Devil's Charge (2011)

by Arnold, Michael

  Heel swallowed thickly. ‘He’s over at some boozin’ ken near the abbey, sir.’ Skellen cast Heel a sour look, but the burly man from Tiverton shrugged helplessly.

  Stryker glowered. ‘You saw him? How was he?’

  ‘Gage in his fist, an’ eyes like a couple o’ piss-holes in the snow, sir.’

  ‘I’ll deal with him later,’ Stryker said sharply, already striding away, the party corralled at the Golden Goose in tow.

  The group strode out into the marketplace and immediately identified a group of soldiers from Stryker’s company gathered across the street. ‘You men!’

  Heads turned at the sound of Stryker’s voice. ‘Sir?’ one replied.

  ‘Back to billets! We march at dawn!’

  Stryker stalked away before the men could argue, and led his group to the nearest alley. They passed more men, ordering them back to their quarters and ensuring the message would be passed on.

  When the alley opened out into a wider thoroughfare, they saw a large group of men, carts and horses. At first Stryker wondered if the looting had increased to a far more sophisticated scale, but then a voice he knew well emanated from the party. It was a gravelly tone, made coarse by London’s streets and laced with the possibility of violence.

  ‘Bob!’ Stryker shouted at the men around the cart. ‘Bob!’

  At length, a heavy-jowled man with fat on his stomach and muscle on his arms stepped from the crowd. ‘Gabriel’s beard, Stryker, but this gaggle o’ lazy, piss-brained nanny hens are good for nothin’ but whorin’ and sleepin’, I swear it!’

  Stryker grinned at Robert Yalden, or Blunt Bob as he was known to the men. Sir Edmund Mowbray’s regimental wagon-master was famously short-fused and impressive in a fight, and, to Stryker’s mind, one of the colonel’s most wisely picked staff officers. ‘Where are the horses, sir?’

  ‘Satan’s stones, man, am I your bloody mother?’ Yalden snarled. ‘Am I?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Stryker said quickly, ‘but you are the most knowledgeable and efficient wagon-master in the entire army.’

  ‘Well fuck me backwards if your nose ain’t covered in my dung!’ He pointed a gnarled hand in the direction of a large building of timber frame and low roof. ‘Old storehouse. When we got here it was full o’ tallow candles and dragoons. Now the candles are in the lads’ snapsacks, and the store’s full o’ horses!’

  ‘And the dragoons?’

  ‘Out on their ear.’ Yalden patted his sword-hilt. ‘Took some persuading, but they saw sense.’

  ‘Thank you, Bob,’ Stryker said, as Skellen smirked in the background.

  ‘Sir to you!’ Yalden snarled.

  ‘Sir,’ Stryker replied with a wry smile and turned away, leaving the wagon-master to berate his unfortunate subordinates. ‘I mean to check on the horses,’ he said to his men. ‘Rest of you go out into the town. Warn the men they’ll deal directly with me if they’re not ready to march by sun-up.’

  Stryker covered the fifty paces to the storehouse in short order, passing at least half a dozen homes whose doors had been flung open so violently that pale wood had been exposed where the hinges were ripped away. Skellen was at his heel, as Stryker knew he would be. A scream rang out from somewhere nearby. It split the air with its startling pitch, sharp and blood-curdling. There were many screams that night. Screams of the wounded, of the frightened and of the angry, and neither man paid any heed.

  The storehouse’s rectangular frontage stretched out before them. At its centre was a wide doorway, large enough for a cart to pass through. Yalden, as always, had chosen well.

  Flanking the doorway were four of Mowbray’s musketeers, grim-faced and watchful.

  ‘Captain Stryker and Sergeant Skellen,’ Stryker announced as he drew close.

  The musketeers stepped aside, one of them unlocking the great door as the pair passed.

  The temporary stable was wide and long, but its low ceiling and ripe stench made it feel suffocating. Skellen followed Stryker into its depths, staring about the gloomy building. There were somewhere in the region of thirty horses tethered to the upright beams of the walls. Greys and blacks and bays and chestnuts. All standing nervously, all staring at the newcomers.

  ‘Strange,’ Skellen murmured at Stryker’s side. ‘They’re not eating.’

  Stryker looked at the untouched hay strewn around the beasts. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Somethin’s spooked ’em.’

