Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles (33 page)

Stryker moved to take a look for himself. The mouth of the tunnel was less than a man’s pace across. ‘It’s narrow.’

Gardner nodded. ‘See now why I said your man would have to be a littl’un?’ The Welshman had been adamant that whoever was chosen would have to be slight of frame. Stryker had been bewildered by the request, but had acquiesced all the same. ‘On land your brawn keeps you alive. Down there it’ll see you dead.’ Gardner glanced up at Skellen. ‘Imagine old spider-limbs crawlin’ down there, boy.’

‘P’raps not, eh?’ Skellen grunted.

‘I am to go,’ Barkworth’s voice, ordinarily a virtual whisper, croaked from the edge of the cist. ‘I am the smallest,’ he looked at Skellen, ‘and the bravest. Besides, I cannot stay on this fucking tor any longer.’

Gardner beckoned him to the centre of the stone circle. ‘I’ll take you as far as the woods, then you are on your own. It’ll be risky once you’re out in the open, boy, for the badger’s eyes are everywhere, but if you move with guile you might just make it beyond the hills.’

‘Shall we?’ Barkworth said quickly, perhaps before he could think too deeply upon the matter. He moved around the cist, shaking the hand of each of his comrades, before returning to the tunnel’s entrance and following the hermit to his knees. ‘Launceston, then.’

Stryker stared down at him through the gloom, even as Gardner vanished from view. ‘Aye. Head due west, but beware of Tavistock. We cannot know which side holds it.’

‘I’ll have a care, sir.’

‘All’s well, then. Pick up the road west of Tavistock. It will take you all the way home. Find Colonel Mowbray. Get some men out here with all haste.’

Barkworth began to slide into the tunnel. ‘And if Mowbray refuses?’

‘Then fetch Captain Forrester.’

Simeon Barkworth flashed a final, sharp-toothed grin, and was gone.

CHAPTER 13

The Barn Near Gardner’s Tor, Dartmoor,
6
May
1643

Witch-finder Osmyn Hogg slurped steaming pottage from his wooden spoon. Some of it dripped on to his cloak, congealing in a mealy blob, and he hurriedly rubbed at it with a sleeve.

‘Here, sir,’ José Ventura leapt up from his place at the little fire outside the building’s double doors. ‘I have cloth.’

Hogg waved the Spaniard away. ‘No matter, José. Sit.’

Ventura did as he was told, returning to his cross-legged position on the rotten log, but his face spoke of confusion. Hogg was not surprised, for Ventura had seen him fly into a rage for less than spilt pottage, but today he did not mind. Did not care for such trivialities. ‘I am sanguine, señor. Sit and finish your breakfast.’

Indeed, today Osmyn Hogg was in a positively buoyant mood.

The hanging had gone almost to plan. Not perfectly, he had to admit, for part of him had expected Stryker to be handed over as soon as Broom’s body ceased its thrashing, but some vestige of loyalty from his men was to be expected, he supposed. One thing that was not in doubt, however, was the imminent delivery of the fiend into Wild’s – and, by turns, Hogg’s – hands. Soldiers were rough men, hard and inured to fear, but, in Hogg’s experience, they were often remarkably Godly creatures. As if a life of fighting and killing, of plundering and whoring, made such men more sensitive than most to their lot in the afterlife. These were the kind of men who would not wish to harbour a witch.

It had been Hogg, of course, who had suggested Stryker as a potential collaborator to Otilwell Broom. The man had bled that night, screamed as Ventura and his needle had sought a witch’s mark Hogg knew would never be found, and, eventually, he had talked. He had admitted of his involvement with the men on the little tor. Had blurted information about their strength, their provisions, their strategy. He had even muttered something about a girl being trapped up there with the malignants. Stryker’s bitch, no doubt. And, simply to get the pain to stop, Broom had signed a piece of blood-spattered vellum that declared his compact with Lucifer. When Hogg had initially put his quill to the confession, Stryker’s was the only name he had thought to scratch, but Ventura had suggested they include the girl, and Colonel Wild had mentioned that a dwarflike beast marched with the king’s men. Both, Hogg had decided, would be worth adding to the pot, if only to bring a note of authenticity to the charge.

