Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles

by Michael Arnold

  Captain Stryker, with the musketeers at the side of Grenville’s huge human hedgehog, felt every muscle and sinew in his scarred body tense. He marched to battle yet was forbidden to fire. The immediate threat from the Roundhead musketeers had diminished now, thankfully, for they seemed to have pulled back to join the main body of men standing on the high summit, but it remained a terrifying prospect to stroll into the face of the enemy without first softening their spirits with flying lead.

  ‘Always knew I’d die with a gun in me ’and,’ a voice droned from Stryker’s blind side. ‘Just didn’t realize I wouldn’t be allowed to use the fuckin’ thing.’

  Stryker smiled, more due to the knowledge that William Skellen was with him than to the tall sergeant’s sardonic commentary. A constricted sound emerged from beyond Skellen, as though someone stifled a sneeze, and Stryker looked across to see Simeon Barkworth chuckling.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but never heard the words. They were obliterated by a bone-fracturing explosion a hundred and fifty paces up the slope. The first of Parliament’s cannons had fired.

  The whole of Grenville’s division seemed to stagger back a step, shrinking and wincing as if each man believed he could keep his head if he could retract it far enough into bunched shoulders. In the sudden, muffled aftermath, Stryker peered around, searching for casualties. He heard the screams before he saw the wounded, somewhere away to his right, and it was then that he saw another full division of men, frantically forming up on the grassy slope. Hopton’s column, attacking from the south, on Grenville’s right flank, had made it to the upper section of the hill, only to be summarily smashed by rebel artillery.

  Stryker shook his head clear, the silence quickly replaced by a high-pitched ringing, only to hear Grenville’s voice bellowing at the head of his men. It did not matter that he was still unable to discern the order, for he was immediately swept up in the motion as the Royalist division rumbled into life again.

  ‘By God’s blessed kneecaps,’ he heard Forrester intone nearby. ‘We’re marching into the bloody ordnance.’

  Sure enough, the rest of the iron tubes, arranged like a line of black toads, squat and ugly on the steep slope, belched into life. Some were double-charged, and they roared their anger with tongues of bright flame and billowing smoke that filled the air with the stench of rotten eggs. They hurled their iron lumps down the face of the hill to tear a swathe of gore through the flinching Cornishmen.

  To Stryker’s left marched the divisions commanded by Slanning and Basset, and they seemed to be taking the brunt of the volleys’ ire. He saw three shots race down the slope, one flying overhead, but the others sailing true, plucking men out of line like a child tossing aside his toys.

  ‘Can we shoot yet, sir?’ the tremulous voice of one of Stryker’s musketeers reached him from the redcoats at his back.

  He twisted back angrily. ‘No you damn well can’t, Godwin! Not till I say. Sergeant Skellen?’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ Skellen replied smartly.

  ‘Any man shoots, stick your halberd up his arse.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Three of the cannon were aligned directly with Grenville’s block of pikes, and they each spewed forth smoke as their charges ignited. The men braced themselves for impact, step faltering in that horrific moment of expectancy. And what a short moment it was, thought Stryker, remembering the high, looping cannonades that had marked his last battle, Hopton Fight. There, the slope had been gentler, and the distance far greater, so the balls had been sent in high arcs to plummet on to their targets. Here the range was tiny and the guns were aimed directly down the steep descent, so that they scythed the air only feet above the tall grass.

  One of the balls fell short, skipping up off the turf like a flat stone skimming a lake, and took a musketeer’s leg clean away in a fine red mist. The others hit home, flattening files of pike, pulverizing the men it hit and causing the survivors to scream their terrors to the hills. Sergeants moved immediately in, snarling their practised threats so that the tight formations did not bend or break. Men wiped away blood and bone and brain from their ashen faces with trembling hands. The regimental preachers strode across the rear ranks, bellowing prayers and encouragement at men who heard only their own hearts beating.

  Up ahead, perhaps eighty paces now, the gunners pushed more spherical iron balls into their barrels, stepping away for their crews to set to work.

  ‘We’ll never reach them!’ a near sobbing man shrieked in querulous panic.

