Marston Moor

by Michael Arnold

  Horsemen were immediately among them, butchering bloody paths through the melee, their swords and breeches, buff-coats, breastplates and faces spattered in the blood of their prey. A great wail went up, new drums thundered, and then the rebel infantry stormed forwards in waves to support the horse. There had been no quarter asked, and none would be given.

  Stryker was barely aware of which way he faced, thinking only of survival. He drew his sword as he fired the pistol, ducking below the arc of a high-swung partisan and shooting the assailant in the face for his trouble. Then he dropped the smoking piece and took the blade in both hands, hacking a green-coated man down with nothing but brute force and desperation. He trampled over the felled soldier, searching for escape but seeing nothing but dead ends.

  ‘God with us!’ was the only cry now, and Stryker twisted and turned, cleaving path after path that took him nowhere at all. He slid the tip of his Toledo blade into a man’s windpipe, jerking it free to slice it sideways at a passing horse, and rolled clear of the stamping hooves. He was up quickly, dizzy but alive, daubed in mud and the blood of friend and foe. A man armoured in morion pot, breastplate and tassets lunged at Stryker with an axe, aiming to open his belly from stones to sternum. Stryker wrenched himself away, feeling the axe’s edge rip at his coat, and, as he slid in a patch of horse dung, he noticed a pike discarded in the morass. He dropped the sword, hefted the shaft that was snapped halfway along its length, and spun, sweeping all eight feet of tapered ash in a wide curve that collided with the axe-man’s thigh. The blade, designed only to thrust, failed to penetrate the metal tassets but knocked him off his stride, and Stryker drew back the half-pike, stabbing upwards with all the strength he had left. The tip crunched beneath the Parliamentarian’s chin, up through the soft tissue behind his jawbone, and the man’s bloodshot eyes rolled up as if staring at the rim of his morion. Stryker released the shaft, leaving it stuck and quivering, and went to find his sword.

  ‘Stryker!’

  He felt his ears prick like a startled animal. He collected his sword and turned.

  Captain John Kendrick ran his tongue slowly over his ghoulishly sharpened teeth. Time seemed to slow. The battle raged all about them, but each man, ten yards apart, stared at the other as though none existed but them.

  Stryker pointed his sword at Kendrick’s chest. ‘You killed Hood.’

  Kendrick had a sword in one hand and the other he flexed, letting the metallic fingers, topped by the vicious brass gadlings, clank with grim foreboding. He wiped the sword on his dense cloak. ‘You killed Janik.’

  Stryker pulled free his second pistol and fired. The shot flew wide. He dropped the weapon and moved forwards, adjusting his sword grip to ensure the shark-skin hilt would not fail. ‘You murdered Lieutenant Brownell.’

  ‘A mistake,’ Kendrick replied casually, holding up his own sword to beckon his enemy. He winked. ‘I was trying to kill you.’

  Hidden deep in the woods, Fight the Good Fight of Faith Helly was frightened. Frightened of a Royalist victory without Stryker; of a Parliamentarian victory with the spectre of the Vulture. So she stared at the lengthening shadows, made gloomier by the sepulchral forest, and flinched as flaming tongues licked the bracken where men ran and screamed.

  She could not discern anything meaningful in the madness. The battle still raged to the south, but fighting had spread to Wilstrop Wood, and men crashed through the undergrowth, darted round trunks and died in the leaf mulch. There were riders too, helmeted centaurs with bright spurs and dark swords, and they slashed all around, hacking tracks through the wood to cut down whom they may. But Faith did not know to which side any man was loyal, nor whether she would be safe under their white-eyed stares, so she let them pass with sealed lips and a hammering heart. The firelocks guarding the ammunition had long moved away, though they said nothing of their intent, and she had considered following them, but it seemed more sensible simply to hide and pray for nightfall. So she waited and watched and wondered.

  It started to rain again: the droplets that weaved through the boughs of her hiding-place were fat and heavy. She decided to move, and gingerly stood up. A horse whickered softly behind her.

  ‘My, my,’ a man said. ‘What have we here?’

  The rain lashed Marston Moor, mingling with the blood streaking Stryker’s blade as it clanged in the air above his head.

