by Robert Low
Ewan climbed down stiffly, went to the second horse and began hauling the body off; when Batty went to help he saw John Dubh, eyes staring at morning clouds he could not see and a latchbow bolt almost through his neck. His good hand shook then.
‘Wee spalpeen got away,’ Ewan explained wearily. ‘We had killed everyone else, but that yin reined round to running when John Dubh chased him, springing like a deer. Would have got him, too, if the bastard had not turned and shot. Bratach salach got clean away and no doubt has raised the others.’
Batty looked at the bloody pale face of Black John and thought how the man with the latchbow had killed two of them and ridden to safety. Stands well in the sight of the Devil, he thought dully, then drew Ewan aside and told him how Will fared, quietly, close enough for the fog of their breath to mingle.
‘Well, there it is,’ Ewan said. ‘Mayhap we all should have gone back to Will’s wee fortalice when you telt us.’
‘He insisted otherwise,’ Batty answered, watching as Ewan explored the body of Black John, ransacking it for anything of use or value. Then he heaved the dead man by his shoulders to the edge of the drop.
‘Canna give him proper burial, but I have said what words are needed and taken what he will no longer miss. I dinna want that whip-man to get anywhere near him.’
Batty nodded and helped him roll John Dubh off the edge. There was a slither, a pause and a thump. Batty made the cross, then looked up across the bridge. There were riders, small still but growing shadows with the light at their back.
‘I have a plan to ruin this bridge,’ he told Ewan, who nodded, hefted the great sword off his back and then nodded to Batty and held out his hand.
‘It has been an honour and pleasure, Master Coalhouse,’ he said, ‘but they will be on you afore you can load Will back on a horse. Fire up your match when you will; I will hold them.’
Last of the Lovats of Beauly, Batty thought with a sudden pang in his chest, fierce and hot, that almost sprang tears to him. He watched the man lope back across the bridge and then hurried to get Will.
‘Thwarted them again, eh Batty,’ Will whispered as he tried to help his way on to the horse.
Grit, Batty thought. Will always had a deal of that. Now the bolt had broken something in him and he was starting to choke on his own blood. The nearest help was Graitna, heart of Armstrong country and no safe place for any of them. In his head, he drew a map of the country he knew well enough and realised how much of it hated him. He heard Ewan’s voice from somewhere in the past saying ‘If a man is judged by the number of his enemies, ye are mighty indeed, Batty Coalhouse.’
Batty went out along the bridge and knelt where he knew his first slow match began. He called out to Ewan, seeing the riders coming closer; one or two dismounted and he was sure he could see the masked figure of Nebless Clem urging them all on.
Ewan turned briefly, big sword in both hands. ‘Fire up yer bridge-blower, Batty. Do not wait for me. An rud a theid mun cuairt, thig e mun cuairt.’
What goes around comes around.
Batty wanted to rage at him, but he knew what Ewan was doing and why. He watched the sparks fly from the dagg when he pressed the trigger, watched the slow match flare and blew more life into it. It hissed like a snake and set off on its way.
Ewan did not wait, especially for the boy with the cunning latchbow – he went forward, big sword held above his head like a banner and roaring out ‘claymore’ in his own tongue. A latchbolt hissed past him, a rider came at him and he swung while running; the horse shrieked and went down, front legs smashed. The rider went out through the ears and Ewan ignored him, plunging on.
Seeking for the head of the snake, Batty saw, running to Nebless Clem; cut him down and all is done with – another rider tried to skewer Ewan, but he danced sideways and cut the man in the middle as he went. A bolt struck him, staggered him, but he did not fall…
Batty became aware of the slow match and recoiled from it, back along the bridge to the far end, where he lit the other. The first one went off in a shower of sparks and pops, the smoke obscuring any sight of the battle beyond. Batty hauled himself up into the saddle.
‘Can ye ride?’ he demanded and Will nodded and managed a bloody smile.
‘Steeplechase on a Truce Day, dinna worry about me.’
‘Aye, you will take the silver bell for it, for sure.’
