And so as soon as the door looked shattered enough, I pushed the man with the axe aside, kicked it in, felt the lift and beat as my Lady Leopard leaped on my shoulder, and charged through with my shortsword in my hand, ready to fight Dormer and kill him …
And so it was that he turned his pistol from Becket to me. And so it was that Becket put himself between the pistol and me. I saw it in the slowness of my Lady’s rage, I saw him step sideways deliberately when he saw Dormer’s knuckle whiten on the trigger, and his left arm was blown off by the pistol-ball at such short range. He charged upon Dormer and head-butted him, bore him down by sheer rage and weight, struck him one-handed, blood-spattered white face snarling and Dormer was strong enough and fast enough to slash him with a knife in the gut.
Becket gasped, hunched, rolled bonelessly off Dormer, who staggered up again, kicked him. But I was there. I came close, I turned his shoulder gently, for I wished him to see me, to see the black demon of his fearful godspace and know that I would send him to the place he called Hell.
He turned, his knife ready, but he was battered, and he had some godsight, and so he saw me with my Lady Leopard, saw the truth of me. He hesitated, only for a heartbeat, and in that time of filling and swelling and the great heart-muscle clenching, like a fist, I raised my shortsword and struck sideways, severing his neckbone with the heavy blade, crunch through the gristle and nerve, and so he crumpled and fell.
I picked up his head, happy to have taken it. ‘You are mine now,’ I told him as his eyes blinked and blinked. ‘Your spirit will serve me until I let you go.’ And the fluttering was quicker, quicker, moths escaping from a dead tree, before they stilled and his eyes were only meat. Lady Leopard greeted his spirit with a playful pat from her paw.
Then I turned to my candle-husband. He had seen me kill Dormer but was dying, bleeding from his destroyed arm, bleeding from his ripped belly. Oh now, I thought, now you can come to me, godsight. The Lady Leopard made her shapeshift to the Lady of All, filled me with the knowledge I got all alone in the forests, the wisdom for which I gave up my child.
I reached out to David’s face, pushed away the sweaty curls, as he fought the demon of pain, fought not to cry out or groan. There are few wounds more agonising and bloody than a ripped liver. I put gentleness on his forehead, stole pain from him. He calmed.
‘Which will you have, my lover?’ I asked him softly in English. ‘The death which will come soon, perhaps tonight or tomorrow, or the death I give you with my knife?’
It was hard for him to take enough breath to speak. ‘Your … knife.’
He lifted his hand again, and held mine tight. He knew what had happened. His arm he might recover from, but a knife in his guts and liver as well … No. And it would be hard to die unhelped since his lungs were not pierced. But I hesitated, my own heart invisibly torn, and he gripped harder with the pain. So I showed the knife to him, to be sure I understood, and then when he nodded, I drove the blade up between his ribs and into his heart. So I killed my friend.
Up, up I went, borne up by the wind of his passing into the dreamtime, borne up by rage and sorrow and revenge, by fever and the madness of my Lady. And in that time I saw my son’s warrior spirit too, broken free, carried by his favourite god. He knew where he was and smiled to see me there again.
It was time to put a stop to the Spaniards and their Suffering Jesus and their greedy plan to take England. There is nothing to choose between one tribe of hairy ghosts and the other, but David Becket had been blue-green English and his spirit had no trouble choosing.
So I looked to the north and east and saw Thundering Jehovah dancing and bellowing among the rocks of the north. Such a crazy, charming, little boy of a god. Here, I called, come and play. He caught my scent, grown large with my pain, saw the frail wooden cockleshells of his enemy and brother god Suffering Jesus, and boomed his challenge, swooping down upon them, his cloud-chariots scudding before him, scooping up the waves with his fists made of air.
It was the work of less than a moment, stepping sideways out of time and back again. Then I was back in myself, unwelcome there, the knife still in my hand.
