Burning the Water
Page 5
They were not all Germans, Batty knew. They were Maramaldo’s men, from the Italies, the Dutchies, Spain and elsewhere, who wore their wealth in ragged and stained finery, parti-coloured and paned. They draped themselves in geegaws and amulets, festooned themselves with ribbons, rings and chains and ear bobs in gold and gems, all of it negotiable and usually gambled away.
Batty knew them well, the memory almost an ache. Yet Rafael Sabin was now Chancellor of the Sable Rose, the right hand of Maramaldo and the man with the power to negotiate and agree condotta – contracts – with employers. What was the likes of him doing stealing shitty-arsed cattle from Bewcastle?
It meant that the Company of the Sable Rose was somewhere close to Bewcastle and a thousand and more folk, with all their carted lives and beasts, would need a deal of feeding. Even so – and even allowing for Sabin’s nature as he remembered it – Batty could not think that the Chancellor of the Sable Rose would be out on the herschip like some eager youngster.
It was a nagging thought, but the man at his back worried Batty more. It will be yon Rutland, he thought, with no more skill at tracking than a blind slewhound with no nose. He hoped that was so and that it wasn’t the Wallis men he was feeling like heat on his shoulderblades, for he was riding like an arrow straight into their Cheviot hills and brooded on the rotted luck of that.
Still, if it was Rutland then he would not last long, for the Wallis would get him. If he was lucky, he would turn up days later, only stripped naked and robbed even if his assailants learned who he was and who his Master. Probably because of it. Rutland was no man for the moor and hill, as awkward and vulnerable as an egg on a busy path.
The Wallis had no fear of Musgrave riders, or even the great Dacre himself, for this was a country where a hundred riders could be got in half-a-day if even the least of Names sent out word. If you were a Nixon, or a Charlton or an Armstrong, you could have a thousand swarming the Cheviots and at least half would have a Scots lilt to their talk. The Wallis Name was not great, but they had others at their back who might dare to bait the Dacre Bull.
Men will fight for drink, coin or quim, Batty thought, but they will exert themselves for the grayne for free.
He rode on through a land of brightening whin and gorse, the colours shrieking to the damp blue sky that winter was done with – and that was strange in a land where spring did not mean much to snow and wind.
He picked his way on to a drover road and then on south and west, towards the loom of the Cheviots, the sun sweating him and the warm rain sluicing it off again.
Towards dark, when sun lowered like a fat red hen on roosting eggs and the cold crept out with weasel teeth, he came up on Langton. It was a spill of cruck houses and a tower ruined by war then further wrecked by folk pilfering the last stones for sheep pens and barmkins. They looked at him with suspicion and appraisal, seeing a fat old man with one arm offering them a flash of coin for a place at their fire and a lick of their pot.
The heidman weighed up the possibilities and also saw the padded jack under the big wrap of cloak and the burgonet under the blue bonnet, the former pulled on to offer protection from the rain as well as the impression that there was no war hat beneath. He saw the worn hilt of a backsword, a brace of daggs in saddle holsters, another pair shoved through the belt and one of them with the butt converted into an axe. He saw a tribe of knives and knew they were for throwing, thought he spotted the hilt of a vicious bollock dagger down one boot.
At which point he revised his opinion on what was helpless and easily robbed in favour of biting the offered coin and making a place by the fire. He would have presented not only his smoke-blackened howf but his wife and daughters, too if Batty had offered as much coin again.
Batty saw to Fiskie’s comfort under a rickety lean-to while the elder of the heidman’s boys looked at the tattered dyke and the gate with a dubious eye and an accent thick as pease brose.
‘Eer hobby cud loup yett,’ he said and Batty assured him that Fiskie was not likely to jump the gate. Then he followed the boy back to the howf and hunkered round a pit fire, the smoke eddying up into the rafters and out through the straw, though a deal of it was blown back by the rain-wind outside and hazed the inside with reek.
The heidman was a long streak of dourness, his wife a once-pretty girl worn to a nub of womanhood by poor food, lost babes and work, yet she had a ready smile even if she had few teeth left to make it winsome.
