“You know how they harden those points?” Wilkinson asked.
“No.”
Wilkinson was bending over the stump of the arrow. He was using a fine saw, its blade no longer than his little finger, to make a deep wedge-shaped notch in the cut end. “What they do,” he said, staring at his work as he spoke, “is throw bones on the fire when they make the iron. Bones, boy, bones. Dry bones, dead bones. Now why would dead bones in burning charcoal turn iron into steel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nor do I, but it does. Bones and charcoal,” Wilkinson said. He held the notched arrow up, blew some sawdust from the cut, and nodded in satisfaction. “I knew a fellow in Kent who used human bones. He reckoned the skull of a child made the best steel, and perhaps he was right. The bastard used to dig them up from graveyards, break them into fragments, and burn them on his furnace. Babies’ skulls and charcoal! Oh, he was a rotten turd of a man, but his arrows could kill. Oh, they could kill. They didn’t punch through armor, they whispered through!” Wilkinson had selected a six-inch shaft of oak while he spoke. One end had already been sharpened into a wedge that he fitted into the notched ash of the cut arrow. “Look at that,” he said proudly, holding up the scarfed joint, “a perfect fit. I’ve been doing this too long!” He held out his hand for the bodkin, which he slipped onto the head of the oak. “I’ll glue it all together,” he said, “and you can kill someone with it.” He admired the arrow. The oak made the head even heavier, so the weight of steel and wood would help punch the arrow through plate armor. “Believe me, boy,” the old man went on grimly, “you’ll be killing soon.”
“I will?”
Wilkinson gave a brief, humorless laugh. “The King of France might be mad, but he’s not going to let the Duke of Burgundy hold on to Soissons. We’re too close to Paris! The king’s men will be here soon enough, and if they get into the town, boy, you go to the castle, and if they get into the castle, you kill yourself. The French don’t like the English and they hate English archers, and if they capture you, boy, you’ll die screaming.” He looked up at Hook. “I’m serious, young Hook. Better to cut your own throat than be caught by a Frenchman.”
“If they come we’ll fight them off,” Hook said.
“We will, will we?” Wilkinson asked with a harsh laugh. “Pray that the duke’s army comes first, because if the French come, young Hook, we’ll be trapped in Soissons like rats in a butter churn.”
And so every morning Hook would stand above the gate and stare at the road that led beside the Aisne toward Compiegne. He spent even more time gazing down into the yard of one of the many houses built outside the wall. It was a dyer’s house standing next to the town ditch and every day a girl with red hair would hang the newly colored cloths to dry on a long line, and sometimes she would look up and wave at Hook or the other archers, who would whistle back at her. One day an older woman saw the girl wave and slapped her hard for being friendly with the hated foreign soldiers, but next day the redhead was again wiggling her rump for her audience’s pleasure. And when the girl was not visible Hook watched the road for the glint of sunlight on armor or the sudden appearance of bright banners that would announce the arrival of the duke’s army or, worse, the enemy army, but the only soldiers he saw were Burgundians from the city’s garrison bringing food back to the city. Sometimes the English archers rode with those foraging parties, but they saw no enemy except the folk whose grain and livestock they stole. The country folk took refuge in the woods when the Burgundians came, but the citizens of Soissons could not hide when the soldiers ransacked their houses for hoarded food. Sire Enguerrand de Bournonville, the Burgundian commander, expected his French enemies to arrive in the early summer and he was planning to endure a long siege, and so he piled grain and salted meat in the cathedral to feed the garrison and townsfolk.
Nick Hook helped pile the food in the cathedral, which soon smelled of grain, though beneath that rich aroma was always the tang of cured leather because Soissons was famous for its cobblers and saddlers and tanners. The tanning pits were south of the town and the stench of the urine in which the hides were steeped made the air foul when the wind blew warm. Hook often wandered the cathedral, staring at the painted walls or at the rich altars decorated with silver, gold, enamel, and finely embroidered silks and linens. He had never been inside a cathedral before and the size of it, the shadows far away in the high roof, the silence of the stones, all gave him an uneasy feeling that there must be more to life than a bow, an arrow, and the muscles to use them. He did not know what that something was, but the knowledge of it had started in London when an old man, an archer, had spoken to him and when the voice had sounded in his head. One day, feeling awkward, he knelt before a statue of the Virgin Mary and he asked her forgiveness for what he had failed to do in London. He gazed up at her slightly sad face and he thought her eyes, made bright with blue and white paint, were fixed on him and in those eyes he saw reproof. Talk to me, he prayed, but there was no voice in his head. No forgiveness for Sarah’s death, he thought. He had failed God. He was cursed.
“Think she can help you?” a sour voice interrupted his prayers. Hook turned and saw John Wilkinson.
“If she can’t,” Hook asked, “who can?”
