The Lord of Middle Air

by Michael Scott Rohan

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Military Sci-Fi

Synopsis

Young Walter Scot is hot on the heels of cattle raiders in the service of the dark Lord of Soulis when he encounters his kinsman Michael Scot - and his life is changed for ever. Even in the turbulent Borderlands of the thirteenth-century Scotland Michael had a fearsome reputation as a magician and master of forbidden arts, trafficking with the demons of middle air. Now he has returned from years of exile with the Pope's pardon and the favour of the Emperor, a peaceful man of God - and yet strange events still follow him. The mysterious fire that blasts the raiders. The fourth voice that laughs where only three men were seen. The luxury that suddenly appears to furnish his long-abandoned castle - the mystery about him only deepens. But still darker forces are at work behind the bloody rivalries of Border politics, black sorceries stirring within the sinister castle of Hermitage. When Walter's father is ambushed and killed, his betrothed flung into a dungeon and his lands and his very life threatened by the necromancer-baron Soulis, Michael appears to offer the aid he desperately needs. Aid that, as Walter soon discovers, is almost as frightening as his enemies' threats - as he is transported to another world, ensnaring, enchanting, seductive. There he finds a new life, new heroism and a new, all-consuming love. But there is a terrible price he must pay...

Release date: August 29, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 253

Sample

This was the way of it, that the stolen beasts were driven down Teviotdale and out by the Gray Hill southward. Out of the country altogether, and away towards Liddesdale, with the Colt riding hard on their track.

In hot trod, as it was called then; and with him Geordie the groom and Wat of the Homefield, two hard men and worthy, if a little solid in the skull. Riding, because the villagers had come running to the tower, and because the Colt’s father was from home and few men else to take up the trail. The lifting of cattle had always been a popular sport as between neighbour and neighbour, along with the shifting of boundary stones, the diverting of streams and suchlike; but since the devastations of the late war, when all the great towns of the region had burned, it was fast becoming the daily pursuit of an increasingly lawless land. So that, as the Colt’s father fulminated in his cups of an evening, there were some families in danger of forgetting that food could be gained other than from their neighbours, and of altogether losing the arts of peace and the planting and raising of seed.

This worried the Colt little, for though he was fond enough of his father, he knew well the lord was not himself averse to snapping up an unconsidered steer or two on the sly. If the arts of peace depended on him, their outlook was poor. But this continual bleeding at the herds was something else, a new thing, and the Colt fancied he could put a name to the cause. A black name, casting a sinister shadow; and the Colt would inherit these lands one day, and the wealth that grazed across them, and sprang from their soil. What was being driven away was his; and his heart burned within him.

He cast his eyes across the rising land ahead, and the rough rounded hills beyond, made hazy as the sun warmed the moist air. Normally he took delight in them in such a fresh spring dawning, the warm hues of brown and yellow bracken heath and rich green forest burgeoning after the long barren winter, glistening as if new-painted after a night’s light rain. He loved the land that would be his; he knew no other, and he felt its quickening in his own blood. But now he marked only the signs of passage, the crushed grass and bracken, the hoof-scattered dung, the horseprints that wove around the central trail with a drover’s hasty care; and he felt for the haft of the heavy crossbow at his saddle.

‘The spur’s fresh!’ snapped Wat, swinging low in his stirrups. ‘They drive afoot still, the callow bastards! We’ll be on them aye moment!’

‘Aye,’ growled Geordie through his beard, and gestured at the thickening wall of trees, oak and birch and alder, lining the shallow vale ahead. ‘Yon’s Allan Water, and a ford! Best we rein in, Colt, and steal up on ’em!’

