Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (27 page)

Soon back above ground
, his mind whispered.
Back with the living.

Then he was in the chamber which the Cannock men had dug and he could reach out and touch the foundations of the Cathedral Close’s walls, press freezing fingers against the slick stones that bore the tool marks of the miners’ excavations. In the earth below these foundations, four feet beneath the stones, they had dug a channel for the explosives.

‘I’m suffocating,’ O’Brien said. ‘Can’t get a breath.’ Suddenly the Irishman was beside him in the chamber at the tunnel’s end, his own cask easily out of the water, his prodigious strength unflagging. His unblinking eyes, though, glowed white in that near-grave and were swollen with terror.

‘The worst is over,’ Mun said, knowing it to be a lie for worse was to come. Once they had lit the fuses. ‘Give it to me.’ Mun had already placed his cask up on the rough wooden platform which the miners had erected to keep the charges clear of the water. Now he took O’Brien’s and placed it beside his own. ‘Go on, get out,’ he growled.

‘Ballocks,’ O’Brien growled back, edging up so that they were almost level, their combined mass all but filling the cramped alcove. ‘You’ll need help with the fuses.’

‘Get out, Clancy,’ Mun said, seeing black spots before his eyes, the fear threatening to overcome him.

‘Fuck off,’ O’Brien said.

‘You’re too damn big and too damn slow,’ Mun hissed. ‘Once these are lit we need to be gone. I won’t have you lying there like a stopper in a flask leaving me at the back when this lot goes off.’

‘But you can’t do all the fuses.’

‘I can help,’ another voice said.

‘Who has match?’ Mun asked. He had brought his own lit match coiled round his right wrist but it had long since gone out when keeping the end burning had seemed less important than keeping his head above water. It was too wet to relight now.

‘I have two, both lit,’ the same voice came back from somewhere behind them, followed by the sound of the man blowing on his match to back up his boast.

Mun locked eyes with O’Brien, who passed up another powder keg from a Cannock man further back. ‘Go back. I’ll be right behind.’ For a heartbeat, by the frail faltering candlelight he saw pure turmoil in the Irishman’s eyes. He knew his friend would sooner half of Lichfield came down on his head than that he leave Mun to finish the job alone. But then a grimace showed white against O’Brien’s mud-smeared beard and he nodded and cursed, his reason to remain negated by the man behind who anyway had the only burning match and would need to come up to the foundation wall with it. That the Irishman was down there at all with his fear of confined places …

‘If you’re not back … above ground … before I finish the Lord’s Prayer … I’ll be back to drag you out by your feet.’ With that O’Brien pushed himself deeper into the meagre chamber, careful not to disturb the casks, and there contorted, bringing his mud-slathered knees up to his chest. Awkward as a cow on a crutch he got himself turned round and began to
crawl past Mun, who sucked in his belly for every half an inch was needed, back towards the narrow shaft.

The next man behind squirmed into the space left by the Irishman and went to crouch in a dark corner, his wrists up by his begrimed face, blowing now and then on the match coiled round them so that the lit ends glowed menacingly before dulling again. Five more powder kegs were passed along by the Cannock men and Mun painstakingly set them side by side on the low trestle beneath the slick, stone-flecked earth and the wall’s foundations.

He could not lay a trail of powder, for the dampness underground would likely ruin it, besides which there was no dry surface on which to pour it. Also, he could never lay a trail long enough to give him the time to crawl back out before the explosion. Instead they would have to hope that at least one of the young man’s match-cords remained lit long enough to ignite the one charge that would blow up the whole cache.

The canvas-swathed keg O’Brien had brought down was bone dry and so Mun chose this for the heart of the detonation, with his knife cutting the sack open and digging a hole into the lid until the tip of the blade fetched out a spill of black powder.

He nodded to the match around the Cannock man’s wrists. ‘Give me both of them,’ he said. The others, their work done, were already backing out of the tunnel boots first, eager to be far from so much black powder, candle flame and lit match.

