Burning the Water

by Robert Low

  ‘I widnae have thought you cared much,’ Batty replied levelly, ‘considering it was Armstrongs and the ones from Hollows. I remembrance a Dacre kin of yours burned out the timber version of yon tower a few years back.’

  Dacre had the grace to acknowledge it, but with a dismissive wave of one hand.

  ‘This is fascinating,’ Henry Rae declared firmly, ‘but scarcely moot. My lord Dacre – I have confidence in the tale Captain General Maramaldo and Batty Coalhouse bring and so you must you. Jack Musgrave has stirred up a slorach of bad cess out there on the Border and your name is being dragged into the mire of it since folk know Mad Jack as the Bastard’s Buzzard.’

  Dacre hunched himself a little, bringing the fur collar up round his ears. ‘What my bastard brother at Lanercost does is neither here nor there to me.’

  ‘Not true,’ Rae persisted, ‘with respect. Besides – your bastard brother may have no hand in it, but he is bound by reputation to the Musgrave running riot with fire and sword. Folk will talk. They will talk all the way back to the ears of the King and one of the words that will be said will be “rebellion”.’

  He lowered his voice a little. ‘There is Catholic in it, too.’

  Dacre winced. Aye, there it is, Batty thought. Henry Rae was coming here with folded, sealed packets, no doubt plans and plots about getting a Wardenship again. That will float off into the mists and a Musgrave would be the cause of it – twenty years before, a Musgrave had born witness to ‘cross-border transgressions’ that put Dacre in the Tower and a trial in Westminster Hall.

  He got off with that, Batty remembered, but the name Musgrave must itch him. As must the fact that his base-born brother is staunchly Catholic when the rest of his family is not.

  The kinch of it, though, Batty thought, will be an armful of persuasions…

  ‘I am to be persuaded by a murderous burner of cruck houses and an auld ingeniateur who ruined our forces at Ancrum Moor?’

  ‘God moves in mysterious ways,’ Henry Rae intoned piously. Maramaldo laughed but there was too much rheum in it and he fell to coughing.

  ‘A Levantine houri with seven veils is mysterious, sirs,’ he managed at last. ‘God simply seems… mad as a stone-sinking cat.’

  ‘Less of your blasphemies,’ Dacre snapped, then slapped the table loudly enough for them all to wince. ‘Andra. Andra – get in here.’

  Andra appeared, a worn-thin man needing more sleep.

  ‘Take this one to Soor-Faced Tam,’ Dacre ordered, indicating Maramaldo. ‘Tell him to accommodate the Captain General here in the Upper Ward, with all comfort, but that he is not to go anywhere.’

  Maramaldo straightened a little and offered a little neck bow, managing to make it dignified for all that his hair was a plastered memory of greatness, his finery stained and torn and a chancre on his lip wept as much as his liquid eyes.

  ‘I have been here before,’ he said, ‘and each time I ask myself “how did it go so wrong?” So many disappointments, so many opportunities, so much hard work, all squandered.’

  ‘Save it for the hemping,’ Dacre growled. ‘Broomhoose will gie you that on its own.’

  ‘To be fair,’ Batty said softly, ‘that wisnae him, it was his treacherer lieutenant, Sabin.’

  ‘Now commander of the Company of the Sable Rose,’ Maramaldo added bitterly.

  ‘How did that happen exactly?’ Dacre asked, ignoring Andra’s impatient foot-hopping. Maramaldo sighed.

  ‘Musgrave came. He was the one who issued the contract, after all, so he came and spread vicious rumours about what was negotiated. The sums involved were… at variance.’

  ‘You lied to your men about what was being paid out?’ Dacre interrupted incredulously and Maramaldo spread his hands.

  ‘Expenses. Overheads. The differences between florins, guilders and thalars, kreuzers, groschen – and what the fuck are testoons in the name of God?’

  ‘A coinage as debased as the man whose head is on it,’ Batty growled and Dacre wagged a finger at him.

  ‘Have regard for your lip,’ he answered sharply, ‘else you will find it drooping on a hemp loop.’

  Then he turned back to Maramaldo and shook his head with with amusement.

  ‘Aye, doing them out of coin would dae it. Men who fight for money need salted with the full price.’

