Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles (59 page)

Stryker surged on, moving to Skellen’s right again so that the sergeant could stand sentry in the spot where the world was all black to him. There was no time to reload his musket now, and he made to discard it and draw his sword, but a Roundhead musketeer was on him too quickly, and he was forced to duck below the heavy swipe of the burly man’s wooden stock. He drove his own firearm up into the man’s sternum, winding him, and reversed the cumbersome weapon, jabbing the stock at the man’s nose, breaking it with ease. The rebel staggered back a pace as Stryker swung it in a wide arc, wrenching his own shoulder muscles in the process but connecting with the musketeer’s temple. The man crumpled as though his entire skeleton had been sucked from his flesh.

The Royalists gushed onwards like water in a storm drain. Stryker slipped on a gelatinous patch of guts, pitched forwards and barrelled through a dazed pikeman’s legs, smashing them from under the hapless greycoat like round shot through a wattle fence.

The musket was gone, tumbled away in the fall, and he hauled his sword free as he stood. A pair of bearded, wild-eyed rebels came at him now, and, perversely, he found himself wondering if they were brothers, even as one of them went down under Skellen’s crushing halberd. The other, brandishing a frantic grin and a curved, scythe-like instrument that was probably adapted from an agricultural tool, lunged at Stryker, whipping the crescent blade left and right in heavy motions that might have been honed on Devon’s crops. Stryker swayed out of range of the first flurry, ducked under the next few, and parried the last, the powerful blow reverberating all the way up his arm. Just as he thought he might be overpowered by the thickset brawler, the man’s brown eyes widened in a look of utter surprise, and he slumped to his knees. Only when Stryker strode round him did he notice the bullet hole in the side of the man’s skull.

He paused to catch his breath and stretch his jarred sword arm. Everywhere he looked fights raged, duels between Royalist and Parliamentarian, officer and commoner, pikeman and musketeer. The rebel blocks, so tight and dense at the start of the day, had disintegrated into groups. The bravest died, the rest ran. The Parliamentarian army, huge, fresh, and confident, had been routed by the redoubtable Cornish. They had been clawed from the formidable summit by a force less than half their size, smashed and scattered like white ash in the Stratton breeze.

And Stryker felt strangely elated. Here, amid the screams and the filthy smoke, the blood-drenched grass and the clatter of flying lead on pike staves, he was happy. This was what he knew. Where he felt most at home. Some men knew how to grow corn. Others – like his long dead father – could turn a sheep’s grimy fleece into gleaming gold coins. But not Stryker. He knew how to fire a musket and wield a blade. He knew how to unhorse a cavalryman and deploy a pike block. He knew how to fight.

But the elation left him like wine from a punctured skin. Because, amid the mad, raging chaos of the battle, his single, gritty eye had caught sight of something – someone – he had not expected to see this day. It was the feather he saw first; tall, broad, black as a December night, quivering atop a gleaming helmet with the distinctive trio of face-guards worn by a harquebusier. Its owner was conspicuous, because on a hill crammed with infantrymen, he perched, proud and unflinching, on the back of a huge stallion. And that beast, snorting and mad-eyed, had a coat as black as the one beneath its rider’s armour corselet.

Stryker stared at the cavalryman for what seemed like a lifetime, the clamour of battle blurring and muffling as he stared over men’s heads and wavering pikes.

‘Wild!’ he bellowed. ‘
Wild
!’

The rider’s eyes, pale blue like nuggets of fine glass, seemed to twitch at Stryker’s call. He scanned the deep lines of men locked in bitter, private struggles until, in a moment that saw a slow smile form at the corners of his mouth, his cold gaze finally rested upon Stryker.

Stryker flicked his sword’s tip, beckoning Wild to him, knowing the pair had unfinished business. He braced himself for the cavalryman’s charge, to twirl away at the last moment or dive low to slice through the horse’s thundering fetlocks.

To his surprise no attack came. He stared at Wild, surprised and baffled in equal measure as the colonel carefully turned his mount away. And then he saw it. The rope, knotted at the back of Wild’s saddle. His eye traced its taut length until, in a single, gut-twisting moment, he saw the wretched man tied to its far end.

‘O Jesu!’

