A Dish of Spurs

by Robert Low

  He moved to the door, found it locked, slipped on. A powder mill was a sieve of entrances and exits, because a close-fastened structure acted like a barrel if the powder ever exploded. There was one entire wooden wall, a weak structure designed to funnel any explosions in the least destructive direction, but Batty thought the builders had never experienced what powder could do if it was all fired at once.

  He found an opening and was in, pausing in the dark to take in the strange shapes. Those hanging things surrounded by toothed wheels would be the shakers for mixing the ingredients. The great bulk of the flat-edged millstones was easy to spot and the stink of nitre and sulphur and acrid alchemics caught his throat.

  He heard a cough. Someone shuffled out.

  ‘Who is there? Is any yin there?’

  Querulous and rheumy that voice, fitting for a man who lived and breathed this fetid atmosphere for most of his long sleepless nights, Batty thought. Poor luckless old man, having to miss all the food and drink and bonhomie for a cold watch in this tomb. You stand poorly in the estimation of the Laird of Hollows, he thought. You stand as poorly in the estimation of God Himself.

  Worse than all of that, you stand poorly in my path.

  He moved to the sound, just as the man shuffled round the end of a block of millstone; they collided, both recoiling with the shock. With a sharp cry, the watchman lashed out and whacked Batty in the ribs with his cudgel, hard enough to make him gasp.

  The next one will be at my head, Batty thought wildly, then drew from his boot and thrust in a swift, much-used motion. The watchman seemed to catch his breath with a sharp intake; the cudgel clattered to the floor and he paused, hung on the moment, then fell like a tree.

  Batty straightened, wincing and panting. A punch, he thought, no more. Almost friendly… save that the fist had sharp steel in it.

  Then he scowled – bloody old fool with a stick nearly ends me before I am started. If it had not been for ells of slow match…

  He levered himself out of his jack of plates and uncoiled the slow match from round his body, while the man he had stabbed in the lungs gurgled and wheezed and bled. Batty paid him no more mind than if he had been part of the mill, a flagstone or a shaking vat.

  He was annoyed for his ells of slow match, concerned more that it might get wet in the old man’s spreading lake of blood than for the long, hard death the man was having. He had made that match himself, to a tried and true method so that he knew the burn-length – two spans an hour – and did not want any interference with it.

  Good hempen cord, soaked in limewater and saltpetre for the nitre, washed in a lye of water and wood ash. Laid flat all of a piece, which was awkward since it was so long, but if you hung it up soaked the nitre collected at either end and vanished from the middle, so that all you got was a few seconds of dangerous flare and spit before it fizzled out.

  Coiled like lengths of snake round the mill, it would burn steady, a series of winking red eyes leading down to several points. One would be to the magazine outside. Another was to the dust sieves, kegged and covered. Another was to an uncapped keg of the proving powder, left in the mill itself because folk anxious to be off and with a free day waiting could not be bothered taking it back to the magazine.

  The slow match for the magazine was vinegar-soaked against the wet, though Batty was not exactly sure what this would do to the burn rate. Faster, certes, he thought, so he cut it longer. He could not afford to coil it round the dry of the magazine – too much powder in there and it would go off prematurely if he did. It would have to stretch out along the ground until the final moment and Batty was least sure of this one.

  He hoped the ground was not too damp as he led the last, longest match to the magazine, half crouched to keep an eye on the guards at the bridge. Once down in the deep-ramped entrance, he cracked the wooden door easily enough, fed the match into the stacks of kegs and bundled cakes and scurried out like a fat rat from a ditch. He closed the door and barred it, making a muzzle out of the magazine.

  Then he went back to the dark chill of the powder mill, to the acrid reek and the scurry of vermin attracted by the blood of the dead man. He sat in a corner and watched his breath smoke, glancing every now and then at the high-set window, looking for the smeared milk of a new dawn. He saw lights flicker where Hollows would be, thought he could hear the faint sound of laughter.

  There had been other Lady Days, other celebrations of the change of year and most had been better than this, Batty thought. Even the one that heralded 1530, though that had also had a lick of death in it. He laid his head back against the rough wall, staring at the faint outline of another, seeing the ill-laid stones of the mill.

