Burning the Water

by Robert Low

  ‘The treasure…’ Horner bleated, then faded under the renewed gaze. ‘It is fragile. Not so much gold and silver. And other matters. The Lord Chancellor…’

  ‘Will take his chance,’ Maramaldo said. ‘As I said, we do not have time left for niceties.’

  ‘I was promised the nuns,’ Horner muttered sullenly. ‘I took assurance…’

  ‘Contracts have been agreed,’ Maramaldo admitted, his voice a slap. ‘They will be adhered to, among gentlemen.’

  A spasm of pain rippled him in the chair and he waved one hand, a weak flap of dismissal while the other flicked at Cornelius to offer his brew.

  ‘We will see whether Balthie values nuns or sense,’ he said hoarsely, then turned to Horner. ‘Then we will all get what we desire, either way.’

  ‘What the Lord Chancellor desires…’

  Maramaldo’s dark stare was a fierce glitter on both men and Horner went quiet so quickly Klett swore he heard the man’s teeth click.

  ‘In the morning,’ Maramaldo said to Klett, ‘you will reason Balthie and his nuns out of the tower. If not, you will blow him out by the afternoon.’

  ‘The guns are not up yet…’ Klett answered, sullen that he still had no clear idea of what his master was doing and that he had been so clearly left out of the planning of it.

  ‘Until they are you may delight us with your marvellous contrivance,’ Maramaldo replied blissfully. ‘That wall gun. And Master Horner…’

  Horner, who had been looking at Klett’s sullen discomfiture, jerked round to face the stare. It was colder than he’d ever thought possible, glassed as a sucking sea.

  ‘I am not contracted by the Lord Chancellor. If you wave that man and his wishes at me again, I will hang you up by a rod through your heels and flay you alive.’

  * * *

  The morning was all lark song and savoury with smells. Torn grass and turned earth mingled with woodsmoke and hot pottage, while voices hummed like bees; somewhere down by the river came the steady rhythm of axe on wood.

  Cutting wood for fires and ruining that windbreak, Batty thought. Akeld will have a breeze up its nethers once Maramaldo’s men have gone.

  Which would not be in a hurry, he saw. There were a brace-hundred of them, with horses and pack-mules but this was but an imp of the Great Satan that was Maramaldo’s loftily named Company of the Sable Rose.

  Somewhere over the horizon would be a few hundred more, shifting slowly and steadily in this direction, with pikes, muskets, bows, horse, bairns and beldames, sway-hipped gauds, notaries, secretaries, carts, tents and all the panoply of a great company.

  And a brace of stolen sakers, Batty remembered.

  He stood on the tower top, behind the largest segment of the rotten tooth stump of it, which left only his head exposed to the men trailing up to stand beneath with a square of white linen on a pole. For all that, Batty felt an itch on his back at the thought of the men circled behind him; he did not trust Maramaldo, even with a parley flag.

  The man himself came up, carried on a chair of yellow plush by four men on outrigger poles. Batty marvelled at that – the great Maramaldo, reduced to an invalid carriage.

  Then he saw the yellow face and narrowed his eyes at that. This was not the Fabrizio Maramaldo he remembered, wielding a farrier’s axe with one hand and his face a richer, different colour entirely.

  ‘Kohlhase.’

  The one who called out was Klett, the man he had fought. There was another with him, pouter-pigeon puffed with self-importance and Batty thought this was the one the nuns had spoken of, the one called Horner.

  The one who mattered was struggled up to join them by sweating men at each corner of the great oak seat lashed to poles. He was smothered in a huge green cloak festooned with madder ribbons and trimmed with a fur made rattier by the rain.

  ‘Careful you cunny-licking scabs,’ he spat, but it was a gusting puff of the bellow Batty had remembered; the men gentled the affair to rest, then stood back to wipe the sweat and rain from them, shuffling uncertainly.

  They were achingly familiar to Batty and as unlike the men from the Borders as monkeys to mice. They had pluderehosen and venetians, pansied slops in all colours save decent, the material rich and thick and pulled through the slashes so far it dropped almost to their knees.

