Devil's Charge (2011)

by Arnold, Michael

  All around them the wounded were being ferried back to Hopton, where Gregory Chambers waited, and Stryker knew the doctor would be soaked to the skin in blood, cutting, sawing, tying, aided by a team of surgeon’s mates who would be pinning down the badly wounded as their limbs were crudely and hurriedly butchered off.

  ‘Sir!’ Another voice reached them now. The speaker was trotting in their direction, a grin splitting his face. ‘Lieutenant!’

  ‘I bloody survived, thank Christ!’ Andrew Burton exclaimed. ‘Hot work though, eh?’ He smacked his lips together. ‘And not a drop to see me through it.’

  Stryker chuckled. ‘My compliments, Lieutenant. Have you seen Barkworth?’

  Burton shook his head. ‘He was in the melee. That’s the last I saw of him.’

  The three walked their mounts further down the slope to where the Royalists’ only piece of artillery stood, silent and still, on its wicker platform.

  Gun Captain Porter strode up to them. ‘Sir, your lady took Master Blaze down to the village.’

  Stryker nodded. ‘How does he fair?’

  Porter wrinkled his lips. ‘He’s poorly, sir.’

  Stryker turned away, gazing up at the ridge from whence the next glut of Chambers’s patients would soon come. The newest Earl of Northampton had already smashed into the waiting Parliamentarians and the battle raged all across the higher ground. But this time the rebels had kept their form and their discipline, and the pikemen, arranged in tight, bristling squares like vast iron-clad hedgehogs, were defending the units of musketeers, who spat leaden fury into the midst of the cavalry.

  ‘Why don’t ’e let us fire, sir?’ Porter said, the frustration clear in his tone. ‘Northampton, I mean.’

  Stryker looked at the Welshman. ‘Northampton’s dead. His son commands now.’

  ‘And his son did not see the damage Meg caused?’

  ‘He is stricken with fury and grief, sir,’ Stryker replied. ‘He sees nothing but the need to kill.’

  Porter shook his head angrily. ‘But he charges against well-organized pike and shot, Captain. Without first making a few more holes, he will dash his men against them like waves at Rhossili’s cliffs.’

  Stryker did not answer but stared back up at the ridge, where, sure enough, the Royalist horsemen were already wheeling away, desultory musket fire and rising jeers chasing them across the bloodstained heath.

  ‘Shit,’ Skellen muttered.

  Stryker dipped his head to Porter and kicked his horse into action. ‘Enough rest, lads!’ he called over his shoulder, and Burton and Skellen spurred their own mounts forwards.

  They rode up to join the Royalist cavalry as the thousand horsemen reached the heath’s lower third and circled round to launch another assault.

  ‘You!’ A voice cracked like a drake blast from the leading riders.

  Stryker instinctively stared at the ground, urging his mount to move away.

  ‘You there!’ The snapping, aristocratic tones reached him again. ‘The one with the scars!’

  Stryker had wanted to avoid attention, but he could hardly ignore the more specific hail. He looked up, seeing the new Earl of Northampton cantering over to him.

  Sir James Lord Compton raised the sliding nasal bar of his helmet and looked down at Stryker. His face was blackened by smoke, but the tears had scored vertical white lines down his clean-shaven cheeks so that now he appeared like an armour-plated jester.

  Stryker lowered his gaze. ‘My lord.’

  ‘I saw you, sir,’ the earl said levelly.

  Stryker lifted his chin to look at the twenty-year-old. ‘Saw me, my lord?’

  The young man sheathed his sword and took a moment to wipe blood spatters from the gauntlet of his left forearm with the leather of his right. ‘Try to save my father. Your name?’

  ‘Stryker, my lord. Second Captain, Mowbray’s.’

  Northampton’s brow wrinkled, this time spawning horizontal white lines. ‘Foot?’

  ‘Sir.’

  The earl drew his blade again, making Stryker flinch. ‘You showed great valour, Captain. Something I shall not forget.’ He turned his horse. ‘Form up! We charge again!’

  It began to rain as the flying column hastened up the slope for a third time. The men were tiring, but anger at the loss of their leader drove them on. The great blade-flashing mass and the ground-shaking thunder of screams and whinnies thrashed across the rabbit warren once again. More horses fell, but as before the number to make it all the way through was a testament to the horsemanship of the riders. They hit the first Roundheads with bared teeth, snarled oaths and bloodied swords.

