They bolted. Stryker jumped bodies and weaponry, fearing a slip or trip would be the end of him and all the while expecting the thunder of hooves at his back. A corporal ran past him, evidently resolved upon the same course, but the man, younger and fleeter of foot, went down in a welter of blood as a carbine ball shattered the back of his skull. Stryker did not look back. He kept running, sprinting until his legs burned and his chest felt as though it would explode. Up ahead were the whitecoats, Newcastle’s Regiment of Foot, and their formation had not been compromised. Their banners of rich red, adorned with the cross of Saint George and the white crosses of the Marquis of Newcastle, called to him, beckoning him to their protection.
He reached the brigade as Skellen bellowed a warning from behind. Stryker turned, just in time to see the flash of a blade stab down at him from the back of a snorting destrier, and he threw himself flat, fingers clawing the mud. He felt the heavy sword slice the air, heard the hiss but felt no pain, and he rolled to the side, scrabbling in the slick filth and pushing himself up as if the ground itself might swallow him.
Then the assailant was gone, too fearful of the poised pikes to linger, and Stryker, Skellen and Hood were hauled into the bristling circle as the rest of Prince Rupert’s grand army disintegrated around them.
As the vast Royalist battle line crumbled so the horsemen belonging to the Earl of Manchester and the Earl of Leven, commanded this day by Cromwell and Leslie, gave chase. They spurred into the fraught chaos, slashing at heads and spines, leaning low out of saddles to cleave a fleeing man’s neck or snatch the standard from an ensign’s desperate grip. And as the men loyal to the Crown – men who had marched all the way from the west coast, men who had held York for so long against such insurmountable odds – turned to run away, the Allied infantry, galvanised by the Earl of Manchester’s return and spearheaded by the rehabilitated Major-General Crawford, swarmed into them.
‘Parliament!’ Captain John Kendrick snarled as he whipped the top of a musketeer’s skull away with his sword as casually as if he shelled a boiled egg. ‘God with us!’ He did not believe in any deity, of course, and nor did he particularly care about any Parliament, but today he would indulge the whims of his new Puritan comrades. After all, he had not expected this. It was, he admitted, something of a miracle.
Kendrick was near Crawford as they advanced. Manchester’s Foot, on the extreme left of the rebel line, were already across the ditch when Cromwell struck, and now they wheeled right to come at the Royalists from the west. The huge Scots contingent, away to his right, clambered over the corpse-filled trench and pushed directly north, squeezing the enemy like dogs herding sheep, so that the twin armies of Prince Rupert and the Marquis of Newcastle were now just a single, throbbing multitude. The herd shunted backwards. They had not all capitulated, and those that were tempted quickly learnt that to run meant to be hunted and slaughtered by the whooping cavalry. So they gathered instinctively behind the only brigade that remained entirely intact, a stoically solid block of white-coated men who loaded and fired with impressive regularity from beneath a score of red banners. The whitecoats faced their persecutors as the broken Royalist horde edged north and east, step by anguished step, retiring towards the ancient road that would take them to York. Swarming after them, tramping in their blood-slick wake, was one of the largest armies to have ever been assembled in the three kingdoms.
Kendrick saw his enemies as they were swallowed by the whitecoats. Two he recognized vaguely, the stripling officer and the tall, lugubrious sergeant, but theirs were not the faces that sent so violent a judder through him. The face of the third man – lean and pale beneath a wide-brimmed hat and framed in long, raven-dark hair – was etched on John Kendrick’s mind, never to be erased. It was a face that was hard. One of sharp lines, weathered creases and a single, grey eye that seemed to plunge through a man like the stab of a poniard. Perhaps, the Vulture thought, there was a God after all.
Stryker loaded his pistols and slammed them into his belt. It was a strange world, the inner sanctum of a hedgehog, for, though the sounds of battle were undiminished, it was impossible to clearly see what transpired on the outside. Officers and preachers milled at its core below the colours of the various individual companies, while rank upon rank of musketeers formed the first of several concentric circles around them, and three more ranks of pike made the outermost spines that gave the formation its name.
A blast of enemy musketry crackled from beyond the shielding pikemen, punching several back, their spaces filled by the men behind. One ball hit a musketeer who was moving up to present his piece, and he thudded on to his back, his face almost completely wiped away. Stryker retrieved the dropped musket, blowing on the match to keep it alive.
