Azincourt. Bernard Cornwell

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СКАЧАТЬ The girl did not see the man. She had her face buried in Hook’s arms. She could hear the screams, but she would not watch. She whimpered whenever a man screamed under the exquisite pain that the French exacted as revenge.

      Hook watched. He reckoned the tall man who wore the eagle and the sun could have stopped the torture and murder, but the man did nothing. He sat in his saddle and watched impassively as the French stripped the surviving archers naked, then took their eyes with the points of long knives. The men-at-arms taunted the newly-blinded archers and scoured out their sockets with sharp blades. One Frenchman pretended to eat an eyeball, and the others laughed. The long-haired man did not laugh, he just observed, and his face showed nothing as the blinded men were laid flat on the cobbles to be castrated. Their screams filled the city that was already filled with screaming. It was only when the last blind Englishman had been gelded that the handsome man on the handsome warhorse left the square and the archers were left to bleed to death, sightless under a summer sky. Death took a long time, and Hook shivered even though the air was warm. Saint Crispinian was silent. A naked woman, her breasts cut off and her body red with blood, collapsed amidst the dying archers and wept there until a Frenchman, tired of her tears, casually stove in her skull with a battle-axe. Dogs sniffed the dying.

      The sack of the city continued all day. The cathedral and the parish churches and the nunnery and the priories were all plundered. Women and children were raped and raped again, and their menfolk were murdered and God turned His face away from Soissons. The Sire de Bournonville was executed, and he was fortunate because he died without being tortured first. The castle, supposedly a refuge, had fallen without a fight as the French, permitted into the town by the treachery of Sir Roger, found its gate open and its portcullis raised. The Burgundians died, and only Sir Roger’s men, complicit in their dead leader’s betrayal, had been allowed to live as the city was put to the sword. The citizens had resented their Burgundian garrison and had never abandoned their loyalty to the King of France, but now, in a welter of blood, rape and theft, the French rewarded that loyalty with massacre.

      ‘Je suis Melisande,’ the girl said over and over, and Hook did not understand at first, but at last realised she was saying her name.

      ‘Melisande?’ he asked.

      ‘Oui,’ she said.

      ‘Nicholas.’

      ‘Nicholas,’ she repeated.

      ‘Just Nick,’ he said.

      ‘Jusnick?’

      ‘Nick.’

      ‘Nick.’ They spoke in whispers, they waited, they listened to the sound of a city screaming, and they smelt the ale and the blood.

      ‘I don’t know how we get out of this place,’ Hook said to Melisande, who did not understand. She nodded anyway, then fell asleep under the straw with her head on his shoulder and Hook closed his eyes and prayed to Crispinian. Help us out of the city, he begged the saint, and help me get home. Except, he thought with sudden despair, an outlaw has no home.

      ‘You will reach home,’ Saint Crispinian said to him.

      Hook paused, wondering how a saint could speak to him. Had he imagined the voice? Yet it seemed real, as real as the screams that had marked the death of archers. Then he wondered how he could escape the city because the French would surely have sentries on all the gates.

      ‘Then use the breach,’ Saint Crispinian suggested gently.

      ‘We’ll go out through the breach,’ Hook said to Melisande, but she was still asleep.

      As night fell Hook watched pigs, evidently released from their sties behind the city’s houses, feasting on the dead archers. Soissons was quieter now, the victors’ appetites slaked on bodies, ale and wine. The moon rose, but God sent high clouds that first misted the silver, then hid it, and in the darkness Hook and Melisande made their way downstairs, and out into the reeking street. It was the middle of the night and men snored in broken houses. No one guarded the breach. Melisande, swathed in Sir Roger’s bloody surcoat, held Hook’s hand as they clambered over the wall’s rubble, and then as they crossed the low ground where the tanning pits stank and walked uphill past the abandoned besiegers’ camp and so into the higher woods where no blood reeked and no corpses rotted.

      Soissons was dead.

      But Hook and Melisande lived.

      ‘The saints talk to me,’ he told her in the dawn. ‘Crispinian does, anyway. The other fellow is grimmer. He sometimes speaks, but he doesn’t say much.’

      ‘Crispinian,’ Melisande repeated, and seemed pleased that she understood one thing he said.

      ‘He seems nice,’ Hook said, ‘and he’s looking after me. Looking after you too, now, I reckon!’ He smiled at her, suddenly confident. ‘We must get you some proper clothes, lass. You look right strange in that coat.’

      Though, if Melisande looked strange, she was also lovely. Hook did not notice that until the first dawn in the high woods when the sun shot a million lances of green-shimmering gold through leaves and branches to light a slender, high-boned face wreathed in hair as black as night. She had grey eyes, pale as moonlight, a long nose and a stubborn cast to her chin, which, as Hook was to learn, reflected her character. She was pitifully thin, but had a sinewy strength and a scorn of weakness. Her mouth was wide, expressive and talkative. Hook was eventually to discover that she had been a novice in a house of nuns who were forbidden to speak, and in those first days it seemed Melisande needed to compensate for months of enforced silence. He understood nothing, yet he listened entranced as the girl chattered on.

      They stayed the first day in the woods. From time to time horsemen appeared in the valley below the beeches. They were the victors of the siege of Soissons, but they were not dressed for war. Some were hawking, others seemed to be riding for the pleasure of it, and none interfered with the few fugitives who had apparently escaped Soissons and were now walking southwards, yet still Hook did not want to risk an encounter with a Frenchman and so he stayed hidden until nightfall. He had decided to head westwards, towards England, though being an outlaw meant that England was as dangerous as France, but he did not know where else he could go. He and Melisande travelled by night, their way lit by the moon. Their food was stolen, usually a lamb Hook took in the darkness. He feared the dogs that guarded the flocks, but perhaps it was Saint Crispin with his shepherd’s crook who protected him, for the dogs never stirred as Hook cut an animal’s throat. He would carry the small carcass back to the deep woods where he would make a fire and cook the flesh. ‘You can go away on your own,’ he told Melisande one morning.

      ‘Go?’ she asked, frowning, not understanding him.

      ‘If you want, lass. You can go!’ He waved vaguely southwards and was rewarded with a scowl and a burst of incomprehensible French, which he took to mean that Melisande would stay with him. She did stay, and her presence was both a comfort and a worry. Hook was not sure if he could escape the French countryside, and if he did he could see no future. He prayed to Saint Crispinian, and hoped the martyr could help him once he reached England, if he reached England, but Saint Crispinian was silent.

      Yet if Saint Crispinian said nothing, he did send Hook and Melisande a priest who was the curé of a parish close to the River Oise and the priest found the two fugitives sleeping under a fallen willow among a thick stand of alders, and he took them to his home where his woman fed them. Father Michel was embittered and morose, yet he took pity on them. He spoke some English that he had learned when he had been chaplain to a French lord who had held an English prisoner in his manor. That experience of being a chaplain СКАЧАТЬ