Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  “This won’t take more than one.” Captain Spofforth slapped at the wood, evidently with the same count running in his head as I had. “They’re behind rock, up there, or I’d carry it at the charge.”

  “You may have to, yet.”

  He pursed his lips and nodded, a curiously precise gesture for a man so blackened and bloodied. “I thought so. Well, I think we cannot take another volley. Will you take his Majesty to safety?”

  I jerked my head toward the caves behind us. “You should best fall back with us, Captain.”

  “Ah. Yes. But I haven’t the men to make a convincing volley; it must be an assault.”

  “Can we look to Milord Cecil for rescue?”

  Spofforth’s level voice said, “I imagine they have taken Mr Secretary a prisoner, or killed him outright, knowing him to be James’s man. If he is free, there are no more troops closer to here than Bristol.”

  “Then Bristol is where I’ll take King James.”

  I did not know Spofforth well, but the man gave me a look of gratitude that convinced me he was serious in his talk of an assault.

  “Stand ready to go, Frenchman. I must do this while I have men enough to make it appear a respectable charge.”

  I kept the count steady in my head. Not yet, not yet…The taste of powder and lead was sharp on my tongue. “Monsieur Saburo, can the King walk?”

  The samurai’s face was tranquil in the flaring light. “Not yet. I’ll carry him, Rosh’-fu’.”

  “Good. Stand ready to move. Dariole, help Saburo take James,” I ordered; glanced up, and gave Spofforth a sharp nod. “Captain—prepare, if you please.”

  A single shot cracked out, ahead of Spofforth’s half-volley, and I heard a man scream at the cave-entrance. It catches somewhere between a man’s breastbone and his belly, that sound. Up on my toes, crouching, skirts flung over my arm, I coughed as powder smoke caught in the back of my throat.

  The smoke from the muskets eddied about the enclosed space, torches barely penetrating it, so thick it was. I found myself squinting to see the caves at the back. And that is good. “When they charge,” I said, half-choking, “M. Saburo, Mlle Dariole, we shall take the King straight through the caves directly behind us. Once we start, you must not stop. Is that clear?”

  “Hai!”

  Dariole gave me a sickly look over James’s head and nodded with complete determination.

  I stuffed apostles, shot bag, and pistol down the front of my bodice, and nodded to Spofforth. He stuck his hand out. I switched the skirts to my other arm and reached out to shake his hand. Doubtful I shall see you again, Captain—Fludd will not have thought to give orders to take prisoners.

  “Good luck, monsieur.” I looked him in the eye.

  “Thank you.” The spare, leather-faced captain grinned. “And good luck to you, too—madam.”

  The enemy’s musket-volley blasted. The air vibrated. Splinters and chunks of wood flew. The English captain stood up, bawling through white smoke, “Give fire!” A fusillade, of even so few muskets from his men, spiked deafening noise into my ears. Without hesitation, Spofforth hurdled the disintegrating table, twenty men with him, dropping their discharged muskets and pulling out rapiers.

  “Go!” I ordered. “Quickly!”

  Dariole and Saburo hauled James up. I followed, letting my back shield them as much as it might, as we scuttled across the cavern floor. A tremendous din of fighting and screeching came from the main entrance. Pistols cracked. A man howled at a soprano pitch.

  The edge of the cave caught my shoulder as we slammed through it. I pushed ahead, kicking boxes aside, sending cowering members of Alleyne’s company screaming out of our way.

  “Say you saw nothing!” I bellowed at Alleyne—although I thought it useless. I snatched up my Saxony rapier and dagger, where I had left them ready with lanterns, and thrust one lantern at the female duellist. Buckling my sword-belt most absurdly over my farthingale, I fell in behind Dariole and the samurai. They had the Scotsman’s feet off the ground, running him along between them, Saburo lending most of the brute strength, Dariole yelling encouragement to the King.

  The floor grew uneven, straw diminishing. Snags cast black shadows. A brick wall loomed up in the darkness.

  “Stand back!” I strode past. Hauling up my black silk skirt and the snapped remainder of the farthingale, I planted a hefty kick with my riding boot.