  Done in a hurry, he thought. Flung up with more thought to getting it working than doing a good job. Michelangelo would be outraged, he thought, and chuckled softly to himself, wondering if the man still designed fortifications, or was bringing beauty from marble instead.

  Not an elephant, though. On this same night a dozen years ago, Batty had sat with others round a flickering fire in a rubbled, pocked bastion of Florence, waiting for the raw new day of 1530 and the slaughter it would bring, listening to Michelangelo cursing the white elephant given to his former patron, Pope Leo X.

  Batty put his head back against the rough stone and listened again…

  ‘That catamite-lover,’ Michelangelo growls, scrawling on the back of fields of fire and ranges as he did so, scoring the charcoal to fragments with his rage. ‘Another Medici. Made us all immortalise that idiot beast, which died two years after he got it. They choked it with poor food, then fed it gold to make its bowels move – can you believe it?’

  He shakes his head. Scrape, scrape, scrape. He is almost sixty and still full of manic energy, dark-haired, dark-bearded.

  ‘Gold, in the name of God. But even in the short time it lived, the beast caused riots all the way to Rome. People wrecked a cardinal’s villa trying to see it – broke down walls and dug holes through houses. Folk died.’

  Scrape, scrape.

  ‘Sereno wrote poetry to it – “such a spectacle has been observed by Pompey, Hannibal, Domitian and few others”. The Spaniard, Naharro, wrote a play with a part for the beast. Folk loved this doggerel, the Pope almost as much as he loved that elephant. He called it Hanno and lavished attention on the big-arsed monstrosity, which someone taught to bow to him. Would have been better teaching it not to void everywhere – noxious animal. Until they choked it with bad feeding, that is.’

  Scrape, scrape, and the charcoal splinters fly while those spatulate hands blur with manic intensity.

  ‘If they had used the gold they fed it as a laxative to pay for marble,’ he says, ‘San Lorenzo basilica would be finished instead of looking like a dog kennel.’

  Another pause, another head-shake, while his eyes flick from subject to paper and his fingers fly.

  ‘Noxious beast,’ he mutters, then hawks and spits. ‘Not as noxious as Raffaello da Urbino, the little Pope balls-licker.’

  He puts on a falsetto voice that makes folk chuckle.

  ‘How would you like us all to immortalise the departed Hanno, Your Immense Holiness? Fresco? Oils? Pen and ink? Stucco? Marble? Intarsia? Leonardo might do something – though he is past his best these days and never finishes commissions. Simoni has some slight skill with majolica…’

  The charcoal splinters to ruin finally, and he throws the remains of it away.

  ‘Little turd, Raffaello,’ Michelangelo scowls, staining his clothes as he searches for another piece. ‘Died of swiving his mistress, La Fornarina, and not before time. Thirty-seven years in the same world as me was too long – the dauber was even about to be made a cardinal, can you imagine it?’

  He spits on his fingers, wipes them clean on his front so as not to smudge new paper.

  ‘Should have exhibited him in a cage, not the thrice-damned elephant, which we had to paint, sculpt and fuss over for years after it died.’

  All the rough-arsed had loved
Michelangelo’s tales and the fact that he sat with them, the wonderful artist of beauty, the calculating genius of arc and range. Sitting sharing bad wine with the powder-stained, bloody-handed of Batty Coalhouse’s company, who had to carry out Michelangelo Simoni’s clever schemes for repairing the shattered defences, re-site the rabinets and culverins and demi-culverins.

  ‘You are here fighting the Medici and the Pope,’ Batty says to him. ‘Yet the Pope is your patron. What will you do once this is done with?’

  Michelangelo shrugs.

  ‘Go back and sculpt for the Pope. Like you, I am a mercenary – you could be fighting for the French tomorrow. I will build and design and sculpt for the Medici if they ask and pay and give me something interesting to work on.’

  He leans forward, his eyes intense, his spade beard quivering.

  ‘I am a whore, no less than those on Rome’s Ripetta wharf. A Florentine Republic, however, is the love of my life.’