In the north-east corner of the hill two men waited impatiently for Wild’s return.

‘We must leave,’ Osmyn Hogg, witch-finder and reluctant Roundhead, hissed angrily when the colonel, prisoner in tow, steered his horse nonchalantly back from the southern part of the summit, where battle still raged. ‘These craven fools are done. Finished!’ He thrust out a finger, tracing it along the rear of the beleaguered remnants of the Parliamentarian army. ‘Soon there will be none left, and we will be prisoners.’

Wild shot him a disparaging look. ‘We have the horses, Master Hogg. Our escape will be swift when it comes.’ His voice became low, acidic. ‘Just wait a little longer, witch-catcher, and you will witness God’s own miracle.’

‘A miracle will be our survival,’ José Ventura, Hogg’s assistant, muttered.

Wild, the only soldier in the group, tore his horse round to face the corpulent Spaniard. ‘Then get your greasy hide out of my sight.’

Ventura bridled, and Hogg had to raise a calming hand for peace. He nodded to his servant and cast his gaze back to Wild. ‘He is right, Colonel. We should go. This is not our fight.’

Wild spat on the turf by his mount’s wide hooves. ‘A pox on you both! Go! Take yourselves down to Plymouth and catch the next ship to the New fuckin’ World, for all I care. But you will miss the one thing you pray for most.’

Hogg was frightened. Petrified. He had thrown in his lot with the rebel army, only to find himself stuck on this God-forsaken hill while he watched Lord Stamford’s mighty horde dash itself against Sir Ralph Hopton’s rocks. He wanted to flee this vile place. And yet he had seen that ensign. Stryker’s ensign, flown high above the men surging across the summit.

This was his chance. His one chance. It had been so long. He wanted to leave, but he knew he would stay.

Captain Innocent Stryker had worried for his protégé. When Burton had ridden into the darkness, he had fumed at the young officer’s insubordination, but when the lieutenant had failed to return, that anger had turned to concern. In the heat and blood and commotion of battle, he had pushed such thoughts from his mind, daring to hope that his second-in-command was somewhere safe, perhaps watching the shocking Royalist victory from afar.

But now all that hope had gone. Andrew Burton was indeed watching the battle, but he was not at all safe.

‘He goads you, sir!’ Sergeant Skellen had warned as the pair stabbed and slashed and kicked and punched their way through the melee to reach the casually trotting Wild. ‘Do not follow!’

Stryker knew it was a wise enough warning, for to break through to the land beyond the immediate fight was inviting trouble. That space at the rear of the remaining Roundhead line, towards the shallow escarpment that formed the northern slope of the hill, was still teeming with enemy soldiers, those waiting to see if the battle was truly lost or thinking to loot their own supply wagons. Some, he imagined, simply waited to offer surrender and plead for quarter. To dash into that area, Skellen pointed out, was to risk overreaching themselves, becoming cut off from the rest of Hopton’s still advancing force. Yet Stryker had seen Lieutenant Burton, tethered and led by Wild like an ox to slaughter, and he waved the sergeant’s protests away.

The pair waded across the carpet of inert flesh, of discarded pikes, spent muskets, and dented metal that swathed the hill above Stratton. Men lay where they fell, dead-eyed and slack-jawed, macabre marionettes piled on the grass by some unseen puppet master. All around them, rebel soldiers ran away, taking their chances with the open land to the north or the sheer slope to the east. Some, formed in small but courageous groups, fought on. The majority were beginning to surrender.

One man stepped into Stryker’s path having evidently decided to end the day in blood, jabbing at him with a partizan, the ornate blade at its head slicing towards his belly. Stryker blocked the blow with his sword before Skellen stepped out from the darkness of his left flank and cleaved the man’s face clean in half.

Four pikemen, lethal poles still in hand, spied the pair as they strode on, and moved to intercept them. Skellen went to engage the grimacing men, and battered the first’s pike aside with his halberd. He could not sever the killing tip because the pike’s cheeks – strips of steel riveted to the staff below the head – held it intact, but he was already inside the weapon’s killing range. The Roundhead released the pike as Skellen came at him, fumbling for his tuck, but the halberd’s billhook had chopped through his ankle in the blink of an eye, and he was on the ground before he realized what had happened. His comrades, hitherto so brave with their snarls, dropped their own pikes and ran.

