Traitor's Blood (Civil War Chronicles) (45 page)

Banks knelt down, wiping fingers across the wounded man’s brow. When they came away, they were smeared, dark and sticky. He gazed up at the men. ‘Evidently not in the Thames.’

The soldier shook his head grimly. ‘Found ’im beside a big old vat o’ tar.’

Before abandoning his stricken horse, Stryker had thrust a hand into the saddlebag and grasped a small, metal object. It was a pricker, intended for clearing a musket’s touch-hole when the weapon became clogged during action. It was sharp and solid, and Stryker had jammed it straight into Makepeace’s foot.

The wound was not serious, but Makepeace had staggered back reacting to the unexpected pain, and that had given Stryker time to rise to his feet and draw his own blade.

As the skirmish in the adjacent field had ground to a standstill, Stryker and Makepeace had traded blows in a dozen bursts of snake-fast swordplay. Both heaved on their lungs, dragging air into their bodies as the strength ebbed away.

‘I have to hand it to you,
mon Capitaine
,’ Makepeace breezed as he regained his composure. ‘You’re certainly determined. Like an old Irish wolfhound my father once owned. I was hoping Bain had culled your little pack while you were languishing in Wynn’s cellar. Decided to drink himself insensible, did he, instead?’

‘He decided to die,’ Stryker retorted.

‘How foolish of him,’ Makepeace said bluntly. He slashed forward with his blade in a nimble move that had his enemy stumbling back rapidly. Stryker parried half a dozen blows and the exertion wrenched at the barely healed wounds that were scattered about his body in a network of pain. The glancing blow from Makepeace’s musket-ball had torn the skin along his temple, while the duel was taking its toll on the old wound to his abdomen. It was beginning to pulse fresh gouts of blood, and Makepeace’s brown eyes fixed gleefully on the circle of scarlet that bloomed on Stryker’s shirt.

‘Why are you here, Stryker?’ the turncoat sneered. ‘Look at yourself. You’re bleeding like a gelded boar. You don’t care about the Royalists. Leave now, man, and you’ll hold your head up high. Turn your back and walk away. You don’t need to pursue this any more. Hampden’s done his work well. He’s held your army too long and they’ll be forced to wait out the night. Where do you think the survivors from Brentford have gone?’ Stryker remained silent and Makepeace sniggered. ‘London! They’ll have scuttled all the way back to Devereux and squealed in his ear. And I’ll wager you know what that means?’

Stryker’s temple throbbed dully and was sickeningly painful. It was all he could do not to slip to his knees and close his eyes.

Makepeace went on with mocking relish. ‘This place’ll be sick with Parliament’s soldiers by sun-up. You’ve lost, don’t you see? If the king ever gets this close to London again, it’ll be minus his head!’

Stryker met his gaze and spoke as steadily as he could. ‘You have Moxcroft. I need you to give him up.’ He glanced over Makepeace’s shoulder to catch sight of the spy, still slumped horizontally across the bay’s saddle. ‘If you won’t, it is my duty to take him from you.’

‘You really are a gullible sap, Stryker. How many men have you ordered to their deaths for this mission? How much blood must be spilled for your misguided loyalties?’

Stryker gritted his teeth. He raced forward, sweeping his blade down in a heavy blow that took all Makepeace’s strength to block. But block it he did, and in less than a heartbeat he had stepped to Stryker’s side and forced an equally desperate parry from the long-haired captain that forced him to disengage lest he be outmanoeuvred.

Makepeace was fast, faster even than Stryker remembered, and he had to concentrate hard to keep his focus amid the pains that racked his torso, the sweat that oozed like acid into his eye and the burning in his lungs.

Makepeace looked him up and down. He grinned fiercely. ‘You’re getting sluggish,’ he hissed. ‘Old and blind. Not a handy combination, Stryker.’

‘And why am I blind, Eli? She was barely more than a child.’

‘Ah, but she
was
more than a child,
mon Capitaine
. Young, I grant you, but more than a girl.’

‘You stopped to ask her age?’

‘I could see she was old enough. And then I found out I was right. She did not resist my attentions, did she?’

‘You bastard. When I found you she had no tears left. Nothing. You violated her. Broke her.’

‘She grunted with pleasure,
mon Capitaine
. Grunted and moaned and begged for more, I well remember.’

