Her life was a tallow flame in a wet wind, every ragged draw of breath into her only serving to make folk wince, each exhale leaking like the blood they could not staunch.
The bairns were orphans, used to hardship even if they had shrieked a bit with the bangs and the flashing, but now their hard eyes were melting as Sister Hope failed to beat the arrow. It had come down in that perfect curve all missiles have, as designed by God when he made the world; this one arced down the steps and took one of His own nuns low in the back, cracking her ribs open like a pry-bar on an old bird nest. She had been protecting the youngest of the bairns with her body, gathering her chicks into her rough wool dress like a Scotch Dumpy.
Sister Faith prayed and wiped, Sister Charity probed and cut, but only the shaft was loosened out; the great barbed head could not be removed and Batty had known it from the moment he had seen her.
He let them bind her up all the same with no word of the pointlessness of that, while he scrambled to haul the dead out, awkwardly crouched so he would not be the next one to take a longbow shaft. The man Batty had hacked with the dagg was easiest to lever up and roll over the remains of the cart barrier, but Batty needed help with the one on the stairs because he had half-armour all the way down his thighs, segmented like a brace of lobster tails.
Not that it had done him any good, for the shot which killed him had fretted his face into a bloody parody of the Italian cutwork lace which decorated his cuffs; his last snoring breaths had been through a nose and mouth blasted to ruin. Batty wondered what the caliver had been loaded with and Sister Charity, after signing the cross on the man, told him it had been her rosary beads.
‘Unstrung. I used half-a-dozen, for I had no shot left and they were only wee,’ she added and, because of the veil, Batty could only see her eyes, which were full of pain.
She is sore sorry for having done it, he marvelled and never considers what he would have done to her if she had not. But he said nothing and sat patiently while she murmured prayers at the face ruined to shreds by a slew of hard wee prayers; Batty sat silently and took in the fluted breastplate and the segmented tassets, the roped edges and lace and ribbons.
Ten florins in that armour, Batty thought. About a year’s food and drink and made special for him, not plundered. A Lance Captain, for sure.
Then they tumbled him out and Batty thought that the man called Klett was mired up to his armpits, for Maramaldo would not be pleased to learn that three nuns and one-armed Batty Coalhouse had contrived to kill so many hard veterans, never mind a Captain who commanded a Lance of thirty men.
Maramaldo would know by now, of course, for it was his trumpeters blowing and bellowing for the attack to be called off and Klett had known it even as he had gone back over the carts and away.
Sister Charity crouched and watched while Batty went into the undercroft, reeking of smoke and flame and blood. Sister Faith was praying while Sister Hope heaved wheezes in and out, the children sitting at opposite sides of her like brave sentries.
All save the oldest, the boy called Daniel, who stood like a shadow, his small arms folded across his thin chest as if he hugged himself; when Batty came down he looked up as if staring at a mountain or a distant horizon, then turned to look the same blankness at Sister Faith when he heard her intone: ‘Father in Heaven, bless us this day.’
‘Ah kin coup ma lundies.’
Batty jerked free of memory, shivered with it. Her blue eyes were bright and open and Sister Hope sighed out that proud boast with her last breath, gone to the sunlit meadows of her youth, turning cartwheels and careless of showing her legs, or her unbound hair. Her wizened monkey face had a smile on it that defied the cracks and lines to somehow make her look like a blissful girl.
‘Our Father,’ Sister Faith murmured. The air braided in Batty’s throat and he had to look away from that face. He thought about the woman with the hand of her boy; though she had clung tight and never let go, Our Father had plucked the boy away anyway.
‘She is beautiful.’
Her voice brought him round to look, seeing the calm assurance of her eyes.
‘Sister Hope,’ she prompted. ‘She looks beautiful and at peace. God be praised.’
‘Things have looked better,’ Batty grunted. ‘It seems your God picked the wrong man, which is no surprise to me. I cannot save you, your Sisters or the bairns.’
‘My God?’ she replied quietly. ‘Our God. Yours too.’
