‘If God is with us, Will, it’s because He loves nothing better than to watch men slaughter each other,’ Tom had said, at which Trencher had shaken his head wearily, Penn had glanced skyward as though expecting divine wrath, and Dobson had muttered that that being the case he was going to give God a show to remember.
Now, to make sure it was still in place, Tom touched the sprig of furze he had wedged between his helmet’s visor and its skull. That morning, their hands cold and their breath clouding, every man in Parliament’s army had picked broom or gorse, or else sent the younger lads in their troops to gather it, for the field sign was to be a green bough worn in their hats. To the amusement of the men Penn had braided three slender broom branches into a ring which he now wore on his pot like a laurel wreath or crown. Some of Haggett’s troopers had taken to calling him your majesty and Penn played along, wafting his hands and affecting a haughty air.
‘Try and finish the day in one piece this time, Tom,’ Penn said now as Skippon’s drummers began to beat the Battalia and the brigade began to march. ‘No sleeping on the field tonight.’
Tom’s guts twisted at the cold memory of lying all night with the dead and dying below the Edgehill escarpment. He could smell again the blood and faeces. The earth. That night he had seen men’s ghosts climbing out of stiffening bodies. He had lain half dead himself, besieged by visions and the deepest terror he had ever known, as looters had sawn off his finger for the ring on it. Perhaps the bitter cold of that night had saved him, slowing the blood in his wounds. Or perhaps, as he had said, God had not wanted him for Heaven and Satan had not wanted him for Hell, so that he had lingered, his own thirst for revenge sustaining him. And yet, if he had died would he have been reunited with Martha? Had she been waiting for him only to be denied at the last? Had he failed her again?
‘Remember the watchword, lads!’ Corporal Mabb called above the drums and the officers’ commands, the neighs of excited horses and the roar of cannon to the south of the field. ‘Let’s hear it, young Banks, if you please, lad.’
‘Religion,’ Trooper Banks said, his helmet’s chin strap digging into his hairless face and whitening the flesh.
‘Either my lugs are full of mud or else they’re as old as the rest of me!’ Mabb exclaimed, ‘because for a moment there, Banks, you sounded like a little girl. I asked for the watchword.’
Banks frowned, embarrassed. ‘Religion!’ he yelled, his startled mount tossing its head.
Mabb nodded. ‘That’s better, lad. And don’t forget it, neither,’ he said to them all. ‘And if your pal has lost his greenery be sure to tell him. You don’t want some bugger putting a hole in you only to say how sorry he is when you find out you’re both Parliament men.’
‘Forward!’ Colonel Haggett shouted, his raised hand signalling the advance. Out in front the vanguard, some five thousand men, were moving forward, their collective trepidation filling the grey dawn like the threat of a gathering storm. With them moved field artillery, oxen lowing as conductors urged them over the difficult ground, mud-slathered pioneers doing what they could with spades and levers to ease the passage, and all ensconced within companies of men armed with firelocks who provided close protection. Far off to their left in the Kennet valley Tom could just make out a small body of infantry and more field artillery on the move, the foremost of them already taking up a defensive position behind a great hedge separating the enclosures around Enbourne from a large force of Royalist horse. Tom supposed those musketeers and pikemen had been charged with preventing the Cavaliers from using the track to Hungerford to disrupt the Lord General’s overall plan, whatever that happened to be. Much of the rest of the army, such as Essex’s reserve of ten infantry regiments – another five thousand men – was hidden from view. And yet even what could be seen was enough to set the blood in men’s limbs trembling like water coming to the boil.
‘God be with you, lads,’ Trencher said to the men around him. ‘Send the devils to their graves. Every man you kill is one that can’t kill you.’
Tom’s loaded pistols were snug in his boots, their long barrels pressing against his flesh, their butts sticking out above the bucket tops but held close against the leg by garters cut from a scarf of Essex orange. His sword hung on its baldrick, the hilt in front of his left hip, the scabbarded blade beginning to whisper of its hunger for blood.
‘I wish Weasel were here,’ Penn said.
