The Bleeding Land (38 page)

He pressed himself down against Achilles’s neck, pushing the pistol back into his boot and glancing around to see that there was suddenly space around him, for the Greencoats had broken. They were running, though their one-eyed commander was screaming at them to stand, hauling men back by the scruffs of their necks, and Tom recognized him as Colonel Lunsford, the man he had seen slashing apprentices at Westminster.

‘With me, boys!’ Balfour cried, wheeling right, desperate to use their momentum and spread the terror their charge had planted in the Greencoats’ bellies amongst other men. Bluecoats these, and as fine-looking a regiment as Tom had ever seen. Achilles surged amongst them and Tom swung the
poll
-axe underarm, cleaving a man’s head in an explosion of gore that spattered those fine blue coats with crimson.

A hanger struck Tom’s back but his buff-coat stopped the blade, then Achilles screamed but Tom did not see who or what had hurt him. All around him Balfour’s troopers were sowing death and terror, their blades plunging into the mass, carbines roaring, but then Captain Clement was yelling for them to withdraw. A musket butt jabbed up at Tom and he beat it aside with the poll-axe and Achilles slammed his head down onto the musketeer and he dropped.

‘Withdraw! Withdraw!’ Clement was yelling and then Tom saw why. A blue-coated pike-division was coming for them, six ranks of men each hefting sixteen feet of ash tipped with a steel blade. For a moment Tom held his ground and Achilles stamped the churned earth furiously.

‘We’ve done our work! Time to go,’ an experienced trooper called Horton shouted, fighting to control his own mount, when his head burst in a spray of blood, skull and brain. Tom stared at Horton. One of the man’s legs was shaking violently, the foot still in the stirrup, but surely he had to be dead, for half his face and head was gone.

‘Withdraw, Rivers!’ Clement yelled, bringing his horse alongside. ‘Get back, damn you!’ he roared, spittle flying. ‘That’s an order!’ But for Tom everything had slowed and he felt as though he were mired in a deep dream; one of those he sometimes had which he could control. Or thought he could.

Troopers were riding back past him in their panic to escape those wicked pikes and one of them cut across another, so that the second man’s horse pulled up and then the horse screamed and the trooper’s face contorted, eyes bulging, nostrils flaring as a pike blade erupted from his shoulder and another ripped open his neck.

Tom glanced round. Clement was gone. But Trencher was there, screaming at him. All Tom could hear was a roar like that of the sea hurling itself against rocks, and musket balls
cracking
the air around him or thunking into armour. Or slapping into flesh.

Then some part of him reacted. He wrenched on the reins and Achilles shrieked and turned and dug in and tore away with the others. As the blue-coated pikemen came on.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

‘THE KING AND
the cause!’ prince rupert yelled, raising his sword to the grey heavens.

‘The King and the cause!’ men roared. They had begun at a walk, then a rising trot, harnesses and gear jangling, leather creaking. But now the Prince dug his spurs into his horse’s flanks and it lurched forward, headlong towards the enemy waiting in battalia at the crest of a small hill. The rebels had placed musketeers in the hedges and enclosures on the flank to rake the Royalist right, but the Prince’s dragoons had chased them off.

‘Heya, boy!’ Mun yelled, raking his heels back and snapping the reins as all around him the Royalist right wing broke into a full-blooded charge.

A stuttering volley of pistol and carbine fire spat at them and Mun felt the thrum of lead ripping through the air but nothing hit him and he raced on, Hector matching the Prince’s mare for speed, his hooves adding to the rolling thunder, flinging mud.

And the enemy were breaking! Some of the orange-scarved riders were hauling their mounts round and giving them their spurs. Others, appalled by the failure of their volley to slow the
Prince’s
charge, wheeled left and right in panic, yelling at their fellows to stand.

‘Death to traitors!’ someone yelled.

‘Kill the scum!’

