And if Boughton’s artillery arrived tomorrow as promised, the siege would be over quickly. Which begged the question: Why send us here at all?
Palmer glanced at the window that opened onto the woods and frowned. Mist obscured the view of the monastery but a high light now shone through from the octagonal tower, imparting a strange luminescence to the fog.
Summoning the faithful…Palmer stood.
“Shadrach…”
“I know.” He returned his hybrid to its holster just as the door opened. Sergeant Lewis stood in the doorway at an angle, favouring his damaged leg.
“Cap’n. The monastery…”
Shadrach stood, a dark silhouette whose cape and broad-brimmed hat were outlined by the fire that shone through the window. “We will not wait for dawn, Captain Palmer. That beacon is not a call to arms for any straggling Royalists. That fire has been lit for something else.”
CHAPTER SIX
Jethro Lewis stood, wincing at the fresh pain that shot down his thigh, and imagined fresh torments to inflict upon Shadrach. Outside, the sun had vanished below the seaward horizon, and emergent stars dusted the clear night. The high walls of the monastery darkened the sky further, save for the blazing fire within the lozenge-shaped windows of the octagonal tower. Formerly vacant eye sockets now glared balefully down at the interlopers, shining on the thick mist that swallowed the dead forest. Only the topmost branches showed above the sea-like fog, whipping in the wind like the grasping fingers of drowning sailors.
With his men, he came to Shadrach and Palmer, the former staring at the skies with a frown. Palmer acknowledged Lewis’s arrival with a curt nod. “Get the horses.”
Lewis sneered, but turned back to the courtyard. Within moments, Overy and Morton had the full complement of steeds, unhappy at having their shelter disturbed, and led them by the reins out of the inn. The reluctant clopping of hoofs on stone gave way to softer sounds as the horses picked their way through the sodden, marsh-like ground.
“What be up with him, Cap’n?” Lewis inclined his head towards Shadrach, noting the way the cloaked stranger had his hand on the opening of the leather holster that held his murderous hybrid-weapon. “Mutterin’ about stars, again?”
If Shadrach heard, he did not respond. Palmer pulled on his gauntlets and took his horse. “Ride, Lewis.”
Lewis paled. “Through the woods?” A shudder ran down his body before he could stop it. He clenched his fists, hoping his men had not witnessed it.
“ ‘Tis the only way to the monastery. I will take point, Shadrach will take the vanguard. Your men will stay close to me; there is no clear path I can see, and we would not wish to become lost now, would we?”
“Palmer.” Shadrach’s voice was low, but full of urgency. “Tell your men, when we ride through the woods…touch nothing. Do not break any of the branches, nor the leaves, if any remain.”
Palmer frowned. “What?”
“Remember Dante:
‘Once we were men, now we are stumps of wood;
Your hand should show some mercy, though we had been
The souls of serpents.’ ”
Palmer shuddered. Then he looked as though an understanding had passed between him and Shadrach. More of that bloody book-nonsense they’s been quotin’ to each other.
But it was an order he had no qualms of obeying. “You heard them book-lovers, lads. No tearing strips for souvenirs, now.”
Lewis glared at the captain’s back as he took his place in the procession. He ensured Morton took the place between Shadrach and himself; he had no wish to present his back to that murderous bastard. Overy rode before him.
The light from the octagonal tower provided the only guide through the woods. They had to walk their horses slowly through the tangled, dead forest, gently coaxing them to put one trembling foot in front of another. Lewis glanced down and hissed. Tree roots had pushed through the damp earth, flexing pale wooden muscles like well-fed worms in grave soil. He pushed the thought from his mind and concentrated on the agonisingly slow progression of Overy and Palmer.
They became strangely hued silhouettes against the multicoloured lights cast from the monastery’s stained glass windows; dark, yet full of stars.
The stars are right. Damn that Shadrach! He glanced upwards and saw a shifting canopy of stars, occasionally broken by irregular streaks of blackness as the topmost branches moved overhead.
