A Dish of Spurs

by Robert Low

  ‘She bleeds still, a bittie, though she will never complain of it,’ she said and then frowned over it. ‘It is better than it was, but moves slowly towards healing. Faster than her soul, Will Elliot, which may never be whole again.’

  The words followed him like cawing rooks, trailing after him into the night so that he was hunched into his thoughts and letting the horse pick the way it knew well, all the way back to the stone slab of Hermitage. He was lost in wondering how in the name of all the pits of Hell he might start anew to track down the babe. Every surreptitious journey to some possible lead had ended in nothing at all.

  The men came as a surprise to him, had taken him before he even knew he was grabbed.

  ‘Aye, aye, Land Sergeant,’ said one as they took his latchbow and sword, parry dagger and bollock knife, swift and easy as scooping sucklings from a bairn. Will blenched at the sound of that voice, for he knew it well.

  Mattie of Whithaugh loomed out of the dim, leaning casually on his saddle-front and nodding with satisfaction; behind him, Will saw Sorley Armstrong grinning.

  ‘You have a wee engagement,’ Mattie said. ‘With the Laird of Hollows.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Hollows Tower

  Friday, (2 March)…

  Patten came into the hall almost unnoticed among the throng gathered round the high table where the Laird sat. In front of him stood a square man, blocky and pale, his hands bound in front of him, but his beard jutting with a defiance – though Patten thought it smacked of desperation. He remembered him, with a sudden spasm, as one of the men who had ambushed the column taking the royal bairn south.

  Since then, he had made it his business to learn a deal about the men involved, and this one had been an official from Hermitage. Probably still was, Patten thought, and counted more than that these days. Bringing him here, bound and threatened, was a reckless move for the Laird of Hollows, and if he kept tweaking the beards of his betters they would eventually come at him together.

  The Laird of Hollows wore an embroidered leather doublet over a clean linen shirt with a high, small-ruffed collar and a grey, fur-trimmed gown over that. Above his glower of brows was a black velvet hat with a panache of plume in it and Patten almost laughed aloud. Wee papingo, he thought, all dressed in his best feathers to make himself out noble, though the truth was that he was no more elevated than any shoemaker.

  Yet he did have the money and rents from Hollows and elsewhere, not to mention the loyalty of every Armstrong on both sides of the Border for miles in every direction. Above all, Patten added to himself, he was a robber baron in the Debatable Land, where his was the only real law.

  It was this very fact Johnnie Armstrong was pointing out to the Land Sergeant of Hermitage, who had tried to bluster his hands free, at the very least, with the statement of who he was and what he represented.

  ‘The law, is it?’ the Laird replied, lolling back in his seat. He waved one expansive, ringed hand.

  ‘D’you see any here who care for your law, Will Elliot?’

  They all laughed, dutiful and savage. Like a wolf pack, Patten thought with a shiver, scenting blood; he did not like the tone of this matter, but the faint throb of his hand kept him from stepping forward to say so. Across the crowded flagstones, he caught the eye of the Lady, almost lost in the throng and consigned to the fringes as if of no account; her eye was glaucous as a fish.

  ‘The Scott of Buccleuch will care,’ Will replied, and there was a mocking burr of sound at that. The Laird flushed a little.

  ‘Wicked Wat? Aye, I hear he is to take over as Keeper. If he had cared, Will, he would have come at me before, when Armstrongs burned him and took his gear and kine. Are you worth more?’

  ‘His dignity is,’ Will responded, hoping that it was so. ‘He is Warden of the West as it is. Now he is Keeper of Liddesdale as well, and I am his Land Sergeant – an affront to me is a direct one to him. You step on that cloak at your peril, Johnnie Armstrong.’

  Leckie started to growl about giving the Laird of Hollows his ‘my lord’ due, but a wave of the Laird’s hand clicked his teeth shut on it. The Laird scowled at Will.

  Will did not like that look. Holy Mother, he is eident to do me harm, he thought, and the sweat ran down his back in salt worms.

  ‘I hear you will not be Land Sergeant at Hermitage for long – and though I dislike the thought of giving aid to Wat Scott, I do not think he would exert himself much on your behalf. Your death, in fact, would be to his advantage.’