  Soldiers do not mortar as well as bricklayers. The wall bulged, and dropped abruptly, breaking into clumps. A cold wind blew out of the darkness beyond.

  “Leave go of me!” James Stuart bellowed, loudly enough to make me startle.

  “We must leave, your Majesty.” I considered a punch to the point of his jaw. Then we must carry all his weight. And, with the way my fortune runs, he’d die on me.

  His wide, beard-fringed face caught the lantern-light. “Henry stabbed me! My son!”

  “We have to go!” Dariole shifted from foot to foot, looking up at the Scottish King. “Messire, tell him! We have to go!”

  I took the King’s arm, hustling him into the darkness of the caves beyond the demolished wall.

  Perhaps a quarter of an hour later, when no sounds could be heard, I paused. “They’ll come after us—will be, now, on their way.”

  “Is there way out?” Saburo demanded.

  “Yes, I was shown—” I stopped.

  I was shown it by Caterina.

  If Fludd already knows of it….

  “We must think.” I set one of the lanterns down on a limestone ledge. Pinnacles shot the shadows of great forests against the wall beyond us. “There’s no use in witless flight. Think.”

  “What?” Dariole demanded, reaching uncomfortably around behind herself to adjust the seam of her breeches. I did not know whether a man should laugh or weep, under such circumstances.

  “Accept that Robert Fludd has calculated this,” I said, waving my hand in a gesture that took in caverns, the camp outside, Henry Stuart, the bleary-eyed King standing beside me. “Accept that he’s had years to do it. What do we conclude?”

  The young woman shook her head dumbly. Saburo and the King only stared. I addressed myself to all of them, but I looked at Dariole.

  “If he calculates what’s conditional on this day happening as he desires,” I said, “then he’ll also have calculated all the different ways in which it may fail. He calculated on Cecil’s men, or Henry wouldn’t have his own soldiers here. Perhaps they’re intended to flush us out, so James can be quietly put to death here, not on stage. I think Fludd will have calculated every way that events might go, after musket-fire began—because nothing produces so unlikely chances as war. And so….”

  The young woman nodded. I completed the thought only for James Stuart’s benefit; Saburo, I saw, anticipating me as much as Dariole.

  “And so he will have planned for the assassination failing, and King James escaping,” I said. “And so, one of the things he will have the mathematics for is where we shall escape—and the precise time of it.”

  “But you may choose to follow a different course of action,” a voice said out of the darkness, “and Dariole is the one to put astray the calculations of the London Master.”

  Saburo gave a grunt; Dariole whipped about, staring at the old woman; King James gazed absently into the darkness, no attention given to the world outside his thoughts. As Caterina walked into the lantern-light, her dark eyes flickered momentarily up and down my dress. I found myself looking at her defensively.

  “Heavens!” she remarked.

  “Sister Caterina.” I had been expecting her so much that I did not even startle. I suppose her to have walked the miles down from Cheddar Gorge earlier in the day—or else to have persuaded some hapless trooper of Spofforth’s to let her ride pillion.

  Dariole, from behind me, spoke to the nun. “You said I should make decisions. Stay here, or go. And I say we should get out of here! Now!”

  Glancing back, I saw the Stuart King stand shakily on his
own feet, no longer supported by the samurai. “True, we cannot stay within these caves. We are all agreed, I believe.”

  Saburo made a bow to James that was some way between the English and the Nihonese, and that therefore put him very low indeed. “King-Emperor, my daimyo and my Shogun sent our embassy here to begin trade agreements with you, and with no other king. For that, it’s necessary that you remain on the throne. My sword is in your service, lord. We must leave here.”

  I couldn’t blame him for taking advantage of his situation. Who wouldn’t be a hero to a foreign king, if he could?

  The Scotsman stared at him with watery eyes, then extended his hand. I leaned forward, speaking quietly into Saburo’s ear:

  “Kneel, kiss hands; don’t argue.”

  The stocky dark man did as he was told, and the Stuart King nodded several times.

  “You can get up.” He gestured for Saburo to rise from the cave floor. “We appreciate your kind offer, Master Saburo Tanaka.”

