P. Chisholm - An Air of Treason

In the days when his feet had leathery soles and he was smaller and lighter, he could move like a shadow. He was no longer a boy but he could still put his feet down softly and he did that, slipping through the clearer parts of the undergrowth in his loose woollen breeks, the shirt and the blanket under his arm, mud smeared in stripes and splotches over his face and chest.

There were only two guards set, chatting in the darkness by their watchlight at the bend in the road, smoking his tobacco. Getting past them had been almost insultingly easy. And then he had free rein over the sleeping men in the monastery. After he had taken a knife out of the boy’s scabbard, hanging by his bed in the dorter, he carefully trimmed the wicks on the watch candles so they’d go out a few minutes later. He broke the tethers of the horses that weren’t Whitesock by scorching the rope first with a watchlight and then he broke the bolts open by levering with one of the halberds. And then he’d cracked the nags over the backside with the pole of the halberd and let out a good Tyneside yell. His throat still hurt from it. He had the shirt over his head and the blanket round his shoulders and he’d spent a happy few minutes running through the shadowy dorter shrieking about the burned monk, singing the one piece of plainchant he knew which was some nonsense his mother used to sing to get them to sleep. “Dee is eery, dee is iller, solve it sigh clum in far viller!” he’d intoned, finishing by howling and then shouting “Alarm!” and “Ghosts!” for good measure. Once the darkness was full of frightened men in their shirts running about and punching each other, he’d pulled the shirt down properly and tied the blanket round his waist under it and done a bit of running and punching himself.

As a final flourish he’d run directly across the cloister screaming and out the gate while the dimwitted Captain stood there blinking with his sword in one hand and the lantern in the other. The old Spaniard came out then with his crossbow on his shoulder and Dodd picked up speed into the darkness.

Then came the hard part. As he ran he stripped his shirt off again and picked up a branch to drag behind him and pounded through the woods as fast as he could back to the old carlin’s pit, doing his best not to shout when he bruised his foot on a stone or trampled through brambles.

At the edge of the pit he’d used the blanket to wipe the mud off his sweating body and face, dropped it and the shirt into the pit, let himself down on the wedged billets of wood and the stone he’d propped against the wall, pulled them out and used the two poles from his splint to manoeuvre the hurdle back over the top of the pit, leaving it dark. And then he’d groped about, found the shirt and blanket, pulled the shirt over him, dropped onto the bracken and wrapped the blanket round him, panting hard as he heard Leigh’s boots approaching.

He hadn’t had time to put the splints back on his leg for effect but he hoped they wouldn’t notice. It seemed they hadn’t and they’d been fooled by his imitation of the noises Carey normally made at night. He’d stay meekly in the pit now and hope like hell young Kat would get to Oxford in time. He’d done all he could, mind, he couldn’t think of anything else he could do for the moment.

After some more thought he sat up again and looked at his feet. They were a sad sight, bruised, muddy, still bleeding in a couple of places. He pulled the thorns out with his fingernails and as he didn’t have any water to wash them with, he carefully pissed on them which stung but at least left them cleaner. Then he strapped the splints on again. After that there was no sound from the old woman so he might as well go back to sleep as there was no chance she would feed him.

Yet she did. She woke him with more thrown pebbles and then let down a pail with bread, cheese, and a quart of ale which Dodd assumed would be full of valerian and wild lettuce. He was thirsty from all the running around and needed his rest, so he drank half of it. And had to admit that the old woman’s green goat cheese was excellent, maybe better than Janet’s.

Ay, Janet. He’d have some tales to tell her of the south. She’d laugh her spots off, his freckled leopard of a wife and then he’d see to her, ay, he’d see to her well and perhaps he’d plant a child in her this time.

He was dozing in the middle of a particularly pleasant daydream of something unusual he could do with fine goat’s cheese if his wife would only cooperate, when the branch he’d dragged behind him to hide his tracks came over the edge of the pit and landed in front of him.

He’d hidden the stolen knife by driving it into the earth between two stones and so he stood and moved closer to it.

A man in a morion was standing near the dressed stones at the edge of the pit, idly pointing a loaded and cocked crossbow down at him one handed. His other sleeve was folded up short.

“Senor Elliot,” said the Spanish accented voice.

“Ay,” Dodd said after a moment. The man had him cold, nothing he could do about it, so he sat down on the pile of bracken and crossed his legs.

“Last night,” said the Spaniard, hissing in through his teeth like a man hiding that he was wounded, “it was very divertido , eh? An excellent camisado attack.”

Dodd shrugged. “It wasnae me, whatever it was,” he said, more for form’s sake than anything else, as he didn’t expect this one to believe him. “What’s a camisado attack?”

The bony hawk face smiled briefly. “A night attack. We call it camisado because the attackers have shirts over his armours so they look equal as the sleepers.”

“Ay?” said Dodd, interested. You wouldn’t call a night attack that in the Borders, of course, because everyone would be wearing jacks, whether they’d been asleep or no. These Southerners were pitiful, really.

“The thing is strange,” said the Spaniard, “No deaths. None killed. Why not, Senor Elliot?”

Dodd shrugged again

“I watched with admiration,” said the Spaniard, “one man against twenty-five idiots, what a chaos!”

Dodd said nothing, didn’t see the point.

“My name, Senor Elliot, is Don Jeronimo de la Quadra de Jimena.”

He said it as if it should mean something to Dodd, as if he was stating his surname, but of course Dodd didn’t know anything about Spanish surnames.

“You are Don Roberto Carey his man, yes?”

Did don mean sir in foreign? “Ay,” said Dodd.

“He send you find me?”

Dodd almost said no, but then he thought it might be more interesting if he lied. So he did that. “Ay sir,” he said, “but he didna tell me why. I was tae bring ye to him.”

The man frowned so Dodd sighed and said it again more Southern. He knew Carey would back him, whatever this was about. The grizzled soldier nodded slowly. Then he took out the bolt and released the crossbow string, squatted down at the edge of the pit. Dodd watched with interest as he filled his clay pipe one-handed with Dodd’s expensive medicinal tobacco and started smoking.

“I like this herb,” said the Spaniard, “very good. Did Don Roberto tell you anything?”

“Why would he?”

“No. What do you intend tonight?”

Dodd had never heard such a cheeky question in his life. What did the foreigner think he’d say?

“Sleep,” he said coldly, “as I did last night.” He was watching the Spaniard from below so the shape of the face was different, but then as Jeronimo turned his face away and winced for some reason, he suddenly knew him. It was the man who had stared at him at the Oxford road inn. He almost said something about it but then he decided it could wait. If Jeronimo was the one responsible for all the pain and aggravation he’d suffered since Saturday night, Dodd didn’t want him alerted to his doom. And when Dodd caught a whiff of the smoke from his pipe, he could have killed him just for the tobacco.