Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (50 page)

‘Your orders, sir?’ Dobson bellowed, his size and matching belligerence silencing any potential dissenters before they gave their objections voice.

‘The same as Colonel Haggett’s,’ Tom replied, ramming a wad of cartridge paper pilfered from a dead musketeer down his pistol’s muzzle. ‘We hold this hill.’

‘Thought you might say that,’ Dobson rumbled, then lifted his face guard and drank from a flask.

On the far side of the field a company from Major-General Skippon’s brigade had broken from the rear and was marching up the hill towards where the great hedge was broken by an old, skeletal oak. But from where he was Tom could see no enemy soldiers up there on what must surely yet be Parliament’s side of the escarpment. Unless the enemy had somehow got up there unseen. His thoughts were hauled back to the very real and immediate threat from the east.

‘Here they come!’ Ellis Lay warned as the front rank of the enemy marched up over the ridge.

‘They’ve even got a bloody fifer, the vainglorious tosspots,’ James Bowyer said as the thin merry tune carried like smoke on the breeze.

‘No wonder they look so damn pretty,’ Trencher added, for fifers were rare because they were kept only at their commander’s expense, which meant that Lord Wentworth was likely rich enough that his musketeers would not be running out of powder and shot any time soon. Furthermore, his pikemen were coming too, big strong men with their blade-tipped staves arrayed in a bristling hedge.

They mean to intimidate us, Tom thought. Fools think a show of force will break us. They have not managed it yet.

‘Horse!’ Penn called, and Tom muttered a dark curse because over on their left, at the rear of General Skippon’s musketeers,
a troop of harquebusiers had broken onto the field, appearing it seemed from nowhere.

‘Where in God’s name did they come from?’ Trencher asked. ‘I thought the ground beyond that hedge was impassable.’

‘Maybe they’re ours,’ Ellis Lay suggested.

‘They’re not ours,’ Tom said, and as if to prove it the troopers drew swords and poll-axes and galloped across the field towards Skippon’s men, shrieking hellishly, their horses’ hooves flinging mud.

And the rearmost rank of musketeers were still reloading.

‘Should we help?’ Penn asked Tom.

Tom shook his head. ‘We’ve got our own fight.’ He looked at Trencher, who was grimacing at the screams of Skippon’s men who were being butchered with cold steel and lead. But Trencher nodded and turned his horse back round to face Lord Wentworth’s oncoming musketeers.

‘Sir! Sir!’ someone was shouting and Dobson called to Tom and gestured to Trooper Logward who was threading his mount through the whirling mass of horseflesh and armed men to get to Tom.

‘He means you, Tom,’ Dobson said, and Tom felt a sudden coldness fill the marrow of his bones as it truly hit him that he was now commanding these men. That they had accepted him. For he could give them only death.

‘Sir, drums, sir!’ Logward twisted in his saddle and pointed west. ‘From over there. Must be ours, sir! Must be.’

Tom could not hear the drums above the horses and the musketry and the yells and the screams, but the hope in Logward’s eyes was good enough for him.

‘About bloody time,’ Dobson growled.

‘Haggett’s men! To me!’ Tom roared. ‘Are we going to let some unbloodied apprentices march up here and take all the glory?’

‘Yes!’ someone shouted. Tom ignored it.

He sat tall in the saddle and pointed his pistol towards
Wentworth’s musketeers who had come into range now and had been given the order to halt and make ready to fire. ‘We’re going to slow those whoresons down. We’re going to buy time for whoever Trooper Logward assures us is on their way.’ He glared at Logward who was craning his neck, peering anxiously west as though hope itself was enough to summon Parliament soldiers.

‘We’re too few to charge them, sir,’ Martindale said, hauling on his reins, struggling to control his horse. ‘I’m no coward but charging them is suicide.’

‘We’re going to bleed their pike,’ Tom called, scouring men’s eyes with his own fierce glare. ‘The musketeers will have to come to their aid. They will wheel and in doing so they will waste precious time.’

Martindale nodded.

‘I like it, Tom,’ Trencher said.

‘I thought you might,’ Tom said, feeling the murderous grin stretch his lips, for pikemen were only dangerous if you were within seventeen feet of them. Beyond that you could shoot at them all day long.

‘Bloody fools,’ Trencher murmured.

‘Have a care!’ someone yelled. Haggett’s men bent over in their saddles and spurred back up the rise, giving ground.

‘Give fire!’ a Cavalier officer shouted and fifty or more burning matches kissed priming pans, and the manifold flashes preceded a resounding barrage and a wall of smoke.

