Devil's Charge (2011)

by Arnold, Michael

  Stryker remained silent. The looting of the dead was as much a part of battle as the fighting, but he understood Skellen’s disgust. The ghouls, as Skellen put it, drifted in from town and village as night fell across a battlefield. They would pick their way through the human detritus in search of wan cadavers that could no longer protect their most precious possessions. They would pillage those corpses, or take blades to those still clinging grimly to life, rifling through pockets for anything remotely of value, and snapping already stiff fingers to relieve them of rings.

  ‘They’ll hide in the forest,’ Skellen said, ‘and creep out when the fighting’s done.’ He shuddered. Men like him did not fear battle, or the act of dying, but the thought of being one of those stripped and looted cadavers was a rare thing of terror.

  ‘But you’re in the right of it, Sergeant,’ said Stryker. ‘It won’t be difficult to find the battlefield with that lot as our guides.’

  Captain Lancelot Forrester thought his heart would explode, such was the fear he now felt. He swallowed hard, forcing a caustic bubble of vomit back down his throat, and gripped the reins as tight as he could. The hooves were a blur beneath him, flinging clods of mud in all directions, but he could not hear them, for their thrum was a mere fraction of the rumble that he knew would be felt all the way up to the heath’s crest.

  But Forrester could not see that crest, for he was one horseman in amongst so many hundred. As an infantryman, he did not have the skill to ride with Northampton’s elite harquebusiers, but the earl was astute enough to know that to lose the talents of an experienced officer would be foolish in the extreme. So Forrester had become a dragoon.

  The mount he rode was slow but steady, not an oat-fed lightning bolt favoured by the cavalry, but a solid, obedient beast that would not shy from gunfire. Dragoons were mounted infantry, so Forrester had a new musket slung at his back, and that gave him cause for comfort, for he hated relying on the dubious reliability of the short-arms employed by harquebusiers.

  But now, in this instant, as the heavy artillery belched smoke from the ridge, he was simply one of a thousand riders. The Earl of Northampton and his son were at the front of the vast, ground-churning column, Colonel-General Hastings was out on the left with his own formidable troop, and Sir Thomas Byron headed the right flank. They thundered forwards, a cacophonous, steel-clad mass of power and speed.

  Forrester could not see the lethal iron sphere, but he heard it. It whistled high and fast from the midst of the grey-coated infantry on the ridge, its cry shrill above the roaring hoofbeats of the oncoming Royalists, like the caw of a raven in an autumn gale, and Forrester instinctively ducked into his horse’s neck, wincing, tensing every sinew.

  And the cannon ball flew high above their heads and far beyond even the rearmost horsemen.

  Forrester twisted back to see the ball smash into the wet earth. It burrowed its way into the ground, sending grass and gorse and mud flying in all directions, leaving a wide, dark smear in its wake. A tidal wave of relief washed through Forrester’s veins then, as he realized the Royalist column had ridden under the arc of the ball. Their madcap sprint, its speed and recklessness, had not been the suicidal charge he had imagined, but a deliberate race to pass beyond the killing range of the rebel artillery.

  When he turned back to face the slope, confidence in his commander suddenly renewed, he was startled to see the foremost riders with their arms aloft, signalling for the column to halt, and it took all his strength to wrench his eager mount to a trot.

  For several moments the massed Cavaliers were in utter disarray as the more fleet-hoofed beasts overshot their slower or more compliant compatriots. The fastest horses had to be savagely kicked and cajoled back into the column, for they had no wish to break off the charge, and nor, suspected Forrester, had their masters, but Northampton was there, right at the front, stood high in his stirrups and bellowing for discipline.

  The great cannon up at the top of the slope crashed another volley, but this time the Royalists paid no heed as the ball flew impotently above them. Instead they listened to their earl. He snarled orders for them to resume the tight formation, threatening dire penalties for those who disobeyed. None did, and soon the column was back together, tight and bristling.

  ‘We are safe from their ordnance, praise God!’ the Earl of Northampton bellowed as he cantered across the front rank. ‘But there will be no charge! No charge, I say! You wait for my mark and my mark alone!’

  The earl turned his horse to face the ridge, drew his sword and thrust it up at the rebel formation’s leftmost extremity. ‘Look to the hedges. The rebels will have snipers there!’ The blade flicked to his right, the Roundheads’ left flank. ‘And there too! Behind those walls!’

