Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (6 page)

‘Where’s Barkworth?’ he asked of the nearest men. One pointed to his right, further along the line to the eastern extremity of the village. Sure enough, out on the far side of the musket line, he saw a diminutive figure dressed in grey, holding a short sword and spitting unintelligible oaths.

‘Sir?’ Barkworth rasped as he came running back towards his captain.

‘You’re the fleetest of foot, Simeon.’

Barkworth grinned, displaying a mouth full of mouldering, crooked teeth. ‘I am, sir.’

‘Get into that damned forest and see what they’re about. Have they retreated far, or do they linger close?’

‘I will, sir.’ Barkworth’s sharp yellow eyes narrowed as he scanned the deeper forest. He pointed with his sword. ‘Might like to ask him a few questions while I’m gone, eh?’

The rebel had not fallen far from the road, and that was his undoing. A near miss from a Royalist musket-ball had caused him to lose concentration and his foot had snagged an exposed tree root. The fall, it seemed, had knocked the wind from him, and by the time he recovered his senses, Stryker’s advance party had reached a point beyond his hiding place, cutting off his escape.

‘Richard Port, sir,’ the man, who looked to be in his early twenties, had replied to Stryker’s first question. ‘Musketeer, Purcell’s Foot.’

Stryker glared down at the captive. He knew that the circle of redcoats hemming in the kneeling Parliamentarian must have been a formidable sight, and he set his jaw, hoping his glowering expression and glinting grey eye would cow the fellow as it had so many others. He placed a hand on the swirling metal of his sword-hilt, leaving it there as a reminder of violence held, for now, in check. ‘Purpose here?’

‘Luring us in, sir,’ Lieutenant Thomas Hood had spoken at Stryker’s right hand, and he shot his subordinate a hard glance.

‘No, sir, not that!’ Port cried suddenly. ‘Never that!’ He had been stripped of his weapons and held his good right hand up at Stryker in supplication. The wrist of the left had been damaged in the fall, and he let that lie across his lap. His cap was lopsided, his eyes round as newly cooled musket-balls and his skin slick with a cold sweat. ‘An accident is all. No design, sir, ’pon my life.’

‘What lies beyond these trees?’ Stryker asked.

‘Another road, sir,’ Port bleated. ‘Just a little track. We are a patrol out of Keynsham, sir. Stumbled into your force, and—’

‘Thought to bloody our noses.’

Port offered an apologetic shrug. ‘Aye, sir. But nothing more sinister. There is no more than two score in our whole unit!’

Stryker kicked him in the chest, flinging him on to his back, leaves billowing in all directions like fine ash before the breath of bellows. Port cried out, curled into a ball like a woodlouse, and began to rasp breathless prayers into the earth. But the Royalist captain was astride him in a heartbeat, kicking his injured left arm free and placing his boot heel directly on the wrist.

Port’s scream was shrill and desperate.

Stryker eased his weight on to the boot, feeling the rebel’s pinioned limb sink into the ground until the soil was compact enough to resist. The wrist began to audibly crack.

‘Please!’ Richard Port squealed like a piglet at Smithfield. ‘Please, sir! I beg you!’

But Innocent Stryker could not relent. He knew he should, and yet it was as though his leg would not heed his conscience. In that moment he felt like a cooking pot left too long over a flame. All the darkness of recent weeks, the anger, the melancholy, the guilt and the abject, spiralling sense of loss bubbled to the surface in a great torrent. He had to hurt, as he had been hurt.

‘Sir,’ a man muttered at Stryker’s back. It might have been Skellen, it might have been Heel. He did not care.

‘Once more, damn your hide! What is your purpose here?’

‘An ambush, sir!’ Port wailed, eyes glistening. ‘Nothing more! ’pon my son’s life, nothing more!’

Son. The very mention of the word thrust a lid on the cauldron, a jug of water on the flames beneath. He met Port’s wide gaze, lifted his boot, and stepped back. Christ, but what was he doing? He took a deep breath, shook his head, and addressed the captive again. ‘Is there a larger body of men in this area, Musketeer?’

‘No, sir,’ Port murmured, lying on his side now, clutching his agonized wrist to his breast as he gasped like a drowning man. He forced himself to look up into Stryker’s face, his breaths heavy, laboured. ‘A chance raid. Ill-judged as it were, God forgive us.’