  They had silks and ribbons, geegaws and favours, were parti-coloured here and there and as gaudy as parrots; Batty remembered himself when he was part of it and felt a spasm of old ache, quickly gone.

  Then he saw the only sparrow in the bunch, a fussing little man in a strange gown and turban, nodding like a bird and with eyeglasses on a loop round his neck. He was thin as a stork and carried a battered leather satchel – a book, Batty saw. One of Maramaldo’s clever wee men, he thought, who can read and scratch out the Latin for agreements. A soothsayer, he added to himself, seeing the symbols on the man’s robe; he remembered Maramaldo had a weakness for alchemists and fortune-tellers. Not that you would need one to predict the future of the great Captain General these days; one look at his gaunt yellow face would do.

  Klett’s voice jerked him from the reverie.

  ‘Your dagg is very fine,’ he said. ‘By Hofer from Ferlach in Carinthia.’

  ‘Is it?’ Batty answered. ‘You saw a lot in the dark – but it was right in your face most of the time and hard to miss, I will admit.’

  Then he humped up his good shoulder in a lopsided shrug.

  ‘I had it from a stinking-pyntled moudiewart backshooter called Clem Henharrow, so I would not know anything about its true origin.’

  Klett nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘It is well made – the axe is in the handle where others I have seen place it on the muzzle, which is not so good.’

  ‘Because it fouls up?’ Batty hazarded and Klett laughed.

  ‘Perhaps you might clot it with all manner of foulness, Master Coalhouse,’ he answered softly, ‘but the true reason is that folk use it for more prosaic purpose – cutting wood and the like; the blows knock the barrel out of true.’

  ‘Ah well – you would be the expert in guns, Master Klett. I am hearing you have a singular one of your own.’

  Klett nodded.

  ‘I do. I am instructed to blow you off that tower with it if you do not come out, you and your nuns all.’

  ‘And weans,’ Batty answered, then added into Klett’s bewilderment: ‘Five bairns. Did you not realise there were bairns here as well?’

  Klett’s quick, bewildered glance at Maramaldo then Horner showed some bitterness – if he had known, it was a recent revelation, Batty thought. Horner was blank-faced as dressed stone.

  ‘Oho,’ he called out mockingly. ‘Master Horner omitted to mention there were bairns, did he? That would be because you would have to slay them when it came to the bit, Klett. Think you could do that?’

  ‘Send them out,’ Horner interrupted. ‘And see.’

  ‘What do you call it?’ Batty asked, then nodded into Klett’s bewilderment. ‘The name. Of your gun.’

  ‘Doppelhaken,’ Klett replied shortly.

  ‘A double hackbut,’ Batty translated. ‘My, but it is a fearsome engine. Must weigh a bitty and kick like a bad-tempered mule.’

  Klett lifted his face from the work and rested cold eyes on Batty’s own.

  ‘Enough. Come out of the tower or you will see it in action, just before…’

  ‘Ach, weesht,’ Batty interrupted. ‘Let the man who matters speak – besides, it has been a long time since I have heard the voice of Fabrizio Maramaldo and from what I see now, it is diminished a great deal.’

  Maramaldo’s face was straw and whey, the sweat on it out like fat pearl drops. His cheeks had always been pouched as a squirrel, but now they were sagging though the veins on them were intricate as brocade needlework. The little beard he had always affected as long as Batty had known him was cropped and shaved to a parody that only enhanced the cracked lips; there were sores on them, Batty saw and his thinning hair was plastered damply t
o his skull.

  His voice, however, was firm enough.

  ‘Furca and fossa,’ he said. ‘March treason.’

  Furca and fossa – the pit and the gallows, which was high justice dispensed by hanging where it was possible, or drowning where it was not. Batty remembered Layton, face pressed into a shallow puddle with the Douglas boot on his neck. Eure had only escaped the same when someone had found a gnarled tree, only high enough by being on a slope.

  ‘Aye, aye,’ he answered admiringly. ‘You have learned a bitty in the time you have been in the Borders, Fabrizio. But there is no March treason here – you are the riders come here to spoil. Besides, you have no writ.’

  ‘Ah, but I have the rope,’ Maramaldo countered, ‘and your strange decoration proves that your tower is a suitable spot for hanging. Besides, there is a stream in spate which will serve as drowning pit.’

