Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (5 page)

‘Here he is, sir, the lad who says he’s back from the dead. I’ll bet the King’s quaking in ’is boots,’ the corporal said, a snort escaping his nose as he gave Tom one last look up and down before the officer dismissed him with a curt nod.

Tom rubbed his mare’s poll but she was not in the mood and tossed her head and dragged a foot through the grass.

‘Sir, my name is Thomas Rivers. I fought with you at Kineton Fight.’

Captain Clement, who all knew was a dour man, spread his lips in what would have been a smile on anyone else.

‘I heard tales of spirits walking the plain after that bloody day,’ he said, face tight as a good knot, chin jutting. ‘They say that ghosts of the slain have contested that fight many times since. I put it down to nothing but the idle prattle of superstitious fools. And yet here you are, Thomas Rivers, an apparition before my eyes.’

The captain wore a simple montero-cap like those of his men and a cheap russet cloak tied at the neck over his buff-coat, so that on first appearances his rank would not be in the slightest bit obvious. But his religion came off him in waves and with it a cold authority that, if not beheld, was certainly felt.

‘I was wounded,’ Tom said. ‘But I am hale enough now.’

‘You spent that night on the field?’ Clement’s eyes were slits.

Tom nodded.

‘And looters took your finger for the ring on it.’

Tom was not aware he had even revealed his mutilated hand. ‘I was unconscious,’ he said, ashamed for what he had let be done to him. Clement’s face, half of it stained the deep burgundy of strong wine, was gripped by an almost zealous scrutiny.

‘Your friends saw you fall. They said you were shot. Will Trencher said you were beaten to death.’

‘I
was
shot, sir.’ Tom shrugged. ‘But the ball passed through the flesh. Achilles my horse was killed. In the morning they carted me off with the dead bound for a hole full of corpses. But that’s when I …’ he paused, holding Clement’s eye for a long cold moment, ‘came back.’

‘I remember that night well enough, Rivers,’ the captain said. ‘It was a cruel cold.’ He looked up to the smoke-filled night sky. ‘Colder than this. You spent the night with the dead. And yet you did not become one of them. I would know how you survived.’

‘God didn’t want me,’ Tom said. ‘Neither did the Devil.’

Clement’s lip curled at that. ‘Where have you been? Kineton Fight was last October.’

‘A family from the village took me in. Stitched my wounds and hid me from a troop of the King’s horse. Good people,’ he said, thinking of Anne Dunne, the pretty daughter of the couple who had hidden him in the priest hole concealed in their roof. But then his mind played a cruel trick, turning Anne’s golden hair raven black, her pink cheeks bone white, until this vision of his lost love Martha Green caused him to start.

‘You’re wild in a fight, Rivers,’ Clement said. ‘I remember you. I remember ordering you back. You disobeyed me.’

Tom could remember nothing of that. He recalled his friend Nayler being killed, his throat ripped out by a musket ball. He remembered seeing his enemy Lord Denton, a man for whom Tom’s hatred burnt as hot as Hell’s fire, and trying to get to him. Beyond mortal fear, beyond all senses other than the lust
to kill the man whose vile machinations had forced Tom to take up arms against his king and side with Parliament against his own family, he had forged on until …

They had beaten him to the ground.

‘I don’t want men in my troop who can’t be controlled. I will have discipline. Order.’

‘I am a killer,’ Tom said. ‘I have a talent for it.’

Clement’s brows arched. ‘That’s as maybe, Thomas Rivers, but I do not want you in my troop.’

‘Told you it was him! Tom!’

Tom turned. There, their faces cast in shadow by the fire behind them, stood a knot of hard-faced men all shrouded and trussed against the cold night air.

‘I told you it was him, Penn, it’s Black Tom back from the dead!’ Despite the dark, Tom would have recognized Weasel by his narrow shoulders and quick hands alone.

‘As God is my witness,’ Matthew Penn said, ‘it really is you, Tom.’ Tom felt a grin tug at his lips as he took in the incredulous expressions of the men with whom he had ridden and fought. There were seven or eight of them who had left the fire to take a look at him. If they were not all friends, they were brothers-in-arms, drawn from their comfort by the miracle of a man risen from the dead.

Will Trencher’s bald head gleamed in the flame-glow, his cap clutched to his chest. His mouth hung open, so that he resembled more the awe-filled Catholic witnessing a statue of the Virgin Mother crying tears of blood than the stout Protestant he was.

