Last Writes (17 page)

Spring turned to a summer much sunnier than usual and February’s rain dried out of the land, aided by high winds from the east. It was the sheriff’s observant little kitchen maid, Elspeth, who told him one day that there seemed to be o’er much going on Balgalkin land.

‘Ploughing, sir,’ she said.

‘Ploughing?’ echoed Rhuaraidh Macmillan in disbelief. ‘At this time? Never. Don’t forget the man has right of feal and divot in the peat.’

Elspeth bobbed a curtsey. ‘Turning the land, then, sir. They weren’t using the tairsgeir at the peat hags …’

‘But ploughing? Surely not just now.’

Thinking the girl was mistaken, the sheriff put this put of his mind, too.

That is until Angus Mackenzie was at his door again.

This was several days later. The owner of Culloch Beg had made his way once more to Drummondreach. This time he was crosser than ever, his face now a puce colour. ‘The law’s no good at all. Leanaig’s still after his revenge for losing his Cathie, Sheriff.’

‘What has he done now?’ asked Rhuaraidh Macmillan cautiously. In his view the law and revenge should be kept well apart.

‘My spring rises on his land and the water comes down to me from Balgalkin. Always has.’

‘Go on.’

‘Leanaig’s torn up his ground caterways so it doesn’t drain down the hill my way any more, and so cut off the burn. The whole of Culloch Beg’s dry now – there’s no’ enough water in my stream for man or beast.’

Sheriff Rhuaraidh Macmillan considered this for a minute and then said, ‘Angus, I’ll have to take this in to avizandum.’ Seeing the look of total bewilderment on the man’s face he explained, ‘That means to give the matter my earnest consideration – to think about it.’

‘Thinking’s no good to man or beast either, Sheriff. Thinking’ll not get water back to Culloch Beg and I need it there.’

‘Wait, ye …’

‘And nor will the law.’

‘The law is the law.’ It was the sheriff’s ultimate credo.

‘The law’ll no’ get my water back but my Callum might,’ insisted the man bitterly.

‘Callum musn’t try.’

‘Leanaig says that a man can do what he likes on his own land,’ countered a sorely tried Angus Mackenzie.

‘No, he can’t.’

‘Yes, he can. He’s boasting about it all over Fearnshire.’

‘He can’t do what he wants if that which he does is done deliberately and with malice against his neighbour,’ responded Rhuaraidh Macmillan.

‘Can’t he just? This time,’ repeated Angus Mackenzie spiritedly, ‘I’m going to send Callum up there with some of my men and …’

‘You’ll do no such thing, Angus Mackenzie. You’ll leave this to me. Now, away with you back to Culloch Beg.’

After the owner of Culloch Beg had reluctantly gone back to his own domain Sheriff Macmillan sat in his room for a long time thinking about Scottish law. He thought, too, and about that which wasn’t either Scottish law or even strictly legal but might work.

Presently he stirred himself, sent for his clerk and his palfrey, and rode over to Castle Balgalkin in state. True enough, the land had indeed been turned, the furrows running laterally rather than downhill, thus turning water away from its natural way down the hill to Culloch Beg.

Hector Leanaig was unrepentant. ‘I can do what I like on Balgalkin land. No man can gainsay that, Sheriff.’

‘You have interfered with the natural run-off of the water, Hector.’

‘What of it? It’s Balgalkin’s water.’

‘Maybe, but it is a mark of civilisation, Hector, that the wronged party can be the party in the right.’

‘And you call that the law?’

‘I do. And Angus Mackenzie has been wronged by you, right enough.’

‘It’s my land,’ said the laird carelessly, ‘and I’ll do what I will with it, whatever Mackenzie says. It’s my daughter, too, that’s away there,’ he added, jerking his thumb down the hill.

‘The law does not countenance such behaviour.’

The Laird of Balgalkin looked at the sheriff. ‘The law has nothing to do with it.’

‘The law, Hector Leanaig, is called
aemulatio vicini
and I’m charging you with a breach of it.’

Hector Leanaig shrugged his shoulders. ‘I haven’t the Latin.’

‘It’s an act towards a neighbour that is normally legally proper – such as your turning up your own land, Hector – which can be actionable if taken in malice and harmful to others.’

Hector Leanaig flushed. ‘You’ll no’ get away with that, Sheriff, in any sort of court.’

‘On the contrary, Hector, it’s you who isn’t going to get away with it. You’ll answer to it, unless that is …’

The Laird of Balgalkin scowled. ‘So it’s got down to horse-trading, has it, this famous law of yours?’

‘Only in a manner of speaking, Hector,’ said the sheriff pleasantly.

