Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (31 page)

Mun studied the ground between them and the rebels and was relieved to see no rocks amongst the rich green grass and swaying yellow patches of cowslips bowing as one in the breeze. Nothing for a horse to break a leg on or cause it to throw its rider, though charging uphill would be bad enough. Near by, a young rabbit sat transfixed by the men and horses readying for battle, until a rook walked too close and the little creature streaked off for its burrow.

‘Are they Colonel Haggett’s men?’ Mun asked The Scot, who was staring up at the dragoons, shielding his eyes against the sun.

‘Ah dinnae ken. If they are then the silver is on the move and Haggett has got some gumption after all.’

‘Either way they’re rebels,’ Mun said, pulling back his firelock’s cock halfway. Hector was neighing and baring his teeth, sensing the battle thrill in his master, feeling it himself perhaps.

The Scot nodded. ‘You are an eager young blade, Sir Edmund,’
he said, half turning in the saddle to address his men. ‘Right, lads! Let us introduce ourselves,’ he yelled. ‘Try to leave one or two of them with their blood on the inside, for ah shall hae words with them. Though ah dinnae think they’ll stand.’

‘They’ll run,’ Mun said to Jonathan, ‘but we’ll catch them and when we do, that is when you’ll give fire. When you can smell the tobacco on them.’ He supposed that was his answer to the young man’s request to join his troop. Jonathan supposed it too for he grinned broadly and leant to plant a kiss on his mare’s neck. Mun caught O’Brien’s eye and nodded towards Jonathan and the Irishman nodded back with an expression that said,
I’ll keep an eye on him
, and all around them men loaded firelocks, encouraged their mounts and steeled themselves to the coming action.

‘I hope they don’t bloody run,’ John Cole said. ‘What wi’ our horses being done in we’d not mek a long chase of it.’

‘They’ll run or they’ll die,’ Goffe put in, his weathered farmer’s face impassive as he cinched the belt over his back-and-breast one hole tighter through the buckle.

‘Into line!’ Mun yelled. The Scot’s men were already forming but his own had been awaiting his order and now they moved into their positions almost as neatly as Prince Rupert’s own Lifeguard. ‘Stay at the rear,’ he ordered Jonathan who nodded, his jaw firm and his eyes intense beneath the rim of his three-bar pot. Then Mun nodded to The Scot that he and his men were ready. ‘God and King Charles!’ he roared.

‘God and King Charles!’ more than one hundred throats clamoured back, raising a black cloud of
craa
ing rooks into the sky.

They’ll give us a volley and then they’ll run
, Mun thought, looking up at the twenty or so dragoons cresting the ridge. He and The Scot led, the rest of the division forming a killing wave three files deep and in close order as they rode up the hill at an easy pace.

And yet it was still no easy thing riding towards firearms that
were pointed in your direction and Mun felt his body contract, drawing into its core like a fist around a shilling, flesh and bones cringing from the coming lead storm. He heard a rebel officer demanding that his men hold their fire and he cursed inwardly, for every moment the dragoons waited made it more likely that their fire would reap lives.

‘Ready, boy. Good boy, Hector.’ He touched the stallion’s flanks with his spurs, the spurs that had once belonged to the King of England himself, and Hector pulled a full length in front of O’Brien bouncing on his right and Cole on his left and even a head in front of The Scot. Mun needed to show that he was unafraid and more than that, that he was eager to get up that hill and teach the rebels that insurrection buys only death. He must lead his men from the front and inspire them by his own example and so he growled an obscenity at that part of him that
was
afraid, and he opened his chest and lifted his chin.

And then the rebels gave fire.

A ball plucked the hem of Mun’s buff-coat and another thunked off a man’s breastplate near by and the King’s men roared in defiance and, heels kicking back, came on at a good trot.

‘Fight us, you dogs!’ Rowland Bide yelled up at the enemy, but of course they would not fight, for it could be no fight between twenty dragoons and one hundred and twenty harquebusiers. It could only be bloody butcher’s work and so the rebels were running back over the ridge to mount their little horses, their token gesture of defiance given.