It was a shame, Osmyn Hogg inwardly accepted, that Broom should have to die in such a manner. Judging by the man’s hair and clothes, he had doubtless been a Godless rakehell, but he was no witch. The death, as with Hogg’s every thought since that fateful meal in Okehampton, came down to one thing only. One person.

‘Stryker.’

José Ventura glanced up from his piping bowl. ‘Señor?’

Hogg shook his head as though it were full of wasps. ‘Nothing.’ It had been a surprise even to him that he had uttered the word out loud. Such was the power the knave’s very name had over him, he supposed. He took another tentative sip of pottage, pushed the beads of barley about his mouth with his tongue, and swallowed slowly. ‘I said Stryker.’

Ventura looked at him, fleshy jowls tremulous as he nodded. ‘What of him, señor?’

‘He is an evil man, José.’

Ventura nodded again. ‘I know this, señor. You tell me of his cavort with witches.’

Hogg closed his eyes, throwing his mind back a decade to an unassuming little place called Podelwitz. ‘One witch in particular.’

Ventura sniffed derisively. ‘Germany full of such wenches.’

‘This one was English, José. She followed the armies as did we.’

‘You were priest then?’

‘I was,’ confirmed Hogg. ‘And I know what you must think. A whore, and nothing more. But she was so much more. A consummate seductress. Luring men to sin with her wiles.’ And what wiles, he thought, guiltily. He remembered catching her with the young novice, Jerome. Remembered walking into the lad’s chamber to see him thrusting and grunting at her naked, glistening behind. Remembered that he had grown instantly hard, unable to tear his gaze from her exquisite buttocks. And she had looked back at him then, glancing over her slender shoulder with the most coquettish of smiles, and shot him a wink that told him she could read his very mind.

Hogg swallowed thickly, though there was no pottage in his mouth. ‘She brought one of my novices to sin. To ruin in the eyes of God. Would have done the same to me had I not been strong in faith.’

Ventura peered at Hogg for a short time, expression contemplative. ‘He give you your limp?’

Hogg subconsciously put a hand to his hip, rubbing the area that still ached after all these years. Stryker, the witch-helping, faithless obstructer of justice, had shot him in the rump without so much as a second thought. The memory, the hatred, the need for vengeance rankled within the witch-finder even now. ‘Aye,’ was all he managed to say.

‘We will get him,’ José Ventura said matter-of-factly. ‘We will get him and he will swing.’

‘I pray so,’ Hogg said, and that was all too true. He had prayed for Stryker’s demise every night for eleven years. And now, on this bleak plain in a far-flung corner of England, justice would finally be done.

Inside the barn Colonel Gabriel Wild spoke soothing words to his big stallion. The troop’s horses had been stabled in here since the prisoner’s execution, and, though the place was now empty for them, the stench of old blood had clearly unsettled the flighty beasts.

Christ, he thought, but there had been a lot of blood. Broom had squealed like a stuck boar, the blubbery Spaniard had grinned like a hideous ghoul, Hogg had kept a face of stone, and the floor and walls had been stained crimson. But at least Broom had talked. He had signed Hogg’s damned confession, pleasing the witch-hunter, and, more importantly, he had confirmed that morale in Stryker’s camp was at a low ebb.

‘We’ll go in soon,’ Wild said.

Welch, the dragoon captain sent by Collings, was seeing to his own mount nearby. He left the beast and went to stand at Wild’s flank. ‘Sir?’

Wild stared at the pinch-faced dragoon. ‘I said we will attack soon, Captain.’

Welch frowned. ‘Mister Hogg believes they will surrender of their own accord.’

‘Then Mister Hogg is a fool,’ Wild sneered. ‘He believes they’ll stroll down that bloody slope like reproached children.’ He chuckled at the thought. ‘But he forgets that I have faced Stryker before. He is a swash-and-buckler out of the classic mould, as are the men at his command. Mark me well, Captain, there will be a fight before this is done.’

‘Then—’ Welch began, but his words trailed off to nothing.

‘Then what? Speak plain, sir.’

‘Then why did you allow him to hang the prisoner, sir?’

Wild considered the question for a moment. ‘Because the prisoner signed a confession stating that he is a witch, and that puts him under Hogg’s justice.’

