Pistoleer: Roundway Down

by Smith, Skye

  Again a cry. He walked towards it and pushed aside some sacking in the corner of the only room. As soon as the sacking was removed the baby began crying in earnest. He lifted the smelly, bloody thing and tried to soothe the cry with his shushing. Yeh, right, as if that would work. He turned the baby over to see where the blood was oozing from. A cut, a knife cut to her shoulder. A long straight cut made by a sharp blade. The bastards likely cut the poor little thing to convince the mother to service them. It was a sharp shallow cut that had already crusted and stopped bleeding, so where was the blood from? And then he saw the ear above the cut shoulder. Where the lobe should be there was a pulpy red mass oozing blood.

  Something long and low shot out of the sacking at his feet. A snake? No, a rat's tail. He looked back at the baby's missing lobe. It had been chewed off. He kicked in the direction the rat had fled, but it was a waste of effort. During this war the rats, dogs, crows, all of the scavengers had lost their fear of man. Why should they fear man when for two years they had been feeding on their corpses all over the kingdom. He took the baby over to her mother lying on the floor and placed her on the left nipple, the less bruised nipple. Perhaps the babe could have one last feed. That may stop her from crying. That may even save her life if she were dehydrated.

  "No, no more, have pity," a weary voice whispered hoarsely. The woman still lived. Her eyes opened and she stared. "At least take your armour off first, so it does not scrape off my skin. Or if you are in a hurry, then do me sheepie style - but you will have to help me to my knees."

  "You have nothing to fear from me," he told her gently. He reached over and grabbed some of the sacking with which to cover her nakedness, and then passed her the aleskin he found underneath the sacking. He was about to ask her if that was her husband dead by the shed, but then decided not to. Such a question could make her hysterical, and he needed her to remain calm. The baby needed her to remain calm.

  As if she had read his mind she asked about her husband. "There is only you and the babe," he told her. "No one else is about. Everyone else must be in hiding. Who did this? How many were they? By which road did they leave?"

  Her arm moved to reposition the baby and then she pushed herself up on one elbow and stared at the door. "Along the Marshfield road. There are armies gathering along the high road to Bath. The men that, that, that were here were guarding two supply carts. I think the cargo was gun powder. They entered every cottage and took anything, everything they could eat. There were more than ten of them, perhaps a dozen. Not all of them - not all of them came into my cottage. The first of the men that, that - the first of the men wore a big purple plume in his hat."

  "How long ago did they, er, leave?" He had almost said 'did they finish with you'.

  "They will be halfway to Marshfield by now. No, not that far, for they were leading our cows."

  Daniel stepped outside, and was glad of the fresh air and brightness. He pulled his whistle up to his lips and let out three hard blasts in a row, and then bellowed out to the empty village, "There is a woman here who needs the help of other women!" Then he walked up and down blowing and yelling over and over, but there was no answer so he went back to Millie, untied her, and climbed into the saddle. He checked the primes of his guns, and then thrust a hand down into one of his saddle bags, and brought out two balls of baked clay. He emptied one of his small pouches of gun powder into the two of them and then re-stoppered them with their wax-and-fuse plugs. Once the two grenados were primed he turned Millie towards the west, towards Marshfield, to follow the carters who had sacked this village.

  He rode out of Colerne under a cloud of guilt at leaving the injured mother and child, but he shook it out of his head. He could do nothing to help the woman. She needed nursing and tending. She needed the help of other women. Beside, if the locals came out of hiding they may mistake him for one of the royalist foragers and take a bit of vengeance against a lone rider. These thoughts caused him to hurry Millie. If they were leading cattle, then he may be able to catch up to those foragers and punish them.

  "Don't be a fool," he told himself and slowed Millie and shook such foolish thoughts out of his head. There were ten men with those powder carts, at least ten, ten against one. More to the point, he had a ship to board in Bristol. His duty was to lead his clan to their new home in Bermuda, not to avenge a woman he had known for but a moment.

