Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (2 page)

‘Get back eastways, and keep yer arses away!’ a hulking musketeer three or four paces from the lieutenant bellowed suddenly, shying a clump of dried mud at the column.

‘Tell yer Parly-mant!’ another bawled, waving his musket aloft like a club. ‘Keep its fackin’ nose out, less’n it wants it chopped off !’

‘Run away, boys! The king’s lads’ll give ye another batterin’!’

Men pushed through the crowd then, brandishing their scarred tucks to clear a path through the heaving mob. The lieutenant’s natural empathy for the departing rebels made him wince at this, for he knew what was to come. The Royalist soldiers wanted recompense for their troubles. Regimental pay was an undependable thing at the best of times, and it was generally accepted that a victorious army would take as much reward in plunder as through legitimate means. These forbidding warriors were part of the army’s Cornish contingent, judging by their accents, and the lieutenant knew that they more than anyone else would want to extract a high price for their pains. He had witnessed their assault at first hand, had been there in that charnel house of an alley known as the Christmas Steps, when the snarling men of Kernow had launched themselves at the desperate defenders. Through the self-induced – and never more welcome – wine haze, the lieutenant had ricocheted from one dying man to the next, screaming for his mother and weeping for himself, as whistling shot carved up the air all around. It had been a nightmare. A living nightmare.

The lieutenant looked on helplessly as the grim-faced Cornishmen waded directly into the Roundhead column, pushing and shoving the cowed rebels, snatching purses, rummaging in pockets, emptying snapsacks on to the road in the hope of finding something precious. Swords and daggers were taken, hats plucked clean off flinching heads, pipes, tobacco and coin spirited clean away.

‘St-stop that!’ the lieutenant bleated, though he could sense how feeble he must sound. The protest earned him not a single glance. The world suddenly spun. He vomited again.

‘Get away!’ a new voice echoed about the lieutenant’s swirling skull, and he forced himself to look up. ‘Get away, I say! Damn your skin and bones, I shall run each of you through myself !’

Abruptly, the lieutenant saw him: a huge man atop a huge horse, filthy from the grime of battle but nonetheless dressed in finery. He was narrow-faced, almond-eyed and long-nosed, with flowing coke-black hair that cascaded from beneath a wide, feathered hat in a veritable explosion of curls.

‘Leave them unmolested!’ Prince Rupert of the Rhine snarled again, laying about the nearest men with the flat of his long, glittering sword. Most of the looters scattered immediately, fearful of the young general and his near mythical reputation. The king’s nephew was known to be brave, reckless and utterly ruthless.

‘But m’lord!’ one brazen plunderer wailed. He stood his ground before the prince’s mount, clutching a snapsack close to his chest as though it were a newborn babe. ‘These is ours by rights!’

Rupert swept his blade downwards in a flashing diagonal arc. The flat connected with the Cornishman’s helmet, felling him like an elm in a gale. ‘Anyone else?’ the prince dared his surly troops. ‘The terms are clear. They march away unmolested.’ He stood in his stirrups, raising the sword with deliberate menace. ‘Make me break my word, and I will stretch your necks!’

The lieutenant gave a wry smile as the looters evaporated as quickly as they had appeared. He coughed briefly, spat a gobbet of sour-tasting spittle into the trough, and turned away. ‘Bloody animals.’

‘Can you blame them? It was a bad fight.’

The lieutenant looked up in surprise. He was standing before the charred ruin of a house, around which were gathered dozens of infantrymen. They wore red coats, most faded to a pale pink, in the main. Some sucked on clay pipes, others chewed scraps of desiccated meat or inspected new wounds, while many sharpened tucks that had been battered and blunted in the assault. He felt his pulse quicken with a stab of apprehension. He had lived through the storming of Bristol, a hard, bloody, terrible fight, and yet – compared to these men – he knew that he was yet as green as April grass. These were veterans, men who had fought together through this summer of blood and survived. They had charged up that lonely hill at Stratton, and had stood shoulder-to-shoulder at Lansdown. Some might even have been on that vast killing ground beneath the ridge at Edgehill. Their faces were lined and weathered, their expressions implacable; they had the easy nonchalance only experience could give. And they were terrifying.

