Shake Loose the Border

by Robert Low

  It flew open and – nothing happened. Ewan took a step forward, planning to shoulder the door fully open and a length of steel whicked out, making him rear back with a yelp. Batty had been waiting for something like it and he struck the blade, hard, with his own; the clang of it seemed deafening and the blow clearly affected the unseen swordsman, for he gave a curse and drew back his arm.

  Batty put his armless shoulder to the door and pushed – again the steel flicked out, this time with a gauntleted hand in the basket-worked hilt. Batty could not get his own sword into play and roared his frustration out.

  Ewan grabbed the gauntleted wrist of the man and hauled hard. There was a grunt and a crash as the man was pulled off balance and struck the door, slamming it almost shut on his own arm at the elbow. The sword fell free and Ewan, snarling viciously, relaxed and hauled again, slamming the man into the door again. And again.

  Batty took the chance to sheath his sword and haul out the axe-handled dagg; it was empty as a Monday morning church, but Batty wanted the axe end of it.

  He shouldered the door again and this time there was no resistance, since Ewan had let the arm go. They piled in, to see a man flailing on the floor, growling and snoring hard through a battered face, broken and bloodied by repeatedly meeting the door.

  He was scrambling upright, but Batty gave him no chance; he moved in, stamping on the front foot, slashing with the axe while the man scrabbled away, raising one hand as if it was a shield. It was not; Batty slashed ruin into it, making the man howl and curl up.

  He was aware of Ewan on his right side, sword poised to stab – there was no room to use the slashing edge in the room – but hesitating. Batty did not. He knew the man, had seen the lard bulk of him, the thin hair plastered to his scalp. Mickle Anthone, Clem’s right-hand man; he brought the axe down hard, hard as a man leaning into making blows with a whip, aiming for the head and falling short by a foot at least.

  He only stopped when he ran out of breath and stood, axe dangling bloodily in one fist, half bent over. His heavy head swung all of a piece towards Ewan, who thought he looked like a panting bull about to charge.

  Batty wanted to excuse himself, wanted to say how hesitation would kill you in a business as hot as this, but he knew it was a lie and was shamed of having beaten the man to seeming death, even if it was Mickle Anthone. In the dim light of a reeking crusie the man’s blood moved sluggishly out from under his head and chest like a black lake.

  Ewan stared, unable to speak and call Batty a bloody-handed killer, though he knew it was the truth. Knew also that it had always been so and it should have come as no surprise after all this time.

  ‘Will Elliot. Will Elliot.’

  The muffled shout broke the moment and Batty squinted for the location. Ewan pointed to the dark shadows further into the room and Batty now saw that it was no more than another porter’s room, windowless and sparse – but this one was for the gaoler and the cell lay beyond.

  ‘Will Elliot…’

  The bellow was wavering, the door was barred by a single balk on their side, so Ewan lifted it free, while Batty stuffed the dagg in his belt, took the crusie and stuck his head and the lamp into the cell.

  He saw an apparition, squinting against the scarring of the light, a mad-bearded figure running with tears and shuffling forwards like a sleepwalker.

  ‘Will Elliot,’ he said and the relief he felt, the great rush of emotion almost made him drop the lamp.

  ‘Batty Coalhouse,’ Will said hoarsely, stumbling out of the cell. ‘It’s always you.’

  Batty gave him a weary glance. ‘You’re welcome.’

  * * *

  Someone shouted and a horn blew – our turn, Batty thought. Get them off the fortifications of the Prato Gate or they will take it and Florence will fall. He got up and started moving through the smoke which was an oiled smear that made the world into charcoal and slate. He caught sight of Fernan Lippe, his face like flour paste, his mouth a dark knife slice.

  ‘Black flag.’

  Batty heard it; everyone heard it and it seemed to leap from head to head and chilled to the marrow. Black flag. No quarter. Now the affair would be to fight or die.

  ‘That isn’t right,’ Batty said, but Buonarotti was gone to the foot of a scaling ladder and climbing like a mad monkey, slathered with hatred for those who dared climb all over his creation.

  Batty started to follow, heard the clatter as something landed, saw the little black ball of it careen and roll. Knew what it was.

