Burning the Water

by Robert Low

  Serve ye right, ye poor-tin Nostradamus, Batty thought triumphantly, then turned to where Sister Faith stood aghast, both hands clutching her damask tight round her.

  He bundled her out of the panoply, felt the fuse burn down, heard the deep-throat crack and saw the bastel light up like a sick dawn. There was a moment, an eyeblink where he flung Sister Faith to the ground and fell on her, hearing the air oof out. He had time to wonder if she thought he had been overcome with lust after seeing her naked – then the huge roaring pressure crashed on them like a wave.

  He was shifted by it, heard something slam into the bastel roof, scattering tiles. His ears buzzed and he knew it was the same for her; their mouths moved, wet and silent and he could not even hear his own voice let alone hers.

  He forced himself upright, staggering, half-turned to see the panoply collapsed and on fire – yon wee brazier, he thought dully. In the middle of the flames something struggled in a shroud of burning canvas and he knew it was Cornelius. Magic yourself oot o’ that, he thought viciously.

  He heard her voice then, thin and far away and urgent. He stood for a moment, trying to understand, watching the tent burn, watching the rain of embers sift like falling stars. Stood in a blaze of burning, hearing the faint cries, the screams, growing louder, feeling the world turn under his feet, knowing what babies know when they wake crying in the night.

  ‘God save us,’ said a buzzed voice he knew as Sister Faith. ‘What have you done?’

  What I always do. Unleash Hell into the world with powder and slow match. He turned and looked at her through smoke heavy with human fat, looking for God and seeing only her in her winding sheet, pale face horrified. I am forever blowing things up, he thought dully, then was pinked with anger at her.

  ‘The Archangel Michael with flaming sword,’ he said, hearing the words now as if from far off down a wynd. ‘That’s what you wanted, Sister. Beware of what you pray for.’

  Behind her, he saw a figure lurch unsteadily out of the bastel doorway and now the screams and shrieks were everywhere. Batty and Juup saw each other at the same time and Juup got to his blade first, drew it, brandished it and roared a challenge.

  Something dark slithered down the tiles of the roof, teetered on the edge and fell on him with a wet slap; Batty watched the dark descent of it, a boulder-sized chunk of what had been an ox, landing with an ugly sound. From under it’s splayed back legs and spattered entrails, Juup’s arm twitched once, twice and then was still.

  Batty stared, vaguely aware of the noise behind him, including the blare of a trumpet. How low did you need to be in the estimation of God, he thought, to die ingloriously under the back-end of a deid ox?

  ‘The children,’ Sister Faith said, made the sign of the cross over Juup and tugged Batty by the wrist. He followed her into the dark of the bastel.

  The door had long been burned and torn away, so there was no barrier there, but beasts shifted nervously and squealed in old stalls – Maramaldo’s finer mounts, kept drier and safer. Above, the trap to the next level was open and a voice echoed hoarsely down it.

  ‘Juup? Is that you? Juup? Where is Sabin? What is going on?’

  Not ‘Captain General’. Just Sabin. There is the full measure of Rafael’s standing with Maramaldo’s old guard, he thought.

  The ladder shifted and a figure came down, awkwardly fast. At the bottom, he froze to stillness at the cold touch of steel on his neck.

  ‘Holy Cross,’ Batty said, seeing the scars. ‘Who is above? Itemise them all or I will open your thoughts to the light of day.’

  Holy Cross thought he might get from under the barrel before the whirr made the spark that ignited the powder in the pan. The thought lasted a heartbeat and no more.

  ‘The kinder,’ he said, resigned and bitter, ‘Babe and all.’

  ‘No one set to watch?’

  ‘Me.’

  Sister Faith was already on the ladder, the damask cloth flung over one shoulder because she could not climb with it wrapped round her. For a moment Holy Cross stared at her naked rear before a hard poke with the barrel changed his view.

  The trumpet blared again; Sabin was out there, trying to bring order to the chaos and realising now who had done it. Realising all his powder store had gone.

  Batty jerked his head to where the lurid blood-glow flared and dipped as the Big Tent burned away to nothing and Cornelius with it.

