Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles (14 page)

The matter in question, the one he and his hundred men now undertook, was an irritation. An issue to be resolved with an ambush, a capture, and a swift, exquisitely painful death. And yet, until it had been dealt with, Wild knew that it would consume him. The colonel’s stomach churned as he thought upon Stryker. A man, he presumed, who might have been handsome once, tall and dark as he was, though mutilated now by that repulsive mess of swirling scar tissue. Wild had a short temper, he knew that about himself, never denied it, but the hatred he felt for the malignant, one-eyed fiend astonished even him. Stryker had surprised him, tricked him, robbed, mocked, and humiliated him, and that was enough to ensure Gabriel Wild’s need for revenge. But the scorn poured forth from the dead-eyed, pasty-faced Collings had simply been too much to bear. Stryker would have to die, Wild had promised himself, because he could not live out his days knowing that the smug bastard’s heart still beat.

The alehouse came quickly into view at the end of the street, and Wild led his steel-clad column towards it, turning left into its large courtyard without regard for the four or five drink-addled sots stumbling across the filthy cobblestones. The clatter of hooves was deafening, like a prolonged thunderclap or the cannon fire from a mighty seaward fort, and wide-eyed faces immediately appeared at the windows of the complex of taphouse and stables.

‘Dismount!’ Wild commanded when the last of the troopers had drawn up in the rectangular yard. He swung a leg across his horse’s back to plummet on to the squelching ground. It hadn’t rained all day, but the sheer amount of mud, straw, and horse dung that had collected over the time since the area had last been cleaned meant the uneven cobbles were swathed in an ankle-deep carpet of muck.

He glanced at one of his officers. ‘Give the men liberty, Captain.’

The captain, a squinty-eyed fellow with grey stubble and a flat nose, lifted his hinged visor. ‘Will do, sir.’

‘But no more than small beer,’ Wild added as his men began to chatter and laugh. ‘I want ’em sober and fit to ride.’

At the captain’s sharp nod, Wild handed another trooper his reins, spun on his heels and marched towards the tavern’s studded door.

Inside, the taproom was a dingy affair, the night’s darkness barely repelled by a handful of candles, and positively exacerbated by the fuggy clouds of tobacco smoke billowing around almost every patron. Wild released the hook at the bottom of his visor, unbuckled his chin strap and lifted his helmet free. He shook his head briefly, like a dog in a rain shower, letting his badger-striped auburn hair flow freely about his shoulders.

Wild stepped slowly up to the water-ringed counter, deliberately allowing every gaze to fall on him, intending the locals to get a good look at the armoured killer in their midst. He needed them to fear him, and for that fear to loosen tongues and slacken jaws, so that the unwelcome foray into this grimy peasants’ lair would be worth the trouble. Placing his pot carefully on the counter, he peered into the gloom. It was a simple enough place; a single large room with a rush-scattered floor, half a dozen low tables, and a score of rickety-looking stools. The walls and ceiling, stained by the smoke of wood, tallow, and tobacco were nearly as black as the night sky. In one wall a substantial hearth blazed. A small cauldron hung above the flames, some kind of pottage bubbling within. The solid mantelpiece held a row of pewter plates and jugs, a wooden cup full of old pipe stems, a handful of desiccated onions, and a rusty old dagger that he supposed must have held some kind of sentimental attachment for the tapster, for it had long since ceased to be lethal.

The men at the tables still gawped at him like cattle, as he knew they would, and he found their dull stares irritating in the extreme. These were low folk. The kind Wild would employ to clean his jakes or muck out his horses. Drove-boys, probably, and farmhands, ostlers, or even simple vagrants. And yet he needed them, their information and their gossip, if he was to achieve his goal.

‘Stryker.’

The dull expressions did not twitch at the name.

‘I am looking for a man named Captain Stryker,’ Wild tried again. ‘A king’s man, he leads a company of redcoats.’ Still nothing. ‘He has scars where his eye should be.’ Wild placed a gauntleted hand across the left side of his face. ‘Like so. His second, a slim youth, has no use of his right arm.’

‘What’ll it be, General?’

Wild spun round to face the man standing on the opposite side of the sticky counter. ‘Be?’

