‘Bloody fool,’ Mun growled as the young man came to stand panting beside Fitch, his pistols raised like the rest of them.
Then Mun saw the rebel sergeant hoist his halberd, saw his mouth open and heard him give the command present! And saw the men move their matchlocks away from their bodies, muzzles pointing at the sky. Then the sergeant yelled, give fire! And those muskets’ butts came up to shoulders, their barrels levelling out, muzzles promising flaming fury.
‘Down!’ Mun screamed, and they threw themselves down as gouts of flame flashed, hitting the ground and turning their heads – else their helmets’ face guards would have kept them raised – and Mun heard the fierce hiss of musket balls tearing the air above his head. For two heartbeats he feared he had got it all wrong, but then he felt the ground tremble and vicious elation exploded in his blood. He wrenched his head round and there was O’Brien and the rest of his troop, blades in their hands, spurring onto the field and shrieking like fiends.
‘Go on, lads!’ Fitch was up on his knees, waving his fellows on with his pistols, his eyes wild. ‘Get into ’em. Cut the bastards apart!’
‘Fine day for it, Sir Edmund!’ O’Brien bellowed as he galloped past, his poll-axe held wide, and Mun stood as the rebel second rank gave fire, plucking a trooper from his horse and sending a beast careening to crash to the ground, a musket ball embedded in its chest.
‘Here, sir!’ He turned to see John Cole and Farmer Goffe leading their horses and he considered taking Walter Cade’s horse as Cade wouldn’t be needing it now, but Mun’s saddle was on the colic-struck piebald mare and so he mounted quickly with the others, turned, and spurred across the field to join in the slaughter.
Tom looked at Trencher and Trencher shrugged. The two of them ran forward to be greeted by a sight that neither man had dared hope to see: Major-General Skippon’s brigade sweeping across from the left to pour a volley into Sir Nicholas Byron’s regiment before the King’s men had had the time to wheel fully to face the threat. Trooper Meshman had brought Skippon and the major-general had swept up the escarpment and into the enemy’s flank just below the spur of the round hill.
‘The good Lord has answered your prayers, lad,’ Trencher said. Tom said nothing. Trencher knew very well that whatever prayers had been offered up from that cursed hill, none of them had come from Tom’s lips. ‘Still, it’s going to take more than that,’ the big man went on, squatting to wipe his knife on a dead Cavalier’s breeches. ‘Someone has still got to deal with those whoresons.’ He pointed the knife at the other regiment, Colonel Wentworth’s men, who had halted seventy paces short of the hill crest to await orders. The ranks of musketeers were blowing on their match, refilling the powder flasks hanging from their bandoliers, or else waiting patiently, matchlocks held across their chests. To their left a company of pikemen bristled in battle formation, ready to protect the musketeers against horse.
‘We could retire now that a proper officer has come along, slip away over yonder slope and let someone else have a turn up here.’ Trencher’s eyes were on the musketeers who were only a stone’s throw away, though they held their fire rather than waste a volley on just two men.
Behind Tom Haggett’s men were stripping the dead of weapons, powder and shot, or else relieving them of armour if it was better than that which they themselves owned.
‘But we’re not going to slip away, are we?’ Trencher said. A grey-bearded musketeer yelled an insult up the slope and Trencher returned a hand gesture that would have ruffled an innkeeper.
‘No,’ Tom said. ‘Not until Lord Essex puts cannon and another thousand men up here.’ The din of distant engagement, of cheers and screams, of artillery and musketry and cornets and drums, told Tom that battle had been joined as far north as the River Kennet and as far south as the River Enbourne. But none of that was his concern. He had told Colonel Haggett that they must hold that round hill, had convinced him that they must, even knowing that the cost would be high. And the colonel and many of his brave men had given their lives doing it. To ride away now would be to insult those dead men.
Trencher nodded towards the regiment facing them. ‘So we keep those gooseberry-eyed gingamabobs busy until the good Lord sends us another miracle. Another regiment or two,’ he said, ‘and General Skippon will thank us for it. If we’re still alive this afternoon.’
Corporal Mabb had appeared at Tom’s shoulder and was taking in the scene.
‘He’ll do more than thank us,’ Tom said. ‘He can send us enough ale to drown in and ensure these men get their bread and their pound of flesh.’
