Shake Loose the Border Read online

  ‘I would concern yourself with your own costs ye lubberwort,’ Batty replied and waggled the axe-handled dagg. ‘This monstrance will cause your eyes to cross, or I am a Dutchman.’

  The man’s English was not up to the task and he clearly thought Batty was already a Dutchman – which is what he had been told – for he rattled off something in that tongue and then started forward, cudgel in one hand and a dagger in the other; his friends followed.

  ‘Malatesta says I am to bat your bollocks into next week and bring you back, bloody but alive,’ the man said, closing fast. There had been more from Malatesta, whose red anger had provided more glow in the dark of the Dun Heifer than any candelabra.

  ‘Beat him, break his legs, break his one good arm, Panteleo. Do not fail me.’

  Panteleo Vercellis did not intend to do that; he had seen what others who had failed suffered when Thomas Bui transmuted into Malatesta.

  Batty cursed his luck, backed up to keep all of them in sight, for they were circling him like wolves; from a window, a woman’s voice called out, querulous and shrill. One of the men barked back at her in German.

  Panteleo stopped, close enough to swing and yet with pity in his face. He shrugged. ‘I do not like it, for I have heard of you and it seems a great shame to have you damaged. There are people who will pay a lot to have you unsullied, so they can do that themselves.’

  ‘Aye aye,’ Batty said as level-voiced as he could muster, ‘I will make you rich, nae doubt.’

  He knew this man spoke soft in order to get closer, knew there was no soft in him at all and he hefted the dagg and aimed it casually from near his waist. ‘No matter who gets to spend it on women and drink, one of them will not be you. Did you forget I had this?’

  The man stopped and looked suddenly wary.

  ‘Or did you not think I’d use it.’

  ‘One shot,’ Panteleo said, though he was licking his lips and Batty knew the hexagonal barrel must have looked like the entrance to a dark tunnel. ‘They often fail,’ he added hopefully.

  ‘Mine never fail,’ Batty lied. ‘Move a wee bitty to the right. That way I can line you up with the chiel behind – at this range the shot will rip through your bollocks, out your arse and into him. Two for one…’

  The man paused, then curled his lips and Batty knew it was coming so he squeezed the trigger, saw the wheel spin, saw the spark – and then nothing at all.

  Misfire.

  He cursed, reversed it and slashed the axehead just as the man ran in, making him rear back as he skidded forward; they collided, Batty thrown into the harsh harl of the building. The man lost his footing and fell to his knees – Batty did not hesitate, brought the axehead down on the cloth-capped head and heard the clang of the steel cap underneath it.

  He cursed his luck and lashed out one boot, catching the man in the chest, throwing him backwards to the cobbles; the man lay there, dazed and gasping – but the others were closing in.

  ‘Rush him,’ one of them advised in Italian and the man next to him started to foolishly obey; there was a movement of shadows off to Batty’s left and then a high, thin ping of sound; the man who had started to rush stumbled and fell, his head rolling free.

  The others looked wildly around and one stared at the headless man leaking his life over the rainwashed cobbles. Somewhere a woman screamed. Ewan Fraser stepped out of the dark, cradling the huge sword and smiling.

  ‘Ye have cut his head off,’ one of the others cried out and there was no denying the truth, for the man was spasming his headless last in a spreading pool darker than the wet cobbles; lights and querulous calls came from all round.

  Panteleo scrambled up, his knife still in one fist and his eyes wide with pain and shock; his feet sloshed and slipped in the blood.

  ‘I will fillet you like fish,’ he bellowed, but a big black-bearded face thrust out of the dark next to Batty – making him jump and cry out as loudly as the man with the knife.

  ‘Losh, this game is rotted. Run ye bliddy fools,’ John Dubh said and slashed the air a foot from Panteleo’s face with a winking edge of backsword.

  Batty gave Panteleo no chance to work out what to do next – he lunged, stamping forward on the front foot and slicing the axe in a flurry of movement.

  Panteleo yelped and his sleeve turned crimson; the rest of his men were already slithering and sliding half-way down the Hidegate. Run, you cunny-licking harecop, Batty willed, but was surprised when the man’s face twisted angrily.

