Erasmus Collings raked Wild’s captive with his dead eyes. ‘You know the orders, Colonel. All spies and Irish are to be hanged.’
Wild nodded. ‘And this one will be, I promise you.’ He leaned down, saddle groaning at the action. In a low, conspiratorial voice, he said, ‘He is Stryker’s lieutenant, sir.’
The black beads twinkled in Collings’s lamb-white skull. ‘Stryker?’
‘Stryker,’ Wild echoed. He thought about the familiarity of speech he had witnessed between the villainous captain and his men back at Bovey Tracy. ‘And he holds an—affection—for his men, if memory serves. They are friends.’ He almost hissed the last word. ‘I would have this wretch watch the battle.’
Collings’s thin, bluish lips twitched in amusement. ‘You are a vindictive man, sir.’
Wild sniffed, cleared his throat, and deposited the resulting yellow globule at the prisoner’s feet. ‘Stryker humiliated me, sir. I would rather take my vengeance against the captain himself, but I must make do with his lieutenant. Until I meet that scarred demon again, leastwise.’
Collings seemed satisfied enough. ‘Very well.’ He let his gaze drift to the girl. ‘Have you chosen to speak to us?’ Silence greeted the question. ‘No matter, Miss Cade. Your stoical hush has only harmed you, for your reward is a position of honour on this hill. From here you may witness the very death of the cause you so admirably strive to protect.’
Lieutenant Andrew Burton forced one of his eyes open. It was sticky, near glued shut by swelling tissue and congealed blood, but eventually the puffy lids parted, stinging intensely as the tangled mess of lashes and gore finally peeled free, and he lifted his face a touch. The breeze kicked up then, making the small, knuckle-carved lacerations in his lips and cheeks smart like a thousand paper cuts, while even the tiniest breaths stung at his nostrils and chest. What he saw was a forest. It appeared beautiful at first, crowned by a drifting halo of cloud that seemed to glow yellow in the sun. But then his ears, still ringing from the kicks and punches of the night, caught a muffled crackle, like damp logs in a blaze. And he knew. The sounds were the music of battle, the clouds were the stinking, acrid fumes of burnt black powder, and the forest was where his friends were, even now, fighting and dying.
He stole a glance at Cecily. At least he had found her, he thought. She did not look at him, but stared off into the middle distance as if deeply enmeshed in a dream. A white-faced man with no hair, mottled blue and purple lips, and the smallest, blackest eyes he had ever seen was speaking to her now. Burton did not listen to the words. Nor, it seemed, did she.
‘I want you to see this, Lieutenant,’ a new, stark voice now entered his mind, searing out above the perpetual chimes. The speaker was the man who had, until now, been saddled, dragging him along like a fisherman with a hooked trout. Now, though, he was right there beside him. ‘Your Pope-fucking friends have less than half our number. They cannot hope for victory. I want you to watch their deaths from up here. With me.’
Burton knew that voice. He had recognized it down in the village, but, in the midst of capture, and torture, near blindness, and the terror of knowing that he would surely be executed as a spy, he had not been able to place it. The bastard had been wearing the dress of a harquebusier, and that was rare, for the rebels had very few cavalrymen in Stratton, but still the name had eluded him, even as he was hauled up the steep hill at the end of a wrist-burning rope. But something in this new, whispered threat had jolted his memory, and his mind flew back to a forest west of Bovey Tracey and a wagon full of munitions.
‘Colonel Wild.’
Someone patted him on the shoulder. ‘Very good, young man.’
Burton tried to turn his head to see his enemy, but his neck convulsed, compelling him to remain focussed on the foot of the slope. He affected a bitter laugh that seared his broken ribs. ‘Where’s your troop?’
Wild hit him. It was not a heavy blow, more a shortened jab into the flesh of his shoulder, but Burton, weak, wounded, and flat-footed, went sprawling to the long turf. He sensed the big Parliamentarian standing over him.
‘Never speak of my men, Lieutenant.’
Burton coughed up a glutinous gobbet of blood and tried to spit. His enfeebled lungs meant that it simply slid down his chin, mingling with the grass where he lay. He craned his head to look up at the fearsome silhouette. ‘Stryker is down there, Colonel. He’s coming for you.’
