Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (41 page)

‘Shite,’ he muttered, chiding himself for the feeling. He had been uneasy with the whole affair since their clandestine flight from Bristol. First fearing doom at the hands of Killigrew’s slithery meddling, then witnessing with horror the change in Stryker’s attitude. But now? He had dared to tell Stryker that he would not fight Mowbray’s men if it came to it, and that sentiment had not altered one bit. Yet he had to admit that the rebel cause in this cannon-ravaged city had been inspiring in the extreme. The bravery of each and every citizen was something that he could not help but respect and admire. And what did that make him? ‘A paper-skulled fool, that’s what,’ he said aloud.

He looked again at Stryker. An imposingly tall man wearing a coat that strained to hold in his bulbous midriff had joined the captain by the cart. Skellen grimaced in distaste. ‘But you’re the real trouble, ain’t you, Colonel Skafflock? You’re the real reason his head’s turned. Thinks he owes you, the silly bugger.’ He spat, turning angrily back to the party digging the ditch and piling the breastwork. He wondered if things would be different if they had never encountered the greencoats in the wood at Hartcliffe. Never run into bloody Richard Port.

‘Coming along nicely,’ Vincent Skaithlocke said as he produced his own pipe from a snapsack that seemed like a tiny purse in his massive hand. He had a lighted scrap of match-cord and braced it between his lips, the smouldering tip lolling like a fiery tongue as he fished a plug of dark sotweed from somewhere in the voluminous folds of his coat.

‘Aye,’ Stryker reflected, ‘they’re working well. If the king’s men come over the wall here, they’ll run straight into it. Not that you’d be concerned about that,’ he added pointedly.

Skaithlocke winced. ‘A fair accusation,’ he hissed, the match forcing him to speak through the corner of his mouth. He crumbled the tobacco deftly into the pipe bowl and plucked the match free from the embrace of his lips. ‘Perhaps, then, it is time for you to come into my circle of trust.’

A gout of smoke tumbled around Stryker. ‘No more games, sir, please.’

‘It is no game, Innocent.’ The colonel dipped the match’s hot end into the bowl as he sucked hard upon the bone-white stem. Soon his bearded face was obscured by the pungent cloud, and he snuffed out the match between thumb and forefinger. ‘I have misled you a little, I think, though I pray you will forgive me when you learn of my reasons.’

Stryker watched the black shapes of the digging crew as they bustled around the breastwork. ‘Go on.’

‘Gloucester is a means to an end. Indeed, the same can be said for the entire conflict.’ He stared down at Stryker through the twisting grey tentacles. ‘There are greater issues at stake than this pathetic war, son. You remember the horrors of the Low Countries as well as I.’

‘We’ve spoken of it many times, Colonel,’ Stryker said. The nightmares still haunted him. Screams of dying men, the fearful faces of families caught in the path of a marauding army, the laughter of men for whom life was cheap. The sickly sweet stink of scorched flesh had become ingrained in his nostrils, he felt sure; an ever-present reminder of a youth spent in hell. ‘You know I could never forget our years there. No man could.’

Skaithlocke seemed to pause, letting his billowing outbreath linger for a time. ‘What if I were to tell you,’ he finally said, ‘that my years fighting for the Provinces have not yet reached an end?’

Stryker did not try to conceal his bafflement at this new line of discussion. ‘You said you had come home to save England from a tyrant.’

‘And I have,’ Skaithlocke nodded, ‘in a way. The real tyrant is Ferdinand.’

‘Ferdinand? The Emperor? But he is dead.’

‘Not our old enemy, Stryker. His son; Ferdinand the Third.’ Skaithlocke slammed a fist into his solid palm as he spoke. ‘Unholy Roman Emperor, King of Hungary, Germany and Bohemia. Archduke of Austria. Murderer.’

The titles hit Stryker like case shot, throwing his mind into an uncontrollable spin, and he let it tumble away, forgotten places and long-dead faces pushing their way from misty obscurity to sudden sharpness. Comrades who would now be nothing but bones piled with so many others in pits around the desolate continent raced up to glower at him. Men who had been courageous or craven, amusing or dull, hawk-witted or foolish. So many faces; so many names. Yet one returned to him again and again; a man who had been around the same age as Stryker, trained as a killer by the enormous soldier who towered above him in this most unlikely place.