  It was too close to the truth for Will to argue against, so he contented himself with a glower and hoped his heart’s thunder could only be heard in his own ears.

  ‘If you are so much the law,’ the Laird went on slowly, ‘then you should be out on a hot trod for Batty Coalhouse. I have a pile of left arms and some of their owners waiting to be buried thanks to him.’

  ‘Make a Bill,’ Will answered shortly, knowing the Laird would never ride out to Hermitage, nor ask a Scott for as much as the time of day. Besides, any investigation or Truce Day trial of Batty would find too much at the Laird’s own door.

  ‘I have a better idea,’ the Laird said, and the hall buzzed with a murmur of savagery; Will felt his bowels shift.

  ‘He will come for you,’ the Laird declared. ‘You are fast friends, which is why you have not done your duty and gone after him in the first instance.’

  ‘He is no friend to me,’ Will declared, which was not exactly denying Christ three times, but was close enough for him to feel the taint of the lie.

  ‘We will see,’ the Laird said. ‘I have a wee room prepared for you and will send a message to Powrieburn, one Master Coalhouse is sure to get.’

  He turned to Leckie and smiled.

  ‘What d’you think, Leckie – a left arm, like my poor lads?’

  Will’s mouth was so dry at the thought he could not speak at all, and it took him all his time to stand up – even then he sagged a little and had to step sideways to recover his balance. The Laird saw it and his head came up like a dog on the trail.

  ‘Some toes, mayhap. Balance him up as it were.’

  Now the hall was a buzz of vicious bees and Patten was more alarmed than ever, for it was one thing to hold such a man as the Land Sergeant of Hermitage, another thing entirely to mutilate or even kill him. He announced it, overloud because he was afraid.

  His words hung in the air like a blast of chill air and everyone fell silent under the haar of it. The Laird looked round, his face flushed and threaded with veins.

  ‘Master Patten,’ he declared, rolling the name round his mouth like imminent spit. Then he smiled, which took everyone by surprise, not least Patten.

  ‘Is correct,’ the Laird added, and Will staggered with the lurching force of the relief.

  ‘I am the Laird of Hollows and I do not attack unarmed men,’ he went on. ‘Not even the friend of such an infame as Batty Coalhouse.’

  He made a gesture and Leckie stepped forward with a knife and cut the rope binding Will’s hands; he fell to massaging life back into them, almost weeping with the prickle of returning blood.

  Leckie took a linen-wrapped bundle from someone and then handed it to Will, whose sausage fingers fumbled to unwrap it; his basket-hilt sword and parry dagger fell to the flags with ringing clangs, and for a bewildering moment Will stood there, blinking.

  When he looked up, the Laird was away from the table, one hand on hip, the other resting on the long hilt of the massive two-handed sword which had snicked the head off the Fyrebrande. The point made a sinister grate as he turned it slowly, smiling. He had shrugged out of the grey robe and stood in his shirt and hose.

  ‘Now you have a better chance,’ the Laird said, ‘of keeping your wee bits on your person.’

  Will became aware that folk had drawn back, all the way to the far walls and corners, and that only two people were left in the square they formed – himself and the Laird of Hollows.

  The Laird hauled off his soft hat and flung i
t away. Then he spun the two-handed weapon lightly upright, bowed and fell into a stance.

  ‘Porta di ferro piana terrone,’ he said. ‘Flos Duellatorum of Maestro dei Liberi of Cremona.’

  He saw Will’s narrow-eyed incomprehension and, as much for the equally bewildered crowd, translated.

  ‘Guard of the Iron Door.’

  Of course it is, Will thought bitterly. Along with all the other fancy wee poses he no doubt has, culled from the manuals of arms. He shook life back into his fingers and hands, wrapped them round the hilts and set himself.

  ‘Come ahead, then,’ he said as firmly as he could manage.

  Powrieburn

  At the same time

  The month had come in growling and swishing a tail of snow-wind, and if the old saw held true, would bleat its way out at the end, all lamb-soft and sunny. There was precious little sign of it that Bet’s Annie could see, and the day, when she surfaced into it, was bitch-cold.