Wild laughed, a hearty, savage laugh. ‘No, sir. I am coming for him.’ He knelt suddenly, leaning close to Burton’s prone form, speaking directly into his ear. ‘If he survives the battle, I will find him, and I will make good my promise. And once I have his stones in my fist, I will hand him to the witch-hunters, and they will dangle him from a high branch for the demon he is.’ A strong thumb came down at Burton, pressing into his chin, grinding a pathway into his cracked jawbone.
Burton screamed.
Wild chuckled again. ‘You will follow, Lieutenant. As will the rest of your company. You will swing, and you will dance, for the drop will be short, I assure you. Nothing will break, save your spirit. And you will all know that you died the day you crossed Gabriel Wild.’
Captain Innocent Stryker was only a company commander, and his men were only attached to Grenville’s division by an accident of fate, but that did not mean he would fail to seek an explanation.
The battle had smouldered throughout the afternoon, reaching three o’clock without even the foremost rank of the column’s pikemen reaching the last of the light-blocking oaks. But the Royalist advance had continued a few paces at a time, at least in the only lane Stryker could see, and it had seemed foolhardy in the extreme to halt such hard-won progress when there was still daylight.
But halt they had. Grenville, still out in front, blade at the ready, and in full view of enemy marksmen, had been accosted by a rider who had spurred along the narrow lane from the rear of the column, clipping the thighs and shoulders of the tightly packed pikemen as he went and spawning a chorus of jeers and oaths as his chestnut mount flung thick clods of earth in its wake.
Now, with the rider kicking hard towards the rear of the division, the column had been ordered to stop, a screen of musketeers deployed beyond the front rank to protect them from marksmen.
Stryker, watching the hasty conference from up on the wooded bank, was shocked that Grenville would surrender what little momentum his division had built up, and he leapt from the loose-earthed edge, sliding headlong down the short escarpment. Sword sheathed and musket gripped across his sternum in both hands, he stepped along the column’s left flank, passed stoic pikemen and sooty musketeers, until he reached the Cornish talisman.
‘Sir?’
Sir Bevil Grenville was in hurried discussion with the huge form of Anthony Payne, gesticulating with his naked blade while bullets whistled around them. For his part, Payne seemed more agitated than Stryker had seen him before, the halberd he gripped – like kindling in his paw – twitching with each word he spoke.
They broke off when the colonel saw Stryker, and he turned to stare at him with red-rimmed eyes. ‘You want to know why we stop, yes?’
Stryker nodded wordlessly.
‘Well you’re in luck, for I was just explaining the same to Mister Payne.’ He waited for Stryker and Payne to share a nod. ‘The messenger came direct from Sir Ralph, whose division fights parallel to ours to the south.’ He cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘It appears we are down to our last four.’
‘Last four, sir?’ Stryker repeated, utterly nonplussed. ‘Last four what?’
‘Barrels,’ Anthony Payne rumbled cheerlessly.
‘Powder,’ Grenville added. ‘We have four barrels of powder left.’
Stryker jammed his musket butt into the soft earth and leaned against the long weapon while he rubbed sweat and powder from his eye. His mind raced as he silently totted figures. ‘Should be enough if we make good headway, sir.’
Sir Bevil Grenville shook his head, teeth gritted. When he spoke again,
his voice was barely more than a whisper. ‘Our army has four barrels of powder left, Captain. Our entire army.’
Stryker felt his jaw sag, powerless to stop it. ‘We’ll—’ he stammered, reeling from the news, ‘we’ll be through that in no time, sir. Jesu, it’s taken us all day and we aren’t even beyond the tree line.’
‘And that, Captain Stryker,’ Grenville replied gravely, ‘is why we are to make one last push. A final advance. In silence.’
It began with cannon fire.
The brace of small fieldpieces, so far left cold at the rear of Sir Bevil Grenville’s beleaguered division, were dragged forth by teams of grunting musketeers and gunners. Positioned at the very head of the column, like the fangs of a vast snake, their small muzzles were aligned directly along the lane. The gunners primed them, shoved the three-quarter pound iron spheres down the barrels, and awaited the order. And the quaint, rural track, sunken over the centuries and enclosed by mighty trees, exploded in flame.