Batty reined around and they went off, leaving the clash and shouts until a roar and a fetid heat on Batty’s back told where the second charge had gone off. He risked turning to look back and saw timber flying in the air.
That was it for the bridge, he thought. And for the last of the Lovat Frasers.
Will was half in and half out of the world, knowing they were running and trying to feel the urgency of it. All he felt was a great sense of loss, but that would be because of Batty’s singing.
‘They buried him at the mirk midnight,
when dew fell cold and still,
when the aspen grey forgot to play
and the mist clung to the hill.’
Chapter Sixteen
At the bridge
Clem sat on the bay while peewits called and swirled and Parcy took the lists and gave the bad news – six dead, two so badly hurt they’d need taken back to shelter by two others. Ten men lost, though Skelf was constant and nagging in saying how he killed two of the northern caterans with his latchbow. Parcy grudgingly confirmed one a certainty – ‘shot through the neck, by God. Nae man lives with that.’ The other he thought likely to die, shot in the belly by Skelf, who preened and strutted with it all.
The bridge was the worst of it. It had been the easy passage for little pack ponies of salt from the Solway to make it up on to the moors and then to Edinburgh or Berwick. No-one much cared to go after salt, since disposing of it afterwards was complicated and likely to attract attention.
Now it was broken at the far end and the remainder of it lurched and hung like a drunk fallen on a fence. It would collapse, everyone agreed, at the first foot on it and they said it firmly, because they knew Clem was likely to ask and it saved tension all round if he realised no-one was about to risk it. Not even him.
The only way over the burn, as was pointed out to him, was a detour of eight miles across the bracken and then eight miles back to the other end of the bridge to try and pick up tracks. It looked like rain, as Sleekeye pointed out, so haste was advised.
Clem could feel their heat and their eyes. Sleekeye, no doubt, had been telling them how this would gain them nothing and they were forcing it at the expense of raiding for the winter and finding somewhere warmer than the Mutton Pot scrub. He knew Sleekeye was only the voice saying what they all thought, knew that they hadn’t liked what had been done to the girl at Micklegate – even the Broken Names, who were bloodsoaked at the best of times.
He hadn’t liked it himself. Afterwards. Tried to excuse it as necessary, a way of forcing the da out of Micklegate but that was a lie; the bastel houseplace had fallen like a fat apple and he had been tempted to stay and make it his new home. But the others had glowered and scowled until Sleekeye had dared to whisper in Clem’s ear about how this was Armstrong land.
He glanced at the wreck of the bridge, at the clouding sky, then at Sleekeye.
‘We go after Batty Coalhouse,’ he said.
* * *
Batty halted after a while, making the excuse that he was checking his direction, though it was really to give Will a chance to straighten up in the saddle before he tipped off.
‘Where are we headed?’ he asked and Batty told him, light and smiling.
‘Langholm – we will just skirt the north of the Debateable so we don’t bump into Armstrongs. There will be warmth and shelter there. Then we head back to Edinburgh and Fife.’
‘The tower is burned,’ Will whispered and Batty acknowledged it. Langholm’s tower had belonged to the Maxwells but the Earl of Hereford had washed war over it three years ago, burning it to a blackened husk.
‘Won’t they follow?’ Will asked and Batty reassured him that they might try, but it would rain soon and, with luck, they’d be in front of warming fire eating stew with meat in it while Nebless Clem plootered through the mud of the moor.
‘Thwarted them again, eh Batty?’
They rode on, hunched into a soft, persistent drizzle until Batty saw a light, a corpse-candle affair so wan he had to squint to convince himself it was real. It was, filtering from under the badly fitting shutters of a bastel house.
It was a dumb shadow in the night, surrounded by two or three smaller shadows of outbuildings, but Batty rode them up close enough to be heard and then called. He had to do it twice before he heard wood clack and a voice sailed out of the unshuttered slit.
‘Who are ye and what do you want?’
‘Travellers, needing warmth and shelter. One is an injured Will Elliot…’
‘And the other is Batty Coalhouse,’ the voice finished. ‘Aye, I have heard. You ken we are Armstrongs here?’