  The hooked nose of a bare-fanged Kendrick loomed back at him over the cross of steel. He moved as Stryker remembered; incongruous beneath the kinked hump, but somehow neatly balanced. He was weaker than Stryker, but able to deflect and riposte with impressive crispness, and Stryker heaved at him now, throwing him away so that he did not find some sly way to pummel his lone eye with the knuckled gauntlet.

  Kendrick stumbled back, breathing heavily. All around them the last pockets of whitecoats were crumbling, falling where they stood, cut like a field of wheat beneath so many scythes, but none paid them notice, leaving them to their private duel. The Vulture swooped in, darting low to cut at Stryker’s ankles, forcing the latter to leap out of range, almost becoming entangled with his own scabbard.

  Kendrick straightened, rolling his distorted shoulders. ‘Water hemlock, from the New World.’ He sneered. ‘One draws a yellow liquid from its roots. Looks like piss. Smells worse.’

  Stryker’s mind went to a tavern in Skipton. ‘The poison.’

  Kendrick made a clicking noise with his tongue. ‘The savages use it.’ He swept his blade in the hissing figure of eight he had used to dazzle Stryker at Lathom. ‘Jesu, but it is deadly stuff. A drop will do the trick.’

  Stryker circled him warily. ‘A coward’s weapon.’

  ‘As I said, the tainted chalice was not intended for that young peacock’s lips.’ Kendrick lunged, thrusting at the belly, then whipping the tip upwards to catch Stryker’s chin. When he sliced only air, he rocked back, giving himself space to draw the cinquedea. He turned the broad blade slowly to let the raindrops glitter on the wicked steel. ‘After that, my place in the service of the Crown appeared rather untenable.’

  ‘’Tis a harsh choice to change one’s loyalty,’ Stryker said, swinging his blade from side to side. ‘Unless that loyalty was never truly owned.’

  Kendrick blew rainwater from his lips. ‘Oh?’

  ‘You are Ezra Killigrew’s man. And he, Vulture, is a traitor and a double agent.’

  Kendrick laughed. ‘Very good!’

  ‘Hate-Evil Sydall was his man too. A Parliament spy, unaware that his master shared secrets with both sides.’

  ‘When Master Killigrew heard we would sack Bolton,’ Kendrick returned, ‘he feared what Sydall might reveal. Better to eradicate a good agent than risk exposure. But you’ll never prove it. And you will die on this field.’

  The turncoat jumped in, closing the range and hewing his sword downward in a crushing blow. Stryker parried, staggered back, recaptured his balance only to have to parry again. The second strike caught him just above the hilt, and though the ornate guard turned the edge away, the jarring effect made him sway alarmingly so that his rear foot skidded in the scarlet stew. He took a knee, flattening a palm in the filth to steady himself. His fingers snaked across something hard and smooth. He looked down, registering what he saw, then let it go as he met another blow with a block that only just repelled Kendrick’s thrust. He wrenched his body sideways to squirm away from the darting cinquedea. The blade, named for its width, caught him across the upper arm, and he knew he had been saved by the layer of oiled hide. He scrambled to his feet, went on the attack with a half-dozen sharp jabs that Kendrick absorbed without fuss or fluster.

  There were horsemen nearby no longer fighting but watching the private performance play out. He hauled air into his lungs as his mind churned. He needed to stall for time. ‘I have the cipher,’ he said eventually.

  Kendrick stopped short, visibly shaken. ‘I do not believe you.’

  ‘That is your choice. But I have it, and it is safe.’

  ‘You�
��ll give me that flagon, Stryker, or so help me …’

  ‘It is no flagon, you dull-witted fool.’ Stryker forced a mocking laugh, hoping that the captain would be enraged into a mistake. ‘A Puritan like Sydall would entrust his secrets to one place only.’

  Kendrick untwisted his features. ‘Alone it incriminates nothing. What is a key without its lock?’

  ‘I’ll find the lock. You will die now, Vulture, and Killigrew will die later.’

  John Kendrick licked his lips. ‘That’s the spirit, Stryker. But, alas, I am a hard-man. I have been given the power of the Balkan sorcerers and the feathered barbarians of Virginia.’ He shrugged, flipped the cinquedea in his hand, and lurched at Stryker. ‘I cannot be killed!’

