Marston Moor by Michael Arnold Page A

wide enough to provide shelter. They emerged now into the dawn, red-eyed and parched after a night of blood-stained revelry, many clutching bundles of linen they had stripped from beds, or piles of stolen clothes. Others carried plate, cookware, cutlery, cloth, weaponry. Fights broke out as men realized their snapsacks had been emptied while they were in their cups, hordes lifted by slight hands and greedy hearts. They blamed one another, bawled and cursed and drew blades darkly congealed from the night before. Some officers called for calm. Most ignored their men, for they were as ale-sick as the rest. Accompanying everything were the sporadic reports of gunshots, which echoed about the streets as survivors were pulled from their hiding places like weeds from a flower-bed. Out on the moors, pistols cracked as cavalry units hunted those who had made it out into the wilderness.
    Stryker was perched on the edge of a low stool in the yard of The Swan tavern. The enclosure itself was a potholed square of rammed earth pooled with rainwater and filled with men. These were the leaders of the enemy, Rigby’s officers and those senior townsfolk marked as the mandrel upon which Bolton’s defence had spun. Colonel Rigby himself had escaped in the confusion, galloped off to safety as his men had died, but the Royalists had taken hundreds of prisoners and dozens of colours, and now Stryker had the dubious honour of guarding the cream of them. He eyed the sooty, streaked faces, checking for signs of furtive whispering or grim determination, but there was nothing. The men were utterly deflated, resigned to their fate, and cowed by the sentries that lined the yard’s edge. Most sat, despite the wet ground, while a few stretched their legs, milling listlessly like so many ragged sleep-walkers, pleased, he supposed, that they had at least survived the night. He glanced up at the clouds that drifted high on the nagging breeze. He guessed the rain would stay away for a time, so he drew his twin pistols, laying one on his lap, and fished an old, dry rag from his coat.
    As he began to scour the grime from the pistol’s frizzen a dark shadow snaked across him. ‘Did you fare well?’ he said, without looking up.
    Sergeant William Skellen issued a noncommittal grunt. ‘Well enough, sir.’
    Now Stryker turned. ‘Oh?’
    Skellen had retrieved his fearsome halberd from their baggage wagon, and he jammed its butt end into the ground so that he could lean against it. In his other hand he gripped a visibly bulging snapsack. He shook it so that its contents jangled. ‘I shall not bemoan the lack of pay for a while.’
    ‘Taken from the dead, I trust.’
    ‘None alive shall miss its shine.’ Skellen’s shady eyes moved to the captives, examining each stricken face. ‘Sorry parcel, ain’t they?’
    ‘Sorry but alive.’
    Skellen nodded. ‘Aye, not scoopin’ their guts off the street like some o’ those poor bastards. What’s to become of them?’
    Stryker shrugged, returning to his pistol. ‘Exchange. The gaols are full. We shall see our own officers released in return. Many were taken at Cheriton Fight.’
    ‘And the commons?’
    ‘Locked in the church, to be chained and marched far away to some dank hole.’
    ‘Transport the buggers?’
    ‘Perhaps,’ Stryker said. The order that would seal the captives’ fate had not yet been issued, but those corralled in the church, the lower sort of folk worth nothing in an exchange and expensive to feed and guard, might well be banished from the realm altogether. Especially, Stryker thought, given Bolton’s reputation for zealous Puritanism. These were not the kind of men who would turn their coats and enlist with the prince’s growing army. It would not surprise him if Rupert sold them into indentured servitude, slavery in all but name, and packed them off to work on plantations in those fever-ravaged islands across the ocean. ‘They cannot be left to grieve and conspire.’
    ‘How are