‘You said he would come, Lord!’
Stryker spun round. ‘Seek Wisdom!’
The elderly priest tugged at his filthy beard and glared skyward. ‘I doubted you, Lord, and I am a wretch for it!’
Stryker laughed. ‘You linger here?’
‘I am no apparition, you ugly English bastard! Of course I linger. I offer these men prayer.’ Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner frowned suddenly. ‘Where is Simeon?’ He glanced past Stryker, to Skellen and Hood, and Stryker saw real sorrow in the baby-blue gaze. ‘He’d not leave your side easy, boy. Like a bloody mongrel at his master’s heel, that one.’
‘He is no more,’ Stryker said simply.
‘Then may he know peace.’ Gardner closed his eyes. ‘Take him into your arms, Almighty, for he was a good man.’
‘Stryker,’ a man said, coming to stand beside the Welsh priest. ‘Jesu, but you’re a grand thing to behold.’
Skellen and Hood offered their hands for Lancelot Forrester to shake in turn, as Stryker grinned. ‘Orders?’
Forrester shrugged. ‘Stand and fight, old man.’ He paused as they all flinched against the tide of a new volley. A teenage herald, not part of the Northern Foot but, like Stryker, part of the hedgehog’s new-found jetsam after the rout of his own unit, reeled into their midst and slumped to his knees, winged by a bullet that shredded the cloth at his shoulder. Forrester watched him, unmoved, as he spoke. ‘What else may we do? Someone must give those bastard riders pause for thought. The army will seek refuge in York, and we here shall cover its retreat.’ He spat between his boots. ‘The whitecoats will stand and fight, Stryker, and I am bloody glad to have you with us.’
Chapter 23
The Army of Both Kingdoms fell upon the stranded brigades like an avalanche. Their infantry spearheaded by the Eastern Association swarmed through the acrid clouds, pouring volley fire as they went so that the tightly bunched Royalist foot shivered and shook under the leaden hailstorm, and all the while Cromwell’s shattering horsemen harried the men remaining in formation and picked off those who did not.
Stryker fired his musket, the Montero-capped heads of the men in front vanishing in the billow of smoke. He moved back a pace as senior officers howled the command. Retiring in good order was a painstaking business at the best of times, but the enemy horsemen would not let them deploy out of circle, so they were forced to shuffle across their own tangled detritus, moving with aching sluggishness while their southern flank was raked by ceaseless musket fire. The urge to break and run was almost too much to bear, but by placing themselves between the advancing enemy and the York road they might just prevent a massacre, because the rest of Prince Rupert’s ruined army was in full retreat.
The battle was lost – they all knew it – but the whitecoats of the Northern Foot were making nuisance enough to prevent the rebel cavalry, Cromwell’s brutal warriors, from giving chase. Stryker strode to the rear of the creeping body of men, staring out in the direction of the city. It was difficult to see anything beyond their huge ring of pikes, and the smoke and the darkness made the world all the more opaque, yet one thing was clear; the haemorrhage of Royalist soldiers into the roads and lanes and woodland would be impossible for the enemy to staunch. Most of the Allied infantry
– the Covenanters in the main – were already peeling away from the battle front in pursuit, for they had regiments to spare, but they would not be swift enough to cut off the majority of the terrified Royalists, and plenty would make it back to the safety of York.
Stryker went back to his men. Rupert’s routed army would survive, because the whitecoats would protect the routed divisions by sacrificing themselves.
A small field piece erupted somewhere unseen, its iron ball coring the brigade so that a whole file of pikemen was obliterated in an instant. A thickly bearded man, his shoulder emblazoned with the same cross of courage that adorned Forrester’s coat, reeled out of the cordon screaming. He collapsed to his knees, guts slithering through his fingers and over his thighs as he scrabbled to gather them with trembling, bone-white hands. Stryker knelt beside him, cutting his bandolier with his dirk. He gritted his teeth as he wiped away the stricken man’s entrails, thumbing open one of the powder boxes hanging from the leather strap, and beginning the process of loading the musket.
