by Smith, Skye
Junior wobbled over to stand by the rear guard. He had put his lost boot back on instead of taking the other off. "Firing formation,” he yelled and he held his sabre high above his head. "Four ranks, as we did in practice. Pikes laying flat on the ground. When they are in range we will fire, and then raise the pikes and plant them in this muck to protect us while we load."
Daniel shook his head. Junior wasn't even going to have them form a pike square to keep them safe from a full on charge-and-wheel attack. "If you are going to shoot at them, then do us a favour and shoot at the horses. They are the easier targets because it doesn't take much of a hit to make them useless in a charge. Any painful hit will do. Now if you want to keep to Captain Hotham's four ranks, well that is fine by me, but meanwhile I want you to walk backwards towards the dike as we wait for the charge."
Junior stormed towards Daniel with a red face and expletives in his spitting mumbles, but he had only gone half way when his heel broke through the web again and he fell to his knees. His men stifled their laughter and broke ranks and began to walk softly and carefully across the mile of open ground between them and the dike.
Once Junior reached Daniel he put his face only inches from Daniels and hissed, "You can't lead them across open ground like they were children searching for butterflies and buttercups. They will be slaughtered in open ground."
"Well let’s hope the cavalry officers are not as wise as you then,” Daniel replied and dragged his mare along to follow the two companies of bare foot lads. She hated the sucking mud and was stepping gingerly trying not to break through the grass. He took pity on her and chose his route to meander from one clump of dry looking grass to another. Those would be local high spots and not so damp. Hotham was falling well behind and was in a constant tug of war with his stallion’s reins.
"Just look at them,” the rear guard yelled out. "There must be a thousand of them." The cavalry were forming one wide line on the road along the edge of the field and preparing to charge.
"Don't guess at the number lad. Numbers are important in a battle," Daniel told him. "Count out ten to see how much space ten take up, and then count how many tens there are."
"Thirty five sir,” the lad called back after a few moments of counting. "Thirty five tens, so that is... ugh." The lad beside him helped him with the math. "Three hundred and fifty sir."
"Three hundred and fifty of them, and three hundred and fifty horses, against two hundred of us," Daniel called out to the men, but he was lost in thought. Pitiful. The Providence alone would have a crew of fifty, and cannons filled with grape shot. What were the Hothams thinking? It only made sense if there were still some treachery going on. Treachery such as once all two hundred of these lads were slaughtered they would have an excuse to surrender Hull.
He called out again, "That means that if you wait until a horse is close so you cannot miss him, then after our first salvo there will be only a hundred and fifty of them left to chase us. The rest will be fully busy with their injured horses. After the second salvo all the horses will be injured."
"If we don't miss,” one of the rear guard spoke out.
"It's much easier to hit a horse than a rider. Much, much easier. Look at them. They are the sons of wealthy men so they wear good armour, but they are only the second sons so their horses wear no armour. Wouldn't you love to see their faces when they realize that they must trudge all the way home to daddy with their saddle over their shoulders to ask him for a new horse."
"What if we kill one of the riders?,” another lad asked, a big bugger of a lad with a scar across his forehead. "you know, accidental like. Say the horse goes down and they fall off and hit their head."
"No loss to the world, or to their daddy's kitchen maids,” Daniel replied. "I will forgive you." The men laughed at this, and they needed to laugh because three hundred and fifty horses were moving towards them in one wide line and gaining speed with every step.
"Now at this point in any cavalry charge," Daniel yelled, "even a hardened soldier is struck by fear and the great desire to turn his back and run away from the horses." He yelled louder because most of the men were thinking exactly that. "That is always the wrong choice unless safety is very close at hand." They were now in the middle of a wide open field. "If you stand alone with a pike and you keep your head and face the charging horse, then you may well beat him. If two of you face the horse, you certainly will beat him. If three of you face the horse, the rider will not complete the charge. Now stand your ground and watch carefully and be ready to shoot."
