“God be with you,” Sir William saluted the archers, who murmured a dutiful response.
“And the devil take the French!” Sir John called as he strode from his tent. He was in a high mood, the prospect of action giving his eyes a gleam. “It’s a simple enough job this morning!” he said dismissively. “We just have to take the barbican away from the bastards! Let’s do it before breakfast!”
Melisande had given Hook a lump cut from a flitch of bacon and a piece of bread, which he ate as Sir John’s company filed downhill toward the siege-works. It was still dark. The wind was brisk and cool from the east, bringing the scent of the salt marshes to cut the cloying smell of the dead. The arrows clattered in their bags as the archers followed the winding paths. Fires glowed in the siege lines, and on the defenses of Harfleur where, Hook knew, the garrison would be repairing the damage done during the previous day. “God bless you,” a priest called as the bowmen filed past, “God be with you! God preserve you!”
The French must have sensed something evil was brewing for they used a pair of catapults to lob two light carcasses across the ramparts. The carcasses were great balls of cloth and tinder soaked in pitch and sulfur and they wheeled and sparked as they arced through the night sky, then fell in a great gout of flame that burst bright when the wicker-strapped balls landed. The firelight reflected off helmets in the English trenches and those gleams provoked the crossbowmen on the walls to start shooting. The bolts whispered overhead or thumped into the parapets. Insults were shouted from the walls, but the shouts were half-hearted, as though the garrison was tired and uncertain.
The English trench was crowded. The archers with the fire arrows were ordered to the front, and behind them more archers waited with bundles of faggots. Sir John Holland, the king’s nephew, was in charge of the attack, though again, as when he had led the scouting party ashore before the invasion, he was accompanied by his stepfather, Sir John Cornewaille. “When I give the command,” the younger Sir John said, “the archers will loose fire arrows at the barbican. We want to set it alight!”
Iron braziers had been placed every few yards along the trench. They were heaped with burning sea-coal that gave off pungent fumes.
“Drown them with fire!” Sir John Holland urged the archers, “smoke them out like rats! And when they’re blinded by smoke we fill in the ditch and take the barbican by assault!” He made it sound easy.
The remaining English guns had been loaded with stones coated with pitch. The Dutch gunners waited, their linstocks glowing. Dawn seemed to take forever. The defenders got tired of shooting crossbow bolts and their insults, with their bolts, faded away. Both sides waited. A cockerel crowed in the camp and soon a score of birds was calling. Pageboys carrying spare sheaves of arrows waited in the saps behind the trench where priests were saying mass and hearing confessions. Men took it in turns to kneel and receive the wafers along with God’s blessing. “Your sins are forgiven,” a priest murmured to Hook, who hoped it was true. He had not confessed to Robert Perrill’s murder and, as he took the host, he wondered if that deception would condemn him. He almost blurted out his guilt, but the priest was already gesturing the next man forward so Hook stood and moved away. The wafer stuck to his palate and he said a sudden, silent prayer to Saint Crispinian. Did Harfleur have a guardian saint, he wondered, and was that saint beseeching God to kill the English?
A stir in the trench made Hook turn to see the king edging through the crowded ranks. He wore full battle armor, though he had yet to pull on his helmet. His breast and back plates were covered with a surcoat on which the royal arms were blazoned bright, crossed by the red of Saint George. The king carried a broad-bladed war-ax as well as his sheathed sword. He had no shield, but nor did any other knight or man-at-arms. Their plate armor was protection enough and iron-bound shields were a relic of olden days. The king nodded companionably to the archers. “Take the barbican,” he said as he walked along the trench, “and the city must surely fall. God be with you.” He repeated the phrases as he worked his way along the trench, followed by a squire and two men-at-arms. “I shall go with you,” he said as he neared Hook. “If God wants me to rule France then He will protect us! God be with you! And keep me company, fellows, as we take back what is rightfully ours!”
“String your bows,” Sir John Holland said when the king had gone past. “Won’t be long now!” Hook braced one end of his big bow against his right foot and bent it so that he could loop the string about the upper nock.
“Shoot high with the fire arrows!” Thomas Evelgold growled. “You can’t do a full draw or you’ll scorch your hand! So shoot high! And make sure the pitch is well alight before you loose!”
The gray light seeped brighter. Hook, gazing between two gabions of the battered parapet, could see that the barbican was a wreck. Its great iron-bound timbers that had once formed such a formidable wall had been broken and driven in by gunfire, yet the enemy had patched the gaps with more timbers so that the whole outlying fort now resembled an ugly hill studded with wooden balks. The summit, which had once stood close to forty feet high, was half that now, yet it was still a formidable obstacle. The face was steep, the ditch deep, and there was room at the top for forty or fifty crossbowmen and men-at-arms. Banners hung down the ruined face, displaying saints and coats of arms. Once in a while a helmeted face would peer past a timber as the men on the ragged top watched for the expected assault.
“You start shooting your fire arrows when the guns fire!” Sir John Cornewaille reminded his men. “That’s the signal!
Shoot steadily! If you see a man trying to extinguish the fires, kill the bastard!”
The coals in the nearest brazier shifted, provoking a spurt of light and a galaxy of sparks. A page crouched beside the iron basket with a handful of kindling that he would pile on the coals to make the flames to light the pitch-soaked arrows. Gulls wheeled and flocked above the salt marsh where the bodies of the dead were thrown into the tidal creeks. The gulls of Normandy were getting fat on English dead. The wafer was still stuck in Hook’s dry mouth.
“Any moment now,” Sir William Porter said as though that would be a comfort to the waiting men.
There was a creaking sound and Hook looked to his left to see men turning the windlass that lifted the tilting screen in front of the nearest gun. The French saw it too and a springolt bolt whipped from the ramparts to thump into the lifting screen. A gunner pulled a gabion away from the cannon’s black mouth.
And the gun fired.
The pitch that coated the stone had caught fire from the powder’s explosion so that the gun-stone looked like a sear of dull light as it whipped from the smoke to flash across the broken ground and crash into the barbican.
“Now!” Sir John Holland called and the page piled the kindling onto the coals so that bright flames burst from the brazier. “Don’t let the arrows touch each other,” Evelgold advised as the archers held the first missiles in the newly roused fire. More guns fired. A timber on the barbican shattered and a spill of earth scumbled down the steep face. Hook waited till his pitch bouquet was well alight, then placed the arrow on the string. He feared the ash shaft would burn through, so he hauled fast, winced as the flames burned his left hand, aimed high and released quickly. Other fire arrows were already arcing toward the barbican, their flight slow and awkward. His own arrow leaped off the string and trailed sparks as it fluttered. It fell short. Other arrows were thumping into the splintered timbers of the barbican. The cannon smoke drifted like a screen between the archers and their target.