Marston Moor (39 page)

Leven could do nothing but agree. Like the Royalists down on the moor, their flanks were formed of horsemen. On the far right, facing Goring’s Northern Horse, were the cavalry and dragoons of Fairfax’s Northern Association commanded by the lord’s son, Sir Thomas, who rode in the front line, which, in turn, was comprised of five bodies of horse interspersed with units of musketeers. There was a line behind, of equal strength, and a third line of Scots horse in reserve. Over on the left, at the already bloodstained Bilton Bream, the cavalry were commanded by Manchester’s second, Oliver Cromwell. He too had a trio of deep lines, leading the first in person, with the second commanded by Colonel Vermuyden. The third was again made up of Scottish cavalry, to be led by David Leslie. The centre of the army was dominated by foot, and that was where Leven’s proud Covenanters brought their strength to bear. Fairfax had taken three thousand foot to the gates of York, while Manchester had supplied twice that number. In contrast, Leven’s army had fourteen thousand pikemen and musketeers, and now they marched past him in huge, snaking columns to take up position on the ruined fields of corn. The Army of Both Kingdoms had suffered much during their abortive siege, with cannon, musket and plague pecking at them without remorse, but still, after all that, Leven could gaze upon a burgeoning battle line that would, within an hour or two, boast the better part of twenty thousand infantry. More, indeed, than the entire Royalist army combined.

Eventually he looked at Fairfax and nodded. ‘Pray God you are right, my lord.’

Stryker stared up at the ridge. They had stood to arms the entire morning and watched, with unease and then horror, as the escarpment had filled with soldiers. The cornfields had gone, replaced by metallic killers on red-eyed destriers, by phalanxes of musket and pike, by dragoons with long-arms slung across their backs, by gun crews and their black-muzzled murderers. There were so many banners on that hill. Reds and blues and yellows and blacks. They swirled high, every blurring smear of colour a marker for each individual unit, though he could not count them all. He had not seen an army so vast since the Low Countries. It spread over the ridge and down part of the steep slope like a swarm of bees, vastly outnumbering his own army. A vague memory of Bolton-le-Moors swirled through his head, and he found himself wondering if this day was God’s revenge.

He took some salted trout from his snapsack, tearing off strips and handing them to the others. Skellen and Barkworth were behind him, their mounts flanking Faith’s hirsute pony.

‘The unholy trinity,’ Thomas Hood said. He was saddled at Stryker’s right side, chewing as he spoke. ‘I see the Fairfax Foot hold the centre. Thank the Lord, for I’d rather our lads face them than the blue bonnets.’

Stryker saw Lord Fairfax’s banner in the middle of the Allied infantry. The front row, from what he could see at so low a perspective, was made up of ten regiments. They were brigaded into five divisions, two regiments apiece, and on the right, as Stryker saw it, were the red and green coats of the Earl of Manchester’s army, while on the far side were the grey Scots in their blue hats and plaid shawls. Between them they accounted for all but one of the brigades, and that, in the very centre, was the one that had taken Hood’s eye. It seemed strange that Lord Fairfax’s men – those who had suffered many defeats to Newcastle’s grizzled whitecoats – would be entrusted to hold the very epicentre of the Allied line, the fulcrum around which the rest of the foot brigades would turn. ‘They hurried back,’ he said, considering what had prompted the deployment. ‘They are not drawn into their separate armies, but mixed and spread. The Yorkshiremen probably reached the field first.’ A thought struck him as he glanced at Hood. ‘The banners are not easy to make out. You are sober?’

‘The men have drained the sutler dry,’ Hood said with mock chagrin.

Stryker laughed. ‘I need your wits, Thomas.’

‘You have them, sharp and clear.’ He twisted to see the girl. ‘I have Miss Helly to thank.’

‘Do not turn hot-gospeller on me, Lieutenant,’ Stryker said as Faith blushed, ‘for I plan to get blind drunk in York this night.’

Hood nodded. ‘I look forward to it, sir.’

‘Amen to that,’ Skellen muttered.

