Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (45 page)

‘Up there!’ Banks yelled, and through a break in the hedgerow Tom saw musketeers pouring black powder down muzzles and ramming balls and wadding home.

‘Heya!’ Tom gave his mare the spur and she responded, lurching forward into a canter, then scrambled up the muddy bank and through the breach in the hedge up onto the dew-slick grass. ‘Go on, girl!’ he cried, hauling his sword from its scabbard, not caring if any man had followed. But they had followed: Trencher and Penn, Dobson and Haggett’s whole troop. And they all must have seen that the men who had fired on them were nothing more than a skirmishing party, thirty to forty musketeers in loose order who should never have shot at them if they’d had any sense.

A man lifted and shouldered his musket, the scouring stick still poking out from the muzzle, and fired and the stick flew past Tom’s face as he swung his sword, striking the stock, the impact throwing the musketeer backwards into the grass. Then Tom hauled his mare round and spurred her forward and scythed his blade at another man, lopping off his left arm so that the musket fell with it and the man shrieked.

‘King Jesus!’ Trencher bellowed, riding a man down and hauling back on the reins so that his horse had no choice but to trample the flesh and bone beneath it.

Men were screaming like animals, dying badly, and Haggett’s troopers were loosed to butchery. Tom wheeled right and saw Colonel Haggett fire his pistol and a man’s face explode in a splash of blood and brain. A musketeer fired and flame roared from his matchlock’s muzzle and Tom heard the thunk of it passing through Trooper Bayle’s breastplate even as the young man rode off across the field – most likely dead though his horse didn’t know it.

‘Mercy!’ a white-bearded musketeer called, falling to his
knees and hoisting his matchlock above his head. Corporal Mabb trotted past and leant over in his saddle, bringing his blade in a savage underarm arc that split the back of the musketeer’s head open.

‘No mercy for Cavalier devils!’ Mabb called, spittle flying, eyes wide.

There was no order, no formation to the troop, just troopers riding men down across the field and musketeers having no time to reload and so reversing the matchlocks to use them like clubs, swinging them at their attackers, or brandishing their hangers clumsily, desperately, before being cut down.

‘That one ain’t dead!’ Ellis Lay yelled, pointing at a musketeer who was lying face down in the grass by a clump of furze. ‘I saw ’im move!’

Knowing the game was up the musketeer lifted his head and Tom saw the terror in his face as he clambered to his feet and began to run up the rise leaving his musket behind.

‘The poor sod,’ Penn muttered as he and Tom watched a handful of Haggett’s men ride after the terrified musketeer; the rest of the skirmishers had been slaughtered.

‘Aye, that’s no way to go,’ Dobson put in, walking his horse up to them, his big sword still in his hand. Some foul gobbet of dark meat was hanging from it, caught on a notch in the blade.

James Bowyer put his hands to his mouth. ‘Run, you white-feathered merry-begotten bumfiddle!’ he yelled; and men laughed as young Banks and four others, having caught up with the fugitive, surrounded him and drove him on, jeering and striking him with the flats of their swords.

‘Can’t we take him prisoner, sir?’ Penn called to Colonel Haggett who was behind them leading Trooper Bayle’s horse by the reins. Bayle’s lifeless body was somehow still upright in the saddle though his head was slumped and jolting horribly.

The colonel shook his head. ‘We must push on,’ he called back. ‘Corporal Laney, bring those men back and form battalia! Three deep. I’ll not have us strung out like a damned rabble
and tearing off like hounds after a fox!’ Tom knew this was aimed at him, knew Colonel Haggett well enough to be sure that the man would be angry with him for leading the charge into the field without having awaited orders.

‘And if we’d waited till the good colonel had us all formed up and sitting pretty those curs would have had the time to reload and give us another shower of lead. Maybe two,’ Trencher said, detecting the same veiled reprimand in their commander’s orders.

Tom paid no notice. He was watching the plight of the last musketeer still alive on the field. Struggling up the steepest part of the escarpment the man stumbled and fell, his tormentors heckling him to get to his feet and run, or else fight like a man.

‘Where’s your king now?’ someone near Tom bellowed. The pursuers were a good two hundred paces away now, up near the summit of what must be the highest point for miles around, where green scrub bristled in the breeze against the charcoal grey of gathering rain clouds.

