The Blood of Roses (10 page)

The smell from early cook fires was triggering a response in Private Wallace’s stomach as well. It rumbled like a small volcano as his nostrils flared to the scent of woodsmoke and frying biscuits. Yawning, he scratched absently at his crotch and, as an afterthought, set his musket aside and unfastened the flap of his codpiece. With a satisfied grunt of relief, he watched the hot yellow stream send its own squirts of steam rising off the broken stalks of corn. The steam blended acridly with the mist and as his eye followed the dispersing puffs, his gaze strayed to the increasing lightness overhead. The clouds were pulling away from the horizon, stretching thin bands of pink and gold into the deep royal of the sky. Towns and villages throughout the countryside would be stirring to life. Early-morning vendors would be dragging their laden carts along the roads, hoping to be among the first arrivals when the huge gates of Edinburgh swung open. Cloaked in gray clinging mists by night, the royal city would be emerging, tower by tower, spire by sparkling spire, as the sunlight crept above the gnarled crust of the earth. All around him life was proceeding as usual, the sentry thought glumly, and there he was standing guard over a bloody swamp.

Another annoying wave of buzzing washed past him, louder this time, and he squinted to see through the rapidly lifting fog. Identifying what looked to be a low black hedge bristling along the verge of the cornfield, he frowned and knuckled his fists into the corners of his eyes. He could not remember seeing a hedge there before. But even as he stared and craned his neck forward to get a better view, the hedge shifted, seeming to curl into the cornfield like some great black wave of molasses.

The sentry’s jaw gaped slowly open. It wasn’t a hedge at all! It was men! Hundreds of them! Thousands of them emerging from the swamp and mists like black twisting creatures from hell.

“Rebels,” he croaked. “Bluddy hell, it’s rebels!”

Spinning around, he groped for his trusty Brown Bess, but the musket was not where he had left it. In its stead stood an enormous grinning specter of a man, his trunklike arms and legs blackened with mud, his wheat-colored mane of hair and beard spattered with grime. As the sentry watched in horrified awe, the giant held up the appropriated musket and offered a companionable wink.

“Lookin’ f’ae this, were ye?” Struan MacSorley inquired.

Private Wallace nodded stupidly and reached forward to accept the offered weapon. When his hand was around the cold metal of the barrel, he felt the giant’s huge paw close over his wrist and start to squeeze. Tighter and tighter, the pressure increased until he could actually hear the bones being crushed like so much dry kindling. He opened his mouth to scream, but the ice-cold shiver of metal that slashed across his throat prevented anything more than the hiss and bubble of escaping air. With his free hand, Wallace clutched the severed edges of flesh and cartilage and felt the warm spray of blood gushing through his fingers. He hardly felt the pain in his shattered wrist; his only concern as he was tossed aside into the sharp, stabbing stalks of corn was to keep his head from splitting completely away from his shoulders and rolling into the swamp.

MacSorley wiped the blade of his dirk on the dead soldier’s waistcoat before he turned and beckoned to the half dozen men crouched behind him.

“Only the one.” He snarled contemptuously. “Smug bastards, are they na? Where’s the challenge?”

Alexander Cameron laid a hand on MacSorley’s arm and grinned humorlessly. “I’m sure you’ll have plenty of opportunities to test your mettle over the next few hours.”

Raising his arm, he windmilled it once to signal the all-clear and saw the gesture repeated at intervals along the edge of the morass. Only in one position did there appear to be trouble. The Highlander had been seen; before he could deal efficiently with the sentry, a warning shot popped in the silence.

Lord George Murray used it as the signal to release his contingent of Athollmen. The air swelled instantly with the screeching wail of bagpipes, the swell spreading and rippling along the length of the field until it was a cacophony of rousing, defiant
piob’rachds
that called the men to charge. All but the rear guard were clear of the swamp, and within seconds the ground thundered with the percussion of thousands of running feet. Those who possessed muskets or pistols discharged them in the general direction of the low white tents that pimpled the far side of the field, then, in no frame of mind to dally over reaming, loading, ramming, and refiring, flung the emptied weapons aside and swung their heavy broadswords into the air. Others, wanting nothing to hinder their speed or entrap their sword arms, unbelted the six yards of tartan wool that comprised the pleated and folded swath of their kilts and cast their garments aside, hurling themselves into the charge half naked.

