by Robert Low
‘Honour, is it?’ she said and her voice had gone low, still bell-clear in the silence that lingered on after the last outburst. She leaned forward into his fire of face.
‘Here is honour, husband. Release Will Elliot. Make restitution to Mintie Henderson. Forget Batty Coalhouse. Before you lose all honour – and your wife besides.’
That rocked him and everyone saw it. But he righted himself and blinked a bit and his hand twitched. Wanting the comfort of the goblet, she saw and could not hide the sneer.
‘Well – truly are the daughters of Eve related,’ the Laird replied, breathing heavily. ‘All you are missing, Lady, is an apple. The serpent you possess already… it is in your mouth and speaking to me – to me – of honour.’
He turned away from her then and made a deal of pretence at studying Scrymgeour’s plans. Clearly ignored, the Lady drew herself up and stalked from the room. Like a tiger some of the onlookers thought admiringly.
* * *
Not far away, perched like a crow up among the trees dripping into the Esk, Batty crouched and watched the cage turn and tried not to see a wheel instead, braided with broken limbs and moving slowly – save when some passer-by spun it out of amusement and malice.
And the man on that wheel, Batty thought, barely in this world at all, had to watch the bewilder of it circling him – cloud, tall house, sky, steeple, endlessly repeated, slower and slower until someone spun it anew, until it faded into the fogged veil of a death too slow.
At least Will was upright, Batty thought. With his feet pierced like Christ’s own he would be weak from shock and loss of blood, but they would have stopped the bleeding; they did not want him to die before he had served his purpose.
A gibbet on a roof made rescue hard to consider. No point in galloping down like some Roland, Batty thought, so he watched and soaked and tried to think of a way to get to Will, get him down and get him away.
Short of riding up with a band of Grahams, it did not seem possible.
The man on a bad nag caught his attention, moving away north. Langholm, perhaps. Or the inn at Mosspaul. Batty had seen the man before, coming and going at Hollows – a clerk then, off on the Laird’s business.
Batty slid away into the drip of trees, noting the burgeoning green, the swell of buds. New life was coming through the wind and cold rain, and with the spring would come Fat Henry and a vengeance that would fire the land to ruin.
If I leave any of it, Batty thought savagely.
Langholm
That same night
Ganny was half drunk – again. Ridley did not care for how often that was happening, but had to admit that, so far, it had not spoiled his looks. If he was honest, the priest was forced to admit that it excited him, as if a marble statue, perfect and white, had flushed to lewd life.
Ganymede was no statue and less than lewd. He was querulous and irritable.
‘I am going mad,’ he complained, scowling so hard that Ridley despaired. ‘I see no one save wee Jane here.’
‘Well,’ Ridley declared waspishly, ‘you insisted we keep “wee Jane”, so you only have yourself to blame if she latches you to her side. It’s not some pup you can leave in the straw.’
‘If it wasn’t for her I would already be mad,’ the boy spat back. ‘You keep telling me it is too dangerous to go out.’
It was true and yet not so. Dangerous to Ridley, who was afraid ‘wee Jane’ might be recognised. The chance of the creature having been stolen from around here was slim, but Ridley had foul dreams about some shrieking mother declaring it, in public and at the top of her voice. Worse still, he was afraid of losing Ganny to some Hollows tough with a taste for such a boy and rich enough to turn his head. The thought of that ate at the priest nightly, made his possession of the boy all the more fervent, as if he was forming chains to bind him with.
Yet he knew he could not pen the boy up, but neither could he be constantly at his side to protect him. He tried a kiss, but Ganny backed away.
‘Where have you been all day?’ he demanded and Ridley sighed.
‘Physicking the robber baron of Hollows,’ he said wearily, then added with a touch of bite, ‘the man who pays for this roof and the food you eat.’
‘Is he ill then?’ Ganny pouted.
‘Don’t,’ Ridley pleaded. ‘The wind will change and you will be stuck looking like that.’
Ganny squinted and Ridley sighed, gave in and waved a hand dismissively.
