‘Rearguard?’ Stryker was incredulous. ‘We’re retreating?’
‘Not so, sir.’ The aide shook his head vigorously as his mount fidgeted and whickered, thick clouds of steam billowing from its flaring nostrils. ‘Ordered march back towards the hill.’
‘We’re damn well retreating!’
‘The day is stalemate, Captain. His Majesty aims to remove himself from this place in an orderly manner and reconcile his forces. You are to keep’, he continued before Stryker could reply, ‘those damned Roundheads at bay while the main force withdraws. You’ll have artillery support.’
Stryker acknowledged receipt of the order with a curt nod, and the aide wheeled his horse about in an ostentatious flurry of hooves and snow.
The men had stood idle for too long in this confounded weather anyway. Swinging out of his saddle with tremendous energy, Stryker thumped on to the frozen earth. A soldier materialized from somewhere and took his mount’s reins without a word, leading the beast to safety behind the Royalist lines.
Stryker turned to his sergeant, who was standing like a statue a few paces behind him. ‘You heard the man, Mister Skellen.’
‘Indeed an’ I did, sir,’ Skellen replied briefly.
‘We advance on my mark.’
‘Sir.’ Before he turned away, Skellen’s gaze flickered momentarily to meet the single eye that stared back at him.
‘Ready?’ Stryker asked his old comrade-in-arms.
Skellen’s look was sardonic. ‘Yes, sir.’ A tiny smile played across the captain’s features, before vanishing back behind its usual saturnine mask. There was no one in the world he would rather have watching his back than Skellen.
The sergeant turned about and marched away towards the bristling ranks awaiting his order.
‘Look lively, you mangy palliards!’ Skellen yelled, as he took up his position to the left of the front rank. ‘Eyes front! Shoulder pikes!’ he cried, slamming his halberd, its fearsome blade dark with crusted blood, into the cold earth. ‘We march on Mister Stryker’s word an’ no other!’
‘Gives me the chills, that eye,’ one of the new recruits murmured to his mate. ‘From neck to nuts, as God’s m’ witness.’
‘It should,’ Skellen growled, startling the pikeman, who had not intended his comment to be overheard.
The pikeman swallowed hard. ‘Beg pardon, Sergeant, but I ain’t never seen a grey eye like that. Dark, but silver. A damned sparkin’ anvil.’
Skellen nodded, his thin face splitting in grim relish. ‘They say his mother was a she-wolf, Bicks.’
The pikeman, Walter Bicknell, was unable to stop his eyes swivelling over to where the captain now stood facing the company.
Skellen followed Bicknell’s stare and chuckled. ‘The flecks of silver only show when he smiles, which ain’t often, or when he smells a kill, which he does this very moment.’ The sergeant stepped away to cast deep-set eyes upon the rest of his men. ‘Follow him, lads! Follow the good captain! Follow him and thank the good Lord above that he’s on your side!’
The massed ranks straightened. Nearly one hundred pairs of eyes, made watery by the cold, blinked rapidly to regain focus. Lungs were hawked clear of gunpowder-spotted phlegm, shoulders were rolled and squared and the sixteen-foot lengths of ash hefted into the dank air. Pikes were damned unwieldy brutes, especially on a day like this, when a man’s fingers were numbed to the marrow, but in these expert hands they rose in unison, dropped in unison, and nestled comfortably on to shoulders that had carried them for hundreds, in some cases thousands, of miles.
In front, a tall officer with one eye and a devilish grin drew his broad sword and showed them the way. And as one, they followed him.
The king had declared war on Parliament in August, but it had taken a full fortnight for the army to amass. Stryker had been summoned from his home in Hampshire, and hired to gather a company. It had not taken as long as he had feared, for the majority of his old comrades came swiftly back to answer the call. These were veterans, hard men who had seen war on a grand scale in Europe and lived to tell the tale. The king was glad of them, though many of His Majesty’s more high-born officers had raised eyebrows at the rough-and-ready captain and his grizzled professionals. Stryker had swelled his ranks with lads from the shire whose eagerness partly compensated for their inexperience, and he had left Skellen to batter them into shape on the long march to the rendezvous point at Shrewsbury.