‘This has something to do with your son, doesn’t it?’ he said abruptly, focussing on Skaithlocke’s intense gaze.

Skaithlocke took his time emptying the charred contents of the pipe with seemingly deliberate slowness. ‘What I told you about John was true, Stryker,’ he said when the clay stem was safely secreted about his person. ‘He was shot.’ His eyes became distant, then suddenly glassy, sparkling in the warm torchlight. ‘But it was at dawn, by a Papist squad of villains who refused to offer quarter.’

Stryker’s throat tightened as he imagined the fear his friend would have felt that day. It was one thing taking a ball or blade in the heat of a fight, quite another to know one’s own fate in advance. Even so, he told himself, such things happened. ‘But, Colonel, it is a brutal war,’ he said, careful to choose his words wisely. ‘John was a soldier.’

‘And he should have expected death?’

Stryker shrugged. ‘Men who live by the gun tend to die by it eventually.’

Skaithlocke rounded on him with a ferocity Stryker had almost forgotten the big man possessed. His right arm jabbed against the captain’s chest, jolting him into a stumbled retreat. ‘Should he have expected the bastards to poke out his eyes too?’

‘Jesu,’ Stryker blurted, reeling from the human storm cloud. ‘They did that?’

But Skaithlocke was not listening. His eyes were blank and his mind elsewhere, lost in some blood-stained German field, replaying his deepest horror as if in his own personal torture chamber. ‘Should he have laughed merrily as they sliced off his stones, Stryker? As they crammed them into his screaming mouth?’ He was crying now, sobbing, his broad face distorted like that of a gargoyle with the anguish of the moment. ‘Aye, he was a soldier, and soldiers expect death every day. But not like that.’ He stopped, let his mortar-barrel arms drop as though the bones had dissolved from the inside, and blinked in utter bewilderment as if the last seconds had been lost on him. ‘Not my son,’ he said in something akin to a sigh. ‘Not like that.’

Stryker went to pick up the pipe he had dropped in the sudden outburst. ‘Christ, Vincent, I am sorry. Truly I am.’ He felt his own eye prickle, even as John Skaithlocke’s terrified face changed in his mind into that of Lieutenant Burton. He blinked hard. ‘Why are you here?’

‘To alter the war,’ Skaithlocke said, his voice still drifting in the distance.

‘Which war?’

Skaithlocke looked at him, his pupils contracting in the guttering half-light to focus on his face. ‘The only war that matters. The war against my son’s murderers.’ He raised an arm again, though this time the fist was uncurled, beseeching. ‘Come with me, Innocent. We will take the fight to the Papists like no man since Adolphus, with the united English army at our backs.’

Stryker could not stifle a low chuckle. ‘And how do you expect to arrange such a thing? It is absurd!’

‘By killing a man.’

‘
A
man?’ Stryker echoed incredulously. ‘Who?’

The north wall, Gloucester, 20 August 1643

The bluecoats walked away at precisely the right time, showing their backs as had been prearranged. They were on the fire-step at the summit of the earthwork that formed the north wall, posted here to patrol the area for an attack across the Little Mead, but now, and for the next five minutes, they would be looking elsewhere.

‘Very impressive,’ Nikolas Robbens said in a small voice. He was pressed up against a pile of masonry some twenty paces from the rampart. It had been plundered, he assumed, from one of the houses destroyed by the previous day’s bombardment, and would be destined to plug any gaps in the dilapidated walls. Not yet, though. Tonight it served as the first marker on his night-shrouded adventure. He watched as the bluecoats moved further away from the next marker, the spot on the northern rampart where Slager had told him to cross. The place he had made sure would be empty.

Now was the time, Robbens knew, for the soldiers would soon be back. He stooped to gather the snapsack at his feet. It was reassuringly heavy, and he felt the contents briefly; one final ritual before the off. Satisfied, he absently smoothed out the silken ear-string at his left lobe, hoisted the sack on to his shoulder, and made his move.

