Armed in Her Fashion Page 6

  Claude waited until Jacquemine Ooste had gone up stairs to the bedchamber. This was his chance. If he could catch up with Willem de Vos before the revenant reached the Chatelaine, he could take it from him. It was his, as much as it was anybody’s. He had a right to it. He’d need to avoid the chimeras; they’d take him back to Her. Perhaps it was a blessing, after all, to be disguised as a woman. To travel as a woman among women, to draw no unwanted attention to himself, until the mace was his again and he was strong again.

  He rose, kicking his chair back, and darted around the screen.

  “Who are you and what do you want?” the wet nurse asked.

  “Take me with you,” he said. “I am a condotierre. I can be your guard.”

  The wet nurse opened her eyes wide. “What sort of jest is this?”

  “I am a man-at-arms, I tell you. A crossbowman. I know I don’t look like one now, but I am.”

  “And I’m the pope.”

  “Look,” Claude said, showing her his fingers on his weak right hand. “The callous from my crossbow string.”

  The girl Beatrix joined them, looking from her mother’s face to Claude’s and back again.

  “Hmpf. A callous from the loom or the spindle, more like,” said Margriet, examining his hand and then letting it drop. “You are some girl whom the good Vrouwe Ooste has taken in like a stray cat, and a liar, too. We eat stray cats now in Bruges, do not forget. Why on earth would you want to come with me, girl?”

  His arm burned.

  “I, too, have business with the Chatelaine,” he said softly. “You are hunting one of her revenants. You need someone who knows her ways.”

  “Indeed? How do I know you won’t betray me, call the chimeras on me?”

  “You can trust me.”

  “But not your arm. What use is a guard with a useless sword arm?”

  What good indeed? But even left-handed he could take care of himself. Claude circled around the screen back to the table, took his knife in his left hand, returned to Margriet and threw the knife hard at the wall. He hoped the mere surprise of it, and the sight of the blade quivering in the wall, would be enough to impress, that no one would wonder which part of the wall he had been aiming at.

  “I’ll take my chances,” Margriet said, after a pause.

  Claude burst out laughing despite himself.

  “A rotten throw,” he said. “I’ll admit I am not the man I was. But you are going out of the city, where the chimeras roam. I know their ways. I fought alongside them. I will lay down my life for yours if we are attacked, if only you will show me your way out of this city and give me one small thing in payment.”

  “Hmph. And what payment would you ask of me, besides the pleasure of my company, which is, of course, a blessing to all?”

  He tried to speak as nonchalantly as he could. He did not want to answer questions about the mace, about why he wanted it.

  “A share of the pelf if you recover it. I’ll take that funny weapon you mentioned, with the hollow handle. It has a heavy ball on one end, with points all around it? A strijdknots, I think you call it? What the French call a masse?”

  “You can have that. God knows I wouldn’t know what to do with the thing and would have to sell it anyway. The sword, too; it’s yours. I have no need for arms, God help me. But if we don’t recover it for some reason, you get nothing, as I’ll have nothing to give. And we can’t carry any food. I have no right to anything here, and I can only hope that we receive hospitality at the religious houses on the way. If you can live on very little, and help us find what we can, you can come. If Vrouwe Ooste allows it.”

  “She is a guest, not a prisoner,” said Jacquemine, standing in the doorway with a little bag in her hand.

  “And she truly was a man-at-arms?”

  “Dressed as one, anyway, the priest said.”

  They spoke as if Claude were not there, as if his knife were not still quivering in the wall. He strode to it and pulled it out, sheathed it on his belt.

  “Well,” said Margriet. “I don’t need a guard. But when I meet Willem, or the revenant made from his body, or whatever it is, well, I may need help getting the sack from him.”

  “If you are determined to do this foolish thing, Margriet,” said Jacquemine, “you will take this copper pot and little bag of oats with you, and some waterskins. I would give you more if I had more to give.”

  “That is more than I can take, Vrouwe Ooste,” Margriet said. “I will not take food out of the children’s mouths. I will only take what is my due.”

  “Then let me give you this in place of that last sou, then, you stubborn thing.”

