Burning the Water

by Robert Low

  There was more of the same, yet Luther was a smiling avuncular old sot, built like a dancing bear Batty had seen at a fair once. He had welcomed them warmly, his fleshy smile plastered on a brosy face with a large forehead and hair sticking out from around his ears like sheep wool.

  He limped from the last of an attack of gout, but drank wine with relish and congratulated them on their work against the Devil’s people, but it was all fakery. It took three fat bottles and a good hour to reveal, at least to Batty, that his biggest dislike of the Jews was how they would not be swayed by his personal efforts and eloquence to convert.

  It was an outrage of pride in a man who claimed to be humble, but that was the cast of Martin Luther, Batty thought. He was in the middle of writing a hymn on the Lord’s Prayer and fulminating about making war on the Turk – but there was a copy of the Mussulman’s Bible, the Qu’ran, which was well-thumbed.

  Hypocrisy was the least of Luther’s faults but it was the one the Kohlhase band had come to deal with and Luther spilled out the meat of it indignantly, as if none of it was his fault. The gist of it was that one of Luther’s patrons, Philip, Landgrave of Hesse – and a man who had been hunting the Kohlhase band like a bad-tempered Spanish Inquisitor – had wanted to marry one of his wife’s own waiting women. He did not want rid of his wife, mark you, who was unconcerned about this arrangement.

  The Landgrave had thought this new Reformed-to-Protestant religion, which allowed priests to marry openly, could be persuaded to other liberal practices. So he had gone to Luther and his cronies, citing the polygamy of the ancient Biblical patriarchs and an alarmed Luther, silly old fawning sod that he was, had advised the Landgrave to forget all that and just marry the woman in secret.

  Which he did – with Luther and his cronies as guests and even witnesses.

  ‘Scarcely secret,’ Hans had pointed out and Luther had given him a hard look, then collapsed like the windy old bag he was.

  Of course it had not been a secret and when it came out it was roundly condemned by everyone – especially the Elector of Saxony. John Frederick was a slit-eyed whoremonger with a great bush of beard and the manners of a boar, but he was also Luther’s patron. The entire Protestant League he and others had made at Schmalkald a decade or so ago now encompassed almost all of north Germany, throwing out Catholics, thumbing their nebs at the Pope and holding Luther up as the figurehead of righteous religion.

  The Landgrave, of course, was now desperate, wanted help and was threatening to make public the good Doctor’s part, which would put a considerable tarnish on Luther and League both.

  ‘So you wish him removed,’ Hans had said coldly and Luther, huffing and hemming, had not quite admitted it but made it clear. The coin he handed over made it clearer still – if a band of notorious brigands attacked the Landgrave and killed him in the process, it was only one more act of horror to add to the pile heaped on them like faggots.

  Afterwards, Georg had been full of the joy of spring and the promise of at least hot food and wine when they reached the next village along the Elbe.

  ‘We shall wave a coin or two,’ he exclaimed so everyone could hear it, ‘and they will bow and bring out their willing daughters.’

  It was a good attempt at raising morale, for the last months had not been good for Hans Kohlhase and his war against Saxony; yet Luther’s scheme was too much like turning the Kohlhase Band into hired slaughterers rather than righteous revengers and there were a few who said so.

  Not that it mattered, because Luther’s cronies, Melancthon and Bucer, had clearly put Luther up to killing the Landgrave, but were not around to keep him to it. The bastard Doctor thought about it only long enough to realise that he was biting the Elector’s feeding hand. He no doubt hummed a few pious lines of ‘Fater unser’ to absolve him of any sin – then ran off and alerted the Landgrave to his imminent assassination.

  If he ever wondered how Luther had come by the information, the Landgrave never bothered to ask and the dazzling possibility of appeasing the Elector with the heads of the notorious Kohlhase pack buried the thought of it forever. The delight of wine and women and hot food had hardly left Georg’s mouth before the bolts and arrows flew and the Langrave’s ambush burst on them. It had hardly been a fight at all, for everyone had fled for the river.

