Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2)

by Giles Kristian

  ‘Just take me to Denton,’ Tom said, turning the editor round and pushing him through the trees.

  Rather than go back north past All Souls and Birkenhead’s workshop, and risk the editor being recognized by the crowds that Tom presumed would have gathered there by now, they headed south and crossed over High Street. They stuck to the shadow-shrouded gravel back streets, the ancient litter-strewn lanes and even a stinking, unpitched cartway, but steered clear of Christ Church College, for that was where the King himself had his chambers and Tom had no wish to run into His Majesty’s soldiers.

  Up ahead a college door creaked open and a man stepped out into the road. ‘Who goes there?’ he challenged them, a candle lamp flickering at the end of one spindly arm. An ancient sword wavered at the end of the other.

  ‘Get back inside and lock your door, old man. The rebels are here,’ Tom growled, marching past with Birkenhead. By the flickering light of the candle Tom saw a shock of white hair and a wizened face in which the jaw had all but unhinged.

  ‘Rebels? In Oxford?’ The man’s rheumy eyes blinked incredulously. ‘Fate stands now upon the razor’s edge,’ he murmured, then vanished, and there was a slam of door and clicking of locks and Tom and Birkenhead had the street to themselves once more.

  ‘Old fool thinks it’s the fall of Troy,’ Tom said.

  ‘Are you not Achilles full of wrath?’ Birkenhead accused him.

  ‘My horse was called Achilles,’ Tom said, a sudden pang in his chest as though a cold hand had clutched his heart. And then they came to the church of St Peter-le-Bailey where a knot of men were angrily debating whether or not to ring the bells in response to the earlier explosions.

  ‘What news?’ a man called to them, silencing the others with a wave of his cane. He was portly and well dressed, his beaver sporting three white plumes.

  ‘Some sort of accident near All Souls,’ Tom replied. His talk of rebels had made the old man scuttle back inside and lock his door but these men would ring the bells and call out the regiment, which would make it harder for Tom and the others to make their rendezvous with The Scot.

  ‘It was no accident, sir,’ the man replied, crossing the street towards them, thrusting his cane into the mud with each step. ‘The watch have caught a damned Roundhead trying to slip out of the city!’ He flapped a hand. ‘Like a damned eel, may they stretch his neck and watch him do the gallows jig.’

  ‘Keep moving,’ Tom hissed at Birkenhead, whose shorter legs were struggling to keep pace with Tom’s long stride. ‘Then good luck to us all, sir,’ he said to the portly man, who pulled his plump neck in as though offended at being all but ignored.

  ‘You think we should pull on the damn ropes? Wake the town?’ the man called after them.

  ‘I do not!’ Tom called without turning, as he and the editor paced on up New Inn Lane, Tom ignoring the shouts of sergeants and officers coming from the castle whose imposing dark bulk dominated the western skyline off to their left.

  Tom cursed under his breath. Which of them had been caught? Trencher? Penn? Some small part of Tom hoped it was Trencher. It was an ignoble and dark hope and Tom was ashamed of it. Trencher and Penn were the nearest thing to friends he had in this life, but he knew that the big, granite-faced man was tough to the marrow. Trencher burnt with a hatred for the Royalists and if anyone could hold his silence long enough for the others to get clear it would be him.

  ‘If you do not go now you will never get out of the city,’ Birkenhead said.

  ‘Hold your tongue or I’ll cut it out,’ Tom growled. They do not know there are more of us, he thought. The explosion could have been the work of one man, someone within Oxford who hated the Cavaliers, some Puritan zealot with a love of black powder.

  But damn ill luck that one of them was caught.

  New Inn Hall was, in the main, a grand-looking, stone-built affair with a slate roof, several broad chimney stacks and leaded windows. But what held Tom’s eye were the four sentries, two either side of the main entrance and all alarmingly well armed. Each had a good buff-coat, two firelocks thrust into his belt and a curved hanger or Irish hilt at his left hip.

  ‘Your rebellion exacts a heavy price and not just in blood,’ the editor said in a low voice. ‘The university’s silver plate has been requisitioned. It goes through that door, is melted down and comes back out as crowns to pay the King’s army.’ He grabbed Tom’s arm and Tom rounded on him and wanted to thrust his blade into the man’s neck. But Birkenhead held his ground. ‘Think, man!’ he hissed. ‘It’s the Royal Mint. There will be more soldiers inside. You will get us both killed.’