‘Be damned to that!’ snapped the Colt, and cursed inwardly at the squeak in his voice. The men exchanged meaningful glances; the lord would have their hides if anything happened to the young man. The Colt snatched up the bow and cocked it in one motion, as Wat had long ago taught him; a churl’s weapon, but even the sons of knights were best to have the use of it in these troubled times. ‘We’ll—’

What he intended he forgot, in the wake of what hit him. The flash sprang out of the forest shadow. The concussion made the very air a solid thing that struck him with jarring force. The trees shook and wavered, and a tide of birds billowed skyward, screaming. The horse shrilled and reared beneath him, and for a moment all sense was lost in the effort of staying in his stirrups and quelling it. Wat and the groom were no better set, wheeling and cursing their own mounts even as their ears sang with the sound. And no sooner had they got their beasts steadied than a new fright came bursting out of the trees towards them, the stolen cattle in a buffeting knot, wild-eyed, froth-nosed, lowing and bellowing, stampeding back uphill along their own tracks with no drover behind them but terror. A riderless horse, stirrups swinging, charged after them, screaming wildly, with dark streaks down its crupper, and after it, from a spot further along, another, and another, this one painfully lame yet bolting like the rest. A thin swirl of smoke twisted around the treetops.

The century was the thirteenth after Christ, the year its thirtieth. The Mongols had not yet brought the Chinese powder westward to scorch the gates of Samarkand. Neither the Colt nor his men had ever heard any such sound as this, save in the descent of lightning; and the sun stood near noon above them in a clear sky.

The Colt hesitated a second, seeing his own pallor on the walnut faces of his men. He had played at such things often enough as a child, his fancies fired by minstrel’s song and nurse’s story, had thought himself a brave knight stalking sword in hand into a dragon’s den or outlaw’s covert, unafraid and valiant. But now the very trees seemed to bristle with cold menace, and what lay behind them less known and predictable even than a dragon. Then, because he was the Colt, and was too afraid to be seen afraid, he spurred his balky mount downhill past the scattering cattle. Wat yelped and pulled at his arm, but he shook the old farmer off with an impatient snarl and grabbed a bolt from the sheaf tied at his belt. The horse shied again as the acrid, devilish smell stung its nostrils, and so did the Colt, inwardly, but he pressed on down the dung-strewn trail to the ford. Wat and Geordie, wild-eyed as the cattle, urged their panting horses after him, crossing themselves repeatedly. As he reached the margin of the trees, bow at the ready, they caught up with him, and unslung their own short longbows; but all three reined in and stopped, staring.

Allan Water ran brown but clear before them in the green-gold glade light over a bank of silted gravel that made the ford, unhurried between deep pools. The cattle had evidently crossed it; so had their thieves. They were still here. One lay at the water’s edge on the far bank, face-down; he was blackened, ragged and smoking, and very still. Another stumbled about on the gravel like a blind man, clutching his face. A third was loping back across the river in great heedless splashes, oblivious to the watchers he should have feared like the hand of divine wrath. He ran straight at them, yelling wordless as a beast, and off past them into the thick wood by no path. Yet all there was to run from on the far bank was a trio of strangers, and two of them utterly unfearsome.

One was squat, with a great broad face and narrowed squinting eyes, almost a dwarf save for the heavy shoulders on him; the other was his opposite, a spindly gawk whose very eyelids seemed to droop with the effort of staying open. Both men were swarthy, not like windburned Wat or red-faced Geordie, but with the sallow yellowish colour of a hotter sun, darker men than the Colt had ever seen; and they wore livery coats brighter than bird-plumage in fantastical squares of yellow and blue. They were mounted, or perched, atop two sturdy mules, expensive beasts at the head of a small baggage train; they rode like baggage themselves. The third man, though, was more impressive. He was tall, he wore heavy robes of dark red, and he sat erect on a massive black horse of a breed the Colt didn’t recognize but instantly admired. His skin was lighter, but still unusually brown, and the air of command in his bearing was unmistakable. Yet even this man looked old – ancient to the Colt’s eyes, perhaps fifty, his long dark hair and short pointed beard an oddly streaked blend of white and black. The man gestured to his dwarfish servant, who sprang from his saddle, caught the stumbling man in a grip his struggles seemed hardly to disturb and, forcing him to his knees, ducked his head in the river. The reiver struggled wildly, then suddenly subsided, sobbing, as if it had brought him some relief.

