O’Brien grinned wickedly. ‘Horses put the fear of God into infantry.’
‘That’s part of it,’ Mun said, ‘but there’s another reason they’re wetting their breeches.’
The Irishman’s gloved fingers raked the thick red bristles on his cheek until the answer struck him. ‘They’re bloody recruits!’ he said. ‘Not even proper soldiers, but for those officers sitting nice warm beasts, boots out of the frost.’
Mun nodded. ‘Those officers have come north. From Blackburn.’ He gestured at the handful of riders who were corralling those on foot towards the trees, which were still four or five hundred yards away by Mun’s reckoning. ‘They’ve come looking for wool traders and farm boys to turn into soldiers, those who were not in the villages when the sergeants came banging the drum.’
‘To give the traitorous fellows their due it looks as if they’ve found some,’ O’Brien admitted.
That was true enough, Mun thought. The rebels knew Derby was holed up forty miles south in Warrington and they’d guessed correctly that the Preston garrison would be keeping their bones warm. So here they were, out in the freezing cold. Recruiting. Mun felt the blood begin to tremble in his limbs. It was the battle thrill coming on him.
‘The brazen bastards,’ Trooper Harley said, winding his wheellock. Many of the others were doing likewise, slipping spanners over the square section of their weapons’ wheel shafts and filling the still morning with a salvo of clicks before priming the pans with powder and pulling the pan covers shut.
‘We’re going to tear them to shreds,’ Mun said, checking that his own weapons – the two firelocks and his carbine – were secure. His heavy sword was snug in its scabbard on his saddle behind his left hip. He still wore the old back-and-breast he had bought from a trooper in Nehemiah Boone’s company whose place he had taken after breaking the man’s leg, but beneath it he now wore a fine buff-coat stripped from the dead captain who had led the assault on Shear House. Downing had been the man’s name and his leather coat – so fine that it could not have cost the captain less than eleven pounds – fitted Mun perfectly, providing not only protection but much-needed warmth. As for Nehemiah Boone, just the thought of him was enough to sour Mun’s belly. They might both fight for the King but there was as much bad blood between Mun and the captain – the first of it spilled by Boone himself the day they had met – as there would soon be amongst the frosted tussocks in the valley below.
‘If we let those men live they and others like them will be at the gates of Shear House before spring,’ he announced to the troop, taking off his gloves. ‘They will threaten our families. They will try to kill us.’
‘Whoresons can try,’ a hard-looking man with a weathered face said. His name was John Cole and from what Major Radcliffe had told Mun and from what Mun had since seen for himself, Cole was a useful man to have with you in a fight.
‘They will spread their sedition and we shall never be rid of this war,’ Mun went on, tying his helmet’s leather thong beneath his chin then shoving cold hands back into the gloves. ‘So we kill them before they get to those trees.’
‘Do we offer quarter?’ a wide-eyed lad named Godfrey asked, pushing his wheellock back into its saddle holster with a trembling hand.
‘You can offer by all means, lad, but kill them first,’ O’Brien said, pushing his own helmet down snug over his thick red tresses.
‘Kill them,’ Mun said, holding Godfrey’s eye with enough steel in the gaze to make the young trooper more afraid of him than of the enemy below. And with that he gave Hector a touch of heel and urged him over the frost-stiffened tussocks of the ridge, his eyes riveted on the men below, whose formation had disintegrated now in their panic to get to cover.
Mun knew it was unwise to ride at any sort of speed down such a slope, but he also knew that if they descended at a walk the rebels would gain the trees and he would lose the advantage. So they went at the trot, hooves thudding against the iron-hard ground, armour and tack clinking and jangling. Mun felt the icy wind bite into his face, blurring his vision and dragging tears from the corners of his eyes. The bitterly cold air scorched his throat and lungs but he relished it, his whole body thrumming now with the excitement that always flooded his veins before mortal danger. And now he could hear the men in the gully below shouting, could discern fragments of commands mostly lost amongst the wind gushing past his face and eking into the gaps between helmet-steel and ears.
