Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles (56 page)

And then they were at the guns, swords drawn, banshee cries shrill and demonic, and the gunners were already on the back foot, stunned and terrified by the sudden ferocious charge, as though they faced frantic-eyed berserkers from days of old. They panicked, began to run. Stryker hacked a man down with his big, basket-hilted blade, the expensive Toledo steel, commissioned for him by Queen Henrietta Maria herself, flashing through the man’s face as though he were made of silk.

He ran to the nearest cannon, kicked another gunner away in case he was attempting to fire the iron beast one last time, and immediately had to crouch behind the barrel as a musket-ball pinged off one of the big wheels. But the ball landed at his feet, barely dented, and he realized the shot must have come from a great distance, for it had been almost powerless when it reached him. He rose to his feet, stared into a dense patch of smoke until the breeze shifted it, and there, midway between the ordnance line and the bustling crest, he spotted the closest team of rebel musketeers.

‘They’re too far away!’ he shouted to anyone who would listen. ‘Keep going, lads! Send the bastards back!’

The men responded, hacking and bludgeoning their way through the bravest – or slowest – of the gun crews, suddenly confident that the enemy marksmen were too far out of range to pose any real threat.

Skellen was nearby. Stryker could not see him at first, for the area around the cannons was thick with powder smoke, but he heard the sergeant’s roar, a battle-cry borne in the gutters and taverns of Gosport and honed on the bleeding lands of Saxony. Barkworth was there too, screaming unintelligible Gaelic curses at men who must have thought a true demon puckrel had come to claim their souls for the underworld.

‘Spread out!’ Forrester’s tone, strained with battle but still distinct in its educated cadence, reached him through the stinking fog. ‘Take the rest of the guns, damn you! Take them all!’

Stryker repeated the call, realizing they needed all thirteen pieces decommissioned before Hopton’s divisions could gather pace, but he quickly saw that the last vestiges of the enemy crews were gone, high-tailing it up towards the safety of the summit. He stopped, heaving in a few massive breaths to steady his heart and mind. The guns were captured, just seconds after they had fired their last, and he jabbed his bloody sword at the air, a banner to which the tattered Royalist columns could flock. And there, no more than fifty paces away, he saw the huge ensign of Sir Bevil Grenville surge through the acrid mist like the prow of a warship.

The king’s men were coming.

James Chudleigh slapped a hand against his right cheek to suppress the tick. Somehow it would not relent, the skin flickering madly beneath his eye.

‘They have captured the ordnance, sir,’ an aide murmured at his side. ‘Without a shot fired.’

Chudleigh rounded on the unfortunate man. ‘God’s precious blood, man, I can see that!’

The cheek twitched ever more violently.

‘No matter,’ Major-General Collings, still beside Chudleigh on his smaller mount, intoned nonchalantly. ‘They must now march up hill into a force more than twice their size. It is lunacy, and they will lose.’

But Chudleigh was staring down at the advancing Royalists, his heart beginning to rattle inside his chest. He ignored the tick, leaving it to shiver wildly, and hurriedly drew an ornate spyglass from his saddlebag. He trained it on the lower slopes, taking in the overrun cannon and the bodies of pike and musket that were now this side of those impotent emplacements. And then he shifted the glass further back, towards the tree line, and took in the men and colours that still spewed from the hidden lanes. ‘Hopton is down there.’

‘General?’ Collings prompted warily.

Chudleigh lowered the glass, glanced across at the skeletal face with its jackdaw eyes. ‘Only Grenville’s men have advanced beyond our guns. The rest of their pitiful little army still muster against the trees.’ He thrust the glass back into the saddlebag and slammed a fist into his opposite palm. ‘He has overreached himself, gentlemen, and we can destroy him while his friends dither.’

The tongue-lashed aide found his voice again, clearing his throat awkwardly. ‘Sir, we will let them come to us, yes? Dash themselves on our steady ranks. They do not have the numbers to trouble our position, and soon your father will return with our horse.’

