The Bleeding Land (39 page)

‘All in good time, Rivers,’ Boone said. The captain had dismounted and was striding along the train, his magpie’s eyes searching for shiny things amongst men’s everyday belongings. Some of the other men were looking back towards the sounds of battle, but most were preoccupied with plundering.

‘The King needs us, Captain!’ Mun called.

‘We’ve played our part, Rivers,’ said Humphrey Walton, a trooper with a sharp blade of a beard, as he flourished two cups of ale towards another man, who raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips admiringly. ‘Let them dance without us, lad. Just for a while. By Christ we’ve earned it.’

Mun felt the anger rise in his chest, hot bile brimming up his throat. He looked at Downes but the man shrugged.

‘He has a point, Mun,’ he said, dismounting stiffly to join the looting. ‘Come on, O’Brien, you’re an Irishman aren’t you? The only thing you do better than stealing is drinking.’

O’Brien nodded and made to dismount.

‘Stay where you are!’ Mun barked and the red-haired giant frowned, shrugged and remained mounted. ‘Captain, I insist we rejoin the fight,’ Mun said. ‘As the Prince commanded.’

Boone turned and glared. In his hand he held a gilt dress spur with a silver rowel. ‘The Prince meant for us to await his return,’ he said, pointing the spur at Mun. ‘We are too few and must wait for His Highness to round up the rest.’

‘That is not what he said,’ Mun said, as Hector made a side pass, sensing his master’s anger.

‘Are you calling me a liar, Rivers?’ Captain Boone asked.

‘Careful, lad,’ Corporal Bard growled from a waggon bed.

‘I’m saying you would rather fill your own purse than do your duty to the King,’ Mun said, sensing eyes on him as men stopped ferreting to watch the exchange. Boone’s sword rasped from its scabbard as he strode towards Mun, hatred flaring in his face like black powder in the priming pan.

‘Dismount, Rivers,’ Boone snarled, fury trembling his pointed beard.

Mun hauled his foot from the stirrup and swung down to meet the challenge, but had barely got both boots onto the ground when Boone struck him across the face with the dress spur and Mun staggered backwards, blood dripping through the fingers pressed to his cheek.

‘You bastard coward!’ he rasped, drawing what was left of his sword.

‘No, Mun!’ O’Brien cautioned.

Boone was grinning, beckoning him on.

‘Put that blade away, Rivers,’ Corporal Bard said, and Mun looked up to see Bard’s carbine pointed at him, the grey-haired soldier shaking his head slowly. ‘Don’t be a fool, lad. You didn’t get through that tussle back there to end up shot by your own bloody corporal.’

If you only knew what I did to my last corporal, Mun thought. ‘Your carbine isn’t loaded, Corporal,’ he said, his fist bone-white on his ruined rapier’s hilt. In truth he did not know whether or not Bard’s carbine had a ball snug in its barrel, but had guessed that the man had not yet reloaded.

‘Even if that were true, lad, what are you going to do with that?’ Bard asked, nodding at Mun’s broken blade.

‘My father is fighting for the King,’ Mun said, loud enough for others to hear. ‘I am not the only one with kin back on that field. You expect me to play the guttersnipe, pilfering men’s Sunday clothes whilst the rebels still hold the ground?’

‘I expect you to follow orders, you damned cur!’ Boone yelled.

Mun glared at his captain, wanting more than anything – almost anything – to thrust that broken length of cold steel into Boone’s rancid heart. But what he wanted even more than that was to rejoin the battle whose distant murmur sounded like the ocean, and if he acted on his hatred he would be killed in his turn by Bard or someone else.

He tossed the broken sword aside and turned, mounting Hector with fluid ease.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Boone rasped. But Mun gave no reply as he cuffed blood from his face, wheeled the stallion round and rode towards the roar of the cannon.

‘Wait for me, you damned hot-headed fool!’ Mun twisted and saw O’Brien riding after him. There were
others
too, including Rowe and Downes, the latter stuffing some shiny loot into his knapsack even as he spurred forward. Mun waited, then nodded to the big Irishman when he had caught up.