Faith opened her mouth, but her words were drowned as they crossed her lips. The volley had come from a line of heavy guns up on the ridge, its thunderclap reverberating across the moor. Vos edged to the left, and Stryker had to grip hard to keep him steady. One man, a dragoon away to the right, was thrown, his mount rearing in terror. A mighty flock of birds rose from the forest at their backs, speckling the sky amid a crescendo of flapping wings and shrieking caws.

‘Steady!’ a voice was bellowing out in front, from somewhere within the dense rows of the prince’s foot brigades. ‘Steady my good men!’

The guns flashed orange again, tongues licking the crest of the ridge. Smoke billowed, obscured the black muzzles in bitter cloud, and then the rumble shook the earth. The half-dozen lumps of iron whined over their heads, crashing into the forest canopy. A nervous murmur rippled through the ranks.

‘Saker, sir,’ Skellen said. ‘Tickles my back teeth.’

‘Did’nae think you had back teeth,’ Barkworth replied.

‘With the Major’s leave, you shall have no front teeth,’ Skellen growled.

The tall Gosport man and the tiny, yellow-eyed Scot glared at one another and then they were all laughing as the first of the Royalist artillery pieces rent the damp afternoon. Skeins of smog threaded back through the brigades into the woodland. Faith caught her breath, smothering her face with her sleeve. For Stryker, it was as though an apothecary waved a pungent potion to his nostrils, livening his senses and churning his bowels.

Skellen’s voice turned to a whisper. ‘There’s a lot of fuckin’ rebels up there.’ He glanced at Faith. ‘Beg pardon.’

‘Like fleas on a dog’s back,’ Barkworth reflected.

‘Only one dog I’m interested in,’ Skellen said, and Stryker looked back to see Boye, the large white poodle that had seen more battle than most, barking madly as Prince Rupert cantered out to the left wing with a group of aides.

‘You believe him Satan’s creature?’ Faith asked dubiously.

Skellen wrinkled his nose. ‘He can’t win a fight, lass, but he’ll lose one right enough.’

Stryker tore his gaze away from the party around which the dog sauntered. ‘The men believe, Mistress. The simple folk, dragged from their ploughs to spill the blood of their neighbours for kings and nobles they will never meet and principles they can never understand. Remember the sutler’s charm?’ He paused for her to nod. ‘They pray to God, right enough, but also to the faeries in the forest and the wraiths in the rivers. Those men believe Boye brings us luck. If he is harmed, they will believe the magic brook runs dry.’

‘And then, Miss,’ Skellen said, ‘we really are in trouble.’

The bombardment was feeble. The great guns on both sides shredded the afternoon, Scottish crews spewing fire and venom from atop the ridge, king’s men replying by turns, but the rain had persisted, and the ground had turned to bog. The mattrosses worked tirelessly with scourer and sponge, rammer and priming iron, but the damp powder fizzed meekly and the soil beneath the huge wheels shifted and collapsed with each recoil so that every new shot required a different elevation than the last. And all the while the targets moved as brigades on both sides were cajoled into amended positions to accommodate new arrivals.

It was around five o’clock when the singing began. The cannon duel had petered to nothing, and the big sakers and demi-culverins seeped smoke from silent muzzles, their barrels hissing as the unrelenting rain pattered. Some of the smaller pieces engaged in their own duel, the higher-pitched spitting of drake minions and falconets continuing where their monstrous cousins had ceased. But in the main there was quiet, and out of that quiet came voices.

‘The enemy don white paper in their hats,’ a haughty messenger with russeted armour and hair in glossy ringlets called down to Stryker as he cantered past.

‘Paper?’

‘Or handkerchiefs.’ The horse continued by so that he had to twist hard to keep hold of the conversation. ‘We, therefore, shall wear none!’

Stryker knuckled the edge of his hat. ‘Field word?’

‘
God and the King
!’

As Stryker turned to pass on the order, a wave of sound rolled down from the slopes and flooded the moor, deep in tone but temperate, pleasant even. The Royalist army seemed collectively to hold its breath.

