A Dish of Spurs

by Robert Low

  The rain lashed down and Sore Jo cursed it, while Black Penny held his cupped hands until they were overflowing, then wiped them over the dog’s nose; it wagged the ragged tail in an ecstasy of love.

  The others, hunched and dripping, started to make more whine than the dog, so Penny straightened and nodded.

  ‘Clym,’ he said and set off.

  * * *

  Up high on Tinnis, Clym and six others huddled round the grey ash that had been Batty’s fire, wishing they had one of their own but shackled to the dark by Clym’s order to give nothing away.

  Clym wound his axe-dagg in the velveteen black, the ratchet sound of the turning wheel a grate on everyone’s nerves. His was the only gun they had; like most Borderers, they distrusted the unreliable weapons, preferring the longbow, or in tight spaces like this, the hand-spanned latchbow – though not powerful, at these ranges it would stick a man in his vitals well enough.

  The place was tight, certes. And empty – or so they thought at first arrival – beyond a bracken bed and the ashed pit fire and some stacked dry wood and kindling. The dog had snuffled round the bracken bed and Black Penny had been satisfied that Batty had slept there long enough to reek it, though Penny was worried there would not be enough smell to salt the dog’s nose.

  Then Unhappy Anthone had found the wee rickle of knitted wool and held it up like a Truce Day football prize. One sniff of that and Beauchien had stretched his neck and bayed, shattering the dark and bouncing the echoes all round.

  ‘Go and get him,’ Clym had ordered, and then settled to wait. They had heard the dog baying since, heard the low sullen rumble of the thunder and sat in the dark hidey-hole, waiting.

  The flash and flare of lightning made them all jump, but the entrance was around a wee elbow and so the worst of the light only made Faerie stone shadows dance on a wall of it. Corbie Mart was sure they could have had a fire anyway, since it could not be seen outside at all, and Clym hushed him angrily and then put him right on it.

  ‘The smell of the smoke,’ he growled. ‘And us shown up between it and whoever is outside, easily seen and shot at.’

  Not in the wet, Corbie thought moodily. Unless he has a bow, and nothing told of Batty had revealed an ability to bend a longbow with one hand, even if the tales were already crediting him with walking on water.

  Even a latchbow would be a trouble for a one-armed man to span – so it would be a dagg or two, which is what Corbie had heard. In this weather, you might as well bare your arse and fart, for the result would be the same – a funny wee noise, some noxious fume and not much else.

  Corbie Mart did not voice it all the same, and hunkered in the dark with the rest, waiting and thinking of Mosspaul and decent drink.

  He warmed himself at the thought of Batty, one arm dripping, miserable wet as a drowned rat, half crouched to get in the low entrance and raising his head at the last to discover himself and Clym and all the others, with basket-hilt blades, parry daggers and Clym’s fearsome axe-butted dagg.

  The rain rushed down like a wind, blew damp in the entrance and the smell of mulch and grave earth. No one other than Clym liked this hole. The others had all seen the Faerie work in it when they had ducked in, their shadows capering madly in the torchlight, and marvelled at anyone having risked staying here at all. Corbie Mart, for all the storm banged and fizzed and lashed outside, would not spend one eyeblink longer than he needed to. Clym, who had spent nights here, was scathing with his glare.

  ‘D’ye think they got him first?’

  ‘Shut your hole.’

  Corbie Mart subsided moodily, no longer warmed by the wait. He sat and listened to the rustling rush of the rain, the plip and spatter of it off the rim of the cave entrance. He saw a little red eye winking at him. He blinked, rubbed his eyes and looked again. It winked at him like a one-eyed rat; his belly dropped away and he felt colder than snow.

  ‘Clym?’ he said and, exasperated, Clym growled inchoately.

  ‘There’s an eye.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A wee eye. Outside. Winking at me. Like a rat with one eye shut – but it is a bit big to be a rat if that is its eye. Mayhap… it might be a bogle.’

  ‘Christ, Corbie – are you wittering witless?’

  ‘A bogle,’ repeated Red Will’s Tam and laughed scornfully. Unhappy Anthone sniggered an echo.

