by Smith, Skye
He turned slowly all around while inspecting the skylines, watching for the scouts of either army. "Bloody Hell,” he grunted trying to keep the panic out of his voice. "By the look of the clouds of dust rising over the ridge behind Leslie, there is another army behind us. Bloody Hell, the English cavalry must have crossed downstream and now they are outflanking us.
The scout shielded his eyes from the glare and looked towards where Daniel was pointing. There were indeed swirls of dust floating over the ridge. "Calm yourself,” he said and looked to his brothers-in-arms who nodded in confirmation of his thoughts. "Leslie convinced the local farmers to herd their cattle back and forth behind that ridge. It's an old trick from his German campaigns. Raise enough dust and it looks like your army is about to be reinforced by cavalry."
They all ignored the cloud of dust and instead took turns watching for signs that the King may be riding with the English cavalry. Meanwhile they got a good look at the cavalrymen. Most were young men wearing costly clothes and mounted on expensive horses. A few were carrying pistols or carbines, but not many. They all had swords and lances and the sun glinting off metal showed that most were wearing chest armour of some kind.
"Effing Aristos,” the scout cursed. "Jack dandies every one of them. They have absolutely no idea of how brutal a battle can be. They ride like they are on an effing deer hunt with not a care in the world except for which of the kitchen maids they will hump tonight."
The youngest of the scouts eased the looker out of Daniel's hands and then played with the pipes until he could see clearly through them. "There's a lot of them, though."
One man ignored the new toy because he was busy keeping a count. "That's seven hundred so far, and more coming. The first squad and the scouts are about to make the crossing. Poor buggers. In a few minutes they'll all be crying for their mothers."
"They are aristos. They won't cry for their mothers, but for their wet nurses,” jested one of the scouts. "They probably haven't spent more than a few days with their mother since they popped out of her."
"They've started across," whispered the youngest. He handed the looker back to Daniel. "It's good for watching a few men at a time, but useless to see what is really going on."
Daniel passed it along to the man who supposedly could recognize Harry Rich or the King. The man shrugged and turned away from the view of the cavalry in the river so he could look along the heads of the new cavalrymen who were arriving every minute.
The first squads of the cavalry were now spreading out in the ford. The leaders were going slowly and allowing their horses to pick their way across the uneven bottom, so a knot of riders was forming in the middle of the river at the deepest part. When the leaders were just past halfway, Ham's gunners threw down the blind of bushes that hid their two cannons, and pulled the string to fire the first of them. A moment later they fired the second. They were staggering the fire so that there was always one cannon almost reloaded at any time.
Daniel had inspected the bore of the cannons and estimated that firing each one would be like firing ten blunderbusses. Now as he saw the masses of birdshot hit the lead horses, he felt sickened. It was terrifying to behold. Terrifying for the poor horses, and terrifying for how quickly two small cannons could turn a sunny morning wade across a pleasant river into a nightmare from Hell.
"They're just lucky our cannon are firing bird shot,” one of the battle hardened scouts told Daniel. "If we'd used pistol balls the river would be flowing red with human blood by now. About ten years ago the Swedish army switched from using big cannons to using those small cannon because they can be moved along with the infantry. That was back when we wus chasing the Imperial army that slaughtered the city of Magdeburg.
We caught them up and returned the favour. I still have nightmares about it. Effing Imperial infantry never knew what hit them. The canisters of pistol balls just mowed them down, over and over, just mowed them down. Bastards got what they deserved though, for raping and murdering all them Saxon women and children."
"You caught them up near to Leipzig, yes?" Daniel asked. There was no answer. The man had turned back to watch the ford.
At least thirty horses had reared or bolted or spun or bucked or dropped to their knees, and not just in the front ranks. The scout explained that because of the oval flaring of the cannon muzzle, the pattern of the bird shot would have been an oval that was wider than high. As the shot got further from the muzzle, the shot would have spread out higher, lower, and wider. A quarter of the birdshot would have harmlessly hit the water, a half would have hit the lead horses, and another quarter would have arched over the lead horses and hit the horses behind them.
While half of the cavalry in the ford were fighting to keep their saddles and fighting to keep control of their injured and panicking horses, the other half kept charging across. Alex had expected that the first riders sent across the ford would be experienced men, perhaps even mercenaries rather than the volunteer aristocrats. For fresh squads of cavalry to charge across meant first getting around the wounded men and horses in front of them that were blocking the center of the ford. They were now charging around both sides. Their mission was now obvious. They had to get across and silence the cannons.
Going around the sides meant crossing in deeper water, which slowed them down. By the time they were around their own injured men, a long line of pikemen had formed along the shore to stop them from gaining the bank and the firm footing of dry land. Worse, interspersed with the long pikes were musketeers. To try to reach the cannon through such a bristling line would be suicide.
Those leading the charge realized this and turned along the bank looking for a hole in the pikes. Behind the leaders, one by one, each rider came to the same decision. The first volley from the muskets hit horse meat at close range and those horses turned away from the gun smoke and joined the mad splashing melee of insane horses in the middle of the river.
