“Why here?” a man called out.
“Because Sir Roger knows what he’s doing,” Smithson said, sounding anything but certain, “and if you’ve got sweethearts here,” he went on with a leer, “make certain the little darlings come with you.” He began thrusting his meaty hips backward and forward. “Don’t want our sweethearts left in the streets to be humped by half the French army, do we?”
Next morning, as he did each morning, Hook gazed north across the Aisne to the low wooded hills where the beleaguered garrison hoped to see a Burgundian relief force. None came. The great gun-stones whirred across the ashes of the burned houses and bit into the crumbling wall to start up their clouds of dust that settled on the river to drift seaward like pale gray stains on the water. Hook rose early every morning, before it was light, and went to the cathedral where he knelt and prayed. He had been warned not to walk the streets by himself, but the people of Soissons left him alone, perhaps scared of his height and size, or perhaps because they knew he was the one archer who prayed regularly and so tolerated him. He had abandoned praying to Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian because he reckoned they cared more about the townsfolk, their own folk, and so he prayed instead to the mother of Christ because his own mother had been called Mary and he begged the blessed Virgin for forgiveness because of the girl who had died in London. On one such morning a priest knelt beside him. Hook ignored the man.
“You’re the Englishman who prays,” the priest said in English, stumbling over the unfamiliar language. Hook said nothing. “They wonder why you pray,” the priest went on, jerking his head to indicate the women who knelt before other statues and altars.
Hook’s instinct was to go on ignoring the man, but the priest had a friendly face and a kindly voice. “I’m just praying,” he said, sounding surly.
“Are you praying for yourself?”
“Yes,” Hook admitted. He prayed so that God would forgive him and lift the curse that he was certain blighted his life.
“Then ask something for someone else,” the priest suggested gently. “God listens to those prayers more readily, I think, and if you pray for someone else then He will grant your own request too.” He smiled, stood, and lightly touched Hook’s shoulder. “And pray to our saints, Crispin and Crispinian. I think they are less busy than the blessed Virgin. God watch over you, Englishman.”
The priest walked away and Hook decided to take his advice and pray again to the two local saints and so he went to an altar beneath a painting of the two martyrs and there he prayed for the soul of Sarah, whose life he had failed to save in London. He stared up at the painting as he prayed. The two saints stood in a green field scattered with golden stars on a hill high above a white-walled city. They looked gravely and a little sadly toward Hook. They did not look like shoemakers. They were dressed in white robes and Crispin carried a shepherd’s crook while Crispinian held a wicker tray of apples and pears. Their names were painted beneath each man and Hook, though he could not read, could tell which saint was which because one name was longer than the other. Crispinian looked much the friendlier man. He had a rounder face and blue eyes and a half-smile of great kindliness, while Saint Crispin appeared much sterner and was half turned away, as though he had no time for an onlooker and was about to walk down the hill and into the city, and so Hook fell into the habit of praying to Crispinian each morning, though he always acknowledged Crispin too. He dropped two pennies in the jar each time he prayed.
“To look at you,” John Wilkinson said one evening, “I wouldn’t take you for a man of prayer.”
“I wasn’t,” Hook said, “till now.”
“Frightened for your soul?” the old archer asked.
Hook hesitated. He was binding arrow fledging with the silk stolen from the cathedral’s altar frontal. “I heard a voice,” he blurted out suddenly.
“A voice?” Wilkinson asked. Hook said nothing. “God’s voice?” the older man asked.
“It was in London,” Hook said.
He felt foolish for his admission, but Wilkinson took it seriously. He stared at Hook for a long time, then nodded abruptly. “You’re a lucky man, Nicholas Hook.”
“I am?”
“If God spoke to you then He must have a purpose for you. That means you might survive this siege.”
“If it was God who spoke to me,” Hook said, embarrassed.
“Why shouldn’t He? He needs to speak to people, on account that the church don’t listen to Him.”
“It doesn’t?”
Wilkinson spat. “The church is about money, lad, money. Priests are supposed to be shepherds, aren’t they? They’re meant to be looking after the flock, but they’re all in the manor hall stuffing their faces with pastries, so the sheep have to look after themselves.” He pointed an arrow at Hook. “And if the French break into the town, Hook, don’t go to Saint Anthony the Lesser! Go to the castle.”
“Sir Roger…” Hook began.
“Wants us dead!” Wilkinson said angrily.
“Why would he want that?”
“Because he’s got no money and a heap of debt, boy, so the man with the biggest purse can buy him. And because he’s not a real Englishman. His family came to England with the Normans and he hates you and me because we’re Saxons. And because he’s crammed to the throat with Norman shit, that’s why. You go to the castle, lad! That’s what you do.”
