Ring of Fire III (4 page)

“Well, yes,” Owen consented. “Too much to hope for until we see the truth of it, eh?” But as soon as he’d uttered the saucy gibe, Owen regretted it: Hugh O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, was hardly a poor commander. Quite the contrary. And humble enough, for all his many admitted talents. Maybe that’s what made him so damned annoying—

“Seems we’ve picked up an escort,” observed O’Brian, glancing behind.

Sure enough, close to a dozen monks—Franciscans, judging from the hooded brown habits—had swung in behind their guards, who remained tightly clustered around the
tercio
banners of Tyrone and O’Neill. One of the monks was pushing a handcart through the May mud, prompting Owen to wonder:
had someone died
en camp
?
Or maybe the brown robes had come to seek used clothes for the poor? If the latter, then the monks were in for a rude surprise: the Irish
tercios
were no longer a good source of that kind of easy charity. They were in dire want of it themselves, these days.

As he approached the
tercios’
staff tents, Owen noticed that, in addition to the pennants of the staff officers, a small banner of the earl of Tyrconnell’s own colors were flying. As he gave the day’s camp countersign to the interior perimeter guards, he pondered the fluttering outline of the O’Donnell coat of arms. Strange: did this mean that Hugh was actually here?

A lean fellow, saber at his side, came bolting down the horse-track from the much larger commander’s tent, perched atop a small rise. The approaching trooper was an ensign: probably Nugent, O’Neill conjectured, or maybe the younger of the Plunkett brothers. No matter, though: they were all cut from the same cloth and class. New families, all half-Sassenach; all lip-service Catholics. Some allies, those.

But Nugent or Plunkett or whoever it was had stopped, staring at the banners carried by O’Neill’s oncoming entourage. Then he turned about and sprinted back up toward the commander’s tent without even making a sign of greeting.

“Seems we’ve got their attention,” muttered O’Neill through a controlled smile.

“See what you’ve done now?” O’Brian’s voice was tinged with careful remonstrance. “They seen the earl of Tyrone’s colors. They’ll think John is wid’ us! They’ll think—”

“Let ’em think. They do so much of it as it is, a little more can’t hurt. Aye, and let ’em worry a bit, too.”

“But—”

“But nothing. Here’s the Great Man himself.”

Thomas Preston had emerged from the commander’s tent. He was an older man, one of the oldest of the Irish Wild Geese that had flocked to Flanders after the disaster at Kinsale, thirty-four years before. And Irish soldiers had been flying to Flanders ever since: leaving behind increasing oppression and poverty, they had swelled the ranks of their four
tercios
now in the Lowlands. Mustering at slightly more than twelve thousand men, many of the newer recruits had been born here, grown here, learned the trade of the soldier here. And all knew that the recent consolidation of the Netherlands, and the consequent divisiveness amongst their Hapsburg employers, made their own future the most uncertain of all.

Preston did not look approving—or happy. After a few sharp phrases, he sent the runner back down the hill; he waited, arms akimbo, a dark scowl following the young ensign’s return to O’Neill’s honor-guard.

“Colonel O’Neill,” the ensign panted before he’d come to a full stop, “Colonel Preston would have the commander’s password from you.”

O’Neill looked over the thin fellow’s head—he was not much more than a
gossoon
, really—and stared at Preston. “Oh, he would, would he?”

“Yes, sir.” A second group of pickets had come to flank the youngster. “Apologies, but Colonel Preston is most insistent. New security protocols, sir.”

“Is that right? And those are his fine ideas, are they?”

“No, sir; they are Hugh O’Donn—I mean, the earl of Tyrconnell’s, sir.”

Ah, but of course. The ever-innovative earl of Tyrconnell’s legacy lived on in the camp he had abandoned almost a month ago, in the first week of April. O’Neill’s gaze flicked briefly to the small O’Donnell coat of arms fluttering just behind him. Or, maybe he had
not
abandoned it, after all...

O’Neill urged his mount forward. “The commander’s day-sign is ‘Boru.’ ”

“Very good, sir, you may—”

But Owen Roe O’Neill had already passed, his entourage—including two officers from John O’Neill’s Tyrone
tercio
—following closely behind. The monks, however, were detained by the guards at the staff tents.

