Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (3 page)

MUN HAD CUT
down two more rebels as they fled for the trees, his heavy sword hacking into the first man’s shoulder, all but severing the arm, then lopping off a goodly chunk of the second rebel’s skull as Hector bore him past at the gallop. Surprisingly it was the first rebel who had died first, almost instantly, bleeding in rhythmic gouts that melted the frost. The second man, with half his skull gone to expose the glistening brains, had lived long enough to mumble that he had wanted no part in the argument between King and Parliament and wished even then, his brains leaking, to be left alone that he might go home to his ill mother.

‘We’ve all got a part in this but you should have joined the right bloody side, lad,’ O’Brien had said not unkindly, though he was cleaning his poll-axe on the dying man’s tunic at the time. The young rebel had seemed about to answer this when he was gripped by a sudden convulsing and frothing about the mouth, soon after which he died with eyes full of tears.

‘He lasted longer than I would have wagered, what with his skull opened up like a boiled egg,’ O’Brien had said, but Mun had not replied because despite his previous order to his men to give no quarter, he was now trying to rein them in and stop the killing.

‘Hold, Shear House men!’ he yelled at twelve of his mounted men who were corralling nine stunned and bloodied survivors together like a noose around a neck. ‘Spare them if they have yielded.’

But his men, who were thirty paces off, were blood-drunk and wanted more.

‘You heard Sir Edmund!’ a man named Goffe bellowed, urging his mount in amongst the press of mostly younger men. ‘Pull that trigger, Bull, I’ll knock yer bloody ears off and you’ll be picking the frost out of ’em.’

Bull was glaring at a rebel who was on his knees, his peaked montero-cap gripped before his terrified face, but Goffe’s threat pierced Bull’s rage and, cursing, he lowered his wheellock, keeping his finger on the trigger. Mun walked Hector over to them, grateful to have Goffe with him. A tenant farmer, Goffe had proved a solid soldier, the kind of man who would be made a corporal in the King’s real army. The other men respected him as one of their own and listened to him, which was just as well for the surviving rebels. At least for now.

‘Take anything worth having,’ Mun said, dismounting and leading Hector by his bridle, ‘and share out the powder and shot. Lash the muskets together in fours and let the lighter men tie them across their saddles.’

They knew well enough what to do, had done it before, and dismounted to set about their task. Other Shear House men were spread across the site of the carnage, looting the dead, cold hands fumbling at the boxes on slain rebels’ bandoliers, emptying the precious black powder into their own flasks. Two of the younger troopers were doubled over and puking, the vomit pattering onto the frosty grass and steaming, and Mun knew it was the shock of seeing men butchered. He felt the thrum in his own limbs intensify now that the fight was over: his body’s way of confirming that it still lived, that the heart still thumped in his breast whilst other men’s hearts had beaten their last and were growing cold.

It had been a wild but utter victory. They had swept down into the valley in a wave of death and if they had been wolves and the rebels sheep the result would not have been any different, for they had killed thirty and lost not one. Mun dared to wonder if this proved that God was on his side; on the King’s side too, yet he pushed such thoughts back into the dark corners of his mind. Because God was merciful and would wish Mun to be merciful now.

But Mun had not stopped the killing out of mercy.

‘You command here?’ a rebel barked, eyeballing Mun even as John Cole snatched his knapsack off him and began to rifle through the contents.

‘I do,’ Mun replied, walking over, letting go of Hector’s bridle so that he could slide his sword through a scrap of cloth torn from a rebel’s shirt.

‘You devil! You gave us no opportunity to surrender,’ the man protested as Mun tossed the bloody rag aside. He was in his thirties, clean-shaven, clear-eyed and with a strong jaw that Mun guessed had been honed to sharp edges by the yelling of commands. He did not seem afraid, which might have been surprising given that his newly raised troop lay butchered before it had ever served Parliament’s cause. Yet good commanders knew that fear spread like fire. Good officers learned to smother it, whether in the presence of their own men or the enemy.