  Tom’s heart was a raging fireball in his chest, burning with the need for vengeance, so that a part of him believed he could slaughter those sentries and anyone else who got in his way. But another part of him, probably the same cold, calculating part that had hoped it was Trencher who had been caught by the Cavaliers, knew that Birkenhead was right and that he would die before he even got a chance to spill Lord Denton’s blood.

  ‘Will the soldiers know you?’ he asked.

  Birkenhead shrugged. ‘Perhaps they have seen me around the city. Perhaps not. They will know my words if not my face.’

  ‘Then get us in there,’ Tom murmured. From the corner of his eye he could see that the guards were looking over at them, more than likely growing suspicious.

  ‘How?’ the editor said under his breath, eyes imploring Tom to see sense and give it up.

  ‘Just do it and do it now, or you’ll greet the new day a corpse.’ Birkenhead exhaled slowly as though gathering himself, then nodded and they crossed the road towards the soldiers, who bristled and drew their firelocks, no doubt put on edge by the explosion to the east.

  ‘What is your business?’ one of them challenged.

  ‘I am John Birkenhead, the editor of Mercurius Aulicus, and I would speak with Lord Denton.’

  The soldiers were wide-eyed. ‘We just heard tell that a rebel blew your printing press to shivers!’

  ‘Which is why I need to speak with Lord Denton,’ Birkenhead said sharply, ‘for we must have a new press built immediately and the college plate must pay for it.’ He lifted an ink-stained forefinger into the air and Tom hoped that the sentries could not see the tremble in it. ‘We must print a newsbook without delay to show the rebels that their base sabotage has come to nothing.’

  ‘Was anyone killed?’ another soldier asked, tucking his firelock back into his belt.

  ‘Just fetch Lord Denton before I put your teeth through the back of your skull,’ Tom snarled, at which the young soldier blanched and looked to his fellows for support that never came.

  ‘Lord Denton is not here,’ the first soldier said, looking from Tom to Birkenhead and back to Tom. ‘He’s been gone some four or five days and I cannot say when he will be back.’

  The words struck Tom like a musket butt rammed into his gut; his hand found his sword’s grip and he resolved to drown the night in blood.

  ‘Tell Lord Denton I will call again,’ Birkenhead said, his tone suggesting that he suspected the soldier of some duplicity. ‘Come, Thomas, we have work to do,’ and Tom felt a tug on his arm and looked round as if in a dream, saw the editor’s eyes pleading with him to follow, and before his reeling mind caught up with itself he was walking south, back down the moonlit street, as a peal of bells assailed the night.

  ‘I could not do more,’ Birkenhead said in a small voice. Then a door slammed and Tom turned back and saw two men step out of New Inn Hall. It was dark and the men had their backs to him as they walked north, their features hidden by broad beavers and night’s veil. And yet none of that mattered and Tom’s breath caught in his throat. For he did not need to see the broader man’s face to know who he was. It was all in his bearing and gestures and the way he held his shoulders as though inviting any who dared to get in his way. Tom had known this man almost all his life.

  ‘Come with me if you want to live,’ he said to Birkenhead.

  The edit
or turned his face up to the sky, to the moon-silvered smoke slung low over the city, some of which might have risen from his own beloved printing press, and offered up a prayer. And then they began to walk north.

  After Henry Denton.

  Henry Denton and his companion did not follow New Inn Street onto the wide thoroughfare of Thames Street. Not that the small troop of musketeers from the King’s Oxford Army gathering there could have stopped Tom from following Denton if he had gone that way, for the promise of blood had sluiced away all sense of caution now.

  Henry had lusted after Martha. Tom had always known that. Much worse was that Henry had stood by whilst Lord Denton had defiled her. And after that he had joined in the ritual humiliation when Tom had been helpless and rage-filled, face-down in the freezing mud outside Baston House. When Henry’s father had pissed on him.

  And as for fear, Tom could not recall the last time he had felt that. Anticipation, yes, and certainly the blood-shivering thrill that filled his limbs before a fight – as it did now – but not real fear. Yet for all that he was vaguely aware that it was fortunate the two men had turned right into a darker, meaner lane that led to Cornmarket Street.

