A History Maker Read online

  “Economics: Old Greek word for the art of keeping a home weatherproof and supplied with what the householders need. For at least three centuries this word was used by British rulers and their advisers to mean political housekeeping — the art of keeping their bankers, brokers and rich supporters well supplied with money, often by impoverishing other householders. They used the Greek instead of the English word because it mystified folk who had not been taught at wealthy schools. The rhetoric of plutocratic bosses needed economics as the sermons of religious ones needed The Will of God.”

  — from The Intelligence Archive of

  Historical Jargon.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Map of Saint Mary’s Loch, 2220

  TITLE PAGE and DEDICATION

  Book Information

  EPIGRAPH

  TABLE of CONTENTS

  View of Dryhope Tower, 1820

  Prologue by a Hero’s Mother

  CHAPTER One – Public Eye

  CHAPTER Two – Private Houses

  CHAPTER Three – Warrior Work

  CHAPTER Four – Puddock Plot

  CHAPTER Five – The Henwife

  Notes Explaining Obscurities

  Postscript by a Student of Folklore

  Dryhope Tower

  and Saint Mary’s Loch,

  Bowerhope to the left on the far shore,

  around 1822

  PROLOGUE

  BY A HERO’S MOTHER

  BEFORE VANISHING from the open intelligence net Wat Dryhope gave me a printout of the next five chapters saying, “My apology for a botched life, mother. Do what you like with it.”

  I put it on a shelf behind old encyclopædias. The title scunnered me. Not knowing it was ironical I feared that his memoirs, like those of ancient politicians, would hoist a claim to importance by blaming his failure on wicked enemies and stupid helpers. The words “a botched life” suggested something different but equally dreich: the start of Augustine’s Confessions where the saint prepares us for his extraordinary conversion by denouncing his very ordinary early nastiness. I loved Wat most of my gets so had no wish to read what might make me despise him. Nor could I burn his writing unread. I placed it in easy reach and ignored it for years.

  One grey dank autumn afternoon two months ago I had fed the poultry and was snibbing the henrun gate when I fell down flat and took an hour to regain breath and balance. I have had several tumbles lately, each worse than the last; have also started recalling events of twenty, forty, sixty years ago more clearly than this morning or yesterday. Lying on the cold ground I knew that if not killed by a stroke I must soon join my daughters softening into senile dementia in the house where I was born. On returning to the tower I took Wat’s printout from the shelf and dusted it. After filling a glass with uisge beatha I began to read and finished long before nightfall without sipping a drop. Admiration for Wat had become my strongest feeling; also anger with myself for keeping his work so long from the public. Later readings have not lessened my admiration for the clarity of the narration and honesty of the narrator.

  A History Maker tells of seven crucial days in the life of a man with all the weaknesses that nearly brought the matriarchy of early modern time to a bad end yet all the strengths that helped it survive, reform, improve. Wat Dryhope, like Julius Caesar describing his Gallic wars, avoids vainglory and self-pity by naming himself in the third person and keeping the tale factual. He also writes so cannily that, like Walter Scott in his best novels, he gives the reader a sense of being at mighty doings. Adroit critics will notice his sly shift from present to past tense in the first chapter. Like Scott he tells a Scottish story in an English easily understood by other parts of the world but leaves the gab of the locals in its native doric. This shows he wanted his story read inside AND outside the Ettrick Forest, and I have warstled to help this by putting among my final notes a glossary of words liable to ramfeezle Sassenachs, North Americans and others with their own variety of English.

  Yet with all its art four fifths of Wat’s story is proven fact on the testimony of a whole horde of independent witnesses. The first chapter is not only confirmed by public eye records but clearly based on them. These records also confirm his account of the reception before the Ettrick Warrior house, his platform announcement, his talk with Archie Crook Cot in the third chapter, and quotations from public reports and discussions of the new militarism in the fifth. Open intelligence archives confirm the judgement on the Ettrick–Northumberland cliffside battle by the Council for War Regulation Sitting in Geneva, and the night of puddock migrations to fresh water in southern Scotland that year, and the dates and wording of the advert and banquet invitation issued by Cellini’s Cloud Circus.