But in the midst of this pack of human wolves, sat on his haunches against the worm-eaten door frame, was the man who had spoken. He was the most fearsome man of all. It was all the lieutenant could do to keep from gasping, such was his shock at looking into that face. It was the narrow, hollow-cheeked face of one accustomed to hardship. A face that might have been handsome once, but which now carried the telltale lines and divots of a lifetime spent in battle. A face that lacked its left eye, that space – and most of the left side – now consumed by swirling, mottled scar tissue, as though the man had dipped his head directly into flame.

The lieutenant returned the scarred man’s stare as he casually rose to his feet. ‘But the terms . . . sir?’ The lieutenant was uncertain as to what manner of man he addressed. The scarred man was tall, filthy and ragged. He had long hair the colour of raven feathers, tied at the nape of the neck, and a woollen coat of the same shade. His lean torso was protected by a sleeveless doublet of dark yellowish hide, split diagonally by the broad leather of a baldric. The lieutenant’s father had warned him of men such as this. Land pirates, brigands turned soldiers, men without morals who sought only blood and plunder. This man fitted the mould perfectly, but for his boots and sword. The former were clearly expensive; supple leather, lovingly cut and stitched, then blackened and stiffened at the rigid tops to protect the thighs as though he were a cavalryman. His sword was more impressive still. A long, broad blade sat tight in its scabbard, swirling basket hilt blooming like a bouquet of silver flowers from the snug throat, a gleaming ruby-coloured garnet winking at its stout pommel. It was not the weapon of a common footpad.

The man lifted a hand to worry at the scabby edges of a recently healed wound that ran horizontally across his forehead in a livid pink line. He smiled kindly enough, though the older scarring mutilating his eye socket pulled taut, turning the expression ugly. ‘They lost many friends, sir. Hundreds, by my reckoning. That’s a deal of scores to settle, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘I suppose, sir,’ the lieutenant muttered, deciding this frightening fellow had the bearing and speech of a man accustomed to command. He would err on the side of caution until he knew better.

‘No matter,’ the tall soldier said. ‘Their fear for the prince outweighs their greed.’

The lieutenant nodded, felt his guts lurch again, and doubled over, coughing up a stream of bright bile that spattered his boots.

‘Bumpsy bloody stripling.’

It was another man who had spoken, though the sound was more a deep croak than a human voice. The lieutenant forced himself to look up, ignoring the world as it swam before him. The new speaker, leaning against a blackened wall some three or four paces to the pirate’s right, was not what he had expected at all. He had never laid eyes on such a – such a what? The lieutenant did not know how to describe him. He was dressed as a warrior, swathed in a suit of grey, with the hilt of a dirk protruding from the top of each of his long boots, and a sword hanging at his waist. But that sword was improbably short, deliberately cut away and reshaped for an owner who could have been no taller than four feet. The lieutenant’s first impression was of a child. But then he saw the eyes, bright with wisdom, yellow like those of a cat. And he noticed that the skin of the imp’s face was as creased as old bark and as tough as the baldric from which the toylike blade dangled.

‘Sir?’ the tiny fellow rasped again, the hint of challenge in his bright eyes.

The lieutenant realized he was staring, slack-jawed and wide-eyed. ‘Beg pardon,’ he muttered, blinking quickly to regain focus. He was immediately embarrassed to have apologized to an enlisted man, but something in the grating tone and twinkling menace of the gaze had extracted the words from him before he had time to think. The dwarf smirked, an expression of pure evil to the lieutenant’s eyes, and he turned quickly to the man he had taken to be in command.

‘Bumpsy, sir?’ he said, recalling the original insult.

‘Mister Barkworth implies the wine carried you through . . . Ensign?’

‘Lieutenant, sir,’ he corrected, forcing himself to straighten. ‘Lieutenant Thomas Hood. Lately of Slanning’s, but imminently—’ He stopped short as a dozen invisible daggers jabbed at his guts, the wine twisting his innards to knots.

The tall man shot a sideways glance at the voice-throttled dwarf, producing a jagged-toothed smirk from the latter. ‘You are, are you not, in your cups, Mister Hood?’

