Rizzio: A Novella

One late afternoon · May, 1566 A scaffold in Edinburgh

Henry Yair stands on a platform looking down at a large crowd. The afternoon sun is behind him and he can see their faces very clearly but thinks they probably can’t see him because they’re squinting. He fixes his eyes on a woman and a man, quite young, sweethearts maybe; they’re holding hands. They look so concerned. Perhaps they’re worried about something. He tries to nudge the man beside him to get him to look at them too but finds his hands are bound together behind his back.

Yair has been seeing apparitions in the night. Sometimes they frighten him, these grey and green things, shifting things going quickly back and forth. Sometimes he watches them objectively because he’s too tired. Sometimes he really sees what is there. Sometimes that is worse.

Standing next to him, his gallows brother, is Thomas Scott, the Perth man with the smashed-in nose. Scott is the Sheriff. Ruthven’s man too. Yair smiles at him, thinking how nice it is that they are both Ruthven’s men, but Scott is crying really loudly.

There are two other men up here with them, richer men. Lairds, Yair thinks. He looks at them in their fine clothes and sees they are Mowbury and Harlow. They were there that night. He saw them stab David Rizzio. He saw Harlow lift a chair and Mowbury turn towards a door and reach for the handle. He recalls these meaningless snippets of action: a man lifting a chair. He never put it down. Is it down yet? Is he still there, holding that chair high? No, he is here with Yair. Perhaps another man, same as this man here, is back there, back then, still holding that chair? Yair’s memories are fractured and have no meaning. Time slides into other times yet he knows he saw these things. Mowbury and Harlow – lairds, both – lifting a chair and turning to a door.

But Mowbury and Harlow are being kept away from Scott and Yair. The lairds are all the way over the other side and they are not dirty like him and Scott.

Scott looks terrible. Yair has never seen Scott from the side before. The bridge of his smashed nose is completely gone and – it’s amazing! – he can see the tears rolling down Scott’s far cheek as well as the one near to him. That’s how flat his nose is. It’s not in the way at all. Scott has lost some teeth recently. His chin is bloody, his gums all raggedy.

A man walks forward to the crowd and shouts things. By order of Lord Darnley… David Rizzio… Murder… These men before you here held… Royal pardon… Mowbury and Harlow to be released… Per justice.

Justice? Yair grins at Scott. There were hundreds of them there that night. There’s only four of them standing here. That’s funny if nothing else. Morton and Ruthven and all of them, and now four. Yair smiles at the crowd, at the couple, but no one smiles back.

He tries to laugh but he’s been shouting so much his voice is hoarse and he can only squawk a haw-haw.

The two Lairds are led from the scaffold, helped down the steps to the street below, and the eyes of the young couple follow them. The crowd parts to let the Lairds through, keeping their eyes down. They seem ashamed to have witnessed the Lairds’ pardon, as if they might get into trouble for having seen the men there. They turn back and look up at Yair and Scott.

Suddenly there’s a hooded man and a minister in a long grey cassock reading a prayer book.

Yair has attended executions many times, but this crowd seem all wrong. This feels different. They aren’t jeering the way they usually do. They’re just standing there, arms by their sides, looking from one to the other, expressionless faces, heads jerking like pigeons.

He’s not sure what’s going on.

The shouting man says other things. Words… By order of… Upon the night… Did wilfully… And there did… Father Adam Black.

Yair brightens at the mention of Father Black. He knows that name. He smiles, remembering his funny way of walking, a hobbling and a rolling of a lame knee to propel himself forward, as if he were stepping over something. Getting around something.

Praying is going on near him, incantations, but that’s a waste of time because God hates him and Yair knows that. And now the crowd are making a sound, a coo and yelp of surprise as a rope is pulled down over his neck. It sits heavily on his clavicle, resting there. He can’t stop thinking about it sitting on his bones but is distracted by Scott crying loudly next to him, open-mouthed, stringy slabbers falling from his mouth onto his shirt front.

They put a rope on Scott too, and through a smog of psychosis, Yair is suddenly aware of where they are and what is being done.

Scott is asked if he wants to speak. He shakes his head. They don’t ask Yair to speak but he wants to. He babbles his panic in loud, loud sounds, keeping the noises going as they push him to the edge of the platform. He raises his voice to the crowd.

I AM MAN, he tells the sky and the couple and the swirling buildings and the green air. A wind picks up suddenly, stealing his voice and carrying the earthy smell of horse as the ground beneath him disappears.

It is white, this place, a comfortable nothing, he thinks.

A sudden rush of blinding pain roars into his head and he tries to sit up, gulping in air through his massively swollen tongue.

The crowd are calling, screeching, singing, some of them, and the pain in his head is so bad that he needs to stop the light burning into his eyes, just cover his eyes, but his hands don’t work. His shoulders are stuck. He can’t see the crowd, just sky, and he cannot move.

Here is a man in a hood with a knife.

And the man reaches down and takes hold of Yair’s cock and balls quite gently. A finger slips on the soft underside of his balls and it feels loving.

Yair laughs until the man slices them off. The crowd jeer. The hood holds them up to show Henry Yair his own sweet cock and balls that he loved all his life. Pain cascades through Yair’s body, sweeping him in and out of life, in and out of the white pain in his head.

Yair looks up and he sees his own sweet cock held high above him in the sky by a bloody hand and then—