‘Shhh!’ The man put a finger to his lips and Mun froze, holding his breath, his heart clenching. Then he heard the wet percussion of picks stabbing into pebble-flecked earth. There was a sudden crumbling of soil to Mun’s left and immediately a musket’s muzzle appeared and there was a tongue of flame and there must have been a crack but Mun did not hear it. He was on his back in the water. The musket ball had hit him, he knew that much. But he did not know where it had struck him for though he had felt the blow he felt no pain. Yet.

A face appeared through the hole and then the Cannock man scrambled through the filth, pulling a knife from his boot, and Mun saw the man’s arm rise and fall, saw a flash of blade and heard a man screaming.

‘The fuses,’ Mun growled, pushing himself up onto his knees. Now the pain. Searing agony in his thigh, the mud slathered on his breeches sheened with watery blood. ‘Cut them shorter!’

‘But we won’t have time—’

‘Just do it!’ Mun threw himself onto the bloodied rebel, grabbed hold of his bandolier and hauled him further through the hole until the body stuck fast sealing it. ‘Hurry!’

The other man
was
hurrying, pulling the match-cords from his wrists, blowing on them, taking his blade to them and sawing them shorter. He held them up and Mun nodded, half lying on the dead man, holding on for all he was worth, his cold hands numb to the steaming blood on them. He could hear the muffled shouts of those on the other side of the hole and suddenly the corpse was convulsing, jerking like a fish on a hook as his comrades took hold of his legs and tried to draw him back through the breach. But Mun held on. ‘Set them! Do it now!’ he yelled and the other scrambled over to the trestle, his eyes wild, and pushed the unlit ends of the match-cords into the hole which Mun had dug into the cask lid.

‘It’s done,’ the Cannock man said, blowing on the fuses.

‘Now go!’ Mun was losing his grip on the dead rebel, the men on the other side beginning to win the tug of war.

The other man muddled over on hands and knees and took hold of the dead rebel’s coat.

‘Get out!’ Mun growled.

‘No,’ the man said, and then Mun saw the begrimed face properly for the first time.

‘You damned fool!’ Mun said, for not only was the other no Cannock man, he was barely a man at all, but rather Lord Lidford’s heedless boy. Who seemed determined to get himself killed. ‘What are you doing here? Get out!’ Mun screamed at
Jonathan, whose face was a snarl, his fists full of the dead rebel’s felt tunic. ‘Go now or die.’ The corpse lurched violently but together they held on. Mun heard a man curse savagely and the body went still.

‘You’re shot,’ Jonathan Lidford said.

‘Go, you goddamned fool,’ Mun said. ‘There’s no time.’ The rebels had given up and were no doubt scrambling back up their shaft on the other side because they knew what was coming. Jonathan let go of the dead man and slewed off and Mun exhaled, cursing in pain.

Then he was moving, being hauled backwards, a strong arm under his right arm and across his chest. He tried to call the boy a bloody idiot but the words were garbled. He was cold, had lost sensation in his legs. It’s the cold water, he thought, the black spots filling his vision again. But he knew it was more than the cold water, knew it was because his warm lifeblood was leaving his body, draining into the Lichfield mud so that he would soon be as dead as the coffin-buried corpses in the earth above him.

He tried to dig his heels into the mire, wanted desperately to speed the progress back up the tunnel because he somehow knew that the fool boy would not leave him and so would be blown to pieces or buried alive when the burning match met the dry black powder.

If the match was still alight.

The boy is stronger than he looks
, he thought.
I wonder how short he cut the fuses.

Then the world shook and there was a boom, but a muted one like a far-off cannon’s roar, and a blow like a kick to the stomach. And then there was nothing.

WHEN TOM HAD
come exhausted and stinking to the foot-bridge across the Cherwell north-east of Oxford he had thought The Scot had gone, ridden east into the dawn, and thus that he was a dead man. But then he had seen shapes moving in the gloom, men and horses milling and the glint of helmets and tack against the silver tideline of the coming daybreak.

‘It’s done?’ The Scot had asked simply, whistling a signal for his sentries to come in from their positions in the scrub to mount up.

‘It’s done,’ Tom had replied, pulling himself up into the saddle and scanning the faces around him. Trencher’s face was a slab of granite and in a heartbeat Tom knew what was coming.

