by Robert Low
It was all managed like a mummer’s play, for the amusement and instruction of the gawpers. Patten saw this after a few minutes, when he realised that the Laird was parrying everything, creating no counterstrokes.
Patten knew the Italian sword manuals were considered far too vicious, concentrating on attack and almost always ending in one or both combatants dead or injured. That was for the single-handed blade. The two-handed sword manuals from the Italies were the opposite, too oriented to defence, unlike the Swiss and Germans – that was typical of the little robber baron of Hollows, Patten sneered to himself, to choose the worst of every fighting style.
Still, it did not matter much if you had mastered it, he conceded, seeing how the Laird danced with the huge, unwieldy weapon. Mattered less still if you fought an idiot and could afford the instruction in it; in the end, all Johnnie Armstrong of Hollows was doing was setting his seal on the moment, showing the admiring crowd that he was still the Laird, Master and Champion of the Armstrongs.
Will did not see it until later, stamping and birling in the maelstrom of it and thinking he was fighting for his life. It was only after the man had exposed his back and shown that it had been deliberately designed to make a fool of him that Will realised what was happening and stepped back a little. His scowl stopped the Laird’s smile.
He nodded, seeing Will understood. Then the next second Will saw the great sword whirl round, held by the ricasso, the blunted section of the blade, the hilt and quillons lashing into his face like a mace.
‘Mordstreich,’ the Laird called, and Will, his face shrieking and his eyes full of his own blood, did not need to know that it meant Death Stroke and was not Italian at all, but the altogether more vicious Swiss.
The next should have been the finish of it, a two-handed waist slash that might well have cut him through. Instead, as he staggered away and tried to dash the blood out of his eyes, he felt the heat and the sheer size of the Laird right up close, so that his wine breath fluttered Will’s nostril hairs.
He had a brief bewildering moment when the sword whirled like a circle of light; then the Laird, his face impassive, drove the point through Will’s instep.
Will shrieked, his face a red mist of his own blood, his mind a white light. When he came to his senses slightly, he realised he was slumped, clinging onto the ricasso, with both hands as if he kneeled at a crucifix; he was astounded that he had dropped his own weapons.
For a moment he let go of the two-hander, looked into the Laird’s face and tried to pull away; the Laird smiled, soft and vicious, ground the sword in a small circle and drilled pain deeper into Will with every grate of small bones.
The removal of it, that sickening suck that lifted his foot like a marionette, brought Will off his knees, struggling as if in a net to keep the blackness from swallowing him. He could get to his weapons…
The second blow drove it through his other foot, a last vicious twist splintering the bones. The pain hit him, his eyes turned white as they rolled up into his head, and he gargled while the world roared like a great voice in his ears; as he fell to the flagstones, he realised it was the crowd of onlookers, cheering their Laird.
Solway Coast
Not long after
She awoke but did not move or want to be awake. She wanted to be dead and lay in the smoked dark hoping to be no more than a cloud on a star, feeling so small between them, trying to wish herself into oblivion.
There was a tendril of wind, draughting into the hut she knew she lay in, whispering night secrets to her with the scent of fox and earth and salt. She did not want that; it was life.
Life would not let her be. It clattered the lid on a kettle, sparked the fire with pops, muttered in the strange, incomprehensible way of the selkie boy, so that she knew where she was and no matter how she fought not to know, it was there, bright as day.
She tried, then, to be alone with the sound, as if there would be no sound except for her and that way she could banish it. But it would not be cellared and the scents betrayed her, with their harsh smoke, the fish, the savour from the kettle and the tang of something else – eau de vie.
Finally, there was the most traitorous of all, the tuneless grate of singing sound that dragged her back to the now and the pain and the anguish of failure.
‘For speak ye word in Elfin-land, ye’ll ne’er win back to yer ain countrie.’
She opened her eyes and saw him by the fireside, blood-dyed by the flames and squinting his face up into that strange grimace of displeasure that lied about his enjoyment of strong drink. He caught her looking and corked the flask with his teeth, grinning so that his curve of beard waggled.