Then they hit. Mun saw the Prince hack off a man’s arm and blast a hole in another’s chest with his carbine, but Mun knew he could match any man’s horsemanship and grabbed his own carbine, controlling Hector with his knees as the stallion bit an enemy trooper’s leg and the man screamed. From his right a sword slashed down but Mun caught the blade on his own and sent it wide, bringing the carbine across and pulling the trigger. The gun snarled fire, hammering the rider from his saddle, though his left foot was caught in the stirrup and he was wrenched horribly as his horse galloped off, his steel-sheathed head turning the mud like a ploughshare.

With one savage swing of his poll-axe O’Brien scythed off a man’s head, the neck stump spouting crimson gouts into the air as the head struck the ground and was kicked by a hoof, so that it rolled ten feet through the filth.

‘Sweet Jesus Christ!’ Vincent Rowe shouted, wide-eyed and spattered in blood. He wheeled his horse round and round. ‘Sweet Jesus! Did you see that?’

The rebels were breaking, men whipping their mounts with the flats of their swords, desperate to escape from the ruin of their left wing.

‘Ride on! Ride on!’ an officer roared, hoisting his carbine and thrusting it towards the north-west. But Mun was already moving, plunging on towards the Parliamentarian rear, Hector eating up the muddied ground, black mane flying.

‘Cannon!’ someone yelled as they came over a slight ridge and Mun’s breath snagged in his chest for there, waiting for them, were three cannon, their crews making ready to unleash the big guns’ fury.

A ragged salute of booms pounded Mun’s world and he
cringed
, dipping his head, but the gunners’ aim was all wrong and the cannon coughed their iron balls too high and Mun did not know where they landed as he galloped on. Towards several knots of musketeers, many of whom had their matchlock butts in the mud, desperately reloading, plunging scouring sticks into barrels. Others were blowing on match-cords to make sure their tips were burning, then fumbling them into the serpents’ jaws and hoisting the heavy muskets to their shoulders. Those muskets spat fire, their lead balls fizzing past Mun’s ears, and a trooper in front of him was struck but the horse galloped on, its master slumped over, jolting horribly in the saddle, so that if the ball had not killed him the broken neck would. But most of the musketeers hit nothing and then Mun was upon them, slashing an enemy’s face open as he raced past, his fellow troopers’ yells and screams like those of wild animals. For they were full of the mad thrill of battle. A frenzied blood-lust gripped them, gripped Mun, like a hawk’s talons, because musketeers had no chance against cavalry. All the rebels could do was die on Royalist blades, and then Mun was through, past the last real resistance on Essex’s left wing and plunging onwards across the waterlogged fields with hundreds of other gore-spattered men.

Fleeing before them were the remnants of Sir James Ramsey’s rebel Horse, riding as though the Devil himself were on their heels. And perhaps he was, for Prince Rupert hungered to kill and his men craved vengeance on these treacherous curs who had thought to defy their king and plunge the world into chaos.

Onwards, across ditches and ploughed fields, hooves thundering. All around Mun groups were peeling off after their own prey, like hounds catching the scent of another fox and breaking from the main chase, but he followed the Prince through a field of gorse and through a gap in a thick hedgerow and there, sitting amongst rough grazing and ripe for picking, was the Parliamentarian baggage train. Ox-drivers, women and children and the handful of men who had been left to
guard
the train recognized the horsemen galloping past them, saw the devils they were fleeing from, and took to their heels, running north for their lives. But a knot of twenty or so rebel troopers, perhaps realizing that they had led the Royalists to such an important prize, pulled up, their horses whinnying, eyes rolling, and turned to make a fight of it. Yelling encouragement to each other they dragged swords from scabbards and hoisted poll-axes and bravely charged.

‘Go on, Hector!’ Mun roared, extending his right arm forward so that his rapier pointed at a trooper in a bloodied buff-coat who was wielding a curve-bladed hanger and screaming as he came. ‘Go on, boy!’ Thirty paces away. ‘Yah!’ In a matter of heartbeats the two lines would clash with steel and fire. Fifteen paces. Then his opponent veered left and Mun brought his sword back and scythed it at his head, but the man got his hanger up and it cut Mun’s blade in half, the ring of steel loud and Mun’s arm screaming with the pain of the impact.