‘Well?’

‘I think your behaviour calls for restitution of all the wrongs you have done to Mackenzie, tocher and all.’

‘So?’

‘So,’ said the sheriff in a steely voice, ‘if this isn’t done by the end of the week I shall have put you in Dingwall Gaol.’

Hector Leanaig shrugged his great shoulders. ‘You’ve no grounds for doing that and you ken that well enough. It wouldn’t be lawful and no court would agree to it.’

‘That is so,’ admitted the sheriff calmly, adding pedantically, ‘On both counts.’

‘Man, I’ll be out the next morning and well you know it.’

‘Maybe, but one night in there alongside Colin Urquhart’ll be quite enough.’

‘For what?’ demanded Leanaig.

‘To catch the smallpox from him. That’s what he’s got and what his father died from. Didn’t you know?’

‘And they said that first of all we ought to have a business plan,’ said the youngest among them, a lad who on happier ships might have been called the cabin boy, ‘seeing as we could hardly advertise.’

‘If that’s all they said,’ grumbled the one they thought of as the first mate, ‘then we oughtn’t to have sent you on the course in the first place. Cost a lot of dosh, it did.’

‘Waste of good money,’ said the third mate, who thought he ought to have been sent on it instead and said so. He would have been if he had been able to read and write.

‘It wasn’t a waste,’ protested the lad indignantly, ‘though they did complain that they were always sent junior staff on their course instead of senior management and they didn’t like it.’

‘What did I say?’ The third mate looked round challengingly at the others. ‘I should have gone. Not him.’

‘They said,’ the lad carried on gamely, ‘that even so there were all sorts of things we should be thinking about doing now trade was slackening off so badly.’

‘Give me a for instance,’ growled the first mate.

‘Like having a mission statement.’

‘I’m not having anything to do with missionaries.’ The second mate sat up suddenly. ‘Caused me no end of trouble did missionaries. Talking, talking, talking …’

‘Mission statement,’ repeated the cabin boy. ‘It’s nothing to do with missionaries.’

‘That’s good,’ said the second mate, subsiding back onto his haunches on the deck.

‘Tell us what it is, then,’ said their leader, the tallest and the swarthiest among them.

‘For starters,’ said the lad, momentarily diverted from the subject of mission statements, ‘he said we ought to be calling you Captain Hook.’

Their leader looked bewildered. ‘Why?’

‘He didn’t say. He did ask though if you wore a black eyepatch and had a hook instead of a hand and I said no, you didn’t, and there were thirteen hands on board.’

‘And we don’t fly the Jolly Roger either,’ said the oldest man there, the one they called the ancient mariner. ‘I hope you told him that, too.’ He thumped the deck. ‘And about my wooden leg.’

The cabin boy kept going. ‘And they said I ought to be called Little Billee – I don’t know why.’

‘Never you mind,’ said the captain hastily. ‘We aren’t going to eat you.’

‘Billy No-Mates,’ crowed the second mate.

‘Like I said,’ the third mate, a man with a giant chip on
his shoulder, reminded them, ‘that course was a total waste of money.’

‘We do use grappling hooks,’ pointed out the captain thoughtfully. ‘It’s the only way to get onto some of the bigger ships. Them and hooked ladders.’

‘Doesn’t always get us over the side, though, does it?’ said second mate, ‘not now they’ve taken to covering the rails with barbed wire like they have.’

‘Tell us what this mission statement thing is, then, boy,’ said the captain. ‘I’m interested.’

‘It’s supposed to set out what it is we’re trying to do,’ replied the cabin boy.

‘We know what we’re trying to do,’ said the first mate briskly. ‘Raise more funds.’

‘And raise ’em more quickly,’ added the second mate. ‘Fuel’s getting low.’

The cabin boy looked nervous. ‘But they say we have to say what for.’

‘I’ll give you what for …’ began the first mate, clenching his fists.

‘Let him go on,’ commanded the captain.

Before the lad could get a word in edgeways the second mate said simply, ‘We take either ships or people hostage. That’s all. Job done. Six words.’

‘Seven,’ said the third mate triumphantly.

‘We have to tell everyone why we’re doing what we are,’ persisted the lad. ‘That’s the thing they were on about. Explaining.’

‘I am the captain and that’s what I do,’ murmured the man, but under his breath.

‘We do it for the money,’ repeated the first mate heavily.
‘You know that and everyone else ought to be able to work it out for themselves.’

The captain gave a short laugh. ‘The shipowners can, right enough. And their insurers are even better at it. They know which side our bread is buttered, all right. Tankers are worth a lot of money.’