A tidal wave of raised, glittering broadswords surged across the cornfield and swept toward the enemy camp. Cope’s troops, stumbling from their orderly rows of low-slung tents, stared at the boiling mass of screaming humanity and, as one, experienced a burning clutch of liquid fear in their bowels. They scattered before the onslaught, running in a frenzy of screaming confusion. They grabbed for the neatly stacked pyramids of muskets only to cast them aside unfired. Horses loosely tethered reared free and bolted riderless into the midst of the growing chaos; some were chased and caught by the dragoons who, scarcely recovered from their shameful performance at Colt’s Bridge, took the initiative again and began a panicked retreat to the coastal road and safety.

Seeing the dragoons flee before them, the common foot soldiers veered like a school of fish and streaked after them. They sheered off again as a second wave of screaming rebels rose up out of the cornfield and began hacking and slashing at the forerunners. Those brave enough or foolhardy enough to stand and meet their attackers were slaughtered where they stood, their shiny thin bayonets no match for the five-foot lengths of raw steel that showed no mercy in parting limbs from torsos or paring flesh from bones.

As each clan engaged a pocket of the enemy, they roared the ancient battle cries of their warrior ancestors. The air was torn asunder by the screams of men, the screams of the bagpipes, the screams of those who found themselves standing ankle deep in a sea of weltering gore.

Only at the farthest edge of the camp was there a visible attempt under way to rally an offense. The fearsome and well-deserved reputation of the captain in command of the field artillery was sufficient to stem the spread of panic among his men. With cool efficiency they responded to his orders and turned the massive bronze cannon in their caissons, preparing them to fire upon the encroaching storm of charging Highlanders.

Alexander Cameron saw the guns being rolled into position and swerved toward them. Struan MacSorley and Aluinn MacKail were close on his heels, leading their regiment of Camerons straight into the gaping black maws of the cannon. Better than a hundred yards from their goal, Alex swung his broadsword high above his head, feeling its raw strength pour down to infuse his body with the bloody savagery of his ancestors. Pride swelled his heart and pumped through his veins, and from somewhere out of a dim and terrifying memory he heard his own voice roaring the Cameron
cath-ghairm:
“Sons of dogs, come hither; come hither and eat flesh!”

Through a haze of rage and vengeance, he heard the command to fire, saw the smoldering linstocks lowered to the powder-filled touch-holes of the cannon. A searing flare of hot orange flame burst upward, sparking its way into the wadded breech of each gun, where the larger charge of gunpowder exploded, propelling twelve-pound canisters of razor-sharp grapeshot out of the muzzles in an eruption of smoke and burned wadding.

The volley tore through the front rank of Highlanders, obliterating some to eternity, lifting others and catapulting them through the air in bloody cartwheels of shredded flesh. Alex was close enough to feel the scorching lash of heat and to be jarred temporarily off balance by the concussion of twenty guns discharging simultaneously. The pressure caused by the explosions sucked the air from his lungs and left him briefly blinded and deaf, but his arms were driven independently by instinct and were already swinging the broadsword into the solid wall of flesh and arrogance that stood before him.

Vaulting between two smoking guns, he brought the mighty blade slicing down across the path of an artilleryman, the weight and force of the two-handed stroke ripping the officer’s shiny steel saber aside, tearing it from numbed fingers so that it flew in a graceful, curving arc and vanished in the clouds of yellow smoke. The officer saw his death mirrored in the primitive ferocity of Alex’s eyes and braced himself as the broadsword slashed back and carved a bloody swath through the stretched tendons and muscles of his chest. The soldier spun away, the gouting blood leaving a fine spray of crimson droplets along Alex’s arms.

A second defender was able to parry the deadly thrust of Alex’s sword but sagged against the sharp, biting steel of the dirk that was plunged hilt-deep into the unprotected hollow of his raised arm. On Cameron’s left, the blur that was Aluinn MacKail skewered one gunner on the point of his broadsword and, still compensating for the dead weight on one arm, calmly fired his pistol point blank into the chest of another soldier. Struan MacSorley, having slashed his way into a semicircle of government troops, dealt with each one in turn, churning the ground into red mud beneath his feet. The unexpected insult of steel scratching along his arm had him whirling around, propelled on the wind of a roared Gaelic oath. The soldier who had dared to violate the inviolate stumbled back in horror as Struan straightened to his full, terrifying height of six-and-a-half feet of brawn and fury. Both men stared for a moment at the string of scarlet pearls beading on the hairy forearm before Struan reached out, lifted the soldier by the loose folds of flesh beneath his chin, hurled him up and over the spine of a cannon. There, he landed with enough impact to split his skull like a ripe melon. The corpse remained balanced across the gun for a long moment, then slid limply, wetly onto the spattered grass.

