Burning the Water

by Robert Low

  ‘Better to fight and fall than live without hope,’ Batty answered sharply and she nodded slowly back at him.

  ‘There is always hope when God is involved,’ she said, ‘but it is also my belief that Master Horner is not in control out there and any promises made by him are nothing, while those made by the men who have already tortured and killed our Sisters are even less. I will load the calivers and pray for the souls of those who attack us. I will not kill anyone and I suspect my Sisters in Christ feel the same.’

  She left him in the dark and fumbled her way to the stairs and down to the poor gutter of tallow to find Sister Charity had already loaded the calivers and sat with one across her knee. She had replaced her face veil so that only her eyes showed, glittering with a fevered light that told Sister Faith her disease had flared. For a moment, Sister Faith wondered if Sister Charity was as resolved against killing as she once had been. Then Sister Hope stirred and made her smile; the children slept around Sister Hope, who whimpered in her own sleep like a pup.

  Sister Faith sat in the last glamour of the butter glow and thought about the man upstairs, who had come in answer to her prayer. He was an ugly man – the ugliest man she had ever seen – scarred and hard and had already killed two men he had admitted to and more, she was sure, he had not. He swore. He drank. He gambled. He showed no religious feeling at all.

  In the end, the questions thundering in her had no answer and she bowed her head, took the ring in her fingers and twisted it.

  ‘Dear God. Your wisdom encompasses us all around. I thank You for Your blessings and guidance. You sent this man to save the others, the children and I only wonder… how should I trust him?’

  She heard no answers as she stared at her pale hands, only a soft, tuneless singing from above, like a hymn for poor, dead Trumpet.

  ‘I sewed his sheet, making my mane; I watched the corpse, myself alane; I watched his body, night and day. No living creature came that way.’

  * * *

  They came before dawn, in a rush like a wind over the moor. The first sign of it was a night-owl whisk of arrows at the entrance, one of which shunked into the wood of the carts, two more sailing over Batty’s head to clatter and splinter on the far wall.

  Then the figures came lurching out of the dark, silent save for grunting as they stormed the carts and began tearing them aside. Great dark figures they were, so that Batty’s first shot, a thunderous blast of flame, pitched one away and blew away all night vision.

  His second dagg was out and in his hand when a desperate figure, reeking heat and fear, hurled himself in a rushing shriek at Batty, scrambling over the carts like a mad spider. Batty backhanded him with the long barrel, pointed and shot at a second figure he saw bursting through the barrier; the wheel whirred and sparked, but nothing happened.

  Cursing, Batty flipped it to grasp the barrel, then chopped viciously on the man he had already backhanded – he had kept the axe-handled dagg second for this purpose – and the man shrieked as it hacked into his thrown-up forearm.

  Batty cut and slashed, seeing the man he had failed to shoot stumble down the steps to the undercroft, where the bairns were shrill as bleating sheep with screams. There was a bang and flash from down there and the man flew backwards to loll on the top step, snoring in bubbling gasps through a faceful of blood.

  The man Batty had been hacking died with a last whimper just as another shadow fought over the splintered carts and came on, all snarl and rage. He slammed into Batty, who grunted with the effort of it, flailed with his elbow but couldn’t get a decent swing. A hand raked his head, the nails digging for his eyes and he roared, kicked, squirmed, trying to get his good arm working.

  He heard another bang and a pained yelp, managed to get his arm under the crushing weight of the panting thrashing man and heaved; they stumbled apart like exhausted dancers and there was a moment of staring, a moment of white eyes and sweat-gleam in the dark.

  Short, Batty noted. A wee man. And in that eyeblink, he was back when he was young and had both arms, when his da was growling instruction at him ‘for the learning in it’. Batty knew even then to listen closely and learn fast, for Maramaldo’s camp was a hard university for laddies.

  ‘Never,’ his da had ordered vehemently, ‘pick a fight with a short man.’

  The short man grunted and Batty blinked out of the reverie. My da never explained what you do if a wee man picks a fight with you, he thought bitterly and launched himself, swinging the axe-handled dagg and snarling like a pit dog. The wee man met him with a blade of his own; sparks flew and they locked, sweated and spat and struggled for a moment, then broke apart, panting.

