Shake Loose the Border

by Robert Low

  ‘A man as good as yer auld Homer said it,’ Batty answered, half away with the Faerie and the wine.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bunarotti,’ Batty replied. ‘Whom the world knows as Michaelangelo.’

  ‘Ye ken him? From where? There is a story there and we have fire, food and wine, so speak on.’

  Batty said little, simply told of being in Florence during the siege of ’29 and how Michaelangelo was siting defences as an engineer. ‘He likes wine and sculpture,’ he added. ‘There is no terribilita in paint, he would say. Carving is better and easier – you cut to the skin and then stop.’

  He laughed softly at the memory, then lifted the cup in toast.

  ‘I feel as lit by fire a cold countenance

  That burns me from afar and keeps itself ice-chill;

  A strength I feel two shapely arms to fill

  Which without motion moves every balance.’

  Henry Rae looked astonished. ‘I had not heard the man did poetry also. There is a deal of love in that.’

  Batty acknowledged it, but did not expound on it further since it was certain the Herald would not appreciate it. Instead, he murmured tunelessly, a verse of The Lament of the Master of Erskine.

  ‘Fair weill, my lady bricht,

  And my remembrance rycht;

  Fair weill and haif gud nycht:

  I say no moir.’

  ‘Christ’s blood, I hope you do say no more,’ the Herald spat. ‘I am heart sick of that bliddy affair for it is played and declaimed incessant at the court in Holyrood. The Dowager Queen herself has now banned it I hear – and Alexander Scott now wishes his poetry had never been set to music.’

  Everybody wishes his poetry had never been set to music, Batty thought, but Mary of Guise’s reaction is hardly a surprise when the verse is supposed to be the dying words of her lover, killed at Pinkie only the year before; every performance opened that wound raw.

  They drank and cocked ears to the distant sound of raised voices; something smashed and clattered.

  ‘Warden Grey will be busy,’ the Herald noted then paused as the door was rapped hard, then Will’s Patey stuck his mourn of a face round it.

  ‘Yer Captain, Davey Hume, wishes a word.’

  Wearily the Herald waved him in and the Captain entered, dripping over the scuffed floor.

  ‘Raining is it now?’ Batty offered mildly and had a sour look in reply.

  ‘I cannae get all they wagons in the gate,’ Hume said, ‘especially yon moudiewart long yin. It will not be turned.’

  ‘That’s because you bought them without thinking,’ Batty replied, which stung Hume into bridling, though he was stopped by the Herald’s hand.

  ‘Without thinking? We took them as bargain,’ he said and Batty made an ambivalent movement of his head.

  ‘Always look the gift horse…’ he said, then saw Hume’s face and sighed.

  ‘You took what was left, for they were cheap and there was a reason for that,’ he explained. ‘Every wainwright makes his own wagons and most of what you have was never built in this land – they were brought by various Companies and discarded for the reasons you are now discovering. You have southern Italian wagons here, built for big loads – that’s the great heavy affairs which you need a hand of fat-arsed horses with shoes to pull through the dubs of this country. You have ones from the Austrias, which are shorter because you need to work them round steep, climbing bends. And you have north Italian ones, the bugger that will not turn in the gate, made narrow and long because the bridges up there are not wide and there is no point to a wagon which won’t cross a river, is there?’

  The Herald bellowed with joy, then slapped Hume hard on one sullen, wet shoulder.

  ‘Now you know, Davey Hume, and it takes a Scotch to set you straight. And those folk don’t even do wagons, they use bliddy pack ponies, by God’s balls. Pack ponies!’

  If you rode over the tops of the trackless moss, Batty thought sourly, you’d see the benefit of pack ponies. Also across that shaky bridge – he was heart-glad he was not crossing it any time soon.

  The Herald soothed Davey Hume with an offer of wine and laughed again. ‘You should have regard for Batty here, who is well-versed in wagons of all sorts and the mercenary Companies that use them. He is late of the Sable Rose, after all and though half of them drowned in the Mary Rose, there are yet enough left in Kent for Captain-General Maramaldo to take to the wars.’

  Perhaps he felt the chill, for he stopped, glanced at Batty’s face and rubbed his own with a pungent curse.

