Armed in Her Fashion Page 3

  “Did he now?”

  Elisabeth frowned at her. Would she ask again, how Margriet came to be outside the city walls during a siege? No, she would not. Margriet recognized that expression. It said: I am not asking. It was an expression they had all learned, all the residents of this cursed city who had been children during the bloody so-called Matins of Bruges in 1302. As Elisabeth and Margriet had both been.

  When they were children, Elisabeth used to walk ahead of Margriet on the great treadmill that powered the crane in the market square, that loaded and unloaded the goods on the canal boats. The people of Bruges turned their children into machines and the city prospered.

  And then when the French attacked, in 1302, they turned their children into weapons. Up on the rooftops, bricks in hand.

  Margriet had sometimes wondered, in the intervening years, whether she would have to pay with one dead child for every Frenchman she had killed in her own childhood. Trouble was, she did not know how many she had killed, how many had died from the rocks and bricks she threw from the rooftop with her family. One had died, at least. She knew about one.

  Perhaps, she had thought on more than one silent night, cradling a stillborn baby in her arms, God was taking his due. Perhaps God had not been paying attention the night that Beatrix was born, alive.

  Like a market-woman distracted by one thief while the other helps himself to the contents of her cart, God had let her get away with her first child, her only child now.

  Margriet must get to her Beatrix, now, to tell her that the chimeras were trying to bring down the walls. They had not succeeded today. Tomorrow, they might.

  Elisabeth Joossens, who had been up on those rooftops, too, was not going to ask any citizen of Bruges to account for their actions. This was their code, their silent password.

  “Hie to your house, shrew, and be grateful I saved your life,” pimply Pieter hissed, too young to know the code, emboldened by his new position, now that all the men had gone from Bruges. “Do you not see the sun is nearly down?”

  It was. The streets were grey and empty. The revenants were coming, and soon enough Pieter would be fending them off. Within the city, Jacquemine Ooste would be worried, fretting over little Jacob. But first Margriet must see to Beatrix, tell her to prepare to leave the city. They must go. Tomorrow, they must go. They must take refuge where they could—some religious house, if any were left unburnt.

  Damn the chimeras.

  Margriet darted up the wooden steps to the top of the city wall, hearing Pieter yelling behind her. She leaned over the wall and shouted at the carnage below.

  “Go to the devil, all of you, and save yourselves the shame of leaving with your tails between your legs!”

  Margriet stumbled down the stairs again, back to where Elisabeth Joosens was still standing guard inside the gate. She whispered, “They will take down the walls, Elisabeth One way or another. It’s time to prepare.”

  Elisabeth nodded, gripped her broomstick, as if that would help.

  Margriet walked into her city crookedly, bent, holding her ribs with her right hand and the bunched-up corner of her apron full of thistles with her left. The city was silent: no horseshoes ringing on the cobbles, for the horses had all been eaten. No carts wheeled over the stones. No children played and the canals were empty save a few small boats tied up to posts.

  Outside the besieged city were the chimeras, but the greater danger to the people of Bruges was within.

  All the houses were shuttered, with evening coming on; the only way to tell which walls hid healthy people and which hid those touched by the revenant Plague were the marks scratched into the doors: a rectangle, wider than it was tall, with rounded corners. The Hellmouth.

  And sometimes, on the richer houses, by the words Domine Miserere Nobis. Or the letter H, for Helpest.

  The Helpest, the revenant Plague, meant death. Painful, hideous, but mercifully quick, and mere bodily death was not the worst weapon the revenants carried.

  Far, far worse was the Grief, which drove out reason and weakened the will. Every night, revenants flew over the skies of Bruges, and called the names of the living, over and over. Every night, some of the living went mad. They saw strange sights, and tore their hair and flesh, and would not eat or drink.

  And, then, one of two things would happen:

  The Grief-stricken would go pale and thin until they, too, became revenants, and walked out of their houses to take the hands of their beloveds, and walk away, over the walls, though the living (sometimes) tried to hold them back.

  Or the newly Grief-stricken opened their doors and let the revenants in, willingly. Once a revenant entered a house, everyone who lived there would be dead of the Plague within days.

  Buried death or walking death: those were the only outcomes, once the revenants’ call opened the heart of a living person.

  But Margriet did not fear the dead. Willem might well be dead, that she knew. Three weeks since the Battle of Cassel, and no sign of her husband. He might well have been among the prisoners fed to the Hellbeast, in which case he would be a revenant. What of it? If she heard him call, she would be glad, for she would know she was truly a widow. Her husband could call her name all he liked, and she would only smile, knowing he was dead. There was no crack in her heart by which the Grief could enter.

  The Chatelaine paced the rolling floor of her private chamber, swinging the mace that fit over her hand like a gauntlet, that bit into her flesh and seemed now to grow out of her arm, at her side.

  Her husband’s house had many rooms and most of them were red. Great halls that glistened red, deep wormholes that glowed red, wiggling passages that pulsed red. The Chatelaine was fluent in all its hues and meanings.