Some horses went down, and took their riders with them. Any rider who lost his saddle was at immediate risk of being trampled or kicked by flailing hoofs. Cavalry were still streaming down the far bank and into the deeper waters on each side of the ford. They were lashing every bit of speed out of their struggling horses in a mad race. This because the riders all hoped that they could reach the other side of the river within the time it took the Scots to re-load their muskets and cannons.
It was a race the cavalry had no chance of winning. The musketeers were not reloading, they were just swapping out their first gun for their second and taking aim. The next musket balls did not come as a volley, but as individual shots aimed at those horses closest to the line of pikemen. Because the professional artillery gunners were using socks for powder and canisters for shot, reloading the four pounders took less than a minute, and then they roared again. Eventually the thunder of musket and cannon shot was drowned by the heart rending screams of horses and riders in extreme pain or terror.
"There's the king,” the spy with the looker called out to Daniel and the squad. They all turned away from watching the madness in the ford and looked across the river. "See the white plume? The man on the white horse. That must be the King." His call set them all running towards the deeper bush where their horses were tied up. Daniel and his ten scouts urged their horses to lurch down the river bank and then urged them to a run across the sandbar. Because of the sandbar they made it halfway across the river at speed, but then they were into water deep enough to slow them to a crawl, half swimming.
The masses of cavalry that were lined up along the bank were watching the disaster in the ford and they must have thought that the flying squad were English scouts. Scouts that were either retreating from the withering fire, or bringing messages, or coming for new orders. Whatever the case, the cavalry did not try to block the flying squad as it made the south bank of the Tweed and then raced on towards the white plume.
Daniel and his spy were in the lead and they were just short of the group of commanders when the spy called out, "It
's not the king! It's just bloody Harry Rich!" They both pulled up their horse so quickly that they almost went over the necks, and even then that brought them to a stop just feet from the man in the floppy hat with the white plume. The mistake was understandable, considering that all courtiers were copying the king's fashion of wearing a beard trimmed to a V point and a thin but curled mustache.
Alex's spy told the others in the flying squad to flee and then turned to follow them. As Daniel turned his own horse, his right hand pulled his killing pistol from its saddle holster, cocked it, aimed it at Rich's chest armour, and pulled the trigger. His last vision of Rich was the look of shock and horror that crossed the man's face as he was thrown backwards in his saddle by the force of the pistol ball. The look of a man who thought he had just been killed.
One dent in the man's armour would have to do, for some of Rich's aides were moving in on Daniel to cut off his escape route. There was no time to holster his spent pistol, so he grabbed his dragon up with his left hand, cocked it and fired it into the faces of the horses and riders who were in his way. The stinging smoke and birdshot caused the horses close by to scream and rear, including his own mare, but at least she was still pointing in the right direction to follow the fleeing flying squad.
He rapped her on the head with the still smoking dragon to get her attention, and then kicked her cruelly to get her moving. Seconds later he was out and away from the other horses, the other out-of-control horses. It was by sheer luck that he got the spent pistols holstered before he lost his knee grip on the horse, because his mare was leaping ahead in a half-bucking, half-running movement.
Ahead he could see the hole in the lines of English cavalry that had opened up to let the scouts run through. They must not have seen the attack on their paymaster, and moreover, must have assumed that the flying squad were English scouts racing away with messages that may save the poor sods caught in the crossfire at the ford.
Now there was nothing to do but hold tight and let the mare run. As she lurched down the bank and into the river, he heard the blare of trumpets and he hoped they were to signal the recall that would stop anymore brave fools from charging the cannons. On the way to capture a king he had been leading the squad, but now on the way back from shooting a general, he had been left far behind. This meant that the sounds of splashing horses coming from behind him were not the horses of friends. He stole a glance over his shoulder. A dozen or more riders were giving chase.
"Fuck, fuck, effing fuck!" Daniel began cursing, and continued on with the same wonderful word for every stride of the mare. The mare that was racing him to safety. The mare that was racing him towards the line of Scottish pikemen that were guarding the riverbank with their pikes prone. They were not moving aside to create a hole in the line for the flying squad to run through. Could it be that they took the flying squad for foes? When they did realize that they were actually friends being chased by foes, would they see him as the last of the friends, or the leader of the foes? His life depended on the answer.
The pikemen were least of his worries, however, because his mare had reached the deepest water and was tiring quickly. He must keep his saddle, he must keep his mare moving, he must beat the English to the other bank. As busy as he was just keeping his saddle, the same thought kept going around and around in his head. What was the Scottish word for friend? Ah, bugger it. For him that was now the most important word in the world and he couldn't remember it. It was the one word that could take him through those pikemen without being skewered.
The rest of the flying squad had reached the pikemen ahead of him. Lucky them, they were born and bred Scots, even if they had removed their long wool knit skirts and had dressed like Englishmen while out scouting. They would be yelling the word for 'friend' and would be yelling it with the correct lilt of voice that would distinguish them from English spies. Hopefully they would point him out as a friend to the pikemen and the musketeers.