  That and Maramaldo’s illness would do it. That and the vicious he expelled to show he was still a power – the captains of his Company ill-used and dangling. Maramaldo’s worst betrayal, Batty thought, was to betray what he knew of the governance of a mercenary band.

  Dacre indicated Andra should take the man away. Batty watched Maramaldo shuffle out of the door and could not equate the walking corpse of him with the monstrous chimera he had pursued most of his life.

  Then Maramaldo stopped and turned back, his face a rank pool of strange misery and loathing. ‘She is in my head, Balthie.’

  Charity or Faith. Aye, Batty thought as Andra huckled the man away, either of them will do that – and for a man so steeped in sin any drop of purity polluting his black cess would ravage him. Or mayhap it was the pox crawling through his brain.

  Henry Rae was frowning. ‘He came under my protection.’

  ‘Protected they are,’ Dacre declared grimly. ‘Nae harm will come to them until the trial.’

  ‘Them?’ Batty demanded. ‘You include me in this?’

  ‘Ye are a Scotch gunner caught fairly on the wrong side of the divide,’ Dacre declared. Batty made a sound that made Dacre’s eyes narrow.

  ‘Ye growl at me, sir?’

  ‘I came in the hope of saving your good name – and the nuns still held by a band of mercenaries now controlled by a savage hand.’

  ‘Musgrave will not slay nuns,’ Dacre muttered.

  ‘Musgrave is called Mad Jack for a reason,’ Batty spat back. ‘He has already had his own sister slain and she was the nun I was supposedly sent to save – did you listen to any of this tale?’

  Dacre’s face darkened and Henry Rae was swift to step in to the coiling tension.

  ‘Maramaldo is one who will not be missed in this enterprise,’ he said, ‘but Master Coalhouse is another matter. He has secrets which will assist me if I am to deliver your writ to cease and desist to Musgrave.’

  Dacre hitched his collared gown a little. ‘The only secret I see about him is how he grew a new arm – I had been told he was single winged.’

  Henry Rae looked expectantly at Batty, who grinned at them both with a cemetery of teeth.

  ‘Help me out of this confection,’ he said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Cheviots, not long after

  Fat grey-bellies sagged in a dull sky and spat rain that was danced across clinging grass. A lone pie started from cover and whirred away. No sign of a mate, Batty said eyeing the bird morosely, which is a bad cess. How be, Captain General – how’s the wife?

  He growled the old spell against the curse of magpie, feeling as peevish as the rain and fretted about the nuns; he wanted the business done with and was aware that this was the hardest part of it – sticking his neb back into the man-trap round Twa Corbies.

  ‘A man should avoid three things,’ Henry Rae had advised. ‘War, women and witchcraft – you have courted all of them out in the Cheviots Master Coalhouse.’

  Batty needed no telling on it and said that much, too, tugging at the doublet which he now thought was sent from the Earl of Hell to torment him. The sleeve was empty and fastened to his chest by a bone pin borrowed from Norham – all the contents of it, nine neat scrolls worth a king’s ransom, had been passed to Dacre who had read and stared and read and stared until Batty thought the man would stay pop-eyed forever.

  Instead, he had called for ink and quill and parchment and given Henry Rae the writ to stay the hand of his bastard brother and the Buzzard of Bewcastle. He had not, however, had the grace to present Batty with a replacement jack and so he had been left with the doublet, tight to start with and not helped by what
he still had stuffed inside it – a wee rickle of wool and needle as well as the bowl and its snug of pottery vials.

  Henry Rae was unimpressed by Batty’s mood. ‘Wind your neck in. Remember what good friends we should all be today – Musgrave will not be best pleased at the writ I carry from Bull Dacre and the ones he has dragged into this affair on the promise of advancement or riches that will not now materialise will be well facered.’

  ‘Sabin is the yin to watch,’ Batty said and Henry nodded.

  ‘Which is why we go to Twa Corbies. Musgrave and his rickle of men will be there, but Sabin and the Sable Rose will be yet around Windylaws. He’ll have to make sure of those men before he moves – but if he has any sense, he has guns and nuns both, so that Musgrave will have to honour his contract to the full.’