‘Now!’ Tom called, kicking his mare into a canter that would take them obliquely across the second rank of musketeers who were stepping forward to fire their own weapons.

‘God and Parliament!’ Trencher cried and others took up the shout.

‘God and Parliament!’

And the pike stand quivered, their sergeant roaring commands because they suddenly realized that the harquebusiers were coming for them.

Their horses’ hooves thudded against the ground and men yelled their war-cries and the battle thrill boiled in Tom’s veins as he led Haggett’s men – his men now – across the rough, gorse-strewn hill. He pulled up twenty yards short of the wicked pike blades, far enough away to make those weapons impotent but close enough to see fear twist their bearers’ faces beneath their pots.

‘Kill them!’ Tom raised his pistol and fired and a pikeman fell back, his stave clattering against other men’s armour. All around Tom pistols and carbines spat flame and lead into the press of tightly packed enemy and they could not miss.

Some of the pistol balls clanked off breastplates or pots but even if they did not kill they caused mayhem and terror. The pike stand lumbered like a wounded beast and came on bravely, attacking because what else could it do? But Tom’s men wheeled and rode away from their pikes only to turn and give fire again and by the time Lord Wentworth’s musketeers had wheeled to their left to come to their comrades’ aid the pike stand was a bloody, clamorous, chaotic mess.

And yet those musketeers
had
wheeled and they had done it as neatly and as quickly as Tom had ever seen, and he knew with sudden horror that he could not get his men away before the first volley.

‘Withdraw!’ he screamed. ‘Back! Back, damn you!’ He saw fear flash in men’s eyes, saw the curses on their lips as they too realized they had lingered too long before the pike stand, drunk on the butchery.

‘Everyone back!’ Dobson bellowed.

‘Fire!’ a man screamed and in one glimpse Tom knew it was Lord Wentworth himself and he did not begrudge the man his furious joy as his musketeers gave fire.

James Bowyer’s mare neighed and careened sidewards, horse and rider flayed, and Tom saw at least three other men slump or fall from their mounts, armour, flesh and bone crashing to the ground. The dead and dying hampered the escape of
the living and four ragged breaths later the next rank fired and Penn, who had been hauling his mare around a mass of stricken flesh and flailing hooves, was hit in the back of the head, the ball passing through his helmet to lodge in his skull.

‘Matt! Matt!’ Trencher was screaming, heedless of the lead storm, as Penn tumbled from his horse, inanimate as only the killed can be.

Jeffes was down, his horse shot, and Martindale’s horse made only twenty yards before it went down onto its knees, raw bloody flesh hanging from its rump.

‘Back up the hill!’ Tom screamed at those still mounted, then wheeled his horse and spurred over to Jeffes.

‘Get on!’ He held out an arm and Jeffes grasped it and then another volley thundered and Tom’s horse shrieked and Jeffes’s eyes bulged and he fell forward, two holes in his backplate. But Tom’s horse was hit too and she fell sidewards, keening, eyes rolling, and Tom pulled his right foot from the stirrup before she hit the ground. He scrambled over the creature, putting its body between him and Wentworth’s men. Another musket ball thumped into the mare’s flesh and then came a huge cheer and Tom looked over the point of her hip to see that the pikemen had thrown down their pikes and drawn swords and knives and were charging up the field in a mad, vengeful horde. They butchered wounded men as they came, some of the pikemen stopping to loot but most coming on.

Martindale turned towards the onrushing tide and fired his pistol, then the wave swallowed him and Tom pulled his poll-axe free from his baldrick, the haft comforting in his hand even as he faced death.

‘Come, then,’ he spat, twirling the poll-axe once and looking for the pikeman who would die first. ‘Come and kill me, you ugly shankers!’ he bawled. Then he heard hoof-beats and yelling as the remains of Haggett’s troop thundered past him, two firing pistols before all ploughed into the pikemen, their mounts knocking men to the ground, trampling them, their
blades plunging and scything down onto heads and shoulders. Tom strode forward in their wake, into that cauldron of heinous murder, and swung his poll-axe into the neck of a man trying to rise, then had to put his boot on the pikeman’s face to pull the axe free. A sword scraped off his backplate and he turned swinging, the poll-axe’s spike ripping out a man’s throat in a crimson gush.

