A Dish of Spurs

by Robert Low

  No one knows why save me, Mintie thought – particularly ma, though she does not need to know what is happening to know what might – and I can say nothing.

  She remembered some nights, as a child, seeing the red glare and hearing the shouts and thought how much firmer those memories were for her mother. Without da, she thought, she will be fearful.

  Mintie resolved to be stronger than all, so that when Bet’s Annie and Jinet and Megs fell to telling terror tales, alternately lacing their fantasies and stuffing kertches in their mouths and squealing, she grew annoyed.

  She recalled some of the tales herself. Winter harvests, they called them with grim jest, a reaping of black smoke and cinders and a threshing of luckless captives tossed on Jeddart staffs while the wind blew away the chaff of their frantic screaming.

  She chivvied the women with work and scowls. With Wattie gone there was more to do, so that the day went swiftly, and eventually Mintie found time to climb up to her private place, the floored space above all and just beneath the roof, where there was only her and the scuttle of mice in the kist which held her mother’s treasures.

  She sat and thought about shod geese and slipshod horses and was so nearly on the edge of understanding that it fretted her, so she opened the kist, just to remind herself of better times. Must and mice piss rose up from the folds of what had been her ma’s wedding dress and her own Christening gown. The Nottingham lace, aged down to the colour of old bone, was gone for handsome ruffs and bonnets and fine bedding for the long-tailed family of field mice who had tunnelled through the leather and made it a home, safe from harvest.

  Harvest. Winter harvest, where the frozen riggs blossomed only blood. She shivered and felt her own breasts then, felt the hardness of the nipples, the sensation of it turning her armflesh goosed, and she stripped suddenly and stood, running her hands over her body, pretending they did not belong to her. Will Armstrong, she thought of, with his beard combed out – but she recoiled from it, for she suddenly saw him as if in a vision, lying there all blue and not talking to worms.

  Then, with a sudden flush as if she had been dipped in fire, she felt where Will Elliot’s knee had dug in her, the pit of the stomach, felt his hand. She touched the buttock cheeks of herself, felt the heat as they had been when he slapped them…

  The Virgin bothered her, perched high and looking at her even though Her eyes were raised to Heaven; Mintie turned it to the wall, but the moment was gone, leaving her strange and desolate, mired in the memory of Agnes. She cupped her hands on her own flat stomach and felt like weeping and laughing at the same time.

  The clatter of cooking and the smell of new bread brought her back to the moment and the cold under the roof space, so that she realised with a shock that she had fallen asleep and did not know for how long. Not long, naked, for she might have frozen to death, slipping into the coverlet of coldness as easy as sliding into the burn water on a hot summer’s day, feeling it lave you like a lover…

  The frantic shouting and the barking of Mykkel snapped her into her clothes and spilled her down the ladder to the hall below, and then to the undercroft and out to the yard. Bet’s Annie stood in a circle of women, all silent as crows in a pecked field. One hand was at her breastbone, as if it hurt, the other was clutching the bridle of a horse.

  A limping sick horse, wheezing and sore, and with blood on the saddle and both holsters emptied.

  The Saul, scraped and bloody and minus Batty Coalhouse.

  Chapter Five

  Liddesdale

  Not long after

  His shouts had been wild and ugly, he knew that. Driven out of him when a shoulder smashed into a twisted tree, bouncing him off in a star-whirl of arm and legs until he struck again and crashed through thick bushes and hard stone.

  He skidded and slithered for a moment, then dropped again, struck again, bounced again, falling feet first through a ripping tangle of whin and stunted willow that clawed him almost to a standstill. The final drop, into the reeds and choke along the burn, was almost a kiss in comparison.

  For a long time Batty heard nothing, felt nothing. Then the cold woke him, shivering and shaking him into its bite and the world of pain that was his body.

  And the voices, which froze him more than the air.

  ‘Christ’s wounds – why does himself fret so on this man? He is just a fat auld Graham bastard with the one arm.’

