Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (2 page)

Be sure to return to us with news of the rebels’ movements
in the north-west
. Had those not been the Prince’s words? So rather than sit idle in Oxford with the King’s army, watching the enemy grow stronger and letting the edge of his sword dull, Mun would hunt. He would kill. Surely a child of war like the Prince would understand his reasons for remaining in Lancashire, would rather Mun remained a thorn in his enemy’s side than became a swaggering wineskin like most of the gentlemen Cavaliers in Oxford.

‘You don’t have much faith in the peace negotiations I take it,’ O’Brien said, one bushy red eyebrow hoisted. Tack and armour jangled and clinked and horses snorted; those sounds and the occasional raucous
koww
of a crow the only interruptions to the silence of the frozen fells.

‘There’s more chance of you taking holy orders and ending up the Bishop of bloody Bath than there is of His Majesty going along with Parliament’s demands,’ Mun replied.

O’Brien cocked his head thoughtfully, as though the scenario Mun had suggested was not entirely inconceivable. ‘The concessions they demand of him are unrealistic,’ Mun went on. ‘Just think it through.’ He doubted the Irishman would. ‘The King will not relinquish his sovereign control of the militia. Honour prevents him handing over those whom Parliament would scourge. His religion will not let him put an end to bishops, and only a fool would disband a growing army that shows signs of being useful.’

Mun clapped his hands together and pumped his fists, trying to get some warmth into them. ‘No, the negotiations will come to nothing, mark my words, and if I know the Prince he’ll be stalking around Oxford like a caged animal.’

Mun thought about the Prince and his seemingly boundless energy for war. ‘Actually, I’d wager he is ignoring the sham of peace entirely. He’ll be up to the same as us,’ he said, patting the pistol’s butt, ‘trying to further our political advantages by means of steel and shot, for he knows better than anyone that our failure to take London has cost us dear.’

O’Brien sniffed loudly. ‘Well let’s hope the royal fellow doesn’t decide to use his steel and shot on us for not rejoining the regiment.’

‘You’re free to leave. Bugger off back to Ireland if you want. I won’t make you stay,’ Mun said, looking straight ahead, feeling a stab of irritation. Or rather disappointment to think the Irishman might want to leave. Yet he knew it was unfair to expect O’Brien to risk punishment for Mun’s own dereliction.

‘I’ll freeze my arse off a while longer if it’s all the same to you.’ O’Brien looked off across the frost-hardened heath. ‘You need me to look after you. Besides, little Francis would miss me something terrible if I buggered off now.’

Mun felt the cold air bite into the cracks in his lips as he smiled, for who would believe that, aside from their friendship, a baby was truthfully the main reason why O’Brien had not turned his mare south and ridden to Oxford. Mun knew the big man had grown fond of little Francis, Bess and Emmanuel’s baby who had been born to the demi-cannon’s roar during the siege of Shear House. The dear fatherless boy’s first taste of life had been bitter with the acrid smoke of muskets, his little ears full of the screams of the stricken and dying, but he had brought a tenderness out of O’Brien that Mun guessed few had ever witnessed. Though how an infant did not wail with terror at the sight of the red-haired giant was a constant surprise to Mun.

‘It’s all the same to me but Prudence will be happy to hear of it,’ Mun said, watching from the corner of his eye for O’Brien’s reaction. Which was a great shiver and beard-splitting grimace. The cook did not boast looks that Anthony van Dyck would have got his brushes wet for, but she clearly thought the Irishman did and her ears and cheeks would flush red whenever she saw him.

‘The way she leers at me …’ O’Brien growled, ‘as though she’d put me in one of her pies and wolf me down with a wash of ale.’

Mun laughed, his breath blending with Hector’s, fogging around his face. Then the stallion neighed, the bit in his mouth jangling against his teeth, and Mun knew Hector well enough to follow the beast’s gaze into what little breeze prevailed against them from the east.

And that was when he saw it. A faint stain on a ridge of ground thirty paces off his right shoulder, where the frost had been knocked off the heather.

‘Come on, boy,’ he said, clicking his tongue and pressing his right knee against Hector’s warm flank, ‘let’s take a look, shall we?’

O’Brien flicked his reins and made to follow. ‘Good idea. It won’t be so damned cold if we get off the high ground,’ he called, thinking that Mun would lead them over the swell and down into one of the many deep river valleys that cut through the moorland. But Mun did not answer, because he did not know yet what he was looking at.