  Somewhere over the squealing bairns, a voice started to bellow and the man jerked, though he did not turn his head.

  ‘Batty Coalhouse,’ he said and Batty felt a wash of weariness – he knows of me, he thought.

  Bugger.

  ‘My name is Klett,’ the stocky man said and half turned his head as the bellow came again, followed by a blowing horn.

  ‘Have we danced afore this?’ Batty asked, not eager to close for another bout yet wondering how the man knew him – wondering, too, why the name was familiar; he heard someone coming up the steps and Klett did too, for he backed off, trying to watch Batty and the way into the undercroft at the same time. When his back hit the splintered remains of the carts, he stopped.

  ‘We have not,’ Klett panted, ‘but I know you well. I have hunted you a long time, Coalhouse. Since the wedding feast.’

  The world fell away from Batty’s belly then, but a hunting-horn farted out a long, rasp of note and this time Klett jerked like a gaffed fish; a long barrel poked, wavering, up the top step where the snoring man lay and Batty managed a feral grin as Klett saw it and the nun behind it.

  ‘Your ma is calling you,’ he said as the horn sounded again and Klett heaved suddenly, lifting himself backwards on to the cart and rolling away. As if contrived, a shower of arrows spattered in, two hitting the carts and a brace more lancing past Batty, close enough to make him curse.

  Batty saw one hit the man on the step so that he gave one last, sudden snort and died. Another was low enough to make the nun – Sister Charity, he saw – bob down into cover.

  Batty himself hunkered down on the slathered flags of the tower, but it was reflex, for all his mind was filled only with the memory of the wedding feast of Von Zachwitz, the noble who had robbed Hans Kohlhase of his horses. It rose like a body from a marsh, bloated with horror – the Kohlhases had invaded the celebrations, captured the very noble who had caused all the problems for Hans and then…

  Watched bride and groom die. Batty almost spoke it aloud, sick with remembering. You stuffed the groom’s mouth with powder charges and lit them, the voice in his head accused.

  The bride, though – that was inspired. A chaplet of sausage charges, the slow match cut with Batty’s consumate skill to last just long enough for the bride to see her groom die before her own head blew up.

  A nice, pretty woman – until the charge went off. Respected woman, too, from a family who once made furniture and clocks then found fortune in using their staghorn and ebenist art, their skills with cogwheels and lever locks, to make guns.

  The family had become rich enough to elevate a daughter to the nobility, providing a dowry Von Zachwitz needed in return for the heraldry they craved.

  Batty bowed his head under the weight of it all, remembering the names embroidered into the wedding table linen.

  Von Zachwitz and Klett.

  Chapter Eight

  In the tower at Akeld

  Afternoon of the second day…

  Her life was a tallow flame in a wet wind, every ragged draw of breath into her only serving to make folk wince, each exhale leaking like the blood they could not staunch.

  The bairns were orphans, used to hardship even if they had shrieked a bit with the bangs and the flashing, but now their hard eyes were melting as Sister Hope failed to beat the arrow. It had come d
own in that perfect curve all missiles have, as designed by God when he made the world; this one arced down the steps and took one of His own nuns low in the back, cracking her ribs open like a pry-bar on an old bird nest. She had been protecting the youngest of the bairns with her body, gathering her chicks into her rough wool dress like a Scotch Dumpy.

  Sister Faith prayed and wiped, Sister Charity probed and cut, but only the shaft was loosened out; the great barbed head could not be removed and Batty had known it from the moment he had seen her.

  He let them bind her up all the same with no word of the pointlessness of that, while he scrambled to haul the dead out, awkwardly crouched so he would not be the next one to take a longbow shaft. The man Batty had hacked with the dagg was easiest to lever up and roll over the remains of the cart barrier, but Batty needed help with the one on the stairs because he had half-armour all the way down his thighs, segmented like a brace of lobster tails.

