Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (40 page)

‘What’s wrong?’ Jonathan asked, nudging his horse closer to Mun to be heard.

‘The ditch,’ Mun said through a grimace, rubbing Hector’s muscle-corded neck, ‘it hasn’t been filled. They can’t get across.’

‘Not in that hail,’ O’Brien added.

‘They’re falling back!’ someone yelled.

‘No, you damned scabs!’ Richard Downes screamed, leaning forward in the saddle and pointing his sword at the wall. ‘The rebels are that way! Turn around, you flighty arse-rags!’

‘Oh ballocks,’ O’Brien growled. ‘This is turning out badly.’

Prince Rupert was riding amongst the retreating musketeers, yelling at them to stand firm and renew the attack. Mun looked round and saw a hundred or so pikemen by a furze thicket, watching the battle as they waited for the order to advance. Beside the men a fire blazed and spat and when the order came they would hold their cloth-wrapped pikes in the flame and join the attack. But the attack was floundering.

‘O’Brien, come with me,’ Mun said, pulling Hector round and giving the stallion his heels.

‘Where are you off to, Corporal?’ Godfrey called after them.

‘Never you mind, lad, but I’ll be back to hold your hand!’ the Irishman yelled.

They rode across the rough ground towards the big clump of furze, where Mun pulled up, soothing Hector with calming words as he eyed the pikemen before him.

‘What are you thinking, sir?’ O’Brien asked, reining in beside him and glancing at the pikemen, whose eyes were riveted to them.

‘Just look big, mean and Irish,’ Mun said.

‘I can manage that,’ O’Brien said, as Jonathan trotted his horse up, the bay tossing her head briskly.

‘You said to stay with you,’ Jonathan said, glancing at them both, affecting a look of innocence.

‘What can I do for you, sir?’ a grizzled-looking sergeant asked Mun, eyeing them sceptically, his halberd over his shoulder. Some of his men had downed pikes and were smoking pipes even as the fight raged on near the wall two hundred paces away.

‘Give me a pike,’ Mun said. ‘A short one.’

The sergeant shook his head. ‘These pikes are needed and all must be accounted for.’

Mun drew a pistol and pointed it at the man’s head. ‘Give my corporal a pike. If you please.’ The sergeant’s eyes bulged beneath his pot’s rim and his men looked on with equal bafflement.

‘Audley, give the corporal your pike.’ The sergeant scratched his unkempt beard as Audley brought his weapon over and rested its butt on the ground by O’Brien.

‘Cut it in half, Corporal,’ Mun said, still pointing his firelock at the sergeant. The Irishman dismounted, took his poll-axe from its saddle holster and went to work, oblivious of the pikemen around him and the violence coming off them near thick enough to touch. ‘You owe me one pike,’ the sergeant dared, even with the muzzle of Mun’s fine pistol promising him oblivion. ‘I don’t forget a face.’

Mun nodded, shoving the firelock back into its holster as O’Brien, having hacked partly through, broke the stave in two across his leg. ‘Get some rags on the other half too,’ Mun said, and this time pikeman Audley came forward of his own volition and proceeded to bind the other half of the stave in rags. When it was done O’Brien handed both staves to Mun whilst he mounted, then held out a hand.

‘I assume one of those is for me,’ he said.

‘Not the way you ride,’ Mun answered, walking Hector close enough to the fire that he could, by resting the staves across Hector’s withers, light the cloth-wrapped ends in the flame. As soon as they were blazing he backed up, one stave in either hand, his legs alone gripping Hector. He looked at Jonathan. ‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said.

Jonathan grinned. ‘I’ll decide when I find out what it is we’re doing,’ he said.

And that was good enough for Mun as he urged Hector forward, breaking into a canter back towards the maelstrom.

‘The King and the Cause!’ he yelled, riding into the pungent flame-lit fog of musket smoke. ‘The King and the Cause!’ He spurred past the right-hand edge of the Royalist horse and on across the uneven, gorse-strewn ground into the midst of Bellasis’s musketeers. And men cheered him.

Prince Rupert looked up, seeing Mun and with him the chance to turn the tide back towards the wall. ‘Ride, Sir Edmund!’ he
yelled, spurring his own horse into a gallop, cutting across the field towards Mun, men scattering before him.