A fat sergeant with tawny sash at his portly midriff, blood-spattered sword in hand, made a surprise lunge from Stryker’s right. The captain spun clear, parried the next blow, and kicked the sergeant in the guts, doubling him over. The fat Roundhead vomited, and Stryker opened the back of his skull with crimson steel.

Stryker pushed on, Skellen panting at his heels, and soon faced a braying musketeer. He made to check his advance, but slipped on a patch of blood, crunched on to a knee, and rolled haphazardly to his left. The move succeeded only in putting him at the feet of another enemy fighter, and he had to roll backwards this time to avoid the downward thrust of the man’s tuck. The point drove deeply into the soil, becoming stuck for an instant, and Stryker lurched up, cannoning into the man’s skinny waist with his whole weight. The pair crashed backwards in a chest-crushing tangle of limbs. Stryker found himself on top of the Parliament man, but his hands were pinned beneath the stricken Roundhead’s shoulders, so he slammed his head down, breaking the man’s long nose in a sickening explosion that sent a fine red spray up into Stryker’s eye. He rolled away even as the man screamed, for he was entirely blinded, and frantically rubbed at his eye with a gloved palm. When his vision returned, the Roundhead was silent, Skellen standing over him, halberd buried deep in his chest.

And then they were clear, punching through the last of the Parliament’s effective troops. Stryker realized that the reserve line, which he had spied during the throes of battle, had been routed and left the field.

‘There he is!’ Stryker pointed with his blade.

Sure enough, Wild’s loping horse casually tore up the grass at the tree line at the hill’s north-eastern edge, Lieutenant Andrew Burton in tow.

‘Here!’ Colonel Gabriel Wild called. ‘Witch-finder!’

Osmyn Hogg caught the pistol cleanly and set about arming it. His fingers fumbled as they worked. ‘We must do this quickly. They have overrun the entire army. Stamford is gone. Collings is away.’

Wild swore in exasperation. ‘Do you wish to see Stryker die? Do you?’

‘Aye.’

‘Then hold your damned nerve. I will cut him down and chop off his stones. Once he has looked upon them, bleeding in my palm, I’ll stick my blade in his heart and we will ride for Devon.’

‘What if—’

‘What if nothing,’ Wild snarled. He jerked his head at the men who dashed in confused anarchic groups all about the hill, Royalists in pursuit. ’We have no insignia. No field signs that anyone here will recognize.’ He patted his sword-hilt. ‘They’ll leave us for easier pickings.’

José Ventura picked his nose with his forefinger and inspected the produce. ‘You promised we hang him.’

Wild turned on him. ‘Do we have time for that, you swine-brained dolt? No, it must be over with quickly. You may go if you wish.’ He stabbed a thumb at his metal chest. ‘But I owe that bastard.’

‘We will stay,’ Osmyn Hogg intervened.

‘And if I fail?’ Wild asked warily.

Hogg patted the pistol. ‘I know what to do.’

The colonel grinned suddenly. ‘But I won’t fail.’

Stryker and Skellen reached the group at the tree line.

‘Wild!’

One of the horsemen turned at Stryker’s call. The man, dressed in fine cavalry armour, slid immediately down from the saddle and strode across the grass, a half-smile on his lips.

‘You humiliated me twice, Captain,’ Colonel Gabriel Wild said, jauntily enough, but his blade appeared in his hand as he spoke.

Stryker shrugged disinterest. ‘Perhaps you should think of becoming one of Stamford’s clerks.’

Wild’s amused demeanour slipped a touch as his face darkened. ‘The powder wagon and then your trickery at the tor. I promised to kill you.’

Stryker let his eye drift beyond Wild to the three horses. One of those beasts, riderless now that Wild had come to challenge him, had a rope attached to its saddle. ‘Just give him to me,’ he said flatly, unwilling to look directly at Burton lest his friend’s decrepit state put him off balance, ‘and you can go free.’

Wild pursed his lips, dropped his visor into place and offered a sharp bow. ‘Come and get him.’

‘Want me to chop the fucker, sir?’