  With his thoughts more balanced he left the road to Marshfield and crossed an untilled field to reach another road; a road that ran west along the ridge. It was barely more than narrow rutted cart track but it was marked with a crude arrow sign that said 'Bath Road'. He kept to that track along the ridge edge so long as it took him west, but when it turned more southerly towards Bath, which he could now see clearly in the distance below, he stopped and looked for another way. He had no desire to go down into Bath.

  He found a drovers path that continued west along the ridge and then traversed down a steep slope, across a stream, and then up a steep slope on the other side to another ridge. Only when he made the top the new ridge did he realize that it wasn't just a ridge, but a plateau that was higher than most of the ridges and hills all around it. A plateau because it was flattish on top but was surrounded by steep valleys which made it almost like an island. For want of a better name he called it Catherine Hill after the abandoned village where he had crossed the stream.

  Bath was now directly south of him, but down in a great valley. It was here that he first heard gun fire, and not just from muskets, but from cannons, and not just a few shots, but continuous. He turned away from a steep path down that would take him to Bath and instead kept riding west along the southern edge of the plateau towards the sounds of gunfire. He soon reached the western most edge of the plateau, and there he turned north, and within a few hundred paces was stopped still by what he saw.

  Spread out across the top of the next hill to the west there was an entire army dug in. To the north east of that army and labouring up the slope, another entire army was attacking the first. On his entire plateau there was only him and yet within a mile of him across the next valley there were thousands and thousands of men swarming like ants all over the next hill. Both armies were huge and he could only guess at the numbers. Perhaps three thousand men aside, or perhaps more. He yelled a curse to the fates, for these two armies were blocking his way to Bristol. How dare they.

  He was too experienced of a scout to risk being seen as a silhouette on this skyline, so he dismounted and led Millie away from the edge. For an hour, or perhaps two, he made his way very slowly north along the edge, keeping off the skyline but occasionally moving on all fours to the edge so he could use his spectacle looker to view what was happening in the battle for the next hill.

  There was no safe way through or around the valleys below him, not with so many men, so many squads of mounted men ranging about. There was as much chance of him being captured and shot by one side as by the other. Bristol was only ten miles away, but he could not continue along this plateau until this battle was decided. He felt like screaming in frustration because that meant that he would have to back track for miles and use the Bath road to reach Bristol. Instead he continued to stare in grim fascination at the battle for the next hill.

  From the flag standards he knew that it was Waller's army on the top of the hill, and that it was his infantry who were dug in all around the top of that hill. Why would Waller leave Bath and move his army to that hill? From the standards he also knew that it was Colonel Bevil Grenville's Cornish infantry who were fighting their way doggedly up the slope. This meant that the other army were royalists under General Ralph Hopton. There were other standards too. Those of Prince Maurice, the devil prince's younger brother, and also those of the Marquess of Hertford, which meant that Hopton's cavalry had been reinforced by cavalry from the king's army at Oxford.

  For more than an hour he watched the battle from his viewpoint, and by that time the sun was dropping in the sky so he gave up his notion of backtrac
king through Bath to get around the battle. Instead he settled himself into a sheltered nook with a good view and chewed the last of his supply of smoked dried cod from Lyme while he watched the battle through his looker and tried to make sense of what was going on.

  This was obviously a strategically important battle so he wished Robert Blake were here with him, because Rob would be able to explain exactly what those strategies were, and what was at risk, and what was to be gained. Since both of these armies wanted to control Somerset, and since Hopton's had been reinforced from the king's main army in Oxford, then this could very well be the battle which would decide the fate of the entire SouthWest.

  After pondering as to why Waller had left the defenses of Bath for the hill top north of the city, the only reasonable explanation was the royalist canons. The royalists must have enough big guns to wreck Bath and all who sought safety there. By choosing to fight on this hill instead, perhaps Waller was trying to save Bath from a gruesome fate.

