Burning the Water

by Robert Low

  No Chester men here, though and few English at all, but just as skilled. Descendants of those who fought for Hawkwood in Italy – mercenaries like himself, Batty thought. Who knew the value of everything, including the cheap coin of human life.

  At last, he forced himself to look at the stinking-black parody of what had once been human. They had torn wood from the cart and oil from the lamps to burn her beaten, bound, violated body but last night’s rain had contrived to save part of her – a blue-white arm, a leg to the hip, a last raggled wisp of greyed hair from the charcoal scalp.

  The rest was twisted the way fire always wrenches the shrinking sinews, making the agony clear as lambent flame and the body a parody of a Barbary ape; the grin was one Batty knew all too well and there was no humour in it at all.

  He spat the stink of it from his mouth and levered himself up thinking that he had found the missing nuns. Thinking that he might well have found Musgrave’s sister. He did not need to think on who had done this, for he knew already.

  Not Border thieves but Reformers, all hot for God and scorching out Catholics in the north. He felt them, the unseen presence of them coiling like some insidious adder, looking for any excuse for outrage.

  He mounted stiffly and rode on towards the bastel house, which he knew was no steading but a fortalice of the Dacres, usually filled like a bad barracks with men in his pay and long since taken over by Wallis riders.

  Not now, though. Batty stopped below the crest of a ridge, dismounted and hirpled through the rough tussocks and gorse to the shade of a gnarled tree where he hunkered down and listened to the hills.

  The sun burned him, for all that the short day was wet, and his leg hurt where he had been tumbled into a deep dene on Tinnis by a shot from Geordie Bourne. The same one which had killed The Saul, though it had taken the beast a year at least to die from it.

  I thought I would die from it, Batty remembered, while laid at the foot of a brace-hundred drop with men scouring for me.

  He shook it from him and all the other memories that surfaced and rolled over to leer at him; the Armstrong men whose arms he had chopped off – all left ones like his own and the answer to a dead horse’s head message from the Laird of the Armstrongs. The Armstrong powder mill blasting Hell into the Debatable. No Toes Will Elliot slung in a cage from the roof of a fortalice only a little larger than the one he now peered at.

  The bastel was a tall, two-floored tower whose steep-pitched roof and crow-gables gave some indication of how thick the walls and slates were. A crow perched on the top of the wrenched-open door, there was a dog kennel but no hound and the whole place was blind-window empty, cracked like an egg.

  Batty did not think it was blown out of all life – there was the faintest blue of smoke, but the folk inside were keeping quiet. He wiped the sheened sweat from his face as the flies and midgies hummed and whined, driven off in the next minute by the sudden puff of a cooling breeze which still had rain in it.

  There was another tower beyond Akeld, an older and taller affair from the time of the Wallace and the Bruce, though the stones had fallen in here and there, or been removed for building Akeld’s barmkin wall. The top, uneven as a ragged old tooth, was crowned with a lattice of wood; a look-out post built out of one of the old floors and as good a corbie nest as you would find.

  It was clear there was someone perched in it and the entrance, once a doorway whose stout studded wood was long gone, was blocked by two upended carts in a V that was too neat to be an accident.

  Batty lay in a patch of damp, peering through the winter-sere fronds of a bracken clump; there was new green in it and a small spider moved purposefully, spinning and drawing out silk for a web. Peasies skimmed; a cushie-doo mourned in the trees.

  And a man stood beyond, bare-arsed and pissing in a high arc towards the battered stone tower.

  His breeks dangled at his knees and he had laid aside a long-barrelled musket to unbreech himself for the act – though the slow match was upward, out of the damp, Batty saw and still glowed like a fevered eye.

  He had a friend with him and dressed like himself, though standing hipshot and arrogant, leaning on a longbow and laughing. No more than sixteen, Batty thought, taking in the look of the pair.