‘The Lord of Hollows, as he calls himself, is choleric and his urine is sweet. Beyond that, I cannot tell, for I am physicking him at a distance, without his knowing, at the behest of his wife. He thinks I am no more than his wife’s latest priestly plaything.’
‘Euch,’ Ganny declared, making an even worse face. ‘You tried to kiss me after drinking piss all day?’
‘Not piss, beautiful boy – urine. And I don’t drink it all day – I don’t drink it at all. I taste it, to discover, among other things, if the owner has diabetus mellitus. On the top of my tongue, d’you see? Like this.’
He waggled his tongue and Ganny waved with disgust.
‘Christ, put that horror away. A pig’s tongue is better looking.’
Stung, Ridley bridled.
‘Pig’s tongue, is it? This tongue has more learning in it than your entire head. More than your whoremongering head will ever gain.’
‘Whoremonger? Where am I whoring then? I never leave this place long enough to waggle my bits at anyone else. Unlike you, pleasuring everything in this forsaken hole called Hollows. It is a wonder your foul instrument is still attached.’
‘Foul instrument,’ Ridley repeated, wondering where the boy had picked that phrase up from. ‘Foul instrument?’
‘Of pleasure,’ Ganny added sullenly. ‘I heard yon bishop say so, back in St Mary Merton. Foul instrument of pleasure he called you. He hadn’t seen it, though – I had.’
Ridley shivered at the remembrance of the bishop. If the hordes had not launched themselves at St Mary Merton, he thought, my fate would have been much warmer. Then he caught Ganny’s grin and found it infectious.
‘Foul instrument of pleasure,’ he repeated. ‘That bishop would not know one if it hit him in the face.’
Ganny clapped his hands and laughed with delight at that.
‘He would not know the difference between a sigh of love and a fart,’ Ridley went on, and then, in the middle of Ganny’s laughter, an entire thought struck him like a sounding bell.
‘I have a mind to make you a bishop,’ he declared, and Ganny looked at him, tilting his head to one side like a curious bird. Ridley felt the tumescence in him and his mouth went dry.
‘A bishop?’
Nodding, moving closer, losing all his sense, Ridley laid it out. Soon the year changed at Hollows Tower, as well as everywhere else, and they were planning a Feast of Fools, for which they needed, of course, a boy-bishop. They would pay too.
Ganny clapped his hands with delight at the thought.
‘I will buy some cloth of gold,’ Ridley babbled, gathering Ganny to him. ‘We can make cope and mitre from it – you will dazzle them…’
‘And wee Jane can be the baby Jesus,’ Ganny declared suddenly, bright with enthusiasm. He danced in a circle with delight, peeling off his clothes as he did so, and Ridley, who had forgotten the baby in the moment, had a wild moment of panic at the thought of it, at the idea of bringing it into public view. It was dispelled at once when Ganny fell on his knees in front of him.
‘Oh God,’ he said at the touch. The babe – a danger. But perfect, of course, for the Feast of Fools, where everything was turned on its head and servitors became noble and a boy-bishop scathed the holiest of sacraments. A girl-child as Jesus was perfect…
Perfect as marble, white marble like Ganny’s cheeks…
Powrieburn
Five days later
Mintie lay in a labyrinth of memories and those who tended her thought she was numbed by grief and circumstance. Megs said so, sco
wling at the fact that now both the mistresses of Powrieburn were laid flat and of no use at all, but Bet’s Annie scathed her and anyone else who voiced a poor opinion.
They were wrong. I am not blank, Mintie thought, nor frozen. Just the opposite; when you are frozen from the tragedy of your life, you can endure it. It’s when you wake up that it drives you mad. When you wake to the knowledge that you are a palace of brothels, that all you were is now dead, all the hopes and dreams and the normal course of events for a life gone like smoke.
Everything that steps in the world must mark it, grind it, break silences and trails – save herself, who was no more than an interruption on the face of the moon. She found herself staring at her hands, folded in her lap and no more part of her than the whisper of another’s breath.
