The Bleeding Land (32 page)

‘GOD ALMIGHTY!’ MATTHEW
penn exclaimed at the first explosion. Then a series of even louder booms ripped through the night, their thunder lingering after the initial blasts, rolling across the plain as Tom pushed back against the gaol wall to lever himself up onto his feet – no easy thing after the beatings he’d received.

‘Not God, Matthew, more like all bloody Hell breaking loose,’ Nayler said. Hands bound behind his back, the short man was on his tiptoes, one cheek pressed against a crack in the wall as he tried to spy on the wind-scoured world beyond.

‘Our boys are attacking!’ Weasel announced, his eyes showing bright and hopeful in the gloom, so that Tom was amazed how well his own sight had adjusted to the dark.

‘Sounds more like an accident,’ Will Trencher said, ‘like some stupid bastard lit his weed in the powder magazine.’

‘Could be our lot, though,’ Weasel protested, an edge of disappointment in his voice. ‘Right, Will?’

‘If it is, the numbskulls have forgotten their bloody muskets,’ Trencher replied, and Tom saw Weasel’s narrow shoulders slump at that because Trencher was right and there was no crackle of gunfire to accompany the initial massive salvo. But that barrage, accident or not, had unleashed chaos into the night beyond
those
rotting walls. Officers yelled orders, horses galloped past, flaming torches flew, their red-yellow light flaring through the cracks in the gaol’s walls, illuminating the men around Tom fleetingly before the darkness reclaimed them.

‘Whatever it is it’s got this lot jumping,’ Penn said.

Then a fusillade of musketry tore through the howling wind and Weasel turned to Trencher. ‘See! I told you!’

Trencher shrugged big shoulders.

‘That’s close!’ Nayler said.

‘Very bloody close,’ Penn agreed.

Then something thumped against the gaol’s door and Tom and the others instinctively backed away. Another thump, shaking the whole decrepit structure. Then one more and the door fell off its hinge and a giant with a breastplate and an ancient pot helmet on his huge head stood where the door used to be, a grimace splitting his bird’s nest beard.

‘Here they are,’ he growled over his shoulder, then stepped aside as another man strode in. By the wan light Tom saw a face that was battle-scarred and murderous. The man’s three-bar pot and breastplate were black and he gripped two long wheellock pistols which he pointed into the shadows as though he had come to execute them.

‘Which one of you is Thomas Rivers?’ he asked, scouring each of them with cold eyes.

Tom stepped forward. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘And who are you?’

The scarred man grinned savagely. ‘Unless you want to swing from those gallows out there tomorrow, you’re all coming with me.’

A horse whinnied in the gloom behind the scarred man and Tom felt the others’ eyes on him as the giant and two others came in clutching wicked-looking knives. The giant came up behind Tom, grabbed his bound wrists in one hand and began to saw through the rope. The others were being cut loose too.

The wind moaned and whistled past the open door and to the east muskets cracked intermittently.

‘The only way you’re going to live through this is if you keep your heads down and do what I say,’ the scarred man said, gesturing with a pistol for Tom and the other four men to follow him out into the night.

Freedom and the fresh night air flooded Tom’s blood as he glanced this way and that, trying to make some sense of what was happening. Torches streaked through the darkness. The wind flailed all sound like chaff sifted from grain, so that some carried across the moat to them but most did not. It was disorientating, but Tom guessed that men were being formed into companies. Somewhere close by, the King of England must be wondering if the battle was at last beginning, he thought, as the giant thrust the reins of a grey mare into his hands.

‘I want
my
horse,’ Tom said, the wind whipping his long hair across his face. The mare looked frightened, one foreleg was stamping the ground and her ears were twitching madly, trying to sift the dissonant sounds of the night around them.

‘You’ll take what you’re bloody given,’ the giant rumbled, his massive beard bristling in the gusts. Penn, Trencher, Weasel and Nayler were already mounted, necks craning, tense and alert, so Tom hauled himself into the saddle.

The scarred man’s handful of troopers positioned themselves around them, their eyes searching the dark paths between the barn and other smaller outbuildings and the shadowy plain beyond. Then Tom saw the two guards who had been stationed outside the plough shed. They were twenty paces away, lying in the long grass where the ground sloped down to the moat. The young man with the hare lip – his name was Burke, Tom remembered – was almost certainly dead, his pale face mutilated by a dark, savage gash. As for the other man Tom could not say, for all he could see of him was his boots.

