Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (3 page)

‘Cap’n Stryker, sir?’

Stryker had to twist his head to see the speaker, who had approached on his blind left side. ‘Aye.’

‘John Reece, sir,’ the man said. He was a fresh-faced fellow, of lean frame and fair hair that crested his narrow head like a straw bird’s nest. ‘Musketeer in Trevanion’s.’ He clutched a wooden ale pot as though his life depended on it, raising it in ragged salute. ‘And we were with you, sir. At the Steps.’

Stryker’s mind darkened at the memory. What a fight it had been. Prince Rupert’s ambitious assault had seemed doomed to fail. His huge army, spearheaded by experienced infantry brigades, had stormed Bristol on three sides, hammering and tearing at the defiant rebels on the walls. But those rebels, inferior in number, had been staunch and undaunted, and their courage proved as resolute as their aim. From the blazing walls a hail of shot had poured down, smiting hundreds of the king’s best men, wounding and killing a sickening number of his most promising commanders and dissolving morale as though it were a pillar of salt in a flood. And yet somehow a determined squad had found a way over a thinly guarded section of wall, and their escalade, unlike the rest, had been completed unscathed. Stryker remembered the shouts of amazement as – stone by stone, timber by timber, barrel by barrel – the defences had crumbled, torn away by the unexpected storming party from within the city. The cry had gone up, excited, shrill, blood-freezing. A breach. A goddamned breach! And they had surged; swarmed forward into that small but crucial crack, forcing their triumphal way into the burning streets and spreading in all directions like a wave through a rock pool.

Stryker’s company had been in the forefront, reaching a dark alley, treacherously steep and claustrophobically narrow, down which the defenders had scurried. He shuddered at the memory of plunging into those hellish depths on the heels of the enemy, bathed in flame and flayed by lead. The rebels had made their last stand in that bloody place, a place Stryker now knew to be called the Christmas Steps, and the passage had become a moonlit charnel house. Eventually the human dam broke, the tide of vengeful king’s men bursting through by sheer weight of numbers, and the city had fallen. But at such cost, by God.

It was all done with now, though. Bristol was in Royalist hands. Finally, painfully, the great port had capitulated. Like a bulbous black canker, poisonous and festering, it had perched between the king’s heartlands of Wales and the south-west, a symbol of rebel defiance and a hub of their power. The canker had been cut away by Prince Rupert’s knife, cauterized by the joined armies of Cornwall and Oxford. It was a great victory, Stryker knew. And yet he could not feel a victor’s joy. He felt only a sense of despair. Of emptiness.

‘So you were,’ Stryker said eventually, pretending to remember the man and his courage. ‘And how fares your colonel? Shot in the leg, was he not?’

Reece’s face visibly drooped. ‘Dead, Captain.’

Stryker swore softly. It was always a terrible blow to lose a competent officer, but the identity of this particular casualty made it doubly worse. Stryker had served with the Cornish forces in the weeks before its amalgamation with Hertford’s Western Army, and he knew that the men from the deepest corner of England revered their commanders with a zeal that was unmatched.

The tapster slid a pewter cup towards Stryker, followed quickly by a blackjack of strong beer. He filled the cup and lifted it to his lips. ‘Trevanion.’

Reece nodded and took a long swig of his own drink. ‘An’ Colonel Slanning’s mortal wounded too, sir.’

Stryker shot the young musketeer a hard stare. ‘You’re certain?’

‘Not dead yet, thank the good Lord, but we hear he’s dire poorly.’

And that, thought Stryker, could spell the end of the grand Cornish army, as sure as any defeat on the field. ‘I pray he survives.’

Reece took another deep draught. ‘Was all so glorious after Stratton, sir. We marched up that bloody hill and drove those bastards off like they was an army of chil’en.’ He offered a wan smile. ‘But then so many fell at Lansdown, cut down and left to rot. Our beloved Sir Bevil among ’em. And good General Hopton blinded so cruelly.’

Stryker nodded bleakly. Sir Bevil Grenville had been one of the most charismatic men he had ever served with. His bravery and ambition at Stratton had been the driving force of that most unlikely of victories. A pole-axe had split his skull at Lansdown, while the Royalist general, Sir Ralph Hopton, had been caught in an explosion after the battle and was still laid low by his wounds.