She sat and folded her hands in her lap, twisting that wedding band – no, Batty suddenly realised, not a wedding band. A rosary ring. Which, he supposed, was a wedding band of sorts if you were a nun, married to Christ.
‘You were chosen by God to rescue these children. Sister Charity, too, perhaps.’
Not herself, Batty noticed. Not placed anywhere in that.
‘I do not know why God chose you, Master Coalhouse,’ she went on, ‘but the fact remains that He did, which makes you the most fortunate of men. Few are so picked by the Almighty.’
‘Do not lay this on me, woman,’ Batty growled back, stung to anger. ‘I came here out of stupidity, thinking there was only you to spirit away. Even then I considered the matter foolhardy at best, but had come to look for the nun who is related to the Musgraves, or proof of her death.’
He subsided, glowering and waved his one grimy hand as if to dismiss the entire affair.
‘You were the proof.’
She said nothing and then went to help the children wash Sister Hope and prepare her for a burial that was more wish than surety. Batty sat, hunched and cold and hungry and emptier than a banker’s heart.
‘I am not chosen,’ he muttered.
He sat on a faded chair of yellow satin plush wrapped in a boatcloak and furs so that only his face showed. It was like the chair, that face – same colour, greasy, tattered and stained with old pollution.
If you had not known Captain General Fabrizio Maramaldo before this, Klett thought, you would know all you needed to know just by looking at that face. The flickering shadows in the undercroft of Akeld’s bastel did little to help.
Horner would have agreed if he and Klett had dared do more than breathe beside each other. Poxed, Horner saw. From the sores on his lips to the sweat on his tow-coloured brow, Maramaldo is bad poxed and perhaps dying of it.
Yet the glitter from those pouched eyes had more than just fever in them and the rake of them across his face almost made Horner blanch.
‘Five men,’ he said, the Neapolitan accent thick as clots. ‘Five men are dead. One of them is Giovanni Cadette, a Lance-Captain of skill.’
No one spoke and the eyes raked round. Cornelius hovered nearby with a napkin and a bowl filled with something; Klett doubted if Maramaldo would drink the brew, even if it had the balm of poppies in it, for the Captain General had not pissed for five days and his bladder must be like a football.
‘It was a simple enough task.’
The eyes were settled on Horner like blowflies but the words were directed at Klett, who squinted, bemused. He looked sideways at Horner, who was smirking and, gradually, the truth hit him and fought with the disbelief all over the field of his face.
‘I sent you Master Horner,’ Maramaldo declared. ‘With a plan. All you had to do was capture some nuns and bairns and a trinity of useless men.’
‘They were careless…’ Horner began.
‘When I desire you to speak I will say so. Until then stay silent.’
Horner stayed silent and Klett cleared his throat.
‘I was not party to your plans, Captain General,’ he said bitterly.
‘And this accounts for your failure… how?’ Maramaldo spat back, then winced. There was silence for a moment.
‘Nuns,’ Maramaldo murmured as if savouring the gravy of the word. The eyes seemed to grow colder. ‘Who have killed five and are still not taken from their tower after – how long have you been here, Klett?’
‘Five days.’
‘Indeed. Five days. Five dead. No treasure. You have even contrived to kill one Master Rutland, who is known to me and was expected.’
‘He came to find me, with information…’ Horner interrupted, then fell silent as Maramaldo scorched him with glare.
‘From my employer?’
‘I am sure of it,’ Horner replied and Klett, bewildered, suddenly realised that Maramaldo had less interest in the treasure. What he was interested in was now a mystery to Klett – as was why Horner was involved; his focus had seemed to be all on the treasure.
‘This Rutland came with messages. Unwritten. Assurances that our plan proceeds apace,’ Horner went on, bobbing his head while Klett fought his wild thoughts, his head flickering like a flame in a high wind.
‘Is that certain?’
Horner’s head threatened to bob off the stalk of his neck.
‘You would wager your life on it,’ Maramaldo said eventually and Horner nodded.
‘Indeed I would. The Lord Chancellor…’
‘That was not a question, Master Horner of the office of the Lord Chancellor.’