  ‘Sabin hates you more even than he hates Maramaldo and that’s saying a wheen,’ Henry Rae went on. ‘None of them will pick a fight with me – but you are the notorious Batty Coalhouse, who cut the left arms off a slew of Armstrongs, blew up the tower in Hollows and a powder mill with it and who ruined English hopes and lives at Ancrum. None in this place will have any good humour towards you.’

  ‘I am not planning to invite them to a roast goose dinner,’ Batty answered sullenly.

  ‘I am not asking you to like them, just keep from annoying them.’

  Henry Rae shifted in the saddle; his arse swellings were bothering him and he hated the wet, hated the chafing and, above all, hated the place he was going to – all such camps were thick with swirling diseases, from the Death to the Sweats and everything in between.

  As if all that was not purgatory, he had Batty Coalhouse, with his beak nose and his bearded chin rising to meet it, fat-bellied, one-armed, dressed like a ravaged papingo and dangerous as a canker. There are people, he thought, who are born to rub others up the wrong way; Batty Coalhouse was born to rub the whole world up the wrong way.

  They came up over the lip of another rise of Cheviot, expecting yet more of the same – a treeless sea of sere grass rolling in breakers to a pewter horizon. Instead, Batty reined in and squinted at the funeral-feather of smoke. He needed to say nothing to Henry Rae, who knew well enough what it meant.

  ‘Whose hand did that?’ he asked and Batty peered, rising up a little in the stirrups; Fiskie blew out distaste from his nostrils as a waft of char tendrilled round them. Then Batty lowered himself slowly down.

  ‘Lobsters,’ he said and tried not to let the relief show that it wasn’t the whore-dressed killers of the Sable Rose.

  ‘King’s Men?’ Rae demanded. ‘Are you certain?’

  Certain enough to ride on, Batty thought – then thought better of it and slowed so that Henry Rae could take the lead and wave his fancy Berwick Pursuivant coat at them.

  It was a wee cruck house with a muddy garth and a feed-store whose thatch smouldered. There was blood in the garth, churned up to a froth by running feet. There was blood on the broken cart and on the bodies coiled round their wounds.

  Heads looked up and hands went for weapons; they were all in the new-style red that seemed to be replacing white as the preferred colour of Trained Bands. These were not from London, all the same, but looked the part, with metal helms and pikes and longbows.

  They had started that way at least, but now were festooned with dead poultry and the plunder stripped from the place. A packman’s beast lay dead, all four hooves sticking up like Northumberland pipes; the owner was simply a pair of feet poking from under it and the commander of this troop – or so Batty presumed because he had a horse – had a bolt of blue perse slung over his shoulder and a list in the saddle. He looked them over owlishly, belched, then had the grace to look embarrassed when he spotted Henry Rae’s herald coat.

  Rae went to him and Batty heard him speak, soft and firm while the other nodded and let the perse slip from his shoulder to the bow of his saddle, hoping no one had seen it.

  Twenty men, Batty thought, counting them. None of them looked ashamed and were happily plootering through the scattered debris of someone else’s lives; Batty saw the ravens circle the smoke. It is always ravens, he thought. Them and the pies, that ill-omened bird marked by its failure to weep for Christ on the Cross.

  He saw the sheepfold and the tree and the slow, sick realisation curdled in him that he knew the place, had lain in that cruck house while Trottie moved round him and John Wallis spoke. Had been dunted to oblivion by Mickle Jock under that tree – he wondered what had become of the ram and feared the worst.

  He urged his horse a little way towards the bodies, whose feet alone were revealed, blue-white and marbling. They were bare and not an old woman. A man, then, maybe one of the Wallis chiels set to watch and guard.

  A red coat burst from behind the cruck, chasing a chicken with whoops of merriment and no skill; others laughed and a cloud of memories rose up like fallen leaves, whirling Batty into their midst for a dance he did not want.

  ‘Are you all there, Master Coalhouse?’

  Henry Rae’s voice came with a solicitous face, though there was an irritated cast to it. A man who disnae care to be ignored, Batty thought, shaking the last of old memories from him.

  ‘This is Ventenar Jonas Appleby,’ Rae went on, indicating the mounted soldier, who nodded and smiled slackly. ‘His men are at our disposal and will escort us to Twa Corbies. It seems Musgrave is not there, but others he has dragged in are and the man himself is hourly expected back.’