  ‘You think one of them is Lord Denton?’ Birkenhead asked, his tone suggesting he would be deeply offended to learn that the sentry had indeed lied to him.

  ‘Not William,’ Tom said, never taking his eyes off the man thirty paces ahead, who was richly clothed in voluminous blue breeches and an expensive blue doublet that was slashed to reveal the fine lining of white fabric underneath. He wore the red sash of the King’s service and sported two red feathers in a silk scarf around the crown of his broad beaver. ‘His piss-proud son Henry,’ Tom said, thinking that running the new Royal Mint was a job to which the Dentons would take like pigs to mud.

  The man next to Henry glanced behind him, aware of company, but Tom touched the brim of his hat and the man turned back round, reassured that the two men following had no malevolent intent. Both men laughed and Henry passed his friend a bulbous flask, slapping the man’s back and growling some drunken malediction.

  You won’t be laughing soon, Tom thought, wishing he had a good poll-axe or an Irish hilt rather than the rapier that had been provided to complement his disguise, for he knew Henry was a fine swordsman and Tom would rather assail them with brute force and aggression than engage two opponents at once in a fencing bout.

  ‘And you have a grievance with Master Denton?’ Birkenhead enquired but received no answer as Henry and his companion waded into a throng of women who had coalesced out of the darkness. ‘It would seem the young man is a flesh-monger,’ the editor said, ‘with an appetite for Jack whores and harridans, for there is no decent notch to be found round here. So I am told.’

  Tom recalled a summer’s day many years ago when he and Mun had come across Henry and his cronies in Gerard’s Wood beating a crippled boy. Henry had taunted Martha Green too. He had declared that she would open her legs for a farthing, but seeing as there are three of us, I’d happily stretch to the price of a quart of good ale. Those foul words echoed now across the years, piercing Tom’s soul like a thin blade: a blade he twisted himself by conjuring Martha, his once beautiful love, in his mind’s eye, her skin turning blue as she hung lifeless at pain’s end on a rope beneath the old bridge across the Tawd.

  Henry’s companion turned, the wench clinging to him cooing in his ear, and wafted a hand at Tom the way a man might shoo a fly. ‘You wags will have to wait your bleeding turn,’ he called, enough slur about it to suggest that they had been enjoying the favours of the beaker. But Tom gave no reply as he and Birkenhead approached, the editor’s unease palpable in the night air.

  Several churches’ bells were ringing now, alerting the city to the furore, or perhaps celebrating the capture of a traitor. A stone’s throw north musketeers were gathering, readying to sweep through the streets in a night patrol. The men of the watch were bristling and there was a growing thrum in Oxford, as though, having heard the explosion at All Souls, folk were venturing outside to taste the night for themselves. At the end of the street the Saxon tower of St Michael at the north gate imposed itself on the gloom as God’s witness to Man’s sin. But none of this seemed to concern Henry Denton and his friend.

  Henry too turned towards them, thrusting a ringed finger into an ear and waggling it theatrically. ‘Your lugs full of dung?’ he barked. ‘My friend told you to wait, sirrahs.’ His other hand was snarled up in a mass of black hair, beneath which a hard-faced woman half grinned, relishing the covetousness she had provoked. ‘I will not be rushed when buying quim.’

  ‘Take your time, friend,’ Tom said, lingering in the shadow of a garden wall. By contrast Birkenhead was cast in the glow of the near-full moon that hung in the eastern sky above the old Saxon tower beyond Cornmarket Street. Tom could feel the editor’s eyes on him, could sense the man’s cold fear. And his indecision.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Tom growled at him, never taking his eyes off Henry and the other man, a rougher sort by the looks but a soldier certainly, given the age and wear of the leather baldrick across his right shoulder and the nicks and dents on the wrist and knuckle guards of the pattern sword hanging from it. A ballock dagger hung above his crotch from a belt, its wooden grip worn smooth. Tom fixed on this man’s eyes. ‘Your taste in friends is worse even than your taste in women,’ he said, nodding in Henry’s direction. ‘Leave him to his whores and be gone.’

  The man glanced at Henry, who was busy assessing and comparing the attributes of three women who were fawning over him with the ardour and insincerity of the hungry.

