That skirmish occurred on the first day, but thereafter the French seemed to fall back into sleep and so the English men-at-arms rode unarmored, their mail and plate carried by the sumpter horses. The riders’ different colored jerkins gave the mounted column a holiday appearance, enhanced by the banners flying at the head of every contingent. The women, pages and, servants rode behind the men-at-arms, leading packhorses loaded with armor, food, and the great bundles of arrows. Sir John’s company had two light carts, one loaded with food and plate armor, the other heaped with arrows. When Hook turned in his saddle he saw a filmy cloud of dust pluming over the low hills and heavy woods. The dust marked the trail of England’s army as it twisted through the small valleys leading toward the River Somme, and to Hook it appeared to be a large army, but in truth it was a defiant band of fewer than ten thousand men, and only looked larger because there were over twenty thousand horses.
On the Sunday they dropped out of the small, tight hills into a more open and flatter countryside. Sir John had suggested that this was the day they should reach the Somme, and had added that the Somme was the only major obstacle on their journey. Cross that river and they would have a mere three days’ marching to Calais. “So there won’t be a battle?” Michael Hook asked his brother. Lord Slayton’s men were also in the vanguard, though Sir Martin and Thomas Perrill stayed well clear of Sir John and his men.
“They say no,” Hook said, “but who knows?”
“The French won’t stop us?”
“They don’t seem to be trying, do they?” Hook said, nodding at the empty country ahead. He and the rest of Sir John’s archers were a half-mile in front of the column, leading the way to the river. “Maybe the French are happy to see us go?” he suggested. “They’re just leaving us be, perhaps?”
“You’ve been to Calais,” Michael said, impressed that his elder brother had traveled so far and seen so much since last they were together.
“Strange little town, it is,” Hook said, “a vast wall and a great castle and a huddle of houses. But it’s the way home, Michael, the way home!”
“I just got here,” Michael said ruefully.
“Maybe we’ll come back next year,” Hook said, “and finish the job. Look!” He pointed far ahead to where, in the smudges of brown, golden and yellow leaves, a sheen of light glittered. “That might be the river.”
“Or a lake,” Michael suggested.
“We’re looking for a place called Blanchetaque,” Hook said.
“They have the funniest names,” Michael said, grinning.
“There’s a ford at Blanchetaque,” Hook said. “We cross that and we’re as good as home.”
He turned as hooves sounded loud behind and saw Sir John and a half-dozen men-at-arms galloping toward him. Sir John, bareheaded and wearing mail, slowed Lucifer. He was looking off to the left where the sea showed beyond a low ridge. “See that, Hook?” he asked cheerfully.
“Sir John?”
Sir John pointed to a tiny white lump on the sea’s horizon. “Gris-Nez! The Gray Nose, Hook.”
“What’s that, Sir John?”
“A headland, Hook, just a half-day’s ride from Calais! See how close we are?”
“Three days’ ride?” Hook asked.
“Two days on a horse like Lucifer,” Sir John said, smoothing the destrier’s mane. He turned to look at the nearer countryside. “Is that the river?”
“I think so, Sir John.”
“Then Blanchetaque can’t be far! That’s where the third Edward crossed the Somme on his way to Crécy! Maybe your great-grandfather was with him, Hook.”
“He was a shepherd, Sir John, never drew a bow in his life.”
“He used a sling,” Michael said, sounding nervous because he spoke to Sir John.
“Like David and Goliath, eh?” Sir John said, still gazing at the distant headland. “I hear you got church married, Hook!”
“Yes, Sir John.”
“Women do like that,” Sir John said, sounding gloomy, “and we like women!” He cheered up. “She’s a good girl, Hook.” He stared at the land ahead. “Not a goddam Frenchman in sight.”
“There’s a horseman down there,” Michael said very diffidently.
“There’s a what?” Sir John snapped.
“Down there,” Michael said, pointing to a stand of trees a mile ahead, “a horseman, sir.”
Sir John stared and saw nothing, but Hook could now see the man who was motionless on his horse in the deep shade of the full-leafed wood. “He’s there, Sir John,” Hook confirmed.
