Devil's Charge (2011)

by Arnold, Michael

  ‘Drop it,’ Stryker said calmly, ‘or my friends will see you dead before you can pull that trigger.’

  The robber, a stocky brute with jug ears and thick copper-coloured hair, merely winked. ‘A brave gamble.’ His voice was calm, and, as Stryker stared at the levelled long-arm, noting how it did not waver, he began to have his doubts. The shot would be difficult. For the robber to be sure of hitting Stryker’s head, even at such close range, would take great skill, and yet the hand clutching the weapon was steady, the man behind it determined.

  The wagon’s driver kicked out, his foot jabbing savagely upwards, the sharp point of his boot, powerful and unexpected, meeting with the robber’s groin. The movement caught everyone off guard, not least the big-eared gunman who had held his ground so belligerently.

  The man screamed, but still did not relinquish his weapon. He let his arm drop to blast a hole in his surprise attacker, but the driver was rolling rapidly away, scrambling into the scrub at the road’s edge, where the moon failed to penetrate. The caliver, fired wildly amid the man’s pain-wracked cries, spent its fury straight into the deep mud.

  Stryker’s captive saw his opportunity and spun round, reaching for a dagger at the small of his back, but Stryker was too fast and ran him through. As the new-made corpse slumped to its knees, Stryker heard two more shots, the distinct coughs of carbines, and the men at the baggage dropped limply on to the sticky earth.

  ‘Traitor!’ the copper-haired robber, caliver in one hand, balls in the other, was screeching frantically as he swept the empty long-arm like a club in great arcs just inches from the ground. It was so difficult to see in the darkness, but Stryker knew the man must be hunting for the driver of the wagon, hoping the heavy wooden stock would meet flesh in the confused gloom. ‘Fucking traitor! I’ll split your ’ead like—’

  Stryker’s sword curtailed the last arc with an arm-shaking clang as he stepped into the man’s path. ‘Drop it!’

  The man ignored him, instead taking his spare hand from his injured groin to grasp the caliver with both hands. He screamed, and lofted the makeshift club vertically above his head, intending to slam it down in a blow that would crush Stryker’s skull as though it were eggshell.

  Stryker was prepared, and stepped backwards as quickly as the treacherous ground would allow, confident the attack would fall short.

  It never came. As the frantic assailant summoned all his reserves of strength, the lethal point of another sword had darted from the gloom to take him at his exposed armpit. The blow was heavy, crunching through skin and bone, finding its way between ribs, not stopping until several inches of sleek steel had disappeared inside its target.

  Air sighed from the wound with the sound of a blacksmith’s bellows. The robber’s grip failed, the caliver falling from his paralysed fingers, and only then did William Skellen jerk his blade free.

  The robber’s eyes became suddenly dull. And then he fell, face first, into the mud.

  The wagon-driver introduced himself as Abel Menjam when he had eventually been coaxed from his hiding place within the dense trees. The wound at his head was superficial, a gash sustained as the wagon overturned, and Skellen quickly stemmed the bleeding with a tightly bound strip of cloth.

  ‘I’m in the corn trade,’ Menjam had said as Stryker and his men dragged the four bodies into the thick undergrowth at the side of the bridleway. He described how his vehicle had collided with a great branch, unseen as it lay across the night-shrouded earth, and, as he had been thrown from the upturned wagon, his assailants had burst from the shadows.

  ‘A farmer, sir?’ Skellen asked.

  Menjam’s high-pitched laughter was like the yap of a small dog. ‘No fear, sir! I sell it. Far simpler than growing the stuff!’

  Stryker kicked at the spilled kernels. ‘I’m sorry you have lost your wares, Master Menjam.’

  Menjam, a head shorter than Stryker, extended a hand. ‘I have my life, sir. For that you have my deepest thanks, Colonel—?’

  Stryker shook the dainty hand, noting the soft skin of a man unused to hardship. For a moment he had considered pretence that they were not soldiers, but the way in which their paths had crossed had precluded such a lie. ‘Captain Grant,’ he replied, thinking quickly. ‘For King Charles. We could not ignore your plight.’

  Menjam grinned through thin, purple lips. ‘Well I am glad of it, sir.’

  Stryker looked at the small man, from his wisp of grey hair, past his twitching black eyes and his clean-shaven chin, to the tips of diminutive feet that pointed from beneath the hem of a long cloak. And irritation stirred within him. Menjam’s perverse joviality was jarring in the wake of so much death. ‘Why were they trying to kill you?’ he asked bluntly.