  Stryker moved further into the long room, caution ringing like church bells in his mind. At the far corner was a small table, piled high with various items of tack. ‘Where’s the stable hand?’

  Skellen looked at him. ‘Not somethin’ Blunt Bob would have forgotten, is it?’

  Stryker shook his head. And, as he moved deeper into the musty room, he noticed a leg jutting out from behind the table. He ran forward, crouching down beside the prone form of a young lad, a deep gash glistening at his temple. He removed his glove and felt for a pulse at the boy’s neck. It was there, faint but steady. ‘Sir!’ Skellen said, urgency inflecting his voice.

  Stryker stood, looking across the room to where the sergeant pointed. There was a door set into the wall, presumably leading to some kind of antechamber. The door was ajar, and, from beyond it, low voices could be heard.

  ‘Alert the guards, Will,’ Stryker ordered and, as the sergeant quickly obeyed, ran to the door and pushed it open. What he saw took him utterly by surprise. There in front of him was his own horse, Vos. The huge, red-coloured stallion was being coaxed through the antechamber to another door that, Stryker now saw, opened out on to the street beyond.

  ‘He won’t go, Saul,’ the coaxer was saying. ‘Won’t move a blinkin’ muscle.’

  ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’ Stryker said, striding by Vos’s muscular bulk to accost the yellow-coated man who gripped his bridle.

  The man simply gaped, and another spoke for him. ‘None o’ yer goddamned business!’

  Stryker spun to his left to see a second man dressed in yellow step into his field of vision. This, he presumed, was the one named Saul. ‘It is my goddamned business,’ Stryker said, keeping his tone level, ‘because it’s my goddamned horse.’

  The yellowcoats glanced at one another, each searching the other’s face for a response, but Stryker had seen enough. The guards at the front of the building were obviously unaware of the yellow-coated intruders, while the unconscious stableboy and use of such a furtive exit route told him only one thing.

  Stryker hammered his fist into the first man’s chin. The man released Vos’s looped reins, and, though it felt to Stryker as though he had punched an anvil, went crashing on to the messy hay.

  Stryker turned immediately on the one named Saul, lashing up at the man’s meaty midriff with the sharp toe-end of his boot. It connected in a dull thud, hard and fast, and Saul doubled forward with a howl of agony and surprise. When he straightened, his face was a mask of rage. One hand remained pressed to his injured guts, a knife appearing in the other. ‘Come, sir,’ he challenged, crouching slightly like a cat about to pounce.

  Stryker advanced quickly, hoping Saul had lost some of his wits with the blow, and moved a hand to the tacky shark-skin grip of his sword-hilt. The blade, his most prized possession, hung from its long scabbard, inviting him to reveal its lethal edge, but the room was small, especially so with the huge stallion stood patiently at its centre, and Stryker could not be sure that its length would prove help not hindrance.

  ‘Stick ’im, Saul!’ the first man, sitting up now, screamed, voice high and desperate as he hurried to regain his feet. ‘Hew ’n punch the fucker!’

  ‘Get off yer blasted arse, Caleb, and help me!’ Saul snarled, lunging forward as he finished the sentence.

  Stryker was ready for the attack. Saul had struck high, as Stryker knew he would, aiming the dagger for the exposed windpipe, and Stryker twisted away, performing an about-turn on the balls of his feet. He finished behind his attacker, and kicked savage
ly at the yellowcoat’s broad back. Saul careered into Vos’s solid flank, bouncing off the horse as though he had run into a tree.

  As Saul went sprawling on to the hay, Stryker turned his attention to Caleb, noticing how alike this pair were. Both had broad, flat noses and thick auburn beards. Both were of stocky frame, but significantly shorter than Stryker.

  ‘Not going to help your brother, Caleb?’ Stryker said. He glanced back at Saul’s inert body. ‘He’d be glad of the assistance, I think.’

  Caleb looked from Stryker to Saul and back to Stryker. A small whimper escaped his mouth, a whimper that became a bellow of rage. He leapt forward with the fury of a wounded bull, and Stryker had to react rapidly lest he be trampled by the crazed yellowcoat. This time he drew his long sword. It might not have been effective in a duel, but now it would most certainly suffice. He would not even have to deliver a stroke.