‘Go on, boy!’ Mun growled, ‘go on, Hector!’ And now he saw nothing but the palisade looming as he sped towards it, and tongues of flame flaring down at him, and he gripped the flaming pikes and rode on, Hector snorting furiously. ‘Faster, Hector!’ Mun yelled, and Hector responded, feet clumping against the earth, and Mun felt a musket ball rip the air by his head, and then with an enormous effort Hector leapt, carrying him over the ditch, Mun’s bones rattling when they landed, the stallion’s hind hooves gouging the ditch’s side for purchase. Then they were up and the wall loomed before them.

‘King Charles!’ Mun screamed, hefting the short pikes into the night, their blazing ends roaring as he swept them through the air as a beacon for the King’s men to see. He glimpsed a musket’s muzzle above the wall and half tensed for the shot, then the rebel was flung backwards and Mun turned to see that both O’Brien and Jonathan had fired their pistols from the other side of the ditch. More musket balls were hammering into the earth around him and Hector began to wheel and so Mun hurled the fire pikes against the palisade.

And he heard rebels screaming
fire
.

Then rose the clatter of arms and armour and the Prince was there, having jumped the ditch, his proud horse tossing its head as Rupert grinned savagely and screamed at the musketeers to come and take Bristol. The roar from a thousand throats was deafening as men clambered down into the ditch and up the other side and in the chaos Mun leant forward and kissed Hector’s neck, awed by the stallion’s bravery and because Hector had carried him safely across that trench without Mun having the reins, which was a thing he knew folk would not believe and yet it had happened. Matchlocks were thundering and men with grenades from John Stradling’s South Wales Regiment came forward and lobbed their bombs over the palisade, the explosions making Mun flinch involuntarily. His
fire pikes had all but gone out yet it did not matter, for the foot’s blood was up and they were falling upon the palisade with hands, halberds and partisans, pulling it down or forcing gaps between the piles.

‘Bring up the horse!’ the Prince yelled at Jonathan, who turned from the ditch and spurred off back through the musketeers and the pikemen that were surging forward in case the rebels countered with their own horse. Then a great cheer went up as a section of the wall came down, and some men pulled the timbers across the ditch to make a bridge whilst others poured through the breach.

‘Sir Edmund! With me!’ Sword in hand, his horse neighing madly, the Prince was forcing his way through the musketeers, who did what they could to let him pass. Unable to leave the Prince to face alone whatever awaited them beyond the outer defences, Mun asked another effort of Hector, impelling him through the gap in the palisade.

Then they were through to the dead ground between the city’s outer defences and the River Frome. Bodies littered the ground and Mun glimpsed patches of scorched earth from the Welshmen’s grenades yet he did not stop, but cantered after the Prince towards a party of musketeers who had made a stand. Perhaps as many as thirty rebels had formed a firing line across a paved street leading towards College Green, their weapons levelled, and in that moment Mun knew he must either ride them down or die with a back full of musket balls.

‘Yah!’ he cried, vicious with the spurs, drawing his sword as Hector drove on, galloping now, the two of them together. As the night burst into flame and those muskets coughed their hatred and a ball took Hector in his eye. Mun felt the stallion’s great strength give out, felt the muscles and sinews release as if cut, and then they were falling. Yet, somehow, and only for a heartbeat, Hector found his feet, found the strength to slow his momentum, before crashing to his knees with a great and weary exhalation, so that Mun was still in his saddle. He
pulled his boots from the stirrups and fell to the grass, then scrambled on hands and knees round to the stallion’s head and the bloody, gore-filled hole that had been Hector’s right eye.

No!
‘No, Hector!’ He pulled off his helmet and pressed his face against Hector’s muzzle, feeling the stallion’s hot blood on his lips and cheeks as musket balls whipped through the night around them and the Prince’s army ran towards them. Hector nickered softly, his sweet grassy breath and the iron tang of blood filling Mun’s nose, and then his head sagged and Mun could not hold on but had to let it slump onto the ground.

Mun could not see for the tears in his eyes and could not hear for the cleaving of his heart. A musket ball thumped into Hector, its force mostly spent so that it only half stuck in the flesh at the point of the shoulder. Slowly, detached as if seeing himself in a dream, Mun dug his fingers in and pulled the ball out, closing his fist around it, feeling its hot slipperiness against his skin.

‘The Prince! The Prince is down!’ someone yelled and Mun twisted, looking for the Prince, then saw a pistol flash and Rupert standing beside what looked like a small hump in the ground but for the glint of gold in the saddle cloth.