  Captain Lancelot Forrester followed the earl’s gaze and realized that he was probably right. And then a thought struck him. One that made his heart pound again and his stomach twist and his bowels begin to loosen. He swallowed hard, reached down to check that his sword slid easily in and out of its scabbard, whispered a silent prayer and awaited the inevitable order.

  ‘Dragoons!’ the Earl of Northampton cried. ‘Forward!’

  Stryker and his small party heard the hoofbeats and knew they were close to the killing ground. The noise gave Stryker the impulse to check his weapons, and he patted the buff-coat, pistols and sword he had taken from the outbuilding where Girns and Rontry had stayed during their time in Brocton. Happy that he was armed and prepared for a fight, he increased the group’s pace as best he could, always mindful that each bump and trough in the perfidious road caused Jonathan Blaze to cry out in agony.

  Eventually they reached a fork in the road, and, noticing the silhouettes in the forest were taking the right-hand option, they followed suit.

  ‘Couldn’t keep away, eh?’ A croaking voice, broad with the accent of Britain’s far north, rang out from behind a wide tree, sudden and heart-stopping. ‘I heard you’d escaped the Close, but didn’t think I’d be seeing you so soon.’

  All eyes turned to the tree line, Stryker, Burton and Skellen unsheathing swords, Blaze yelping at the movement.

  A man clutching a long sword stepped into their path. At his back came more men. Soldiers bearing muskets and blades.

  And Stryker grinned. Not because the soldiers wore the red sashes of King Charles, but because their leader was a stocky, scarred, bald-headed dwarf, with bright yellow eyes and a huge, mottled scar that ran across the breadth of his neck.

  ‘What are you doing here, Master Barkworth?’

  Simeon Barkworth sheathed his weapon. ‘Where were we to go when Gell sent us packing?’ he said. ‘He stripped us of anything of value, including our weapons. So we walked to Stafford.’

  ‘All of you?’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ Barkworth replied in that hissing tone, a legacy of a noose-crushed windpipe. The Scot raised a brow. ‘Your Swedish friend, too.’

  ‘Jesu,’ Stryker muttered. It was the first time he had thought on Henning Edberg since Lichfield, and the revelation that he was somewhere on Hopton Heath was a bitter blow indeed.

  Barkworth shrugged. ‘But he is away with the dragoons. Even now they’re deployed on the heath.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I have the pickets, sir,’ the little man explained. ‘Protecting the earl’s rear, should Gell think to sweep round the flank and attack the artillery.’ He pointed to the road at his back. ‘The battle is on the heath thither.’

  ‘You have artillery?’ Blaze spoke now, his weak voice suddenly pricked with a needle of excitement.

  Barkworth looked at him, his amber eyes widening as he took in Blaze’s damaged appearance. ‘Aye—sir. Roaring Meg is being readied even now.’

  Blaze leaned forward to speak directly into Stryker’s ear. ‘Roaring Meg, Captain. I must go to her!’

  Stryker twisted in his saddle to catch Blaze’s blackened eye. ‘Who is she?’

  Blaze’s shredded lips turned up at the corners. ‘She, Stryker, is Staffor
d’s famed demi-cannon. A fearsome beast!’

  Stryker nodded in understanding and stared back down at the commander of Northampton’s pickets. ‘The earl leaves you out here, while the battle rages?’

  Simeon Barkworth offered a rueful smile. ‘He knows only what he sees, sir. A little man from a defeated garrison. We are humiliated, Captain. Fit enough for picket duty only.’

  Stryker looked at Skellen. ‘A waste, wouldn’t you say, Sergeant?’

  Skellen sniffed. ‘For certain, sir. Poison dwarf should be in the front rank, where he can block a few musket-balls.’

  Barkworth’s feline eyes narrowed as he looked at Skellen. ‘Battles are treacherous places, Sir Crannion. Be sure to watch for daggers between those lofty shoulders.’

  Skellen grinned broadly. ‘You couldn’t reach these lofty shoulders.’

  ‘We’re here to fight, Barkworth,’ Stryker interjected. ‘And you’re coming with us.’

  The little man’s features creased in a crooked-toothed smile that turned the scars on his face a pale white. ‘Sir. Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Who is your second here?’