O’Neill said nothing, gave no sign of recognition as he approached the commander’s tent, with Preston’s pennant snapping fitfully before it. Preston was equally undemonstrative. O’Neill stayed atop his mount, looked down at the older man and thought,
Sassenach bastard
, but said, with a shallow nod, “Colonel.”

Preston was not even that gracious. “Where is the earl of Tyrone?”

“I expect he’s enjoying a nap about now.”

Preston’s mustache seemed to prickle like a live creature. “Yet you fly his colors.”

“I received your instructions to come without the earl. I have done so. But he is symbolically here with us in spirit—very
insulted
spirit—Colonel Preston.”

“Damn it, O’Neill: the whole point of excluding him was so that you
wouldn’t
be carrying his colors.”

Owen, bristling reflexively at the profanity, found his anger suddenly defused by puzzlement: “You were worried about his—his colors?”

“Yes, blast it. And why did you bring those bloody Franciscans with you?”

O’Neill looked back down the low rise: most of the monks had moved past the first checkpoint, were drawing close to the second, where the commander’s day-sign was to be given. Two lagged behind with the handcart, near the staff tents. “I assure you,” muttered O’Neill,” they’re not my Franciscans. I’d not bring—”

The flap of Preston’s tent ripped open. O’Neill gaped: Hugh Albert O’Donnell, in cuirass, was staring up at him, blue eyes bright and angry. “The Franciscans who came in with you—do you know them? Personally?”

“No, but—”

Hugh wasn’t looking at him anymore. His strong neck corded as he shouted: “First platoon, down the hill! Guards: take hold of those monks. Immediately!”

Owen Roe O’Neill was, by all accounts and opinions—including his own—excellent at adapting to rapid changes on the battlefield. But this was not a battlefield, or rather, had not been one but a slim second ago. And that change—from common space to combat space—was not one he easily processed.

Stunned, he saw the nearest monks pull wheel locks from beneath their robes and discharge them into the second set of pickets at murderously close range. Further down the slope, one monk pushed the handcart into Tyrconnell’s staff tent while his partner drew a pistol on the guards there.

In the same moment, the grimy soldiers who had been skulking to and fro in the trenches came boiling out, not bothering to dress ranks. But stranger still, they seemed in perfectly good order, operating not as a mass, but in groups of about five men each. This chaotic swarm of small, coherent teams streamed downhill, several tossing aside practice guns and pulling real ones, others drawing sabers and short swords. O’Neill’s own guards retracted, clustered tight around him, weapons drawn, as the leading infiltrators drew grenades and shortswords from beneath their robes and closed in—

Just as the first teams from the trenches caught the assassins in the flank with a ragged chorus of pistol fire. Snaphaunces and wheel locks barked while a strange, thick revolver—a “pepperbox?”—cracked steadily, firing five times. When the fusillade was over, only one of the monks was still on his feet; a few on the ground moved feebly. A second wave of soldiers—sword-armed—closed the last few yards and finished the bloody execution. An alert trooper kicked the one lit grenade down the slope and away from the cart-track, where it detonated harmlessly.

Down at the staff tents, the monk who had drawn a pistol had evidently not done so any faster than one of the guards. The two weapons discharged simultaneously and the two men went down—just as the monk who’d trundled the hand cart into the staff tent came sprinting back out. The other guard who’d been slower on the draw went racing after him—and went airborne as the tent exploded in a deafening ball of flame.

By the time O’Neill had his horse back under control, the whole exchange was over. Almost twenty bodies lay scattered along the cart track, small fires guttered where the staff tents had been, and men of the Preston
tercio
were carrying two of their own wounded off to where the Tyrconnell regiment’s young surgeon could tend to them. With his ears still ringing from the explosions, and his veins still humming with the sudden rush of the humor the up-timers called “adrenaline,” Owen could only feel one thing: that he was glad to be alive.

Then he turned and saw Hugh O’Donnell’s eyes—and wondered if his sense of relief was, perhaps, premature.

* * *

“Why did you bring John O’Neill’s colors, Owen?” O’Donnell’s voice and eyes were calm now. But most of the others in the commander’s tent—those belonging to the staff officers who would have been blown to bits if they hadn’t already been summoned here—remained far more agitated.

