Armed in Her Fashion Read online

  Did she need to hold the distaff? Or was it enough to simply have it on her person? She closed her eyes and felt the weight of the distaff between her shoulder blades. She could call—who? How far were they from Ypres? Would anyone get here in time? Perhaps there were people closer who would come, but would they be strong enough and in enough numbers?

  Birds. She would try birds. Something dangerous, and she would hope that she could control them when they arrived, as she had controlled Baltazar.

  She would call them as she had called the fireflies. For an hour, longer, she stared into the pale sky and called all the hawks, all the vultures, all the eagles.

  The sky was empty.

  In the cold light of morning it was silly, of course it was silly. The fireflies had gone where they wanted and she had played a child’s game, thinking she could predict their appearance. And then Baltazar … well, all revenants were drawn to the people they loved, weren’t they? He had said he was called but perhaps he was confused, perhaps the dead lied. He was not Baltazar, could not be her Baltazar. But perhaps he was a shadow, a memory, and she could live as his wife even if he were no longer quite her husband. In the daytime she would grieve him and at night he would come to her, and stand in the doorway, and she would look upon his blood-stained face and love him.

  Could such a life be? If only she knew the future, she could begin to grieve the past.

  Something on the horizon was moving. Seven black shapes against the sky like insects against a church window.

  Her birds—could it be her birds? Had she called them?

  The wind rose like the sound of a million insects, then it roared like a whirlwind, and something enormous and dire rose up over the northwest horizon.

  A creature of the sky, a dragon with a blunt face like a mole and grey skin gleaming like steel. It filled heaven, and beneath it the people on the horizon were small. It soared without moving its vast wings. The roar grew louder as the dragon approached. There was a flash of fire from the ground to the south, and there were people running, running from the low shapes of buildings that had not been there a moment before.

  A city, a city of metal and glass.

  The people were dressed strangely and running along roads like ribbons of stone.

  Everything was screaming; the world was screaming.

  Beatrix screamed, too, and as she screamed she fell, until she was floating in the air and all the ages of the world were rushing past her.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Margriet had been shouting her daughter’s name long enough for her throat to get raw. She had started shouting the moment she saw Beatrix slipping in the saddle, and kept shouting while the chimera in front of Beatrix stopped her horse and tried to raise the girl, and kept shouting while the whole party stopped, and they unbound Beatrix’s hands and lowered her to the ground.

  Claude and Margriet were unbound now, but there was no point in trying to run and any way Margriet would not have left Beatrix there, staring, unaware, barely breathing.

  Another shout and a shake, a splash of water in the face, and at last, at last, Beatrix blinked and rolled over and vomited on the ground.

  Margriet knelt behind her and held her, wiped her chin with a linen clout from her pack.

  “I saw …” Beatrix whispered.

  “What?” Claude asked sharply.

  “A new city,” Beatrix said. “And a dragon, or some enormous beast.”

  “Some device of the Chatelaine’s,” said Margriet.

  “It was not here,” Beatrix said. “The world was changed. The people. There was fire.”

  “You chose a poor time to have a vision,” Claude grumbled.

  “She doesn’t have visions,” Margriet said.

  She heard the quaver in her own voice. Damn that Baltazar and his brown eyes! Damn him! This madness was the first sign of the Grief, surely. So many in Bruges had run into the streets, claiming to see things that no one else could. Within days, they wanted nothing more to do with the living world. Their revenants took them away, willing captives.

  It would not happen to Beatrix.

  “She has not slept or eaten properly,” Margriet said, more firmly. “It was a dream. Nothing to fuss about. What more do you expect, not even letting us stop to drink and eat and pass water?” She raised her voice at the end and looked at the horned man, who seemed to be the leader of this gang.

  “We’ve stopped now,” he said, looking down at her with a smirk. “Over there. Hildegard will take you.”

  Hildegard was the big chimera with the steel arms. She stood and watched while the three of them relieved themselves in the long grass. Beatrix wobbled a little on her feet but she insisted she could walk on her own; she also insisted on taking her distaff with her. She had always been prey to notions; this was not the first time Margriet had wished she had been able to set her daughter right, set her working smoothly again, the way the men of Bruges used to repair the workings of the great treadmill in the marketplace, where Margriet had once walked with all the other burghers’ children.

  Margriet’s breasts hung heavy and sore now. Two days, only. Two days since she had nursed little Jacob for the last time, nursed any baby for the last time.

  And so what? Would she miss it? It was a relief to have her body to herself, to not have be tied to the household. But yes, she would miss it, would miss the little insistent tug of life, the quiet, the blue eyes staring up at her, content. She would miss it, in the time that remained to her.

  Two days since her loutish husband had given her a death sentence.

  As they walked back to the fire, with Hildegard’s knife drawn at their back, a man with insect arms pulled up to his chin squealed, “I see the man-woman squats to piss after all!”

  A few chimeras laughed.

  “An aketon does not make a man!” shouted a Bird-man.

  Claude seemed to ignore them, as Monoceros gestured for the three of them to sit with their backs to a fallen log. A Bird-man—not the one who’d hooted—tied their three legs together, with Margriet in the middle, one ankle bound to Claude, one to Beatrix. Then Monoceros gave them each a bit of dark bread and sausage and a flask of weak ale.