‘Nayler, too,’ Tom said, his memory conjuring their friend, bloodied sword in hand just feet from the ranks of the enemy, deep in the fray at Kineton Fight. Tom would have sworn he could hear Nayler now screaming at him to climb up behind him as hot lead shredded the smoke and the battle din filled the world as though the gates of Hell had been hauled open.
Get on, lad, we can’t hang about here! Nayler had yelled, the words barely out before a musket ball had ripped open his throat.
‘Hang on, what’s going on here?’ Trencher said, jerking Tom back to the present. The big man was lifting himself as much as he could, straining to see what was happening up ahead, and then Tom became aware that the drums were beating new orders and General Skippon’s men had stopped.
‘Hold!’ Colonel Haggett raised a hand and the sixty-one men at his back stopped too, some of them mumbling the usual curses of soldiers who, having steeled themselves for action, are brought to a halt knowing that their courage will dissipate like smoke on the breeze and they must summon it again before long.
Skippon’s drums had fallen silent, but others beating on, towards Biggs Hill to their south and still more to the north towards the River Kennet, along with sporadic musket fire and the deeper cough of field artillery, announced that the battle was on.
‘Seems we’re to be held back,’ Corporal Mabb said, not sounding unhappy at the prospect.
‘We had better not be,’ Tom gnarred, for he had not come to watch other men fight.
‘Patience, lad,’ Trencher said. ‘We’re the only horse hereabouts. Someone will find a job for us before long.’
‘Well look who it is!’ Ellis Lay, a trooper with a sharp beardless chin, announced, as the Lord General himself came over the rise to their left on a fine grey horse. Around him rode a retinue of cuirassiers, their armour dull in the dull day, and several harquebusiers armed to the teeth. And as the men in Skippon’s vanguard saw their Lord General they cheered, the musketeers lifting their montero-caps to wave them in the air, and Essex acknowledged them with a stiff wave before disappearing from Tom’s sight behind the massed ranks.
‘Now we’re safe,’ someone called out. ‘One glimpse o’ the earl and Prince Rupert will take to ’is heels and be back in Germany before nightfall.’ Men laughed and another trooper said he’d wager a half crown if he had one that Essex had come to order the general retreat on account of a hare having crossed his path, or having yellow speckles on his fingernails, or because his right cheek was burning which meant someone was talking ill of him. For Essex was known to be a superstitious man.
‘Or because the enemy has taken the field and if we don’t scarper he’ll have to fight the buggers,’ James Bowyer put in.
‘Hold your damn tongues,’ Corporal Mabb barked, as Colonel Haggett twisted in his saddle to shoot his men a reproachful look before turning back to greet an officer from the Lord General’s party whom Tom had seen coming at a fair canter.
‘I keep expecting to see the bastards coming over that spur,’ Dobson said into his beard, eyes scouring the rising ground up towards Wash Common. ‘The King’s whole damned army and that devil prince.’
‘Not seeing them is worse than seeing them,’ Tom replied and Dobson agreed. For the shifting breeze was from the east again now, bringing the calls of the enemy’s drums though the Cavaliers were still hidden from view.
‘Listen up, lads,’ Corporal Laney called as Colonel Haggett walked his horse towards them and the other officer cantered off, his horse’s hooves flinging clods of dew-soaked earth.
‘Men! Lord Essex will le
ad the vanguard! Sergeant-Major-General Skippon will remain with the reserve and assume command of Lieutenant-General Stapleton’s horse. Our task is to ride up the escarpment and secure the highest point before the enemy does.’
‘He doesn’t look happy about it,’ Trencher murmured.
‘I’d imagine Essex chose him for the task because he did such a fine job of getting all that silver to Thame,’ Penn put in, sharing a knowing look with Tom. But if that was true and Haggett’s superiors thought him a brave and resourceful commander Tom did not mind in the least. Because they were to ride towards the enemy who waited unseen beyond the escarpment.
And his sword was hungry.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THEY RODE UP a sunken lane at the sitting trot, bodies tense and shoulders hunched because they feared the sudden musket fire of King’s men lining the hedges either side. The air here was still and heavy and Tom breathed deeply of it, savouring its damp earthiness, the meagre warmth of a low, corn-coloured sun now and then touching his left cheek through gaps in the hedgerow.
