Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (36 page)

Musket-balls whined about their heads as they ran on. The clang of steel rang out ahead and they knew they were close to where the bulk of Crisp’s bluecoats must be. They pushed through more drifting, sulphurous smog, and, like an unfolding dream, the battle spread out before them. The rebel raiding party was flooding the next two saps, where a concerted effort to repel them was underway. Musketeers and sappers of various Royalist units were joining the fray with every passing second, sent into the trench system from Darcy’s encampment further back along the road. They would soon overwhelm Crisp and his men, but there appeared to be no sign of a retreat.

Stryker and Skellen tumbled into the trench with the rest. Along its snaking length personal duels were being played out amid the screams of the living and the dying. The shovels of terrified sappers scythed the air in crushing arcs, while their guards fired muskets and stabbed with their tucks, desperate to rid the carefully constructed works of this baying rebel mob. Blood sprayed in great gouts, spouting into the gory mud from split skulls and lacerated throats, mixing with the guts of belly-slashed men and the vomit of those for whom the sheer sight had rendered them quivering wrecks.

A man burst from the rabid melee up ahead. He was tall and thick-set, and he knocked Stryker aside with a contemptuous blow of an upturned musket. Stryker went sprawling, tasting the coppery tang of soil laced with blood, and wrenched himself away, rolling out of range of a follow-up blow. But the big man had advanced beyond him, determined to fell Skellen, and he swung the musket butt again, clubbing it at the sergeant’s head. Stryker watched helplessly as Skellen parried the blow with his halberd, stepped back a pace, and swiped his pole-arm low. The halberd blade was made up of a sharp point, a bill-hook, and an axe, and it was that latter facet that cleaved through his attacker’s knee, chopping him to the bone so that he bellowed like a gelded bullock as he dropped into the mire.

Stryker had recovered his wits and his feet, and he was ready as another man came on. The Northern Brigader hefted a fierce-looking partizan, and Stryker slashed the air between them with his sword, caught nothing, and was forced to duck low to avoid the irresistible arc of the partizan’s heavy riposte. He retreated a fraction, set his stance again, and realized that he was grinning; madly, wickedly grinning at the man who was trying to kill him in this sticky pit. Because this was what he lived for, what he craved: battle and chaos and carnage. Blood pulsed in his ears, the song of rage that played its tune when fear and exhilaration mingled in visceral harmony, and he knew that he should be ashamed. These were his comrades, his own army, but he did not fight for Parliament. He fought for the approval of a man he had not seen for half a lifetime, yet who still commanded his utmost respect.

Skellen was at his side again, and together they forced their shared foe back until the Northern Brigader tripped on a body and went sprawling. Stryker lurched across him, stabbed him in the shoulder so that he dropped his weapon, and the pair surged on along the sap. They were with the main body of bluecoats again now. The raiders, it seemed, had reached an impasse, for the next few rows of trenches were brimming with Royalist reinforcements, who were shooting back with increasing regularity. Captain Crisp was in the midst of his men, urging them on, but even he could see that the day was done, and he called for the squad of bluecoats who had stayed with him during the sally, unused thus far. Stryker saw that each of them clutched a small sack that bulged as though it might carry turnips, but he knew well enough what nestled within the embrace of the cloth.

‘Get ’em over there, men!’ Crisp bawled. ‘Give ’em hell!
Hell
!’

The squad lined the trench wall, covered by the fire of their musket-toting comrades, and produced clay spheres from their sacks. Each ball had a fuse jutting from its smooth surface, and the men lit them with the glowing matches carried by the musketeers. They fizzed into life for a second, and then they were airborne, lobbed by the raiding party into the saps beyond.

Stryker ducked, pressing his back against the muddy side as the explosions ripped the evening apart. His ears rang, his head swam, and yet more of the powder-brimming vessels were prepared, lit and thrown. The ground shook, screams rose above the blasts, distinct in their shrillness, and a shower of soil and blood and flesh and gristle descended from the heavens like a biblical plague. Limbs slapped the wet earth, a scorched head landed just a few feet from Skellen to stare accusingly up at him. He kicked it quickly away, swearing as gelatinous ooze splattered his boot.

