The Bleeding Land (40 page)

‘When you say by himself, you mean himself and us,’ Trencher announced, taking up Nayler’s first point as he cranked his wheellock, winding the internal serrated wheel that would release when the trigger was pulled and spin against the piece of iron pyrite on the cock, creating sparks that would ignite the barrel’s charge.

‘Not just us. The Foot are bleeding too,’ Tom said, thrusting his loaded pistol back into his boot.

‘Aye and they’ll need to,’ Trencher said, ‘for we’re up against men of quality, highborn bastards who wear their honour like damned cuirassier’s armour.’ He spat. ‘It’ll take everything Essex has got to get them to quit the field with their king’s beady eyes on them.’

‘Not all of them are honourable men,’ Tom said, his own eyes scouring the seething masses as he leant, rubbing Achilles’s muscled neck. ‘Are you ready to fight again, old friend?’ he asked the horse. The proud stallion tossed his head and there was a great clatter of staves and a chorus of furious yells as, two hundred paces away, two pike-divisions locked in a dance of death. Ranks of musketeers poured thunderous volleys into each other. Sergeants roared commands. Drums beat out the language of battle. Horses whinnied and hooves rumbled across the earth and the whole terrible tumult was cut with the anguished, animalistic shrieks of the wounded and soon to be dead.

‘No quarter!’ Captain Clement yelled. ‘If we lose they’ll hang us all!’

‘There ain’t enough rope in all England,’ Nayler said.

‘No quarter!’ Clement bellowed again, then turned his mount and joined Sir William Balfour, who raised a gloved hand and with that the troop began to move.

Essex had sent two regiments of foot against the enemy’s centre, within which the King’s standard now and then swept through the grey day as a dogged display of royal authority. Those regiments were driving on at push of pike, thinning the King’s ranks, but as he rode at a rising trot at the head of the only cavalry Essex had left on the field, Tom knew Balfour was about to tip the balance.

‘Good boy, Achilles. This time we’ll break them.’

They picked up the pace, cantering now around the enemy’s flank which was already beset by Essex’s own regiment of foot.

‘Soon now, my friend,’ Tom said, though surely the horse couldn’t hear him above the mad din, and now he could see the horrified faces of pikemen in the rear of the King’s battalia who saw the enemy behind them but could do nothing about it. Balfour’s troop swept up to their rear and along with more than a hundred others Tom pulled his pistol and gave fire, a ragged ear-splitting fusillade that tore into the pikemen, and
for
a heartbeat Tom saw thin clouds of red mist rise as men fell in the press.

‘Kill them!’ Balfour yelled, drawing his sword and plunging into the screaming mayhem, hacking like a frenzied butcher, and then Tom was there too, swinging his poll-axe at men whose only defence were the blades on the end of their pikes sixteen feet away in the opposite direction from the death now amongst them.

‘For Parliament!’ Matthew Penn roared.

‘For God!’ Trencher hollered louder. Tom hammered the poll-axe down, the blade splitting a helmet and wedging in the skull beneath, and suddenly he had a dead weight on the end of his arm, until the man’s helmet strap snapped and the axe came away with the helmet attached. He did not hesitate, swinging the axe and smashing the snagged helmet into another man’s face, crushing it in a spray of dark gore.

Some of the pikemen were bringing their staves up and over to meet this new threat but little good it would do them for the horsemen were too close, safe beyond the killing zone of most of those wicked points; and so others of the King’s men were abandoning their pikes now, hauling crude swords into the death-gorged day.

‘Stinking cack handlers! Whoreson devils! Piss-licking, gore-bellied scoundrels!’ Nayler was screaming, battering men down with his sword, driving his horse deeper into the crumbling mass.

Tom brought his poll-axe up and yanked the blood-slick helmet off the blade, then swung for a man who had swiped at Achilles. Without pikes they’re dead, he thought savagely.

‘Give this to your king!’ Trencher spat at two men who were trying to haul him from the saddle, then thrust his blunderbuss into a face. It roared and the man’s whole head vanished in a spray of bloody gristle.

‘Your right! On your right!’ came a yell from behind Tom and he glanced over to see that a small troop of Royalist
harquebusiers
were trying to intercept them, though there was no way through. A greater threat was the larger group of horsemen thrusting into the mass ahead of them from the other side. Richly dressed, some in cuirassier armour, they looked like remnants of the King’s Lifeguard of Horse.

