And he started to kill.
The first man, both hands gripping his outstretched pike, did not even see Stryker. He crumpled in a matter of seconds as the Royalist captain opened a gaping hole in his groin. Blood pumped thickly in a steaming spray, dowsing Stryker’s arm, chest, and face. The man at his side saw him fall, looked down through the shifting lattice and called a warning. Stryker pushed up between two pikes, stabbed him in the throat, and dropped back out of sight.
But the cry had gone up now, spreading like wildfire, and soon the Roundheads had sent their own men into the bloody world where the knife was king and a man fought on his knees.
One of the rebels came at him quickly, scrambling across the grassy no-man’s-land, a dirk in each hand. He reached Stryker, and slashed at the Royalist’s face with one and then the other in rapid succession. Stryker swayed out of range for both swipes, but his own lunge missed, clipping the Parliament man’s earlobe but nothing more. The rebel came again, and this time he seemed to favour his left hand, jabbing the blade forth with three or four staccato thrusts. Stryker dodged them comfortably, only to see his assailant’s right arm snap forward. The man had read Stryker well, guessing he would see an attack from that side late, and he threw himself backwards as the dirk slashed home, avoiding its deadly point by a hair’s breadth. But then he was on his back, staring up at the tangled mesh of pikes that crossed above, and he heard the rebel scramble towards him.
‘Two blades?’ a voice Stryker knew suddenly rasped nearby. It was a constricted sound, more of a croak than a real voice, and inflected with the accent of Scotland. ‘Now that’s fightin’ dirty.’
Stryker forced himself up, grinning as he laid his eye upon Simeon Barkworth. The dwarf could stand beneath the ceiling of pikes, so short was he, and that made him lethal against men on all fours.
Barkworth grinned, snatching one of the blades from Stryker’s would-be killer, a man whose throat he had evidently slit. ‘Still,’ he said happily, holding up a dirk in each little fist, ‘I’ve always believed fightin’ dirty was the only way to do it.’
‘Come ’ere, you fuckin’ ’alf-man!’ a spittle-laced snarl erupted from behind the Scot.
Barkworth spun on his heels and held up the dirks. ‘Half-man, is it?’ He lurched forward, agility unaffected in this gloomy place. His challenger responded, but he was on his knees, and that made him terribly cumbersome. In a flash he was dead, one of the dirks lodged in the roof of his gaping mouth.
Stryker quickly thanked Barkworth for saving his life. The blood-spattered dwarf offered a bow. ‘Skellen would’ve helped, o’course,’ he said, ‘but the lanky streak o’ English piss could’nae get under here wi’out puttin’ his back out.’
Stryker grinned and went at the enemy pikemen again. He chopped away at the knee of one, hamstrung another, and sliced a yawning horizontal gash in the belly of a third. And as the men fell, their comrades stepping up to plug the gaps became ever more sluggish to take their places. And the Royalists at Stryker’s back heaved and they roared and they began to gain ground.
Henry Grey drummed his fingers nervously against his thigh.
He had spurred back towards the safety of his seven-score horse, followed swiftly by Collings’s group as the Royalist battailes reached the brow of the hill, and had watched proceedings from behind the two lines of foot. And now, as he watched with burgeoning horror, the first line was not annihilating Sir Ralph Hopton’s little army, but shuddering, rocking back, giving ground.
Stamford wore plate on back and chest, a gorget at his throat, tassets over his thighs, and on his head sat a Dutch pot, a fixed peak helmet with sliding nasal bar. And suddenly he began to feel hot, as though his skin boiled beneath all the armour. He breathed deeply, snatched off the helmet, and fiddled with its chin strap.
An errant musket-ball flew past. There was nothing deadly about it, for its power had long since dissipated, but he went to put the pot back on. When he looked up, he saw the second – as yet untouched – line of infantry begin to quiver, as if readying to march. Yet they were not advancing. He looked on as their officers called for them to stand firm, their sergeants and corporals threatening them with bullets between the shoulder blades should they take a single step back. But the land before them was littered with the dead and wounded, the cannons were gone, the grass was black with blood. And step back they did.
