‘A bird of mixed omens the wren,’ O’Brien said, stroking his mare’s neck, his great shoulders low and loose. ‘’Twas a wren that led the Romans to our dear Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.’ He shrugged half-heartedly. ‘And yet of course in folklore it is considered the King of the Birds.’
‘The wren?’ Mun shared a silent look with Jonathan, who raised his eyebrows and shrugged. ‘I have never heard that. The wren is such a small bird.’
The Irishman’s left hand flew to his breastplate, his mouth falling open with a gasp. ‘Did you not have stories in your house, Edmund? Filling your wee head before your mamma tucked you in your bed?’
‘My mother read us the plays,’ Mun said, as the mare he was on snorted and pawed at the ground. The beast, a piebald mare which he had inherited from a dead man in Nehemiah Boone’s troop, was sweating and kept turning its head towards its right flank, so that Mun was almost certain it had colic. He could do nothing about that now. ‘Marlowe and Shakespeare,’ he said, wishing he had not had to give Lady back to Godfrey, although at least he had returned the animal unharmed after the carnage of Bristol.
‘And you, lad?’ O’Brien asked Jonathan.
‘My father is not a man for stories,’ he said, clearly more interested in the exchange of musket fire towards the crest of the gorse-strewn escarpment.
O’Brien eyed them both and shook his head. ‘Then I feel it is my charge to enlighten you while we wait.’ The Irishman’s teeth flashed white against his red beard.
‘If you must,’ Mun said flatly. In truth anything to distract them while they awaited orders – moreover, anything to take his mind off the prospect of riding an unfamiliar, colic-struck horse into a fight across ground unsuited to cavalry engagements – was welcome.
O’Brien nodded. ‘Long ago the birds held a contest to see who could fly the highest. He that could would become the King of the Birds.’ He lifted off his helmet and thrust a hand amongst his thick red hair, scratching vigorously. ‘At first it looked as if the eagle would win, and you can’t really blame them all for thinking it. But just as the eagle began to tire …’ he raised his helmet, ‘for he was so high that from the ground could be seen nothing but a speck, the wren, which had been hiding under the eagle’s tail feathers do you see, crept out.’ He fluttered meaty fingers into the air. ‘That little cutty wren soared up and up, far above the tired old eagle, and shouted, “I’m the King!” And so he was. He proved that cleverness is better than strength.’
‘What does that say about you, you great Irish gollumpus?’ Mun asked, hoisting an eyebrow at Jonathan, who grinned.
‘Why, that some of us are blessed with brain and brawn,’ O’Brien said, ‘whilst others must make do with nothing but good breeding and passable looks.’
But Mun did not bite as his friend clearly wanted him to. For he was thinking of the wren.
The relief he felt at having taken off his back- and breastplates was nullified by the vulnerability he felt without them. And yet he knew that removing all but the most essential of impedimenta, keeping only his helmet, buff-coat, pistols and a poll-axe instead of his sword, because of its comparative shortness, had been the right thing to do. For the ground on the north side of the ridge and tumuli if not muddy was boggy, the previous day’s rain still lying in puddles here and there, so the leather of Mun’s buff-coat was heavy with water. Crawling the three hundred paces they had so far managed had been hard enough without the added encumbrance of armour.
The waterlogged ground seething and hissing below him, Mun was reminded of crawling through the tunnel to blow the mine beneath Lichfield Cathedral. Only this time he had left O’Brien behind, convincing his friend that what he lacked so far as stealthiness was concerned, the big man made up for with his ability to inspire men.
‘If something happens to me the troop is yours, Clancy,’ Mun had told the Irishman after he had outlined the scheme by which he hoped to throw the rebels off the hill’s summit, ‘and you’ll report to Prince Rupert directly, not that bastard Boone, and tell him you’re taking the men home to Shear House.’
‘If you go and get yourself killed, I’ll tell your ma you left the estate to me and sell it for women and wine,’ O’Brien had replied, then the two of them had gripped each other’s forearms and wished each other luck.
