Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles (26 page)

‘I feel,’ Burton began self-consciously. ‘I feel if we are to die here, then I should cast aside my damnable timidity.’ He stared at Stryker until the latter was forced to meet his gaze. ‘What have I to lose?’

Stryker’s heart felt like a culverin shot weighing against his ribs, because he feared his own reaction. But when he finally cast his eye down upon the lieutenant, he did not see a rival but the young man who had become the nearest thing he had to a son. What he felt was not jealousy but pride. ‘You have nothing to lose, Andrew. You’re a fine soldier and a good man.’

Burton visibly coloured. ‘Thank you, sir.’ Then he frowned, because he had seen something down amongst the bullet-chipped stones and churned earth of the west slope. ‘Sir?’

Stryker searched the terrain for himself. There, standing on a small boulder, immediately accosted by a pair of musket-toting redcoats, was a pike-thin, filthily clothed man with bare feet, black gums, and long, silver beard. Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner had returned.

‘See, God?’ Gardner barked at the sky when Stryker had ordered he be allowed up to the summit. ‘He is not an imbecile, just as you said.’

‘Enough, Gardner.’ Stryker did not feel inclined to trade insults, however good-natured they might have been, with the enigmatic hermit. Instead he jerked his angular chin at a pair of rocks a little way along the edge of the crest. ‘Come, I would speak with you.’

‘Now then,’ Gardner said happily when he had placed his bony rump on one of the stones, ‘what might you have to say to an old priest, who knows for a fact that the English are the good Lord’s least favourite creations?’

Stryker went to take the stone opposite, but his long scabbard made sitting difficult. He removed it and, realizing he had not thought to inspect the sword since the fight, drew the double-edged blade. ‘I would offer you my thanks.’

‘Funny way to thank a man,’ Gardner replied, blue eyes transfixed by the darkly stained steel. ‘A fine beast, if ever I saw one.’

Stryker discovered a perverse pleasure in unsettling the loud-mouthed old man, and he found it hard to stifle a smile. ‘A gift from the Queen.’

Gardner ran his gaze over the rutted blade, the ornate basket hilt and the heavy pommel set with a huge red garnet. ‘Fit for a king.’ He looked up finally. ‘You would thank me?’

Stryker nodded. ‘For forewarning us of Wild’s intention to attack.’ He thought of the gorse faggots that had proved so vital. ‘And giving us the means to fight him off.’

‘No matter,’ Gardner shrugged.

‘And secondly,’ Stryker went on, running a finger along one of the pockmarked edges of his sword.

‘Secondly?’

‘I would ask you what it is you’re doing here.’

‘I live here, boy, have I not already told you?’ The old man glanced heavenward. ‘Are his ears made entirely of cloth, Lord?’

Stryker abandoned his inspection of the blade and stared into Gardner’s weather-beaten face. ‘What are you doing here now? Why did you come to us yesterday?’

Gardner smiled wryly. ‘I was having a little peek at you fellows, and some of your men in red surrounded me.’

‘You said before that you let Skellen capture you.’

‘Aye, well. I wanted to see who it was that had evicted me from old Seek Wisdom’s hill.’ He scratched at some unseen parasite within the filthy beard at his chin. ‘I helped you because you looked like you needed it. You’d have been annihilated without me, boy, and I couldn’t live with that.’

‘Why? You’re hardly for the King.’

‘No, but I’m hardly for the Parliament either, boy. Old Seek Wisdom won’t care a rat’s ballock which side wins this war, long as I’m left alone, but you were kind to me. I repaid the kindness.’

Stryker drove the point of his sword into the earth between his tall boots and leant forward, resting his chin on the pommel. ‘Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord,’ he mused, ‘what kind of name is that?’

‘A good, Christian name,’ Gardner retorted sharply, before offering a sly wink. ‘And one not too far removed from your own first name, I’d guess,
Stryker
.’

That was a shrewd thrust, Stryker had to concede, and the corners of his mouth rose in a sardonic smile. ‘You’re not so mad.’

‘Mad?’ Gardner glared at the white smears of cloud crowning distant tors. ‘Mad he calls me, God.’

‘Seek Wisdom,’ Stryker prompted evenly.

