Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (20 page)

‘I could not do more,’ Birkenhead said in a small voice. Then a door slammed and Tom turned back and saw two men step out of New Inn Hall. It was dark and the men had their backs to him as they walked north, their features hidden by broad beavers and night’s veil. And yet none of that mattered
and Tom’s breath caught in his throat. For he did not need to see the broader man’s face to know who he was. It was all in his bearing and gestures and the way he held his shoulders as though inviting any who dared to get in his way. Tom had known this man almost all his life.

‘Come with me if you want to live,’ he said to Birkenhead.

The editor turned his face up to the sky, to the moon-silvered smoke slung low over the city, some of which might have risen from his own beloved printing press, and offered up a prayer. And then they began to walk north.

After Henry Denton.

Henry Denton and his companion did not follow New Inn Street onto the wide thoroughfare of Thames Street. Not that the small troop of musketeers from the King’s Oxford Army gathering there could have stopped Tom from following Denton if he had gone that way, for the promise of blood had sluiced away all sense of caution now.

Henry had lusted after Martha. Tom had always known that. Much worse was that Henry had stood by whilst Lord Denton had defiled her. And after that he had joined in the ritual humiliation when Tom had been helpless and rage-filled, face-down in the freezing mud outside Baston House. When Henry’s father had pissed on him.

And as for fear, Tom could not recall the last time he had felt that. Anticipation, yes, and certainly the blood-shivering thrill that filled his limbs before a fight – as it did now – but not real fear. Yet for all that he was vaguely aware that it was fortunate the two men had turned right into a darker, meaner lane that led to Cornmarket Street.

‘You think one of them is Lord Denton?’ Birkenhead asked, his tone suggesting he would be deeply offended to learn that the sentry had indeed lied to him.

‘Not William,’ Tom said, never taking his eyes off the man thirty paces ahead, who was richly clothed in voluminous blue
breeches and an expensive blue doublet that was slashed to reveal the fine lining of white fabric underneath. He wore the red sash of the King’s service and sported two red feathers in a silk scarf around the crown of his broad beaver. ‘His piss-proud son Henry,’ Tom said, thinking that running the new Royal Mint was a job to which the Dentons would take like pigs to mud.

The man next to Henry glanced behind him, aware of company, but Tom touched the brim of his hat and the man turned back round, reassured that the two men following had no malevolent intent. Both men laughed and Henry passed his friend a bulbous flask, slapping the man’s back and growling some drunken malediction.

You won’t be laughing soon
, Tom thought, wishing he had a good poll-axe or an Irish hilt rather than the rapier that had been provided to complement his disguise, for he knew Henry was a fine swordsman and Tom would rather assail them with brute force and aggression than engage two opponents at once in a fencing bout.

‘And you have a grievance with Master Denton?’ Birkenhead enquired but received no answer as Henry and his companion waded into a throng of women who had coalesced out of the darkness. ‘It would seem the young man is a flesh-monger,’ the editor said, ‘with an appetite for Jack whores and harridans, for there is no decent notch to be found round here. So I am told.’

Tom recalled a summer’s day many years ago when he and Mun had come across Henry and his cronies in Gerard’s Wood beating a crippled boy. Henry had taunted Martha Green too. He had declared that she would open her legs for a farthing,
but seeing as there are three of us, I’d happily stretch to the price of a quart of good ale
. Those foul words echoed now across the years, piercing Tom’s soul like a thin blade: a blade he twisted himself by conjuring Martha, his once beautiful love, in his mind’s eye, her skin turning blue as she hung
lifeless at pain’s end on a rope beneath the old bridge across the Tawd.

Henry’s companion turned, the wench clinging to him cooing in his ear, and wafted a hand at Tom the way a man might shoo a fly. ‘You wags will have to wait your bleeding turn,’ he called, enough slur about it to suggest that they had been enjoying the favours of the beaker. But Tom gave no reply as he and Birkenhead approached, the editor’s unease palpable in the night air.

Several churches’ bells were ringing now, alerting the city to the furore, or perhaps celebrating the capture of a traitor. A stone’s throw north musketeers were gathering, readying to sweep through the streets in a night patrol. The men of the watch were bristling and there was a growing thrum in Oxford, as though, having heard the explosion at All Souls, folk were venturing outside to taste the night for themselves. At the end of the street the Saxon tower of St Michael at the north gate imposed itself on the gloom as God’s witness to Man’s sin. But none of this seemed to concern Henry Denton and his friend.

