The Bleeding Land (2 page)

Mun grimaced at the thought of a dozen burning weals peppered up the backs of his legs, then flicked his reins, cursed again and raced after his brother.

Once across the shifting green sea of Old Gore meadow Tom followed the ancient sheep path past clutters of boulders and a few stag-headed Scots pines all cloaked in pale green lichen. It was dusk proper now, the sun having all but sunk far beyond the Irish Sea and the western edge of the world.
Over
the centuries countless sharp-footed herds had dragged up stones from the soil, so that even Tom slowed his mount to a walk now to lessen the risk of injury. He could smell the woodland beyond the rise – musky, green, rich and damp – and after a little further he wheeled his bay north across a dense scrub of nettles and onto a ridge thronged with bright yellow St John’s wort, where he waited for Mun. He had known Mun would follow him. For all his brother’s high-mindedness – born of the responsibilities that attended being the eldest – Tom knew that Mun too loved nothing better than galloping across the countryside to fight the imaginary enemies of the King. England needed brave warriors, men who could fight and ride and who feared nothing. What were some hard words and a few lashes of their father’s crop compared with the defence of the kingdom?

‘I expect we will miss supper,’ Mun moaned, catching his breath as he came alongside Tom, who was leaning forward letting his bay crop the yellow flowers.

‘Maybe Bess will save us some,’ Tom suggested hopefully, suddenly realizing how hungry he was. They had not eaten since waking and nothing whetted the appetite like fighting Spaniards.

A sound brought both boys’ heads whipping up. ‘Did you hear that?’ Tom gasped.

‘It came from the woods,’ Mun said, nodding towards the mass of beech and oak that sprawled before them, at once both inviting and forbidding.

‘Sounded like a girl,’ Tom piped, blue eyes wide as he stared towards Gerard’s Wood. Sir Gerard had been dead for twenty years and in the absence of an heir the land had gone to the Church, but folk still knew the swath of broadleaf forest as Gerard’s Wood. It was a no man’s land, a place in which children highborn and low wiled away the summer days confined only by their imaginations.

Mun clicked his tongue and his horse started forward. ‘Is
your
powder dry?’ he asked, mimicking the austerity of some of his father’s stiff-necked friends who were veterans of the Dutch wars.

Tom clutched at an invisible flask hanging from an invisible bandolier. ‘Dry as bone dust, sir!’ he snapped with a nod.

‘Good man. Then let us round up these Spanish curs.’ Mun started down the flower-bright ridge and across another clump of nettles. A flutter of swallowtail butterflies scattered chaotically and Tom grasped for one but missed. ‘Don’t give fire until my word, you hear?’ Mun ordered, looking straight ahead as they passed the first trunks and entered the forest. Again Tom nodded, clenching his jaw and easing his horse on with a stab of heels.

The last shafts of golden dusk light arrowed eastwards through the trees and all around them leaves rattled one against another in the breeze. Tom shivered with the thrill of the hunt and the bay, sensing its rider’s excitement, whickered, the sound stifled by the dense cluster of undergrowth. Deeper they delved, through corridors and passageways, across glades and clearings and babbling streams. The forest grew so thick that any sense of direction came only from the nature of the slope. Here, where the evening breeze could not penetrate, the only sounds were the clinks of their own tack, the occasional snort of a horse, and the creaks of boughs rubbing against each other, stretching, twisting as they had over centuries. Until—

‘I heard it again,’ Mun hissed. ‘Over that way.’ He pointed towards a stand of beech marked with a clear browse line some six feet off the ground where deer had eaten the twigs and branches as high as they could reach. Nearby, an ancient holm had been savaged into contorted, outlandish shapes. ‘We should ride home,’ Mun said, though he was leaning towards the sound, ears straining. ‘What do you say? Shall we go back?’ He twisted in the saddle now and glared at his younger brother.

Tom shook his head, his blue eyes wide and his imaginary carbine still in his right hand. Mun nodded and, clicking his
tongue
, moved off in the direction from which the noise had come.

Someone was shouting now, cursing in a tone barbed and malicious. Someone else was laughing and then the boys heard the girl’s voice again, just as they pushed their horses between a holly briar and a dead beech standing in ruins and perforated by generations of woodpeckers.

