Both men froze, dropped their weapons. ‘Andrew,’ Stryker tried again.
The blackened, pulpy face rose to greet him as Burton peered out from eyes battered to slits. ‘Captain,’ he murmured, unable to properly speak.
Stryker tried to smile, to offer some kind of encouragement, but the expression became more of a grimace. ‘I—I am sorry, Andrew. For everything—’
Burton seemed to offer a nod. ‘Friends, sir.’
Stryker did smile then. ‘Aye, lad, friends.’
‘Enough,’ Hogg interrupted. He smirked. ‘All these years, Stryker. All these years I have waited to repay you. I limp still, terribly, did you know?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that kind of thing cannot go unpunished, now, can it?’
‘I thought you wanted me hanged for a witch,’ Stryker said, stalling for time.
‘I did. Do!’ He shook his head slowly. ‘But sadly my hand has been forced. Or should I say God’s hand?’
Stryker looked into Hogg’s eyes and saw that the man meant what he said. He also read nervousness there, a vein of anxiety that might make a man’s hand unsteady. Hogg had just one shot. He would take his chances. ‘You have me, sir. Revenge is yours.’
Osmyn Hogg chuckled. He glanced across at Ventura. ‘Go, señor. Lead on.’
The Spaniard peered left and right, evidently gauging which route to take. Noticing the greater numbers of Royalists already beginning to gather on the northern slope, he kicked at his mount, steering it towards the lip of the forested eastern face.
Hogg straightened his arm, the pistol’s black mouth gaping at Stryker, ready to spit its death. ‘You would have me fire, Captain, because you feel I am a poor shot. Perhaps I would miss. And you would most likely be right. Besides, I cannot kill both you and your sergeant.’ He smiled, a motion that barely registered beyond his lips. ‘But revenge comes in many forms, wouldn’t you agree?’
The shot seemed abnormally loud now that the battle was petering out.
Hogg’s horse whinnied, turned a wide, skittering circle in its fright, and then it was gone, vanished with its triumphal rider down the tree-covered slope.
And Captain Innocent Stryker screamed.
He screamed because the witch-finder had not taken his chances with the range. Because he had swept his outstretched arm across his body and taken aim at the prisoner tied only a few feet away. Because the pistol flint had sparked bright. Because the small leaden ball, which might have been a lump of round-shot at such close proximity, had flown true. And because, in that terrible, deafening moment Lieutenant Andrew Burton had died.
The men of Sir Edmund Mowbray’s Regiment of Foot, those that were not off scavenging for loot or intoxicated by bloodlust, gathered at the tree line.
There were around seventy of them, made up of the companies of Innocent Stryker and Lancelot Forrester, the regiment’s second and fourth captains respectively. Forrester led them now, had maintained their cohesion when Stryker had broken from the line, and had kept the pikes tight and the muskets firing until, against all the odds, the rebel line had splintered. And then he had marched them in good order to the edge of a copse, where one of his men had spied their missing captain locked in a duel with a man many of the redcoats immediately recognized.
‘Truss up that badger-skulled bugger,’ Captain Lancelot Forrester ordered when his men first reached the prone form of Colonel Wild. ‘He belongs to us now.’
Wild thrust palms into the earth and pushed himself up so that he was sitting. He gazed at Forrester, pale eyes blazing like fire on ice. ‘I will kill you, sir.’
Forrester sheathed his bloody sword and folded his arms. ‘Not hugely likely, is it?’
‘Sir!’
Forrester looked up at the sharp hail, recognizing Simeon Barkworth. The Scot, every inch of his scarred face shimmering with blood, had found Forrester in the melee. He had fought bravely, ferociously, yellow eyes bright with each kill. Yet now Barkworth’s eyes seemed dull, his shoulders strangely rounded. He was standing beside a tall man with bald head and hooded eyes, clutching a huge halberd.
Forrester beamed. ‘Skellen! Glad you made it!’
It was then that he saw a man kneeling between the pair, his back to the company. He wore a dark, nondescript doublet, but Forrester could see the long, raven-black hair tied in a ragged tail at the base of the neck, and he knew he had found his friend.