However, when I lifted my knife again to go with my dear, strange lover, the Lady stopped me. And I knelt weeping and dirty with blood, shaking with fever and sorrow and the hard ending of dream-walking, while Cecil allowed the Frenchmen back onto the gun platform and they began the labour of boring out new touch-holes in the spiked guns. None dared come near me for they saw the bloody knife, the head I had taken, and feared me.
David was there again, a tall, strong young man, playing a laughing veney with his spirit-sword. No longer were his black curls sprinkled with silver, no gut hanging over his swordbelt, no longer were his hands clumsy and unreliable, here he was again as he had been in his prime. I had killed him and might have asked him to stay with me for company, but to love someone is to let them go.
In my dreamsight he came close and kissed me, then blinked at my lower belly, looked again and laughed. What had he seen hiding in my woman’s place? I smiled back at him, suddenly understanding. If she should live to be born, if she should live to receive her woman’s snake, then I would tell her the tale of her strange father.
He saluted with his sword as the hairy ghosts do, then turned. I saw him tramping up the sunshine to make report to his Captain, the one he had stopped believing in but had never deserted. Who stood, as David expected, with a red banner of lions and the open gate of Paradise behind Him.
When we look at the Lady of All, we see what our hearts truly expect. Do you think She is only one thing or another? Do you think She is too small to hold all of us?
But then, I have never seen any spirit fly anywhere else, even if they go a roundabout way or spend time locked in confusion in the world. This might be a shock to the strange, heathen hairy ghosts who have made such a fuss and a botheration over where their spirits will end up.
In the end, naturally, we all fly home.
Simon Ames
San Lorenzo
It was taking them a stupidly long time to hang him, giving him every chance to shout out that he had lied. The thing was enraging. What kind of fool did they think he was? He had told them he had been an inquisitor …
May they rot before and after they get to hell, Simon thought, a pulse of fear still beating in his jaw, for all his knowledge and all his wisdom, he still had to concentrate hard to keep the gates of his body shut tight, sweat was trickling in maddening rivulets down his face.
At last they shoved him in another direction, unbound his arms, pulled the hood off and he gasped and blinked at the sun. Don Hugo was standing there, face impassive.
‘You are correct that His Excellency may want to question you. For this reason, I will not hang you yet.’
Simon just stared and panted. You liar, he thought, you were testing me.
He was shoved the same way they had taken Snake, down two ladders, through the ill-smelling crew’s quarters and down another ladder into the hold, where they unlocked a cage and shoved him in. Snake was there and a dead body and a great deal of filth. But Snake came to him and embraced him with tears of joy in his eyes, speaking in his own language, then haltingly in Spanish.
‘You not hang! So fine a scribe, upside-down scribe. Good, I am happy.’
Simon smiled wanly and had to sit down, the weakness in his legs still there. He could breathe, he was not hanging by his neck slowly kicking his way to heaven, but to lose the sky, the air … He tried to feel gratitude. No, he would be honest with the Almighty. Hear, Oh Lord God of Israel, your servant is not satisfied.
There was a waterskin that Snake brought to him, the water in it smelled bad but not actually poisoned and Simon drank, still thirsty. It felt strangely defiant to drink when he wanted, rather than having to wait for Padron to come with the water. Once the cage had been locked and the soldiers had climbed the ladder out of the hold and shut the trapdoor the dim light became an utterly thick blanket of blackness.<
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Is this better than being hanged? Simon asked himself and decided that it was, just. He was going to be hanged anyway, or shot or possibly tortured if Medina Sidonia liked to use that to establish truth. Poor Snake, who was no better off, was feeling his way around the cage, kicking all the turds into the furthest corner, rolling the corpse in the same direction. It will only take a few days for the foul airs to kill us both, Simon thought. If he wants to talk to me, Medina Sidonia had better hurry up.
Time passed. Simon decided that if he was going to be Snake’s advisor when Snake became King of his country, he had better learn the language. Snake found this very funny but began with enthusiasm.
