Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles (17 page)

Grantham stared at his colonel in surprise. ‘Sir?’

‘In a strange way, I had hoped that one-eyed fiend would put up more of a fight.’

The Royalist circle, entirely surrounded now, shuddered again as three pikemen went down under the hail of lead. Men in the second rank shifted forwards to plug the gap before it was filled by Roundhead horsemen.

‘It ain’t over yet, sir,’ Grantham warned.

‘Nonsense, man!’ Wild called over his shoulder as he kicked at his mount. ‘Come! Let us spill some Royalist blood!’

Stryker could see that his company was about to shatter. The first group of horsemen, those who had retreated after the initial feint, were returning now, sweeping back across the gorse and heather to encircle Stryker’s tattered force. They maintained their distance, for they rightly feared the outstretched pikes, but their own weapons were being brought to the fight with devastating effect.

The Royalists were on the brink of destruction.

‘Stay clear o’ that a wagon, you pribblin’ bloody pizzle-lickers!’ The shout reached him from somewhere on Stryker’s blind left side, and he might have thought it had come from one of the exultant attackers, had it not been a voice he knew almost as well as his own. ‘You want to blow us to kingdom come?’

The words hit Stryker in a moment of sheer epiphany, stabbing him like a white-hot blade.

The wagon.

He spun on his heel, pushing his way back towards the centre of the beleaguered formation, forced to step across the contorted bodies that had been dragged from the front rank. There, beside a group of musketeers hurriedly working to reload their weapons amid the chaotic terror, he caught sight of Skellen, still berating the men for lighting their match-cords too near to the powder-laden wagon.

‘Grenados!’ Stryker shouted.

Skellen’s eyes, ordinarily so small within hooded sockets, widened at the word, and he immediately ran to his captain’s side.

Stryker and Skellen vaulted over the side of the wagon, wincing as pistol and carbine balls whistled around their ears, and desperately rifled through the cloth sacks. After the longest few seconds of his life, Stryker finally laid hands upon a sack bulging with a dozen or so fist-sized spheres. ‘
Here
!’

Skellen clambered across the sword stacks and bushels and thrust his long arms into the bag, held open by his captain, drawing out a metal casting in each hand. ‘
Match here
!’ he shouted as Stryker took a couple of explosives for himself.

As the pair leapt down from the vehicle, one of the musketeers from the rearmost rank scuttled across the blood-shadowed heath to meet them. He held out his musket, on which a glowing length of match was fixed.

‘Good lad,’ Skellen grunted, placing the grenado’s fuse against the orange tip. Almost immediately the short tube packed full of black powder sprang into manic life.

Colonel Gabriel Wild drew his long blade. It was a poor thing, a standard cavalry backsword he had taken from a store at Okehampton to replace the fine weapon that had been stolen from him. Stolen by a man who, he presumed, was cowering somewhere within the heaving mass of dying redcoats. Today he would take back his beautiful blade. Today he would take back his honour. He had once heard that the old Scottish savage, Wallace, had made a scabbard from the skins of the men he had killed. Perhaps that should be Stryker’s fate. Or maybe the victory would be even sweeter if he could present the thieving villain’s head to Erasmus Collings. That would wipe the supercilious smirk off the effeminate major-general’s pallid face.

Wild’s aide, Grantham, caught the colonel’s eye, jolting him from the beautiful dream. ‘I fear it is taking too long, sir. They’ll be ready to give volley fire soon, and our moment will be lost.’

Wild nodded. He enjoyed witnessing the slow convulsions of Stryker’s company as it died, struggling to replace the men falling so rapidly about them, but Grantham was right. To delay would only gift the enemy time to load their muskets. It was now or never. He held his sword aloft. ‘Charge!’

Colonel Wild was blinded at first. A sheet of white – pure and pristine as new snow – covered his vision, wiping out the land, the sky, the distant pinnacles of tors, the frayed circle of enemy troops, and even his own proud horsemen. In its wake came the sound. An overwhelming, ear-splitting crescendo of explosions that combined high pitch with low grumble.