  ‘Stronzo. Porco miseria,’ he said and came forward, the dirk slashing left and right. Batty fended the blows and the steel rang like bells; he heard more shouts, almost felt the lights on his back like a heat. He could not afford to stay longer fending off a dagger with an axe and crabbed sideways, looking to head off up the street. Batty saw Ewan, walking casually as if strolling to a pie shop, hefting his bloody great sword and measuring distance.

  ‘Dinna,’ he managed, then flung up one good arm as the knife went up, only to find it a feint. The blow took him on the jack and he heard one of his horn plates crack – then the man lurched under the dull clanging weight of Ewan’s blade flat on his head.

  Panteleo went to his knees. Batty kicked him in the face and then went off up the street, stumping and muttering like a winter-woken bear, stuffing the pistol in his belt. When he had put a distance between himself and the furore, he turned and glared at the Frasers.

  ‘I said run, ye bliddy fools.’

  It was a long way back to Henry Rae’s house and every wary step gave Ewan time to frown over how he had just murdered a man in a public street. He thought Batty might have had something to say on it, but the man hirpled along like a sailor on a rolling deck, singing softly and sounding like a cat mourning on the tiles for love.

  ‘Fair weill, my lady bricht,

  And my remembrance rycht;

  Fair weill and haif gud nycht:

  I say no moir.’

  Chapter Three

  Later, 1548 – Blackscargil

  The wind blew squalls off the sea and brought gulls with it, crying like lost children. It made the Frasers uneasy, that sound, but all it meant to Batty was that there was weather on the way; you could taste the snow and Blackscarsgil was no place to be caught.

  It was a rolling waste of tussock and copse, broken hill country under a pewter-grey sky. The whole country had such names – Muckle Snab, Bloody Bush, Blackhagg, Wolf Rig and more – but none was darker than Blackscargil.

  ‘Then why are we going to it?’ Malcolm Fraser had demanded sullenly, cold to the bone and fighting the spare horse and pack pony; being youngest he got the worst tasks.

  ‘There is a tower in it and a man I need to see,’ Batty answered tersely and all of the Frasers had to be content at that, though they did not like it much; they knew it already from what Thomas Bui had said, his lips stiff and dry. Batty did not want to tell them more, but when they stopped at the charred remains of a cruck, he had them halt and unsaddle.

  The house had lost most of its thatch and the curved roofbeams were gone, but the walls still stood, blackened and frowning; there was a section at one end which had more thatch on the roof and they shifted gear into this.

  ‘Where are the folk who lived here, d’you think?’ Red Colin asked and Big Tam hefted off the pack-saddle and set it down in the mulch of old dung and straw.

  ‘Deid as snails in frost,’ he said flatly and no-one argued with him.

  ‘How long are we here then, Master Coalhouse?’ Ewan asked lightly and Batty scowled at him.

  ‘Have you somewhere else to be?’

  ‘I have not, other than a desire to be in a decent tavern with a leather of ale.’

  ‘I am with you there,’ John Dubh agreed, ‘but you are paying, mind.’

  Batty had heard the hardness creep into Ewan’s voice and thought it best to curb his temper; it was unease at where he was going that made him contrary, he knew. That and having to trust these caterans from the north. He did not like
any of it.

  ‘We will be there by and by,’ he said, trying for a smile and falling far short of it. ‘I need to meet with the one who lairs in a tower just over the ridge. With luck I will find Will Elliot there, agree a ransom and we will be away.’

  He paused, then hauled the leather pouch of coin from under his jack and handed it to Ewan.

  ‘This is the ransom money. I will not ride in with it, so when I return will be as good a signal as any that the deed is done and we will all go with this pouch and fetch our man out.’

  The Frasers saw the sense in it and if any thought of the money or what they could do with it, their faces did not show it. Batty added nothing that might throw an insult.

  ‘Be watchful,’ he added. ‘They may work out where you are and almost certainly know that I am not alone – it would be a bliddy fool who rides in this part of the world alone. They may come down on you.’

  ‘Tha sinn nar seasamh deiseil,’ Ewan said sombrely and the others repeated it. We stand ready – Batty was unnerved by it, by the feeling that these were men ready to give their lives for this. For him. Bliddy northers, he thought trying to dismiss it, as equal likely to take all this coin and bolt back to their wee bog in the north. Up until their sombre ‘we stand ready’ that had been his worst fear and now he was thrown into confusion.