  Stryker’s horse went down. He did not know if the beast had been hit by flying lead or had simply snagged a hoof in one of the myriad holes, but before he could think, he was lying face down in the bloody grass. He patted himself down quickly, hearing the battle rage up ahead, and realized with relief that he was unscathed.

  In a second he was up and running, pausing only to snatch up a discarded tuck, sprinting into the men of Gell’s front line. The block he faced were musketeers in the main, but there were pikes there too, and he had to spin past a thrusting point to reach the Roundheads’ waiting swords. He parried the first blow, gave three short stabs of his own, the second of which met with a wet smack against the bridge of his enemy’s nose. The man reeled away, blood spurting freely, and his comrades either side hesitated in the face of Stryker’s rage.

  It was then that Stryker heard a voice he knew. One that brought with it a flood of memories: of booming mortar fire; of a dark, looming gallows; and of a sneering moustachioed face.

  ‘Gell!’ Stryker shouted, but all he could see were the nervous faces of grey-coated infantrymen, braced for attack behind their swords and upturned muskets. He spun on his heel, looking for some kind of leverage.

  There, turning dazed circles at the edge of the fighting was a huge piebald horse, and he ran across to it. A man sat in his path, weeping inconsolably, his knee shattered by a musket-ball that would condemn him to a life of begging in some city gutter. Stryker kicked him out of the way, gathered the limp reins and heaved himself up into the black saddle.

  He was at the battle line in moments and, from his new vantage point, could see a tall, slender man, with tight black curls cascading from beneath a pewter-grey helmet.

  ‘Gell!’ Stryker bellowed. ‘Gell!’

  The fight’s din was deafening, but, eventually, the object of Stryker’s focus looked up, a sudden flash of recognition igniting his features. And Sir John Gell grinned.

  Stryker saw the blade in the Parliamentarian commander’s hand, and recognized it immediately. It was madness, he knew, to throw away his life for a piece of metal, but something about Gell’s mocking expression sent an incandescent rage coursing through his veins, and he kicked forwards.

  Gell was three ranks away, a pair of sword-wielding greycoats standing in his way, but the first saw the fury on his face and began to step back, throwing the man behind off balance.

  Stryker screamed and surged. The second man managed to raise his blade, its tip opening the flesh of the horse’s rippling shoulder, but the animal was a destrier, a big, muscular, battle-bred beast, and, though it let loose a shrill whinny, it did not break stride.

  And then Stryker was through, and Gell stared up at him, the grin gone, the moustache no longer upturned, but a black line adding definition to tightly pursed lips that showed only fear. Gell raised the blade he had taken from Stryker at Lichfield, and Stryker could immediately see that the Derbyshire man was trained in swordsmanship. But here, on a blood-reddened piece of Staffordshire heath land, such things counted for little. This would not be a gentleman’s duel of dancing feet and flicking wrists. It was a brutal, dirty brawl. The kind Stryker had known all his life. The kind he liked.

  Stryker wanted his sword back. It had been awarded to him by Queen Henrietta Maria, the best, most perfectly balanced weapon he had ever held, and it enraged him to know that another man w
ielded it. He slid from the saddle, walked up to Gell, and lifted the cheap tuck he had collected near the face of the melee. Gell darted forwards, but Stryker swept the blade up, knocking Gell’s thrust aside with brute strength, and chopped downwards in a heavy blow that drove a great dent into the Parliamentarian’s rounded helmet.

  Gell staggered back, only just parrying a second chopping arc and barely managing to keep his feet.

  ‘You’re the one from Lichfield Close,’ Gell hissed, stalling for time.

  Aware that he was in the midst of the enemy, Stryker strode forwards. ‘You have my sword.’

  Stryker was thinking only of recovering his possession. Gell’s exquisite blade was up in a flash, red edge gleaming, but Stryker batted it away contemptuously and lunged. The tuck might have been a cheap, standard-issue affair, but its original owner had still taken the time to hone it to a feathered sharpness, and that sharpness took its point through Gell’s thick doublet and made short work of the collar underneath.