  Caleb ran straight on to the blade, the expensive Spanish steel piercing his clothing and flesh with little difficulty. Stryker was forced to use all his strength to keep a grip on the hilt, and he leaned in, putting his full weight behind the weapon. For a moment it seemed as though Caleb would keep coming, run through the sword and place meaty hands around Stryker’s throat. But then, as if time itself slowed, his momentum dwindled. It was as though he waded through slurry. And then he stopped. Stopped and sagged. The light faded from his pale blue eyes and the breath wheezed its way through the fresh hole in his chest.

  For a moment man and corpse stared at one another. Caleb was gone, but Stryker could not take his eyes from the man he had killed. The yellowcoat was hanging on the blade, blood blooming in all directions where the weapon had entered. He was held up only by the strength in Stryker’s hands.

  ‘Captain!’

  The warning was almost too late, for Saul had regained his wits and was bearing down upon him from the other side of the room. There was no time to pull the sword from Caleb’s broad frame, so Stryker released it, twisting away to face the new assault, and thanking God his assailant had lost his dagger during their first altercation. He ducked below Saul’s heavy punch, and rammed his own fist low and solid into the stocky man’s guts. Saul was unhurt, but it made him step back a pace, and Stryker followed him, unyielding, aggressive.

  Saul doubled over in a great bellow of anguish as Stryker kicked him in the balls, then grasped his shoulders in a grip of iron, lifting a knee savagely into his face.

  He howled as blood sprayed in a fine mist from his shattered nose, then he was stumbling backwards, reeling from the attack, retreating from an enemy that seemed unable to relent. Hands were at his shoulders again. He was being propelled rearwards, step by inexorable step, halting only when something hard met the small of his back. Then his eyes, fixed though they were on Stryker’s narrow face, seemed to glaze.

  Stryker looked down, staring at the trio of long iron prongs that filled the space between their bodies. Tattered pieces of Saul’s intestines hung from their sharp points like some implement used at a city shambles.

  ‘Thank you, Will,’ Stryker said, acknowledging Skellen’s timely intervention. ‘I owe you one.’

  The sergeant jerked the pitchfork free. ‘I’ll add it to the list, sir.’

  Stryker let Saul’s body drop to the floor and cast his eye across the carnage of the room. Vos still stood, impassive and immovable, but all around the horse it looked as though a petard had been ignited within the small chamber’s confines. Caleb’s body was slumped near the stallion’s front hooves, the sword still protruding from his sternum, blood escaping in a thick lake to stain the hay. Stryker walked across to the dead man and bent to grasp the basket-hilt of his sword, placing a boot against the already stiffening shoulder. ‘Hew and punch.’

  ‘Beg pardon?’ Skellen replied.

  ‘That’s what this bastard,’ Stryker said, with a gentle kick of the corpse, ‘urged the other to do.’ He glanced at Saul’s inert body. ‘I assumed that bastard would heed his advice. Luckily for me I was right.’

  ‘The old neck slash and belly slit,’ Skellen said grimly. ‘I know it well.’

  Stryker thought better than to ask for the sergeant to elaborate. He wiped the blade on Caleb’s breeches, leaving a long red smear across the bright yellow fabric, and slid it back into its scabbard. ‘Get those guards round here, Sergeant,’ he ordered, taking hold of Vos’s reins. ‘Tell the buggers to man the back door as well!’

  The hours went quickly by, for the night brought a ceaseless stream of duties. The sacking continued unabated, and with it came tales of drink-fuelled brawls, rape and murder. But the sack of a town was – by tradition if not law – accepted as the right of a victorious soldier, and Stryker could only curtail the acts of his own men, hoping that they would muster in time for the morning departure.

  It was still dark when he and Skellen made their way back to the marketplace to take a look at the number of prisoners the bitter storming had ensnared. They paced across the cobbles, seeing disparate groups of men huddled together at sword-point, waiting, Stryker assumed, to be herded to a central location where they might be held in the short term.

  A large, dirty-white dog ran across their path. It had beady black eyes and a coat of tight curls. It trotted to where Stryker stood, pausing to sniff at his boots and breeches, and if Stryker had not recognized the animal instantly, it might have earned a sharp kick for its curiosity. Instead Stryker straightened his back instinctively.

  ‘Ah, if it ain’t the rather less than innocent Innocent!’ Prince Rupert of the Rhine’s mildly accented English barked from some distance behind Stryker. The latter turned to see the extraordinarily tall general striding, head and shoulders above all others in the marketplace, from the direction of the parish church.