And then, as his eyes and ears recovered, he heard the screams.

Stryker and Skellen had shoved and bullied their way to the very front rank of the company and lobbed their grenados with as much force as could be mustered. The fizzing spheres had touched ground several paces in front of the charging horses. They had rolled for a second, quickly overrun by the foremost cavalrymen, and Stryker’s heart sank because he feared the thrashing hooves had surely snuffed the bright fuses out. But at the last moment, just as the redcoats braced themselves to be smashed by the tidal wave of man and horse, the little cases of black powder erupted.

It might have taken longer than Stryker had anticipated, but, when the explosions finally came, the iron casings had been blown into the very midst of Wild’s troop. Like a flock of starlings evading a hawk, the horsemen turned as one, reeling instinctively away from the thundering, blinding, burning danger, wrenching savagely on reins and raking bloody lines along their mounts’ heaving flanks. Those riders on the opposite side of the beleaguered circle did manage to strike home, but their efforts were aborted as soon as they realized what had happened to their comrades. In a matter of seconds the Roundhead grip had been released, Wild’s black-feathered harquebusiers galloping pell-mell down the slope from whence they came.

Stryker gazed at the carnage left behind, and was put in mind of the shambles at Smithfield. A mess of meat and bone, hair and sinew. Twisted, bleeding and unrecognizable, strewn in haphazard array amongst lumps of torn muscle and gelatinous entrails. But this butchery had been done by gunpowder, and the stench of scorched flesh hung ripe and nauseating in the air.

‘Make ready!’ someone shouted from within the circle. Stryker could not discern the voice, for his ears were ringing uncontrollably. ‘Make ready, you idle buggers!’ the voice bawled again, and this time he knew it had been Sergeant William Skellen. With that repeated order his confidence finally began to build, for he understood that his musketeers must have finally loaded and primed enough guns to make a meaningful fist of defence.

He stepped back from the outermost rank and took up position in the very centre of the formation. He saw Cecily there, curled tight against the turf, Otilwell Broom at her side with his arm across her shoulders. Marcus Bailey was with them too, shivering like a dog in a rainstorm, muttering what Stryker presumed were desperate prayers for survival. The sight of Bailey made him glance across at the wagon. Its timbers were speckled with white patches where Wild’s pistol shots had hit home, splintering the wood.

‘Get the wounded back here!’ Stryker bellowed, forcing the terrible thought from his mind. ‘Get them out of the line, damn your hides! Be quick about it!’

For a time it seemed as though the order had been ignored, for he could not see through the close-packed scarlet coats, but eventually the rear ranks began to shift as bodies were dragged clear. There were plenty of them, more than Stryker had imagined, and he took a vast breath to steady himself. Once the defensive lines had been closed, the dead and dying hauled into the centre, and all gaps filled to present a complete and sturdy front to the enemy, Stryker ran round to the far side of the circle.

Burton, commanding the men on this side, caught his eye. ‘We’re ready for ’em this time, sir.’

‘I’m glad of it, Andrew,’ Stryker responded breathlessly, before turning quickly on his heel. An urgent shout of warning had carried to him from the part of the circle facing the slope. The Roundheads were coming back for more.

Colonel Gabriel Wild felt like crying. His men had travelled halfway across this God-forsaken moor, demeaning themselves by speaking to dull-witted yokels and persevering through some of the least cavalry-friendly terrain he had ever encountered, but, for all that, they had finally run their quarry to ground. They had outflanked Stryker’s infantrymen, ambushed the captain as he had ambushed them, and been no more than a heartbeat from crushing the life from the red-coated horde. But the grenados had changed everything. The explosions’ roar had been enough to force the horses into hasty flight, but the fire and the wicked, scything shards of iron had truly turned organized attack into a maelstrom of chaos. A dozen of his men had been cruelly cut from their saddles in the blasts, torn and seared by the grenados and their unseen throwers, and, as if with one mind, he and his men had instinctively retreated.