But the ambush never came and they continued round a bend, ascending the northern spur of the escarpment from the west-south-west knowing that they could not be seen by the enemy from their quarters in the Kennet valley. They kept an easy pace until midway up the escarpment where the gradient became more daunting for a stretch and here Tom and some of the others drew their pistols because they thought if an ambush was coming it would be at that place.
‘If I were them I’d have killed us by now,’ Trencher said a little later as the lane began to level out again. A cock pheasant clattered up from the hedge on their left, a streak of copper, metallic green and red, its korr kok carrying out across the fields. And men who had been startled had only just pulled their heads out of their shoulders when a ragged volley of musketry crackled to their right. A man ahead of Tom named Delbridge slumped forward and fell from his horse, so those behind were trying not to trample him even as they drew pistols and hauled carbines round. Somewhere else a horse was screaming.
‘Up there!’ Banks yelled, and through a break in the hedgerow Tom saw musketeers pouring black powder down muzzles and ramming balls and wadding home.
‘Heya!’ Tom gave his mare the spur and she responded, lurching forward into a canter, then scrambled up the muddy bank and through the breach in the hedge up onto the dew-slick grass. ‘Go on, girl!’ he cried, hauling his sword from its scabbard, not caring if any man had followed. But they had followed: Trencher and Penn, Dobson and Haggett’s whole troop. And they all must have seen that the men who had fired on them were nothing more than a skirmishing party, thirty to forty musketeers in loose order who should never have shot at them if they’d had any sense.
A man lifted and shouldered his musket, the scouring stick still poking out from the muzzle, and fired and the stick flew past Tom’s face as he swung his sword, striking the stock, the impact throwing the musketeer backwards into the grass. Then Tom hauled his mare round and spurred her forward and scythed his blade at another man, lopping off his left arm so that the musket fell with it and the man shrieked.
‘King Jesus!’ Trencher bellowed, riding a man down and hauling back on the reins so that his horse had no choice but to trample the flesh and bone beneath it.
Men were screaming like animals, dying badly, and Haggett’s troopers were loosed to butchery. Tom wheeled right and saw Colonel Haggett fire his pistol and a man’s face explode in a splash of blood and brain. A musketeer fired and flame roared from his matchlock’s muzzle and Tom heard the thunk of it passing through Trooper Bayle’s breastplate even as the young man rode off across the field – most likely dead though his horse didn’t know it.
‘Mercy!’ a white-bearded musketeer called, falling to his knees and hoisting his matchlock above his head. Corporal Mabb trotted past and leant over in his saddle, bringing his blade in a savage underarm arc that split the back of the musketeer’s head open.
‘No mercy for Cavalier devils!’ Mabb called, spittle flying, eyes wide.
There was no order, no formation to the troop, just troopers riding men down across the field and musketeers having no time to reload and so reversing the matchlocks to use them like clubs, swinging them at their attackers, or brandishing their hangers clumsily, desperately, before being cut down.
‘That one ain’t dead!’ Ellis Lay yelled, pointing at a musketeer who was lying face down in the grass by a clump of furze. ‘I saw ’im move!’
Knowing the game was up the musketeer lifted his head and Tom saw the terror in his face as he clambered to his feet and began to run up the rise leaving his musket behind.
‘The poor sod,’ Penn muttered as he and Tom watched a handful of Haggett’s men ride after the terrified musketeer; the rest of the skirmishers had been slaughtered.
‘Aye, that’s no way to go,’ Dobson put in, walking his horse up to them, his big sword still in his hand. Some foul gobbet of dark meat was hanging from it, caught on a notch in the blade.
James Bowyer put his hands to his mouth. ‘Run, you white-feathered merry-begotten bumfiddle!’ he yelled; and men laughed as young Banks and four others, having caught up with the fugitive, surrounded him and drove him on, jeering and striking him with the flats of their swords.
‘Can’t we take him prisoner, sir?’ Penn called to Colonel Haggett who was behind them leading Trooper Bayle’s horse by the reins. Bayle’s lifeless body was somehow still upright in the saddle though his head was slumped and jolting horribly.