The Colt, frozen by the tableau, snatched together his wits and looked around after the other. He could still hear him crashing and thrashing away through brambly undergrowth.

‘You might as well leave him be!’ called a very clear voice, in amiable tones. The red-robed man jerked his head slightly. ‘Better to be content with rounding up your cattle, eh?’

The young man bridled. ‘Who in Hell are you to be giving me orders? And what’s been doing here? What have you done to these men, and by what right?’ He flushed. He had been addressed in Norman French and instinctively spoken it back, instantly marking what class of person he was. That could be an unsafe thing.

‘Right?’ The stranger shrugged. ‘The common right and duty to help in the trod. To help the rightful owner. And you would be the Colt of Branxholme, would you not? Not the lord yet, I think; not at … seventeen?’

‘I’m Walter Scot, and my age is my own concern! I’m old enough to be sure I never saw you in my life before. So how’d you know so much of me? And I demand again, what do you here?’ He hefted his bow meaningfully. ‘This all stinks too much of magic to me, and we want no more of that in the Marches! We’ve a hot fire for any sorcerers turning this way, a stake and a tar-barrel too – or a griddle, if you’d prefer! So speak!’

The stranger threw back his head in a silent laugh. ‘Sorcery, Colt! Why, what sorcery would I need simply to recognize you as your father’s son? You have the self-same friendly way with you. And you had to be less than eighteen, because it is thus long since I was last in these parts, and Branxholme was not long wedded – a lovely girl! – and had no son. I have a right in these woods and on this road because they lead me to my home; and I thought to do the lord of them a favour by waylaying what were clearly thieves – Armstrong men out of Liddesdale, if I’m a fair judge. They threatened me, and that’s something I do not appreciate. As for how I did it—’ He gave that silent laugh again. ‘No sorcery in that, young Master Scot! Merely some strong substances commonly used in alchemical investigations – and lest you balk at that, they’re no secret to the better class of armourer, even. Only making them work together thus fiercely, that’s a little trick they use in the far Orient – but it’s one you could wield yourself if I showed you, without need of spells or incantations. And that I could prove before any judge in the land, if need be.’

Walter was silent a moment, watching the patterns of sun through the leaves, the water chattering by the stones. Against his will, he was impressed. His father, utterly uneducated himself, had taken unusual pains to give the Colt the best education these parts had to offer, at the great Grammar School of Roxburgh, and it had bred in him a strong reverence for men of learning, and admiration for men who had seen the world – though to that he had found exception, these last two years. This man seemed to be both.

‘Bedamned, he’s the right o’ it!’ exclaimed Wat hoarsely at his side.

‘What? Of what?’ demanded the Colt.

‘Him!’ hissed the old man, jabbing a thumb down at the half-blinded thief, now kneeling miserably by the bank with the short man’s heavy hand on his shoulder. ‘Him there, that’s Wullie Armstrong, Blood-Wullie’s son!’

Geordie scratched his head. ‘By’re Lady, and is it! Blood-Wullie that burned Hoddie Netherhope in’s hoose! There’s an ill name for a Liddesdale bandit! And yon that ran by us, sure ‘twas Andy Armstrong o’ the Rig, that lifted above fifty head from the Kers themselves twa months gone!’

‘Andy it was, right enough,’ nodded Wat. ‘I kennt his mither when she was but a wean. He had her look.’

Walter glanced at the woebegone thief; with some of the scorching washed from his face he did have the look of an Armstrong man, right enough. ‘And a hard man to meet on the trod,’ he said thoughtfully. The thief wore an armour cotte of studded leather, with a sword and a sheaf of crossbow bolts at his waist. The dead man had the same, and a helm, for all the good it had done him. Two heavy pikes lay in the shallows at the far side of the ford. ‘We could have dealt with them, though.’

‘Oh, aye,’ said Wat, a trace too hastily.