  Gesses and lederwams and tellebarrets with tall feathers. Puffed and slashed and parti-coloured, they were as foreign here as papingoes in a rookery, Batty thought, though they have more than just a vicious shriek to them. There were sumptuary laws that prohibited just about everything these men wore – but it would be a brave beadle who called them to account for it.

  One of them shouted out and Batty knew the tongue, though he did not speak more than a few words of it. He had heard it often before – a Slav way of speaking which brought back the camps he had been in, the stink and the chatter, the swagger and gaud of men and women like these.

  They dress like Landsknechte, Batty thought, because everyone apes those German fighters who themselves want to dress and strut like the best soldiers around – the Swiss. But this pair were neither Swiss nor German but stradioti from the Balkans and he knew that they would rub shoulders with Albanese, Levantines, genours from Spain as well as Germans and Italians.

  He knew the like well enough and thought about who their Captain might be for a long time while the spider industriously spun and scuttled. It might be Thomas Buas of Argos, he thought, who had served Fat Henry at Calais. Or Theodore Luchisi, or Antonio Stesinos; Fat Henry had used all of those capitanos for his wars with the French.

  Batty had not heard that any were here in the north of England, all the same. Only one Captain General was known to be here and he blinked away the bads cess of it even as he wryly congratulated himself on his own skills. Bigod, he thought, not only have I found the lost nuns – I have found the men who burned at least one of them.

  Not Reformers after all – worse than that. Men who did not care for anything that did not shine. I do not need Sabin, Batty thought bitterly. I have stumbled on Maramaldo all myself alone.

  He stared at the spider and saw only a blur while his mind whirled. I am like a wee dug chasing a running stallion, he thought bitterly, with no good idea of what will happen if I sink my auld teeth into its galloping hurdies.

  He watched the pair sourly, saw the one with the longbow decide to outdo the exploits of the other by moving closer, then fumbling down his breeches and baring his arse. Batty held his breath; if anyone had as much as a good sharp rock, the bare-arsed fool would end up bloody and possibly dead.

  There was a sharp bang and a fount of white smoke from the top of the tower; the two lads whirled away and the one with his ribboned hose and breeks dangling round his knees fell over and rolled away.

  There was a pause, then the pair laughed, one hauling the other up while he – shakily, Batty thought – covered himself. Batty could not believe that the shooter had missed; even allowing for poor eyesight and bad powder, the youths were scarce twenty feet from the tower, clapping each other on the back, slapping their thighs and laughing.

  Like rabbits cornered by a terrier, Batty thought, the defenders are frozen with fear. He had seen it before and worse – men who would rather kill themselves than die in battle, though it was incomprehensible to Batty that an armed man would do such a thing in preference to fighting.

  Yet he had long since learned that there was no fathoming the fear in man nor beast – even the two lads, still capering, were wisely wary as they jeered and cat-called.

  That annoyed Batty, all the same, for pissing and waving your bared hurdies at folk who were laired up and had little chance left was cruel as pulling the legs off one side of a spider, just to see it run in frantic circles. He looked at the insect, busy spinning away as the lads laughed again; there was a second bang and a white plume of feathered smoke and the lads scattered, not laughing now.

  Then they realised they were unhurt and whoever had shot had missed again and went back to howling and jeering. The time between the shots was too quick
for reloading, so there was more than one decent firework in the tower, but Batty shook his head at such poor shooting. Still, he had the idea that the folk behind the carts in the tower had just a little bit of dignity left, squeezed almost out by terror and it angered him that these callous lads had no respect for it.

  Think themselves hard men, he mused. Think themselves all swagger and front-of-the-queue. Something moved at the corner of his vision and he squinted at the man who had come out of the bastel house. Drawn by the noise, he mused, watching the man shake his head with disgust and vanish again. Batty wondered how many more there were – then he slid out one of his little knives and felt the balance of it on his palm as he measured distance.