But the young major-general was not listening. Instead his gaze was fixed firmly upon the most advanced of the Royalist ensigns, a gigantic blue standard cutting its way through the drifting smoke. ‘That is Grenville. The popinjay leads his cankerous whoresons ahead of the rest. Thinks he can cow our men by holding his fire.’

‘He’s probably run out of powder,’ Collings interjected levelly.

Chudleigh shook his head. ‘It is a knavish trick!’ The twitch had gone, and Chudleigh inwardly thanked God for the sign. ‘Believes he can best me on his own, does he? By God I will show him.’

Chudleigh raked his spurs viciously along his mount’s flanks so that the beast lurched into action, and he steered it right to the edge of the flat summit, cantering along the front of the first of his two vast lines of infantry. This first line was filled with the best men of Devon. His own pikes were here, and those of Sir John Northcote, and even Merrick’s redoubtable greycoats. Perhaps three thousand in all, stretched into a line that covered the better part of nine hundred paces.

He looked for Northcote’s banner and galloped directly towards it.

‘My pikes, Sir John!’

Northcote, a dour fellow with tightly trimmed whiskers, clear blue eyes and close-cropped hair that did not show beneath his hat, offered an uneasy frown. ‘Shall we not simply wait for them to struggle up the slope, sir?’

‘No, sir, we shall not. I would take my pikes down to thrash Grenville while he is without support. Some of your men too, and a body of the greys.’ He peered back down at the foremost Royalist division, gauging their strength quickly. ‘He has five or six hundred there, so I will take a thousand.’

‘But, sir—’ Northcote began to protest.

‘But nothing, sir!’

Chudleigh wrenched his horse away, leaving the colonel no option but to obey, and stood high in his stirrups as his detachment took shape a little way down the slope. Of the thousand, the vast majority were pikemen, with a hundred or so musketeers in support, and they shuffled dutifully into place.

When they were ranged before him, he drew his sword, revelling in the rasp as it cleared the scabbard’s throat, and pointed the keen tip down at the steadily marching foe. ‘Let us flense these savages,’ he bellowed so that the men in the packed ranks could hear, ‘and toss their remains into the sea!’

‘
Huzzah
!’ came the cry, rippling through the bristling new body of men.

‘Take heart! These are not your countrymen. They are dirty, Pope-loving Celts! Heathen men, no better than those the Lionheart crushed so many years ago. Now take up his legacy! Complete his journey! God will reward every man here!’

The men cheered again, but this time the cry was taken up throughout the entire rebel force, surging across the hill’s summit like a rain-swollen tide. They stabbed their pike staves up at the clouds, thousands of points of light glimmering from thousands of blades.

Major-General James Chudleigh slid down from his horse, tossed the reins to a waiting officer, and strode out to lead his men to battle.

Stryker saw the Parliamentarians move off the crest, slowly at first, but picking up speed with every pace as they hit the hill’s steep incline, and he knew the real killing was about to start. The skirmishing – so bitter and drawn out – had been no more than the day’s opening exchange. Here, on this grassy slope between the dense forest and the flat crest, the land would become a charnel house.

He retrieved his musket and returned to Grenville’s column as it began to fan out, pikes on the left, muskets to the right. Stryker looked back, hoping to see the rest of Hopton’s army, and there, swarming up from the tree line like God’s own host, came the remaining trio of Royalist columns. But they were too far back to influence the fight, at least for the moment, and Grenville’s men were on their own.

‘It’s Chudleigh!’ he heard someone call. ‘That’s his banner!’

Sure enough, a figure in fine, gleaming armour paced confidently at the very front of the Parliamentarian advance.

And then Stryker’s attention switched to his own side, as another lone figure scampered out to stand before the Royalists, waving his sword in sweeping arcs above his head. A giant soon joined him, shielding his body from any in the closing rebel ranks that might try a lucky shot, and Stryker realized the smaller man was none other than Sir Bevil Grenville.

An eerie hush descended upon the Royalists then, as the Cornishmen, so grizzled and ferocious, gazed upon the man they revered above all others.

‘It is a day for swords!’ Grenville brayed. ‘A day for fire, and for blood! A day for death! God is with us, my brave lads! Long live the King!’