‘What in the name of—’ Stamford whispered. He peered around, looking for an explanation and laying eyes on the staff officer encased in jet-black armour. ‘Collings!’
Collings spurred to his side. ‘My lord?’
Stamford pointed at the reserve line. ‘What the devil are they doing?’
Collings lifted his hinged visor. His expression was blank as a corpse. ‘They fear the Cornish, sir.’
‘But Sourton—’
‘Went some way to rectifying matters, but I rather think a march up a steep slope with fewer men and hardly firing a shot has somewhat reaffirmed the mystique.’ He slammed the face bars back down, beady eyes glinting from within their steel cage. ‘Besides, word of Chudleigh’s capture has spread to them, my lord.’
‘Then they must strive for his rescue,’ Stamford blustered, feeling himself flush again.
Collings shook his head. ‘I fear not, sir. The men in the second line are of the Trained Bands. Here under duress. Without their general, their hearts will fail them.’
Stamford’s tassets clanged as he slammed a fist on to his thigh. ‘But I am their general, by God!’
Collings turned his horse away. ‘You were not here, my lord.’
CHAPTER 23
The sulphurous gunsmoke had transformed the afternoon into premature dusk, but the ebullient Royalists rumbled on. They hammered and slashed and tore at the rebel front line, and that line, facing south now and weakened by the loss of their best troops in Chudleigh’s abortive charge, was beginning to crumple under the strain of an enemy that smelled blood and sensed victory. It should not have been this way, for their sheer numerical supremacy should have carried the day, but morale was ebbing like a fractured dam, and in the whites of the Cornish eyes the men could see their own deaths.
The musket fire, such a storm throughout the day, was desultory now, flames licking forth from blackened muzzles as soon as men could charge them. But most entered the fray with their weapons upturned, taking the butt ends to break the bones of their enemies.
With each heartbeat that thudded in the chest of a king’s man, his ragged opponents shunted backwards, edging towards the rear of the hill, aware that on three sides they were already hemmed in. And the enemy reserve, still formidable by sight, was not moving forward. They should have been surging up to fill the gaps between the tattered blocks of Northcote and Merrick, but instead they did nothing, simply stopped and stared to the rear like a vast flock of sheep. The Royalists guessed at their fear; Hopton and his colonels sensed it and urged the thin Royalist line forth, promising the unlikeliest of victories.
And the Parliamentarians began to run.
Eighty or so paces to the rear of the Parliamentarian force the great and the good of Devon’s rebel army were taking their leave.
Major-General Erasmus Collings watched the Earl of Stamford’s back bob up and down as his destrier carried him to the protection of his cavalrymen, and to the safety they would ultimately find. Stamford would run now, live to fight another day, and, Collings did not doubt, would blame this debacle on James Chudleigh.
‘I am leaving,’ he said to Wild, slamming down his black visor.
Wild, at Collings’s left side and still dragging Stryker’s battered lieutenant in his wake, opened his mouth to protest, but Collings raised a firm hand. ‘Do not waste your breath, Gabriel. The battle is lost. Our best men are falling back, while our Trained Bands already look to the hills.’ He cast his gaze across the rest of the group. ‘Save yourselves or stay for martyrdom. I care not.’
‘What of the girl?’ Wild asked, glancing down at
Cecily Cade.
Collings urged his horse over to where she stood. He stared down at the wan-faced bitch for a moment, then waved for a pair of aides to help him haul her into his saddle. She did not resist, so broken was she by the night’s ministrations, and he gripped her waist tightly. ‘Stamford forgets her in his flight.’ He grinned suddenly, understanding that his own star would rise this day, regardless of the rebel cause at large. ‘She will go to London, with me. Pym can weed out her damned secrets.’
‘I had hoped to find vengeance,’ Colonel Gabriel Wild said as he turned away from the gentle escarpment down which Collings had galloped. He stared, dumbstruck, at the line of battle that was now nearer sixty paces away. The Roundheads still fought, but they were giving ground with every passing second.
