by Robert Low
‘Swef,’ he crooned softly to the beast, splashing the lamp oil over the wizened scorch on its back. ‘I am right sair sorry for this, for you dinna deserve it. But needs must…’
He had worked it out in his head on the way to here, a simple plan, or so he thought, because simple plans were always best. In and out, he thought. Grab the nun and away, easy as begging.
Because, he argued with himself, it might be Mad Jack’s sister in there and, if it is not, she will be proof to Mad Jack back in Bewcastle that his sister is dead. Then he wondered if this grinning scorch of nun was, in fact, the sister and made a note not to tell this part of the tale to the Bastard’s Buzzard. Five pounds English, he thought to himself, was never earned harder than this.
He sparked his firestarter, each flare seeming as large as a cartwheel. He blew it into flame, made it bigger, then thrust it at the nun.
There was a moment when nothing happened, then a soft sighing sound sent flames racing; the packhorse whinnied anxiously and Batty whipped out his sword and pricked it viciously.
‘Away wi’ ye,’ he growled and the packhorse, astonished, pained and afraid set off at a fast lick, up over the ridge and down the other side; the flames streamed from the nun like a cloak. Like the one in Florence, Batty thought and scrambled up on to Fiskie.
‘Ride, my bonny,’ he said and Fiskie took off like a rat heading for a drain.
Batty heard the cries through the rush of wind and the soft drum of Fiskie’s unshod hooves; mercenaries are as hagged as any auld beldames, Batty thought with a flush of satisfied triumph, hung about wi’ wee medallions against this, or charms for that. A burning nun on a flaming horse coming at them out of the dark, after what they had done earlier, will send them running like chooks.
The next second he was hanging grimly on as Fiskie veered, too late to avoid hitting a man unseen in the dark. One meaty shoulder of the horse sent him flying with a shriek, but it was all Batty could do to hang on; on the other side he saw that the burning nun had been bucked off by the frantic packhorse, whose mane and tail had caught alight.
The black finger of the stone tower loomed and Batty hauled Fiskie up in a skid of damp earth, then hurled himself off. He landed badly on the wounded leg and felt it give way with such a shriek of agony that he did not have to bellow himself, though he did anyway.
He crashed a shoulder into the carts, called out that he was a friend and started to haul himself up and in – only to fall and roll to the feet of a shadow woman whose caliver was pointed straight at him and whose eyes were gimlet.
‘Freen’,’ he croaked, then saw the face more clearly as he blinked sweat and pain out of his eyes. The same face that had shoved itself out of the dark earlier to haunt him.
‘Get ready,’ he gasped, trying to lever himself up. ‘We are leaving…’
The leg buckled and lanced agony through him; he found himself on his knees, supported by the nun, who wiped his forehead as if he was a bairn.
‘I do not believe we are going anywhere,’ she said and Batty bewildered and blinking, suddenly saw more faces behind her, thrusting out of the dim to peer curiously at him. One wizened mouth opened in a gummed smile under bright blue eyes set in a rutted field of wrinkles.
‘Ah kin coup ma lundies,’ it said and Batty groaned with the bad cess of it. Then the pain rolled over him like red billows and drowned his senses entirely.
Chapter Six
In the tower at Akeld
Sometime later…
‘Ah kin coup ma lundies.’
The ingenuous blue eyes were smiling and the paleness of her wrinkled face told how she had spent a lifetime cloistered. Batty struggled to come to terms with what had happened and where he was.
The tower. Not one nun but a whole parcel of them – even with the best intent, Fiskie could not carry them all.
Fiskie… he started to struggle up but the dull ache in his leg made him gasp and the nun’s blue eyes clouded with a child’s sorrow. The pale hands were brisk and efficient, all the same and made him comfortable with strength and ease. Then the gummed smile returned.
‘Ah kin mak’ a whole whirlimagig.’
‘Aye?’ Batty answered, unable to think of anything better. Then another figure wraithed out of the dappled dim and patted the first nun on the shoulder.
