by Robert Low
‘We’ll gie him a decent kisting,’ said a voice and the granite cliff face of the Randi King loomed into Batty’s view. ‘We owe you for that.’
Chapter Seventeen
With the Egyptiani
Mair sleekit than a buttered otter. That was Merrilee Meg’s take on Nebless Clem, who had contrived to make his escape yet again. Batty found that out after a score of hours thinking he was back in the Swan, the Dutch fluyt that transported Maramaldo up and down the Baltic.
The Swan was the worst ship in Christendom, whose rats knew more about sailing than the half-dozen apes they had as a crew. He was relieved to find that what he rode in, swaying under flapping canvas, was one of the Egyptiani covered carts.
When it stopped, the King heaved himself up the side and dropped to the bed of it, a great flat clunk of sound that rocked the cart to and fro. The King grinned.
‘Awake then is it?’
‘How long have I been out?’
‘Long enough,’ Meg answered and put the delicious balm of a cold compress on his forehead. ‘Yon whip scars ye have are a right sight, no mistake. Some of them have been stretched broken so that your back will look like auld Egypt writing from now on. Your lovers will go mad trying to work out the message.’
‘Well, we are making camp for the night, having avoided Graitna and trying to avoid Carlisle,’ the Randi King said. ‘Headed south to St Cuthbert’s Fair once we have set you back on your feet.’
‘My thanks for that,’ Batty managed. ‘How did ye ken where I was?’
The King waved dismissively. ‘We have oor ways and I owed you for the rescue of the Ape.’
‘Bliddy wee hoormonger,’ Meg threw in bitterly. The King laughed.
‘Ye wonder where he gets the grit for it, considering how he is handled most nights by yerself, mighty Meg.’
She rose in a waft of stale sweat and perfume, tossed her head and declared her intent to fetch Batty some broth. Outside, Batty heard the low murmur of talk, the tinkling clash of anklets and bracelets, the sound of wood being cut.
‘Aye, aye – be assured your horses are revelling in comfort.’
‘Will?’
The King sighed. ‘A bad end for a good man. We left him by the altar as you raved over it so hard. Tied him a decent carpet all the way from the Mongol lands and sat him with his face uncovered. He will scare the horses, so he will.’
Merrilee Meg snorted, whether at the joke or the way they had left him, and he exchanged winks and she swayed off dropping over the side of the wagon. The King watched her go and chuckled.
‘Aye, sometimes I envy the Ape…’
He seemed to say that every time and Batty often wondered if he had been there. Probably not – for all his grim strength, King Billy did not like magic and knew what Meg could do with a sample of seed.
‘Not if you had seen him with his hair full of straw in the garth at Carlisle,’ Batty growled back and the King admitted it with a shrug.
‘I thought he was lost, for sure. You are welcome to travel as far south with us as you care.’
Batty said nothing and the King eased himself a little, turned sideways to seek something hidden and turned back, grinning.
‘The wummin are cleaning and loading your fine pistols, we have recovered all your wee knives – but your sword is a ruin. The blade is broken at the tip and bent in the middle. I have it, but unless there is sentiment in it for you, I would advise you leave it here. Egyptiani smiths are noted for bringing the dead back to life.’
Surprisingly, Batty found the sentiment in the old blade – but a useless edge was just that and he said so. The King nodded sagely, then thrust a burlap wrapped package forward.
‘A wee bit too fine for the likes of yourself,’ he offered, ‘and a duellist’s weapon. I can see it hanging in pride on the wall of your wee tower, all the same.’
Batty unwrapped the burlap to find his own sheath and a new sword in it. It was a backsword of sorts, but for all it had a basket hilt in the Scottish style, Batty thought it had been fashioned elsewhere, particularly because backsword by tradition were sharp on one side only and this one had an inscription cut into the blade: Si Deus pro nobis quis contra nos, the King told him.
If God is for us, who will stand against us – it made Batty think of Templars and that made him uneasy. It made him think of Sister Faith and her insistence that he was Michaelangelo, that he had drunk from the Holy Grail instead of the rough-carved wooden bowl she had handed him to keep safe.