‘I had hoped for Christian Armstrongs.’
‘Get ye gone,’ the voice answered coldly. ‘Else we will come out and vengeance ourselves on the slaughterer of Hollows.’
‘If you could,’ Batty spat back, ‘you would have already. Instead you will huddle there until the moudiewarts chasing us come up. Nebless Clem will ignore you and take over your outbuildings and anything in them he needs.’
‘Would we be better off if you were here when he arrived? I dinna think so. Begone.’
Begone. Nae Christians here – try up the dale. Batty remembered Minty telling the story an eon ago, laughing when she had laughter in her. That was gone; he turned Fiskie’s head and rode on, dragging Will behind him.
They rode on while the rain filtered away, but gathering clouds veiled the sun. Batty raised his head and bathed in birdsong. He knew he was heading in the right direction but had no clue what lay ahead, save that the Armstrongs would be somewhere in it if he stood poorly in the sight of God. He knew Nebless Clem feared them, too and so would be riding cautious, throwing riders out as scouts.
In the end, horses decided it; they stumbled more often and almost pitched Will off, so Batty steered them in the direction of a stream, little more than a rill and followed it to where he found a ruin half-hidden by birch.
This was no recent victim of the English purge on the borders but an older affair, where Names had looted and pillaged until no-one wanted the place. It was solid walled, the remains of a slate roof at one end, but the stones and slates had been plundered over the years by neighbours who valued the treasure of them.
It had lain uninhabited but for rats and birds, long enough for birch to grow through some of it, trunks thick as a man’s forearm. It was also shaded and hidden by them and Batty took a chance.
He helped Will off the horse and laid him under the shelter of the slate-roofed end, covering him with Fiskie’s horse blanket. Then he dared a fire, little and made with wood that smoked only a little blue haze. He unsaddled the horses, brushed them as best as he was able, until Fiskie started in to grunting with the pleasure of it. Then he fed them what fodder he had left and finally made a decent gruel of grain and wind-dried cod, listening to the cushie-doos murmur back and forth.
Will barely ate a mouthful, his breath a heavy, broken stutter. There was blood on the horn spoon when Batty took it and that made him frown. He stared at the man, his face waxy and the colour of old cream. He had grit, for sure, but he would die unless he got better care and the thought drove a blade of sorrow and panic into Batty, so that he almost sprang up to saddle the horses again.
He watched the beasts cropping grass, thought of all the times he had seen blood in the drinking bowl or on the lips of men wheezing desperately to live. He could pick up a stalk of grass, sign the cross over it to consecrate it as a Host and give absolution to Will, but he would not do it just yet. Instead, he watched him in the poor light of day, surrounded by birdsong.
Will was aware of it, could not open his eyes to look back at Batty but still could see him. He knew he was dying but no longer felt the fear of it. If you are stuck under a great rock you can’t move, with no hope of rescue, what do you do?
Count the blessings of your life? Not many. Consider the blessing that it won’t be troubling you much longer.
Batty thought that in a different world they would just have looked into each other’s eyes, and Batty would have said: ‘You’re dying’ while Will confessed that he knew, but was afraid. That’s all they would have said if they’d been talking straight from the heart and Batty had stared into the eyes of dying men too often to know how impossible it was to live like that.
And Will thought of the world moving forward without him, not noticing he was gone. Am I wicked for thinking of a world that ends when I do? Not ending with respect to me – but every set of eyes closing with mine.
‘How do you feel?’ Batty managed to ask and Will smiled.
Dying is nothing, he wanted to say and he had no fear of it in his mind. But living? Living was becoming a field of sheep hefting to a hill, wandering where they pleased. Living was a gliding owl in the dark. Living was a good horse between your legs and a caliver under one leg and the rolling moor with a stream fringed with trees along it and the bulk of grey shape that might be Hermitage or Heaven.
He wanted to say all that, but all he managed was ‘fine’.
Batty felt a chill on his neck and went to pull the blanket up round Will when the pigeons burst away with frantic flaps; he turned, reaching for the axe-handled dagg in his belt, then looked up into two faces, bearded and tense.