  The sudden arrival of the object made them all leap and curse. It bounced into the cave and rolled quietly around for a moment, while everyone brought their weapons up, and Clym only avoided shooting the thing by the sheerest willpower.

  ‘See?’ said Corbie triumphantly. ‘A wee red eye…’

  The thunder rolled, but as Clym saw the flash of lightning, blue-white and blinding, he knew it was Batty, even before the black shadow of the one-armed man lit the wall of the cave.

  That was a blink before the wee red eye of the nubbed slow match burned down with scarcely a sound against the sizzle of the rain, burned down to the neck of Batty’s aqua vitae flask, long emptied of the contents and refilled with all the powder and shot Batty had, stuffed full as an egg is of meat.

  It blew up with a sound that shattered the world of everyone in Ill-Made’s cave.

  To Batty, it was no more than a dull thud and a dragon’s breath of hot air from the entrance, blowing out dust and the stink of powder and blood.

  He sat back and let the rain run off him, blinking it from his eyes; ‘no match with a slow match’ had been the proud boast of his company to all the others. Balthazar Kohlhase has no peer when it came to making and trimming fuse to the perjink second, none for the making of granadas with powder and iron scraps and shot.

  He had spent a long time at it in the last moments of refuge in Ill-Made’s hidey-hole, knowing he would have to leave it and could never come back. He had been vindicated with the very first bay of the dog, its exultant cry at having picked up his scent. There was only one way it could have been given a marker for that – and that had been deliberately left in the hidey-hole cave when Batty had quit it. He had been right – Clym Hen Harrow had known of Ill-Made’s cave.

  That bloody sock, he mourned to himself. You could never get the blood and brains cleaned from it. I will have to start knitting it ower again…

  There was no sound from inside the cave and Batty did not expect one – the packed flask of shot and powder would have been a pepperpot spray in such a confined space; if the Faerie lurked in the shadows of it, they were out now, dipping their hats in the gore and whetting their wee steel nails.

  Batty did not want to go in, but the plan called for it, so he went into the entrance enough to gain shelter from the drive of wind and rain, hunkered and sparked his wee tinderbox until it flared into life. Then he juggled it and the torch with his knees until he could raise the sputtering, windblown pitch high enough to see a little better; finally he ducked the rest of the way into Ill-Made’s hidey-hole.

  He kicked a body almost at once and held the torch high to see the lurid horror of what he had made. They were flung everywhere, shredded and bloody and not like they had ever been people at all.

  Batty found Clym, a look of surprise on what was left of his face and a hole in his cheek the size of a pistol ball; the exit of it had taken the most of Clym’s cunning brains out the back of his head. Batty stuck the torch in the firepit ash, took the axe-handled dagg, admired it briefly and shoved it in his belt; he drew out his whet-sharp bollock dagger, drew in a deep breath and, grim as old reef, began butchering.

  Some time later, Black Penny came up on Ill-Made’s hidey-hole, gripping the dog tight because it was whining and straining, which Penny did not like and said so. Behind him, breathing hard and sullen, Sore Jo was soaked and quarrelsome. He wanted shelter, wanted the business done with, and himself off Tinnis with its Faerie and its bang and flash. Everyone knew this because Sore Jo was repeating it like a litany.

  ‘Christ, what now with that dug? Bloody useless whelp when needed and now you say it is facere
d by something?’

  Sore Jo was facered himself, more by the strange taste on his tongue and the sizzle of blue flashes; he wore a steel cap under a blue bonnet and a home-made back and breast, and did not like wearing all that iron with lightning forking about. Besides – the rain was hammering on it and he would have to spend a goodly time with cloth and sheep grease to keep the rust at bay.

  ‘I want off this place,’ he began again; and behind him, the other two argued with one another, equally uneasy – but Rob’s Davey and Rob’s Tam would always do that, regardless of what it was. If one of the brothers was for something, the other was against, and they fell to fighting more often than not, though it meant nothing in the end.

  Sore Jo was also a Borders man and hated walking; no Borders man would walk when he could ride, but their horses were tethered up on Tinnis, all them and their gear getting wet; Sore Jo wanted back to his nag.

