Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles (55 page)

Chudleigh spurred clear of his staff officers to take up position on the left flank of his first line of infantry. He stared down at the smoke-wreathed forest choking the hill’s foot, and at the Cornish soldiers who spread out across the grass before it, shifting with admirable proficiency into recognizable lines of battle. There were not many; less, in fact, than he had expected, and he quickly realized that only the colours of Sir Bevil Grenville and Sir John Berkeley had so far emerged.

Chudleigh watched as a horseman galloped up the face of the hill towards him. He was in civilian dress, though the orange ribbon tied at his wrist spoke clearly of his allegiance, and he urged the heaving animal mercilessly on until it began to drift sideways as the incline proved too much. He slewed the froth-muzzled beast to a halt, slid off the saddle, and threw his reins to an infantrymen, deciding to climb the last few paces himself. ‘They have broken out of the lanes, sir,’ he rasped breathlessly, bending to brace hands on his leather-bound knees.

‘I can see that,’ Chudleigh muttered irritably.

The messenger lifted his head. ‘But that is not all, sir. They refuse to give fire.’

‘I heard artillery.’

‘Aye, sir. They fight in four columns, each with a brace of robinets, or the like. They fired those, then launched into a near run.’

Chudleigh frowned. His pulse quickened, though he was not sure why. The cheek began its dance once again, forcing him to clamp a hand hard across the right side of his face. ‘Without shooting?’ When the rider offered a rapid nod, he asked, ‘Then how did they manage to reach this far?’

‘Speed, sir. And they have the greater numbers in the wood. Our musketeers were forced to fall back. They give fire even now, sir, but it will not be long before the rest of the malignants reach the open ground.’ His face screwed into a look of embarrassment. ‘To tell it true, sir, I fear the men are unsettled. The enemy advance without returning fire. It is unnatural.’

Chudleigh drew a deep breath that made him feel light-headed, and sucked at his upper lip in thought. Hopton’s strange tactic had thrown him, he inwardly admitted, though it was surely irrelevant. He glanced at the messenger with new-found resolve. ‘Get back down there. Tell the gunners to wait until Hopton’s full force is mustered in the open, then flay the king’s men till there’s not a soul left standing.’

The messenger bowed, puffed out his cheeks in readiness for the next lung-bursting errand, and went to his horse.

Out the corner of his left eye James Chudleigh caught sight of a group of figures a little way along the ridge. Most were mounted, studying the scene around the forest, just as he was, but a couple were on foot. That in itself was not strange, except that one of them seemed to be tied by a short rope to a harquebusier’s saddle and the other was a woman. He went to investigate, pausing only to sear one last image of the lower slope on to his mind.

Yes, he thought, he could not lose.

Sir Bevil Grenville’s division was formed up on the open ground.

The Cavalier knight stood at the head of his pikes with Payne at his side, careful to be a conspicuous spearhead for the men to follow. To their right the column’s skirmishing musketeers, still forbidden to fire, formed into a single body led by Sir John Berkeley.

Grenville turned to face his troops, blade held high. The bristling forest of ash and steel erupted in a low, spine-chilling cheer. They swayed as one, shimmering like a vast shoal of fish, and jolted forward, the massed pike block finally unleashed on ground to which they were suited. The pikemen had seethed down in the lanes, rendered ineffective by the terrain and by an enemy who stayed well away from the killing tips, but out here, on open ground and gathered en masse, they were lethal. They lumbered up the steep slope, spurred on by the relentless thrum of drums, protracted lines of musketeers keeping pace at the flanks. Sergeants bawled oaths of threat and encouragement, waving partisans, pole-axes, and halberds high, ensuring their charges understood that to fight was safer than to desert.

Captain Stryker, with the musketeers at the side of Grenville’s huge human hedgehog, felt every muscle and sinew in his scarred body tense. He marched to battle yet was forbidden to fire. The immediate threat from the Roundhead musketeers had diminished now, thankfully, for they seemed to have pulled back to join the main body of men standing on the high summit, but it remained a terrifying prospect to stroll into the face of the enemy without first softening their spirits with flying lead.