‘Do not let them save the colours!’ Balfour roared, for he had seen this troop too and savagely spurred his mount on, parting the pikemen like a wedge splitting an oak. Above the heads of the disintegrating mass, Captain Clement aimed his pistol at the King’s men and fired and a man in a full suit of cuirassier armour was thrown back in his saddle. But he recovered straight away, the armour having stopped the ball, and pushed on towards the Royal Standard.

All but a brave few of the King’s infantry and that small knot of horse were fleeing back to the Edgehill escarpment upon which officers were trying to staunch the flow and form battalia amidst waving colours and the incessant beat of the drums.

And then Tom saw it. To his right, and like a boulder around which anarchy seethed, leapt a rampant gold griffin in a black field, the standard bearer tirelessly sweeping it left and right as a rallying call. A fireball bloomed in Tom’s gut. He pressed with his left leg and hauled the reins across, urging Achilles on, and spurred towards his enemy knowing that some of his fellow troopers had broken from Balfour’s charge to follow him.

But Lord Denton had musketeers and those men were blowing on their match-cords and bringing their muskets to their right shoulders or steadying them in stands.

‘Heya! Go on, Achilles!’ The stallion was bowling men over who were too slow getting out of his way and then those muskets roared and Tom half saw the rider on his left flung backwards, and Achilles screamed and seemed to shudder but galloped on. ‘Go on, boy!’ Swords and pike blades flashed in his peripheral vision and muskets and firelocks cracked but all he could see was that golden griffin leaping above the fray. A
voice
in his head screamed at him to keep going. To push on!

He knew Achilles was hit, could feel the beast’s anguish, but he gave him the spur and whipped the reins, and then he saw Lord Denton beside that standard, yelling orders, screaming at his men who were priming their pans, shaking black powder down their muzzles and ramming down bullets and wadding.

Another devils’ chorus and this time he felt the impact of the ball against Achilles’s chest. The beast galloped on and then stumbled and suddenly time seemed to slow, Tom vaguely aware that the stallion was falling and he with it.

Then time caught up in a whirring blur and he found himself foundering in the mud, not knowing if he was shot or if any bones were broken, and horses thundered by. He could hear someone screaming Denton’s name, demanding the bastard cur come and fight, and after a moment realized the voice was his own. His fingers closed around the haft of the poll-axe and he pulled it from the mud as he hauled himself up on unsteady legs, half aware that Achilles lay bleeding and panting fifteen feet away.

‘Get on!’ someone yelled and he looked up and saw Nayler up on his mare, bloody sword in one hand, reins in the other. ‘Get on, lad, we can’t hang about here!’ Then Nayler’s throat ripped open and his eyes bulged as he slumped dead.

A blade scythed down and Tom staggered, slewing sidewards out of reach, then roared and flew at the musketeer, knocking the sword wide and bringing the poll-axe underarm in a two-handed swing, cleaving the head apart from chin to forehead. He lifted his left leg and plunged the booted foot into the dying man’s belly, yanking the axe free.

‘Denton!’

Then another man rammed his musket’s butt against his head and he felt the world inside his barred helmet explode in white heat, but he kept his feet, blindly swinging the poll-axe about him as his vision flooded back and he screamed in rage and hateful fury.

‘I’ve come for you! Denton!’

A musket ball plucked his shoulder. He felt his axe blade bite flesh again and he snarled, swinging madly, consumed by frenzied blood-lust. Then another musket butt slammed into his back, knocking him down, and another hammer blow to his helmet’s tail drove his face into the mud, so that filth filled his mouth and nose and he could not breathe.

Then there was nothing.

The breeze had all but died and the battle’s smoke hung in the stinking air thick as London fog. It was dusk now and getting cold. Men coughed and hawked and spat black phlegm. Some lay bleeding and moaning, dying where they had fallen. Other wounded soldiers dragged themselves across the muddy, blood-churned ground, feeble and pathetic as infants as they sought the protection of their own lines. For the cauldron of battle had boiled over and the raging flames were doused, each side pulling back from the butchery to draw breath, exhausted, appalled but alive.

Bone-weary, his head pounding, Mun sat Hector on Edgehill’s lower escarpment, his eyes trying to untangle the snarl of war’s debris littering the plain below. The pale sun hung before him, a white disc in the grey western sky. Below it the mass of Essex’s Parliamentarian army drew back like a scalded hand, brigades coalescing in an attempt to give the impression of a cohesive whole but failing to convince.