  ‘Ach, bigod, I meant to find a better time and way…’

  ‘Maramaldo?’ Batty demanded, feeling as if his face had been pulled from a snowdrift. The Herald sighed.

  ‘Free from Dacre’s prison and sent south to take charge of what’s left of his old Company, the better to get it under some control.’

  ‘Freed?’ Batty echoed disbelievingly. ‘He was to be hemped.’

  ‘At the king’s pleasure,’ Henry Rae replied. ‘The writ was only to be signed and the deed done – but auld Henry up and died, did he not?’

  Batty slumped, marvelled and sickened all at once. ‘The De’il looks after his ain.’

  Davey Hume crossed himself and the Herald nodded soberly. ‘The new young king was persuaded to release Maramaldo in order that he take charge of a wheen of men who might cause trouble. I hear the Company is to be sent to Devon or Somerset, where the common are set against gentlemen. They want the Latin mass and the recall of English Bibles, I hear.’

  There will be little plunder in it, Batty thought, so Maramaldo will contrive to find some, even if it means levelling hamlets and vills to embers and ruin.

  Maramaldo. He never ceased to maze me, Batty thought. Beyond that, he did not know whether to be glad or furious, but he set down the wine, which suddenly tasted of cloy.

  * * *

  During the day Hidegate’s wynds were clotted with people passing up and down, dodging and elbowing and cursing in a funnel of space where you could reach out either arm and fingertip the rough, high house walls on both sides.

  Masons, merchants and dancing masters, barbers and advocates, all met on the narrow passages with varying degrees of politeness. A douce goodwife, crushing her basket and trying to keep her hem out of the filth, would vie with a porter delivering coals, fishwives with their creels, the sweeps and the water carriers.

  On the south side of it was the old Austin Friary, abandoned during the Dissolving some thirty years before and now mouldering to ruin – next to it, up another narrow twist of cobbles called Anchor Wynd, was the Dun Heifer.

  Batty knew it was foolish to come here in a night made darker by a sea haar and a mizzle of rain, but he could not sleep and could not cast Maramaldo from his mind in order to allow it. The man who had cut off his arm had been sprung from a certain death Batty had helped arrange and Batty, who had come to a new way of looking at the old Captain-General, was ruffled about how he felt over it all.

  The Anchor Wynd was darker than the Earl of Hell’s back passage, so that even the lights of the lantern boys seemed to make little difference. They, knowing the way of it, were already lying in wait, rushing forward to offer their services and usually in pairs with one holding a great light on a pole, the other a bull’s eye lantern for focusing on the ground.

  There were a few lurkers, watching for opportunity and if they saw a one-armed man with a good belly as an easy mark they revised it when they caught sight of a jack of plates stained by war, a backsword and brace of fat wheel-lock daggs in his belt. That and the two dark pillars on either side of him, one dressed in a mail coat that came below the knee and fairly screamed ‘mad Irish’, the other a vision of Gallowglass save that his feet had shoes.

  The curfew was imminent and the drum had sounded, giving folk a last few minutes to vacate the streets; the dying echoes of it slid into the night with the tramp of a garrison patrol, who would return soon enough to make sure it was upheld.

&nbs
p; The arguments started at once, over who had hired what; the douce housekeepers in the tenements above used the noise and the drum as a reminder that they hadn’t fulfilled a vital domestic function and began emptying nightpots and slops into the street, shouting ‘gardyloo’ as a belated warning. As a revenge for the racket it was stinking sweet.

  ‘Haud yer hand,’ voices bellowed back and someone announced that he was Thomas Loudon, advocate and cursed them roundly for ruining his second-best hat; ‘my best was beshitten two days afore in this same pestilential place. I swear by the same pestilential wummin – if I ever get you in a court, mistress, expect nae mercy.’

  ‘Mind yer foot, sir, or you will coggle doon…’

  The timely warning clamped the advocate’s lips and focused his attention on not being jostled down a set of steps; Batty hung back and let them go, aware of Ewan on one side and Red Colin on the other. He kept to the shadows under the tavern lintel until Daunie’s quaver of voice warned him that the doors of the Dun Heifer were being shut.

  ‘This tavern is not for the public, sir,’ Daunie Dodd began and Batty thrust his face into the light.

