Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles (53 page)

Collings hauled his own horse round now, facing Hogg. ‘No buts,’ he snapped. ‘Did it work?’

Hogg rubbed his big nose. ‘Aye, sir, he confessed to witchcraft.’

‘Then do the same to Miss Cade,’ Collings ordered flatly. ‘I want the location of that gold, Master Hogg, or you will be held responsible.’ The beady gaze darted to Colonel Wild like a magpie sighting silver. ‘Bring the bitch to the hill. Let her see the destruction of her precious malignants and then, if she maintains her bovine obstinacy, our friends here will prick the words out of her.’

The battle smouldered like the thousands of match-cords carried along the western face of the hill. Grenville’s division pushed on, desperate to break free of the deep lanes that forced them into narrow lines, nullifying their pikes to utter impotency, but there were so many Roundhead shooters in the trees, picking at them, plucking men out of line, forcing them to stall.

The morning progressed rapidly. Ten o’clock passed, then eleven, and as the sun glimmered in warped chinks through the canopy immediately over their heads, the king’s men knew that noon approached. But still they had not broken free. Still they could see nothing of the upper half of the hill, the open land where the bulk of Parliament’s vast horde awaited them.

The pikemen in the lane moved painfully slowly, kept to shuffled advances of a few feet at a time, all the while battered by the enemy gunmen. Their own musketeers still flanked them, skirmished along the high banks, fought tooth and nail to keep the enemy shooters at bay, but there were simply not enough of them to free the column up.

Stryker’s eye was full of powder grit, his face singed, his fingers black. But he fired and reloaded and fired again. A fresh volley of musketry crackled madly somewhere to his right. His gaze drifted there, expecting to see some new line of foes, but he looked only upon a thick mass of branches and leaves. The fight – this same contest between determined pikemen and sniping musketeers – was playing out in the next lane along, and the next, he presumed, and the one beyond that. All four Royalist divisions would be marching through this same torment.

He tripped suddenly, cursing as he pitched forward, looking back to see what branch had snagged him. But there, flat on his back, was a grey-coated man with a thick, black beard and wide orange sash. He had been wounded, a messy bullet hole glistened at his groin like a huge ruby, but he still had strength enough to lift a pistol. The shot cracked out, pitched high, deafening at this close range, and Stryker fell back on his haunches, fully expecting the world to turn black. But the thud on a tree behind told him he had survived, and he scrambled rapidly to his feet. The prostrate Roundhead clutched a tuck in his other hand, and he made to hurl it at Stryker, but the captain reached him first, burying his leather-bound toes deep into the bearded man’s wound in a savage kick. The Parliamentarian screamed, pure and penetrating, and Stryker kicked him again, this time in the face. He slumped back, head bouncing on the bed of fallen leaves.

‘
On
!
On
!
On
!’ an officer bellowed down on the lane, willing his pikemen onwards like a herd of terrified cattle. But they were still painfully slow. The foremost men flinched as sporadic shots flashed forth from deeper into the lane. They knew their comrades on the banks were fighting well for them, for the reports of Royalist muskets rattled just as loudly as those of the rebels, but a man gripping a sixteen-foot-long pole could not protect himself from a flying lump of lead, and their instinct was to turn tail and run. The sergeants threatened them. They snarled and cajoled and prodded with their halberds, and the frightened pikemen did not turn. But, with each passing moment, with every man thrown to the mud by an unseen gunman, the advance was gradually beginning to stall.

Colonel Gabriel Wild spurred his horse into Stratton, its hooves clattering over a patch where the road was cobbled. He knew where Hogg and Collings had kept the pasty-faced wench, and turned his snorting beast into the alley that would lead him to the secluded building at Stratton’s periphery.

The alleyway was clogged with mud, cloying reddish filth churned to slop by soldiers, horses, cartwheels, and villagers. Wild’s mount sank to its fetlocks, but he raked his spurs all the way along its heaving flanks, making it clear that no argument was to be tolerated. But the going was slow all the same, the unhappy animal whinnying its protest as it picked a tentative route between the timber-framed homes and businesses that leaned over the alley.

‘What happens, m’lud?’