‘Hello, Will,’ Tom said, then nodded to his other friends. ‘Matthew. Weasel.’

‘Forgive us, sir, we don’t mean to interrupt,’ Trencher said, pointing the cap towards Tom, ‘but we never thought to see this lad again. Reckoned him killed.’

‘Reckoned?’ Matthew Penn blurted. ‘Saw, more like. Saw poor Nayler get his throat shot out, then saw Tom murdered.’

Having gathered his courage, Trencher stepped forward and held out his hand, a smile softening his pugnacious face. Tom gripped the hand firmly as Matthew slapped his shoulder and Weasel and some of the other troopers stood grinning like fiends.

‘You can’t bloody kill Black Tom, eh, Rivers!’ a broad-shouldered, big-bearded man called Robert Dobson said, pressing his thumb against the side of his nose and shooting a wad of snot onto the ground.

‘Are you back with us then, Tom?’ Matthew asked, the whites of his wide eyes reflecting the fire’s glow.

‘I’ll not have him in my troop,’ Captain Clement said, turning his scrutiny on Penn and the others. The troop’s camp fire suddenly flared, illuminating the party and lending a savage aspect to Clement’s long face with the great red smear across it.

‘Come now, sir,’ Trencher entreated, ‘you don’t believe in the walking dead now do you? I’ve seen this lad cut down Cavaliers like he was scything bloody wheat. He’s a good soldier.’

‘Being a killer does not make a man a good soldier, Trencher,’ Clement said, ‘it makes him dangerous to his own side.’ He turned and eyeballed Tom again. ‘Rivers is a sword that does not fit its scabbard. He’ll not ride for me.’

‘But sir—’ Matthew began before he was cut off by Clement’s raised finger.

‘Hold your tongue, Penn,’ the captain warned, not taking his eyes off Tom’s. ‘I’ve been a soldier long enough to know that some men bring a troop bad luck. They perhaps don’t mean to but that’s the truth of it.’

‘Never saw you as a superstitious sort, Captain,’ Trencher said. ‘Thought we left all that to the papists.’

‘Aye, and the old women,’ Weasel murmured.

‘Where there is slaughter and carrion there are ravens, Trencher,’ the captain said. ‘If it’s true it’s not superstition. I know men. And this one is a raven.’

‘But what will he do?’ Penn asked, looking from Clement to Tom.

‘It’s all right, Matt,’ Tom said, rubbing his mare’s cheek and muzzle, ‘I’ll find another troop.’ He felt the twist of a grimace. ‘I kill Cavaliers. There’ll be a captain hereabouts who’ll find that of some use.’ He clicked his tongue and the mare started forward.

‘Rivers,’ Captain Clement said, ‘seek out a man by the name of Crafte. Captain James Crafte. He’s with the foot, on the earl’s staff. Tell him I sent you.’

‘I am a harquebusier, not a pikeman or a damned musketeer,’ Tom said, ‘and I’ll outride any man in this regiment, you included, Captain.’

Clement frowned. ‘Crafte doesn’t lead a troop. Truthfully, I have no idea what the man does besides attend Essex like a damned shadow.’ He rubbed a palm against his stained cheek. ‘But find him, Thomas Rivers, and you may get your chance to kill Cavaliers.’ Then Clement turned and walked off to join a knot of officers who were standing smoking pipes by a pollarded oak, and Tom’s friends swarmed in on him again, slapping his back and shoulders and bombarding him with questions.

‘This Captain Crafte can wait till tomorrow,’ Will Trencher said, taking the mare’s reins off Tom and handing them to a young trooper with a curt order to take the horse to the picket. He was grinning savagely, the smile at odds with the carved granite of his face. ‘It’s not every day a ghost joins our fire.’

‘I didn’t think you were superstitious, Will.’

‘And I thought you were dead, lad, so it looks like we were both wrong,’ Trencher said, and together they all walked back towards the flames around which the rest of the troop sat huddled.

‘Weasel,’ Trencher rumbled, ‘we’ve all of us heard General Balfour bemoaning the theft of his personal stash of brandywine. Now would be a good time to chance upon a drop.’

Weasel grinned and broke away, heading for his tent, and Tom went with the tide, enjoying the fire’s heat on his face and the company of men he had presumed he’d never see again.

And in the morning he found Captain James Crafte.

‘And this Captain Clement rides with Sir William Balfour’s Regiment of Horse?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Tom glanced over at the three men sitting behind tables, busily scratching away with their quills, only pausing to dip them into ink pots or scatter sand across the paper.