“Bastard’s watching us. Can you flush him out, Hook? He might know whether the goddam French are guarding the ford. Don’t chase him away, I want him driven to us.”
Hook looked at the land to his right, searching for the dead ground that would let him circle behind the horseman unseen. “I reckon so, Sir John,” he said.
“Do it, man.”
Hook took his brother, Scoyle the Londoner, and Tom Scarlet, and he rode away from the half-hidden horseman, going back toward the approaching army and then down a slight incline that took him from the man’s sight. After that he turned east off the road and kicked Raker’s flanks to gallop across a stretch of grassland. They were still hidden from their quarry. Ahead of the four horsemen were copses and thickets. The fields here had no hedges, only ditches, and the horses jumped them easily. The land was nearly flat, but had just enough swell and dip to hide the four archers as Hook turned north again. Off to his right a man was plowing a field. His two oxen were struggling to drag the big plow that was set low because winter wheat was always sown deeper. “He needs some rain!” Michael shouted.
“It would help!” Hook answered.
The horses thumped up an almost imperceptible rise and the landscape that Hook had held in his head revealed itself. He did not turn to the wood where the horseman was hidden, but kept going northward to cut the man off from the Somme. Perhaps the man had already ridden away? In all likelihood he was simply some local gentleman who wanted to watch the enemy pass, but the gentry knew more of what happened in their neighboring regions than the peasantry and that was why Sir John wanted to question the man.
Raker was tiring, blowing and fractious, and Hook curbed the horse. “Bows,” he said, uncasing his own and stringing it by supporting one end in his bucket stirrup.
“Thought we weren’t supposed to kill him,” Tom Scarlet said.
“If the bastard’s a gentleman,” Hook said, and he supposed the man was because he was mounted on horseback, “then he’ll be sword trained. If you come at him with a blade he’ll like as not slash your head off. But he won’t like facing an arrow, will he?” He locked an arrow on the stave with his left thumb.
He patted Raker’s neck, then kicked the horse forward again. Now they were coming at the wood from the road’s far side. He could see that Sir John had stayed on the slight crest, not wanting to spring the man out of his hiding place, but the lone Frenchman had scented trouble, or else he had simply watched for the approaching English long enough, because he suddenly broke cover and spurred his horse north toward the river. “God damn him,” Hook said.
Sir John saw the man ride away and immediately spurred forward with his men-at-arms, but the English horses were tired and the Frenchman’s mount was well rested. “They’ve no chance of catching him,” Scoyle said.
Hook ignored that pessimism. Instead he turned Raker and banged his heels back. The Frenchman was following the road that curved to the right and Hook could gallop across the chord of that curve. He knew he could not out-gallop the man and so stood no chance of catching him, but he did have a chance of getting close enough to use the bow. The man turned in his saddle and saw Hook and his men and slashed his spurs back, and Hook kicked as well and the hooves hammered the hard ground and Hook saw that the fugitive would be hidden by trees in a moment and so he hauled on Raker’s reins, pulled his feet from the stirrups, and threw himself out of the saddle. He stumbled, fell to one knee, and
the bow was already rising in his left hand and he caught the string, nocked the arrow and pulled back.
“Too far,” Scoyle said, reining in his horse, “don’t waste a good arrow.”
“Much too far,” Michael agreed.
But the bow was huge and Hook did not think about his aim. He just watched the distant horseman, willed where he wanted the arrow to go, then hauled and released and the cord twanged and slashed against his unprotected wrist and the arrow fluttered a heartbeat before its fledging caught the air and tautened its flight.
“Tuppence says you’ll miss by twenty paces,” Tom Scarlet said.
The arrow drew its curve in the sky, its white fledging a diminishing flicker in the autumn light. The far horseman galloped, unaware of the broadhead that flew high before starting its hissing descent. It fell fast, plunging, losing its momentum, and the horseman turned again to watch for his pursuers and as he did so the barbed arrow slapped into his horse’s belly and sliced into blood and flesh. The horse twisted hard and sudden with the awful pain and Hook saw the man lose his balance and fall from the saddle.