  The smart ones got out of their gambesons and jacks – Batty, with his one hand, had long since settled on a front-fastener, with three easy buckles and had that off with a skilled twist or two. He was kicking off his boots when the wet-mouthed shriekers came down on him and he went into the water, throwing off ironmongery as he went.

  He had made it. Others sank like stones. Mortensson, the Swede, with his back-laced quilting, Svart Juan the Spaniard with his pointed and embroidered jack, Derk Kohlhase with his ankle-length Irish maille coat.

  They all washed up later, rolling in the shallows like half-ashamed returning prodigals, to be stripped to the wounded curdle and left for the chewers and peckers to remove the last cloth of them, the flesh itself. No one would know of the marvellous creation of God that had been Mortensson, with his righteous Christian wrath against injustice, or the darkly-handsome Juan’s astounding hatred of people who ill-treated horses, or the maiden-winning smile of adventurous Derk, youngest of the Kohlhase.

  Gone, if they were lucky, into a marked hole in Christian ground, or else just bones scattered to oblivion – which was better than being taken alive, as Hans and Georg had been. To be then braided into the turning spokes of a breaking wheel in a cobbled street and left to slowly spin and rot in a Berlin street.

  All gone except for me, Batty recalled, who had hauled himself out the far side, in a soaked serk and one sodden boot. Thirty-nine years old, as poor and almost as naked as the day I was born.

  He heard Sister Hope grunt, the slither of the body going over and sank down in the lee of the damp stones feeling the ache of his leg. The same one he’d strapped a dagger to, inside his last sloshing boot that day, he remembered. He had wanted to go back to Luther and unstitch the paunch of him, but matters were too dangerous even then and he had concentrated on using it to get himself away to safety and return himself to fortune.

  Sister Hope’s face thrust a grin at him and he came back to the present and started to lever himself up, then caught the soft, subtle creak of sound, saw the rope taut and thrumming. He groaned.

  ‘I meant for you to untie him, Sister, afore you rolled him off the edge…’

  Sister Hope looked uncertain and then on the point of tears, so Batty patted her shoulder soothingly and considered the problem of Trumpet, now hanging and swinging gently from the tower. He hefted the rope – too much weight to haul it back up, even if all of them tried. He could cut it, but he had wanted to keep that rope, in the vague, distant hope that it might be used as it was now – to dangle off the tower like a lifeline.

  Save that whoever had the desperate strength to try it at the very extremity, would now have to scramble down the length of a dead man to reach the tower’s foot.

  Batty sat down and laid his head back against the wooden poles of the tower platform, feeling the rain on his face. Soft as kisses, like the day he had lain hidden and watched Luther lumbering about his garden. The day he had clenched and unclenched his one hand on the knife for a long time before choosing life and safety over the sure death he would have if he ran in and gave the good Doctor Martin Luther some Kohlhase vengeance.

  Luther was alive still, Batty had heard, though sick and bad-tempered as a mangy old bear, growling sermons against the Jews from every pulpit he could climb in. He was spared, Batty thought wryly, for some higher purpose – to be elevated to the Right Hand of God probably.

  While I will elevate no higher than this poxed tower.

  He heard a hiccup of sobbing and then soothing voices; it would be Sister Hope, bubbling snot and tears like a bairn scolded by the Big Bad Man in the tower because she had made a mistake. Batty sighed at the bad cess of it all – trapped with thre
e Sisters, five bairns and certain to be at the mercy of Maramaldo, the man he had spent most of his life hunting like a tiger.

  Some tiger me, Batty thought, whose snarls can only make daft nuns weep.

  Then, as he morosely struggled to get back to his feet, he heard Sister Hope’s querulous voice through the last sniffs.

  ‘Was he not wonderful to come?’ she said. ‘A sainted man to risk his life for children.’

  ‘I would not enrol him in the canon of saints just yet. We have no idea why he came at all.’

  Practical, with an edge to it and a hint of accent – that would be Sister Charity, the Spanish nun from the Netherlands, the former whore who had not forgotten the iniquities of men.

  ‘I dinna jalouse why else he would come? Did God not send him, Sister Faith?’

  Batty could almost see Sister Faith pausing in her twisting of that wedding ring to pat comfort into Sister Hope.

