Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (35 page)

It took another twenty minutes for the Royalist cavalry to come. As the scout had feared, they cantered down from the hill and on to the road, and there they had turned west, cutting off Wallis’ route back to London. The scouts, positioned nearest the tree line at the highway’s flank, passed back the detail through a chain of strained whispers. They counted seventy-two harquebusiers, all well armed and riding good mounts. The cornet carried a colour that was predominantly blue, with yellow trim, though they did not recognize it. But that did not matter, for the scarves at their waists and ribbons in their filth-spattered hats were as red as the blood that had spilled from Titus Greening’s ill-fated greycoats. This was a large, dangerous force, and Wallis knew better than to engage it.

‘Any man speaks,’ the black-coated commander hissed, ‘I’ll run him through myself.’ His men inched as close to the ground as they might, trying to keep their long scabbards clear of bent knees and tangled roots, each one peering through the foliage with apple-eyed concern.

The time it took for the new arrivals to come down from the hill had been well spent. Wallis had led his troop, less the four scouts, deep into the surrounding woodland until he was certain the horses would not be heard from the road. He had ordered them tied to sturdy trunks with loose knots in case a swift departure was required, and then they had paced out into the thick veil of summer-swollen bracken and boughs laden with the broadest leaves. The prisoners stayed close to Wallis, driven like sheep at dagger point by sullen soldiers made all the more resentful by the nature of this most ignominious concealment.

Wallis, crouching beside a fallen log, fixed the women with a slit-eyed stare. He covered his mouth with one hand, patted the hilt of his sword with the other. Cecily looked away. Lisette sneered, but stayed silent.

They watched and waited. Birds burst from the highest branches, startled by some perceived danger, and the rustle of the breeze was soon overwhelmed by the noise of the enemy troop as it clattered through the forest. Lisette listened intently, ever surprised by the sheer din that soldiers made. Thudding hooves and creaking saddles, chains and straps, sword-hilts and spurs, stirrups and whinnies and laughter. She glimpsed them through the trees, but the distance Wallis had put between his party and the highway meant that the Royalists appeared like wraiths gliding through chinks of light in dense undergrowth. She prayed that they would leave the road, flood into the wood and descend upon Wallis and his black-backed ghouls, but the very nature of their cacophonous progress told her that they were completely unaware of the rebel force lurking in the brush. This was a big, confident troop who knew their own strength, trusted in it, despite their proximity to land that was in the stranglehold of Parliament. They were arrogant and oblivious, and she knew that this rare, God-sent opportunity would slip like water through her fingers. Wallis would kill her if she ran, but if she did not, she would be hanged as a spy by Erasmus Collings. There was no choice to be made.

She stood. It was as if the world slowed. Wallis was peering up at her in terror-fuelled rage, Cecily’s green eyes were widening in shock, and then she was sucking air into her lungs, turning to face the highway and the unwitting friends who rode there. Now or never.

The pain ripped through the rear of her knee, pushed by immense, inexorable force, and she collapsed helplessly backwards, even as her lips were working to bellow for help. The air punched ruthlessly from her chest, she could make no sound, and instead fell down and down until her back hit a dull hardness that seemed to sear along her spine. She stared up at the sky through shimmering branches, and the next moment a man loomed over her, casting a shroud across her eyes, and she squinted mutely up, wondering what had happened. Movement flashed in her face, like an adder’s strike, then all was night.

CHAPTER 14

The Outer North Gate, Gloucester, 16 August 1643

The sun was sinking behind the western hills as the party gathered before the Outer North Gate. Captain Peter Crisp, a flaxen-haired man in his early twenties, was to command the one hundred and fifty musketeers of Stamford’s blue-coated regiment, and he removed his hat as he faced the milling mob. They were hard men. Many of them were veterans of other campaigns, and that had set them in good stead, but now each had suffered the trials of this siege and had tasted the successes and failures of Massie’s policy of continual sallies against the creeping Royalist entrenchments. They knew what to expect, knew what was expected of them, and that made them grim-faced and dead-eyed as they prepared their bristling array of weaponry. Muskets, swords, pistols, hatchets, clubs, axes, knives, grenades. Every blade had been honed to a zinging edge, each musket-ball kissed, each powder flask filled.