‘Aye and perhaps even some of the back pay we’re owed.’
‘Now that would be a miracle,’ Tom said.
‘Well? What now?’ Corporal Mabb said, avoiding eye contact. Tom saw that the corporal had tied a scarf around the top of his bloody thigh. But all three of them knew Mabb didn’t have long.
‘Can you ride, Corporal?’ Tom asked. The man’s face and hands were bone white. Almost blue, actually. There could not have been an ale beaker’s worth of blood left in his body and yet he was still standing.
‘For a bit maybe,’ Mabb said.
Tom nodded. ‘Then get your men mounted, sir.’ They turned to walk back towards the ragged knot of men who were still able to fight and Tom felt a hand grip his left arm just below the shoulder. Now Mabb held his eye, despite the rest of his features sagging and his head hanging low. He looked deeper into Tom’s eyes than Tom would have liked, but Tom did not flinch.
‘Don’t waste these lads,’ Corporal Mabb said. ‘You’re a fighter, Rivers, and God knows you’ve done well for us. But you’ve got a dark soul and I know you ain’t afraid of death. If it’s lost, if we can’t hold this ground, promise me you’ll get the lads away from this … damned place. They’ve done their best and neither God nor man could ask more.’
The hand on his arm clenched with a strength that surprised him.
‘I’d have your word, Thomas Rivers,’ Mabb said. There was a flintiness in the man’s eyes then that Tom had never seen there before.
‘You have my word,’ Tom said and the corporal took his hand away. ‘Now back in the saddle, sir, while you still can.’
Mabb nodded curtly and turned. ‘Colonel Haggett’s troop! Mount!’ he yelled.
And Dobson shook his head and cursed. Because the fight had only just begun.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
‘BACK!’ TOM YELLED, turning his mount and throwing himself flat against the mare’s neck as another volley thundered, some of the musket balls thudding into flesh or thunking off armour or helmets. They spurred back up the rise, back onto the crown of the hill.
‘Where’s Corporal Mabb?’ James Bowyer called, pressing his thumb into a new dent on his breastplate.
‘There,’ Penn replied, gesturing with his pistol back over the brow. Tom looked back to see Corporal Mabb still in the saddle, slumped over, his chin on his breastplate. He had been beside Mabb at the last advance and had not seen the man hit, and yet the corporal was clearly dead. Most likely his leg wound had quietly spilled his lifeblood down his mare’s flank until death had come for him.
‘Old sod did well to last as long as he did,’ Dobson said.
‘Who commands now?’ Jeffes called, wheeling his horse round and round. The animal was bleeding from its neck and shrieking with fear. Near by, a young trooper was cursing God with his last breaths, lying on his back spitting blood and bile. ‘Who commands?’
‘I do,’ Tom shouted. Trencher and Penn nodded their approval. Haggett’s men had ridden to just outside effective musket range and were milling and keeping their horses moving, reloading pistols and carbines and steeling themselves to ride at the enemy again.
‘Your orders, sir?’ Dobson bellowed, his size and matching belligerence silencing any potential dissenters before they gave their objections voice.
‘The same as Colonel Haggett’s,’ Tom replied, ramming a wad of cartridge paper pilfered from a dead musketeer down
his pistol’s muzzle. ‘We hold this hill.’
‘Thought you might say that,’ Dobson rumbled, then lifted his face guard and drank from a flask.
On the far side of the field a company from Major-General Skippon’s brigade had broken from the rear and was marching up the hill towards where the great hedge was broken by an old, skeletal oak. But from where he was Tom could see no enemy soldiers up there on what must surely yet be Parliament’s side of the escarpment. Unless the enemy had somehow got up there unseen. His thoughts were hauled back to the very real and immediate threat from the east.
‘Here they come!’ Ellis Lay warned as the front rank of the enemy marched up over the ridge.
‘They’ve even got a bloody fifer, the vainglorious tosspots,’ James Bowyer said as the thin merry tune carried like smoke on the breeze.
‘No wonder they look so damn pretty,’ Trencher added, for fifers were rare because they were kept only at their commander’s expense, which meant that Lord Wentworth was likely rich enough that his musketeers would not be running out of powder and shot any time soon. Furthermore, his pikemen were coming too, big strong men with their blade-tipped staves arrayed in a bristling hedge.