The line of horses was at a full charge when they hit the damp soil. The smarter of the horses, that is, the less trained horses, were slowing and fighting their bits and shying into the horses beside them. The better trained horses ran on and their hooves were breaking through the web of grass roots and then their legs were disappearing up to their fetlocks. Some came to a skidding halt, some veered sharply one way or the other, some bucked their riders and some tripped forward and fell head first into the soft ground.
The cavalry charge was a shambles. There were horses out of control everywhere. There were men dismounting. There were men trying to mount. There were men kneeling beside downed horses. Over half of the horses had been too smart to do themselves injury, however, and so two hundred riders were reforming back on solid ground and gazing at the two hundred lads of the East Riding Trained Bands who were laughing and jeering at them.
"Come on you lot,” Daniel yelled at them. "Before they figure out some other tactic, lets get to that dike. Sergeant, help your captain. He seems to have lost his horse." Indeed, since Junior had been dragging his horse along, he had been trailing the rest of the men so he had been the closest to the charge. Just before the charge had met with disaster, Junior had stopped fighting with his stallion, had dropped the reins, and had hopped, skipped and jumped between the tufts of dryer grass to catch up. The stallion was happily grazing on lightly salted grass, and in no hurry to go anywhere.
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Once they made the dike, they turned back towards Hull. It was senseless to continue onwards to the Providence with so much cavalry about. Senseless and dangerous. When they were within a quarter mile of the fortress, the Swift was sighted racing towards them along the Humber. Daniel waved them down, handed his reins to the sergeant and wished the lads the best of times at the alehouses tonight. They would drink well for a week on the story of the noble cavalry charge.
He called after them, "Remember to break the rest of the sluice dams before it gets dark. To the west of the town as well as along the river Hull. And don't you be taking any foolish chances. The king's army will want to get even for today's humiliation."
When the dinghy came to fetch him off the shore, the first questions he asked were, "Did you catch up to the two navy ships. Are they coming back to help us with the Providence?" And that was even before he had thrown his boots, his saddle holsters and his weapons into the little boat.
"Aye we caught them both, but they won't be back before dark. The evening offshore breeze has begun and they will have to fight it all the way up the Humber against the tide."
Daniel grabbed at the gunnels and used his arms to turn the dinghy so it was bow out, and then he put one foot into it and pushed off with the other. "So who did you choose as skipper in my place?" In their clan the captains were elected by the crew, and could be replaced by a vote of no confidence. "Teesa?"
"Oh she was furious when no one voted for her. We chose Hugh but it took two rounds of voting."
"Good choice. He's skippered the Freisburn ships often enough. He needs to learn how to write though. That is what is holding him back." When they reached the ship Daniel politely called out to Hugh, "Permission to come aboard skipper."
Hugh was well pleased. "Permission granted. Where to now Danny?"
"Keyingham Creek. Lets make it more difficult for the king to unload the Providence. If we slow the unloading down, then tomorrow we will have the help of the navy to take b
ack that ship."
With the ebbing tide and the freshening offshore wind blowing them towards the sea, it took no time at all for them to reach the sand dune from where they had first seen the masts of the Providence. Meanwhile the crew were busy preparing for some mischief.
"Can I come?" Teesa asked.
"No," eleven men shouted in chorus.
"But I'm better with a bow than any of you."
"We don't need accuracy, we need range,” Daniel told her. "You couldn't even string the larger of our bows." A strong selfbow and an arrow with a metal bodkin was still preferred by these men to a modern musket. Muskets had replaced crossbows not selfbows. Speed of reload was the obvious reason, for a good bowman could pump five or ten arrows into a musketeer or an arbalester while they were reloading. There were many other good reasons too, such as fire arrows.
