‘God and King Charles!’ more than one hundred throats clamoured back, raising a black cloud of craaing rooks into the sky.
They’ll give us a volley and then they’ll run, Mun thought, looking up at the twenty or so dragoons cresting the ridge. He and The Scot led, the rest of the division forming a killing wave three files deep and in close order as they rode up the hill at an easy pace.
And yet it was still no easy thing riding towards firearms that were pointed in your direction and Mun felt his body contract, drawing into its core like a fist around a shilling, flesh and bones cringing from the coming lead storm. He heard a rebel officer demanding that his men hold their fire and he cursed inwardly, for every moment the dragoons waited made it more likely that their fire would reap lives.
‘Ready, boy. Good boy, Hector.’ He touched the stallion’s flanks with his spurs, the spurs that had once belonged to the King of England himself, and Hector pulled a full length in front of O’Brien bouncing on his right and Cole on his left and even a head in front of The Scot. Mun needed to show that he was unafraid and more than that, that he was eager to get up that hill and teach the rebels that insurrection buys only death. He must lead his men from the front and inspire them by his own example and so he growled an obscenity at that part of him that was afraid, and he opened his chest and lifted his chin.
And then the rebels gave fire.
A ball plucked the hem of Mun’s buff-coat and another thunked off a man’s breastplate near by and the King’s men roared in defiance and, heels kicking back, came on at a good trot.
‘Fight us, you dogs!’ Rowland Bide yelled up at the enemy, but of course they would not fight, for it could be no fight between twenty dragoons and one hundred and twenty harquebusiers. It could only be bloody butcher’s work and so the rebels were running back over the ridge to mount their little horses, their token gesture of defiance given.
‘Heya!’ Mun yelled and Hector put his head down and Mun leant forward, back straight as the creature snorted and broke into a canter, his great muscles defying the slope. Up they rode, yelling now to rebuff fear and to put fear in the enemy, and then the ground evened out and Mun was upon the crest, the wound in his right leg screaming, and there on the reverse slope waited two troops of rebel horse.
‘King Jesus! King Jesus!’ the rebels screamed and with sudden horror Mun knew that he and The Scot had ridden into the baited trap. He pulled up and straightened, throwing up a hand as Hector wheeled in tight circles, blowing, and the rest of the troop came over the brow and, seeing what awaited them, hauled on their reins.
‘I take it that’s not Colonel Haggett?’ Mun said as The Scot came alongside, his mare tossing her head indignantly.
The Scot shook his head. ‘They’re fresh out of Thame, I’ll wager,’ he said, ‘and they mean to fight.’
Mun glanced back to see that the two rebel divisions had merged into one which now trotted towards them in neat order, perhaps one hundred and fifty men in two ranks, knee to knee.
‘Aye, they mean to fight,’ Mun agreed, turning back to The Scot, who yelled at the men to hold and await his command, for confusion and doubt infected man and horse, Mun saw, leaching the battle lust that had but a moment before coursed through their veins.
‘We’ll not outrun them,’ The Scot said, and Mun knew the truth of that. Their horses had not been properly rested for days, whereas if the rebels were out of Thame their mounts would be fresh.
‘What say we test their resolve?’ The Scot said, his voice raised above the sound of the horses neighing, tack jangling, and now the drumming of hooves upon the earth.
And test yours, too, Mun thought, suspecting The Scot of wanting to prove his new allegiance to The King and the Cause. He nodded, teeth bared, and kneed Hector back round to face the oncoming enemy.
‘God save the King!’ he bellowed, giving Hector the spur, and felt the muscles in the stallion’s hindquarters bunch and explode with raw strength.
‘Death to traitors!’ Cole screamed, his face a mask of wide-eyed hysteria as he raked back his spurs and charged, and suddenly they were flying towards the enemy.
Carbines and pistols roared at them and Mun heard lead balls punch into flesh and thunk off armour, heard a man grunt and a horse scream and in his peripheral vision saw a man flung back in his saddle.
