Warlord's Gold: Book 5 of The Civil War Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page B

things were blurry, but the mist was beginning to clear. He could discern more edges from the darker smudges and knew now that they were people. Or at least they were bodies, punctuating the shore at intervals for as far as he could see. Some were up, crouched or standing, bewildered and staring mutely at these harsh new surroundings. Others did not move. They lay crumpled and twisted, faces flat against the sand, ominous in sheer inertia.
    It was chaos. Carnage. As though some great maritime battle had been fought off shore, the dead and wounded spewed up by the ocean with the spars and shrouds shredded by flaming cannon and whistling shot. Except war had not come to this cold place, nor had guns belched across the waves. But battle, it seemed to Stryker, had been joined nevertheless. Man had taken on nature, and he had been found wanting.
    ‘Beelzebub’s ballocks,’ a deep, droning voice intoned behind him.
    Stryker managed to turn and focus. The man he saw was tall and thin. He wore no coat, for the garment had seemingly been stripped off by the night’s furious tides, and the shirt left behind was dishevelled and tattered. ‘Sergeant Skellen,’ he said. ‘How fare you?’
    ‘My noggin, sir,’ Skellen said, lifting a hand to his bald head. ‘Feels like I’ve been cudgelled by a bleedin’ bear.’ His sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, exposing forearms that were long, and, though thin, knotted with lean, taut muscle. The veins on his hands and wrists were raised, as if the skin was layered in an intricate web of whipcord, and his palms were like shovels. He was several inches taller than Stryker, with eyes set deep within darkly hooded sockets.
    ‘You look hearty enough to me, Sergeant,’ Stryker said.
    Skellen ran a huge hand over his stubble-shadowed chin as he perceived his captain. ‘You don’t, sir.’ Squinting down the length of the curving shoreline, he said, ‘Think we’ve lost a few.’
    Stryker used his tongue to corral a few errant grains of sand from along his gums, spitting them into the wind. ‘More than a few.’
    He followed Skellen’s narrow gaze. Of the forty or so people he could make out amongst the wreckage of the Kestrel , only half of those were visibly moving. And in that moment he understood that Stryker’s Company of Foot would never be the same again. He had lost them. Or, at the very least, a good portion. They had been swallowed by the sea, chewed in its vengeful maw and tossed on to this lonely beach. He stared out at the slate-grey water. How many were still out there, food for the monsters of the deep?
    ‘Muster the men, Will. Let us see what we have left.’
     
    Stryker stood on the rocky ridge and stared down at the men on the beach. He could hardly countenance what he saw. Debris was everywhere, lapping on the gentle tide or working its way on to the saffron-coloured sand. A single sail bobbed in the surf a little way out to sea, while a large amount of rigging wallowed in vast tangles that made the shallows appear to be infested by a colony of giant octopuses. Amid those hempen tentacles were black shapes, the detritus of life aboard a ship. Splintered timbers, square trenchers, sacks, barrels, clothing, blackjacks and a myriad of other items, all turned to flotsam by the great storm that had put an end to the doughty Dutch fluyt. There were bodies, too. Face down for the most part, drifting with the water out of reach, already becoming bloated and pale.
    ‘That’s the lot, sir,’ Sergeant William Skellen announced morosely as he clambered up to his commanding officer’s granite perch. He spat towards the sea in impotent defiance. ‘Eleven lads left.’
    Stryker nodded as he counted the ragged line of survivors for himself. They were arranged below the ridge, wan and exhausted, mere shadows of the hard men they had been. ‘Eleven. Along with you and I.’
    ‘And Jack-Sprat.’
    ‘Must you?’ Stryker admonished, though he did not begrudge Skellen his