He strode past Wild, nodded happily at the blood-sheeted faces of Barkworth and Skellen, and tapped Stryker’s back lightly with a toe. ‘I’ve a bone to pick with you, old man. Why in Christ’s name did you leave the line? That was fooli—’
Stryker turned to look at him then, and his narrow face, bloody though it was, was pale, his grey eye dull. And Forrester looked beyond him, saw that he cradled the head of a man in his hands, and only after several lingering moments did he recognize Lieutenant Burton. He straightened and took a step back. ‘Oh Lord.’
Stryker was not listening.
He turned back to Lieutenant Burton’s sagging body, finally released of its bonds by Skellen’s deftly twitched halberd, and just stared. He stared at the eyes, open but unseeing, at the face made almost unrecognizable by pulping fists, and at the blood that glistened from the deep hole in his forehead. A pistol ball was small, but this one had been fired at horrifically close range. It had caught Burton to the right of his brow, just above the eye, and punched through skin and bone and brain, carving a tunnel that grew as it travelled, as the ball flattened with the impact, until it exploded through the back of the skull to nestle in the trees beyond.
Burton had died instantly, head punched back, rope snapped taut, legs turning to columns of water. Lieutenant Andrew Burton, who had come to war with a childlike view of the world, and had learned to fight like a warrior.
Stryker felt the thickness in his throat, felt his eye sting.
Through the fog he caught the sound of Forrester’s voice again, but this time it was a harsher tone, strained and querulous. Stryker forced himself to look away from Burton, and saw that his fellow captain had drawn his sword and was advancing upon Wild.
‘No! Forry, no!’
Forrester spun on his heel, and Stryker saw that his friend’s jaw quivered, his chest heaved, eyes glistened. ‘What, Stryker? God, man, what?’
‘It wasn’t him.’
Forrester let his blade drop, struggling to understand. ‘It wasn’t him?’
Stryker shook his head, took his hand from behind Burton’s head, wiped the blood from his fingers, and stood. ‘It was Hogg.’
Forrester frowned. ‘The witch-catcher?’
Stryker nodded mutely, still dazed by the fight and the murder.
Forrester stalked up to him. ‘Well where, by the Virgin’s blessed womb, did he go?’
‘It will not go! Culero!’
Osmyn Hogg, thirty or so paces down the hill’s eastern face, looked back up at his assistant. The pair had cantered straight over the brow of the hill, only to find that the slope, down which so many rebel troops had escaped, was far steeper than they had expected. It had been dreadfully difficult to negotiate the terrain, littered as it was with rocks and roots, brambles and vast beech trees, but Ventura, horse already struggling beneath him on the flat summit, was barely progressing at all.
‘You’re too fat, José! Get off and run!’
Ventura’s sweaty jowls shook vigorously. ‘I cannot manage slope.’
‘Nor can your horse!’
Hogg stared up at the escarpment’s highest point, checking for pursuers. A number of men wearing orange sashes and ribbons emerged from the trees, looking to flee from the crushing defeat, but they did not concern him. His only thought was of a black-clothed Cavalier with long hair and a hideously scarred face. By God, he thought, revenge had been sweeter than he could ever have foreseen. Now, of course, he needed to be away. ‘By God, José, we must flee!’
And then he saw them. It was not the scarred man, mercifully, but at le
ast a score of redcoats. They streamed out of the trees like a horde of demons, flowing down the near vertical slope in a great tide. He turned away. ‘I must flee.’
Ventura was staring, open-mouthed, at the thundering redcoats, and he turned back to see Hogg’s horse begin to move. ‘No!’ he screamed at Hogg’s back. ‘Señor, no! Do not leave me!’
The slopes of Stratton Hill claimed many victims. The routed rebels leapt down the escarpments with victorious Royalists at their heels. Some made it clear, some were captured, but many, too many, lost their footing in the panic and tumbled headlong into trees, breaking necks and backs. Twisted bodies blanketed the torrid land, escaping steel and lead only to fall victim to the terrain and their eagerness to be away.
But the redcoats of Sir Edmund Mowbray’s Regiment of Foot paid the Devon men no heed. They had won the day as much as the jubilant Cornish, had every right to chase down the fugitives or take well-earned respite or strip the hundreds of corpses that now offered up clothing, money, weapons, and trinkets to the victors. The redcoats had a new quarry now, however. They had all seen their lieutenant’s broken corpse, had all felt the rage etched into the faces of their captains, and now they hunted.