  ‘Yes we will, you chicken-hearted bastard!’ another snarled at him, clipping his ear with a swift slap.

  Stryker looked back up at the big guns. The snarling man was right, they would close the distance eventually, but at what cost?

  The ordnance lit up once again, each one firing from left to right so that the slope erupted in a great wave, the fieldpieces careening backwards on their split-trail carriages.

  The air pulsed. More men died, another corridor was ripped open in Grenville’s dense block of pike. Stryker stepped over a man, wailing, inconsolable, begging for his mother. His fingers, stained deepest red, groped at the ragged stump that was once his leg, the limb obliterated below the knee by a bouncing round shot.

  ‘Jesu,’ Stryker whispered.

  ‘Bad business, sir!’ Skellen shouted above the screams.

  Stryker looked at him, realizing the sergeant thought his blasphemy was for what he had seen. In fact, it was for what he was about to do. ‘Are you with me, Will?’

  Skellen affected an amber grin. ‘Always, sir.’

  Up at the high Parliamentarian position, Major-General James Chudleigh had reined in alongside his fellow major-general, Erasmus Collings, as the ferocious artillery burst to life. They exchanged pleasantries as briefly as possible. Chudleigh disliked the Earl of Stamford’s spymaster and knew the feeling was mutual. He shifted his gaze to the pair of prisoners.

  ‘They seem rather distracted.’

  Collings raised a hairless brow. ‘One is a spy, and has been soundly beaten, sir. The girl has been walked.’

  Chudleigh looked up from the dishevelled captives. ‘Walked?’

  Collings’s face was expressionless as his hard little eyes met those of the rebel commander. ‘A method to extract confessions from those suspected of witchcraft.’

  James Chudleigh did not consider himself a bad man. Stubborn, yes, fractious on occasion, but not wicked. And yet in his frustration with Cecily Cade he had handed her over to Collings in the hope that his threats, perhaps even his evil, coal-pebble eyes, would frighten her into giving up her secrets. He had not, it seemed, fully considered the implications of such a decision.

  ‘Christ on His cross, Erasmus, I asked you to interrogate her. If it comes out that we tortured a woman as we would torture a damned warlock—’

  For answer, Collings beckoned one of his companions over with a wave. He was a dark-clothed man of average height, with straight, shoulder-length auburn hair, a brown beard flecked with silver, a huge, hooked nose and teeth that were so large they might have better suited the horse on which he perched.

  ‘Osmyn Hogg,’ he said smoothly. ‘God’s chief witch-finder, sir.’

  Chudleigh offered a brusque nod. ‘Well?’

  Hogg waited as a new barrage of cannon fire reached its world-shaking crescendo, clearing his throat as the thirteen explosions began to ebb. ‘She is your prisoner, Major-General, of course. But she is also charged with making a vile compact with Satan.’

  ‘So you see,’ Collings interrupted swiftly, ‘I am at liberty to employ the most expedient methods in this case.’

  ‘And did she talk?’

  Collings threw Hogg a venomous glance before shaking his head. ‘No, sir. Not yet.’

  Chudleigh gazed down at the girl. She looked gaunt and weak, but news of her continuing obstinacy eroded what little compassion he had been prey to. ‘Are you ready to watch your precious king’s men die, Miss Cade?’

  Just then a loud m
urmur swept along the deep lines of infantrymen ranged to the group’s right. It was as if each of the five thousand men had drawn a simultaneous breath, easing it out upon a few whispered words. Chudleigh looked across, seeing that something had indeed set them to feverish gossip, and he was about to berate their officers for allowing such behaviour in the ranks, when he noticed one of the sergeants gesticulating frantically at something down on the slope with his halberd.

  Chudleigh wrenched his horse’s head so that it turned to face Stratton Hill’s western slope. His gaze raked across the grass, over some of his more advanced musketeers, and to the line of smoking fieldpieces. Men scuttled around them, hurried to and fro like ants about a nest, and he expected them to belch forth at any moment. Except they did not belch. Indeed, they did nothing at all. Now they were silent.

  ‘Dear God,’ he whispered.

