Burning the Water

by Robert Low

  ‘Jesus, I have never asked for a thing for myself, not ever. Yet You Yourself have said that if you ask it shall be given. I am willing to die, Lord, if it is Your will, which encompasses us all around and…’

  The words failed her, faltered and stopped. She gripped the cross until it bit the palm; the wind seemed suddenly more chill and she shuddered.

  ‘Dear Saviour Jesus,’ she said, raising her head to the dark and the dank, hidden stones, ‘send a Deliverer to save the others from this evil.’

  And she thought of the man she had seen, the one who had thrown something that had felled one of the boys. Killed him, she thought and wondered at that. Yet St Michael carried a sword and it was not just for show, but to smite the enemies of God.

  Sister Faith wondered and then prayed a third time, for the soul of this unknown man.

  Five miles away

  At the same time…

  Batty woke with a yelp, launched upright straight from a dream and blinking into the shredded remains of it, the sweat slick on him.

  The nun, on fire in the rubble of Florence.

  It was an old dream which had returned to him during the business with Mintie Henderson at Powrieburn and had lurked around the edges of his sleep ever since. It was not always the same, even though it had once been a reality.

  During the siege of Florence in ’30, Batty and Simoni, the one the world knew as Michaelangelo, had struggled to keep the fortifications intact and had discovered the enemy had tunnelled in under a convent.

  So Batty had blown it up at the crucial moment when the enemy broke through. Blown it to flames and rubble and millwheeling dead – and the nun, screaming and on fire.

  Michaelangelo had dragged Batty away and the nun had been left to shriek and burn, so that Batty was never sure, afterwards, whether he would have helped her or not. Michaelangelo was more assured about it.

  ‘If you had, you would have ruined your one good hand in all the world,’ he had told Batty later, head to head in the flickering dim of the Inn of Ropes. It was true horror to Michaelangelo, that lost limb, for his hands were his life, as he said often. He shuddered sometimes when he looked at Batty, reaching out to touch the stump with a gesture of wonder and revulsion, for it was his biggest fear.

  ‘I could not sculpt,’ he would say then. ‘I could paint still, with only one hand and no matter which, but it would not be the same. There is no terribiltà in paint.’

  And all the time he would work away with his red chalk, bleeding genius over the back of plans of the fortifications while folk lurched in and out and the noise whirled like flying rubble.

  Batty remembered that Simoni seemed immune to it, the frantic couplings – women did not seem to interest him at all – and the mad dancing and music of those living with the imminence of death.

  Yet he sketched them, his quick, grimed, broken-nailed fingers moving like spider legs, catching the frozen moment of a wild laugh, an exposed chest, a flung hand, then tossed the half-finished affair away. By the end of a night, there would be a blizzard of scrawled, crushed paper, like muddied snow, all round the chair he slept in, head fallen into his pillowed arms on the scarred table.

  The men liked him, Batty remembered, because he did not much care for company at all, but yet sat with them and they felt honoured by it; for all his fame and title, he was as filthy and uncouth as they were and they loved him for that, as they loved the way he could make their likeness on paper.

  ‘This siege will last as long as the wine,’ he told them and they agreed and started in to drinking it faster than ever, so that he laughed, his mouth like an open drain in his big ugly face.

  ‘There is too much algarde in this inn,’ he would shout, suddenly and for no reason and people would cheer. Then he would list all the names of wine, in alphabetical order – antioche, blanc, charrie, chaudel, clary, right through to vernage and, finally, roared out by the others as the chorus – VIN.

  Batty blinked the memories away and wiped the sweat from his face, grateful for the catlick of wind which lipped its way through the tangle of whin and gorse he was laired in. His leg hurt and had gone stiff; he cursed the boy and his bow.

  The stun of surprise had lasted an eyeblink, but the boy got to business first – youth, Batty thought bitterly, over the moss of age. He had drawn and shot, but the first was half-hearted – barely back to the chest, never mind the ear – and his aim poor; Batty had felt the blow on his lower leg and was shoved off-balance by it, falling on his back with his arms and legs waving like a beetle.