‘What in Jesu’s name do we have here?’ a skinny, ashen-pale boy of about sixteen said, brandishing a gnarled lump of oak towards the mounted intruders.

Mun took in the scene: three boys, all with sticks, all bigger and older than he. In the middle of them was Zachariah the cripple. Zachariah’s nose was bleeding and his breeches and hempen doublet were filthy and bloodied. And there, standing just behind the ashen-faced boy, her hands to her mouth, eyes round with fear, was Martha Green.

‘What offence has he done you?’ Mun asked Henry Denton, the boy he knew the best of the three. It was nothing he had not seen before – Zachariah’s twisted foot invited the worst cruelty boys were capable of and though Mun had never beaten the boy himself, he had never defended him either.

‘Little boys should be in bed,’ Henry Denton spat, pointing a stubby finger up at Mun. A stocky youth, Henry Denton was handsome, but a mop of fair hair, clear skin, ruddy good looks and a rich father had made him arrogant too. At least, that’s what Mun had heard his mother say.

‘Everyone is little compared with you, you fat toad,’ Tom said from Mun’s left.

‘Hold your tongue!’ Mun snapped at his brother, keeping his eyes on Henry who was staring balefully at Tom, his lips twisted in a grimace.

‘Thomas, isn’t it?’ Henry said, tilting his head to one side. ‘Does your wet-nurse know you are out?’ The other two boys laughed and Tom glowered, looking to his elder brother to do something. Anything.

But Mun sat his horse like a statue, legs gripping like a vice, holding the beast still as it snorted and dragged a foot across the ground. Henry shrugged broad shoulders and turned, nodding to his pale, reed-thin companion, who slammed his club between Zachariah’s shoulder blades knocking him to the ground. Martha Green screamed and stepped forward but Henry snarled at her to stay back. ‘Leave him be, whore!’ he said and even the boy with the oak club seemed shocked at that word. The third boy, a fat bully with a face full of pimples, merely grinned, spitting on Zachariah and threatening another blow, so that the cripple dared not rise again. He lay there, face in the forest litter, ruined leg trembling and, Mun noticed, wet.

‘You are evil!’ Martha cried, her green eyes blazing, finger pointing. ‘God will punish you, Henry Denton. He’ll punish you all!’

‘You think God cares about one of His mistakes?’ Henry asked, lips warping into a smile. ‘Why do you care, anyway, whore? What’s this cripple to you? Surely he can’t screw. He can barely walk!’

‘Shut your mouth!’ Martha screamed, tears in her eyes.

‘Mun,’ Tom hissed. ‘Edmund.’ But Mun was staring at Henry.

‘Hobbes, have you got a halfpenny?’ Henry asked the pale, skinny boy. ‘They say Martha Green will open her legs for a farthing, but seeing as there are three of us, I’d happily stretch to the price of a quart of good ale.’

Without thinking what he was doing Mun dismounted, taking the reins in his right hand and offering them up to Tom, whose eyes were round as coins in a bone-white face.

‘Ride home, Tom,’ Mun said calmly. ‘I’ll be along.’

Tom shook his head, glancing at Martha Green whom he thought the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

‘Do as I say or I’ll take Father’s crop to you myself,’ Mun threatened, thrusting his mount’s reins into his brother’s hand. Tom hesitated a moment, then turned his horse and led Mun’s
from
the clearing, half twisting his neck off his shoulders as he went.

‘You mean to fight us, Mun?’ Henry asked and, grinning, threw his two foot of beech to the ground.

‘They’ll kill you, Mun,’ Martha warned, hands clasped as Henry’s cronies came and stood behind their leader, one at each shoulder.

‘I would rather be dead than a coward,’ Mun said, pleased with the way it sounded, though he was terrified enough that his whole body had begun to tremble.

He did not even see the first blow. It crashed against his ear in a burst of white-hot pain, sending him staggering, but before he could fall more blows were raining down, scuffing across his head and shoulders. Mun threw his forearms up, trying to protect his face, but he could do nothing about the kicks that were gouging into his shins and larruping the muscles of his thighs. He was aware of Martha screaming and Henry yelling curses, some of which Mun had never heard before, but mostly he was aware of terrible pain coming from all parts of his body at once. He was certain that one of the boys still had a club and he desperately hoped that the boy would not strike his head, for surely he must know you could kill a man like that.