‘They can’t shoot me for doing my duty now, can they?’ O’Brien said, a grin splitting his red beard.

‘I wouldn’t put money on it, O’Brien,’ Mun said, smiling back. Then they gave their mounts their heels and rode.

They cantered south-east, following the line of the Kineton to Banbury road with hedges on their right beyond which was the rebel left flank, then on past knots of their own dragoons and musketeers in the ditches and boundaries, and when they came back to the open plain and its deafening, smoke-shrouded chaos, Mun’s guts turned to ice. The rebel foot regiments were pushing forward, pikes bristling, their musketeers firing and loading, firing and loading, enveloping their own ranks in reeking fog.

‘What do we do now?’ Rowe asked, standing in his stirrups, peering through the smoke-charged air, trying to discern what was happening.

‘We ride to the centre, to Sir Nicholas Byron’s brigade. We form a troop with the men we have and we hope the Prince or Captain Boone brings back the rest.’

‘Isn’t
that
Byron’s lot?’ O’Brien said, lips pulled back from his teeth. A musket-shot away, two components of Essex’s foot had passed his stationary van and were assaulting a large Royalist battalia in the flank, their massed firepower over-whelming the Royalist line.

‘They’ve still got bloody horse!’ Downes remarked, pointing to a force of rebel harquebusiers and armoured cuirassiers who were cleaving their way into Byron’s disrupted ranks.

‘Whilst ours are halfway to St Albans by now,’ O’Brien said, ‘because the highborn bastards think they’re out for a day’s hunt.’

Mun twisted in the saddle and counted his companions, now
fishing
in pouches for balls, jabbing scouring sticks into pistol and carbine barrels and winding wheellocks with spanners. Eleven men. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

One of his own pistols was still loaded but he set about loading the other and then his carbine, as around him horses tossed their heads and snorted, tack, arms and armour jangling.

The small group tried to make sense of the battle. In the near distance men were dying, their screams drowned by the savage salvos of muskets, cannon and the great murmur of battle. The air was thick with the stench of it. ‘God give me strength,’ Mun growled. He knew the others were looking to him, waiting for him, though he did not know why, and felt the trembling grow more fierce in his hands as he holstered his pistol against the saddle and whispered soothing words to Hector, all the while hoping that more of the King’s Horse would appear and some or other officer could tell them what to do.

‘Are you all ready?’ Mun heard himself ask, which was strange, he thought, for he did not feel ready in the slightest to plunge back into that seething cauldron, still less so with only a handful of companions. ‘Don’t waste your shot,’ he warned.

‘And keep away from those damned pikes unless you’re wanting a second arsehole,’ O’Brien added, clutching his poleaxe whose blade’s heart-shaped holes, Mun saw, were blocked with dark congealed gore.

Then they were trotting across the foot-churned field and past a mass of musketeers, some of whom called out asking whose men they were; but not knowing who the musketeers were, neither Mun nor any of his companions gave them an answer. Then on past the Royalist right wing which had fragmented from the centre to make a stand in a good defensive position behind a ditch supported by some cannon and a troop of dragoons.

‘Christ’s wounds, where’s the rest of you? Where is the Prince?’ a buff-coated captain yelled. Assuming only King’s Horse would come so close in such a small number, the
ashen
-faced man had come forward from his company and raised a hand to halt Mun’s troop. ‘Essex still has cavalry on the field. Where’s ours?’

‘His Highness is regrouping,’ Mun said, hoping it was true. ‘What of our left wing? Wilmot’s Horse?’

The captain waved an arm to the west. ‘I heard he swept their cavalry from the field but no one has seen him since.’

‘We have no Horse left in the fight?’ Mun felt sick at the thought, for without cavalry the King’s Foot was horribly vulnerable to Essex’s superior numbers, not least to the mixed cavalry they had seen ploughing into Sir Nicholas Byron’s brigade.

‘There are some of the King’s Lifeguard hereabouts,’ the captain said. ‘We passed them on our way across here. But only twice your number.’ He shook his head. ‘Maybe a few more.’ Seeing he could expect no help from the remnants before him the captain cursed and turned his back on them and marched back to his position, his men eager to hear what news he had.