  Stryker threw himself to the side, to the place where he had knelt, and there he scrabbled in the mud for the pistol he had so fleetingly felt. Kendrick bore down on him from behind as his fingers hit upon the smooth handle. He snatched it up, twisted, and fired.

  John Kendrick stopped in his tracks, baffled as he looked down at the blood pumping from his side. ‘You shot me,’ he said, utterly astounded. ‘But I am a hard-man.’ He looked up in amazement. ‘You shot me, Stryker.’

  Stryker clambered to his feet. ‘And now I shall run you through.’

  A pistol fired close by, but it was not the one in his hand. The world was spinning and he felt himself fall. Then all was silent.

  Stryker woke in darkness. He was curled on the ground, knees drawn to his chest, his side wet and cold where it nestled in the mud. He peeled open his eye. The lids parted stubbornly, stickily, and he guessed they were glued with caked blood. He saw boots pacing around him, fetlocks too. It was all a blur. He tried to sit. His head hurt, and he slumped back down. He waited, breathed through the pain, and sat up again, more slowly this time, happy, at least, that the rain had stopped.

  He rubbed his face with cold hands. Calluses scraped his cheeks and he realized that his gloves had gone. He patted his body. His baldric and sword had vanished, his dirk too. The purse that had been strung at his belt had been cut clean away. In panic, he reached for his breast. The book was still there, between coat and shirt.

  ‘They have Bibles, our captors. They need not rob you of yours.’

  Stryker forced his aching neck round to peer blearily at the man who had spoken. It was another seated on the ground, one of many, he now realized. Hundreds, unarmed and cross-legged. The voice was one he knew but could not place. ‘I was shot,’ he heard himself say.

  The man hunched behind him nodded. ‘Right in the head.’

  Stryker stared hard, forcing clarity into the lines that moved in and out like plucked harp strings. He managed to discern a red coat. He saw a wide hat that perched atop thin, sandy hair and a cherubic face. ‘Forry?’

  Captain Lancelot Forrester smiled, though the gesture barely reached his eyes. ‘Fortunately for you, your skull is made of more than bone.’ He held up a small, metal dome. ‘Where the devil did you get this?’

  Stryker gazed for a moment; then he remembered the secrete he had been wearing beneath his hat. ‘A gift from a friend.’

  ‘That friend saved your life.’

  Stryker slid a hand gingerly to his head and followed the trail of congealed blood to a spot just above his right temple. There was a crusty gash under the tangled hair, and he dabbed it with his fingertips. Then he reached to take the secrete. The bowl-shaped sheet of steel had a pronounced dent on one side, which he fingered in astonishment. ‘Jesu.’ He looked up sharply. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Marston Field,’ Forrester said.

  ‘Hood is dead.’

  ‘Mowbray too. And a great many more.’ Forrester pressed his mouth into a firm line. ‘I have not seen old Seek Wisdom.’ He sighed heavily and sorrowfully. ‘We lost.’

  Stryker looked around. The prisoners were gathered in a large herd, like cattle, and were being harassed by a ring of musketeers and horsemen. The area was lit by torches held by sentries, and thousands of pale awnings stretched away into the distance like a horde of ghosts. The rebels quite literally held the field. They had made a leaguer of it. Stryker stared at his fellow captives. They had all been stripped of their possessions, no doubt, but their coats remained, and those were a panoply of colours. Tillier’s greens, Rupert’s blues, some yellows, reds and browns. Maudlin delegates of two proud, annihilated armies.

  His scalp burned with sudden brightness, making him wince as he dabbed the injury with numb fingers. ‘One of Kendrick’s men?’

  Forrester’s head shook in the gloom. ‘One of those bloody horsemen thought to use you for target practice.’

  ‘And the Vulture?’

  ‘Hurt bad, sir,’ another, gruffer voice came from the shadows. ‘But you did not get a chance to end him.’

  Stryker jerked round. ‘Skellen?’

  ‘The same, sir.’

  Skellen’s gloomy face, stained dark from the gash in his scalp, held a new depth of sorrow. He had witnessed many terrible things in the Low Countries, and had long prayed never to see them visited upon English soil. Skellen would never again be the same. Stryker shook the sergeant’s huge hand. ‘I am glad you live to fight another day, William, truly.’