Crisp paced before his silent raiders. He wore the blue of his regiment beneath a sleeveless buff-coat. His hands were gloved, his lean face carried a fresh livid scar that ran vertically between his left eye and the corner of his narrow mouth, and his eyes were dark blue. He waved the hat at his men as he spoke, though his other palm gripped the hilt of his sword. ‘You all know what we’re about. They’ve extended their damned warren from the East Gate towards Friar’s Barn. The Governor, God keep him safe, is determined the malignants pay dear for their boldness.’ He forced a grin that did not touch his eyes. ‘We have the honour of collecting that debt.’ He drew his sword slowly, held it aloft and nodded to the men who guarded the hatch adjacent to the huge bastion.

Stryker was a short way back, in amongst the files of anxious rebels. He and Skellen could not avoid the storming parties any longer, lest they draw unwanted suspicion, and now had come their chance to show Massie where their loyalties lay. It was an ambitious plan by the young colonel, he conceded. A huge gamble to risk so many of his best fighters in the destruction of the Royalist positions, but the big siege guns had been quiet for two days now, and that had encouraged Massie to take the fight to the enemy. Rumours within the city spoke of a lack of powder, or a shortage of courage, or some divine deliverance that had spiked the cannon in retribution for the king’s continued persecution of his people. Stryker was more circumspect. Though he did not speak his thoughts, he knew that the bombardment of Bristol, not yet a month past, had consumed a vast amount of howling round shot, and the first days of Gloucester’s tribulation had seen the same. He guessed the Earl of Forth had simply run out of cannonballs. But whatever the reason for the cessation of the hitherto lethal pounding, the need to destroy the encroaching saps had not diminished.

Beside Stryker, a young boy of no more than thirteen checked his dirk, flicking the cutting edge with a black fingernail. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

The boy’s freckled face blushed hotly as he looked up at the man who must have seemed like something from his nightmares, with his hideous burns, puffy blue-black bruising and single grey eye that glinted like quicksilver. ‘I wish to run the malignants through, sir. Every last one of ’em.’

Stryker shook his head at the show of bravado. ‘There’s nothing noble in killing, lad.’

The boy looked away, his eyes suddenly glassy. ‘In truth, sir, I’ve no choice. Pa was killed by the cannon, sir. M’ brother, Geoffrey, died with poor Mister Harcus. No one left to fight for our home. No one ’cept me, sir.’

Stryker stared down at him, appalled and impressed in equal measure. He was an enemy of this rebel city, sworn to defeat it for the king’s cause, and yet these people had a courage that tore mercilessly at his loyalties. ‘Godspeed, then.’

‘And to you, sir,’ the boy said.

The timbers and stone-filled bushels plugging the little sallyport were pulled away piece by piece to expose the studded door that would lead them to the slop-bottomed ditch that served as Gloucester’s moat. Stryker shuffled forwards with the rest, jostled by blue-coated shoulders and moving his head at awkward angles to avoid the jutting muzzles of muskets as the men were corralled into line. He carried no firearm of his own, save a pistol thrust into his belt, for he wished to avoid killing the Royalist sappers if at all possible, but he patted the swirling basket hilt of his sword as a matter of instinct, finding comfort in the solidity of the Toledo steel. He glanced up at the rampart. Some hundred yards to the south, looming above the area they planned to attack, a drake had been positioned. The small cannon had been brought up to pulverize the trenches and the sappers who dug them in advance of the main raid, and he hoped it would do its job well. Otherwise, he thought fearfully, all its black-mouthed presence achieved was to alert the Royalists that a sally was imminent.

Crisp was ordering a team of a dozen men forward. They carried the ladders that would span the moat. They moved to the port and, as soon as the door was thrust open for the first of them – the pioneers – to scurry out into the exposed world beyond, the drake began to fire.

‘May the Romish bastards hide while our brave lads go to work!’ Crisp called stoically above the boom at their heads. He moved to the sallyport himself, replacing his hat, and lifted his sword in salute to the men who were about to follow. ‘For Captain Lieutenant Harcus!’