  ‘I am here to see Thomas Bui, known as Malatesta.’

  Then he went past Daunie without waiting, stepped on to the uneven flags of the landing with the Frasers at his back; he heard the door close with a sinister grate. Lights bobbed and voices growled and muttered; somewhere, a woman laughed high and shrill.

  The Dun Heifer was an old haunt for Batty, a dirty, mean den that needed candles on a dull day for anyone to see by. Everyone who was anyone knew the way to it without need of light or guides and, above the lintel on the inside, was the carved inscription Lord, In Thee Is All My Trust, the letters worn to shine by the touch of the superstitious, who wanted it to be true in a place such as this. Batty shouldered through into the kitchen.

  Here he bowed politely to Mrs Dodd, as enormously fat and large as her husband was tiny and scrawny. She was swathed in her finest blue wool lined with murray over a sage-green underdress and had, until now, worn a headwrap as fat as any Ottoman Sultan’s. She bowed to everyone who passed through, like the receiving line for Mary of Guise, but thought all was done with and stared open-mouthed at Batty, fancy head cover in one hand and her head shaved against the nits.

  He left her, trailing the penny special smells – minced collops, rizared haddocks or tripe, a fluke of roasted skate and onions – into the dim noiseome den where usually lords, lawyers, ladies of ill-repute and the loathsome met and had their high jinks.

  Not now, though. Now it was full of shadows and laughter, the odd sparkle of a geegaw, the high shrill of one of the gauds, a rill of Italian and a harsh of Germanic.

  ‘Ho, Daunie, bring more light here. I cannot see these newcomers and I have a desire to – besides, my pastes are a mystery to me and I feel I have a decent hand.’

  The voice was fruity and light but it came from a barrel with a square head, capped by grey hair to his ears, the chin carefully shaved. He wore a shirt in cramoisi which did nothing for the eyes sunk in violet ringed pools.

  ‘You never have a decent hand and can never tell it anyway,’ Batty said while the Frasers looked on, trying to be stolid and show none of the unease they felt; they were all aware of being surrounded by half-shadowed figures dressed like papingoes in bright colours, all slashed and paned and ribboned, stained with old sins. The women were bold, no less gaudy and no less stained.

  The man roared and slapped the table and stood up.

  ‘I need no light to know Barthelemie Kohlhase,’ he declared loudly and Daunie, half-way to the table with a wax-slathered branched candelabra made a face and turned to go. Batty plucked the affair from his hands and stuck it on the table, scattering coin and cards; someone sitting in the shadowed end made an annoyed grunt.

  ‘Barthie,’ said the man with a wide, deep grin.

  ‘Thomas,’ Batty countered. They made no move to kiss cheeks or clasp wrists, but Thomas Bui thrust a horn cup at Batty and then gave Ewan and John Dubh the same. They sniffed, smacked lips and drank if off in one; there was appreciative laughter.

  ‘At least now I know your attack dogs are Scotch,’ Thomas Bui declared. ‘No-one drinks brandy like they do.’

  ‘They will drink anything,’ Batty agreed, ‘and have only one proviso regarding it – which I share – that it must not have been previously swallowed.’

  He was aware of the men round the table shifting away, scraping back benches and stools to slide into the shadows and leave him and Thomas Bui alone. He sat down and Thomas sat opposite.

  ‘What brings you here? Do not say chance.’

  ‘The chance you have a man I seek,’ Batty answered. ‘Taken from the north scant days ago. Steward of a wee fortalice. His name is Will Elliot and he has poor feet which makes walking awkward.’

  ‘He has missing toes and bad stab marks through the insteps,’ Thomas Bui replied flatly. ‘I had our barber look at him, thinking his wounds were more recent than they were. Hoping to get him to at least stand upright without a stick. I bought him from some stradioti; I do not know what Company they were in but I suspect they were leaving it at the time.’

  Batty’s heart spun a little and he tried to control his voice. ‘Is he here still?’

  Thomas Bui leaned back a little and contemplated Batty. ‘What’s your interest in the man?’

  ‘Ransom, no more no less. Sent by the wee lord whose fortalice he stewards for.’

  ‘I thought it might have been Maramaldo.’

  Batty shrugged. ‘I had heard he was out and away. Why would I care?’