One more round of grenades was hurled, one more swelling blast tore the Royalist trenches to smithereens, leaving them in seething, gory tatters for the crows and kites to squabble over, and then Captain Crisp was ordering the retreat and they were running, scrambling, clawing their way back towards the safety of the North Gate, vengeful musketry snapping at their backs, fallen friends left to rot in the August sun.

The eastern trenches, Gloucester, 17 August 1643

The fragrant smoke from Captain Lancelot Forrester’s pipe billowed out over the shattered network of saps to mingle with the rotten-egg stench still lingering after the previous evening’s skirmish.

‘God’s teeth,’ he muttered on a fuming outbreath, blinking through the rising pall, and clamped the clay stem firmly between his teeth.

‘Quite,’ a muffled voice came from his side.

Forrester turned to the man who had spoken. He was tall, at least six foot, but that was all that was discernible through his jangling cage of siege armour. It was enormously heavy, Forrester knew, with thick plates at back and breast, more hanging across the thighs and a death’s-head burgonet that completely encompassed the man’s skull. All this was necessary, of course, for the man’s occupation made him a target for every musket-wielding man and woman on Gloucester’s walls.

‘I’m looking for Mister Sang,’ Forrester said. ‘Chief engineer for this sector.’

‘I am he,’ came the muffled answer. The engineer carried a long-handled shovel, and he trudged laboriously across to a cluster of stone-filled gabions and leaned it against one so that he could lift his visor.

Forrester followed, upending his pipe and dropping it into the snapsack hanging from his shoulder. ‘What’s the bill looking like?’

Sang’s face was deeply pitted, ravaged by some childhood disease, and his eyes were watery and red. He blew out his cheeks. ‘Twenty-four of theirs.’

Forrester’s brow shot up. ‘Jesu, he must be running out of men at this rate. Ours?’

‘Nearly as many.’ Sang turned to survey the saps destroyed by the rebel sally. Rebuilding work had not yet started, and the teams of sappers in their mud-encrusted leather aprons stood around in small groups, unwilling and unable to return to their little valleys while the wicker screens were not in place. ‘But it is the trench-works that matter.’

‘And?’

‘The damage is extensive. We lost quite a few tools and weapons, and the buggers detonated grenadoes all along this section. They came from the north, so I’m told.’ He glanced at the looming edifice of Gloucester’s East Gate. ‘Swept down into the trenches all around here. It was ambitious, I’ll give them that.’

‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.’

‘What’s that?’ Sang said. ‘Marlow?’

‘Shakespeare,’ Forrester replied in a slightly admonishing tone. ‘
Hamlet
, Act 2, scene 2. And who could say it better? These raids seem mad enough, for Massie cannot have the manpower or ammunition to keep them up. Yet they play havoc with our lads’ morale. I suppose that’s the point of ’em.’

‘And we must press on regardless,’ Sang said, scanning the fallen screens that littered the ground beside each collapsed sap. ‘Might I presume you’re here to guard us, sir?’

‘Indeed we are,’ said Forrester. He looked back at the files of red-coated musketeers who waited a short way back from the trenches with Lieutenant Jays. He nodded to Jays, who began to bring them forward. ‘The merry men of Mowbray’s Foot.’

‘From where do you hail, sir? Local?’

Forrester shook his head. ‘Rather a hotchpotch, if I’m honest. Our colonel’s estates are –
were
– in Hampshire, though God only knows what Puritan zealot owns ’em now. We began with men from thereabouts, as you’d imagine. But as the war’s rolled on, we’ve recruited from whichever town we’ve been billeted. And, of course, a good many of us are veterans.’

Sang stared up at the gate and the figures of those who perched so defiantly upon it. ‘How does this compare, sir?’

Forrester took a moment to think upon that, recalling the bloody battles and bitter sieges that had punctuated his formative years. ‘Smaller in scale,’ he said eventually, ‘but harder on the heart.’

The engineer grasped his shovel. ‘I’ll set the men to work, sir.’

‘You do that.’

