Marston Moor (56 page)

Stryker woke in darkness. He was curled on the ground, knees drawn to his chest, his side wet and cold where it nestled in the mud. He peeled open his eye. The lids parted stubbornly, stickily, and he guessed they were glued with caked blood. He saw boots pacing around him, fetlocks too. It was all a blur. He tried to sit. His head hurt, and he slumped back down. He waited, breathed through the pain, and sat up again, more slowly this time, happy, at least, that the rain had stopped.

He rubbed his face with cold hands. Calluses scraped his cheeks and he realized that his gloves had gone. He patted his body. His baldric and sword had vanished, his dirk too. The purse that had been strung at his belt had been cut clean away. In panic, he reached for his breast. The book was still there, between coat and shirt.

‘They have Bibles, our captors. They need not rob you of yours.’

Stryker forced his aching neck round to peer blearily at the man who had spoken. It was another seated on the ground, one of many, he now realized. Hundreds, unarmed and cross-legged. The voice was one he knew but could not place. ‘I was shot,’ he heard himself say.

The man hunched behind him nodded. ‘Right in the head.’

Stryker stared hard, forcing clarity into the lines that moved in and out like plucked harp strings. He managed to discern a red coat. He saw a wide hat that perched atop thin, sandy hair and a cherubic face. ‘Forry?’

Captain Lancelot Forrester smiled, though the gesture barely reached his eyes. ‘Fortunately for you, your skull is made of more than bone.’ He held up a small, metal dome. ‘Where the devil did you get this?’

Stryker gazed for a moment; then he remembered the secrete he had been wearing beneath his hat. ‘A gift from a friend.’

‘That friend saved your life.’

Stryker slid a hand gingerly to his head and followed the trail of congealed blood to a spot just above his right temple. There was a crusty gash under the tangled hair, and he dabbed it with his fingertips. Then he reached to take the secrete. The bowl-shaped sheet of steel had a pronounced dent on one side, which he fingered in astonishment. ‘Jesu.’ He looked up sharply. ‘Where are we?’

‘Marston Field,’ Forrester said.

‘Hood is dead.’

‘Mowbray too. And a great many more.’ Forrester pressed his mouth into a firm line. ‘I have not seen old Seek Wisdom.’ He sighed heavily and sorrowfully. ‘We lost.’

Stryker looked around. The prisoners were gathered in a large herd, like cattle, and were being harassed by a ring of musketeers and horsemen. The area was lit by torches held by sentries, and thousands of pale awnings stretched away into the distance like a horde of ghosts. The rebels quite literally held the field. They had made a leaguer of it. Stryker stared at his fellow captives. They had all been stripped of their possessions, no doubt, but their coats remained, and those were a panoply of colours. Tillier’s greens, Rupert’s blues, some yellows, reds and browns. Maudlin delegates of two proud, annihilated armies.

His scalp burned with sudden brightness, making him wince as he dabbed the injury with numb fingers. ‘One of Kendrick’s men?’

Forrester’s head shook in the gloom. ‘One of those bloody horsemen thought to use you for target practice.’

‘And the Vulture?’

‘Hurt bad, sir,’ another, gruffer voice came from the shadows. ‘But you did not get a chance to end him.’

Stryker jerked round. ‘Skellen?’

‘The same, sir.’

Skellen’s gloomy face, stained dark from the gash in his scalp, held a new depth of sorrow. He had witnessed many terrible things in the Low Countries, and had long prayed never to see them visited upon English soil. Skellen would never again be the same. Stryker shook the sergeant’s huge hand. ‘I am glad you live to fight another day, William, truly.’

Skellen let his gaze drift beyond his friend. ‘Plenty did not.’

Stryker eased himself round to see teams of men lining up sacks a hundred paces away. With a knot in the pit of his guts, he saw they were not sacks but corpses. They came from everywhere; from the ditch and the woods, from the ridge where the Allied host had converged, to Long Marston in the east and Tockwith in the west. Five armies had clashed on this lonely Yorkshire moor, and the dead numbered in their thousands. They were stripped as they were collected, valuables harvested as waxen bodies were tossed in meshed, crooked heaps upon the back of wagons and brought to the vast line, where some – a fortunate fraction – might be identified. The rest would be dusted in lime and lobbed in a pit.

