Azincourt. Bernard Cornwell

white wands that they held aloft as their horses high-stepped delicately on the rutted road. The Sire de Bournonville must have expected them because the west gate opened and the town’s commander rode out with a single companion to meet the approaching riders.

      ‘Heralds,’ Jack Dancy said. Dancy was from Herefordshire and was a few years older than Hook. He had volunteered for service under the Burgundian flag because he had been caught stealing at home. ‘It was either be hanged there or be killed here,’ he had told Hook one night. ‘What those heralds are doing,’ he said now, ‘is telling us to surrender, and let’s hope we do.’

      ‘And be captured by the French?’ Hook asked.

      ‘No, no. He’s a good fellow,’ Dancy nodded at de Bournonville, ‘he’ll make sure we’re safe. If we surrender they’ll let us march away.’

      ‘Where to?’

      ‘Wherever they want us to be,’ Dancy said vaguely.

      The heralds, who had been followed at a distance by two standard-bearers and a trumpeter, had met de Bournonville not far from the gate. Hook watched as the men bowed to each other from their saddles. This was the first time he had seen heralds, but he knew they were never to be attacked. A herald was an observer, a man who watched for his lord and reported what he saw, and an enemy’s herald was to be treated with respect. Heralds also spoke for their lords, and these men must have spoken for the King of France for one of their flags was the French royal banner, a great square of blue silk on which three gold lilies were emblazoned. The other flag was purple with a white cross and Dancy told him that was the banner of Saint Denis who was France’s patron saint, and Hook wondered whether Denis had more influence in heaven than Crispin and Crispinian. Did they argue their cases before God, he wondered, like two pleaders in a manor court? He touched the wooden cross hanging about his neck.

      The men spoke for a brief while, then bowed to each other again before the two royal heralds turned their grey horses and rode away. The Sire de Bournonville watched them for a moment, then wheeled his own horse. He galloped back to the city, curbing beside the dyer’s burning house from where he shouted up at the wall. He spoke French, of which Hook had learned little, but then added some words in English. ‘We fight! We do not give France this citadel! We fight and we will defeat them!’

      That ringing announcement was greeted by silence as Burgundian and English alike let the words die away without echoing their commander’s defiance. Dancy sighed, but said nothing, and then a crossbow bolt whirred overhead to clatter into a nearby street. De Bournonville had waited for a response from his men on the walls, but, receiving none, spurred through the gate and Hook heard the squeal of its huge hinges, the crash as the timbers closed and the heavy thump as the locking bar was dropped into its brackets.

      The sun was hazed now, shining red gold and bright through the diffusing smoke beneath which a party of enemy horsemen rode parallel to the city wall. They were men-at-arms, armoured and helmeted, and one of them, mounted on a great black horse, carried a strange banner that streamed behind him. The banner bore no badge, it was simply a long pennon of the brightest red cloth, a rippling streak of silken blood made almost transparent by the vapour-wrapped sun behind, but the sight of it caused men on the wall to make the sign of the cross.

      ‘The oriflamme,’ Dancy said quietly.

      ‘Oriflamme?’

      ‘The French war-banner,’ Dancy said. He touched his middle finger to his tongue, then crossed himself again. ‘It means no prisoners,’ he said bleakly. ‘It means they want to kill us all.’ He fell backwards.

      For a heartbeat Hook did not know what had happened, then he thought Dancy must have tripped and he instinctively held out a hand to pull him up, and it was then he saw the leather-fledged crossbow bolt jutting from Dancy’s forehead. There was very little blood. A few droplets had spattered Dancy’s face, which otherwise looked peaceful, and Hook went to one knee and stared at the thick-shafted bolt. Less than a hand’s breadth protruded, the rest was deep in the Herefordshire man’s brain and Dancy had died without a sound, except for the meat-axe noise of the bolt striking home. ‘Jack?’ Hook asked.

      ‘No good talking to him, Nick,’ one of the other archers said, ‘he’s chatting to the devil now.’

      Hook stood and turned. Later he had little memory of what happened or even why it happened. It was not as though Jack Dancy had been a close friend, for Hook had no such friends in Soissons except, perhaps, John Wilkinson. Yet there was a sudden anger in Hook. Dancy was an Englishman, and in Soissons the English felt beleaguered as much by their own side as by the enemy, and now Dancy was dead and so Hook took a varnished arrow from his white linen arrow bag that hung on his right side.

      He turned and lowered his bow so that it lay horizontally in front of him and he laid the arrow across the stave and trapped the shaft with his left thumb as he engaged the cord. He swung the long bow upright as his right hand took the arrow’s fledged end and drew it back with the cord.

      ‘We’re not to shoot,’ one of the archers said.

      ‘Don’t waste an arrow!’ another put in.

      The cord was at Hook’s right ear. His eyes searched the smoke-shrouded ground outside the town and he saw a crossbowman step from behind a pavise decorated with the symbol of crossed axes.

      ‘You can’t shoot as far as they can,’ the first archer warned him.

      But Hook had learned the bow from childhood. He had strengthened himself until he could pull the cord of the largest war bows, and he had taught himself that a man did not aim with the eye, but with the mind. You saw, and then you willed the arrow, and the hands instinctively twitched to point the bow, and the crossbowman was bringing up his heavy weapon as two bolts seared the evening air close to Hook’s head.

      He was oblivious. It was like the moment in the greenwood when the deer showed for an instant between the leaves, and the arrow would fly without the archer knowing he had even loosed the string. ‘The skill is all between your ears, boy,’ a villager had told him years before, ‘all between your ears. You don’t aim a bow. You think where the arrow will go, and it goes.’ Hook released.

      ‘You goddam fool,’ an archer said, and Hook watched the white goose feathers flicker in the white-hazed air and saw the arrow fall faster than a stooping hawk. Steel-tipped, silk-bound, ash-shafted, feathered death flying in the evening’s quiet.

      ‘Good God,’ the first archer said quietly.

      The crossbowman did not die as easily as Dancy. Hook’s arrow pierced his throat and the man twisted around and the crossbow released itself so that the bolt spun crazily into the sky as the man fell backwards, still twisting as he fell, then he thrashed on the ground, hands scrabbling at his throat where the pain was like liquid fire, and above him the sky was red now, a smoke-hazed blood-red sky lit by fires and glowing with the sun’s daily death.

      That, Hook, thought, had been a good arrow. Straight-shafted and properly fledged with its feathers all plucked from the same goose-wing. It had flown true. It had gone where he willed it, and he had killed a man in battle. He could, at last, call himself an archer.

      On the evening of the siege’s second day Hook thought the world had ended.

      It was an evening of warm and limpid light. The air was pale-bright and the river slid gently between its flowery banks where willows and alders grew. The French banners hung motionless above their tents. Some smoke still sifted from the burned houses to rise soft into the evening air until it faded high in the cloudless sky. Martins and swallows hunted beside the city’s wall, swooping and twisting.

      Nicholas Hook leaned on the ramparts. His unstrung bow was propped beside him as his thoughts drifted back to England, to the manor, to the fields behind the long barn where the hay would be almost ready for cutting. There would be hares in the long grass, trout in the stream and larks in the twilight. He thought about the decaying cattle byre in the field called Shortmead, the byre with rotting thatch and a screen of honeysuckle behind which William Snoball’s young wife Nell would meet him and make silent, desperate