‘Steady now, keep your damned heads,’ the scarred man said over his shoulder, his big horse tossing its own head spiritedly. ‘Rivers, you stay by me or I’ll slice off your balls and feed them to Bartholomew here.’ The giant gave a feral grin that
Tom
wanted to smash through the back of his massive skull. Instead, he gripped the reins and kicked his heels and rode between the two livestock pens in which the beeves shuffled in the shadows, lowing at the wind and the night’s tumult. Then they walked their mounts across the duckboard bridge over the moat and into the main camp, where a burly sergeant was swinging his halberd, bellowing at the soldiers that were forming into battalia as best they could amongst the tents and paraphernalia of the camp.

‘Who are you?’ the sergeant challenged them, then he got a better look at the scarred, arrogant-looking man leading them and he recoiled slightly, ramming the halberd’s butt onto the ground. ‘The watchword, sir, if you please!’

‘Rubicon,’ the scarred man replied haughtily, barely deigning to look down at the sergeant, who dipped his head and stood back to let the riders pass. Tom felt eyes on them in the dark, sensed the Royalist soldiers watching them, wondering who and what they were, for they must have made a strange sight. Then, as they turned their mounts north away from the main camp and rode towards the outlying pickets, a shout carried to them on the wind from the direction of their island gaol.

‘They’ve found the lads we clobbered,’ Bartholomew said matter-of-factly. ‘Should’ve sunk ’em in the moat with the rest of the shit.’

‘Where are we going?’ Penn hissed to the man leading them.

‘Shut your mouth,’ Bartholomew growled.

Then a musket ball fizzed past Tom’s right ear accompanied by a distant crack and all of a sudden men were running after them and more matchlocks spat angrily, gouts of flame rending the night’s thick veil.

‘Move! Rivers, with me!’ the scarred man yelled, spurring his horse so that it lurched forward, and Tom’s own mare followed, breaking into a gallop as the small troop tore away. Hooves hammered the soft earth and the wind dragged tears across Tom’s cheeks and muskets spat lead balls at them.

The scarred man fired a wheellock to their right and Tom saw a flash of red tunic as a sentry spun away in the dark.

‘Heads down!’ the scarred man yelled, because there were men up ahead too, more Royalist pickets, their match-cords glowing malevolently as they blew on them and put muskets to shoulders.

Tom threw himself forward as a ragged volley roared, and Weasel’s horse screamed and fell but the rest galloped on. One of the scarred man’s troopers whooped madly and another fired his wheellock and the pickets yelled their challenges.

Tom hauled on the reins and his grey mare squealed in protest, but she had no choice but to turn with the savagely wrenched bit in her mouth and Tom kicked with his heels and together they galloped back the way they had come. He saw Weasel’s horse thrashing on the ground and rode up to it, leaping from his own mare before she had come to a stop. A musket ball had ripped into the horse’s neck and blood bubbled from the wound, but there was no sign of Weasel.

‘Weasel!’

‘Here!’

Tom spun and saw him crouching in the dark, cradling one arm, his face a knot of pain. Then his eyes widened. ‘Look out!’

Tom turned, recoiling as a musket’s butt flew past, missing his face by a finger’s length, the sentry roaring and bringing the matchlock round again as though it were a club. Tom threw up his arms and twisted away out of reach of a blow that would have snapped his ribs, then threw his right leg forward and swung his arm in a wide arc, crashing the fist against the man’s cheek with the distinct crack of breaking bones. The man dropped but another musketeer appeared from the gloom, slashing at Tom with a crude sword, his powder boxes dancing noisily across his chest. ‘Mount up, Weasel!’ Tom yelled, desperately avoiding the sweeping blade.

‘Rebel scum,’ the musketeer growled, his sword’s point
striking
out like a snake as Tom leapt backwards. Hooves thundered and a great horse galloped by and the musketeer’s head exploded in a spray of brains and gore that stung Tom’s face as they spattered him. The rider who had hacked the man’s head apart had wheeled his mount around almost before the musketeer’s body hit the ground. It was superb horsemanship.