  They came up cautious all the same and hunched under the thunder, the rain and the flashes, which all seemed harder and closer up on the bare waste of Tinnis. They went down a dip and up the other side; the dog, which had led them unerringly, now stopped suddenly, the sodden coat of it bristled along the backbone like a hedgepig.

  Now even Sore Jo was alarmed and drew his blades.

  ‘It will be that Batty,’ hissed Rob’s Tam.

  ‘Away – he is a score of miles from here,’ Rob’s Davey replied. ‘Or else prisoned by Clym. Or dead.’

  Then the lightning flashed, blue-white and fierce, and for an instant they all saw Clym, peering at them from low on the ground, as if he was hunkered and waiting for them.

  Just for an instant, then he was gone and everyone was blinking, even Black Penny, who had shut his eyes to try and keep his dark sight. It never worked – the flash seared right through his closed eyes and it was all just a white spot to him now – but the dog was barking, squeezing it out as if sicking up bad meat.

  ‘Clym?’

  Penny’s querulous shout was drowned by the roll of thunder; cursing he went forward and now he had to haul the dog with him, and that had Penny’s own hackles up.

  They crept up to where the blob of Clym’s face started to loom. Penny called out again, squinting through the rain on his face. Then the lightning flashed again.

  Clym’s face was strange, lopsided, but it was him, the white hair on it plain. He was not hunkered – or if he was, then he had lost a deal of weight.

  Blinking in the afterglare of the flash, Penny tried to make sense of it, the thunder crashing overhead now, so hard on the heels of the flash that he knew he was under it, felt the sheer power and weight of it like a giant hanging anvil.

  ‘Clym – is that you?’

  The next flash made Sore Jo scream, and they all saw, in the brief starkness of it, the head of Clym, ragged neck trailing tissue and stuck on the hilt of his own sword, which had been driven into the sodden turf of the moor.

  And beyond it, eldritch as any Faerie the sharp silhouette of a man with one arm, stark and not inclined to hide at all.

  ‘Christ,’ yelled Rob’s Tam.

  ‘Christ, Christ,’ echoed his brother. Sore Jo whimpered and backed away, flexing wet hands on the hilt of his own sword and parry dagger, and the dog jerked and danced in Penny’s hand, barking and snarling.

  ‘Let it loose,’ Sore Jo roared out. ‘Let it loose.’

  ‘I would keep it leashed were I you.’

  The voice was low pitched but came in a moment of sharp silence at the end of a rolling grumble of thunder and was just audible above the hiss of rain.

  ‘I have loaded daggs here, Clym’s among them. My powder is dry and I will shoot yon hound if it comes at me.’

  There was a pause while they all considered matters, then the air puffed out of the moment and it wrinkled and sagged like an emptied wineskin.

  ‘You have killed Clym,’ Sore Jo yelled, and it was clear he was wondering how it had been done and where the others were. Batty confirmed it tersely.

  ‘I have killed them all,’ he corrected. ‘Dead as stones in the cave.’

  ‘You cut off his heid,’ Penny roared out suddenly. ‘After he was gone. God’s blood – that was an ungodly act on a dead man.’

  ‘He should have thought on that before he came after me, with his fists full of steel and pistol.’

  Which brought the memory of Batty’s words concerning his own pistols; Penny looked from one to the other and they all had the same thought. They had no pistols, not a longbow, nor even a wee latchbow, only good steel.

  ‘We can get him,’ Rob’s Tam declared savagely. ‘He is lying about his powder being dry. In this weather—’

  ‘Away—’ his brother replied, and they knew he had daggs under his cloak – knew that one or more of them would die killing Batty Coalhouse. They winked on the brim of it – and Batty spoke at the tipping point.

  ‘In my time on the Devil’s earth,’ he said in a grindstone grim of voice, ‘I have killed at least one of most everything that breathes air.’

  The thunder bawled an agreement to it. The flash showed where he had been and then left them blinking blind.

  ‘I know the insides of men and women and weans better than any barber-surgeon. I have opened bits of the Lord’s creation up and let light wander where it had no right to be.’

  The thunder growled sullenly and the men turned this way and that, no longer sure of where the voice was coming from.

  ‘Do you think I would harp and carp about you four?’