  ‘He came out of prayer,’ she declared firmly, ‘and we must not cast off God’s gift.’

  ‘He came for what is in that chest,’ Sister Charity persisted and Batty thought about matters for a time after they had fallen silent. He thought about how ill-named the Spanish whore-turned-nun was. And he thought about Sister Faith’s certainty that he had come in answer to prayer – brought by God to be the Archangel Michael, he thought. Michaelangelo, same name as the man who had prevented me from saving a nun once – or, at the least, provided the excuse for me not to save her.

  He felt the skin pucker on his neck and arms at the strangeness of that… before shaking the mystery away from him; he made loud noises to alert the Sisters as he came down the ladder.

  There was only Sister Faith left, sitting by the last embers of the stamped-out fire, no more than a shadow in shadows as Batty levered himself down beside her. Below, he heard soft singing as one of the Sisters lullabied the bairns to sleep. Hope, it would be, Batty thought and then laughed softly at his next thought; Charity was too cold for that.

  Batty was hungry, but had already worked out that food was scarce and kept for the weans. Water they had, if only what they licked off the stones, but none of it would matter when the men came for them all.

  ‘I thought you all named yourself efter saints,’ Batty said when the dark silence grew too black and long. ‘Even male ones, I am told.’

  ‘We three were so named,’ Sister Faith declared, ‘but took these names when we left St Margaret’s. After the three Christian martyrs buried on the Aurelian Way.’

  ‘So there were truly three such saints, then?’

  Sister Faith nodded. ‘Sisters, too – Pistis, Elpis and Agape, which is Greek for Faith, Hope and Charity. Their mother was also martyred. Her name was Sophia, which means Wisdom.’

  ‘I suspect more tale than history in that,’ Batty rumbled back and Sister Faith smiled.

  ‘Mayhap. But there was another Sister Faith, from Aquitaine in the time of the Romans. She was persecuted and martyred for refusing to make pagan sacrifices, even under torture with a red-hot brazier.’

  Batty watched her twist the wedding band and saw the iron in her. Bigod, here was one who would thrust her very face into such a brazier if it glorified God, he thought. The problem with such folk is that they tend to haul other’s people’s less eager nebs into the flames as well.

  ‘How do you get to be a saint, then?’ he asked. ‘For it seems you elect yourself – or someone else – to such a role. Whether they wish it or not.’

  His bitterness made it clear he was referring to himself and Sister Faith’s insistence that he was the Archangel Michael. She pursed her lips.

  ‘God disposes,’ she replied.

  ‘I am mightily lacking in flaming sword,’ he spat back, ‘and even had I such you would be hagging at my back not to cut or burn anyone.’

  ‘There are many swords and many ways to use them. Even swords that do not look like such.’

  ‘Many Michaelangelos as well,’ Batty replied with a sigh. ‘You would probably be as well with the one I knew.’

  And he told her of Florence and the burning nun, not knowing why but spilling it from him like vomit.

  ‘He was right, mark you,’ he said at the end of it, ‘though it had more to do with me burning my last hand putting her out. Losing the use of his hands was the worst thing Michaelangelo Buonarotti could think on. He did not care for much else.’

  ‘You like him, all the same,’ she declared and Batty admitted it.

  ‘We knew him simply as Simoni. He was one of us, but better than any,’ he replied. ‘In the short time Florence became a Republic, they reinstated an old custom, the Signoria. It meant electing folk drawn from good families every brace of months. Nine were chosen and had to deliberate together for the good of the city, though they were not stipended for it. They got two servants in green livery, a cook and a jester, a fancy silver and plumed helmet and a crimson cloak lined with ermine.’

  Batty laughed softly, smeared with memories.

  ‘They elected Simoni. First time he turned up looking like that we laughed until we fell over. Giobbo Minuto choked and had to be thumped back to life. Simoni never wore it again, or turned up with his entourage of green men.’

  Batty stirred and eased his aching leg.

  ‘Yet he made us feel finer than we were. Made pictures of us as if we were important folk who could commission such, folk like the Pope himself. He was patron to Michaelangelo, then as now – though your Holy Father stood on the opposite side of the siege then. Until Simoni, the only likenesses made of most of us were the pitture infame. You know of these?’