To be dead in a world where you still walked and talked was to be in a bleakness that made the Bewcastle look like a garland of flowered gardens. Walking dead in such a place, with folk wrenching you back from running as fast as possible through the membrane of water that was no more than a door that led out and away.
There was no lodestone, no sign from God to bear her up with any ease, so she moved through the days like gossamer and silver beams. She tended to her mother, realising, with that faint part of her struggling like a trapped fly with reason, that here was a woman fighting to live and failing with every wheezing breath, even as young, healthy Mintie sought the opposite.
Realising too, with some sliver of shame, that she had brought this on her ma and everyone in Powrieburn, which only added to the bleak in her.
‘She needs better help than us,’ Bet’s Annie declared finally. ‘I hear there is a wee physicker priest at Hollows, catering to the Lady’s soul – will I ask there for her aid, in the love of God?’
Mintie wanted nothing from the Lady of Hollows – but her ma wheezed and stirred, coughing, and the sliver of shame worked itself deeper, so she agreed, though she offered no help as Bet’s Annie saddled Jaunty and Hew his own mount, the pair of them prepared to ride into the dark heart of the Debatable.
It was hard to bear, this world, but she would endure it still, Mintie thought, for a faint thread of hope called Batty Coalhouse and her justice.
Megs and Jinet waited for instruction and guidance, so she became what they wanted – prudent and smiling, modest, calm, candid and benign.
But she moved through the world with her head slightly tilted, as if listening to a sound no one else could hear. Jinet confided to Eck that she thought Mintie was hearing something in the distance and worried that it might be the last vestige of madness – a distant bairn’s crying.
Mintie was listening right enough, but not straining to hear a child weep. She was listening to the soft sputter of a slow match burning down and down and down…
* * *
The whole truth of it was, according to Simoni, that a Medici was the Devil. And possibly God as well.
‘The Magnificent Lorenzo was clearly the Devil, Alessandro the Moor possibly a lesser imp. Lorenzino, however, is an idiot…’
‘Or God,’ Batty said. ‘Since you haven’t mentioned a Medici in that role.’
Simoni waved his goblet, slopping wine everywhere. He belched and looked startled by it, then remembered his thread.
‘Alessandro only thinks he is God,’ he declaimed. ‘Because he is grandson of the Magnificent. Or not, depending on who you listen to – some say he is really the bastard of Pope Clement VII, otherwise known as Guilo, nephew to the Magnificent.’
Batty was losing track; there seemed an awful lot of Medici in this small inn and he said so.
‘Lorenzino is certainly the Devil,’ Simoni went on, as if Batty had not spoken at all.
Batty was too fogged by wine to argue. Besides, Simoni was right about Lorenzino, the least of the Medici. Lorenzaccio, they called him – Bad Lorenzo – but only for going round decapitating statues at night in Rome.
‘Perfectly Medici,’ Simoni agreed, once they had laughed at the stupidly childish acts of Lorenzaccio.
‘Yet there they are,’ Batty declared, throwing his one arm in the general direction of anywhere. It would suffice, since they were in the Caravella inn, on the Via dei Pilastri, not far from the Gate of the Cross and Gallows. And anywhere you pointed in Florence led to a wall besieged by Medici.
Or their supporters, the French of Charles V. And Germans. And Swiss. And any other mercenary bastards who thought Florence could be plundered. But Alessandro and all the other little Medici, Simoni opined, were lolling in Bibbione, miles away from danger, eating cacciucco and insalata nizzarda, fagioli and good marzolino cheese, while we here in Florence exist on thin soup.
For certes they would be doing that, agreed Batty, pouring the last of the wine. And peacocks and pheasant. He knew Simoni missed the cheese above all, but was less convinced of the poor worth of their own fare; in his experience, even thin soup was better than some of the stuff he had eaten in his time and better than they would have if the siege dragged on.
‘For sure,’ Simoni agreed and raised his goblet. ‘Of course, the siege will last as long as the wine does. And we have a lot of wine – even if you and your dogs suck it up like sponges.’
So they sat and drank while men clanked about in armour, ripping up homes along the Via Ghibellina for firewood, while others ran around putting out fires started by French guns. The streets were choked with noise and smoke. Whores grew rich, prisoners were pardoned if they could fight, and church bells rang for no reason.