There was a longer silence, broken only by ragged breathing in the thick air.
‘Balthie Kohlhase,’ Maramaldo said suddenly and Klett simply nodded, trying hard not to raise his eyebrows at what he heard in Maramaldo’s voice. Was that… fear?
‘Why is he in the tower?’ Maramaldo asked. ‘Why is he here, in this place, at this time?’
Klett heard the suspicion and wondered at that, wondered also at Horner’s quick interjection. He had marvelled at the presence of Balthie Kohlhase, whose name had dogged his heels like a black hound all through his life it seemed. He had lied, all the same, about hunting him for that was the task of his two brothers; now that he had found what they had failed to, Klett would present Balthie Kohlhase’s death like a triumph.
‘His arrival is unfortunate, but nothing has strayed so far from the plan that it cannot be rectified,’ Horner said primly. ‘However, we must move more swiftly. The Lord Chancellor wishes this matter resolved to his satisfaction and without delay. We do not have much time.’
Maramaldo grunted and shifted slightly, though it was painful to watch him.
‘When it is proper light, we will see if Balthie can be persuaded to recognise his folly. If he does not, we will blow him and his nuns out of that place and quickly, too.’
‘The treasure…’ Horner bleated, then faded under the renewed gaze. ‘It is fragile. Not so much gold and silver. And other matters. The Lord Chancellor…’
‘Will take his chance,’ Maramaldo said. ‘As I said, we do not have time left for niceties.’
‘I was promised the nuns,’ Horner muttered sullenly. ‘I took assurance…’
‘Contracts have been agreed,’ Maramaldo admitted, his voice a slap. ‘They will be adhered to, among gentlemen.’
A spasm of pain rippled him in the chair and he waved one hand, a weak flap of dismissal while the other flicked at Cornelius to offer his brew.
‘We will see whether Balthie values nuns or sense,’ he said hoarsely, then turned to Horner. ‘Then we will all get what we desire, either way.’
‘What the Lord Chancellor desires…’
Maramaldo’s dark stare was a fierce glitter on both men and Horner went quiet so quickly Klett swore he heard the man’s teeth click.
‘In the morning,’ Maramaldo said to Klett, ‘you will reason Balthie and his nuns out of the tower. If not, you will blow him out by the afternoon.’
‘The guns are not up yet…’ Klett answered, sullen that he still had no clear idea of what his master was doing and that he had been so clearly left out of the planning of it.
‘Until they are you may delight us with your marvellous contrivance,’ Maramaldo replied blissfully. ‘That wall gun. And Master Horner…’
Horner, who had been looking at Klett’s sullen discomfiture, jerked round to face the stare. It was colder than he’d ever thought possible, glassed as a sucking sea.
‘I am not contracted by the Lord Chancellor. If you wave that man and his wishes at me again, I will hang you up by a rod through your heels and flay you alive.’
The morning was all lark song and savoury with smells. Torn grass and turned earth mingled with woodsmoke and hot pottage, while voices hummed like bees; somewhere down by the river came the steady rhythm of axe on wood.
Cutting wood for fires and ruining that windbreak, Batty thought. Akeld will have a breeze up its nethers once Maramaldo’s men have gone.
Which would not be in a hurry, he saw. There were a brace-hundred of them, with horses and pack-mules but this was but an imp of the Great Satan that was Maramaldo’s loftily named Company of the Sable Rose.
Somewhere over the horizon would be a few hundred more, shifting slowly and steadily in this direction, with pikes, muskets, bows, horse, bairns and beldames, sway-hipped gauds, notaries, secretaries, carts, tents and all the panoply of a great company.
And a brace of stolen sakers, Batty remembered.
He stood on the tower top, behind the largest segment of the rotten tooth stump of it, which left only his head exposed to the men trailing up to stand beneath with a square of white linen on a pole. For all that, Batty felt an itch on his back at the thought of the men circled behind him; he did not trust Maramaldo, even with a parley flag.
The man himself came up, carried on a chair of yellow plush by four men on outrigger poles. Batty marvelled at that – the great Maramaldo, reduced to an invalid carriage.
