Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (43 page)

They rode now towards the sounds of musketry, hampered by the undulating landscape, and by the time they came to the part of the column being threatened, the Prince’s troopers had
vanished once again. Tom and his companions reined in and took in the scene. Some musketeers were firing into a nearby hillock, disposing of charge and shot they had not had the chance to use, for they would not march for miles with loaded matchlocks. Others were falling back into column, cursing the Royalist dogs for cowards. A little further down the line several pikemen lay dead or wounded and the company’s colonel, a clean-shaven, red-faced man, was bawling at a captain of horse who had arrived ahead of Haggett’s troop.

‘Someone’s peeved,’ Trencher said, nodding towards the colonel, breathing hard after the ride.

‘What’s the point of bloody horse if it still takes you all day to get from here to there?’ the pike colonel was yelling, brandishing a captain’s leading staff at the other officer. The staff’s erstwhile owner lay dead near by, a gory hole in his face. ‘My lads are dying here while you take your merry time and show up when it’s all over.’

‘My apologies, Colonel, but we came as soon as we heard the shots,’ the captain replied, bristling at being upbraided in front of his men.

‘Back we go,’ Colonel Haggett called to his men, turning his mount and leaving the other troop to their ear-bashing, and Tom rode up to him, bringing his horse alongside as they walked them back up the column.

‘Sir, the Prince will dog our heels all the way to London if we let him,’ Tom said. ‘Every attack slows us, as it is surely meant to. It could be that the King has already overtaken us and that we march into the lion’s jaws.’

Haggett pushed up his helmet’s three-bar face guard, his close-set eyes latching on to Tom’s. ‘And what would you have us do about it, Trooper Rivers?’ he asked, knuckling at the moustache he had grown and to which he was clearly not yet accustomed.

‘We could engage them,’ Tom said. ‘Bleed them. They come a troop at a time, never in any numbers. Two hundred of us
could ride at them, kill some. That would give them cause to think again.’

‘Our orders are to stay with the foot, not tear across the downs after that devil prince.’

Haggett did not like Tom. That was clear and neither did Tom blame him seeing as he had all but usurped the man, taking charge of Haggett’s troopers when the colonel was racked by fever and in danger of losing Parliament’s silver. But to Tom’s mind Haggett was too careful. He was not a coward, he had proved that much in the last months, but he was too careful.

‘Then they will keep coming and we will keep losing men,’ Tom said, frustrated by the colonel’s diffidence but knowing he could hardly expect the man to ignore the earl’s orders.

‘No, Rivers, we will not,’ Haggett said, glancing at his men as they passed. They looked tired and ill-fed but Tom knew they would fight. ‘Not that I need keep you abreast of my lord Essex’s strategy, but we are to cross the Kennet at the first opportunity, keep the river between us and them.’

Tom nodded. It was a sound plan, a better one, truth be told, than charging after Prince Rupert’s fearsome cavalry with weary, hungry men.

But then, was it?

‘A crossing will slow us further,’ Tom said, twisting in the saddle to look south across the downs. ‘How far away is the river?’

‘Five miles perhaps,’ Haggett said, his frown betraying that Tom’s point had struck true.

‘By the time we’ve crossed over, the King and every man he has will be blocking the London road,’ Tom said. ‘We shall receive an ill welcome.’

Haggett closed his eyes and, for a moment, with his sallow skin and gaunt cheeks, he looked like the corpse he had so nearly become. Then those eyes opened wearily. ‘Lord Essex knows his business,’ he said, then with a click of his tongue and a snap of the reins he trotted off, straight-backed and duteous.

‘Obedient as the tamest fireside hound,’ Trencher said drawing near.

‘You heard?’ Tom asked.

‘I heard.’ Trencher grimaced. ‘We’re in for a proper fight. Like Kineton, I reckon. When two armies get so close there’s no avoiding it.’

That was true enough, Tom knew, for, as they had experienced at first hand, an army on the march was vulnerable to attack. Once two great armies were in such proximity to each other no commander could expect to march away without fighting if his opponent wanted a fight.

‘Though, if the earl doesn’t have the stomach for it, we could slip away in the small hours, leaving the fires burning. It’s worked before now,’ Trencher said, the words laced with his distaste at the idea of running from a fight.