‘That’s for sikker,’ agreed Geordie, also hastily. ‘Mind, it wouldna’ been so easy …’

Walter drew breath. He had known these men since they’d dandled him on their knees as a baby. They held no secrets from him. They had told him what he had guessed; that they were too old and him, though he was trained in arms, too young and untried to safely meet three hardened and heavily armed Armstrongs in their prime. These would have been hard and ruthless fighters, more than a match for him and his men, maybe, even without any darker help that Liddesdale’s lord might give them. Which meant this well-spoken stranger had done him a real service.

Old Wat was plucking at his sleeve. ‘This yin here and his men, though, what’s he? I’ve never clappt eyes on the like. Should we no’ tak haud o’ him?’

Walter would have liked to. There was too much mystery here to be let wander around unchallenged. Mystery was a danger to him and his. Yet he could not simply seize hold of the man. That would be dishonourable and inhospitable, and, besides, whatever it was had bested three Armstrongs could no doubt do as much for him. He didn’t want to appear indecisive; better to sound unconvinced and stern. What would his father say? He gave a curt nod. ‘Well, we can see about that. We’ll have to round up the kine soon enough. But first we’ll string that callant there up on a branch as a warning to his thieving kin.’

That sounded about right, and he heard Geordie grunt appreciatively; it only occurred to him a moment later that he wasn’t at all eager to see a man die thus. The Colt was not especially violent, save when angry, and had little cruelty in his nature. He didn’t even know how the thing was done, exactly, knots and so forth; the old fellows would, though.

The dark stranger raised an eyebrow. ‘Have him, and welcome – but save him for ransom, lad, surely. The one that’s dead you may gibbet if you must. It cannot hurt him further.’

Walter seized at the suggestion gratefully. ‘That’s so—’ Then he realized he’d been called lad, and bridled. But the stranger was already speaking on.

‘Tell me, though, first, Colt Walter – this sorcery you spoke of, and so hotly, as if eager to find it out … Since when was there much of that in these parts?’

Wat and Geordie snorted. Walter frowned. ‘Since the Lord of Soulis came home from a long pilgrimage, some three years gone,’ he said, still more curtly. ‘Though where it took him, and to what shrine, I’d sooner not think.’

‘Nor what he brought back with him,’ murmured Geordie into his beard; but the dark man seemed to hear it, and raised his eyebrows.

‘We’ve had enough of travelled men in these parts,’ persisted Walter. ‘You, gudeman, you’d do well to betake yourself and these your servants off to your own land by some other road. If you’re an honest soul, these parts are dangerous. And if you’re not, they’re more dangerous still, for honest men hereabouts have had their bellyful of black doings and thieves in the night!’

The older man laughed again, still silently, but a little sadly now, with a rueful look in his eyes. ‘I don’t doubt it, young sir. But that cannot be. This is my own land, and my home lies only a little way east, in straight sight of the Eildon Hills, as is yours. For you and I, lad, we are kin.’

Walter stared wildly, and the dark man’s amusement faded into cool dignity. ‘So it is. You, Walter Scot, heir of Branxholme and I, Michael Scot, lord of the honour of Oakwood and lands in Fife, formerly scholar of the universities of Oxford, Paris, Toledo, Salamanca and Bologna, besides many other noble institutions. Late physician and counsellor to the great Frederick, second of his name, King of the Sicilies, Jerusalem and Germany, Emperor of the Romans at his court in Palermo, and come straight from the See of Rome itself to sojourn in my own old home. Surely you would not deny passage to a fellow lord of your own name and blood?’

As the stately chain of titles and names rolled out like a solemn procession of the highest and greatest his world held, Walter could only gape. The man who called himself Lord of Oakwood made no apparent movement, but suddenly his horse moved forward and splashed into the stream. A huge black warhorse of a beast, keen-eyed, sleek and fast-looking with fine fringed bridle and saddle of figured leather, it moved with a high-stepping, almost ceremonial gait that spoke to Walter of courts and chivalries, quests and romances he had only dreamed of from reading the few books and hearing the scanty lays of such minstrels as reached these parts. He felt suddenly rustic, unformed, much as the farm-boys appeared to him; and with a deep burning desire he coveted that horse, too fine to be wasted on a sedate elderly scholar like this. He imagined himself riding it down into the drear mouth of Liddesdale and beating on the high gate of Hermitage, calling out its lord to single combat on the sward …

And being chopped into collops by de Soulis’ own guard, or simply slung from a convenient tree. He stifled a brief shudder. It had happened, and to better men than him, full-grown and war-hardened. De Soulis rarely bothered to bloody a blade; he had nothing to prove.