  It was a voice at once irritated, tired – and afraid. Batty would have grinned if the pain had not already twisted his mouth into a rictus of gritted teeth so he would not cry out. Afraid o’ the powrie, he thought, with night coming on the hill of Tinnis…

  ‘It’s not for you nor me to put the Laird to the question, Dog. Find him, kill him, bring proof that it is done. That’s what he said and that’s what we do.’

  This voice was firm and hard, so that Batty knew who led and who followed. The other’s reply was a whine.

  ‘Are you moonstruck? The old fool was shot off his nag by Francie, who has won prizes for his caliver skill. He fell a score of feet at least into the burn.’

  ‘Fifty at least,’ the other corrected, his voice like a splintering of midwinter ice, ‘which is neither here nor there, Dog. Certes, his body isn’t here, nor is the body of the horse Francie swore was downed. So we keep looking.’

  Batty lay on the wet cold, trying not to shake the willows and alder to a betraying clatter, while the sound of plootering and slashing through the choke faded and died.

  The Saul was alive then, Batty thought, so Francie is not as good a shot as everyone thinks. Still, he checked himself as best he could, feeling himself over for the mush of a hole or the sticky of blood.

  There was enough of the latter to almost fool him, but it came from his scraped face, clawed by branches and scree as he fell. His shoulder – the one with no arm to speak of on it – was a mass of agony, and he wondered if they had missed the entire left side of his body when he was baptised, for it seemed to be such an affront to God that He was determined to crush it. Then again, mayhap just the opposite – had he not already lost the arm, it would be gone now, ripped to ruin.

  His leg thundered with pain, but the armless shoulder pulsed with a red, beating heart, and he had to stuff his scarted knuckles in his mouth to keep from any noise as the voices drifted back with the crash and slash through the underbrush.

  ‘Ah, Christ, Dand – enough is enough. It is clear to me he is in Hell, for no man I know will survive a shot of lead from a caliver and such a tumble into a cut like this. It is cold and miserable wet as a witch’s cunny here and… besides.’

  The last was a mutter of fear that let Batty know the man was mortally afraid of the Faerie now, for it was darkening and starting in to rain, a cold slanted sleet.

  ‘Aye, well, you can tell it like that to the Laird, Dog,’ the other one said with a bitter sigh, ‘for I will not search here alone, nor be blamed for giving it up.’

  There was a pause and then an uneasy laugh.

  ‘Mayhap the Faerie have him, horse and all, which is why we cannot find him.’

  The other grunted, grabbed the idea eagerly.

  ‘That will be it, Dand. Lifted into Elfland entire, to be seen in a hundred years.’

  Then they were gone, although Batty lay a long time still and quiet, with the rain soaking him from above and the damp seeping him from below. His thoughts were all fuzzed because of the pain in his shoulder and made no sense, save that he realised that the cold-voiced man had not been insulting the other when he called him ‘dog’. Dog was the man’s name and Batty recalled Will Elliot speaking of a Dog Pyntle who had fled to Hollows, so it might have been him. Dand and Francie he did not know – but he would. If he lived…

  His leg hurt and would scarcely move, but his shoulder was a great red blossom of agony. His helmet was long gone and his head felt swollen inside and out, his stiff sausage fingers brought away viscous streaks of blood. Yet he was not shot…

  He took the thought into da
rkness for a time, then woke suddenly, as if broaching from a stream. Cold. Wet. He had to move…

  He did so, slow and pained. He had his sword, though the baldric was tangled up and it was somewhere at his back and so as far removed as the moon – but he still had a bollock dagger sheathed in his belt and another hidden down a boot. His pistols were all gone and the bandolier with charges. He mourned the expensive loss of them and then wondered about the Saul and five pounds English, snugged up in his pack.

  No use here, even if I had it, he thought. Cannot eat it, or make a heat with it. I must find shelter…

  He crawled along the bracken and reeds to the burn’s edge, stuck his face in and sucked until the cold ached his teeth and his thirst was slaked. Then he rustled and cracked a slow way away from the water, each movement a lance of hurt from that shoulder. He found a curve of rock, dry and sheltered with brush, crawled into it like an animal, dragged in his numbed leg and curled as best he could, wondering if this was his time, the moment Batty Coalhouse left the world.