Then he threw his fists forward, feeling the left one crunch against a nose. A boy yelped and Mun gouged at an eye but then his right leg buckled and he fell to one knee, tasting blood and fearing that they would not stop until he was dead. Another cry, this from Henry Denton perhaps, and then Henry was holding his head and yelling and there was blood between his fingers. Mun called out, blood flying from his lips, his ears ringing so that all sound was muffled. Tom!

Tom was there, wielding his own stick, wild as a boar, teeth bared. He struck Henry again but then the fat boy managed to grab the stick with both hands and yank it from Tom’s grasp, turning the weapon on his younger, smaller opponent with a glancing blow that sent Tom reeling.

Mun yelled and charged, half stumbling into the fat boy, knocking the wind from him and falling with him in a tangle of thrashing limbs, and now Martha was amongst the fray too, screaming and clawing at the older boys like a bird of prey.

As suddenly as it had started it was all over. Mun sat against the trunk of an ancient oak watching in a daze a cloud of hornets and moths diving to feed off several glistening dribbles of sap leaking from the tree. This tree is slowly bleeding to death like me, he thought, feeling like a fallen hero, cuffing snot and blood from his nose and smearing it across his cheek. Nearby, little more than shadows in the half light, Martha was nursing Zachariah, who looked like the most wretched thing Mun had ever seen, but then Mun looked down at himself and was unimpressed with what he saw. His doublet was ripped and blood-spattered and his breeches were filthy. As for his face, it felt lumpy and puffed-up and he suspected only his mother would recognize him.

Tom entered the clearing leading both of their horses and wearing a smile. Apart from a slight limp and a sore-looking graze at his temple he appeared quite unhurt.

‘Well that put paid to them,’ Mun muttered, wincing from a dozen aches and cuts, for Henry Denton and his cronies had gone, vanished into the trees with the last of the daylight. Now the clearing was streaked with the tarnished silver light of a waxing moon. ‘We taught those villains a lesson they won’t forget,’ he added for Martha’s benefit. In truth Mun knew they had lost. He suspected that not even Henry Denton would stoop so low as to fight a girl and so it was more likely that Martha had saved them by joining the skirmish. She was the hero, he realized, though there was no need to say as much, especially as his split lip made talking smart like the devil.

‘We squashed that fat toad, didn’t we, Mun?’ Tom said, bringing the horses up to his brother, who rose on unsteady legs and began to brush himself down with his hands, wincing because his knuckles were grazed.

‘I told you to ride home, Tom,’ Mun said sternly. Zachariah was on his feet now and seemed mostly unhurt, though you wouldn’t know it from the way Martha was fussing round him.

‘You were outnumbered, Mun,’ Tom said, ‘and they had sticks.’ Then he smiled again, gingerly touching the bloody graze on his head. ‘And anyway, we’re brothers.’

Mun glanced at Zachariah again, knowing it would not be long before the poor boy took another beating. As for himself and Tom, they would receive one as soon as Sir Francis returned from London. That was as sure as night following day.

‘Tell them that we will see them home,’ he said, nodding towards Martha and Zachariah.

‘But we shall be home very late then,’ Tom said.

‘Yes, I know,’ Mun replied, patting his horse’s neck.

Tom grinned and limped across to the others and Mun felt his own lips curl, stretching the bloody split so that it stung awfully. It had been some fight after all and even though they had lost, their cuts and bruises the proof of that, they had stood together until their enemies had fled.

Because they were brothers.

CHAPTER ONE

November 1641, London

TOM RIVERS HAD
spoken barely a word since breaking fast in the Ship Inn. There were too many questions; so much to say that he feared to start talking now would be to never stop. And so he kept his tongue still and let his eyes work, glutting themselves with each and every wonder they could cram in. And what a feast it was! At once wonderful and terrifying and like nothing they had ever known. Besides, though he was amongst more people than he had ever seen, he knew not one of them and did not imagine any would be the least bit interested in anything he had to say.