Some weeks later, the combined forces of the king had headed south, aiming directly for the capital. London was the key, the nest of vipers that writhed and schemed at the heart of this conflict. That was how Stryker’s senior officers referred to the city, but Stryker had many good friends in the London Trained Bands, friends against whom he may soon have to fight. And fight he would, if it came to that.
The great mass of men, with its lingering train of baggage and hangers-on, had then marched south through Warwickshire. It had been made known that they would fall upon the Parliamentarian town of Warwick, striking a hammer-blow upon the rebel cause early in the hostilities. Stryker had had his doubts about launching an assault against such a well-fortified position. The possibility of a lengthy siege in the freezing weather was not enticing. He had fought in sieges before. He had camped through cold and sleet, blood and disease. He had watched as heavy ordnance had pulverized ancient fortifications and reduced another innocent population to famine and death. He had seen the rape and massacre of innocents when walls were finally breached. He was not inclined to repeat the experience, and certainly not on English soil.
He was pleased, therefore, that the order to bypass the well-garrisoned castle town had been received. Essex would be left to roam the Warwickshire countryside while King Charles would push south with the intention of taking Banbury. The town was another stronghold of Parliament, but it was considerably less fortified. The proposition had looked good to Stryker, and his spirits had lifted as they traversed the Wormleighton Hills that rose to the north and east of Edgehill. They would crush Banbury, leave Essex kicking his heels in the Cotswolds, and open the road to Oxford.
‘Keep your bastard eyes forward, Powney, God rot your stinkin’ hide!’ Now Skellen’s coarse battlefield tones penetrated the frosty afternoon air like a volley from a saker cannon.
Stryker glanced at the unfortunate Powney. He felt a brief pang of sympathy for the young pikeman as Skellen tore strips from him, but the sergeant was right. A lost footing now would throw out the man’s stride and the effect would undulate back through the ranks causing chaos.
He forced his concentration back on the panorama of churned land stretching before him, littered with corpses of man and horse.
To his right the scattered debris of Prince Rupert’s devastating charge lay like jetsam in tangled irregular clumps of flesh and blood. The grand pomp of cavalrymen had been reduced to carrion in but a few minutes.
The scene in the centre of the field was equally horrific. It was as if a giant charnel house had disgorged its contents, dumping its macabre bounty on to the snow. Stryker was too far away to see the faces, and many were hidden behind the hedgerows that criss-crossed that middle ground, but he knew that each would be affecting its own sickening pose and expression. There would be those that grinned like demonic clowns and others that stared in shock, surprised by their own ends; some would be frozen like grotesque, terror-stricken statues. Each one would be like a ghoulish parody of the living. Here, though, there were fewer horses. It was the domain of man, where fathers and sons were impaled on long pikes, their bodies entwined with those pierced by shot or laid open by steel. Others had met their end by a hurtling cannon ball, though their bodies were broken and scattered, seeds tossed to the wind.
Stryker spat. The Banbury strategy had been a good one, but the enemy had discovered their plans and raced southwards to rescue the town.
In the end, it seemed to him that the two forces had stumbled into one another. Stryker had been at Edgecote the previous day when the council
of war decided upon a course of action that would see Byron’s brigade, some four thousand strong, push south to seize Banbury. Sir Edmund Mowbray’s Regiment of Foot, Stryker’s lads included, had been with that force, and they had fanned out to find billets for the night.
Stryker chose the little village of Cropredy, and though the night was unfathomably cold, the warm fires and even warmer sound of his comrades’ banter and song had lifted everyone’s spirits.
A staff officer, whose name now escaped Stryker, though he would never forget that dog-tired voice, rode into their slumbering billet a little after four in the morning. The message was clear; the forces of Parliament were at hand. They had been spotted by a cavalry patrol out toward Kineton. A general muster was to be observed at Edgehill.
Stryker’s company of pike and musket had begun the day in the centre of the king’s lines, forming part of Byron’s brigade. As the artillery bombardment crashed about them, an evil harbinger of the hostilities to come, the Royalist forces had been massed on the level ground in front of Radway. They had watched as Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, formed his Roundheads across the plain from their own positions.