‘Could be deer,’ O’Brien said, drawing alongside, looking down at the disturbed clump of heather. ‘Or a sheep that has wandered off.’ Behind them the rest of the column had halted in a cloud of their own fog, some of the men slapping their upper arms for warmth, others sitting their mounts as though they had already frozen to death. ‘Mary mother of God!’ he said then, seeing what held Mun’s eye: a column of infantry down in the valley, trudging towards a copse of skeletal oak, ash and alder. There were several horsemen too, one of whom had evidently scouted up the valley’s steep side and left his tracks in the frost: tracks which now led all the way back to the column. ‘Do you think he saw us?’

‘I’d wager a half crown on it,’ Mun said, twisting and gesturing for his troopers to join them. ‘That’s why they’re heading for the trees.’

‘So we know the buggers aren’t ours then,’ O’Brien said, ‘else they wouldn’t be scarpering like mice back to their little hole.’

‘You’re assuming that scout knew who
we
were,’ Mun said,
sweeping out an arm towards the men and horses that were bunching around them. ‘We’re not the Prince’s Horse now.’

O’Brien frowned, casting an eye over the Shear House men who had become Sir Edmund Rivers’s cavalry troop. ‘Aye, you’d think us a horde of starving cut-throats,’ he said. None of the men disagreed, their liquid eyes fixed on the column of foot below.

‘Not cut-throats. Not with these horses,’ Mun said, ‘yet the sight of us was enough to curdle that scout’s blood and put his whole company to flight. All, what, forty of them?’

O’Brien grinned wickedly. ‘Horses put the fear of God into infantry.’

‘That’s part of it,’ Mun said, ‘but there’s another reason they’re wetting their breeches.’

The Irishman’s gloved fingers raked the thick red bristles on his cheek until the answer struck him. ‘They’re bloody recruits!’ he said. ‘Not even proper soldiers, but for those officers sitting nice warm beasts, boots out of the frost.’

Mun nodded. ‘Those officers have come north. From Blackburn.’ He gestured at the handful of riders who were corralling those on foot towards the trees, which were still four or five hundred yards away by Mun’s reckoning. ‘They’ve come looking for wool traders and farm boys to turn into soldiers, those who were not in the villages when the sergeants came banging the drum.’

‘To give the traitorous fellows their due it looks as if they’ve found some,’ O’Brien admitted.

That was true enough, Mun thought. The rebels knew Derby was holed up forty miles south in Warrington and they’d guessed correctly that the Preston garrison would be keeping their bones warm. So here they were, out in the freezing cold. Recruiting. Mun felt the blood begin to tremble in his limbs. It was the battle thrill coming on him.

‘The brazen bastards,’ Trooper Harley said, winding his wheellock. Many of the others were doing likewise, slipping
spanners over the square section of their weapons’ wheel shafts and filling the still morning with a salvo of clicks before priming the pans with powder and pulling the pan covers shut.

‘We’re going to tear them to shreds,’ Mun said, checking that his own weapons – the two firelocks and his carbine – were secure. His heavy sword was snug in its scabbard on his saddle behind his left hip. He still wore the old back-and-breast he had bought from a trooper in Nehemiah Boone’s company whose place he had taken after breaking the man’s leg, but beneath it he now wore a fine buff-coat stripped from the dead captain who had led the assault on Shear House. Downing had been the man’s name and his leather coat – so fine that it could not have cost the captain less than eleven pounds – fitted Mun perfectly, providing not only protection but much-needed warmth. As for Nehemiah Boone, just the thought of him was enough to sour Mun’s belly. They might both fight for the King but there was as much bad blood between Mun and the captain – the first of it spilled by Boone himself the day they had met – as there would soon be amongst the frosted tussocks in the valley below.

‘If we let those men live they and others like them will be at the gates of Shear House before spring,’ he announced to the troop, taking off his gloves. ‘They will threaten our families. They will try to kill us.’

‘Whoresons can try,’ a hard-looking man with a weathered face said. His name was John Cole and from what Major Radcliffe had told Mun and from what Mun had since seen for himself, Cole was a useful man to have with you in a fight.

‘They will spread their sedition and we shall never be rid of this war,’ Mun went on, tying his helmet’s leather thong beneath his chin then shoving cold hands back into the gloves. ‘So we kill them before they get to those trees.’