He hoped she was safe still, as he studied the sword, the way the blade was a double edge from the midpoint to the tip, how the hilt was composed of two solid side guards surmounted with a woven design in the Scottish fashion. It was a matter of lethal beauty and he thanked the King for it.
He saw the genuine delight in Batty’s face and cracked his own with a big smile. ‘I am sure you will leave as soon as you can. Seek Clem and use that fine blade to cut off his eyelids to complete his beauty.’
He leaned forward so his wrecking reef of a face was inches away. ‘I have admired yer derring-do for the longest time. There’s the rub of it. Time. The only enemy ye will never beat – but you have had good innings. Time you left the Border lands, Batty Coalhouse, or you will end at the ither end of that chapel with Will, staring each other out until the Second Coming. Or dance in the air like all Clem’s men are doing, waiting for the crows of dawn.’
He leaned back a little. ‘Ye have the siller for it – ye have replaced your belly with a bag of coin, I see. Enough to live comfortable. Dinna worry – it is safe enough until you want it.’
‘Will’s ransom,’ Batty said, suddenly remembering it. ‘Belongs to a wee lord out in Fife and I will needs take it back to him.’
‘That’s the ither direction,’ the King pointed out. ‘I can give you some men to make sure you get there – but it is my fondest wish you never return to these parts. Now that the war is no barrier to them, your enemies are stirring forth and will eat you.’
Later, Batty found the strength to leave the wagon and sit by the fire in the camp, surrounded by people talking in what seemed half-a-dozen tongues at once. Women swayed among them, cooking and serving while others, men included, worked willow into baskets, or horn into spoons.
He sat beside Megs, who brought him mutton stew and they ate and talked. Batty learned that they were heading down to Applecross and the horse fair.
‘Though it is not only for the horses,’ Megs added and smiled gently. ‘Also to meet others and get them wedded. The King calls it improving the bloodline.’
Batty knew it well enough – this was one of the larger Egyptiani groups, but there were others and they needed to find mates so that, as the King had memorably said to Batty once before ‘we don’t end up with droolers who have an extra limb.’
‘Are you with us?’ Megs asked and Batty shook his head and explained what he must do. She nodded as if she had known.
‘You need a good woman,’ she added. ‘There’s Philo over there, a field in need of ploughing since her man died of the Sweats. She’s the one who cared for you and knows the ways of herb and chant.’
‘A dangerous profession,’ Batty responded, though he had to admit the Philo in question was dark, tinkled with brass and had a shelf of chest that moved well. He felt Megs’ scowl and was urged to tell her of the five women abused and hanged by Nebless Clem.
‘Everyone was told by the Mistress of Blackscargil that they were Egyptiani women, but that was a lie. For a’ that, Clem sought revenge on you, which is why the Ape was seized.’
‘Who were the poor quine?’ she wanted to know and Batty told her. She shook her red head and looked into the flames; for a moment, Batty thought she was working some heinous spell on Clem and did not like being near it.
She felt him shift and turned. ‘You and I have been together often enough for me to know that commingling is no’ a problem with you. Is it maritals that puts you off?’
Commingling. Wher
e did she get it from, he wondered? At the same time the memories of it welled up and he felt himself urging in the groin, enough to make him grunt. She knew well enough what was happening and her smile grew salacious.
‘I have no desire to saddle a wummin wi’ an auld wreck like me,’ he hastened to add. ‘Everyone tells me I am too auld, too slow and the rest.’
He levered himself up and made for the cart, hoping he could heave himself up by the wheel and clatter back into it.
‘I wid have ye, Batty Coalhouse,’ he heard her say.
Christ wummin, I plough you once a six-month, if that and you never ask payment, though you always take something I never miss and am never aware of. All very fine for a witch with red hair, but you are twenty years younger and there is a big change between a rare swiving and being married on to me.
He wanted to say it, but his mouth was dry and he crawled into the bed, feeling flushed and cold at the same time. He fell asleep and when he woke, she was at his back and his hand had been dragged between her thighs, high up against the heat of her.