‘Well done, Sister Hope.’
‘He kens noo that ah kin coup ma lundies.’
‘It is a time since you were able to do that for real, Sister,’ the other nun chided gently and Sister Hope sighed and vanished. The first nun looked at Batty, her face as familiar to him now as his mother’s.
‘Sister Hope is old, but remembers when she was a child. I think couping her lundies was the one thing she missed most about becoming a nun. It means…’
‘Turning cartwheels,’ Batty growled, struggling up as best he could. ‘I ken fine what it means, mistress, though I am surprised to hear a good Fife lilt on a nun from as far south as yourselves.’
‘We are all God’s children,’ the nun replied. ‘I am Sister Faith.’
Batty told her his name and noted that only Charity was missing. The nun frowned a little.
‘She in the tower top with a caliver. Sister Charity has many skills, one of them the art of loading such engines.’
As if to prove it, there was a loud bang from above, followed by shouts and a few jeers.
‘The skill she is missing is hitting,’ Batty replied, struggling up to his knees and feeling his head swim.
‘She is shooting into the air,’ Sister Faith declared firmly. ‘None of us will kill.’
That accounts for it then, Batty thought and wanted to tell Sister Faith that she had almost run the course of her misdirection, since the two boys had last been seen a scant twenty feet from this laired convent, and closing. Before he had killed them.
But the noise made him drag out his axe-handled dagg; the maddened horse had set fire to something else, whose leaping flames seared the night and made crazed caperers of the shapes running back and forth. One stood still and bawled order at them and Batty could feel the man’s rage like the heat from the flames; the horse fell and rolled in a screaming shower of sparks and flame. An arrow, Batty thought… then a huge red blossom bloomed, ugly as a leprous lily; the great boom of it shook the tower and rattled Batty’s teeth.
Powder, bigod. Batty was exultant – the horse had not been felled, but had fallen, after charging into their powder store. He felt a pang about the packhorse and started to scramble up, thinking of Fiskie.
A dark shape loomed and Batty cursed as Fiskie squealed in the dark; he heard him running.
‘No,’ said the nun and it was neither order nor request, just a statement on what Batty was about to do. He fired at the dark shape, the whirling sparks from the wheel and great gout of flame blowing all night-sight away. The acrid, unseen smoke brought tears and coughing, but Batty still heard Sister Faith hoarsely asking forgiveness for him; it felt awkward and uncomfortable.
Fiskie. The horse was gone, galloped into the night, with his two holstered daggs, ammunition, food, water, skillet – everything save what he wore.
He was cursing himself, the horse, the night and all in it when he felt the movement. He dropped one dagg, whipped out another and swung round… to find Sister Faith staring back down the long muzzle at him.
There was a long moment, then Sister Faith sighed.
‘That is what they do, such machines,’ she said.
‘What?’ Batty asked, carefully securing the pistol.
‘They put fear in you,’ she answered, then cocked her head. ‘God did not send you to kill.’
‘God did not send me at all, goodwife,’ he answered. ‘I just came.’
And wish now I had not, for I came to sweep up one nun and gallop off and now I have three and the horse is gone besides. He squinted at where the scattered flames were dying, beaten out by shouting men. Christ, if I had known all this aforehand, I would have ridden on to Wooler.
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‘No, you would not,’ said Sister Faith and Batty jerked round to look at her. She had a face that had been no great beauty when young, but had a swan serenity, where you knew everything was working away furiously underneath, but it never showed. She had brown-spotted hands folded neatly in her lap – and wore a wedding ring, which surprised Batty.
‘Whit?’ he managed, after a long moment of staring.
‘You were thinking that you would have ridden on if you’d known what lay here in the tower,’ she said, then stared into his face.
‘You would have come anyway,’ she added.
‘Christ’s Wounds,’ Batty answered with a poor laugh that sounded shaky even to him. ‘That’s a skill that will get you burned, mistress.’