  He hurled himself down, turning away to put his back to it – there was a loud bang and a sudden slather of pain and then oblivion…

  * * *

  He surfaced like something crawling out of an old barrow and when he opened his rheumy eyes it was to meet the pinch-lipped face of Jinet, scowling back at him. This was not Florence, then…

  ‘I warned ye,’ she said. ‘Dinna exert yerself or suffer the bad cess of it.’

  ‘Ye did,’ Batty managed to mumble. ‘How bad is the cess?’

  She told him and it was bad enough. Some of the whip-scars had opened up and leaked. They needed stitching and she made it clear that hers was a perjink hand for hems and darning socks, but she was no clever doctor. He was also running a fever and, in answer to the question he had not asked – long enough to miss a wedding and a wheen of funerals.

  ‘And every time I see you now it is efter you have been carted back like a bag of dung and dumped,’ she added, then her frown looked forged. ‘This time, though, there were black flags in it.’

  He saw she was concerned about the idea of no quarter having been called on Blackscargil, but Batty put her right on it, so she eased the arrow between her brows, though a smile was nowhere close, he saw.

  He lay one one side, feeling the heat on his back and thinking on the bastion at the Porto Gate. Black flag. He had not heard that term in an age or two and it bothered him how trivial things unleashed the blocked drain of his memories.

  She bustled out and when she came it was with a bowl of broth, a hunk of bread and Dickon, looking fierce as as a Turk.

  ‘You should be rolling sweat and dying of wound fevers,’ she said and he thought she sounded disappointed.

  ‘I drank from the Grail,’ he answered and she looked uneasy at that and finally counted it as simple blasphemy.

  ‘Ye missed the wedding,’ he said brusquely.

  ‘I was not in the mood for dancing – I take it Eliza is now a perjink wife.’

  I hope, he added to himself, the new husband knows what he has taken on…

  Dickon perched on a stool and stroked his curve of beard. ‘Patey’s Davey is now Master of Blackscargil, but we missed Nebless Clem,’ he said sorrowfully. ‘Chased the Forsters and Charltons back to Hell, but missed Clem.’

  ‘He’ll be back,’ Batty warned and Dickon nodded.

  ‘He’ll be back to being the moss trooper he was before, a man broken from his Name and roistering up and down the gorse and whin with a band of other scabby bastards, hiding out on the wastes and calling themselves “Clem’s Bairns” or “The De’il’s Ain”.’

  Clem wouldn’t like that, Batty thought, but had another, more pressing question.

  ‘How is Will Elliot?’

  ‘Better than yerself, limping ower the garth and making himself a nuisance and scaring the weans with dire mutterings about nothing anyone can see sense in.’

  He shifted his weight and levered himself off the stool. ‘I will send men with you and Will to Berwick. After that you are on your own – that’s my thanks for your work with the granados. If it hadna been for them we would never have got through any of the gates. The good news is that the ride to Berwick should be soft as baby hair – the war is done with. Everyone has sealed an end to it.’

  He stayed for a while longer, walking and waving his arms as he gave out what details he knew of the end of the war. Wharton’s reward for all his cunning was to be removed as Warden of the East March, replaced by his old riva
l Dacre – but he remained as Governor of Carlisle and commissioner for the division of the Debatable Land. The Seymours were finished and now Dudley, Earl of Warwick was Lord Protector, mainly because of how he had handled rebellion in Norfolk the year before.

  Batty wished Wharton fortune in the task of dividing the Debatable, since neither country had ever wanted responsibility for it. Dickon eventually left when the Frasers arrived. What’s left of the Frasers, Batty corrected and felt bad for not having attended the kisting of Malcolm and Red Colin and Big Tam. He said as much and had a sombre nod from Ewan.

  ‘Nae matter – you were not yourself. The task is done and they are gone to their Maker as perjink and proper léine-chneis.’

  Batty knew that the personal household warriors were known as léine-chneis – ‘the shirt next to the skin’ – of the chieftain. Men who would die for him, stand in the way of a blade or a ball. He remembered Red Colin, tugging and panting – just anither minute.