Two soldiers with lamps brought waterskins and biscuit in the evening. Simon demanded that they take out the corpse before it started to rot really badly – its belly was already swollen.
Night passed in a strengthening stink, with the ship rocking in the calm and the lips of waves making obscene kissing noises against the hull. Rats came pattering and whispering in the blackness, nibbling on the corpse.
In the morning Simon shouted at the two young soldiers who brought a little more biscuit and they fetched ropes, trussed the gnawed corpse Simon and Snake had rolled to the gate of the cage and dragged it away, farting foulness as it went.
Darkness again. And then they heard something they had never heard before, a kind of rhythmic swish-unk, swish-unk, and the motion of the ship changed. Simon thought hard and then Snake’s voice smiled in the darkness.
‘Padron rowing for us now.’
Simon laughed. Of course, they had never heard it because they had always been too busy rowing. The sound went on for a very long time, and then the booming and crashing of guns was all around. They heard a screeling, crashing, crumpling sound, and the ship rocked; again, more thunder of English guns. There was an echoing crash and the whole ship juddered, again and again.
Next there was a pause and the swish-unk, swish-unk started again, slower, harder, a rolling chant transmitting through the wood. Snake was by the bars of the cage and he hammered with his hands in a complicated beat.
‘We are towing something.’
Another crash of guns. Once a splintering crunch followed by screaming. Snake and Simon sat still in the filth of the cage, protected womb-like in the bowels of the ship, their ears straining to see past the wooden walls to the benches. You knew little enough of what was happening when you were at the oar – but in the cage, nothing. In frustration, Simon began banging his head gently against the bars until Snake’s hand on his shoulder stopped him.
‘Not to start,’ rumbled Snake’s voice, ‘or it become pleasant.’
We will only know we are about to die when we smell the smoke or see the water gushing in, thought Simon, and to know that he could do nothing and was trapped made fear become something like a rat in his chest, running around its own cage, biting to be let out.
Still the smell of gunpowder got to them, clouds of it. So much. More banging, more crashing, more screaming. There was a pattering and squeaking all around and Simon suddenly realised that the rats had come to join them after all, because where they were was the least frightening place. Perhaps not for you, he thought as the pattering and swishing went on on the blackness, but for me this is far worse than the oar. He would never have thought he could say such a thing.
The rowers were still towing, the cannon were still firing, but not their own any more, the noises weren’t near enough and didn’t make the ship vibrate enough. English cannon. It must be an enormous battle, thought Simon, wishing his spirit could be light enough to fly through a knothole and away.
After a while the crashing faded. They were rowing out of the battle area. From the lift to the ship’s keel, Simon thought that there was at last some wind and renewed cannon fire in another direction told him that the great sailing ships were now at last able to come into the battle. But San Lorenzo seemed not to be taking any further part, which was hardly surprising, considering how long the men had been rowing. Simon could see it, almost taste the metal in his mouth, feel his lips crack as he bent with the others over the oar, trying to catch his breath.
‘Poor bastards.’
‘Not Padron.’
‘No, apart from Padron. Let him row the ship by himself.’
‘He like that.’
Nobody came, so there was no food and the waterskin was down to one third, which they decided to save for the morning. They slept at last, not curled against each other since there was enough room in the cage to stretch out, it had been designed to pack in ten men after all. But they were close enough that the sound of the other man’s breathing could reassure each of them that he was not lost alone in a black pit that moved mysteriously.
Not until midday the next black day was the trapdoor raised again, and by that time Simon was frantic with worry about Snake.
‘How long did you have the headache?’ he was demanding, trying to feel Snake’s forehead in pitch black, while Snake fended him off. His skin felt burning hot and slick with sweat.
‘Long time, since we get near England.’
‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘Why? If I sick, two ways to go: out the oarport, in the cage. Both bad. Why say?’