‘Come on, boy!’ he screamed himself, not caring that they were outnumbered or that agony and death could be a heartbeat away, and he pulled his carbine round on its belt and shoved the stock into his shoulder, and aimed low into the mass of riders coming to kill him. He squeezed the trigger and a savage hole appeared in a rebel’s chest, his buff-coat blooming like a black rose, but Mun had already flung the carbine behind him and hauled his heavy Irish hilt from its scabbard. ‘Kill them!’ he bellowed. ‘Kill the dogs!’
A collective grunt and a chorus of shrieks from horses announced the collision of the opposing forces and suddenly it was man against man and the world was a cacophony of discord. Mun hacked into a face, the blade finding the mouth and cleaving the jaw in two, yet the rebel’s eyes stared wildly, madly as though he refused to admit his appalling fate. Mun hauled the heavy sword free, a scrap of bearded flesh clinging to the blade, and thrust the point between the bars of a young man’s helmet into the right eye socket and the brain beyond. He yanked his arm back and pressed with his knee, turning Hector because he knew there were rebels behind him.
Steel sang against his sword which he had raised just in time and his left hand pulled a pistol from its holster and fired it into his opponent’s chest and the ball punched straight through the metal breast and the man slumped dead.
‘Mun!’ O’Brien roared, plunging his poll-axe into a horse’s skull, so that the beast’s legs buckled and it dropped like a rock, spilling its rider into the midst of thrashing hooves where he screamed and was kicked to a pulp, and Mun saw a gout of flame and was flung back, his spine all but snapping. But his steel breast had taken the ball and screaming in mad fury he pulled himself upright and scythed the Irish hilt down onto the arm still pointing the pistol at him, cutting it like a butcher chopping a joint of meat. The rebel screamed but the sound was cut off when his head exploded in a great spray of blood and brain.
‘King Jesus!’ a man with no armour nor even a buff-coat yelled, swinging his poll-axe whose point punched through young Goulding’s backplate into the flesh. Mun saw the young man convulse, his face turned up to the heavens, then topple from his horse onto the ground where he shook, frothing at the mouth.
The Scot was mounted death, working his way through the rebels, his red sword hacking and plunging, killing and maiming. O’Brien was a force of nature, lopping off limbs and felling men like a storm amongst oaks, all his strength behind his brutal poll-axe. Limb stumps spurted crimson gouts. Disbelieving faces passed chalk white in an instant as lifeblood drenched buff leather, horse flanks and the lush grass.
Someone was yelling, ordering the retreat, and Mun knew it was not The Scot, which meant it was a rebel captain, and now he pulled his last pistol free and twisted this way and that, watchful in case a rebel should stab or fire at him on the way past.
‘Back to yer dens, cowards!’ Goffe screamed, spittle flying, froth hanging in his beard. ‘Rogues and bloody bastards, all o’ ye!’
‘Jonathan!’ Mun yelled, catching sight of the boy through the press of men and horses. Jonathan turned in the saddle, eyes wide, sword bloody, and nodded to show that he was unharmed. Mun nodded back, a wave of relief washing over him, as the rebels galloped west, the sound like thunder rolling off across the heavens.
Mun uncocked his firelock and thrust it back into its holster. ‘Hold, men!’ he bellowed, though he needn’t have, for they had won against the odds and knew it, so that no one wanted to push their luck still further by chasing after the rebels.
‘God and the King!’ a man yelled and two or three repeated the cry. One of Prince Rupert’s men was laughing wildly. Other men were cursing. So
me were shouting in pain and still others were offering up prayers of thanks because they had survived.
Mun blinked another man’s blood from his eyes, wheeling Hector round, taking in the scene: the aftermath of a savage fight that had laid men low in mere moments, like a sudden tempest through a field of winter wheat.
One of his men, Christopher Miller, sat slumped in the saddle, cradling the dribbling stump of his left arm, the severed limb itself lying across his lap, its hand and fingers like a bone-white claw. Rowland Bide, who had been eager for this fight, now lay blood-slathered in the grass, his throat ripped open and the gore bubbling with each breath. He was sobbing for his mother.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IT WAS HARD to be sure because the trees distorted the sound, but Tom would have said the gunfire was to the north and no more than three miles away.
‘Sounds like quite a disagreement,’ Penn said, holding the whetstone still against his sword’s edge as he listened with the rest.