‘Whoa, Hector!’ Mun leant back, left hand hauling the reins, and Hector obeyed, turning. All around, blades clashed and men and horses gave vent to fury and the desperate will to survive. The rebel was a fine horseman and had turned his mount and now spurred forward, grinning savagely. Mun let go the reins and drew a pistol and the other’s eyes widened as he realized his mistake and the pistol roared, its ball punching a fist-sized hole through the man’s chest, spraying fleshy bone shards out of his back.

Mun saw the Prince wheeling his horse in a death dance with an enemy trooper, the combatants slashing and parrying. But the Prince had the longer reach and managed to slash his adversary’s left arm and, unable to control his horse, the trooper screamed for mercy, blood spraying from his forearm, which was all but severed.

‘You have betrayed your king!’ Prince Rupert bellowed, then his horse lurched forward and Rupert plunged his blade into
the
rebel’s neck and hauled it out quick as lightning, wheeling his mount, hungry for more prey.

Nehemiah Boone came up on a foe’s blind side and hacked into his grey mare’s quarters and the animal screeched, making a wild traverse, bending her haunches away from the savage blade. The man fought to bring the mare round but Boone slashed him twice about the face and neck and he toppled from the saddle with a crunch of iron and bone.

The enemy’s brave stand crumbled and those that could broke off and spurred away, flying for their lives. The Prince wheeled his horse round, pointing his sword towards those of his men who were already sacking the Parliamentarian baggage train or else trotting over to it. ‘Captain, get those men back to the King!’ he yelled, eyes blazing in a crimson-spattered face.

Mun looked west and saw in the distance a great host of the Prince’s Horse galloping up and over a small rise after the main body of the enemy cavalry. Then the Prince dragged his spurs back and galloped after them accompanied by twenty of his closest and best.

Dragging breath into his lungs, Mun took in the scene: dead men lying all around or sitting slumped in saddles, their horses standing placidly as though awaiting their masters’ commands. Several horses were bleeding out where they stood. Two writhed on the ground, trying in vain to rise, eyes rolling, the foam-slathered bits clinking in their mouths.

‘Well, Corporal . . .’ Captain Boone said, chest heaving, scabbarding his sword and nodding to the carts and oxen and the men that were scavenging that train like hounds on a dead fox, ‘shall we?’

The lantern-faced veteran grinned and spat and together they walked their mounts across the field. Mun followed, patting Hector’s sweat-lathered neck and glancing about him, looking for his friends. He caught O’Brien’s eye and the big Irishman nodded grimly, a greeting infused with the horror of what they had just been through and relief at having survived. And there
was
Vincent Rowe, reloading his carbine with trembling hands, and Mun was glad to see that the young man was unharmed.

‘Good boy,’ he said, feeling the stallion’s hot sweat even through his leather glove, ‘you’re fine, boy. Nothing can hurt you.’

‘Anything worth anything?’ Captain Boone asked a grizzled trooper who was standing up on a cart pulling clothes from a chest and flinging them aside. The trooper was just about to reply, when he grinned triumphantly and produced a fat purse, weighing it in his hand appreciatively.

‘That’s a start,’ Boone said, fluttering a gloved hand, which was as good as a command, and the trooper tossed him the purse before bending back to his task. All along the train men were doing the same. Some were laying hands on letters and pipes, leather jacks, pottery jugs full of wine, cloaks, shirts, tunics and breeches, whilst others were crowing at the sight of silver plate that glowed dully in the grey day.

‘Good fishing,’ Richard Downes said at Mun’s shoulder, for clearly these were the personal possessions of senior Parliamentarians.

‘Aye,’ agreed O’Brien, ‘but it isn’t a trout until it’s on the bank. As my da used to say. We haven’t won the battle yet.’

In the distance, to the south-east, the big guns still thundered. Now and then Mun caught the crackle of musket fire on the breeze and he thought of his father and Emmanuel, his chest tightening. His whole body, muscle and bone, thrummed madly. ‘Captain, we must get back to the fight,’ he called. There were at least fifty men ransacking the rebels’ baggage train, men who, having routed Essex’s cavalry, should have been back on the field harrying his musketeers.