  ‘He’ll be at Windylaws,’ Batty answered, working it out, ‘trying to get Sabin to shift his engines to where they can knock the stones out of Twa Corbies.’

  ‘Heaven forfend,’ Rae declared. ‘I suggest we get there before that happens.’

  Batty did not think it would ever happen. The weather that had sluiced the war between Wallis and the Sable Rose, had softened the ground too much to move heavy engines and Batty had seen the powder for them reduced to slurry.

  He smiled at the thought. At least that place is secure. All I need now is to have the nuns and bairns safe and my task is done. The idea warmed him, a feeling so strange that he almost laughed. He felt good, his bones didn’t ache as much and he put that down to his own resilience. His wounded leg no longer pained him either and he put that down to God or the Devil, since three women had worked on it and two were Satan’s own, while Sister Faith was firmly on the side of the Lord.

  Henry Rae saw what appeared to be the astonishment of a smile on Batty’s cragged face and almost fell off his horse. He was doubly facered when he heard the man intoning.

  Na! tho’ I gang thro’ the dead-mirk-dail; e’en thar, sal I dread nae skaithin.

  * * *

  The good feeling lasted until Sext, which is when the Wallis men fell on them. Batty had been half-ready for it, fretted with that old feeling that had crept on him at puberty and never left. When the itch and scratch of it finally erupted from the head of a beck his hand was already hauling out the dagg from its horse-holster.

  Appleby was no fool, but the scouts he had out were archers on foot – the only horses belonged to himself, Rae and Batty – so they had little time to react before the mounted prickers came bursting up over the rise and descended on them, howling ‘Tarset and Tyne’ and a clamour of grayne Names.

  Appleby was bawling out for his men to form, halberds up to allow the archers to nock and draw. The Border horsemen knew the trick of it and relied on speed and shock to shatter that idea, so that the one who rode down on Batty had his latchbow in one hand, lance in the other and reins in his snarling yellow-toothed mouth.

  Batty did not wait; Fiskie was starting in to dance, so he prayed for dry powder and a working pyrite and triggered the engine. The wheel spun, the pan flashed and the affair went off with its usual fearsome noise and kick; there was flame and a great deal of smoke.

  The man vanished out of the saddle and his horse veered off, squealing at the noise. Fiskie, well used to it, stood his ground – good for you, auld freen, Batty thought and had no t
ime for more; a second rider was closing out of the white smoke of the pistol, this one with a basket-hilt and a good three feet of steel whose edges were the only bright part of it.

  He cut, Batty ducked it – the horses slammed together and Fiskie grunted and went sideways, tangled his feet and fell. Batty felt him go and kicked free from the stirrups, then hurled himself away so he would not be trapped.

  There was a thumping whirl of muddy bracken and sky then Batty was on his hands and knees, whooping in fresh wind. He still had the axe head dagg and saw the rider, savage with triumph, kicking his mount closer and leaning down a little to get a good cut.

  Batty flipped the dagg, dodged the blow and slashed ruin into the horse’s muzzle with the axe head; it shrieked and leaped away, trailing blood from its open mouth while the man, off balance, gave a hoarse cry and fell, rolling to Batty’s feet.

  He had no chance, scarcely even time to throw up a useless warding arm before Batty rained blows on him in a frenzy of fear. When he came to his sense again, he was sitting on the wet grass with a fistful of clotted gore, staring at the ruin of the man’s face. His ma would not know him, Batty thought and then glanced at the hand clutching the muddy grass so hard it had squeezed between the knuckles. One finger was missing, an older wound but still raw. But I ken him, Batty thought. Chilman. Ah Christ… I took his finger, now I have taken his very face and his life.

  He heard Fiskie whicker and turned to see the horse on its feet, trembling slightly but standing patient as a dog. There were shouts, but fading and he heard the thrum and wheep of arrows; the Wallis Riders wouldn’t stand for that and were off, shooting wee latchbow bolts back as they went.

  ‘Are ye hurt?’ demanded Rae, riding up; his blade was bloody but his face was grim. Good for you, wee herald, Batty thought, levering himself to his feet.

  ‘Were they them money-fighters from the Germanies?’ demanded Appleby, red-faced and wild-eyed.

  ‘Wallis men,’ Batty declared and Rae agreed. Batty indicated the bloody fretwork of face.