Owen relied on the tactic that had always served him well: when your adversary has you on the run, that’s when you turn and hit back—hard. “Maybe you should be asking yourself that question, Hugh O’Donnell. A Sassenach”—he glared at Preston, who glared right back—“tells the earl of Tyrone not to come to a council of the colonels? Well, let me tell you, even if John O’Neill is not ‘permitted’ to sit and talk with the regal likes of Preston—or you—I
will
come bearing his standard, and with it, the reminder of his authority—and that of his clan.”

O’Donnell looked away, closed his eyes. “Owen, it wasn’t Preston who excluded John. It was me. And I did it to protect him.”

“Protect John? From what?”

O’Donnell cocked his head in the direction of the killing ground that led down to the gate. “From that...or worse. It was folly for us to have too many tempting targets in one place.”

O’Neill paused. Then, voice level: “What do you mean?”

“I mean, if John
had
come, the last two royal heirs of Ireland would have been in the same place, at the same time. And with politics in the Lowlands being what they are, signaling such a gathering was tantamount to inviting an attack. As we just saw.”

O’Neill frowned. “But we’ve got peace—for now—so who’d want the two of you dead? And how would they—whoever they are—even know you’re in the Lowlands at all, Hugh? The last any of us heard, you were off in Grantville.”

O’Donnell nodded. “Reasonable questions, Owen. Will you listen to the answers,
before
you tell me how wrong I am?”

Owen nodded. “Of course;
that
I can do.” And he grinned. O’Donnell returned the smile—and there were audible sighs of relief in the tent as the tension ebbed. “So let’s have it, Hugh: who is trying to kill you and John? The English? Again?”

O’Donnell leaned back, hands folded firmly on the field table before him. “It could be them. But you also have your pick of new possible culprits. Local Catholics who feel Fernando has been too lenient with the Calvinists. Ministers in Madrid who want to topple Fernando as King in the Netherlands. Maybe Philip himself. In short, anyone who wants to give the Spanish crown a reasonable pretext for ‘restoring order’ in the Netherlands.”

Owen shook his head. “I’m lost. How does attacking us achieve that?”

“We’re a wild card, Owen—all of us Wild Geese. Four
tercios
, almost all full strength at three thousand men each. What happens to the Lowlands if we disband—or rebel?”

“Chaos. The Prince of Orange might try to take charge, but he hasn’t the troops. The locals will try to oust the Spanish. Fernando, a Hapsburg of Spain, and his wife, a Hapsburg of Austria, will soon be surrounded and in peril for their lives.”

“And what happens? Who comes in, if we disband or just stay in barracks?”

“France might try to take advantage. Or maybe the Swede.”

“Exactly—and would Philip want either?”

“Christ, no!” And then Owen saw it. “So, with us no longer ready to be an independent spine for Fernando’s army, the local Spanish
tercios
call for help, and Philip has no choice but to intervene. Decisively.”

O’Donnell nodded. “There are many possible variations on the theme, but that’s the basic dirge. Half the court in Madrid is already calling for a ‘stern approach’ to Fernando’s recent actions: after all, he did take the title ‘King in the Netherlands’ without Philip’s permission. And since then, Philip has let his brother fend for himself...and we’ve all felt the results of that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what has happened to your salaries over the last few months?”

Grumbles arose from every quarter of the tent.

O’Donnell spoke over them. “That’s not Fernando’s doing: he’s not the one holding the purse strings. That would be Olivares, either working independently, or at Philip’s behest. The Lowlands have long been a drain on the Spanish; over time, they’ve invested far more in this patch of ground than they’ve ever earned back. So, while Philip may not yet consider his brother a traitor, why should he pay for his
tercios
? Particularly those which aren’t Spanish?”

“So we Irish are like a redheaded stepchild between spatting parents.”

“Something very like it, yes.” Hugh looked around the tent. “Which means that, any day now, your allegiances may be questioned. And whatever you might answer, you can be sure of this: one or another of your employers will be very unhappy with your answer.”

“You mean, as unhappy as they were when you turned in your commission and titles?”

O’Donnell’s voice was quiet. “You’ve heard then?”

O’Neill shook his head. “Not officially, no: your officers have been keeping it quiet. But when your
tercios
came over here into bivouac with Preston’s, talk started—particularly when your men started getting orders from the Sassena—from Colonel Preston. And there were some as claimed that before you left, you’d folded up your tabard and sash of the Order of Alcantara and sent them back to Madrid.”