  “However did you manage it, before?” Margriet asked.

  “Before? You mean—”

  “I mean fooling everyone. When you were a man-at-arms.”

  Claude stayed silent. It was awkward to turn and look at her, tied side by side like this, so Margriet ate more of her bread. If Claude wanted to hold her tongue, so be it. They were on their way to the Chatelaine now, and it seemed the hellkite had reason to want Claude. Perhaps she only wanted her for her army; the presence of Hildegard showed the hellkite was willing to take women into the ranks. She was trying to set herself up as the Countess of Flanders. So be it, then. One ruler was the same as another, so long as they left the people of Bruges to themselves, and meted out justice… .

  “I cast a spell on my comrades,” Claude said, breaking Margriet’s thoughts.

  “Hmm?” she said.

  “Ha!” Beatrix laughed weakly. “You should be careful making such jokes. You might be taken for a witch.”

  Margriet glanced around. Hildegard was standing, probably within earshot, but not if they spoke quietly. But what had they to keep secret, now?

  “If the Chatelaine has not been taken for a witch yet,” Claude said, “I think I’m safe.”

  “Only because that upstart king of France protects her,” said Margriet.

  Claude snorted. “There is still a pope in Avignon, and although he tuts, you will notice he put an interdict on Flanders, not on the Chatelaine.”

  “Hmph,” said Margriet. “A pope who is as close to the French king as my left breast to my right.”

  “People say the devil took her to be his bride,” Beatrix said. “People say that’s who she is.”


  “And so where is he, then?” Margriet jumped in. “Where is the devil in all this? Why does she command the army? Why does she cavort with King Philippe?”

  Claude frowned. “I don’t presume to know the devil’s business.”

  “I think he’s dead,” Margriet said.

  “But surely the devil can’t die,” Beatrix said.

  “Why not? If God can die, why not him, too?”

  Beatrix’s eyes went wide at her mother’s words.

  Claude laughed. “A blasphemer! I never would have thought it.”

  “It isn’t blasphemy,” Margriet snapped, and this time she did turn to look the girl in the face, awkward though it was to be so close. “God died, and rose again. How is that blasphemy? Tell me? Are you a scholar? Do you pretend to be a scholar, just as you pretend to be a man?”

  Claude’s face went red.

  “I am no scholar,” she admitted, “but I know a little more of the Chatelaine than you do. She is wily. She is secrets upon secrets upon secrets.”

  “I may not know much of the Chatelaine but I am a wife as she is, and I think she is a widow like me, too. Maybe she killed him herself; I can’t say I didn’t dream of it a few times with old Willem. So if she is a widow, who better to understand a widow’s rights?”

  Claude’s eyes went wide.

  “You mean to ask her for your husband’s goods?” he whispered, with a glance at Hildegard. The chimera kept her back to them.

  Yes. She did mean to ask. Let the woman show whether she meant to be a true Countess.

  “Mother,” Beatrix began.

  “Do you remember,” Mother said, keeping her voice low and light, “how the stories of Reynard the Fox began? How they all began?”

  Beatrix nodded. As a child she had asked for those stories every night, the ones about Reynard, the rogue, and how he bested all the other animals.

  “King Nobel had a court at Whitsuntide …” Beatrix whispered.

  “And Ysengrim the Wolf made a complaint against Reynard, saying he had his way with Ysengrim’s wife and pissed on his cubs. And all the other animals laid their complaints, and Cuwaert the hare brought the corpse of his dead daughter on a bier, to show what Reynard had done. And so the king summoned Reynard to court.”

  “Hmm,” said Claude. “It’s madness. But it’s as good as any other plan.”

  It was not mad at all. It was justice.

  “If the Chatelaine wants to act like the Queen of Flanders, let her show it,” Margriet said. “We will put our case before her and let her show how she intends to rule, with justice or without. After all she is a woman and a wife. She has an interest in the rights of wives.”

  The horned man walked over to them and nodded to Hildegard, who loosened their bonds, at knifepoint, and they were each put back onto a horse with their wrists tied around a chimera again. Beatrix still looked pale, but at least now she had some food in her, some ale.

  After they had been travelling on the road a little way, Margriet thought she heard something, footsteps out of rhythm with the horses, behind them. She glanced behind, thinking she’d see the two dead husbands walking behind, staring.

  But it was only the hounds, gamboling. Of course; it was daylight, and the revenants would be hiding somewhere, for now.

  Philippe looked well-rested, as he always did. His dark curls sat glossy on his velvet shoulders. Philippe of Valois, the green shoot on the moribund stump of the Capetian dynasty. Philippe the fortunate, who had made himself king, and knew it. It made him gloat.

  He was so young; just thirty-five. Older than she had been, of course, when she had been taken to Hell. Old enough to be dangerous.

  Beside him, a varlet held a pole with a hooded bird upon it. It was white as ermine, with a scatter of black spots all down its back and wings. The Chatelaine’s breath caught and she very nearly clapped her hands together like a girl.