‘Told you to stay with me, Rivers!’ the scarred man bawled, extending an arm down. ‘Get on!’ Tom glanced behind him. Weasel was mounted and ready, so Tom grabbed the man’s arm and pulled himself onto the horse’s rump as musket balls ripped shreds in the air all around them. The scarred man raked his heels and the horse snorted and obeyed, breaking off into a gallop, its hooves drumming their four-beat rhythm against the soft ground. ‘He never said you were a damned fool!’ the man yelled, as priming pans flashed and muzzles spat tongues of flame towards them.

‘Who?’ Tom yelled in the man’s ear, arms around the armour, hands clenched against the breastplate.

‘Your goddamned brother!’ the scarred man roared, then bawled at his horse to run faster.

Because death was all around.

After a little over a mile the horses had begun to blow and so they had slowed to a trot, riding north for another three miles, Tom guessed, then cutting west through newly ploughed fields whose muddy furrows glistened wetly in the dim half light. It was heavy going for the horses until the scarred man led them down into a hollow way whose high earthen banks were lined with brambles, hawthorn and blackthorn and which was just wide enough for them to ride three abreast. In that sunken lane they were out of the wind and it felt like a sanctuary of calm amidst the wild night.

‘The King’s curs will never find us now,’ Trencher said, breathing hard after the ride. For a while some Royalist cavalry had chased them across the rolling land and Tom had
even
heard a dog yapping after them. But the wind whipped all sound in different directions and with no moon to help them the King’s men had given up the chase. Tom knew Trencher was right. To the Royalists it would seem as if they had simply vanished on the wind.

Bats flitted above them, catching Tom’s eye now and then, their squeaks piercing the drone of the wind beyond the sheltered track. ‘She’s a fine horse,’ he said, his breeches wet from the mare’s sweat, for she had carried the two of them and had never faltered.

‘If she’s lame after this you’ll owe me ten pounds,’ the scarred man said over his shoulder and Tom clenched his teeth within a bitter smile. He did not even have ten pennies. His two most treasured possessions – his father’s pistols and Achilles – were somewhere back in the enemy’s camp and all he had left were the clothes on his back and the ring on his finger.

‘Where are you taking us?’ Penn asked. The leader of this group of mercenaries – for surely that’s what they were, Tom had decided – gave no reply, as though he deemed the men he had freed unworthy of an explanation. But they got their answer a little while later, when they rode up the hollow way’s western bank towards a copse of oak and beech. There on the fringes, the trees’ skeletal, wind-stirred limbs clawing at it in the dark, was an old dwelling whose thatch roof had fallen. Besieged by tall nettles and climbing brambles the place was clearly abandoned. Until now.

‘You’ll stay here until your brother comes,’ the scarred man said when they had dismounted. ‘There’s food in there to last you until then.’ Trencher was examining Weasel’s arm, carefully squeezing here and there to check for broken bones while Weasel flinched and cursed and watched the big man’s face intently, as though he suspected Trencher was enjoying himself.

‘What about the rest of us?’ Penn asked, glancing at Tom. ‘Are we free to return to our regiment?’ The giant Bartholomew
and
the other eight mercenaries were busying themselves lighting pipes, retrieving wineskins from the dilapidated house where they had stashed them earlier, wrapping themselves in bad-weather cloaks and sheltering from the wind.

‘I just told you, you’ll stay here. What happens to you is up to Edmund Rivers,’ the scarred man said. He was leading his horse back and forth, his hawk’s eyes scrutinizing the way it walked for any tell-tale signs of injury. Tom could see that the horse was fine. ‘My job was to get you out,’ the mercenary said without looking up, ‘and here you are.’

The wind was moaning and so Weasel and Trencher drew closer, Weasel scratching the wispy beard that was sprouting in patches from his cheeks and chin. His other arm was in a sling improvised from a swath of dirty linen. ‘Makes sense your brother would try to get you out before they put a rope round your neck,’ he said, beady eyes flicking from Tom to the scarred man and back again, ‘but why did this lot put themselves in harm’s way for the rest of us? We are your brother’s enemies.’

‘Weasel’s on to something there.’ Nayler joined them, rubbing his backside which was sore from the ride. ‘Your father is Sir Francis bloody Rivers.’

Tom felt his lip curl. ‘My father doesn’t know I fight for Parliament,’ he said, arranging the pieces of the puzzle in his own mind. ‘If these men had broken only me out, the rest of you would be questioned. You saw what my brother did to his own corporal. You would know he was behind all this, and you’d spill it to save yourselves a beating. Why wouldn’t you?’