The Cornish soldiers howled their support, screamed their obscenities, and surged up the hill with an ever-quickening pace. But their cries were quickly enveloped by those coming from higher up the slope, for the oncoming Roundhead force was nearly at full charge now, pikes beginning to lower from their shoulders, points level with the heads and chests of the king’s fighters. The sound of Chudleigh’s pikemen was deafening, overwhelming. There were just so many of them. Snarling and spitting and cursing and raging.

At once the cry went up from the Royalist side to charge their pikes, and down they came like a forest of felled trees, jerked from their breastplate rests to train upon the enemy.

Stryker watched, catching sight of his redcoats within the bristling mass. This was not the protective posture his men had employed to such good effect against Wild’s slashing harquebusiers. They were no longer the barrier to keep horsemen at bay. No more a screen for the musketeers. This time they were the aggressors, the chargers, the killers. He silently wished them godspeed.

On the enemy flank the Roundhead musketeers slowed their run, formed up into a wide line, and fired a huge volley, flames swelling across their front. It should have been devastating, should have torn Grenville’s densely packed pike block to fleshy ribbons, but the king’s men moved too fast and most of the balls whistled into the rearmost ranks as they passed by. The front ranks were safe. They levelled their own spears to meet Chudleigh’s, lowered their chins, braced their shoulders, tightened grips, and swept into the Parliamentarian
battaile
.

The pikes stabbed in, pressed irresistibly onwards by the men at their butt ends, eleven or more feet further back. They crossed in the air, forming a tangled latticework of wooden shafts. And then they crunched home. The sound was horrific. The clang of metal overlaying the wet slap of punctured flesh, like a cleaver slammed into a butcher’s block. Some of the pikes found immediate flesh, driven hard into faces and necks. Most missed, drilled between the shoulders of the men opposite, suddenly entwined with the myriad other staves that were now locked amongst the bodies of the men they had meant to kill.

And then the strange, low grunt of the push of pike rose up from the press. Stryker knew it well, had heard it so many times before. After the initial smashing, murderous collision, the opposing blocks would stall, for their pole-arms were entwined with those of the enemy and their sword hands were concerned only with maintaining a grip on the pikes. It was now a time for brute strength and courage. The first ranks, those fortunate enough to have been missed by the initial barrage of slicing steel tips, would lean forward, digging heels into the earth like so many mules, thrusting shoulders into the press, driving every ounce of strength they could muster along the length of ash. Many of the pikemen would have spent countless summers hauling on ropes, representing their respective hamlets in the tug-o’-war with neighbouring communities. The push of pike was a similar experience, only in reverse. Men groaned and cursed, they spat and they screamed and they gnashed teeth and heaved until their hands and arms and backs and thighs were fit to burst. And for a moment, one fabulous moment, it seemed as though Grenville’s famed Cornishmen would achieve the unthinkable and break through the far larger rebel block. Chudleigh’s Devonshire force rocked backwards, stunned by the ferocity of the Royalist press and aware that their musketeers had fired too soon. They took a step to the rear, then another, and it seemed as though they might cut and run, but the men behind leaned in, willing them on, shoving them roughly back down the slope.

Sheer momentum took over. The weight of the larger Roundhead
battaile
, combined with the fact that they were fighting downhill, seemed to turn the tide. It was slow to begin with, Grenville’s hardy Cornish troops digging in, crouching low, grinding back up at them, but the powerful rebel drive staggered forth for the first time since pikes had crossed, and the entire Royalist body shunted backwards, unable to resist.

Stryker looked on in horror as Chudleigh’s broad, deep
battaile
began to bow, its flanks curving round the smaller pike block, threatening to completely encircle it. But then he heard a new voice bellow out above the din of battle. It was sharp and strong, stentorian and confident. He looked to his right, only to see Sir John Berkeley step out of line. The man commanding Grenville’s muskets, dressed superbly in a suit of yellow, with open-sleeved doublet and embroidered buff-coat, cupped a hand to the side of his bearded mouth and shouted again. Stryker heard him properly this time, and moved with the rest of the musketeers, the entire body wheeling round from the Royalist right to face the locked push.