It was a death of a thousand cuts. Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner, black-cloaked and ranting, paced right at the circle’s heart, screaming God’s power down upon them, beseeching King Jesus to save their souls, to ravage the enemy, to loose the heavenly host and bring all their fiery swords down upon the heads of those who would defy their divinely appointed monarch. But still the whitecoats died. And the rebel horsemen, the famed harquebusiers, swooped around them like a flock of screeching kites at a carcass, slicing at the pikes and wheeling away, bellowing psalms as they launched charge after thundering charge.
Yet somehow the whitecoats kept the shape of their dense block, their pikes on the outermost edges, each spear rammed into the instep of the rearmost foot and thrust up and out at an angle that would catch a horse square in the mouth should it be stupid enough to ram home. The musketeers, squeezing muzzles between the heads of the pikemen, loaded and fired like automatons, throats burning with the gritty plumes they sucked into heaving chests. Yet too many were dying. The Allied muskets coughed as each cavalry charge peeled away, and the Royalists’ tight formation made them an unmissable target, to be picked off at will. They fell in their droves, leaving a macabre wake of corpses as the groaning huddle of beleaguered soldiers inched its way across the vicious field.
A musket shot pierced the circle, punching a hole through a drum and killing the drummer. One of the company preachers went down as he waved his Bible at the backs of the defenders, shot through the eye by a horseman’s pistol. The edges of the circle were fraying, its stubborn strength dwindling, but still Cromwell’s horsemen, intent on destroying this final bastion of resistance, were engaged where they might otherwise have been putting the broken brigades to the sword. That was all the white-coated men could hope for.
Stryker went to fetch another powder box from the severed bandolier that he had dropped beside the gutted soldier. As he bent to it, he noticed a bottle of richly crimson liquid lying beside the corpse. He snatched it up, pulling out the stopper with his teeth, and sniffed the contents. He went to find Hood.
‘Get as drunk as you like, Tom. I’ll join you.’
Lieutenant Hood’s eyes, black-rimmed by soot from the pistol he had been firing out at the thrashing cavalry, peered at the proffered bottle. He smiled, shaking his head. ‘I will not, sir. You were right. A copper nose gives a man a stout heart, but a clear head keeps him alive.’
Shouts of alarm echoed on all sides, and they knew the harquebusiers had reformed for another charge. Stryker spat a gobbet of gritty phlegm. ‘Nothing will keep us alive.’
‘I made a pledge,’ Hood persisted, ‘to Miss Helly.’ A shadow crossed his features, hinting at regret. Stryker lifted the bottle to his own lips. ‘As you wish, Tom.’ When he had taken a long draught, revelling in the luxuriant claret, he handed the bottle to Skellen. ‘You and I, Sergeant.’ He fixed his eye on each man in turn. ‘A pleasure knowing you both.’
Skellen swilled the wine in his hand. ‘It’ll be a pleasure dyin’ with you, sir.’
As the sergeant drank, Stryker caught a glimpse – fleeting, nothing more; a glimmer of something that struck a chord in his mind. He stared out through the southern face of the circle. Beyond, a large body of the Earl of Manchester’s Foot was pressing slowly forwards into the whitecoats’ fire. And there, set amongst them, was a company of men who were not clothed in the reds and greens of the earl’s units. They wore darker garments in the main, though that was nothing in itself, except that some wore blue cloaks that stretched all the way to the knees and were faced in yellow thread. They were unusual, and, as he stared, he saw that many of their heads were covered by strange hats that were decorated with large, white feathers, and several of their number were draped in thick animal pelts.
‘By Christ, he is here!’
Skellen and Hood ran to Styker. He crouched behind the outer ranks and loaded the musket, taking more care than usual, ensuring that his shot would fly true. Then he went into the midst of a row of musketeers, taking his place behind the pikes and screwing up his eye, squinting into the gloom. He saw Janik first, Kendrick’s big, moustachioed henchman, and saw too that the fearsome Hungarian trained a musket on his position. Then he sighted the Vulture, black-pelted and glowering, and knew he might never get this opportunity again.
‘Now, you ballock-witted oaf!’ Captain John Kendrick snarled.
‘Not a clear shot.’
‘It is as clear as we’ll get. Shoot the bastard’s head off his shoulders before he slinks back into that hedgehog.’
