Marston Moor (55 page)

The dragoons attacked. They were arrayed along the tree line, and they spurred south, getting as close as they could risk to the dogged whitecoats. They drew up as one, dismounted as one, and fired their muskets. Now Cromwell released his horsemen, thundering against the Royalists once again, and they discharged their pistols too. The Earl of Manchester’s Foot, pressing up from the ditch, kept up their own volleys. The last of Prince Rupert’s brigades absorbed fire on three fronts. And finally, mercifully, gloriously, Cromwell could see that his psalm-singing holy warriors had achieved in the west what Sir Charles Lucas and the famed Royalist horse had failed to achieve in the east: they had broken a fully formed pike circle. God had provided a stunning triumph, for the whitecoats – valiant and resolute – began to fall apart. Newcastle’s lambs had come to the slaughter.

Stryker left Hood’s body and drew one of his pistols. The volley from the dragoons decided matters, for the hedgehog’s north face had not been ready to face such fire, and the pikemen, left exposed against muskets fired at horribly close range, had been savagely flensed. Now the crowing cavalry charged again, but they veered north, curled their run to sweep around to the circle’s newly tattered face, aiming for the gaps torn by the dragoons. They careened straight into the block, the fissures wide enough to fit their crashing, snorting destriers, and the heavy hooves kicked at the pikemen, who parted in panic, the range suddenly too close to employ their long spears. As they shied away, more horses plunged into the widening crevices, acting like wedges driven into rotting timber, and the entire circle ruptured.

Horsemen were immediately among them, butchering bloody paths through the melee, their swords and breeches, buff-coats, breastplates and faces spattered in the blood of their prey. A great wail went up, new drums thundered, and then the rebel infantry stormed forwards in waves to support the horse. There had been no quarter asked, and none would be given.

Stryker was barely aware of which way he faced, thinking only of survival. He drew his sword as he fired the pistol, ducking below the arc of a high-swung partisan and shooting the assailant in the face for his trouble. Then he dropped the smoking piece and took the blade in both hands, hacking a green-coated man down with nothing but brute force and desperation. He trampled over the felled soldier, searching for escape but seeing nothing but dead ends.

‘God with us!’ was the only cry now, and Stryker twisted and turned, cleaving path after path that took him nowhere at all. He slid the tip of his Toledo blade into a man’s windpipe, jerking it free to slice it sideways at a passing horse, and rolled clear of the stamping hooves. He was up quickly, dizzy but alive, daubed in mud and the blood of friend and foe. A man armoured in morion pot, breastplate and tassets lunged at Stryker with an axe, aiming to open his belly from stones to sternum. Stryker wrenched himself away, feeling the axe’s edge rip at his coat, and, as he slid in a patch of horse dung, he noticed a pike discarded in the morass. He dropped the sword, hefted the shaft that was snapped halfway along its length, and spun, sweeping all eight feet of tapered ash in a wide curve that collided with the axe-man’s thigh. The blade, designed only to thrust, failed to penetrate the metal tassets but knocked him off his stride, and Stryker drew back the half-pike, stabbing upwards with all the strength he had left. The tip crunched beneath the Parliamentarian’s chin, up through the soft tissue behind his jawbone, and the man’s bloodshot eyes rolled up as if staring at the rim of his morion. Stryker released the shaft, leaving it stuck and quivering, and went to find his sword.

‘
Stryker
!’

He felt his ears prick like a startled animal. He collected his sword and turned.

Captain John Kendrick ran his tongue slowly over his ghoulishly sharpened teeth. Time seemed to slow. The battle raged all about them, but each man, ten yards apart, stared at the other as though none existed but them.

Stryker pointed his sword at Kendrick’s chest. ‘You killed Hood.’

Kendrick had a sword in one hand and the other he flexed, letting the metallic fingers, topped by the vicious brass gadlings, clank with grim foreboding. He wiped the sword on his dense cloak. ‘You killed Janik.’

Stryker pulled free his second pistol and fired. The shot flew wide. He dropped the weapon and moved forwards, adjusting his sword grip to ensure the shark-skin hilt would not fail. ‘You murdered Lieutenant Brownell.’

‘A mistake,’ Kendrick replied casually, holding up his own sword to beckon his enemy. He winked. ‘I was trying to kill you.’

Hidden deep in the woods, Fight the Good Fight of Faith Helly was frightened. Frightened of a Royalist victory without Stryker; of a Parliamentarian victory with the spectre of the Vulture. So she stared at the lengthening shadows, made gloomier by the sepulchral forest, and flinched as flaming tongues licked the bracken where men ran and screamed.

She could not discern anything meaningful in the madness. The battle still raged to the south, but fighting had spread to Wilstrop Wood, and men crashed through the undergrowth, darted round trunks and died in the leaf mulch. There were riders too, helmeted centaurs with bright spurs and dark swords, and they slashed all around, hacking tracks through the wood to cut down whom they may. But Faith did not know to which side any man was loyal, nor whether she would be safe under their white-eyed stares, so she let them pass with sealed lips and a hammering heart. The firelocks guarding the ammunition had long moved away, though they said nothing of their intent, and she had considered following them, but it seemed more sensible simply to hide and pray for nightfall. So she waited and watched and wondered.

