Raider's Tide

by Maggie Prince

  I am out in the open, but they have not seen me yet. I start to run towards the tower. The Scots are spreading out in an arc. Now I can hear them shouting. I can see their saffron coats, goatskin jerkins and brown and green draperies flapping about their knees. They have bows over their shoulders; a few, horrifyingly, have crossbows. At their waists are axes, dorks and cutlasses. Some carry muskets, and others, most ominously of all, scaling ladders. They are coming faster than I am. It is like running into the gates of Hell. For a moment I consider hiding in the woods, but it is too late. The outer edges of their line are spreading into a circle that will join arms behind me. There is no way back. Suddenly they see me. A great shout goes up. Individual Scots break free of the line and run straight at me. The ground is shaking under their feet as I reach the tower door. Their hands stretch out for me. Their sweat suffocates me.

  I had been afraid that no one would hear me or let me in, but the grille goes up fast, the door opens and Verity and Martinus pull me into the gatehouse. I stagger back against the wall, but something is wrong. The door will not shut behind me. Verity and Martinus throw their weight at it but the Scots are pushing from the other side, and slowly the door is opening again. I try to wind down the grille, but it will not move. I give up, realising they have jammed it, and instead add my strength to those trying to push the door shut. Laughter from outside mocks us. A cutlass pokes through the widening gap.

  “They’re making it easy for us this time, laddies,” calls a voice next to the hinge, a hand’s breadth from my ear.

  “Father! Send down more men!” Verity shouts through the inner door. Footsteps come running from above, but they are going to be too late. The door is opening now and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Those coming down the stairs behind us ought to bar the inner door against us, and safeguard the rest of the tower, but I know they will not. None of us here dares let go to seize weapons. Martinus gestures desperately to Verity and me to get behind the inner door and barricade ourselves in. Verity mutters, “And give you the pleasure of finishing off the bastards on your own?” except she does not describe them so genteelly.

  The hairy hand and arm holding the cutlass pushes further through the gap. There is an explosion – our hagbut. Gunshots thud against the walls. In a brief, quiet moment I hear the hiss and whistle of arrows. Now James is here. He does not add his weight to pushing at the door, but instead seizes the horn from its niche and brings it up hard against the elbow that is pushing through the gap. The hand springs convulsively open and the cutlass clatters down, but the arm does not withdraw. Instead, with a jolt from outside, the door opens faster. Then a hand comes from behind me, a hand holding a sword. With a swift up and downward chop, it slashes at the arm. It is Kate. If her angle had been better she might have severed the limb. An inhuman scream spirals out of audible pitch. Blood spurts, and the arm is pulled back. I know I shall never again watch with equanimity while Kate carves the meat.

  We all hurl ourselves at the door then, and at last it slams shut. Father is here now, and he crashes the six bolts and three heavy iron bars into their slots, fumbling with drunken haste. I steady his hand as he feeds metal into metal. Martinus drags at the handle which lowers the iron grille outside, and as he puts his full weight behind it there is a cracking noise, and it finally turns. Somebody outside yells as the descending grille hits them. James picks up the horn and restores it to its place.

  The battle is long and terrible. It is the worst I remember. Father stands at the window of the living hall with his antiquated longbow, pumping arrows into the enemy. We don’t bother with crossbows here at Barrowbeck. At this height and range they have no particular virtue, and are too slow to reload, though the Scots put them to terrifying use from below. The extra power sends their arrows high over our battlements where our henchmen crouch, firing back. Behind them some of the young men and women from the valley kneel in the shelter of the beacon turret, binding arrow points in linen, dipping them in hot tar and setting them alight before passing them forward for firing. We all have short swords and knives at our belts, in case hand-to-hand combat should become necessary. Verity and James operate the catapult. James hefts the stones and Verity pulls back the lever. Occasionally James just throws a particularly heavy stone over the battlements. Downstairs Leo stands watch on the outer door, ready to bar the inner door if needs be. In the kitchen Kate boils lard for pouring on the enemy, and Germaine carries it up the stairs in wooden pails, cursing under her breath as homesteaders get in her way and the stairs grow greasy underfoot.