Now, Mun, Jonathan, Tobias Fitch, Henry Jones and Walter Cade were crawling along a ditch that ran up the escarpment and along the northern edge of the round hill. On their right was the bank itself along whose summit ran a thick hedge of briar, hawthorn and field maple that was only broken here and there by elm, ash and oak. On their left was a margin of bramble and nettle beyond which the ground fell away, steeply in places, down to rough miry ground.
The ditch along which they crawled slowly but inexorably was dead ground, of no strategic value to infantry or horse. At least, that would be most men’s thinking. Which was why Mun and his chosen men were on their hands and knees and sometimes their bellies – boots, breeches and buff-coats wicking water, wheellocks and firelocks thrust into boots or belts away from the damp. And yet Mun did not think so little of the enemy as to presume that they would not have eyes watching that dead ground from somewhere near the round hill’s summit, where they staunchly held off two of His Majesty’s regiments. Of course it was entirely possible that the outnumbered rebels holding that hill had not even considered the dead ground or the possibility of a few men crawling up their hill like worms trying to get past the bird. Either way, nothing would change the fact that in half an hour by Sir John Byron’s own timepiece, or else at the sound of pistol fire from the northern edge of the round hill, O’Brien would lead Mun’s troop in single file up that ditch as quickly as he dared given the risk of the ground to horse and rider. By which time Mun and his handful of companions would be more than likely fighting for their lives.
Two fusillades of musketry ripped the morning and into the raw gashes poured the screams of ruined men and the urgent shrieks of officers seeking to impose order on stricken ranks.
‘See anything?’ Jonathan asked, coming up behind Mun who had stopped at a break in the hedge and crawled up the ridge to spy over the exposed roots of an old elm. He was almost level with Sir Nicholas Byron’s musketeers who, incredibly, were being driven back, albeit the sergeants were doing their jobs, straightening ranks with their halberds, and the men were withdrawing in good order.
Mun edged back down the slick grass, the musket smoke from the nearby battle wafting over their heads in patchy grey clouds. ‘We’re losing,’ he said.
‘So what do we do?’ Jonathan asked.
‘We keep going.’
The young man nodded grimly and they continued along the ditch and after another forty yards Mun saw three rebel musketeers standing by a pale, lightning-scorched oak and another sitting astride a branch, his matchlock across his thighs. The men clearly had a good view of the fight, because all four were looking to their right, south across the plateau, more interested in their regiment’s fate than in the narrow waterlogged strip of dead ground they were supposed to be watching.
Mun had gone still as a corpse. But for his heart. That was racing, drumming against his breastbone like hooves galloping over hard ground.
‘What now?’ Jonathan hissed behind him.
Mun did not answer. His eyes were riveted to the rebels ahead and he had the notion that tearing his gaze away would alert them somehow, cause one or more to look down along the bank and ditch, and that would spell failure. Between himself, his men and their ten pistols and assorted bladed weapons Mun knew they could kill those four musketeers, would need to to give O’Brien and the others a chance to make their way up the ditch. But to kill them they would need to get close. Very close.
‘What now, sir?’ Jonathan asked, and Mun knew that the reckless young fool would spring up and run right at the enemy if he gave him the order to do so. Which was the only thing they could do, he realized then, his stomach feeling as empty as if he hadn’t
eaten for days. Half an hour must have passed. O’Brien and the others would be setting off up the hill, Sir John Byron – who had thought the idea too unsound to risk his own troopers though had had no problem letting Mun risk his – watching from his white Arab mare.
‘If we go fast they will miss and have no chance to reload,’ Mun said, and now he wrested his gaze from the enemy and slowly turned on his elbows to look at his men, for he needed to see their eyes, needed to know if they believed they could do what must be done. Henry Jones was blinking rapidly and Walter Cade was worrying his bottom lip with his teeth. Inside his helmet Tobias Fitch’s face was slick with sweat, though that might have been from the effort of pulling his stonemason’s brawn up the slope. Only Jonathan did not look afraid. For all that the pupils of his eyes were wide black holes, the young man seemed flushed with the thrill of it and eager to be unleashed.
‘Might be my imagination, sir,’ Cade said, keeping his head low, chin bending the grass, ‘but I think I heard horses behind us.’