Nevertheless, looking around him now Mun knew the King’s army was in no shape to test Essex further. Because the Royalists were retreating up the slope, musketeers and pikemen ascending in loose clusters, the hum of their voices and clatter of their equipment cut with the occasional ragged fusillade of musketry from those few troops still holding their position on the field below. To the north-east, beyond the King’s cannon which had been overrun earlier in the day, Mun could make out several hundred mounted men. Prince Rupert
perhaps
, returned with the troopers he had managed to recall from that crazed, extended fox chase that had ranged so many miles off. But those men did not seem to be drawing up into battalia, which suggested they were in no mood to charge the enemy again. As for the remnants of his own troop, they were withdrawing up Edgehill with the rest. O’Brien and Downes, blood-fouled and weary, had tried to persuade Mun to go with them, that there was nothing more to be done but regroup and revive, but Mun had refused to follow, instead remaining on the lower slope as battered refugees streamed past him. And yet, amazingly, some pike-divisions and musketeer regiments looked relatively fresh, unblooded, as though they had not yet tasted battle. And perhaps they hadn’t, for it had been chaos.

‘Where are you, Father,’ he whispered, suddenly fighting the urge to vomit. He wished he had some water to slake his terrible thirst but wished even more that he could water Hector, who had shown such valour that Mun felt the stallion was the most noble and loyal creature on God’s tumultuous earth.

‘What’s your name, trooper?’

Mun twisted to see a young captain trotting towards him, his buff-coat, breastplate and dark, handsome face blood-spattered.

‘Rivers, sir,’ Mun replied. His muscles thrummed, trembling like a banner in the wind.

‘Sir Francis’s son?’ the captain asked, halting his spirited horse beside Mun and calming her with a firm hand. Mun nodded. ‘My name is Smith,’ the captain said. ‘Are you and that black beast of yours still fit?’ There was fire in the man’s dark eyes and Mun got the impression that the captain was angry that they were withdrawing.

‘Hector could chase the wind itself, from now until Judgement Day,’ Mun said.

The captain frowned. ‘This is Judgement Day,’ he said, and maybe it was, thought Mun, for some men believed God’s
eternal
judgement was already upon them, manifest in this great and terrible conflict for their nation’s soul.

‘Are we mounting a charge, Captain?’ Mun went on. ‘With what men?’

Captain Smith grinned savagely and pulled two orange scarves from inside his breastplate, handing one of them to Mun. ‘I’d wait till we get down there before you put it on,’ he said, ‘but you see there?’ Mun followed the line of his outstretched arm until he saw the object of the young captain’s attention. There, beyond a well-ordered rebel pike-division and walking their horses slowly back across the field towards Essex’s own bloodied but victorious Regiment of Foot, were six men – three cuirassiers and three harquebusiers – guarding a seventh on foot, all adorned somewhere about their person with Essex’s orange. And through the hanging smoke Mun saw that the footman carried what looked to be regimental colours rolled up around the shaft.

‘Whose colours are they?’ Mun asked.

‘Why, they are the King’s, Rivers!’ Captain Smith said through a twist of lips. ‘Those treasonous scoundrels make off with the Royal Standard.’

Mun felt as though he had been horse-kicked. When his small party of Horse had been forced to withdraw from the fray he had feared the worst for those making a desperate defence of the Standard. To see it now in enemy hands was as if he heard those brave men’s death-knell.

‘Loaded?’ Smith asked, nodding at the carbine hanging at Mun’s side and at the pistols holstered on his saddle. Mun nodded. ‘Shall we?’ the captain asked, and Mun clamped his teeth, rubbed Hector’s poll and gave the stallion a little pressure with his thighs, following Smith back down the hill at the trot.

The pungent powder smoke stung his eyes and he blinked it away, his breathing loud inside his helmet now as he broke clear of the fractured masses ascending Edgehill.

Smith was tying the orange scarf around his waist and so
Mun
took his own around his carbine belt, knotting it at his chest over the rusting breastplate, his bowels feeling as though they had turned to water as he hit level ground and rode south-west, back straight, hands loose on the reins. A stone’s throw away a massive hedgehog of bristling pikes wavered menacingly and he could only wonder at the strength of the men who hefted those long staves for hours on end.