“Her son?” Wilkinson suggested caustically. The old man looked furtively around him. There were a half-dozen priests saying masses at side altars, but otherwise the only other folk in the cathedral were nuns who were hurrying across the wide nave, shepherded and guarded by priests. “Poor girls,” Wilkinson said.
“Poor?”
“You think they want to be nuns? Their parents put them here to keep them from trouble. They’re bastards of the rich, boy, locked away so they can’t have bastards of their own. Come here, I want to show you something.” He did not wait for a response, but stumped toward the cathedral’s high altar that reared golden bright beneath the astonishing arches that stood, row above row, in a semicircle at the building’s eastern end. Wilkinson knelt beside the altar and dropped his head reverently. “Take a look in the boxes, boy,” he ordered Hook.
Hook climbed to the altar where silver and gold boxes stood on either side of a gold crucifix. Most of the boxes had crystal faces and, through those distorting windows, Hook saw scraps of leather. “What are they?” he asked.
“Shoes, boy,” Wilkinson said, his head still bowed and his voice muffled.
“Shoes?”
“You put them on your feet, young Hook, to keep the mud from getting between your toes.”
The leather looked old, dark and shrunken. One reliquary held a shriveled shoe so small that Hook decided it had to be a piece of child’s footwear. “Why shoes?” he asked.
“You’ve heard of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian?”
“No.”
“Patron saints of cobblers, boy, and of leather-workers. They made those shoes, or so we’re told, and they lived here and were probably killed here. Martyred, boy, like that old man you burned in London.”
“He was a…”
“Heretic, I know. You said. But every martyr was killed because someone stronger disagreed with what he believed. Or what she believed. Christ on His cross, boy, Jesus Himself was crucified for heresy! Why the hell else do you think they nailed Him up? Did you kill women too?”
“I didn’t,” Hook said uncomfortably.
“But there were women?” Wilkinson asked, looking at Hook. He saw the answer in Hook’s face and grimaced. “Oh, I’m sure God was delighted with that day’s work!” The old man shook his head in disgust before reaching into a purse hanging from his belt. He took out a handful of what Hook presumed were coins and dropped them into the huge copper jar that stood by the altar to receive the tribute of pilgrims. A priest had been watching the two English archers suspiciously, but visibly relaxed when he heard the sound of metal falling onto metal in the big jar. “Arrowheads,” Wilkinson explained with a grin. “Old rusted broadheads that are no good any more. Now why don’t you kneel and say a prayer to Crispin and Crispinian?”
Hook hesitated. God, he was sure, would have seen Wilkinson drop valueless arrowheads into the jar instead of coins, and the threat of hell’s fires suddenly seemed very close and so Hook hurriedly took a coin from his own pouch and dropped it into the copper jar. “Good lad,” Wilkinson said, “the bishop will be right glad of that. It’ll pay for a sup of his ale, won’t it?”
“Why pray to Crispin and Crispinian?” Hook asked Wilkinson.
“Because they’re the local saints, boy. That’s their job, to listen to prayers from Soissons, so they’re the best saints to pray to here.”
So Hook went to his knees and prayed to Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian that they would beg forgiveness for his sin in London, and he prayed that they would keep him safe in this their town of martyrdom and send him home unscathed to England. The prayer did not feel as powerful as those he had addressed to the mother of Christ, but it made sense, he decided, to pray to the two saints because this was their town and they would surely keep a special watch on those who prayed to them in Soissons.
“I’m done, lad,” Wilkinson announced briskly. He was pushing something into his pocket and Hook, moving to the altar’s flank, saw that the frontal’s end, where it hung down to the floor, was frayed and ragged because a great square had been crudely cut away. The old man grinned. “Silk, lad, silk. I need silk thread for arrows, so I just stole it.”
“From God?”
“If God can’t afford a few threads of silk, boy, then He’s in dire trouble. And you should be glad. You want to kill Frenchmen, young Hook? Pray that I have enough silk thread to tie up your arrows.”
But Hook had no chance to pray because, next day, under the rising sun, the French came.
The garrison had known they were coming. News had reached Soissons of the surrender of Compiegne, another town that had been captured by the Burgundians, and Soissons was now the only fortress that barred the French advance into Flanders where the main Burgundian army lay, and the French army was reported to be coming east along the Aisne.
And then, suddenly, on a bright summer morning, they were there.
