CHAPTER 10
Gardner’s Tor, Dartmoor, 3 May 1643
Not a single person on the tor slept for the remaining hours of darkness. The night’s tribulations had been exhausting in the extreme, but the sudden carnage on the tor’s north-west face had put the survivors on edge, fraying nerves and keeping eyes pinned wide and watchful.
As dawn came, a new scar stood out on the lower ground to the south and east, adjacent to the ruined village. A brown blemish on the green landscape, freshly dug soil conspicuous against the carpet of heather, bracken, and grass. It was a pit, deep and wide, carved out amongst the stones and bushes of the tor. The final resting place for twenty men. Eleven had been Wild’s harquebusiers, stripped of their weapons and armour, dumped side by side in the mass grave, while the remaining nine were Stryker’s, five pikemen and four musketeers.
‘Never gets easier, sir,’ Sergeant William Skellen said as he came to stand beside Stryker. His face was gaunt, deep eye sockets sepulchral.
‘Never,’ Stryker agreed.
‘Still, could’ve been worse. If it weren’t for those burning faggots we’d have all been rotting.’
Stryker was staring absently into the pit while a team of grunting redcoats used swords, stones and feet to backfill the huge hole. ‘We have Seek Wisdom for that,’ he said without looking up. ‘What a goddamned failure.’
‘Failure, sir? We won didn’t we?’
Now Stryker met the taller man’s hooded gaze. ‘Won? We’re still trapped here like rats in a barrel, Will. Wild will replenish his forces, his supplies, his weapons. He’ll change his bloody horses and send the buggers in again. And again and again, until there’s no one left to defend this grand pile of rocks. It’s a failure, Sergeant, because it was my ambition that led us here.’
‘But, sir—’
‘But nothing,’ Stryker said, rounding on Skellen. ‘You think a fine troop of horse spends their days and nights in the middle of this bloody moor for the freshness of the air? They’re here because we’ve got their ammunition cart, and they want it back. Add to that Wild’s oath to personally geld me, and you can appreciate the situation. They will never leave.’ He turned to look up at the tor and its limp red and white flag. ‘Not while my colour flies.’
Skellen followed his gaze. ‘They’ll have a rough old time takin’ it down, sir.’
‘I know,’ said Stryker, appreciating his old friend’s stoicism. ‘In the meantime, we must hope Otilwell Broom made it past Wild’s pickets.’
They walked on, intending to inspect the entire perimeter of the tor in an effort to identify some way of strengthening their defences. But the reality blew away any vestige of hope Stryker might have harboured. The night’s violence had left him with thirty-nine musketeers and just twenty-two pikemen, not nearly enough to hold off another concerted assault.
‘Difficult to man the whole hill,’ Skellen muttered behind Stryker, anticipating his captain’s thoughts. ‘Still, least we won’t run out o’ shot or powder.’
They moved up to the flat summit, weaving slowly between a couple of jagged obelisks and up to the grassy, granite-flanked avenue that had offered such vital protection during their time on the tor. Cecily Cade was there, slumped against the wall of grey, eyes red-rimmed from powder smoke and exhaustion. To his credit, Marcus Bailey, the perpetually terrified wagon driver, was with her, still at her side as Stryker had ordered. Stryker lifted his hat to them as he and Skellen strode past. They went to the far side of the tor, acknowledging pikemen and musketeers alike, stopping briefly to offer words of encouragement to the wounded.
Lieutenant Burton stood on the north-west lip of the crest. His face was dark, a layer of soot mingling with the wispy hairs of his beard. He had removed the leather strap that pinned his withered right arm to his body, instead cradling it with his left, rubbing the chafed skin with blackened fingers. ‘Strange to think the bastard’s just down there,’ he said, nodding at the grey building half a mile away.
Stryker went to stand beside the younger man, studying the barn and the little figures that moved around it. There seemed to be a deal more activity than usual and he squinted in a futile effort to pick out the Parliamentarians more clearly, but soon gave up. ‘Plotting our downfall.’
‘Aye,’ Burton agreed. He looked up at Stryker then. ‘We’re not going get out of this one, are we, sir?’
Stryker shook his head. ‘Supplies are running short.’ He felt thankful that they still had access to fresh water, but that would not fill their bellies or give them the strength to fight.