  Many of the valley homesteaders who herded their animals into the tower are now huddled in the lower rooms with them. There are so many this time that in places it is difficult to move. We have put James’s black cattle in the kitchen with Kate. All the animals are going mad with terror. Their lowing and whinnying and squealing fill our ears, and the stink of them rises up the stairs in great waves.

  My job is to go round checking that all possible entry points are defended. I have not forgotten the rope scaling ladders which I saw earlier. As I reach the gatehouse on one of my patrols, I find Leo looking very grim.

  “They’re trying to fire the door, lady.”

  I look down, and see a curl of smoke feathering out of a narrow crack at the base of the door.

  “It will never burn, Leo. Thank the Lord we treated it in time.”

  “Mebbe best get Mistress Kate to soak some leather for under it.”

  “I’ll do that.” I move towards the kitchen, then stop. “Did you hear that?”

  We both listen. Leo’s mouth tightens. “Grappling irons. They’re trying to get up the walls.”

  “They must have hooked into one of the windows. Quick, Leo. If you start looking I’ll get some of the others to go round too.” As I speak, a homesteader comes rushing down from the battlements to tell us the Scots are scaling the walls. There is a flurry of commotion from above. Leo and I quickly bar the inner door and I hurry through the arch to the kitchen. Here people from the valley are tearing up linen for arrows and bandages, feeding and tending their animals, soothing their babies. At the far end of the kitchen James’s black cows are imprisoned by the long table, knee deep in straw and dung, lowing and stamping and rolling their eyes. Over the fire another cauldron of fat is heating, suspended from the greasy, dripping rackencrock. Shiny white gobs of lard slide from the sides of the cauldron, sink in the melted oil, then surface again, smaller. I ask some of the homesteaders to soak strips of leather for under the door, and others to spread out through the tower and check the windows for grappling irons. In the end, though, I am the one who finds the first ugly metal hook.

  I go into the men’s common room and find Henry dead on the floor, our hagbut toppled from its stand, gunpowder drizzling out of its barrel. Henry has a great wound to his head where the grappling iron hit him, before it lodged tightly under the stone sill of the window. Now it rattles and shakes as someone climbs the rope ladder beneath.

  There is no time. A face appears at the window. It all happens too fast. The bright hazel eyes are wide and wild, the beardless mouth young and reckless. He would have hauled himself in, but in the shock of seeing me, his defences are down, and he is too slow.

  I take his face in my hands and push. With an arching cry he somersaults away backwards, out of sight.

  I send his hook spinning after him, but I cannot watch him, or it, hit the ground. Instead, I race from room to room searching for more hooks. Between us the homesteaders and I find three more. We dislodge them with pokers and shovels, sending them and their human burdens hurtling to earth.

  Whether it is the hurling down of these foolhardy climbers that finally makes the Scots lose heart, I do not know, but by the time I reach the battlements again, they are in retreat. Father’s henchmen send a score of flaming arrows after them for good measure, but the fleeing Scots are quickly out of range, heading down the valley towards the sea, carrying their wounded, and leaving behind them twelve or fifte
en ghastly, staring corpses on the bloody, ashen, pig-greasy turf.

  Chapter 5

  None of us emerges until the following day. Double watch is kept all night. By next morning the whole area smells like a slaughterhouse, and a thick crust of black flies has formed on the outside of the tower. They creep in through the window slits and buzz in our faces, grotesquely unable to differentiate between the living and the dead. Outside, they swarm on the bodies. On the grass they move in patterns, forming and re-forming like fishermen’s nets on the sea.

  My father, sober and out of bed for once, leads prayers of thanksgiving for our deliverance, as we all stand crushed together in the men’s common room. On our side only Henry is dead, though several more of the henchmen are wounded. Henry lies now in our tiny chapel over the gatehouse. Father prays for his soul. He even, in what seems to me like a fit of remarkable generosity, offers up a brief prayer for the souls of the fallen Scots.

