Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles (32 page)

‘No.’

The blue eyes narrowed. ‘The suggestion of witchery is a powerful brew, boy.’

Stryker thought of his company. The men that had fought alongside him for so long, endured so many hardships, spilled so much blood. ‘They will not turn me in.’

Gardner nodded, his attention returning to the hawthorn. ‘Then there’ll be more fighting. Except this time you’ll lose.’

‘I know what you’ll say,’ Stryker responded quickly. ‘They have dragooners now, meaning we’re sore outnumbered.’ He stared up at the high tor, the natural fortress squatting on its flat summit. ‘But they will struggle to chase us off this hill, nevertheless. Our supplies are good for another few days, and they cannot keep us from the river, lest they wish to brave a hail of lead.’

‘No no no, boy,’ Seek Wisdom Gardner retorted, ‘I wasn’t about to say anythin’ o’ the sort. Not about dragooners, leastwise.’

‘Oh?’

The old man scratched at a blob of green paste that had congealed on his beard, and leaned close. ‘Guns, boy. They got cannon comin’.’

It was as though Stryker had been punched in the guts. ‘You jest.’

‘Why would I?’

‘You’re certain?’

Gardner winked. ‘Certain as I am that Archbishop Laud used to suck—’

Stryker held up a staying hand. ‘If you say witch’s teats, I’ll—’

‘I was going to say Strafford’s balls.’

Stryker could not prevent a smile, though the news was dire. ‘Do you know what kind?’

Gardner pursed his lips as he considered the question. ‘The usual kind, boy. Low hangin’, I shouldn’t wonder, and shrivelled like a couple of dried plums.’

Stryker glowered. ‘The cannon, Seek Wisdom!’

The Welshman shook his head rapidly. ‘No, boy, I couldn’t discover that particular morsel. But they’re expected in a short while.’

Stryker thought about that. The terrain was treacherous all across the moor. Hills one mile, woodland the next, interspersed by valley and bog. It had been difficult enough dragging a cart across the inhospitable land, let alone a piece of ordnance. ‘Which means they’re probably smaller pieces.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Gardner agreed.

‘Again you help us, Seek Wisdom.’

The bony man shrugged. ‘Like I said before; I don’t hold with either side in this scrap. But I like you, boy.’ He looked directly upwards. ‘Isn’t that right, Lord?’

‘Then you have my gratitude once again.’

‘Besides, the badger is in league with a witch-catcher now.’

That surprised Stryker. ‘In my experience, priests are ever too eager to hunt witches.’

Gardner’s big blue eyes fixed on a point some distance away. ‘I dislike zealots, boy. You know that. It is zeal that chased me here, chased my friends to the New World. Witch hunts are merely another form of zeal. A way for powerful men to control the weak by stupefying them with fear.’

‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ Stryker replied, quoting Hogg.

‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ Gardner repeated. ‘I’m sure God meant it. But let Him point the evil-doers out. Witch-finders are but men, and they must be seen to be proficient in their work, boy. So they accuse the most vulnerable. Those easily blamed, and never missed. They are the worst kind of men; mean, merciless, and cruel. If the badger and his tin-heads are allied to such a fellow, then I am allied to you.’

Stryker nodded his thanks just as a thought struck him. ‘We have food here, Seek Wisdom. Not much, but something to fill your belly better than leaves. Thankfully plenty was taken from Ilsington.’

‘Poor Ilsington,’ Gardner replied wryly.

‘Aye, well,’ said Stryker, embarrassed by Gardner’s sharp thrust. ‘Would you take victuals? Stay?’

‘I’ll eat, my boy, certainly.’ Gardner patted his inwardly curved midriff. ‘This stomach’s been growlin’ all too much of late. But stay? When I’ve just told you there’s ordnance on its way?’ He tutted theatrically. ‘I might be mad, boy, but I’m not insane.’

Stryker nodded his assent. The enigmatic former priest would leave again, melt back into the Dartmoor terrain like a dusk wraith. An idea came to him then, and he chided himself for not thinking of it sooner. ‘Will you take a message out, Seek Wisdom? Broom was my only hope of rescue.’