‘Would you have allowed us to surrender?’ Mun asked, holding the man’s eye, and to the rebel’s credit he held his tongue rather than lie. ‘No you would not,’ Mun confirmed, ‘and if we had given you warning and thus chance to properly defend yourselves, your men would still be dead now’ – he pointed his sword at a rebel whose lifeless face was a blood-sheeted grimace – ‘but many of mine would be corpses too.’ Mun shrugged, pushing his blade back into its scabbard. ‘This is your reward for treason,’ he said. ‘Death is your payment for taking up arms against your king.’

‘You mean to murder us in cold blood?’ The man was wide-eyed, the bridle slipping off his fear at last.

Mun shook his head. ‘Not me,’ he said, glancing up at the wan sky, his breath rising in a cloud. He turned to the rest of his troop who were still plundering the dead. ‘Shear House men, mount up! We have done our work here.’

‘You’re going to leave us out here like this?’ the rebel leader asked, ignoring Cole’s growled threat to take off his buff-coat or else die with it on. Goffe, Harley and even young Godfrey were working fast, relieving the stunned rebels of food, spare clothing, tinder boxes, flints and steel, bottles, blankets and money; stripping them as thoroughly as a dog paring flesh from a bone. ‘We’ll freeze to death,’ the man declared as his men looked to each other fearfully. ‘The nearest village is ten miles east. If we don’t find it before dark we’ll die.’

‘There’s a village called Longridge five miles back that way,’ Mun said, thumbing south, seeing hope spark in the rebel’s eyes. ‘But if I see you there I will kill you. Your only hope lies east. Whalley village.’

‘Who are you, you devil?’ the rebel officer asked as he was shoved this way and that by Cole who was pulling his plain buff-coat off him, leaving him clothed merely in shirt and doublet so that much of his white skin was now at the mercy of the biting cold.

‘He’s the man that gave you a good hiding,’ O’Brien said at Mun’s shoulder, pouring powder down the muzzle of his wheellock. Some of the rebels grimaced, disgusted though perhaps not surprised to discover that an Irishman had played some part in their destruction.

‘My name is Sir Edmund Rivers,’ Mun said, taking hold of his saddle’s cantle and hauling himself up onto Hector’s back. ‘If you do not freeze to death out here you would do well to remember me.’

‘Then I shall pray to the Lord, Sir Edmund, that He sees
fit to preserve me that I might meet you again and avenge these men whom you have barbarously slaughtered.’ His eight companions lacked their leader’s boldness and either gawked pathetically at their enemies or looked at their shoes.

Mun regarded the man for a moment, saw that he was beginning to shiver, the raw air sinking teeth into his bones. Part of him was tempted to give the order to kill the prisoners where they stood and be done with the thing. Then his mind dragged up an image of his father lying plundered and stripped in the bloody mire of Edgehill. It was not a memory, for he had never found Sir Francis or Emmanuel after the battle, yet he knew the image to be true all the same.

Let them freeze, he thought, and with a click of his tongue he turned Hector around and walked him south away from the Forest of Bowland, looking up at the pale, grey-hazed sun and looking forward to getting himself in front of a roaring fire in Longridge village.

Tom Rivers had found more comfort than he would have dared hope for in The Leaping Lord. He had been back in Southwark some seven weeks now, drawn south to London because he knew not where else to go and wanted to be at the least far away from Shear House and the ruins of his former life. London was buzzing, her people still jubilant after their victory at Turnham Green where twenty-four thousand soldiers and townsfolk – men and women – had stood side by side to defend the road into London. Together this huge if unusual army had mustered on Chelsea Fields and marched westwards to deny their king entry to the city.

‘What a sight it was. A vision I shall never forget,’ Ruth Gell had told Tom the night he had come to the Lord. At first she had not recognized him – later she admitted to assuming him to be a beggar – but then she had looked properly into his eyes and she had gasped in shock, seeing through the unkempt hair and beard – and the scars – to the young man she had known
before the war. There had been no available rooms and Tom had shared Ruth’s bed as in old times.

Her eyes had shone as she recounted the tale. ‘All the proud ensigns of the Trained Bands danced in the wind and we stood there shoulder to shoulder with fighting men,’ she had told him, ‘men who had stood against the King at Kineton Fight. And hundreds more were scattered amongst the gardens and orchards and waiting in narrow lanes beside the Thames. And we were prepared to fight, too!’ she had announced, as though daring him to dispute it.