  I have also sent copies of A History Maker to everyone I could find who is mentioned in it. Only Mirren Craig Douglas (that bitter woman) returned it without comment, which from her must signify assent. Wat’s brothers Joe and Sandy — his mistresses Nan and Annie and the Bowerhope twins — the veterans and servants of the Warrior house — the sisters who nursed him — I who schooled him — General Shafto who took him to the circus — all say he tells the truth as they recall it. Only the account of his doings with Meg Mountbenger in the gruesome fourth chapter are not confirmed by another protagonist, and why should he turn fanciful about her when honest about others? Some critics say Lawrence’s account of his rape in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an invention by which a lonely masochist got public sympathy for his queerness. Perhaps. Nothing else in Lawrence’s story depends on that rape so he may or may not have tholed it. But after Wat left Bowerhope that morning only a sore carnal collision can explain his state when he was found by the loch side, and explain his remarks to his sisters, and his story to me, and his dissemination of a plague which withered powerplants in every continent but Antarctica. If still alive Meg is sixty-three. Should she reappear and deny Wat’s story let none believe her. She was always a perverse bitch. She was the first of my gets, but I never liked her.

  So I bequeath A History Maker to the open intelligence, having added to the end notes explaining what those who ken little of the past may find bumbazing. For posterity’s sake my notes about the immediate present are put in the past tense too, since the present soon will be. Wat was a scholar and a fighter. His tale of warfare, love and skulduggery also meditates on human change. It antidotes a dangerous easy-oasy habit of thinking the modern world at last a safe place, of thinking the past a midden too foul to steep our brains in. Last week a Dryhope auntie asked me, “Why remember those nasty centuries when honest folk were queered, pestered and malagroozed by clanjamfries of greedy gangsters who called themselves governments and stock exchanges? I wouldnae give them headroom.”

  This wish not to see how we got here is ancient, not modern. Over three hundred years ago Henry Ford said, “History is bunk.” He was a practical genius who changed millions of lives by paying folk to make carriages in big new factories, while getting millions more to sell and buy carriages these factories made. Having mastered the new art of industrial growth he thought intelligent life needed nothing else. By 1929 the big new factories had made more carriages than could be sold at a profit. The owners closed the factories, millions of makers lost their jobs and houses, and even some rich folk suffered. Ford, not seeing that his method of making money had produced this poverty, blamed the collapse of industrial housekeeping on Communists and Jews and said Adolf Hitler’s fascism was the cure. He was partly right. The Second World War let him expand his factories again for he used them to make machines for the American armed forces. He was not nasty or stupid by nature, but ignorance of the past fogged his view of the present and blinded him to the future.

  A History Maker shows that good states change as inevitably as ba
d ones, and should be carefully watched. My pedantical lang-nebbed notes at the end try to emphasize that. They also emulate my son’s modesty by naming me in the third person. If any future reader learns what happened to my brave, discontented, kindly, misguided, long-lost son I hope he or she will add a postscript for the satisfaction of posterity. I am sorry that I will not be here to read it.

  Kate Dryhope

  Dryhope Tower

  8 December 2234

  ONE

  PUBLIC EYE

  MIST FROM THE SEA covers the hill where a small army lies surrounded by a large. Above the mist and beneath a multitude of stars the public eye hangs like a man-made moon. It is a crystalline globe with lights and appearances of people working in the centre, people whose faces expand hugely when they look outward. They record visions and noises, these people, and comment on them, but now the only noise is the hush-hushing of remote waves breaking on rocks.