The next few nights were dark, and the waning moon was a sliver like a cutthroat’s blade. The Sire de Bournonville feared a night attack and ordered dogs to be tethered out in the wasteland where the houses had been burned. If the dogs barked, he said, the warning bell on the western gate was to be rung, and the dogs did bark and the bell was rung, but no Frenchmen assaulted the breach. Instead, as the dawn mist shimmered above the river, the besiegers catapulted the dogs’ corpses into the town. The animals had been gelded and had their throats cut as a warning of the fate that awaited the defiant garrison.
The feast of Saint Abdus passed, and no relief force arrived, and then Saint Possidius’s feast came and went, and next day was the feast of the seven holy virgins, and Hook prayed to each one, and in the next dawn he sent a plea to Saint Dunstan, the Englishman, on his feast day, and the day after that to Saint Ethelbert, who had been a king of England, and all the time he also prayed to Crispinian and to Crispin, begging their protection, and on the very next day, on the feast of Saint Hospitius, he received his answer.
When the French, who had been praying to Saint Denis, attacked Soissons.
TWO
The first Hook knew of the assault was the sound of the city’s church bells clanging in frantic haste and jangling disorder. It was dark and he was momentarily confused. He slept on straw at the back of John Wilkinson’s workshop and he woke to the glare of flames leaping high as the old man threw wood on the brazier to provide light. “Don’t lie there like a pregnant sow, boy,” Wilkinson said, “they’re here.”
“Mary, mother of God.” Hook felt the surge of panic like icy water seething through his body.
“I’ve an inkling she don’t care one way or the other,” Wilkinson said. He was pulling on a mail coat, struggling to get the heavy links over his head. “There’s an arrow bag by the door,” he went on, his voice now muffled by the coat, “full of straight ones. Left it for you. Go, boy, kill some bastards.”
“What about you?” Hook asked. He was tugging on his boots, new boots made by a skilled cobbler of Soissons.
“I’ll catch up with you! String your bow, son, and go!”
Hook buckled his sword belt, strung his bow, snatched his arrow bag, then took the second bag from beside the door and ran into the tavern yard. He could hear shouting and screams, but where they came from he could not tell. Archers were pouring into the yard and he instinctively followed them toward the new defenses behind the breach. The church bells were hammering the night sky with jangling noise. Dogs barked and howled.
Hook had no armor except for an ancient helmet that Wilkinson had given him and which sat on his head like a bowl. He had a padded jacket that might stop a feeble sword swing, but that was his only protection. Other archers had short mail coats and close-fitting helmets, but they all wore Burgundy’s brief surcoat blazoned with the jagged red cross and Hook saw those liveries lining the new wall that was made of wicker baskets filled with earth. None of the archers was drawing a cord yet, instead they just looked toward the breach that flared with sudden light as Burgundian men-at-arms threw pitch-soaked torches into the gap of the gun-ravaged wall.
There were close to fifty men-at-arms at the new wall, but no enemy in the breach. Yet the bells still rang frantically to announce a French attack, and Hook swung around to see a glow in the sky above the city’s southern rooftops, a glow that flickered lurid on the cathedral’s tower as evidence that buildings burned somewhere near the Paris gate. Was that where the French attacked? The Paris gate was commanded by Sir Roger Pallaire and defended by the English men-at-arms and Hook wondered, not for the first time, why Sir Roger had not demanded that the English archers join that gate’s garrison.
Instead the archers waited by the western breach where still no enemy appeared. Smithson, the centenar, was nervous. He kept fingering the silver chain that denoted his rank and glancing toward the glow of the southern fires, then back to the breach. “Devil’s turd,” he said of no one in particular.
“What’s happening?” an archer demanded.
“How in God’s name would I know?” Smithson snarled.
“I think they’re already inside the city,” John Wilkinson said mildly. He had brought a dozen sheaves of spare arrows that he now dropped behind the archers. The sound of screams came from somewhere in the city and a troop of Burgundian crossbowmen ran past Hook, abandoning the breach and heading toward the Paris gate. Some of the men-at-arms followed them.
“If they’re inside the town,” Smithson said uncertainly, “then we should go to the church.”
“Not to the castle?” a man demanded.
“We go to the church, I think,” Smithson said, “as Sir Roger says. He’s gentry, isn’t he? He must know what he’s doing.”
“Aye, and the Pope lays eggs,” Wilkinson commented.
“Now?” a man asked, “we go now?” but Smithson said nothing. He just tugged at the silver chain and looked left and right.