  ‘Him?’ Batty offered back, peering down at the blackening swing of Trumpet Baillie. ‘He heard you were coming to address us and could not stand the thought of listening to your poxed voice, Fabrizio.’

  There was no anger at all in the answer, only a measured weariness, as if the whole business of Batty Coalhouse was tiresome and trivial. Or it might be the illness, Batty thought, though he was aware that his reasons for believing the first was because it echoed what was in himself; he was done up over the business of Maramaldo, no doubt of it.

  ‘Come out, Balthie. Hand over this treasure, the nuns, the kinder and all. You are netted like a thrush and there is no escape. You have two hours.’

  By which time his guns will be up, Batty thought. Certainly Klett will have assembled his Doppelhaken and be ready to shoot; he thought of Trumpet’s face then and shivered.

  ‘Aye, aye,’ he replied as lightly as he could. ‘You were never a good hunter I suspect, for the first rule of catching a bird is to make sure the net has gone over.’

  Maramaldo was already slumped and being carried off, so Batty was not even sure he had heard his last sally. Just as well, Batty thought, for it was not very good.

  Then, just as he started to turn away, he caught sight of Horner and was sure, with a lightning-strike of certainty and for no reason he could justify, that the man knew Batty would be here. If not in the tower, then Akeld.

  He went slowly down the ladder from the tower, nagged by the revelation, stunned by it. Horner had known. Maramaldo had not expected me, for all his intimation that he had hunted Batty like a thrush; Maramaldo had never hunted in his life, unless you counted guddling in the entrails of those he had gutted, convinced they had swallowed their riches.

  He turned it over and over until he became aware of Sister Charity, crouched with her caliver, determined and solid. Sister Faith stopped praying when Batty came off the last rung and simply looked at him.

  Bigod, he thought, if I have the right of it, then Horner was not surprised to find me here. If so, then he was told it by someone close to Mad Jack – mayhap Rutland spilled all he knew before he died?

  He sank down in the lee of the carts, feeling hunger growl through his belly and rob him of any chance of ciphering it out. No food, little water, less shot, little powder – this is a poor hand. If it was Primero, he thought, you would throw it down on the table with a dismissive curse and accept the loss.

  Not here, though. Here the loss was sharper than vanishing coin.

  Still, Maramaldo’s appearance gave hope, Batty thought. Here is me chasing the condotterie of old, the bellowing, roaring fell cruel Captain General Maramaldo. The man who took my da, my arm and my ma from me without so much as a blink, for the relief of his own anger and to stamp his command back on demoralised men.

  Now, after two decades hunting the beast, I have got up with a mangy lion, a pox-sick man who cannot stand straight. He, in turn, has known he was pursued by a young Hercules, Balthazar Kohlhase and has only managed to diminish that by a limb until now, when he sees the reality is a fat old man with one arm.

  We are each of us pursuing phantoms, Batty thought bitterly, and wasting our lives on it.

  Chapter Nine

  In the tower at Akeld

  Night of the second day…

  The distant crack was a whip across their nerves; Batty saw the wince in Sister Charity even before the ball struck the ruin of carts, blasting splinters, tearing through to thunder against the back wall of the tower, which seemed to shake.

  Batty brushed a few slivers off his jack as if it was lint on a fine embroidered doublet, but the gesture barely raised a smile on Sister Charity’s face.

  ‘It will be too dark to shoot soon,’ Batty said. ‘Besides – his shoulder must be rawer than a wormy dog’s arse by now. Beggin’ your pardon, Sister.’

  They were huddled in the lee of stone near the entrance, for Klett had started on the tower top, then realised no one was daft enough to be up on it and concentrated on plunking a relentless hail of fat ball-shot at the entrance, both over and through the carts, which were now mainly kindling.

  ‘You would be better below,’ Batty said, but Sister Charity shook her head; the veil was loose and Batty now saw the reason for it – she was poxed and it had showed in an unhealthy waxen sheen and lumpen face. Small wonder she had given up her auld life, Batty thought, to become a nun. Less wonder that she ended up serving in some piss-poor almshouses – no decent convent would have her.