  It would be a relief from the pain at least, he thought. Like being broken on the wheel… He threw that from him. He had seen it and knew that what he experienced, ravaging as it was, did not compare to being broken on the wheel.

  He remembered the millwheel turning, how it had mesmerised him, shot him back to that day when, just a blank face in a crowd of gawpers, he had watched his kin displayed on the spokes of a breaking wheel.

  His half-brother had been strapped to it, the executioner had slammed an iron hammer on the limbs between the spokes, then braided the broken remains into the wheel and left him to perish, turning slowly in the vagrant wind. It had taken Hans Kohlhase five days to die, while the Elector of Saxony had declared himself well pleased with the judicial removal of such an outlaw. All his breed and those who rode with him, he promised by public decree, would suffer the same – particularly the one called Balthazar Kohlhase.

  It had all been because of horses, Batty recalled, and a wee noble who thought to rob a horsedealer and use his position to get away with it. Mayhap that’s why Mintie Henderson’s request had fired him to an answer – though it had only come to this in the end, just as the last time had resulted in his kin breaking on the wheel.

  He woke later, in darkness, with hunger an egg he had hatched in his throat. Which was a good sign, he thought, trying to move the leg and no longer able to feel it, for a man who has lost his appetite is not long for this world.

  He had kept his appetite, even if it seemed he had lost his leg. God whittles me like an auld stick, he thought bitterly, and yet grinned, cracking the stiffened blood mask of his face, dreaming of food. Kail obsessed him, the wonderful Border stew which folk spoke of in the plural. ‘They is good the second day, best the third’ ran the saying. Yet when the mutton in it was fished out into a bowl, it became singular again. No matter the grammar, it was good eating.

  He thought of the wedding feast of Von Zachswitz, the noble who had cozened Hans out of his horses and bought the law in his favour. He had then discovered that a hard, stubborn man like Hans Kohlhase, ruined horse dealer, made his own law and his kin acted as jury and executioners.

  They had stormed the noble’s wedding feast, which had been the talk of Saxony. They had tied Von Zachswitz and his new bride up, then eaten the salmon steaks stuffed with cress on a bed of white lilies, the snipe pastried with bilberry jelly and speared with their own beaks.

  Then Hans had asked Batty for his expertise and entertainment, so he had stuffed the groom’s mouth with poor powder and hung sausage charges round the forehead of the bride, so that they could both watch the slow matches burn down on each other.

  They were cut to exactly the same length, but no slow match burns precise as its neighbour, which was the entertainment in it; they took wagers on which would be first, mouths full and laughing, long shoved past morality by all that had been done to them in turn.

  The bride’s match was slightly slower, so she just had time to see the fire fizz out of her new husband’s eyes and mouth before her bridal chaplet blew her head to bits. Everyone cheered…

  He shifted slightly, starting in to shiver again, seeing the moon rise up like a silver coin to dance with the burn water. A vixen musked on the bank paused to fix her mask with a delicate paw like any proud lady, sniffed the presence of him and slid away. An owl, shroud-silent, scraped the slightest powder of snow off a branch as it whisked in, then sat and swivelled its blink.

  Batty huddled, smelling damp loam and what lay beneath it, the faint green spikes of bracken, whin and willow. The deep churn of rotted oak leaf and wormcast, warm beneath the frost. He lay there and thought about Dog and Von Zachswitz. About food. About revenge, which is a dish best served cold…

  He found himself sliding into the dark, like a worm burrowing into the loam, and he tried to shake himself, though he was shivering hard enough as it was. Keep awake, he thought. Keep awake. Sing…

  ‘True Thomas lay o’er a grassy bank, and he beheld a lady gay, a lady that was brisk and bold, come ridin’ o’er the fernie brae.’

  * * *

  The Saul had a broken rib for sure and had been banged about so much that Mintie was certain a lung had popped. He had swelled up with the air trapped in the skin, so that Mintie not only had to cut the girth from him to get the saddle off, but to carefully lance him.

  He grunted, too done up to protest much, but seemed easier after the spurt of watery blood and the hiss of escaping air. Mintie knew there was nothing you could do for his ribs or lung save let him rest in the warm and light a candle to Saint Elegius, but she bathed the smaller cuts and found a nastier one on a hind leg which was deep enough to need stitching. When he was stronger than tonight, she thought.