They mean to intimidate us, Tom thought. Fools think a show of force will break us. They have not managed it yet.
‘Horse!’ Penn called, and Tom muttered a dark curse because over on their left, at the rear of General Skippon’s musketeers, a troop of harquebusiers had broken onto the field, appearing it seemed from nowhere.
‘Where in God’s name did they come from?’ Trencher asked. ‘I thought the ground beyond that hedge was impassable.’
‘Maybe they’re ours,’ Ellis Lay suggested.
‘They’re not ours,’ Tom said, and as if to prove it the troopers drew swords and poll-axes and galloped across the field towards Skippon’s men, shrieking hellishly, their horses’ hooves flinging mud.
And the rearmost rank of musketeers were still reloading.
‘Should we help?’ Penn asked Tom.
Tom shook his head. ‘We’ve got our own fight.’ He looked at Trencher, who was grimacing at the screams of Skippon’s men who were being butchered with cold steel and lead. But Trencher nodded and turned his horse back round to face Lord Wentworth’s oncoming musketeers.
‘Sir! Sir!’ someone was shouting and Dobson called to Tom and gestured to Trooper Logward who was threading his mount through the whirling mass of horseflesh and armed men to get to Tom.
‘He means you, Tom,’ Dobson said, and Tom felt a sudden coldness fill the marrow of his bones as it truly hit him that he was now commanding these men. That they had accepted him. For he could give them only death.
‘Sir, drums, sir!’ Logward twisted in his saddle and pointed west. ‘From over there. Must be ours, sir! Must be.’
Tom could not hear the drums above the horses and the musketry and the yells and the screams, but the hope in Logward’s eyes was good enough for him.
‘About bloody time,’ Dobson growled.
‘Haggett’s men! To me!’ Tom roared. ‘Are we going to let some unbloodied apprentices march up here and take all the glory?’
‘Yes!’ someone shouted. Tom ignored it.
He sat tall in the saddle and pointed his pistol towards Wentworth’s musketeers who had come into range now and had been given the order to halt and make ready to fire. ‘We’re going to slow those whoresons down. We’re going to buy time for whoever Trooper Logward assures us is on their way.’ He glared at Logward who was craning his neck, peering anxiously west as though hope itself was enough to summon Parliament soldiers.
‘We’re too few to charge them, sir,’ Martindale said, hauling on his reins, struggling to control his horse. ‘I’m no coward but charging them is suicide.’
‘We’re going to bleed their pike,’ Tom called, scouring men’s eyes with his own fierce glare. ‘The musketeers will have to come to their aid. They will wheel and in doing so they will waste precious time.’
Martindale nodded.
‘I like it, Tom,’ Trencher said.
‘I thought you might,’ Tom said, feeling the murderous grin stretch his lips, for pikemen were only dangerous if you were within seventeen feet of them. Beyond that you could shoot at them all day long.
‘Bloody fools,’ Trencher murmured.
‘Have a care!’ someone yelled. Haggett’s men bent over in their saddles and spurred back up the rise, giving ground.
‘Give fire!’ a Cavalier officer shouted and fifty or more burning matches kissed priming pans, and the manifold flashes preceded a resounding barrage and a wall of smoke.
‘Now!’ Tom called, kicking his mare into a canter that would take them obliquely across the second rank of musketeers who were stepping forward to fire their own weapons.
‘God and Parliament!’ Trencher cried and others took up the shout.
‘God and Parliament!’
And the pike stand quivered, their sergeant roaring commands because they suddenly realized that the harquebusiers were coming for them.
Their horses’ hooves thudded against the ground and men yelled their war-cries and the battle thrill boiled in Tom’s veins as he led Haggett’s men – his men now – across the rough, gorse-strewn hill. He pulled up twenty yards short of the wicked pike blades, far enough away to make those weapons impotent but close enough to see fear twist their bearers’ faces beneath their pots.
‘Kill them!’ Tom raised his pistol and fired and a pikeman fell back, his stave clattering against other men’s armour. All around Tom pistols and carbines spat flame and lead into the press of tightly packed enemy and they could not miss.
Some of the pistol balls clanked off breastplates or pots but even if they did not kill they caused mayhem and terror. The pike stand lumbered like a wounded beast and came on bravely, attacking because what else could it do? But Tom’s men wheeled and rode away from their pikes only to turn and give fire again and by the time Lord Wentworth’s musketeers had wheeled to their left to come to their comrades’ aid the pike stand was a bloody, clamorous, chaotic mess.