  His next pondering was to why Hopton's army was attacking Waller's up these steep slopes. That really did not make sense, not from such a seasoned general as Hopton. Attacking uphill put the attacker at such a disadvantage, that Hopton may as well have been fighting his way into an ambush. By the number of bodies strewn about it was obvious that the slopes had already taken a heavy toll from the Cornishmen.

  The royalist advantage was in their cavalry, but the slope of the hill was too steep for a cavalry charge. The cavalry could not use their speed to flank Waller to the south, because the southern slopes were much longer and steeper than the northern ones. There was a road along the northern side that kept to a gentler slope, but that road was blocked by Waller's heavy cuirassiers, the London Lobsters.

  Even the royalist cannons were not of much use because none of the other heights of land were within range of the enemy camp. It seemed almost as if Waller had dared Hopton to attack, and Hopton had accepted the challenge. What a bloody waste of men and equipment. Eventually he just assumed that Hopton's Cornish infantry must vastly outnumber Waller's infantry, so despite the disadvantage of the slope Hopton must expect to win out of sheer force of numbers.

  Those brave, foolish Cornishmen were open targets as they fought their way up the hill, and eventually they gave up and retreated. After a rest they attacked again but this time they came up the center, for in the first attack they had learned that Waller had placed his cannons on each end, with none in the center. This time, they made it to the edge of the ridge where a vicious close quarter fight broke out. Even though Waller's dragoons left their horses and fought alongside the infantry, they could not stop the flood of Cornishmen and were pushed back from the edge. The fight for the defended edge of the hill was won by the Cornishmen and now they could hide in the very ditches that Waller's men had dug along the edge to protect themselves.

  The battle went quiet for a short while as everyone caught their breath and regrouped, but it was not over. Waller's infantry had retreated behind the herdsmen's walls of loose stones that ran along the very top of the hill, and now they used their muskets to pin down the Cornishmen the ditches they had just captured. Meanwhile Hopton's cavalry had dismounted and were leading their horses uphill so they could support the Cornish infantry, but their progress uphill was slow.

  Waller's light cavalry took the opportunity to race along the edge shooting and hacking and trampling the Cornish infantry, who were exhausted from spending an hour fighting their way up the slope. It was a brutal reward for such hard work. They lost a lot of men and officers and flags but they held on to those hard won ditches. That is, until Waller's dragoons remounted and charged down from the hill top towards them, and then they gave up and retreated back down the slope.

  It is hard to do an orderly retreat down a steep hill, especially when the whole time the enemy cavalry is traversing the slope hacking at you, and the enemy musketeers are shooting down on you from above. The retreat went from an organized steady pace, to longer steps, to outright running. Hopton's cavalry had finally reached their infantry but too late to help them, and could barely able to help themselves as they too were hit by musket fire. Though Hopton's cavalry took a beating, at least they saved a lot of the Cornish lads from being slaughtered.

  Unbelievably, after seeing their cavalry in such trouble, those same Cornish lads turned themselves around and marched back up that hill. There must have still been two thousand of them climbing the slope even though there were hundreds and hundreds of them dead and wounded littering the slope. Only one thing could have given them such late in the day courage - the desire for revenge. Since Hopton's cavalry were still near to the top of the slope, the Cornish lads had some defense against marauding enemy cavalry. Again they pressed on to the top and again made the ridge and again pushed Waller's infantry out of their defensive ditches.

  This time the charge up the hill went much easier for the Cornishmen and Daniel scanned his looker back and forth trying to see why this difference. Of course, Waller had moved his cannons out of harms way. They were no longer in a position to fire down on the Cornishmen for they had been moved to the relative safety of the shepherd's wall on top of the hill. The sides of the wall seemed to bristle with barrels, so Waller’s men must have pushed some of the loosely piled stones out of the wall to create loop holes to shoot through. With the cannons now there, that crude wall had become a very defendable position.