‘Carbines and pistols, not muskets,’ Trencher said, ‘and maybe three hundred men.’ He looked at Tom, who nodded, agreeing with the assessment.
‘Not dragoons then. Must be proper horse,’ Dobson said. The giant wore rusting back- and breastplates that were too small, over the clothes he had walked out of Oxford in, for The Scot had had nothing to fit him. Tom at least had a buff-coat, though not of quality, and the rapier with which he had sliced Henry Denton’s forehead, as well as the knife he had killed him with.
‘It can’t be a good thing, the enemy being so close,’ Colonel Haggett said. Even those men that were sick had pushed themselves upright against saddles, tree trunks and deadfall, coughing into bent arms and wincing against the pain. Some even pressed scarves against the mouths of the delirious to stifle their moans so that they might hear what was happening beyond their woodland den. ‘That’s cavalry in the thick of it. Man to man,’ Haggett said, pressing the knuckles of his two fists together. He was sweat-sheened and his eyes had sunk into his skull but there was nothing wrong with his ears, Tom thought, because he was right about the cavalry.
‘Sir, we should move. Go deeper into the woods,’ Tom said, nodding west. Above them through the trees the sky looked like a distant seascape, the clouds skimming along like white horses but for one group which were colliding. Around this mass a celestial red stain was spreading. Flowing, Tom fancied.
‘But The Scot won’t find us if we move,’ Penn said, standing and walking over to where Tom stood with the colonel and a handful of others.
‘That is why we should move,’ Tom said, feeling all eyes on him. ‘And we should do it now.’ For he had suddenly been struck by a thought. What if The Scot meant to betray them? What if he was even now leading the King’s soldiers back towards their camp? After all the man had seemed eager enough to ride off and leave Haggett’s beleaguered troop.
‘You think he would betray me?’ Haggett asked, dragging the sweat-stained sleeve of his shirt across his face. His chest was exposed and Tom could see rose spots against the white skin. Thus attired, his buff-coat and armour lying in a neat pile near by, the colonel responsible for Parliament’s silver looked nothing more than a frail, dying man.
‘I would if I were him,’ Tom replied, holding the man’s eye. ‘For just think of what he might gain by delivering twenty thousand pounds in silver and coin unto the King.’
‘More than his fee for getting it to Essex where it’s needed to pay us, that’s for damned sure,’ one of Haggett’s men named James Bowyer said, spitting a wad of phlegm onto a beech’s trunk.
‘This is the fourth day,’ Tom said. ‘You think this silver would still be here attended by dying men if Essex knew its whereabouts?’ There were some sullen murmurs at that. ‘No, The Scot is not in Thame. He’s dead or he’s on his way here with King’s men or His Majesty himself. But he is not in Thame.’
Either Colonel Haggett believed this or else he had not the strength to argue, for he nodded, shivering now, and flapped a feeble hand towards the carts which sat a little way off draped in thickets and gorse.
‘You two,’ Tom said to a pair of dozing troopers who seemed healthy enough, as yet untouched by whatever disease was ravaging the others, ‘ride to Thame and get word to Essex. Tell him that twenty thousand pounds is at risk of falling into the King’s hands if he does not come with all haste to secure it.’
They glanced at their colonel, but Haggett was consumed by his own malaise and did not look up, so they nodded to Tom and went to their horses.
In the distance a last percussive flurry signalled the end of the short but fierce fire fight. Tom turned to Haggett’s men, the nearest of whom were already stirring, some of them like corpses into which a cruel God had breathed one last bitter breath. ‘Get up!’ Tom yelled. ‘We’re moving. Leave nothing behind and move with care. Do not break any branches, and cover your tracks where you can. If you or your horse shits you will bring it with you.’ Then he strode over to the carts, taking Trencher, Penn and Dobson with him, for the draught animals needed to be hitched to the carts and he knew he would get it done faster than Haggett’s men would.
‘We should mount up and leave this bunch of cursed bastards to look after themselves,’ Dobson muttered, slipping a halter over a horse’s head whilst Trencher cleared the wheel spokes of foliage. ‘If you’re right and The Scot has turned lickspittle and declared for the King, we’ll not get far. He’ll smell this lot out like a whore-monger on the sniff for notch.’
