Burning the Water

by Robert Low

  Flodden. Bigod, Fiskie had turned his head the wrong way again and Batty felt the sudden wash of weary defeat. I will never reach Lanercost, he thought, but wander in circles until this plague kills me.

  The shivering was not all wind, Batty realised, nor even because of imagined wraiths – but he was not surprised when the ghosts turned up a little later. He was almost pleasantried to see them, or so he told himself, if they were all old friends come to escort him quietly to be Judged. His breathing rasped and each one hurt a little more than the last, so he might well be about to stand in front of the Maker.

  Aye, fine for you, who had a life.

  Francesco Azerbi was gloomy as he walked alongside the horse, in the same scuffed and cracked high boots and patched breeks he had worn on the day he’d died. Landriano, Batty recalled, in ’29, when the Spanish Duke of Terranova whipped Count St Pol’s Frenchies.

  We won, he remembered, but Cecco, silly bastard, saw the ball bounce and roll from what must have been the last roundshot fired from Frenchie guns. He went for it as if it was a football match – the look on his face when his leg vanished in a spray of blood and bone was priceless.

  Yet I wept for him, Batty recalled, the last time I ever did for anyone. He was my last best friend…

  I owed you money – besides, your tears were nearly all relief that you still had both legs.

  I had no arm, mind you, Batty reminded him and then noted that Cecco was walking fine enough now.

  A phantom leg for a phantom.

  It was a poor jest under the circumstances and Batty said as much, wondering why Cecco had come to haunt him in the first place. I was your last best friend…

  Not the last. Simoni has that honour.

  And there he was, striding along with his spade beard and his hands full of paper and charcoal, sketching even as he walked.

  Dead then, Batty said and then could not be sure, for Michaelangelo looked the same as he had when they fought for Florence. Even the big horse-tooth smile was the same.

  You should have come with me, Batty. I would have made a statue of you. In gold.

  No David me, Batty told him. Besides, I thought yon Cellini was the goldsmith.

  He did it with gentle malice, for he knew Michaelangelo hated Cellini, his nearest rival in sculpture.

  Pervert! Soddomitaccio! He could not even have a woman the normal way. He stole the gems from the Holy Father’s tiara!

  And off he went into a long litany of Cellini’s faults, a liquid rill of Italian, just as he had in the inn in Florence the night before he had warned Batty he was leaving. His voice trailed after him long after he had gone and the wind blew, eldritch cold and full of old possibilities.

  It hissed at what might have happened if he had gone to Rome and sought Michaelangelo out after all. It whispered wonders about what kind of Batty might have been if Cecco had lived and their friendship gone on. Would he have then, sick at heart, switched sides for four florins a thirty-day to fight in the last bastion of the League of Cognac, the doomed Republic of Florence?

  If not, he would never have met Michaelangelo. Or a burning nun.

  The shivering wracked him and he fought to control it, fought to crush the ‘what ifs’. You don’t do that Batty, he heard himself say aloud. You play the hand you are dealt, in life as in Primero…

  Nor do you let phantasms rent your head like an empty room.

  The thick Borders accent made him turn, head heavy as a twenty-pound shot so that he could feel it wobble on his neck as watched his mother step carefully round a scatter of horse dung, arms clasped round her to hold the shawl he remembered, the one da had got off a stradiot who swore it had belonged to his own mother. Black and fringed, with a swirl of red flowers and firebirds – Muscovite, his da had insisted.

  I never had anything as braw, save memories of hame. Better things tae keep in your heid than ghosts, Balthazar.

  You loved your Graham home, Batty remembered. Even though they hated you for going off with a lad from the Germanies.

  Och, that was just family. You think ye ken them, Balthie, but you dinna.

  Widdershins with that, ma, he mocked – you think you ken me, but you dinna.

  She laid a hand on his knee, standing by Fiskie’s head and looking up at him from beyond the grave with that old, familiar look that ripped the heart from him.