  ‘Do you know who he is, whelp?’ the man snarled at Tom, throwing one hand Henry’s way, the wine flask hanging from his index finger. The promise of violence – a look Tom had come to know well – flashed in the eyes beneath the hat’s rim. ‘His father’s a lord, you insolent cur.’

  ‘I know Henry Denton better than you, you scab-faced bastard,’ Tom said. ‘Henry is a fartleberry hanging from his father’s arse.’

  The insult cut through Henry’s preoccupation and he turned, shrugging off one of the whores who sought to hold his attention. A gust blew from the south bringing the tang of blood from the offal and filth which the butchers in the Queen Street shambles emptied daily into the street. To Tom it was also the smell of battle. He inhaled deeply.

  ‘You are drunk. Now fuck off!’ Henry’s companion swigged the last drop from his flask and hurled it at Tom, just missing, so that the vessel shattered against the wall in a spray of clay shards. He turned back to the gaggle of whores and gestured for Henry to do the same.

  ‘Leave us, ladies,’ Tom snarled from the shadows. ‘You’ll get no silver from these men tonight.’

  ‘The lad’s tired of life!’ Henry’s friend exclaimed, turning. His sword hissed against the scabbard’s throat and he came at Tom with the naked blade. ‘Your stubbornness will get you killed, whelp.’

  Tom hauled his own blade free and lunged but the man parried, his heavier blade knocking Tom’s rapier wide, and brought the sword scything back so that it would have opened Tom’s belly had he not stepped back and thrown his left arm across himself, catching the other’s sword on his knife where blade met guard. Taking the strain Tom threw his right foot forward and slammed his forehead into the man’s face, sending him staggering.

  A whore screamed. ‘Fetch the watch, Clemence!’ another shouted as they dispersed like crows shooed from a hanged man’s gallows.

  ‘You’re a dead man!’ the soldier snarled through teeth daubed in the blood that was flooding from his nose, but anger had made him reckless and he came at Tom with a series of wild hay-making strokes that Tom avoided with keen eyes and fast feet, backing off until his opponent’s sword was out wide. Then he whipped his rapier up, slashing the man’s face so that he screamed in agony and reeled, dropping his sword.

  ‘I saw you die!’ Henry yelled, his own fine sword pointing at Tom accusingly, whilst his friend staggered, cl
utching his face, then fell to his knees, blood cascading through his fingers and soaking his cuffs and sleeves. Tom had caught a glimpse of the wound: a deep slash that had opened the soldier’s face from his neck to his right eye. ‘I saw you die,’ Henry said again, paying his friend no heed, fixated as he was on his old enemy. ‘We saw you killed at Kineton Fight!’

  ‘I came back from the dead, Henry,’ Tom said.

  Birkenhead had thrown himself against the garden wall which he now all but clung to, the whites of his eyes glowing against the inky dark.

  ‘What happened to Martha …’ Henry’s mouth twisted, as though he hated himself for what he was about to say. ‘None of that was my doing. My father—’

  ‘Your father will bury you two days hence, Henry,’ Tom said, fighting the urge to fly at the man and tear him to bloody meat with his bare hands. ‘He will stand by your grave and know his line is extinguished and then I will kill him too.’

  Tom might not have felt real fear since he had become a killer of men, but he recognized fear when he saw it and he saw it now in Henry’s handsome face.

  ‘Kill him, Henry!’ his friend screamed, on his knees drenched in blood, the gore-slick hands at his face shaking wildly with pain and shock. ‘Look what he’s done to me! Kill him!’

  ‘This time there’s no coming back,’ Henry snarled, finding his courage, remembering his own prowess. ‘You’ll be food for the maggots, Rivers. Just like your hanged whore.’

  Tom flew at him and their swords sang out in the night, the ring and scrape of steel barely keeping time with the deadly dance of the blades. Strike, parry, riposte, Tom’s left arm bent as a counterbalance by his right cheek, the hand still gripping his knife. But Henry’s skill was more than a match for Tom’s fury and he fluently turned each parry into an attack, so that Tom knew he was in the fight of his life. And though they were evenly matched in height, Henry’s was the longer blade, giving him a greater lunging distance and a murderous advantage.