He became light-headed and lowered his head. Nausea took him, and his fingers clenched on the reins. Skeletal fingers caressed his cheeks and he bit off a scream. He tore them from his face, heard the snapping of broken, dead wood like finger bones breaking under torture.
They be only twigs. What’s wrong with yerself, Lewis? Yet everywhere he looked, wherever faint light from the monastery shone, he saw faces: tormented expressions open-mouthed in agony from within the knots of the oaks; cunning, avaricious faces lurking in the boles of the sycamores, ready to pounce upon unsuspecting prey and devour…
Faces of men he had slain, enemy and comrade alike. Faces of those he had betrayed, whose bleeding corpses were still warm as he stole their silver. Faces that called his name and demanded vengeance. The twigs that caressed his cheeks now scratched, dug deeper, drawing blood and screams – for they were indeed fingers; the rotting, desperate grasp of the dead.
* * *
Palmer halted at the screams. It was the first time he had heard Jethro Lewis utter a sound like that. It took him a shocked moment to catch his bearings and realise where he was.
Too late. His horse reared as he turned, and his head made contact with a branch. His helmet cushioned him from most of the blow, but the wood had struck him hard enough to lose his balance and control. The reins dropped from his fingers, his backside slid from the saddle, and his feet slipped from the stirrups.
“Captain! Captain!”
It was Overy’s voice; like the screams of Lewis, the urgency and fear in the hardened dragoon’s cries was alien to his ears.
“Quiet, damn you!” Palmer barked. “Keep still, so I may find you.” Darkness combined with a red mist that veiled his vision. The lights of the monastery were lost to him, and he saw nothing save red-hued figures shuffling in the gloom. He pushed against the trunk of a tree, grabbing at boles and stumps of severed limbs to get upright, and reached for his sword. It shuddered free from the scabbard, and he held it in shaking hands. Until his vision improved, he dared not trust to his pistol; a shot in the darkness would spell ruin to such a closely-bunched line.
“Overy! Where is Lewis?”
Sobbing answered him. The sobbing of a man returned to childhood fears. Palmer froze, remembering Shadrach’s words: When we ride through the woods…touch nothing. Do not break any of the branches, nor the leaves, if any remain.
Had there been snapping of branches? What hell are we in?
“Morton! Shadrach! To me!” He reached a hand towards the weeping wreck of Overy, recoiled at the stench of ordure. The dragoon had soiled himself.
Orange and scarlet flashed in the sky, and white smoke filled the air, accompanied by the smell of gunpowder. Palmer’s ears rang with the musket blast, and the image of Overy’s terror-struck features burned into his retinas before the flash vanished and smoke obscured his vision.
Palmer had seen terror in men’s eyes before. He had seen the animalistic state they turned to after constant exposure to artillery and musket fire, the battle cries and the howls of the dying. He had seen men turned to nervous wrecks, unable to control the violent shaking that overtook them. Despite what Shadrach told him, Captain James Palmer fancied he had seen much of the horror of war.
What possessed Overy’s face had nothing to do with the privations of warfare. Palmer told himself it was the smoke and fire of the musket that turned the face of a veteran dragoon into a demonic visage from the deepest pits of Hell. Weeping and child-like pleading became maniacal laughter; cackling, grinning with glee, eyes burning with unwholesome delight in a world only Overy
could understand.
“Overy…” Palmer could not hear the name over the roar in his ears. He knew it was pointless to reason with the man, to reach out and comfort him in the darkness that now returned to the woods.
Hands clutched him. Spittle flew in his eyes. The laughter became a sob.
“Hold me.”
Palmer started. Then he felt the hot blood gushing from Overy’s chest; knew then that the musket fired had not been his. Then whose?
“Please…hold me.” A familiar request on the field of battle; when a man’s agonies are close to an end, and the greater horror looms before him: the awareness of passing this sphere, going alone into the great void that awaits all. A journey none wish to take, and will hold to human comfort for as long as they are able.