‘For England and King Charles!’ he roared, and that’s when the first muskets cracked in the valley, etching a grimace between Mun’s lips, for this all but confirmed that the troops below were Parliament men and in truth Mun had not been utterly certain before. ‘England and King Charles!’ he yelled again, and this time several others repeated the war-cry as they followed Mun’s lead and gave the spur, breaking into a gallop, a fear of flying lead hunching shoulders and pulling in heads. O’Brien, no great admirer of the King but a sworn devotee of killing men who pointed muskets at him, gave his own cry of ‘Ireland’, as a stuttering volley of musketry shredded the crisp afternoon. Mun felt a ball whir past his left cheek, and the frantic rhythm his troopers’ horses beat against the ground.
They galloped down onto the valley floor, men folding forward and grunting with the impact of coming onto flatter ground, and now Mun could make out the faces of his enemies one hundred feet away, their eyes wide with terror as their freezing hands fumbled at powder flasks, scouring sticks and glowing match-cords. He saw one man drop his musket and another turn and run, but Mun’s prey was a buff-coated officer sitting a chestnut mare, who was screaming at his recruits to form a line and for the love of God load and give fire.
Forty feet away.
Taking the reins in his left hand Mun reached behind him with his right and hauled his carbine round on its belt, though he did not fire because the weapon was jolting wildly.
Twenty feet.
The rebel officer must have fired his pistol already for now he drew his sword, but Mun gripped with his knees and brought his left hand up to steady the carbine’s barrel and the rebel threw his other arm across his face in vain as Mun squeezed the trigger. The carbine roared and its ball punched a hole through buff leather, skin and breastbone, and through the rebel’s heart, spraying gore-flecked bone and slivers of glistening meat out of the ruin of his back, and then Mun was flown past him.
A callow-faced young rebel raised his matchlock and Mun cursed, thinking himself a dead man. But in his fear or inexperience the musketeer had misjudged the length of match clamped in the serpent’s jaws and the tip of the burning match missed the priming-pan, or else he had forgotten to open the pan, and Mun spurred Hector forward so that the stallion’s chest slammed into the man, catapulting him backwards with the sound of bones snapping. ‘King Charles!’ Mun clamoured, drawing a pistol and shooting a rebel between the eyes, who collapsed, a dark stain blooming on the crotch of his breeches, his brains spread across the frosted tussocks like spilled porridge.
Mun twisted and saw O’Brien bury his poll-axe in another mounted officer’s shoulder, heard the rebel scream like a vixen before the Irishman leant across and shoved his pistol into the man’s belly and gave fire, gobbets of flesh and spine erupting from a void in the officer’s back.
Some rebels were still running for the trees and so Mun hauled on the reins and kicked back with the spurs that had once been fastened to the boots of the King of England himself, urging the stallion on, breaking away from the chaos to cut down the fugitives.
‘Wait for me, you greedy bastard! Sir!’ O’Brien yelled and pulled his own mount round to gallop after Mun. Who was already pulling his heavy sword out of its scabbard and into the raw, death-filled day.
CHAPTER TWO
MUN HAD CUT down two more rebels as they fled for the trees, his heavy sword hacking into the first man’s shoulder, all but severing the arm, then lopping off a goodly chunk of the second rebel’s skull as Hector bore him past at the gallop. Surprisingly it was the
first rebel who had died first, almost instantly, bleeding in rhythmic gouts that melted the frost. The second man, with half his skull gone to expose the glistening brains, had lived long enough to mumble that he had wanted no part in the argument between King and Parliament and wished even then, his brains leaking, to be left alone that he might go home to his ill mother.
‘We’ve all got a part in this but you should have joined the right bloody side, lad,’ O’Brien had said not unkindly, though he was cleaning his poll-axe on the dying man’s tunic at the time. The young rebel had seemed about to answer this when he was gripped by a sudden convulsing and frothing about the mouth, soon after which he died with eyes full of tears.
‘He lasted longer than I would have wagered, what with his skull opened up like a boiled egg,’ O’Brien had said, but Mun had not replied because despite his previous order to his men to give no quarter, he was now trying to rein them in and stop the killing.
‘Hold, Shear House men!’ he yelled at twelve of his mounted men who were corralling nine stunned and bloodied survivors together like a noose around a neck. ‘Spare them if they have yielded.’