‘Back with us then.’
He wore a wrap of dirty blanket and his clothes were scattered and steaming all round the fireplace. So were her own, Mintie saw.
‘If you hate it so much, why put it in your mouth?’
It was a voice like the whisper of moth-wings, but Batty heard it and grinned broader still at the memory in it of the old Mintie.
‘By God, lass, if it tasted good we would never be done swallowing. It is only the fact that it tastes like the worst physick that keeps me this side of sober.’
There was a pause while Mintie blinked away the last shreds of the little sleep she wanted to be more, sucking in the echoes of strange music, the hiss of growing spring and the cold eyes of stars.
‘You should have let me go.’
‘The Solway is a cold embrace for a woman with a cuddle of stones mumming as a child,’ he replied shortly. ‘It is no life for a young lass, that.’
‘It is an affront to life,’ said a new voice, heavy and thick with grief and censure; Mintie turned to the face of Auld Nan, fierced by firelight into a vengeful angel.
‘God hates me,’ she replied wearily, and Auld Nan hissed her displeasure and rattled the kettle with a stirring spoon to show it.
The music, strange and thin, moved over her like the dancing rill of a burn giving birth in spate; despite herself, she turned her head – so heavy, like a huge gunball – to see the selkie boy with the pipe in his mouth, head waggling from side to side.
‘Just so,’ said Batty thoughtfully. ‘There he is, poor wee twisted soul, witless and webbed, rolling-eyed and gabbling. Yet he is doing what neither the pair of us can do, Mintie – I can’t play the wee pipes at all and you can’t get up from where God has thrown you.’
He leaned forward a little.
‘Look at him, Mintie. His fingers are fused, yet he plays and the music is in him.’
He stopped and they listened; at first it sounded like screeching cats to Mintie, but gradually she heard a melody of sorts, distinguished something like a merry jig. Sweet as snake venom.
‘Mayhap that’s the music they play in Elfland,’ Batty mused and reached out to touch his doublet, sighing when he felt the damp.
Mintie was trembled by the music, wanted to get up and run, flee like a deer. Instead she cried, soft and silent, but Batty saw the betraying glint of her tears, heard the faintest whisper of her.
‘He stole from me.’
Batty did not know whether Mintie meant just the horse and the money, or her father, or everything that had come after, but he knew Hutchie Elliot was in it even without the name. He sighed.
‘I have said before – punishing Hutchie will not bring back the loss.’
‘If God loved me, He would do it.’
The logic was unassailable.
‘Am I to be an archangel, then?’ he replied, trying to keep his voice light and feeling the crushing weight of it dragging his soul down, like Mintie’s stone baby, into a darker sea than the Solway’s firth.
‘Michelangelo,’ he said almost to himself, ‘with fire and sword.’
Auld Nan heard it and crossed herself. Batty watched Mintie slide into the little death, breathing easy while the fire popped and the kettle lid clattered with savoury promise. There was the yeasty smell of good beer as Auld Nan fetched horn beakers of it.
<
br /> There is yeast in me too, Batty thought, no more willed by me than beer has a choice – and it will out in the murder of a bride and groom with slow match entertainment, or vengeance for a young girl.
Batty had seen Auld Nan’s fervent cross-signing for what it was – a warding against the bad sins of what must be done. Folk knew all about sin, or so they thought, but Batty knew everyone was born and situated in station differently from one another, and sin was particular to all of them. Dependent on self and circumstance.
For all that, a body felt guilt. Even if not master of self nor circumstance, the fool felt guilt and shame for it. It was senseless as the self-loathing of an idiot for being born that way – he looked at the selkie boy, listened to his music. No such loathing there, he thought. He is in himself, complete and needing no more. But priests would claim the sin in him made him monstrous, wrought it hard in texts and tracts and fierce mouthings about reward and punishment.
For all that he knew this, for all that he could deny God, Batty still felt accountable beyond the facts, wanted to atone, to flagellate and humble himself, to promise to be better.