Reece sighed. ‘Fortune’s turned against us, sir.’ He glanced around the taproom. ‘We can all sense it. Trevanion now gone, Slanning on his way.’

A hollow feeling formed deep in Stryker’s guts, for he knew what the musketeer was intimating, even if it could never be uttered. The Cornish had had enough. Their triumphal march east had not been inspired by loyalty to the monarchy, but by devotion to their local leaders. And those men had been gradually whittled away. Morale would surely follow. He tilted back his head and drained the cup, letting the welcome taste of beer ease his troubled mind.

‘The miserable,’ a new voice cut across him, ‘have no other medicine but only hope.’

Stryker turned. Reece had gone, melted back into the mass of bodies from whence he had come, to be replaced by a different visage altogether. This face was round and red-cheeked. It carried none of the telltale marks of campaign and disease that others bore, yet Stryker knew that its owner was no less a veteran than himself. He tried to smile, but failed. ‘Shakespeare?’

Captain Lancelot Forrester’s cherubic faced creased in a warm grin. ‘Of course!’ He moved to Stryker’s side, removed his battered hat, and ruffled his thinning sandy hair with a chubby hand. ‘Though dear William was wrong in this instance.’ He caught the tapster’s eye. ‘Ale, sir, and make haste about it!’ When cup and coin had been exchanged, Forrester took a swig, wiped his lips with a grimy sleeve, and belched. ‘You are an elusive fellow, old man.’

Stryker frowned. ‘Where I said.’

‘You said the White Hart.’

‘I said the Two Boars.’

Forrester shrugged, evidently deciding it was not worth an argument. ‘Well, we’re both here now, so we can commence the long overdue toast.’ He drained his cup, peered into Stryker’s blackjack, and waved at the tapster again.

The man sidled across to the two officers. ‘Sirs?’

‘More ale, my good man,’ Forrester demanded. ‘The most potent brew you have. A jug a piece, and no short measures!’ Satisfied, he glanced at Stryker. ‘Let us drink to him, for it has been a long time coming.’

‘I’m in no mood for it, Forry,’ Stryker said, immediately regretting the gruffness of his retort.

‘And I’m in no mood for your woes, old man. Not today.’

Stryker looked up from his newly replenished blackjack, and, for a fraction of a heartbeat, felt as though he might launch himself at the man before him. He was in a mood blacker than Bristol’s singed walls, made darker still by drink and grief, and no man spoke to him in such a way. But almost as quickly, a rush of remorse washed through his veins, shaming him utterly. Lancelot Forrester had fled his aristocratic upbringing as a young man, choosing the allure of a mercenary’s life; one of whoring, drinking and fighting. Thus, his path had crossed with that of Stryker, and they had learned their trade in the Low Countries, fighting for the Protestant League against the combined forces of the Counter-Reformation. He had fought alongside Stryker all over Europe, witnessed the same horrors at Edgehill, and faced the same dangers in this new kind of war. There were not many men who might address Stryker thus, but Forrester was one of them.

Stryker offered a resigned nod. ‘Very well.’

Forrester lifted his cup as he beamed. ‘Then we’ll drink to Lieutenant Andrew Burton of Sir Edmund Mowbray’s Regiment of Foot. A callow youth he enlisted, a true warrior he departed. May he rest in peace.’

‘Aye,’ Stryker echoed, drinking straight from his blackjack, entertaining the forlorn hope that the liquid would somehow assuage his guilt. It did not, and his mind whirled with the image of young Burton on that blood-soaked hill in north-east Cornwall, a glistening hole in his forehead where a pistol ball had entered. The lieutenant had been his protégé, his friend, and, though he had not fired that fateful shot, Stryker nevertheless felt culpable.

‘And may his murderer rest in pieces!’ Forrester added, indulging in a prolonged draught and belching again. He grinned wolfishly. ‘Young Andrew would have been in the thick of it, eh? Wading through the blood and smoke with the rest of us.’

That was true, thought Stryker, and he let slip the ghost of a smile.

‘By the by,’ Forrester went on, ‘the giant will be with us soon, I fear, so drink up before the thirsty bugger asks to share ours.’

‘I told him to see to the men,’ Stryker said.