‘They won’t stand without cavalry,’ Downes said.

‘They’ll stand,’ O’Brien replied. ‘They’ll stand or they’ll lose.’

They went on at a sitting trot and Mun ducked instinctively as a musket ball whipped past.

‘We’re King’s men, you fool-born villain!’ a man behind him named Rowland Temple roared at a young dragoon who, perhaps thinking they were Essex’s men slipped through the lines, had taken a potshot at them. ‘Son of a rancid goat!’ Temple exclaimed, shaking his head as they rode on and a big sergeant cuffed the young dragoon about his head, knocking off his felt cap. ‘Our own side are trying to kill us now. That’s all we bloody need.’

Then Mun gave Hector the pressure of his right leg and the stallion broke into a canter along the rear of Byron’s battalia and Mun hoped he was not alone but had no time to find out. Because the Royalist centre was collapsing. Rebel horse were surging into the gaps, breaking up Byron’s formation,
and
there, wavering at the heart of Byron’s foot soldiers like a challenge that no man of Parliament could ignore, was the Royal Standard.

Then Mun looked up ahead and saw a small troop of the King’s Lifeguard of Horse, no more than a score of them, charging from the south into the fray, trying to get to the Royal Standard before the rebels could. And he knew there was a chance, however small, that his father was one of those men, encased in his fine cuirassier’s armour and closed helmet which had captivated his sons since they were old enough to walk.

And he and Hector plunged into the chaos.

‘Yah! Heya!’ Mun was yelling, slowed now by the press of Byron’s retreating men but forcing a rough way through, O’Brien at his right shoulder and Downes to his left. If they could just link up with the Lifeguard they might form a wedge and drive into the rebels. Force them back.

Royalist musketeers were sheltering amongst shattering pike-divisions, unable to load their guns in that hedge of staves.

‘Protect the colours!’ Mun roared, thrusting onwards, suddenly wishing he had a sword. ‘The colours!’

A musketeer put his gun to his shoulder and Mun ducked as it roared, cursing as the ball fizzed past, for musketeers were supposed to wait for orders to fire volleys at massed ranks rather than trying to pick off individual horsemen. But now Mun had other concerns as the rebel horse wheeled left, hitting Byron’s beleaguered line in the rear.

‘We’ll never get through!’ Downes said, his face a grimace through the smoke as the King’s panic-stricken men flooded past seeking the relative safety of the Edgehill escarpment.

‘We’ll get through!’ Mun snarled back at him, spurring Hector on, desperate to link up with those brave men of the King’s Lifeguard of Horse who had fought their way to the Standard and were now trapped. For a block of rebel pikemen had moved to cut off what remained of Byron’s line from the
Royalist
rear and now they levelled their wicked blades at Mun’s small troop.

‘Well, we can’t go that way,’ O’Brien said, thrusting his poleaxe to their right, where a formation of musketeers waited, ready to pour a fusillade of flesh-ripping lead into any Royalists who came too close.

‘Give them a volley!’ Mun yelled, and pulling his carbine round on its strap pointed it at the pikemen and pulled the trigger. Several rebels fell to the ragged volley but the rest held their ground, their faces all teeth and hatred as they screamed curses and dared the whoreson Cavaliers to come closer.

‘We can’t stay here!’ Downes yelled.

Mun cursed again because he knew his friend was right. There was no way through to the men who now desperately fought to defend the King’s standard. He roared in fury and frustration and Hector squealed, then Mun stood in his stirrups and through the drifting, acrid, throat-drying clouds watched Essex’s foot and that audacious troop of Horse overcome the Royal Colour party.

And he knew his father’s friend, Sir Edmund Verney, was as good as dead.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

‘BLOODY BALFOUR’S LOOKING
to win this war all by himself,’ Nayler said through a grimace. With the back of his hand he was gingerly sweeping wet grey gobbets from his buff-coat’s shoulder. ‘You could have told me I had some bastard’s brains all over me, Weasel,’ he moaned.

But Weasel ignored him, too busy leaning forward in his saddle, straining to hear what Captain Clement was yelling above the battle-din as his troop, fresh from the fight, prepared to re-enter the fray.