Written by Ailsa Fraser
The stone crackles under your pickaxe and comes away in a shower of dust and chunks, thumping to the ground. The others crowd around you, swinging in unison, and their sweat mingles with yours on your skin. Your efforts thump through the ground, low and resonant. The whole earth seems to shake with your desperation, and you’re sure that the enemy can hear it.
You can certainly hear them.
You’ve been able to hear them for weeks. Shouting orders outside the castle walls; swords clanging as the soldiers grow restless; the constant grind of cartwheels delivering food, supplies, everything they won’t let you have. For months, now, you’ve watched them from the parapet, careful to avoid any archer’s eyes, and seen the force the whole of Catholic Scotland will bring to bear against the righteous. They stream in and out of St Andrews like the tides beating against the sands below.
The plan worked. You and the others managed to take the castle and send Cardinal Beaton to the Hell he deserves for what he did to George. His body hung from the window of the bedroom he shared with his mistress for days, for all to see. For all to know.
But it has been months. And your stomach is empty.
You’ve survived, so far—you all have. You have food to eat, just not enough. And you have places to sleep, even if they may be the beds of dead men. For a while, you slept well, knowing that George has had his justice. But you haven’t slept since they started digging the mine.
They can’t get through the walls. They know that, as do you. The castle was known to be impregnable, until you and the others fell upon it. You were not an army, though; you were dressed as workmen, and the cardinal was not expecting you. You have been waiting for invasion since you arrived, and they cannot catch you off guard. They cannot come through the gates.
So they started digging the mine. All day, every day. And when you lie down to sleep, the noise of their labours drills through the walls and into your skull.
Your pickaxe has splintered and blistered your hands many times, by now. You’ve all been working feverishly. If their mine opens and takes you by surprise, you are lost. You need to intercept them. If you can fight them off directly, you can hold the castle.
But the sound of the miners shakes the whole castle. And you cannot tell where it comes from.
The first countermine was a hurried affair. It broke you all in for the work—in every sense of the word—only to find that you had been wrong. The miners were nowhere near that shaft. You had to start again.
The second was even more frenzied. Your teeth ached as you slammed yourself and your pickaxe against the hard earth, time and time over, the joints on your hands like blisters and your heart an agonising pound. And still, came the call: they’re not here. They’re somewhere else in the castle.
We are wasting our time.
You want to give up.
There had been talk of the English coming to save you, but that hasn’t happened, and hope can’t survive on desperation alone. You watched your hope starve, then your luck, then you were only here because there was nowhere else to go. If you leave, the besiegers will slaughter you. When they get in, they’ll still slaughter you.
Maybe you shouldn’t have done it. But every time it crosses your mind, you remember George.
You walked through the infamous Sea Tower, when first you arrived. That was where they kept him, before they burnt him for his ideas, and its basement dungeons made you retch. It stank of waste: piss, shit, and human potential. The higher floors were much nicer, of course. Sometimes, the cardinal had had hostages to hold here. Important hostages—too important to offend. But George hadn’t been one of them. They’d put him here to grind down his opposition, to watch it turn to dust. When that failed, they just turned all of him into ash.
He had spoken to you of a better way to worship God. He had promised a better world. And there is no doubt in your heart that he was right. You long for the church George promised you—passionately, eloquently, perfectly formed in that brilliant mind of his. You have no doubt that one day it will come, as God wills it; you know equally that George should have been here to see it.
George was your friend.
After you came out of the Sea Tower, you looked up at Cardinal Beaton’s mangled body, mutilated by crows and defecated on by gulls, and smiled. It was the last time you would smile for weeks.
The English are not coming. You know this, in the same way you know that George was right. It is only you and God who can save you—and your hands, tremoring as they grip the pickaxe, are weak.
Weeks of mining. Weeks of listening to their advance, of watching your end draw near. There is only the dark rock ahead of you, your compatriots beside, and the constant, deafening doom-song of their approach. The light at the end of the tunnel is far behind you.
You will fail.
The pickaxe drops from your hands. You drop to your knees. Someone curses you and pushes in to keep mining, but you heave in what breaths you can.
You will fail. Already, two countermines have gone nowhere. The cacophony of the miners surrounds you, pierces you, and it is the sound of the Devil’s laughter. This countermine, too, will meet a dead end. This, too, will go nowhere. They will erupt from the earth and take you all by surprise, and your death will be swift and listless.
You avenged George, at least. But you cannot do the work he should be here to do himself.
The cacophony grows louder as you despair. Your breathing quickens, then slows as you run out of air. Dust rains down around you, dirtying your hands, your hair, your face. The earth is trying to pull you down, and your limbs have never felt heavier.
Then the noise crashes through.
It shocks you back to awareness. The wall of rock gives in at the ground just beneath your feet and before you, grim-faced, are the dirtied men who’ve been pacing the outside of your castle like hungry dogs. Their mine is deeper than yours; they stand below you, the hole in your floor and their ceiling. They peer up at you and scowl.
Their shock at the sudden clash is as evident as yours, and despite your despair, you recover first, even as your compatriots hesitate. All of you will have the advantage: you are above, you are below, and they will have to climb to get through. You turn around and run.
“Through!” you shout. “We hit them! Come through!”
Your shout thunders down the mine, and you keep shouting it as you run, bashing your head on the twisted, uneven rock. But others hear you: men with swords shout and clatter down into the mine, streaming past to fight off the invaders. You don’t see them come through.
After a few paces, something sharp drives into your back. You never see what it is. Instead, you fall to the ground. There you stay; there you die, swiftly and listlessly. But after you do, the men come through to fight, to drive off the besiegers. St Andrews Castle will still be yours.
When they come to drag your body out of the mine, there is a smile on your face.
Author’s Note: Cardinal David Beaton had the Protestant preacher George Wishart imprisoned in St Andrews Castle then executed in March 1546. Months later, several of Wishart’s friends infiltrated the castle, drove out the servants, and murdered Beaton in retaliation, hanging his body in public view so none of his allies attempted rescue. Regent Arran, Governor of Scotland, besieged the castle and a mine was dug to get inside. The defenders, however, after two failed starts, were able to dig a countermine to intercept the invasion and hold onto the castle until a truce was reached in December 1546. Today, Wishart is commemorated, along with other Protestant martyrs, with the Martyrs Memorial along the Scores in St Andrews.
Featured image credit: “St Andrews Castle” by dun_deagh is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Retrospect Journal 