Warlord's Gold: Book 5 of The Civil War Chronicles (36 page)

Fassett spat oath after oath, his breath hardly faltering as he came on. Stryker deflected one dagger blow, offered his own darting riposte, which pushed the momentum back on to the smaller man, and he felt as though he had gained the upper hand. Suddenly he slipped. Unbeknown to him, he had reached the bank of the stream. He toppled back, scrabbling for purchase, but it was no good, and he was tumbling before he could find his balance. He hit the bank on the way down, mouth crammed with dirt, and collided with the water hard, the wind punched out of him. He was up on all fours as the icy stream rushed over his hands, but he could not seem to gather his wits enough to stand. He gasped, desperate to haul air into lungs that felt cored out and raw. And then he saw Fassett, or, rather, he saw Fassett’s reflection. The killer had followed him down the bank, and he advanced, quillon gripped tight in each fist. Stryker’s sword was nowhere to be seen, tossed away in the fall to languish somewhere amongst the stones of the riverbed. Stryker spat a mouthful of grit and spun about. The stone was the size of his palm, smooth at the surface but weighty for all that, and he hurled it as hard as he could. It would have cracked Fassett’s skull as sure as a hammer against an egg shell, except that it missed. But it forced Fassett into an unexpected crouch that saw him stumbling on the loose stones underfoot, his balance betrayed.

‘Stryker!’ a woman’s voice shouted. He turned as Fassett was scrambling to his feet. Lisette was there, ankle deep in water. She had his sword, and, with a wink, tossed it to him.

Fassett launched himself at Stryker, but the captain wrenched his shoulders round like an uncoiling spring, swinging the blade in a powerful arc. For a moment it looked as though Fassett had made it inside the range of the razor edge, but just as he flexed his elbows to stab at Stryker’s chest, the broad steel scythed his shoulder. It was not a killing blow, but it cleaved deep into the flesh, severing skin and muscle in the blink of an eye, and slamming into Fassett’s shoulder-bone. He was felled like a great oak, and he brayed at the stars as he collided with the water.

Above him was Stryker, blood dripping black and thick from his sword. Fassett made to move, but he only had one quillon left and Stryker kicked it out of his grip. Then Stryker stepped on his former torturer, pushing his boot down on Fassett’s windpipe, pinning his head back in the stream so that the water just managed to slip over his cheeks and pour into his stunted nostrils. Fassett’s face was a rictus of terror, wide-eyed and beseeching beneath the glassy surface, an evil spirit from an old folk-tale, a glowering apparition in an enchanted mirror. Stryker stared back, held his foot firm, and in the moonlight his eye turned from grey to quicksilver, glinting like an evil orb.

Roger Tainton cursed William Trouting as he whipped the nag with a spiked branch, compelling the downtrodden beast into the dense inner sanctum of the copse. The man had betrayed him not once but twice, evidently deciding to send his sin-drenched crew to capture the gold. Well, Tainton thought with relish, he would get a nasty surprise. Fassett and Squires would give the party a bloody nose and Trouting’s would-be footpads would slink back to the
Silver Swan
with their tails thrust firmly betwixt their legs.

He slashed the branch down again, raking it hard across the horse’s ribs. If he could just get it moving at speed, he might be able to press on beyond the copse and west, towards the road. With God’s guidance Fassett and Squires would join him soon, or he could find somewhere to hide the glittering bounty while the sailors plundered the hut. At worst, they would kill the mute and the mulatto and stay at the decrepit shack for some time, but he was confident they would not chase him far to the north. They would be lost without their ship, after all.

‘On!’ Tainton snarled. The nag juddered forwards with difficulty, its cargo heavy and the terrain near impassable. Gunfire rattled behind. Shouts rent the darkness. He looked back, seeing nothing. ‘On!’

Then he heard the rustle of bushes, the snap of twig and branch thrust roughly aside. There were voices – loud, close – but he recognized none. Tainton clamped shut his eyes, knowing there was no time to waste, but utterly confounded as to what to do. How had the seamen come through Fassett’s trap so quickly? But the voices kept coming, and they grew in volume, and Tainton harangued the heaving pony, calling down the Holy Spirit to invigorate the pathetic beast’s limbs. He reached into the voluminous depths of his cloak and plucked his secret pistol free. He had loaded it before taking the wagon into the copse, and now he jerked back the hammer.