‘And it is done, by all accounts,’ Forrester replied brightly. ‘So Mister Skellen tells me, leastwise, though he probably lies. Still, my greatest hope is that he has discovered a cache of tobacco somewhere betwixt Devizes and here, and it will be about his person when next we meet.’

Stryker took another swig. ‘They say the King comes to Bristol.’

‘Joy of joys,’ Forrester muttered. ‘Here to awe the townsfolk with his regal majesty, no doubt. What will be his next move, d’you suppose?’

‘Next move?’

‘I’ll stick a groat on the capital.’ Forrester answered his own question before Stryker could think of a reply. ‘A dash to London, and victory by Christ-tide.’

‘Precisely what we were saying last year,’ Stryker chided, ‘was it not?’

Forrester blew out his ruddy cheeks. ‘I suspect it was. God’s nailed hands, but I hope I’m right this time. Do you know how long it’s been since I donned the garb of Caesar?’

‘I believe you’re about to tell me, Forry,’ Stryker replied resignedly, knowing full well that an attempt to avoid Forrester’s tales of his days in the theatre was an utterly futile gesture.

‘Near a full two years! Can you warrant such an outrage? Two years of slogging about the damnable countryside, when I was born to tread the boards. The Candlewick Troupe will have missed my skills tremendously.’

‘The Candlewick Troupe will have been closed down like the rest.’

Forrester shook his head angrily. ‘Bloody Puritans. It is worth winning this war, if only to oust them and their dour ways.’

‘How fares your company?’ Stryker asked, deftly steering the conversation in an alternative direction.

‘They’re well, Stryker.’ Forrester shrugged. ‘Well as can be expected after such tribulation. Lost a dozen on the Steps alone. You?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘Jesu! We’ll have no men left if this keeps on. Rupert’s tactics are successful, I grant you, but, zounds, they’re damnably dear. And where do we find replacements? Seems every lad of fighting age is either enlisted, dead or turning Clubman.’

‘Aye.’ He had encountered the same obstacles. Recruiters worked feverishly in town and village, swelling the ranks of Cavalier and Roundhead alike with any man able to heft a pike. Bribes, promises and threats were all fair tools in the battle to keep an army from withering away. And now a third faction was growing with each passing month. The Clubmen – those who took up arms to protect their homes and livelihoods from marauding soldiery of any allegiance – were beginning to look like an army in their own right. He wondered how long it would be before their influence was truly felt.

‘Though I hear you have one replacement,’ Forrester remarked pointedly.

‘Thomas Hood.’

‘It’s about time, eh? More than two months since—’ he hesitated. ‘I am sorry.’

Stryker waved him away. ‘No matter. I needed a lieutenant.’

Forrester’s round, blue eyes narrowed. ‘But did he need you?’

Stryker looked up sharply. ‘What have you heard?’

‘That you frightened the very bones out of his body this morning.’ He drank deeply, offering a wry smirk when his gaze returned to Stryker. ‘And ain’t spoken with the poor lad since. He may benefit from poor Burton’s demise, but it was not of his doing.’ He turned suddenly. ‘Aha! Sergeant Skellen, well met indeed. Have you—?’

A gigantic man had stridden into the tavern. He was of lean, tough frame, like an ancient tree, with long, powerful arms and huge hands. His eyes were heavily hooded, sepulchral in their deep sockets, and his hair closely shaved, through which a myriad of tiny white scars could be seen, criss-crossing his scalp like the lines of an old map. He was a head taller than anyone else beneath the gnarled beams of the Two Boars, and he moved across the room with a languid, almost predatory confidence. Stooping briefly under the lintel before straightening with a nod in Forrester’s direction, he held up a small, brown object between thumb and forefinger, proffering the captain a black-toothed grin. ‘Took a while to find the good stuff, sir.’

Forrester clapped his chubby hands together. ‘Then let us pack our pipes and drink the smoke, damn your sluggish ways!’

‘Where is Barkworth?’ Stryker asked as Sergeant William Skellen approached, handing Forrester the plug of sotweed.

Skellen shrugged. ‘Got ’imself into a scrap with one o’ the Cornish. Happy as a dog with three pizzles, sir.’

‘And the men?’

‘Settled, sir.’

‘In their cups?’