picked off one by one by hidden marksmen.
'A victory!' said Essex. 'Revenge for the Yellow Ford!'
Two and a half thousand men had died on the English side at the massacre of Yellow Ford. Here there were fifteen, perhaps sixteen Irish corpses. The body of Essex's horseboy lay draped over what was left of the barricade. One of Gresham's men had caught a musket ball in the mouth but had had the decency to fall unconscious and would be dead within the half hour, his face smashed to a pulp. A victory.
'Is it a victory from which we can claim to have learnt a great deal, my Lord?' asked Gresham, trying to keep the irony out of his voice. The pain was tightening now, sending hot needles into his eyes and down the whole side of his face. He yearned for darkness and a cold compress on his head.
'We've learnt that the Irish will run if they meet a foe of sufficient determination. Your men did well.' Essex looked carefully at Gresham, perhaps disappointed by his flat response. 'I'm grateful. Truly grateful. More perhaps than you might realise. I'll go and tell your men what I've just told you.' With that, he hauled his horse round, and galloped off to where Gresham's men were climbing out of the ditches. Essex sat beautifully on a horse. The men gathered round him, and after a few words Gresham heard cheers and huz-zahs thinly on the air. The fools. Yet it was no more than he would have done, and his time to say well done to his men would come.
Mannion tapped him on the shoulder. Gresham turned and looked round. He was wearing a padded coat for riding, deliberately loose fitting, its tail flapping behind him on the saddle. A neat hole had cut through the cloth where the coat had ridden out behind him at full gallop. An inch further forward and it would have smashed into the small of Gresham's back, pulverising his spine. Mannion had not finished. He leant forward, started to yank the strap off the saddlebag on Gresham's horse. It sat just behind his kneecap. A ragged hole had been torn in the leather. Mannion withdrew something from the bag. A flattened lead ball lay snugly cut into the cover of a book, where it had come to rest. The Revenger's Tragedy. With both shots the marksmen had allowed just a little too much for Gresham's speed, placed the ball a few inches behind where it should have gone.
'I think what we might 'ave learnt,' said Mannion, tossing the book to Gresham, 'is that the Irish have some fuckin' good shots. It ain't bad to hit a horseman at full gallop from that range, not bad by 'alf. Can't 'ave bin more than a dozen shots fired at us. That's bloody good shootin'. And they knew enough to pick out the officer, too.'
Something in Mannion's tone cut through Gresham's tiredness. 'You telling me this isn't an Irish ball?'
'I'm telling you. And I saw who it was fired it at you. Two of 'em, I reckon. One fired at the Irish, took everyone's attention. Other bugger swung round at you. Bloody good shot, too.'
As the excitement drained from Gresham the double reaction — to action and to a separate attempt on his own life — set in. He pulled gently on the reins, and his horse, which had been vaguely poking at some grass, ambled off under his lethargic control to where his men stood, Essex just having ridden off to lead the main column through the broken barricade. They cheered as Gresham reached them, grinned at him, and he leant forward out of the saddle, slapping hands and occasionally grasping and shaking one. They had reloaded their muskets, he noted, before mounting their celebration, so if more Irish had risen up from the woods behind them they would have at least received one full volley before their charge. That was good. That was training.
He noticed a bare leg sticking up over the side of a mound, some ten or twenty yards beyond the ditch. Leaping lightly from his horse, he handed the reins to a soldier, and picked his way to where the Irish body lay. The ground was littered with huge tussocks, soft marsh between each one; he felt the earth sucking at his boots.
'Ere,' said Mannion, catching him up. 'You sure about this? It only needs one man in those woods…'
Gresham said nothing. He needed to see the enemy. He reached the figure, pathetic now in death. He was a young man, perhaps not even sixteen. He wore a ragged shirt and some sort of pantaloons that looked as if they could have been made of canvas, with something that looked like a woollen plaid over one shoulder. Knitted and spun by a mother? By a lover? Even by a wife? The musket ball had caught him full over the heart, smashed into his chest. Death must have been instant. He had long, straight legs, at his age more like a woman's than a man's. They were muddy, scarred with scratches from brambles or thorns. He had no shoes, but the sole of the foot that was sticking up had hard, brown skin on it that Gresham suspected was tougher than any leather. The boy's face had a strange innocence, and though his lips were drawn back in a grimace of pain — or was it hate? — one could see how good-looking he had once been. The body was filthy, the boy's hair sticking out in spikes and also covered in mud — a smear of mud across his face. Foul living? Or disguise? A disguise that broke up the whiteness and the symmetry of his face, a disguise that covered him not just with the earth but the smells of the earth, so that the human smell a horse or dog might sense was battened over and covered?
