Agincourt - Cornwell Bernard - Страница 85

To his left, unseen by Sir John, the Duke of York died.

The French attack had struck the English vanguard first. A hundred men were dead in that fight before the oriflamme reached King Henry’s men, and in the front of the foremost men was Ghillebert, Seigneur de Lanferelle, and he was half aware that the English to his left had stepped back as the charge crashed home, but the Duke of York and his men had stayed put, thrusting with lances, and Lanferelle had twisted aside, letting a lance slide off his breastplate’s flank, then ramming his own lance into an unvisored face. “Lanferelle!” he shouted, “Lanferelle!” He wanted the English to know whom they faced, and he fended off a lance with his own then unslung his mace and started to hack. This was no place for the subtle graces of a tournament field, no place to show a swordsman’s skills, this was a place to hack and kill, chop and wound, to fill an enemy with fear, and Lanferelle drove the spiked mace down into a man wearing the duke’s livery and wrenched the bloody spikes out of the split helmet and skull and thumped it forward into another man, hurling him back and he could see the duke clearly now, just to his right, but first he had to kill a man to his left, which he did with the heavy mace in a blow that rang up his arm. “Yield!” he shouted at the duke who had dropped his visor, and the duke’s response was to swing his sword that clanged on Lanferelle’s plate and Lanferelle dropped the mace head over the duke’s shoulder and pulled so that the tall man stumbled forward, lost his footing, and fell full length. “He’s mine!” Lanferelle shouted, “the bastard’s mine,” and that was when the battle joy came to Lanferelle, the exultation of a fighter who dominated his foes.

He stood over the duke, one foot on the fallen man’s spine, and killed any man who tried a rescue. Four of his own men-at-arms flanked him with poleaxes and they shouted insults at the English before killing them. “I want the standard!” Lanferelle shouted. He thought the duke’s great flag would be a welcome decoration in his manor hall where it could hang from the smoke-darkened beams beneath the musicians’ gallery and the duke, a prisoner in Lanferelle’s keeping, would be forced to see that standard every day. “Come and die!” Lanferelle shouted at the standard-bearer, but English men-at-arms pushed the man back out of immediate danger and closed on Lanferelle and he parried their blows, thrusting back hard, depending on the weight of his mace to throw his opponents off balance, and all the while he shouted at his men in the second rank to defend his back. They had to keep the crush of Frenchmen from crowding him, and they did it by threatening their own ranks, giving Lanferelle room to slash the mace at any man who dared oppose him. His four men were using their poleaxes to hack at the English line that was so thin Lanferelle reckoned he could fight through it and lead a mass of Frenchmen to the rear of the English center. Why not capture a king as well as a duke? “Forward!” he bellowed.’ Forward!” but when he tried to go forward he half tripped on the bodies that had fallen across the Duke of York’s legs. Lanferelle tried to kick the dead men out of his path, but a lance thrust from an Englishman hammered his breastplate and threw him back. “Bastard!” Lanferelle shouted, driving the mace’s bloody spikes toward the snarling face, then a shout of warning made him glance to his left and he saw that the English were driving into the French ranks and threatening to fight around to his rear. He reckoned there was still time to break the enemy line and he tried to go forward again and once more was checked by the dead men, and a sudden rush of Englishmen came to oppose him, their lances, poleaxes, and maces battering his armor and he had no choice but to step back. His chance to cleave the line was gone for the moment.

He backed away, leaving the Duke of York face down in the mud. The duke, stunned and trampled, had drowned in a blood-drenched puddle and now the English advanced across his corpse, coming for Lanferelle and for his standard of the sun and falcon, and Lanferelle held them at bay with swift hard strokes. He did not know the duke was dead, only regretted that he had temporarily lost him, but then he saw another standard to his left, a standard deep in the French ranks that showed a rearing lion blazoned with a crown and he reckoned Sir John Cornewaille’s ransom would make him rich enough. “With me!” he bellowed, and he rammed and shoved and fought his way toward Sir John.

Away to Lanferelle’s right a furious battle raged around the king’s four standards. Scores of Frenchmen wanted the honor of capturing England’s king, but they faced the same horrors that dogged the rest of the French attackers. Their front rank had gone down fast, its men exhausted by the mud and wounded by the arrow-storm, and the king’s bodyguard had killed them with axes, maces, and mauls. Now the attackers tripped on bodies and were met by ax strokes, yet still they pushed forward and a French lance pierced the faulds of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the king’s younger brother, and the blow to the groin drove him down into the furrows. Frenchmen surged to take the fallen man prisoner, but Henry stood over his injured brother and used his sword two-handed to hack at the enemy. He fought with a sword because he regarded that as a royal weapon, and if it put him at a disadvantage against men armed with poleaxes and maces, then Henry did not acknowledge it, because he knew God was with him. He could feel God in his heart, he sensed God giving him strength, and even when a French poleax rang on his crowned helmet with a sudden blinding force, God protected him. A golden fleuret was chopped from the crown and his helmet was dented, but the steel was not broken and the leather liner soaked some of the blow’s force and Henry stayed conscious as he lunged the sword into the axman’s armpit and screamed his war cry. “Saint George!”

Henry of England was filled by a God-given joy. Never, in all his life, had he felt closer to God, and he almost pitied the men who came to be killed for they were being killed by God. Henry’s bodyguard flanked him and, one by one, they killed eighteen Frenchmen who, only the night before, had sworn a solemn oath to kill or capture the King of England. The eighteen had been bound together by their oath and they had advanced together and now they died together. Their bodies lay tangled and bloody to impede the men who still wanted the fame of capturing a king. A Frenchman bellowed his challenge, stumbling forward, spiked mace thrashing at the king, and the king slammed the sword hard forward to lodge the point in the slit of the Frenchman’s visor, and the mace struck a man next to the king, who staggered, and another Englishman drove his poleax spike into the Frenchman’s throat so that blood ran down the ax’s iron-sheathed handle. The man sank to his knees, and the king rammed the blade into the visor’s slit, butchering the man’s lips and tongue. Blood welled at the slit, a poleax slammed onto the man’s helmet, driving in the steel and opening the skull to spray the king with blood as he ripped his sword free and parried a lance thrust. “Saint George!” he shouted and felt the divine power thrill through his veins. The Frenchman with the lance had an open visor and Henry saw fear in the man’s eyes, then a mute appeal for mercy as his lance was wrenched from his hands, but God did not want mercy for Henry’s enemies and so the king cut his sword across the man’s face to slice open both his eyeballs. One of the royal bodyguard cracked the blinded man’s helmet with a maul, and so another body was added to the heap of French dead that protected the English line.

And the English line held. In places it had been driven back by the weight of attacking men-at-arms, but the line did not break, and now it was protected by ramparts of dead and wounded Frenchmen, and in places the line bulged forward as the English counterattacked into the French formation. And the French, unable to march straight ahead, began to spread to their flanks.