‘Harcus!’ the men echoed.

Skellen, clutching a halberd, was at Stryker’s side. ‘What about him?’

Stryker grimaced. ‘Lobbed a grenade from the wall down into one of the nearer trenches. Got himself shot while he admired the result.’

‘Hell’s bells,’ Skellen muttered.

Peter Crisp disappeared through the hatch and the musketeers followed in a tide of blue coats and curses. They bolted across the ditch, the long ladders bowing hazardously beneath them, and on to the devastated land that had once flanked the main highway to the east. They were like an army of demons, screaming threats and prayers, shrieking their hatred to the dimming sky. The ground to the east was as torn and potted as the violated acres to the south, old homes smashed and burned by the rebels to clear their line of sight and now enveloped by the besieging army’s advancing trenches, made into breastworks behind which the king’s men might fire up at the city.

The raiding party skirted crumbling walls and tumbledown, blackened roof beams. They leapt over the first trenches without resistance, for these had become sodden and duly abandoned. The sappers, encased in their suits of protective iron, were in the next row of trenches. They were desperately trying to climb out and away before the bluecoats reached them, all the while replaced by a scrambling file of musketeers. Massie had told Stryker that this part of the enemy camp was occupied by Darcy’s Northern Brigade. They were a good fighting unit. The scrap would be hard-fought and bitter.

The Royalists crouched behind upended dog carts and slithered into some of the more robust ditches, fishing for musket-balls in their leather pouches and blowing frantically on smouldering match-cords. In a matter of seconds, the firing began.

‘
On
!
On
!
On
!’ Captain Crisp screamed, ducking instinctively as a musket-ball whistled past his head. He turned back to see the large force swarming in his wake, and he twirled his blade high so that it winked in the orange light. A man to his left flew back, punched in the chest by a ball fired at devilishly close range, and he collapsed in a bloody heap, staring lifelessly at the dusky ether.

Stryker was there, running with the men as though they were a herd of maddened oxen willing to trample anything that dared block their path. He drew his sword as he reached a trench, leapt down into it, his boots plunging into the sticky morass that had already crept up through the cracks between the timbers lining its base. He lost his footing for a moment, steadying himself against an upturned and empty gabion, and twisted round to see a metal-clad engineer charge at him, pick-axe in his big hands. The attack came swift and heavy, and Stryker barely managed to shift his weight to the side to avoid a certain killing blow. The axe point ploughed a deep cleft in the trench wall, sticking there, as the saturated mud would not relinquish its new prize. Stryker felt the urge to kill the man as he tried in vain to yank the weapon free, but he knew the thick body armour the engineers wore would only damage his blade, so he shouldered his way past. He ran along the sap, faintly registering Skellen’s foul-mouthed war cry somewhere behind, and reached a lone musketeer. The man had been cut off, for already the bluecoats had overrun this ditch and were swarming into the next, but his musket was primed to fire and he pulled the trigger. The ball whipped wildly to the side, holing a wicker basket to Stryker’s right, and he charged into the acrid plume of smoke that had belched around the musketeer. The man had already reversed the long-arm, putting it to use as a club, and he thrust it powerfully forth, hoping to smash the butt end into Stryker’s face. But the captain pivoted away, wise to the move, and battered the bewildered Royalist’s cheek with his sword-hilt. The man fell, dazed but not seriously hurt, and Stryker left him to wallow in the filth.

He climbed out of the sap, sprawled in the mud, and charged on. The air had turned thick with powder smoke. Somewhere cannon fired, though he could not tell from which side it had come. A pair of corpses lay ahead, one dressed in Stamford’s blue, the other in yellow, tangled together in a raging embrace that had killed them both. Stryker vaulted them, his boot clipping one of the outstretched arms, and he stumbled all the way to the next trench. He virtually fell into the sap, hit the bottom hard, feeling all the beatings at the hands of Richard Port come back to taunt him, but Skellen was there as ever, hauling him up in defiance of the pulsing agony. They saw that this trench had already been purged, bodies scattered all the way along its length, and Skellen swung his long legs up and over, dragging Stryker up in turn.