  Not that it had done him any good, for the shot which killed him had fretted his face into a bloody parody of the Italian cutwork lace which decorated his cuffs; his last snoring breaths had been through a nose and mouth blasted to ruin. Batty wondered what the caliver had been loaded with and Sister Charity, after signing the cross on the man, told him it had been her rosary beads.

  ‘Unstrung. I used half-a-dozen, for I had no shot left and they were only wee,’ she added and, because of the veil, Batty could only see her eyes, which were full of pain.

  She is sore sorry for having done it, he marvelled and never considers what he would have done to her if she had not. But he said nothing and sat patiently while she murmured prayers at the face ruined to shreds by a slew of hard wee prayers; Batty sat silently and took in the fluted breastplate and the segmented tassets, the roped edges and lace and ribbons.

  Ten florins in that armour, Batty thought. About a year’s food and drink and made special for him, not plundered. A Lance Captain, for sure.

  Then they tumbled him out and Batty thought that the man called Klett was mired up to his armpits, for Maramaldo would not be pleased to learn that three nuns and one-armed Batty Coalhouse had contrived to kill so many hard veterans, never mind a Captain who commanded a Lance of thirty men.

  Maramaldo would know by now, of course, for it was his trumpeters blowing and bellowing for the attack to be called off and Klett had known it even as he had gone back over the carts and away.

  Sister Charity crouched and watched while Batty went into the undercroft, reeking of smoke and flame and blood. Sister Faith was praying while Sister Hope heaved wheezes in and out, the children sitting at opposite sides of her like brave sentries.

  All save the oldest, the boy called Daniel, who stood like a shadow, his small arms folded across his thin chest as if he hugged himself; when Batty came down he looked up as if staring at a mountain or a distant horizon, then turned to look the same blankness at Sister Faith when he heard her intone: ‘Father in Heaven, bless us this day.’

  * * *

  ‘Ah kin coup ma lundies.’

  Batty jerked free of memory, shivered with it. Her blue eyes were bright and open and Sister Hope sighed out that proud boast with her last breath, gone to the sunlit meadows of her youth, turning cartwheels and careless of showing her legs, or her unbound hair. Her wizened monkey face had a smile on it that defied the cracks and lines to somehow make her look like a blissful girl.

  ‘Our Father,’ Sister Faith murmured. The air braided in Batty’s throat and he had to look away from that face. He thought about the woman with the hand of her boy; though she had clung tight and never let go, Our Father had plucked the boy away anyway.

  ‘She is beautiful.’

  Her voice brought him round to look, seeing the calm assurance of her eyes.

  ‘Sister Hope,’ she prompted. ‘She looks beautiful and at peace. God be praised.’

  ‘Things have looked better,’ Batty grunted. ‘It seems your God picked the wrong man, which is no surprise to me. I cannot save you, your Sisters or the bairns.’

  ‘My God?’ she replied quietly. ‘Our God. Yours too.’

  She sat and folded her hands in her lap, twisting that wedding band – no, Batty suddenly realised, not a wedding band. A rosary ring. Which, he supposed, was a wedding band of sorts if you were a nun, married to Christ.

  ‘You were chosen by God to rescue these children. Sister Charity, too, perhaps.’

  Not herself, Batty noticed. Not placed anywhere in that.

  ‘I do not know why God chose you, Master Coalhouse,’ she went on, ‘but the fact remains that He did, which makes you the most fortunate of men. Few are so picked by the Almighty.’

  ‘Do not lay this on me, woman,’ Batty growled back, stung to anger. ‘I came here out of stupidity, thinking there was only you to spirit away. Even then I considered the matter foolhardy at best, but had come to look for the nun who is related to the Musgraves, or proof of her death.’

  He subsided, glowering and waved his one grimy hand as if to dismiss the entire affair.

  ‘You were the proof.’

  She said nothing and then went to help the children wash Sister Hope and prepare her for a burial that was more wish than surety. Batty sat, hunched and cold and hungry and emptier than a banker’s heart.

  ‘I am not chosen,’ he muttered.

  * * *

  He sat on a faded chair of yellow satin plush wrapped in a boatcloak and furs so that only his face showed. It was like the chair, that face – same colour, greasy, tattered and stained with old pollution.

