Trowbridge glanced at Stryker for the first time. ‘Can’t stand ’em m’self, sir.’ He grinned. ‘Good money, though. Inland towns’ll pay a pretty penny for ’em pickled.’
‘I believe they’re supposedly an aphrodisiac.’
Trowbridge shrugged. ‘A what, sir? I don’t know what that is, but they’re certainly meant to help keep your pizzle hard.’
Stryker laughed into the wind, but immediately fell silent.
‘Captain,’ Trowbridge said urgently, but Stryker was already running down the side of the knoll.
‘I saw them!’ he called over his shoulder.
Trowbridge stared back towards the oak copse. ‘God help us,’ he mouthed. On their northern flank, emerging from the tree line in a silver wave, were cavalry.
Stryker reached his long, red-coated line and turned northwards to stare across the sloping heath. There, at the place where the land vanished into the dark copse, he saw the glinting ranks of the horsemen. Jelyan Mookes, one of his veterans, was nearby. He had already registered the threat, for a horrified expression had stricken the corporal’s sallow face, but his words were muffled by the gale. And then the wind dropped. Suddenly, surprisingly, there were no howling gusts to whip away all other sounds. Ears were liberated, attention was hooked, and Mookes’s cry carried to the company. Shrill and desperate.
‘Horse!’
They all heard the hoofbeats at the same moment. Distant thunder, growing instead of dying. Collectively heads turned to the right, northwards, gazing down the gentle slope. What they saw was a wide, glinting line of killers, silhouetted against the dark wood beyond. They spanned the near horizon like avenging angels, standing tall in stirrups, grinding wicked spurs into their mounts’ flesh for ever more speed, bearing down on their quarry with hard faces and glittering eyes. Harquebusiers, light cavalrymen, armour-plated warriors with drawn swords and levelled pistols.
Stryker sprinted along the line, making for the ammunition wagon at the front of the column but all the while looking at the charging horsemen, unable to tear his gaze away from the metallic hunters. He had faced many such men before, from agile harquebusiers to heavily armoured cuirassiers, and even the fabled winged lancers of Poland. But this new enemy was different from the rest. The men now sweeping towards his company bore a field sign he knew all too well. One that told him he had brought this upon his men; for his willingness to pick a fight when a more sensible man might have marched on by, and for the humiliation of the horsemen that had followed. Because the men on the slope each wore a feather fixed into the plate of their helmet tail. A long, black feather that, Stryker knew, had been plucked from the body of a Great Cormorant.
Colonel Gabriel Wild was coming for him.
For a second Stryker hesitated. It was a bad place to be caught, open ground in front, river at their backs, and he did not know what to do for the best. But if there was one thing his years of soldiering had taught him, it was that a decisive officer, even a bad one, was better than a ditherer. ‘Charge for horse!’ he bellowed, hearing the command echo up and down the line. When he drilled his men, he would form them into a tight, sharp-angled square, but this was not drill, and time allowed only the simplest of movements. ‘Charge for horse!’ he shouted again. ‘Form circle! Protect the cart! Protect the cart, God damn you!’
The column contracted like a vast snake coiling inwards when disturbed by a predator, musketeers instinctively shrinking behind the screen of spines formed by the pikemen. It seemed to take an age, but as the cavalry closed the distance between them with startling rapidity, the red-coated infantrymen finally formed a crude circle, pikes on the outermost fringe, wagon at the very centre.
Each pikeman jammed the butt end of his long, tapering stave into the instep of his right foot, angling the weapon upwards so that the leaf-shaped blade at its tip could be held rigidly in line with a horse’s chest or face. Behind them the musketeers hurriedly rammed lead balls into their iron barrels and tipped black powder into firing pans. Mercifully, a handful of weapons were already primed and ready to fire, and the men blew carefully on their slow-burning cords of match, caressing the glowing embers into life.
Stryker, orchestrating matters from outside the formation, saw Cecily Cade atop her mount, jaw lolling open as she stared in stunned silence at the black-plumed horsemen. He ran to her, reached up to take her arm, and almost dragged her from the saddle. She yelped, more out of surprise than pain, and Otilwell Broom, riding beside her, gave a sharp bark of protest.