  They had a fire lit, careful to feed it with anything that did not smoke more than faint blue haze, whirled away almost at once by the wind. They had oats and fish and made a decent meal of them both, washed down with wine, courtesy of Sir Grey of Wilton.

  He had sat in his solar room and squinted at Batty and the Frasers, while Henry Rae looked on, standing hipshot and trying to act as if he did not care.

  There was a lot about murder and a headless body and a lot from Henry Rae about the fourteen other killings in the town that night, over a dry spot or food or drink or women. None of them would be solved, he added pointedly. In the end they had been waved away and, outside, took farewells as if they meant it.

  ‘Good luck with your venture,’ Henry Rae had said, hitching a splendid fur trimmed cloak round his Herald’s cote to keep the rain off. ‘I hope we do not meet again.’

  ‘Same back at ye,’ Batty had growled. ‘Watch out that your ain heid stays on your shoulders – where you are going is more dangerous.’

  Batty was roused by Big Tam thrusting a horn cup at him, which he took and sniffed suspiciously – the strong whiff of it confirmed that it was aqua vita. He took it, sipped and swallowed, feeling the burn, raw and fiery. The Frasers laughed softly at his watered eyes, then Ewan held his cup up in a toast.

  ‘Uisge-beatha,’ he said, ‘to remember Blàr na Léine.’

  Batty knew uisge-beatha was their name for aqua vita, the water of life. He also knew Blàr na Léine was the battle that seemed to have doomed the Frasers, so he asked about it. Ewan was silent for a long time, he and all the Frasers staring into the fire.

  ‘The chieftainship of the McDonalds of Clanranald was in dispute,’ he said eventually. ‘Our Laird, chief of the Fraser of Lovat, was the uncle of Ranald Galda whose cause he supported. We took four hundred of our best and joined with the Earl of Huntly, chief of Clan Gordon and Lieutenant of the North.’

  There was a silence, then Ewan said: ‘It did not go as we had thought.’

  The others growled deep hooming sounds in their throats, a noise that hackled Batty up.

  ‘We thought to crush the McDonalds and make Ranald the chief and went to Inverlochy and took Castle Tioram.’

  His head bowed and he shook it, then drank. ‘That was it, or so we thought. Ranald Galda was installed as the chief, Huntly went off one way and we started back for home. The treacherous skulking bastard MacDonalds fell on us in some wild marshland to the north of Loch Lochy – Blàr na Léine which means “field of bogs”.’

  ‘We did not need to fight,’ John Dubh interrupted bitterly.

  ‘In the end, we here did not,’ Red Colin answered, ‘to the shame of us all so we cannot go back.’

  Ewan spat out aqua vita so that the fire flared like a dragon’s breath.

  ‘Everyone got killed save us,’ he went on bleakly. ‘The Lovat heidman is dead, so is his heir and my own from Beauly are all sent to the mud. I thought it best that some Lovat Frasers did not leave mithers to weep.’

  ‘They weep anyway,’ Malcolm added, head down. ‘For shame.’

  Mothers weep up and down the land, Batty thought. You need only look round at this wee cruck house to see tears; they are soaked into the walls. Yet they will come back if they live, he thought. They will creep back and build it again and plant again and move sheep and cattle out into the pasture and, if they are fortunate, will manage a harvest at least once before bastards that look like us come down on them again.

  No matter that the war atween Scotch and English is trickling to a close, he thought; for the reivers it is just a better excuse to shake loose the Border.

  * * *

  He sat astride Fiskie while the wind circled and fingered, looking for ways into the cloak’s ragged hems while it muttered about snow. Batty had seen the sky, pale milk where a sun fought to shine, grey as lost hope everywhere else. It did not add much to the pele of Blackscargil, a tall block of stone pierced with wan lights even though it was mid-morning. Surrounding it was a man-height drystone wall and a scatter of buildings, roofs slated or thatched.

  ‘Who lives there?’ John Dubh had asked when Batty set out to ride the little way over the rise to it.