Hook watched their arrival from the western ramparts. Horsemen came first. They wore armor and had bright surcoats, and some galloped close to the town as if daring the bowmen on the walls to shoot. Some crossbowmen loosed bolts, but no horseman or horse was hit. “Save your arrows,” Smithson, the centenar, ordered his English archers. He flicked a careless finger at Hook’s strung bow. “Don’t use it, lad,” he said. “Don’t waste an arrow.” The centenar had come from his tavern, the Goose, and now blinked at the cavorting horsemen, who were shouting inaudibly at the ramparts where men were hanging the Burgundian standard alongside the personal standard of the garrison’s commander, the Sire de Bournonville. Some townsfolk had also come to the walls and they too gazed at the newly arrived horsemen. “Look at the bastards,” Smithson grumbled, gesturing at the townsfolk, “they’d like to betray us. We should have killed every last one of them. We should have slit their goddam French throats.” He spat. “Nothing will happen for a day. Might as well drink ale while it’s still available.” He stumped away, leaving Hook and a half-dozen other English archers on the wall.
All day the French came. Most were on foot, and those men surrounded Soissons and chopped down trees on the low hills to the south. Tents were erected on the cleared land, and beside the tents were the bright standards of the French nobility, a riot of red, blue, gold, and silver flags. Barges came up the river, propelled by giant sweeps, and the barges carried four mangonels, huge machines that could hurl rocks at the city walls. Only one of the massive catapults was brought ashore that day, and Enguerrand de Bournonville, thinking to tip it back into the river, led two hundred mounted men-at-arms on a sally from the western gate, but the French had expected the attack and sent twice as many horsemen to oppose the Burgundians. The two sides reined in, lances upright, and after a while the Burgundians wheeled back, pursued by French jeers. That afternoon smoke began to thicken as the besieging French burned the houses just outside Soissons’s walls. Hook watched the redheaded girl carry a bundle toward the new French encampment. None of the fugitives asked to be admitted to the city, instead they went toward the enemy lines. The girl turned in the thickening smoke to wave farewell to the archers. The first enemy crossbowmen appeared in that smoke, each archer protected by a companion holding a thick pavise, a shield large enough to hide a man as he laboriously re-cranked the crossbow after each bolt was loosed. The heavy bolts thumped into the walls or whistled overhead to fall somewhere in the city.
Then, as the sun began to sink toward the monstrous catapult on the river’s bank, a trumpet sounded. It called three times, its notes clear and sharp in the smoke-hazed air, and as the last blast faded, so the crossbowmen ceased shooting. There was a sudden surge of sparks as a thatched roof collapsed into a burning house and the smoke whirled thick along the Compiegne road where Hook saw two horsemen appear.
Neither horseman was in armor. Both men, instead, wore bright colored surcoats, and their only weapons were slender white wands that they held aloft as their horses high-stepped delicately on the rutted road. The Sire de Bournonville must have expected them because the west gate opened and the town’s commander rode out with a single companion to meet the approaching riders.
“Heralds,” Jack Dancy said. Dancy was from Herefordshire and was a few years older than Hook. He had volunteered for service under the Burgundian flag because he had been caught stealing at home. “It was either be hanged there or be killed here,” he had told Hook one night. “What those heralds are doing,” he said now, “is telling us to surrender, and let’s hope we do.”
“And be captured by the French?” Hook asked.
“No, no. He’s a good fellow,” Dancy nodded at de Bournonville, “he’ll make sure we’re safe. If we surrender they’ll let us march away.”
“Where to?”
“Wherever they want us to be,” Dancy said vaguely.
The heralds, who had been followed at a distance by two standard-bearers and a trumpeter, had met de Bournonville not far from the gate. Hook watched as the men bowed to each other from their saddles. This was the first time he had seen heralds, but he knew they were never to be attacked. A herald was an observer, a man who watched for his lord and reported what he saw, and an enemy’s herald was to be treated with respect. Heralds also spoke for their lords, and these men must have spoken for the King of France for one of their flags was the French royal banner, a great square of blue silk on which three gold lilies were emblazoned. The other flag was purple with a white cross and Dancy told him that was the banner of Saint Denis who was France’s patron saint, and Hook wondered whether Denis had more influence in heaven than Crispin and Crispinian. Did they argue their cases before God, he wondered, like two pleaders in a manor court? He touched the wooden cross hanging about his neck.
The men spoke for a brief while, then bowed to each other again before the two royal heralds turned their gray horses and rode away. The Sire de Bournonville watched them for a moment, then wheeled his own horse. He galloped back to the city, curbing beside the dyer’s burning house from where he shouted up at the wall. He spoke French, of which Hook had learned little, but then added some words in English. “We fight! We do not give France this citadel! We fight and we will defeat them!”
That ringing announcement was greeted by silence as Burgundian and English alike let the words die away without echoing their commander’s defiance. Dancy sighed, but said nothing, and then a crossbow bolt whirred overhead to clatter into a nearby street. De Bournonville had waited for a response from his men on the walls, but, receiving none, spurred through the gate and Hook heard the squeal of its huge hinges, the crash as the timbers closed and the heavy thump as the locking bar was dropped into its brackets.