The man splashed across the ford and reined in facing them. Geordie stared at him, and whispered, ‘Look at the face on him! Yon’s a Scot, true enow, though his chops were left ower lang i’ the griddle!’

‘The Laird o’ Oakwood Tower!’ muttered Wat, the elder. ‘D’you not mind him, Geordie? These twenty years gone? The scholard, the man o’ cunning?’

‘Mind him? Oh aye, though I never saw the man! But I heard worse names than those …’

That, too, the man seemed to hear. Those features, darkened by a sun Walter imagined like a lamp of hot gold in a brassy sky, twitched again in a calm grin. ‘I may go on my way, then?’

Walter, unable to think of anything sensible to say, nodded like his father in a bad mood. ‘I’ll have that man first,’ he barked.

‘Assuredly. Gilbyn! Gilberto!’ The man who called himself Lord of Oakwood gave a quick toss of his head, and his dwarfish servitor splashed across the stream, towing the reiver, and flung him headlong at Walter’s feet. Geordie sprang down with a spare rein, bound the Armstrong’s hands and ankles and heaved him over his saddlebow.

The dark man smiled amiably. ‘There, then. My thanks, and my respects to Sir Robert from a kinsman – and now, if you, young Colt, would take some well-meaning advice from one, it’s high time you rounded up those cattle before they spread themselves all over the Marches. Fare you well, young sir.’

Geordie swore. Walter bristled, but the man was right. ‘Come on!’ he called impatiently to his followers, wheeled his horse around – how awkward and weak it felt beneath him now, though it was as fine a cob as any in the Marches – and clattered up the uneven path out of the trees. Wat and Geordie followed close, as if glad to be out of that strangely oppressive sunlit glade, and the Colt found himself drinking in the clean damp air in great gulps, to be rid of that acrid smoky odour. And by all Hell, there was laughter behind them! Walter looked back with baffled fury – and then his blood ran chill again. There had been three men in that party, and no other to be seen; but in that nasty merriment there were quite unmistakably four, and one of them a deep hollow bass.

He grabbed Geordie’s captive by the greasy hair. ‘You! As you value your neck, how many in that party you met?’

The prisoner too was staring back, his burnt brows climbing. ‘But three! I swear’t! Or we’d never have challenged! And then – he threw – and it … it-t …’ The hardened Armstrong dissolved in a sudden flood of wailing tears.

Geordie slapped him. ‘Haud yer noise, man! Leave be, Colt, for the lord to weigh. The cattle are our concern now!’

Walter nodded and spurred his horse away, loosing the bowstring and reaching for the rope at his saddlebow. But, like some impending prophecy, the laughter followed at his heels.

The gathering of the cattle was long, but less labour than it might have been, for a few more of the Branxholme men had been summoned and sent riding hard at heel, fearful lest the Colt might come to harm in his rashness. Fearful not only for the father’s wrath but for Walter’s own sake; for in truth the son was more beloved of his people, and, though he did not know it, thought the better man by far. They passed the beasts by, fearing some catastrophe, but when they found him unscathed they set at once to herding and roping. They were full of praise for the young lord’s daring, till they saw how it angered Walter; the feeling of bafflement and helplessness burned in him still. He would have loved to ask some of the older men if they knew anything more of this Michael, but he feared it would lower him in their eyes. When the tally of beasts was complete they watered them at the Dodburn and set off on the homeward path, with Walter riding behind rather than before, lost in dark thoughts. They left him to it.