‘Always knew I’d die with a gun in me ’and,’ a voice droned from Stryker’s blind side. ‘Just didn’t realize I wouldn’t be allowed to use the fuckin’ thing.’

Stryker smiled, more due to the knowledge that William Skellen was with him than to the tall sergeant’s sardonic commentary. A constricted sound emerged from beyond Skellen, as though someone stifled a sneeze, and Stryker looked across to see Simeon Barkworth chuckling.

He opened his mouth to speak, but never heard the words. They were obliterated by a bone-fracturing explosion a hundred and fifty paces up the slope. The first of Parliament’s cannons had fired.

The whole of Grenville’s division seemed to stagger back a step, shrinking and wincing as if each man believed he could keep his head if he could retract it far enough into bunched shoulders. In the sudden, muffled aftermath, Stryker peered around, searching for casualties. He heard the screams before he saw the wounded, somewhere away to his right, and it was then that he saw another full division of men, frantically forming up on the grassy slope. Hopton’s column, attacking from the south, on Grenville’s right flank, had made it to the upper section of the hill, only to be summarily smashed by rebel artillery.

Stryker shook his head clear, the silence quickly replaced by a high-pitched ringing, only to hear Grenville’s voice bellowing at the head of his men. It did not matter that he was still unable to discern the order, for he was immediately swept up in the motion as the Royalist division rumbled into life again.

‘By God’s blessed kneecaps,’ he heard Forrester intone nearby. ‘We’re marching into the bloody ordnance.’

Sure enough, the rest of the iron tubes, arranged like a line of black toads, squat and ugly on the steep slope, belched into life. Some were double-charged, and they roared their anger with tongues of bright flame and billowing smoke that filled the air with the stench of rotten eggs. They hurled their iron lumps down the face of the hill to tear a swathe of gore through the flinching Cornishmen.

To Stryker’s left marched the divisions commanded by Slanning and Basset, and they seemed to be taking the brunt of the volleys’ ire. He saw three shots race down the slope, one flying overhead, but the others sailing true, plucking men out of line like a child tossing aside his toys.

‘Can we shoot yet, sir?’ the tremulous voice of one of Stryker’s musketeers reached him from the redcoats at his back.

He twisted back angrily. ‘No you damn well can’t, Godwin! Not till I say. Sergeant Skellen?’

‘Aye, sir,’ Skellen replied smartly.

‘Any man shoots, stick your halberd up his arse.’

‘Sir.’

Three of the cannon were aligned directly with Grenville’s block of pikes, and they each spewed forth smoke as their charges ignited. The men braced themselves for impact, step faltering in that horrific moment of expectancy. And what a short moment it was, thought Stryker, remembering the high, looping cannonades that had marked his last battle, Hopton Fight. There, the slope had been gentler, and the distance far greater, so the balls had been sent in high arcs to plummet on to their targets. Here the range was tiny and the guns were aimed directly down the steep descent, so that they scythed the air only feet above the tall grass.

One of the balls fell short, skipping up off the turf like a flat stone skimming a lake, and took a musketeer’s leg clean away in a fine red mist. The others hit home, flattening files of pike, pulverizing the men it hit and causing the survivors to scream their terrors to the hills. Sergeants moved immediately in, snarling their practised threats so that the tight formations did not bend or break. Men wiped away blood and bone and brain from their ashen faces with trembling hands. The regimental preachers strode across the rear ranks, bellowing prayers and encouragement at men who heard only their own hearts beating.

Up ahead, perhaps eighty paces now, the gunners pushed more spherical iron balls into their barrels, stepping away for their crews to set to work.

‘We’ll never reach them!’ a near sobbing man shrieked in querulous panic.

‘Yes we will, you chicken-hearted bastard!’ another snarled at him, clipping his ear with a swift slap.

Stryker looked back up at the big guns. The snarling man was right, they would close the distance eventually, but at what cost?

The ordnance lit up once again, each one firing from left to right so that the slope erupted in a great wave, the fieldpieces careening backwards on their split-trail carriages.

The air pulsed. More men died, another corridor was ripped open in Grenville’s dense block of pike. Stryker stepped over a man, wailing, inconsolable, begging for his mother. His fingers, stained deepest red, groped at the ragged stump that was once his leg, the limb obliterated below the knee by a bouncing round shot.