So he would commit even more sins to expiate the ones already gone, for the new ones were in a Good Cause.
Who lay, breathing soft in the little death.
* * *
The riders came in the night, two wide-eyed boys and Bet’s Annie, walking like a sailor and so weary she thought herself about to shatter to shards.
She was sagging with relief when she found Mintie alive and snugged up in a strange hut, with an eldritch boy the other lads eyed with cautious revulsion, Auld Nan the Solway Witch – and Batty, big-bellied, solidly cheerful and grinning still, even if it never quite made it to his eyes.
Bet’s Annie wiped even that mockery from him, saw the cold stone that replaced it when she told him what had happened just as they had started on their ride to find Mintie.
Two men had ridden up to the outer door of Powrieburn and Bet’s Annie and the boys, just far enough away to see and yet not be seen, had heard Megs and Jinet shriek as the door was hammered. One of the men, Bet’s Annie noted, was Leckie, the steward of Hollows.
But the men did not want in, only to leave a message.
‘Boots,’ Bet’s Annie declared, slathered with the thrilling-sick horror of it. ‘Bloody and rent at the feet and nailed to the door. He was awfy proud of those boots and would never have given them up willingly.’
She had not needed to say the name, for she could see Batty had worked it out, but she said it anyway.
‘Will Elliot.’
Chapter Eighteen
Hollows Tower
Feast of St Gregory (12 March)…
The wind took the cage and turned it gently, but enough for the figure in it to wake with a start and a wail at the pain and horror of the world he found himself in. The two crows yarped alarm and flapped sullenly away, sodden with rain.
The Lady, feeling the harsh snick of wind up here on the half-done roof, watched the long, banded cylinder turn at the end of its rope, hoisted high on the arm of the raised gibbet whose struts strained with the weight. It will come crashing down on their heads, she thought moodily, as the workmen huddled miserably beneath it looked warily at the sound of creaking, then up at the groaning figure.
Serve them their just due if it did, she added to herself. And then, more bitter and savage than she had thought possible, she added the wish that her husband be one of them.
He was in the hall, of course, talking animatedly with Leckie about the upcoming feast for Lady Day, about rents and blackmeal and how it was essential it all be gathered in. As if nothing untoward had happened. As if the world had not tilted and flung everything Hollows held dear to the edge of the precipice.
All he cares about now, she thought bitterly, is the rents and blackmeal, which will all be handed to the other man who stood by his table, with fistfuls of charts and plans and expense – Sandy Scrymgeour, master builder from Myres and the man creating Hollows in stone. Gold would be more proper, the Lady thought, for every corbel and crow-stepped gable seemed to cost more than the last.
Her husband, flushed and animated with drink as much as enthusiasm, would not countenance another mason for the work, all the same – Scrymgeour was related to John, Master of Work for the dead King James; John and Sandy both had been ousted by the Regent in favour of a Hamilton kinsman and, as ever, any enemy of an enemy was a friend – even if he overcharged you on rubble and mortar.
Her husband was all energy and backslapping since he had humiliated Will Elliot and proved his continued prowess with the two-handed Armstrong sword. But it had not been his Lady who had rubbed ointment into the overtaxed muscles that night, even though she knew of it and what else had been rubbed and which of the remaining hoors had done it.
It was a mark of his disrespect that he had done it in a half-wood, half-stone tower no more than the width of a courtyard square and with three floors only; in a world of little privacy, he might just as well have swived the bitch fully naked on the high table at dinner.
That was now the measure of the man she had married, she thought, with a sick, sad loss, bitter as aloes. Energy wasted in pettiness.
All her life she had risen early, to dress herself and pray, sometimes in the pale quiet before the world sprang to life with demands on managing her husband’s hall. Lately she had prayed with Father Ridley. He came every other day to provide balm for her soul and she looked forward to it more and more.