Skellen cleared his throat noisily. ‘Beg pardon, sirs, but I should see to the lads.’
‘Carry on, Sergeant,’ Stryker replied. When he looked back at Burton, he saw that his second-in-command had turned to face the tor’s interior, staring intently at the entrance to the avenue.
‘Should a soldier marry, sir?’
Stryker was momentarily taken aback. ‘Marry? I—er—I suppose. Women follow the armies up and down this bloody land.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t want her following,’ Burton responded tartly. ‘She’d be set in a house where it is safe.’
‘Safe?’ Stryker mused. ‘And where might that be?’
‘Perhaps down in Cornwall,’ Burton said with a nonchalant shrug, though it was clear that he had put some thought into such a union.
Stryker watched the young man carefully for a moment, noticing that Burton’s eyes kept flicking back to the avenue. ‘Christ,’ he said suddenly, ‘you already have a woman in mind, don’t you?’
‘And what if I have?’
‘Easy, Andrew,’ Stryker said, shocked by his subordinate’s combative tone.
Burton cast his gaze to his boots, a crimson tide flooding his hollow cheeks. ‘Forgive me, sir. I—I lost my mind for a moment.’
‘No matter,’ Stryker replied, and was surprised to find that, far from anger, he was assailed by his own wave of embarrassment, for he too had secretly coveted Cecily Cade. It stood to reason that the lieutenant would also find the girl attractive. She was a singular beauty, well educated and forthright, and far closer in age to Burton than Stryker. He forced himself to keep his eye on the barn, in case his awkwardness was etched across his face. ‘She would be quite a catch.’
Burton patted his useless arm. ‘Too great a catch for one such as me?’
‘No,’ Stryker said, wondering if he had responded too quickly, ‘of course not.’
‘I feel,’ Burton began self-consciously. ‘I feel if we are to die here, then I should cast aside my damnable timidity.’ He stared at Stryker until the latter was forced to meet his gaze. ‘What have I to lose?’
Stryker’s heart felt like a culverin shot weighing against his ribs, because he feared his own reaction. But when he finally cast his eye down upon the lieutenant, he did not see a rival but the young man who had become the nearest thing he had to a son. What he felt was not jealousy but pride. ‘You have nothing to lose, Andrew. You’re a fine soldier and a good man.’
Burton visibly coloured. ‘Thank you, sir.’ Then he frowned, because he had seen something down amongst the bullet-chipped stones and churned earth of the west slope. ‘Sir?’
Stryker searched the terrain for himself. There, standing on a small boulder, immediately accosted by a pair of musket-toting redcoats, was a pike-thin, filthily clothed man with bare feet, black gums, and long, silver beard. Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner had returned.
‘See, God?’ Gardner barked at the sky when Stryker had ordered he be allowed up to the summit. ‘He is not an imbecile, just as you said.’
‘Enough, Gardner.’ Stryker did not feel inclined to trade insults, however good-natured they might have been, with the enigmatic hermit. Instead he jerked his angular chin at a pair of rocks a little way along the edge of the crest. ‘Come, I would speak with you.’
‘Now then,’ Gardner said happily when he had placed his bony rump on one of the stones, ‘what might you have to say to an old
priest, who knows for a fact that the English are the good Lord’s least favourite creations?’
Stryker went to take the stone opposite, but his long scabbard made sitting difficult. He removed it and, realizing he had not thought to inspect the sword since the fight, drew the double-edged blade. ‘I would offer you my thanks.’
‘Funny way to thank a man,’ Gardner replied, blue eyes transfixed by the darkly stained steel. ‘A fine beast, if ever I saw one.’
Stryker discovered a perverse pleasure in unsettling the loud-mouthed old man, and he found it hard to stifle a smile. ‘A gift from the Queen.’
Gardner ran his gaze over the rutted blade, the ornate basket hilt and the heavy pommel set with a huge red garnet. ‘Fit for a king.’ He looked up finally. ‘You would thank me?’
Stryker nodded. ‘For forewarning us of Wild’s intention to attack.’ He thought of the gorse faggots that had proved so vital. ‘And giving us the means to fight him off.’
‘No matter,’ Gardner shrugged.
‘And secondly,’ Stryker went on, running a finger along one of the pockmarked edges of his sword.
