Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles (39 page)

The ragtag mass of Royalists had only moments left when Stryker reached the cist. The ancient stone circle was exactly where he remembered from the night Gardner and Barkworth had vanished into the ground, and he crashed through the bracken veil, dozens of clattering footsteps hitting the stones in his wake.

He turned quickly. ‘Pikes to the flanks! Pikes to the flanks!’

William Skellen was there, head and shoulders above the melee. He repeated the order, physically moving many of the men into place, shoving those wielding pikes out to the sides and hauling the rest into the centre. ‘Charge fer ’orse!’ he bellowed when he was happy with the formation. The pikemen jammed the butt ends of their pole-arms against the instep of a shoe and angled the bladed head upwards. The sergeant glared at the musketeers. ‘Any wi’ primed pieces, give ’em murder!’

Colonel Gabriel Wild was only a matter of yards from the Royalist stragglers when he saw the front rank of red-coated musketeers shoulder matchlocks. He wheeled away at the last moment, cringing as the weapons flashed, spitting deadly lead into his charging cavalrymen. Two men fell, the rest followed their leader, hauling on reins to sheer out of range.

As the Roundhead harquebusiers regrouped, Wild wondered at the sanity of this last-ditch break for freedom. They had to flee, of course, for they could not hope to ride out the destruction wrought by Wild’s cannon and dragoons, but it had surprised him that they chose to run on to the wide expanse of the plain. He had waited out to the east, fully expecting to see them bolt into the tumbledown enclosures of the old village in a futile attempt to find at least nominal protection, and had been entirely bewildered to see them bolt in the opposite direction. But so be it, he thought as he brought his mount back to the troop’s right flank. This would be easier.

Wild searched briefly for one of his officers. ‘Captain Hound!’

One of the riders spurred from the line, lifting his visor to see Wild. ‘Sir?’

‘Take half the men, Captain, and chase them out o’ that bloody bracken.’ He never trusted such concealed terrain. One never knew what hoof-breaking horrors might lie in wait, and he had no intention of risking the whole troop until the way was clear. ‘Attack their centre. You’ll have to put up with one more volley, but it’ll be weak enough, and you must avoid those damned pikes at all costs. Understood?’

The captain lowered his visor. ‘Sir.’

Wild watched as half his troop cantered out of the line, breaking swiftly into a charge. Soon they filled the land between him and the Royalists, and he could not easily discern anything beyond their plate-covered backs, bobbing in time with the horses. But he did notice the redcoats begin to move. The pikemen at the edge of the bracken stayed rigid, their horse-killing spears angled up to pierce any mount that dared gallop close, but things seemed more fluid at the centre of Stryker’s last stand. A new rank of musketeers came to the fore, shots cracked out from their malevolent muzzles, unsaddling three Parliamentarians, to be quickly replaced by the next group. But then, when that last volley had been spat into the Dartmoor air, the musketeers melted away.

‘What the devil?’ Wild whispered to himself as he watched the men at the very centre of the bracken run pell-mell in the opposite direction. Their fear was understandable, but he could not fathom why they had left the pikemen in place. Something in the pit of his guts twisted. He did not know why, could not understand the feeling in his moment of triumph, and yet something here was out of kilter.

‘Wait!’ Wild bellowed, but his voice was drowned out by the din of hooves and the cheers of his men. He stood tall in his stirrups, ignoring his churning bowels and willing his beloved horsemen on. They broke through the outermost bracken leaves, pulverizing the mouldering foliage to mulch and pouring between the flanking pike units, who quickly stepped back, intent only on bringing down the musketeers who had so suddenly abandoned their comrades.

‘Why aren’t they engaging?’ one of
Wild’s inferiors muttered at his left hand. ‘Sir?’

‘What?’ Wild snapped irritably.

‘Why aren’t the pikes engaging?’

‘Now!’ Captain Stryker roared. He had retreated some fifty paces, allowing the horsemen to funnel deep into the pike-walled corridor. ‘Now!’

Ensign Matthew Chase was at Stryker’s side, gloved hands gripping tightly to the huge red and white banner under which Stryker’s company fought. Immediately he thrust the standard aloft, waved it in a wide figure of eight, and the world erupted.