  Nebless Clem Selby lived there, though he was not the first to do so. Until recently, Batty had been told, the Tower had belonged to Dand Selby, known as Firebraes in his better days. His better days had been a long time before, but Grey of Wilton had mentioned how Dand had been married on to Eliza Graham from Netherby, a woman half his age.

  He had said it with a sly sidelong look, for he knew Batty was a Graham, though not welcome with that Name anywhere save for Netherby; Eliza Graham meant nothing to Batty and his face did not flicker, which disappointed Grey of Wilton.

  ‘Dand was failing,’ he went on, ‘when Nebless Clem arrived with enough men to overawe and enough kinship to be allowed to stay.’

  The rest was familiar enough; Nebless Clem had proved vigorous, cunning and ruthless and his work at raiding and trading had put Blackscargil back on the up. Nebless Clem, deputy to the Laird of Blackscargil, had become the power, inch by sly inch.

  ‘Then Dand died,’ Grey of Wilton had added flatly. ‘Now Clem has tower and the Graham wife both. No-one kens how Dand Selby died, but he was auld and sick.’ He accompanied this last with another of his sly sideways looks that said how Dand Selby hadn’t been old or sick enough for Clem – or mayhap even his wife.

  ‘How did he lose his neb?’ Ewan Fraser had wanted to know and Grey of Wilton had shot him a sour look.

  ‘Poking it in ither folk’s business, no doubt. Let that be a lesson.’

  Batty knew little about Nebless Clem, but he had heard how he had lost his nose. He had boasted how he could smell out witches and did it loudly and often the day he rousted out seven Egyptiani women from his woods, where they were collecting herbs and, Batty thought, God alone knows what else. He left them dancing on the air once he and his men had had their sport.

  The Egyptiani had had their revenge; they came in secret to the tower with all the other traders who slurried around the place, though they made sure to hide what they were. In the night they were gone and so was Clem’s nose; they found him gagged and bound in his own bedroom, blood everywhere. That was a brace of years ago.

  ‘Fortune smiles on him,’ John Dubh had offered on hearing this. ‘The Egyptiani stopped at just his nose.’

  They stopped short, Batty was sure, because the Travelling Folk did not want more feud out of it, but the message was clear; his tower was no protection against the Egyptiani and the punishment was slight for the deaths of seven. He would sniff out no more witches.

  Batty knew that
secretive race well enough, especially the women; he shivered as he looked down on a strange scene, but it was nothing to do with what he saw and everything to do with memories. He heard them singing, soft and sweet, as they had when sent out by the Randy King to make sure the Armstrongs hunting Batty stayed at arm’s length, for he had the hospitality of the Travelling Folk at the time.

  In his mind he saw a woman on her hunkers, dress carelessly rucked back to her thighs and the dark mystery of her naked fork all exposed.

  He had not felt a twitch at it. Not the way she was gralloching a man, to make sure he had not swallowed his wealth before dying. She was singing, soft and dreamy while the snow swirled and it was as if she did nothing more than stir the makings of a blood pudding in a bowl.

  ‘There was a maid this other day and she would needs go forth to play; and as she walked she sighed and said, I am afraid to die a maid.’

  As she’d sliced and cut the Armstrongs who had pursued Batty, he’d heard other women, adding their sibilance of sinister chorus, saw them in the shadows working smooth and slow while the blood crept out to darken the slush and the steam of it misted them.

  ‘For I will, without faile, maiden, give you Watkins ale; Watkins ale, good sir, quoth she, what is that I pray tell me? Tis sweeter far then suger fine and pleasanter than muscadine.’

  He shook himself like a dog from water and tried to concentrate on what he saw, though it was hard. What he stared down at looked like a Fair Day or a Truce Meet, but skewed, as if seen through wavering glass.

  There were trestles under awnings that flapped like loose sails in the cutting wind. Smoke rose from cook fires, men and women chaffered back and forth, offered goods for sale, argued cost and quality while stamping their feet to keep warm. Pack ponies sauntered in and out in neat threaded lines and men stumbled after them, hands lashed and feet fettered enough to let them walk but not run.

  Business was being done here and everyone was a trader – and not just of fabric, cabbage and small beer, Batty thought. He glanced at the uppermost room of the tower they called, simply, The Scar and saw the light in the single slit of a window mute to a peep behind closing shutters.