Gardner let his gaze drift back to the soldier. ‘It is a hard existence out here, boy. Bleak and unforgiving. If a man may not converse – with his creator, or the moor, or the hills – then he truly sinks into madness.’

Stryker watched the former priest for a minute or so. Watched his reptilian tongue flicker across cracked lips, watched spindly fingers fiddle with the strands of his grime-ingrained beard, and stole a glance at the red-raw toes of his naked feet. Stryker knew Gardner was not insane, for he read intelligence in those wide, unblinking eyes. Indeed, Gardner had often spoken with a presence of mind that belied his frantic demeanour. Yet somehow he had been reduced to this waif. This shadow of a man. ‘Laud did this to you?’

Gardner nodded, a staccato gesture putting Stryker in mind of a woodpecker. ‘And his lackeys, aye. So I have hidden myself away on the moor these past years. Not many live hereabouts, Captain, and those who do tend to steer a wide berth. I have grown accustomed to it.’

Stryker straightened, leaving the sword jutting vertically from the soil, the hilt quivering gently. He took off his hat, rearranged the dishevelled feathers, and propped it on the rock at his side. Then he took the black ribbon from his blacker hair and ran his fingers roughly across his scalp, shaking out the soot-clogged knots. ‘It must be difficult, nevertheless. Nothing could be farther from the clergy.’

Gardner’s mouth cracked open in a smile that brandished some of the most decayed gums he had ever seen. ‘Oh, you’d be surprised, my boy. The priesthood gave me a life of prayer, contemplation, and fasting, and so does this!’ His grin broadened. ‘Though the fasting is generally not of my choice!’

‘You still pray?’

‘Aye, why wouldn’t I?’

‘Forgive me, Seek Wisdom, but you do not sound like a priest.’

Gardner cackled. ‘Do not let my occasional Celtic oath fool you, boy.’

Stryker was still unconvinced. ‘You keep your faith? After all that’s happened?’

Gardner tapped the side of his pointed nose. ‘Ah, now there speaks a damaged man. Your faith took flight long ago, yes?’

‘Well, I—’ Stryker hesitated.

‘Ah, fret not, boy,’ intervened the Welshman cheerfully, slapping Stryker on the shoulder. ‘I’m not one o’ your Banbury hot-gospellers, about to stick a finger in your face and cry heretic.’

Not that the old man’s condemnation would have been a problem, reflected Stryker, up here on an isolated hill in the middle of a vast wildness, but admitting a crisis of belief was still something that did not come easily to him. Such confessions were dangerous affairs, and he had long since decided to keep his thoughts on the matter hidden. In public he would bow his head if a prayer was spoken, or nod obediently when the regimental preachers brewed up a rant, for to articulate his inner feelings would be tantamount to suicide.

‘I believed once,’ Stryker replied tentatively, ‘but I suppose life has steadily chipped it away.’ In actuality, he had always regarded religion with a degree of scepticism. The Roman church seemed all too elaborate and ritualistic. A faith where mysticism and obfuscation were wielded as tools to awe and confuse. Conversely, Protestantism, especially the increasingly powerful Puritan element, appeared a dour and joyless business. A system designed to drive any last vestige of happiness from the human soul. Both sides of the spectrum, it seemed to Stryker, were intent on one thing: keeping the common man obedient.

‘You hear that, God?’ Gardner asked the sky. ‘Chipped away, he says! Ever heard such buffle-brained swine slop?’

Stryker sighed heavily. ‘You cannot begin to imagine what I’ve seen. What I’ve witnessed.’

‘Half of what everyone else sees, I’d wager,’ Gardner replied with a quick wink.

Stryker ignored the impish barb. ‘In the Low Countries death was an everyday thing.’

Gardner shrugged. ‘War, disease, it was ever thus, boy.’

‘More than that,’ Stryker shook his head, staring directly at his sword, long buried images suddenly swirling in his mind. ‘More than war. There was a cruelty I have seen nowhere else.’ He had witnessed a good deal of barbarity in England this last year, clambered across bodies, waded through red-stained rivers, seen men hacked, sliced, hanged, and shot to pieces. But nothing had come remotely close to the horrors of Germany. ‘A depravity and a—an evil that showed me once and for all that the world is—’

‘Is?’