‘And abandon the baggage train and most of the big guns?’ Tom shook his head. ‘Even then their horse would catch up and chip away at that lot,’ he said, thumbing towards the marching column. ‘Piece by piece.’ He thought of the master stonemason Guillaume Scarron and hoped the Frenchman was earning good money shaping stone wherever he was. ‘No. Essex will fight,’ he said. ‘He has to.’

‘Aye.’ Trencher scratched the bristles on his granite-like face. ‘And sooner rather than later, too, or his army will be too weak from lack of a decent feed to put up much of a scrap.’ He shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘I say let’s fight the curs and be done with it.’

Two crows flapped up into the sky,
craa
ing loudly, the hard, gnarled notes of their calls sounding as though born of pain. Tom watched them jostle up into the grey banks of cloud drifting south before a northerly that was beginning to bite his face. Yet he felt a bloom of savage heat deep in his gut even as he breathed in the cold air, feeling the September day course through his blood. For he knew the King would be waiting for them.

And there was a battle coming.

‘I’ll wager they cursed the earl when they happened upon that German blackguard and that diabolic dog of his,’ Penn said, huffing into his hands and rubbing them together. Somewhere out in the darkness a female tawny owl was hooting, now and then answered by a male.

‘Who?’ Tom asked, returning to the fire with a bundle of sticks.

‘The bloody quartermasters,’ Dobson answered, running his ballock dagger over a small whetstone as Tom dropped the sticks and Trencher proceeded to feed them to the flames. ‘They thought we had won the race, the stupid bastards. There they were, ambling into Newbury when they stumbled into Prince Rupert and the King’s bloody vanguard idling on the bridge. Got Cavalier boot prints on their backsides now, I’ll warrant.’

‘Which leaves us here in the cold,’ Penn said, rounding his mouth and exhaling so that his breath clouded like pipe smoke.

‘Another night ’neath the stars,’ Corporal Laney added, though he stared up at the black bowl of heaven as though seeing it for the first time. Or the last.

All around them other fires crackled and spat and the sound of murmured conversation filled the night. Essex’s whole army, Tom reflected, bivouacked there in that place beneath those indifferent bodies of the firmament, in and around the villages of Enbourne and Hamstead Marshall. Tom could sense the apprehension hanging in the air, the fear and foreboding, the cold unease and the excitement, too, of men who know they will kill or be killed the next day.

He thought of Mun then and felt certain his brother must be in Newbury with the King’s army. The chances were they would face each other across the field. It was a dizzying notion that dredged up unwelcome thoughts of their father. And of Emmanuel.

‘Just think of it,’ young Banks said, the whites of his eyes glistening in the flamelight. ‘His Majesty the King just two
miles away from where we sit now. The bloody King of England just over there,’ he said, pointing north-east.

‘A strange thought, ain’t it?’ James Bowyer said, taking the shoe off his right foot and lying back, holding his stockinged leg in two hands and clenching his foot against the fire’s warmth. ‘I could fart and with the right wind the King of England would smell it.’

‘I’ll wager he can smell that stocking even now and asks who has died nearabouts,’ Corporal Mabb put in, squatting by the flames, his eyes closed as he relished the heat on his age-haggered face.

Dobson lifted his ballock dagger to his face and looked down its length, then tested the edge against his thumbnail. ‘Any of you want a good edge putting on your knife while I’m at it?’ he asked without taking his eyes off the blade.

Tom and Trencher shook their heads.

‘I rather hope we don’t end up that close to the curs,’ Penn said, but handed his knife over anyway.

Dobson nodded. ‘It always pays to keep a good edge,’ he growled into his beard, setting to work on Penn’s knife.

Tom doubted knives would be needed in the coming fight, knew that Dobson doubted it too. But it wasn’t really about keen blades. Men liked to keep busy before a battle, Tom had learned, because it took their minds away from thoughts of death. Which was why he had not taken Dobson up on his offer. Tom would sharpen his own blades, perhaps later when sleep would not come, as was often the way before a fight. And whilst doing it he would not think of Mun or of his family, or death. Well, not his own death anyway. He would let his mind conjure Lord Denton then let it dwell on him. And he would hope that the chaos-loving God who resided in Heaven and who either fashioned Man’s suffering or else did nothing to prevent it, would put that black-hearted bastard in front of him in the coming fray.