The tapster, a silver-haired fellow well drawn in his years, rested stubby paws on his potbelly. ‘To drink, sir.’

A handful of Wild’s troopers had filtered through the low doorway now, chattering and laughing as they crossed the rushes in their colonel’s wake. Wild raised his voice to reiterate his earlier order. ‘Small beer.’

The tapster went to work, filling a battered pewter cup from one of his casks. He slid the drink across the counter, peering at Wild through rheumy eyes. ‘They won’t talk.’

Wild had already put the cup to his lips, but held his arm at the man’s words. ‘Oh?’

The tapster’s face cracked in half-smile, brandishing a set of chipped and crooked teeth, all black at the gums. ‘The folk hereabouts.’

‘Royalists?’

‘No, sir, not a bit of it!’ the tapster responded as though Wild had made a raucous jest. ‘But they’re ’fraid, sir. There’s been so many o’ yon soldiers marchin’ and ridin’ through Widdy these past months not a single man can call ’imself safe. The answer?’ He leant across the counter conspiratorially. ‘Keep your bliddy pie-hole clamped and pray the likes o’ yourself don’t come a knockin’. Beggin’ your pardon, sir.’

Wild took a swig of ale, wiped his mouth with his gloved wrist, and examined the room. Yes, he thought, the tapster was right. He had relied on fear and intimidation to cow the locals into speaking, but the strategy had had the opposite effect. He set the cup down hard, chiding himself inwardly and considering his next move, when the tapster folded his arms and winked.

‘But I’d be right willin’ to whisper a few words if you and your men saw fit to buy a few more throat wetters.’ He grinned again, a note of triumph in the expression. ‘What say you, General?’

‘Get him up,’ Colonel Gabriel Wild snapped, stepping back to allow a couple of his troopers to haul the hapless man to his feet. ‘He’s had long enough to sleep.’

The tapster, it transpired, went by the name of John Bray, and when Wild had dragged him over the ale-stained counter, the confidence had flowed out of him almost as quickly as the stream of piss down his leg.

That had irked Wild, the piss, for it had somehow found its way on to the upturned thigh protectors of his long boots, and though it would probably scrub clean, the mere sight of the liquid infuriated him. And he had hit Bray.

He had always intended to, naturally, for the man had had the temerity to attempt to extort money for what morsels of information he possessed. But the sight of the dark urine mark, and Bray’s sweaty jowls and the way his filthy fat hands grabbed at the colonel’s gorgeous clothing, had made something snap in Gabriel Wild’s mind. So Wild used his left fist for the punch. Instead of the stinging reprimand a gloved backhand might have been, Wild had employed his armour-clad hand, the one encased within the articulated steel gauntlet, rendering it more like a medieval mace than bone and flesh. John Bray did not even cry out. The blow had almost certainly broken his jaw, snapped his head back, and sent him sprawling in a heap amongst the mouldering threshings.

Now, as his men bolstered the lolling Bray, slapping him sharply back into consciousness, Wild inspected the blood spatters on his gauntlet, wrinkled his nose in disgust, and stared about the room. It had already emptied, save his own men. ‘Welch.’

One of the cavalrymen near the door met his eye. He was a tall young man with a curved nose and strawberry-blond hair. ‘Sir?’

‘Let’s wake this swine up.’ He jerked his chin in the direction of the counter. ‘Get back there and find a bucket.’

In a matter of moments, Trooper Welch reappeared carrying a wooden pail, water slopping over the rim in time with his loping step. He skirted round the side of the counter and strode directly up to Bray, though he addressed Wild. ‘Shall I, sir?’

Wild nodded silently.

John Bray woke with a start, his mouth flapping quietly at first, like a landed carp, before he let fly a great scream of pain and terror. He tried to raise a hand to his already hideously swollen jaw, but the pinioning grasp of the men at his flanks prevented any movement. He began to weep.

Wild stalked up to the frightened tapster. He knew the weeping was really a plea. A last ditch appeal for mercy, the high-pitched keening of a broken man. But instead the sound grated on him. Made his teeth itch and his spine tingle. For this was a man akin to Stryker. A gutter-born, grubby peasant of few scruples and even less grace. The mere sight of the pathetic toad, hanging limp from the troopers’ vice-like grip, seemed to make the colonel furious, and the stench of him made Wild positively enraged.

