Traitor's Blood (Civil War Chronicles) (2 page)

Perhaps not an army, needled a little voice from the back of his conscience, but he had certainly fought against Englishmen. Killed them even.

‘Tragic.’ Sir Stanley nodded gravely. ‘But necessary, Stryker.’

‘My men and I won’t let His Majesty’s cause fail,’ muttered the captain.

The lieutenant colonel grinned. ‘Capital, sir. Admire your courage, Captain, damn me, I do.’

Stryker nodded at the compliment, though he knew admiration for his particular talents would stretch only as far as those talents proved useful. A professional killer engendered more fear than respect in the upper echelons of society. He was dangerous, a man whose morals and appearance were considered more akin to those of common bandits plaguing Balham’s estates than to a comrade-in-arms.

Worst of all, there was the scar; Stryker knew it would likely
be turning Sir Stanley’s stomach. The lieutenant colonel’s careful approach on Stryker’s right-hand side, in order to view the part of his face that remained intact, had not passed unnoticed.

Stryker watched Sir Stanley make the sign of the cross and wondered if he was asking God to smite the rebel horde or to protect him from another kind of demon closer at hand.

‘Yes, sir, war is crucial!’ Sir Stanley barked. He drew a wheezy breath and leant across to slap the younger man on the back, the leather glove making a dull thud against the captain’s crusty buff-coat. ‘Someone must stand beside our king in his time of tribulation. The rebellion must be stopped. Cut out like the festering canker you and I, good Christian men that we are, know it to be!’

‘Praise God.’ Stryker forced a smile as Balham hauled on his reins, urging his horse back down the lines.

‘Praise God, Captain Stryker!’ Sir Stanley called over his shoulder. ‘And long live King Charles!’

Stryker twisted in his saddle to scan the escarpment that dominated the landscape behind them. His gaze rested upon a small group of figures, barely visible in the gathering dusk. ‘What now?’ he whispered, ignoring the twitching horse and creaking leather beneath him.

‘What’s that, Captain Stryker, sir?’

Stryker’s body twisted back to face the massed ranks of humanity across the expanse of ground between Radway and Kineton. His one good eye, however, slid down to the man standing beside him. ‘I was asking him what we should do now, Sergeant Skellen,’ he clarified.

Skellen’s uniform bore no demarcation of rank, but his bearing was confident. He was tall and lean, the owner of a dour leathery face and a deep voice that frequently dripped with sarcasm. His big, gloved hands wielded the vicious halberd, the only official token of his status, with an ease that denoted a man familiar with weapons and their deadly purpose.

The sergeant glanced up at Stryker to show he had his full attention, but was careful not to allow his dark eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, to meet the officer’s gaze directly. ‘Beg pardon, sir, but who?’ he said in an accent common to the rough taverns of Portsmouth and Gosport.

‘His Majesty, the King,’ Stryker replied, with a jerk of his head to indicate the ridge behind them.

What should they do? The opposing armies had been locked in combat for the better part of the afternoon. Both sides had made gains; both conceded losses. It was now growing dark, and the snow had been trudged and pounded by hoof and foot into a blood-red slush during the battle.

‘Aye,’ said Skellen knowingly. ‘Men won’t stand for it, Mister Stryker.’

In an instant Stryker lurched down to lean over his sergeant, the muscles in his thighs protesting as they gripped the creaking saddle. ‘They will stand for it, Skellen,’ he growled dangerously, having to raise his voice above a fresh salvo of cannon fire that was being unleashed from the battery to his left.

The sergeant whipped his head back to face front. ‘Aye, sir,’ he grunted.

‘They will stand for it as long as I bloody well tell them to, and I’ll tear the goddamn throat out of anyone who so much as farts his dissent.’

Skellen clamped his mouth shut, fixing his gaze on the distant enemy formations. He knew that his captain was right. Yes,
his
men would stand – they’d follow him into the mouth of hell itself if he asked them – but the rest? The raw recruits and the farm-hands, only here under extreme duress? They would be away as soon as the dusk could cover an escape, dissolving into the night as if they’d never been here at all.

Edgehill itself was a ridge, a growth jutting out from otherwise low-lying land to form a long mound running north to south, seven hundred feet above sea level. It stood like a great barrier
between the towns of Stratford-upon-Avon in the west and Banbury to the east.