It started to rain again: the droplets that weaved through the boughs of her hiding-place were fat and heavy. She decided to move, and gingerly stood up. A horse whickered softly behind her.

‘My, my,’ a man said. ‘What have we here?’

The rain lashed Marston Moor, mingling with the blood streaking Stryker’s blade as it clanged in the air above his head.

The hooked nose of a bare-fanged Kendrick loomed back at him over the cross of steel. He moved as Stryker remembered; incongruous beneath the kinked hump, but somehow neatly balanced. He was weaker than Stryker, but able to deflect and riposte with impressive crispness, and Stryker heaved at him now, throwing him away so that he did not find some sly way to pummel his lone eye with the knuckled gauntlet.

Kendrick stumbled back, breathing heavily. All around them the last pockets of whitecoats were crumbling, falling where they stood, cut like a field of wheat beneath so many scythes, but none paid them notice, leaving them to their private duel. The Vulture swooped in, darting low to cut at Stryker’s ankles, forcing the latter to leap out of range, almost becoming entangled with his own scabbard.

Kendrick straightened, rolling his distorted shoulders. ‘Water hemlock, from the New World.’ He sneered. ‘One draws a yellow liquid from its roots. Looks like piss. Smells worse.’

Stryker’s mind went to a tavern in Skipton. ‘The poison.’

Kendrick made a clicking noise with his tongue. ‘The savages use it.’ He swept his blade in the hissing figure of eight he had used to dazzle Stryker at Lathom. ‘Jesu, but it is deadly stuff. A drop will do the trick.’

Stryker circled him warily. ‘A coward’s weapon.’

‘As I said, the tainted chalice was not intended for that young peacock’s lips.’ Kendrick lunged, thrusting at the belly, then whipping the tip upwards to catch Stryker’s chin. When he sliced only air, he rocked back, giving himself space to draw the cinquedea. He turned the broad blade slowly to let the raindrops glitter on the wicked steel. ‘After that, my place in the service of the Crown appeared rather untenable.’

‘’Tis a harsh choice to change one’s loyalty,’ Stryker said, swinging his blade from side to side. ‘Unless that loyalty was never truly owned.’

Kendrick blew rainwater from his lips. ‘Oh?’

‘You are Ezra Killigrew’s man. And he, Vulture, is a traitor and a double agent.’

Kendrick laughed. ‘Very good!’

‘Hate-Evil Sydall was his man too. A Parliament spy, unaware that his master shared secrets with both sides.’

‘When Master Killigrew heard we would sack Bolton,’ Kendrick returned, ‘he feared what Sydall might reveal. Better to eradicate a good agent than risk exposure. But you’ll never prove it. And you will die on this field.’

The turncoat jumped in, closing the range and hewing his sword downward in a crushing blow. Stryker parried, staggered back, recaptured his balance only to have to parry again. The second strike caught him just above the hilt, and though the ornate guard turned the edge away, the jarring effect made him sway alarmingly so that his rear foot skidded in the scarlet stew. He took a knee, flattening a palm in the filth to steady himself. His fingers snaked across something hard and smooth. He looked down, registering what he saw, then let it go as he met another blow with a block that only just repelled Kendrick’s thrust. He wrenched his body sideways to squirm away from the darting cinquedea. The blade, named for its width, caught him across the upper arm, and he knew he had been saved by the layer of oiled hide. He scrambled to his feet, went on the attack with a half-dozen sharp jabs that Kendrick absorbed without fuss or fluster.

There were horsemen nearby no longer fighting but watching the private performance play out. He hauled air into his lungs as his mind churned. He needed to stall for time. ‘I have the cipher,’ he said eventually.

Kendrick stopped short, visibly shaken. ‘I do not believe you.’

‘That is your choice. But I have it, and it is safe.’

‘You’ll give me that flagon, Stryker, or so help me …’

‘It is no flagon, you dull-witted fool.’ Stryker forced a mocking laugh, hoping that the captain would be enraged into a mistake. ‘A Puritan like Sydall would entrust his secrets to one place only.’

Kendrick untwisted his features. ‘Alone it incriminates nothing. What is a key without its lock?’

‘I’ll find the lock. You will die now, Vulture, and Killigrew will die later.’

John Kendrick licked his lips. ‘That’s the spirit, Stryker. But, alas, I am a hard-man. I have been given the power of the Balkan sorcerers and the feathered barbarians of Virginia.’ He shrugged, flipped the cinquedea in his hand, and lurched at Stryker. ‘I cannot be killed!’

Stryker threw himself to the side, to the place where he had knelt, and there he scrabbled in the mud for the pistol he had so fleetingly felt. Kendrick bore down on him from behind as his fingers hit upon the smooth handle. He snatched it up, twisted, and fired.

John Kendrick stopped in his tracks, baffled as he looked down at the blood pumping from his side. ‘You shot me,’ he said, utterly astounded. ‘But I am a hard-man.’ He looked up in amazement. ‘You shot me, Stryker.’

Stryker clambered to his feet. ‘And now I shall run you through.’

A pistol fired close by, but it was not the one in his hand. The world was spinning and he felt himself fall. Then all was silent.