‘But what do we actually want the money for?’ squeaked the lad. ‘They said that that’s what they wanted to know in the first instance before they could advise us.’

‘Equipment and overheads,’ responded the second officer promptly. ‘Radar screens cost the earth these days and our stuff’s going to need updating very soon.’

‘So we don’t have to shout “Ship Ahoy” every time we sight a vessel any more,’ said the ancient mariner, who had done his turn in the crow’s nest in days of yore.

‘We very nearly missed that new liner out of Southampton the other day,’ said the captain, nodding. ‘I quite thought it was going to give us the slip. That would have been a pity because it was a whopper.’

‘There was those good ladders, too, that we had to pitch overboard when that poncy frigate tried to come alongside us last week,’ the first mate reminded them. He sucked his teeth. ‘I must say the boys were a bit slow in getting out the fishing lines instead. And they asked what we’d caught.’

‘Which wasn’t a lot,’ grimaced the captain.

‘I didn’t like it when they hailed us by saying “Avast, my hearties”,’ sniffed the first mate. ‘Downright rude, if you ask me.’

‘They get it from the pantomime,’ said the captain. ‘Not real life.’

‘And we want money for running the ship, too,’ said the first mate, still on track. ‘Fuel doesn’t come cheap, you know. And now that we have to go halfway round the island of Lasserta to get it, the cost mounts up something wicked.’

‘They said on the course that that was what came of operating out of a failed state,’ volunteered the cabin boy, his gaze going from one speaker to another like a devotee at Wimbledon, ‘whatever that means.’

‘If we put in anywhere else for it we’d be sunk,’ said the second mate feelingly.

‘Literally,’ said the captain, ‘and that’s without anyone else on the high seas trying to do it. Which, I may say,’ he added gloomily, ‘they do. All the time.’

‘There was that warship the other day …’ began the third mate. ‘They were itching to have a go. I could tell.’

‘Then there’s all those pesky mercenaries to be paid for,’ cut in the first mate. ‘And they don’t come cheap. Ideas above their station, the lot of them, if you ask me.’

‘Moreover,’ said the second mate, ‘they don’t always obey orders. The other day when we were taking over that oil tanker from the Gulf one of them went down to the galley to nick some fresh meat. They only ever think of themselves, you know.’

‘Victuals is always important at sea,’ opined the ancient mariner. ‘Always was, too.’

‘Lucky not to have had a cleaver through his head,’ growled the third mate.

‘Or a knife in his chest,’ muttered someone else. ‘There’s always knives down there in the galley. Downright dangerous if you ask me.’

That the man had a something approximating to a cutlass prominent in his own belt was ignored by them all.

‘What about the cost of the upkeep of the hostages, too?’ said the second officer, whose responsibility these had ipso facto become. ‘Very picky, some of them are – especially the women. One of them wanted make-up. I ask you! Where do you suppose we could get her make-up in the middle of the ocean?’

The first mate stretched his arms above his head and said expansively, ‘Easy. A luxury yacht. Time you lot started thinking outside the box.’

‘Talking of hostages,’ piped up the cabin boy quickly, ‘they asked at the course if we had any experience of the Stockholm syndrome.’

The first mate scratched his head.

‘There was that cruise ship out of Stockholm, last year, remember. Big one. Swedish. Didn’t see any syndromes about. A lot of passengers, though. Quite upset they were. Rich, too, of course.’

The cabin boy looked anxiously from one face to another. ‘They said,’ he began tentatively, ‘that the Stockholm syndrome was when hostages began to collude with their kidnappers.’

‘That’s good,’ said the second mate richly. ‘Them collude with us! It’s us that colludes with them or else. Fetch and carry, that’s all we do. That and post letters. Terrible some of them are for writing home. If they’ve got good homes, why do they leave them?’

‘Don’t forget we’ve got that prisoner to feed, too,’ said the captain. ‘You know, the one that called himself a
negotiator and thought he could get us to accept peanuts in exchange for a container ship.’

‘If you ask me keelhauling would have been too good for him,’ sniffed the third mate. ‘Too clever by half.’

The captain gave a short laugh.

‘He kept on saying “Jaw, jaw is better than law, law”. I don’t know where he got that idea from since we’re not in territorial waters in the first place. I had him put him in irons in the end to keep him quiet.’

The first mate turned back to the boy. ‘Anything else, lad?’

‘Yes, there was something else,’ nodded the cabin boy in spite of all this. ‘They said we ought to clarify our demands.’

The first mate gave a mocking laugh.

‘“Your money or your life” being so yesterday,’ he said. ‘Is that it?’

‘I’ve never killed anyone who didn’t cough up,’ said the second mate virtuously.