But there were too many of them. They swarmed around Ellis Lay, plunging blades into his horse which was screaming, then as the beast went down they hauled Lay from his saddle and hacked him apart. For a moment Tom was shielded on either side by horses, the pikemen unable to get close, and he drew his sword, head snapping round, weapons raised. On his right Dobson was fighting like a bear, snarling as he hammered heads with his poll-axe, dropping men with almost every blow. On his left Trencher was wheeling his horse, scything his heavy sword at men who were, for the moment at least, backing off.

A pikeman slipped between two horses and swung a hanger which Tom caught on his own sword, in the same movement bringing the poll-axe across and chopping the man’s sword arm off at the elbow, as Dobson roared in pain, the long spike of a sergeant’s halberd driven through his left shoulder. Tom slammed his sword’s hilt guard into the pikeman’s face, dropping him, then saw the sergeant yank the spike back out and then ram it back into Dobson’s arm and the giant could do nothing as another pikeman buried a ballock dagger into his thigh. But Dobson was frenzied and refused to die, swinging his poll-axe and bellowing, savaging men even as they pulled him from the saddle and he was lost from Tom’s sight.

Every one of Haggett’s troopers was down.

But for Trencher.

The big man’s horse was blood-slathered, its eyes wide with terror as Trencher wrenched the reins and hauled it round and kicked his heels and screamed. Tom dropped his sword and the poll-axe and grasped the arm thrust towards him, his left hand
somehow grabbing hold of Trencher’s baldrick as he thundered past. He clung on, swords striking his buff-coat and backplate, his feet thumping against the ground as Trencher’s brave mare carried them out of that murderous maelstrom, back up the rise past dead men and dead horses.

Towards the Red and Blue regiments of the London Trained Bands who had at last arrived to pour their musket fire into the Cavaliers and drive them from the hill.

His men had ploughed into the thin company, annihilating its cohesion, their horses’ chests breaking arms and faces and crushing bones. Now Mun rode into that screaming chaos. Their pistols and carbines spat lead, punching holes in men. Their blades plunged and hacked and blood flew. O’Brien was slaying men who would have had more chance against the noose or fire or foul disease than they had against the Irishman. Some thrust up with the butts of their matchlocks, using the things like unwieldy clubs, but Mun’s men had honed their skill through the last winter and become butchers.

A sword struck Mun’s left thigh, not piercing his buff-coat, and he twisted in the saddle to bring his Irish hilt scything down, knocking the hanger from the musketeer’s grasp then leaning out and ramming the point into the man’s open mouth before drawing it back in a gout of blood.

Harley swept his sword down at a man who threw up his matchlock and caught the blade on its stock, but Godfrey came up behind him and struck down, taking off the man’s ear, so that in a heartbeat his lace falling band bloomed bright red and he was mid scream when Godfrey finished the job with a better-aimed blow that cleaved his skull.

Milward shot a man who fell to his knees still gripping his musket, and John Cole urged his horse forward but the beast pulled up and refused to trample the musketeer and so Cole screamed a curse at the animal and clicked his tongue and kicked his heels. He had all but passed the rebel but then leant
right over and drove his poll-axe’s spike through broad-hat and skull and the rebel shook like a fox in a snare.

‘Run, traitors! Run, you dogs!’ Jones shouted as those rebels who were able dropped their matchlocks and ran, or limped, back to their fellow musketeers.

‘Let them go,’ Mun barked at those of his men who made to ride them down. For musketeers without muskets were next to useless on that escarpment, yet must still draw rations and encumber the enemy.

Besides which, Mun had more to worry about than chasing down unarmed men. The main body of Major-General Skippon’s musketeers had discouraged Sir Nicholas Byron’s brigade enough that Byron’s men were no longer coming up the hill. Alarmingly they had the look of a regiment about to withdraw and Mun said as much. A few moments later their drummers confirmed his fear.

‘We’re too damn late,’ O’Brien said, coming alongside Mun, blue eyes fixed on Skippon’s men. Beads of blood glistened like rubies amongst the bristles of his beard, but the crimson spray up his breastplate told Mun that the blood was not the Irishman’s own. ‘You should have crawled faster.’

‘You should have ridden faster,’ Mun said.

‘Whatever, we’ve buggered it up,’ O’Brien said, which was true enough. If Skippon’s musketeers had still been involved in a firefight with Sir Nicholas Byron’s brigade Mun could have risked a charge to attack their rear. But Skippon had beaten Byron off, meaning that the rebels could turn their muskets, or at least a sufficient number of them, towards Mun’s troop. To ride at so many loaded muskets would be reckless at best.