  The voice came from behind them and that broke them apart. They scampered, stumbling and falling over the tussocked grass, jarring themselves on sudden dips and spilling to roll over, then leap up like hares in March.

  Batty watched them go, watched the dog drag Penny a little way, because the leash was wrapped so tight round one wrist that he could not let go; every time he lurched back to his feet, the dog would haul him off balance.

  Behind, he felt the glassed stare of Clym’s disapproval of his Bairns, of their rank white-livered running in the face of a cask-bellied auld man with one arm.

  And only the one shot of Clym’s own dagg left to him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Hollows Tower

  Feast of St David (1 March)

  He was no more pious than any other man, but William Patten could hold his own in a theological debate and felt bound to defend the reforms of his king. The Laird of Hollows, on the other hand, expressed outrage that Bishop Barlow, encouraged by King Henry, had not only blown the remains of St Thomas à Becket from the mouths of his cannon, but stripped the Pembroke shrine of St David’s bones.

  ‘And jewels, mind you,’ he added, ‘which was probably more to the point of it. For his wee catamites to play with.’

  ‘Priests and their catamites are what got us to this part,’ Patten argued mildly, knowing the Laird of Hollows was debating purely for the sport in it and from no sense of pious anger. ‘You mistake the reformers for what they are reforming, my lord.’

  ‘A bishop is a bishop,’ the Laird replied, pouring liberally. ‘Which means women or young boys.’

  ‘If that is so, then is his sin not redeemed at the last, my lord?’

  ‘By God’s own grace,’ the Laird replied, sucking his fingers where wine had slopped.

  ‘A gratis gift from the Lord,’ Patten agreed, ‘for faith in Christ and not earned by deeds or bought with indulgences.’

  ‘Aha,’ said the Laird, seeing the mire Patten was laying for him. ‘Pure Luther that, and him a prelate of your reformers who is swiving some wee German whore.’

  He thumped the table in triumph and made dishes clatter; folk looked round for a moment, paused to stillness, then went on with their work, preparing Hollows for the year’s end feast, no more than three weeks away now. The Laird wanted his stone hall finished by then, even if the builders muttered about cold-cracked mortar and tried to up the price.

  Katherina von Bora, Luther’s properly legal wife and called ‘di
e Lutherin’ because of it, was hardly a wee German whore, though he, of course, was a priest. Reformed to the point of having a wife. Who was Saxon nobility, no less – Patten mentioned it and saw the cloud on the Laird’s brow, as dark a menace as the ones which had only just cleared that morning and under which Patten had travelled, trembling and soaked, from Carlisle.

  ‘Saxony,’ the Laird muttered, and Patten knew why that name bothered him – Batty Coalhouse. Patten never spoke it aloud, all the same; no one did in Hollows, if they valued their skin.

  ‘It is an awkward business,’ he offered quietly, and the Laird did not need to ask what business he referred to; there were four men and a dog trembling in the undercroft and awaiting ‘the Laird’s pleasure’ after bringing the news of the latest failure to bring The Man Who Could Not Be Named to a suitable end.

  ‘Awkward for Clym bloody Hen Harrow, certes,’ the Laird growled bitterly, then waved his cup so that Patten only just managed to get his crown hat out of the way of the spilling wine; he brushed the feather in it as if soothing a bird.

  ‘He is some lad for the cutting of body parts,’ the Laird went on sullenly. ‘I shall mark that when it comes to his own.’

  ‘Awkward for all, sir,’ Patten answered smoothly. ‘Sir Thomas, of course, has every faith in your ability to carry out suitable recompense on the man who committed such vile calumnies on the person of his son.’

  And myself, he thought, and swallowed the gorge of fear at the memory of that day, the mad, snarling Graham men, the blood on the snow, and the way Otley’s head had burst open…

  He said nothing on it, all the same, for any calumnies visited on him were neither here nor there in the balance of Sir Thomas Wharton’s scales; the Deputy Warden of the English West March wanted suitable vengeance for the discomfort to his son and the affront to his plans and honour. Above all, he wanted the still missing babe.

  ‘Sir Thomas will have his recompense,’ the Laird replied sourly, then offered Patten a lopsided grin.