That was how, an hour or more homeward, he was the last to notice the smoke plume over the hillcrests, till their excited shouts called it to his mind. He saw the size of it, and swore. ‘More deviltry!’ he snarled, swinging his horse to the head of the little column.

‘Aye, so I fear,’ said Wat, shading his eyes against the falling sun. ‘Southeast by the Slitrig water, it’d be – and was’na it yonder the Laird was called yestre’en?’

Walter ran his fingers through his brown hair. ‘Aye, he was! And will you look at the height of it? That’s more than some cottar’s roof caught light –’

They heard the horn, then. Not ringing, not thrilling, a thin exhausted wail that barely carried on the breeze, and was hardly stronger; but it was repeated and repeated, and from the same direction as the smoke. ‘That’s it!’ said Walter grimly, and turned his weary horse’s head. ‘Follow, all of you!’

‘But the beasts!’ groaned one of the drovers.

‘Drive them along, man!’ snapped Walter. ‘It’s not so far, and we’ll not leave them a prize for any more reivers!’

Long before they reached the last hilltop they saw the man who blew, and he them. He stared at first, unsure whether to run towards them or away, but when he saw Walter spurring ahead of the cattle he set up a great wailing outcry, and came staggering and stumbling down the sparse-grown slope with his arms flailing. When he reached Walter he was too exhausted to do more than hang at his stirrup and gasp, a lank old peasant clad in stinking sheepskins.

‘Speak, man!’ shouted Walter furiously. ‘What’s afoot?’

‘Acreknowe – fired!’ the man wheezed. ‘Reiver bastards – the Laird’s there – sieged in—’

Walter flung him sprawling from his stirrup and waved the others forward. He could guess it now, a fool could. A double thrust – the Lord decoyed from home with the bulk of his men and pinned down by a waiting force, while a few reivers struck deep into the heart of his country, stealing beasts from farms in the very shadow of Branxholme’s wall, loosing more than they could steal. A move at chess, most likely; not so much for the gaining of wealth, as to show that Branxholme’s shadow was no longer the sure shield it had been. A move to lessen the Lord’s power and prestige. A chill thought grew on him then – a move, too, to draw out his rash heir in trod? Might there not have been another ambush waiting, some way ahead?

He flushed out the fear with deliberate anger, and spurred to the hilltop. The encounter at the ford had shaken him, moved him to reflect. He had been raised to fight, like his father before him; but he had also been schooled to think. It was upon him to show more than rashness, now. He swung from his saddle below the summit, and falling to his belly crawled forward to stare down into the vale below. Wat and Geordie, with hunters’ instinct, wormed up through the dripping bracken to his side. The sight below them was grim.

The round dished vale was pleasant in the long-shadowed sunlight, a green and brown draughtboard on a dark cloth of forest, for its pieces the strips of ploughland and the round drystone beastfolds dotted here and there. At its centre, less than half a mile below, ran a strip of dark water, and along it the fermtoun, the little gaggle of steadings and shielings where the cottars lived. Walter caught the smell of the red earth freshly turned, and felt something like love for it. This was rich land, if only the little men were left in peace to till it; it was his hope when he inherited to maintain that peace, and he often imagined himself sitting sternly in judgement as his father did, or riding out to harry thieves and midnight reivers in defence of his people. Now, though, he caught another taint on the wind, and it carried the bitterness of reality.

It was from the heart of the little village that the column of brownish smoke arose, sparking and flaring at its centre. The cottars’ rooftops would be all peat, few if any rich enough to afford dry thatch, still less the tiles of slate and stone that castles could command. They would burn slow, and the heavy smoke would roll among the streets and cause choking mayhem to their defenders. Clearly that was the plan of those he saw wheeling and circling around the outer walls, whooping and yelling.

Geordie unleashed a soft oath. ‘All alowe! And yon’s a sight more men than the Laird had word of!’

‘More than he had with him!’ agreed Walter softly. ‘And they’re stopping the ways out between the houses.’

‘Like to smoking a warren!’ mouthed Wat angrily.

The image made . . .