  Gell screamed as Stryker’s inferior weapon slashed across the base of his neck, opening a deep gash that immediately spurted a stream of blood down the Parliamentarian’s chest plate.

  Gell dropped the sword and stumbled backwards, gabbling incoherently as he clutched hands at the wound. Stryker went in for the killing blow, but already Royalist trumpets were loosing their querulous message, compelling his comrades to retreat, and a heartened swarm of rebels were coming to their stricken commander’s aid. There were too many for Stryker to face alone, and he dived to scoop up the Queen’s blade, its red garnet twinkling from the ornate pommel. A man wielding a savage-looking partizan challenged him as he straightened, but Stryker had no wish to linger, and threw the cheap tuck at the rebel’s face. Partizan met blade, sending it skittering harmlessly away, but the move had given Stryker time to scramble back to his waiting destrier. As the vengeful rebels converged on him, he ground boot heels hard into the big piebald’s sides, and the beast lurched violently away from the ridge.

  Some two hundred yards from the battle’s centre, at the very edge of Hopton Heath, on the Royalist right flank, a troop of dragoons cantered down the slope. They had been part of the force sent by the old Earl of Northampton to clear the walls of the deer park that had been manned by Gell’s musketeers and his remaining four drakes.

  Just like the dragoons of Northampton’s left flank, their foray had been successful, and the walls had been taken after a short, bloody scrap. And now, as the Royalist cavalry disengaged all along the ridge, the troop, summoned by the new earl, were on their way to join the next charge. It was getting dark, so, the dragoon commander surmised, the Royalist commanders were becoming desperate and every available man would be required, even at the expense of the flanks.

  ‘Down to the bottom of the slope,’ called the leader, a muscular-set major with golden hair and moustache. ‘They will wheel round and charge again. We must join them.’

  The major looked across the ridge as he reloaded his weapons, a carbine and a brace of pistols, marvelling at the Parliamentarian change in fortune. He did not know how they had managed to hold the crest after being so near destruction, but now they were offering a stout, organized defence that would be extremely difficult for the Royalist cavalry to break down.

  And then he halted. His horse, a capricious beast purchased only days ago in Stafford, stomped agitatedly at a patch of gorse, and he growled a low warning into its pricked ear. For he no longer wished to move to the foot of the slope.

  ‘Sir?’ a nearby officer prompted.

  The major looked sharply at his subordinate. ‘We are ordered to the bottom, so take the men down.’

  ‘You’re not joining us, sir?’

  Major Henning Edberg shook his head slowly. ‘I will follow presently.’

  He had seen a ghost.

  CHAPTER 23

  Captain Stryker, the last man to break away from the melee, coaxed his piebald warhorse through the rabbit warren, flinching with each jolting hoof-fall. Behind him, shoulder to shoulder, stood the jeering ranks of Sir John Gell’s Parliamentarian army. In front, some two hundred yards away, was the swirling mass of Royalist cavalry, regrouping for the next clash of flying mud and snorting horses, spraying blood and clanging steel. Far to his right horsemen streamed down the slope, the dragoons, he presumed, sent to clear the hedgerows. He wondered if Forrester had survived. To his left, riding parallel with Forrester’s group, were the second detachment of dragoons, those men sent up to clear the walls criss-crossing the other Parliamentarian flank.

  His eye lingered on the latter group. The dragoons, ambling down the edge of the heath, harassed – if not overly hindered – by the musketeers on the crest, had something about them that snagged in his mind. It was not the small flag gripped at the head of the troop by a skinny cornet, for that declared allegiance to the Earl of Northampton. It was something else. Something Stryker could almost identify but that stayed tantalizingly obscured by rainfall and by the fog of war, nebulous and mocking.

  Muskets still coughed from up on the ridge, but he was far enough away to be out of range for any but the best marksmen, and he began to relax, even as a lone rider broke away from the dragoons.

  The rider cantered at an even pace across the heath towards him, and Stryker slowed his mount, lifting a hand in greeting. It was only when the dragoon was around fifty paces away that a flame of recognition scorched his mind. He had not thought to see this man again, but the yellow coat, the yellow hair and the yellow whiskers were all too real. And so was the carbine he now saw, jutting from the rider’s outstretched arm, and so was its flame and its smoke plume and its sharp report.