‘Heya!’ Mun yelled and Hector put his head down and Mun leant forward, back straight as the creature snorted and broke into a canter, his great muscles defying the slope. Up they rode, yelling now to rebuff fear and to put fear in the enemy, and then the ground evened out and Mun was upon the crest, the wound in his right leg screaming, and there on the reverse slope waited two troops of rebel horse.

‘King Jesus! King Jesus!’ the rebels screamed and with sudden horror Mun knew that he and The Scot had ridden into the baited trap. He pulled up and straightened, throwing up a hand as Hector wheeled in tight circles, blowing, and the rest of the troop came over the brow and, seeing what awaited them, hauled on their reins.

‘I take it that’s not Colonel Haggett?’ Mun said as The Scot came alongside, his mare tossing her head indignantly.

The Scot shook his head. ‘They’re fresh out of Thame, I’ll wager,’ he said, ‘and they mean to fight.’

Mun glanced back to see that the two rebel divisions had merged into one which now trotted towards them in neat order, perhaps one hundred and fifty men in two ranks, knee to knee.

‘Aye, they mean to fight,’ Mun agreed, turning back to The Scot, who yelled at the men to hold and await his command, for confusion and doubt infected man and horse, Mun saw, leaching the battle lust that had but a moment before coursed through their veins.

‘We’ll not outrun them,’ The Scot said, and Mun knew the truth of that. Their horses had not been properly rested for days, whereas if the rebels were out of Thame their mounts would be fresh.

‘What say we test their resolve?’ The Scot said, his voice raised above the sound of the horses neighing, tack jangling, and now the drumming of hooves upon the earth.

And test yours, too
, Mun thought, suspecting The Scot of wanting to prove his new allegiance to The King and the Cause. He nodded, teeth bared, and kneed Hector back round to face the oncoming enemy.

‘God save the King!’ he bellowed, giving Hector the spur, and felt the muscles in the stallion’s hindquarters bunch and explode with raw strength.

‘Death to traitors!’ Cole screamed, his face a mask of wide-eyed hysteria as he raked back his spurs and charged, and suddenly they were flying towards the enemy.

Carbines and pistols roared at them and Mun heard lead balls punch into flesh and thunk off armour, heard a man grunt and a horse scream and in his peripheral vision saw a man flung back in his saddle.

‘Come on, boy!’ he screamed himself, not caring that they were outnumbered or that agony and death could be a heartbeat away, and he pulled his carbine round on its belt and shoved the stock into his shoulder, and aimed low into the mass of riders coming to kill him. He squeezed the trigger and a savage hole appeared in a rebel’s chest, his buff-coat blooming like a black rose, but Mun had already flung the carbine behind him and hauled his heavy Irish hilt from its scabbard. ‘Kill them!’ he bellowed. ‘Kill the dogs!’

A collective grunt and a chorus of shrieks from horses announced the collision of the opposing forces and suddenly it was man against man and the world was a cacophony of discord. Mun hacked into a face, the blade finding the mouth and cleaving the jaw in two, yet the rebel’s eyes stared wildly, madly as though he refused to admit his appalling fate. Mun hauled the heavy sword free, a scrap of bearded flesh clinging to the blade, and thrust the point between the bars of a young man’s helmet into the right eye socket and the brain beyond. He yanked his arm back and pressed with his knee, turning Hector because he knew there were rebels behind him.

Steel sang against his sword which he had raised just in time and his left hand pulled a pistol from its holster and fired it into his opponent’s chest and the ball punched straight through the metal breast and the man slumped dead.

‘Mun!’ O’Brien roared, plunging his poll-axe into a horse’s skull, so that the beast’s legs buckled and it dropped like a rock, spilling its rider into the midst of thrashing hooves where he screamed and was kicked to a pulp, and Mun saw a gout of flame and was flung back, his spine all but snapping. But his steel breast had taken the ball and screaming in mad fury he pulled himself upright and scythed the Irish hilt down onto
the arm still pointing the pistol at him, cutting it like a butcher chopping a joint of meat. The rebel screamed but the sound was cut off when his head exploded in a great spray of blood and brain.