At around three o’clock the order to advance had been given by King Charles himself, and had been passed down from his vantage point on the ridge, seven hundred feet above sea level, through the chain of command and eventually to the officers on the plain. The brigade shouldered pikes and prepared for the march across the snow-dusted fields as the terrain sloped steadily down towards Kineton.
Stryker remembered the nervous excitement of the raw recruits in Byron’s great brigade, like young destriers ready for the charge. As General Sir Jacob Astley paced in front of the line, resplendent in red and gold, the men fidgeted in their ranks, apprehension flooding every vein and tension stiffening joints. Some had prayed, whispering silent pleas to the Almighty, while others growled personal threats towards the Roundhead lines. Stryker remembered the youngster – barely in his teens – in the front rank as he had snivelled pathetically, teardrops tapping the taut skin of his white knuckles as he gripped his pike. Some men had laughed insanely to themselves; others spilled the contents of their stomachs, or bowels.
Like Stryker’s lads, General Astley had worn only back and breast plates, having discarded the cumbersome tassets that would flap across his thighs. Stryker remembered the dark, wide-brimmed hat, adorned with a red ribbon and feather, as Sir Jacob made his way purposefully out in front of the great formation, holding his arm aloft.
‘O Lord!’ Astley shouted so that as many men as possible would hear. ‘You know how busy I must be this day. If I forget thee, do not forget me.’
Stryker had not known whether to applaud this show of valour, his cynical eye casting around to see if the king or Prince Rupert were within earshot. But now, as he remembered how Astley had drawn his sword and pointed it like an arrow toward the massed enemy battalions, he could not help but feel admiration. Stryker had found himself drawing his own sword and, with Sir Jacob’s rallying cry of ‘March on, boys!’ echoing in his ears, he had repeated the call.
Like some giant biblical behemoth, the entire Royalist front line had rumbled into motion.
In front of Kineton itself, the slope’s downward gradient petered out, stalled, and began to rise steeply. On this rising ground were the waiting Parliamentarians and, in immediate response to the Royalist advance, thousands of their finest men had marched out.
Stryker remembered the close-up toil of the push of pike. His men had marched in their tertio headlong into the blue uniforms of Sir William Constable’s regiment and levelled their wicked weapons, as the Parliamentarians levelled their own.
It was known as the push. Two bodies of infantry, each numbering in their thousands, pushing at the other, attempting to knock the other off balance, forcing the opposing tertio to fold and capitulate. Stryker often likened the manoeuvre to a pair of Greek wrestlers, shoving and grunting and sweating. But the classical allegory was abandoned in the field of battle. In this bout, the wrestlers were pointing sixteen-foot lengths of ash at one another, each topped with a wicked leaf-shaped blade. Amongst the grunts and oaths, the commands and the screams, another noise rang out rhythmically, constantly, in the background. The ostinato of battle. A thud, a squelch, and a loud sucking; blade impales man; blade twists in flesh; blade is jerked free to search for its next target.
Stryker knew that sound well. He had heard it countless times, on countless fields across Europe.
That first push of pike had ended inconclusively for Stryker and his men. They had been with Byron’s brigade in the centre of the Royalist line and had smashed into the opposing tertio. He half expected the Roundheads to run at the sight of his hard veterans holding the centre of their particular battaile, but the enemy had been brave and had closed well, pushing and heaving forward with admirable resilience.
The ranks met one another, pushing as hard as was possible, then stalled. Pikes missed their marks, men were too closely packed to draw their swords, and the locked ranks screamed their frustrated enmity into the cold air. A melee was avoided as the Parliamentarian force eventually withdrew, maintaining an order that Stryker could only admire. The pikemen, including his own force, had removed themselves from the front line as musket companies took up the battle, pouring volley fire into the autumnal gloom.