  Stryker gave a low bow, but Rupert ignored it. Instead he pointed at the blackened remains of a workshop facing on to the street. ‘In there,’ he said abruptly, before casting a look of distaste in the direction of the rapidly growing number of prisoners.

  ‘To your duty, Sergeant,’ Stryker called back to Skellen as he followed Prince Rupert – and the dog, Boye – into the fired chandlery. ‘By dawn!’

  Once beneath the precarious beams, Stryker snatched off his wide-brimmed hat, partly out of respect and partly because he was suddenly aware that the garment, a gift from Rupert, was looking some distance beyond its best. ‘Your Highness,’ he began, ‘I trust you are well?’

  ‘S’precious blood, Captain! Do not bow and scrape.’

  Stryker looked up, meeting that dark, intimidating gaze.

  ‘And put your bloody hat on,’ the prince snapped before Stryker could formulate a sensible response. For the first time, Rupert seemed to notice the guards that had followed them into the room. ‘Leave.’

  When the pair were alone, Rupert’s long face became impish as his keen eyes twinkled. ‘How was it? The blade, I mean?’

  Stryker could not withhold a smile when he thought of his new double-edged broadsword. ‘Incredible, General. Well balanced, strong and as sharp a thing as I’ve used.’

  Rupert grinned excitedly. ‘Did I not tell you? Spanish steel, Captain. Toledo, to be precise. The best of the best.’

  ‘And I thank Her Majesty for it daily, sir,’ Stryker said genuinely.

  ‘We were all grateful for your yeoman service last year,’ Rupert said. ‘In fact, Stryker, my aunt is quite taken with you. I will tell her you are pleased with the token.’

  ‘Token?’ Stryker brushed fingertips across the pommel’s twinkling garnet. ‘It is an incredible gift, sir.’

  Rupert nodded. ‘Quite so.’ He fished in his doublet briefly, eventually producing a silver drinking flask. ‘It is good to see you survived the fight, Stryker, damn me it is.’

  ‘Likewise, sir,’ Stryker said, accepting the flask and unscrewing the lid, ‘but this is a strange place to be toasting our victory, if I may be so bold.’

  As Stryker took a draught of the fiery liquid, Rupert glanced left and right as i
f the Earl of Essex himself might be crouched behind one of the black beams. He paused to rifle once more inside the doublet, which, Stryker could tell in the moonlight, was a mix of green and silver, its silks and satins shimmering with each movement. When his hand reappeared it gripped a small apple. Rupert sunk his teeth into its pale flesh, a bead of juice tracing a path down his pointed chin. When he had finished chewing, the prince met Stryker’s expectant gaze, his own eyes suddenly hard. ‘I have lost something, Stryker. Someone, to be precise. One of my agents. The very best.’

  ‘And you wish me to find him?’

  Rupert nodded slowly.

  ‘Where, sir?’ Stryker asked with a sense of foreboding. His last mission for the prince, which had cost three of his men their lives, and barely left him with his own, had been one of the most perilous undertakings of his military career, and he was not eager to experience anything similar.

  Rupert stooped to ruffle Boye’s coarse fur. ‘Staffordshire.’

  Stryker thought for a moment. ‘I was told Mowbray’s were marching on Gloucester with you, Highness.’

  Rupert nodded. ‘And they are. But without you.’

  ‘This mission is secret?’

  ‘Well, it ain’t public knowledge, Stryker, naturally!’ He took another bite of the apple. ‘When the main force marches west, to Gloucester, you will instead travel north.’ Gnawing away the last pieces of flesh from the fruit, he tossed it into the charred ruins at his feet, ignoring the panting Boye, who darted across the room to snaffle the core. ‘This agent was escorting an important man,’ Rupert’s voice echoed about the chandler’s smoke-stinking shell, ‘to Stafford. It is crucial to our cause. We have the south-west and Wales. And we have much of the north. The enemy hold the south and east. But who owns the middle?’

  ‘No one,’ was Stryker’s reply.

  The prince nodded sombrely. ‘Neither side and yet both sides. It is a kookketel, Stryker. A cauldron. Stirred and bubbling. We must take it, inch by bloody inch if need be. Stafford is garrisoned by king’s men. It must stay that way. The man my agent escorted was—’