Most of the smile was because they were eating Batty’s decent food, rations of salt meat and cheese all but free of spoil and better fare by far than the heidman and his wife usually enjoyed; it had been a wet summer the year before and a hard winter, so even folk who grew hardy oats rather than the wheat of farmers further south were notching in their waists.
Batty accepted their porray of roots and poor hope and watched them fall on his bread, good wheat with only a salting of bone meal and sawdust. They savoured the last of his cheese, hard and pale with hardly a mould on it and only a couple of weary worms falling out at a tap; Batty watched them crawl round the wood platter as if looking for relatives while the fire popped and smoked and, outside, the wind argued with the rain. The heidman and his wife gobbled the lot and beamed.
This is better lodgings than on many a ride, Batty thought; yet the comfort of it was denied him, driven out by a persistent uneasiness, like unseen eyes from distant hills. Outside somewhere, the Watcher still lurked, Batty was sure of it. Less sure than ever that it was Rutland, who had seemed ill-skilled for such a task as riding into the wilds and avoiding all trouble. Someone more skilled then, Batty thought as he chewed. Bigod, Coalhouse, you have tumbled in a bear pit.
He pulled out his flask and swallowed, became aware of the eyes on him and sighed, facered by his own stupid mistake. Then he had to watch as the heidman’s throat bobbed like a mad bird and only stopped when his wife snatched the flask from him and sucked it like a bairn on the teat. He listened to them spit either love or hate at each other and thought of Maramaldo and the first time he had seen Rafael Sabin.
He had been 16 and had learned his trade in eight years sweating at the elbow of his da, a Kohlhase from Saxony. Both of them were cared for by Batty’s ma, Bella Graham of Netherby, tupped by his da practically in her own bed and so the disgrace of her Name.
The year before Batty’s sixteenth saint’s day, Maramaldo’s troop had served the Pope against the French, but the fight at Marignano had ended all hope of the Holy League winning and Maramaldo knew when to quit a burning building.
So the next year saw them with Charles of Egmond, lending support to The Black Gang From Arum and fighting in Frisia. The Arumer Zwarte Hoop were led by Big Peter and, like him, they were all peasant farmers annoyed with the Hapsburgs. They were good farmers, but poor fighters in the end – Big Peter’s best success came when he went to sea and sank a score or more of ships.
Before the year was out, Maramaldo changed sides and started to hunt out the almost-defeated Black Gang he had once run with. It had been a hard snow, so foraging had taken Maramaldo’s troop a long way from their winter camp; besides, men were out after loot as much as food, because fighting peasant farmers was not lucrative.
In smaller and smaller groups they used savagery and surprise to scatter the herds of villagers they came on – but the cattle were not always cowed.
Batty did not even recall the name of the place, but remembered coming up on it with five others, led by Sabin; even then Sabin was Maramaldo’s favourite and Batty should not even have been out, save that all men were needed for foraging and Batty was no green sapling who knew next to nothing bar working big guns. He had grown up in a rough camp of hard men and knew which end of a knife to point at a rival.
They came to find the men they had sent earlier, another handful who had vanished into the drifting snow like wraiths and had not returned.
‘Found drink and women,’ Sabin declared moodily when Maramaldo sent him in pursuit – but he went and Batty went as we
ll, with instructions from his da to bring back this or that and ‘a little something for your ma’.
Batty remembered the smell at first, like a forge where hot iron has been just quenched. He had smelled it before, but not as strong and did not need Sabin’s warning hand to stop, crouch and fetch out his backsword. It was blood, lots of it and not yet so frozen it would not reek.
They found their missing men not long after, throat cut and belly slit in a grue of their own bloody slush. The snow whirled, making Batty blink, sending everyone into an instinctive huddle; the charge when it came was better resisted as a result, though Sabin took the brunt of it.
The fighter who did it was big and bearded and howling. He wore the tattered remains of looted war gear but mustered only a pitchfork. Once he had been part of the Zwarte Hoop but this was either his old home or he been left behind in this vill through sickness – for all that, he wielded the fork like a half-pike and drove it hard into Sabin’s thigh, sending the man over, screaming.