Tom thought the big man was likely right, that even if they were careful they would yet leave enough of a trail for The Scot to follow, that so much silver was plenty of motivation to make a good search of it.
‘We’re not going anywhere, Dobson, except deeper into this wood,’ Tom said, then called a knot of Haggett’s men over, telling them to put their shoulders against the back of the carts to help get them moving. ‘It’ll be dark soon and no one will find us in the dark.’
‘Not without us having good warning,’ Trencher put in with a nod, satisfied that the two oxen before the rearmost cart were hitched and ready to do their jobs. ‘You’ll stay with us, Dobson, do your duty and serve your country.’
The big man mumbled some or other curse into the thicket of his beard, then clicked his tongue, leading his beasts off deeper into the woods, with Haggett’s men – those that were able – helping the carts as they could. But Tom knew Dobson was right, that if they were being hunted there was little chance of not being found, particularly by a troop of men who knew full well in which wood they were hiding, if not now the exact location. If Tom’s instinct about The Scot was right he would be better off riding into the dusk and leaving these ill-fated men like sheep for the wolves. There was nothing tying him to Haggett’s troop. Better to report back to Captain Crafte, who would surely by now have heard of their success in Oxford and the ruin of the King’s printing press. Crafte would also know about Tom’s failure to kill the Mercurius Aulicus editor John Birkenhead, but that was another issue.
And yet Tom would not leave this troop. It was no sense of duty to the cause, nor even for the sake of seeing the silver used to pay brave men what they were owed. It was something else. Something to do with the fear he saw in these men’s eyes, the hopelessness that had etched itself into the faces of the sick and dying and even those who were as yet hale. Now, as one of Haggett’s men led the animals up front and Tom pushed the cart from behind, he realized with no little surprise that he needed to protect these troopers for they might not be able to protect themselves. Disease and sickness had ravaged them, so that in place of courage was wretchedness. And it was on this wretchedness that The Scot would prey, if Tom’s suspicions were confirmed.
Well, let him come, Tom thought, as the cart’s wheels and their own boots flattened bluebells and the smell of damp bog myrtle thickened the air, while they pushed deeper into the wood.
‘I am not afraid,’ he whispered, wondering how long they had before men came looking for them. I
am a killer.
Twilight brought the churring of nightjars leaving their nests in the heather and molinia grass to take up residence on branches above the clearing in which Tom and his companions had chosen to make camp for the night. They had pushed west towards the last light of the day and after about a mile Penn had noticed an injured roe buck tucked well into a thicket of blackthorn. From its breathing it was clear the creature’s life was ebbing away and even when Tom was but three feet away it could hardly lift up its head.
Trooper Banks, one of Haggett’s men, had raised his carbine but Trencher had growled at the man did he want to bring Prince Rupert himself down on them. Then as Tom, Dobson and Penn held the beast still, Trencher took his big knife and cut its throat, afterwards dragging it out from under the thorn.
‘This lot will be happy for some fresh meat,’ Penn said, but Tom was more interested in where the roe buck had chosen to hide as death stalked it.
‘We’ll camp here,’ Tom said, and with that they had managed, all of them taking cuts and thorns, to push the carts through the mass of blackthorn and hazel into a small clearing beyond, through which a stream ambled. Colonel Haggett had not contested their choice. The man had used whatever strength he yet had to make the journey, albeit in the saddle like those others of his men who were too sick to walk or help with the carts.
Then Tom and Trencher had skinned the roe buck, finding two deep puncture holes in its flesh and terrible bruising.
‘Must have been one hell of a fight,’ Trencher had muttered, for these fresh scars were clearly caused in battle by another buck’s antler.
‘Makes you wonder what the other one looks like,’ Penn said as the raw, skinned flesh steamed in the crimson-washed gloaming.
‘A fallow will seek out an injured or sick deer and beat it to death,’ Tom said, ‘I’ve seen it often.’ And Trencher had raised an eyebrow at that, his eyes flicking towards the coughing, sweating men setting up camp around them, and not even Dobson had missed the allusion.
Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) Page 24