‘Dinna jerk that fast,’ one said. ‘Pull it slow and let it drop.’
Batty looked at them steadily, then let the axe-handled dagg drop to the ground with a thump. They weren’t runaways from one of the paid-sojer companies, they were Broken Men in dirty trews and scuffed boots and ragged jacks, splintered and cut from hard use. Border men and the worst of them. The one who had spoken had a latchbow, raised almost to his shoulder. This will be the one who boasts about killing three of us.
‘Well,’ said the other one, ‘wid ye look at that. Batty Coalhouse, what Clem has been chasing and trembling over for all this time. Meaner than a stepped-on adder, bloody-handed and terrible, they said. Whit is all the fuss about, eh, Patey?’
‘Ah kilt three of them,’ Patey replied, lowering the latchbow and grinning.
‘Two,’ the other corrected and Patey hawked and spat.
‘Three in a while – look at him, Tam. Belly-shot and dying.’
‘Well,’ said Tam again. ‘Here ye are, having been sounded out as a tusky boar and found squatting like a fopdoodle.’
‘Nebless Clem will be happy for you,’ Batty growled, wondering if he could reach the tribe of knives across his chest, or the one in his boot, or even his backsword.
‘On yer feet,’ Tam ordered, sneering. ‘Put yon one good hand on your heid and stand up. Face me.’
‘Watch him, Tam,’ Patey warned.
‘Shut yer breadhole, Patey,’ Tam growled and then eased a little, his smile all lopsided and brown. ‘I’d as soon have Patey put yin of his bolts in your face, but that would mean us dragging you on to a pony and carting the pair of you away back to Clem.’
‘We could try the Armstrongs at Hollows,’ Patey put in. ‘Pound for pound they will pay the best price for him.’
Tam half-turned, considering it. ‘Clem’s nose will be out of joint ower that.’
They both laughed, then Tam signalled Patey to hand over the latchbow. ‘Go fetch up the ponies.’
Patey scowled at him. ‘I am the one for this weapon. You couldna hit a bull’s arse at touching range. You get the ponies.’
Tam scowled, then turned to Batty. ‘Get yourself free o’ that blade at your side.’
B
atty got the baldric over his head and the backsword slithered to the ground. Tam’s feral grin got wider.
‘See, Patey? When you pull his fangs he’s a wee tamed hound. I’ll get the mounts – watch him close, mind.’
He stumped off, clashing through the undergrowth. How did I not hear them come up, Batty wondered? They are bulls, not foxes.
He felt himself come over loose, felt his mouth fill with spit and start to zing. He measured the distance to Patey and his latchbow. Then he started to reach inside his half-opened jack; Patey made a warning gesture, but Batty made a whimpering sound.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘I have money here. Take it and let me go.’
He hauled out a handful of silver and let it spill, catching the light; Patey’s mouth dropped a little and he stared.
‘How much more is in there? Bring it all out.’
Batty half-rolled his body, feeling a knee shriek. At the same time he plucked out Brother Throw from the tribe of knives banded in the apostles across his chest and flicked it.
Something hissed past his shoulder, then Patey cried out, a gurgling sound, and staggered sideways. Batty dipped to the backsword, drew it and lunged, but Patey was on his back, kicking like a beetle and Batty had nothing much to do other than to look into the shocked eyes while blood from Brother Throw’s neck slice sluiced down like a scarlet scarf.
Batty said nothing, simply leaned the sword into the new hole and pushed until Patey shut up all sounds.
Then he rescued Brother Throw and wiped the blade clean on Patey, sheathed it and went back for the dropped dagg. He heard the crashing as Tam lurched back with the ponies, saw him as he came into the clearing.
‘Ye are right, Patey,’ he was saying, ‘we will go to the Armstrongs…’
He had time to be briefly shrill when the bang went off and the flare soared out of the barrel. Then he was slung away like some discarded bag, hit the last wall of the ruined house and slid down it leaving a snail trail of gore.