‘Kill him and be done with it,’ Tom murmured to himself, as one of the riders suddenly pulled up, his horse screeching, and the others did the same, Banks nearly falling as his mount fought against the bit.

A fusillade of pistol and carbine fire cracked at the summit and one of the troopers pitched forwards and fell from his horse.

‘Oh Jesus!’ Corporal Mabb exclaimed, pulling a pistol from its holster.

‘Hold!’ Tom roared. ‘Hold!’ Because Royalist cavalry were coming over the crest and Haggett’s men were turning to flee.

Then Trencher was on his right and Penn on his left.

‘Here we bloody go,’ Dobson growled, coming up on Penn’s left, drawing a pistol and pulling it to the full cock.

‘Hold, damn you!’ Tom bellowed at a knot of men who had turned their horses and were riding back down the hill. To his credit Colonel Haggett behind them was trying to stem
the flow. Tom could hear him yelling at his men to turn back round and face the harquebusiers who were galloping down the hill, swords promising cold death. One of those Cavaliers caught up with Banks and hacked into his neck and the young man died in a crimson spray.

‘Hold your fire!’ Tom raised his own pistol, his other hand gripping the reins, trying to control his mount for she was terrified. ‘Hold your fire! Wait until they’re upon us!’

One hundred paces. ‘Hold!’ Fifty paces. ‘Aim low!’ The King’s men came like a wave that threatened to sweep away all before it. There was no time to count them but there were enough. ‘Fire!’ Tom squeezed the trigger and a Cavalier flew back in his saddle as though knocked over by God’s hand and at least thirty other men fired at the same time and all from close enough that Tom could see men’s faces as they died, their killing wave shredded by lead. But the Royalists came on and Tom drew his second pistol and fired, hitting another man in the shoulder, and this time the salvo from those around him was ragged, but more Cavaliers fell.

‘For God!’ Trencher screamed, spurring his horse forward even as he drew his sword.

‘Kill them!’ Corporal Laney yelled, ramming his sword’s point into a man’s mouth.

Grunts and shrieks, the clang and clatter of blades on armour and the whinnies of beasts filled the world and yet above it all Tom could hear his own breathing loud inside his helmet and as rhythmic as the sea, as he let the battle-lust seize him body and soul. A blade bit through his buff-coat into the flesh of his left shoulder and he threw his sword arm across, slashing the broadsword into his attacker’s raised left arm which was protected by a steel elbow gauntlet. Snarling like a beast the man hacked at him again but this time Tom caught the blow on his blade and for a long moment it was a battle of strength, each seeking to force the other’s sword wide to make time for a killing blow. Tom felt his arm begin to tremble with the
strain, muscles screaming. He was twisted awkwardly and his opponent was strong. Too strong.

‘You’re a dead man,’ Tom spat, and with his left hand he grabbed the pistol from his left boot and brought it up against the Cavalier’s blade, taking the strain, and in the same moment rammed his sword forward between the bars of the man’s helmet and into his eye.

‘Tom!’ Penn yelled and Tom twisted round, saw another King’s man aiming a wheellock at him and ducked just as the weapon exploded. Then Dobson spurred forward and brought his sword down, chopping off the Cavalier’s hand which fell onto the grass still clutching the pistol. The wrist stump squirted into Tom’s face and he tried to blink the gore away, unable to rub his eyes clear because of the bars of his pot, as the mutilated man shoved the spurting limb under his left arm and somehow brought his mount round then spurred off through the maelstrom. It seemed they were being overrun, that the fierce crashing wave of Royalist flesh and steel would obliterate them and they would die. But then came a surge the other way as the rest of Haggett’s men ploughed into the fray, having found the courage to turn and fight.

‘Told you the Lord was with us!’ Trencher yelled to Tom, his grin revealing blood-smeared teeth as he lifted his arm to look at a gouge in his buff-coat torn by a pistol ball. But it was not over yet and he got his sword up just in time to parry a blow that might have cleaved open his face.

‘God and Parliament!’ someone cried and Tom caught a glimpse of Corporal Laney before he disappeared under a slaughter of blades.

‘Go on, girl!’ Tom urged his mare forward to add his weight to the momentum and slashed his sword at a man but missed, then another Cavalier was on him, had blind-sided him and plunged his poll-axe into Tom’s mare’s skull.