William Skellen’s tall stride took him to the front of the braying pack as they surged down through the trees like scarlet-pelted wolves. He leapt over the ruts and humps of the incline, the soil crumbling and sliding at his every footfall, acutely aware that one step out of place could see him in a shattered heap at the bottom of the hill. He saw the two horsemen, focussed on the nearest, and hurled himself forward.
Skellen caught José Ventura, pounced at him like a giant cat, careened into the Spaniard’s blubbery side, and smashed him from the saddle.
The pair fell, tore at one another with bare hands, all the while rolling down the slope. Eventually they collided with the base of a soaring beech, and it was Skellen who bore the brunt of the impact, the unmoving trunk knocking the wind from him, his halberd long gone, bouncing and clanging its way into a dense patch of bracken.
Ventura was in no mood to fight, and he made to flee, scrabbling with fingernails at the shifting earth, but Skellen was up quickly, drawing breath into his squashed chest, desperately trying to keep up the chase. He scrambled on to all fours, sighted Ventura’s wide body as the Spaniard negotiated the steep escarpment, and went to run him down. In his haste he lost his footing again, and the earth burst from under him in a miniature landslide that carried him with it. He managed to stay upright at first, but the slide took him over an exposed tree root, his boot snagged, and the tall sergeant pitched violently. He rolled, bouncing off loose soil, clipping gnarled roots, crushing flowers, and praying that his head would not meet one of the jagged rocks.
In the whirling collage of browns and greens, of red coats, grey coats, lichen-crusted trunks, and boulders darkened by moss, Skellen could not tell which way was up, and he thrust out an arm, clawing at the ground, the air, anything, desperate to slow his descent. His fingers clipped something. He could not tell what, for the leather gloves removed that level of sensitivity, but he snapped shut his palm all the same.
He stopped. Suddenly, shockingly. A scream exploded from him as his arm stretched tight, snapped rigid, and his body jerked to a dead halt, tearing at the muscles in his shoulder. For a moment he lay there, white-hot tongues of fire licking down the side of his torso, but the pain soon ebbed, and he lifted his head to see the knurled bow of an exposed tree root in his fist.
‘I’ll pray every day,’ Skellen murmured, glancing skyward. ‘Least I’ll try.’
He hauled himself up, clutching his wrenched arm close, sucking air through gritted teeth with even the tiniest movement. The damage was probably extensive, he thought, considering how bloody agonizing his upper arm was and, more worryingly, the fact that he couldn’t feel his hand at all. But at least it wasn’t all bad.
A call came from further up the slope: ‘Is he dead?’
Skellen looked down at the contorted body of José Ventura. The Spaniard stared back at him, but his brown eyes, bulging from their sockets, had no light in them. One of his fleshy arms was bent in the wrong direction where the elbow joint had shattered, and, though his head faced the sergeant, the rest of his gross bulk seemed to be twisted in the opposite direction, a manoeuvre Skellen imagined only an owl could manage. Ventura had evidently fallen too, only his descent had ended in a snapped neck.
Osmyn Hogg thanked God. Not silently, not in sombre reverence, but in a howl that startled carrion birds from their cadaver banquet and echoed up and down the slopes. It was unbecoming of a man of his standing, but now, in this wonderful moment of skin-prickling relief, he did not care.
He had made it.
Hogg had been rewarded for his life of diligent servitude with the gift of the better horse. They had looked the same, his mount and Ventura’s, but where the latter’s would not negotiate the slope, Hogg’s had proven its worth. It had bolted headlong down the escarpment. It had leapt branches where men tripped, had rounded blood-speckled bushes, powered past fleeing Roundheads and hacking Cavaliers, and taken the steep, loose, sliding, treacherous soil quite literally in its stride. And now he was at the lower portion of the slope, where the steepness petered out into a gentle curve as it approached the glistening river. For a moment his heart almost stopped as he realized that the waterway would need to be forded, but he could see that bodies had begun to pile up in places where men had been cut down or drowned, and between those dams of flesh the river had been reduced to a stream.