Stryker heard the approach of rapid footsteps and turned to see a newcomer reach the group. ‘What say you, Simeon?’

Barkworth panted from the run and his constricted voice rasped like a whetstone on a new blade. He glanced with interest at Port, then looked back up at his commanding officer. ‘There’s a track beyond the trees, Cap’n.’ He pointed to the north, where the forest was thickest. ‘Half mile that way. Nothin’ there now, so the buggers are long gone. No great army, though, sir.’ He glanced again at Port. ‘Just these sorry bloody greencoats.’

‘Got more than they bargained for,’ Lieutenant Hood put in.

Stryker ignored him, looking instead at Ensign Chase. The standard bearer had been quietly taking account of the aftermath of this most hectic skirmish. ‘Bill?’

Chase had evidently left the company flag out on the road with the rest of the men, for he held a naked blade in one hand. With the other he scratched at his wiry brown beard. ‘Just two, sir. Both theirs.’

Stryker nodded his thanks before scanning the assembled faces for his most senior non-commissioned men. ‘See to the dead, Sergeant Heel. Skellen, truss this one up and bring him back to the road. We’ll let Quartermaster Kinshott find a wagon.’

Richard Port peered up at his captors nervously. ‘Sir?’

‘You’re for Bristol, fellow,’ Stryker replied. ‘You can beg the King for mercy.’ He nodded at Skellen.

Skellen lent his ferocious halberd against a nearby elm and stooped to hook a gloved hand round Port’s tensed arm. ‘Up you get, son.’

The rest of the group began to pick their way back to the road. Stryker was forced to skirt a dense thicket of bracken, the route bringing him close to Thomas Hood, and he heard the younger man chortle at something Ensign Chase had said.

‘Stand the men down, Lieutenant,’ Stryker snapped, cutting short their shared jest, ‘and be sharp about it!’

Hood swallowed hard, casting his eyes to the ground. ‘Aye,
sir.’

Stryker instantly regretted his tone. Indeed, he regretted the very words themselves. He raised a hand in his new subordinate’s direction. ‘Thomas, I—’

‘Christ on His Cross!’ The raging blasphemy echoed through the trees like a pistol shot. ‘Come ’ere, you fucking little bastard!’

Stryker and the men at his flanks turned as one to gaze upon a scene engendering such surprise that they simply stood and stared. William Skellen was on his backside in the dirt and leaves, knees hauled up to his chin, huge hands cradling his right leg at a point midway up the thigh. Even from this distance, dark tendrils of blood could be seen oozing between his gloved fingers. He rocked back and forth like a bedlamite, hooded eyes fixed upon the trees to the north and cursing.

And already some way off, leaping bracken and weaving branches like a deer with a green hide, Musketeer Richard Port made good his escape.

CHAPTER 3

Bristol, 3 August 1643

Stryker leaned forward to pat the sleek neck of Vos, his sorrel-coloured stallion, as he and his eight companions trotted steadily through the Frome Gate and into the battered city. Vos whickered contentedly, his right ear twitching slightly in time with his master’s hand, and Stryker muttered something soothing as they drew closer to the heavily armed guards milling malevolently beyond Bristol’s walls. The place was clearly nervous, the sentries watchful and suspicious, and Stryker wondered if the king’s arrival had set them on edge. An attack on Bristol now, however unlikely, was indeed something of which to be mindful. If the enemy could wrest back control of England’s second city while the sovereign was inside, then that might end the war at a stroke. He was glad to be quartered out in the relative calm of the countryside.

The time had slipped by without incident since the skirmish on Hartcliffe’s hitherto sleepy roadway. Stryker had taken pains to be pleasant to the folk of the village and had enjoyed his hostess’s simple but comfortable home. Indeed, the delights of a home-cooked meal, rather than the charred remains they were normally given, was something to be savoured. Thus, when the summons had arrived, he had been most reluctant to leave the pleasant billet. Colonel Mowbray, however, had been clear that no dissent would be tolerated. Stryker had had Vos tacked and made ready for the ride.

‘Still, old man,’ Captain Lancelot Forrester chirped at Stryker’s right side, ‘there are advantages to being back on the road.’

