A Dish of Spurs

by Robert Low

  She shouldered past a moss-grown stone and yelped with shock and surprise when Hutchie stepped out, caliver in his hand and the slow match smoking; his grin was feral sharp.

  It was a reflex that she did not even think was in her, an act she had not thought of consciously – she shot out a hand and covered his like a lover. There was a moment when the surprise froze him, his eyes bewildered at the gentle touch.

  Then she squeezed as hard as she could and smothered the match in his grip, so that it ground its burn into his palm. He roared and backhanded her, a blow that flung her away to crash and roll in the bracken, right to the feet of Batty.

  He hefted her up with a steel grip, steadied her, then let her go, drew his sword and stepped between her and Hutchie, who had dropped the caliver and was flapping his scorched hand. Then he realised Batty was there with his hand full of steel and he backed rapidly away, hauling out Davey-boy’s stolen backsword. They crouched, eyeing each other.

  Hutchie took in the solid confidence of the man he faced, the undershot jut that made the untrimmed beard spring up, the narrowed fox eyes in a face like a bad map. His jack had been coloured and neatly stitched once, but was dangling with torn threads, a uniform dung colour stained with rust where rents had leaked water into the metal plates. It could also have been old blood, Hutchie thought, remembering Batty’s reputation.

  Then he sneered. One arm. Old. And by the looks of those pouched eyes, almost done up.

  Batty saw the sneer and knew what was coming, watched the cunning eyes in that handsome, florid face with its white smile. He wore no more than doublet and shirt and fat breeks and hose, but Hutchie Elliott was as dangerous as a cornered rat for all his lack of armour.

  ‘I am better than you,’ Hutchie said suddenly.

  ‘Aye, aye, so you say,’ Batty replied mildly, watching the eyes.

  ‘You are a broken dog, Batty Coalhouse,’ Hutchie said and suddenly lunged with a roar.

  ‘Here is your death.’

  The blades clashed and Mintie, dazed and jaw-bruised, heard the grunts of them as they fought, circling and stamping.

  Hutchie cut and slashed, but Batty was nowhere near and the air healed quickly. His next was a thrust that whicked past Batty’s ear and would have taken him in the mouth if he had not jerked; he stepped in close, to where Hutchie’s furious eyes had gone boar-slitted, and spat in his face.

  Reeling away, Hutchie cursed and Batty thought he had him – he whirled his wrist and slammed his blade down, just as Hutchie parried. The sheer strength of the blow made Hutchie cry out and the backsword went flying from him – but Batty heard the sharp, high ting and saw most of his own blade whirl like a scythe through the air.

  Then he stared at the nub end he had left, perfectly sheared, a clean-cut edge. Like the dream, he thought dully.

  Hutchie, shaking life back into his numbed hand, gave a cry and lashed out with a foot, catching Batty on the shins and staggering him. He followed it up with a roundhouse left hook which drove into Batty’s belly like a ram on a wall.

  Mintie heard the whoosh, saw Batty stumble away, saw the kick that sent him sprawling. Hutchie, staggering wildly, looked round for his sword but spotted the caliver, spotted the last wink of the slow match and laughed.

  He darted for it, swept it up and blew the match back into life, swung the red eye of it and fastened it to the lock, while Batty sucked in air and pain and looked up at the caliver muzzle, big as a cave.

  My match, he thought, which I made and gave to Davey-boy Graham for his splendid new gun. Any other match would have been crushed of life with what Mintie did, but not mine. No match with a slow match, he thought bitterly. And now it kills me.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Mintie, holding out one hand to Hutchie, who grinned his white grin at her.

  ‘You don’t need to do this,’ she went on. ‘I forgive you. You can go free. But you need to hand ower the babe, Hutchie. Is she safe and well?’

  Hutchie blinked slowly, then nodded and glanced quickly round, found what he wanted, took a step or two back and rattled the crib with a kick; the bairn woke and wailed.

  ‘A fortune in that wee cry,’ he said.

  ‘You will never spend it,’ Batty wheezed and wondered if he could get the axe-handled dagg out and throw it twice as magically in one morning. Hutchie knew of the dagg as well and was not about to leave it with Batty.

