The Bleeding Land (43 page)

HE COULD NOT
breathe. Something was clogging his mouth and throat and so he clawed at his own face and found the end of something and pulled. It kept coming and coming, spooling up from his gullet as though it would never end and then he realized what it was. Hair. Raven black, thick as a horse’s tail and twined in loose curls. He was choking on it. It was killing him. Then he saw her, tramping through snow away from him. She turned and looked, her face white as lace, and he tried to wave but could not move his arms. Were the bones broken? He yelled. No sound. She did not see him and then she turned and traipsed on and his heart ripped open because he knew he would never see her again. Martha
.

Then terror struck him. He was being pulled and wrenched this way and that
.

Dogs?

A pack of dogs had found him. Big mastiffs, whose coarse hair and fetid breath stank like death. They were tearing at his clothes, trying to get to his flesh, but he could not move to fight them off. They must have come all the way from Lathom green. From the bear post. Why him? They tugged and tore and he knew with dread certainty that they would, any moment, find his bare flesh and rip into it and begin to eat. He tried
to
summon her face again. If only he could make their eyes meet the dogs would leave him be. Somehow. But he could not conjure her, could not remember what she looked like. And then he realized it was not hair that was choking him. It was rope. Thick and coarse and suffocating him
.

Darkness. The smell of blood and faeces. And earth. A shrill, broken laugh. Wraiths moving through the frozen gloom, flapping and croaking like carrion crows. Bending and crouching amongst the—

Corpses?

Seeking. Stealing. Cutting.

A man five feet away cried out for his mother. One of the wraiths twisted suddenly and sidled over. Tom saw a flash of blade, heard a wet gurgle and splutter and smelt fresh shit as the dying man’s bowels opened.

If they see I am alive they will kill me. If I
am
alive
.

He was half aware of a deep sense of repugnance at having been stripped naked. He knew his feet were bare even, though he could not feel them. Like crows they had pecked him clean and moved on. They were all around, plundering the dead and the nearly dead, yanking rings from fingers or hacking the fingers off and stuffing them into knapsacks. They cawed and squabbled over purses and helmets, back- and breastplates and swords. They hauled buff-coats, boots, doublets and jerkins off stiffening men, leaving pale pathetic corpses in the mud that was hardening and hoary with frost. There was no pity, just greed, and Tom looked up at the stars, indifferent and eternal and infinite, and he had a sense that this was not how he was meant to die. But God was hateful.

I was shot. My shoulder?

He felt no pain. The freezing night had eaten into his very marrow. Numbing him.

He tried to move but could not. A corpse’s leg lay across his own, heavy as iron. Slowly, as though his own blood was thickening, clotting with ice in his veins, he turned his head.
There
, beneath a shock of silver hair, was a dead face, the expression frozen in eternal surprise.

‘Did you check that one?’ A woman’s voice, cold as frostbite.

‘I can’t remember. You do it,’ a man replied.

‘Lord preserve us, but it’s another gold one,’ the woman hissed. ‘Give me the knife. Quick before someone else sees it!’

Tom kept his eyes shut and wondered if he was still breathing. He tried to think of Martha but could not remember her face, so he recalled a scene from his childhood. Mun and his friends had not let Tom play with them, saying he was too small, and he had cried. But Bess had taken her savings, sixpence in all, and walked to Lathom market, there paying a carpenter to make a pair of stilts specially for Tom. Together they had gone up to Gerard’s Wood to find the other boys and when Mun saw Tom tottering along, his face a mask of concentration, he had laughed until his stomach ached.

I love you, Bess
.

He wished she were with him now. She would fight for him.

He kept his mind’s eye fixed on her face as his arm jerked and twitched. And he begged for death’s embrace.

As they sawed off his finger.

‘Away, villain!’ Mun growled, pointing a pistol at a toothless crone who cursed him and shuffled off to find easier pickings. The looters were everywhere, shadows moving amongst the dead, and the sight of them would have made Mun sick if he were not already numbed to the horror of it all. Dead and dying littered the field, piled up three deep in places, and Hector would have been hard-pressed to find footing amongst them. So Mun had left the stallion tethered at the foot of the escarpment, telling him to go with no other until he returned, and Hector had nickered softly that he understood.