The men were wrapping the points first with strips of waxed cloth and then with strips of oiled cloth. The oiled cloth was easy to light, but the waxed cloth was harder to blow out as the arrow flew. One of the disadvantages of arrows was their cost. If you couldn't retrieve them for re-use, the cost of them mounted up quickly. Not that these arrow cost them anything other than labour during the long winter nights. Once they were gone, however, replacing them would cost a whole lot more than a ball of lead.
The sand dune was miles beyond the fields that the crew had flooded. Was that only this morning? Summer days were blessingly long in the north. The grasslands that ran between the dune and the woods were dry, and the grass was long and tinder dry. The plan was to climb the dune to add range to their arrows, and then use them to light a long line of fire in the grasses. The offshore wind should spread the fire towards the woods where the Providence was hidden.
"But it's a stupid plan,” Teesa complained just to be ornery. "Robert doesn't want his own ship blown up. He wants it captured, with or without the cargo. If you set fire to the woods then the ship will catch fire and then boom."
"The king needs that cargo,” Daniel explained, not just to Teesa but to the men making fire arrows. "Every man guarding it, fetching it, carting it, and sailing on the ship will be set to work fighting the fire. Even once it is put out, the ground will be hot and smouldering for days. If you were a carter would you haul gunpowder through smouldering land. For sure they will save the ship and the cargo but it will cost them time and time is what they don't have. By then perhaps Robert will have organized all the forces at his command to recapture his ship."
They reached the sand dune in too much twilight. Any scouts along the shore line would certainly see them and report it if they had put ashore, so instead they continued towards the sea and then doubled back and dropped their anchor off the sand dune just before dark. Daniel took five men with him, the five best archers other than Teesa, and they set out with ten arrows a piece, five fire and five armour piercing. Plus their pistols of course. What ever other weapons the clansmen carried, they always carried a pistol. It was their reserve, to be used to save their own skins.
It was a lovely star lit night and about four days after full moon, so it would be black for a few hours yet. They followed their tracks from this morning up the dune, and once to the top kept low so their silhouettes wouldn't be seen against the starlight. They looked and listened but there seemed to be no one about, so they scooped out a hollow in the sand and lit the first arrow with a flint and steel and a bit of cotton. Once it was going they lit the other arrows and immediately began loosing them towards where they thought the longest driest grass would be.
From the light of the first arrows they could see better for the next and the next until all the fire arrows were away. Like nasty little boys everywhere, the crew wanted to linger and watch the fire spread, but there was no sense to doing that since there was nothing more they could do whether it spread or not. It was fascinating to watch it spread, however. A gust of wind hit them, and down below one of the flames leaped up into the grass heads and it began to race from head to head pushed by the wind.
"Come on you lot. I'm tired to death and I want my bed." Daniel told them. Going down the dune was much easier than going up. Going up was a trudge against falling sand, and you slipped backwards one step for every three. Going down you could almost leap in long strides and cover three steps in one. At the bottom of the sand dune one of the crew was waiting for them with the jolly boat. It was he who whistled out a bird call, a call never made by a bird in the dark, that warned them that something was very wrong..
It was meant as a surprise attack, but it was not. The riders perhaps had not just wanted to surprise them, but also to come between them and the path back to Hull. Whatever their reasons they were waiting to spring a trap upwind of the sand dune. It is difficult to keep a group of horses quiet, and even more difficult to keep them from stinking. The crew coming down the dune knew that mounted men were close by, so they feigned a mad dash across the strand to the boat. Feigned because as soon as they heard the sound of hooves, they doubled back and scrambled eight feet up the sand dune.
The riders who had laid a trap found themselves in a trap. The horses couldn't mount the loose sand of the dune, and the men they were trying to trap were up out of the reach of sabres and shooting heavy arrows at their horses.
"Oye" came a yell from the jolly boat, "quit sendin' them flippin' arrows this way."
By this time the riders had retreated to regroup, but that created a standoff with the riders not wanting to brave the arrows again, and the crew not wanting to be caught in the open while sprinting for the jolly boat.
