Agincourt - Cornwell Bernard - Страница 40

The sow was a giant shield, shaped like the toe of a shoe, behind and beneath which men could work safe from enemy missiles, and it would have to be built strong enough to withstand the repeated strike of gun-stones.

A white-haired Welshman, Dafydd ap Traharn, supervised the work. “I come from Pontygwaith,” he told the archers, “and in Pontygwaith we know more about building things than all you miserable English bastards put together!” He had planned to run two wagons loaded with earth and stones to the place where the sow would be built and use the wagons to protect the archers from enemy missiles, but the rain had softened the ground and the wagons had become bogged down. “We’ll have to dig,” he said with the relish of a man who knew he would not have to wield a spade himself. “We know about digging in Pontygwaith, know more than all you English fart-makers put together!”

“That’s because you were digging graves for all the Welshmen we killed,” Will of the Dale retorted.

“Burying you sais, we were,” Dafydd ap Traharn replied happily. Later, as he chatted with Hook, he cheerfully admitted he had been a rebel against the English king just fifteen years before. “Now that Owain Glyn Dwr,” he said warmly, “what a man!”

“What happened to him?”

“He’s still alive, boy!” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “still alive!” Glyn Dwr’s rebellion had burned for over a decade, giving young Henry, Prince of Wales and now King of England, a long education in warfare. The revolt had been defeated and some of the Welsh leaders had been dragged on hurdles through London to their executions, but Owain Glyn Dwr himself had never been captured. “We have magicians in Wales,” Dafydd ap Traharn lowered his voice and leaned close to Hook as he spoke, “and they can turn a man invisible!”

“I’d like to see that,” Hook said wistfully.

“Well, you can’t, can you? That’s the whole thing about being invisible, you can’t see them! Why, Owain Glyn Dwr could be here right now and you couldn’t see him! And that’s what has happened to him, see? He’s living in luxury, boy, with women and apples, but if an Englishman gets within a mile of him, he turns invisible!”

“So what’s a rebel Welshman doing with this army?” Hook asked.

“A man has to live,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “and eating an enemy’s loaf of bread is better than staring into an empty oven. There’s dozens of Glyn Dwr’s men in this army, boy, and we’ll fight as hard for Henry as we ever did for Owain.” He grinned. “Mind you, there are a few of Owain Glyn Dwr’s men in France as well, and they’ll fight against us.”

“Archers?”

“God be praised, no. Archers can’t afford to run away to France, can they now? No, it’s the gentry who lost their land who went to France, not the archers. Have you ever faced an archer in battle?”

“God be praised, no,” Hook said.

“It is not what I would call a happy experience,” Dafydd ap Traharn said grimly. “My God, boy, but we Welsh don’t take fright easily, but when Henry’s archers shot at Shrewsbury it was death from the sky. Like hail, it was, only hail with steel points, and hail that never stopped, and men were dying all around me and their screams were like tortured gulls on a black shore. An archer is a terrible thing.”

“I’m an archer.”

“You’re a digger now, boy,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, grinning, “so dig.”

They dug a trench away from a gun-pit, digging it toward the walls of Harfleur, and the defenders saw the trench being made and rained crossbow bolts and gun-stones on the work. The defenders’ catapults tried to lob stones onto the new trench, but the missiles went wide, landing in showers of splattering mud. After thirty paces of new trench had been made Dafydd ap Traharn declared himself satisfied and ordered a new pit to be excavated. It had to be big, square and deep, and so the archers hacked and shoveled till they reached a layer of chalk. The new pit’s side seeped water so that they slopped about in muck as they raised a parapet of tree trunks on three sides of the pit, only leaving the rear that led to the English camp unprotected. They laid the trunks flat, four abreast, and piled more on top, so that a man could stand upright in the pit and be invisible to the enemy on Harfleur’s walls. “Tonight,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “we’ll make a roof and our lovely sow will be finished.”

They made the roof at night because the pit was close enough to the walls to be within easy range of a crossbow, but the enemy must have guessed what was happening and they shot blind through the rain-soaked darkness and three men were wounded by the short, sharp bolts that spat from the night. It took all that night to lay long trunks over the pit and then to cover those timbers with a thick layer of earth and chalk rubble before adding a final covering of more tree trunks. “And now the real work begins,” Dafydd ap Traharn said, “which means we have to use Welshmen.”

“The real work?” Hook asked.

“We’re going to make a mine, lad. We’re going to dig deep.”

The rain ended at dawn. A chill wind came from the west and the rain slid away across France and the sun fought against cloud as the enemy gunners hammered the newly made sow with gun-stones that wasted their power on the thick log parapet. Hook and his archers slept, sheltering under the crude cabins they had made from tree boughs, earth, and ferns. When Hook woke he found Melisande scrubbing his mail coat with sand and vinegar. “Rouille,” she said in explanation.

“Rust?”

“That’s what I said.”

“You can polish my coat, darling,” Will of the Dale said as he crawled from his shelter.

“Do your own, William,” Melisande said. “I cleaned Tom’s, though.”

“Well done,” Hook said. All the archers were worried about Thomas Scarlet whose customary cheerfulness had been buried with his twin brother. Scarlet scowled these days, or else sat by himself, brooding. “All he wants,” Hook said quietly, “is to meet your father again.”

“Then Thomas will die,” Melisande said bleakly.

“He loves you,” Hook said.

“My father?”

“He let you live. He let you stay with me.”

“He let you live too,” she said, almost resentfully.

“I know.”

She paused. Her gray eyes watched Harfleur, which was ringed with gunsmoke like a sea fog shrouding a cliff. Hook put his wet boots to dry beside the campfire. The burning wood spat and shot sparks. It was willow, and willow always protested against burning. “He loved my mother, I think,” Melisande said wistfully.

“Did he?”

“She was beautiful,” Melisande said, “and she loved him. She said he was so beautiful too. A beautiful man.”

“Handsome,” Hook allowed.

“Beautiful,” Melisande insisted.

“When you met him in the trees,” Hook asked, “did you want him to take you away?”

She gave an abrupt shake of her head. “No,” she said, “I think he is a bad angel. And I think he is in my head like the saint is in yours,” she turned to look at him, “and I wish he would go away.”

“You think about him? Is that it?”

“I always wanted him to love me,” she said harshly, and started scouring the mail again.

“As he loved your mother?”

“No! Non!” She was angry, and for a while she said nothing, then relented. “Life is hard, Nicholas, you know that. It is work and work and work and worry where the food will come from and it is more work, and a lord, any lord, can stop all that. They can wave their hand and there is no more work, no more worry, just facile.”

“Easy?”

“And I wanted that.”

“Tell him you want that.”

“He is beautiful,” Melisande said, “but he is not kind. I know that. And I love you. Je t’aime.” She said the last words decidedly, without apparent affection, but Hook was struck dumb by them. He watched archers bringing firewood to the camp. Melisande grimaced with the effort of scrubbing the sand on the mail coat. “You know of Sir Robert Knolles?” she asked suddenly.