Wild, at the head of his regrouped force, stared up at the Royalist formation. Obscuring their feet and hose were the remains of his men. The troopers caught in the blasts that shattered so many limbs and pierced so much flesh. Christ, he thought, but some of those flying shards had come perilously close to hitting his own mount. Enough was enough.

‘More treachery!’ Wild shouted left and right as his steel-clad line eased into a canter. ‘They cannot defeat us by strength or valour, but by tricks alone!’

‘Colonel,’ it was Grantham, at his left side, who spoke. ‘They will be ready with volley fire.’

Wild shot him a brutal glance. ‘The time for timidity is over, by God! We must put them down!’

A huzzah greeted his words. They would go again. Shatter the enemy and leave them to bleed out on this desolate heath. He squinted at the faces of the king’s men. Wondered which of them was the one-eyed captain. He knew Stryker was in there, somewhere hidden behind his forest of pikes, sheltering like the most despicable kind of coward. No matter, they would charge again. Weed the bastard out.

Wild waved his sword high, circled the tip so that all eyes could see, and led his men on once more.

Once more.

‘Wait!’ screamed Sergeant William Skellen. ‘Wait you fuckers!’

His musketeers were eager. They shuffled forward, pulling right up to the shoulders of their pike-wielding compatriots, trigger fingers itching to unleash bloody chaos.

Stryker was in the front rank, hand raised, poised to give the signal. He heard the belaying cries of Lieutenant Burton, his other sergeant Moses Heel, and his two corporals, all struggling to keep the formation tight and prepared to fire.

The cavalry drew closer, cormorant feathers hovering above them like so many black standards. This time they did not split apart, did not attempt to encircle the infantry island, but advanced on a single, wide front, relying on sheer weight of numbers to break the Royalist line.

Fifty paces. The land began to tremble, shivering up into knees and hips.

Forty paces. The sound of the Roundheads’ snarls carried to them above the thunder of hooves. Stryker’s pikemen charged their pikes, angling the lethal spears upwards.

Thirty paces. Stryker took a last deep breath.

Twenty. He brought his arm down in a snapping arc.

‘
Fire
!’ the sergeants bawled.

The first rank of musketeers fired, perhaps twenty shots in all. Stryker felt the air pulse either side of his neck, his ears clanged as though filled with church bells, and the leading Roundhead saddles were immediately emptied. The relief that washed over the beleaguered defenders was almost palpable, for the blast had done its work.

‘Good lads!’ Stryker bellowed above the din. A surge of pride bolted through him as the bulk of the harquebusiers wheeled rapidly away. ‘Empties move to the rear!’

The shooters did as they were told, shifting back into the clear space in the circle’s centre to reload their weapons, and Stryker caught sight of a grey uniform within the throng to his right. ‘Barkworth!’

The diminutive Scot shouldered his way through the infantrymen. ‘Sir!’

Out on the slope, Wild’s visor-faced riders were already regrouping to launch an immediate assault.

Stryker looked down at Barkworth. ‘Find the lieutenant.’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘Tell him to give me a score of muskets.’

Barkworth frowned. ‘Will that not leave our rear exposed?’

‘They’re only attacking here,’ Stryker replied quickly, ‘so he can spare them.’

Barkworth scampered into the centre of the ring and Stryker stared back at the approaching cavalry. They were coming again, but this time the gallop had waned to a fast canter as though the Roundheads charged into a gale. They had made a grave mistake by attacking on a single front, a sign, he thought, of desperation. Perhaps, after all, there was hope.

The thick volley had almost been enough for Colonel Gabriel Wild to call off the attack, but his men were the best the western Parliamentarian army had to offer, and he’d be damned to hell if he abandoned matters now. They had bravely faced that angry hail of lead, soaked up the Royalist barrage, and still regrouped. The toll had been heavy, but now he felt certain Stryker could bring no more musketry to bear. The volley had contained at least twenty shots, he reckoned, which meant it had involved every musketeer on this side of the circle, and Stryker was too cowardly to risk leaving his rear unguarded. Which meant Wild’s brave gallopers would most certainly reach the red-coated line before the malignants had time to reload.