Someone on the Swift was using their head, because after about five minutes of this standoff, a fire arrow whistled high above the riders and for a moment they were not hidden by the dark night anymore. Then nothing was hidden by the dark night because that was a bright flash of light from the Swift and then the sound of rolling thunder. When the thunder died it was replaced by the moans of injured men and the screams of injured horses. The Swift had fired a cannon load of grape at the riders.
"Now," Daniel yelled and they sprinted across the open strand and into the shallows to reach the jolly boat. As soon as they did so they could hear the beat of hooves behind them, and then the splash of hooves. The problem was that the jolly boat had come in close to pick them up, but three feet of water was not enough to slow a horse down. With the horses directly behind them, the Swift couldn't even use their cannon. Grape shot is not particular who it hits.
Daniel was running last in the race for the boat, and without even looking to aim, he pointed his dragon backwards over his shoulder and pulled the trigger. It belched out its fiery breath, and a horse screamed, and then he dived into the boat. Something sharp and metal hacked a notch in the gunnels. The two crew who had reached the boat first had now regained their balance and they too fired their dragons. The riders gave up. The boat was in three, then four, then six, then eight feet of water, and on its way to the Swift.
The cannon on the Swift thundered again, but there were no sounds to prove that they actually hit anything, and by then the men were scrambling out of the jolly and onto the Swift. Someone shot another fire arrow in a high arch and for the first time Daniel saw how many riders there had been. More than twenty. No wonder they seemed to have kept coming and coming.
"Here,” Teesa told Daniel as she handed him her bow, two unlit arrows, and a lit candle. "I'm going up to the crow’s-nest to see how the fire is doing." She was right of course. As soon as the Swift began to move towards Hull, the sand dune no longer blocked their view of the fire. Soon all the men were in the rigging, or at least standing on the gunnels trying to get a view of the fire. By the light of it they could see men, hundreds of men, running around batting at it, trying to keep it from leaping from the grass to the woods.
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The Pistoleer - Edgehill by Skye Smith Copyright 2013-14
Chapter 9 - The Siege of Hull, July 1642
"Your effort was a waste of time, an
d it almost cost me the Providence,” Warwick growled at Daniel despite all that the clansmen had done for Hull. "What were you thinking?" They continued to walk together along the top of Hull's northern wall. Every field all around the town was now flooded. The lads of the Trained Band were true to their word and had pulled down every sluice dam.
"Frankly Rob, I would rather you lost your ship than those munitions be used by the king,” Daniel muttered unrepentantly. "Think of how many lives that cargo may end up costing. And don't you be pointing fingers this way. The fire did delay the unloading. Was it my fault that the governor and his son did not rally to finish the job? Was it my fault that your navy ships are not agile enough?"
"Your fire may have delayed the unloading of the powder kegs but not the unloading of the cannons and muskets. According to the clerk at the arsenal here, the Providence was to take 200 barrels of powder, 8,000 musket sets, and eight field guns to the Tower of London. Now the king has all that."
"But you have the Providence back?"
"Aye, and the crew as well. We found Captain Swanley and two ensigns locked in a hold. There is no sign of the first officer. I expect he was Admiral Penington's man on the Providence."
"And the ship's cannons. Did the king get them?"
"None of them. The naval marines chased them off before they could get them ashore. Sixteen of them."
"So the fire was not a waste of time then."
"No. I suppose not. If nothing else, the king's army lost their spit and polish to fighting the fire. They'll be looking rag-and-bones until they can find new clothes." They rounded the corner and continued their walk along the top of the western wall. Warwick borrowed Daniel's spectacle looker from him and stared out over the flooded fields. "Well Hull's walls are certainly more secure for our coming here. Perhaps now the king will leave it alone."
"Not likely,” Daniel replied from his navigator's point of view. "It's the gateway from the North Sea to York and Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Northern Lincolnshire. If they take Hull, then they can bring an invading army up the Humber."