  The boy should have followed it up by dropping the bow, hauling out a knife and pouncing, but he was young and had not learned enough; he hauled out another arrow and started in to nocking it.

  He was still doing it when Batty pointed the dagg at him and pulled the trigger. The boy yelped, dropped the bow and covered up with his hands, as if it would shield him from the hefty ball of lead.

  He did not need to, all the same; the dagg’s wheel whirred and sparked and nothing happened. For a moment, there was stillness, while Batty stared in shock at the misfired wheel-lock and the youth crouched, scarcely believing his reprieve.

  There was a long moment of staring as the ball, freed from the charred wad, rolled casually out of the dagg’s long barrel and plunked at their feet. Then the youth whimpered and dived for the sword at his waist. Batty cursed and flung the dagg – the axe-handled one. The trick had worked before and the axe blade had sliced into a head as if it was a blown egg – but this time the whole engine of it clattered into the chest and face of the boy, flinging him backwards.

  He was half-stunned and Batty gave him no chance to use even the half wit he had; he scrauchled across to him like a scuttling crab, bollock knife out of his boot and buried once in the neck, to cut off any screams that might bring others, then once, twice, three times more in the paunch, sickening-hard punches until there was only kicking and gurgling.

  Only then did Batty roll away, stifling his own moans at the burn in his left calf, breathing hard like a galloped stot. He lay for a time with the wind, until he had enough breath and too much pain, then grunted upright and examined his leg.

  The arrow had missed bone and had just enough power in it to go through the flesh of his calf, so that he sawed off the shaft with the gory bollock dagger and drew both ends out. He let the blood flow a little, then packed clean rainwashed moss in it and bound it with a ribbon or two from the lad’s finery.

  The lad was still, his face turned up and marbled eyes staring at God. It was an old-young face, still barely able to beard up but crow-footed round the eyes, which were bruised and pouched, the nose already fretted with little blood-veins and pits. The mouth snarled yellow teeth and the lips had pox sores on them.

  Batty knew the face well – all the Maramaldo men had it. Satan made in the image of a fallen angel, leering above the silken finery of a houri in a Turkish brothel.

  He searched the lad and found his own throwing knife, a pearl drop pin he liked and some coin, all of which he took along with the axe-handled dagg, giving it a look as if it was a dog which had failed him. Then he hirpled up on to Fiskie and rode away, arguing that he could make for Wooler and that this was no place for him now; for all he knew the bastel house was stuffed with Maramaldo men who, sooner or later, would find the two boys they’d set to watch the tower.

  They would work out that both had been stabbed and wonder about the folk in the tower; he had a grim laugh to himself at the thought of them considering whether the nuns they had trapped were quite as innocent as they seemed.

  Unless they were all callow as the boys he had killed, they could not miss the spoor of it, all the same, nor fail to track Fiskie.

  That was before the pain in his leg set in with the coming of early night. The clouds shrouded moon and stars, which stopped him riding entirely, blinded by dark. Barely able to slither off Fiskie’s back, he had crawled into a shelter of bushes and crouched in his cloak, wondering if he had put enough
distance between him and danger so that he could wait until daylight, get his bearings and then ride hard.

  The Lord is my herd, nae want sal fa’ me.

  It came to him from the silted memories stirred up from the bottom of his soul by the dream of the burning nun – whose face, Batty suddenly realised, was neither the original, nor Mintie’s which he had once imposed on the image. It was the one briefly glimpsed when he’d left Akeld. The old woman in the tower.

  Na! tho’ I gang thro’ the dead-mirk-dail; e’en thar, sal I dread nae skaithin.

  Remembrance of the prayer came from Alesius, that silly wee cant from Edinburgh whose real name was Sandy Kane. Every gown who spouted Latin was for changing their name, Batty remembered, to something higher and mightier – Sandy was one of the fawning hangers-on round Schwartzerde, the German who called himself Melancthon, and Batty had met them all once in Saxony.

  The pack of them, in turn, spent their time denouncing the cult of saints and arguing about whether they were really eating Christ at the Last Supper. That’s when they were not wriggling like belly-up pups round Luther and trying to hump his leg with ecstasy whenever he pronounced on something.