Then Niccolò, the one they called Furbo – foxy – came running in, shouting. ‘We can hear digging in the convent. Stab me up the arse with a rusty pike if I lie.’
Simoni threw down his goblet, so that wine sprayed everywhere.
‘Fuck your mother, I told you so,’ he yelled triumphantly.
This was when Batty knew it was a dream, for not only would Michelangelo Simoni never curse, he would never throw away good wine.
But still he could not wake from it.
Then they were outside the convent of St Theresa, shrouded in dust and shouting, in the middle of which was a strange droning that raised the flesh on Batty’s body. They were the Angels of Michael, busy singing the Song of Moses – the Lord is a man of war. They were, in fact, men of Strozzi’s company, abandoned here when that man took the army off to fight the Pope and the French; he lost and fled and now the Angels of Michael were stuck in Florence with everyone else.
They were clanking metal giants who wanted to rush off into St Theresa and start carving up the enemy who had come up through the old cloacae, then dug the last way into the convent.
But Michelangelo only wanted them stopped at the door, for he and Batty had discovered their digging ages before and the dust that coated everyone was proof that they had blown the floor of the convent open and were massing inside. They had to be kept inside.
‘How long do you need?’ he called out to the kneeling Batty, who lit his fuses and watched them like children.
‘When you see me run,’ Batty yelled back, ‘try and overtake me.’
Then he plunged after Michelangelo, into the billowing mist of dust and shouts, where men struggled to press themselves out of the convent gateway into the street and the Angels of Michael swung into their faces like a door. They struggled and roared; flashes of fire split the gloom.
This at least had been real, but in this version of the mad dream-dash to perdition, Batty wore a salet and a back and breast, used a vicious basket-hilt cutter with ‘Solinger hat mich’ engraved on the blade. But that had been Michelangelo.
In reality, Batty had swung an old, notched sword – the same one he still had – and was counting.
One.
Two.
Three. He saw Michelangelo hurdle someone on the ground, failed to make the jump himself and half fell.
Four.
Five.
Six. Batty always half fell at this point in the dream, and no matter how hard he tried, he could not wake up fr
om the next bit.
Seven.
Eight.
Nine. Batty blundered into the knots of struggling men, fighting and falling in the talus of rubble from older wall collapses. He took someone’s flailing elbow in the ribs, a blow that made him grunt.
Twelve.
Thirteen.
Fourteen – he cut at a figure in torn blue, a jarring chop that carved a steak from the man’s thigh and sent him reeling and screaming. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, in a mist of smoke and dust and wild swinging.
Eighteen. The sweat was running down him like mice in a burning wall.
Nineteen. The world slowed; he caught the black-bearded man under the chin, the sword stabbing upwards, coming out through his mouth and slicing his nose. It snapped. Dream-Solingen steel and it snapped. It always snapped.
Twenty. The man fell away and Batty was left with the hilt and a perfectly sheared nub end. Not even a jagged end, but clean, so that he did not have a weapon at all. It did not matter.
‘Run,’ he screamed, as he always did in the dream, as he had done when the moment was real. Then, though, it did not seem as if he ran through air thick as honey, his legs seeming unable to move. And, as she always did, the nun appeared, weaving like a sick crow, robes flapping, wimple torn, walking as if in a daze. And on fire.
In every other version of this, the man who appeared and caught him by the arm, dragging him away from moving to the nun, was Hans Kohlhase, his bearded face slick, his beard matted and blood all over him. The way he had looked on the breaking wheel, for he had never been in Florence; the reality of that day had been Michelangelo, hauling him away by the arm and deciding for him, in that hesitating moment, whether to save the nun and risk himself, or leave her to the fate of God.
Every time he dreamed this it had been the same – the convent and the street and the world vanished in a great blasting roar of flame, a sick flare of heat and a fist of unseen, casual savagery that flung them all to skitter and roll in the rubble. Stones and burning wood clattering round them. The nun on fire and screaming.