Startled, Wild peered down through his vertical face bars to see a haggard old woman stagger out from one of the low doorways. ‘Christ, you venomous bloody harridan,’ he rasped, turning his face away from the woman, ‘I can smell your damned stench from here.’

The crone lurched at him, grasping the horse’s bridle in a clawlike hand. ‘But what ’appens, sir? Up on the hill? My poor boy, James!’ With her free hand she pointed down the alley in the direction from which Wild had come. ‘He fights!’

‘Get your vile skin away from me, bitch!’ Wild snarled, jerking his boot from its stirrup and smashing it upwards into the villager’s wrist.

She yelped in pain, rocked sideways, and landed heavily on her rump in the mud. Long strands of coarse, greying hair tumbled from beneath her coif to fall across her face and the material of her sleeve quickly began to turn a bright red hue as though a huge rose blossomed there. She stared down at the forearm. ‘But my boy, James, m’lud,’ she moaned, beginning to sob, ‘he did not wish to fight. He bain’t the fightin’ kind, see? They forced ’im.’

‘Pox on your gibbering tongue, palliard’s whore,’ Wild hissed, clambering down to the sticky morass. Holding his breath, he thrust hands under the woman’s armpits and dragged her from his path, dropping her by the side of the alley, her spine-ridged back flush against one of the dirty walls.

As he straightened up he noticed a small group of soldiers up at the far end of the alley. There were five of them, all but one dressed in civilian clothes, though straight tucks clattered at their sides and he could see withered oak sprigs in their hatbands.

Wild tethered his horse using the iron ring of an open doorway, and paced towards the men. ‘Northcote’s?’

The group paused, the nearest man squinting down the alley at him. After a moment’s reckoning, the fellow – a flat-faced, stubble-jawed man with one twitching eyelid and teeth protruding out over his bottom lip – doffed his hat, the rest following suit. Wild’s expensive armour, the ostentatious helmet feather, and his sheer build and bearing clearly shouted his credentials. ‘What can we do for you, sir?’

But Wild kept his steady, purposeful pace, closing the distance between him and Northcote’s men, because they could do nothing for him. It was not the four sprig-donning soldiers that he wished to see, but the fifth man, face hitherto concealed by the rest. ‘Who is that man?’

The buck-toothed soldier stared back with a slack-jawed expression. ‘Sir?’

Wild drew his sword, levelling it at the centre of the group. ‘That man, damn your beef-witted impudence!’ There it was again. The glimpse of a narrow leather sling. His heart raced. ‘What is his name?’

The spokesman for Northcote’s men took a faltering step backwards as the big armour-clad horseman strode ever closer. ‘I—I know not, sir,’ he stuttered, evidently too frightened of the poised blade to give a proper answer.

Wild was only a matter of five strides from the group now, and one of the other soldiers shoved his way past his dumbstruck comrade. He glanced back at the object of Wild’s attention. ‘He was taken an hour after midnight, sir.’ He shrugged apologetically, moving out of the way so that Wild could finally get a good look at the prisoner. ‘He was sneakin’ around the village, that’s all I know. They’ve roughed ’im up a tad, so we’re to take ’im to one o’ these rooms under guard.’

Wild stared at the beaten man. At the swollen eye sockets, the dishevelled hair, the split, weeping, puffed-up lips, and the newly twisted nose. He would not have recognized the fellow if it had been anyone else, for the man’s injuries were so remarkably disfiguring. But this man was different. His right arm, withered and immobile, was pinned against his torso by a leather strap.

Colonel Gabriel Wild sheathed his sword slowly, and grinned.

Down in the sunken lanes the fighting went on.

Stryker’s redcoats were there, his musketeers ahead and on the flanks, locked in bitter skirmish with their rebel counterparts, while his pikemen waited within the large column, creeping along the tree-hung lane an inch at a time. But creep they did. The Parliamentarian musketeers had been sent down from the hill to knock them back; to batter them and bruise them and send them back to Bude. And for a time it had looked as though that might happen, but, though they had winced and paused, seen men wail and witnessed friends die, the column had gained ground.

Stryker loaded his musket behind a broad oak trunk, stepping out into the open when he had tested that his match would shift true to touch the powder in his pan. He flicked the pan cover back, exposing the charge.

‘Sir!’ Simeon Barkworth’s noose-rung voice sounded away to Stryker’s right.