  Sandy Kane was hot for Scottish bishops to read the Bible in ‘the mither tongue’ and composed great pontificating blasts condemning the prohibitions against it – but could no more understand it than he could some mahout from the Indies.

  So Batty had taken great delight in reciting the Lord’s Prayer to Sandy whenever he could – he waukens my wa’-gaen saul; he weises me roun, for his ain name’s sake, intil right roddins. That had even set Luther giggling.

  The leg ached and Batty grunted. He wanted to touch it but knew he would not be reassured with the swell and the sicky seep of blood through his makeshift bandage. He gritted his worn teeth and forced himself up, growling like a bear with the stabs of pain as he hobbled to Fiskie, who looked at him with a reproving, jaundiced eye.

  ‘Well might you chastise me,’ Batty murmured, hauling himself into the damp saddle, ‘but I will be punished for neglecting you, by and by.’

  He patted the neck of the horse and even managed a soft laugh as he turned away, seeking the dim way to Wooler.

  ‘Ye hae drookit my heid wi’ oyle; my bicker is fu’ an’ skailin.’

  Chapter Five

  In the tower at Akeld

  Dawn the next day…

  Cornelius was small, old and wizened as lizard skin. He wore a Moorish cheche, a winding of black cloth which covered his head and looped across his face as a veil, but he was not a Moor nor anything like one.

  He had baggy breeches and a shirt over which he wore a robe which he fondly believed made him look academic and alchemikal, though Klett thought the ragged, stained garment summed up the man for what he was – a slovenly fraud.

  ‘We should leave this place,’ Cornelius declared portentously. ‘It is ripe with the fevers.’

  Klett saw Cadette, Ponce, Jacob and others nodding and looked moodily at Cornelius, who saw the scowl and felt a stab of fear that he had gone too far.

  ‘I have cinquefoil for it, of course,’ he added hastily, ‘which resists poisons with the virtues of its leaves, numbering the totemic five.’

  Klett simply stared. He was thinking that he would like to dispose of Cornelius, who was not a decent Alamain, or Fleming despite the name. He was from Spain, but not even a decent dago; he was a marrano, a Jew who had converted, out of fear, to Christianity. He was also Maramaldo’s favourite, an alchemist and astrologer and a skilled notary. Notaries were what drove the likes of the Company of the Sable Rose for they were the ones who legalled out the condotta – even if Maramaldo would break such an agreement in an eyeblink if it suited him, he valued them as providing status and dignitas to what otherwise, he claimed, would be a band of murderous apes.

  Cornelius’ name, Klett knew, had been taken from Heinrich Cornelius Von Nettesheim, the magician from Cologne everyone had called Agrippa. The little marrano swore he had been apprentice to this magician and had knowledge from the vanished Fourth Book of De Occulta Philosophia. Since no one had ever known or seen of such a fourth book in that trilogy, it was hard to gainsay him.

  Klett was stuck with him and knew the man was there as much to spy and report for Maramaldo as he was ostensibly to offer advice and divination. His advice, as ever, was to abandon the current enterprise.

  Klett knew the marrano was right and that Maramaldo would be furious at what Klett had done. An angry Maramaldo was not A Good Matter, for Klett had seen the bloody results of flayed pulp and did not want to be next on that list. Only success would rescue him now.

  All of this, to Cornelius, was simply a long, agate stare which withered his resolve; he blanched.

  ‘Or vervin,’ he offered weakly, ‘cut from the third joint if the fever be tertian. The fourth if it be in quartane…’

  ‘Quartane fevers did not kill Johannes, nor Locan,’ Klett said eventually. ‘Blades did. I do not think our nuns have become expert knife-throwers overnight, nor that the one man left to them is an assassin of note. Especially if I shot him, as I believe.’

  Cornelius bobbed his head and spread his arms in apology.

  ‘I merely advise that this matter is prolonged…’

  ‘We should be done with the business,’ Cadette interrupted, his square face sour beneath a plumed confection of hat, the brim trimmed with lace.