Alex, pausing to catch his breath, wiped a sleeve across his streaming brow and wondered absently if the blood that came away belonged to himself or his victims.

Still in the grips of the killing madness that had overridden his senses, he stared at his hands, and the pleasure he experienced in seeing them clenched around the blood-slicked hilt of his sword was almost sensual. He felt alive and vigorous. The urges that flowed from the darker regions of his soul made him feel as if he could do anything, conquer any obstacle, overcome any threat that stood between him and his destiny. He wanted to throw back his head and cry a challenge to the fates who professed to know better than he how to govern his future. He wanted to cry out his triumph over the demons who had haunted his past, who had reared their bloodied heads time and time again to taunt him, torment him with thoughts of hatred and revenge. For years he had wandered aimlessly, fighting and killing for the wrong reasons.

He was fighting for Scotland now. For his home, for his family, for the blood and honor of his ancestors. He was fighting for himself, too, for his right to live where he chose and with whom he chose. He was fighting for Catherine, and his right to love her. Catherine …

“Alex! Behind you!”

Cameron reacted an instant too late. He turned in time to see the pistol, only inches from his face. He saw the outthrust scarlet arm and the finger that was already tightening on the scrolled trigger.

But that was all he saw. A tremendous clap of thunder shattered the air and exploded within his brain, the force of it carrying him backward and smashing him against the spoked wheel of a cannon. A raw, shearing agony in his temple distorted sight and sound; the hot taste of scorched flesh and black powder robbed him of the scantest mouthful of air.

As Alex slumped against the body of a dead soldier, he thought he recognized Aluinn’s face bending quickly over him, but he could not hear the words being shouted at him, and in the next instant, he was sucked into a deep, descending blackness.

General Sir John Cope was in shock. The rebels had erupted out of nowhere, had shattered the nerve and backbone of the government forces as violently and as completely as they had destroyed the misty morning silence. They had charged Cope’s camp like a torrent bursting through a dam; had obliterated the army’s defenses and left a writhing, red-gored field of broken, mutilated bodies in their wake. The dragoons had scattered and fled. Colonel Whiteford’s artillerymen had managed to fire only a single volley before they had been overrun and slaughtered at their posts.

Cope, assisted by his Colonels Home and Loudoun, made a desperate attempt to rally the fleeing horse and foot soldiers, going so far as to fire upon their own men in order to discourage the retreat. But the attempt failed and the officers had been swept along in the panicked stream of men, stopping only when they had gained the high ground at the farthest edge of the plain.

Not all of his men had cowered before the onslaught, Cope realized, as he fought the stinging tears of recrimination. Whiteford, Scott, Loftus, Cane, Simmonds … they had all spurred their men into action. Captain Hamilton Garner, whose dragoons had shamed him yet again, had valiantly gathered a body of foot soldiers around him, and, though his efforts were obviously futile, he held steadfast to his pocket of the field.

In other areas, the men were throwing down their guns and swords and throwing up their hands to plead for mercy. They collected in small, quaking groups or fell unabashedly to their knees before the advancing waves of rebels. Hundreds of them, the whole damned lot of them, Cope observed with burning mortification. His whole army defeated and surrendered! All but a few feckless cowards who had taken to their mounts and ridden away at the first screech of the bagpipes.

Despite his own humiliation, Cope could not help but admire the sheer audacity and cunning of the man who commanded the rebel forces. Lord George Murray had planned and executed his attack flawlessly, brilliantly, affecting complete and total surprise on an enemy that had been too self-assured and contemptuous to look for deviousness. He had himself scorned the need for a full picket of sentries along the fringe of the moor. Who but a madman or genius would attempt to cross such a wide-open stretch of swampland under an unfriendly Highland night? And the sight of thousands of screaming, sword-wielding savages charging out of the morass with such vigor and confidence would doubtless have rendered far braver and more seasoned veterans paralyzed with fear.