Burning the Water

by Robert Low

‘Tarset and Tyne,’ they yelled. ‘Wallis men.’

  The cries echoed and bounced, leaped like fire from head to head as the Names roared out their presence to God – Robson, Charlton, Milburn and Potts.

  Hume, Hume, Hume. Remember Broomhoose…

  They sent their hatred galloping off ahead of them and Batty felt the chill suck at his bowels; the last place he wanted to be was facing Maramaldo’s cannon across a muddy Cheviot hillside surrounded by Border horsemen. English or Scots, all the Humes were fired to madness by mention of Broomhouse – and all those who stood as friends to them were also lit by it.

  Besides, there was a nag at him, as if the world was a Michaelangelo drawing with part of it smeared by his big spade thumb. He knew the missing piece was vital, but he could not see it clearly.

  They moved into a vaulted area – the kitchen, Batty saw, which would be the warmest place – where John Wallis scattered folk from the fire and sat down heavily, sticking out his booted feet until the heat smoked water from them.

  ‘Bigod,’ he sighed, ‘this time last week I was mopping sweat from my brow and waving away midgies.’

  ‘Cheviot weather,’ Batty agreed and those who knew you could get four seasons in a day in these hills, grinned a little. Not many, Batty saw – and the woman who banged down a pewter mug of slopping ale had a scowl fit to sour gilt; a joint turned on a spit, filling the place with delicious smells and Batty with an ache of hunger, but no one offered him any.

  ‘So – you slew Tam and there are folk here who would still hemp you for it,’ John Wallis declared, signalling for food to be brought to himself. Batty heard the growls, saw the harsh, lumpen faces round him, dark with hate.

  ‘Fair fight,’ he offered back and tried a smile, though it died of neglect a minute later. ‘An old man with the one arm defeats a bonny fighter o’ the Wallis on the stairs of the Berwick Tolbooth – well, I can see why this would facer his kin.’

  ‘Some would say such a fight could not have been fair for the very reasons you say,’ John Wallis went on, picking meat with his fingers and blowing it cool; Batty’s mouth watered and, suddenly, the events of the last few days washed over him. He felt weary and stretched thin – so thin that he jumped when he felt the nudge on his knee.

  It was the wolfhound nuzzling him and looking hopefully at the plate near John Wallis; Batty scratched it gently behind one ear and it laid a delighted muzzle on his knee.

  ‘Well, at least the hound likes you,’ someone said and there was harsh laughter. Batty shifted.

  ‘It is a fine judge. As are you, John Wallis. If you wanted to hemp me you would have let yon men accomplish it – especially since one of them will now need a fresh finger to pick his scabs with.’

  Someone laughed at that, though it was choked off.

  ‘You have not kinched my neck because you need me for something else.’

  John Wallis cocked a considering eyebrow and Batty was regretting his moment of flared temper, became conscious of the leather cylinder still slung round his shoulders as John Wallis looked at it – but before anyone could speak, a small storm burst on them.

  ‘Diamant, Diamant. There you are, you bugger – come away.’

  John Wallis’ son – Willie, Batty recalled – grabbed the hound by the neck ruff and started hauling it, though he made little headway. Then he stopped and looked anxiously at his da.

  ‘It got away from me,’ he said. ‘You made me take the collar off and the leash with it,’ he added bitterly.

  ‘Here,’ Batty said, reaching out and plucking a morsel off John Wallis’ plate. ‘Dangle this and he will follow you, meek as a lamb.’

  Willie looked, nodded, then went off, holding the meat as high as he could while the dog padded after. No one spoke until John Wallis shoved his plate at Batty.

  ‘Since you have fouled it with your fingers, you had best eat the remainder,’ he growled. ‘Pass him the salt.’

  Suddenly, the hall filled with mutter and business and Batty could not speak for the racing of his heart; he had been offered meat and salt and so accepted as a guest by Twa Corbies. No harm would come to him now – he heard a familiar cackle of laughter and turned into the wizen of Trottie’s face, wondering at how she had come along, unseen, with the other riders.

  ‘The De’il looks after his own,’ she said and John Wallis, mild as new milk, waved her away. He watched Batty as he ate, allowing him a few mouthfuls which Batty tried to chew a little and not gulp like the starving man he felt.