Something glittered. Gresham knelt down, and saw that round the boy's neck, mostly covered by the plaid that had been thrown up round it by his fall, was a silver decoration. He moved the material gently to one side. It was thin, fragile, a thing of rare beauty, with tiny, intricate interwoven designs. Was he a chieftain's son, this young man? Sent out on his first foray to test his manhood. He had no musket by his side, merely a quiver of the darts the Irish favoured and a sword, workmanlike but with no decoration to it. Youth. He had moved forward too close to the enemy, and paid the price for his courage. Perhaps he had wanted to show the other men that he was not afraid, not knowing that all men knew fear.
'Don't move! Stay down!' Mannion hissed at him urgently. Gresham looked up.
A man was standing at the very edge of the woods. Tall, middle-aged, he had the wild beard and hair of the Irish, the same mud-stained appearance. He held a musket, pointing it straight at Gresham. It rested on nothing, no stick or mound, and the barrel was rock steady. Whoever this man was he had muscles of steel.
A wave of tiredness came over Gresham. It was his own folly that had taken him off the road within musket range of this wild man; his own folly that had made him stay by the body. He looked up at the man. Who cared? Would the world cease because this boy had been torn uselessly out of life? Would the world change when the musket ball tore into his own heart? Would death be like the longest sleep possible, pure oblivion and an end to terror and trial? But then there were the dreams. Who could know what the dreams might be?
Very carefully, aware all the time of the musket pointed at him, Gresham straightened the boy's legs before they froze in death at their grotesque angle. It was always a kindness; it saved someone the unpleasant task of breaking the corpse's legs to straighten them out. He laid the plaid carefully over the broad shoulders and exposed the silver ornament to the thin sunlight only now starting to creep out from behind the clouds. He cleared the clotted hair from the boy's face, folded his arms across his chest, closed his staring eyes. And stood up.
He looked across the void into the eyes of the man pointing the gun at him. For once, he did not feel fear. It was always going to happen like this, wasn't it? On some God-forsaken field in the Low Countries, in a back alley in London or in a palace in France. It could have happened so many times before, when the galleys had chased him at Cadiz, when Drake had shot at him, when the Armada had so nearly ground itself, at Tantallon Castle, in the Tower of London. So many times, so many escapes, each one chipping a tiny part off his soul, each one shrieking the question why. Why bother? Why go through this dance to the nonsense of time? To what end? To what purpose? So it happened by a pass that no one had heard of, after the most feeble of little victories. So be it.
He smiled a thin smile at the man, and turned to face him full on, dropping his hands to his side.
'Jesus!' he heard Mannion mutter beside him.
There was a rustle from behind him. His men had seen what was happening, were scrambling to join him. Though he could not see them, he could imagine numbers of them gauging the distance, deciding whether a shot at extreme range might be worth it. Slowly he held out his hand, never taking his gaze from the man with the musket, palm up, in the unmistakable gesture that says no. Do nothing.
The man waited an eternity, the barrel rock steady. Then, quite clearly, Gresham saw him nod. He let the musket drop, butt first, turned on his heels. And vanished into the woods.
'Fuckin' 'ell!' said Mannion. 'He came out o' nowhere, just as you started to finger that necklace thing. 'Ad 'is musket up before I could move.'
'He thought I was going to steal the necklace,' said Gresham. 'Thought I was a grave robber, a battlefield scavenger.'
'Why didn't he fuckin' shoot you anyway?'
'He was sending me a message.' Two of his men had reached him now, puffing and perspiring; four or five others were just behind him.
'If you're going to climb through these tussocks and this bog with your musket at full cock we'll lose more men from friendly fire than we ever do from Irish,' said Gresham with total calm.
The first man looked open-mouthed at Gresham, then almost comically down at his musket. With a shame- faced grin, he hooked his thumb over the hammer, let it click forward so that it was on safe. The story would go