Others followed him, desperate and ill-armed but looming like shadows out of the snow-wind so that they seemed a host of hard charging men like themselves. Batty remembered the farmer-warrior, tearing his pitchfork free and looking for another man to fight, searching the snow. It was because I was wee, Batty recalled, that he didnae see me until I drove the steel into his belly, a fingerlength below the navel.
The backsword had not been all that sharp, for Batty had neglected the weapon and such close-quarter blows before this had been affairs of fists and boots – when it spilled over into drawn blades, there were always bigger men to intervene and cuff lugholes.
But the whole length of the sword had slid in, easy as pushing, until Batty had felt it grate and knew it to be man’s backbone. There had been a moment of disbelief from the big man and then a frantic jerking, like a gaffed fish, so that the sword had sprung free of Batty’s hand, flying up to throw off a little spray of rubies into the snow.
Sabin, howling and cursing, had levered himself up and then fell on the tumbled Zwarte Hoop man with a bollock knife, stabbing and stabbing until he was bloody to the elbow.
Batty had found himself sitting, shivering and colder than the slush under his arse or the flakes on his cheeks warranted, while the hard men of Sabin’s foragers recovered and scattered the Zwarte Hoop’s last army.
This man was the first he had ever knowingly killed. Certainly the first one he had ever shoved a bar of metal into and Batty sat a long time looking, until he knew every pore and hair on his face, the splash of blood on one cheek, the eyes blank as a saint’s statue. Sabin’s shrieking vengeance had left the rest of the man tattered and sodden with blood.
Perhaps he had come home looking for peace, Batty thought later, or just stumbled on the place as a refuge. Either way, he’d led the folk in defence of what little they had, for there was no rival mercenary band here, just one weary Zwarte Hoop fighter and a lot of villagers.
Growling, the men had gathered up what villagers had not fled, then fell to looting what they could carry.
‘Go back,’ Sabin had declared thickly to the others. ‘I will join you presently.’
No one was fooled, or cared, so they went a little way and then dumped their loads and hunkered, waiting for him to finish exacting revenge. When the cold started to bite, the Frenchman, Loreq, began a vote which left Batty, unsurprisingly, with the task of going back to see if Sabin was faring well.
‘For that leg was bad hurt,’ Loreq argued. ‘Perhaps he has fallen and needs help.’
In which case, Batty thought sullenly as he plootered all the way back to the village, they should all have gone to help, for what could I do with a weight such as Sabin if he couldn’t walk?
Sabin was walking well enough, though he had tied one of his fancy ribbons round his upper thigh to staunch the bleed. Batty came up in time to see him slide his dagger round the neck of a woman while those still left alive struggled in the other ribbons he had used to bind them. Sabin had already blinded the woman by slow degrees and was now killing her the same way; two men were already dead and a girl was groaning, still alive for all her throat was slit and the blood was everywhere.
Sabin turned his head when Batty came up, his eyes feral and his mouth wet. Batty, cold as old iron, took his still bloody backsword and thrust it into the moaning girl; he heard a shriek and knew it was the mother, struggling to free herself.
He stepped forward and did the same to the one Sabin held. When he felt the thrust and the slackness in his hands, Sabin flung the body away and rounded on Batty, gore dripping from both hands and his eyes gone wild and unfocused.
Batty had backed away and Sabin, limping so hard he was dragging the leg, followed him in a fury, but was unable to catch the nimbler boy. When they were alone in the whirling snow, Batty stopped, his sword up and his mouth dry; his legs shook as Sabin lurched towards him.
The cold and effort had brought some life back to the eyes, though and Sabin was clearly sapped of real strength so that he stopped, eyed the sword and breathed like a mated bull.
‘You come between me and my blade again, Balthie,’ he had said, then ran out of breath. He did not need the rest of the warning; Batty had stood to one side and let Sabin drag himself past, for he would not put his back to the man and had not done since. Even on the day he had been strapped down for Maramaldo to maim, when he had turned his head so his ma would not see his terror and found Sabin instead, blank as stone, his eyes black and small as apple pips.