  Now Ewan and John Dubh were all that was left. ‘What will you do now?’ Batty asked.

  ‘See you safe hame with Will Elliot,’ John Dubh said.

  ‘Then go back to the glens and kill MacDonalds,’ Ewan added.

  Batty felt a weariness that had little to do with his fever. ‘Do you hate that much?’ he asked. ‘Is there true injustice in what they did? Is that the truth?’

  Ewan stroked his beard – worked to a neat point, Batty saw. Like Dickon. Or even myself, he thought suddenly.

  ‘Aye, they will say they were defending their wee bit glen and chieftains as were we,’ he said slowly, ‘but when injustice wears the same MacDonald face, you make connections, do you not? It is not truth. It is a muddy field strewn with the Fraser dead. It is simply how the heart works.’

  John Dubh came forward with a bundle wrapped in Batty’s cloak. ‘You of all should know the justice in revenge,’ he said, then laid the bundle on the truckle bed.

  ‘When they stripped the jack and shirt away, it was a marvel that all the belly you had was not belly at all. You have been reduced Master Coalhouse.’

  Batty knew well enough how much fat he had shed in sweat and pain, but when he twitched back the cloak he saw what had replaced it under the jack – a scarred leather bag of coin, remains of the ransom. A rickle of wool and sticks. Sausage-shaped wraps of prime corned pistol powder. A spare serk, no cleaner than the one he wore. He had not realised the room he had found inside the jack had been because of his own shrinkage.

  ‘Yer waist is like the cheeks of the squirrel,’ John Dubh said and laughed.

  ‘At first light we leave for Newark,’ Batty said. ‘Make sure you and Will Elliot are ready.’

  He seemed suddenly awake and alert and Ewan remembered the strange claim that he had drunk from the Grail. He could believe it was true of Batty Coalhouse. He and John Dubh left, trailed by the soft, sinister fingers of Batty’s singing.

  ‘She bathed him in the Lady-Well,

  His wounds so deep and sair,

  And she plaited a garland for his breast,

  And a garland for his hair.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Kershope, the next day

  The earth was mottled with new green forcing up through the yellow wither and patched snow, the trees still bare as poor hair; along the gills and burns the reeds whispered and the willows clacked bare branches like wry applause. A fish jumped ripples into the Kershope Burn.

  Hen Graham of the Mote led the way, with twenty riders coddling Batty, Will and the Frasers like swaddling round a bairn. It came as a shock of unease when Batty called a halt at the Kershope water.

  ‘We will cross here and make our way to Hermitage,’ Batty said. Hen Graham looked astonished.

  ‘You pass within a spit of Canobie, in the Debatable which is full of the Armstrongs who hate you.’

  ‘The Armstrongs are everywhere,’ Batty pointed out, ‘and where you lead us has Charltons and Forsters and Dodds, not forgetting that dark nightshade that is Clem Selby. His nose is the only good part of him.’

  ‘I was tasked to take you close to Berwick,’ Hen persisted stubbornly and Batty laid his hand on the man’s arm.

  ‘Keep riding for a night and a day,’ he said, ‘so that those who follow think you still have your charges. That will give us a chance.’

  Hen did not care for it, nor the idea that he was being followed, though it should have come as little surprise. Most of all, he did not like having to go back to Dickon and tell him Batty had gone off on his own He watched the four men urge their horses into the shallow black slide of Kershope Burn, picking a way across the rocks which made the water gurgle about how it wanted to be ice; he did not like the idea of being followed and, without Batty and the others, felt suddenly naked.

  In a few short strides Batty and the others were in Scotland, where Batty turned and raised his hand in a last greeting. Hen Graham returned it and then they rode their separate ways. Batty watched them go, feeling like the last untainted butter spread too thin on bread. Feeling like he was under all eyes.

  He and the others rode generally east with a little north in it to keep them off the rutted trackway up alongside the stream. It started to rain, so Batty put on his horse-cloak to cover the saddle-holsters as much as himself, keeping the daggs dry. He took off his helmet, because the pattering robbed him of all other hearing.

  It was that and his constant, slow deerlike scanning that made Ewan ask whose lands these were. Batty, peeled off his slit bunnet, scrubbed rain off his beard and looked around.