‘Jesu,’ Stryker whispered.

‘Bad business, sir!’ Skellen shouted above the screams.

Stryker looked at him, realizing the sergeant thought his blasphemy was for what he had seen. In fact, it was for what he was about to do. ‘Are you with me, Will?’

Skellen affected an amber grin. ‘Always, sir.’

Up at the high Parliamentarian position, Major-General James Chudleigh had reined in alongside his fellow major-general, Erasmus Collings, as the ferocious artillery burst to life. They exchanged pleasantries as briefly as possible. Chudleigh disliked the Earl of Stamford’s spymaster and knew the feeling was mutual. He shifted his gaze to the pair of prisoners.

‘They seem rather distracted.’

Collings raised a hairless brow. ‘One is a spy, and has been soundly beaten, sir. The girl has been walked.’

Chudleigh looked up from the dishevelled captives. ‘Walked?’

Collings’s face was expressionless as his hard little eyes met those of the rebel commander. ‘A method to extract confessions from those suspected of witchcraft.’

James Chudleigh did not consider himself a bad man. Stubborn, yes, fractious on occasion, but not wicked. And yet in his frustration with Cecily Cade he had handed her over to Collings in the hope that his threats, perhaps even his evil, coal-pebble eyes, would frighten her into giving up her secrets. He had not, it seemed, fully considered the implications of such a decision.

‘Christ on His cross, Erasmus, I asked you to interrogate her. If it comes out that we tortured a woman as we would torture a damned warlock—’

For answer, Collings beckoned one of his companions over with a wave. He was a dark-clothed man of average height, with straight, shoulder-length auburn hair, a brown beard flecked with silver, a huge, hooked nose and teeth that were so large they might have better suited the horse on which he perched.

‘Osmyn Hogg,’ he said smoothly. ‘God’s chief witch-finder, sir.’

Chudleigh offered a brusque nod. ‘Well?’

Hogg waited as a new barrage of cannon fire reached its world-shaking crescendo, clearing his throat as the thirteen explosions began to ebb. ‘She is your prisoner, Major-General, of course. But she is also charged with making a vile compact with Satan.’

‘So you see,’ Collings interrupted swiftly, ‘I am at liberty to employ the most expedient methods in this case.’

‘And did she talk?’

Collings threw Hogg a venomous glance before shaking his head. ‘No, sir. Not yet.’

Chudleigh gazed down at the girl. She looked gaunt and weak, but news of her continuing obstinacy eroded what little compassion he had been prey to. ‘Are you ready to watch your precious king’s men die, Miss Cade?’

Just then a loud murmur swept along the deep lines of infantrymen ranged to the group’s right. It was as if each of the five thousand men had drawn a simultaneous breath, easing it out upon a few whispered words. Chudleigh looked across, seeing that something had indeed set them to feverish gossip, and he was about to berate their officers for allowing such behaviour in the ranks, when he noticed one of the sergeants gesticulating frantically at something down on the slope with his halberd.

Chudleigh wrenched his horse’s head so that it turned to face Stratton Hill’s western slope. His gaze raked across the grass, over some of his more advanced musketeers, and to the line of smoking fieldpieces. Men scuttled around them, hurried to and fro like ants about a nest, and he expected them to belch forth at any moment. Except they did not belch. Indeed, they did nothing at all. Now they were silent.

‘Dear God,’ he whispered.

Stryker and Skellen had burst from Grenville’s increasingly ragged division and sprinted towards the line of artillery pieces that had punished them so severely.

At first Stryker had not known what exactly he was going to do, but one thing was certain, the guns needed to be taken out of the fight. He had thrown his musket to the nearest man, for speed was crucial, and bolted free of Berkeley’s silent detachment, bounding up the hill as fast as his aching legs would allow. Even as he ran, he considered the foolishness of the idea, wondering what exactly two men could do against thirteen cannon and their crew, but then more thumping steps could be heard behind and he risked a brief glance over his shoulder to see twoscore redcoats careening in his wake. They were not just his men either, but Forrester’s as well, his old Brother of the Blade leading the way.