  For more centuries that she could count, she had worn the nine hundred keys of Hell on an iron ring on her belt. They dragged behind her, a long and heavy chain. Her husband had given her the keeping of those keys, given her the weight of them to bear because it made him laugh to see it. That was his first and final error.

  The first thing she did, when she finally managed to imprison him in Hell’s deepest oubliette, was to change the locks.

  She would have liked to destroy the keys. What is an oubliette with a key? Not an oubliette at all. Keys are for remembering.

  But her husband had taught her that the beast called Hell could not be destroyed; not any part of it could be destroyed. Its keys and its locks were as much a part of its great body as its teeth and its guts.

  So she went to the most skilled of her husband’s torturers, who used the fires of Hell to mar his victims in the most beautiful ways.

  Gobhan Og, a wrinkled turnip of a man who had been a smith once, confirmed that the keys were indestructible, nodding sadly.

  “They can change, as all flesh changes. The flesh of Hell may be iron or brimstone or pus or chitin, but no matter what it looks like, it is still flesh, and it may be altered in Hell’s furnaces. Altering is not destroying.”

  “Then you will alter them, and if you please me, you will be my chief artificer. My weapon-master. I will have no more torturers.”

  The Hellbeast required feeding: it must drain the life from revenants, from people held in the moment between death and life for long years. But the Chatelaine would take those people from the wounded who were already dying. She would be a kinder ruler of Hell than her husband had been.

  She must keep a key for her husband’s oubliette but she was strong enough to remember. She would remember that she had power over her husband now, that this was a power she had made herself.

  “Take all of my keys,” she said to Gobhan Og, throwing one end of the chain of keys onto his great anvil. “Make them all into a single weapon that I may wear. What sort of a weapon would work like a key?”

  Gobhan Og thought. He had been out in the world, getting food for the Beast. He had seen something of the wor
ld’s weapons.

  “A flanged mace, perhaps, if we remade all the locks to fit its flanges.”

  “Excellent.”

  “In place of your lovely hand, my mistress?” he looked at her eagerly.

  She looked at her hand, the dark brown flesh still so young-looking, the nails still so pink.

  “I think not,” she said. “Let me wear it like a gauntlet.”

  She had borne the keys already for more than a lifetime. If she must bear them forever; let her wield them as well.

  The mace fit over her hand perfectly and worked its edge into the flesh of her forearm. It was heavier than it looked, forged of all the many keys of her husband’s many rooms.

  She remembered enough about the surface to know that it was safest to arrive with entitlements, with power. Not as some wandering nameless girl, some exile with no land and no memory. No. She would come back to the surface, but with Hell at her back.

  She had set the torturers to new work, with an edict that they were to make, not mar. The fires of Hell could fuse anything without killing it, because Hell was a creature in which Life and Death did not rule. Those furnaces could join metal and flesh, and glass and fur, and any other things that the artificers’ imagination could compass. She would make an army of chimeras, offering the changes to anyone willing. And there were many willing.

  They had started with a French brigand. How miserable he had been when he wandered into what he thought—he swore he thought—was a mere cave. How he had loathed himself for the sins of his past. He had asked her if he could ever be made pure. And so she led him to the furnace, where her beloved unicorn waited. In they went together, into the fire, unicorn and man. That was her first great sacrifice, her first great gift.

  She had not been certain it would work. But it did, and he was beautiful. A body like a man’s, but larger, bronzed and muscled, and with the great horn in the middle of his forehead.

  She asked Chaerephon to name him and he called him Monoceros.

  Monoceros taught the Chatelaine his French language. He became her marshal as his reward. The first of her chimeras.

  She said the word chimeras lovingly, the way one gives a kitten the name of an ogre, to show how fragile it is.

  The chimeras chose their own gifts, just as the victims had once chosen their own punishments; will was the bellows that fed the fires of Hell.

  But there were risks. Soon after they came to the French Court, they met a young noblewoman marred by smallpox, unmarriageable, a reluctant nun. She admired Monoceros and his skin like bronze, asked to be given a skin smooth as Italian glass. The Chatelaine agreed, thinking of the armour she could make.

  Gobhan Og vitrified the noblewoman clear through; he let his furnace get too hot.

  The Chatelaine demoted him in a fury. No longer Head Artificer, he would labour with a shovel, cleaning the unmentionable mess made by the forges. The saltpeter from the flying creatures that were Hell’s parasites. The brimstone that collected in its cloaca.

  And Gobhan Og had begun to plot against her.

  The Chatelaine stopped pacing. She opened her eyes and swung her mace, remembering how pleasantly it had bit into Gobhan Og’s skull, how it had spilled his treasonous brain all over the floor of his little chamber, how the beast had absorbed it into its shining red flesh.

  The Mantis-man who guarded her door opened it and coughed in the strange way of his kind, and then Monoceros stood there. Her beautiful horned man, the first of her servants. The only one she could trust.

  “What news?” she asked him.

  “The hounds think perhaps the mercenary Claude Jouvenal might have gone to Bruges. I gave them the scent off the aketon the mercenary once wore, and they followed a trail to the moat of Bruges. But of course they could go no further, as the town’s walls still stand, for now.”