  That was then, this was now, Batty thought. I should have gone to stay with Michelangelo so that I would not be here now – I jalouse that his Lady Day in the Italies is a lot better than mine.

  Yet he knew, now as then, that when morning came he would stagger himself upright on stiff legs, joints aching and the missing arm itching, take up his weapons and see how poorly he stood in God’s estimation.

  Powrieburn

  That same night

  Her urine smelled fetid, tasted sweet, and of the fifteen shades – five alone of green – the old Mistress of Powrieburn’s expellant was verdigris. With her hooked nails, bloody teeth and fever, Ridley did not need any astrology done; besides, he doubted if these people even knew the month of their birth, let alone the hour and day.

  ‘Phthisis,’ he announced to Bet’s Annie and saw her incomprehension.

  ‘White plague?’ he suggested. He knew some folk named it that way because the victims became so pale. There was a flicker in the woman’s eyes then, and Ridley sighed. Well, no matter – give her the help for it and never mind the Greek.

  ‘Wolf’s liver taken in a thin wine,’ he went on. ‘Lard of sow fed on grass. A broth of she-ass.’

  It would not help, he knew, for the woman was too far gone, but it was always better to offer hope.

  ‘Ground boar penis will ease her breathing,’ he went on and then paused. ‘You should know that ph… white plague… may spread.’

  He paused then, for in some places Ridley knew that phthisis was considered vampirism since one victim invariably led to others suffering slow wasting, and there were ignorants who claimed this was the victim sucking their life in a desperate attempt to stay alive. The condition caused red and swollen eyes which became sensitive to the light, so sufferers preferred the dark – and that only added to the lore.

  Ridley was fairly sure there were no such creatures as vampires and equally certain that those who believed it were quite capable of taking an old beldame like the Mistress of Powrieburn, knocking her on the head and then burying her with a stake through her heart.

  ‘White plague,’ Bet’s Annie repeated slowly. ‘Boar penis.’

  ‘Ground,’ Ridley added patiently, wondering if the entire household was wit-struck. The daughter sat with her hands in her lap, staring at nothing, and though Ridley suspected grief, he did not know of any version which placed a daughter within comfort reach of her dying ma and then let her sit and watch like a crow waiting for a lamb to die.

  In fact, the only time the daughter – Mintie – had been animated at all was when she fixed Ridley in a corner and questioned him on childbirth, wanting to know about the soul of a newborn.

  ‘Placed in the embryo by God,’ Ridley had told her firmly, ‘forty days after conception.’ She had demanded he confirm it, grasping his wrist fiercely as she did so. Afterwards, she had sat like that, saying nothing, staring at nothing.

  Ridley wanted away back to Hollows where he had left Ganny preparing to dress as a boy-bishop, crooning over baby Jane and chuckling as he wrapped her up to be little Jesus.

  This evening Hollows would be a riot of drunks and folk made delirious with celebration and the topsy-turvy madness of a Feast of Fools. Ridley looked around him; this place is the exact opposite, he thought. Even for a household grieving over a slow dying it is bleak.

  He wanted to leave but could not, for he had, at the very least, to offer the woman final Confession and Rites – nor would he get paid if he left before she died and did not think she would do it in a hurry.

  Bet’s Annie knew the scowling physicker she and Hew had brought from Hollows with the stiff blessing of the Lady was no true doctor, nor even a barber-surgeon – though he might be a priest. He knew a bit, but any cunning woman could do as much, for all he made a show of holding urine up to the light, swirling and sniffing and dabbing it on his tongue.

  White plague. Bet’s Annie knew the name well enough, though it was called differently here – Elfstruck. The Faerie had claimed the old Mistress of Powrieburn as sure as if the Queen of Elfland herself had arrived, all tinkling bells and white horse. Hag-ridden was another name for it.

  She told the others that it was just the old woman’s time, no more than age and circumstance, though she knew the Faerie rarely stopped at just the one. Perhaps in Powrieburn, though, which had a compact with the Silent Moving Folk…

  She never spoke to Mintie, had had enough of the girl, in fact. Her ma lay dying there and not a word of comfort for her, just an endless brooding on her own condition, as if she was the only lass in Liddesdale who had ever been tupped against her will, or lost a child.