‘Now, sir,’ Wild said, and the mere sound of his voice seemed to make Bray wince. When he drew his broad-bladed sword, an acrid, eye-burning stink seemed to rise into his nostrils.

‘He’s pissed ’is fuckin’ britches again, Colonel!’ one of the troopers exclaimed in disgust.

Wild ignored the man, choosing simply to lift his sword, turning the glinting point in the air between his face and Bray’s. The wretched captive began to wail, and, interspersed with wracking sobs, a stream of panicked words tumbled from his ruined face.

Wild let the sword drop to the space just beneath Bray’s engorged chin. The tapster fell instantly silent.

‘As I was about to say,’ said Wild slowly, ‘I have neither the time nor the inclination to play silly games of cat and mouse. You will not
barter
information, Master Tapster. You will not offer me titbits as though I were your dog, and expect me to wag my damned tail. And I will not waste my time and energies battering the words out of you.’ He glanced at the troopers. ‘Turn him round.’

Bray screamed again, sensing some impending horror, but the soldiers were far too strong for his feeble attempts to squirm free. They forced him to bend over the counter and yanked Bray’s sopping breeches down to his pudgy ankles, and then, with direction from Wild, they kicked apart his thick legs so that he was utterly exposed.

Colonel Gabriel Wild stared down at Bray’s huge, trembling, lily-white buttocks. The repulsive man was babbling now, shrieking like a hamstrung cat, last shred of dignity long since vanished. Wild took no joy from the deed. He already had the stain of another man’s urine on his obscenely expensive boots, and the last thing he had wanted was to become spattered in the vile tavern-keeper’s blood – or worse – but it was the only means to a crucial end.

‘Now, Master Tapster,’ he began quietly, ‘you will cease your noise. The only time you will speak is when you are spoken to. Is that clear?’

The wounded man muttered something unintelligible. Wild raised his sword so that it scraped along the skin between Bray’s buttocks, the wobbling mounds of flesh tightening immediately at the touch.

Wild spoke again, his voice soft. ‘Please be aware, sir, that if you do anything other than that which I instruct,’ he applied some pressure to the blade, ‘I will thrust this tuck so far up your backside, it will knock out those rotten teeth.’

John Bray did as he was ordered after that. His jaw throbbed and his legs trembled, but he told Colonel Wild all he knew.

Two Miles West of Merrivale, Dartmoor,
29
April
1643

The man was an unassuming fellow to look at. Probably in his late twenties, of average height and plain features, with brown hair to match his brown coat and breeches. And yet, as he scampered out of the darkness, the eyes of thirty-seven red-coated infantrymen, a handful of Cornish soldiers, a plump, sandy-haired officer and a giant were fixed upon him as though he brought news of Christ’s second coming.

‘He bain’t there, sir,’ the man rasped breathlessly when he had reached the expectant crowd.

‘Who?’ Captain Lancelot Forrester asked, nonplussed. He might have been the senior officer present, but the messenger, a member of Anthony Payne’s small unit of Cornishmen, had addressed the giant. Forrester glared up at Payne instead.

‘S’blood, Mister Payne! Who were we due to meet? I have a right to know!’

The Royalist task force had covered the short but rugged journey between Peter Tavy and Merrivale during the last hours of the day and now, as midnight fast approached, they had reached the spot outside the little village that Payne had told him would serve as the rendezvous point. Except the person they were expecting to meet had not arrived.

Anthony Payne – all seven feet and four inches of him – loomed over Forrester like a great oak in the blackness, his silhouette cutting out what little moonlight there had been. ‘Come with me if you would, sir.’ He looked at the messenger. ‘You too.’

Before Forrester could respond, Payne strode further away from the road towards a nearby copse. The rendezvous was to be beside a vast, gnarled elm that climbed almost horizontally out of the roadside just west of Merrivale. The elm was centuries old, the keeper of a thousand secrets, and Forrester had to admit that it was a good place for a clandestine meeting. He left his shrunken company beneath its twisted boughs and, with the messenger in tow, scuttled after Payne.