Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (41 page)

The fire was tipping the balance, Mun saw, for as the rebels fought to control their frightened animals the musketeers swarmed upon them with swords, knives and the butt-ends of matchlocks.

A rebel officer was bellowing at his men to fall back and maybe some of them would have were they not being pulled screaming from their saddles and butchered.

‘Now we’ve got the traitorous scabs!’ a man beside Mun yelled, pulling the stopper of a powder flask with his teeth and pouring a measure into the priming pan. ‘Here come the bloody gentlemen in their own good time!’ The Prince’s Horse were coming, funnelling through breaches in the wall, and this was too much for the brave rebel harquebusiers. ‘That’s right, you bloody run!’ the musketeer bellowed, taking a flask from his bandolier and pouring the main charge down the muzzle. ‘You run back under the stones you crawled out from!’

Mun’s blood yet boiled in his veins. His fury yet grew like a fire feeding on itself and he ran after the retreating rebels, his breathing harsh in his ears, his world shrunk to the vista afforded by his helmet and the craving for revenge.

‘Lost your horse, Sir Edmund?’ Mun looked round to see Captain Nehemiah Boone leering down at him as he trotted his huge chestnut mare alongside. His sword was in his right hand, glowing dully in the murk. His left arm and the hand gripping the reins were sheathed in a long elbow gauntlet of the type rarely seen any more. Bard, Rowe, Downes and the others were there too but Boone waved them past, gnarring at them to go and kill the King’s enemies. ‘Pity. A fine horse,’ the captain went on. ‘I’m only surprised you hadn’t got him killed before now.’

Mun ignored him, his eyes fixed on the bridge up ahead where a valorous knot of rebel horse were making a stand so that the rest might withdraw across the bridge into the town. It
was a maelstrom of flame-spitting pistols and muskets and the rasping clash of swords.

‘You’ll get that troop of yours killed too before long. I’ve made a wager with Corporal Bard to the same.’ Mun locked eyes with him then, saw the malice shining there like polished metal rivets. ‘A half crown says you’ll get those farmers and rogues slaughtered before the month’s out,’ Boone said. The man’s neatly groomed moustaches and beard might have seemed at variance with the predacious-looking teeth revealed now amongst them, but Mun knew Boone, knew he was a killer.

More killer than fighter
, he considered through the searing rage that bid him stick his sword through the bars of Boone’s helmet. ‘Don’t tarry here, Captain, you risk missing your share of the plunder,’ he said, hungering for Boone to raise his sword or pull one of those pistols from its holster. ‘Ah, but of course. You’ll wait until the fighting is over. Then when it’s nice and safe you’ll rob one of your men of his plunder because you’re a recreant, merry-begotten bastard.’

Boone’s hand went to his pistol.

‘Good seeing you in one piece, Captain,’ O’Brien called, coming up on his big mare, his poll-axe gripped by its neck in one massive hand. The Irishman’s eyes had none of the cordiality of his greeting and he bristled with the threat of violence. Jonathan was close behind with the rest of Mun’s troop.

‘I could have you on a charge for desertion, O’Brien,’ Boone said, his lip curled as his left hand took hold of the reins again. ‘But I’d rather not have an Irish devil in my troop in any case.’

O’Brien gave the kind of grin that was almost bloodshed in itself. ‘May you live to be a hundred years, with one extra year to repent, Captain Boone,’ he said, tilting his head but never taking his eyes off the man.

‘A half crown says you’ll get them killed, Rivers,’ Boone snarled, then flicked his reins, kicked with his heels and cantered off towards the fray.

‘Godfrey!’ O’Brien called over his shoulder and the young man came forward, grim-faced in readiness for the fight. The rest of Mun’s troopers sat their horses patiently as the Royalist army advanced around them, officers roaring orders and all of them still under fire from the rebels who yet held Brandon Hill and Water forts behind them. ‘Kindly lend Sir Edmund your horse, Godfrey, then go back and find Hector and keep an eye on Sir Edmund’s gear before some bung nipper gets his thieving hands on it. The saddle and holsters alone are worth more than you, lad.’ O’Brien locked eyes with Mun, in that heartbeat acknowledging his loss and brave Hector’s death, as Godfrey dismounted and walked his dappled grey mare towards Mun, patting the beast’s flank as he handed her over.

‘What’s her name?’ Mun asked Godfrey.