Stryker remembered that day too. It was a week after the horrific and costly Battle of Lutzen, and the English mercenaries who had fought for the victorious Swedes were still encamped around the German countryside. He remembered walking into the Saxony tavern on a bitter November evening, and, even now, could see that poor girl’s face. Her chin and neck glistened with her vomit, and her cheeks were bruised and swollen from the fists.

He remembered seeing Bain propped on a stool in the corner of the room. The sergeant had been calmly smoking a long pipe, guarding the door while his officer had his fun. The girl was bent over a table, while Lieutenant Eli Makepeace, his
breeches bunched around his heels, thrust violently at the girl’s motionless form in front of him.

As Stryker entered, Bain had thrown his pipe down and had reached for the vicious halberd propped at his side, but Stryker’s sword was drawn before the gigantic sergeant could fully rise to his feet. The blade’s solid guard had smashed into Bain’s temple, battering him into his chair and out of consciousness. And then Stryker had turned on Makepeace.

‘I still have the scars,’ Makepeace hissed.

‘You deserved the beating, Eli.’

‘Beating? I was barely alive when you left me. It was near a month before I could walk! Still, that month was spent wisely. Gave me time to plan my revenge.’ The turncoat’s grimace eased into a cruel smile ‘And we repaid you a hundredfold.’

Stryker remembered the payment. How his ale had been drugged as he had celebrated the year’s turning in a dingy taphouse, and how, in his sluggish state, he had been jumped by the vast Sergeant Bain, battered by fist and cudgel. He remembered waking to find himself bound and gagged at the rear of a small, disused stable, a trail of black powder fizzing across the earthen floor, manically tracing its way toward the stout keg at his side.

‘I’ll never understand how you survived,’ Makepeace said. ‘Should have blown you to kingdom come.’

Stryker could not remember with any precision. He knew he had rolled away, desperately wrenching his trussed body across the room as the fuse had run its course. All had become bright for a single, cacophonous moment, before the shroud of black descended.

He remembered waking amid a flood of searing pain in the chirurgeon’s quarters in Leipzig, his body monstrous and damaged. And he remembered Lisette Gaillard and her tender ministrations.

‘You should have swung for that, Eli,’ said Stryker, his voice thick and distant.

‘But there was not a scrap of evidence,
mon Capitaine
,’ Makepeace replied. ‘Of course,
you
knew it was Bain and I. We
wanted
you to know.’

Stryker forced himself to refocus, raising his sword slightly, tempting Makepeace to walk on to its point. ‘I’ll take Moxcroft and bury your corpse here, in amongst the trees, and no one will ever find you.’

Makepeace’s face twitched. Stryker persevered. ‘You’ll be nothing. Another body rotting in the ground. No one will remember you. No one will mourn.’

Makepeace pounced forward, swinging the long sword in a vast arc that started behind his head and which he intended to finish in the top of Stryker’s skull.

Stryker stepped to the side, allowing the blade to slice nothing but air. Makepeace stumbled forward with the weight of the blow, and only just managed to right himself as Stryker attacked. He struck at Makepeace in a series of sharp, staccato blows that had the red-headed man stepping back, parrying furiously.

Makepeace danced to the side in an impressive turn of speed, hoping to switch defence into attack, but Stryker saw what he was about and blocked the Parliamentarian’s low thrust, which might easily have severed the artery in his groin. They were close now and Stryker slammed his free fist into Makepeace’s mouth, smashing teeth as the officer’s head was snapped back. Makepeace did not fall, but his face was now a gruesome mask of blood.

He tried to speak, but pain seemed to grip him as he opened his jaw.

Makepeace spat a globule of blood, mucus and tooth that caught on the long blades of grass between them, dangling in a gelatinous tendril.

Stepping forward, Stryker swung his blade in a massive sideways blow that, though lacking finesse, rocked Makepeace to his core as the Parliamentarian’s own steel took the force.
Makepeace staggered backwards, his sword arm swinging low at his waist, and Stryker advanced again. This time he reversed the swing so that Makepeace had to move his blade across to affect a back-handed parry. Makepeace was drooling blood now and grunting with every action. The fight was leaving him, and his defence was weakening with every movement.

Stryker came on again, delivering three crushing blows to Makepeace’s head in quick succession. The first forced Makepeace to sink to one knee. The second battered the sword from his numbed grip. The third cleaved deep into Makepeace’s forearm at the wrist, making him scream in pain, anger and terror. It was a shrill, pitiful noise that cut across the sounds of the nearby armies like a banshee.

