Three Great English Victories: A 3-book Collection of Harlequin, 1356 and Azincourt. Bernard Cornwell
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in Lannion, pouring smoke into the pale sky.
He ran to the left of the line, where he found Father Hobbe holding a bow. ‘You shouldn’t be here, father,’ he said.
‘God will forgive me,’ the priest said. He had tucked his cassock into his belt and had a small stand of arrows stuck into the hedgebank. Thomas gazed at the open land, wondering how long his men would last in that immensity of grass. Just what the enemy wanted, he thought, a stretch of bare flat land on which their horses could run hard and straight. Only the land was not entirely flat for it was dotted with grassy hummocks through which two grey herons walked stiff-legged as they hunted for frogs or ducklings. Frogs, Thomas thought, and ducklings. Sweet God, it was a marsh! The spring had been unusually dry, yet his boots were soaking from the damp field he had crossed to reach the hedgerow. The realization burst on Thomas like the rising sun. The open land was marsh! No wonder the enemy was waiting. They could see Totesham’s men strung out for slaughter, but they could see no way across the swampy ground.
‘This way!’ Thomas shouted at the archers. ‘This way! Hurry! Hurry! Come on, you bastards!’
He led them round the end of the hedge into the swamp where they leaped and splashed through a maze of marsh, tussocks and streamlets. They went south towards the enemy and once in range Thomas spread his men out and told them to indulge in target practice. His fear had gone, replaced by exaltation. The enemy was balked by the marsh. Their horses could not advance, but Thomas’s light archers could leap across the tussocks like demons. Like hellequin.
‘Kill the bastards!’ he shouted.
The white-fledged arrows hissed across the wetland to strike horses and men. Some of the enemy tried to charge the archers, but their horses floundered in the soft ground and became targets for volleys of arrows. The crossbowmen dismounted and advanced, but the archers switched their aim to them, and now more archers were arriving, dispatched by Skeat and Totesham, so that the marsh was suddenly swarming with English and Welsh bowmen who poured a steel-tipped hell on the befuddled enemy. It became a game. Men wagered on whether or not they could strike a particular target. The sun rose higher, casting shadows from the dead horses. The enemy was edging back to the trees. One brave group tried a last charge, hoping to skirt the marsh, but their horses stumbled in the soft ground and the arrows spitted and sliced at them so that men and beasts screamed as they fell. One horseman struggled on, flailing his beast with the flat of his sword. Thomas put an arrow into the horse’s neck and Jake skewered its haunch, and the animal screeched piteously as it thrashed in pain and collapsed into the swamp. The man somehow extricated his feet from his stirrups and stumbled cursing towards the archers with his sword held low and shield high, but Sam buried an arrow in his groin and then a dozen more bowmen added their arrows before swarming over the fallen enemy. Knives were drawn, throats cut, then the business of plunder could begin. The corpses were stripped of their mail and weapons and the horses of their bridles and saddles, then Father Hobbe prayed over the dead while the archers counted their spoils.
The enemy was gone by mid-morning. They left two score of dead men, and twice that number had been wounded, but not a single Welsh or English archer had died.
Duke Charles’s men slunk back to Guingamp. Lannion had been destroyed, they had been humiliated and Will Skeat’s men celebrated in La Roche-Derrien. They were the hellequin, they were the best and they could not be beaten.
The following morning Thomas, Sam and Jake left La Roche-Derrien before daybreak. They rode west towards Lannion, but once in the woods they swerved off the road and picketed their horses deep among the trees. Then, moving like poachers, they worked their way back to the wood’s edge. Each had his own bow slung on his shoulder, and carried a crossbow too, and they practised with the unfamiliar weapons as they waited in a swathe of bluebells at the wood’s margin from where they could see La Roche-Derrien’s western gate. Thomas had only brought a dozen bolts, short and stub-feathered, so each of them shot just two times. Will Skeat had been right: the weapons did kick up as the archers loosed so that their first bolts went high on the trunk that was their target. Thomas’s second shot was more accurate, but nothing like as true as an arrow shot from a proper bow. The near miss made him apprehensive of the morning’s risks, but Jake and Sam were both cheerful at the prospect of larceny and murder.
‘Can’t really miss,’ Sam said after his second shot had also gone high. ‘Might not catch the bastard in the belly, but we’ll hit him somewhere.’ He levered the cord back, grunting with the effort. No man alive could haul a crossbow’s string by arm-power alone and so a mechanism had to be employed. The most expensive crossbows, those with the longest range, used a jackscrew. The archer would place a cranked handle on the screw’s end and wind the cord back, inch by creaking inch, until the pawl above the trigger engaged the string. Some crossbowmen used their bodies as a lever. They wore thick leather belts to which a hook was attached and by bending down, attaching the hook to the cord and then straightening, they could pull the twisted strings back, but the crossbows Thomas had brought from Lannion used a lever, shaped like a goat’s hind leg, that forced the cord and bent the short bow shaft, which was a layered thing of horn, wood and glue. The lever was probably the fastest way of cocking the weapon, though it did not offer the power of a screw-cocked bow and was still slow compared to a yew shaft. In truth there was nothing to compare with the English bow and Skeat’s men debated endlessly why the enemy did not adopt the weapon. ‘Because they’re daft,’ was Sam’s curt judgement, though the truth, Thomas knew, was that other nations simply did not start their sons early enough. To be an archer meant starting as a boy, then practising and practising until the chest was broad, the arm muscles huge and the arrow seemed to fly without the archer giving its aim any thought.
Jake shot his second bolt into the oak and swore horribly when it missed the mark. He looked at the bow. ‘Piece of shit,’ he said. ‘How close are we going to be?’
‘Close as we can get,’ Thomas said.
Jake sniffed. ‘If I can poke the bloody bow into the bastard’s belly I might not miss.’
‘Thirty, forty feet should be all right,’ Sam reckoned.
‘Aim at his crotch,’ Thomas encouraged them, ‘and we should gut him.’
‘It’ll be all right,’ Jake said, ‘three of us? One of us has got to skewer the bastard.’
‘In the shadows, lads,’ Thomas said, gesturing them deeper into the trees. He had seen Jeanette coming from the gate where the guards had inspected her pass then waved her on. She sat sideways on a small horse that Will Skeat had lent her and was accompanied by two grey-haired servants, a man and a woman, both of whom had grown old in her father’s service and now walked beside their mistress’s horse. If Jeanette had truly planned to ride to Louannec then such a feeble and aged escort would have been an invitation for trouble, but trouble, of course, was what she intended, and no sooner had she reached the trees than the trouble appeared as Sir Simon Jekyll emerged from the archway’s shadow, riding with two other men.
‘What if those two bastards stay close to him?’ Sam asked.
‘They won’t,’ Thomas said. He was certain of that, just as he and Jeanette had been certain that Sir Simon would follow her and that he would wear the expensive suit of plate he had stolen from her.
‘She’s a brave lass,’ Jake grunted.
‘She’s got spirit,’ Thomas said, ‘knows how to hate someone.’
Jake tested the point of a quarrel. ‘You and her?’ he asked Thomas. ‘Doing it, are you?’
‘No.’
‘But you’d like to. I would.’
‘I don’t know,’ Thomas said. He thought Jeanette beautiful, but Skeat was right, there was a hardness in her that repelled him. ‘I suppose so,’ he admitted.
‘Of course you would,’ Jake said, ‘be daft not to.’
Once Jeanette was among the trees Thomas and his companions trailed her, staying hidden and always conscious that Sir Simon and his two henchmen were closing quickly. Those three