‘And yet I barely know the man, have perhaps been in his company twice – if as much as that. Certainly to my knowledge he owes me no favours.’

‘Perhaps he intends for you to owe him one,’ Tom suggested.

Captain Crafte was frowning, though Tom suspected that was as much down to poor eyesight as to curiosity. ‘Thomas, was it?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Tom said.

Crafte’s eyebrows furrowed and then released. ‘Whatever the man’s motive, I must assume that he does not have need of you,’ he tilted his head to one side, ‘or indeed want you, in his own troop.’ His neat little nose wrinkled. ‘Forgive me for saying so but, given that most troops are coming up short on the preferred muster, that does not speak well for you, young man.’

Tom could not argue with that and so he said nothing, at a loss to determine what he was doing in a room with a captain who did not lead men in battle and three secretaries who were so intent on their writing that they had not so much as glanced at him since he arrived.

‘Interesting,’ the captain said, finger and thumb stroking the tuft of brown hair that jutted from his chin.

Captain Crafte was a small, neat man with a neat man’s economy of movement, so that when he walked, as he did now
towards the window, he barely disturbed the old straw on the farm kitchen’s earthen floor.

‘Are you perchance a relation of Sir Francis Rivers, who died at Kineton Fight?’

‘He was my father,’ Tom said, seeing no reason to lie. Crafte stopped still, staring out of the narrow, stone-mullioned window whose pane afforded a murky light. Candles burnt here and there about the room.

‘And may I ask how you came to fight against your father’s master the King?’

‘You may ask, sir, but you’ll get no answer. I have my reasons.’

His back to Tom, Crafte was still as stone, hands clasped behind him. ‘You come to me seeking employment and yet your tongue barely stirs to promote your cause.’

‘I come seeking nothing. I do not know why I am here,’ Tom said, growing irritated by the incessant scratching of quills on paper. ‘Captain Clement might not want a killer in his troop, and that makes him a strange officer if you ask me, but I never thought the man a fool. He told me to find you and so here I am.’ He shrugged. ‘Clearly there has been some mistake, sir. By your leave I will go and find a troop that wants fighters.’

Crafte turned round, his small nose crinkling like a mole’s. ‘Of course you don’t know why you are here,’ he said, a smile touching his watery eyes. ‘I dare say Captain Clement has only the vaguest notion of what it is I do here. How I labour for the cause and do it all unseen. Imagine, Thomas, if you would, a band of bell-ringers pulling on the ropes. Well, I am the man who tells them which ropes to pull and in what order. The resulting peal, that euphony which carries far on the wind, is my design. And yet I am never seen.’ He tugged his tuft of beard, his small eyes boring into Tom’s. Tom had the sudden notion that the man might be mad, that perhaps the dour Captain Clement had a sense of humour after all and had sent him to Crafte for his own amusement.

‘But I need men to pull the ropes,’ Crafte said. ‘What would
you say are your … talents, Thomas Rivers? And I would not include geniality amongst them,’ he added with the merest twitch of a smile.

‘I can ride,’ Tom replied. ‘There are few men in England who can handle a stallion as I can.’

‘Yet you came here riding a mare,’ Crafte said.

‘My stallion was killed under me at Kineton Fight,’ Tom said. ‘He would have galloped through the gates of Hell for me.’

Crafte seemed to consider this for a moment. ‘What other abilities do you possess, young man?’

‘I can shoot straight and I can use a sword.’

Crafte flapped a hand as though shooing a fly. ‘Firelocks and blades. Mere tools,’ he said. ‘Useless without the intent of the hands wielding them. How many men have you killed for our most righteous cause?’

For the cause? Or for myself?
Tom wondered. ‘I do not know,’ he said honestly. ‘Many.’

‘That’s a good sign,’ Crafte acknowledged with a careful nod. ‘You are not plagued by foul, dark dreams after taking a man’s life?’

Tom shook his head. He had known dark dreams but they were of Martha Green hanging by the neck, swinging gently beneath a stone bridge, and Crafte had no business knowing about them.

‘Can you hear that?’ Crafte said, cupping a hand to his right ear, his head half turned towards the window.

Tom shrugged. ‘Just the sounds of the camp,’ he said.

‘Precisely,’ Crafte said, ‘but soon you will hear the peal of bells. They will chime for England and her people. For I have a job for you, Thomas Rivers.’