A shout rang out, clear as a bell and triumphal as a hunting horn. They were behind him. He twisted back to see a face push through a thick knot of dying bracken. It was a small, round face set upon the tiny shoulders of a dwarf. The skin was grey in the gloom, but the eyes shone. They were yellow, bright like the eyes of a cat, narrowing to crescent moons as the man grinned. Tainton might have thought it some kind of demon, a forest-dwelling creature sent by Satan to test his faith. Except that he recognized the face all too well.

‘Hold, you rebel bastard!’ the little man croaked. He clutched a sword that he now twitched out in front. ‘Jump down, there’s a good soul.’

Roger Tainton did alight from the wagon, but fired his pistol. The dwarf went down, wheeling away to crash back into the mouldering bracken, and Tainton ran to him, acutely aware of the other calling voices, men who had evidently spread out across the breadth of the copse. The diminutive soldier was not dead, for his moans emanated from the bracken, but Tainton had not the time to finish the job. He wanted the sword, sweeping his arms through the big, curled leaves until he caught the glint of metal against the darker stems. He stooped to grasp it, spinning back amid a jangle of spurs and a rattling heartbeat. It hurt to run, but he did it nevertheless, reaching the wagon just as three, perhaps four, greencoats came into view between the trees. Tainton considered a charge. One last, magnificent attack for King Jesus, but he wanted to live, to fight another day for the cause of righteousness, and for his inspirational master.

So he abandoned the wagon. He went to the harness and snapped the sword up through its leather fastenings so that the palfrey stepped smartly away. It shook, suddenly aware of its new freedom, and he jumped up on to the bare, skeletal back and roared in its pricked ear. Mercifully, gloriously, the animal responded, galloping into the trees and away.

‘
Merci
, Lisette,’ Stryker said as he and the Frenchwoman clambered up the bank.

She reached the summit first, looking back with a face tight with renewed anger. ‘I hate you yet.’

‘I do not blame you,’ Stryker responded through heaving breaths.

‘Good.’ She looked past him at the corpse of Sterne Fassett. The water had pushed him to the side so that his shoulders were wedged in the undergrowth at the foot of the bank, while water gently lapped at his feet. ‘But I hated him more.’

‘Good.’

Skellen appeared behind them. His bald head glowed with a sweaty sheen from the fight. ‘All well, sir?’

Stryker shrugged. ‘I vowed I would drown him in the sea.’

Skellen went to the edge of the high ground to stare down at the body. ‘Near enough, sir.’

‘Aye,’ Stryker acknowledged, wiping his sword on the grass. ‘Tainton?’

Skellen turned to face him with an embarrassed grimace. ‘Got away, sir.’ He waited for his captain to unleash the inevit­able fountain of oaths. ‘Shot Jack Sprat to boot.’

‘Barkworth?’ Lisette replied quickly. ‘Does he live?’

Skellen nodded. ‘Just winged him.’ He sheathed his own blade now, arching his back so that the spine released a series of cracks. ‘We’ve found something worth a look, though, if you’d like to follow me?’

They spent the rest of the night putting the scene of the killing to rights. There were four dead on Stryker’s side, plus Squires and Fassett, and a group sent to retrieve the rotting corpse of Clay Cordell had brought him back to be lined up with the rest. They had nothing with which to dig a pit, and Stryker was unwilling to risk garnering any more attention from Pagham or Selsey by lighting a pyre, so the bodies had been carefully arranged in the forest, covered with branches, soil and stones, and left to feed the beasts of the wild.

Stryker was painfully aware of the dangers the gold would bring. They were a small unit now, just nine men, plus himself and Lisette, and they could not afford to run into rebel patrols or even risk the prying stares of hungry country folk. They were trapped in rebel territory; isolated in the enclosures and forests that formed the land between the coast and the city of Chichester to the north. They had enough strength to brave the night, for the footpads would not take on such a well-armed group, but that was scant encouragement, for Tainton had vanished, and there was every chance he would return with a party of soldiers from one of the local garrisons. They would have to march during daylight, staying off the roads and pushing as far west as was possible. But first they needed to head north, for the westward coast road was immediately fractured by the four harbours at Chichester, Emsworth, Langstone and Portsmouth, and Stryker was not about to take his chances in those rebel-held places.