  ‘You have supped – will you drink? I have beer and wine and sack. Some Dutch brandywine, gunpowder proved.’

  Batty hesitated, caught between desire and another promise to purge himself of his old life. Bliddy nuns, he thought bitterly, have hagged me with God Himself…

  John Wallis sent his eyebrows into his hairline when no answer came.

  ‘I had heard you were well versed in the ways of war and no stranger to drink. What is your preference?’

  Batty gave in and sighed.

  ‘I am not fashed regarding strong drink and have one proviso only – that it has not been previously swallowed.’

  Beaming, John Wallis summoned a black bottle from someone and poured. It was the brandywine, tested for strength by having some black powder poured into the liquor and the contents lit. If the powder also ignited after the brandywine was consumed, it was a good distillation and Batty knew from the eyewatering smell that it would be. They swallowed, grimaced and grinned.

  ‘So,’ John Wallis said eventually. ‘How will this Maramaldo fight?’

  Chapter Twelve

  Later, at Akeld…

  Maramaldo would fight like the Devil. Batty said as much, though he pointed out that it was not the question John Wallis should be asking – and then told him what it should be, straight out into his scowl.

  Why would Maramaldo fight?

  ‘He fights for pay,’ Batty added helpfully while John Wallis stroked his beard and frowned under his dripping burgonet. ‘So who is paying him to come to Akeld?’

  The Dacre. It was not a difficult tally to add up and when the news of it went round, the howls went up an octave. Tarset and Tyne. Hume. Remember Broomhoose.

  The wind caught the shouts and tore them from mouths, leaping on over the hills like a joyous dog, new-released. The trees were old to the way of it and already all bowing away from the domination of a filthy east wind which was growing in viciousness.

  ‘We’ll have weather,’ said Chilman, squinting at the lead sky. Then he grinned through his mad beard at Batty, who agreed soberly and then nodded at the sight of the man’s rag-bound hand, too bulky with wraps to fit in a gauntlet.

  ‘Sorry for your loss,’ he said and Chilman’s grin widened.

  ‘Och, dinna fash. It is a rare tale to tell round the inn at Wooler – how Batty Coalhouse and me fought, tooth and claw until he toothed and I lost the claw.’

  He laughed and reined away, became one more figure in a jack of plates, big boots to the thigh and a combed burgonet. Like all the others he had a man-and-a-half long Border lance, which they called a stave, slung round one arm by a hoop of leather to let him free both hands. At his waist he had a belt with a bollock dagger on one side and a basket-hilted blade on the other and his horse held the dangle of a latchbow, a targe and a leather cylinder of bolts.

  He was no different from the hundreds of others, now moving silent on shoeless horses, so well used to making sure no bridle jingled nor scabbard rattled that they did it in broad daylight among an army of men.

  Batty was aware of his lack – he had his dagg still, but it was loaded with his last charge of rosary beads and he suspected he would not be offered fresh powder and shot. He had his backsword and six wee throwing knives, plus a stiletto down his boot, so he was not toothless, but he rode a gift-horse he did not know at all and had John Wallis and his picked men round him, to make sure he did not take it into his mind to gallop off.

  John Wallis had shown interest in the
cylinder, but had not pressed the point when Batty had told him it belonged to the nuns and held ‘wee writings from their auld monastery’.

  ‘God did not dispose well on their behalf,’ he noted wryly, ‘to have ridden them into the path of red war in the Cheviots.’

  Batty had thought then what he thought now – that it was no accident or hand of God which had placed Maramaldo and nuns at Akeld, though he could not work out the why yet. Mad Jack was in it, all the same, he was sure of that – Dacre would use him to keep his good name out of matters – but Batty could not understand why Mad Jack would contract Maramaldo to hunt out the sister he had sent Batty to rescue.

  He found out when he came over the rise and looked down on Akeld, while the wind wheeped and sucked and danced. It tore at mane and hair and beards, whipping through the moor, snapping the banners of Maramaldo’s Company, drawn up round Akeld’s bastel.

  They had Companies of pike circled in schiltron, with stirrup-drawn crossbows safely protecting them. Longbow archers, too, Batty saw, and some matchlock muskets – and the two sakers occupying one side.