  ‘Get gone,’ he said to Holy Cross, giving him a shove. The man looked warily at Batty, expecting to be shot in the back as a cruel jest just as he reached the door. It was what Maramaldo might have done and Batty saw his look and curled a lip.

  ‘Run or die.’

  Holy Cross ran. Batty stuffed the dagg into his belt and climbed the ladder to the upper croft, wary as a dog fox in a farmyard.

  He saw Sister Faith, naked and sliding into a dress provided by Sister Charity, who scowled at him and told him to turn his back. Sister Faith laughed.

  ‘He has seen more of me than even Christ himself,’ she said and Charity signed the cross by reflex – then laughed.

  ‘Aye – we are far from the convent now, Sister.’

  ‘Is any other here?’ Batty demanded, looking round suspiciously.

  ‘None but childer,’ Sister Charity replied and they came out of the shadows, as if summoned – Batty struggled to remember their names, but they announced them to save him the trouble, each one accompanied by a curtsey, as if they were dressed in their finest instead of char-smeared rags. Joan, Margaret and Alice. Sister Charity, now that Sister Faith was decent in homespun, plucked the baby up and cooed him to quiet with his name – Stephen.

  ‘Daniel you know,’ Sister Faith said and there he was, gangling and hunched, with his glower and pearl-drop earring and a knife in his belt that he wanted in his hand. Batty nodded to him.

  ‘Understand me, boy,’ he said. ‘Men will be coming for us. If you look to me to be aiding them in any way, I will…’

  ‘What did you do to Juup?’ Daniel demanded in a voice that wanted to be broken but wasn’t yet. Batty blinked and realised that, of all Maramaldo’s men, the boy had fastened on to Juup. Maybe he saw him as a father because that was long-lost from him – if he ever had one at all. Batty recalled his own and the lessons dinted into him, done with love and harshness both. He had no milk of human kindness left.

  ‘Dead,’ he answered blankly. ‘Just outside the door.’

  ‘Did you kill him?’ the boy demanded, trembling hard enough to vibrate.

  ‘In single combat? Blade against blade, all glorious like you imagined?’ Batty responded hoarsely, then laughed, shaking his head.

  ‘Half a coo fell on him,’ he declared. ‘He is lying under it covered in shite. That’s how paid sojers end up, boy, that or something kin to it There is little glory in war.’

  ‘You killed him.’

  ‘Aye, aye – I threw the hind-end of an ox at him with my single mighty arm.’

  ‘You blew up the camp.’

  Batty saw the boy was wide-eyed and angry; he threw off the comfort of Sister Charity’s arm and moved into the shadows. Batty watched him go and then turned quietly to Sister Faith.

  ‘Watch that Daniel,’ he said. ‘Best if he does not get near a serious weapon. We have to hunker in here for a while until the weight of Wallis and the Trained Bands of Ogle come down on a Sable Rose with no powder nor shot for their fancy guns.’

  ‘He’s a boy,’ Sister Faith answered. ‘Afraid and having been put through a deal in the last few days.’

  ‘So have your girls,’ Batty pointed out. ‘So have you and Charity. None of you look to the likes of Juup and Holy Cross to soothe their tremble.’

  She had more to say but he moved away from it to a slit window, trying to see if any of the shouting and horn-blowing was making anything better out of the chaos. He did not want better, but Sabin was good. He was no Maramaldo, but he was good enough to shuffle them into shape.

  There was a sour smear of milk-light her
alding dawn; with luck Ogle’s men were already approaching and with even more, Wallis would appear with his lances and riders.

  He heard the trapdoor open and turned in time to see Daniel vanish down it like a stoat down a hole.

  ‘Christ – was no one watching him?’

  He scrambled down the ladder in time to see the heels vanish out the door and cursed him to the ninth circle of Hell, then followed – only to come to a skidding halt at the sight of the boy held in the cradling circle of an arm. Behind it was a face and another arm with a dagg in it; it looked like the tunnel drop into a dungeon pit.

  Sabin grinned. ‘You will call off those dog-riding prickers and the Trained Band. Else I will kill the boy here and then start on those cursed nuns and their childer.’

  Batty felt the cold haar of morning settle on him, all the way to the bone and the depth of his belly; his arm and hand did not feel like it was his own, but he raised it anyway, the axe-handled dagg fat and heavy.