Stryker had not wanted his pikemen to engage in the fight for two reasons. Firstly, their purpose was to force the cavalry into the narrow passage that followed the course of Seek Wisdom Gardner’s secret tunnel. And secondly, they needed to be free to run as soon as the explosives, packed tight along the length of the ancient vault, took the spark. In the event, those men had executed their task perfectly. The half-troop had galloped above the tunnel, the short fuse had been lit on Ensign Chase’s signal, and the ground had opened, gaping and terrible, to gulp nearly forty of Colonel Wild’s best men into oblivion.

Smoke choked the air, stung the eyes, burnt the throat. The stink of scorched flesh pervaded without remorse, the groans of the wounded ringing out from the huge crater. The earth seemed to hiss, steaming like a vast cauldron. For a time all was still. The pikemen, only just clear of the explosion, and many with singed eyebrows, staggered back to rejoin the rest of the company. Stryker, ears ringing, nodded his thanks before searching for the next danger. Beyond the detonated mine, beyond the ragged, torn hooves and the strewn limbs, Colonel Wild still stood in his stirrups, slack-jawed and apple-eyed. Stryker waited for him to move, but he seemed as static as one of the tor’s rocks.

It was when the dragoons appeared that Stryker knew the fight’s heart still beat. They drew up around Wild’s remaining men, stunned faces surveying the twisted carnage.

‘You see?’ a nasal voice, harsh and insistent, cut through the silence like a rapier through silk. ‘You see? A witch! Look what he does, this suckler of imps! This Satanic fornicator!’

Stryker peered through the powder smoke as it drifted sideways, masking and revealing faces like a transient shroud. Then he saw the face he knew he would find. Dark eyes, huge, hooked nose, long, horselike teeth. ‘Hogg.’

Osmyn Hogg still berated the Parliamentarians. Cantered on his little piebald at their backs, screaming for them to lynch the warlock who had conjured such a fate for honest, godly folk. He was red-faced as he spat his venom, hands balled to white-knuckled fists, hatred etched deep in the lines at his brow and eyes.

And finally the Roundheads moved. Wild, perhaps shaken into action by the raging witch-finder, slumped down into his saddle and shook his head. He glanced at the men at his shoulders, eyes red-rimmed and expression groggy, but Stryker could see his lips twitching as orders were spoken.

They surged forward as one. Wild’s fifty or so cavalrymen and a similar number of dragoons, come to smash the stubborn Royalists once and for all. Stryker’s mind raced, but no more ideas would come. He had known the mine, crammed full of explosives from the ammunition wagon, would only stall the enemy. This outcome was no surprise. And yet now, as he lifted his sword one last time amid the eruption’s smouldering aftermath, he knew he would fight to his last breath. He swallowed hard, throat sore, blinked the grit from his eye, and steadied his breathing. ‘Come on, you bastards!’ he snarled, thrusting his left foot out to brace for the impact of the charge as his pikemen prepared a steel hedge that would at least make life difficult for the oncoming horses.

It was a surprise, then, that the impact never came. At the last moment, with only a few yards to spare, the front rank of cavalrymen peeled away in a welter of curses and snorts and whinnies and cries of alarm. The second rank followed, then the rest, and soon the entire Roundhead column were wheeling back on to the open plain like a flock of startled sparrows.

Stryker let out the breath he did not realize he’d been holding. He watched the cavalry and dragoons gallop away, wondering if this were some elaborate feint designed to fool him.

‘Well I’ll be a ben bowse clap’dudgeon,’ William Skellen’s dour tone carried to Stryker’s revived ears and he turned to look at his sergeant.

But he did not need to ask the cause of Skellen’s exclamation, because through the clearing smoke cloud he suddenly saw men. Not dragoons or harquebusiers but infantrymen, most dressed in the same scarlet coats as his own company. They were a formidable-looking force, somewhere between forty and fifty, all armed and fresh. At their front stood three men who looked so dissimilar that they might have been part of a circus act, had Stryker not known two if them. One was a plump man with fleshy face, rosy cheeks, and sandy hair that fell beyond a wide-brimmed hat worn at a suitably rakish angle. The second man was a tiny figure, the size of a child, clad in a suit of grey, with a small sword at his waist; while the third was simply a giant. The biggest man Stryker had ever clapped his eye upon.