  ‘The banners,’ Batty pointed out and the entire of it fell into place, like squinting at one of Michaelangelo’s drawings in the bad tallow light of an inn until you finally realised that the face was your own.

  ‘What of them?’ demanded John Wallis, while his Border horse careened off right and left, whooping and shouting. Batty told him.

  There was the Company’s banner, white silk with a splendid black rose on it and the old ache of that made Batty blink. He could not see the words underneath the rose clearly, but he knew them by heart – Jay Lay Emprins.

  ‘It means “I Have Undertaken”,’ Batty told John Wallis, though he did not add that ‘empreigne’ also meant ‘to make pregnant’. The joke was that the banner also read ‘I Have Fucked You’.

  There was also a blue and white banner, big as a bedsheet, the colours split diagonally. That one belonged to Zurich and came from the Zwingli forces at Kappel when they went up against the other Swiss cantons and lost. The fancy one, Batty told them, the one split into arrowheads of red, white, blue and gold, was the Jehovasonne, with its golden rayed sun in the centre and a symbol which was the name of God in Hebrew.

  ‘Protestant flags,’ Batty explained, ‘displayed when Maramaldo fights for that cause against Catholics. He has another, a golden one with a silver cross that belonged to the Duke of Ferrera that he flies when he fights Lutherans. You will not see that one anywhere today.’

  John Wallis looked and frowned and still did not understand.

  ‘You are a Catholic rebellion,’ Batty explained grimly, ‘and those wee nuns, innocent wee wimples that they are, are proof of it. Maramaldo is out to get himself back into the good graces of Fat Henry Tudor by putting down a Catholic revolt. And Dacre gets his revenge on you.’

  The Wallis scowl went deeper by a notch.

  ‘He claims us as Jesuits? God, the lie in it.’

  He banged a fist on his knee, making the horse shift nervously.

  ‘He has not won a bliddy thing,’ he growled, ‘and he will recant his claims on us when I stick steel in his dancing-master beard – I thought you said this was Dacre revenge for the Tolbooth?’

  It was and Batty told him as much; disguised as something else and using men who flew no Dacre scallop-banners or Red Bulls to tie him in directly with the deed. Wallis shook drips from the brim of his burgonet and swore at the perfidy of it.

  There was a thump, as if a giant smith had slammed a hammer into the moorland; they felt the tremble of it right up through the horses, which shied and squealed.

  Something whirred overhead like a mad bird, hit a copse and splintered through it for a long way. Bar shot, Batty recognised – two balls joined by a short length of bar-iron and the whole capable of ripping entire ranks to ruin.

  He told John Wallis, who blanched at the sight of the cracked trees, the trunks white as broken bone.

  ‘Keep away from the front of those guns,’ Batty advised. ‘Look – they have a plank platform to let them roll easier but are not fascined or gabioned – not bulwarked so that their movement to right or left is limited. He can swing them if he wants, though they are monstrous heavy to move swiftly. Thirty degrees – any further will recoil one into the other…’

  His words were whipped away by the gusting rise of wind and Diamant capered round the legs of Will Wallis’ already fractious nag, so that he fought to hold it and his da looked sourly at him.

  Will Wallis, Batty thought. What a burden is in that name for a wee lad – I swear bairns weep at the moment of birth because they know what their parents will foist on them with baptism.

  The Names fought like moonlit riders, knots of them attached by kin and old ties darting forward with yells and screams – Tarset and Tyne. Hume. Robson. A-Dodd, to me.

  Batty saw Trottie, dancing on her thin ankles and waving her arms in what might have been spell or simple excitement, screaming: ‘Get to them. Divven give them fortune this day. Slay them German money-sojers.’

  The German money-sojers were unfazed at first – the long pike-spears kept the riders at bay, as they were designed to, but the killing part of the Sable Rose was less than effective, thanks to the wind.

  It caught the crossbow bolts and hurled them sideways. When the prized longbow men launched their hissing volleys, the wind scattered them like chooks.

  The Border Riders rode up and stabbed, retired, came back in little flocks and flurries, shot off pistols if they had them and latchbows when they hadn’t, so that men started tumbling beneath the proud Sable Rose banners; the Wallis men cheered.