  Normally she would never have slept in the feed store, which for all its fragrant contents, warm enough when you burrowed in, was a solid affair whose stones leached cold like a larder.

  But it was private and she had crawled in with Hew, who was as eager as a leg-humping pup. Bet’s Annie had forgotten how young boys were when presented with the mysteries of a woman and her head was muzzy with lack of sleep. Still, she looked at him fondly enough, for he had come back at her again and again, with seemingly boundless energy and enthusiasm, if no skill at all.

  Now he woke and shifted to her, so that she felt the bar of iron on her leg and marvelled at it – Christ’s bones, did he sleep with it up?

  But she shoved him away, too weary to even think straight.

  ‘Away, you muckhound,’ she declared, scrambling up and blowing white breath onto her hands. ‘If you have such fire in you, use it to clean out the stalls.’

  ‘Ach, but Annie,’ he wheedled. ‘You are a braw as the sun on shiny water. Come here, for I love you.’

  Preening despite herself, Bet’s Annie was too wise to be cozened – and too dressed to be easily invaded. She buckled for a moment when he surfaced, naked and displayed – only the young and daft took every stitch off in weather like this, even for loving, so it was a fine sight for her, rarely seen. He shivered, slender and handsome, the bits which had been exposed to sun and weather brown against the rest of him like a cut loaf. Irresistible…

  She was reaching for him when a voice cracked the moment.

  ‘Hew, Hew – are you there?’

  Hew cursed Eck to the ninth circle of Hell as Bet’s Annie spun away with a laugh, leaving him to cover himself up.

  Eck was shuffling and turning his hat in his hands, his breath smoking in the chill. He bobbed politely to Bet’s Annie and blinked once or twice.

  ‘He is in there,’ she said, and began to sway away, knowing the effect she had. Eck cleared his throat.

  ‘It was you I sought,’ he said, and she turned, half expecting some stammering declaration of love – a lie that translated as ‘I would like some of what Hew is enjoying’.

  ‘Mistress Mintie is gone.’

  The surprise of it made her mouth work like a fish. Gone? Gone where? With what? Or whom?

  Eck looked anguished and told her. Gone early that morning. Saddled up Jaunty herself and left alone. No one heard, for everyone was asleep – the door and yett had been left wide open, he added, bright with the thrilling horror of that.

  Bet’s Annie fought the rise of panic. Gone. There was no good in it at all. She whirled as Hew sauntered out, swaggering for Eck’s benefit and smirking knowingly at Bet’s Annie.

  ‘Can you track?’ she demanded, which reeled him out of his bravado and he stammered a bit, then recovered.

  ‘I can follow a leaping hare on a flagged floor blindfolded,’ he answered and there was no boast in it – Bet’s Annie marvelled at how a night’s quim turned uncertain boy to confident youth. Like some alchemical, she thought. Or a witch brew. One more night’s visit to my cunny and I will end up ducked or burned for having transmuted him into a man.

  The thought almost made her laugh, while the boys scurried off, shouting, to saddle horses and fetch their arms. They were delighted to be on a quest, to be out and free of mucking out stables.

  ‘Saddle one for me,’ Bet’s Annie called after them and was less shining on the moment, for she hated riding and that pleasant ache in her nethers from the night before would become a fiery shriek before the day was out.

  But she could hardly trust two laddies to have sense – and she was sure Mintie was riding into trouble.

  * * *

  Miles away, Mintie rode in grey fog, veiled from the duck-egg sky and whirling cry of peewits, lost and looking for the Jerusalem of her soul. She wanted milk and honey, the sweetness of bairns still cauled from the womb, and knew only that it was not for her.

  Not in this world.

  She rode past black cattle, avoided the forge by the curling dog-tail of smoke. Thought of Agnes and felt sadder still.

  The dew was sweet. The wind shifted to the west and felt warm; she realised spring was coming with a sunlight of bright cloth, and once it would have lifted her up like the sound of a treble choir.