  ‘Common padders, sir,’ the smaller man said lightly. ‘Godless brigands. Jumped out from the trees. They were after money, but no doubt they’d have dispatched me for sheer sport.’

  Stryker frowned. ‘You will ride with us.’ He nodded to the upturned wagon. ‘Your cart has a broken axle and your horse is dead.’

  Menjam bobbed his head brightly. ‘I should be grateful, Captain Grant. For as far as your own journey allows.’

  ‘Lichfield,’ Stryker said. ‘We make for the town of Lichfield.’

  Menjam threw his arms skyward, exclaiming his thanks to God. ‘Then we are bound for the selfsame place, sir! The Maker truly looks kindly upon me!’

  The wind bit hard as they took to the road, hunched into cloaks drawn high and tight. Vaporous tentacles rose from the horses’ flanks like the fingers of phantoms, grabbing at the black night above them.

  Two hours before dawn Stryker took the decision to rest. The moon stole only fleeting peaks through clouds threatening snow as they lit a small fire in a clearing at the road’s fringe. Skellen had blasted a hole in a decent-sized rabbit as it fed the previous dusk, and he now hung it from a branch by long hind paws and skinned it from tail to shoulder.

  Abel Menjam helped Forrester forage for kindling, and the pair made a small pile of it. From the corner of his eye, he noticed Stryker rummaging at the foot of a broad ash. ‘What have you there, Captain Grant?’

  Stryker straightened and held out a hand, in which sat what looked to be a piece of coal. ‘King Alfred’s Cake, they call it.’

  Stryker threw it suddenly, sending the semi-spherical black lump tumbling across the clearing towards Skellen. The sergeant extended a wiry arm, plucking the projectile out of the air and holding it up to Menjam. ‘God’s own tinderbox.’

  Forrester came to stand beside Menjam. ‘Daldinia concentrica,’ he said. ‘It’s a fungus, the flesh of which will take a spark if dry enough.’

  ‘Get it lit before the snow, Mister Dove,’ Stryker said, ‘and it should take fine.’

  Forrester nodded, betraying no sign of his amusement at the name. ‘Burns slowly,’ he said to Menjam, ‘but it’ll get our twigs going with any luck. And it’ll save our powder and match.’

  When the embers began to spring from the black fungus and on to the kindling, the rabbit’s bare flesh was spitted along Skellen’s sword and the blade propped over the flames by gnarled branches. The men gathered cross-legged before the fire, drawing as close as the heat would allow and sniffing the air eagerly as the rabbit sizzled and spat, its aroma tantalizing.

  Stryker stared into the dancing flames. ‘I never thanked you,’ he said to Skellen when Menjam had paced into the undergrowth to urinate.

  ‘For Potts? I thought he’d kill you, sir,’ Skellen’s sardonic voice drifted back across the flames. ‘So I got ’im first. I’ll be sure an’ wait for orders next time.’

  Stryker opened his mouth to rebuke the sergeant, but Forrester, fat snowflakes beginning to speckle his wide-brimmed hat, snorted with laughter. ‘Quite right, William!’

  ‘Well I hope we have seen the last of Colonel Crow,’ Stryker said.

  ‘Do have a care,’ Forrester replied, his usually open features screwed tight, serious. ‘He thumps his Bible with the ve
ry best preachers, but I hear the bugger’s frantic as a bloody bedlamite. And he leads a fine troop of dragooners, all of which would gladly do his bidding and employ your back as target practise.’

  Stryker tossed a twig into the flames, the damp bark hissing madly. ‘I’m not concerned with Crow. When the Prince finds out we’ve escaped we’ll have the whole army after our hides.’

  ‘May I ask of your business in Lichfield?’ enquired Menjam casually as he stepped out of the tree line.

  Stryker watched as the corn seller came to sit, holding childlike palms to the tremulous flames. ‘Army business, sir.’

  Menjam was unperturbed. ‘Forgive my simple curiosity, Captain. My, I am famished. Can’t wait for a bite of that tasty-looking coney.’

  Stryker kept his eyes on Menjam. ‘Curiosity can see a caliver pointed at your head.’