Stryker turned on him. ‘Get off that fucking horse if you want to live!’
Broom, taken aback by the infantryman’s coarse ferocity, held Stryker’s gaze for a moment before sliding from the saddle and coaxing his mount to where Stryker waited, still holding Cecily.
‘Follow me,’ Stryker snapped, and paced quickly into the hastily forming circle. Cecily, leading the horse in her wake, cried out again at his iron grip, but he ignored her, shouldering men aside and releasing her only when they were safely at the rear of the last rank.
‘Stay here!’
Though he could see she tried to keep the fear from her voice, her left eye was twitching slightly and the colour had drained from her cheeks. ‘What should I do?’
Stryker wanted to laugh at the question, but resisted the urge. ‘Get behind your horse,’ he offered simply. ‘Crouch low and pray.’ He looked quickly over his shoulder and saw that Broom had followed them. ‘Stay with her.’
The bodyguard glanced longingly at the cart, which sat at the epicentre of the formation. ‘May we not take shelter there?’
Stryker followed his gaze, but shook his head. ‘No!’ he ordered sharply. ‘If a spark catches it, you’ll be blown to pieces. You stay here!’
Broom nodded curtly, and coaxed his own horse into position next to Cecily’s. Both then took shelter behind the beasts.
Stryker turned to push his way out of the circle. When he reached the outermost rank he looked up at the great tide of crowing rebels in black-feathered, lobster-tailed helmets. Stryker could not yet see Wild, though he knew the colonel would be there, close to the front, scenting the kill. Stryker’s eye caught the enemy standard, a small flag of black and white fluttering at the end of a pole hefted by a young cornet. An ominous smudge against the blue sky. Instinctively he turned back to catch sight of his own flag. The red taffeta flapped high and proud above the ragged circle.
‘Charge your pikes!’ he heard Skellen snarl. ‘And load those shitting muskets!’
Time was running out. The enemy would be upon them in moments, but at least they would present a united front. He thanked God that his men were experienced, for an attack of such shocking speed would have set many of the king’s greener troops to flight. His men, he knew, would stand firm.
The redcoats set their faces into grim masks as the Parliamentarians reached them. They feared the slashing blades of cavalry, but trusted that the horses would not charge their lethal hedge of pikes.
Sure enough, the attackers came to within twenty paces of the defensive formation, marginally out of pike range, and began to wheel away, curling back down the slope from whence they came.
‘Fire!’ Lieutenant Burton’s voice barked above the hoofbeats, and those musketeers who were able to fire did so. Six or seven shots cracked out across the bleak field. Four men were punched from their saddles, staining the heath red where they lay.
The Royalists roused a jeer, but almost immediately their whistles and calls began to die away. The cavalrymen, it seemed, had been formed into two squadrons of perhaps fifty troopers apiece, the second group galloping a short distance behind the first. Even Stryker had failed to notice the division initially, but now it was rapidly becoming clear. For though that first squad were peeling away, the second squad were not.
‘Christ,’ Stryker said simply.
‘Clever bugger’s used that charge to see how many muskets we can bring to bear,’ Simeon Barkworth’s voice croaked at his side.
> Stryker looked down at him. ‘Clever or lucky.’
Barkworth shrugged. ‘Either way, he’s won his wager.’
That, Stryker knew, was all too true. Only a handful of his forty-nine musketeers were so far ready to fire, and Wild’s first charge – a feint, it now seemed – had been designed to prove that fact.
The second phalanx of horsemen reached Stryker’s position, but instead of charging home or wheeling away, they drew up alongside the infantrymen and began firing pistols and carbines into the Royalist ranks, walking their mounts around the front of Stryker’s formation like a warship firing a broadside. The great circle convulsed as men shrank from the searing barrage of lead.
Stryker watched in horror as a man to his left pitched backwards, a carbine ball tearing straight through his throat. He ran a gloved hand across his face, wiping away the blood that had sprayed him. ‘Where are those damned muskets?’ he screamed, and knew he had been outwitted. Ordinarily infantrymen would view the short-arm fire of mounted troops with utter disdain, such was the wasteful inaccuracy of the weapons. But here, in open country, aimed at a mass of men who could not offer anything in reply, they could not miss. There was not even a need to take aim. They could simply point their pieces at one, vast, fleshy target and squeeze the trigger. Eventually gaps would open in the circle as men died, like small breaches in a castle wall, and the pike barrier would fracture. And into those gaps would ride the victorious Parliamentarians.