‘Lady,’ the lad replied proudly. ‘She won’t let you down, sir.’

Mun nodded. He wanted to tell Godfrey that he would bring Lady back safely, but he could make no such promises and so he turned his back on the young man, putting his hands and face to the mare’s muzzle, letting her smell him. Then he hauled himself up into the unfamiliar saddle knowing that the stirrups would be about the right length because Godfrey was tall. Lady seemed compliant and trusting, though Mun knew the real test would come soon enough when they rode together into the storm of steel and lead.

‘Are we winning?’ O’Brien asked, nodding towards Bristol. A shot from a light field piece thumped into a nearby hummock, fired by the rebels still holding out amongst the houses around College Green.

‘They should have launched a proper counter-attack when we came through the wall,’ Mun said. ‘They won’t stop us now.’

A corporal cantered up, reining in before Mun, his horse stamping the ground impatiently. ‘Sir Edmund,’ the man said, nodding respectfully. His face was sheened with blood from a cut above his eye. ‘His Highness the Prince requests you join
him at the Frome Gate.’ He pointed north to a bridge around which another mêlée raged. ‘The rebels’ resolve is weakening and one good thrust will see us breach the inner defences.’

Mun nodded and told the corporal he would join the Prince presently, then turned back to his troop as the officer cantered off. ‘Shear House men to me!’ he called into the pre-dawn gloom, raising his sword for them to see through the fog of musket smoke drifting southwards across the field. ‘To me!’ He had lost men but could not think of that now as the remaining twenty-five troopers gathered around him, the weight of their expectations threatening to drag him under. He could see it in their faces, that need, that hunger to stay alive. Their eyes pleaded with him to lead them well and wisely and, no matter what the outcome of the storming of Bristol, to take them home to their families, for all that they would not shirk their duty here.

And yet his soul burnt, still. His fury raged, still.

‘This will be pistol work,’ he called, raising his voice above the ceaseless beat of a drum as it drew nearer, ‘at least until we get amongst them and they take to their heels.’ He pulled out one of his own twenty-six-inch-long man-killers and proceeded to load it. ‘Keep to open ground where you can. Stay together. Give them no quarter,’ he said, looking up now and then, spending a moment on eyes here, a face there, ‘for they will show you none and had every opportunity to yield the town before the killing began.’ Those with naked blades had sheathed them and now checked their wheellocks, firelocks or carbines. A blood-soaked musketeer, limping back from the river using his matchlock as a crutch, bawled at them, calling them lace-loving lobcocks and telling them to get into the fight. They ignored him. ‘You will take orders from me, from Corporal O’Brien, or from the Prince. No one else,’ Mun went on. He wouldn’t put it past Nehemiah Boone to order his Shear House men to charge a battery and see them butchered just to spite Mun and win his wager.

‘Death to traitors!’ Mun roared, turning Lady northward as his men repeated the war-cry, then he rode and they followed him.

And at the Frome Gate they found a slaughter.

Dawn had long broken, the pale light of the new day spilling across Bristol and throwing into shadow those who fought on at the Frome Gate amongst the dead and soon to be dead. Flies were beginning to swarm, drawn by the stench of open bowels and blood and by the heat which the day promised. They gathered hungrily on men’s bloodied tunics, befouled the faces of those who had so recently brimmed with life and fear, and massed in exposed wounds, so that the flesh seemed reanimated by some putrid spirit. And as the flies feasted, the storm of steel and lead raged.

The rebels still held Bristol. They had lost the eastern end of the stone bridge and its defences of gabions and earthworks, but somehow yet held the gate into the city which even now they laboured to bolster with an improvised barricade of wool-sacks.

‘They cannot hold us!’ Prince Rupert had bellowed in the thick of the fighting, walking his new mount back and forth as he encouraged his men and drove them on.

But the rebels
were
holding them.

Mun had led his men up to the gate time and again and each time they had fired their pistols and carbines at the defenders as other men hacked at what remained of the gate with axes or threw up scaling ladders only to be shot or pushed off with pikes, bills and musket butts. Several Royalist officers had been shot and carried off, including Colonel Lunsford who had been shot in the heart and Colonel Bellasis whom Mun had seen take a bad cut to the head. From Mun’s own troop a tanner from Parbold called Geoffrey Asplin had been shot in the face and killed, and Thomas Cope, a brewer from Ormskirk, had taken a musket ball in the shoulder. He had been alive and screaming
the last Mun saw, but the sheer quantity of blood did not, by Mun’s reckoning, bode well for Cope’s chances.