‘Sister,’ she corrected, ‘and do not blaspheme.’
‘And that’s a title will get you burned twice,’ Batty said. Sister Faith smiled, then glanced out to where the flames were sizzling and dying.
‘Burned like her? Who was it?’ she asked softly.
Batty was busy in his head, working out what he had on him – a peck of coin, a brace of daggs, a bandolier of apostles slung round him, a backsword and a selection of knives – so he had told her about the other one he had found before realising he might have sweetened it a little.
When he snapped his lips shut and looked at the nun, she bowed her head for a moment and Batty heard her prayers, saw her turn the ring round and round. Finally, she looked him in the eye again.
‘Do not mention this,’ she begged. ‘The others will lose heart.’
‘Aye, aye,’ Batty answered, flustered enough to be harsher still. ‘Best not tell them we are trapped and helpless – what brought you this way? Bewcastle is a long wheen o’ miles from this place.’
‘Sister Benedict told us we were bound for Kirknewton, where we would find help organised by her brother, the Lord of Bewcastle,’ the nun said, then sighed and crossed herself. ‘She was trying to get there when they caught her.’
Batty grunted. Kirknewton? Well, it was supposedly Reformed, but the place was a huddle of wee cruck houses and the church, no more. Notable, he recalled, for being where men were buried in the aftermath of Flodden field.
It has more ghouls than living folk, Batty thought and is closer to Berwick than Bewcastle – he squinted at why Mad Jack would have done this and could not come up with any reason that made sense. There was another, more pressing problem…
‘What’s your plan, then? Sister.’
‘You are,’ she answered and rose up to walk towards him.
‘Watch…’ he warned, alarmed as she put herself in full view of the outside and took the few steps to kneel by his leg and smiled.
‘If the Lord wants me to die,’ she said, fishing out a candle and a small knife, ‘then I will die. But I won’t die afraid.’
She stuck the candle on a stone, rose up again and seemed to disappear, then materialised again with a flicker of flaming light. Batty worked out that she had gone down steps; there was an undercroft to the tower.
She lit the candle then looked at him.
‘Drop your breeks,’ she said and, for a moment, Batty hesitated and had back a long, slow smile which made him flush. He stood feeling all the unseen guns and arrows on his back, shed the breeks and lay down as she ordered.
A thought struck him as he watched her heat the knife in the candle flame.
‘How many Sisters are you?’
‘Myself,’ she answered, ‘Sister Hope whom you have met. Sister Charity on the roof as I said. And our last driver, Trumpet, who is dying.’
She told him the rest; Trumpet Baillie was the ex-soldier who had driven one of the carts, who had manned the caliver and the tower at the start and had been shot by some sort of large gun or small cannon.
‘It went through the stone,’ she said, calling softly to Sister Hope to hold the candle for her while she worked. ‘Through stone, Master Coalhouse and blew a lot of it and worse into his face. He is dying slowly and blind in the undercroft.’
She looked critically at the knife and Batty felt his throat go dry.
‘Ah kin mak’ the whirlimagig,’ Sister Hope declared, smiling gums at him. Sister Faith looked fondly at her.
‘She is no longer afraid,’ she said and Batty watching the knife and trying not to think about it, wondered aloud what had changed.
‘You are here,’ Sister Faith answered, ‘called by prayer.’
‘Ach, listen wummin…’ Batty began, but the knife descended and the pain slammed him, from where the blade touched to the crown of his head and blew all the light out.
The tower at Akeld
Later…
The rain hissed like snakes and the bastel house was blued with smoke from a fire of damp wood and a chimney badly cleared from the scumfishing that had emptied it of Wallis men in the first place. It reeked of old char.
In the dark dank of the undercroft, Cornelius raised his head and wiped his bloody hands on a rag; his shadow danced madly on the wall as the tallow guttered.
‘He is gone.’