As they had dared hope, the sudden artillery fire, small though it was, seemed to quieten the rebel musketeers ahead. Those men shrank back behind their lead-pocked trunks or retired to the open ground further up the slope, and that was all the respite the Royalists needed.
‘Forward!’ the call screeched from the front, echoing instantly down to the men at the very rear, and Sir Bevil Grenville’s column juddered into life. Drums repeated the order, hammered it home for the first yards before shifting into a sprightly pace-setting rhythm. For the silent advance was not to be wordless or drumless. It was to pass without a shot being fired.
Stryker was near the front, alongside Grenville and Payne, and he heard the same sounds roar throughout the wooded slopes as each of Sir Ralph Hopton’s four divisions followed suit. A single volley from the ordnance, then a quick step towards the enemy. He patted his long-arm, held diagonally across his chest, muzzle pointed at the canopy. It was loaded and ready, his match glowing hot, and he blew gently upon that reddened tip to keep it bright, but he was not to shoot. Sir John Berkeley, commanding the musketeers flanking Grenville’s body of pikes, had reiterated Hopton’s decree. No man was to fire his weapon until the order was given. No explanation had been forthcoming, for the hasty orders from Hopton had included a warning not to reveal the dire situation with powder supply, lest they damage morale, but the troops marched up the rapidly increasing incline regardless. Anthony Payne had told Stryker of the Cornish loyalty to their commanders above all else, and here the claim was borne out before him. The Cornish had been told to march into the face of a vast rebel army without the use of their muskets, and not a murmur of dissent had been heard. Truly, he realized, they would march into hell itself if their Cornish lords – Grenville or Slanning or Trevanion or Godolphin – asked it of them.
‘God speed you, Stryker.’
Stryker turned to see Lancelot Forrester at his back. ‘And you, Forry.’
Forrester’s fleshy face was more rose-tinted than usual, his jowls glistening, his sandy fringe clumped and darkened by sweat where it poked out from beneath his hat. He rolled his eyes. ‘It’s madness, of course. We’ll all bloody snuff it.’
And in that moment Stryker laughed. It was that or cry, and he’d be damned before he died with tears on his cheeks.
The first shots came at them from the enemy marksmen, emboldened now that they knew no more cannon fire would rent the afternoon. But the king’s men had gathered such a pace behind their dashing Cavalier and his goliath-sized manservant that they could no longer turn back even if they had a mind to, for they would be crushed by the men behind.
Nothing could stop the advance now, thought Stryker. This was it. The last-ditch attempt to break through to the upper slope of Stratton Hill. Hopton’s final throw of the dice. Dusk would not be long in coming, and that alone would hinder his advance, but more certain was his imminent exhaustion of black powder, and that would not only trigger stalemate but also a crushing defeat. Stryker felt his skin prickle, felt his senses sharpen as they did when faced with the very real chance of death, and revelled in his newly racing heart. He did not know if this thrust would prove successful. Indeed, they were still vastly outnumbered, even if they made it out of the ensnaring lanes, and Cornwall would almost certainly fall to the Earl of Stamford. But here they were, advancing all the same.
And then the day brightened. Gradually at first, but inexorably, as more and more shafts of light stabbed through the branches above. Stryker glanced up, realizing that the canopy was becoming thinner, and, just as he absorbed the implication, Sir Bevil Grenville turned back with a broad, wild-eyed grin.
‘We’ve made it, my boys!’ he screamed over their heads. ‘They thought to stop us! But who may stop the men of Kernow?’
A vast, rippling cheer drowned out the sporadic cracks of rebel musketry, and the pace quickened again, so that they were nearly at a full run. And then they were out in the open, standing on a wide, rolling expanse of tall grass, without a tree in sight. They fanned out, sergeants and corporals braying for order as the eager pikemen shifted and bustled their way out of line and into their more familiar blocks.
Units of musketeers formed at the flanks of each bristling square, and Stryker and Forrester found the one containing their redcoats. They ran to join them, blowing again on their matches for when the time was right, and offering words of encouragement to any man who caught their eye.