‘Well, you will find nothing but death if you stay,’ witch-finder Osmyn Hogg replied tersely.
‘Aye,’ José Ventura agreed, licking those fat lips.
‘So you leave?’ Wild asked. ‘Abandon your search for Stryker?’
Hogg shrugged, already turning his horse away from the fight. ‘It has taken a decade to find him. I have learned patience.’
‘But if I gave you a chance for revenge,’ Wild asked, ‘would you take it? Even now?’
Hogg looked back at him, nonplussed. ‘Aye. I should give much to see that evil-doer swing.’
Wild did not speak again. He simply smiled and stood in his stirrups, pointing at a bullet-riddled piece of cloth hanging from a pole that rose near the right of the Royalist ranks. It was a big thing, made of taffeta and dyed blood red. It had a Cross of St George in canton and two white diamonds in the field, occasionally flourished on a vagary of wind. And Gabriel Wild’s heart was in his mouth, because he had seen that banner before. On a lonely tor in Dartmoor.
Captain Innocent Stryker had been in many fights. Seen more blood spilled than he cared to remember, witnessed more triumphs and defeats than was natural for a man to bear. But he had never been part of something as stunning as this.
The Roundhead army, apparently so invincible when the sandy common at Bude had erupted at daybreak, was being routed. The two armies faced one another in a long front that stretched west to east across the breadth of the summit, and to an onlooker it might still look as though the huge Parliamentarian line would simply swamp the shallower Royalist force, but the steep slopes at either flank meant that they could not encircle Hopton’s army, and their tired bodies and shrinking morale saw that they were no longer willing to stand in the face of the rampant Cornish.
Stryker had taken a step back to load his musket, and, as he shoved his way back to the front line, he saw the first pikes topple, thrust down by men looking to flee.
‘They’re off, sir! They’re bloody running!’
Stryker twisted his head to the left and saw that Skellen, who had somehow found himself a discarded halberd amongst the strewn weapons, was, as ever, by his side, instinctively shielding Stryker’s blind flank. It was not just Grenville, he considered wryly, who had his own ferocious bodyguard.
‘Keep at them!’ Stryker snarled back. ‘They’re not all done yet!’ That was all too true, he thought, as he hefted his musket. Plenty of units, the ones dressed in grey coats and those wearing oak sprigs in their hats, fought on, lips peeled back in macabre grimaces, turned to animals by terror and blood-rage. He fired, the rebel line immediately vanishing in his powder cloud.
Seemingly in response, a group of enemy musketeers some twenty paces away let fly with a spatter of fire that ploughed straight into Stryker’s position. One of his redcoats, half a dozen places to his right, fell backwards suddenly, thumped from his feet in a fine spray of crimson that settled over the faces of the nearest men. Another toppled at the same time, hands pressed to his guts, wailing into the boot-pulped soil.
A single shot flashed from the direction of the enemy like a bright spark from an anvil, and Stryker heard its whine close to his face. By the high-pitched report, he guessed it had come from a pistol, and, sure enough, he quickly noticed an orange-sashed officer standing alone between the musket blocks, arm still raised.
‘Get the bastard, Will!’ Stryker called to his blind left side where he knew Skellen would still be standing. The tall sergeant, clutching his halberd in huge, thin-fingered hands, gave a single, guttural grunt and lurched out of the line. The officer saw him coming, called for help, but none of his men would leave the safety of the block. He tossed his smoking pistol aside, drew his broad-bladed sabre, and composed himself in a cultured riposte. Skellen knocked the weapon aside as though he were swatting a fly, the blade snapping from the force. He stepped in, feinted high, swept the pole-arm low, and opened the Parliamentarian’s thigh. The wounded man stumbled back, dropped his broken sword to clutch the spouting wound, and Skellen brought the halberd back in a return sweep that cleaved away the rebel’s lower jaw.
A huge cheer went up from the Royalists around Stryker. Skellen, drenched in his victim’s blood, wading through drifting gun smoke, and screaming like a creature from Satan’s infernos, held his halberd high and grinned at the rebel ranks. And they broke.