Startled, Stryker glanced across at his friend. ‘You read minds, Forry?’

Forrester ran a gloved hand along the coke-black mane of Oberon, his big gelding. ‘It is quite clear from your expression that you would rather not make this journey.’

Stryker raised his lone eyebrow enquiringly. ‘For the sake of argument, what are these so-called advantages?’

‘It does no good for a soldier to sit around on his arse for days on end.’ Forrester craned his torso forward, saddle creaking in complaint, to peer across at the fellow riding on Stryker’s left flank. ‘Besides, we may thank the good Lord above that Sir Crannion, here, has been offered a task to which to set that maudlin mind.’

William Skellen chose to ignore the remark and instead kept his dark eyes fixed on a place in the middle distance. Forrester’s point was well made. Skellen had bemoaned his injury almost constantly since the unseen blade had entered his flesh in Hartcliffe Forest. It occurred to Stryker that Richard Port evidently had more about him than the innocent terror he had seemed to exude. The concealed knife, a small thing but sharp as the finest poniard, had torn a neat little hole in Skellen’s lower thigh. He had been lucky, for he had not sensed the fateful movement of Port’s arm, nor made moves to avoid it, and the weapon might have been a great deal bigger, the blow more damaging. But that did not make the furious sergeant grateful.

‘You’re right, Forry,’ Stryker said, loudly enough for Skellen to hear, ‘the whining scold seems to have finally found his peace. I was beginning to wish the devious greencoat had run him through, for my ears hurt so.’

‘Forgive me, Sergeant, but why are you here?’

Skellen, Stryker and Forrester turned as one to look upon one of their party who rode a handsome piebald beast some yards behind. It was Sergeant Major Cornelius Goodayle, and, though he made the remark in good humour, it was a reasonable enough question. The group was made up of the regiment’s eight company commanders, less Colonel Mowbray himself. Lieutenant Colonel Baxter led the way, followed by Goodayle and the half-dozen company captains. Skellen dipped his head in acknowledgement of the regiment’s third most senior man, and answered with due deference. ‘Protection, sir. We was attacked two days back. Ambushed. Roads ain’t safe. My job, as I see it, sir, is to keep m’ captain’s skin intact. Sir.’

Goodayle smiled wryly. ‘If Captain Stryker requires a bloody bodyguard, Sergeant, then I resign my commission, for the roads really are too hazardous.’

Snorts of laughter followed, and Stryker saw fit to defend his man. ‘I gave him permission to come, sir. We languish in our billet, and Skellen is a man of action.’

‘And,’ Forrester added impishly, ‘he was bound to be murdered by his own men, such is his bellyaching of late. Stryker protects Skellen in this, not the other way around.’

‘It is Mowbray,’ someone said with sharpness, and the chatter died away. Baxter tugged on his reins to slow the group, and, sure enough, from amongst Bristol’s busy streets cantered a big bay horse upon which perched a small, well-dressed man with flowing russet hair and neatly kempt beard and moustache. Sir Edmund plucked the feathered hat from his head, waved it at his approaching officers, and absently glanced down to check that his royal-red scarf was neat and conspicuous about his gleaming breastplate.

‘Fastidious as ever,’ Forrester muttered quietly, though without a trace of malice. He was fond of the colonel, as were they all.

‘Ho there!’ Mowbray bellowed when he reached the group. ‘The men?’

A chorus of positive, if impatient, murmurs answered the colonel’s predictable enquiry, and he nodded happily. Stryker felt his own mouth begin to twitch in a private smile. Mowbray’s staccato movements and clipped speech never failed to put him in mind of the sparrows that had danced about his window as a boy. He cleared his thoughts quickly as the man who had founded and funded the regiment leaned forward purposefully in his expensive saddle.

‘I apologize for wrenching you all back to this poor city,’ Mowbray began, voice high-pitched and nasal but clear as a bell. ‘But I am come direct from Council.’

‘What is to become of our grand alliance, sir?’ one of the assembly asked in the accent of the Low Countries, and all eyes fell upon a pale-faced man of willowy frame and twisted, broken nose. Aad Kuyt, the regiment’s first captain, was a toughened veteran of the wars in his homeland, a professional soldier and one of the best Stryker had served with.