‘And Broom had his skin flensed,’ Gardner replied, quick as a pistol shot. ‘And then his neck was wrung like a quarrelsome bloody hen. No fear, boy, I’d rather stay unpricked and short-necked, if it’s all the same to you.’

‘But they would not see you, Seek Wisdom,’ Stryker pushed again. ‘Broom was on the road, but you would move in the shadows.’

Gardner’s head shook firmly. ‘I said no, boy, and that’ll be an end to it. Besides, I am too old to traipse off into Cornwall. I was a sprightly lad once,’ he chuckled ruefully, ‘but time is the ultimate traitor.’

There was an uncomfortable silence as a frustrated Stryker paced away, slumping down on a lichen-bright log a short distance along the riverbank. He watched the water meander past, aware of the company’s hopeless isolation.

‘But do you have a man willing to run the badger’s gauntlet?’ Gardner’s voice interrupted his thoughts after a while.

He looked across at the wizened hermit. ‘No, but I would have no difficulty finding such a man.’

Gardner’s eye twitched in his conspiratorial wink. ‘I said I would not take your message myself, boy. I never said I would not help another.’

Peter Tavy, Dartmoor,
5
May
1643

Forrester had ordered the dead buried quickly, eager to have the matter dealt with before the red kites could swoop to feast. They were interred in a lonely corner of the village churchyard. The local vicar had attended the ceremony, joined by a smattering of curious locals, and all had watched in solemn silence as soil was shovelled on to the eighteen waxen bodies. They had been enemies in life, only to share a grave in death.

Neither Forrester nor Payne had welcomed the delay, but such matters were entirely appropriate after so lethal a fight, and they had encouraged the men to take refreshment from the river and food from any local folk kind enough to offer.

‘What’ll become of me?’ the defeated Parliamentarian commander uttered meekly after the grim funeral. Lieutenant Reginald Jays had spent the night locked with his remaining dozen men in one of the rickety outbuildings of the Peter Tavy Inn. He had only been given the chance of sunlight for the burials, and that had been under the kestrel gaze of a squad of Forrester’s musketeers.

‘All depends how willingly you answer my questions,’ Forrester replied, strolling away from the burial site with the grey-coated officer on one flank and Payne on the other.

‘I’ll endeavour to do my best, sir.’

Forrester stopped. ‘Good. Well firstly, I should like to know why in hades’ name you did not encircle the inn.’

Jays lifted a gloved hand to smooth his tiny moustache. ‘I don’t follow, sir.’

‘And therein lays my question. Why did you blunder straight into our front, where we could easily make a stand?’ He was pleased, of course, not to have faced a more able foe, but men had died for the man’s incompetence, and that fact irked him.

Jays flushed, swallowed thickly, inspected his hose. ‘I—I cannot—’

Anthony Payne, looming over both officers, cleared his throat thunderously. ‘How old are you, Mister Jays?’

Lieutenant Jays peered up at Payne as a rabbit might stare at an eagle. ‘Near fifteen, sir.’

Payne looked at Forrester. ‘Seek no further for explanation, sir. It was no deliberate tactic.’

Jays was crestfallen. ‘It is my first command.’

‘Christ on His Cross,’ Forrester hissed angrily. ‘They send boys against us.’ He fixed the lieutenant with a caustic glare. ‘Which regiment?’

‘Merrick’s,’ Jays replied, sounding more like a rebuked child than a leader of men.

‘You’ve cost me dear, Mister Jays.’

Jays managed to meet the Royalist’s eyes. ‘But, sir, did you not win?’

Despite the prevailing sourness of his mood, Forrester felt his face crack in reluctant smile. ‘Impertinent whelp,’ he said, though without conviction. ‘You are now my prisoner, sir. As are your twelve disciples, and that causes me a problem, for I have neither the time nor vigour to waste on your keeping.’

‘You’ll free us?’ Jays asked hopefully.

Payne snorted his amusement.

Forrester shook his head. ‘I’ll do no such thing, Lieutenant. You’ll stay with me until you’re able to secure funds.’

‘Funds, sir?’

Forrester plucked the wide-brimmed hat from his head and fingered the bullet hole in its crown. ‘You owe me a new hat.’ He placed the damaged item back on his head, wincing as the hair moved around his scalped pate. He thanked God the musket-ball had not been a fraction lower.