Hook was staring at the breach. His heart was beating hard, his breathing was shallow and his right leg trembled. “Help me, God,” he prayed, “sweet Jesu protect me,” but he got no comfort from the prayer. All he could think of was that the enemy was in Soissons, or attacking Soissons and he did not know what was happening and he felt vulnerable and helpless. The bells banged inside his head, confusing him. The wide breach was dark except for the feeble flicker of dying flames from the torches, but slowly Hook became aware of other lights moving there, of shifting silver-gray lights, lights like smoke in moonlight or like the ghosts who came to earth on Allhallows Eve. The lights, Hook thought, were beautiful; they were filmy and vaporous in the darkness. He stared, wondering what the glowing shapes were, and then the silver-gray wraiths turned to red and he realized, with a start of fear, that the shifting shapes were men. He was seeing the light of the torches reflected from plate armor. “Sergeant!” he shouted.
“What is it?” Smithson snapped back.
“The bastards are here!” Hook called, and so they were. The bastards were coming through the breach. Their plate armor was scoured bright enough to reflect the firelight and they were advancing beneath a banner of blue on which golden lilies blossomed. Their visors were closed and their long swords flashed back the flame-light. They were no longer vaporous, now they resembled men of burning metal, phantoms from the dreams of hell, death coming through the dark to Soissons. Hook could not count them, they were so many.
“Oh my God’s shit,” Smithson said in panic, “stop them!”
Hook did what he was told. He stepped back to the barricade, plucked an arrow from the linen bag, and laid it on the bow’s stave. The fear was suddenly gone, or else had been pushed aside by the certain knowledge of what needed to be done. Hook needed to haul back the bow’s cord.
Most grown men in the prime of their strength could not pull a war bow’s cord back to the ear. Most men-at-arms, despite being toughened by war and hardened by constant sword exercises, could only draw the hemp cord halfway, but Hook made it look easy. His arm flowed back, his eyes sought a mark for the arrow’s bright head, and he did not even think as he released. He was already reaching for the second arrow as the first, a shaft-weighted bodkin, slapped through a breastplate of shining steel and threw the man back onto the French standard-bearer.
And Hook loosed again, not thinking, only knowing that he had been told to stop this attack. He loosed shaft after shaft. He drew the cord to his right ear and was not aware of the tiny shifts his left hand made to send the white-feathered arrows on their short journey from cord to victim. He was not aware of the deaths he caused or the injuries he gave or of the arrows that glanced off armor to spin uselessly away. Most were not useless. The long bodkin heads could easily punch through armor at this close range and Hook was stronger than most archers, who were stronger than most men, and his bow was heavy. John Wilkinson, when he had first met Hook, had drawn the younger man’s bow and failed to get the cord past his chin, and he had given Hook a glance of respect, and now that long, thick-bellied bow cut from the trunk of a yew in far-off Savoy, was sending death through the bell-ringing dark, except that Hook was only seeing the enemy who came across the breach where the guttering torches burned, and he did not notice the dark floods of men who surged at either edge of the wall’s gap and who were already tugging at the wicker baskets. Then part of the barricade collapsed and the noise made Hook turn to see that he was the only archer left at the defenses. The breach, despite the dead who lay there and the injured who crawled there, was filled with howling men. The night was lit by fire, flame red, riddled with smoke and loud with war-shouts. Hook realized then that John Wilkinson had shouted at him to run, but in the moment’s excitement, the warning had not lodged in Hook’s mind.
But now it did. He plucked up the arrow bag and ran.
Men howled behind him as the barricade fell and the French swarmed across its remnants and into the city.
Hook understood then how the deer felt when the hounds were in every thicket and men were beating the undergrowth and arrows were whickering through the leaves. He had often wondered if an animal could know what death was. They knew fear, and they knew defiance, but beyond fear and defiance came the gut-emptying panic, the last moments of life as the hunters close in and the heart races and the mind slithers frantically. Hook felt that panic and ran. At first he just ran. The bells were still crashing, dogs were howling, men were roaring war-shouts, and horns were calling. He ran into a small square, a space where leather merchants usually displayed their hides, and it was oddly deserted, but then he heard the sounds of bolts being shot and he understood that folk were hiding in their houses and barring their doors. Crashes announced where soldiers were kicking or beating those locked doors down. Go to the castle, he thought, and he ran that way, but turned a corner to see the wide space in front of the cathedral filled with men in unfamiliar liveries, their surcoats lit by the torches they carried, and he doubled back like a deer recoiling from hounds. He decided to go to Saint Antoine-le-Petit’s church and sprinted down an alley, twisted into another, ran across the open space in front of the city’s biggest nunnery, then turned down the street where the Goose tavern stood and saw still more men in their strange liveries, and those men blocked his way to the church. They spotted him and a growl sounded, and the growl turned into a triumphant howl as they ran toward him, and Hook, desperate as any doomed animal, bolted into an alley, leaped at the wall that blocked the end, sprawled over into a small yard that stank of sewage, scrambled across a second wall and then, surrounded by shouts and quivering with fear he sank into a dark corner and waited for the end.