  Meanwhile Hopton's gunners had hauled two of their field guns up the hill and were bedding them down in the captured ditch works Now both armies held strong positions that were barely a musket's range apart. The fighting continued sporadically into the dark of night, but Waller's army did not make another attempt to push the Cornishmen out of the ditch.

  As darkness fell so did the usefulness of Daniel's looker. Eventually all he could see were the glow of torches and cooking fires, and the occasional flash of a musket or pistol. Despite the torches that were burning all along Waller's wall, he could no longer see what was happening because the wall blocked his view of the camp behind it. He still had some view of Hopton's army along the ditch works and downhill from them. Nothing was happening there other than the tending to the wounded and the stripping of the corpses. Hopton had lost a lot of men in taking the hill, and now he wasn't doing anything with it. Oh the inhumane stupidity of battles and their generals.

  Safe as he was up on his own plateau, Daniel had been enthralled by watching the battle, but after all these hours he still wasn't any closer to Bristol. One option was to ride down into the valley and make for Bath, and he would have done that if he had been riding a sure footed pony instead of old Millie. On Millie it was too dark to risk traversing down the steep slope. He could wait here until the sunrise twilight allowed him to ride down. That meant waiting only about four hours for these were the shortest nights of the year, but by then the armies would be stirring again and the valley way to Bath may be blocked to him.

  Eventually he decided to continue to circle the edge of his plateau in hopes of finding a well used track down that Millie could travel in the dark. With that in mind he led Millie across his plateau to see if there was a good track leading down from its northern edge. There was. The starlight showed him the white line of a good track that ran along the top of a descending spine, so he took it. That was easy enough, but when the spine began to rise again, and the track with it, he tied Millie to a scrub bush and then searched all around for a fork in the track that would lead him down into the valley. He couldn't find one. Yes there were sheep traverses, but in the dark they were too risky for his clumsy hoofed horse.

  The spine seemed to be shaped like a saddle connecting the northern edge of his plateau to the southern edge of the next plateau. It must serve the local shepherds like a bridge, and in the darkness it seemed very much like a bridge, for it was just a narrow track on top of a narrow spine of land with steep slopes falling away on each side. There was no where on it to stop or to camp, and no water for the horse so stopping he
re to wait for light was not an option. He must choose between continuing on, or going back. The thought of going back irked him. True, he knew that there was no one behind him, but then again, he could see no one ahead of him either. He decided to keep going in hopes of finding a track or a road that would lead him clear of these armies.

  * * * * *

  It had been a damn fool thing to do. Why hadn't he spent the night safe on his plateau. The track along the saddle spine had led him to a hamlet with an ancient church and a more modern rectory. A crumbling sign told him that the place was called Gold Ashton, or Cold Ashtor. He wasn't sure which because the paint on the sign was old and flaking. Unfortunately the place seemed to straddle a main road.

  On seeing the road he suddenly understood what the battle had been about and why Waller had been defending Bath from up on a hill to the north of the city. It had not been a battle to protect Bath after all. Since Waller had Bath well garrisoned, Hopton must have marched around Bath to meet up with the king's cavalry at this main road. All main roads would eventually lead to Bristol. Hopton and Maurice had been going around Bath so that they could attack Bristol from the north. From the north it would be easier for Oxford to supply them. The hill where Waller had camped must control part of this road. Waller was stopping Hopton from reaching Bristol, so this had been a battle to protect Bristol.

  Daniel spied out the buildings from a hiding place within a dense copse of young trees and old bushes. There were bright lights in the buildings, even at this late hour, and there were wounded men being led inside them. When he heard the hollow sounds of hoofs and men’s boots on a well packed road surface, he ducked down out of sight. A troop of Cornish infantry led by mounted officers marched up to the buildings. Unfortunately the troop decided to camp for the night just beyond the bushes he was hiding in, so he backed up a few paces through the tangle of brush towards where he had left Millie.