  “Hai!”

  It spoke well of James Stuart, I thought. Mordieu!—were he twenty years younger, and the matter did not concern his son, I think he might almost approve the adventure.

  “We should go now, sire,” I said, holding up my hand in the lamp-light.

  Caves distort echoes: it was not possible to tell the direction—only that someone, far away, shot off a musket, shattering the quiet.

  “Run!”

  I followed the others, bulges of rock knocking at my elbows as I pelted on, scrambling at a pace consistent with safety in the lantern-light.

  Not fast enough. But there may be drops, cliffs, sink-holes, if we miss the way—

  And there is Caterina. And James. Neither of whom are young.

  “Suor Caterina!” I held up the lantern, forging forward to the front of the group. “Which way? Are we still correct?”

  “Yes! Cielo, yes! Keep going, Valentin!”

  The light touched limestone, and I recognised patterns of beasts on dark cave walls.

  Ahead, water glistened, motionless as black ice.

  I dipped my hand under the surface, groping for the guide-rope; thrust it at Saburo and the King, and gathered my skirts and weapons up to my waist. As Mlle Dariole and Caterina passed me—the boy-girl lending her arm to the Italian woman—I glanced back, and entered the water behind them.

  The splashes of our passing in the underground lake or river broke the ancient silence. If there was noise of gunfire, it was too far behind now to be identified. As we splashed up the far bank, I held up my lantern, casting ahead as we passed into a long, low cavern. The cave-exit is somewhere ahead here….

  For the first time since I was six years old, a woman out-ran me, passing me on the rough limestone slope.

  The old woman’s panicked! “Caterina!”

  Swearing, I scrambled up the rise behind her, leaving the rest to follow me; held up my lantern so that I could see where I stepped—and realised that the blackness up ahead of me was not rock, but the cave-opening to the outside air.

  Caterina, panting, reached the entrance.

  A pistol muzzle appeared at the edge of the rock, catching the lantern-light. It pressed into the side of the Italian woman’s head.

  A jet of flame and smoke shot out.

  A bang shattered the silence.

  Caterina’s brains and broken skull splattered up against the other side of the rock-cleft, with the sound of a hard gust of rain hitting a glass window.

  For a split second everything was still, except the slide of blood clots and brain matter down the limestone wall.

  I sprinted up the slope. “Ambuscade!”

  Her body hit the ground; I hurdled her corpse, sword out.

  Blind luck let me knock the carbine out of the attacking man’s hand. I dashed the lantern at his face, hauled it back, and stuck my rapier through his chest, taking him directly through the heart.

  He dropped as Caterina had: solidly, with no sound.

  His carbine vanished onto the black ground, the long slow match sputtering. A brief flare of fire ran through the grass. I smelled burning grass, blood, excrement, the sweet smell of death, and threw the lantern to one side so that it broke. A flare of oil shot up the rock. I hauled Spofforth’s wheel-lock pistol out of my bodice. The flare showed me moving figures: no telling how many—

  The rock-face grated hard against my elbow. I used it to guide me, sliding down until I knelt in concealing shadows. A rock-chipping flicked my bare shoulder, painful enough that I knew it had drawn blood. I urgently threw myself to one side and the man above me clipped my shoulder with his boots as he jumped down from above. He jarred my sword aside, and all but fell into my arms, grappling me.

  The new moon came out from behind a cloud; I heard shouting to one side, and a lantern flared; I fell with the man and rolled on the ground in dew-damp dust.

  He grabbed my left hand; the hand with the loaded pistol. Of course. He has been schooled in this. Paced out the distances….

  No. The first pistol was meant for me. Meant to take me in the heart, at that height.

  And this man all but missed me.

  So he has not been schooled to attack me, he has my pistol-hand because he sees it; and Caterina has already thrown Fludd’s plans out of gear, at the cost of her life.

  I rolled, bringing the man over with me, sent my forehead hard into his nose, and it gave under the force of my blow. I felt his hand twisting mine in towards my body, struggling to push my finger on the trigger.

