Mary Gentle (47 page)

If I had been another man, I might have said that I felt fear.

A jet of flame seared across my vision.

Simultaneously, a musket-shot slammed painful noise into my ears, crashing every other sound into obliteration.

I dived, hitting James Stuart as he rose, and crashed down on the Englishman among the sound of farthingale willow-wood supports snapping.

With my body covering much of his, and tangled in my skirts, I looked up.
One of Spofforth’s troopers has fired his piece by accident; I’ll cut off his cod for it!

The stink of burning match pierced my nostrils, too strong for the number of muskets Cecil’s men bore.

Muskets fired.

Flame spurted sideways out of the touch-holes, and red cones of fire blasted from the weapon’s muzzles. Twenty, in a ragged volley. Chips of stone shattered and fell on me from the cave ceiling, and I reached up and hauled Mlle Dariole down on her arse.

“What?” She snarled between outrage and disbelief.

“Stay down!”

“HENRY!
King Henry!
God for Harry Nine!”

Deafened, I heard deep male voices bellow. More men ran, silhouetted at the cavern entrance. Men armed with muskets.

“They won’t shoot low until they have their ‘King’!” I shouted in Dariole’s ear, and simultaneously found Saburo beside me, the samurai heaving at James Stuart by his other arm. The Scotsman spluttered and swore.

Flame blasted in a ragged line from the entrance to the cavern.
Too soon for the first troop to have re-loaded—they have more men than I thought: forty or more—

The cavern ceiling exploded in a fusillade of musket balls, rubble raining down.

All their men re-loading from half-volleys: our throw of the dice is, will we move before one or other troop is ready?

“This way!” I shouted.

I got up on my knees, hauling the vast tangle of my skirts up around me; grabbed the King, dragging him forward, bodily, with Saburo; and fell into the only shelter the torch-light presented us—the overturned long banqueting table of ancient oak, brought in in sections and reconstructed in this cave.

Splinters flew. The heavy, iron-hard wood shuddered. I heard a stranger’s voice bellow, “Shoot high!” and glanced back in my tracks.

Prince Henry lay with his body half in the streamlet, hair flowing in the water.

“Hold the King!”

Saburo and Dariole both gripped onto James Stuart; she with her hands in the lace of his ruff. Her wide, bemused eyes followed me; I had not time to explain.
Henry will be a hostage, if we have him.

I glimpsed movement behind me, and swung about on my knees as a figure hurdled the fallen table.

If I
had
possessed a musket, I should have shot Captain Spofforth dead on the spot.

Twenty or so of Cecil’s men came with him, falling into cover, loading their muskets. Spofforth swore vilely, hat gone and sword bloodied. Crouching rapidly down, he stared back over the edge of the wood. Too dark to see if bodies clumped toward the exit, where the first half-volley fired. One man’s screams ripped the air apart.

I demanded, “Who is it?”

Spofforth gave a wry, rasping chuckle. “The young Prince’s men.”

“His household guard? Not under arrest?”

“No, those men are held. These are soldiers, wearing the Prince’s colours.”

I hit my fist into the wood, bruising my knuckles. “Merde!”

If Cecil can conceal a company of troopers outside Wookey, for this day—why, then, so can Henry Stuart.

Henry Stuart, with the precognitive advice of Robert Fludd.

I crawled back around on hands and knees. “I’ll get the Prince—”

I stopped.

Two bodies made dark lumps on the “stage” floor of the cavern, black liquid snaking out from under them. One of the players crowded himself back behind a bulge in the rock, at the rear wall, apparently not willing to run for the entrance to the dressing-room caves. No man else stood at the rear of the cave.

Except Dariole, ankle-deep in the streamlet, both hands gripping Prince Henry under his arms, and her body straining to drag him across the rock. Her scabbard caught against the stone as she bent, straightened, dug in her heels, hauled.

