Agincourt - Cornwell Bernard - Страница 15

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• 15/98
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A hunted deer would do that. When it saw no escape it would freeze, shiver and wait for the death it must sense. Now Hook shivered. Better to kill yourself, John Wilkinson had said, than be caught by the French and so Hook felt for his knife, but he could not draw it. He could not kill himself, and so he waited to be killed.

Then he realized his pursuers had evidently abandoned the chase. There was so much plunder for them in Soissons and so many victims, that one fugitive did not interest them and Hook, slowly recovering his senses, realized he had found a temporary refuge. He was in one of the Goose’s back yards, a place where the brewery barrels were washed and repaired. A door of the tavern suddenly opened and a flaming torch illuminated the trestles and staves and tuns. A man peered into the yard, said something dismissive, and went back into the tavern where a woman screamed.

Hook stayed where he was. He dared not move. The city was full of women screaming now, full of hoarse male laughter and full of crying children. A cat stalked past him. The church bells had long ceased their clangor. He knew he could not stay where he was. Dawn would reveal him. Oh God, oh God, oh God, he prayed, unaware that he prayed. Be with me now and at the hour of my death. He shivered. Hooves sounded in the street beyond the brewery yard wall, a man laughed. A woman whimpered. Clouds scurried across the moon’s face and for some reason Hook thought of the badgers on Beggar’s Hill, and that homely thought calmed the panic.

He stood. Perhaps there was a chance he could reach the church? It was much closer than the castle, and Sir Roger had promised to make an attempt to save the archers’ lives, and, though it seemed a slender hope, it was all Hook could think of doing and so he pulled himself up the yard’s wall to peer over the top. The Goose’s stables were next door. No noise came from them and so he climbed onto the wall and from there he could step onto the stable roof that trembled under his weight, but by staying on the rooftop, where the ridge beam ran, he could shuffle until he reached the farther gable where he dropped into a dark alley. He was shaking again, knowing he was more vulnerable here. He moved silently, slowly, until he could peer about the alley’s corner to where the church lay.

And he saw there was no escape.

The church of Saint Antoine-le-Petit was guarded by enemies. There were over thirty men-at-arms and a dozen crossbowmen in the open space in front of the church steps, all in liveries that Hook had not seen before. If Smithson and the archers were inside the church then they were safe enough, for they could defend the door, but it seemed plain to Hook that the enemy must be there to prevent any archer escaping and, he assumed, they would stop any stray archer trying to approach the church. He thought of running for the doorway, but guessed it would be locked and that, while he was beating on the heavy timber, the crossbowmen would use him for a target.

The enemy was not just guarding the church. They had fetched barrels from some tavern and were drinking, and they had stripped two girls naked and tied them across the two barrels with their legs spread wide, and now the men took it in turns to hitch up their mail coats and rape the girls who lay silent as if they had been emptied of moans and tears. The city was loud with women screaming, and the sound scored across Hook’s conscience like an arrowhead scraping on slate, and perhaps that was why he did not move, but instead stood at the corner like an animal that had no place to run or hide. Hook wondered if the girls were dead, they were so still, but then the nearest turned her head and Hook remembered Sarah and flinched with guilt. The girl, who looked no older than twelve or thirteen, stared dully into the dark as a man jerked and grunted at her.

Then a door opened onto the alley and a flood of light washed across Hook who turned to see a man-at-arms stagger into the mud. The man wore a surcoat showing a silver wheat-sheaf on a green field. The man fell to his knees and vomited as a second man, in the same livery, came to the door and laughed. It was that second man who saw Hook and recognized the great war bow, and so put his hand on his sword’s hilt.

Hook reacted in panic. He thrust the bow at the man with the sword. In his head he was screaming, unable to think, but the lunge had all his archer’s strength in it and the horn nock of the bow’s tip pierced the man-at-arms’s throat before his sword was even half drawn. Blood misted black and still Hook thrust so that the bow ripped clean through windpipe and muscle, skin and sinew to strike the doorjamb. The kneeling man was roaring, spraying vomit as he clawed at Hook who, still in panic, made a mewing noise of utter despair as he let go of the bow and thrust his hands at his new assailant. He felt his fingers crush eyeballs and the man began to scream, and Hook was dimly aware that the rapists outside the church were coming for him and he scrambled through the door, half tripping on the first man who lay trying to pull the bow from his ruptured throat as Hook ran across a room, burst through another door, down a passage, a third door, and he was in a yard, still not thinking, over a wall, a second wall, and there were shouts behind him and screams around him and he was in absolute terror now. He had lost his great yew bow, and had dropped the arrow bags, though he still had the sword every archer was expected to wear. He had never used it. He still wore the ragged red cross of Burgundy too, and he began to tear at the surcoat, trying to rid himself of the symbol as he looked desperately for an escape, any escape, then he scrambled over a stone wall into an alley shadowed by the overhanging houses, but in the dark he saw an open door and ran to it.

The door led into a large empty room where a guttering lantern showed a dead man sprawled across a cushioned wooden bench. The man’s blood had sheeted across the flagstones. A tapestry hung on one wall and there were cupboards and a long table holding an abacus and sheets of parchment that were speared on a tall spike. Hook reckoned the dead man must have been a merchant. In one corner a ladder climbed to a higher floor and Hook went up quickly to find a plastered chamber that held a wooden bed with a pallet and blankets. A second ladder led into the attic and he clambered up and pulled the ladder into the space beneath the rafters and cursed himself for not having done the same with the first ladder. Too late now. He dared not drop back into the house and so he crouched in the bat droppings beneath the thatch. He was still shaking. Men were shouting in the houses beneath him, and for a time it seemed he must be discovered, and that discovery seemed imminent when someone climbed into the room where the bed stood, but the man only glanced briefly about before leaving, and the rest of the searchers grew bored or else found other quarry, for after a while their excited shouting died. The screaming went on, indeed the screaming became louder and it seemed to Hook, listening in puzzlement, that a whole group of women were just outside the house, all shrieking, and he flinched at the sound. He thought of Sarah in London, of Sir Martin the priest, and of the men he had just seen who had looked so bored as they raped their two silent victims.

The screaming turned into sobbing, broken only by men’s laughter. Hook was shivering, not with cold, but with fear and guilt, and then he shrank into the small space under the sloping rafters because the room beneath was suddenly lit by a lantern. The light leaked through the attic’s crude floorboards that were loosely laid over untrimmed beams. A man had climbed into the room and was shouting down the ladder to other men, and then a woman cried and there was the sound of a slap.

“You’re a pretty one,” the man said, and Hook was so frightened that he did not even notice that the man spoke English.

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• 15/98
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