  Barkworth indicated a halberd-wielding fellow half a dozen paces to his right. ‘Sergeant Meadows, sir.’

  ‘You there!’ Stryker called to the man Barkworth had pointed out. ‘Meadows!’

  The sergeant, tall and willowy, with a hooked nose and a face full of red freckles, strode obediently over. ‘Sir?’ he said, copying his superior’s deference when addressing the one-eyed stranger.

  ‘Master Barkworth has duties with me,’ Stryker said curtly.

  ‘And you are?’ replied a baffled Meadows.

  Stryker’s face darkened. ‘Someone you’d do well to avoid displeasing.’

  Meadows’s thin neck quivered as he swallowed nervously. ‘Master Barkworth is with you, sir.’

  ‘Good lad,’ Stryker replied. ‘You’re in charge here now.’

  Barkworth stepped forward. ‘Sir?’

  Stryker met the yellow gaze. ‘How does the earl mean to proceed?’

  Barkworth thought for a moment. ‘After the dragoons have cleared the rebel flanks? He has cavalry, sir. He will lead a frontal charge.’

  ‘Hardly a shock,’ Stryker said, thinking back to Spencer Compton’s exploits during the Continental wars.

  Barkworth’s face became taut. ‘You mean to join him?’

  ‘Gell has my sword,’ Stryker replied truthfully, ‘and I want it back.’

  ‘Captain,’ another voice broke across the discussion.

  Stryker turned his head so that he could speak across his shoulder. ‘I had not forgotten you, Master Blaze.’ He looked back at Barkworth. ‘This is Jonathan Blaze. The greatest expert in ordnance under the king’s command.’

  Barkworth eyed the fire-worker dubiously, but nodded understanding. ‘Roaring Meg?’

  ‘Roaring Meg,’ echoed Stryker. ‘Take us to her, if you would.’

  To Stryker’s surprise, Simeon Barkworth’s face lit up in a smile that reached all the way to his eyes.

  ‘You seem—pleased?’ Stryker stared at the Scot nonplussed.

  ‘I think there is something you’ll wish to see, sir.’

  The dragoons surged forwards, their cornets at the front, small flags high, rippling manically in the rushing wind.

  Captain Lancelot Forrester was galloping at the very centre of the massed horsemen. The hoof-borne thunder was deafening, the cold air parched his mouth, the sweat dripped from beneath his pot to send stinging rivulets into his eyes. All around him were the red coats of the Earl of Northampton’s regiment, bright smears of colour stark in the drab afternoon. Occasionally his eye would catch other uniforms. Browns and greens and yellows. But he paid them no heed. Today he was one of Compton’s men.

  The prearranged time to separate was upon them in short order. Mid-way up the slope half the dragoon column were to peel to the left, and half to the right. The fluttering cornets were raised even higher, and the riders urged their horses one way or the other, and then the large force divided, a pair of vast snakes, slithering across the grass and gorse.

  Forrester was with the faction surging to the left of Hopton Heath. He peered up at the ridge. It stretched out above them, a looming spectre that was, he reckoned, of a length equivalent to two musket shots. Grey-coated pikemen and musketeers manned that ridge, darkening the sky at their backs by sheer weight of numbers, but Forrester ignored them, for those men were hemmed in by hedgerows on one side and low walls on the other. It was those flanks that interested him.

  As the dragoons surged on, Forrester squinted up at the hedges that formed the Parliamentarian right flank. Already he could see their dull pastel colours were interspersed by the metallic glint of weaponry, and realized the enclosures beyond would fairly bristle with defenders.

  The sharp reports of musketry began to split the late afternoon as the dragoons came within range. Forrester gritted his teeth and urged his mount on, for the only choice was to ride headlong at the rebel flank and smash those musketeers to oblivion. He saw the smoke plumes drift listlessly from the foremost hedgerows, giving away the shooters’ positions, and picked one as his first target, praying he would reach the man beyond before a lead ball picked him clean off his horse.

  When they were fifty yards from the first hedge, the ground became suddenly pitted and they were forced to slow the charge. Forrester leant across his saddle and stared at the terrain passing in a blur beneath him, and realized with horror that they had galloped headlong into the midst of a rabbit warren. He saw, with a degree of relief, that their course took them along the warren’s very periphery, the burrows becoming increasingly numerous towards the centre of the heath, but the charge was still at risk of stalling.