Henry too turned towards them, thrusting a ringed finger into an ear and waggling it theatrically. ‘Your lugs full of dung?’ he barked. ‘My friend told you to wait, sirrahs.’ His other hand was snarled up in a mass of black hair, beneath which a hard-faced woman half grinned, relishing the covetousness she had provoked. ‘I will not be rushed when buying quim.’

‘Take your time, friend,’ Tom said, lingering in the shadow of a garden wall. By contrast Birkenhead was cast in the glow of the near-full moon that hung in the eastern sky above the old Saxon tower beyond Cornmarket Street. Tom could feel the editor’s eyes on him, could sense the man’s cold fear. And his indecision.

‘Stay where you are,’ Tom growled at him, never taking his eyes off Henry and the other man, a rougher sort by the looks but a soldier certainly, given the age and wear of the leather
baldrick across his right shoulder and the nicks and dents on the wrist and knuckle guards of the pattern sword hanging from it. A ballock dagger hung above his crotch from a belt, its wooden grip worn smooth. Tom fixed on this man’s eyes. ‘Your taste in friends is worse even than your taste in women,’ he said, nodding in Henry’s direction. ‘Leave him to his whores and be gone.’

The man glanced at Henry, who was busy assessing and comparing the attributes of three women who were fawning over him with the ardour and insincerity of the hungry.

‘Do you know who he is, whelp?’ the man snarled at Tom, throwing one hand Henry’s way, the wine flask hanging from his index finger. The promise of violence – a look Tom had come to know well – flashed in the eyes beneath the hat’s rim. ‘His father’s a lord, you insolent cur.’

‘I know Henry Denton better than you, you scab-faced bastard,’ Tom said. ‘Henry is a fartleberry hanging from his father’s arse.’

The insult cut through Henry’s preoccupation and he turned, shrugging off one of the whores who sought to hold his attention. A gust blew from the south bringing the tang of blood from the offal and filth which the butchers in the Queen Street shambles emptied daily into the street. To Tom it was also the smell of battle. He inhaled deeply.

‘You are drunk. Now fuck off!’ Henry’s companion swigged the last drop from his flask and hurled it at Tom, just missing, so that the vessel shattered against the wall in a spray of clay shards. He turned back to the gaggle of whores and gestured for Henry to do the same.

‘Leave us, ladies,’ Tom snarled from the shadows. ‘You’ll get no silver from these men tonight.’

‘The lad’s tired of life!’ Henry’s friend exclaimed, turning. His sword hissed against the scabbard’s throat and he came at Tom with the naked blade. ‘Your stubbornness will get you killed, whelp.’

Tom hauled his own blade free and lunged but the man parried, his heavier blade knocking Tom’s rapier wide, and brought the sword scything back so that it would have opened Tom’s belly had he not stepped back and thrown his left arm across himself, catching the other’s sword on his knife where blade met guard. Taking the strain Tom threw his right foot forward and slammed his forehead into the man’s face, sending him staggering.

A whore screamed. ‘Fetch the watch, Clemence!’ another shouted as they dispersed like crows shooed from a hanged man’s gallows.

‘You’re a dead man!’ the soldier snarled through teeth daubed in the blood that was flooding from his nose, but anger had made him reckless and he came at Tom with a series of wild hay-making strokes that Tom avoided with keen eyes and fast feet, backing off until his opponent’s sword was out wide. Then he whipped his rapier up, slashing the man’s face so that he screamed in agony and reeled, dropping his sword.

‘I saw you die!’ Henry yelled, his own fine sword pointing at Tom accusingly, whilst his friend staggered, clutching his face, then fell to his knees, blood cascading through his fingers and soaking his cuffs and sleeves. Tom had caught a glimpse of the wound: a deep slash that had opened the soldier’s face from his neck to his right eye. ‘I saw you die,’ Henry said again, paying his friend no heed, fixated as he was on his old enemy. ‘We saw you killed at Kineton Fight!’

‘I came back from the dead, Henry,’ Tom said.

Birkenhead had thrown himself against the garden wall which he now all but clung to, the whites of his eyes glowing against the inky dark.

‘What happened to Martha …’ Henry’s mouth twisted, as though he hated himself for what he was about to say. ‘None of that was my doing. My father—’

‘Your father will bury you two days hence, Henry,’ Tom said, fighting the urge to fly at the man and tear him to bloody meat
with his bare hands. ‘He will stand by your grave and know his line is extinguished and then I will kill him too.’

