Reiver

by David Pilling

  Richie frowned. There was nothing about them save green hillside, smeared with patches of yellow gorse and purple heather. Apart from themselves, and a few curlews wheeling in the sky, there was not a living soul to be seen.

  Cleave-Crown cupped a hand to his ear. “There,” he said. “Do you hear it?”

  The screams were growing fainter. Richie caught a faint echo before they faded away completely. He looked at Ruth, whose hearing was better than most.

  “North,” she said quietly, her face white and strained. “High Shaws farm lies a few miles from here.”

  Richie nodded wordlessly. He swung Jack’s head north, and the four sped over the hills at the gallop. When they had covered two miles or so, Richie glimpsed a thin trail of smoke on the horizon. He bit his lip and spurred Jack to even greater efforts.

  By the time they reached the crest overlooking High Shaws, the familiar stink of burning thatch was in his mouth and nostrils. Mixed with the less familiar reek of roasted human flesh.

  The farmhouse at High Shaws was a typically poor cottage, made of plaster and lathe, with a turf roof. It was a charred husk now, all but consumed by fire. A funnel of grey smoke, filled with sparks and rags of blackened thatch and wattle and daub, wafted south across the heather.

  Andrew Shaws, the farmer, lay on his face a few yards away from the burned-out ruin of his home. His jerkin had been stripped away and lay in a heap next to him. Two men, reivers in jacks and steel bonnets, were taking it in turns to chop at his exposed back with their swords. The old man’s white hair was dabbled in gore, his flesh sliced up like a joint of beef.

  Andrew’s son Adam, a gangly youth, lay sprawled on the grass nearby. There was no obvious mark on him. Richie hoped he was merely unconscious. A third reiver had fetched the black kyne from the byre, and was idly checking the beasts over.

  “Adam had a wife and child,” said Ruth. “Those screams…”

  They gazed in mute horror at the smoking shell of the house. Such things had been done before. Countless times. The Border was cruel, and bred cruel folk. Yet Richie was young. There was still some pity in him. The burning alive of a defenceless woman and her bairn, for no other reason than sport, turned his stomach.

  “Rough work,” remarked Cleave-Crown, rubbing his jaw. A hardened killer, even he had turned a little pale.

  Richie drew his pistol. He kept the dag loaded, and the wheel clicked softly as he turned it, ready to fire.

  “About to get rougher still,” he said coldly. “Three of them, four of us. We have the high ground.”

  Davy gave a low whistle. “Man, this is none of our affair,” he exclaimed. “You’re already at feud with the Armstrongs. How many enemies do you want to make in one lifetime?”

  “You can help me kill these pigs,” replied Richie without looking at his cousin, “or you can fuck off and look for another chief. Your choice.”

  Without another word he kicked in his spurs and set off down the ridge. The reivers cutting up Andrew saw him come, left off their sport and ran to their hobblers, which stood together on the edge of the inbye field.

  Richie chased them at the gallop. At a range of fifteen yards or so he extended his right arm holding the dag, sighted carefully along the barrel, fired.

  The bullet hit the nearest man square in the back and punched through the layered padding of his jack. He jerked and went over, arms flailing.

  Davy tore past in pursuit of the other man. A throwing knife gleamed in his hand. He cast the blade overarm; it spun through the air and stuck into the meat of the reiver’s thigh. His victim screamed and tried to stagger on, dragging his injured leg. Davy leaped from the saddle and caught him round the neck. The two went down, rolling on the turf. After a brief struggle Davy ended on top. His dagger flashed as he sawed it across the reiver’s throat.

  Richie turned to look for the third man. He saw Cleave-Crown advance slowly on foot towards the last reiver, ballock dagger in one hand, Jedburgh axe in the other.

  “Come, my bonny,” Cleave-Crown mocked, letting his axe swing loose in his hand, “you’re ready enough to make war on lassies and bairns. Have a go at me.”

  His opponent backed away, scarred face a mask of terror. He risked a glance over his shoulder at the hobblers. They had panicked at the noise of combat and bolted across the field.

  Richie guessed at the workings of the reiver’s mind. He might run from Cleave-Crown, but Richie could easily get between him and his horse. His only choice was to make a fight of it.

