"Cornwell, Bernard - Grail Quest 3 - Heretic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cornwell Bernard)

Heretic

by Bernard cornwell

PROLOGUE
Calais, 1347
 The road came from the southern hills and crossed the marshes
by the sea. It was a bad road. A summer's persistent rain had left
it a strip of glutinous mud that baked hard when the sun came
out, but it was the only road that led from the heights of Sangatte
to the harbours of Calais and Gravelines. At Nifulay, a hamlet of
no distinction whatever, it crossed the River Ham on a stone bridge.
The Ham was scarcely worth the title of river. It was a slow stream
that oozed through fever-ridden marshlands until it vanished
among the coastal mudflats. It was so short that a man could wade
from its source to the sea in little more than an hour, and it was
so shallow that a man could cross it at low tide without getting
his waist wet. It drained the swamps where reeds grew thick and
herons hunted frogs among the marsh grass, and it was fed by a
maze of smaller streams where the villagers from Nifulay and
Hammes and Guimes set their wicker eel traps.
Nifulay and its stone bridge might have expected to slumber
through history, except that the town of Calais lay just two miles
to the north and, in the summer of 1347, an army of thirty thousand Englishmen was laying siege to the port and their encampment lay thick between the town's formidable walls and the
marshes. The road which came from the heights and crossed the
Ham at Nifulay was the only route a French relief force might use
and in the height of the summer, when the inhabitants of Calais
were close to starvation, Philip of Valois, King of France, brought
his army to Sangatte.
Twenty thousand Frenchmen lined the heights, their banners
thick in the wind blowing from the sea. The oriflamme was there,
the sacred war pennant of France. It was a long flag with three
pointed tails, a blood-red ripple of precious silk, and if the flag
looked bright that was because it was new. The old oriflamme
was in England, a trophy taken on the wide green hill between
Wadicourt and Crecy the previous summer. But the new flag was
as sacred as the old, and about it flew the standards of France's
great lords: the banners of Bourbon, of Montmorency and of the
Count of Armagnac. Lesser flags were visible among the noble
standards, but all proclaimed that the greatest warriors of Philip's
kingdom were come to give battle to the English. Yet between
them and the enemy were the River Ham and the bridge at Nifulay
that was defended by a stone tower around which the English
had dug trenches. These they had filled with archers and men
at-arms. Beyond that force was the river, then the marshes, and
on the higher ground close to Calais's high wall and its double
moat was a makeshift town of houses and tents where the English
army lived. And such an army as had never been seen in France.
The besiegers" encampment was bigger than Calais itself. As far
as the eye could see were streets lined with canvas, with timber