‘But they don’t know that you’re not going to, do they?’ pointed out the third mate.

‘I could never see anything wrong with “Stand and deliver” myself,’ remarked the ancient mariner reminiscently, ‘except that it was what highwaymen used to say.’

‘And midwives,’ said a man who had gone to sea to escape a burgeoning family.

The captain stirred himself. ‘That’s what we are, though, isn’t it? Highwaymen of the sea.’

The ancient mariner gave a sudden cackle and burst into song. ‘“‘It’s only me, from over the sea,’ cried Barnacle Bill, ‘the sailor and seadog’”.’

The others ignored him. The third mate turned to the cabin boy. ‘Here lad, what else did the man say?’

‘That we shouldn’t use words like ransom,’ said the boy.

‘And what, pray,’ asked the third mate sarcastically, ‘should we say instead? Please and thank you?’

‘We should call it a release fee.’ The cabin boy looked really frightened now. ‘Not ransom.’

The third mate gave a great guffaw, while the captain asked if there was anything else they should be thinking about.

‘Subscribing to Lloyd’s Register of Shipping,’ said the lad. ‘Or any website that tells you which ship is making for where.’

He was answered by a chorus from the others: ‘Radar’s better.’

‘Even when they zigzag.’

‘I was never very good at books.’

‘We’d have to pay for it.’

‘I get their drift, though.’ The captain sounded quite pleased with his pun. ‘But what we do need to know is how to get better prize money and more often.’

The cabin boy piped up again. ‘That was another thing. They said we shouldn’t call it prize money any longer.’

‘If,’ began the first mate hotly, ‘they think I’m going to talk about bonuses with them being so unpopular now that it’s what bankers get …’

‘Variable pay,’ said the cabin boy succinctly. ‘That’s the in word now.’

‘Two words,’ said the third mate.

‘Anything else?’ the captain asked the lad, not unkindly. ‘Might as well hear it all while we’re about it.’

‘The competition …’ said the lad, nervously looking round at them all.

The crew fell silent. Only the captain felt able to say something and that after a long pause when he murmured, ‘The Shanty Gang.’ Then he turned back to the cabin boy. ‘Did you mention the Shanty Gang to them?’

The boy hung his head. ‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘At first they weren’t sure what we could do about the competition.’

‘Nor are we,’ said the first mate crisply. ‘Short of making the Shanties fly the Skull and Crossbones, that is, and they won’t do that.’

‘Then,’ the boy piped up again, ‘after they’d thought about it for a bit, they suggested what we should do was to warn other shipping about the Shanties. Their radio people will think the warning is coming from an official source and they’ll move into our patch to get away from the Shanty Gang.’

‘Nice,’ said the first mate approvingly. ‘I like it.’

‘Why didn’t we think of that?’ asked the third mate. ‘It’d have saved your course fees.’

The captain, sensing implied criticism, told the boy to go on.

The lad was struggling with an unfamiliar word. ‘They said we should be mortising … no, amortising, that’s it – amortising each year.’

‘Sounds nasty,’ said the first mate.

‘Is it catching?’

‘We haven’t got a fever flag,’ muttered the third mate. ‘It got the moth.’

‘It’s putting some money aside each year to buy a new boat when this one gets old,’ explained the boy.

‘That proves that they don’t really understand our business,’ said he with the giant chip on his shoulder.

‘No need for whatever it was you said, boy,’ the captain came back swiftly. ‘We just keep one of the ones we’ve captured.’

‘There’s a nice little schooner I’ve been keeping my eye on,’ said the first mate. ‘It does a regular run to Lasserta. We can pick it up whenever we want, can’t we?’

The boy swallowed. ‘Then they said we should be doing some projections.’

‘That’s just what I say.’ The ancient mariner stirred. ‘They should never have done away with bowsprits.’

‘Not that sort of a projection, Grandpa,’ said the first mate.

‘Put him in the scuppers until he’s sober,’ began the third mate.

The boy hurried on. ‘But most important of all they said we should have an exit strategy. You know, make a plan about what to do when the going gets nasty.’

‘Scarper,’ said the third mate.

‘Scuttle,’ said the first mate.

‘Take to the boats,’ the second mate chimed in. ‘The little ones, I mean.’

The boy frowned. ‘They did mention something about lifeboats but I don’t think that’s what they meant.’

‘Not our sort of lifeboat,’ said the captain, nodding. ‘I’ve heard about them.’

The boy swallowed and then said in a voice scarcely above a murmur, ‘They said there was something else we could always do if the going got tough.’

‘When the going gets tough the tough get going,’ chanted the second mate. ‘Is that it?’