‘Weasel,’ Trencher said. ‘Heard it, didn’t see it. The place was crawling with dragoons.’

‘There was nothing to be done,’ Penn put in, holding Tom’s eye. Beside him Dobson bristled as though the violence in him clamoured to be unleashed in spite of there being no recourse now other than to escape Oxford before the King’s men rounded them up or flayed them with lead and steel. ‘But you know Weasel,’ Penn said. ‘He’ll swallow his own tongue before he tells those damn nigits anything.’

‘He’ll bloody swing is what he’ll do,’ Dobson said, grimacing.
‘After what we did to their precious printing press they’ll make him dance.’

‘Shut your mouth, Dobson,’ Trencher gnarred, giving the bigger man a murderous glare. Dobson shrugged casually but said no more. Yet Tom knew that Dobson was right for all that he had not wanted to hear it. Weasel, with whom Tom had shared ale and food and ridden into the fray at Edgehill, who had been his brother of the blade, would now die strangled and pissing down his leg at the end of a rope. If the Cavaliers did not bring him down before death and cut him open and pluck out his still throbbing organs.

There was nothing Tom could do, nothing he could have done differently, that would have changed the outcome for Weasel. Or if there was there was nothing to be gained by raking the ashes of it now as they rode south-east, the wind in their faces, across a land stirring towards the new day. After some fifteen or so miles they made camp in woodland near the village of Watlington. The Scot’s men shared their food with them and lent them rain cloaks to sleep under and some time later they woke stiff and damp and moaning to Tom that he still stank like a sewer. Then they rode east twenty miles into the rolling Chiltern Hills and the village of Great Kingshill, where they rendezvoused with a column of horse coming from London bound for the new Parliamentary headquarters at Thame. The day was bright and warm for the time of year and the sun made a silver ribbon of a river in the valley to the south as they watched The Scot make his introductions to a Colonel Bartholomew Haggett.

‘Most of ’em look green as snot,’ Dobson remarked, unimpressed.

‘Most of them look as if they’re knocking at death’s door,’ Penn said. The column comprised some seventy-five men, all harquebusiers, plus the men leading three carts, two pulled by oxen and the third by draught horses.

‘What are they moving?’ Dobson asked, nodding at one of
the carts whose cargo like the others’ was covered by canvas that was lashed tightly down.

‘I can tell you exactly,’ Trencher said. ‘Silver and coin. Twenty thousand pounds’ worth to be specific.’ He nodded towards one of The Scot’s troopers, a spotty lad who was begging two others to return the lump of cheese they had clearly stolen from his knapsack. ‘That is if we’re to believe young Banister over there.’

Penn’s mouth slackened and Dobson became suddenly still, his dark bushy brows hoisted.

‘What?’ Trencher protested. ‘You think I share a man’s bottle and his fire and don’t have the good manners to enquire after his business?’

‘We’re going to hold their hands all the way up to Thame,’ Tom said, making sense of it. He could understand why The Scot had not told them about the convoy – being loose-tongued about that much silver was never a good idea – but Tom was angry nevertheless, for he would rather be southward bound, not least so that the others could claim their reward from Captain Crafte. Instead they would be going north again and west to Thame.

‘That’s enough silver to pay all of us, Essex’s whole bloody army,’ Penn said.

‘Doing God’s work is its own reward,’ Trencher said. ‘I don’t need coin for killing Cavaliers.’

‘Need it for ale, though,’ Dobson said.

‘True enough,’ Trencher admitted. ‘Killing Cavaliers is thirsty work.’

‘You kept that quiet, Will,’ Tom said, cuffing water from his face. He was on his knees amongst nettles by a foam-flecked brook, washing off the stubborn filth from the ditch through which he had scrambled to escape Oxford.

‘I only found out last night, besides which I knew you ladies would get all giddy when this little trove turned up.’ He coughed into a fist. ‘Well, not you, Tom. I expect your lot
would spend all that on a good family feast.’ Tom gave that comment the look it deserved. ‘Anyway, I got the impression that young Banister’s tongue was ale-greased and I didn’t want to land the poor lad in trouble with The Scot.’