It was not Cade’s imagination. Mun had heard it too: a whinny and hoof-beats on a swirl of breeze. ‘We kill those sentries and buy O’Brien and the others time,’ he said, holding each man’s eye in turn as they nodded that they were with him. It would not be much time, for there was every chance that the rebel regiment would be alerted, either by their attack on the sentries or by the sentries themselves. But at least the Irishman and his riders would be much further up the hill before the enemy knew they were coming than they would have been if spotted by the men at the oak mere moments after starting out.
‘Save a shot if you can. We’ll need to take cover when it’s done.’ Mun’s chest inside his buff-coat felt as if it were expanding. His senses were honed to a razor’s edge in anticipation of action. ‘Kill them all and do it quickly.’ Four pairs of eyes bored into his and he knew he had picked the right men for the task. They would follow him into Hell. They had done as much before.
Slowly, carefully, Mun reached over his shoulder and gripped his poll-axe’s haft, slipping it out of his baldrick. Then he pulled one of his long pistols from his boot and from the garter that kept its flared grip snug against his knee, and the others readied their own weapons, teeth gritted, lips tight, but for Cade’s, which were working silently. A prayer perhaps, or more likely in Cade’s case a recital of what he was going to do to the men at the oak.
Keeping low, the sweet vibrant scent of wet grass filling his nose, Mun turned back round, relieved to see that the sentries’ attention was still fixed on the fight raging in the next field. Their only movements were to occasionally blow on their match to keep the tips glowing.
‘After three,’ Mun said, lifting his head, smelling the acrid tang of musket smoke that hung in the air like fog. Then another two great volleys of musketry boomed and Mun was up and running without having counted, hoping the battle’s noise would drown out their own engagement. And then the rebel in the oak tree turned his face and saw them, his mouth open as he scrambled down from the branch, though Mun heard no shout above the ragged crackle of matchlocks beyond the bank and hedge. The rebels lined up beside the oak’s blackened trunk, cocking their match and lifting the muskets to their shoulders, and then they fired and three of the weapons flashed and roared.
Too soon.
And they had missed as they surely must from such distance, and Mun did not break stride, boots squelching in the soft ground, waterlogged buff-coat feeling as heavy as cuirassiers’ armour, heart threatening to explode. Then the last rebel’s musket hang-fired and Walter Cade, now less than twenty paces from the foe, grunted and stumbled but Mun did not stop.
Three of the Parliament men turned their matchlocks round to use them as clubs and one dropped his, drawing a hanger which he gripped inexpertly in two hands, and this one Mun shot in the chest, even as he swung his poll-axe, the blade chopping into a musket stock and severing the fingers gripping it. The rebel shrieked, eyes wide, as Jonathan buried his own poll-axe into the rebel’s face with a wet crack and Tobias Fitch stopped five feet away from another man and shot him in the face.
Henry Jones killed the last of them, all but thrusting his pistol into the musketeer’s belly before pulling the trigger. Then, when the man was on his knees, guts leaking from the singed hole in his tunic, Jones hauled his head back by its long hair and sawed a long knife across his throat.
‘They’ve seen us,’ Jonathan warned, the words barely out when two musket balls smashed into the oak’s trunk, spraying slivers of wood and causing them all to flinch or take cover. But Mun stepped out from the oak and looked across the hill’s plateau and saw that the rearmost rank of Major-General Skippon’s brigade had turned to face this new threat. They were firing independently, blooms of white smoke appearing sporadically before the percussion reached his ears, though for the moment they were not advancing back up the hill.
‘It’s those buggers over there that concern me, sir,’ Henry Jones said, pointing his bloody knife across the sloping battlefield. There on the far side of Skippon’s musketeers, firing pistols at Lord Wentworth’s musketeers and looking as though they were forming up to charge, was a troop of horse. Or rather what was left of a troop.
‘They’re the stubborn bastards that were first up this hill and managed to kick our lot halfway back down it,’ Fitch said, fishing a ball from his bullet bag and thrusting it down his wheellock’s muzzle.