  ‘Fork out that pistol – slow, now – and toss it here. It is fine, and Clym Hen Harrow would rather I have it, for sure.’

  Batty threw the pistol at his feet. So be it then, he thought, and levered himself off his knees. You can only play the hand you are dealt, in life as in Primero.

  ‘You cannot keep the babe,’ Mintie insisted. ‘They will hunt you over bog and moss forever, Hutchie, even if you were to make them hand money for it.’

  Hutchie knew it, but wanted something from all this. He stood in what he had and what little he had contrived to steal, and was, he suddenly realised, no better fortuned than when he had killed Mintie’s father – a horse and a brace of guns. But now, he thought, every hand in the Borders is against me – aye, and further, if I keep this bairn.

  ‘If I hand you the babe,’ he said, ‘you will give me a head start, at least, on the fine horse there which is not whistle-struck?’

  Mintie nodded.

  ‘And put out the slow match of Batty Coalhouse?’

  He was looking at Batty when he said it and her small ‘yes’ tore his eyes to her. He grinned his white grin.

  ‘And will you come with me, wee Queen of the Powries?’ he said. ‘Ride away with me and be my love?’

  There was only the sound of curlews and Batty wheezing. Then Mintie seemed to surface from somewhere else.

  ‘I forgive you,’ she said.

  He blew on the match and started to shake his head.

  ‘No, no, wee Mintie,’ he said, puffing the glowing end until it sparked a little. ‘You will never come away with the likes of me.’

  His voice was bitter as old aloes as he raised the caliver and sighted.

  ‘Nor will Batty be put out save by death.’

  Mintie put out a hand, just as Batty started to move. Slow, he knew even as he did it. Slow and old and still too fat…

  She went between the caliver and him just as the priming pan flared and smoked. The explosion was loud and vicious – and wrong.

  There was a shrieking scream from inside the great egret plume of smoke. Batty lumbered to a halt like some wounded bear, blinking bewildered as Mintie, arms flung wide, stood like Saint Joan to take the ball.

  Which had not come.

  Instead, Hutchie lay where he had been flung, writhing like a cut adder, his hands a mass of blood, and his face – Gods, his face. Mintie, her mind shifting back into the wonder of being alive and whole, saw it an instant before Batty swept her away, but it was enough.

  More than enough, Batty thought, for the ravaging of a burst barrel in a flawed piece of cheap did awful damage. He left Mintie then and moved to the baby in the crib, picked her up and brought her back, pausing only to look once at the writhing, moaning ruin of what had once been Hutchie Elliott.

  There was little left of the swaggering ranter to hang, nor would they have to fasten his hands to keep them from supporting himself on the rope’s end, for he had little of them either.

  Mintie had seen it and was weeping. That was because of all the forgiveness she had been storing up, Batty thought, as he handed her the crib, then went back to fetch the horse and the axe-handled dagg. He took the caliver too, seeing now that the ivory on it was only bone and the silver gilt tawdry. Bloody Egyptianis had cozened Davey-boy after all, Batty thought, with a badly made gun that might have blown up at any of its firings. Still, his da might like to see what killed his murderer.

  Then he bent to where Hutchie moaned in a mask of blood, the raw, wet blubber of lips puffing out pink froth and no meaning, the splendid white teeth of him blown to pulp and splinter. Mintie woul
d think he offered some comfort, a little mercy of soothing noises, but Batty had none of that left.

  ‘Not smiling now, you sow’s arse,’ he whispered and went on, leaving him there. Then he helped Mintie and crib and himself up onto their horses and turned for Powrieburn with the lame one hobbling along at the hind end.

  Mintie, lost in a crimson world of agony from Hutchie’s blow, was only dimly aware, with the fading sound of his choking wheezes, that they were leaving him to die with the Tinnis Faerie.

  Powrieburn, Liddesdale

  Lady Day, 36th Regnal Year of James VI of Scotland (25 March 1603)

  Time snows over all our deeds, Mintie thought, smothering memories, leaving blanks. But not mine, she added fiercely. Three years aulder than the new-dead queen and still to the fore, looking into a future that no longer had the wild Rides that Trottie and the rest of the household feared.