A thought struck Stryker. ‘If I was shot, why did he not make an end of me?’

‘I saw what happened,’ Skellen said in the matter-of-fact way that was so reassuring. ‘I reckoned I would not let that crook-backed bastard reach you. God knows he tried. His men came from everywhere wi’ their curly swords.’

‘Sergeant Skellen used his halberd, you understand,’ Forrester cut in, ‘and you know how bloody-minded he can be with one of those in hand.’

‘The cap’n, here, came to join my little dance, sir.’

Forrester gave a rueful laugh. ‘Had a handful of men with me. Seemed a worthy cause. We’d have fallen in the end, but Manchester’s cavalry thought to interfere, thank God. They took us prisoner before the Vulture’s flock could chop us to offal.’

‘Why did they make prisoner of us?’ Stryker asked suddenly. ‘The whitecoats were fighting to the last man. There was no quarter asked, and none offered.’

‘Cap’n has fedaries among the enemy, sir,’ Skellen answered, a hint of the old wryness inflecting his dour tone. A man in the dress of a harquebusier was striding towards them, and the sergeant indicated him with a jerk of his chin.

Stryker looked at Forrester. ‘Forry?’

Forrester looked embarrassed. ‘This is Captain Camby. An officer in General Cromwell’s troop, and a fellow actor. We trod the boards together at Candlewick Street.’

Camby loomed over them, a lobster-tailed helmet in the crook of his arm. He was young and thin, with soberly cropped hair and a deep cut through his right eyebrow. He tried to smile, thought better of it, and settled for a sympathetic grimace. ‘A bad business.’

‘You won, Captain,’ Stryker said coldly.

Camby cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘Such effusion of blood is never to be celebrated, sir. Not ever.’ He bowed to Forrester and walked quickly away.

Forrester watched him leave. ‘You might have been more civil, old man. The poor bugger saved our lives. They’d have butchered every last man found fighting with the whitecoats if it weren’t for him. He admired our courage.’

‘What happened?’ Stryker said, ignoring his friend. ‘In the end?’

‘The enemy swept the field,’ Forrester replied bluntly. ‘Our horse rallied briefly under Goring, but they were shattered in a trice.’

‘Rupert?’

‘Camby says he was not taken, thank God. Newcastle and Eythin appear to have extricated themselves too. Sir Charles Lucas is captured, I’m told. General Tillier with him.’ He shrugged, looking around at the human debris. ‘And many more besides.’

‘I saw Boye killed.’

‘Skewered, aye,’ Forrester said glumly. ‘The rebels are cock-a-hoop with the news, as you can imagine. They have destroyed Newcastle’s grand army, yet they make far greater noise over the death of a poodle.’

‘What of Rupert’s army?’ Stryker asked. He thought of that great wave of men and horses that rolled like gathering thunder all the way from the Irish Sea, taking Stockport and Bolton and Liverpool in such stunning fashion. ‘The last stand of the whitecoats did much to delay the pursuit. Most will have made it back to York. Perhaps they shall rally again?’

‘The last stand of the whitecoats,’ Skellen echoed slowly. The brigade of Northern Foot had been ripped to bloodied rags, and yet not a single man had looked to surrender. ‘I have seldom witnessed such valour.’

‘They’re gone,’ Forrester said in a low voice. ‘All gone.’

‘All?’ Stryker asked.

‘It is said,’ Skellen muttered, ‘there are thirty survivors from the brigade, sir. Including we three.’

Stryker felt sick. ‘From how many? Two thousand?’

‘My friend Camby,’ Forrester added weakly, ‘saved as many as he could.’

‘And God rot him for the saving!’ Captain John Kendrick sneered.

All three captives looked up at the pale, black-framed face. Stryker tried to stand, but found no strength in his knees. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he managed to hiss, and could hear how feeble his words sounded.