  ‘You should know,’ he said levelly, ‘that as soon as yon lad goes down, I will blow the inside of your head so far away you couldnae find it with maps and almanacs.’

  ‘I was coming to you…’ Daniel said hoarsely and had it cut off by Sabin’s hand on his neck.

  ‘You will not risk this stupid boy,’ he said. ‘I know you Barthelmy. You are soft on kits.’

  There were shouts and more trumpet blasts, making Sabin jerk his head round, then back again; Batty knew that the Sable Rose had spotted the enemy.

  ‘Your bairns are calling you, Rafael. No’ easy to be the leader, is it?’

  ‘Do what I ask, Barty – else you are of no use to me.’

  Batty saw the boy get his hand on the hilt of his knife and wanted to cry out for him to stop, but knew that would spark everything up. Instead, he did a foolish thing – he lurched towards Sabin, who reared back and fired.

  There was an instant of smashing pain on Batty’s chest; he felt the impact of it throw the legs out from under him and propel him backwards so that he fell and skidded in a mist of dirty smoke. He lay, gasping for breath and unable to get any in or out; something trickled on his skin.

  Shot through, he thought bitterly, mouth sucking like a landed fish. Bloody stupid way to die. Heard screams but they seemed far away and he finally managed a breath just as the whirlpool void sucked him in to oblivion.

  Twa Corbies Tower

  A week later

  Four he hurt, an’ five he slew, till down it fell himsell O; there stood a fause lord him behind, who thrust his body through…

  ‘Yer back I see. The De’il still needs you loose in the land.’

  He blinked and swam for a bit before everything settled on Satan’s own imp in the person of a hag with a face like scorched leather flap. He knew the face, fought for voice and eventually managed a croak.

  ‘Where…?’

  ‘No’ Heaven – the Wallis tower at Twa Corbies.’ The voice pinched him like thumb and forefinger, slapping some recognition into his fog.

  ‘Trottie.’

  ‘The same. You should be deid.’

  ‘He is not, clearly. I will thank you not to slather him with whatever cow-piss remedies you used last time you met.’

  Trottie drew back and squinted at Sister Faith. ‘I spent most of my time wiping the contents of yer own wee potions, blood and some noxious grease – they vials he had tucked up under his doublet, which broke. There was some pottery bits as well.’

  She paused and glared from one to the other, then made the horn-sign to Sister Faith’s signed cross. ‘I said last time I saw them. I said then so I did – that’s no poison or love potion you had in them wee jugs. Yet there was power there. I wiped away a deal of blood and found no wound, only a great bruise like the hoof of a horse.’

  ‘Probably the pale rider,’ Sister Faith threw in tartly. ‘Looking for you.’

  ‘Ha – he can look…’

  ‘He will find you in iron chains at the stake,’ chimed a new voice and Sister Charity thrust her face into the debate. ‘If ever you leave this moss, besom.’

  Trottie hissed like a cat, then scuttled for the door, trailing a cracked bell of a laugh.

  God, thought Batty. I instantly knew I had not made it through the Gates when I saw her face… but he could not work out why he was still on God’s good earth at all…

  ‘Sabin?’ he croaked and Sister Faith nodded as if she had expected it.

  ‘Daniel stabbed him in the cods,’ she said, ‘but that was after he shot you.’

  ‘I felt it,’ he managed. He felt it shoot him through the backbone. Straight through his heart – how was he not dead?

  ‘This,’ Sister Faith said and presented the wooden bowl, cradled in her hands like a loving cup; Sister Charity crossed herself and muttered prayers.

  It was inside my jack, Batty remembered. Coddling yon wee vials.

  ‘Mair uses then just to drink broth from,’ he croaked and Sister Faith smiled softly and Charity clapped her hands with seeming exultant joy.

  ‘Is that what you did with it? Well, there it is. Not turned to dust nor ash. Thought worthy. The Archangel Michael right enough…’

  Sister Faith held up the rough-carved bowl and turned it this way and that, reverently, gently. There wasn’t a mark on it, as she pointed out.