  “He’d best not let the parson hear him praying for folks’ souls,” Germaine whispers to me. “That’s Popish stuff.”

  I look at her. Is she loyal to no one, not even my father? Not that there seems much point in his prayers. I cannot believe that God listens to my father. He might as well pray to the elder tree in the thicket, the way some people round here still do.

  “Amen,” chorus the homesteaders. I look across their bowed heads. In a few minutes they will have to walk out past those bloating corpses and down the valley to see which of their stick and mud homes are still standing. Their children, tired from two nights on the common rooms’ floors, are mardy and whimpering. The stench from the livestock is overwhelming even up here now, and it blends with the smell of carnage below to create a foul miasma which clogs our noses. Several times I pass people being sick out of windows.

  Later, most of us go down to help redistribute the livestock. Buckets of milk stand all along the downstairs passageways. The floors of the lower rooms are thick with dung. Most of the cattle are in distress because the crowded conditions have not made for adequate milking. They skip and kick as they are released down the curving slope to the cellars, then shoulder each other along the underground passage, through the stone arch under the dairy, up the slope at the other end where part of the flagstone floor has been removed, and out into the barmkin, pursued by Leo shouting, “Git on, yer great lummocks.”

  Two pigs, herded by their owner out of the barmkin, rush towards where the bodies lie. Children watch in fascination to see if the pigs are to be allowed to eat the bodies, and Kate mutters, “Reet pigs an’ all,” and ushers the children away, while the swineherd hurries his charges up the hill.

  Father yells, “Bury the dead!” I see that his hands are shaking from lack of drink. I put my arm round him and embrace him, then join the homesteaders and help them sort out their animals.

  Later I go up to the chapel to see Henry’s body. Bright sunlight pours in through the high window and shimmers on the embroidered altar cloth and the linen sheet covering him. Four candles burn, two at his head and two at his feet. The four spiked silver candle prickets represent Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The old priest said they were Popish folly, but the new priest says they are beautiful. I lift one of the candles, spilling hot wax on my hand, and hold it close to see Henry better. I can feel my burnt skin puckering under the cooling wax. Henry’s cheeks are smooth and white, his chin dark with stubble. The wound from the grappling iron stands out in shades of black and purple, and below it, the graze from my ring is raised and red. I touch it with the hand I used to slap him, then turn away and bring my hand down on the spike. I am not brave. It is a gash, no more. The blood runs over my fingers, through the turquoise ring, and I walk unsteadily back downstairs.

  Mother has arrived home, and with her are Hugh and Gerald. Verity and I stand outside the tower amongst the piled dungheaps which Kate and Leo are still shovelling out, and hold her tightly and cry.

  “Are you all right?” she demands. “I was dreadfully worried about you.”

  “Yes. Are you all right, Mother?” I see that her cheeks are very red and healthy-looking, and despite her stated anxiety she has the appearance of someone rather pleased with herself. Hugh and Gerald grin at us, and take themselves off upstairs to have a tankard of ale in the common room with the men. All of them are now back from burying the bodies of the Scots in a clearing on the hill behind Barrow Wood. Henry’s body will travel the Old Corpse Road to Wraithwaite tomorrow, for burial in the churchyard. Now the men have been given a quart of ale each to help them forget the dreadful sights they have seen and the dreadful textures they have touched.

  Mother, Verity and I go up to Verity’s room and sit on the cushioned stone benches along the walls, leaning back against the pictorial tapestries which Verity weaves. We are all very tired. Kate, unasked, brings hot, mulled wine.

  “Did they attack Mere Point?” I ask. Mother shakes her head.

  “No, but we’d just let the cattle out again, and they took those. They’re getting too darned clever by half, hiding and waiting like that. I was frantic when I heard they were attacking Barrowbeck. A lad said they’d got into the tower, but Aunt Juniper wouldn’t let me come back until now. Even then she insisted on sending Hugh and Gerald with me. Not that they needed much persuading.” She says this with more hope than conviction.