  Perhaps the Faerie took Hutchie, Mintie thought, lying back in the canopied bed, and smelled the bracken and the new earth. She fancied she could even scent out the perfume of the foxgloves, the Faerie flowers whose kiss was death, but that may just have been conjured by the memories of that day, brought back by the distant carillon of bells tolling for the dead Elizabeth I, by the grace of God no longer Queen of England.

  She had worried about leaving Hutchie wounded and dying. But when Wat Scott sent riders to fetch the body, there was none to be found, only old blood. So either he had been carried off by friends or Faerie – but whatever had happened, neither Mintie nor anyone else had seen or heard of him since.

  Wicked Wat Scott had to be content hanging Black Penny, which he did – though Mintie managed to get a reprieve for the dog and it lived a long time as a faithful guard at Powrieburn; if it missed its old master, it never gave sign of it.

  Neither did Ganny. Mintie swept him into Powrieburn and Ridley vanished. Ganny became Arthur Henderson, went on to better learning in Edinburgh and became a lawyer there. Now he had sons and grandweans of his own, and Mintie thought that the best thing she had ever done – and the nearest she would get to children of her own.

  The wee Queen was delivered quiet and secret to a sternly delighted Regent and a grateful, weeping Dowager Queen, and the rewards for it helped Powrieburn, for Mintie was smart enough to ask for contracts to supply the court with horseflesh rather than a bag of easily squandered gold. What others had as reward – Batty for one – remained a mystery.

  Fat Henry did not come in the spring, though everyone scrambled about in expectation of it. The King of England had too much on his mind and the official chroniclers wrote that it was the threat of invasion by the French that kept his army in the south.

  The truth, of course, was Catherine Parr, the lecherous old goat’s last fling. And him with a festered leg as well, Mintie thought. Men are swine if left to their own.

  Fat Henry came the next year all the same, sending his earls to land at Leith and despoil the place in an orgy of viciousness that stayed in the memory of those in a Scots army who could only watch and fume. There were rebel Scots with the English too – but Johnnie Armstrong of Hollows was not among them.

  He was nowhere, Mintie thought. Left glowering like a spider in the ruins of his home, nursing his cods and his wrath and unable to do much about either. The loss of Hollows, his wife and his dignity crushed him like a nut in a steel fist; he died a few years back, she recalled, an old muttering sink of hatred and self-sorrow, and the Armstrong tower passed to a new Laird, some kin or other. Now that would end too with the union of the borders.

  The years rolled away from Mintie like the Esk, and she closed her eyes and followed them for a while. Bet’s Annie had married Hew, for he bairned her soon after and Ower-The-Moss Henderson had little choice. When he died – 1553, she thought, or 54 – Hew took over as head of the Hendersons and Mintie never had a lick of trouble about marriage or inheritance from that day.

  Will Elliot never recovered from what had been done to him, though he lived on a while longer, hirpling about in some position in Fife, she heard. He died in 1548, which was young. She was told that it was ‘strange circumstances’ but not more, so Mintie thought the folk who told her were being kind and not saying that he had done away with himself, because he had been broken to what he considered nothing – unable to ride or walk like a man. Or court the girl he wanted.

  Mintie felt guilt for that, but only a little. It was the way of things, ordained by God, and she could find no more feelings for Will deeper than she had – which were not enough for marriage. As Batty would put it – you can only play the hand you are dealt, in life as in Primero.

  Batty. She heard from him in 1545, when he came back to lay flowers on the grave mound of the Saul, who had died quite gloriously in the spring – in the middle of an ecstatic roll in a new meadow, kicking his hooves in the air as if he was young.

  Batty had been unchanged and working for anyone who would pay, wore a new shirt, breeks and a hat with a feather – but the filthy old jack of plates was the same, the axe-handled dagg was still snugged up in his belt, and Fiskie was loaded with the same old saddlery and scuffed holsters.