‘And they know we’re here,’ Mun said, for he could see one of the harquebusiers pointing them out to a giant of a man whose face was all beard. ‘But they’re committed on that flank.’ Another musket ball thwacked against the tree trunk and two more cracked amongst the brittle branches above their heads. ‘They’ll not trouble us yet.’ He looked at Fitch. ‘Cade?’
Fitch shook his head and pressed a hand against his own belly where the damp leather was a darker sand colour. ‘A hole the size of a hand-basin,’ he said. ‘Right the way through.’
‘Here they come,’ Jonathan said and Mun cursed because that rear rank of musketeers, some fifty men, had disengaged from their battalia and were being hustled into a separate company three ranks deep.
‘They know their business,’ Jones said, turning the spanner on his wheellock until it clicked, and Mun agreed, feeling a grudging respect for these outnumbered rebels who seemed grimly determined to keep this hill.
‘Come on, O’Brien, you sauntering Irish devil,’ Mun heard himself growl as he looked back towards the ditch up which they had crawled for any sign of his troop.
‘This what you wanted, lad?’ Jones asked Jonathan, watching the oncoming musketeers who were holding their fire now, saving it for one volley that would obliterate them.
Jonathan did not reply. He simply stood facing the enemy, a pistol in each hand, the poll-axe tucked into his cross belts so that its blade sat against his chest.
‘We’ve done what we came to do,’ Mun said, then nodded towards the foe, ‘but I’d have us draw those men further away from their colonel. I’d have them waste more shot too.’
The others nodded, understanding. For the further those fifty musketeers strayed from the relative safety of their battalia the more vulnerable they would be to O’Brien’s men when they turned up. But it was more than that. Mun knew what a good volley from fifty well-trained musketeers could do to men and horses, and if there was a chance that he could diminish that firepower, leach out some of its ferocity, then he had to try.
‘Jonathan, go back to the ditch. Tell me the moment you see them. Tell me again when they’re fifty yards from the top. We’ll make our stand here.’ He stepped back against the tree.
‘I’d rather stay here with you, sir,’ Jonathan said.
‘Do what I tell you,’ Mun snapped, and the young man pressed his lips together and dropped his head, then ran back to the ditch. Then Mun nodded towards the rebels, who were now one hundred yards away. ‘Fitch, haven’t you got anything to say to those men?’
Fitch grinned and stepped clear of th
e oak. ‘You merry-begotten, scab-faced jackanapeses!’ he yelled, pistols held out wide, spittle flying. ‘You couldn’t hit the ground if you fell over! Come on, you squint-eyed, pox-ridden fartleberries! You stinking treacherous bumfiddles! I’ll turn you inside out!’
A cannon roared to the south, the sound lingering and indignant like thunder. Beneath that fading rumble, thin as vapour in the air, came men’s cheers, which made Mun think the cannon, whosever it was, had done more than simply frighten men. Its iron ball had killed.
‘You think we’re winning?’ Jones asked, jerking his head towards the distant thrum of battle.
‘I think I’d prefer to think that,’ Mun said.
‘I see them!’ Jonathan called from behind them, but Mun kept his eyes on the musketeers coming towards them, on their sergeant with his halberd whose spear blade was pointed at the grey sky.
‘Let’s give them something to aim at,’ Mun said and Fitch came to stand at his right shoulder whilst Jones drew level with his left. ‘No point us shooting from this range but no harm in making them think we will.’ The three of them raised six pistols towards the oncoming rebel company and held the weapons steady. ‘Wait for it,’ Mun growled.
‘Sweet Jesus,’ Jones mumbled. ‘Think I shat myself.’
‘Wait for it,’ Mun growled, his pulse racing, the sound of his own heartbeat thrashing in his ears. Every muscle and sinew screamed at him to turn and run for the cover of the oak.
‘Wait.’
The rebels were forty yards away now, the powder burns on fingers and cheeks visible, uncertainty or fear or efficient purpose readable in the eyes beneath their montero-caps. Ten more yards and they would halt and the first rank would fire.
‘Fifty yards!’ Jonathan called and Mun risked a glance behind him and saw Jonathan running to join them. It was too late to stop him now.
Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) Page 37