  Stryker and Skellen had burst from Grenville’s increasingly ragged division and sprinted towards the line of artillery pieces that had punished them so severely.

  At first Stryker had not known what exactly he was going to do, but one thing was certain, the guns needed to be taken out of the fight. He had thrown his musket to the nearest man, for speed was crucial, and bolted free of Berkeley’s silent detachment, bounding up the hill as fast as his aching legs would allow. Even as he ran, he considered the foolishness of the idea, wondering what exactly two men could do against thirteen cannon and their crew, but then more thumping steps could be heard behind and he risked a brief glance over his shoulder to see twoscore redcoats careening in his wake. They were not just his men either, but Forrester’s as well, his old Brother of the Blade leading the way.

  And then they were at the guns, swords drawn, banshee cries shrill and demonic, and the gunners were already on the back foot, stunned and terrified by the sudden ferocious charge, as though they faced frantic-eyed berserkers from days of old. They panicked, began to run. Stryker hacked a man down with his big, basket-hilted blade, the expensive Toledo steel, commissioned for him by Queen Henrietta Maria herself, flashing through the man’s face as though he were made of silk.

  He ran to the nearest cannon, kicked another gunner away in case he was attempting to fire the iron beast one last time, and immediately had to crouch behind the barrel as a musket-ball pinged off one of the big wheels. But the ball landed at his feet, barely dented, and he realized the shot must have come from a great distance, for it had been almost powerless when it reached him. He rose to his feet, stared into a dense patch of smoke until the breeze shifted it, and there, midway between the ordnance line and the bustling crest, he spotted the closest team of rebel musketeers.

  ‘They’re too far away!’ he shouted to anyone who would listen. ‘Keep going, lads! Send the bastards back!’

  The men responded, hacking and bludgeoning their way through the bravest – or slowest – of the gun crews, suddenly confident that the enemy marksmen were too far out of range to pose any real threat.

  Skellen was nearby. Stryker could not see him at first, for the area around the cannons was thick with powder smoke, but he heard the sergeant’s roar, a battle-cry borne in the gutters and taverns of Gosport and honed on the bleeding lands of Saxony. Barkworth was there too, screaming unintelligible Gaelic curses at men who must have thought a true demon puckrel had come to claim their souls for the underworld.

  ‘Spread out!’ Forrester’s tone, strained with battle but still distinct in its educated cadence, reached him through the stinking fog. ‘Take the rest of the guns, damn you! Take them all!’

  Stryker repeated the call, realizing they needed all thirteen pieces decommissioned before Hopton’s divisions could gather pace, but he quickly saw that the last vestiges of the enemy crews were gone, high-tailing it up towards the safety of the summit. He stopped, heaving in a few massive breaths to steady his heart and mind. The guns were captured, just seconds after they had fired their last, and he jabbed his bloody sword at the air, a banner to which the tattered Royalist columns could flock. And there, no more than fifty paces away, he saw the huge ensign of Sir Bevil Grenville surge through the acrid mist like the prow of a warship.

  The king’s men were coming.

  James Chudleigh slapped a hand against his right cheek to suppress the tick. Somehow it would not relent, the skin flickering madly beneath his eye.

  ‘They have captured the ordnance, sir,’ an aide murmured at his side. ‘Without a shot fired.’

  Chudleigh rounded on the unfortunate man. ‘God’s precious blood, man, I can see that!’

  The cheek twitched ever more violently.

  ‘No matter,’ Major-General Collings, still beside Chudleigh on his smaller mount, intoned nonchalantly. ‘They must now march up hill into a force more than twice their size. It is lunacy, and they will lose.’

  But Chudleigh was staring down at the advancing Royalists, his heart beginning to rattle inside his chest. He ignored the tick, leaving it to shiver wildly, and hurriedly drew an ornate spyglass from his saddlebag. He trained it on the lower slopes, taking in the overrun cannon and the bodies of pike and musket that were now this side of those impotent emplacements. And then he shifted the glass further back, towards the tree line, and took in the men and colours that still spewed from the hidden lanes. ‘Hopton is down there.’

  ‘General?’ Collings prompted warily.