“Sweet Jesu!” Michael said in pure admiration.
“Come on!” Hook gathered Raker’s reins and hauled himself into the saddle and kicked back before he had found the stirrups and for a moment he thought he would fall off himself, but he managed to thrust his right boot into the bucket and saw the Frenchman was remounting his horse. Hook had wounded the horse, not killed it, but the animal was bleeding because the broadhead was designed to rip and tear through flesh, and the harder the Frenchman rode the beast the more blood it would lose.
The horseman spurred his wounded mount to vanish among the trees and a moment later Hook was on the road and among the same trees and he saw the Frenchman was a hundred paces ahead and his horse was faltering, leaving a trail of blood. The man saw his pursuers and slid out of his saddle because his horse could go no farther. He turned to run into the woods and Hook shouted, “Non!”
He let Raker slow to a stop. Hook’s bow was drawn and there was another arrow on the string, and this arrow was aimed at the horseman who gave a resigned nod. He wore a sword, but no armor. His clothes, as Hook drew nearer, looked to be of fine quality; good broadcloth and a tight-woven linen shirt and expensive boots. He was a fine-looking man, perhaps thirty years old, with a wide face and a trimmed beard and pale green eyes that were fixed on the arrow’s head. “Just stay where you are,” Hook said. The man might not speak English, but he understood the message of the tensioned bow and its bodkin arrow, and so he obeyed, caressing the nose of his dying horse. The horse gave a pathetic whinny, then its forelegs crumpled and it fell onto the track. The man crouched and stroked, speaking softly to the dying beast.
“You almost let him get away, Hook!” Sir John shouted as he arrived.
“Nearly, Sir John.”
“So let’s see what the bastard knows,” Sir John said, and slid out of his saddle. “Someone kill that poor horse!” he demanded. “Put the animal out of its misery!”
The job was done with a poleax blow to the horse’s forehead, then Sir John talked with the prisoner. He treated the man with an exquisite politeness, and the Frenchman, in turn, was loquacious, but there was no denying that whatever he revealed was causing Sir John dismay. “I want a horse for Sir Jules,” Sir John turned on the archers with that demand. “He’s going to meet the king.”
Sir Jules was taken to the king and the army stopped.
The vanguard was only five miles from the ford at Blanchetaque, and Calais was just three days’ march north of that ford. In three days’ time, eight days after they had left Harfleur, the army should have marched through the gates of Calais and Henry would have been able to claim, if not a victory, at least a humiliation of the French. But that humiliation depended on crossing the wide tidal ford of Blanchetaque.
And the French were already there. Charles d’Albret, the Constable of France, was on the Somme’s northern bank, and the prisoner, who was in the constable’s service, described how the ford had been planted with sharpened stakes, and how six thousand men were waiting on the further bank to stop the English crossing.
“It can’t be done,” Sir John said bleakly that evening. “The bastards are there.”
The bastards had blocked the river and, as night fell, the clouded sky reflected the campfires of the French force that guarded the Blanchetaque ford. “The ford’s only crossable when the tide’s low,” Sir John explained, “and even then we can only advance twenty men abreast. And twenty men can’t fight off six thousand.”
No one spoke for a while, then Father Christopher asked the question that every man in Sir John’s company wanted to ask even though they dreaded the answer. “So what do we do, Sir John?”
“Find another ford, of course.”
“Where, pray?”
“Inland,” Sir John said grimly.
“We march toward the belly button,” Father Christopher said.
“We do what?” Sir John asked, staring as though the priest were mad.
“Nothing, Sir John, nothing!” Father Christopher said.
So now England’s army, with only enough food for three more days, must march deep into France to cross a river. And if they could not cross the river they would die, and if they did cross the river they might still die because going inland would take time, and time would give the French army the opportunity to wake from its slumber and march. The dash up the coast had failed and now Henry and his little army must plunge into France.