‘Psalms,’ Lieutenant Hood said.

Faith nudged her pony forwards. ‘It is beautiful.’

‘Aye,’ Stryker said. All across the ridge, the armies of Parliament and Scotland sang together, voices rising and falling in unison. It was jarring in so martial a scene, yet he could not deny the strange, raw beauty of it.

‘They sing psalms!’ a man’s voice, risen to a childlike pitch, ripped through the chorus. ‘I knew it! We stand here, fearful and silent while the righteous worship on high!’ He was dressed in the leather and steel of a harquebusier, but he had dismounted, staggering across the open ground between the foot brigades that made up the second line of Rupert’s infantry and the cavalry reserve commanded by Crane, Widdrington and Stryker. He reeled away from his horse, turning a full circle and staring up at the sullen sky, raindrops soaking his face. ‘Oh, Jesu, we are lost! All is lost!’

‘Shut him up, for Christ’s sake!’ Crane’s voice bellowed from further along the line.

An officer with a silver-capped blackthorn cane spurred his white mount from one of the nearby horse brigades. ‘Smith!’ he called. ‘Get back to your saddle, sir, this instant!’

Smith laughed a crazed, manic cackle. ‘Doom and damnation is all we may find on this cursed moor!’

The officer bore down on the ranting trooper, hitting him hard with the blackthorn. ‘To your saddle, man!’

Smith seemed not to notice. ‘Do you not hear them, my lord? They do sing their psalms, for they know they are Godly and they know they will carry this day.’ The officer caned him again and this time the moon-eyed harquebusier stumbled to his horse. ‘God is on their side, my brothers!’ he called as he clambered into the saddle. ‘He is on their side! We shall be routed! Do you hear me? Routed, and scattered and slaughtered like hogs!’

A brace of drakes spluttered into life from halfway up the hillside, their bounty screaming over the heads of the foot brigades, dipping as they raced between Stryker’s troop and Crane’s. The woodland crackled behind as branches severed and fell.

Smith laughed again as his horse walked back to his own section. ‘I will be slain!’ he yelled. ‘Jesu, help me, I will be slain this day!’ His officer, shepherding his return, snapped a rebuke. Smith lurched to the side and vomited. ‘God damn me!’ he spluttered as a stream of greenish bile soaked his thigh. The drakes barked again. ‘God sink me!’

The blood came before the vomit ceased. The drake bullet, all five careening pounds of it, took Smith in the stomach. He folded in half, dropping the reins and clawing helplessly as his guts spilled down his horse’s flank. Then he was off, toppling face first in the grass. His mount went back to its meal. The Royalist ranks stared, and the Allies sang. A drummer played a solitary rhythm that might almost have been a lament, except that a trumpet call joined in, and then a shouted order and another drum, and Stryker looked to his left, past the Lifeguard and the long line of troopers under Colonel Widdrington. From the direction of the city, entering the field behind banners of distinct red and white, at long last, came the Northern Foot.

Chapter 19

‘Move those guns!’ Prince Rupert of the Rhine shouted at the cowering gun captain. He pointed to a hummock of rising ground that blemished the flat moor close to the ditch. ‘The hump, there. It will be more advantageous.’

The gun captain, commanding a battery of four small field pieces that had been playing upon the horse of the Allied left wing to virtually no effect, scrunched up the shiny skin of his powder-burned face. ‘It is closer to them, Highness.’

‘It will be better drained.’ Rupert glanced pointedly at the half-buried wheels of a smoking robinet. ‘You will not sink.’

‘Very well, Highness.’ The gunner doffed his cap.

Prince Rupert steered his stallion away, cursing his subordinates as roundly as his warbling enemy. His only prayer was that the Roundheads would attempt an advance upon the ditch that was shielded by thorny hedge and lined with muskets. He kicked hard when he saw the red flag of the Marquis of Newcastle bobbing above the densely packed bodies filling the moor, because it was not a small cornet, rippling on the breeze at the head of horsemen, but the huge square of taffeta carried by an ensign of foot.