But his men, who were thirty paces off, were blood-drunk and wanted more.
‘You heard Sir Edmund!’ a man named Goffe bellowed, urging his mount in amongst the press of mostly younger men. ‘Pull that trigger, Bull, I’ll knock yer bloody ears off and you’ll be picking the frost out of ’em.’
Bull was glaring at a rebel who was on his knees, his peaked montero-cap gripped before his terrified face, but Goffe’s threat pierced Bull’s rage and, cursing, he lowered his wheellock, keeping his finger on the trigger. Mun walked Hector over to them, grateful to have Goffe with him. A tenant farmer, Goffe had proved a solid soldier, the kind of man who would be made a corporal in the King’s real army. The other men respected him as one of their own and listened to him, which was just as well for the surviving rebels. At least for now.
‘Take anything worth having,’ Mun said, dismounting and leading Hector by his bridle, ‘and share out the powder and shot. Lash the muskets together in fours and let the lighter men tie them across their saddles.’
They knew well enough what to do, had done it before, and dismounted to set about their task. Other Shear House men were spread across the site of the carnage, looting the dead, cold hands fumbling at the boxes on slain rebels’ bandoliers, emptying the precious black powder into their own flasks. Two of the younger troopers were doubled over and puking, the vomit pattering onto the frosty grass and steaming, and Mun knew it was the shock of seeing men butchered. He felt the thrum in his own limbs intensify now that the fight was over: his body’s way of confirming that it still lived, that the heart still thumped in his breast whilst other men’s hearts had beaten their last and were growing cold.
It had been a wild but utter victory. They had swept down into the valley in a wave of death and if they had been wolves and the rebels sheep the result would not have been any different, for they had killed thirty and lost not one. Mun dared to wonder if this proved that God was on his side; on the King’s side too, yet he pushed such thoughts back into the dark corners of his mind. Because God was merciful and would wish Mun to be merciful now.
But Mun had not stopped the killing out of mercy.
‘You command here?’ a rebel barked, eyeballing Mun even as John Cole snatched his knapsack off him and began to rifle through the contents.
‘I do,’ Mun replied, walking over, letting go of Hector’s bridle so that he could slide his sword through a scrap of cloth torn from a rebel’s shirt.
‘You devil! You gave us no opportunity to surrender,’ the man protested as Mun tossed the bloody rag aside. He was in his thirties, clean-shaven, clear-eyed and with a strong jaw that Mun guessed had been honed to sharp edges by the yelling of commands. He did not seem afraid, which might have been surprising given that his newly raised troop lay butchered before it had ever served Parliament’s cause. Yet good commanders knew that fear spread like fire. Good officers learned to smother it, whether in the presence of their own men or the enemy.
‘Would you have allowed us to surrender?’ Mun asked, holding the man’s eye, and to the rebel’s credit he held his tongue rather than lie. ‘No you would not,’ Mun confirmed, ‘and if we had given you warning and thus chance to properly defend yourselves, your men would still be dead now’ – he pointed his sword at a rebel whose lifeless face was a blood-sheeted grimace – ‘but many of mine would be corpses too.’ Mun shrugged, pushing his blade back into its scabbard. ‘This is your reward for treason,’ he said. ‘Death is your payment for taking up arms against your king.’
‘You mean to murder us in cold blood?’ The man was wide-eyed, the bridle slipping off his fear at last.
Mun shook his head. ‘Not me,’ he said, glancing up at the wan sky, his breath rising in a cloud. He turned to the rest of his troop who were still plundering the dead. ‘Shear House men, mount up! We have done our work here.’
‘You’re going to leave us out here like this?’ the rebel leader asked, ignoring Cole’s growled threat to take off his buff-coat or else die with it on. Goffe, Harley and even young Godfrey were working fast, relieving the stunned rebels of food, spare clothing, tinder boxes, flints and steel, bottles, blankets and money; stripping them as thoroughly as a dog paring flesh from a bone. ‘We’ll freeze to death,’ the man declared as his men looked to each other fearfully. ‘The nearest village is ten miles east. If we don’t find it before dark we’ll die.’