  The disadvantage of a wheel-lock pistol is that the powder may stay in the closed pan. Rolling in the dust with a match-lock carbine or musket would put out the match, and spill the powder from the priming pan, and he would not be in danger of blowing my belly out with my own weapon.

  I rolled over on my back. He came with me; bent forward, and pushed his teeth against my bare throat, his hand tightening over mine.

  His teeth closed hard about my windpipe. I felt his grip tighten where he had my other arm, holding my biceps. I could not pull my elbow back, to thrust forward with my sword.

  But I am free to rotate my forearm below the elbow.

  Ramming my chin down to protect my throat, I pivoted my hand and brought the hilt of my rapier around in a short, hard arc.

  The Saxony rapier has for its cross-piece a bar of solid steel, diamond in cross-section, and with a pointed finial at each end. It extends out from the guards a good five inches to either side: five inches of sharp-pointed metal.

  I slammed the point of the rapier’s cross-piece into the man’s ear.

  His squeal cut off almost before he had time to issue it, his wet mouth opening on the skin of my neck.

  I twisted the metal up and down and around, stirring the contents of his skull. The drum and small bones of the ear can be pierced, as if a man pushes an awl through a cork into a bottle. His body slumped on me; relaxed in death.

  Kicking him off, I got to my feet, the silk skirts tangling between my legs an impediment to my progress.

  A rock bounced on the earth, and I lifted my pistol: all but fired—a rock as large as a gourd, and no, I saw by the moon’s light. It is not a rock.

  A decapitated head, still spilling blood.

  Saburo.

  I looked for the samurai; searched for some enemy target for my pistol—now is not the time to hit one of our own side!

  A man’s shape folded forward as if he made a deep bow. Something separated from the shadow beside him, hauling a blade across the man’s belly. Momentarily, a curved sword caught the moonlight.

  “Samurai!” I put my rapier into a third man’s heart, warned by the running scuffle of feet to my rear. “‘Cecil’ is the watch-word!”

  “Cecil!” Dariole whipped out of the shadows and stood side by side with me. She glanced up at the grassy rocks above us; whirled about to look behind. “Any more?”

  “None yet.”

  “Seso-sama!”

  That was unmistakable: the samurai’s versi
on of Cecil. I grinned, moved out from the cave entrance, and loped over to the woods.

  Coming back, an alto hiss of “Cecil!” greeted me from Dariole.

  I found her with her knee on the chest of another dead man. The moonlight shone on the black splotches of blood down his body. Her face shone white in the moon’s light. The dead man was by now headless.

  “Five horses in the trees,” I said curtly. “Have we five dead men, or is any escaped to give the alarm?”

  Her doublet was wet from chest to belly. Her dagger dripped as she gestured with it. “Ask Saburo-san. He’s the one counting heads.”

  “You should know better than to grapple,” I could not help saying. “You are better keeping a man at a distance with your blade.”

  “Tell me about it!”

  She stood up, a fierceness about her movements. No more than five men. This is an affray the size of a duel, I realised. And not a skirmish of war. Dear good God, it has given back her confidence….

  “Is the King alive?”

  “He’s in the bushes. Saburo-san! Seso!” Her intense whisper sounded loud. I signalled her to silence. The samurai walked out into the moonlight, his swords unsheathed and black.

  “Have we five dead men?” I pressed him.

  “Hai!”

  He pointed at the flat area of rocks beyond, in the brighter moonlight. More clearly than a man might wish to see them, five decapitated heads stood on the trunks of their necks. One had bled severely from the ear: my own adversary.

  Dariole rejoined us, her arm entwined with that of James Stuart. She stood on his right side, her unencumbered hand carrying her bloodied blade. “I don’t hear anyone else. If there were more men than horses, the rest have gone.”

  “Perhaps this is all. Plainly Fludd took cognisance of the fact that we might come this way, no matter how unlikely…and relied on rehearsing his men in our probable actions.” I walked across the open ground, back to the entrance to the caves.

  Caterina was so small, in the moonlight, that I all but fell over her before I properly saw her.

  The features of her face were untouched, although spidered over with black blood. The side and back of her head were missing. Stripping off my glove, I felt her cooling skin.