Azincourt. Bernard Cornwell

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 had left Father Michel hating everyone in authority, whether it was king, bishop or lord, and that hatred was sufficient to let him help an English archer. ‘You will go to Calais,’ he told Hook.

      ‘I’m an outlaw, father.’

      ‘Outlaw?’ Eventually the priest understood, but dismissed the fear. ‘Proscrit, eh? But England is home. A large place, yes? You go home and you stay far from where you sinned. What was your sin?’

      ‘I hit a priest.’

      Father Michel laughed and clapped Hook on the back. ‘That was well done! I hope it was a bishop?’

      ‘Just a priest.’

      ‘Next time hit a bishop, eh?’

      Hook paid for his stay. He chopped firewood, cleared ditches and helped Father Michel rethatch a cow byre, while Melisande assisted the housekeeper to cook, wash and mend. ‘The villagers will not betray you,’ the priest assured Hook.

      ‘Why not, father?’

      ‘Because they fear me. I can send them to hell,’ the priest said grimly. He liked to talk with Hook as a way of improving his English and one day, as Hook trimmed the pear trees behind the house, he listened as Hook haltingly admitted to hearing voices. Father Michel crossed himself. ‘It could be the devil’s voice?’ he suggested.

      ‘That worries me,’ Hook admitted.

      ‘But I think not,’ Father Michel said gently. ‘You take a lot from that tree!’

      ‘This tree’s a mess, father. You should have cut her back last winter, but this won’t hurt her. You want some pears? You can’t let her grow wild. Trust me. Cut and cut! And when you think you’ve cut too much, cut the same amount again!’

      ‘Cut and cut, eh? If I have no pears next year I will know you are the devil’s man.’

      ‘It’s Saint Crispinian who talks to me,’ Hook said, lopping another branch.

      ‘But only if God lets him,’ the priest said and made the sign of the cross, ‘which means God talks to you. I am glad no saints talk to me.’

      ‘You’re glad?’

      ‘I think those who hear voices? Either they are saints themselves or they are for burning.’

      ‘I’m no saint,’ Hook said.

      ‘But God has chosen you. He makes very strange choices,’ Father Michel said, then laughed.

      Père Michel also talked with Melisande and so Hook learned something about the girl. Her father