Palmer wrestled with his conscience only momentarily. The musket shot had not been fired by Overy, and until he was certain it had not come from one of his own men he had to assume they were not alone in the woods. He pushed Overy away.
Overy mewed like a cat, and reached out again. This time his grasp was tighter, and Palmer struggled to escape a grip that dug talons into his wrists.
The same cry, only louder, even less human; a cat-like mewl combined with an open-mouthed roar that could only have come from the battlefield of Satan: the cry of eternal suffering, of souls locked in everlasting combat with themselves, desperate for the release of death that was forever denied to them.
Words formed in the maelstrom of noise: words that made no sense to Captain Palmer, who fought to free himself from a grip that tore holes in his buff coat and drew blood, a grip belonging to no earthly man.
The words came in a hot blast of air that reminded Palmer of the heat his Crusader heroes must have suffered as they fought to free the Holy Land from the Saracen. He turned his head away, too late to close his eyes, feeling grit and hot sand scrape over his eyeballs; the red mist of his vision became a beige, featureless canvas of dust, dry earth and sand.
Thunder and lightning: a desert storm that shook the ground beneath Palmer and had him quaking. More fire and smoke, flashes of a manic, screaming face that looked even less human; fresh, hot blood slapping Palmer’s face and then the words faded into the sounds of a dying man, rather than the apocalyptic roar of a satanic battlefield.
“The Black Goat…Dear God in heaven, she walks among us. The Black Goat!”
More thunder, more smoke. Fresh musket balls dug deep into the chest of Overy and into the tree that held him prisoner. Fragments of bark and moss filled the air, and the smell of powder was replaced by the stench of scorched flesh and burnt wood.
Splinters. Axe strokes, hacking deep into the tree limbs around him. Grunts of exertion, and the awareness of men around him. Voices unfamiliar to him.
He felt his arms freed. He pulled away and rubbed the hot, stinging blood from his eyes. Then he was grabbed, his arms pinioned and a knee thrust into the small of his back, forcing his head back. A lantern shone on him, and his vision cleared enough to take in the hostile faces of the three armed men who held him prisoner.
But this did not register. Palmer could focus on nothing save the fate of Overy, the axes and pike staffs hacking deep into the dragoon. Yet no more blood was drawn; instead, solid oak replaced Overy’s legs, and he bled sap.
* * *
Jethro Lewis heard Overy’s scream and the thudding of musket balls in his comrade’s chest, and he shuddered, knowing full well the damage a cast lead ball would make upon exit: an entry hole no bigger than a sixpence, the musket ball would flatten and explode out the other side in an exit wound the size of a dinner plate.
And them muskets be awful close! The gunfire was not from his comrades who had set forth from Haverton this morning; the garrison within the abbey had sent men into the wood.
But not to guard against intruders, this Lewis knew. They’d heard the screams of himself and Overy, had come running because they knew something was in the woods.
And Morton? Where was he? The last thing Lewis remembered before his comrade had disappeared into the wood was the flailing, scratching hands of his unofficial second-in-command, clawing his face as the unseen forces in the dead oaks took him from view. The twigs scratched his cheeks deeper, drawing more blood, and Lewis pulled them from his skin. They resisted, digging further like maggots writhing in a new feast of fresh meat, and he pulled harder, crushing them in his fingers.
He cried in pain as splinters drove into his palms, burning. He turned from Morton, ignoring his pleas, and blundered headlong in the opposite direction.
Tears blinded his eyes as he stumbled through the leaf litter and tripped over the exposed tree roots, heading for what he hoped were the main gates to the monastery. Words bubbled from his broken, bleeding lips.
“I’s sorry, John. I really is.” Didna mean to leave you there…
But what else could he do? Seeing faces from the past like that?
Nay. Don’ think on ‘em, Jethro. Just get yersen outa the woods…fresh pain flared in his hands like bee stings, and he was thankful the gloom of the words prevented him seeing the swollen mass of agonised flesh his hands had become.