  Mintie was only half aware of anything else, just the one thing.

  Forty days.

  Forty days. It circled and coiled round Mintie’s head, in and out of her heart. Whether doctor or priest, he would be right – why would he not be? So what she had torn from herself had never had a soul. Unlike wee Agnes’s mite, which went longer to term; for the first time, Mintie realised what she had done to Agnes with her desperate, wild talk.

  Forty days. A priest-doctor said so, so it must be true. It was something, then, lifted from the stain on her own soul, something for the wee mite…

  Her ma coughed and it was a ram on the wall of her. She almost heard the stones crack, felt the lurch as if she had been leaning against it. Then it collapsed, sudden and complete, and the world rushed in. She turned, blinking, felt the spate filling her so that she could hardly breathe.

  ‘Ma…’

  Bet’s Annie, amazed, saw Mintie move to the bedside, take the withered, hook-nailed hands in her own, heard the cracked bell tone of her voice.

  Christ be praised for this miracle at least, she thought.

  Then a voice outside hailed them.

  Jinet, closest to the small window, peered out and announced that a boy was sat on a horse in the yard.

  ‘Dressed like a man,’ she added with a half-laugh.

  Bet’s Annie clattered down to where Hew and Eck stood ready with drawn swords; she scattered them like chooks and unbarred doors into the pewter and milk dawn.

  The boy sat on a fine horse, lance fewtered into the stirrup leather, iron hat on his head and a highly decorated musket slung on his back. Little shield, daggers, sword – he was every inch a warrior; it was just that the inches weren’t many.

  ‘Davey Graham,’ Bet’s Annie said formally. ‘Unsaddle and welcome.’

  Davey-boy grinned at her, then nodded to Hew and Eck, who were older and yet so much less that they did not care to know it.

  ‘What brings you to Powrieburn?’ Bet’s Annie asked as Davey Graham slithered from the horse. On foot he was just a boy festooned with weapons as big as himself.

  ‘My da sent me. To help in the rescue of the Land Sergeant of Hermitage.’

  Bet’s Annie laughed at the poor-tin lie of it.

  ‘He did not, Davey Graham of Netherby. He would no more send his darling Davey-boy out on his own on such a task than he would mount a naked virgin on a milk white and se
nd her into the Debatable with all his gold in two big bags.’

  Hew and Eck laughed, which only deepened the red flush and scowl on Davey-boy.

  ‘Besides that,’ she added firmly, ‘he would know that any such rescue would not be mounted from Powrieburn, since the man who would do it is long gone from this place. So do not lie to me, Davey-boy Graham.’

  Davey frowned and opened then closed his mouth.

  ‘I came to help,’ he admitted and scuffed one boot toe. ‘I like Land Sergeant Will.’

  Bet’s Annie recalled that it was Davey who had been with Will all the way down to Carlisle and back. It must have been a rare adventure for the lad, she thought, and he has clearly made Will a friend; her heart warmed to him at once. He would have to be got back to Netherby, all the same, before Dickon worried himself into a lather – and rashness.

  ‘Get you inside – you look as if you could use broth at least. Bring your nag in and the lads will see to it. You can tell Mistress Mintie of your plans. What does your da say regarding Will being caged up at Hollows?’

  ‘He says Will was daft to get lifted so easily. And he fought badly, he says, though it is hard to take on the Laird of Hollows and his two-hander. He says Will is cunny-struck.’

  Davey-boy was happy now that he was not about to be sent off and happier still that the two lads were trying hard not to show their admiration for his wonderful gun. He was happy enough to repeat what he’d heard and not realise what he said.

  Cunny-struck, Bet’s Annie thought. Aye, well, Dickon and the Netherby Grahams had that right – bedazzled by the possibility of Mintie, Will had been weakened as badly as Samson. But what would the Grahams do about it? She asked as she followed Davey-boy up the steps.

  ‘My da says it is a matter for Batty Coalhouse. He is angered at Batty for what he did with the Armstrongs we gave him.’