Azincourt. Bernard Cornwell

a humble archer can count men,’ the priest said, ‘and if our lord the king collects an army, then the French will wish to know numbers.’

      ‘No, sir!’ Hook said again.

      ‘So they let you go, and bribed you with a whore?’ the priest suggested.

      ‘She’s no whore!’ Hook protested and the men-at-arms sniggered.

      Melisande had not yet spoken. She had seemed overawed by the big men in their mail coats and by the supercilious priest and by the languorous woman who sprawled on the cushioned couch, but now Melisande found her tongue. She might not have understood the priest’s insult, but she recognised his tone, and she suddenly straightened her back and spoke fast and defiantly. She spoke French, and spoke it so quickly that Hook did not understand one word in a hundred, but everyone else in the room spoke the language and they all listened. She spoke passionately, indignantly, and neither the garrison commander nor the priest interrupted her. Hook knew she was telling the tale of Soissons’s fall, and after a while tears came to her eyes and rolled down her cheeks and her voice rose as she hammered the priest with her story. She ran out of words, gestured at Hook and her head dropped as she began to sob.

      There was silence for a few heartbeats. A sergeant in a mail coat noisily opened the hall door, saw that the room was occupied, and left just as loudly. Sir William looked judiciously at Hook. ‘You murdered Sir Roger Pallaire?’ he asked harshly.

      ‘I killed him, sir.’

      ‘A good deed from an outlaw,’ Sir William’s wife said firmly, ‘if what the girl says is true.’

      ‘If,’ the priest said.

      ‘I believe her,’ the woman said, then rose from the couch, tucked the little dog into one arm and walked to the rug’s edge where she stooped and raised Melisande by the elbow. She spoke to her in soft French, then led her towards the hall’s far end and so through a curtained opening.

      Sir William waited till his wife was gone, then stood. ‘I believe he’s telling the truth, father,’ he said firmly.

      ‘He might be,’ the priest conceded.

      ‘I believe he is,’ Sir William insisted.

      ‘We could put him to the test?’ the priest suggested with scarcely concealed eagerness.

      ‘You would torture him?’ Sir William asked, shocked.

      ‘The truth is sacred, my lord,’ the priest said, bowing slightly. ‘Et cognoscetis veritatem,’ he declaimed, ‘et veritas liberabit vos!’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘You will know the truth, my lord,’ he translated, ‘and the truth will set you free.’

      ‘I am free,’ the black-bearded man snarled, ‘and it is not our duty to rack the truth out of some poor archer. We shall leave that to others.’

      ‘Of course, my lord,’ the priest said, barely hiding his disappointment.

      ‘Then you know where he must go.’

      ‘Indeed, my lord.’

      ‘So arrange it,’ Sir William said before crossing to Hook and indicating that the archer should stand. ‘Did you kill any of them?’ he demanded.

      ‘A lot, my lord,’ Hook said, remembering the arrows flying into the half-lit breach.

      ‘Good,’ Sir William said implacably, ‘but you also killed Sir Roger Pallaire. That makes you either a hero or a murderer.’

      ‘I’m an archer,’ Hook said stubbornly.

      ‘And an archer whose tale must be heard across the water,’ Sir William said, then handed Hook a silver coin. ‘We’ve heard tales of Soissons,’ he went on grimly, ‘but you are the first to bring confirmation.’

      ‘If he was there,’ the priest remarked snidely.

      ‘You heard the girl,’ Sir William snarled at the priest who bridled at the admonition. Sir William turned back to Hook. ‘Tell your tale in England.’

      ‘I’m outlawed,’ Hook said uncertainly.

      ‘You’ll do what you’re told to do,’ Sir William snapped, ‘and you’re going to England.’

      And so Hook and Melisande were taken aboard a ship that sailed to England. They then travelled with a courier who carried messages to London and also had money that paid for ale and food on the journey. Melisande was dressed in decent clothes now, provided by Lady Bardolf, Sir William’s wife, and she rode a small mare that the courier had demanded from the stables in Dover Castle. She was saddle-sore by the time they reached London where, having crossed the bridge, they surrendered their horses to the grooms in the Tower. ‘You will wait here,’ the courier commanded them, and would not tell Hook more, and so he and Melisande found a place to sleep in the cow byre, and no one in the great fortress seemed to know why they had been summoned there.

      ‘You’re not prisoners,’ a sergeant of archers told them.

      ‘But we’re not allowed out,’ Hook said.

      ‘No, you’re not allowed out,’ the ventenar conceded, ‘but you’re not prisoners.’ He grinned. ‘If you were prisoners, lad, you wouldn’t be cuddling that little lass every night. Where’s your bow?’

      ‘Lost it in France.’

      ‘Then let’s find you a new one.’ The ventenar said. He was called Venables and he had fought for the old king at Shrewsbury where he had taken an arrow in the leg that had left him with a limp. He led Hook to an undercroft of the great keep where there were wide wooden racks holding hundreds of newly made bows. ‘Pick one,’ Venables said.

      It was dim in the undercroft where the bowstaves, each longer than a tall man, lay close together. None was strung, though all were tipped with horn nocks ready to take their cords. Hook pulled them out one by one and ran a hand across their thick bellies. The bows, he decided, had been well made. Some were knobbly where the bowyer had let a knot stand proud rather than weaken the wood, and most had a faintly greasy feel because they had been painted with a mix of wax and tallow. A few bows were unpainted, the wood still seasoning, but those bows were not yet ready for the cord and Hook ignored them. ‘They’re mostly made in Kent,’ Venables said, ‘but a few come from London. They don’t make good archers in this part of the world, boy, but they do make good bows.’

      ‘They do,’ Hook agreed. He had pulled one of the longest staves from the rack. The timber swelled to a thick belly that he gripped in his left hand as he flexed the upper limb a small amount. He took the bow to a place where sunlight shone through a rusted grating.

      The stave was a thing of beauty, he thought. The yew had been cut in a southern country where the sun shone brighter, and this bow had been carved from the tree’s trunk. It was close-grained and had no knots. Hook ran his hand down the wood, feeling its swell and fingering the small ridges left by the bowyer’s float, the drawknife that shaped the weapon. The stave was new because the sapwood, which formed the back of the bow, was almost white. In time, he knew, it would turn to the colour of honey, but for now the bow’s back, which would be farthest from him when he hauled the cord, was the shade of Melisande’s breasts. The belly of the bow, made from the trunk’s heartwood, was dark brown, the colour of Melisande’s face, so that the bow seemed to be made of two strips of wood, one white and one brown, which were perfectly married, though in truth the stave was one single shaft of beautifully smoothed timber cut from where the heartwood and sapwood met in the yew’s trunk.

      God made the bow, a priest had once said in Hook’s village church, as God made man and woman. The visiting priest had meant that God had married heartwood and sapwood, and it was this marriage that made the great war bow so lethal. The dark heartwood of the bow’s belly was stiff and unyielding. It resisted bending, while the light-coloured sapwood of the bow’s spine did not mind being pulled into a curve, yet, like the heartwood, it wanted to straighten and it possessed a springiness that, released from pressure, whipped the