And yet those musketeers had wheeled and they had done it as neatly and as quickly as Tom had ever seen, and he knew with sudden horror that he could not get his men away before the first volley.
‘Withdraw!’ he screamed. ‘Back! Back, damn you!’ He saw fear flash in men’s eyes, saw the curses on their lips as they too realized they had lingered too long before the pike stand, drunk on the butchery.
‘Everyone back!’ Dobson bellowed.
‘Fire!’ a man screamed and in one glimpse Tom knew it was Lord Wentworth himself and he did not begrudge the man his furious joy as his musketeers gave fire.
James Bowyer’s mare neighed and careened sidewards, horse and rider flayed, and Tom saw at least three other men slump or fall from their mounts, armour, flesh and bone crashing to the ground. The dead and dying hampered the escape of the living and four ragged breaths later the next rank fired and Penn, who had been hauling his mare around a mass of stricken flesh and flailing hooves, was hit in the back of the head, the ball passing through his helmet to lodge in his skull.
‘Matt! Matt!’ Trencher was screaming, heedless of the lead storm, as Penn tumbled from his horse, inanimate as only the killed can be.
Jeffes was down, his horse shot, and Martindale’s horse made only twenty yards before it went down onto its knees, raw bloody flesh hanging from its rump.
‘Back up the hill!’ Tom screamed at those still mounted, then wheeled his horse and spurred over to Jeffes.
‘Get on!’ He held out an arm and Jeffes grasped it and then another volley thundered and Tom’s horse shrieked and Jeffes’s eyes bulged and he fell forward, two holes in his backplate. But Tom’s horse was hit too and she fell sidewards, keening, eyes rolling, and Tom pulled his right foot from the stirrup before she hit the ground. He scrambled over the creature, putting its body between him and Wentworth’s men. Another musket ball thumped into the ma
re’s flesh and then came a huge cheer and Tom looked over the point of her hip to see that the pikemen had thrown down their pikes and drawn swords and knives and were charging up the field in a mad, vengeful horde. They butchered wounded men as they came, some of the pikemen stopping to loot but most coming on.
Martindale turned towards the onrushing tide and fired his pistol, then the wave swallowed him and Tom pulled his poll-axe free from his baldrick, the haft comforting in his hand even as he faced death.
‘Come, then,’ he spat, twirling the poll-axe once and looking for the pikeman who would die first. ‘Come and kill me, you ugly shankers!’ he bawled. Then he heard hoof-beats and yelling as the remains of Haggett’s troop thundered past him, two firing pistols before all ploughed into the pikemen, their mounts knocking men to the ground, trampling them, their blades plunging and scything down onto heads and shoulders. Tom strode forward in their wake, into that cauldron of heinous murder, and swung his poll-axe into the neck of a man trying to rise, then had to put his boot on the pikeman’s face to pull the axe free. A sword scraped off his backplate and he turned swinging, the poll-axe’s spike ripping out a man’s throat in a crimson gush.
But there were too many of them. They swarmed around Ellis Lay, plunging blades into his horse which was screaming, then as the beast went down they hauled Lay from his saddle and hacked him apart. For a moment Tom was shielded on either side by horses, the pikemen unable to get close, and he drew his sword, head snapping round, weapons raised. On his right Dobson was fighting like a bear, snarling as he hammered heads with his poll-axe, dropping men with almost every blow. On his left Trencher was wheeling his horse, scything his heavy sword at men who were, for the moment at least, backing off.
A pikeman slipped between two horses and swung a hanger which Tom caught on his own sword, in the same movement bringing the poll-axe across and chopping the man’s sword arm off at the elbow, as Dobson roared in pain, the long spike of a sergeant’s halberd driven through his left shoulder. Tom slammed his sword’s hilt guard into the pikeman’s face, dropping him, then saw the sergeant yank the spike back out and then ram it back into Dobson’s arm and the giant could do nothing as another pikeman buried a ballock dagger into his thigh. But Dobson was frenzied and refused to die, swinging his poll-axe and bellowing, savaging men even as they pulled him from the saddle and he was lost from Tom’s sight.
Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) Page 38