The sandy-haired fellow stepped forward, offered a theatrically deep bow, and grinned. ‘What would you do without me, Stryker, old man? I dread to think.’

CHAPTER 16

West Dartmoor,
8
May,
1643

Stryker led his newly expanded force from the tor as soon as the bodies had been buried. That had taken longer than usual, for, though a ready-made pit awaited the rows of dead, gaping like the mouth of a smoke-wreathed volcano, the grim task had been hampered by the sheer number of charred limbs that lay scattered far and wide. But, with the extra pairs of hands at Stryker’s disposal, he had seen the job done with sombre efficiency in the eerie silence of the afternoon. And silent it had been, for the enemy had gone. Vanished northward on their thrashing mounts, battered and humiliated.

Thus, with Gardner’s Tor at their backs, Stryker’s column – ranks suddenly swollen to well over a hundred redcoats, six grizzled Cornishmen, Forrester’s dozen prisoners, and a pair of crewless falconets – marched straight into the evening sun. They had the wagon too, though its powder cache had been substantially depleted, and the twin companies walked with a confident step, suddenly a force to be reckoned with.

‘I am constantly your guardian angel,’ Captain Lancelot Forrester chirped happily as he paced at the head of the column with the most senior men. All except Lieutenant Burton, who chose to keep watch over the falconets at the rear.

Stryker was at Forrester’s side, and he smiled ruefully before glancing at the diminutive Scot who scampered quickly in their wake. ‘My guardian angel is Mister Barkworth. And Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner.’

‘Who?’

‘The hermit I told you about.’

‘Ah,’ Forrester nodded, ‘the one with the escape tunnel. What happened to our priestly friend?’

Stryker thought of the old Welshman. A man whose faith made him a natural Parliamentarian but whose moral compass steered him towards helping Stryker. ‘He’ll have been there somewhere. Watching. I have a lot to thank him for.’

‘Stroke of genius,’ Forrester exclaimed suddenly. ‘Blowing up the tunnel, I mean.’

An image of Gardner stayed in Stryker’s mind, though the space around him darkened with the memory of the night he had helped Barkworth escape. ‘When I saw Simeon disappear into the ground, it hit me. Prince Rupert detonated a mine at Lichfield not three weeks ago. It sucked the walls into the ground, by all accounts.’ He shrugged. ‘Seemed we could do the same here.’

‘Lichfield,’ Forrester muttered wistfully.

‘You said you spent some time there, sir?’ a booming voice rumbled across their conversation, and both captains craned their heads to look up at Anthony Payne, his pace remarkably slow in comparison with the rest of the column. It was as though he need only take a casual stroll to match his purposeful comrades, such was the length of his vast stride.

‘I did,’ Forrester replied, before glancing at Stryker. ‘We did.’

‘I heard Sir John Gell put the place to the sword,’ Payne said darkly.

Forrester wagged an admonishing finger. ‘You mean you
read
it, Mister Payne. The pamphleteers made merry with the dastardly Gell’s behaviour, though it was not so.’

Payne’s moon-round face furrowed. ‘Did he not refuse to return the Earl of Northampton’s body after Hopton Fight?’

Forrester bobbed his chin. ‘He did. Captain Stryker and I saw it with our own eyes.’ He winked at Stryker. ‘Eye.’

‘But at Lichfield,’ Stryker said, ignoring his friend’s gentle mockery, ‘he allowed most of the garrison to walk free from the Close. He was not compelled to that judgement, but chose it of his own accord. No man was put to the sword, as the pamphlets would claim.’

‘But Captain Forrester told me he was like to hang you, sir,’ Payne pressed.

Stryker nodded. ‘Aye, that is true. And the captain, here.’ He pointed rearward to where Skellen marched at the flank of the column, berating a pair of musketeers for dragging their feet. ‘And Sergeant Skellen for that matter. But he considered us spies, Mister Payne. Is it such a surprise to hang a gang of intelligencers?’

‘I suppose not,’ Payne mused. ‘Parliament hangs all intelligencers and all Irish.’ He blew out his cheeks with a sound akin to a gale. ‘A narrow escape, then.’