Stryker lifted his head, fixing his grey eye on Gardner. ‘Godless.’

‘But you are a man,’ Gardner replied, his tone uncharacteristically soft. ‘You see a rich, pink horizon. The stars on a clear night. You cannot believe it is all one giant accident. It is the will of the Lord, boy.’

Stryker snorted a short burst of mirthless laughter. ‘I have also seen men mutilate one another for sport.’ He leaned further forward. ‘Rape for pleasure, Seek Wisdom. Massacre for God.’ At once, Stryker’s right hand darted out, snatching the sword from its earthy scabbard and casting his eye across the steel. ‘You’re right. There are many wondrous things in this world. Things I cannot readily explain. But I find it hard to believe in the God you speak of – a God of love – when His creation is so drenched in wickedness.’

‘But, Captain—’

Stryker was glaring now, and he knew he would look a fearsome sight, but he could not,
would
not relent. ‘Were you at Magdeburg?’

Gardner shook his head mutely.

Stryker knew the memory of that doomed city would never leave him. ‘I was. Caught up in that damned siege. Trapped inside for near six months, half starved. And then they came.’

Gardner’s wild blue eyes had ceased their habitual darting. ‘The Imperial troops?’

‘Aye.’ Stryker wondered if his face reflected the severity of his mood. ‘They were mad, frantic-eyed bastards.’

‘Like me?’ The Welshman’s lips twitched at the corners.

‘No,’ was all Stryker could think to say.

‘Famished too, boy, I should wager.’

Stryker nodded. ‘Plundered the place, butchered everyone – every
thing
– they saw, and burnt it to the ground.’ He chose not to reveal how he still sometimes woke during the darkest nights hearing the screams. ‘The stench of scorched flesh never leaves my cursed nostrils.’

Gardner waited a while, waiting as Stryker’s thoughts dallied far from this Devon hillside. ‘I heard the tales,’ he ventured at last. ‘They said twenty thousand souls.’

‘More,’ Stryker replied grimly. ‘So many more than that. Little children. Carved up and tossed in the Elbe. If that river is still poisoned to this day, I would not be surprised.’ This time the former priest did not respond. He let his gaze glide beyond Stryker’s shoulder, to the horizon of heath, forest, and tor. ‘The world is decaying,’ Stryker went on remorselessly. ‘A blood-drenched mess. If that is the will of your God, then I can live without Him.’

Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner took his long beard in both hands and smoothed it down, twisting the tip into a sharp, greasy point at his sternum. ‘It is not God who wills these things, Stryker.’

Stryker laughed, a deliberately harsh sound, like the rasp of an iron file. ‘Ah, free will!’

‘Of course.’

‘How many times have I heard those two little words explain away the world’s evils?’

‘I do not know, boy.’

‘More than I care to count, that’s for damned certain.’

‘Then what do you believe?’ Gardner asked calmly, in a tone that Stryker could finally associate with a man who must once have ministered to scores of souls. ‘In what do you put your trust?’

‘I believe what my ears and nose and eye report.’ Stryker turned his face to look up at the tor. His redcoats milled about on the flat, granite-cluttered crest, honing blades, repairing clothes or simply resting after a night of such trauma. ‘I trust those men up there,’ he said, before pointing a finger at his own chest, ‘and this man here. And this.’

Gardner nodded as Stryker tapped the tip of his long sword against the stone beneath his backside. ‘Well I hope your trust is not misplaced, boy, for I’d wager it’ll soon be tested again.’

‘Oh?’

The old man’s eyes drifted to a point beyond Stryker’s shoulder, and Stryker twisted his neck to gaze down upon the big barn that rose like an ominous grey storm cloud from the trees to the north-west. There was movement all around the squat building, men and horses, but this was not the usual evolutions practised by Wild’s harquebusiers. Something was different this time.

Stryker squinted, forcing the detail to sharpen. And then it hit him, and he was on his feet shouting up at the men on the tor, roaring orders to any within earshot. Because the men he saw, though mounted, wore coats of brown rather than steel plates and helmets, giving them the appearance of mounted infantrymen. Which meant they were dragoons.