The stage torches show her up,
I thought, cold and contained. Likely they will not shoot her,
if
they realise that is Henry Stuart there. If not—

I stood up from behind the overturned table, slung my heavy skirts over my arm, and ran out, hunched over, to the stream-bed.

The Prince, half-recovered, staggered up onto his feet, wrestling with the young woman.

Only let her draw her sword, and he’s a dead man!

In the same second that I reached them, he broke her grip and staggered back. A man moving behind him raised a pistol. The black hole of the muzzle lined up with my chest.

Pistols are uncertain at close range. Nonetheless, I took Mlle Dariole by her upper arms and threw her bodily across the cave, aware that she skidded across the rock when she hit it, into the shelter of the overturned solid table.

“I
had
him!” her voice bawled.

A loud bang deafened me, drowning her outrage. The pistol shot spanged off the rock floor a foot to my right-hand side, leaving a smear of lead that gleamed in the torch-light.

The officer grabbed the stumbling young man. He raised his voice. “
The Prince! The King! King Henry’s here!
”

He yanked the Stuart princeling away as if Henry Stuart weighed nothing, leveling his second pistol at me. Two more men ran up. Wildly loosed pistol-balls put hemispherical holes into the limestone.

Giving up on Prince Henry, I hurled myself towards the table’s shelter.

“Son-of-a-bitch!” Dariole’s face shone white and wet in the wildly moving torch-light. She breathed fast, now, and shallow. Her bare hands were grazed and bleeding where she had hit the rock.

The count in my head ran steadily on: nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—

Shafts of fire shot from touch-holes. In the light of the cones of muzzle-fire, that blasted forward a full yard, I glimpsed men inside the cavern’s entrance. The multiple crash of musket fire stabbed my ears. On the battle-field, the noise of a full musket volley is shattering. In this enclosed space, it not only deafened my attackers, but put a blinding cloud of powder-smoke between us. As the full musket volley crashed out, dirt and loose rock and fractured pinnacles showered down from the cave-roof.

Forty or so musket-balls hit the banqueting table—separated from us by three inches of age-hardened oak.

One musket-ball clipped the table-edge, spraying splinters that tugged at my hairpiece. Pearls spilled and bounced on the sand.

“God and His Saints damn to hellfire the lot of them!” Spofforth exclaimed precisely.

“Have you a spare pistol? And the samurai is a good man with one, also.” I took a wheel-lock pistol as it was thrust into my hand, and set about loading it as quickly as I might. “How many down? What’s your strength?”

“Twelve or fifteen men down.” Spofforth’s face showed powder-blackened as the light caught it. “Twenty standing. You said nothing of enemy soldiers!”

“Regrettably, I was myself unaware, until now.”

A glance at King James, propped up by M. Saburo’s free arm as he held his pistol up, told me the situation there. Tears ran down James Stuart’s slack face.

Spofforth shouted the last drill command: “
Give fire!
”

The line of his men’s muskets behind the table jetted fire and smoke. Before that cleared, the count-down in my mind hit twenty. The enemy volley crashed out. Each man of us flinched at the same instant, like a flock of hunted birds, hunching down from the rock-splinters.

Musket-fire slammed into the table. Heavy as it was, it jerked. A man screamed, struck by one ball that burst a weak place; the men around him cursed and beat at splinters in their hands and faces.

I leaned forward, deeper into the table’s shelter.

Under the noise of men shouting frantically, and the wounded squalling for their mothers, and the next count running down in my mind, I said gently, “Dariole?”

She sat with her back to the wood, among linen and broken crockery, her hands shaking. One yet-unextinguished stage-torch made her face clear to me. Her skin showed waxen, as I had never seen it in any duel, not even on the Normandy shore.

Shock. A battle in war is not the same as duelling, and this is her first.

Her voice almost inaudible, she whispered, “I think I wet my drawers.”

Carefully, I stretched out a hand to her where she sat, shivering, on the limestone. I gave her a wry smile. “Then you’ve joined an old and honourable fraternity. I suggest you do not enquire too closely into the condition of Captain Spofforth’s linen, experienced soldier that he is—no, and not Monsieur Saburo, neither. I suspect his ‘way of the samurai’ to be the exact same way that a European pisses down his leg….”