And next morning, under a heavy gray sky, they headed east.
Hope had sustained the army, but now despair crept in. Disease returned. Men were forever dismounting, running to one side and dropping their breeches so that the rearguard rode through the stink of shit. Men rode silently and sullenly. Rain came in bands from the ocean, sweeping inland, leaving the column wet and dripping.
Every ford across the Somme was staked and guarded. The bridges had been destroyed, and a French army now shadowed the English. It was not the main army, not the great assembly of men-at-arms and crossbowmen that had gathered in Rouen, but a smaller force that was more than adequate to block any attempted crossing of a barricaded ford. They were in sight every day, men-at-arms and crossbowmen, all of them mounted, riding along the river’s northern bank to keep pace with the English on the southern. More than once Sir John led archers and men-at-arms in a headlong gallop to try and seize a ford before the French reached it, but the French were always waiting. They had put garrisons at every crossing.
Food became scarce, though the small unwalled towns grudgingly yielded baskets of bread, cheese, and smoked fish rather than be attacked and burned. And each day the army became hungrier and marched deeper into enemy country.
“Why don’t we just go back to Harfleur?” Thomas Evelgold grumbled.
“Because that would be running away,” Hook said.
“That’s better than dying,” Evelgold said.
There were also enemies on the English side of the river. French men-at-arms watched the passing column from low hilltops to the south. They were usually in small bands, perhaps six or seven men, and if a force of English knights rode toward them they would invariably draw away, though once in a while an enemy might raise his lance as a signal that he was offering single combat. Then, perhaps, an Englishman would respond and the two men would gallop together, there would be a clatter of iron-shod lances on armor and one man would topple slowly from his horse. Once two men skewered each other and both died, each impaled on his enemy’s lance. Sometimes a band of French would charge together, as many as forty or fifty men-at-arms, attacking a weak point in the marching column to kill a few men before galloping away.
Other Frenchmen were busy ahead of the column, taking away the harvest to leave nothing for the invaders. The food, collected from barns and granaries, was taken to Amiens, a city the English skirted on the day they should have arrived in Calais. The bags that had held food were now em
pty. Hook, riding in a thin drizzle, had stared at the distant white vision of Amiens Cathedral towering above the city and he had thought of all the food inside the walls. He was hungry. They were all hungry.
Next day they camped near a castle that stood atop a white chalk cliff. Sir John’s men-at-arms had captured a pair of enemy knights who had strayed too close to the vanguard and the prisoners had boasted how the French would defeat Henry’s small army. They had even repeated the boasts to Henry himself, and Sir John brought his archers orders from the king. He stood amidst their campfires. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, “every man is to cut a stake as long as a bowstave. Longer if you can! Cut a stake as thick as your arm and sharpen both ends.”
Rain hissed in the fire. Hook’s archers had eaten poorly on a hare that Tom Scarlet had killed with an arrow and that Melisande had roasted over the fire, which was surrounded by flat stones on which she had made flat cakes from a mix of oats and acorns. They had a few nuts and some hard green apples. There was no ale left, no wine either, so they took water from a stream. Melisande was now swathed in Hook’s enormous mail coat and huddled beside him.
“Stakes?” Thomas Evelgold inquired cautiously.
“The French, may they rot in hell,” Sir John said as he walked closer to the biggest fire, “have decided how to beat you. You! The archers! They fear you! Are you all listening to me?”
The archers watched him in silence. Sir John was wearing a leather hat and a thick leather coat. Rainwater dripped from the brim and hems. He carried a shortened lance, one cut down so that a man-at-arms could use it on foot. “We’re listening, Sir John,” Evelgold growled.
“Instructions have been sent from Rouen!” Sir John announced. “The Marshal of France has a plan! And the plan is to kill you, the archers, first, then kill the rest of us.”
“Take the gentry prisoner, you mean,” Evelgold said, but too quietly for Sir John to hear.
“They’re assembling knights on well-armored horses,” Sir John said, “and the riders will have the best armor they can find! Milanese armor! And you all know about Milanese armor.”