Ridley had just left her, on his way to Langholm and keeping as low a profile as he could in these awkward times, while still trying to make a living from God; the wee priest had a cruck house in the town and kept himself to himself, could not be persuaded to move out to the safety of Hollows.
‘God’s work is needed everywhere, Lady,’ he had declared when asked. ‘Even in Langholm.’
God, the Lady thought, is barely living Himself in these times – and I cannot rise early enough to thwart a husband determined to ruin us all.
She crossed herself and begged forgiveness, then came down the wind of steps – every fifth one a trap-step, slightly higher than the rest to catch the unwary or those creeping in the dark – into the smoking dim of the hall. On the way, she accepted the nods and bobbed curtseys of scurrying folk, though there were fewer in the cramped place now. That, at least, was a blessing.
Without preamble, she walked into the middle of her husband, Leckie and Sandy the builder, so that all conversation stopped. There was a pause, then Sandy tipped a knuckle to his forehead and, stung to it, Leckie offered a curt bow. Her husband fixed a smile on his face and nodded to her.
‘Lady,’ he said dismissively, and when she did not take the hint, broadened the affair on his face until it twitched his beard with effort.
‘This is a conversation you are ill-equipped to join,’ he pointed out, ‘being among men as it is.’
‘Oh, is it? Rents and levies and lamenting the price of stone-haulers is beyond the likes of me, is it?’
Her voice was dangerously pitched and the Laird reined himself in a little, as did Leckie. Even Sandy had been exposed enough in recent times to do no more than clear his throat at the woman’s presumption.
‘You would do better bending your mind to ending that abomination hanging from our roof,’ she went on, glaring at them all. Leckie, who had arranged it, and Sandy, who had built the contraption, shuffled a bit and said nothing. The Laird glowered back at her.
‘You are interfering in business which does not concern you.’
Leckie and Sandy winced at that and the master builder backed off a step or two, trying to be surreptitious about it and failing.
‘So,’ she said, her voice a gimlet that pinned them all there. ‘Hanging the Land Sergeant of Hermitage in a cage from the roof is no concern of mine? Crippling him and nailing his bloody boots to a neighbour’s door is nothing to me? Did you have some strange notion that I was clapped in an upstairs room with no window
s or mind? Or that I had no say in matters? I may be the only female here bar your collection of draggletailed whores, Johnnie Armstrong, but I am neither one of them nor a dog to be kennelled at your whim.’
‘God grant me the wish,’ the Laird replied, and now Leckie and Sandy were stepping away from the table with no attempt to hide their alarm.
‘Aye, you may think it. Every young lass’s dream according to you, to be held awaiting your pleasure.’
‘I brought the women for the English,’ the Laird attempted and was ravaged by her shrill bark of bitter laughter. ‘To save your honour…’
‘Is that the case? To save my honour you huckled in every whore for miles? And yet some are here still, long after all the sprigs of English gentrice are gone.’
‘By God,’ exploded the Laird. ‘If I had not, you would have been dragged in every nook and outhouse and gaffed like a salmon. Next time I will allow it and you need not look to me for succour.’
‘Neither myself nor any decent woman has succour here, it appears,’ she spat back. ‘Mintie Henderson for one. The stinking-pyntled bastard-born who dishonoured her is still here and untouched, while you hang the law that demands him in a cage.’
‘Christ’s bones, woman – this is neither about Hutchie Elliott nor Mintie Henderson. The pair deserve each other, much good may it do them, for one is a vicious wee rat and the other a lass with a long neb and a loud voice. Besides – moderate your language. You are Lady of Hollows, not some fishwife in a scaling wynd.’
‘Johnnie Armstrong,’ shrieked his wife, the words ringing in echoes, stirring the stone dust and bringing all sound to a stop. ‘After all you have dirled in my ears from cockcrow to compline from the day we were married on to each other, d’you think there is a wee naked filth of word left on the face of God’s earth that is not acquent with Hollows Tower?’
‘Well,’ her husband roared back, his face bagged with blood. ‘Here is another – get you to buggery, woman, and leave honour and men’s work to men.’