  The mist slowly brightens to the west where the sun is nearing the horizon. Bugles from under the mist sound a reveille, then come faint scratchings like the noise of many grasshoppers. “The third day of warfare dawns,” says the public eye sinking into the mist, “An hour from now the battle for the standard starts.”

  It pauses among shadowy figures whose activity causes the scratchings. A sudden beam of light from the globe lights a fourteen-year-old boy, haggard and dirty with stained bandages round brow, arm and ankle. He crouches on a cloak which has been his bed. He is sharpening the edge of a short sword with a spindle-shaped stone. The public eye hangs close to his left shoulder. The boy blushes in embarrassment and hones on, pretending not to see until the voice says, “An Ettrick breakfast — not very nourishing.”

  The boy strikes at the eye with the stone and topples forward on his face.

  “A typical reaction,” says the eye, skipping sideways and leaving him in darkness, “From one of a hot-headed clan on the verge of extinction. Let us see Northumbria.”

  The public eye vanishes and reappears floating up a slope on the other side of a fog-filled valley. Burners cover the hillside with cheerful dots of light and heat, each surrounded by three soldiers. One unhurriedly sharpens swords, one polishes shields and helmets, a third cooks a breakfast of black puddings fried in their own fat. Those who have prepared their weapons sip mugs of hot coffee laced with rum.

  “There is an atmosphere of anticipation,” says the public eye, “But anticipation without anxiety, of anticipation tinged with (let us be frank) pleasure. For half a century these doughty Northumbrians have lost brothers, fathers and uncles to Ettrick, so where you and I see the one surviving clan of a gallant Border army the Northumbrians see — and who can blame them? — the remnant of a nest of vipers. Let’s hear what the commanders say.”

  Five Northumbrian commanders stand on a summit, side by side but far enough apart to offer distinct views of themselves. They are old men in their middle thirties with small clipped moustaches, patient, far-seeing expressions and deeply scarred faces. Plain ankle-length cloaks hide their bodies, each with his clan emblem on the left shoulder: the Milburn football, the Storey pencil, the Dodds thunderbolt, the Shafto buckle, the Charlton winged boot. A dawn breeze shreds the mist behind them and reveals five shining steel poles thirty feet high, each topped with a golden eagle gripping a cross beam. From each beam hangs a banner whose slow flappings do not hide the clan emblem on it and the richly embroidered names of past victories.

  “How will the battle go today, General Dodds?” says the public eye to the middle commander. Dodds looks at the air over it and speaks as if to himself.

  “We’ll crush them. They’ve no food, no water, we outnumber them ten to one. We’ll have their standard thirty minutes after starting bell.” “You have lost a lot to Ettrick,” says the eye, spinning round Dodds’s head to show the wrinkled flesh and small holes where his nose and ears had been.

  “More than you see,” he replies with a slight smile, “A dad, nine brothers, seven sons, six grandsons, five hands and three legs I’ve lost. No, nature never meant me for a swordsman. A commander is all I’m fit for and I’ve never regretted it more than today. I’d love a final chop at Jardine Craig Douglas and his brats.”

  “How do you think General Craig Douglas managed his campaign, General Dodds?”

  “Like a professional. His choice of ground might have led to a draw if Teviot and Liddesdale, Eskdale and Galawater had moved as fast as he moved Ettrick. But they couldn’t, so we’ve got their standards.”

  (Here General Shafto gives a loud guffaw which Dodds ignores.)

  “What puzzles me,” says Dodds, “Is why he should make his last stand there.”

  He points a finger across the valley to an isolated hill now clear of mist. The Ettrick standard stands on the summit with the remains of the Ettrick army bivouacked round it. On every surrounding slope are the bivouacs of their enemies.

  “If Craig Douglas won’t surrender — if he’s determined to die for his flag — he could have found a better den to die in than a waterless hill where we can come at him from every side.”

  “Will you invite him to surrender, General Dodds?”

  The commander-in-chief pushes out his under lip, sucks his moustache and says, “We’ll vote on it. Milburn?”