He looked over, seeing the little Scot, face grim and blackened. Barkworth pointed frantically past him, indicating something on Stryker’s blind left, and he swiftly turned his head to see a flash of tawny smear the air between two thick bushes. He twisted his shoulders, swinging the long-arm across his front, eye still trained along the black barrel. The target was there. A musketeer with a dishevelled scarf around his waist, and that man pulled his trigger first. The ball missed, chipping bark from the oak beside Stryker. He fired his own shot in reply, but missed as well, and the rebel scampered back into the wooded gloom to reload.

‘Ne’er mind,’ Barkworth called, when he heard Stryker’s toxic curse. ‘Least he can’t shoot either!’

Sir Bevil Grenville’s column marched on, edging ever closer to the upper part of the slope where the terrain was an open expanse, friendly to their ferocious pikemen. But all around them the muskets of Parliament were loaded and loosed, loaded and loosed, gnawing away at the resolve of the approaching Cornish. And so the afternoon wore on.

Witch-finder Osmyn Hogg was a true believer. He believed in God’s power, and in Satan’s grip on the weak of mind, and in the notion that prayer – constant, heartfelt prayer – would see a man’s deepest desires come to pass. And as he looked to the south-east corner of the hill’s broad summit his belief increased a hundredfold. ‘I recognize that man,’ he said to Colonel Wild as the harquebusier walked his mount over the long grass to greet the group.

Wild, resplendent and proud atop the muscular destrier, signalled to two young boys brought up from the village to support Chudleigh’s huge force in return for a few coins and the promise of safety. They scampered over to the horseman and helped lift his unwilling passenger from where she lay in front of him, face down across the horse’s ample back. He stared dispassionately at her, unmoved by the ordeal that had turned her from raven-haired beauty to the dishevelled, gaunt, stooping figure she had become. He remembered her from the tor; how she had bolted down from the granite-strewn heights to scream at the men who had killed the prisoner, Otilwell Broom. That pith she displayed, the vigour and the venom, it was all gone now. Drained clear away by whatever torments Hogg and his oily servant had dreamt up.

When Cecily Cade had been dragged over to stand beside Hogg, Wild lifted his visor, lips peeled back in a white-toothed grin. ‘I expect you do, Master Hogg.’ He removed his helmet and twisted back to stare at the man tethered at the end of a short rope affixed to his saddle. Only the man’s left wrist was bound, for his other arm was clearly useless, hanging inert and emaciated by a leather strap that kept it braced to his chest. Lifting a gauntleted hand to ruffle the silver badger stripe bisecting his otherwise dark hair, Wild added, ‘He is one of Stryker’s lackeys. His lieutenant, no less.’

The witch-catcher’s eyes bulged from his face as Hogg looked beyond Wild to the tethered man.

Hogg kicked his mount forward a touch, glancing from the prisoner to Wild and back again. ‘He is here?’

Wild nodded energetically. ‘Oh yes.’ He gazed down at the wooded area that stifled the lower half of the hill. Musketry, screams, and smoke still wafted up from that place of unseen horror. ‘Down there, to be exact.’

‘What is the meaning of this, Colonel?’

Wild looked to his right, to where the new voice had sprung forth. ‘Major-General Collings.’ He reached back, grasping the grimy rope, and gave it a swift tug. The man fastened to the far end came stumbling forwards, almost colliding with the horse’s rump. ‘A spy, sir. Found in Stratton during the night. Caught red-handed.’ He allowed himself a malicious smirk, jerking the rope. ‘One-handed.’

Erasmus Collings raked Wild’s captive with his dead eyes. ‘You know the orders, Colonel. All spies and Irish are to be hanged.’

Wild nodded. ‘And this one will be, I promise you.’ He leaned down, saddle groaning at the action. In a low, conspiratorial voice, he said, ‘He is Stryker’s lieutenant, sir.’

The black beads twinkled in Collings’s lamb-white skull. ‘Stryker?’

‘Stryker,’ Wild echoed. He thought about the familiarity of speech he had witnessed between the villainous captain and his men back at Bovey Tracy. ‘And he holds an—
affection
—for his men, if memory serves. They are friends.’ He almost hissed the last word. ‘I would have this wretch watch the battle.’