CHAPTER ONE
This dream stunk. It literally stunk. I couldn't recall ever smelling anything in a dream before, and I hoped to God this wasn't a permanent change. Or if it was, that my future dreams would be a lot more fragrant than this one.
I was striding through an encampment of soldiers who obviously hadn't bathed in the last two months. That alone, the act of walking -- feeling my legs stretching out, one after the other, hearing the crunch of stone and earth underneath my feet -- made the dream a pleasurable one, the smell notwithstanding
I was evidently among friends. Men were sitting with bows beside them checking their arrows. They nodded to me as I passed. The better-dressed men, who sat in smaller groups sharpening their swords, raised their hands in greeting. I was never that interested in history, but my guess, based simply on the movies that I had seen, was that I had put myself in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. I smiled and waved a salute.
It had evidently just stopped raining. Our camp was a field of mud, and the brown and gold leaves on the trees to the north and west of us were still heavy with water. It was evening, and it became clear as I walked that a number of us were headed to some sort of meeting. I was dressed slightly better than most of the men, in a light blue tunic underneath a gray cape of some sort. I had high leather boots that kept the mud from my feet. Ahead of me a large group had gathered, and, as I joined them, a man in a far more sumptuous tunic than mine had leapt atop a log to address us.
I could hear little of the speech at the start. The men around me were offering their own comments on it, drowning out the speaker.
"What good's a passport home with them out there?" one man scoffed. "Sittin' on the bloody way, ain't they?"
Although his friends roared in cynical approval, the crowd gradually grew quiet. It had become that this speech was worth listening to. The cynicism didn't stop, naturally. The first man suggested to his companions that he wouldn't mind being a gentleman in England now a-bed himself, while another added that he'd like to be holding his manhood while he was at it.
But the rest of the group paid them no attention at all. The speaker had them in the palm of his hand. He was brilliant, his speech a rhythmic incantation of patriotic fervor that was taking these few, these happy few, this band of brothers, and turning them into an army that would, if nothing else, die happily in his service when battle was joined tomorrow morning.
It wasn't until he reached the end, his voice lost in the prolonged cheering of every single man with whom I was standing, mine own among them, that I realized that he was a fraud. I nearly stumbled as I recalled that I had declaimed this speech myself, to my roommates back in college, like every other English major who thought himself the first to discover the power of Shakespeare's words.
And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon St. Crispin's Day.
This was
King Henry V
, goddamn it. And not the real
King Henry V
either. This was Kenneth Branagh, whose movie version of the play I had watched only a few years earlier.
I was dreaming about being in a movie. A movie I could smell. Huh.
The speech over, I returned to my own tent and fell asleep. I awoke in the dream the next morning, and watched the Battle of Agincourt unfold before me. Or not unfold, as the case turned out to be. Assisted by a young squire, I dressed in my armor and strode out to the field of battle, once again reveling in the act of walking. I stood to the rear, proper coward that I was, watching the king deploy his forces between the two woods that flanked the road. We waited there for four hours, doing absolutely nothing. I knew little of the battle itself. The other fellows in front of us would be French, I knew. And we were supposed to win, weren't we?
"My Lord Handley." A squire had come running back to me from the front. "The king requests that you attend him now. He seeks his council's wisdom 'fore the fray."
"The king?" I asked, looking around to see if there were perhaps some other Lord Handley he was looking for. "Wants to see me?"
It was a stupid question. I knew even in the dream that my name was Handley. My Lord Handley was a bit much, though. I was usually happy to answer to Rick. Or Hando, which is what some of my co-workers at the metro desk of the Charleston Messenger liked to call me.
"My Lord?" the squire asked.
"Lead on, MacDuff," I said, suppressing a grin. He stopped in his tracks and stared at me with astonishment as if I had somehow remembered his name from some previous meeting.
"Just go."
I waved him ahead of me.
"Handley," roared Branagh as I joined him under the pavilion at the center of the line of battle. "You see the problem that we face, my friend. The French would sit there, twid their thumbs, and laugh. We must perforce attack, yet few we are; and twenty thousand Frenchmen sit astride the road toward home."
"Uh, yeah. I do see that. Sire."
I looked out over the field. Compared with them, we looked like a couple of policeman trying to hold back a demonstration.
He roared again and clapped me on the back, sending me stumbling forward amid the laughter of his advisors.
"And I would have your counsel, too, my Lord," he said. "My Gloucester here says wait, while Exeter would have us charge their line and mow them down."
I pretended to study the field. There was something about Agincourt that was tugging at me, some half-remembered fact that made this battle stand out. I probably should have taken a few more history courses in college.
"So, to number our advantages here," I said, "we have, uh . . ."
We had large groups of longbowmen on the right and left of our line, behind pointed wooden stakes driven into the ground. Two smaller groups of archers divided three groups of footmen. The French, as I looked at them sitting there five hundred feet to our east, appeared to have, in addition to far more men, distinct groups of cavalry and crossbowmen.
"We have these bigger bows, for one thing."
"Quite so, my Lord," said one of the king's other advisers, "our reach exceeds theirs far."
That was it -- longbows.