The earthwork was not steep here, for Massie had concentrated all his efforts in strengthening the south and east walls in response to the clear Royalist intent in that area, and Robbens scrambled up the glacis with ease. At the summit, he scrambled over the palisade and slid sideways down the outer face, knees slightly bent, legs braced, and plummeted into the ditch. This was not the formidably deep barrier that lined the wall to the south, and he negotiated it without difficulty. Massie had no need to create a moat here, for he already had one, and Robbens now stood at its bank. The River Severn split into two limbs further west, the earthworks of the West Gate cradled in its fork, and one limb ran all the way along the north wall, providing a natural, fast-flowing moat to keep the Welsh infantrymen camped this side of the city at bay.

Nikolas Robbens stared into the black abyss as the water rushed by. It was not a furious current, for the river saved its most dangerous power for the time when it swelled with autumn rains, but it looked vigorous nonetheless, and the assassin had to breathe deeply to calm his nerves. He jerked his shoulder so that the snapsack slipped free, and reslung it so that it was tied tightly around his neck.

Someone shouted up on the rampart. Robbens swore ferociously as he kicked off his shoes. The bluecoats were returning. He said a short prayer, asking God to forgive him his wrongs and to welcome him into His house when he departed this life. Judgement would be terrifyingly soon, and the thought made his guts twist. He shook his head violently, chasing away the doubts. He would commit his last murder, and in return Slager would make his beloved brothers rich. Ruud and Marc had been little more than babies when they had witnessed their parents die, and Nikolas, the eldest, had not been able to protect them from that awful sight. Now, finally, he could set matters straight. He, of course, would die, slaughtered where he stood, but his brothers would be lifted out of poverty at a single stroke. And that, without doubt, was worth a hundred martyrdoms.

He patted his hands against the perfectly bald expanse of his pate, and cracked his elbows. When a second cry of alarm broke across the sound of the water, he knew he could stall no longer, lest he wished a leaden ball in the back. Nikolas Robbens took a huge gulp of air so that his lungs burned, and hurled himself into the river.

Near the cathedral, Gloucester, 20 August 1643

‘The King?’ Stryker blurted in astonishment. ‘You mean to assassinate the King?’

Colonel Vincent Skaithlocke bobbed his massive head. ‘King Charles will die, my friend. He will die, and the Parliament will win, and the war will be over.’

They had left Friar’s Orchard with all its flapping ears and prying eyes, Skaithlocke leading his puzzled protégé to the rooms set in the middle of a row of sagging oak-framed hovels that he used as his quarters. Now, seated on a three-legged stool beside the empty fireplace, Stryker gazed up at Skaithlocke as he tried to make sense of the night’s revelations. ‘You mean to take us into the fight on the Continent? How, Colonel? There would be no stomach for such an enterprise.’

Skaithlocke was pacing back and forth across the middle of the room, and he wagged a reproachful finger as he replied. ‘That is where you are quite wrong, son. There are plenty in the Commons who would see the defence of the Protestant Union as a calling from God. A new crusade.’ He shut his eyes, tilting his chin upwards as if sniffing the air. ‘Just imagine it. Dream it, as I have. England united by a Protestant Parliament, its gaze turning to a Europe on the brink of annihilation at the hands of Romish evil-doers.’ He looked back down at Stryker, his eyes narrow, drilling through the space between them. ‘Austria and Spain are strong. The Swedes and Dutch and their allies cannot turn the tide on their own. Not after so many years of carnage.’

Stryker rubbed his eye, suddenly feeling exhausted. ‘I cannot believe the Parliament would countenance such a thing.’

‘But what if an army of Englishmen sailed to their aid?’ Skaithlocke went on. It was clear that he had not heard what Stryker had said. ‘Our men are no longer green as grass, are they? They’re veterans now. Forged in the fire and blood of Kineton and Adwalton. Roundway, Stratton, Lansdown, Bristol.’ He clapped his wide hands together in a sound that echoed about the ceiling like a thunderbolt. ‘Just imagine it, Innocent. All those battles, all that experience. Bring those hard men together under a single banner. Send them to the Low Countries in an armada. Trust me, Stryker. We can achieve this. We can avenge John and all the others.’

‘Does Massie know about this? Is he part of the plot?’

Skaithlocke waved a dismissive hand. ‘Of course not. He cares only for his precious city, for he believes it will make his name. Besides, there is no stomach for such a plan, not even in the most ardent Roundhead. They would win their war, but they would not commit regicide.’ He shrugged. ‘So I must do it for them. Take the dirty work away and leave only logic.’