Then he saw the yellow face and narrowed his eyes at that. This was not the Fabrizio Maramaldo he remembered, wielding a farrier’s axe with one hand and his face a richer, different colour entirely.
‘Kohlhase.’
The one who called out was Klett, the man he had fought. There was another with him, pouter-pigeon puffed with self-importance and Batty thought this was the one the nuns had spoken of, the one called Horner.
The one who mattered was struggled up to join them by sweating men at each corner of the great oak seat lashed to poles. He was smothered in a huge green cloak festooned with madder ribbons and trimmed with a fur made rattier by the rain.
‘Careful you cunny-licking scabs,’ he spat, but it was a gusting puff of the bellow Batty had remembered; the men gentled the affair to rest, then stood back to wipe the sweat and rain from them, shuffling uncertainly.
They were achingly familiar to Batty and as unlike the men from the Borders as monkeys to mice. They had pluderehosen and venetians, pansied slops in all colours save decent, the material rich and thick and pulled through the slashes so far it dropped almost to their knees.
They had silks and ribbons, geegaws and favours, were parti-coloured here and there and as gaudy as parrots; Batty remembered himself when he was part of it and felt a spasm of old ache, quickly gone.
Then he saw the only sparrow in the bunch, a fussing little man in a strange gown and turban, nodding like a bird and with eyeglasses on a loop round his neck. He was thin as a stork and carried a battered leather satchel – a book, Batty saw. One of Maramaldo’s clever wee men, he thought, who can read and scratch out the Latin for agreements. A soothsayer, he added to himself, seeing the symbols on the man’s robe; he remembered Maramaldo had a weakness for alchemists and fortune-tellers. Not that you would need one to predict the future of the great Captain General these days; one look at his gaunt yellow face would do.
Klett’s voice jerked him from the reverie.
‘Your dagg is very fine,’ he said. ‘By Hofer from Ferlach in Carinthia.’
‘Is it?’ Batty answered. ‘You saw a lot in the dark – but it was right in your face most of the time and hard to miss, I will admit.’
Then he humped up his good shoulder in a lopsided shrug.
‘I had it from a stinking-pyntled moudiewart backshooter called Clem Henharrow, so I would not know anything about its true origin.’
Klett nodded thoughtfully.
‘It is well made – the axe is in the handle where others I have seen place it on the muzzle, which is not so good.’
‘Because it fouls up?’ Batty hazarded and Klett laughed.
‘Perhaps you might clot it with all manner of foulness, Master Coalhouse,’ he answered softly, ‘but the true reason is that folk use it for more prosaic purpose – cutting wood and the like; the blows knock the barrel out of true.’
‘Ah well – you would be the expert in guns, Master Klett. I am hearing you have a singular one of your own.’
Klett nodded.
‘I do. I am instructed to blow you off that tower with it if you do not come out, you and your nuns all.’
‘And weans,’ Batty answered, then added into Klett’s bewilderment: ‘Five bairns. Did you not realise there were bairns here as well?’
Klett’s quick, bewildered glance at Maramaldo then Horner showed some bitterness – if he had known, it was a recent revelation, Batty thought. Horner was blank-faced as dressed stone.
‘Oho,’ he called out mockingly. ‘Master Horner omitted to mention there were bairns, did he? That would be because you would have to slay them when it came to the bit, Klett. Think you could do that?’
‘Send them out,’ Horner interrupted. ‘And see.’
‘What do you call it?’ Batty asked, then nodded into Klett’s bewilderment. ‘The name. Of your gun.’
‘Doppelhaken,’ Klett replied shortly.
‘A double hackbut,’ Batty translated. ‘My, but it is a fearsome engine. Must weigh a bitty and kick like a bad-tempered mule.’
Klett lifted his face from the work and rested cold eyes on Batty’s own.
‘Enough. Come out of the tower or you will see it in action, just before…’
‘Ach, weesht,’ Batty interrupted. ‘Let the man who matters speak – besides, it has been a long time since I have heard the voice of Fabrizio Maramaldo and from what I see now, it is diminished a great deal.’