The colonel shook his head. ‘We must push on,’ he called back. ‘Corporal Laney, bring those men back and form battalia! Three deep. I’ll not have us strung out like a damned rabble and tearing off like hounds after a fox!’ Tom knew this was aimed at him, knew Colonel Haggett well enough to be sure that the man would be angry with him for leading the charge into the field without having awaited orders.
‘And if we’d waited till the good colonel had us all formed up and sitting pretty those curs would have had the time to reload and give us another shower of lead. Maybe two,’ Trencher said, detecting the same veiled reprimand in their commander’s orders.
Tom paid no notice. He was watching the plight of the last musketeer still alive on the field. Struggling up the steepest part of the escarpment the man stumbled and fell, his tormentors heckling him to get to his feet and run, or else fight like a man.
‘Where’s your king now?’ someone near Tom bellowed. The pursuers were a good two hundred paces away now, up near the summit of what must be the highest point for miles around, where green scrub bristled in the breeze against the charcoal grey of gathering rain clouds.
‘Kill him and be done with it,’ Tom murmured to himself, as one of the riders suddenly pulled up, his horse screeching, and the others did the same, Banks nearly falling as his mount fought against the bit.
A fusillade of pistol and carbine fire cracked at the summit and one of the troopers pitched forwards and fell from his horse.
‘Oh Jesus!’ Corporal Mabb exclaimed, pulling a pistol from its holster.
‘Hold!’ Tom roared. ‘Hold!’ Because Royalist cavalry were coming over the crest and Haggett’s men were turning to flee.
Then Trencher was on his right and Penn on his left.
‘Here we bloody go,’ Dobson growled, coming up on Penn’s left, drawing a pistol and pulling it to the full cock.
‘Hold, damn you!’ Tom bellowed at a knot of men who had turned their horses and were riding back down the hill. To his credit Colonel Haggett behind them was trying to stem the flow. Tom could hear him yelling at his men to turn back round and face the harquebusiers who were galloping down the hill, swords promising cold death. One of those Cavaliers caught up with Banks and hacked into his neck and the young man died in a crimson spray.
‘Hold your fire!’ Tom raised his own pistol, his other hand gripping the reins, trying to control his mount for she was terrified. ‘Hold your fire! Wait until they’re upon us!’
&
nbsp; One hundred paces. ‘Hold!’ Fifty paces. ‘Aim low!’ The King’s men came like a wave that threatened to sweep away all before it. There was no time to count them but there were enough. ‘Fire!’ Tom squeezed the trigger and a Cavalier flew back in his saddle as though knocked over by God’s hand and at least thirty other men fired at the same time and all from close enough that Tom could see men’s faces as they died, their killing wave shredded by lead. But the Royalists came on and Tom drew his second pistol and fired, hitting another man in the shoulder, and this time the salvo from those around him was ragged, but more Cavaliers fell.
‘For God!’ Trencher screamed, spurring his horse forward even as he drew his sword.
‘Kill them!’ Corporal Laney yelled, ramming his sword’s point into a man’s mouth.
Grunts and shrieks, the clang and clatter of blades on armour and the whinnies of beasts filled the world and yet above it all Tom could hear his own breathing loud inside his helmet and as rhythmic as the sea, as he let the battle-lust seize him body and soul. A blade bit through his buff-coat into the flesh of his left shoulder and he threw his sword arm across, slashing the broadsword into his attacker’s raised left arm which was protected by a steel elbow gauntlet. Snarling like a beast the man hacked at him again but this time Tom caught the blow on his blade and for a long moment it was a battle of strength, each seeking to force the other’s sword wide to make time for a killing blow. Tom felt his arm begin to tremble with the strain, muscles screaming. He was twisted awkwardly and his opponent was strong. Too strong.
‘You’re a dead man,’ Tom spat, and with his left hand he grabbed the pistol from his left boot and brought it up against the Cavalier’s blade, taking the strain, and in the same moment rammed his sword forward between the bars of the man’s helmet and into his eye.
Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) Page 34