  The terror passed from his face. He straightened up and drew his sword and knife. Like most reivers when faced with death, he accepted his lot with grim fortitude.

  “My name is Martin Potts,” he declared. With that, he rushed at his foe.

  The unequal duel was over in seconds. A clumsy man to look at, Cleave-Crown moved with surprising grace in a fight. He caught the thrust of the sword on his knife, parried it away, spun on the ball of his foot and cut downward. The rounded head of his axe came down and carved deep into the nape of the reiver’s neck. Bone and flesh parted under the wickedly sharp blade. Almost decapitated, the reiver toppled onto his face.

  “Potts,” grunted Cleave-Crown, wiping his axe on the dead man’s breeches. “This will have been a feud, no doubt.”

  Richie thought so too. The Potts were another Redesdale family, from the northern end of the valley. He had intervened in a private quarrel. More blood on his head. More deadly feud.

  Ruth knelt beside the old farmer, checking for a pulse. She looked up at Richie and shook her head. Gone.

  Adam, the youth, was sitting up. He looked about him with mazed eyes. There was a vivid blue swelling on his brow where the reivers had clubbed him unconscious.

  Richie slid from the saddle and hurried over to him. “Adam,” he said, crouching, “can you hear me?”

  The lad stared back, slack-jawed. For a moment Richie feared the crack to the head had scrambled his wits.

  “I know you,” Adam said slowly. “Richie…Richie Reade. Richie O’the Bow.”

  Richie gripped his shoulder. “Listen. There is nothing for you here now. You must get yourself to Crowhame. Do you hear me? My kin will take you in. Give you food and shelter.”

  Adam’s brow furrowed. His head turned a fraction to the left, towards the burnt farmhouse. Richie braced himself to tell the boy his family were dead. Father, wife and bairn, all slain.

  “Crowhame,” muttered Adam, touching the bruise on his head. “I cannot go there. The place is no more. Armstrongs destroyed it a few nights since.”

  Richie went cold. “Destroyed,” he echoed, the word tasting foul in his mouth. “Don’t talk nonsense. My uncle is alive. It would take more than a poxy Armstrong to put him in the ground.”

  The boy stared back at him stupidly. He was still dazed. There was little more sense to be got from him.

  “What do we do?” asked Ruth. Her face was streaked with tears. Richie wished she wouldn’t look at the smoking horror of the farmhouse and its grisly contents.

  “Leave,” he said, straightening up. “We’ll take the horses. That’s all.”

  Cleave-Crown looked startled. “What?” he exclaimed. “Have we risked our skins for nothing? There’s good beef here, man.”

  He pointed his axe at the kyne. Richie stalked over and seized Cleave-Crown by the collar of his blood-spattered jack.

  “We leave the beasts,” he screamed, “understand?”

  The other man looked shaken. Richie let him go and went to fetch Jack, who was nibbling the grass beside the dead farmer’s gory corpse.

  He climbed into the saddle. The others watched him. Cleave-Crown pale and uncertain; Ruth wiping away her tears; Davy carrying the good leather boots taken from the reiver he slew.

  “To Crowhame,” said Richie. “I want to see for myself.”

  “And him?” asked Ruth, nodding at Adam. “We can’t just leave him here.”

  “We can. If he rides with us, he will be outlawed. The boy
has lost enough already. Let him keep his good name, at least.”

  “Fetch those horses,” he added. There was iron in his voice, and his companions obeyed without question.

  As he feared, they reached Crowhame to find it a ruin. Liddesdale had been thorough. Nothing remained of Richie’s cottage, where he was born and had intended to spend his days with Ruth, save a few charred timbers and post-holes.

  The outlaws wandered through the desolation, searching in vain for any signs of life. They found only the bodies of their kin. Some were burnt beyond recognition, others covered in a mass of wounds. The Armstrongs spared nobody. Children lay beside their parents, all slaughtered in a cold-blooded frenzy. The fields stood empty, beasts stolen, byre and stable razed to the ground. Fire had consumed all the cabins, but the farmhouse and bastle still stood. They were empty stone shells. The roof of the house and the timbers of the bastle had all been torched.