  She shunted him into the Fyrebrande’s big stall, putting the fine horse in a smaller one, which he did not like and showed with snorting displeasure.

  It was when she finally got to moving the saddle that she found the money in Batty’s pack, still snugged up in a shirt to stop its betraying jingle. There was a peck of oats in a similar bag, and then Mintie found the griddle plate, which no sensible Borderer goes without. With that on a fire, a little water mixed with a handful of oats, you could have a hot bannock or two and enough of a meal to keep you until shelter was reached.

  Batty’s griddle, like all of them, was tucked under the flap of the saddle and the hole in the flap led Mintie to it, to the great dinged dent in it and the surety of how the Saul had come by his injuries. Someone had shot him and it was only by the grace of the Virgin’s hand that the animal was not dead.

  But Batty might be, for that’s just where his knee would be, and if the shot had gone through it to do damage to the griddle, he was injured and out in the cold. Yet there was no blood here, and suddenly Mintie was sure that Batty was not dead, though she wondered at her strange certainty.

  The women were flustered as chickens sensing a fox, and her mother had collapsed on her bed so that Bet’s Annie and Jinet were fussing round her. So it was Megs who brought news that Will Elliot was at the gate, wringing her hands as she did so.

  He was a shadow in the gathering dusk, sitting politely and waiting to be asked to dismount, which Mintie did. She was wary of him all the same, arriving into the middle of clear sign that Batty had been hunted and perhaps killed; he was, after all, the Land Sergeant from Hermitage and thus the Keeper’s man.

  She could not stop the blurting from Megs about the return of Batty’s horse, and was forced to watch Will examine it, then nod.

  ‘Good work, wee Mintie. You know your horseflesh.’

  ‘As you might expect,’ Mintie replied tartly. ‘I am my father’s child.’

  He looked at her, judging her demeanour and getting the glimmer of why she was so stiff. He sighed and passed a hand through the tangle of his beard.

  ‘Mintie – I am not the enemy. I came here because two men arrived at Hermitage not long since, asking for the Keeper.’

  Mintie s
aid nothing, just waited, so Will went on, encouraged.

  ‘One of them was Dand the Lamb Ker, whom I know slightly. The other, bold as you please, was Dog Pyntle.’

  Now Mintie’s interest perked like hare ears.

  ‘Him who removed your toes yon time?’

  ‘The same. As if there never had been a Bill made on him, nor did it matter if there was. Asking for the Keeper.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Slapped the pair of them in the jail, o’ course. My, they howled, though. Demanding the Keeper, roaring that they had news, had been on his work – though they would not say what it was.’

  ‘And what did Keeper Hepburn have to say on it?’

  Will shrugged.

  ‘The Keeper left for Edinburgh earlier, with only Hen Graham for company, the pair of them sleekit as wet seals.’

  Mintie sucked her bottom lip at that news, and Will nodded, moving back and forth now, talking as much to himself as her.

  ‘It is clear who the Keeper trusts,’ he added bitterly. ‘Hen Graham is a greased wee fox who hunts my job. The pair I have in the jail made me wonder, Mintie, by God’s wounds they did. I just knew they were up to no good – and the Keeper and Hen Graham are as bad, it seems. Whatever Batty thought was about to happen is happening – and I came here to find him.’

  ‘He is out there,’ Mintie declared, bright and wide-eyed. ‘That pair had a deal to do with shooting the Saul and might well have shot him as well.’

  Will tore off his blue bonnet and scrubbed his head in a fury of fluster.

  ‘Och, what a God-damned bliddy slorach. Batty shot and a Ride out on the Moss. Nor any wee Ride neither, if Batty has the right of it.’

  His swearing in front of her was proof enough of his concern, but Mintie ignored it and told him what she had worked out about shod geese and slipshod horses. Will nodded, for he had worked it out himself. The whole weight of the matter sank him to his hunkers, where he chewed his cap and shook his head, muttering barely audible swearing that would have stripped the gilt off a saint’s statue.