He tried to pull free and felt the thighs close.
‘Best liniment for what ails your fingers, Batty,’ she breathed. ‘It will ease your stiffness.’
Her own hand was where stiffness was being encouraged and he wanted to tell her to leave off, but failed. Spectacularly.
She lay with him all of that night, which was unusual from the other times. He woke briefly, feeling her fingers tracing the still-raw scars on his back, as if reading runes. She knew he was awake and he felt her wine-breath on his ear.
‘Ye are too thin by far. I liked my Batty with more belly.’
And a clean shirt. And washed armpits. Once a wummin gets ye…
He fell asleep to her breathing, wondering if she was touched by some curse that made her want auld fat men. In the morning, she was gone from the bed and he was still wondering.
Chapter Eighteen
Eastwards, up the Liddesdale
He moved through the mist, hoping it would last well into morning, aware of the heat of the Armstrongs and Elliots and Nixons to the north, the Milburns, Dodds, Charltons and everyone else he had antagonised to the south, over the river in England. If he could just stay mouse-quiet and unseen until Hermitage…
He rode in silence, thinking on her and what she had said. ‘You are a lonely man,’ she had offered, her voice soft in the dark.
‘No more than you,’ he had replied. ‘But I am an older man who can live with my loneliness, quietly. You are young, and it must be difficult to accept your loneliness, right in the middle of a’ yer ain folk. You must sometimes want to fight it – which is why you make the offer you do.’
She had struck his arm, hard enough to make him wince with her little nut fist.
‘Fool,’ she said. ‘There is eighteen years between us, that’s all. A good man is a good man, no matter the silver in his hair. Youth is not the only lonely time – you keep coming to my house but you cannot rid yourself of your loneliness. I have it in me to help you forget it, but you never stay long enough, as if the feeling of cleaving to another kicks you to your feet.’
Her voice tailed to a firm sadness. ‘I have decided this will be otherwise.’
‘The King may think different,’ Batty offered, a little afraid and knowing it was exactly as she said. She laughed.
‘He has never lain with me. He fears the magic. Part of why he wishes me wed to you.’
Batty gawped and she laughed. ‘He kens you will not stay with the Egyptiani and that we will leave once wed. He kens also that I am the best sense you will get for achieving your goals – your ain tower in a place of peace.’
I’ve enjoyed every age I’ve been, even the one where I lost my arm, he thought now, shuffling along the Eskdale. Every scar is a badge I wear to show I’ve been present, the hat-plumes displayed proudly for all to see. Nowadays, I don’t want the face and body of the likes of Hepburn at Hermitage, the Fairbairn. I want to wear the life I’ve lived and do so for the longest time.
He thought about Will and how the world had not ceased because he was dead, how everything flew on despite his lack of presence in it. Death is not an evil. It takes away good things and the desire for them. Old age is the Devil, Batty thought, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them. Pawky folk that we are, we fear death, and we desire old age.
He met only the wool men, Forsters from Caddyshaws near Hermitage. They were coming up the Eskdale looking to sell good fleeces in Graitna, to men who would ship them out of the Solway to the Dutchies. Good, clean wool would bring premium prices in a world ravaged by sheep-scab and Caddyshaws nestled in the armpit of Hermitage, which had allowed them to raise the sheep in safety.
They knew who Batty was – who did not ken of the one-armed, heavily armed rider who scorned the rest of the Border and all his enemies in it? Tam Forster opined this, grinning brownly in the lights of lantern and fire. Since he offered decent ale and a plate with fish in the gruel, Batty worked out that he considered it only his due to speak freely.
‘Them Armstrongs out of Mangerton will pact with the De’il to feel your collar,’ Tam offered, passing good bread.
‘The ones of Whithaugh might even brawl with their Mangerton Laird if it meant grabbing you for themselves,’ said Johnnie Forster, Tam’s younger brother. ‘You made them look daft and they didnae care for that.’
‘I had no hand in making them look daft,’ Batty growled, spitting out fish bones. ‘They managed that themselves.’