There was nothing for it but to ride straight at the pikemen and hope they opened a hole in their line for him to ride through. As he watched, that was exactly what the pikemen did. He felt a wave of relief that was short-lived as a dozen musketeers ran forward, raised their guns, swung them towards him, and fired. Instinctively he ducked down behind the mare's head and braced himself for the searing pain of a ball and the bone-cracking tumble to the ground.
It could be that the only men who died of musket wounds on the battlefield of Kelso ford on that day were the two lancers who had caught up to Daniel and were about to skewer him with their lances. Alex's professional musketeers on the shore followed their general's orders to the letter. Only kill to save your own. The two lancers were hit by so many musket balls that they were lifted backwards out of their saddles. The rest of the English giving chase gave it up immediately, and therefore the musketeers did not fire the spare guns that their loaders had shoved into their hands.
Actually, there were no more shots to be heard anywhere along the Scottish bank. Alex's professionals, both the gunners and the musketeers, had been ordered not to kill. As soon as horns signaled the cavalry to retreat from the ford, the Scots had stopped firing. The sounds of battle, however, continued on for hours. The sounds of injured and dying horses. The calls for help from the men in pain. The cries for their mothers from those youngsters who this day found out the difference between a deer hunt and a cannon hunt.
On the other side of the ford men were dragging themselves out of the water, whilst their friends were finding anything white to hold up as a request for a truce so they could help the injured men. Alex ordered white flags to be shown in response, and even had one of the scouts ride into the ford with one of the flags and yell to them that they could retrieve the injured that had fallen close to the Scottish bank.
Eventually Alex Leslie and his artillery officer, Alex Hamilton rode into the middle of the ford and met with Harry Rich and his lordly officers. The negotiations and terms of retreat took less than a half an hour. When Ham returned, Daniel pushed closer to him so he could hear him explain the ceasefire to his gunners.
"Leslie explained to Rich that our standing orders were to disallow an English army from standing on Scottish soil, but that any engagement must begin with a clear warning. Then he told him that this mock battle had been the warning, so the next cavalry charge would be met with pistol balls and grape, all aimed to kill. Rich complained of the ambush tactics. Leslie told him that a surprise attack by so many horse could only be countered by ambush, but at least the ambush had been with bird shot.
Rich ceded the point and began negotiating for a truce while the injured were sent on their way back to Berwick. Leslie told him to warn the procession of wounded to stay well south of the river, especially near Coldstream ford where the main force of the Covenanter army and their main bank of field guns were waiting for the English infantry to cross."
One of the gunners interrupted. "But we don't have anyone at Coldstream, and these are our only two field guns."
Ham laughed. "A little white lie to save lives. Tonight I will pray for Alex's soul for telling it. You should have seen the effect of the lie on Rich's face. Because of it Harry Rich has decided to make a general retreat all the way back to Berwick to discuss the new-found strength of the Covenanters with the other generals."
"So what were the terms for the safe retreat?" one of the gunners asked. "Do we get their supplies?"
"The only terms that Alex demanded,” Ham replied, "was that all dead and wounded horses be left in Kelso. They have agreed."
"That is all?" The gunner shook his head. "The wounded horses, and nothing more. Rich must be laughing at Leslie as if he were an old fool."
"Hold yer tongue," another gunner growled in a thick border brogue, "the effin English have been stealing the food and the young women from the border villages, and making enemies of the locals on both sides of the border. The folk around Kelso are half-starved. Tonight they will all have meat in their grass soup and General Leslie will be c
heered at every hearth. This embarrassment of the noble English cavalry will spice their horse stew."
Once Alex Leslie had finished briefing his officers about the truce and the terms, Daniel sauntered over to him and told him, "So it is done then, and with no slaughter other than the horses. Congratulations." At his words they clasped hands but then Daniel told him, "And now I must leave you. I have my ship to see clear of this coastline before the Navy happens upon it. I suppose I will head south to evade the Navy. Tell Argyll that I will pick up more whiskey from Edinburgh another time, for Rotterdam will be my next port of call."
"Nay, Danny. Go to Edinburgh with no fear,” Alex told him. "Harry Rich just told me that the Navy is worrying the port of Aberdeen far to the north of Edinburgh. Go quickly and fetch your whisky." As an afterthought, the general stepped over to his horse and pulled a pistol out of a saddle holster and handed it to Daniel. "Here, take this with my thanks. A token of my appreciation for putting the fear of death into that ass Harry Rich. When he met with me, he had his breast plate undone, and still he was having trouble breathing."
Daniel took a good look at the pistol he had just been handed. It was beautifully engraved, which meant it had been made for a wealthy gent. It wasn't the engraving that caught his eye, however, but the two barrels, one above the other. There was a flint-dog for each, and both on the right side of the gun, but only one trigger. The barrels were of two different bores and lengths. The under barrel was shorter and had the large bore and the flared muzzle of a dragon, while the over barrel was longer, with a smaller bore and the bore had rifling grooves to spin the pistol ball.
Even with two barrels this ornate pistol was no heavier than his own dragon, which spoke well of the quality of the metal of the barrels. He could see from the works that the trigger would release any flint that was cocked, including both at once. "It is a fine gift, Alex, but it is more fitting for a general than a pistoleer."