‘Praise God!’ he bellowed, wondering if the redcoats could hear, hoping they could. All those years of waiting for revenge. All those nights of sleeplessness he had endured, the terrible pain in his rump, put there by an arrogant boy’s pistol. All those nights lying with that incessant ache, staring at the ceiling, imagining that boy’s end. And now he had had his revenge. Not the revenge he had planned, but this was infinitely better. Stryker’s face had been exactly as Wild had predicted – exquisitely twisted with anguish – and he would now live with the pain as Hogg had.
‘Seek His will in all you do!’ he cried as the horse splashed into the sun-dappled shallows, dyed murky and red. ‘And He will show you which path to take!’
The sound of the shot pounded through the trees.
Hogg felt the horse shudder beneath him.
‘No,’ he whispered in disbelief. He kicked at the beast, thrashed at its neck with his hands. ‘No!’
It would not move. Would not respond at all. It let out a strange mewing sound, sidled to the left, slewed back, staggering like a drunkard. Hogg twisted in the saddle, peering into the trees to see if anyone pursued, but he could not see further than a few yards into the gloom. He turned back, kicked again, but the wheezing animal ignored him, blew a spray of bubbling foam from its flared nostrils, gave a final, juddering whinny, and slumped to its fore-knees. Hogg slid forward with a rasping cry, pitched clean out of the saddle, and tumbled across the beast’s neck, scrabbling to grasp the coarse mane as he fell. He slammed into the stream, the splashing water ringing like laughter in his ears, breath punched out of him as he hit the slimy bed.
And then he was fighting, thrashing to free his hands and knees from the sucking silt, wrenching his upper body up and out of the water lest he drown like all the others. Finally he was out, sitting, saved, praising God again as air filled his lungs. It reeked of sulphur, but he had never taken a more welcome breath.
He was facing the hill now, still on his haunches, the cold river reaching his belly. He stared into the woodland, at the tall beeches, at the broken bodies, at the dark slope that led up to a field drenched in blood. And in that second, that quiet, peaceful moment, he realized God had not shown him the right path to take. Because out from the shadows stepped a man. A man with a narrow face that was horribly scarred down its left side; whose hair was long and black as night, and whose clothes were stained in the blood of others.
Stryker let the smoking
musket drop from his grasp and crossed the short distance to the river.
He stared down at the horse, its legs still twitching. ‘Poor bastard. A bad shot.’
Osmyn Hogg peered up from the riverbed with eyes that were nearly all white. ‘I am your prisoner, sir.’
Stryker drew his sword slowly, letting the delicious rasp of steel linger, revelling in the way it made Hogg’s face convulse. ‘Lieutenant Burton was your prisoner.’
Hogg swallowed hard, his neck pulsing in time with the muscles of his face. ‘I—I—’
‘You?’
‘I accept quarter!’ Hogg blurted, reaching out to Stryker with clawed hands, as a beggar would pull a rich man’s cloak. Stryker thought he saw tears in the witch-finder’s eyes, though it might have been river water.
He waded into the river, boots splashing in the stillness of this part made quiet by its morbid dam, holding his blade low, the tip nestling against Hogg’s chest.
Hogg winced at the touch, flinched, but stayed put, too frightened to make any sudden moves. ‘I accept quarter!’ he shrieked again.
‘No, witch-finder,’ Stryker said calmly, voice low. ‘None has been offered.’
That shook Hogg into life. His eyes hardened, face becoming rigid with hate. ‘You are a devil, Stryker,’ he spat. ‘A wicked fiend who would shoot a man of God for a whore! That whore suckled imps. She deserved to die. And so do you.’
Captain Stryker thought of Beth Lipscombe then, the woman who might have died by Hogg’s hand, and of Otilwell Broom and all the other innocents who had doubtless been tortured and killed by this man. Walked and swum and pricked and hanged. And he thought of Andrew Burton, his friend and protégé, who, even now, stared unseeing at the Cornish clouds. He shook his head. ‘Not today.’
Stryker’s arm moved with all the power those memories instilled, driving the blade upwards vertically from Hogg’s chest, into his chin, and on through bone and skin and muscle and lips and teeth, stopping only when it hit his long nose.
Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles Page 45