‘Weil,’ Tam answered, beaming from under the waterproof round his head, ‘it is a fine, saft night and if it rains harder there is room underneath the cairt for all o’ us. The Armstrongs are no’ oot and aboot in this wet moonlight – and Nebless Clem is half-way to Berwick.’
This last was news to Batty, which he realised Tam had known all along, for he had a sleekit look.
‘For a wee shilling or two,’ he said, ‘I can mayhap tell ye why.’
Batty knew why. He would be going to Malatesta before the man packed up and moved south. He would be looking for men and Malatesta, who hated Batty as much as the next man, would be likely to offer them.
Tam saw his chances smoke away and scowled, burying his bad cess in a mug.
* * *
He woke into another saft day of mizzle, where the rain never fell but hung in the air, drenching cobwebs with diamonds.
The high ground wore a shroud of silver, the path up to the little wood was a glittering net and the soaking earth smelled rich and sweet while the drips pitted and patted as he rode Fiskie away from the wool-sellers.
Batty did not wait to say goodbye, or take a hot posset; he wanted away from Tam and Johnnie and struck out along his original path until he could not see them, then turned more north than east. He did not trust them.
Not long after, when the sun was more than a milk wash in the east, he looked back towards the Esk and a sharp flick of light caught his eye. He knew it was the point of a slung lance, knew it well and waited until he saw two or three more. Men were riding up the Eask and in a little while would come on the wool seller brothers.
Armstrongs, he was sure of it. A small patrol, six or eight seeking news which they would get from Tam and Johnnie Forster. A one-armed man who was certainly Batty Coalhouse, heading east along the Esk, no more than an hour ahead.
Will they hunt down their quarry or go back to the warm of Mangerton? Or maybe even Whithaugh. He knew the truth – they would hunt down their own grannies if commanded and Batty would have sold his soul there and then to the Earl of Hell for two things – a glass with eau de vie and his youthful eyes returned.
‘What shall we do?’ he breathed to Fiskie, who whuffed back at him. Batty nodded – what we always do.
‘Run,’ he answered.
And then he was off, forging swiftly and feeling the heat of them on his ravaged back.
They rode too hard and for too long, down dips and up slo
pes until Fiskie’s breathing made Batty stop. He looked back; a dark figure tottered over the far rise behind him, a cloak flung off his shoulder and trailing like a wedding train. He raised a wavering caliver, there was a plume of smoke and, an eyeblink later, the faint pop. Batty waved to him in savage exultation – missed, you bugger…
Then he cursed as a horseman breasted the crest, the big, powerful beast blowing hard, but urged into a new run. In the moment before Batty turned his head and started to urge Fiskie on, he saw the face. Knew it. Maurie Armstrong of Whithaugh, the one he had humiliated at Mickledale.
Out with some kinsman, hunting any whisper of a one-armed man. Batty had fumbled out a dagg and turned Fiskie to face Maurie, thinking he’d have to be quick or the others would swamp him like fever.
Maurie had flogged his fine horse into a final canter, but it was failing and finally stopped entirely, blowing. Maurie raised himself up in the stirrups.
‘Hold hard, Batty Coalhouse, or I will blow out what brains you have.’
He kicked and cursed the horse into a stumbling trot, half-falling through the clinging bracken; it must have been a long, hard ride to get this far from those treacherous wool-selling brothers, Batty thought – for once, a chasing horse is worse than mine for wind.
Maurie had a pistol, which Batty realised must have been a deliberate action – there was the one with caliver, too and he imagined others would be so armed; the many daggs of Batty Coalhouse would be legendary now.
Maurie shot, which made the horse shy sideways at the blast and put his aim so far off he probably did not even hit the ground. Shrieking with fury, he savaged the bit, kicked with his spurred boots and the animal squealed and lumbered on.
At the last moment, Batty raised his pistol and fired, with Fiskie standing sideways; now we find how well we stand with God or the Devil. At that moment Maurie’s horse had enough and stopped, flinging up its head in time to take the ball in the upper lip – the explosion of blood and brains, the high screaming of the horse, the smoke… all of it pinned Batty to the spot.