Colonel Gabriel Wild was exultant. Finally, after the loss of the arms cache and resulting humiliation, he had run his quarry to ground. A memory flashed into his mind as he wallowed in this moment of triumph. The image of a poor, stricken, broken-jawed tapster, bent across his own ale-slick counter, a sword tickling the cleft between his flabby buttocks. That had been the turning point. The moment when wild goose chase had become exciting hunt. The second when hound had sniffed fox. Bray had whimpered and sobbed and wailed as Wild pressed the blade against his most private parts, and loosed his bowels when the tip had broken flesh. And then he had told Wild of the rumours that spoke of a one-eyed king’s man who led a company of redcoats and a wagon packed full of weaponry. Those whispers said the Royalist fugitives were travelling westward, which Wild had already guessed, but, crucially, they also told of a circuitous route through open plains and ancient forests. With each village Wild had visited through his manic night ride, more questions were answered and more sightings reported. Stryker might have stayed well clear of the major roads, but a hundred or so men, several horses, and a wagon were difficult to hide altogether.
And then, in the grey dawn, Colonel Gabriel Wild had spotted the telltale glint of pike tips on the horizon, and he had sensed immediately that this was his fox.
But this fox, he thought with exquisite relish, had nowhere to go. No hole in which to hide. Stryker would die a most horrible death – if he was unlucky enough to survive this assault – and the thought made Wild’s skin tingle with delicious anticipation.
Standing high in his stirrups, Wild surveyed the scene. To his right, the desolate plain stretched for at least another two miles, offering no shred of shelter, while to the left, at the Royalists’ backs, the river formed a natural barrier. In short, there was nowhere for the enemy to go. No hope for Stryker and his company.
The redcoats had formed a ragged circle in a desperate attempt to stave off Wild’s horsemen, but that had been almost as dangerous a move as remaining in a column, for now they had presented a concentrated mass of bodies for Wild’s men to shoot. Things might have been different, he reflected, had Stryker’s musketeers been ready for the attack, for muskets had a longer range than Wild’s carbines and were vastly more accurate, but he had taken the gamble that they would not have marched with primed weapons, and that gamble had paid off.
‘Shoot ’em!’ Wild bellowed above the din of small-arms fire. ‘You cannot miss, boys! Shoot the malignant bastards down! No prisoners, you hear me? No goddamned prisoners!’ Captives were slow, cumbersome creatures that would impinge his glorious ride back to Okehampton. Besides, he wanted every last one of Stryker’s motley band dead and rotting by sundown. He turned to one of his officers. ‘Truth told, Grantham, I’m a little disappointed.’
Grantham stared at his colonel in surprise. ‘Sir?’
‘In a strange way, I had hoped that one-eyed fiend would put up more of a fight.’
The Royalist circle, entirely surrounded now, shuddered again as three pikemen went down under the hail of lead. Men in the second rank shifted forwards to plug the gap before it was filled by Roundhead horsemen.
‘It ain’t over yet, sir,’ Grantham warned.
‘Nonsense, man!’ Wild called over his shoulder as he kicked at his mount. ‘Come! Let us spill some Royalist blood!’
Stryker could see that his company was about to shatter. The first group of horsemen, those who had retreated after the initial feint, were returning now, sweeping back across the gorse and heather to encircle Stryker’s tattered force. They maintained their distance, for they rightly feared the outstretched pikes, but their own weapons were being brought to the fight with devastating effect.
The Royalists were on the brink of destruction.
‘Stay clear o’ that a wagon, you pribblin’ bloody pizzle-lickers!’ The shout reached him from somewhere on Stryker’s blind left side, and he might have thought it had come from one of the exultant attackers, had it not been a voice he knew almost as well as his own. ‘You want to blow us to kingdom come?’
The words hit Stryker in a moment of sheer epiphany, stabbing him like a white-hot blade.
The wagon.