‘Secondly?’
‘I would ask you what it is you’re doing here.’
‘I live here, boy, have I not already told you?’ The old man glanced heavenward. ‘Are his ears made entirely of cloth, Lord?’
Stryker abandoned his inspection of the blade and stared into Gardner’s weather-beaten face. ‘What are you doing here now? Why did you come to us yesterday?’
Gardner smiled wryly. ‘I was having a little peek at you fellows, and some of your men in red surrounded me.’
‘You said before that you let Skellen capture you.’
‘Aye, well. I wanted to see who it was that had evicted me from old Seek Wisdom’s hill.’ He scratched at some unseen parasite within the filthy beard at his chin. ‘I helped you because you looked like you needed it. You’d have been annihilated without me, boy, and I couldn’t live with that.’
‘Why? You’re hardly for the King.’
‘No, but I’m hardly for the Parliament either, boy. Old Seek Wisdom won’t care a rat’s ballock which side wins this war, long as I’m left alone, but you were kind to me. I repaid the kindness.’
Stryker drove the point of his sword into the earth between his tall boots and leant forward, resting his chin on the pommel. ‘Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord,’ he mused, ‘what kind of name is that?’
‘A good, Christian name,’ Gardner retorted sharply, before offering a sly wink. ‘And one not too far removed from your own first name, I’d guess, Stryker.’
That was a shrewd thrust, Stryker had to concede, and the corners of his mouth rose in a sardonic smile. ‘You’re not so mad.’
‘Mad?’ Gardner glared at the white smears of cloud crowning distant tors. ‘Mad he calls me, God.’
‘Seek Wisdom,’ Stryker prompted evenly.
Gardner let his gaze drift back to the soldier. ‘It is a hard existence out here, boy. Bleak and unforgiving. If a man may not converse – with his creator, or the moor, or the hills – then he truly sinks into madness.’
Stryker watched the former priest for a minute or so. Watched his reptilian tongue flicker across cracked lips, watched spindly fingers fiddle with the strands of his grime-ingrained beard, and stole a glance at the red-raw toes of his naked feet. Stryker knew Gardner was not insane, for he read intelligence in those wide, unblinking eyes. Indeed, Gardner had often spoken with a presence of mind that belied his frantic demeanour. Yet somehow he had been reduced to this waif. This shadow of a man. ‘Laud did this to you?’
Gardner nodded, a staccato gesture putting Stryker in mind of a woodpecker. ‘And his lackeys, aye. So I have hidden myself away on the moor these past years. Not many live hereabouts, Captain, and those who do tend to steer a wide berth. I have grown accustomed to it.’
Stryker straightened, leaving the sword jutting vertically from the soil, the hilt quivering gently. He took off his hat, rearranged the dishevelled feathers, and propped it on the rock at his side. Then he took the black ribbon from his blacker hair and ran his fingers roughly across his scalp, shaking out the soot-clogged knots. ‘It must be difficult, nevertheless. Nothing could be farther from the clergy.’
Gardner’s mouth cracked open in a smile that brandished some of the most decayed gums he had ever seen. ‘Oh, you’d be surprised, my boy. The priesthood gave me a life of prayer, contemplation, and fasting, and so does this!’ His grin broadened. ‘Though the fasting is generally not of my choice!’
‘You still pray?’
‘Aye, why wouldn’t I?’
‘Forgive me, Seek Wisdom, but you do not sound like a priest.’
Gardner cackled. ‘Do not let my occasional Celtic oath fool you, boy.’
Stryker was still unconvinced. ‘You keep your faith? After all that’s happened?’
Gardner tapped the side of his pointed nose. ‘Ah, now there speaks a damaged man. Your faith took flight long ago, yes?’
‘Well, I—’ Stryker hesitated.
‘Ah, fret not, boy,’ intervened the Welshman cheerfully, slapping Stryker on the shoulder. ‘I’m not one o’ your Banbury hot-gospellers, about to stick a finger in your face and cry heretic.’
Not that the old man’s condemnation would have been a problem, reflected Stryker, up here on an isolated hill in the middle of a vast wildness, but admitting a crisis of belief was still something that did not come easily to him. Such confessions were dangerous affairs, and he had long since decided to keep his thoughts on the matter hidden. In public he would bow his head if a prayer was spoken, or nod obediently when the regimental preachers brewed up a rant, for to articulate his inner feelings would be tantamount to suicide.