Kendrick limped closer. Stryker’s pistol ball had evidently damaged him, for now his every movement was laboured. ‘That fool Camby commands the guards, and he harbours romantic notions of chivalry that would make a reasonable man expunge his luncheon. But I’ll take the watch before dawn, and you will suffer.’ He sidled in a step, to whisper: ‘I want that cipher.’

‘You have already turned your coat,’ Stryker retorted in sudden panic at the stupidity of the words he had spoken during the battle. ‘What concern is it of yours?’

‘Our mutual friend will be abundantly grateful for the safeguard of his reputation,’ Kendrick replied, keeping his voice low. ‘And I have thought much upon what you said before you shot me. Oh yes,’ he added with a grin, ‘I have not forgotten. Where else would a Puritan hide it? The answer hit me like your goddamned pistol ball. Where have you hidden it? Does the girl have it?’

‘No.’

Kendrick drew breath to rasp another threat, but then he halted. He stared for what seemed like an age, before slowly his lips drew back to reveal the shark-like jaws. ‘Wait.’ He cocked his head to the side as he regarded Stryker. ‘Your hubris glows like the Everton beacon.’ Kendrick winced with pain as he turned to click fingers at one of his blue-cloaked hajduks. ‘Strip him.’

‘You cannot—’ Stryker began.

‘Search every stinking crevice if you have to,’ Kendrick was saying as a pair of his men pushed into the apprehensive herd.

Stryker made to fight the men, but found no strength as they tore away his coat and shook it like hounds with a fox. The Bible dropped to the ground. They pushed Stryker so that he slumped like a rag doll on his back.

Kendrick beamed. ‘Huzzah for arrogant men, eh? You believed yourself invincible, so why place something this precious anywhere but about your person?’ One of the hajduks retrieved the book and tossed it to him. ‘I shall kill you, Stryker,’ Kendrick declared as he plucked the fluttering object out of the air. ‘Slowly, painfully. They call me the Vulture; well I shall make you an
eagle
. The blood eagle, have you heard of it? I will break your ribs and tug your lungs out through your back. They shall drape over your shoulders, like the wings of an eagle, and you will be alive long enough to know every moment of your delicious agonies.’ He wetted his thin lips with a flickering tongue. ‘I cannot do it here, of course, for these Bible-licking Puritans frown upon such practise. More’s the pity. But soon, Stryker. So soon.’ He began to walk falteringly away, one hand clutching the prize, the other clamped tight to his wounded side. ‘In the meantime,’ he called over his twisted shoulder, ‘I will find that polecat of yours.’

Stryker’s skull throbbed, but he managed to summon the will to heave himself upright. Beyond the mass of prisoners, and behind Kendrick’s group, he had noticed the approach of a short column of horsemen. ‘Why? You have the book!’

Kendrick halted and turned. ‘But I want you to be assured that yours is an end of total defeat.’ He waved the Bible at Stryker while his men guffawed. ‘Know this; the Sydall whelp will be swived raw, and then she will be gutted like a Christ-tide piglet and left as carrion in a ditch. Because no one defies me, Stryker. No one. Yes, sirrah, I will find her.’

For the first time, it was Stryker’s turn to smile. ‘Not if she finds you first.’

Faith Helly perched side-saddle on a bay cob that bore notches on its ears and muzzle where blades had cut. She rode through the guard detail, flanked by an escort of a dozen riders on bigger, more intimidating mounts. She was still as slight and wan as Stryker remembered, and yet there was an imperiousness about her he had not before encountered. For the first time, he supposed, she was safe. Truly safe. Her finger, tiny and white, extended towards Kendrick. ‘Him.’

‘This man?’ the rider immediately behind her, large and forbidding on a black destrier, asked sternly. ‘You are certain?’

Stryker looked up at him. His face was deeply lined, with a wart rising from the right eyebrow, while his body was bound in leather and iron. He wore no helmet or gorget, so that thick bandaging could be seen about his neck. Stryker was taken back to the cavalry fight below Bilton Bream, and to the man whose head he had so nearly cleaved from his body. He propped a hand against his face, sliding fingers over the scars that would betray his identity. He held his breath as blood rushed in his ears.