Some of the ruined men still clung stubbornly to life, their moans cloying the stench-thickened air in a hopeless lament. The night was bitterly cold and clear and by the stars’ light
Mun
searched, as he had done for the last two hours. He had seen hundreds of dead faces, not knowing for the most part which side they had belonged to in life. All were now united in death. A great army of the dead. He wandered aimlessly, stumbling over stiff limbs, all but oblivious to the plaintive cries of those who were not ready to die though they surely would.

But he had not found his father or Emmanuel. He had a vague idea where on the field he had seen Sir Edmund Verney and a small knot of foot and horse make their final, desperate stand beneath the Royal Standard, and what he found at that place was a scene of unimaginable awe: sixty or more corpses fallen thick as wheat before the scythe. Many were naked, already stripped and plundered by local folk who had, like carrion-feeders, flocked to the field of the slain. White flesh glowed in the cold, waning moon’s light and some of the dead stared at Mun accusingly or pointed at him with stiff arms and clawed hands. And if his father had fallen near this place, his fine cuirassier’s armour would have drawn looters like beggars to a bishop’s train.

‘Be gone or you’ll join the dead!’ he barked at another scavenger, this one a mere boy with pale hair and arms straining beneath a bundle of swords.

He had never felt so tired. Empty. Exhausted to his very soul, so that he suspected that if he were to sit down now amongst the dead he would simply become one of them.

Of course, there was a chance his father and Emmanuel were even now reunited with the rest of the King’s Horse, or else walking their tired mounts back south-east after their relentless pursuit of the enemy. But he did not think either of these was true. He knew his father well enough to be almost certain that Sir Francis would not have left the field to chase after a broken force, like an over-eager young blood caught up in the mad thrill of it all. Neither would Sir Francis have been unable to curb his horse, simply letting it run itself out rather than remain in the fray, as some men had surely done. No, his father
had
not sought this war, but with its coming would not place anything above the execution of his duty and the preservation of his honour. And though Mun had not seen him amongst those men he had watched trying to force a way through to defend the King’s standard, he yet knew that Sir Francis had been there. And Emmanuel, whose fire outblazed his sense at times, would have been there too, staying by his lover’s father, loyal to the end.

Only when he was challenged by a small troop of rebel Horse did Mun give up the search. With nightfall a considerable portion of Essex’s army had remained on the field and now their fires blazed and crackled in a ragged line along the north-west, and in his stupor Mun had wandered too close.

‘Who are you?’ a trooper had called and Mun had heard swords rasp up scabbard throats and the clicks of pistols being cocked.

‘I am looking for my father,’ he had replied, barely looking up at the dark mass of mounted men. ‘And for my friend.’

‘You are the King’s man?’ the horseman asked.

‘As should you be,’ Mun said, knowing he still gripped his pistols though he could not feel them for his hands were useless, little more than numb, rigid claws.

‘Insolent bastard,’ one of the troopers growled.

‘Away with you, man,’ the first rebel said. ‘There has been enough killing today. Go back to the living and leave the dead to God.’ And with that Mun had turned back towards the Edgehill escarpment and the fires of his own side winking here and there on its heights, and tramped through the slain once more.

His heart stopped when he thought he saw Tom torn and bloody amongst mounds of horseflesh, some of the beasts still breathing and lifting their heads now and then. But the dead man was not Tom, and so he moved on, his whole body shuddering with cold.

The bitter night was at its deepest when he found some of his
own
troop huddled in cloaks against the cold. They sat beside a meagre fire they had made from broken pike staves, musket rests and whatever else they could find that would burn, and of his friends Mun saw O’Brien first. The big man was cradling a cup of ale to his chest as though there was heat in the thing, not cold liquid, and absent was the good-natured raillery that was the usual accompaniment to the fire’s crack and spit. Rowe and Downes were there too and Mun was glad to see that those three at least had survived the day.

‘I was beginning to think we’d lost you,’ O’Brien said, looking up at Mun with glazed eyes and offering him the cup. Mun drank of it deeply, handed it back and shuddered, dragging a frozen hand across his mouth and beard.

‘Captain Boone was looking for you,’ Vincent Rowe told him, the feeble flamelight making sharp angles of the young man’s face.