  He stayed the night and they played Primero, and he said that when he was done siting rabinets and culverins all over Berwick for the English, he would go back to the Scots. Or take Fat Henry’s coin and start the process of knocking down what he had helped build at Leith or Haddington. Either that or go and see Michelangelo in Rome. If that man still lived.

  Mintie, never sure if he jested or not, simply laughed at the thought of Batty sharing confidences with the Pope’s artist. But next morning Batty was gone before she was up and she never saw him again.

  She heard various rumours of him after that – he had gone to Ireland with the English, or Germany to fight in the wars there, or was pursuing someone called Maramaldo up and down the east coast and elsewhere. None of what she heard mentioned Michelangelo and she was a little sorry about that.

  It had been a wheen of years ago and he was dead and gone, for she recalled him saying that he had been born with the century.

  They were all dead and gone, she thought with a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the cold March breeze. All the ones in Powrieburn now are strangers to those times; I am the only one left who remembers.

  Time has snowed over it all, save me. She drew the coverlet up and was about to call out, waspishly, for Trottie to come and close the window and stop wailing about the threat of riders. There would be an end to them now, but they would go out in fire and sword, she knew.

  Then she heard – or fancied she heard – the gentle singing. It leaped her heart into her throat and she knew it could not be him, not after all these years, that it had to be someone else. If it was anyone at all.

  But it hung on the breeze, gentle as a baby breathing.

  ‘And he has gotten a coat of the elven cloth, a pair of shoes of the velvet green. And until seven years were gone and past, True Thomas on earth was never seen.’

  Author’s Note

  There are three Walls in Scotland, all built for the same reasons. The best known is Hadrian’s, but the Antonine is still a visible scar and more than a footnote in history books. The one no one mentions nowadays is the Scotch Dyke.

  Built in 1552, a decade after the events of this tale, the dyke marked a final agreement by England and Scotland concerning the Debatable Land. Two parallel ditches flank an earthwork bank a dozen feet wide and the height of a man, which runs for about four miles west from the Esk and once cut the Debatable in half, to keep the Scots away from Carlisle. At either end was placed a boundary stone marked with a cross pattée.

  Little remains these days. There is no monument to it and even maps omit it – but it was, literally, the defining moment when the Debatable Land was officially incorporated into the territory of both countries.

  The Borderers ignored it, of course. They thought it no more than a nuisance to moving stolen cattle back and forth, and continued to raid and counter-ra
id much as they had done before, right up to the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and even beyond. They simply went round one end and back the other. Which tells you all you need about the nature of the Borderers, on both sides of the Divide. When they decided to abrogate responsibility for a stretch of Border land, both countries agreed that there would be ‘no firm raisings’ – in other words, no-one could build houses or fortresses.

  Since the point of the Debatable was that no-one was prepared to police it, the imhabitants ignored that – the result, among others was Canobie, nowadays the village of Canonbie, the 16th century equivalent then of a Wild West frontier town. Even today there are scarcely more than four hundred inhabitants – though it is much more peaceful.

  Similiarly, Hollows Tower was built with no reference to ‘firm raisings’ and still exists, built in stone and perched above the Esk – it is now called Gilnockie and is the Armstrong Museum; you can even get married in it these days. There is a mill near there too, but it belongs to the much later wool industry; there never was a powder mill.

  The Armstrongs of Hollows – now Gilnockie – have no doubt been maligned here and were no better nor worse than other Names in the area. The Laird I have here is fiction, but the father I give him was not. Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie was the Lord of the Borders and his fate at the hands of the king is as described. He had five sons, not just the one I shamelessly use here – but the sheer power, defiance and outlaw nature of the Armstrongs was too good to pass up for this story.

  Powrieburn is complete invention, as is everyone in it – though Tinnis Hill is not, and remains as defiantly Faerie as when I saw it on my travels.

  Batty and Will are also imagined, though Batty’s past as one of the Kohlhase family of Saxony is real enough. The story of the Kohlhase horses is well-known in Germany and has been made into several films. I also placed Batty at the Siege of Florence, all part of the embryonic wars of religion on the continent. Michelangelo was there, as described and arranging the defences.