He spun on his heel, pushing his way back towards the centre of the beleaguered formation, forced to step across the contorted bodies that had been dragged from the front rank. There, beside a group of musketeers hurriedly working to reload their weapons amid the chaotic terror, he caught sight of Skellen, still berating the men for lighting their match-cords too near to the powder-laden wagon.
‘Grenados!’ Stryker shouted.
Skellen’s eyes, ordinarily so small within hooded sockets, widened at the word, and he immediately ran to his captain’s side.
Stryker and Skellen vaulted over the side of the wagon, wincing as pistol and carbine balls whistled around their ears, and desperately rifled through the cloth sacks. After the longest few seconds of his life, Stryker finally laid hands upon a sack bulging with a dozen or so fist-sized spheres. ‘Here!’
Skellen clambered across the sword stacks and bushels and thrust his long arms into the bag, held open by his captain, drawing out a metal casting in each hand. ‘Match here!’ he shouted as Stryker took a couple of explosives for himself.
As the pair leapt down from the vehicle, one of the musketeers from the rearmost rank scuttled across the blood-shadowed heath to meet them. He held out his musket, on which a glowing length of match was fixed.
‘Good lad,’ Skellen grunted, placing the grenado’s fuse against the orange tip. Almost immediately the short tube packed full of black powder sprang into manic life.
Colonel Gabriel Wild drew his long blade. It was a poor thing, a standard cavalry backsword he had taken from a store at Okehampton to replace the fine weapon that had been stolen from him. Stolen by a man who, he presumed, was cowering somewhere within the heaving mass of dying redcoats. Today he would take back his beautiful blade. Today he would take back his honour. He had once heard that the old Scottish savage, Wallace, had made a scabbard from the skins of the men he had killed. Perhaps that should be Stryker’s fate. Or maybe the victory would be even sweeter if he could present the thieving villain’s head to Erasmus Collings. That would wipe the supercilious smirk off the effeminate major-general’s pallid face.
Wild’s aide, Grantham, caught the colonel’s eye, jolting him from the beautiful dream. ‘I fear it is taking too long, sir. They’ll be ready to give volley fire soon, and our moment will be lost.’
Wild nodded. He enjoyed wit
nessing the slow convulsions of Stryker’s company as it died, struggling to replace the men falling so rapidly about them, but Grantham was right. To delay would only gift the enemy time to load their muskets. It was now or never. He held his sword aloft. ‘Charge!’
Colonel Wild was blinded at first. A sheet of white – pure and pristine as new snow – covered his vision, wiping out the land, the sky, the distant pinnacles of tors, the frayed circle of enemy troops, and even his own proud horsemen. In its wake came the sound. An overwhelming, ear-splitting crescendo of explosions that combined high pitch with low grumble.
And then, as his eyes and ears recovered, he heard the screams.
Stryker and Skellen had shoved and bullied their way to the very front rank of the company and lobbed their grenados with as much force as could be mustered. The fizzing spheres had touched ground several paces in front of the charging horses. They had rolled for a second, quickly overrun by the foremost cavalrymen, and Stryker’s heart sank because he feared the thrashing hooves had surely snuffed the bright fuses out. But at the last moment, just as the redcoats braced themselves to be smashed by the tidal wave of man and horse, the little cases of black powder erupted.
It might have taken longer than Stryker had anticipated, but, when the explosions finally came, the iron casings had been blown into the very midst of Wild’s troop. Like a flock of starlings evading a hawk, the horsemen turned as one, reeling instinctively away from the thundering, blinding, burning danger, wrenching savagely on reins and raking bloody lines along their mounts’ heaving flanks. Those riders on the opposite side of the beleaguered circle did manage to strike home, but their efforts were aborted as soon as they realized what had happened to their comrades. In a matter of seconds the Roundhead grip had been released, Wild’s black-feathered harquebusiers galloping pell-mell down the slope from whence they came.
Stryker gazed at the carnage left behind, and was put in mind of the shambles at Smithfield. A mess of meat and bone, hair and sinew. Twisted, bleeding and unrecognizable, strewn in haphazard array amongst lumps of torn muscle and gelatinous entrails. But this butchery had been done by gunpowder, and the stench of scorched flesh hung ripe and nauseating in the air.
Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles Page 12