He stumbled once more, slamming into the ground and tasting earth. He forced himself up, but the wound Shadrach had inflicted upon him flared, refusing to allow him to put any weight on the leg. It turned to rubber, ignored all commands to move. Jethro Lewis crashed to the ground again, with fresh cuts to his sweating palms, and tears came.
The only time he had cried since childhood, and he hated himself for it. How comes I loses control like this? They be phantoms, demons o’ my own imagining. Why run from ‘em?
Anger built from the hate. ‘Tis that bloody Shadrach. He be the one who brought us to this devilry! He be the one who made sure I couldna run away!
Kneeling in the leaf litter, with tears, blood and snot running down his face, he looked to the bleak sky with its feeble promise of light and howled to the empty heavens.
“Damn ye, Shadrach! And damn ye, Palmer, Smythe and Boughton! Damn ye all! We should never have come yer, should never…”
A gloved hand pressed against his mouth, cutting off his words and stifling his breath. He was pulled back into darker shadows, just as the lantern’s light shone in his direction.
Lewis struggled against his assailant, but the grip was vice-like. A strangely accented but familiar voice whispered into his ear.
“We are most certainly damned now. Keep still, and keep silent! Wait for them to pass.”
He ceased his struggles. He went limp, allowing Shadrach to press his body firmly into the undergrowth, far from the sight of the grinning faces carved in the dead trees: surely by Satan himself, decorating his own dark Eden.
The light passed, and with it the sight of James Palmer, arms pinned behind his back by two burly infantrymen. In the lantern’s light, their sashes were crimson smears, and then Lewis saw the blood on their faces.
Kendall’s men, he thought. His shoulders tensed with the realisation of where that blood had come from. My men!
“Hold,” Shadrach whispered as Lewis’s struggles returned. “We cannot –”
“No,” another voice said firmly. The sound of a cocked flintlock pistol echoed in the surrounding dead wood. “You cannot. Get to your feet. Slowly.”
Lewis rolled over as Shadrach arose. He groaned as the newcomer was joined by another comrade. Then another.
Three men formed a rough semicircle around Shadrach and Lewis. Three flintlock pistol barrels faced them.
“The powder is dry, gentlemen,” the first soldier said. “You would do well to do as we say. Besides, we are not your only enemies, as you have doubtless discovered.”
“We are not your enemy, soldier,” Lewis grunted, pointing to his sash. “We fight for the King.”
The soldier’s face came into view. It was young, once. Now the deprivations of war – and something else – had hollowed the cheeks and sunken the eyes, turned the beard grey and the skin sallow
. There was darkness there, darker than the gloom of the dead woods. A darkness that made Lewis shudder.
Yet no hint of weakness in his bearing: the flintlock was steady and unmoving, the trigger finger poised and unshaken.
“Is that why you called out the names of the Parliamentarian colonels who are based in Launceston? Smythe and Boughton have not switched their allegiance to the King, as far as I am aware.”
Remembering what he had uttered just before Shadrach caught up with him, and how it had ended the mission, Lewis groaned. He averted his eyes from Shadrach’s glare.
The retreating duo holding Palmer prisoner had returned. The lantern cast a pallid glow over the three prisoners and their captors.
But it was the members of the Royalist garrison who looked more uneasy than the Parliamentarian interlopers. Screams still emanated from the darker section of the woods, and Lewis wondered how many men had come forth.
Shadrach’s face was grim as he turned to the captors. “Take us to your commander, gentlemen. I would have words with him…while he is still human.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The approach to the monastery was swift. With their hands bound behind their backs, enemy pistols aimed at their necks, Boughton and Smythe’s men were hurried through the last section of the woods. In a way, Palmer was glad they had guides; the twisting, circular path they took through the dead woods was not the one he would have taken, and it was obvious the men of Fairlight knew the safer passages through the accursed forest.
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