  She read it in his face and managed a slight smile.

  ‘The Spanish call it the Dutch Curse, the Hollanders say it is the Spanish Pox. The French say it is the English Disease and the English call it the French Plague.’

  She paused, her red-rimmed eyes brimming with more than fever.

  ‘They all have it, no matter who began it. The truth is, of course, that it is God’s way of showing how the sin of Lust punishes itself.’

  Batty had nothing he could say that would not be scowling, so he kept quiet. He was no stranger to a woman’s poxed face and the memory of a particular one soured him into looking away. She misread the gesture and shifted the veil back into place.

  ‘I will stay. You go below – Sister Faith will appreciate the company and if they rush us, you are better placed there.’

  He thought about it for an eyeblink; Klett had been shooting for some time and was almost certainly held to it, though Batty could not understand Maramaldo’s reasoning; there should have been blood and fire long before now, with the realisation that neither Batty, nor nuns, nor bairns were coming freely out. All this bang and crash could not fail to bring the Wallis out, full of vengeance and sharp steel.

  If Maramaldo had not finished the business here, it was because he would not – or could not. Batty wondered, for a glorious, gooseflesh moment, if the Captain General had died. Then he dismissed it; not only was God not that good at dealing such a winning card to a poor hand like this, but the signs were against it. If the Captain General was dead, there would be more nerves and unease within the ranks of his men.

  No, he thought, not dead. Ill, mayhap, with some favoured captain in charge and holding to Maramaldo’s last command – shoot them out of the tower. If the Captain General did not recover by the time the sakers came up and found light to shoot, that would be what would be used.

  It came to him that Maramaldo might want nuns and Batty alive, to bargain with Mad Jack for the release of his favoured lieutenant, Rafael Sabin.

  He told Sister Faith this in the undercroft, conscious of the bairns listening with their too-round eyes and pale, wan faces. She did not speak for a time and Batty felt ashamed that he had somehow failed her and her God – then anger at her for having made him feel this way.

  ‘There is another small hope,’ he offered and saw the cock of her head. It was so slight he was now wishing he had never mentioned it at all, but ploughed the stony furrow of it anyway.

  ‘A kennel with no wee dog,’ he said. None of the hard mercenary men were Borders bred or had been here long enough to know the way of it, Batty was sure, so they would have missed i
t. Maramaldo might, too, because he was not at his best in his thinking.

  ‘The first thing anyone does, if they have help they can rely on,’ Batty explained, ‘is release the hound before barring the bastel door and yett. A wee bitty wool in the collar, coloured to show who is come unbidden to their door, knotted for numbers. The beast will run where it has been trained.’

  ‘Where?’

  Batty shrugged. The nearest Wallis stronghold – Twa Corbies was most likely – but he doubted if there had been a colour to mark the likes of Maramaldo’s men and the knots would be too few now.

  ‘But the Wallis are watching and gathering,’ he added. Little help to Batty Coalhouse, who had slain one of their number on a stair in Berwick’s Town Hall – but he did not mention that.

  Eventually, Sister Faith shook her head and Batty admired the iron in her that would not let her give into the slender fantasy of it.

  ‘If the Wallis are coming at all, they will wait until they have sufficient force,’ she said. ‘Which will be too late for us.’

  She beckoned the children off the chest and into her embrace. They had to step over the linen-wrapped corpse of Sister Hope to do it.

  ‘I know you are tired and afeared,’ she said to them carefully, ‘but there are a few things you need to learn about God, so you must listen closely.’

  She turned to Batty, who was just realising that the shooting had stopped and was uneasy about what it meant.

  ‘We will baptise them anew, conduct Holy Communion and Extreme Unction,’ she declared and Batty turned as a figure slithered down the steps in time to hear this. Sister Charity looked outraged, her eyes burning behind the veil.

  ‘We are not priests,’ she declared. ‘We can baptise, but only a priest can perform the other rites. It is sacrilege.’

  ‘I do not believe God would suffer his little ones to be denied the peace and love of the Sacraments simply because we are not priests. But I know your doubts, Sister and if you believe it wrong, do not participate. If there is a sin in it, let it be mine alone.’