‘Where do we march, Captain?’ Lieutenant Jays ventured.

‘West to Launceston,’ Forrester replied. There was no need to explain Payne’s imminent departure north to Stratton. ‘Where you will be clapped in irons, I do not doubt.’ He noticed Jays’s bottom lip quiver slightly. ‘But you are a gentleman, so have no fear.’

‘You’ll likely be offered the king’s commission,’ Anthony Payne put in.

Forrester nodded. ‘We need ever more men, Lieutenant Jays. Your best chance of liberty is to switch allegiance.’

Jays was taken aback. ‘But my honour, sir—’

Forrester dismissed the protest with a wave of his hand. ‘There is no honour in war, young man. The quicker you learn that, the longer you’ll live. But enough of this. You’ll come back to Launceston as my prisoner, and there you will be dealt with accordingly. Your presence will necessarily hinder our progress, so I would warn you that any trouble from you or your men will not be tolerated.’

With that, Forrester looked pointedly from Jays to Payne. The Parliamentarian stared up at the colossal Cornishman with dumbstruck awe. ‘Good,’ Forrester added, satisfied that his intimation had been understood.

‘Best get moving,’ Anthony Payne muttered. ‘Dusk soon.’

‘Right enough,’ Forrester agreed. ‘Let us cover a mile or two before dark, eh?’

Gardner’s Tor, Dartmoor,
5
May
1643

Twilight saw the now established routine play out. Stryker’s pikemen – pots, breastplates, and pikes stacked in the avenue – set about taking their familiar positions all around the higher parts of the tor. Some stood on the vast stacks at the very summit, others on the obelisks fringing the crest, and many on the smaller granite heaps further down the slopes. They were the lookouts, the men who would raise the alarm if an enemy advance was spotted. Down on the lowest climbs, and, to the south-east, around the breastworks made by the tumbledown village, Stryker’s musketeers stood in wait, staring out into the grey ether, occasionally blowing on cords of match to keep the crucial embers alive.

Yet, on the plain to the west of the tor there was new activity. Five men snaked, single file and silent, through the network of bushes and stone that pocked the area at the foot of the hill. Four of them were soldiers, boots thudding and weapons clinking in the deathly silence, but they were led by a cadaverous figure with the hair and beard of a pagan druid, the clothes of a beggar, and the name of a Puritan.

Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner had promised to show Stryker the secret of his ability to approach the tor unseen, for it would prove, he claimed, the way a message might be carried to the Royalist high command. Stryker had been incredulous, but he, Skellen, Burton, and Barkworth had followed the former priest into the darkness nevertheless.

After several minutes picking their way slowly over the perfidious terrain, Gardner came to a halt at a dense thicket of bracken. He glared, wide-eyed, at the four men in turn, raising a spindly finger to his lips to urge a complete hush. Thus satisfied, he eased his way into the undergrowth, parting the bracken at his waist. The rustle of foliage seemed unnaturally loud in the still night, and every man winced as he followed the path cut by the Welshman.

Stryker was last through the bracken, coming to a standstill at the thicket’s epicentre. To his surprise the ground here was cluttered with flat, pale stones. They were set in a wide circle, and he realized that this was no accident of nature. ‘What is this?’

Gardner’s blue eyes twinkled in the wan moonlight. ‘An ancient place,’ he whispered softly. ‘A secret of the old Britons, the ones the cursed English chased all the way into Wales and Scotland, and across the Tamar, of course.’

Burton was staring down at the stone circle. ‘Some kind of tomb?’

Gardner clicked his fingers. ‘You have it, boy. They call it a cist in these parts. But this is more than a tomb, I can assure you.’ With that, the hermit paced to the cist’s heart and dropped to a crouch, digging fingertips beneath a stone that was larger than the rest. In a flash he had prized the flat tablet of granite away from the earth, revealing a gaping patch of blackness. ‘Much more.’

Sergeant Skellen moved to take a look. ‘Well I’ll be a Tom O’Bedlam.’ He looked back at Stryker. ‘A tunnel.’

‘Goes off west,’ Gardner elaborated, pointing to the woodland that concealed Wild’s large barn. ‘Its twin hides in those trees. I’ll lead your man through.’