He had not disputed it. ‘We knew that devil Prince Rupert and his cavalry couldn’t hurt us in the streets,’ she had said, ‘and you know what His Majesty’s men did? They watched us. They watched us eat and they watched us pray and damn their eyes but they did not know what to do.’ The ghost of a smile had lit her eyes. ‘It wouldn’t look good, would it, the King sending his soldiers against so many ordinary folk? And we knew it. You should have seen it, Tom. It was like a miracle.’

Ruth had shrugged, accepting that he would never know how it had felt to be among them on that glorious day. ‘By evening it was all over. His Majesty and all his haughty lot buggered off.’ Her plump lips had curled then, like a cat settling into its basket. ‘We danced and sang and drank until we fell over. Oh but you should have been there, my handsome man. You should have seen us.’

Tom had listened, barely saying a word, barely even stirring other than an occasional nod to usher her on with the story, and Ruth had obliged, washing the dirt of the road from his skin and tracing callused fingers over scars and the puckered flesh of wounds that had not been there when she had last known his body by candlelight. Only in the early hours of the morning, when Tom had been vaguely aware of his limbs slackening, his body surrendering at last against Ruth and her lumpy bed, had she murmured that she had thought he was dead.

‘Some of your friends were here,’ she said, her voice barely
above a whisper, as though she was compelled to tell him but hoped he would not hear. She pushed his long hair behind his right ear, fingertips brushing his cheekbones and the taut ridge of his brows. ‘Matthew Penn and Will Trencher. They’ve been in a few times. They said you were killed at Kineton Fight.’ Tom felt some small lifting of his soul’s burden at the mention of his friends. ‘They miss you, Tom. Never said as much of course, but I could see it in their faces. You men can’t hide things like that. Matthew said you fought like a demon. That you weren’t afraid of anything.’

‘I was afraid,’ Tom heard himself mumble.

‘One of the others saw you ride into the King’s men, saw you shot from your horse.’ There was a short heavy silence. ‘I’m sorry if Achilles is gone,’ she said, ‘you loved that horse better than you love most people.’
Better than you love me
, her eyes said. Tom said nothing and Ruth nestled a kiss amongst his hair and pressed her cheek against his head. ‘No one has heard from you since.’

A short while later he heard Ruth say: ‘Well you’re safe now.’

And then he had slept.

Now it was mid March and freezing still, and Tom had resumed his old duties at the Lord, clearing tables, hefting barrels and doing whatever else Abiezer Grey, in grudging tone, asked him to do. Grey had not been cheered to see Tom again, had visibly chafed when Tom had said that he would work for food and fodder for his mare but not for a room, being as he would share Ruth’s bed. But it was more than distaste at the thought of Tom lying with Ruth, more than simple jealousy that Tom had seen in the innkeeper’s eyes. If it was not quite fear it was fear’s cousin, and it was a look he was coming to recognize in patrons of the Lord and in whores and tradesmen, even in the jakes farmers and rag-and-bone men he dealt with.

For Tom was a killer. People saw it in him and it disquieted them so that if they could they avoided him. If they could not do that, they would equip themselves with dourness, incline
towards few words and eye him askance. And for his part Tom did little to assuage their unease, saw no point in trying to be anything other than what he was: a man who had butchered others in the red-hot madness of battle. A man who had lain with the dead, been pecked at by the carrion feeders, and yet had been turned away from Hell itself and brought back to life.

The freezing night he had spent on the plain below Edgehill was a haunting from which he could not unshackle himself. In the daytime, when he was busy earning his food and beer, the memory of that great battle was a thin gossamer web clinging to his soul. But at night, after they had enjoyed each other and Ruth was sleeping soundly beside him, its horror spread like a dark heavy stain that threatened to spill into his mouth and drown him. Somehow the smell of death, of open bowels and the copper stink of blood, would seep from his memory back into his nose. Pain would bloom in the wound in his shoulder – all healed now – where scalding hot lead had ripped through his flesh. He would clench his right hand, the savage stub of the third finger throbbing, reminding him of the indignity of being mutilated by thieves who had flocked to loot the dead.