‘King Jesus!’ a man with no armour nor even a buff-coat yelled, swinging his poll-axe whose point punched through young Goulding’s backplate into the flesh. Mun saw the young man convulse, his face turned up to the heavens, then topple from his horse onto the ground where he shook, frothing at the mouth.

The Scot was mounted death, working his way through the rebels, his red sword hacking and plunging, killing and maiming. O’Brien was a force of nature, lopping off limbs and felling men like a storm amongst oaks, all his strength behind his brutal poll-axe. Limb stumps spurted crimson gouts. Disbelieving faces passed chalk white in an instant as lifeblood drenched buff leather, horse flanks and the lush grass.

Someone was yelling, ordering the retreat, and Mun knew it was not The Scot, which meant it was a rebel captain, and now he pulled his last pistol free and twisted this way and that, watchful in case a rebel should stab or fire at him on the way past.

‘Back to yer dens, cowards!’ Goffe screamed, spittle flying, froth hanging in his beard. ‘Rogues and bloody bastards, all o’ ye!’

‘Jonathan!’ Mun yelled, catching sight of the boy through the press of men and horses. Jonathan turned in the saddle, eyes wide, sword bloody, and nodded to show that he was unharmed. Mun nodded back, a wave of relief washing over him, as the rebels galloped west, the sound like thunder rolling off across the heavens.

Mun uncocked his firelock and thrust it back into its holster. ‘Hold, men!’ he bellowed, though he needn’t have, for they had won against the odds and knew it, so that no one wanted to push their luck still further by chasing after the rebels.

‘God and the King!’ a man yelled and two or three repeated the cry. One of Prince Rupert’s men was laughing wildly. Other men were cursing. Some were shouting in pain and still others were offering up prayers of thanks because they had survived.

Mun blinked another man’s blood from his eyes, wheeling Hector round, taking in the scene: the aftermath of a savage fight that had laid men low in mere moments, like a sudden tempest through a field of winter wheat.

One of his men, Christopher Miller, sat slumped in the saddle, cradling the dribbling stump of his left arm, the severed limb itself lying across his lap, its hand and fingers like a bone-white claw. Rowland Bide, who had been eager for this fight, now lay blood-slathered in the grass, his throat ripped open and the gore bubbling with each breath. He was sobbing for his mother.

IT WAS HARD
to be sure because the trees distorted the sound, but Tom would have said the gunfire was to the north and no more than three miles away.

‘Sounds like quite a disagreement,’ Penn said, holding the whetstone still against his sword’s edge as he listened with the rest.

‘Carbines and pistols, not muskets,’ Trencher said, ‘and maybe three hundred men.’ He looked at Tom, who nodded, agreeing with the assessment.

‘Not dragoons then. Must be proper horse,’ Dobson said. The giant wore rusting back- and breastplates that were too small, over the clothes he had walked out of Oxford in, for The Scot had had nothing to fit him. Tom at least had a buff-coat, though not of quality, and the rapier with which he had sliced Henry Denton’s forehead, as well as the knife he had killed him with.

‘It can’t be a good thing, the enemy being so close,’ Colonel Haggett said. Even those men that were sick had pushed themselves upright against saddles, tree trunks and deadfall, coughing into bent arms and wincing against the pain. Some even pressed scarves against the mouths of the delirious to stifle their moans so that they might hear what was happening
beyond their woodland den. ‘That’s cavalry in the thick of it. Man to man,’ Haggett said, pressing the knuckles of his two fists together. He was sweat-sheened and his eyes had sunk into his skull but there was nothing wrong with his ears, Tom thought, because he was right about the cavalry.

‘Sir, we should move. Go deeper into the woods,’ Tom said, nodding west. Above them through the trees the sky looked like a distant seascape, the clouds skimming along like white horses but for one group which were colliding. Around this mass a celestial red stain was spreading. Flowing, Tom fancied.

‘But The Scot won’t find us if we move,’ Penn said, standing and walking over to where Tom stood with the colonel and a handful of others.