Stryker had marched back toward Radway, finding a position of relative safety in order to see to the wounded. It was vexing that they were not in the main brigade, for a devastating Roundhead cavalry charge, led by the standard of Sir William Balfour, had swept into the shocked Royalist ranks like a wave. Stryker and his men could only look on in fury as horsemen burst into view like so many avenging angels. The call to charge pike for horse – angling the spiteful points upward in a bristling mass that would deter all but the most well-trained or crazed animal – was late and panicked, as the brigade braced for impact. Joined by Sir Philip Stapleton’s heavily armoured cuirassiers, Balfour’s cavalry charge hit home right across the Royalist centre.
Stryker had watched in horror as first Fielding’s brigade, and then Byron’s, broke and fled back toward Edgehill. Victorious cavalrymen whooped and cheered as they chased their now pitiful quarry across the fields like rabbits.
Almost an hour after that frustrating capitulation, Stryker and his pikemen now yearned to enter the fray once more.
Stryker strode out in front of his company. Once again, his men were bearing down on an opposing battaile, but the pace of the entire battle was slower. Firing a musket was hot work that dried a man’s mouth and stung his eyes. To level a pike, its weight pulling down from several feet away, was enough to have your hands burning and your forearms screaming for mercy. And all that was before combatants engaged in the melee, where swords were drawn and punches thrown.
The immediate enemy were, once again, a company of Constable’s bluecoats. They were more numerous than his own unit, but Stryker could see weariness informing their every step. The light tunics were stained red with blood, the men themselves tardy in their formation, ragged and out of step. They had been sent forward by Essex in a last-ditch attempt to seize the day, but Stryker could tell from the rounded shoulders of the front rank that this was one fight too far for them.
‘Ensign Burton,’ Stryker called, without shifting his gaze from the oncoming enemy.
‘Sir,’ Burton said, appearing beside him, struggling to hold Stryker’s company standard high.
‘Look at those bastards, Ensign. They tire. They’re scared. They’ve been battered and bruised all afternoon.’
‘Aye, sir, but so have we,’ replied the younger man.
‘But your rebel pikeman doesn’t need to know that, lad. How do we know they tire, Mister Burton?’
Burton considered this for a moment, and glanced up at his captain. ‘Well, their pikes are low, sir,’ he ventured.
Stryker grinned, the puckered skin that was once his eye socket creasing in its usual macabre fashion.
‘Very good, Mister Burton. Their pikes are low. Their shoulders are down. Their step is all over the damned place. So what must we not do?’
‘Any of that, sir?’
‘Exactly. Pass the colour to Corporal Mookes and check over the men, Ensign. Any man looking tired, dropping his shoulders, lowering his weapon, missing his step . . . I want that man on a charge. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Sir!’ Burton barked, handing the giant standard of red and white taffeta to the corporal before turning his attention to the block as it made its inexorable progress toward the enemy.
The young officer had puked his guts on to the reddened snow during the first push. This time he’d be too busy for that.
It was but a moment before the pike blocks met. Never a man to stand aside and watch his company do all the work, Stryker had cut down two musketeers as they hurriedly loaded their weapons to spew lead into the Royalist ranks. He heard the drummers shift their beat to indicate that pikes should be levelled, and he heard the thud as the front ranks lumbered into one another.
Eager to join his men and coordinate the push, Stryker began to move toward the mass of bodies as they heaved onward. Already the Parliamentarian force was reeling against the strength of his ferocious pikemen, and he felt a pang of pride. But before he had covered just a few paces, he was faced with a new threat. Two bluecoats had broken away from their unit and were approaching him in the chaos, one on either side, attempting to outflank him. The man to his right was of average build, but his eyes were fearful and wild, like a caged animal. He gripped a thin blade in his white-knuckled fist, holding it level with Stryker’s face. The other was a gigantic beast, wielding half a broken pike. Unfortunately for Stryker, the half he held was the business end, its red blade glistening with menace.
Stryker was confident of besting a single opponent, but two were daunting, especially given his compromised vision. Deciding that all the courage was to be found in the bigger man, Stryker chose him as his first target.
The big man offered a peg-toothed grin and jabbed at the air between them with his half-pike. He was too far away from Stryker to do any harm yet, but he had made his intention abundantly clear.
Traitor's Blood (Civil War Chronicles) Page 2