‘There’s a village called Longridge five miles back that way,’ Mun said, thumbing south, seeing hope spark in the rebel’s eyes. ‘But if I see you there I will kill you. Your only hope lies east. Whalley village.’
‘Who are you, you devil?’ the rebel officer asked as he was shoved this way and that by Cole who was pulling his plain buff-coat off him, leaving him clothed merely in shirt and doublet so that much of his white skin was now at the mercy of the biting cold.
‘He’s the man that gave you a good hiding,’ O’Brien said at Mun’s shoulder, pouring powder down the muzzle of his wheellock. Some of the rebels grimaced, disgusted though perhaps not surprised to discover that an Irishman had played some part in their destruction.
‘My name is Sir Edmund Rivers,’ Mun said, taking hold of his saddle’s cantle and hauling himself up onto Hector’s back. ‘If you do not freeze to death out here you would do well to remember me.’
‘Then I shall pray to the Lord, Sir Edmund, that He sees fit to preserve me that I might meet you again and avenge these men whom you have barbarously slaughtered.’ His eight companions lacked their leader’s boldness and either gawked pathetically at their enemies or looked at their shoes.
Mun regarded the man for a moment, saw that he was beginning to shiver, the raw air sinking teeth into his bones. Part of him was tempted to give the order to kill the prisoners where they stood and be done with the thing. Then his mind dragged up an image of his father lying plundered and stripped in the bloody mire of Edgehill. It was not a memory, for he had never found Sir Francis or Emmanuel after the battle, yet he knew the image to be true all the same.
Let them freeze, he thought, and with a click of his tongue he turned Hector around and walked him south away from the Forest of Bowland, looking up at the pale, grey-hazed sun and looking forward to getting himself in front of a roaring fire in Longridge village.
Tom Rivers had found more comfort than he would have dared hope for in The Leaping Lord. He had been back in Southwark some seven weeks now, drawn south to London because he knew not where else to go and wanted to be at the least far away from Shear House and the ruins of his former life. London was buzzing, her people still jubilant after their victory at Turnham Green where twenty-four thousand soldiers and townsfolk – men and women – had stood side by side to defend the road into London. Together this huge if unusual army had mustered on Chelsea Fields and marched westwards to deny their king entry to the city.
‘What a sight it was. A vision I shall never forget,’ Ruth Gell had told Tom the night he had come to the Lord. At first she had not recognized him – later she admitted to assuming him to be a beggar – but then she had looked properly into his eyes and she had gasped in shock, seeing through the unkempt hair and beard – and the scars – to the young man she had known before the war. There had been no available rooms and Tom had shared Ruth’s bed as in old times.
Her eyes had shone as she recounted the tale. ‘All the proud ensigns of the Trained Bands danced in the wind and we stood there shoulder to shoulder with fighting men,’ she had told him, ‘men who had stood against the King at Kineton Fight. And hundreds more were scattered amongst the gardens and orchards and waiting in narrow lanes beside the Thames. And we were prepared to fight, too!’ she had announced, as though daring him to dispute it.
He had not disputed it. ‘We knew that devil Prince Rupert and his cavalry couldn’t hurt us in the streets,’ she had said, ‘and you know what His Majesty’s men did? They watched us. They watched us eat and they watched us pray and damn their eyes but they did not know what to do.’ The ghost of a smile had lit her eyes. ‘It wouldn’t look good, would it, the King sending his soldiers against so many ordinary folk? And we knew it. You should have seen it, Tom. It was like a miracle.’
Ruth had shrugged, accepting that he would never know how it had felt to be among them on that glorious day. ‘By evening it was all over. His Majesty and all his haughty lot buggered off.’ Her plump lips had curled then, like a cat settling into its basket. ‘We danced and sang and drank until we fell over. Oh but you should have been there, my handsome man. You should have seen us.’
Tom had listened, barely saying a word, barely even stirring other than an occasional nod to usher her on with the story, and Ruth had obliged, washing the dirt of the road from his skin and tracing callused fingers over scars and the puckered flesh of wounds that had not been there when she had last known his body by candlelight. Only in the early hours of the morning, when Tom had been vaguely aware of his limbs slackening, his body surrendering at last against Ruth and her lumpy bed, had she murmured that she had thought he was dead.
Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) Page 2