Sang lowered his visor and hauled his right boot out of the mud, then the left, and repeated the process until he had achieved enough momentum to walk towards the siegeworks, his weighty armour making each movement painfully slow. The sappers saw him coming and began to stretch, grumble, and stoop to collect picks and hatchets or fasten filthy pads to their knees. Some went to fetch the wooden sledges they would use to drag away the excavated turf, while others waited in order to discuss covering fire with the advancing musketeers.

Forrester remained beside his gabion screen. The East Gate was well protected, the walls shored up by earth and incorporating some of the more robust houses built immediately adjacent to it, but it was still viewed as a weak point in the ring of defences, for it had not been afforded the formidable bastions of some of the ancient city’s other great entrances. Yet success had been limited even here, the Royalist attacks repelled with scarcely fathomable ease, while audacious raids by the Parliamentarian garrison had pecked away at the will of the king’s seemingly unstoppable force. Forrester wondered whether it was the reluctance to storm the city that had proven so costly, or perhaps the decision to award the ageing Earl of Forth overall command. He thought of Stratton, of the silent march of the Cornish troops, a move even bolder than anything Massie had conjured, and imagined what those mad-eyed men of Kernow might have done if they had been sent into the breach.

Well, that was all irrelevant for now. The grand Oxford Army and their Welsh allies would have to deal with the impudent folk of Gloucester in their own way. He watched the rampart as a sudden flurry of activity made it appear like a disturbed hive of bees. He noticed there was an artillery piece, a drake or something similar, mounted on the palisade, and men were scuttling about it. He shielded his eyes with a flattened palm and squinted against the sun, watching the animated bluecoats go about their business. Did they know what consternation they had caused in the Royalist encampment? He gave a rueful laugh. They probably had no idea. The senior officers seemed to be more jittery than ever this morning, as though the lack of progress had been highlighted to a nerve-shredding point by the night’s daring sally. It was openly bandied about that Massie’s stubborn force must surely be running low on powder and shot, but Forrester suspected that the Royalist provisions were hardly in rude health either. They had exhausted all the ammunition for the bigger cannon, which meant, until more could be sent from Oxford, they had no hope of opening another breach. Moreover, Lieutenant Colonel Baxter had muttered over dawn’s bacon and eggs that he had heard the latest consignment of powder consisted of just five barrels. They had ordered fifty. He had not seen it for himself, but rumour was that Gilby’s musketeers, recently up from Bristol, had been issued with six-shot bandoliers instead of the usual dozen, which proved the point well enough. Forrester wondered how long it would be before Mowbray’s men felt the same austerity measures bite. And what would that do for morale?

‘Christ, but we need to get in there soon,’ Forrester muttered aloud. He suspected the engineers would begin undermining the walls as soon as the saps could reach them. Blow the whole thing sky-high as they had at Lichfield. As far as he was concerned, it could not happen soon enough. Gloucester was battered and bruised, but by no means beaten.

He was startled by a sharp cough from the walls, followed immediately by a scream that grew in pitch and intensity. An expanding ball of smoke raced out from the top of the enemy palisade like a gigantic mushroom, and Forrester felt himself duck, his legs buckling as a matter of instinct. He thrust himself against the gabion. All around, men did the same, dropping tools and scrambling for shelter, but not all could clear the slippery ground in time, and they scattered in all directions like hens before a fox. The scream became louder, and Forrester tasted blood as he bit the inside of his mouth.

The whining ball caught one of the sappers straight between the shoulders. It burst through him as though he were a pillar of butter, careening through spine and sinew in a shower of gore, ripping a tattered path through his shirt and apron. It seemed to lift him for a heartbeat, carry him away as though he had sprouted wings, and he flew the best part of ten yards before dropping into one of the saps, head down, legs splayed and upright, shoes thrust above the muddy bank like twin flag poles. They shook for a few seconds, beating the air while the man’s blood and innards seeped into the shallow ditch. There were others in the sap, hiding from the murderous iron shot, and they stared, dumbstruck and horrified, at the man who had been snuffed out like a candle flame in a storm.