  ‘I hear you had him marked for a hemping,’ Thomas Bui answered and Batty managed a laugh, though it sounded hollow even to him.

  ‘The Red Bull Dacre had him on a gibbet, waiting the word of Fat Henry, who choked on it and died before issuing the writ.’

  ‘So Maramaldo said,’ Thomas Bui answered, ‘together with a lot of cant about the Lord sparing him for better work ahead.’ He saw Batty’s face and how he would not ask the question that bothered him. So he provided the answer anyway.

  ‘He spoke of you. He came here on the way south. Has a handful of Border horse – Charltons and not the best of them, mind – and a score of ragged chiels barely able to hold a pike the right way up. He was buying captives who could be indentured to him as fighting men and thought to get some old soldiers from me. Half his Company sank in the Mary Rose.’

  ‘Did he take any?’

  Thomas Bui shook his head. ‘I had none by then. Only one thing stinks worse than fish after three days and that’s guests who do not work and need feeding. I ransomed the English I had to some Scotch out of Carlisle. They take them for the delight of hanging them – hold a Fair Day for it and call it ‘dancing on air’. I ransomed some Scotch to an English from a tower out in the wilds, probably for the same fate. I thought to add this Will Elliot to the party for he was no use to me.’

  Batty knew that the distinctions between ‘sold’ and ‘ransomed’ could get you hanged, but the act was the same no matter the legals in it. He wondered who the English with a tower in the wild was and asked it aloud.

  Thomas waved a deprecating hand. ‘Niente è per niente – 200 English shillings will get you the who. The where you must find for yourself.’

  Nothing is for nothing. Batty had heard that many times before, but the price was steep just for a name and he said so. Thomas leaned forward a little.

  ‘Only a tenth of that is for the name,’ he answered, softly vicious, ‘the rest is for me to forget Maramaldo’s request to do you much harm as possible.’

  Thomas Bui knew Barthelemie Kohlhase by reputation and some sightings. He knew he had been at the siege of Florence years before, helping Michaelangelo Bunarotti site defence works and guns. Before that, he had heard, Kohlhase had been a gunner for Maramaldo, who had something to do with the loss of his arm. He knew Barthie was a gunner much in demand. He knew the man was known as someone who was ‘no mat
ch with a slow match’.

  None of which prepared him for the sudden savage dig of metal in one knee under the table, nor the curl of smile over the sickle beard.

  ‘I have adjusted this to take account of that being your left knee. How do you value your bags, Captain-General Bui? For if you do not part with the name and with us in good grace, I will blow them so far away ye could not find them with an almanac.’

  Bui gave in and gave the name, then Batty stood, pistol still in his hand and backed for the kitchen, shepherded by the Frasers, watched by shadow men who scraped back their chairs and waited to be let off the leash. Batty went past Daunie’s now-scowling wife, then Daunie himself as he unbolted the door. Out into the rain-lashed street, a wind had scattered the mist and brought storm from the sea.

  There was no-one around, which Batty decided was God’s grace on a curfew. ‘What now?’ Ewan demanded and Batty gave him a scornful curl of lip.

  ‘Run, ye bliddy fool.’

  * * *

  They ran, though Batty’s part in that was short and ended in a wheezing stumble. He was half-way up Hidegate, slithering on cobbles wet as a black whale’s back, when he had to stop, one shoulder on a slimed wall, mouth open to suck in more air. Too auld, he thought fiercely. Too bliddy auld for this…

  There was movement in the shadows and he remembered he still held the drawn dagg and lifted it menacingly; he hoped the powder was still dry.

  ‘Stay clear, ye scullions.’

  Then he heard the slap of leather and saw the figures coming up hard from the Dun Heifer; there were four of them and they stopped a loud shout away then one stepped forward. He had a lump of wood and a dagger and Batty had no doubt his friends were as similarly armed; they aim to do me damage, Batty thought, then drag me back to the feet of Malatesta.

  Batty felt a lurch of panic, for he could not see any of the Frasers and cursed them under his breath. Run, he had said like a bliddy fool and they had obeyed him with all the speed of young legs.

  ‘How now, Mynheer Kohlhase. You have played your hand, bully and now must suffer the cost.’