  Twa Corbies might win it after all, Batty thought, if this wind keeps up and there is no shortage of powder, shot or bolts.

  Something smacked his helmet and he jerked, thinking it a spent missile. Will’s nag went into a mad frenzy of buck and kick, so that the boy flew off and, just as his father reined round to go to his aid, he cursed and flapped one hand, struck by something on the gauntlet.

  Then the missiles streaked in – hail, Batty noted with amazement. Large as chicken eggs…

  The war stopped. Horses bucked and bolted, men yelled and ran. The pikemen hunched up and dropped their long spears to shield their heads as the hail pelted down on them like the wrath of God.

  Batty fought with his own horse, hanging grimly on as it squealed and tried to bolt, circling only because Batty held it on a tight right rein; he wondered how long it would be before the beast remembered to buck.

  It never did, for the stinging barrage slackened to a wash of ice-water, a torrential downpour that closed the world to something seen through a dark glass. Weather. In the name of Christ, this is weather indeed even for the Cheviots. Batty fought the horse to a trembling standstill and suddenly found Chilman at his knee, waving his filthily-bandaged hand.

  ‘Yon guns…’

  Batty stared uncomprehendingly for a moment, then realised what Chilman was saying – the sakers would be sluiced to ruin, the slow matches out and the powder no doubt drenched to a black slorach.

  ‘Have you pins?’

  It was a shrewd question roared out above the hissing bellow of water from a man who knew a good gunner always carried such – the spikes for hammering into the touch holes of guns, thus rendering them useless. It was the final act a gunner could do when his weapons were in danger of being overrun and Batty’s last trio of spikes were in three bands on the bandolier not occupied by apostle charges.

  His one hand was too full of reins to reach for them, an instinctive gesture – but his face was as much of a betrayal and Chilman nodded, his beard scattering droplets and his grin gapped as a badly-copsed wood.

  ‘Aye, Headman John thought as much – come with me.’

  Cursing, Batty forced the uneasy horse in the wake of Chilman’s own, the rain battering down like an emptied pail. Grey shapes loomed; more Wallis men and John Wallis in the centre of them, his beard dripping.

&n
bsp; ‘Ride for them engines, boys,’ he roared, spitting water with every syllable. ‘Ride with Batty here, who will drive a stake into each black heart o’ them.’

  Tarset and Tyne. Wallis men… the roars went up and temporarily drowned the mad-snake hiss of the rain. Batty met John Wallis’ steady gaze with a miserable one of his own which told the Laird of Twa Corbies all he needed to know; he grinned back into Batty’s bad-cess glower.

  ‘Away, Batty,’ he bellowed and slapped his backsword down on the horse’s rump – with an outraged squeal and a whip of wet mane into Batty’s face the beast was off. There was nothing left but to hang on and pray to a God Batty was convinced now hated him personally.

  * * *

  Maramaldo felt the horse go out from under him as it turned and twisted, set to trembling by the battering of hail and so nervous now that it skittered at shadows and flicks seen at the corner of an eye.

  One such set it dancing sideways on the treacherous mud. All four hooves scrabbled frantically for grip, scouring up ruts, there was a moment of whirling and a thump that drove most of the air from him, then Maramaldo rolled in a welter of filth and wet.

  He had just enough time to think himself lucky for having spilled free of stirrup and tangle when he crashed into something solid and the rest of the air whoofed out of him.

  He was gone from the world for only a moment or two, blinked back into the sheeting, blinding rain and the realisation that he was hard up against a great circle of wood and iron. Wheel, he thought, half dazed. A wheel on one of the sakers…

  The horse was gone – treacherous lump, Maramaldo thought, for all it cost. I shall feed it to the Company…

  There was a thump and a spray of watery mud; Maramaldo looked up and into the grim drip of a familiar face, melted with age and the distortion of water.

  Balthie Kohlhase.

  * * *

  Batty came off the horse awkwardly when it lumbered almost on to the guns; he landed badly, stumbled on to the shriek of bad leg and fell heavily on the wooden deck, where he lay for a moment with the rain in his eyes.