  Richie pictured the final moments of Crowhame. Reivers on horseback, swarming over the village. Clash of steel by moonlight, screams of women and children, his uncle’s voice raised in hoarse defiance. The thatch burning merrily, casting a hellish red glow on the last desperate stand of the Reades.

  Perhaps some had got inside the bastle. Their last refuge. In his mind Richie heard the rasping neigh of Nebless Will:

  “Set a fire next the door, lads – smoke the buggers oot, or let ‘em burn inside!”

  The rough stone walls were smeared with black patches. Marks of the fire. Richie laid his hand against one. It was still warm.

  My fault.

  These words thudded inside his head, over and over. The burden of guilt was too much to bear. His eyes blurred, and he slumped to his knees, head resting against the scorched wall.

  “Come away. We can do no good here.”

  Ruth’s voice. As ever, full of gentle comfort and understanding.

  “Me,” he whispered, “I did this. The blood of our family lies on my head. If I had gone to Liddesdale and given myself up to Nebless Will...”

  “No. The Armstrongs are savages, who take cruel revenge for even the slightest injury. They would have killed you, and then destroyed Crowhame anyway. Only the Warden could have saved our folk. He wanted nothing to do with us.”

  Richie shook his head, refusing to be consoled. “Then we should have stayed here. Died with the rest. Instead I ran away.”

  She knelt and rested her head on his shoulder. For a long while there was silence between them. The wind sighed across the tops. They heard Cleave-Crown, muttering a string of foul curses as he wandered the shattered village like an angry bull. There was no sound from Davy. Richie knew how his cousin preferred to grieve. He would have found a quiet nook somewhere, to weep in private.

  Richie gathered himself. “No tears,” he said, climbing to his feet. “Time enough for them when I’m old, and can afford to weep over the past. Would my uncle have me sit around and pipe my eye? My father? There is vengeance to be taken. Blood to be paid for.”

  His mate looked up at him sadly. “Richie,” she said, “the feud is over. It’s done. Our folk are all dead.”

  He banged his chest. “I’m not. So long as I draw breath, the feud lives.”

  Ruth sighed. “So you would declare war against Liddesdale. Four of us, against two thousand?”

  “We have friends,” he insisted. “The Dodds and Milburns have plenty of lances. My uncle rode many forays with them. They can help.”

  “Even together, they would still be outnumbered,” she replied. “You think the great Names of the March will agree to shake loose the border, just for our sake? Man, you are bewitched. They might offer us a little food and pity, even shelter for a while, but nothing more. Especially with war brewing.”

  Like everyone else along the Border, they knew something of the Scottish Regent, Moray, and his invasions of Liddesdale. The tales of the butchery he committed had grown in the telling to almost legendary proportions. It seemed no amount of hangings and burnings could keep the folk of that valley quiet for long. The destruction of Crowhame was stark proof of their endurance.

  Rumours of war were also common currency. Every marketplace in every town was alive with gossip the alehouses and street corners full of amateur politicians who reckoned they knew what Lord So-and-So was thinking, what the Queen would do if the Catholics rose in arms.

  The Reades never paid much heed to any of this. They had enough to do merely to survive. Richie himself had only ever been a lip-service Catholic. Their more numerous and powerful neighbours thought different, and were poised to jump in the saddle for Mary Stewart.

  Perhaps we should have paid more attention, thought Richie, looking about him at the silent devastation.

  “Back, then, to Hope’s End,” he said, unable to think of anything better.

  The little band of survivors made their way sadly back to the Black Moss, all lost in thought. Davy, his eyes red with weeping, hummed the melody of a wordless lament. Richie and Ruth rode in front, hand-in-hand, their eyes fixed straight ahead. Cleave-Crown brought up the rear, silent and downcast, fingering the edge of his axe.

  They took with them the spare hobblers, taken from the reivers they slew at High Shaws. Nothing was taken from Crowhame. The Armstrongs had picked the village clean of anything useful, down to the last sickle.

  The outlaws were nearing the edge of the Moss when Ruth spied a horseman. “Richie,” she said, shaking his arm, “look to your right. We are followed.”

  He turned his head and saw the distant figure of horse and rider, silhouetted against the tawny afternoon sun. The rider approached them at a canter.