  Every wee lad thinks his ma disnae understaun’ him. Silly wee Balthie…

  Silly wee Balthie, he echoed dully. Who watched her step round the horse dung and then turn to look over her shoulder, her face the grey-blue it was when he found her on the morning she died. Of fever folk said, but it was more than that, with a husband dead and a son maimed.

  Did you enjoy the wedding?

  And he knew she would be there, the Klett bride with her fizzing chaplet of sausage charges, the slow match burning down and her smile flaring out from underneath it.

  She tilted sideways – not just her head, but all of her. Swung sideways at the same time as something struck Batty on the shoulder and the side of his head. He smelled freshly crushed dung and had time to think that he had fallen off Fiskie and where there was dung there was horse and where there was a horse there was…

  * * *

  Bella is stiff and trembling. Batty thought he knew her until recently, thought he had seen all of her, stripped naked, splashing in secret pools in the hills, or lying in the grass chewing a straw and waiting, sloe-eyed, for him to scramble free of his breeks.

  That suited her wildness. The last time they had fucked had been in a rich man’s house, abandoned in haste so that everything was left, from drapery to heavy, dark furniture and even carpets from Arabia.

  In the rich red candlelight, in that setting, her wildness had become something else, at odds with it all. It unsettled Batty as her mood does now. He tries to tell her it is war, that it is foolish to grow attached… but then realises what he says and has to clamp shut on saying more.

  I will kill him, she says to him, sitting and hugging her knees. One day and in the worst way possible…

  Things change, places merge and flow. Maramaldo rides his horse, the one he had at Asti, the one whose legs were torn out from beneath it by the whirling statue of St Secundus, blown from the Red Tower of Asti by Batty’s da. Maybe a leg was whicked off by part of da, Batty thinks, watching the horse, waiting for the moment.

  Instead, Maramaldo leans down and leers at him. We are the same, you and I, but different. Unwanted in decent company…

  And the burning nun who is Sister Faith holds out a hissing chaplet of sausage charges which, for all Batty tries to avoid taking, somehow ends up in his one good hand, with the slow match down to the glowing nub.

  The explosion is strangely soft and slow, an expanding bloom of white light…

  * * *

  The white light blurred and took shapes, took sound. A voice and a face, though it took him a long moment of fighting with the fog in his head to match both to memory and circumstance. He found the face, a long mourn of bad road with a beard fixed on one end and a balding fringe on the other. In between was a single eye bright as a jewelled toad; the other was a puckered ruin of scar tissue, usually hidden under a black cloth bound round his head.

  ‘Stucley Taylor,’ he mumbled and had back a grin and a nod.

  ‘Well, at least you know me and are no longer talking with ghosts and angels called Michael,’ Stucley answered. ‘Your fever has broke at last.’

  Batty became aware of the truckle bed he lay in, walls, a ceiling. There was a half-shuttered window and a peg on the back of a stout door held a grey cloak and a hat with a ratty feather. He lay under a warm blanket and seemed to be wearing no more than a sark.

  ‘Alnwick,’ Stucley declared and Batty let that seep into him and bubble up alarm.

  ‘Alnwick?’

  Stucley nodded.

  ‘Where you are. We found you out on the Flodden moor – bliddy Fortune favours you in life as it does Primero, Batty Coalhous
e, for we were only there at my insistence. Left to the troop I led, we’d have turned back an hour before.’

  Flodden to Alnwick. Fevered…

  ‘How long since?’ he demanded and felt Stucley steady his panic with a firm hand on one shoulder.

  ‘Easy. You are breathing easier, but do not have the legs for springing up yet. Four days is the answer.’

  He paused and frowned, shaking his head.

  ‘You are a tough one-winged old crow,’ he went on, ‘for I have seen the ague you had on others and they mostly died of it. They were not recovered in four days.’

  Four days. Sabin… where was he? And what was happening round Twa Corbies after so long?

  Stucley patted him as if soothing a nervous horse or a sick dog, then told him why he was out on the moor at all with a band of Riders.

  There was no Warden here since Dacre had fallen from favour and the function of it had been taken by the Warden of the East March, Sir William Eure.