Tom might not have felt real fear since he had become a killer of men, but he recognized fear when he saw it and he saw it now in Henry’s handsome face.

‘Kill him, Henry!’ his friend screamed, on his knees drenched in blood, the gore-slick hands at his face shaking wildly with pain and shock. ‘Look what he’s done to me! Kill him!’

‘This time there’s no coming back,’ Henry snarled, finding his courage, remembering his own prowess. ‘You’ll be food for the maggots, Rivers. Just like your hanged whore.’

Tom flew at him and their swords sang out in the night, the ring and scrape of steel barely keeping time with the deadly dance of the blades. Strike, parry, riposte, Tom’s left arm bent as a counterbalance by his right cheek, the hand still gripping his knife. But Henry’s skill was more than a match for Tom’s fury and he fluently turned each parry into an attack, so that Tom knew he was in the fight of his life. And though they were evenly matched in height, Henry’s was the longer blade, giving him a greater lunging distance and a murderous advantage.

The first flurry ended as suddenly as it had begun and both men stepped backwards, their guards raised, Tom sucking air into his lungs and knowing he needed to close the distance between them. He launched himself at Henry again, his front foot kicking back and his rear leg thrusting forward in an explosive pass, his arm straight and strong, the rapier’s point impelled towards his enemy’s face, but Henry threw his back foot across his body, turning side-on, and the point of Tom’s blade hit nothing and then Henry was upon him and Tom’s body worked instinctively, his blade meeting every thrust and driving the deadly point wide, the balls of his feet barely brushing the ground as he made of himself a moving target. The weapons kissed and rasped and Tom knew Henry was the better swordsman but he twisted and parried and somehow kept the death-dealing point of his enemy’s blade off him.

Then Tom stepped backwards out of reach and dragged a forearm across his head, blinking away sweat and turning his face enough to spit but keeping his gaze riveted on Henry. Henry almost grinned, for he knew that Tom had made a mistake by putting space between them, knew that Tom’s best chance, the explosive pass, had failed. Now Henry’s longer blade would finish it.

‘On a horse you were a nuisance, Rivers,’ he said, whipping his blade left and right, cutting the air with sharp breaths. ‘But like this …’ Now the predatory flash of teeth in the moonlit shadows. ‘Like this … without your brother … you are nothing.’

Small, still careful steps brought Henry a little closer, their sword points overlapping now by a hand’s span. Perfect striking distance.

‘The watch!’ Birkenhead cried, and Tom was aware of men’s voices, a commotion behind him on New Inn Street. ‘Cease this madness before it’s too late!’

‘Kill the bastard!’ Henry’s friend screamed, one eye bulged and mad with pain, bloody hands still pressed against the savage wound as though he was ashamed of it.

Come on, you arrogant pig’s bladder
, Tom thought, aware now of flamelight spilling across the ground round his feet and along the garden wall, chasing away the shadows and illuminating Birkenhead’s wan face. Then Henry lunged to show how the pass attack
should
be done, but Tom dead-parried the blade and struck, his rapier’s edge slicing into Henry’s forehead, then punched in with his left hand, plunging the knife into the side of Henry’s neck.

‘You’re a dead man, Henry,’ Tom spat in his face. Then he hauled the knife out and would have stayed to watch his old enemy piss his breeches and gasp his last pain-racked breaths, but to stay was to die.

And so he ran.

For a while they chased him like a hound pack on the scent
of a fox, west past the old Saxon church and the run-down tenements, on through damp passageways, then south-west along the paved streets of the colleges. Their yells sometimes sounded close enough that they must surely be on him, their torches drowning him in their accusing light. Other times the voices were more faint, swirling in echoes off grand college walls and lost to the night. But Tom never stopped to take stock, instead letting his legs eat up the ground, his boots splashing through filth, the wind gushing past his ears and his heart hammering with exertion and the thrill of the chase.

He did not know when they had at last given up the hunt, or at least when he had outstripped them, but by the time he had weaved his way back to the north-west of the city there was no sign of pursuit. And yet by now the night watch would know that what they had been alerted to was no drunken brawl over whores. John Birkenhead would have revealed Tom’s identity and his part in the destruction of his precious printing press. He would have reported that there were other rebels involved too, though there was every chance the Royalists had already gleaned as much from the man they had captured trying to slip out of the city. All of which meant they were still searching for him.