Stryker buried his boot in Makepeace’s chest, sending the captain collapsing on to his back.

Makepeace whimpered, words of agony and desperation bubbling incoherently through his shattered mouth. But Stryker ignored his entreaties, tossing his sword to one side and drawing the long dirk from his belt. He moved to kneel beside the wounded man, blood and dew soaking his knee.

‘I’ll make it quick, Eli,’ he said in low, hoarse tones.

Makepeace retched. A thick mass of vomit and blood and spittle and bile boiled up from his throat, turning his mouth into a macabre cauldron, and he twisted to the side to expel the foul liquid. When he turned back his brown gaze was calm as it met Stryker’s cold, grey eye. He tried to speak, but his words were so indistinct and quiet that Stryker could barely hear them.

He leaned close, and then the words took form. Makepeace had whispered a name. A name that explained many things and destroyed so many illusions. Stryker momentarily lowered his weapon.

The blade was deep in Stryker’s stomach before he felt it.

At first his body made no reaction, and he moved his own dirk toward Makepeace, but then his vision blurred, his guts lurched violently and the strength left his hands. The dirk fell
from his grip as surely as if his hand had been severed, and he slumped back on to his haunches in shock. Only then did he notice the handle of the weapon Makepeace had wielded with such venom in his remaining good hand.

Eli Makepeace laughed. One hand was useless, the wrist clouded in steam as hot blood still pumped from it. His face was white, his mouth too damaged to smile.

His movements were painfully slow, as if he were fighting the great current of the Thames, but he managed to heave himself to his feet, gathering up Stryker’s discarded sword as he moved.

Stryker tried to rise too, but a flame of agony shot in all directions from his belly to his head and feet and hands, pushing him back to the ground.

Makepeace loomed over him now. ‘I hate to leave you,’ he said, his voice hoarse, every word an effort, ‘but I have a prior engagement, of which you are no doubt aware. Sir Randolph must find his way to London.’ He held out the long blade so that its point trembled at Stryker’s throat. ‘
Bon voyage, mon Capitaine
.’

Stryker awaited the killing blow.

But Makepeace’s narrow, feral eyes had widened. The two men held each other’s gaze for what seemed an eternity, neither speaking, neither moving. And then something began to appear from Makepeace’s midriff. Amid his own pain and confusion Stryker did not realize what was happening until the bloody point of a halberd burst through the exquisite purple doublet to glint dark and wet in the evening light.

Makepeace’s expression fell blank, his face sagging, the life seeping from him like sap from a tree. He dropped Stryker’s sword and, with the pole-arm still protruding through his chest, slumped to his knees.

Behind him stood a dark figure, one who had now released its grip on the long halberd shaft. The shaft dropped to the blood-smeared grass, its weight pulling down on Makepeace’s body so that he stayed kneeling, his upper body unnaturally contorted
like a grisly marionette. The turncoat’s blood pulsed across his torso like the blooming petals of a scarlet flower. His eyes stared blankly into the gathering gloom and his chest groaned in one last, great sigh.

He was gone.

‘
Bon voyage, mon Capitaine
,’ Lisette Gaillard said quietly.

‘
L
iberated from Sir Richard Wynn’s magnificent cellar,’ General of Horse, Prince Rupert of the Rhine said, raising a crystal glass. He stared at the crimson wine that shone richly within, before glancing up to the man seated opposite. ‘I believe you know the cellar in question?’

Captain Stryker, of Sir Edmund Mowbray’s Regiment of Foot, caught the glint in the prince’s eye and smiled ruefully. ‘I spent a little time there, yes sir.’

Rupert sipped the dark liquid, swilling it theatrically, savouring the flavour. He swallowed it down and glanced around the faces assembled at the long, polished table. When he caught the eye of one man in particular, he dipped his head. ‘My apologies, Captain Forrester, please continue.’

Lancelot Forrester, cheeks burning bright with the heat, the wine and the eminent company, grinned. ‘So we’re standing there,’ he said, continuing the tale that had been interrupted by the servant’s decanter, ‘and the goddamned Trained Bands draw up, clear as day, noisy as a tree full of rooks.’

‘And they’re watching you?’ Prince Rupert prompted enthusiastically, enjoying Forrester’s flair for storytelling despite having seen the debacle at Turnham Green first-hand.