‘I believed once,’ Stryker replied tentatively, ‘but I suppose life has steadily chipped it away.’ In actuality, he had always regarded religion with a degree of scepticism. The Roman church seemed all too elaborate and ritualistic. A faith where mysticism and obfuscation were wielded as tools to awe and confuse. Conversely, Protestantism, especially the increasingly powerful Puritan element, appeared a dour and joyless business. A system designed to drive any last vestige of happiness from the human soul. Both sides of the spectrum, it seemed to Stryker, were intent on one thing: keeping the common man obedient.
‘You hear that, God?’ Gardner asked the sky. ‘Chipped away, he says! Ever heard such buffle-brained swine slop?’
Stryker sighed heavily. ‘You cannot begin to imagine what I’ve seen. What I’ve witnessed.’
‘Half of what everyone else sees, I’d wager,’ Gardner replied with a quick wink.
Stryker ignored the impish barb. ‘In the Low Countries death was an everyday thing.’
Gardner shrugged. ‘War, disease, it was ever thus, boy.’
‘More than that,’ Stryker shook his head, staring directly at his sword, long buried images suddenly swirling in his mind. ‘More than war. There was a cruelty I have seen nowhere else.’ He had witnessed a good deal of barbarity in England this last year, clambered across bodies, waded through red-stained rivers, seen men hacked, sliced, hanged, and shot to pieces. But nothing had come remotely close to the horrors of Germany. ‘A depravity and a—an evil that showed me once and for all that the world is—’
‘Is?’
Stryker lifted his head, fixing his grey eye on Gardner. ‘Godless.’
‘But you are a man,’ Gardner replied, his tone uncharacteristically soft. ‘You see a rich, pink horizon. The stars on a clear night. You cannot believe it is all one giant accident. It is the will of the Lord, boy.’
Stryker snorted a short burst of mirthless laughter. ‘I have also seen men mutilate one another for sport.’ He leaned further forward. ‘Rape for pleasure, Seek Wisdom. Massacre for God.’ At once, Stryker’s right hand darted out, snatching the sword from its earthy scabbard and casting his eye across the steel. ‘You’re right. There are many wondrous things in this world. Things I canno
t readily explain. But I find it hard to believe in the God you speak of – a God of love – when His creation is so drenched in wickedness.’
‘But, Captain—’
Stryker was glaring now, and he knew he would look a fearsome sight, but he could not, would not relent. ‘Were you at Magdeburg?’
Gardner shook his head mutely.
Stryker knew the memory of that doomed city would never leave him. ‘I was. Caught up in that damned siege. Trapped inside for near six months, half starved. And then they came.’
Gardner’s wild blue eyes had ceased their habitual darting. ‘The Imperial troops?’
‘Aye.’ Stryker wondered if his face reflected the severity of his mood. ‘They were mad, frantic-eyed bastards.’
‘Like me?’ The Welshman’s lips twitched at the corners.
‘No,’ was all Stryker could think to say.
‘Famished too, boy, I should wager.’
Stryker nodded. ‘Plundered the place, butchered everyone – everything – they saw, and burnt it to the ground.’ He chose not to reveal how he still sometimes woke during the darkest nights hearing the screams. ‘The stench of scorched flesh never leaves my cursed nostrils.’
Gardner waited a while, waiting as Stryker’s thoughts dallied far from this Devon hillside. ‘I heard the tales,’ he ventured at last. ‘They said twenty thousand souls.’
‘More,’ Stryker replied grimly. ‘So many more than that. Little children. Carved up and tossed in the Elbe. If that river is still poisoned to this day, I would not be surprised.’ This time the former priest did not respond. He let his gaze glide beyond Stryker’s shoulder, to the horizon of heath, forest, and tor. ‘The world is decaying,’ Stryker went on remorselessly. ‘A blood-drenched mess. If that is the will of your God, then I can live without Him.’
Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner took his long beard in both hands and smoothed it down, twisting the tip into a sharp, greasy point at his sternum. ‘It is not God who wills these things, Stryker.’
Stryker laughed, a deliberately harsh sound, like the rasp of an iron file. ‘Ah, free will!’
Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles Page 19