  ‘But he died at Ancrum,’ Stucley declared bitterly and Batty recalled that Stucley, ex-gunner and now Land Sergeant at Alnwick, had been a loyal retainer of Eure. He did not think Stucley knew that it was Batty and his guns who had ruined Sir William’s day at Ancrum and vowed not to mention it. Nor of watching the man, swinging and burned at the hands of The Douglas and his men.

  Stucley, left with the mess caused by Eure’s death, was trying to keep the reins of Law tight in the Marches in the midst of a whirl of too much war and too few spare men. When he heard tales of plunder and March Riders around Twa Corbies he rode out with all the men he had – six – to see for himself.

  Batty did not need to hear the rest, could guess it. Discovering not a dozen or even a hundred but thousands involved in a siege round Twa Corbies, Stucley wisely scuttled back into Alnwick, taking with him the fortunately-discovered Batty.

  ‘Now you can tell me the truth of matters,’ he declared, fixing Batty with his one good eye. ‘I know you Batty Coalhouse and it is no happenstance to find you in the middle o’ all this.’

  Batty told him, flat out as a slapped hand on a table.

  ‘I can halt matters if I can get to the Bastard Dacre at Lanercost,’ he ended. ‘Though Sabin will be closing in and probably waiting for me beyond the walls of Alnwick.’

  Stucley stroked his beard for a long time and then shook his head.

  ‘God’s Wounds, if a man is known by his enemies, then you are the best-known in England and Scotland both. D’you think ye can sail up to the likes of a Dacre, even a wee yin such as the Bastard in Lanercost, with a hail-fellow-well-met? And what will you do to persuade him to put a halt to whatever is going on?’

  Batty had no answer to that, but saw that his possessions were all neat and perjinkly hung in a corner of the room – the battered cylinder of Deeds with it. He saw, too, the little wooden bowl and the vials on a table.

  Stucley gave up waiting for an answer.

  ‘I shall send you some broth to put life back in your legs,’ he declared, ‘but now that I ken what is happening round Twa Corbies, I will have to report it.’

  That would be foolish and Batty said so, pointing out that Dacre and Musgrave had contrived to make matters look like a new Catholic rebellion in the north.

  ‘Besides,’ Batty finished. ‘Who will you report it to? There is neither Warden of East nor Middle Marches.’

  Stucley muttered into his beard for a moment or two and then was forced to admit the truth of it.

  ‘Gower would be favoured for the post,’ he admitted, ‘save that Sir William disliked him and his last act was to have him sent south to answer charges. He is in the Fleet Prison and unlikely to be Warden of anything.’

  Gower had been Marshal of Berwick, Batty recalled. Poor wee Red Rowan, he thought, who is having more and more thrust on his shoulders for less and less pay.

  ‘That will be why the great and good are gathering,’ Stucley went on. ‘Grey of Wilton, Sir William’s son Henry, Wharton and the Bull Dacre himself, brother to the Bastard Dacre at Lanercost They will be elbowing and offering favours for consideration of the Warden posts.’

  It took a moment to sink through the last mist of Batty’s brain.

  ‘Wait. Bull Dacre is here? In Alnwick?’

  ‘Never likely!’ Stucley replied with a snort. ‘He is at Norham, though, which his da was Captain of at one point. In 1522, I think. It’s held presently by Richard Bowes, kin to Sir Robert, the engineer who surveyed it last year.’

  He paused, bleared by memories of his former occupation.

  ‘They are filling it full of contramures and peterera,’ he muttered. ‘Slings and murderers, Batty, all modern and loading at the breech. Bull Dacre came out of his own hold at Naworth at the request of the King himself to oversee the works.’

  Once a gunner, Batty thought and then felt weary and despairing; the Bull Dacre at Norham wasn’t the one he needed – or mayhap, he thought suddenly, it is. He is the head of the Dacre Name, called Bull because the banner of the Dacres he flies is a red bull. Only he is allowed to do that.

  The Bull Dacre was also as fiercely protective of his Name as a cat with kits; he would not want his bastard brother in Lanercost spoiling his chances of being made a Warden of the March. Perhaps he might be persuaded to throw his weight against his brother – and Norham was a mere a lick and a spit away.