  ‘On! On!’ the leading officers screamed, for they were too close now to abort the attack.

  Forrester dug deep for a reserve of courage and spurred his horse on, praying its hooves would not fall foul of the treacherous earth, and ducking as low as he could to avoid the musket-balls flying all about like summer midges.

  And then he was there, crashing into the first hedge, his sword somehow looming high in a white-knuckled grip. The musketeer he had picked out was crouched on the far side of the dense foliage, frantically blowing on his burning match tip, desperate to reinvigorate the half-hearted embers. He stared up at the blade-wielding spectre that cast a shadow across him, eyes pristine and white with terror, and then the sword swept down in an irresistible arc, cutting through the cloth of the Roundhead’s montero cap and crushing the skull beneath.

  Forrester ignored the shrill cry and the gleaming blood that now dripped from his sword-point, for his own life depended upon a quick assessment of the situation. To his left and right, all the way along the hedgerow, his fellow dragoons were slashing down at the first musketeers. A handful of the enemy, like his own victim, had gambled on having their weapons reloaded by the time the horsemen reached them, and that gamble had been a bad one, but most of the grey-coated defenders were already falling back to the protection of what Forrester now saw was a complex network of enclosures, stretching back across the whole depth of the ridge. Orders carried to them from those deeper defences, and it was clear that the greycoats were busily hunkering down to make ready their muskets.

  ‘Christ,’ Forrester hissed, wondering how the dragoons would penetrate the hedges. They could no more negotiate the natural breastworks than the column of harquebusiers waiting at the foot of the slope.

  ‘Dismount!’ The order, turned to a snarl by urgency, reverberated through the dragoons, and, almost as one, they began to slide quickly from their saddles. They formed two ranks, for there was not the room for men and horses to stand side by side at the hedge-face.

  Forrester, in that first rank, watched his new comrades with surprise at first, but then he realized that this was the natural course to take. He was an infantryman by trade, and, amidst the heat of battle and the metallic tang of newly shed blood, it had not occur
red to him that this kind of action was exactly what Northampton had expected. Dragoons were not cavalry, but mounted infantry. Soldiers afforded both the speed of hooves and the versatility of foot. They did not need to leap the obstacles to bring blades to bear, for, unlike traditional cavalrymen, they had weapons offering far greater range.

  He obeyed the order and, copying the more seasoned troopers at his flanks, moved quickly behind his horse, using the big beast’s bulk as protection. He unslung his musket and began to load it.

  Already the Parliamentarians were giving fire, making the air all around fizz with bullets, but their aim was poor and undisciplined, made so by anxiety, and only one man and one horse were wounded in the exchange.

  And then the Royalist dragoons were primed and ready, and the orders to give fire blurted from the most senior among them. Forrester heard the directive as well as any man, and he moved out from behind his mount and stepped up to the sternum-high hedge, hoisting his musket to his right shoulder.

  The Earl of Northampton’s dragoons fired their flintlocks in a great volley that rolled across their front rank in a massive wave. And then that front rank was reloading amid their rising smoke halos, and the rear rank fired between them. The sound was an ear-splitting crash of simultaneous explosions as hundreds of pans flashed together, but Northampton’s dragoons were seasoned troops, and not a single man flinched. The Parliamentarians in the hedgerows bore a heavy toll, for their tangled breastwork of foliage, though perfect for deterring horses, was no protection against flying lead, and their units were enfiladed with horrific ease. Men were snatched back, their blood spraying on to the bushes and mixing with the exposed soil of rabbit holes.

  ‘Mount!’ the red-coated officers screamed.

  The order reached Forrester as a muffle, for the two volleys had obliterated his hearing, but he understood well enough, and, musket still loaded, hauled himself back into the saddle. He looked across to the left, and saw that three or four of the dragoons had slashed at the hedge with their swords until a gap had opened just big enough for a horse to pass through. Forrester wrenched on his reins and had soon joined his comrades in a single file line that passed through the hole and into the enclosure beyond. One or two muskets cracked from the Parliamentarian lines in defiance, but Gell’s Derbyshire men were still in total disarray after the close-packed and disciplined Royalist volley, and they had not yet gone to ground to begin an organized resistance.