  We talk until Kate rings the bell for supper, then we go up to eat in the living hall. Lately Germaine has been eating here with us, instead of in the kitchen with Kate and the henchmen. As usual, our food is half cold by the time Kate has slogged up the east stairs with it. She bangs down the pewter dishes in front of us. I believe she thinks we should pay for our privileges.

  “Wouldn’t you prefer to eat in the kitchen, Germaine?” Verity asks gently. When she speaks gently, we all know to watch out. “You’d get your food hot from the hearth then. In fact, I think I might start eating in the kitchen myself.”

  “A good idea, mistress. Perhaps we all should.” Germaine helps herself to more of the congealing mutton in its puddle of yellow grease.

  Father throws Verity a look and says, “That’s quite enough of that, Daughter.”

  For much of the rest of the meal, talk is of the tower’s defences. It annoys me that Father booms on to Hugh and Gerald about improving the defences of the two towers, when he does so little about it in practice. Hugh takes my hand under the table and gives it a squeeze. I stare at him, quite startled. He asks my father, “Are you riding tonight, Uncle?” A shocked silence falls. It is an unspoken rule that we never discuss my father’s regrettable tendency to rob travellers on the queen’s highway.

  My father smiles at his nephew. “Likely as not. You wish to come?”

  Hugh smiles respectfully back. “Nay. Thanks Uncle. I’m as tall as I care to be.”

  After the meal, Verity and our two cousins and I walk up towards Barrow Wood in the dampness of early evening. Hugh says, “It was time someone said something. You are all too careful of him. Being squire of Barrowbeck won’t save him from having his neck stretched, if they catch him.”

  “Oh…” I sigh. “I know, but you don’t have to live with him. You had a more kindly response from him than any of us would have.”

  It is exhilarating to be free of the constrictions and smell of the tower. Hugh takes my hand again, and I see Verity’s eyes widen.

  “Well, Cousin.” Hugh speaks quietly to me, excluding the others. “How are you truly, after your ordeal?”

  “Well enough, thank you Cousin.” I feel far too unnerved to make any pretence of proper conversation. I see, mildly alarmed, that we have now lost sight of the other two amongst the trees. I decide that frankness is my best defence. I lift our clasped hands.

  “What am I supposed to make of this, Hugh?”

  He flushes. Hugh is very fair-skinned, with pale, straight hair, fairer than his brother. I know that he is considered handsome, and I can see that one could think him so, but to me he is still so much my childhood companion that his
comeliness or otherwise is irrelevant. We face each other in the darkening forest. “How do you feel about our families’ plans for us?” he asks me.

  “Hugh… I’m not ready to consider them yet…” I clear my throat and try again. “Of course, I love you as a cousin…” I feel desperately disturbed by his closeness. Never, even in our most frightening games as children, has Hugh seemed threatening, but he seems threatening now. “It’s too soon,” I falter. “I hadn’t thought it would come so soon.”

  “Your father and mine have indicated their wishes, Beatie, but it doesn’t have to be soon.” He lets go of my hand. “I should have liked it to be soon… it’s not just our fathers’ wish… but you’re two years younger. I can wait. Could we… perhaps… try to see each other differently? I have to confess that your friendly, jesting attitude towards me makes you rather unapproachable on these matters.”

  There is a pause. The light is fading. Hugh seems like a stranger. We walk in the direction of the old hermit’s cottage, no longer holding hands, no longer speaking. Green light filters through the leaves, down to the forest floor. When we reach a corner of the crumbling boundary wall we sit down on it, side by side in the moss-coloured dimness. I turn to Hugh. “We know each other too well, Hugh. I cannot think of you in the way you wish.”

  He puts his arm round my shoulders briefly, then releases me. “I won’t ask you again until the winter, Cousin.” After a moment he adds, “I would do anything for you, Beatrice. I would walk through the quicksands across the bay for you.”

  I stand up. “Now you’re getting carried away, Hugh.” I feel uneasy and uncomfortable, and I think at first that Hugh’s words are the cause. Then I realise that there was a noise. I turn slowly. Surely the hermit’s cottage is still uninhabited? The noise is repeated, a crackling, shifting sound.