  Batty blessed the uncanny luck which had felled him on the moor just long enough to be guided to it. He felt a tingle at the thought – Fiskie, too, had stubbornly resisted heading towards Lanercost.

  Christ’s Blood, he thought as he shook himself free of the moment, yon Sister Faith will have me canting on my knees if she keeps up her ‘chosen by God’ babble.

  ‘Aye, well, perhaps he will see me when I am well enough,’ Batty declared blandly and closed his eyes against the suspicion pouring from Stucley. Eventually, after a long time, he heard the man leave; when he opened his eyes, he was alone.

  He creaked his way upright and had to sit on the edge of the truckle for a long time until the world settled, looking at his knobbed knees sticking from under the sark. Not his own garment, he noted, which was hooked up behind the door and still damp.

  Hardly St Michael with flaming sword, he thought bitterly. I can barely sit upright.

  By the time the broth arrived and he had allowed himself to be tutted at by a chap-cheeked woman called Greta, he had graduated to standing upright, though he permitted himself to be chivvied back to bed.

  He found a flask from Stucley and blessed the man for it – good brandywine and, even if it was confiscated and cost Stucley nothing, the thought was a decent gesture. He drank it from his new bowl and sat, examining the vials over and over, poking them with a grimy finger.

  Clay, with firm waxed stoppers and writing all over in the Latin – he knew the shape of the letters, even if he could not read it. There were crosses, too, so it was not some Devil’s work inside, but it made no sense and he tucked them away, finished the drink and secreted the bowl away, too.

  Well, he thought, belching barley and feeling sleep settle on him, I will have to try Norham. There will be a way in, through moat and contremures, inner and outer wards. Avoiding slings and murderers. One that doesn’t involve swinging like a Barbary ape from the walls, or getting drookit swimming – I am ower auld and lacking appendages for such derring-do.

  Cunning, Batty thought. Both to get in and get out – he had people he yet counted friends in and around Norham. The biggest trick of it would be avoiding Sabin. He will have worked out matters, too and though he has trackers and will ken where I am by and by.

  The thought shivered him and then he was comforted, just as suddenly, by the appearance of Bella’s face in his head, bright as sunlight. Yet her words were chill as haar.

  I will kill him in the worst way possible.

  Akeld, at the same time…

  Charity was a lady, wore a dress of green-blue brocade which might once have belonged to a whore or a rich
gudewife. She carried it off well, for all that it was too short and showed her stick ankles, for it was also too tight and her ample curves – those La Tormenta curves – were all displayed. It laced up the front in a coquettish way and Sister Faith knew that it was chosen by a man.

  She came with fruit and meat, climbing the steps to the bare, charred upper floor of Akeld and let through by guards who knew her as Maramaldo’s woman. The news she brought was more sustaining than the food to Sister Faith.

  Twa Corbies held still and Musgrave was furious, the Ogles fretted and all the men were growing bored and wet waiting for Maramaldo’s guns.

  ‘Which have been fixed for a day,’ Charity confided, ‘though he keeps the fact of it secret in the hope that Batty Coalhouse can stop this affair.’

  There was more – Charity had persuaded Maramaldo to at least remove the corpses of the treacherous captains from where they hung, swinging and blackened and crow-picked. Cornelius was gone and good riddance to him. The treacherous Sabin, too, was gone from Musgrave’s army and Maramaldo was sure he pursued Batty. He did not want to send men after Sabin and it was not because he did not want to aid Master Coalhouse but because he could not trust any enough for such a task.

  ‘There is no word of Master Coalhouse,’ she ended, picking up the licked platters and preparing to leave.

  No word. Life hangs by a Coalhouse thread and six days remain before it is severed, Sister Faith thought as she watched Charity leave, her dress iridescent as a blow-fly.

  Yet it was something that Maramaldo held his hand from them and Sister Faith had no doubt God was responsible for that, touching the Captain General with a scorch of shame and redemption. Though even she had to admit that Maramaldo’s own reasons were all to do with advantage; for all that, she offered prayers.