‘With a face like a bulldog licking piss off a thistle,’ O’Brien added, cocking an eyebrow but not taking his eyes off the flames.

‘And there was me thinking that bastard would be too busy enjoying his spoils to care,’ Mun said, holding his hands near the flames and wincing as the hot aches began to fill them.

‘Want some?’ Downes asked, ripping a hunk of bread off a loaf and offering it to him. He took it with a nod of thanks. ‘Found it in the rebels’ train,’ Downes said through a mouthful. But when Mun tried to eat the bread he found that his mouth would not work properly. The jaw bones themselves were numb, so that he could not chew, and he stuffed the bread between his sash and his breastplate instead, saving it for later.

‘I heard we got the King’s colours back,’ Rowe said in an obvious attempt to lift the mood. One man muttered that they should not have lost them in the first place, and another questioned what was an ensign against the lives given for it. Mun sat by O’Brien, looking into the flames and half listening
to
the talk but not wanting any part in it. Some managed to get a little sleep. Others, many still in armour for want of anything warmer, walked back and forth between the resting men, for it was the only way they could find to keep some vestige of heat in their flesh and bones. Mun gave himself over to this strange semi-conscious state, too weary to be properly one of the living but too repelled by the day’s events to sleep. And before the first hint of the new day announced itself as a cold, white glow beyond the hill upon which the King’s army hunched, Captain Nehemiah Boone returned, his tired eyes flaring when they recognized Mun amongst those still huddled by the smouldering embers.

‘Rivers,’ he spat, beard and moustaches unkempt, his cloak pulled tight at his neck. In his other hand he clutched a wine pitcher that moved as though empty or nearly so.

‘Captain,’ Mun acknowledged him, blinking exhaustion from his own eyes, trying to sharpen them. With Boone were Corporal Bard, Humphrey Walton and several of the others in the troop who had lingered amongst the rebel baggage train rather than rejoining the battle, but from their looks they did not seem eager for the confrontation.

‘You care to finish what you started earlier in the day, you brazen cur?’ Boone snarled, handing the wine jug to Bard and stepping in amongst the ring of slumberous soldiers. Bard put the jug to his lips and drained the last of the liquid, never taking his eyes off Mun.

‘And get myself hanged for fighting an officer?’ Mun said.

‘Let’s put the whole thing behind us, eh?’ O’Brien suggested with a smile.

‘Shut your damned Irish mouth,’ Boone warned, pushing his long, lank hair back from his face and glaring at Mun. ‘You won’t live long enough to hang, you base bloody villain.’

‘So be it,’ Mun said, climbing to his feet, every muscle complaining, every sinew taut as a bowstring.

Then a shiver ran through the assemblage thronging the
hillside
and with it came a murmur like that of the sea and all turned east towards the spreading glow of dawn.

‘What is it now?’ Rowe said, craning to spy what was causing the fuss, huffing into cold hands as, all around, men were getting to their feet.

‘Holy Christ, it’s the King himself,’ O’Brien said, standing with the rest as the King of England, Ireland and Scotland descended the slope with a retinue of knights and musketeers. He wore a broad-brimmed hat and a black cloak and was conspicuous as much for not being apparently armed as for being the King.

‘He’s smaller than I imagined him,’ Downes murmured as men began to fall to their knees and bow their heads, though all, Mun noticed, watched their king from beneath their brows as he passed.

‘And he has a face like thunder, too,’ O’Brien added, wincing through aches as he went down to one knee, and Humphrey Walton replied that that was hardly surprising seeing as His Majesty had today learned that his own subjects were prepared and willing to turn their muskets and cannon on him.

‘Make way for His Royal Majesty, Charles, by the grace of God King of England, France and Ireland, King of Scots and defender of the faith!’ a courtier yelled in a sergeant’s voice, and Mun saw another man beside the King, in a buff-coat and three-barred pot, point in their direction.

‘Smarten up, boys, they’re coming this way,’ Corporal Bard said through a grimace, sweeping a filthy hand through his filthy grey hair, and suddenly the men in Mun’s troop looked as terrified as they had before the day’s first charge, turning their eyes to the ground as though they wished it would swallow them. And then he was there, amongst them. Charles Stuart, King anointed by God.