  Chudleigh lowered the glass, glanced across at the skeletal face with its jackdaw eyes. ‘Only Grenville’s men have advanced beyond our guns. The rest of their pitiful little army still muster against the trees.’ He thrust the glass back into the saddlebag and slammed a fist into his opposite palm. ‘He has overreached himself, gentlemen, and we can destroy him while his friends dither.’

  The tongue-lashed aide found his voice again, clearing his throat awkwardly. ‘Sir, we will let them come to us, yes? Dash themselves on our steady ranks. They do not have the numbers to trouble our position, and soon your father will return with our horse.’

  But the young major-general was not listening. Instead his gaze was fixed firmly upon the most advanced of the Royalist ensigns, a gigantic blue standard cutting its way through the drifting smoke. ‘That is Grenville. The popinjay leads his cankerous whoresons ahead of the rest. Thinks he can cow our men by holding his fire.’

  ‘He’s probably run out of powder,’ Collings interjected levelly.

  Chudleigh shook his head. ‘It is a knavish trick!’ The twitch had gone, and Chudleigh inwardly thanked God for the sign. ‘Believes he can best me on his own, does he? By God I will show him.’

  Chudleigh raked his spurs viciously along his mount’s flanks so that the beast lurched into action, and he steered it right to the edge of the flat summit, cantering along the front of the first of his two vast lines of infantry. This first line was filled with the best men of Devon. His own pikes were here, and those of Sir John Northcote, and even Merrick’s redoubtable greycoats. Perhaps three thousand in all, stretched into a line that covered the better part of nine hundred paces.

  He looked for Northcote’s banner and galloped directly towards it.

  ‘My pikes, Sir John!’

  Northcote, a dour fellow with tightly trimmed whiskers, clear blue eyes and close-cropped hair that did not show beneath his hat, offered an uneasy frown. ‘Shall we not simply wait for them to struggle up the slope, sir?’

  ‘No, sir, we shall not. I would take my pikes down to thrash Grenville while he is without support. Some of your men too, and a body of the greys.’ He peered back down at the foremost Royalist division, gauging their strength quickly. ‘He has five or six hundred there, so I will take a thousand.’

  ‘But, sir—’ Northcote began to protest.

  ‘But nothing, sir!’

  Chudleigh wrenched his horse away, leaving the colonel no option but to obey, and stood high in his stirrups as his detachment took shape a little way down the slope. Of the thousand, the vast majority were pikemen, with a hundred or so musketeers in support, and they shu
ffled dutifully into place.

  When they were ranged before him, he drew his sword, revelling in the rasp as it cleared the scabbard’s throat, and pointed the keen tip down at the steadily marching foe. ‘Let us flense these savages,’ he bellowed so that the men in the packed ranks could hear, ‘and toss their remains into the sea!’

  ‘Huzzah!’ came the cry, rippling through the bristling new body of men.

  ‘Take heart! These are not your countrymen. They are dirty, Pope-loving Celts! Heathen men, no better than those the Lionheart crushed so many years ago. Now take up his legacy! Complete his journey! God will reward every man here!’

  The men cheered again, but this time the cry was taken up throughout the entire rebel force, surging across the hill’s summit like a rain-swollen tide. They stabbed their pike staves up at the clouds, thousands of points of light glimmering from thousands of blades.

  Major-General James Chudleigh slid down from his horse, tossed the reins to a waiting officer, and strode out to lead his men to battle.

  Stryker saw the Parliamentarians move off the crest, slowly at first, but picking up speed with every pace as they hit the hill’s steep incline, and he knew the real killing was about to start. The skirmishing – so bitter and drawn out – had been no more than the day’s opening exchange. Here, on this grassy slope between the dense forest and the flat crest, the land would become a charnel house.

  He retrieved his musket and returned to Grenville’s column as it began to fan out, pikes on the left, muskets to the right. Stryker looked back, hoping to see the rest of Hopton’s army, and there, swarming up from the tree line like God’s own host, came the remaining trio of Royalist columns. But they were too far back to influence the fight, at least for the moment, and Grenville’s men were on their own.

  ‘It’s Chudleigh!’ he heard someone call. ‘That’s his banner!’