  ‘Yet this is where Rafael Sabin’s shot struck. I suspect the shot struck a little more off-centre of the bottom – the resultant mark from the rim is the horseshoe bruise Trottie saw. The blood she wiped from you was Christ’s own, taken from the Cross, vialed up and sealed with the provenance of the Templar knights. Likewise His last dying sweat. The force of the ball broke the pottery.’

  ‘She burned the cloths,’ Sister Charity said bitterly. ‘So there is no more of it. Besom…’

  Sister Faith smiled. ‘The true treasures of Glastonbury, Batty – the blood and sweat of our Lord’s last moments and the Holy Grail he drank from at the Last Supper. You have been anointed with one and blessed to sup from the other. God be praised.’

  Edinburgh

  Winter 1545

  Rafael Sabin was led, hunched over and shuffling from the wound in his groin, to the gibbet in Carlisle and it must have come as a greater shock for him to see Maramaldo there, smiling benignly at him as Sabin danced in the air.

  Yet Maramaldo was under his own sentence of hemping, waiting only on the scrawl of King Henry on a writ for it – but Fat Hal was away raising men for France and he already had the core of a new unit, mainly a grumble of foreign mercenaries called the Sable Rose. That Company was led by a new Captain General known as Holy Cross, who had petitioned to be carried across in the King’s own flagship, the Mary Rose.

  Batty learned all this sitting in the Auld Unicorn, a tavern halfway up the steepest climb of Edinburgh’s West Bow. He listened closely, because no one knew more about what was going on with mercenaries or politics than Leone Strozzi, brother of Piero. Piero Strozzi had fought in Florence – against the Medici for all that he was married to one – and was coming to Scotland, fresh from being soundly thrashed by the Imperials and Spanish in a fight in the Italian mountains and looking for new pastures.

  There were matters Batty knew that Leone didn’t, some of which he exchanged and most of which he kept to himself.

  He did not tell the big bluff man stuffing meat and ale in his beard that two nuns, now homespun goodwives of impeccable character had headed south to the last holding from the Glastonbury pie – a small manor in Kent. Accompanied by some children and a hard-eyed man-boy who would not be put off by any resistance from servants who thought the place forgotten and that they could live as they pleased.

  He did tell Strozzi that the Sable Rose, Holy Cross proudly at their head, had marched on the Mary Rose to be taken to France. Since the King’s flagship had sunk in the Solent north of the Isle of Wight only a month since, Strozzi’s mouth forgot the pie and ale and dropped open for a long time.

  Then he took off his hat and scrubbed his
kiss-curl.

  ‘All dead?’

  ‘Unless God raised them up,’ Batty replied curtly, not wanting to think on faces he’d known bloating in that salty deep.

  ‘God’s Wounds,’ Strozzi breathed, then drank a long swallow and squinted at Batty.

  ‘What of yourself?’ he demanded. ‘I hear you were shot – but you look hale to me.’

  ‘Sabin was never good with a pistol,’ Batty replied curtly, feeling the slow, strangely comforting, ache of the horseshow bruise, glorious as a sunset beneath shirt and jack. He did not miss the bowl, tried not to think of being covered in the blood and sweat of Christ… it would not be real, he thought. Those Templars swore to everything holy because their provenance raised the price of pig’s blood and labourer’s grease.

  But still – it was possible, just possible, that the Lord’s last leakings had transmuted the centuries to anoint me, Batty thought and shivered at the idea. If my lost arm grows back I will be on my knees all the same…

  ‘Brother Piero will be looking for good men when he comes.’

  ‘Not Maramaldo,’ Batty muttered sourly. ‘He will hang if God has the right and Fat Henry finds the time.’

  Yet, even as he said it, he felt… regret. For all he denied it, Batty had been forced to admit that Maramaldo had been right – we are the same, you and I.

  Leone laughed. ‘I would not touch that one with gloves on,’ he said, then signalled for more ale. ‘What say you Batty? You are a good gun-layer and you know how to site and set defences besides. No match with a slow match either I hear…’

  Batty thought about it in the whirl and noise and fug, the smells of ale and farts and old sweat. Someone cranked up a vielle and he raised his head at the tune. It would be Sister Faith, he thought, sending me the Lord’s thoughts on matters.

  O I hae dreamed a drearie dream,

  ayont the isle of Skye.

  I saw a dead man win a fight

  and I thocht that man was I…

  Author’s Note