  ‘I have told you,’ Menjam persisted earnestly, ‘I am a seller of corn, nothing more. I cause no trouble, nor seek it out. At least until last night, when my produce was sown in the mud by that pack of ruffians and my trusty old pony cruelly shot.’

  Stryker nodded, though his grey eye did not flinch from Menjam’s face.

  CHAPTER 5

  Oxford, 15 February 1643

  A way to the south and east, in the commandeered home of an ousted Parliamentarian, a barrel-shaped officer with ruddy features and hair spiked like hackles rubbed the dregs of sleep from his glassy eyes.

  ‘What is it?’ Colonel Artemas Crow said as he shoved himself out of the rocking chair that had served as bed for the night, blinking at the big silhouette leaning casually against the frame of the open doorway.

  ‘You summon me?’

  Crow looked at the newcomer with disfavour. ‘I summoned you last night, Major Edberg.’

  The man addressed removed his red-ribboned hat and ruffled his hair with a handful of thick fingers. ‘A hard night, Co-lo-nel,’ he said.

  Crow squinted as Edberg spoke. The major’s English was good, but heavily accented, and it grated that he struggled to wrap his tongue around Crow’s own title. He watched Edberg step into the room. The man was broad and tall, like an ancient oak, looming, intimidating. He wore the same clothes as Crow, the yellow coat and breeches, the dark riding boots, the sword and pistol, though the red scarf about his waist was shabbier, and there were no feathers in his hat.

  Unlike Crow’s bristle-topped pate, the major’s hair was long and golden. It was not curled in the fashion of so many of the king’s rakehells – those men who brought about the derisive Cavalier monicker – but fell in tousled clumps, matted by the sweat of long rides and tough fights.

  A blade had nicked Edberg’s cheek, leaving a scarlet wound, puffy and livid, running horizontally above his golden moustache. The major’s boots, bucket-tops pulled up to protect his thighs, were covered in filth where he had ridden through the sticky terrain, while a myriad droplets of blood speckled his buff-coat’s skirts and sleeves.

  ‘Losses?’ Crow asked dubiously.

  ‘Ja. Two. Ran into the oäkting to the south. Killed five.’

  The colonel tugged angrily at his spiky hair. ‘You lost two men?’

  Edberg’s expression betrayed nothing. ‘You want to build a reputation for this troop? I win you fights.’

  Crow sighed heavily, but relented. A victory, however costly, was all that mattered. ‘And are the men improving?’

  Edberg gave an almost imperceptible nod. ‘We continue daily evolutions, sir. And I hammer them.’

  Crow’s pale stare lingered on the barrel-chested mercenary. ‘I bet you do.’

  Edberg picked his nose, wiping the contents on the greasy sleeves of his buff-coat. ‘What news?’

  Crow stood, moving to a table on the room’s far side. He gathered up his cross-belt, sword and scabbard. ‘I pay you well, do I not?’

  Edberg watched with blank disinterestedness as his colonel buckled the belt just below his right shoulder and attached the scabbard at his left hip. ‘You do.’

  ‘But you are a mercenary. You would like more.’

  ‘Naturligt,’ Edberg agreed. ‘The killing in England is not going to end. Not any time soon. And where there is killing, there is money to be made.’

  ‘War is business,’ Crow said, knowing the Stockholm-born major had fought for the Protestant Union at virtually every major engagement of the last fifteen years. ‘It is why I hired you.’ He waited for a moment. ‘But how about I give you something better?’

  Edberg bunched his upper lip so that his coarse moustache touched his nostrils. ‘What can be better than coin, Co-lo-nel?’

  ‘Rank.’

  Edberg’s left eye twitched a fraction.

  A ghost of a smile crossed Crow’s face. ‘I am a very powerful man, Major. This troop is bankrolled from my own purse. What say you to a regiment of your own? Perhaps you should learn to pronounce—Colonel?’

  Edberg sucked thoughtfully at his moustache. ‘The price?’

  ‘A death.’

  Edberg did not flinch. ‘Who’s? A Scotch’un, I hope. I was at Newburn. Scotch fucked us right in our arses.’ The battle of Newburn had been a terrible defeat for King Charles’s armies at the hands of the Scottish Covenanters. ‘I hate those bastards. Hate their hides. If he’s Scots, I’ll kill him gladly.’

  Crow rolled his eyes. This swash-and-buckler was as taciturn as a statue, but mention the Scots and he would happily recount the lurid details of that rout on the banks of the River Tyne. ‘Our man is English, Major. Stryker.’