He blinked back to the fire, and heard the mewling of cats – then realised that it was the woman, crooning songs to the flames; his flask was empty and the man grimed his way to the side of his wife and started to paw her. Batty could stand the reek and the rasping singing no more, got up and lurched out of the smokey howf into the rain-washed night.
There were faint corpse-candle lights, wriggling worms of pallid comfort marking where the rest of these tallow folk lurked; Batty decided to go and talk to Fiskie. Better that than more of the reeking shelter and the scrape on his nerves either of singing or sweaty coupling.
He did not like this feeling and had tried to make himself believe that it was the same old scrape, the heightened senses that had served him so well in the past. But he knew it was a lie. There was something else, like a wind bringing the scream of something far in the distance.
Chapter Three
Near the bastel house of Akeld
A day later
The water in the burn frothed and surged, leaping its way over stones as shocked by the assault as all the creatures who had made their home along the banks. Fiskie splashed across what was normally a sluggish ripple and the water gurgled up over Batty’s boot soles, while the horse protested at the sudden slap on his hot belly.
It had rained all night, but the land steamed under the assault of the sun, while birds ripped their throats out with joy from every budding tree that dripped on the rolling swell of green and yellow. Yet the nights were frosted and sudden chill gusts swept up and over ridges, strong enough to tear away the new buds.
This morning, the heat had gone leprous on the smell from the huddle of trees and it hit Batty’s battered nose with a shock of familiar chill and old horror. It spilled memories into him, entire maps of hamlets and vills with their charred timbers and blackened bodies.
He stopped on the rise above the burn and leaned his elbow on the pommel to study the place a little better, squinting through the haze at the trees. Yet it was only when the horse in them moved that the picture sprang into view, like a deer shifting in a dappled glade.
The beast was a pack pony, the hefty saddle slipped beneath it so that it walked awkwardly as if heavily pregnant. Nearby was a cart, only partly visible – it was the wheel pointing to the sky that made Batty grunt softly, for it reminded him of the breaking wheel that had ruined Hans Kohlhase from his life.
That and the smell, pungent and richly sickening; Fiskie blew out indignantly when it trailed into his flaring
nostrils and Batty patted him soothingly, narrow-squinting to see if there was danger here before he moved down.
There was a long moment of waiting, sweating silent, while a blackbird sang for a note or two, then whirred away. Batty nudged Fiskie and they went down to the line of trees.
The pony raised its head and whicked softly, hoping for someone to sort out the mess of its loading saddle, so that Batty had no trouble dismounting and moving to it, speaking soft and walking slow.
The saddle was a solid wooden affair, ripped free of what had been loaded on it and he unlatched it and let it fall; the pack pony stepped free of it and shook rain off like a dog.
The cart was upended, but the contents here had been long plundered, too, save for a scatter of lanterns which still had oil in them. The bottom of the cart was split apart, the planks wrenched free and the only chest left with content in it spilled it to the still soft ground out of a splintered secret panel – a black stain trampled in the mud, laced with soiled white like dead doves.
A nun’s habit and wimples, wrenched from a hiding place and which none of the raiders would want. Batty hunkered on his toes and looked at the ground, the tangled churn of footprints too confused for him to make sense of numbers. Enough, all the same, to deal with the poor woman who had owned the habit and had hidden it carefully away.
They had stripped her plain dress from her and no doubt done things where death was a blessing from her God. Nearby was a man, untouched save by small beasts and birds – he had been dead at the start, Batty surmised, shot by a big war-arrow which someone had carefully removed; the broken shaft lay nearby, but the point had been dug out for reuse.
Batty studied the shaft, saw the waxed thread and the good feathering. A longbow arrow made by someone prudent, who knew the value of a barbed arrowhead. A prized longbow archer, then, with a hump of muscle on one shoulder from hauling on the big warbow to send a four-ounce arrow four hundred ells and more. With a swagger from being paid more than anyone else and allowed more leeway – Chester men could still kill a Welshman on sight, by law.