  And suddenly Stryker was galloping. Major Henning Edberg’s shot had missed his thigh by an inch, finding a home in the piebald stallion’s fleshy rump. This time the pain was too much for the stallion’s training to absorb. It reared in agony, bolting down the slope in the direction of the gathering Royalists, and Edberg swerved his own mount to follow.

  At the foot of the slope the king’s cavalry were beginning to wonder if this was not to be their day. After a murderous, triumphal opening hour, they had failed to take the ridge. Moreover, the three charges had cost them scores of men and horses, several officers, and the Earl of Northampton himself.

  ‘We must go again quickly, by Christ!’ Sir James Compton, Third Earl of Northampton said as an aide fastened a tourniquet above his knee. ‘It is getting too dark to continue, and the rain will make that damned coney warren even more precarious.’

  Sir Henry Hastings, mounted at the young lord’s right hand, nodded in agreement. ‘But not you, sir.’

  Sir James turned on him, the movement causing him to hiss through gritted teeth. ‘It is not mortal, Sir Henry.’

  ‘But it is bad,’ Hastings warned. ‘You are losing much blood. Any more and you will swoon, and even you cannot lead a charge like that.’ Sir James sighed heavily, a gesture Hastings read as acquiescence. ‘Thank you, my lord. I will take command.’

  The younger man remained silent, and Sir Henry Hastings lifted his face to the brooding sky, feeling fat raindrops burst on his skin. ‘Once more,’ he said quietly, and then raised his reddened sword high for all to see. ‘Once more!’

  Sir James, Lord Northampton, left at the foot of Hopton Heath with a score of retainers, watched Hastings go and felt a burning shame, for the charge was his to lead. Yet the wound, for all his bluster, was severe, and it would be folly to ride with the fourth assault. He gazed at the backs of the galloping men, praying they would avenge his father before the day became too dark to continue the fight.

  Another horseman caught his eye. It was strange to pick out one rider among so many. Yet this man was not charging up the slope, but down it, the horse taking a wide berth around the great, earth-shattering column. In the rider’s wake came another man, one of the yellow-coated dragoons Sir James remembered joining the Stafford garrison after the fall of Lichfield, and his immediate instinct was to assume the
first man must be a Roundhead. But then he saw the rider’s horrifically mutilated face, and recognized him as the only man to have gone to his father’s aid, risking his own life in the process.

  The earl turned to his nearest aide, as the pair sped past. ‘Theophilus?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘What the devil d’you suppose they’re about?’

  Stryker ignored the charging throng of cavalry as he fought to regain control of the stallion. It careened as fast as its powerful legs could manage, ears taut, eyes like white plates, nostrils blasting, the pain in its rump having turned it from obedient steed to frenzied demon in the blink of an eye.

  Up ahead was the very foot of the slope, and that area, parallel with the place he had left Roaring Meg, was studded with small, tangled copses. He gripped the reins tighter, if only to stay in the saddle, and looked beyond the stallion’s big head. Sure enough, the crazed animal was headed directly for one such wooded grove, a place of trunks and branches and fallen logs. A place of untold peril for a bolting horse and anyone foolish enough to perch on its back.

  So Stryker drew his sword, threw it on to the heath, and let go.

  He was vaguely aware of a crashing sound as the stallion bolted through the copse, leaving a vast swathe of wreckage in its wake, but the fate of the wounded beast was the least of his concerns. The ground whirled around him as he hit the long, rain-drenched grass of the wood’s edge, and he expected to hear the crack of shattering limbs. But he managed to curl into a fast, bruising roll that took the brunt of the impact, and though his whole body seemed to ache, he was able to scramble to his feet in short order.

  He retrieved the blade, quivering tip-down in the mud as Edberg reined in above him. The dragoon pulled a pistol from his saddle holster and aimed it at Stryker’s heart. ‘I thought Gell stretched your neck.’

  ‘He saw sense.’

  Edberg’s icy-blue gaze narrowed. ‘So it would seem.’ The hand holding the firearm twitched.

  Stryker kept his face blank, though his heart gave his chest a rapid battering. ‘Why does Crow want me dead?’