  Milburn says, “He had his last chance yesterday as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Give him another,” says Storey. Charlton agrees. “No harm at all in giving old Craig Douglas a last chance to surrender,” says Shafto with another sharp guffaw, “He won’t take it.”

  “If that’s the case, Shafto, you give him the message,” says Dodds, grinning, “Pile it on as thick as you like, and don’t forget the bit about their aunties.”

  Shafto nods, salutes and stalks off down the slope, a herald with a flag of truce striding beside him. Our point of view remains between them until they ascend the besieged hill as the Ettrick soldiers gather on the summit. Three rows of youths, the smallest in front and tallest behind, stand behind the standard in a crescent with its tips toward the approaching Northumbrians. At the foot of the standard Jardine Craig Douglas is General among his senior officers. The graceful speed with which this company has moved into place, the casual yet energetic stances in which they wait would seem theatrical to observers used to the conscript or mercenary troops of the historical era. Each soldier presents a clear silhouette from a different angle: arms folded, or thumbs tucked in belt, or hand on hip and other on sword hilt. Even the smallest and dirtiest soldier — he who struck at the public eye with his hone — has now the poised dignity of a commander in a painting by Velasquez. Only one lanky officer slouches near his general like a morose actor who would prefer to be in a different play. General Craig Douglas also has an eccentric aspect. In an epoch when most men are over six feet tall and most generals have neat moustaches Craig Douglas is a gaunt five-foot six whose bushy grey eyebrows, beard and whiskers give him a wild hobgoblin look. The Northumbrian embassy halts three paces before him. The herald blows a fanfare. In the following stillness a lark is heard. Shafto, speaking for all to hear, soon drowns that voice. “Jardine Craig Douglas! I bring a message from Sidney Dodds, commander of Northumbria. You have fought bravely and well — none but your enemies know how well — but today you are doomed unless you surrender that standard, a standard you cannot stop us seizing! You have only a few seasoned troops to defend it and less than a hundred juniors, half of them fledglings. Did you save your youngest blood till last to spill it in a hopeless cause? Surrender now and gladden the hearts of your aunts, sisters and sweethearts. Surrender now and speed the revival of Ettrick as a clan of fighters. Surrender now and lose not one atom of the admiration rightly owed you by the viewing public, your allies, family, enemies and posterity.”

  “A kind suggestion!” says Craig Douglas swiftly and loudly, “And nobly said. What do you think of it, men? Will we give him that old pole?”

  He turns his back on Shafto and stands with fist on hip staring up at the g
olden eagle above the slowly flapping banner. His question has not been aimed at anyone so nobody replies until he looked sideways at his tallest and most slovenly officer saying, “You are our thinker Wat — you read history books, have been to the stars, have turned down a chance of living forever. What should I do?”

  “Give him the pole. Let’s go home for a wash and a breakfast,” says Wat loudly, “We can order another pole. Our aunts will weave another banner.”

  “There speaks the voice of reason!” cries Craig Douglas, cheerfully clapping Wat on the shoulder, “The voice of reason and NOT the voice of cowardice as we who fought beside Wat Dryhope yesterday know. But war isnae a reasonable trade.”

  He moves away from his officers, still staring up at the banner. His voice becomes quieter but more distinct.

  “That old pole means a lot to me. I started fighting for it a week before the eldest of you was conceived. We’ve done well since then. In battle after battle we’ve conquered and won allies until Ettrick has seized standards from Wick to Barrow and taken some on commons as far south as Sunningdale. But today Ettrick is the only undefeated clan on the Scottish Borders — one hundred and eight of us, mostly cadets and fledglings — one hundred and eight hungry, thirsty folk surrounded by over a thousand experienced, well-watered, well-fed warriors. So my good son Wat says, ‘Drop the pole. Give them the flag. They’ll take it anyway. Nobody will blame us.’ That is reasonable advice and I reject it!”