  He felt her shake her head in the dark.

  ‘Stuck up on walls in Florence,’ Batty went on, ‘and left to fade and blister. Limnings of malefactors and outlaws. Like me. Like those out there.’

  ‘I thought they were men-at-arms,’ Sister Faith replied wryly. ‘Knights of chivalric intent.’

  ‘Aye, you may dream of it. Them, too, who still care. Oh, they have laws and contracts and notaries and rules, none of which are worth a bawbee when it comes to the bit.’

  Batty hawked up some spit, thought better of it and swallowed.

  ‘Maramaldo is their Captain General, a proud title, as is the one he covets – condottiere. So called because he is the one who agrees the condotta, the contract. That details such matters as payment – in florins, che considerato il mercato che qua è, which is Italian for ‘considering the way the market is’. There are agreements on those recruits paid on reaching barracks, on paghe morte, the money collected per month for men who are dead or missing but still kept on the Rolls. On this and that and the other.’

  ‘Italian, all of it, because that is the bearpit of war thanks to all the witless stushies of the cities there – though the Germanies are growing hotter by the day and France will flame when Fat Henry crosses the Channel. Or England, if France crosses the other way. Mind you, no one who wants a good fight need stir a heel-length from a door in the north, for war is headed back this way, sure as chooks lay eggs.’

  ‘The world is at the end of days,’ he added morosely. ‘God and all his saints are asleep and have left it to the likes of Maramaldo.’

  ‘You are one of them, then?’

  It slashed into Batty, lanced to the very quick of him so that he winced with it.

  ‘Aye and no. I was once with Maramaldo and serve yet as a hired soldier, but no one is like Fabrizio Maramaldo.’

  He leaned forward a little.

  ‘D’you ken what ‘condottiere’ means, Sister?’ he asked, hoarse with loathing for them, for himself, for the hand God had dealt him to show how lowly his standing was in Heaven.

  ‘A person who agrees contracts,’ she answered primly. ‘You have just said so.’

  He chuckled bitterly.

  ‘It means dealer,’ he replied. ‘You can be a condottiere di scarpe and merchant decent footwear. Or you can be a condottiere d’armi and merchant death under arms.’

  He eased his shoulder
s a little and finished with one dagg, squinting down the barrel into the night.

  ‘To be known as a condottierie d’armi is what all Captain Generals wish,’ he went on. ‘That and the trappings of a noble birth most do not have. None of us paid-for soldiers are noble knights, nor anything near it and, of the worst of us, Maramaldo stands head and shoulders from the crowd.’

  He looked at her resolved, determined face, all creased like a linen sheet and wanted to let her know the truth, even as it sickened him to tell her.

  ‘Even the Pope will not permit Maramaldo in any Christian army, which is why he is here, with the Reforming Henry Tudor,’ he told her. ‘Once he is done here, there are a wheen of Reforming Catholics and outright Lutheran protestors in the Germanies, for they are as damned by the Holy Father as Beezel-bub.

  ‘Fat Henry Tudor pays the coin but even he will not contract Maramaldo directly, leaving that to his commander of the north, the Earl of Hertford. This is because Maramaldo is too much of a Satan to inflict on the civilised French, enemies or no, but the Scots are imps of Hell anyway, so they do not matter.’

  He had her gaze now, fixed her with one of his own as if driving the words into her like nails on a cross.

  ‘Burn everything. Burn even the water was what Fat Henry told his men to do to the Scots and if anyone is capable of that, it is Maramaldo, who believes that fire is to war as mustard is to sausage.

  ‘In the morning, afore it is proper light,’ he added bleakly, ‘such a condottiere d’armi will come to our door to sell us death. Maramaldo and the most of his men are not here… yet… but still we hold poor cards, Sister and will be asked to knock or draw. You must tell me what you wish me to do. For myself, I will fight.’

  There was silence for a long moment, then he felt and heard her rise stiffly, saw the wink of gold from that wedding band as she smoothed her habit.

  ‘It is my belief,’ she said sadly, ‘that if you stood with one foot in Paradise, Master Coalhouse, you would remove it to fight.’