  A long throw and, once done, it would set Batty to the dance of it as sure as leading a maid to the ring by one hand. One hand is all I have, he thought and then grinned. Yet it is all I have needed so far…

  He rose a little, feeling the pain in his knees. He paused, poised and threw, watched the sun-silvered whirl of it, like a spinning wheel of light.

  The lad who owned the gun jerked sideways and fell full length in the steaming grass without so much as a yelp. For a moment, the other carried on jeering and laughing – even pointing at his fallen friend and slapping his thigh with amusement at what he thought was a simple, careless fall.

  A wee bit foxed with drink, Batty thought, which is helpful.

  The boy stopped laughing in another second, stared for a lot longer, then fell to his knees and started to shake his friend. Now he discovers the knife, which has taken his friend in the neck, Batty thought. As good a throw as I ever did… aye, there. He has the way of it now.

  The boy looked up and round, at the tower and then about him, holding the knife which he had drawn from his friend’s neck. He sprang back from the body as if it was on fire and fumbled at his bow, which was as big as he was and needed someone bigger and stronger to do it justice.

  Still, even a slight lad could stick you with a fletch, Batty thought and flattened himself in the damp grass for a bit, then risked a peek; the lad had stuffed the knife in his belt and was crouched, the bow smarted and nocked with a long arrow, though he turned in an uncertain half circle. For a moment, Batty contemplated a second knife, but had to admit that he had been more than lucky with the first throw. If that had been a hand of cards at Primero, he thought, I would be sweeping a deal of coin into my bonnet, held by a willing woman.

  He also knew that, if he had been down there, he would have been yelling his lungs out to let the others know that a snake was in the henhouse – but not at sixteen. At sixteen I would have been as rank silly as this boy, Batty thought, putting personal dignity above sense. He will not yell for help; he will try and avenge his friend and restore his affronted pride at having been caught in such an ambuscade.

  Now was the time Batty was for wriggling back and away, but even as he did so he caught the first glimpse of someone beyond the carts, a face pushing out of the shadows. Even allowing for Batty’s eyesight, which he was forced to admit was not as fine as it had once been, it was not pretty and not young that face, but it was undoubtedly a woman. She seemed to stare directly at him, as if straight into his eyes – then she was gone.

  Batty slithered back down the slight slope, but the face stayed with him even as he made his mind up that he had done all he could. These were the nuns and at least one of them was alive, with perhaps a wagon driver, maybe two. They had a brace of engines with them – calivers by the sound – but could not hit a bull’s arse at barrel length and were pinned by men who knew the trade of siege.

  Maramaldo’s men, no less, Batty was sure of it, and the two fantoosh lads were the least of them, given the task of watching in the rain because they were young and at the mercy of grimmer veterans. Batty did not want to discover how many grimmer veterans there were in the bastel house.

  Batty had paid for some precious time for the victims, but the hot-damp and the midgies were starting in to irritate and he had, he thought, done all he logically could, for there was no way he could save them. Only a fool would try and Bella Graham of Netherby did not raise her wee Batty to be a fool.

  He hummed to himself as he worked out that it was best to let matters take their course and tell Musgrave his sister was fell murdered and that Maramaldo had done it.

  ‘He slew my knight, to me so dear; he slew my knight and poined his gear,’ he sang under his breath. Let Musgrave hang Sabin, he thought and I will watch with as little on my face as he had on his when Maramaldo took my arm…

  Inside I will be dancing, he admitted and hummed on:

  ‘My servants all for life did flee – and left me in extremitie.’

  Straightening stiffly, he started to limp off to find Fiskie. The slither of noise made him turn and he found himself staring into the equally astonished eyes of the lad with the longbow.

  Chapter Four

  In the tower at Akeld

  Not long after

  Sister Faith prayed, as she had been doing for two hours or more, turning the ring round and round her wedding finger, feeling the smooth wear on the indentations and the crucifix. It had been given to her by her mother, afraid of the year and the apocalypse promised in Revelations – ‘half-time after the time’, which was seen as referring to Anno Domini 1500.