‘But surely you do not believe—’

Wild held up a hand for silence. ‘Hogg carries Collings’s authority, Captain, which means he may act as he wishes within reason. I have no idea why he is so bent on smoking Stryker from his lair, but his methods can only aid my cause. Broom confessed to being a messenger for the malignants. He was to ride to Launceston for help. Which means?’

‘Which means they are desperate,’ Welch replied. ‘They do not believe they can hold out much longer.’

‘Precisely,’ Wild said cheerfully, leaving one hand on his mount’s thick neck and resting the other on the hilt of his sword. ‘Hogg believes they will capitulate. I do not. But I do suspect the presence of a witch-catcher will weave disquiet into their ranks, and that, in turn, can only soften their resolve.’

‘And soon we will have ordnance,’ Captain Welch added, understanding.

Wild nodded firmly. ‘And soon we will have ordnance. And those guns will pound Stryker’s nest till there is nothing left, forcing him out into the open, where we will cut down that bastardly gullion and his motley followers and take back the wagon.’

The horse, a big, skewbald gelding, announced its entrance with a thunderous snort through flared nostrils spattered in foam. Its rider, a man of perhaps twenty years of age, with a wispy blond beard and pale eyes that seemed too close together, was not a typical soldier, for his clothes were nondescript and he bore nothing to betray his allegiance. Yet as he cantered along the once narrow forest path, now beaten broad by the comings and goings of Wild’s cavalry, the words he bellowed secured his safe approach.

‘Parliament! General Collings!’

Gabriel Wild had only just stepped into the clearing outside the barn. He was secretly pleased for the commotion, for it excused him from exchanging pleasantries with Hogg and Ventura, who squatted by their small fire, and thrust his way through the gathering men to greet the newcomer. ‘What news?’

The rider drew up amid a spatter of mulch, snatching off his hat. ‘I come from Major-General Collings, sir.’

‘So I gather,’ Wild responded dryly.

‘Or rather,’ the rider said, sliding briskly from the saddle and handing his reins to one of Wild’s troopers, ‘I am with the ordnance train. My name is Penny, Colonel. Lieutenant Thomas Penny.’

Wild felt his pulse quicken. ‘The guns are close?’

Penny nodded. ‘Not a day hence, sir. Gun Captain Laws bade me warn you of his impending arrival.’

‘I was told you had two pieces.’

‘Aye, sir. A pair of solid falconets. Small but steady, sir.’

Wild sucked at his top teeth. A falconet was hardly ideal. They were small fieldpieces, requiring a crew of just two, with a two-inch bore and shot weighing no more than one and a quarter pounds. But, for all that, he did not face castle walls here. The obstinate tor might appear fortress-like, but there was no real keep, nor moat, or cannon. All that was required of his new artillery was that it cow the Royalists into submission. Keep them hemmed in at the summit or drive them on to the plain, he did not care which. ‘All to the good,’ he said after a short time. ‘My compliments to Mister Laws, and can you not ask him to make more haste?’

Penny pursed his thin lips. ‘They’re still heavy old things, sir. A team of dray horses draws each gun.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘Gun Captain Laws would have it here in a trice if he could, but it takes time to negotiate this damnable moor.’

Wild grunted his disapproval. ‘Then tell him I anxiously await his safe arrival, Lieutenant.’

‘Naturally, sir.’ With that, Lieutenant Penny clambered back on to his mount. The skewbald gave a huge whicker that sounded more like a roar and scraped at the churned earth with a filthy-fetlocked front hoof. Penny lifted his hat, dipping his head in a tight bow. ‘Till the morrow, Colonel.’

Gardner’s Tor, Dartmoor,
6
May
1643

‘He can swive ’imself, sir.’

Stryker’s rather informal council of war sat along the edge of the tor, facing the woods to the north-west and the enemy camp within. The big barn was heavily obscured by a forest canopy that seemed to grow more dense with each passing day, but the grey smudge of its stone walls was still visible, as were the figures in silver and brown who milled about its edges.

‘Well I appreciate the sentiment, William,’ replied Stryker, responding to Skellen’s proposed answer to Colonel Wild’s ultimatum, ‘but I cannot be held responsible for your deaths.’