  Instead she knelt, squatting low, her knee not quite touching the muddy ground outside the Hellmouth. She stood again quickly.

  “I have brought you a present,” said the king, “in gratitude for your service. And we shall have a mass of thanksgiving for the fall of Bruges. When you come to one of my estates, we will take her hunting. The hunting here is poor.”

  The Chatelaine inclined her head. Was this display of favour from Philippe a sign of more to come? Or a clue that he was preparing her for disappointment? He had said: give me Bruges, and you will be Countess of Flanders.

  “It is a gift fit for a queen,” she said. “Or perhaps, at least, a countess.”

  Beside her Chaerephon coughed, reminding her to be politic, to be patient. Philippe frowned. She had spoken wrongly, again. She had been so long under the Earth, so long among the people of Hell, who had nothing to hide.

  “Fit, I hope, for your famous menagerie,” said the king. “I would like to see it. I have heard—”

  “What?”

  “Rumours,” he said, spreading his arms wide.

  The Chatelaine did not want him to visit her menagerie. She wanted him to go away, so she could get acquainted with the marvellous bird. Poor creature.

  “You are kind, my king. My menagerie is much depleted of late.”

  This was the truth. One of the unicorns had gone into making Monoceros, and that was the beginning. That was the first of her animals to be sacrificed. She had whole rooms full of insects and others, high-ceilinged, full of birds; the Mantis-men and Moth-men and Bird-men had come from those. When an animal and a human went through the fires of Hell together they emerged bonded, mixed, in an alchemy not even Chaerephon could explain.

  Philippe smiled. “I know you have sacrificed, and that this is only one gyrfalcon. But she is a very pretty gyrfalcon, and she is a killer.”

  The bird was very pretty indeed, and when a powerful man asked himself inside your home it was not a request. That much she did not need to learn; that much she remembered.

  The unicorn had been a gift. Hundreds of years ago, when she still had the strength to fight her husband in the night, when she still remembered her birth name and the life from which she’d been ripped. It was too late, by then, for the unicorn her husband gave her to be any kind of test. It was a gift, freely given, but not freely taken, for the new, young Chatelaine of Hell had not been free.

  She had loved the unicorn, though, and her husband was pleased.

  She loved Monoceros, now, partly on the beast’s behalf, and partly because she had made him; he was her own.

  “What’s this?” the king asked as they entered the first red room, deep inside Hell.

  They were four; she told the king he could bring only one of his men because the animals were skittish and the quarters cramped, but she took Chaerephon, too. She wanted him by her, listening and watching the king. This was the room for large birds, the new home for the gyrfalcon.

  “I have never seen such a thing,” the king said, laughing.

  Philippe held his finger out but pulled it back when the dodo snapped its sharp beak and lifted its wings, angry. The Chatelaine shushed it. In the corner, the old lovebirds twittered. There were so many empty poles in this room. There had been another dodo, this one’s mate, but the damn things had never bred. The Chatelaine was a good breeder, of everything from snakes to bears. She made an effort with everything, if she could get a pair. Everything except the blemmyes and the wodewoses; it had seemed wrong to breed them and she had secretly been pleased when they died, after the long unhappy life given to them by the food of Hell. Although her husband had mocked her for it, she had not liked the idea of breeding people.

  Now she had cause to regret her squeamishness—the army she might have by now!—but she had been so much younger, then, and had not yet understood that people turn each other into weapons.

  “I am pleased with the reports from Bruges,” Philippe said, walking th
e room and peering at the birds. “For a moment there I feared the siege would be long and uncertain. They are stiff-necked, these Flemings. Are you sure you wish to rule them?”

  He had a way of pulling the conversation out from under her. She would have to watch that.

  “I have no doubt of my ability to manage them.”

  “That would certainly put you one up on Count Louis. I would be more than happy to find some replacement for him, some man I could trust to quiet Flanders down and let me get on with the English.”

  She stopped and looked at Chaerephon, who gave her a little rueful smirk, as if to say, we knew this would happen.

  “Some man?” she said, speaking lowly, carefully. “We agreed, my king, that if I could put down the rebellion, Flanders would be mine.”

  “And yours it will be. I am a man of my word. We need to find some way to do it properly, though. We’ll have to find you a new husband. I imagine it won’t be difficult to get an annulment for your …”

  He’d overstepped, and knew it, looking at her face. She kept her features perfectly still for a moment and let him flounder.

  “You are suggesting I find some scion of the ruling house, some cousin of Louis’, perhaps, and marry him. Some weak-willed man I can control.”

  “I have no doubt you could control any man, no matter how strong his will.”

  His black eyes flashed. Sometimes he looked womanish himself, with his soft curls brushing his narrow chin.

  She tried to stop her heart from beating. She wanted nothing more to do with marriage. She wanted her demesne to be hers by right, a right no one could challenge. She spoke slowly, looking just past Philippe to where Chaerephon stood.

  “I lost my memory of my parentage, as you know. But I feel sure that your clerks are clever enough to discover who I truly am, to discover that I am in fact the next heir to the county of Flanders, once Louis is … dealt with.”

  “Wouldn’t matter,” said the king, and turned to look at the rest of the room. “Can we move on?”