‘So this is where we shall beat them,’ Corporal Mabb said, patting his mare’s neck. ‘Let your eyes be full of it now, lads!’ he called, ‘before the fun begins and we all get overexcited. For you will tell your grandchildren about this place. Mark my words. Others will say they were here whether they were or not. But you
are
here, eh? So feast your daylights on these fields and be glad you chose the winning side.’ His claw-like hand reached inside his tunic and produced a small bag of tobacco which he opened and brought to his nose, inhaling its fragrance appreciatively. ‘And we might as well have a smoke while we’re about it,’ he said, glancing at Colonel Haggett who nodded his consent. Mabb grinned and pulled out his pipe.

To look at him one would have thought the corporal had not a care in the world, but Tom knew better, knew that as an old head amongst young heads Mabb would serve the troop the way a keel serves a ship, providing the foundation, the spine upon which the strength of the troop depended. What he lacked in youth and vigour Mabb could make up for in temperance, for all that Tom considered the man’s optimism ill-founded as he took in what was to be the battlefield, chewing a stale hunk of bread he had saved from the day before. His eyes ranged over a tract of land bounded on the north by the River Kennet and the heavily enclosed water meadows lining its banks, on the east by the Newbury to Andover road, and on the south by the River Enbourne. It would soon be the stage for a scene of bloody confusion. He knew all too well the chaos of battle, when a man is given over to his most base instincts so that he may butcher other men, savage their living flesh with bullet and blade, and watch the terror and regret in their eyes as death claimed them. As his guts soured at the thought, Tom could not help but wonder if Mun was even now making the same appraisal of the field. Was his brother imagining the
carnage that would prove yet another stain on the souls of all who survived?

‘These fields will soon cradle the living unto death,’ he murmured to himself. The earth would be steeped in blood. And yet what choice was there? With the King’s army standing astride the route back to his base around London, Essex was doing the only thing he could. He was making a fight of it. And Tom was hungry for a fight. Despite the drudgery of the march and Parliament’s army having lost the race to Newbury, Tom had a new-found respect for the earl. Essex had organized his army according to a predetermined plan so that it had marched in the brigade formations in which it would be deployed in battle. That dawn, in the cold damp dark, each unit had known its place relative to another, moving into battalia with the benefit of the earl’s leading commanders having surveyed the landscape before nightfall. Though in the event it had been by no means a simple affair, for the ground did not favour the great formations of foot and horse with which commanders had strategized and in which soldiers had trained.

‘This will be no Kineton Fight,’ Penn had remarked earlier, as the breaking dawn had slowly revealed to the rank and file the landscape before them. The battle lines of both armies ran north–south and what faced them was a terrain of small fields surrounded by thick hedgerows.

‘It’ll be hard enough for the plodders,’ Trencher had grumbled, meaning the infantry, ‘but for us it will be near impossible.’

‘That’s as may be, lad,’ Corporal Mabb said, ‘but yonder ground will be just as troublesome for His Majesty’s horse as it will be for us, meaning they shan’t play first fiddle like they normally do. The colonel may put me right,’ he said, nodding to Haggett who was out in front of them, talking with another officer, ‘but I suspect that due to the terrain we shall be used around the place in small numbers.’ He stretched out an arm as though scattering imaginary seeds here and there. ‘Same for them buggers. And I reckon they’re not so frightening by the score.’

Still, Tom did not like the look of the dew-covered escarpment, in front of him and slowly rising towards the south, eventually to form the broad open plateau known, according to a local man, as Wash Common. He wished brave Achilles were alive still, for the stallion had known no fear and Tom would have trusted his sure-footedness. By contrast the mare he rode now, which The Scot had given him to make good his escape from Oxford, was nervous. Her ears were flat and she was tossing her head, so Tom was trying the same soothing words on her that Achilles had liked.

‘Be a good lad, Penn, and take a little ride up there,’ Trencher said, pointing up the escarpment, a northern spur of which rose off to their right, the low, newly risen sun shafting light across it yet leaving the near side in cold shadow. From the look of the clouds scudding eastward across the heavens, the new sun’s glory would be short-lived. ‘Get an eyeful of the merry-begotten curs so we might have a better idea what kind of day it’s likely to be.’