  Skellen let his gaze drift beyond his friend. ‘Plenty did not.’

  Stryker eased himself round to see teams of men lining up sacks a hundred paces away. With a knot in the pit of his guts, he saw they were not sacks but corpses. They came from everywhere; from the ditch and the woods, from the ridge where the Allied host had converged, to Long Marston in the east and Tockwith in the west. Five armies had clashed on this lonely Yorkshire moor, and the dead numbered in their thousands. They were stripped as they were collected, valuables harvested as waxen bodies were tossed in meshed, crooked heaps upon the back of wagons and brought to the vast line, where some – a fortunate fraction – might be identified. The rest would be dusted in lime and lobbed in a pit.

  A thought struck Stryker. ‘If I was shot, why did he not make an end of me?’

  ‘I saw what happened,’ Skellen said in the matter-of-fact way that was so reassuring. ‘I reckoned I would not let that crook-backed bastard reach you. God knows he tried. His men came from everywhere wi’ their curly swords.’

  ‘Sergeant Skellen used his halberd, you understand,’ Forrester cut in, ‘and you know how bloody-minded he can be with one of those in hand.’

  ‘The cap’n, here, came to join my little dance, sir.’

  Forrester gave a rueful laugh. ‘Had a handful of men with me. Seemed a worthy cause. We’d have fallen in the end, but Manchester’s cavalry thought to interfere, thank God. They took us prisoner before the Vulture’s flock could chop us to offal.’

  ‘Why did they make prisoner of us?’ Stryker asked suddenly. ‘The whitecoats were fighting to the last man. There was no quarter asked, and none offered.’

  ‘Cap’n has fedaries among the enemy, sir,’ Skellen answered, a hint of the old wryness inflecting his dour tone. A man in the dress of a harquebusier was striding towards them, and the sergeant indicated him with a jerk of his chin.

  Stryker looked at Forrester. ‘Forry?’

  Forrester looked embarrassed. ‘This is Captain Camby. An officer in General Cromwell’s troop, and a fellow actor. We trod the boards together at Candlewick Street.’

  Camby loomed over them, a lobster-tailed helmet in the crook of his arm. He was young and thin, with soberly cropped hair and a deep cut through his right eyebrow. He tried to smile, thought better of it, and settled for a sympathetic grimace. ‘A bad business.’

  ‘You won, Captain,’ Stryker said coldly.

  Camby cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘Such effusion of blood is never to be celebrated, sir. Not ever.’ He bowed to Forrester and walked quickly away.

  Forrester watched him leave. ‘You might have been more civil, old man. The poor bugger saved our lives. They’d have butchered every last man found fighting with the whitecoats if it weren’t for him. He admi
red our courage.’

  ‘What happened?’ Stryker said, ignoring his friend. ‘In the end?’

  ‘The enemy swept the field,’ Forrester replied bluntly. ‘Our horse rallied briefly under Goring, but they were shattered in a trice.’

  ‘Rupert?’

  ‘Camby says he was not taken, thank God. Newcastle and Eythin appear to have extricated themselves too. Sir Charles Lucas is captured, I’m told. General Tillier with him.’ He shrugged, looking around at the human debris. ‘And many more besides.’

  ‘I saw Boye killed.’

  ‘Skewered, aye,’ Forrester said glumly. ‘The rebels are cock-a-hoop with the news, as you can imagine. They have destroyed Newcastle’s grand army, yet they make far greater noise over the death of a poodle.’

  ‘What of Rupert’s army?’ Stryker asked. He thought of that great wave of men and horses that rolled like gathering thunder all the way from the Irish Sea, taking Stockport and Bolton and Liverpool in such stunning fashion. ‘The last stand of the whitecoats did much to delay the pursuit. Most will have made it back to York. Perhaps they shall rally again?’

  ‘The last stand of the whitecoats,’ Skellen echoed slowly. The brigade of Northern Foot had been ripped to bloodied rags, and yet not a single man had looked to surrender. ‘I have seldom witnessed such valour.’

  ‘They’re gone,’ Forrester said in a low voice. ‘All gone.’

  ‘All?’ Stryker asked.

  ‘It is said,’ Skellen muttered, ‘there are thirty survivors from the brigade, sir. Including we three.’