‘Do we offer quarter?’ a wide-eyed lad named Godfrey asked, pushing his wheellock back into its saddle holster with a trembling hand.

‘You can offer by all means, lad, but kill them first,’ O’Brien said, pushing his own helmet down snug over his thick red tresses.

‘Kill them,’ Mun said, holding Godfrey’s eye with enough steel in the gaze to make the young trooper more afraid of him than of the enemy below. And with that he gave Hector a touch of heel and urged him over the frost-stiffened tussocks of the ridge, his eyes riveted on the men below, whose formation had disintegrated now in their panic to get to cover.

Mun knew it was unwise to ride at any sort of speed down such a slope, but he also knew that if they descended at a walk the rebels would gain the trees and he would lose the advantage. So they went at the trot, hooves thudding against the iron-hard ground, armour and tack clinking and jangling. Mun felt the icy wind bite into his face, blurring his vision and dragging tears from the corners of his eyes. The bitterly cold air scorched his throat and lungs but he relished it, his whole body thrumming now with the excitement that always flooded his veins before mortal danger. And now he could hear the men in the gully below shouting, could discern fragments of commands mostly lost amongst the wind gushing past his face and eking into the gaps between helmet-steel and ears.

‘For England and King Charles!’ he roared, and that’s when the first muskets cracked in the valley, etching a grimace between Mun’s lips, for this all but confirmed that the troops below were Parliament men and in truth Mun had not been utterly certain before. ‘England and King Charles!’ he yelled again, and this time several others repeated the war-cry as they followed Mun’s lead and gave the spur, breaking into a gallop, a fear of flying lead hunching shoulders and pulling in heads. O’Brien, no great admirer of the King but a sworn devotee of killing men who pointed muskets at him, gave his own cry of ‘Ireland’, as a stuttering volley of musketry shredded the crisp afternoon. Mun felt a ball whir past his left cheek, and the frantic rhythm his troopers’ horses beat against the ground.

They galloped down onto the valley floor, men folding forward and grunting with the impact of coming onto flatter ground, and now Mun could make out the faces of his enemies one hundred feet away, their eyes wide with terror as their freezing hands fumbled at powder flasks, scouring sticks and glowing match-cords. He saw one man drop his musket and another turn and run, but Mun’s prey was a buff-coated officer sitting a chestnut mare, who was screaming at his recruits to form a line and for the love of God load and give fire.

Forty feet away.

Taking the reins in his left hand Mun reached behind him with his right and hauled his carbine round on its belt, though he did not fire because the weapon was jolting wildly.

Twenty feet.

The rebel officer must have fired his pistol already for now he drew his sword, but Mun gripped with his knees and brought his left hand up to steady the carbine’s barrel and the rebel threw his other arm across his face in vain as Mun squeezed the trigger. The carbine roared and its ball punched a hole through buff leather, skin and breastbone, and through the rebel’s heart, spraying gore-flecked bone and slivers of glistening meat out of the ruin of his back, and then Mun was flown past him.

A callow-faced young rebel raised his matchlock and Mun cursed, thinking himself a dead man. But in his fear or inexperience the musketeer had misjudged the length of match clamped in the serpent’s jaws and the tip of the burning match missed the priming-pan, or else he had forgotten to open the pan, and Mun spurred Hector forward so that the stallion’s chest slammed into the man, catapulting him backwards with the sound of bones snapping. ‘King Charles!’ Mun clamoured, drawing a pistol and shooting a rebel between the eyes, who collapsed, a dark stain blooming on the crotch of his breeches, his brains spread across the frosted tussocks like spilled porridge.

Mun twisted and saw O’Brien bury his poll-axe in another
mounted officer’s shoulder, heard the rebel scream like a vixen before the Irishman leant across and shoved his pistol into the man’s belly and gave fire, gobbets of flesh and spine erupting from a void in the officer’s back.

Some rebels were still running for the trees and so Mun hauled on the reins and kicked back with the spurs that had once been fastened to the boots of the King of England himself, urging the stallion on, breaking away from the chaos to cut down the fugitives.

‘Wait for me, you greedy bastard! Sir!’ O’Brien yelled and pulled his own mount round to gallop after Mun. Who was already pulling his heavy sword out of its scabbard and into the raw, death-filled day.