  She remembered it vividly, for she had turned thirteen on the day the Archbishop had died and her mother and two brothers had turned up just as all the nuns and novitiates turned out in the rain to see old John Morton carried off to a crypt in Canterbury’s cathedral.

  Her mother and two younger brothers had looked so cold, standing outside the convent of the Priory of St Sepulchre while the Benedictine nuns tried to look pious and failed. A deal of that had to do with the carved arch over the Archbishop’s effigy – the angels and cardinal caps were fine, but the fat barrels with MOR on them made straight faces difficult, even if the Archbishop’s family thought it a dignified play on his name – MOR-tuns.

  In contrast to everyone’s shiver, she remembered, she had felt warm and at peace for all her thin novitiate clothing, for she had known, on that day, that God was real. He lived. It had been that simple for her and the peace it brought had been total and encompassing.

  Now, in this place of sick heat and damp, after all the years between – even after God, it seemed, had abandoned the Sisters to the destruction of Henry Tudor – that conviction was with her still.

  Yet she was deeply troubled for the others who lay and sweated and groaned in the fetid dark of the tower and she rubbed the ring round and round, the crucifix on it up and down, as she always did when she needed a special prayer answered.

  Not for me, she argued, for I am ready to join You, my Lord. For the others. And she bowed her head and repeated the prayers once more. There were only two, so they did not take long.

  The first was for Sister Benedict, who had not made it to the safety of the tower. Sister Faith had watched the cart roll away, the staggering horses lashed by Si Wood until two arrows had brought one beast down and the cart to a tangled halt.

  She had seen Si felled by a youngster in ribboned finery and was sure it was the same one who continually bared his nethers so that the defenders in the tower would fire off what little powder and shot they had. Sister Faith was more concerned that one or both of those ungodly youths would finally work out that they were unharmed because the nuns they had trapped would not kill anyone, but fired into the air instead.

  Sister Benedict was gone and Sister Faith knew it, though she had not told the others; Sister Benedict had been one of their only two hopes and the others had visions of her and poor Si Wood hurrying towards Bewcastle and Sister Benedict’s brother, a powerful lord in the area who would bring righteous wrath on the heads of their tormentors.

  The second hope was for Sister Mary and Leckie, who had gone off in the opposite direction – that had been Sister Faith’s idea, for it gave everyone a chance and had allowed the remaining sisters and cart
s to reach the tower. She was not so sure that Sister Benedict’s sacrifice had allowed Sister Mary and Leckie to reach Wooler, all the same.

  Sister Faith did not want to destroy this hope, so her prayer was silent, spilling from behind tight lips and squeezed eyelids. She had an idea that these men, so unlike any soldiery she had seen, were foreign and mercenary, likely to visit Hell on their captives and somehow in the pay of Thomas Horner – but still her contract with God would not allow her to pray for Sister Benedict’s quick death.

  Instead, she asked the Saviour to accept Sister Benedict’s soul and to comfort her in her hour of need, while beseeching Him to speed Sister Mary on her way. She spoke under her breath the same way she had once spoken aloud to her mother, before she had gone to be a nun. She had been troubled then, too.

  Her mother had understood, as she had always done and Sister Faith smiled at the memory. Dead and gone these many years, yet the drift of her ma’s face was still sharp and bright when Sister Faith remembered and she repeated the words her mother had said to her then.

  ‘Ne’er mind where you are now, or the world, or anything in it. If Jesus has called, then let Him hold you and comfort you as I have done. If He is coming for you, then run to Him. Turn away, let go of all else and run to Him.’

  Now Sister Faith wept, not with grief but in farewell, for Sister Benedict, the other nuns in her care – even her mother and this life, which she thought would end soon.

  After a time, she smiled through the tears and straightened her small body. She felt the lack of habit and wimple – a homespun dress and cloak and kerch was not the same. She turned the ring, that old, familiar gesture, then composed herself and offered her second prayer.