Nestled snugly beneath this great escarpment – on the Stratford side – was the village of Radway, and running north-westwards from Radway was a wide plain. It was at the end of this fair-meadow that Kineton could be found, perched on the edge of the River Dene.

Stryker knew how different it would have appeared just two or three days earlier. The fair-meadow, punctuated by rough scrubland and flanked by ancient hedgerows, would have been a serene patch of unadulterated countryside. At its centre there was a ploughed field, which, though tough work at this time of year, would be subject to the toil of a farmer and his oxen.

But not today.

The battle had raged for much of the afternoon, ebbing and flowing like the great tides Stryker had seen dash the North Sea coast when he’d shipped out to the Low Countries thirteen years previously. It had begun with an hour-long cannonade, though the relentless pounding of infantry positions on both sides had had little effect.

As woeful as the Roundhead aim had been, Stryker had still heard the screams while iron balls skipped off the granite-hard earth and crashed through the Royalist ranks as if they were skittles. The wicked shot would cut a man in half. If it just took him at the knee, he was accounted fortunate.

Maddeningly, fewer of Parliament’s troops went down under the Royalists’ attack. Essex was either a clever man, or a lucky one, Stryker judged, for arranging his infantry behind the ploughed land in front of Kineton had been a crucial stroke. The Royalist cannon balls had, more often than not, sunk into the turned earth, nullifying the lethal ricochet that put paid to so many of the King’s men.

‘Which would you rather?’ Stryker said, glancing down at Skellen. ‘Fight a clever man or a lucky one?’

‘Lucky, sir,’ Skellen replied immediately. ‘His luck’ll run out.
Now your clever cully makes his own luck. That’s a man to be feared, sir.’

They were startled by a splatter of mud and snow, kicked up from the hooves of an incoming gelding. The rider, one of the colonel’s aides-de-camp, wrenched on his reins, bringing his steed to a skidding halt.

‘Captain Stryker, sir!’ the aide shouted over the battle din, before Stryker could rebuke him for his impertinence. ‘Compliments of Sir Edmund and you’re to intercept yon blue-coated fellows,’ he said, indicating an advancing pike formation. He evidently could not precisely identify the unit, though it was clear from their pro-Parliamentarian field chants that they were not friendly.

‘He means us to advance?’ Stryker asked urgently.

‘I think not, Mister Stryker, sir. Think not. Rearguard action is all.’

‘Rearguard?’ Stryker was incredulous. ‘We’re retreating?’

‘Not so, sir.’ The aide shook his head vigorously as his mount fidgeted and whickered, thick clouds of steam billowing from its flaring nostrils. ‘Ordered march back towards the hill.’

‘We’re damn well retreating!’

‘The day is stalemate, Captain. His Majesty aims to remove himself from this place in an orderly manner and reconcile his forces. You are to keep’, he continued before Stryker could reply, ‘those damned Roundheads at bay while the main force withdraws. You’ll have artillery support.’

Stryker acknowledged receipt of the order with a curt nod, and the aide wheeled his horse about in an ostentatious flurry of hooves and snow.

The men had stood idle for too long in this confounded weather anyway. Swinging out of his saddle with tremendous energy, Stryker thumped on to the frozen earth. A soldier materialized from somewhere and took his mount’s reins without a word, leading the beast to safety behind the Royalist lines.

Stryker turned to his sergeant, who was standing like a statue a few paces behind him. ‘You heard the man, Mister Skellen.’

‘Indeed an’ I did, sir,’ Skellen replied briefly.

‘We advance on my mark.’

‘Sir.’ Before he turned away, Skellen’s gaze flickered momentarily to meet the single eye that stared back at him.

‘Ready?’ Stryker asked his old comrade-in-arms.

Skellen’s look was sardonic. ‘Yes, sir.’ A tiny smile played across the captain’s features, before vanishing back behind its usual saturnine mask. There was no one in the world he would rather have watching his back than Skellen.

The sergeant turned about and marched away towards the bristling ranks awaiting his order.

‘Look lively, you mangy palliards!’ Skellen yelled, as he took up his position to the left of the front rank. ‘Eyes front! Shoulder pikes!’ he cried, slamming his halberd, its fearsome blade dark with crusted blood, into the cold earth. ‘We march on Mister Stryker’s word an’ no other!’

‘Gives me the chills, that eye,’ one of the new recruits murmured to his mate. ‘From neck to nuts, as God’s m’ witness.’