  Her beautiful hounds, made out of a dozen men and women with broken backs or broken necks, whose bodies were frozen and who had been left to rot to death in their bedsores. She put their heads on the hounds, and set them off as a pack. The double-headed hounds had the loyalty of dogs, and the anger of nearly-dead humans.

  Monoceros stood, waiting.

  She paced. She must have the forged mace back—not just a mace but a key, a key to every lock within the beast and to its very bridle. With the forgery, the mercenary girl could return, could open any door she liked, could open the doors to Hell’s oubliettes, could free any prisoner there.

  And the French king was growing impatient. Demanding the surrender of Bruges, but the Chatelaine had lost more than half her forces at Cassel. If she spent any more in attacking a walled city, she would be weakened indeed.

  “Let us see if the gonner-chimeras can frighten Bruges into surrender,” she said. “If all goes well, they will have those gates open by sundown.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A woman was picking through a midden between two houses, a rolling pin in one hand. She looked up when Margriet passed. They peered at each other like suspicious crones, although Margriet was still young enough to bear children and this woman looked not much older than she was.

  The fingers around the rolling pin were black. She kept clutching and re-clutching it, as if keeping hold of her weapon by sheer force of will. Already taken by the first stages of the Plague, but her eyes were sharp. It had not been she who let the revenants in to her house.

  Soon, her skin would fall away in clumps, leaving bloody welts on her back and chest. The Plague killed from the outside in: first the numb, dead skin, then the attacks of heart and lungs and brain. Her breathing was already laboured, although that might be ordinary fear or want.

  Neither of them said a word.

  Margriet was not afraid of the woman. The disease did not seem to pass from the living to the living. It came only from the revenants who had started to return to Bruges a few days after the battle of Cassel, men Margriet had known from children. They were dead now: wounded, bleeding, rotting. They swam the moat, uncaring how many hastily made arrows and javelins stuck in their backs. They climbed the city walls after sundown with bare hands and feet. They walked the streets until dawn. They called out names.

  Margriet jumped as church bells clanged from all directions, from whatever parts of the city still had a priest or a child to pull a rope.

  She turned away from the woman with the rolling pin and the rotting flesh and hurried down an empty street, cleaner than any street of Bruges had ever been in Margriet’s life.

  She had a little time between the bells and the revenants.

  Her daughter would not want to leave Bruges. Beatrix’s husband, like Margriet’s, had not come back from the Battle of Cassel. Beatrix was living now with Margriet’s father and sister, in the house where Margriet grew up.

  Nobody lived now in the rooms Willem and Margriet had shared over Willem’s shop, where the tables stood empty, waiting for their master’s return. Two years ago, after Margriet had lost yet another baby, she had moved in to the Ooste house to nurse little Jacob and help Jacquemine care for her toddler, Agatha. It was a way to make some money. She had not regretted living apart from Willem. There would be no more dead babies for her. She had Beatrix, her first child, her only child. Beatrix was her blessing and Margriet was finally too tired to ask God for more.

  As for Willem, he had been a poor husband and a worse merchant. Margriet would be able to sell the house, if he was dead.

  If she could return to Bruges, that is. If the houses still stood when she did.

  She turned the corner into Casteelstrate and nearly barreled into a man stinking of wine.

  “The bells are ringing,” he said, loudly, to be heard over the clanging.

  She had not smelled a drunken man for some time. It was hard to find enough wine to get soused in a city that had been besieged for a month. One of the churches must still have had something to be looted.<
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  “I am on my way indoors.” She stepped to one side to get past him.

  He let her pass but turned and dogged her steps.

  “It’s people like you who let the revenants in,” he puffed. “You think it’s hard to block your ears against their calls when you’re safely in your chamber? It is impossible when you see them face to face. You must not be in the street.”

  Just her luck to run into a man in this city of women. The only men of age left in Bruges now were this sort: stooges or cowards. This bullying fool fancied himself some kind of protector, in the absence of better men. Ha. Margriet had helped protect this city from the French when she was a child, before this idiot was even born. She had protected it with the rocks and bricks that came to hand, sitting on the cold rooftops before the dawn.

  “Get out of my way.” She pushed him aside.

  “Every person in the street when the revenants come will turn traitor. I’ve seen it happen.”

  “Then I suppose you must have been in the street yourself.”

  “I go into the streets to protect the weak, you stubborn woman.”

  “I don’t need the protection of a drunkard. You stink like a friar. Now go, before I make you go.”

  “Ha! Make me go how, I’d like to know.”

  She had nearly reached the doorway of Willem’s empty shop. Her father’s home was not much farther, but she wanted to be rid of this blackguard.

  She stood close to the lock and fumbled for one of the keys she still wore on the chain around her neck, hiding it with her body, as if the key were something secret. She fit it into the lock.

  “This is where you’re going? No, too close to the street. Look at these flimsy shutters. You’ll stand no chance against them, in here alone.”

  He crowded against her. He wanted to come in.

  “I have no need of you. Go.”