Maramaldo’s face was straw and whey, the sweat on it out like fat pearl drops. His cheeks had always been pouched as a squirrel, but now they were sagging though the veins on them were intricate as brocade needlework. The little beard he had always affected as long as Batty had known him was cropped and shaved to a parody that only enhanced the cracked lips; there were sores on them, Batty saw and his thinning hair was plastered damply to his skull.
His voice, however, was firm enough.
‘Furca and fossa,’ he said. ‘March treason.’
Furca and fossa – the pit and the gallows, which was high justice dispensed by hanging where it was possible, or drowning where it was not. Batty remembered Layton, face pressed into a shallow puddle with the Douglas boot on his neck. Eure had only escaped the same when someone had found a gnarled tree, only high enough by being on a slope.
‘Aye, aye,’ he answered admiringly. ‘You have learned a bitty in the time you have been in the Borders, Fabrizio. But there is no March treason here – you are the riders come here to spoil. Besides, you have no writ.’
‘Ah, but I have the rope,’ Maramaldo countered, ‘and your strange decoration proves that your tower is a suitable spot for hanging. Besides, there is a stream in spate which will serve as drowning pit.’
‘Him?’ Batty offered back, peering down at the blackening swing of Trumpet Baillie. ‘He heard you were coming to address us and could not stand the thought of listening to your poxed voice, Fabrizio.’
There was no anger at all in the answer, only a measured weariness, as if the whole business of Batty Coalhouse was tiresome and trivial. Or it might be the illness, Batty thought, though he was aware that his reasons for believing the first was because it echoed what was in himself; he was done up over the business of Maramaldo, no doubt of it.
‘Come out, Balthie. Hand over this treasure, the nuns, the kinder and all. You are netted like a thrush and there is no escape. You have two hours.’
By which time his guns will be up, Batty thought. Certainly Klett will have assembled his Doppelhaken and be ready to shoot; he thought of Trumpet’s face then and shivered.
‘Aye, aye,’ he replied as lightly as he could. ‘You were never a good hunter I suspect, for the first rule of catching a bird is to make sure the net has gone over.’
Maramaldo was already slumped and being carried off, so Batty was not even sure he had heard his last sally. Just as well, Batty thought, for it was not very good.
Then, just as he started to turn away, he caught sight of Horner and was sure, with a lightning-strike of certainty and for no reason he could justify, that the man knew Batty would be here. If not in the tower, then Akeld.
He went slowly down the ladder from the tower, nagged by the revelation, stunned by it. Horner had known. Maramaldo had not expected me, for all his intimation that he had hunted Batty like a thrush; Maramaldo had never hunted in his life, unless you counted guddling in the entrails of those he had gutted, convinced they had swallowed their riches.
He turned it over and over until he became aware of Sister Charity, crouched with her caliver, determined and solid. Sister Faith stopped praying when Batty came off the last rung and simply looked at him.
Bigod, he thought, if I have the right of it, then Horner was not surprised to find me here. If so, then he was told it by someone close to Mad Jack – mayhap Rutland spilled all he knew before he died?
He sank down in the lee of the carts, feeling hunger growl through his belly and rob him of any chance of ciphering it out. No food, little water, less shot, little powder – this is a poor hand. If it was Primero, he thought, you would throw it down on the table with a dismissive curse and accept the loss.
Not here, though. Here the loss was sharper than vanishing coin.
Still, Maramaldo’s appearance gave hope, Batty thought. Here is me chasing the condotterie of old, the bellowing, roaring fell cruel Captain General Maramaldo. The man who took my da, my arm and my ma from me without so much as a blink, for the relief of his own anger and to stamp his command back on demoralised men.
Now, after two decades hunting the beast, I have got up with a mangy lion, a pox-sick man who cannot stand straight. He, in turn, has known he was pursued by a young Hercules, Balthazar Kohlhase and has only managed to diminish that by a limb until now, when he sees the reality is a fat old man with one arm.
We are each of us pursuing phantoms, Batty thought bitterly, and wasting our lives on it.