  “Seems in a hurry to meet us,” said Richie. “Let’s bide here and let him catch up.”

  He dropped his reins and rested his hands on the pommel of the saddle. Seeing the outlaws halt, the rider slowed and came on at a more cautious pace. By now he was close enough to recognise. A tall, gangling youth with a livid bruise on his forehead.

  “Turn back, Adam Shaws,” cried Richie, “you have no business with us.”

  Adam rode closer. He was a year or so younger than Richie, and fast outgrowing his clothes. His greasy brown hair stuck up like the bristles of a hedgehog, his face was covered in spots, and his spindly, knock-kneed legs were several inches too long for his grubby breeches.

  Yet he was brave, Richie reflected, to seek out a pack of outlaws, alone, with nothing more than a ballock dagger and a rusty sword to guard himself.

  “I will ride with you,” said Adam in the high, fluting voice of a youth whose voice is breaking. It was a flat statement of intent.

  “I got nowhere else,” he added quickly. “My folk are dead. You saw them. The farm is gone. I won’t beg for charity.”

  Richie exchanged glances with Ruth. “We’re outlaws,” he said gently, “beyond the law. Any man might kill us without fear of prosecution. Do you want to end your days in hemp?”

  Adam’s face was sullen. A stubborn one, this. Richie recalled his father was the same.

  “Don’t care,” the youth grunted. “They killed Maggie and our bairn. I couldn’t stop them. I tried. Failed. Nothing else matters.”

  He pointed at Richie. “You saved me. I owe you a debt of life. There is only one way I can repay it. With service.”

  “The lad makes a fair case,” remarked Davy. “No lawyer could put it better.”

  Richie gave him a dark look. He knew his cousin’s taste for boys. Davy was weighing the youth up with naked hunger in his eyes.

  Adam didn’t seem to notice. “I still got the kyne,” he said. “The reivers left our byre untouched, so I herded the beasts in there before going in search of you. Take them. Or else some other thieves will.”

  This settled it. Richie knew his refusal to steal the kyne at High Shaws had angered Cleave-Crown, and perhaps demoralised the others. Here was a chance to win back their confidence.

  “All right,” he said after a moment’s thought, “you can ride with us. But you’re a man no
w, Adam Shaws. Look to your own safety. I have enough burdens on my conscience.”

  Adam nodded eagerly, as though he wouldn’t have it any other way. While he swapped coarse jests with Cleave-Crown, Richie rode up to Davy and grabbed his arm.

  “You leave him be,” Richie said quietly, “understand?”

  Davy’s eyes widened in an expression of mock innocence. “Me? I don’t know what you mean, sweet cousin.”

  Richie let him go. “You know very well. I trust in you, Davy. Don’t let me down.”

  With their new recruit in tow, the outlaws left the ruin of Crowhame and made for High Shaws.

  9.

  The long-awaited storm broke in November. Forster was at Hexham, dining with his son, when word arrived. A barely legible note on a torn strip of parchment, hastily scrawled by the captain of one of his border garrisons and thrust into his hands by an exhausted trooper.

  Forster dismissed the messenger and quickly read the note. “Well?” rasped Nicholas, scowling across the table.

  The old man ignored him, tufted brows knitted together as he tried to make sense of the writing.

  When he was done reading, Forster laid down the bit of parchment and smoothed it flat. “Well,” he said, “it’s come at last. My lords of Northumberland and Westmoreland have raised their standard. Their message is plain as the nose on my face. God for Mary Stewart, rightful Queen of England and Scotland, and down with the heretic Elizabeth Tudor.”

  “Percy has seized Alnwick and Warkworth,” he went on. “Old family strongholds, of course. He’ll march south, to join up with Westmoreland.”

  Nicholas shoved his chair back. “How many men?” he demanded. “What of the riders of Redesdale and Tynedale? Have they turned out for Northumberland?”

  “It’s a brief note,” replied Forster, tapping the parchment, “but the writer fears so. As for men, he doesn’t venture to say. Thousands, I wager. We have a heavy task on our hands.”

  “The lieutenant must know,” said Nicholas. “I’ll send word to him at once.”

  He meant the Earl of Sussex, royal lieutenant for the North. Sussex had his headquarters at York, a long way from the threatened Marches.