  The big man sucked at the matted hair of his top lip again. ‘Stryker. That skitstövel from Cirencester.’

  Crow clenched his teeth so that his jaw pulsed in pain. ‘I want rid of him, Major. I want him rotting in the ground.’ He paced past Edberg, striding out into the bustling courtyard on to which the house fronted. The small area of churned mud had been home to Crow’s dragoons since they had followed Prince Rupert back from Gloucester, and the whole area stank of horse flesh and leather tack, unwashed bodies and stale drink.

  ‘But he’ll be shot,’ the mercenary was saying as he followed Crow across the ankle-deep slop. ‘We saw to that at the hearing. Why did you want him dead, anyhow?’

  Crow rounded on the Swede. ‘The man murdered Saul and Caleb Potts, Major!’

  ‘But they were stealing those mounts.’

  ‘Irrelevant.’

  The pair had passed between two of the courtyard’s properties and out on to some common land, where a small barn rose from the wet grass. Crow entered the barn without ceremony, causing a dozen hats to be snatched off dipped heads, but he ignored the deference, instead singling out one man. ‘Is my horse ready?’

  ‘Aye, she is, sir,’ the trooper replied, darting off to take the bridle of a big grey.

  Crow turned back to Edberg. ‘News has reached the Prince. Disturbing news.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Crow’s face seemed to redden further. ‘It transpires the murderous churl has escaped.’

  Now Henning Edberg’s face cracked in a slight frown.

  Crow’s mount had been led to stand beside him, and he hauled himself expertly into the well-buffed saddle. ‘Rupert is embroiled in his usual court intriguing, and has authorized me to oversee Stryker’s capture,’ he said, gathering up the reins.

  ‘He won’t be in Cirencester now, sir.’

  ‘Of course he won’t,’ Crow snapped. ‘But I know where he went.’

  The cobalt eyes widened a fraction. ‘He talked of Lichfield. At the hearing.’

  ‘You recall it too. Whatever business he had there seemed dire urgent, did it not?’

  ‘It did.’

  ‘Go there, Major Edberg. Find the swaggering devil.’ He leaned down so that his mouth would be closer to Edberg’s ear when he spoke. ‘But do not bring him back.’

  ‘You want me to kill him,’ Edberg replied, ‘against the general’s orders?’

  Crow nodded slowly. ‘And in return I will make you Colonel Henning Edberg.�
� He grinned wolfishly. ‘How does that sound?’

  ‘Good,’ Edberg said bluntly. ‘But I want one other thing.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Tell me why. Why did I lie at the hearing? Why must I kill him now? Why do you hate him so?’

  Crow straightened, nodding towards the stable entrance. ‘Close the door.’

  A minute later, when the door swung open again, Colonel Artemas Crow nudged his horse out of the stable and into a tentative canter. Mud began to spray up at him, but, for the first time this vile winter, he did not mind. He almost laughed aloud, for he was about to have the revenge he so craved. And Captain Stryker was going to die.

  Near Roughley, Staffordshire, 20 February 1643

  The fitful snow cleared by mid morning, and the arduous progress of Stryker’s small group was much improved under cloudless skies. They cantered where they could, pleased finally to give the horses a run after so many days of snail-paced drudgery. Abel Menjam maintained his almost constant ebullience, despite looking laughably incongruous atop Oberon. He gripped Forrester’s coat tightly as the captain urged the enormous beast over the frozen ground, only releasing a hand to adjust the crusty bandage encircling his head.

  ‘You never did tell,’ Menjam said over Forrester’s shoulder.

  Stryker, in the lead, twisted to look at him. ‘Tell?’

  ‘Your reason for visiting Lichfield, Captain Grant. That is to say,’ he added quickly as he saw Stryker glower, ‘that Staffordshire is a place of hot rebellion. The Midlands are for Parliament, town by town.’

  ‘It is not so risk-fraught,’ Forrester answered before Stryker could think of a suitably noncommittal response. ‘Lichfield remains for the King.’

  ‘Aye, that’s as maybe,’ Menjam replied, ‘but many of the common folk are ardent rebels, mark, ’tis a matter of religion.’

  Stryker shrugged. ‘We’ll take our chances.’

  They negotiated a narrow, moss-fringed bridge that took them across a brook of clear water, stickleback dancing beneath the amber current like minuscule shadows.