Sister Faith prayed, as she had been doing for two hours or more, turning the ring round and round her wedding finger, feeling the smooth wear on the indentations and the crucifix. It had been given to her by her mother, afraid of the year and the apocalypse promised in Revelations – ‘half-time after the time’, which was seen as referring to Anno Domini 1500.
She remembered it vividly, for she had turned thirteen on the day the Archbishop had died and her mother and two brothers had turned up just as all the nuns and novitiates turned out in the rain to see old John Morton carried off to a crypt in Canterbury’s cathedral.
Her mother and two younger brothers had looked so cold, standing outside the convent of the Priory of St Sepulchre while the Benedictine nuns tried to look pious and failed. A deal of that had to do with the carved arch over the Archbishop’s effigy – the angels and cardinal caps were fine, but the fat barrels with MOR on them made straight faces difficult, even if the Archbishop’s family thought it a dignified play on his name – MOR-tuns.
In contrast to everyone’s shiver, she remembered, she had felt warm and at peace for all her thin novitiate clothing, for she had known, on that day, that God was real. He lived. It had been that simple for her and the peace it brought had been total and encompassing.
Now, in this place of sick heat and damp, after all the years between – even after God, it seemed, had abandoned the Sisters to the destruction of Henry Tudor – that conviction was with her still.
Yet she was deeply troubled for the others who lay and sweated and groaned in the fetid dark of the tower and she rubbed the ring round and round, the crucifix on it up and down, as she always did when she needed a special prayer answered.
Not for me, she argued, for I am ready to join You, my Lord. For the others. And she bowed her head and repeated the prayers once more. There were only two, so they did not take long.
The first was for Sister Benedict, who had not made it to the safety of the tower. Sister Faith had watched the cart roll away, the staggering horses lashed by Si Wood until two arrows had brought one beast down and the cart to a tangled halt.
She had seen Si felled by a youngster in ribboned finery and was sure it was the same one who continually bared his nethers so that the defenders in the tower would fire off what little powder and shot they had. Sister Faith was more concerned that one or both of those ungodly youths would finally work out that they were unharmed because the nuns they had trapped would not kill anyone, but fired into the air instead.
Sister Benedict was gone and Sister Faith knew it, though she had not told the others; Sister Benedict had been one of their only two hopes and the others had visions of her and poor Si Wood hurrying towards Bewcastle and Sister Benedict’s brother, a powerful lord in the area who would bring righteous wrath on the heads of their tormentors.
The second hope was for Sister Mary and Leckie, who had gone off in the opposite direction – that had been Sister Faith’s idea, for it gave everyone a chance and had allowed the remaining sisters and carts to reach the tower. She was not so sure that Sister Benedict’s sacrifice had allowed Sister Mary and Leckie to reach Wooler, all the same.
Sister Faith did not want to destroy this hope, so her prayer was silent, spilling from behind tight lips and squeezed eyelids. She had an idea that these men, so unlike any soldiery she had seen, were foreign and mercenary, likely to visit Hell on their captives and somehow in the pay of Thomas Horner – but still her contract with God would not allow her to pray for Sister Benedict’s quick death.
Instead, she asked the Saviour to accept Sister Benedict’s soul and to comfort her in her hour of need, while beseeching Him to speed Sister Mary on her way. She spoke under her breath the same way she had once spoken aloud to her mother, before she had gone to be a nun. She had been troubled then, too.
Her mother had understood, as she had always done and Sister Faith smiled at the memory. Dead and gone these many years, yet the drift of her ma’s face was still sharp and bright when Sister Faith remembered and she repeated the words her mother had said to her then.
‘Ne’er mind where you are now, or the world, or anything in it. If Jesus has called, then let Him hold you and comfort you as I have done. If He is coming for you, then run to Him. Turn away, let go of all else and run to Him.’
Now Sister Faith wept, not with grief but in farewell, for Sister Benedict, the other nuns in her care – even her mother and this life, which she thought would end soon.
After a time, she smiled through the tears and straightened her small body. She felt the lack of habit and wimple – a homespun dress and cloak and kerch was not the same. She turned the ring, that old, familiar gesture, then composed herself and offered her second prayer.
‘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.
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.’