Sergeant Andor Janik was the best shot in Kendrick’s company, and the pair had examined the white-coated brigade every second since first they had spotted Stryker, hoping that he would brave the outer edge of the circle. Now, at last, his shoulders and head were fully exposed. Now was the time.
Janik muttered something in his native tongue as he curled a finger around his trigger. And then he swore, and Kendrick swore too, for they could see Stryker’s own musket, and it was pointing at them.
‘Take the shot!’ Kendrick blurted, suddenly frightened. ‘Take the goddamned shot, Sergeant Janik!’
Janik fired.
Stryker pulled the trigger as Cromwell’s horsemen launched their charge. Smoke plumed, the heavy stock smacked hard into his shoulder, and he was instantly blind. Air pulsed beside his face and he knew that Janik had fired too, and missed. He dropped the musket, flapping wildly at the smoke, and strained his stinging eye to see what had become of his own bullet.
Kendrick was still standing. Stryker screamed an oath of rage and frustration. His enemy was looking down, as if he regarded his feet, and gradually Stryker realized the shot had, indeed, found a mark. Janik had gone, vanished. Killed. Stryker turned to deliver the bittersweet news to his comrades, and then saw Thomas Hood’s body.
The swords of Oliver Cromwell’s horsemen clattered against the outstretched pikes like a thousand sticks dragged across a wattle fence. Still the hedgehog did not break. They wheeled away to reform, and every man fighting with the bloody-minded Northern Foot gave a guttural jeer. Almost every man.
Stryker and Skellen knelt beside Hood’s prone form. Lancelot Forrester had seen the lieutenant reel back too, but it was too late. Janik’s musket-ball, intended for Stryker, had slammed into Hood and the bullet had taken him in the centre of the chest, the soft lead flattening to a wide, destructive disc as it drove a path through flesh and bone. Hood was dead before he hit the ground.
‘My God,’ Forrester was saying.
Stryker looked up from the lieutenant’s wax-white face. But Forrester was not looking at Hood at all. ‘Forry?’
‘My God,’ Forrester said again. He stared northwards, in the direction of the forest. ‘It is over.’
Oliver Cromwell had curtailed the last charge deliberately, because all he wanted was to draw the collective gaze of the Royalists for long enough to deploy his dragoons. And now they were in position. His own horsemen had done the
ir job, distracting the musketeers within the hedgehog, and they formed up in their broad, iron-strong line, reloading their pistols for the final time. A messenger brought news, as he prepared his own weapons and summoned his own courage, of the Northern Horse. The only enemy cavalry to have tasted success this day, led by the wastrel George Goring, were returning to the field to find their comrades in deep trouble. He prayed aloud for God to keep their numbers low and resolve feeble, and then he gave orders for a body of his riders to sweep them from the moor.
The dragoons attacked. They were arrayed along the tree line, and they spurred south, getting as close as they could risk to the dogged whitecoats. They drew up as one, dismounted as one, and fired their muskets. Now Cromwell released his horsemen, thundering against the Royalists once again, and they discharged their pistols too. The Earl of Manchester’s Foot, pressing up from the ditch, kept up their own volleys. The last of Prince Rupert’s brigades absorbed fire on three fronts. And finally, mercifully, gloriously, Cromwell could see that his psalm-singing holy warriors had achieved in the west what Sir Charles Lucas and the famed Royalist horse had failed to achieve in the east: they had broken a fully formed pike circle. God had provided a stunning triumph, for the whitecoats – valiant and resolute – began to fall apart. Newcastle’s lambs had come to the slaughter.
Stryker left Hood’s body and drew one of his pistols. The volley from the dragoons decided matters, for the hedgehog’s north face had not been ready to face such fire, and the pikemen, left exposed against muskets fired at horribly close range, had been savagely flensed. Now the crowing cavalry charged again, but they veered north, curled their run to sweep around to the circle’s newly tattered face, aiming for the gaps torn by the dragoons. They careened straight into the block, the fissures wide enough to fit their crashing, snorting destriers, and the heavy hooves kicked at the pikemen, who parted in panic, the range suddenly too close to employ their long spears. As they shied away, more horses plunged into the widening crevices, acting like wedges driven into rotting timber, and the entire circle ruptured.
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