  ‘Armstrong in the main. One or twa’ wee folk – Littles and Bourne and the like. Hendersons, who pay blackmeal to everyone else just to live in peace. If you squint hard with good eyes you might see a wee rickle of hill. That is Tinnis, the Faerie hill and cuddled at its foot is Powrieburn.’

  ‘We will not be going there,’ Will said determinedly. Batty glanced at him.

  ‘D’ye think of her still?’

  ‘Only every day,’ Will whispered. ‘And I will not go there.’

  Neither Ewan nor John Dubh knew exactly what the exchange meant, but there was such a sense of loss in Will’s words that they both decided it had to do with an auld love. They also recalled something mentioned, in a darker way, about Powrieburn and Faerie and curses.

  Curses they knew well enough; Ewan remembered when the Lovat Frasers had left their homes to fight, encouraged by the shrill of women, the screams and whoops of bairns – and the clapping hands. Always that fierce rhythm when the clan women raged or lamented – or cursed. That time it had been curses which raised the hackles on Ewan and the others, for none of them had heard the like before. He had asked Auld Coull, who looked paler than death, what it meant.

  ‘Means? It means the wives of the glen are cursing and banning the enemies of Lovat, wishing ill-luck to them. I have heard wives flyte in England and Scotland and even heard the Egyptiani, who have mastered the foul art of it, so it’s nae marvel to me to hear it. But the ill-scathe tongues of they witches, wi’ their gruesome demands that men should be slaughtered like sheep and that they may dip their hands to the elbows in the heart’s blood of MacDonalds… it makes me feart and sick and they are on our side.’

  It had been a seal on them, Ewan thought and though meant for the enemy, had somehow rebounded. Which is the nature of curses and witches. He remembered that he had made his escape by dragging the bloody remains of Coull on top of him as vengeful, uncursed MacDonalds prowled.

  They came up on a huddle of three buildings seemingly crouching in the lee of a wood. Batty stopped and eyed it carefully; the others did the same, looking for smoke, signs of horses. There was nothing and John Dubh said so.

  ‘There is thatch,’ Batty pointed out, which did not make any sense to Ewan and John, but when they rode closer they saw the walls had a strange texture about them, were mottled like a collie dog. Batty put them straight.

  ‘This is Redmoss, hame to Tam’s Davey Little and his father before that. It has been
burned out so many times the stones has turned like bone and you canna get the char out.’

  He squinted carefully as he levered himself off Fiskie and then waved to Ewan to go inside and take a look.

  ‘I ken the place,’ Will said, slithering awkwardly off his own mount. ‘Each time, the Littles would come back, fix the lost beams, fix the thatch and start ploughing.’

  ‘They raised sheep,’ Batty added, ‘and could always rely on one or two of the clever yins running into the woods, to be rounded up again.’

  John Dubh wondered at how resolute you would have to be to keep coming back after every raid burned you out and he said as much as Ewan ducked back out of the low door, spat and looked up at Batty.

  ‘A man, a quine and two bairns. Deid a month I would jalouse. Not a mark on them…’

  Batty went in, blinking at the transition from light to dim. He peered until he found rags and an old spurtle, made a torch and managed to get his firestarter on it. Once lit, he held it up so he could see better, envying Ewan for being able to see all he did in what was near pitch to Batty.

  A man, a woman and two bairns, the man in a seat, the woman on a truckle bed with the bairns in either arm. They were gone to leather and sinew like rope, wisps of hair.

  ‘Whit slew them?’ John Dubh demanded, peering over Batty’s shoulder. Batty heard the fear of disease in his voice, so he lied about what had killed them.

  ‘Hunger,’ he said and saw the pot with a few scrapes of withered boiled grass and roots. Saw the window shutters covered with blankets, to keep it dark enough to fool the bairns into sleeping and not wanting food. Saw the bow at the feet of the man.

  ‘The whole of the country will be like this, worse along the dales and moss now,’ Will said. ‘The Border has been shaken loose.’

  ‘Not a good death,’ Ewan muttered. ‘We are not staying here, surely.’