Stryker could not see clearly what was happening to the left and right of his position, but the blocks of pike and musket immediately facing his own men threw down their arms and turned tail. His men followed, keeping tightly together so as not to loose cohesion, and slashed at the routed Roundheads’ backs. The bravest rebels rallied in small pockets of resistance, but they were quickly overwhelmed and died where they stood.
Stryker surged on, moving to Skellen’s right again so that the sergeant could stand sentry in the spot where the world was all black to him. There was no time to reload his musket now, and he made to discard it and draw his sword, but a Roundhead musketeer was on him too quickly, and he was forced to duck below the heavy swipe of the burly man’s wooden stock. He drove his own firearm up into the man’s sternum, winding him, and reversed the cumbersome weapon, jabbing the stock at the man’s nose, breaking it with ease. The rebel staggered back a pace as Stryker swung it in a wide arc, wrenching his own shoulder muscles in the process but connecting with the musketeer’s temple. The man crumpled as though his entire skeleton had been sucked from his flesh.
The Royalists gushed onwards like water in a storm drain. Stryker slipped on a gelatinous patch of guts, pitched forwards and barrelled through a dazed pikeman’s legs, smashing them from under the hapless greycoat like round shot through a wattle fence.
The musket was gone, tumbled away in the fall, and he hauled his sword free as he stood. A pair of bearded, wild-eyed rebels came at him now, and, perversely, he found himself wondering if they were brothers, even as one of them went down under Skellen’s crushing halberd. The other, brandishing a frantic grin and a curved, scythe-like instrument that was probably adapted from an agricultural tool, lunged at Stryker, whipping the crescent blade left and right in heavy motions that might have been honed on Devon’s crops. Stryker swayed out of range of the first flurry, ducked under the next few, and parried the last, the powerful blow reverberating all the way up his arm. Just as he thought he might be overpowered by the thickset brawler, the man’s brown eyes widened in a look of utter surprise, and he slumped to his knees. Only when Stryker strode round him did he notice the bullet hole in the side of the man’s skull.
He paused to catch his breath and stretch his jarred sword arm. Everywhere he looked fights raged, duels between Royalist and Parliamentarian, officer and commoner, pikeman and musketeer. The rebel blocks, so tight and dense at the start of the day, had disintegrated into groups. The bravest died, the rest ran. The Parliamentarian army, huge, fresh, and confident, had been routed by the redoubtable Cornish. They had been clawed from the formidable summit by a force less than half their size, smashed and scattered like white ash in the Stratton breeze.
And Stryker felt strangely elated. Here, amid the screams and the filthy smoke, the blood-drenched grass and the clatter of flying lead on pike staves, he was happy.
This was what he knew. Where he felt most at home. Some men knew how to grow corn. Others – like his long dead father – could turn a sheep’s grimy fleece into gleaming gold coins. But not Stryker. He knew how to fire a musket and wield a blade. He knew how to unhorse a cavalryman and deploy a pike block. He knew how to fight.
But the elation left him like wine from a punctured skin. Because, amid the mad, raging chaos of the battle, his single, gritty eye had caught sight of something – someone – he had not expected to see this day. It was the feather he saw first; tall, broad, black as a December night, quivering atop a gleaming helmet with the distinctive trio of face-guards worn by a harquebusier. Its owner was conspicuous, because on a hill crammed with infantrymen, he perched, proud and unflinching, on the back of a huge stallion. And that beast, snorting and mad-eyed, had a coat as black as the one beneath its rider’s armour corselet.
Stryker stared at the cavalryman for what seemed like a lifetime, the clamour of battle blurring and muffling as he stared over men’s heads and wavering pikes.
‘Wild!’ he bellowed. ‘Wild!’
The rider’s eyes, pale blue like nuggets of fine glass, seemed to twitch at Stryker’s call. He scanned the deep lines of men locked in bitter, private struggles until, in a moment that saw a slow smile form at the corners of his mouth, his cold gaze finally rested upon Stryker.
Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles Page 43