‘Rebel scum!’ the man barked, spitting at Tom as his horse stumbled and her legs buckled and she fell, but Tom pulled
his feet from the stirrups and threw himself clear, hitting the ground, so that his bones clattered like dice in a cup. Having dropped his sword he made a grab for it now but could not get to it for a turmoil of legs and hooves that would have broken bones. So he scrambled clear and climbed to his feet, drawing his knife as all around him men fought for their lives. And yet there was no fear, only fury, a madness raging like fire in his chest as he ploughed through a gap between horseflesh, avoided gnashing teeth and the tossing head of another beast that would have hammered him into the ground like a nail, and came around the rump of the horse whose master was doomed.

He ran and grabbed a fistful of the baldrick criss-crossing the Cavalier’s backplate and the man bellowed angrily, his horse plunging on so that Tom was hauled from his feet, yet he clung on. The rider flailed behind himself with his poll-axe, scoring a glancing blow across Tom’s helmet, but Tom did not let go and his weight pulled the man back a little and that was all Tom needed. He wrenched the man further back and reached around, plunging the knife into his underarm right up to the hilt, and now the man shrieked. Tom let go of the belts and the knife and was pitched forward, for a moment flying, then smashed his helmet’s face guard against the horse’s rump, his head snapping back horribly as the ground rushed up to meet him and the wind was hammered from his lungs.

‘Up you get, lad!’ It was Corporal Mabb, his buff-coat black with blood, his horse’s eyes rolling, spittle flying from its mouth. ‘That were nicely done, Rivers,’ the old man said, and for a heartbeat Tom was surprised to see that he was smiling but then realized why. The Royalists were withdrawing, extricating themselves from the mêlée. They had had enough.

‘Back to your king with you, dogs!’ a man shouted, as those harquebusiers not sporting green sprigs in their helmets turned their mounts and gave them the spur, hooves drumming against the earth, clods flying.

‘God and Parliament!’ James Bowyer bellowed, his dry, gruff voice buffeting its way through the animal shrieks of men yet gripped by blood-lust and the fierce joy of having survived murder.

‘Are you alive, Tom?’ Trencher called across the field, pouring black powder down his pistol’s muzzle. At least seven men were not, by Tom’s reckoning. Three more were wounded: blood-slathered and paling. He nodded to Trencher, the movement sending searing pain through his neck, and stood looking up the rise. The King’s men were cresting the hill now, the first of them having already vanished beyond it, galloping headlong north-east back towards Newbury. But the roar of cannon to the south and the sporadic crackle of musketry and the beating of drums told him this battle was only just beginning.

Many of Haggett’s men had dismounted and were even now searching the dead for plunder, spilling the contents of knapsacks onto the grass, yanking boots off dead limbs and thumbing tunic seams for coins secreted in the lining. But the only thing Tom wanted was his sword and was glad to feel it in his hand again – until he saw a fine pair of leather pistol holsters attached to the saddle on a dying horse. They would do nicely, he thought, wiping his sword through a fistful of grass before drying the blade on his breeches. But a whip-thin trooper named Crathorne had seen the holsters too.

‘They’re mine,’ Tom said, thrusting his broadsword back into its scabbard. ‘You can have all but the holsters.’

Crathorne nodded, clearly disappointed though not enough to argue. But then he stopped and thumbed his nose, blowing snot into the grass. ‘Looks as though your pistols will have to live in your boots a while longer,’ he said, turning to make his way back to his horse which was cropping the grass near by. For Colonel Haggett was bellowing at his men to mount and form up, in order to ride up to the summit over which the last of the Cavaliers had vanished.

‘They might be preparing to come again,’ Haggett called. ‘I
want three ranks. Knee to knee. We’ll come back for the dead and wounded once we’ve secured this hill.’

Tom ignored him and knelt by the dying horse to begin undoing the holsters’ buckles and straps.

‘That means you, too, Rivers!’ the colonel yelled and Tom swore under his breath and stood, wincing at the hot pain in his neck, the bruises from his fall and where his back-and-breast had dug in, and the cut in his left shoulder. He noticed a dead Cavalier near by whose wheellock appeared to be unfired and so he went over, took the pistol from the cold hand and lowered the cock to the priming pan.

‘Rivers!’ the colonel shouted. ‘Find yourself a horse, man!’

‘Doubt you’ll get far on that’n,’ Crathorne said, mounting near by.

Tom put the wheellock’s muzzle to the suffering horse’s head and pulled the trigger, the sudden roar conspicuous now that the fight was over.