‘We’ll go east,’ he told Lisette, Skellen and Barkworth as they watched the rest of the men hitch a horse to the heavy wagon. A trio of his most reliable men – devoid of their green coats – had just returned from a nearby farmstead where they had traded one of Sir Alfred Cade’s golden rings for the animal.

Lisette’s chin tightened a fraction. ‘East is further into Roundhead land.’

‘And north is Chichester.’ He shrugged. ‘We must go round.’

She nodded. Skellen blew out his cheeks at the prospect of a march that seemed to be getting longer and more arduous by the minute.

‘The horse looks strong,’ Stryker said. It was hardly a French destrier, but it carried a great deal more meat on its bones than the poor nag Tainton had been using. ‘We move north, away from the coast, for a mile or two,’ he continued, ‘Then swing east, for another few miles, and north again. We’ll be quickly into the hills, avoiding Chichester entirely.’

‘The hills?’ Barkworth croaked. He had a hand clamped over his shoulder where Tainton’s bullet had sliced the flesh. Fortunately the wound looked clean enough and had no errant scraps of cloth attached. He fiddled absently with the makeshift ban­dage fashioned from strips of Sterne Fassett’s shirt. ‘Then what? Barely a road up there, I’d wager.’

‘Cap’n knows it like the lines of his palm,’ Skellen answered, glancing at Stryker.

Stryker nodded. ‘I grew up on the Downs. I’ll get us through.’

‘Then what?’ Lisette asked dubiously. ‘We cannot hope to walk all the way to Oxford with this bloody treasure.’

‘Winchester,’ Stryker said, the strands of a plan coming together after hours of private deliberation. He, too, had wanted to take the gold where it was safest, and that, without doubt, was Oxford. But it was too far, through the most dangerous territory outside of London itself. ‘Basing is our only other garrison in the region, but it is under constant threat. Even if we reached its walls, we would never make it out again. We could take ship, sail round to Bristol, but from where? And from which port would we find help this far to the east?’ Besides, if he ever set foot on another ship, it would be too soon. ‘Winchester is our only course. It has men enough to provide a forward escort, and lies far enough west that we may reach friendly lines more readily.’

‘But to get there,’ Barkworth said, his noose-ravaged voice made all the more rasping by teeth gritted against pain, ‘we must walk the high downland. That is a long way to trudge without running into the enemy.’

‘We will make the march in two stages,’ Stryker advised. ‘I come from a town called Petersfield, twenty miles short of Winchester. If we reach it, I will find places in which we might keep concealed.’

‘Laney is there,’ Lisette said.

Stryker looked at her quizzically. ‘Laney?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Benjamin Laney, the rector at the big church. He was the man who assisted me when I was there a year ago. He is staunch for the King.’

‘Petersfield it is,’ Stryker said. ‘We find Laney. With his help, we might discover if the way to Winchester is clear.’

CHAPTER 17

Southampton, Hampshire, 20 October 1643

Wagner Kovac let the stick take his weight as he gingerly crossed the threshold. He did not strictly need the walking aid, but he had grown used to it during his recuperation, and, if he was honest with himself, he was keen to demonstrate the sacrifices he had made on behalf of his colonel. This was to be their first meeting since his return from the ill-fated hunt, for Norton had been away, cultivating his growing influence at Poole and Blandford and taking a view of enemy forces in the north-west of the county. Now he was back in the city he had found himself governing, and Kovac had been summoned from the infirmary as soon as morning flooded with light.

‘The prisoners,’ Colonel Richard Norton said, without looking up, ‘have been rounded up, branded like cattle, and locked in their pens.’ He was seated at the large table in his usual office, the surface scattered with scrolls, scratching noisily at a pale piece of paper with a large quill. ‘I feel like a farmer, Wagner, truly I do.’ Now he looked up. His face was set firm, eyes unmoving. ‘And yet every farmer needs his helpers, his drovers and his farmhands. If a farmhand cannot do his job correctly, then the farmer must replace him, would you not say?’