Klett grunted and it seemed to Horner that he did not care much, but he was wrong; Klett felt the death of Ponce keenly, but not because he had known the man for a length. In this business, he thought, it is sensible not to become attached, for life can go pleasantly along on its way in plunder and whores and then – bang. Your fine friend is blown into Hell.
No, the death of Ponce was one more added to the tally he would have to present to Maramaldo and he felt that sharply enough, though he would not show it. There was another, Martello the Italian, nursing a shoulder which had been put out of joint when he was struck by a running horse. But Ponce had been with Maramaldo a long time.
‘The ball cut too many vitals,’ Cornelius added.
‘Shot from close range,’ Jacob added morosely, ‘as he was about to enter the tower. Those nuns are skilled.’
Klett glanced sourly at him.
‘No nun did this,’ he growled and then stirred the other corpse with his toe, so that Rutland’s head lolled. ‘Nor is this our cuckoo. At least, not the one who killed our boys with throwing knives.’
Jacob had no answer to that, nor did Cadette, who kept as far back in the shadows as he could; they both knew that the man they had lugged in had no throwing knives on him and hands as soft as kneaded pastry, save where a sword hilt had raised some callous on his right palm.
He was – had been – a wee gentleman gamecock, though what he was doing out on the wilds of the Cheviot was another matter. A Wallis, Klett thought, starting to poke a neb into what had happened around Akeld. The thought of what they would do when they found out – or found the bodies of their kin, the original occupants – was one which raised a panic Klett fought to control. Yet again, he could not understand his orders to remain here.
Maramaldo on one hand, the Wallis on the other… they had to finish this now, swiftly and regardless of cost, for it was clear there was another cuckoo and this one had gained entrance to the tower. A Borders man if his unshod nag of a horse was anything to go by and a fighter judging by the pistols in the saddle holsters and the gear in bags.
It did not help that Horner, still hugging secrets to himself, was black-browed over Rutland’s death.
‘He was my messenger,’ he told Klett bitterly. ‘I saw him before. I warned you of him. Of not killing him…’
‘How are we to know this?’ Klett spat back, equally vicious. ‘You think he is your messenger, but he may well be working with the other one, the one who is now in the tower.’
Horner’s dismissive wave only fuelled Klett’s raging suspicion that there were matters being kept from him by this papingo, whose involvement in matters was more than simply a treasure.
The only matter they shared, it seemed, was the thought that where there was a brace of new cuckoos…
‘Twice reason to be done with this business,’ Klett declared. ‘Before first light, rain or no, we will be at the place.’
He glared pointedly at Horner.
‘If you have matters to say, best say them now, for once we are broken in, the ram is through the gate.’
Even Horner understood the term; no quarter would be given to the occupants. He disagreed with a vehement shake of his head.
‘Alive, your Captain General commanded. Alive, Meinheer Klett.’
Klett did not reply, simply stared at the dark and the faint smudge of the tower through the lisping rain, as if willing it to crumble with his eyes.
* * *
Inside, Batty woke and found a new face looking at him. It was younger than the others, but reduced by dark and flickering candle to planes and shadows, so that the eyes were drown-dead pits and the cheeks seemed shrunk into blackness. This skull stretched into a smile, brief as a blown candleflame – then she drew a black veil across it, leaving only her eyes like pits.
‘I am Sister Charity. Would you like water?’
He nodded and she handed him a horn beaker, turning to speak over her shoulder as he drank.
‘Sister Faith – he is awake.’
The old nun came up as he finished and handed the beaker back.
‘There is more,’ Sister Charity said. ‘Water is what we have most.’
The rain ran down the inside walls like the soft patter of playful cats and Batty realised he was in the sheltered spot, under the overhang of latticed wood that formed part of the watch platform of the ruined-tooth tower. His leg ached and he moved it gingerly.
‘What have you done to me?’ he growled at Sister Faith.
‘It was filthy,’ she replied. ‘I cut the flesh away, cleaned it out and bound it with some healing herbs, a simple prayer and clean linen.’