  If you had not known Captain General Fabrizio Maramaldo before this, Klett thought, you would know all you needed to know just by looking at that face. The flickering shadows in the undercroft of Akeld’s bastel did little to help.

  Horner would have agreed if he and Klett had dared do more than breathe beside each other. Poxed, Horner saw. From the sores on his lips to the sweat on his tow-coloured brow, Maramaldo is bad poxed and perhaps dying of it.

  Yet the glitter from those pouched eyes had more than just fever in them and the rake of them across his face almost made Horner blanch.

  ‘Five men,’ he said, the Neapolitan accent thick as clots. ‘Five men are dead. One of them is Giovanni Cadette, a Lance-Captain of skill.’

  No one spoke and the eyes raked round. Cornelius hovered nearby with a napkin and a bowl filled with something; Klett doubted if Maramaldo would drink the brew, even if it had the balm of poppies in it, for the Captain General had not pissed for five days and his bladder must be like a football.

  ‘It was a simple enough task.’

  The eyes were settled on Horner like blowflies but the words were directed at Klett, who squinted, bemused. He looked sideways at Horner, who was smirking and, gradually, the truth hit him and fought with the disbelief all over the field of his face.

  ‘I sent you Master Horner,’ Maramaldo declared. ‘With a plan. All you had to do was capture some nuns and bairns and a trinity of useless men.’

  ‘They were careless…’ Horner began.

  ‘When I desire you to speak I will say so. Until then stay silent.’

  Horner stayed silent and Klett cleared his throat.

  ‘I was not party to your plans, Captain General,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘And this accounts for your failure… how?’ Maramaldo spat back, then winced. There was silence for a moment.

  ‘Nuns,’ Maramaldo murmured as if savouring the gravy of the word. The eyes seemed to grow colder. ‘Who have killed five and are still not taken from their tower after – how long have you been here, Klett?’

  ‘Five days.’

  ‘Indeed. Five days. Five dead. No treasure. You have even contrived to kill one Master Rutland, who is known to me and was expected.’

  ‘He came to find me, with information…’ Horner interrupted, then fell silent as Maramaldo scorched him with glare.

  ‘From my employer?’

  ‘I am sure of it,’ Horner replied and Klett, bewilde
red, suddenly realised that Maramaldo had less interest in the treasure. What he was interested in was now a mystery to Klett – as was why Horner was involved; his focus had seemed to be all on the treasure.

  ‘This Rutland came with messages. Unwritten. Assurances that our plan proceeds apace,’ Horner went on, bobbing his head while Klett fought his wild thoughts, his head flickering like a flame in a high wind.

  ‘Is that certain?’

  Horner’s head threatened to bob off the stalk of his neck.

  ‘You would wager your life on it,’ Maramaldo said eventually and Horner nodded.

  ‘Indeed I would. The Lord Chancellor…’

  ‘That was not a question, Master Horner of the office of the Lord Chancellor.’

  There was a longer silence, broken only by ragged breathing in the thick air.

  ‘Balthie Kohlhase,’ Maramaldo said suddenly and Klett simply nodded, trying hard not to raise his eyebrows at what he heard in Maramaldo’s voice. Was that… fear?

  ‘Why is he in the tower?’ Maramaldo asked. ‘Why is he here, in this place, at this time?’

  Klett heard the suspicion and wondered at that, wondered also at Horner’s quick interjection. He had marvelled at the presence of Balthie Kohlhase, whose name had dogged his heels like a black hound all through his life it seemed. He had lied, all the same, about hunting him for that was the task of his two brothers; now that he had found what they had failed to, Klett would present Balthie Kohlhase’s death like a triumph.

  ‘His arrival is unfortunate, but nothing has strayed so far from the plan that it cannot be rectified,’ Horner said primly. ‘However, we must move more swiftly. The Lord Chancellor wishes this matter resolved to his satisfaction and without delay. We do not have much time.’

  Maramaldo grunted and shifted slightly, though it was painful to watch him.

  ‘When it is proper light, we will see if Balthie can be persuaded to recognise his folly. If he does not, we will blow him and his nuns out of that place and quickly, too.’