‘It should,’ Skellen growled, startling the pikeman, who had not intended his comment to be overheard.

The pikeman swallowed hard. ‘Beg pardon, Sergeant, but I ain’t never seen a grey eye like that. Dark, but silver. A damned sparkin’ anvil.’

Skellen nodded, his thin face splitting in grim relish. ‘They say his mother was a she-wolf, Bicks.’

The pikeman, Walter Bicknell, was unable to stop his eyes swivelling over to where the captain now stood facing the company.

Skellen followed Bicknell’s stare and chuckled. ‘The flecks of silver only show when he smiles, which ain’t often, or when he smells a kill, which he does this very moment.’ The sergeant stepped away to cast deep-set eyes upon the rest of his men.
‘Follow him, lads! Follow the good captain! Follow him and thank the good Lord above that he’s on your side!’

The massed ranks straightened. Nearly one hundred pairs of eyes, made watery by the cold, blinked rapidly to regain focus. Lungs were hawked clear of gunpowder-spotted phlegm, shoulders were rolled and squared and the sixteen-foot lengths of ash hefted into the dank air. Pikes were damned unwieldy brutes, especially on a day like this, when a man’s fingers were numbed to the marrow, but in these expert hands they rose in unison, dropped in unison, and nestled comfortably on to shoulders that had carried them for hundreds, in some cases thousands, of miles.

In front, a tall officer with one eye and a devilish grin drew his broad sword and showed them the way. And as one, they followed him.

The king had declared war on Parliament in August, but it had taken a full fortnight for the army to amass. Stryker had been summoned from his home in Hampshire, and hired to gather a company. It had not taken as long as he had feared, for the majority of his old comrades came swiftly back to answer the call. These were veterans, hard men who had seen war on a grand scale in Europe and lived to tell the tale. The king was glad of them, though many of His Majesty’s more high-born officers had raised eyebrows at the rough-and-ready captain and his grizzled professionals. Stryker had swelled his ranks with lads from the shire whose eagerness partly compensated for their inexperience, and he had left Skellen to batter them into shape on the long march to the rendezvous point at Shrewsbury.

Some weeks later, the combined forces of the king had headed south, aiming directly for the capital. London was the key, the nest of vipers that writhed and schemed at the heart of this conflict. That was how Stryker’s senior officers referred to the city, but Stryker had many good friends in the London Trained
Bands, friends against whom he may soon have to fight. And fight he would, if it came to that.

The great mass of men, with its lingering train of baggage and hangers-on, had then marched south through Warwickshire. It had been made known that they would fall upon the Parliamentarian town of Warwick, striking a hammer-blow upon the rebel cause early in the hostilities. Stryker had had his doubts about launching an assault against such a well-fortified position. The possibility of a lengthy siege in the freezing weather was not enticing. He had fought in sieges before. He had camped through cold and sleet, blood and disease. He had watched as heavy ordnance had pulverized ancient fortifications and reduced another innocent population to famine and death. He had seen the rape and massacre of innocents when walls were finally breached. He was not inclined to repeat the experience, and certainly not on English soil.

He was pleased, therefore, that the order to bypass the well-garrisoned castle town had been received. Essex would be left to roam the Warwickshire countryside while King Charles would push south with the intention of taking Banbury. The town was another stronghold of Parliament, but it was considerably less fortified. The proposition had looked good to Stryker, and his spirits had lifted as they traversed the Wormleighton Hills that rose to the north and east of Edgehill. They would crush Banbury, leave Essex kicking his heels in the Cotswolds, and open the road to Oxford.

‘Keep your bastard eyes forward, Powney, God rot your stinkin’ hide!’ Now Skellen’s coarse battlefield tones penetrated the frosty afternoon air like a volley from a saker cannon.

Stryker glanced at the unfortunate Powney. He felt a brief pang of sympathy for the young pikeman as Skellen tore strips from him, but the sergeant was right. A lost footing now would throw out the man’s stride and the effect would undulate back through the ranks causing chaos.

He forced his concentration back on the panorama of churned land stretching before him, littered with corpses of man and horse.

To his right the scattered debris of Prince Rupert’s devastating charge lay like jetsam in tangled irregular clumps of flesh and blood. The grand pomp of cavalrymen had been reduced to carrion in but a few minutes.