Hood felt his cheeks burn. ‘Was, sir. No longer.’

The scarred face smiled its grimace again, his lone grey eye piercing the younger man like a lance through a hog. ‘There’s no shame in it, Tom. The taking of a city is a terrifying ordeal, and no mistake. And the officers lead the charge, yet they are no more shot-proof than the next man. None would blame you for drowning your fears before you faced the guns.’

Hood nodded. ‘Kind in you to say, sir.’

‘And a sympathetic commanding officer would doubtless pat your back and fill your cup before plunging into a breach.’

‘I’d like to think so, sir.’

The tall soldier stooped, plucking a wide-brimmed hat from the ground and propping it on his head at a slight angle. When he looked at Hood again, the grey eye seemed to flash silver. ‘Sadly for you, Mister Hood, I am not a sympathetic man.’

Lieutenant Thomas Hood felt his jaw loll. ‘C-Captain Stryker . . . sir?’

The fearsome man in black stalked forward and offered his hand. ‘Well met, sir.’

Hood took it and winced as his fingers were crushed. ‘Sir.’

‘Welcome to Stryker’s Company of Foot, Mister Hood. Your new family. Fight well and we shall be friends.’ He released Hood’s hand, glowering in a manner the lieutenant’s father would have branded demonic. ‘Drink after battle in future. If I see you at the wine barrel before a fight again, I’ll drown you in it myself.’

Bristol smouldered through the night. Buildings were smoking shells, the carcasses of homes and livelihoods. Ravens and kites circled endlessly, their beady eyes scouring the savaged land for the remnants of the fleshy feast upon which they had gorged in the hours following the slaughter.

Roads – strewn with the dead less than a day before – were still stained dark where blood had pooled in the ruts. It was summer, and the rain had been thin enough, but it had been constant, falling in diagonal blankets that filled the narrow streets and turned the ground to a morass. And those viscous thoroughfares, which yet bore the ragged gullies carved by thousands of scrabbling shoes, had also retained the flotsam of battle in a macabre parody of the Severn shoreline just a few miles to the west. Twisted spurs jutted from the mud, severed and abandoned beside broken dirks and buttons, buckles, scabbards and shot. Glinting litter to gladden any magpie and sadden any heart.

The city was quiet. The crows of the victors, matched in their volume by the melancholy wails of desperate citizens, had waned like the watching moon. Soldiers – ebullient and vengeful in the hours after the truce – had felt the excitement of assault drain away, replaced in equal measure by the stark reality of a long butcher’s bill and acute, throbbing exhaustion.

Captain Innocent Stryker stooped a touch to clear the lintel of a tavern in Bristol’s broken heart. He removed his hat and stepped inside. The shutters at the windows had been blown or smashed clean off during the assault, but still the gloom was immediate, oppressive, and his single eye took several moments to adjust. Gradually the light won out, aided by a couple of stinking tallow candles at the taproom’s far corners and the chinks from some unseen light above, battling to leak between the floorboards in thin beams.

The room was busy. Men clustered in groups to brag of the fight, compare wounds, share in one another’s relief and toast fallen comrades, for they were the lucky ones. Near a cold hearth at one end, half a dozen fellows in yellow and white coats rolled dice and growled at the numbers, spitting oaths and slapping backs as fortunes spun with the carved bone cubes. A man with a mangled nose perched on a low stool, fiddle nestled against his bandaged chin as he played a lively reel. His mate, a red-haired monstrosity with arms like culverins, danced an ungainly jig, face ruddy and eyes glazed, ale slopping haphazardly from the pot in his big paw.

Stryker pushed his way to the counter, finding a spot that was not soaked in beer to prop his elbow, and turned back to squint into the room. The men largely ignored him, officer though he was, but the few to catch his eye dipped their heads in acknowledgement. He did not care. This was where he wanted to be, well away from the polite congratulations of fellow officers and the snide machinations of the army elite. Even now, he suspected, the gainsayers would be whispering. They would gather in the corridors of power, both here and at Oxford, the king’s new capital, and recount the butcher’s bill with macabre relish. Losses had been heavy, and Prince Rupert’s jealous rivals – of which there were many – would be making merry with that fact.