  ‘If you had not gone off burning nuns,’ Klett replied mildly, ‘and stopped the others carts as you were supposed to…’

  He broke off and smiled winter into Cadette’s glare until the man dropped his eyes and muttered.

  The tension was broken by the arrival of Horner, dressed in sober finery; beside the popinjays of Klett’s company he looked a drab sparrow.

  Here, Klett thought bitterly, is the architect of our woe, the man who came with a tale so slathered in rich reward that it was impossible to ignore – a cartload of nuns and a trio of useless men carrying a hidden treasure so valuable Maramaldo could not pass it up.

  Now two of my men are dead, Klett thought, and all these hardened warriors are frustrated by those same nuns, locked up in a crumbling tower and well armed – as they had been for two days. If it was left much longer, Maramaldo would be here and Klett’s task for him unfulfilled. The Captain General would not be happy at that.

  Unless the matter was done with and the treasure unveiled. If there was treasure… Klett looked sour at Horner as he came up.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Tracks of a horse, heading off towards Wooler. It seems we have a cuckoo in our nest.’

  Horner’s tones were clipped, though he was a lot less haughty than he had been when he’d arrived in this place. A lot less clean, too, Klett noted with a cold comfort.

  Horner had been hot to rush the place on arrival. Klett, fresh from scouring four Wallis defenders from the bastel of Akeld, had looked at him with a jaundiced eye and pointed out the lurker on the tower top.

  ‘Armed, no doubt,’ he’d pointed out. ‘So the first hero will fall, for certain.’

  He’d left the words hanging there for Horner to chew on, sitting on his too-fine beast and watching smoke spilling greasily up out of the tower.

  ‘Trying to signal for aid,’ he had bellowed and started his fine horse prancing.

  Sow’s arse. Klett smile had been iced but polite.

  ‘I think not, Master Horner,’ he had answered, as if gentling an excitable bairn. ‘They are starting a fire for their own ends – who is there to come to their aid in a God-forsaken hole such as this?’

  ‘The filthy devils who own Akeld,’ Horner had answered, scowling, ‘but not before we have those nuns.’

  Klett had frowned at that; Horner seemed to know more than he was telling and Klett already had the uncomfortable notion that Maramaldo had not told him the entire weft of the plan. Capture some nuns and carts, he had been told and make a deal of noise around Akeld; Klett did not know the reason for any of it and th
at ruffled him.

  He had lost the thread of that when Horner high-stepped his horse towards the crumble of tower, his slim sword raised and trying to look the very picture of Mars, exhorting Klett’s men to rush the place. It might have worked too, for he had good seat and was only slightly foolish with the ruined droop of his wet hat-plume, but the man on the tower ended his mummery.

  There had been a bang and a spout of smoke from the ruined crenellations and the fine horse shrieked, then went into a mad frenzy of bucking and throwing; the very first one pitched Horner up in the air and down in the mud.

  For a moment there had been confusion, all splash and ripple, Klett saw, with no order. Mercenaries of Maramaldo, hardened veterans my sorry arse – no more sense than a barnyard of chooks he’d thought then and subsequent events had not improved his opinion.

  Klett knew he had been given these, the least trained and youngest, because Maramaldo could spare them and Klett did not like the thought that he was as expendable.

  Horner’s fancy stot, keening with pain, had finally staggered, coughed and fallen with a shriek that was altogether too much like a child for comfort.

  ‘I fear he has done for your fine mount,’ Klett had offered and was genuinely sorrowed for the animal, even as he fought to keep his face straight at what had happened to its owner.

  Horner, slathered with mud and fury, had looked aghast at the dying, screaming horse, then up at all the riders round him, one by one, as if bewildered. For a long while no one had moved – then Jacob, the least ribboned fool of the pack, stepped forward, placed his caliver muzzle on the blood-frothed head of the horse and fired.

  The great gout of flame and noise jerked everyone alive, it seemed – save for the horse. Klett remembered that Jacob had stepped out of the smoke, blowing on his slow match and offered Horner a scathing look for not performing the act himself. Then he had looked at Klett, the broad, flat, bearded face giving no more away than a shuttered window; Klett had known then that none of these men would rush the tower.