‘Pikes!’ the Prince yelled over his shoulder. ‘Pikes, damn you!’ The rebel firing line had dispersed, the musketeers fleeing from the onrushing Royalists. Or from Prince Rupert perhaps. But then Mun saw horse. They were gathered by a line of gabions to the right of the bridge across the Frome, perhaps three hundred troopers, their backs to the river. The Prince had seen them too which was why he was calling for his pikemen, who, with the musketeers, were rushing past Mun now. But those pikemen were in loose order and the commander of the rebel horse saw his chance and raised his sword, roaring instructions as his men prepared to charge.

Mun leant over Hector and pulled his pistols from the saddle, his arms trembling as though the marrow in them simmered, then laid one of the weapons on the ground. With a finger he
traced a line from the stallion’s left ear to his ruined right eye, then did the same with the opposite ear and eye, holding his thumb on the cross point of this imaginary X.

Because he would not get this wrong. No matter what.

Then he put his lips to the spot, which was just above Hector’s blood-beaded white star, and held there. ‘My good boy. My brave boy,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, my friend.’

Pulling away he brought his pistol up. Placed its muzzle on that sweet spot. Turned his face away. Squeezed the trigger.

The pistol’s roar stunned him. He dragged an arm across his eyes, smearing blood and tears. His own breathing was gathering pace. His stomach clenched as though he had swallowed a hot coal. He thrust the spent pistol into his boot and picked up his helmet, pushing it down on his head as men of the Oxford Army, who had been flowing past him like a river around a boulder, checked. Because the rebel horse was coming.

A musketeer turned to flee but Mun grabbed his bandolier and hauled him around, snarling at the soldier to be a man and face the enemy. Being more afraid of Mun than of the rebels, the musketeer planted his feet and began loading his matchlock as the ground itself trembled with the rebels’ charge and Mun strode towards them, consumed by fury.

‘Kill them!’ he yelled, drawing his Irish hilt. The Royalist pikemen clustered, trying to form a decent stand and present their weapons, yet were hampered by the musketeers who sought protection amongst them. Then the horse were on them, harquebusiers firing their pistols and slashing at men’s faces. Unable to close ranks and lock themselves with one another the pikemen were being butchered and some threw down their weapons and either drew swords or fled. Yet Prince Rupert stood firm in the heart of the fray encouraging his men, and many, seeing him thus, took heart and fought savagely.

A man beside Mun jabbed his pike up at a rider’s face but the man saw the blade in time, jerking his head aside and at the same moment firing his carbine whose ball punched through
the pikeman’s breastplate and killed him. Mun ducked beneath the horse’s swinging head and came up on the rebel’s left, hacking into his leg in a frenzy until the blade got caught in the bone and the horse turned, shrieking, and knocked him to the ground. The rider was screaming, his leg all but severed and Mun’s blade stuck fast, when a musketeer came up, his weapon reversed, and rammed the butt into the rebel’s right side, knocking him out of the saddle. The horse bolted and the musketeer fell upon its master, pummelling his head to a mush contained only by the helmet.

Getting to his feet, his neck burning from the whiplash of being thrown backwards, Mun saw it was the same musketeer whom he had berated moments before. He looked up at Mun, eyes wide, a feral grin etched into his face, then hauled Mun’s basket-hilt sword free of the meat and bone and offered it up. Mun nodded, taking the sword, its weight of more comfort to him than armour, buff-coat or even pistol. Then the other man hefted his bloodied matchlock and stalked off to find another kill.

A musket ball glanced off the left side-bar of Mun’s helmet and struck a nearby captain in the arm as Mun raised his pistol and fired at a rebel but somehow missed.

‘Make way!’ someone yelled, ‘stand clear!’ Mun turned and saw fire. Men wielding fire pikes lumbered into the fray and went for the horses, the flames seething in the darkness, and the horses would not endure it, their eyes rolling, nostrils flaring as they whinnied in terror.

‘Burn the bastards!’ a sergeant screamed, thrusting his halberd into a horse’s mouth, breaking its teeth. ‘Burn them!’ The stricken horse backed away, tossing its head in a spray of blood, and whilst its master struggled a musketeer ran up to him, rammed the muzzle of his weapon into the space between underarm and breastplate, and fired.

‘That’s it, lad! Give the shanker something to remember you by!’ the sergeant spat as the rebel slumped sideward, his hand
still gripping a pistol, and the horse sensing the dead weight on its back began to turn in tight circles.