But most did not. Indeed, most did not look at their comrades or their officers or their weapons at all. They simply stared up at the hill before them. And at a flat crest stained black by men. Thousands upon thousands of men.
CHAPTER 22
Major-General James Chudleigh had not expected to lead Parliament’s army, for his position had only come about as a result of Lord Stamford’s slothful advance through Devon, but he thanked God for such fortune. He was hardly a novice, of course, having fought in the Irish wars and recently engineering the victorious rout at Sourton Down, but this battle, of all battles that might have fallen into his lap, was an indisputable godsend. Because he simply could not lose.
Chudleigh spurred clear of his staff officers to take up position on the left flank of his first line of infantry. He stared down at the smoke-wreathed forest choking the hill’s foot, and at the Cornish soldiers who spread out across the grass before it, shifting with admirable proficiency into recognizable lines of battle. There were not many; less, in fact, than he had expected, and he quickly realized that only the colours of Sir Bevil Grenville and Sir John Berkeley had so far emerged.
Chudleigh watched as a horseman galloped up the face of the hill towards him. He was in civilian dress, though the orange ribbon tied at his wrist spoke clearly of his allegiance, and he urged the heaving animal mercilessly on until it began to drift sideways as the incline proved too much. He slewed the froth-muzzled beast to a halt, slid off the saddle, and threw his reins to an infantrymen, deciding to climb the last few paces himself. ‘They have broken out of the lanes, sir,’ he rasped breathlessly, bending to brace hands on his leather-bound knees.
‘I can see that,’ Chudleigh muttered irritably.
The messenger lifted his head. ‘But that is not all, sir. They refuse to give fire.’
‘I heard artillery.’
‘Aye, sir. They fight in four columns, each with a brace of robinets, or the like. They fired those, then launched into a near run.’
Chudleigh frowned. His pulse quickened, though he was not sure why. The cheek began its dance once again, forcing him to clamp a hand hard across the right side of his face. ‘Without shooting?’ When the rider offered a rapid nod, he asked, ‘Then how did they manage to reach this far?’
‘Speed, sir. And they have the greater numbers in the wood. Our musketeers were forced to fall back. They give fire even now, sir, but it will not be long before the rest of the malignants reach the open ground.’ His face screwed into a look of embarrassment. ‘To tell it true, sir, I fear the men are unsettled. The enemy advance without
returning fire. It is unnatural.’
Chudleigh drew a deep breath that made him feel light-headed, and sucked at his upper lip in thought. Hopton’s strange tactic had thrown him, he inwardly admitted, though it was surely irrelevant. He glanced at the messenger with new-found resolve. ‘Get back down there. Tell the gunners to wait until Hopton’s full force is mustered in the open, then flay the king’s men till there’s not a soul left standing.’
The messenger bowed, puffed out his cheeks in readiness for the next lung-bursting errand, and went to his horse.
Out the corner of his left eye James Chudleigh caught sight of a group of figures a little way along the ridge. Most were mounted, studying the scene around the forest, just as he was, but a couple were on foot. That in itself was not strange, except that one of them seemed to be tied by a short rope to a harquebusier’s saddle and the other was a woman. He went to investigate, pausing only to sear one last image of the lower slope on to his mind.
Yes, he thought, he could not lose.
Sir Bevil Grenville’s division was formed up on the open ground.
The Cavalier knight stood at the head of his pikes with Payne at his side, careful to be a conspicuous spearhead for the men to follow. To their right the column’s skirmishing musketeers, still forbidden to fire, formed into a single body led by Sir John Berkeley.
Grenville turned to face his troops, blade held high. The bristling forest of ash and steel erupted in a low, spine-chilling cheer. They swayed as one, shimmering like a vast shoal of fish, and jolted forward, the massed pike block finally unleashed on ground to which they were suited. The pikemen had seethed down in the lanes, rendered ineffective by the terrain and by an enemy who stayed well away from the killing tips, but out here, on open ground and gathered en masse, they were lethal. They lumbered up the steep slope, spurred on by the relentless thrum of drums, protracted lines of musketeers keeping pace at the flanks. Sergeants bawled oaths of threat and encouragement, waving partisans, pole-axes, and halberds high, ensuring their charges understood that to fight was safer than to desert.
Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles Page 40