The soft nonsense works, as it usually does. I saw so many young men in this condition in the Low Countries, in their first assaults. The shock of war overcomes many determined prides.

“I did the same, myself, mademoiselle, the first time I heard guns at war—which caused me some embarrassment: they were our guns.”

She gave a tiny, involuntary splutter. She looked still as if she might vomit, but the blankness had gone from her gaze.

“You may guess at how old I was, mademoiselle….”

“Fifteen? Sixteen?”

“Twenty-two.”

She laughed out loud, taking my hand and letting me pull her out from the deeper part of the table’s shelter.

“This won’t take more than one.” Captain Spofforth slapped at the wood, evidently with the same count running in his head as I had. “They’re behind rock, up there, or I’d carry it at the charge.”

“You may have to, yet.”

He pursed his lips and nodded, a curiously precise gesture for a man so blackened and bloodied. “I thought so. Well, I think we cannot take another volley. Will you take his Majesty to safety?”

I jerked my head toward the caves behind us. “You should best fall back with us, Captain.”

“Ah. Yes. But I haven’t the men to make a convincing volley; it must be an assault.”

“Can we look to Milord Cecil for rescue?”

Spofforth’s level voice said, “I imagine they have taken Mr Secretary a prisoner, or killed him outright, knowing him to be James’s man. If he is free, there are no more troops closer to here than Bristol.”

“Then Bristol is where I’ll take King James.”

I did not know Spofforth well, but the man gave me a look of gratitude that convinced me he was serious in his talk of an assault.

“Stand ready to go, Frenchman. I must do this while I have men enough to make it appear a respectable charge.”

I kept the count steady in my head.
Not yet, not yet
…The taste of powder and lead was sharp on my tongue. “Monsieur Saburo, can the King walk?”

The samurai’s face was tranquil in the flaring light. “Not yet. I’ll carry him, Rosh’-fu’.”

“Good. Stand ready to move. Dariole, help Saburo take James,” I ordered; glanced up, and gave Spofforth a sharp nod. “Captain—prepare, if you please.”

A single shot cracked out, ahead of Spofforth’s half-volley, and I heard a man scream at the cave-entrance. It catches somewhere between a man’s breastbone and his belly, that sound. Up on my toes, crouching, skirts flung over my arm, I coughed as powder smoke caught in the back of my throat.

The smoke from the muskets eddied about the enclosed space, torches barely penetrating it, so thick it was. I found myself squinting to see the caves at the back.
And that is good
. “When they charge,” I said, half-choking, “M. Saburo, Mlle Dariole, we shall take the King straight through the caves directly behind us. Once we start, you must not stop. Is that clear?”

“Hai!”

Dariole gave me a sickly look over James’s head and nodded with complete determination.

I stuffed apostles, shot bag, and pistol down the front of my bodice, and nodded to Spofforth. He stuck his hand out. I switched the skirts to my other arm and reached out to shake his hand.
Doubtful I shall see you again, Captain—Fludd will not have thought to give orders to take prisoners.

“Good luck, monsieur.” I looked him in the eye.

“Thank you.” The spare, leather-faced captain grinned. “And good luck to you, too—madam.”

The enemy’s musket-volley blasted. The air vibrated. Splinters and chunks of wood flew. The English captain stood up, bawling through white smoke, “
Give fire!
” A fusillade, of even so few muskets from his men, spiked deafening noise into my ears. Without hesitation, Spofforth hurdled the disintegrating table, twenty men with him, dropping their discharged muskets and pulling out rapiers.

“Go!”
I ordered. “Quickly!”

Dariole and Saburo hauled James up. I followed, letting my back shield them as much as it might, as we scuttled across the cavern floor. A tremendous din of fighting and screeching came from the main entrance. Pistols cracked. A man howled at a soprano pitch.