Now they were no longer attacking in waves, one troop after another. Instead Mun and his men and those of Boone’s troop and others sat their horses behind and amongst the musketeers and dragoons thronging the Frome Gate, firing at will and maintaining a constant hail of lead against the faltering bulwark that stood between them and Bristol’s brave but outnumbered garrison.

‘We’re running out of powder,’ O’Brien said, pouring powder down the muzzle of his wheellock and blinking sweat from his eyes. ‘Shot too.’ He put a ball and wad down the barrel then scoured home the charge. ‘And from what I hear Prince Maurice is still picking his nose on the south side,’ he said, grabbing the reins one-handed as his horse spooked at an explosion. He calmed her with a soft growl as he took his spanner and steadily wound the pistol’s lock.

‘We’re making hard work of it,’ Mun said above the din, aiming his firelock at a rebel who was leaning over the wall trying to shove a scaling ladder off with a captain’s leading staff, though it was clear the man was no captain. Mun fired but the ball struck the wall in a spray of stone chips and the rebel ducked out of sight. ‘We can no more sustain these losses than can they,’ Mun said, glancing at the bodies scattered around and at those wounded being helped to the rear. ‘One of us will break soon.’

A cheer went up and Mun looked over his right shoulder to see reinforcements in the form of Colonel Grandison’s brigade coming on to the drums in ranks as neat as could be across uneven, furze-strewn ground. Presenting a front some seventy paces across, they were arranged in six ranks of fifty: grim-faced musketeers who to Mun’s eye had the look of men who know that they have come to do a job, know that they are expected to change the day. Those horse and foot in loose order before the gate instinctively hurried left or right to get out of
the way because they knew what was coming, that to stay was to face obliteration from their own side.

‘The buggers will wish they’d opened the doors for us now,’ Tobias Fitch called, grinning at the defences, and Mun noticed a musket-ball dent in the man’s forge-black breastplate that had not been there before the fight. The former stonemason’s apprentice would have been dead had the plate not been of good quality.

‘Opened the doors?’ O’Brien remarked as the approaching musketeers blew on their matches and cocked them, fitting the cords into the serpents. ‘They’ll wish they’d killed the fatted calf.’

The musketeers in the first two ranks were trying their match now, making sure the burning ends would reach the centre of the pan.

‘Present!’ one of Grandison’s officers yelled, and the well-drilled soldiers moved the muskets away from their bodies, muzzles still pointing at the sky, powder flasks clacking noisily.

‘Give fire!’ the officer bawled and the fifty men of the first rank levelled their matchlocks and squeezed their triggers. The sound was deafening and Mun felt Lady tense beneath him, though she gave him no trouble. Then as the smoke hung in the still air like an ethereal rampart before Grandison’s men, the front rank fell away to the rear to reload and the next rank stepped forward.

‘Fire!’ this rank’s captain roared and another volley ripped into the Frome Gate and the walls of Bristol. Mun and the men around him watched in awe as each rank came forward in its turn, so that Mun found he could not count beyond ten between volleys. It was impossible for the rebels to present their own firearms in the face of such fury and Prince Rupert knew it. Seizing his chance he ordered his men forward, calling on them to storm the gate in the name of the King. The clamour from Royalist voices was tumultuous. They poured forward unopposed and tore at the barricade like frenzied
animals. And they forced a breach. The first two or three were killed for their efforts but then some were through, their own muskets barking, and when he saw that Mun knew it was all but over.

‘Forward!’ he roared, his ragged voice lost like a breath in a tempest, urging Lady through the throng. He found that the bloodied foot were happy to let him and his men pass, relieved even, to see others going forward instead of them, and then he was on the bridge, glancing down at the bodies in the water as he pushed on. A cold hand clutched his heart with the realization that he was the first mounted man through the gate, but he did not stop and Lady picked her way around corpses and took him down into the doomed city.

And there were the enemy, trying to retreat in good order, loading and firing matchlocks and wheellocks even as they withdrew, from the breach and those spilling through it like blood from a wound.

‘They may be short on fealty but they’ve plenty of courage,’ O’Brien remarked, licking dry lips. ‘Wait for the order, lad,’ he called to Jonathan who had drawn his sword and looked hungry for slaughter. ‘You bloody wait.’