  She rode Jaunty down the long falls of elder and briar, yarrow, harebell and thorn bush, all the way down the blackmealed lands of the Armstrong, out past the huddled thumbnail defiances of the Grahams.

  Out to the silvered Solway, sitting on Jaunty like a lop-lugged sack and lost as a shower of sparks from a log.

  When rain and night came, she stopped and slithered off Jaunty’s back, stumping on wooden legs to the shelter of a copse. No fire. No food. Jaunty whickered plaintively, and Mintie fondled the velvet muzzle for a moment, but offered nothing, not even the relief of unsaddling.

  In the morning she climbed back up, and Jaunty, moody but loyal, carried her on. She made good time and only had to hunker down in the damp a second night. She remembered it had taken one more when she had come this way with Batty – but he would have been riding light, giving her time to think. It had made no difference then, nor would now, so she almost rushed to the end of it, down to the place she had chosen. Or which had chosen her, she could not be sure.

  The boy knew her, peering from his huddled hidey-hole, his hands held in front of him as if in prayer, his herring eyes rolling. He remembered her, would have gone and welcomed her, save for the other one, the one he did not care for. The woman did not know she was followed by the one he did not care for.

  Mintie did not know of the selkie boy, had left Jaunty as if she had never been anything to her, and Jaunty, not knowing the way of it, fell to cropping the windblown grass while her mistress gathered stones.

  Fat, rounded and clean-washed, they snuggled in the apron, cradled close to her as any bairn would be – to anyone looking, she might have been a mother with a wean caught up to her breast in the safe snug of an apron loop, crabbing along the shingle.

  As she wandered, picking her way down the long tumble of stones to the sighing sea, she sang softly of all the regrets and the things she was leaving, so that they began to fade, become like trees in a thick mist. No more than black bars, the memories of themselves.

  The wind blowing the grass. The fish that jumped and left ripples. The cow licking her calf clean of newborn slime. The cautious sharp-shouldered stalk of a cat. The bee at the heather – first this year. The sun like a coin and the salt Solway breeze that spiced the air.

  The boy ran for his ma, who came out too late, in time to see her up to her knees, the wet dress clinging so that she stumbled. Too late and too far away – yet someone was close and closing still, hurling off a stumbling horse.

  She was numbed by the cold and breathless with it, but the world had faded, stalk by stalk, flower by scented flower, shrunk to a pale line between the sea and the duck-egg sky. She started to fall, tumbling into the heavy embrace of the stone bairn – and found herself snagged.

  It bewildered her,
half in and half out as she was. She could not fall, could not slide beneath the cold balm of the Solway coverlet and let the stone bairn carry her down and down with her hair like wrack.

  There was splashing and a grunt, and suddenly the world cascaded back on her, so that the chill bit and she whooped in air. Then the realisation that she was held, by a single strong arm round her waist, firm-fastened and dragging her back to the land and the world and all the pain.

  ‘Let me go…’

  ‘No.’

  She knew the voice. Batty. She tried to beat at him, to struggle, but he was a moving rock, a relentless progress towards the land, and she was carried out of the sea and up the shingle.

  She became aware of the selkie boy and then his ma.

  ‘Soft, soft,’ the woman said and gathered her in, so that she was the bairn and the stone one tumbled out, back to all the other rocks of the beach.

  ‘Let me go,’ she managed before the grey swallowed her.

  ‘Never,’ she heard him say.

  Hollows Tower

  At the same time

  He cut and slashed, dashed in, scurried back, spun on his good foot, did every thing he could remember and some he had never tried, so that he started to pant and drool and sob with fear, frustration and fatigue.

  To every attack, the Laird parried, smiling and easy and light as grace.

  ‘Porta di ferro mezzana,’ he would say. ‘Guard of the Iron Door, in the middle.’

  ‘Porta di Denti di Cinghiale – Guard of the Wild Boar’s Teeth.’

  And once, when Will thought he had at last forced an error and could strike at his exposed back:

  ‘Porta di Donna Sovrana,’ he had called, and the blade appeared across his back, the clang of Will’s sword on it like a knell.

  ‘Guard of the Queen,’ he translated, turning light and easy so that Will saw the entire event had been deliberate.