Simon put his face in his hands. He heard Snake lift himself up on an elbow.
‘You know what it is?’
‘Not yet. My uncle is a physician, I’ve learned some things from him … Headache, fever…’
‘My nose bleeding again.’
Simon sighed shakily. ‘Most likely it’s jail fever, there are two kinds, very like each other. Have you ever had jail fever?’
‘I had fevers…’ He said some words in his own tongue, which Simon assumed were the names. Snake coughed and lay down again. ‘Not jail fever.’
Have I had jail fever? Simon wondered and honestly could not say, except that if he had so much as sniffed its miasma when he was a boy he would most certainly have caught it, since he seemed to catch every other fever it was possible to have. Or yes, perhaps he had, when he first started acting for Walsingham and had gone to the Clink, to interrogate someone in a cell so full of rats, it had seemed like a furry sea. That had put him in bed for three months with a raging headache and a fever that convinced him at one point that he was a bird and must fly out the window. Perhaps he’d had this kind of jail fever. Well, if he hadn’t caught it yet, he almost certainly would now.
He was furious with the Almighty. In fact, all his frustration and fright of yesterday and all his fears for Snake today and the blackness and the cramping hunger of his belly and the hopelessness of everything, all boiled together into a great black ball of fury. I am no Job, to worship you defiantly in spite of everything, he said to the nothingness above and around him, I am not some Christian godling either. How dare you treat me like this, in all your power and might, to crush me like a worm and then crush me again. How dare you!
The trapdoor opened, sullen looking soldiers put down a ladder, came with biscuit and a new waterskin, which they pushed through the hatch in the gate, and left again.
Simon called after them, ‘The battle yesterday. Who won?’
The soldiers, fluff-faced both of them, looked at each other and shrugged. ‘Many galley-slaves hurt and many of us too,’ said one, ‘We were towing Rata Encoranada to fire her guns at the English. She did some damage, but I heard we were meant to take the White Island and we did not.’
The Isle of Wight, Simon thought. It was the last possible place for a refuge before the Straits of Dover. And we are past – no wonder the cannon fire was fierce. The English know as well as the Spanish how vital it is.
There was no swish-unk, swish-unk, but they were moving, San Lorenzo was sailing. Dimly he could hear the sounds of hammering and carpentry through the hull. It seemed there was enough wind to keep them moving without the oars. No doubt the oarsmen are exhausted, some of them hurt or dead. Why haven’t they brought us out as replacements?
His skin crawled. What if they did? What if he was chained to a bench again – not Padron’s of course, but any bench would do. Well, no doubt the Almighty would find it amusing, which made it almost a certainty.
Snake’s fever rose higher and higher through the day, and he smelled bad, although he had no flux. By the evening, he was muttering incomprehensibly in his own tongue, speaking to someone, shouting. Once he swept his arm out and almost knocked Simon over. All Simon could do was pour water into him and sponge him gently with a rag ripped from the striped breeches he had been given, and water from the nearly empty waterskin.
The night was hideous, the next day worse. Simon only dozed, trying to get water into Snake as he cried and raved and fought demons in his delirium, trying not to be caught and strangled by Snake, who seemed to regard him as a mortal enemy.
By the morning after, Snake’s skin burned a little less – temperate enough for a custard, rather than hot enough to fry a lamb chop, Simon thought to himself who tended by now to divide his thinking solely between worrying and food.
The trapdoor opened, the ladder came down. First they handed up some sacks and a barrel. Next four soldiers came to the cage and looked in.
‘What’s wrong with the black?’
‘I think he has a jail fever.’
‘What about you?’
Simon grinned. ‘I’m well,’ he said and hoped sincerely that it wasn’t true. ‘I’ve had jail fever.’
The soldiers looked at each other, one staggered as the ship heeled in the waves. We are at anchor somewhere, Simon realised, his attention not focused on Snake for a moment. I wonder where.
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