  “A sou won’t be much good to you here in Bruges. Oats, though, you can eat.”

  “And you think you will find a market outside these walls?” Jacquemine Ooste scoffed. “You will need something to eat, at least until you find the first religious house, and God only knows how many are yet standing.”

  “Mother, take the oats and let’s be gone,” said the girl, poking her head around the corner. “And we thank you very much for your kindness, Vrouwe Ooste.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Beatrix was glad of the moon. It was just past full and dappled the streets with puddles of silver. Mother, though, insisted they keep to the shadows.

  The bundle tied to her back was light: a few smallclothes, her spindle, and a wooden bowl. Her water flask was slung over one shoulder and banged on her right hip; on the other, her knife weighted her belt. Her fur-lined hood, her wedding gift from Baltazar, opened into a short cape to cover her shoulders.

  Beatrix felt like a pilgrim, using her distaff as if it were a walking stick.

  Mother carried the small bag of oats and the little copper pot in her bundle.

  A revenant came walking toward them and Mother pulled Beatrix into an alley. They stood there, not quite hidden but of no interest to the revenant, who called “Alberic, Alberic, little Alberic.” He was a young man, about Baltazar’s age, and Beatrix could not help but stare at his skin, and wonder if it were the moonlight that made it so pallid.

  As it passed, Beatrix looked sidelong at the mercenary beside her. Claude was taller than either of them and did not seem afraid. She was dressed like any other woman, although shabbily, and her hair was plain, undressed and uncovered under her hood. If she was telling the truth about having been a man-at-arms, those slender hands had killed, what, a dozen men, a hundred, a thousand? Had they all been at the end of a crossbow, or had Claude ever fought with her hands, with a knife?

  It was the coldest part of night, and the air by the canal was damp. They walked on toward the south end of the city, and came at last to the open water called the Minnewater. It flashed like a battlefield in the moonlight. At the far side squatted the beguinage, silent and dark. Would any revenants dare knock on those doors? Would they have any names to call? Who loved those women, those poor sisters?

  Beatrix shivered.

  At the edge of the Minnewater, Mother stopped.

  “What are we doing here?” Claude whispered.

  “Hush. Wait. You’ll see, soon enough.”

  Mother whistled.

  Something happened to the surface of the water. A ripple with intention; a few bubbles; a line of spume and then a collection of dark twigs, slick with green.

  A face.

  Beatrix stumbled backwards.

  Two bulbous eyes blinked open and a mouth widened, from a hole rotted and misshapen like the bole of a tree, into a frog-like grimace. Then it lifted its head out of the water on a neck like a dragon’s.

  Beside her, the mercenary drew her knife.

  “God give you good evening, snake,” Mother said. She inclined her head a little, as she might when she met another merchant’s wife in the street.

  The creature spat, a long dirty spout that fountained around him. Was it a
him?

  “Margriet,” the serpent spoke, in a low rumble like the sound of the gears that drove the crane-treadmill near the market.

  Beatrix decided it was a him. A him who knew Mother. Beatrix looked at her mother as if seeing her for the first time. If Father had kept secrets from them all, then so had she.

  “I must go beyond the walls, as far as you will carry me,” Margriet said. “And these two with me.”

  “Hold a moment,” said Claude. “This is your way out? Asking passage from a water-monster?”

  The serpent moved his mouth around as if he were chewing mutton.

  “All three?” the serpent asked.

  Mother nodded, as if she were ordering bread.

  “The packs, too?”

  Mother put her hand on her hip. “I don’t have all night, you mouldy wiggler.”

  Beatrix gasped as her rudeness. “Mother.”

  The eyes rolled, the thin inner lids flashed down, and he emitted a grumble like the bubbling of a swamp. To the damp stone wall he swam and drew his long body along it, an expanse of slime and sticks and bits of matted string and floating wood and all the things that lived in a Bruges canal.

  “Hop on,” Margriet said, pointing.

  Claude took a step backward.

  “What is it?” Beatrix asked.

  “I’ve never been very good with boats,” admitted Claude with a quiet chuckle. “I was very nearly killed in a storm once. I can’t—I can’t swim.”

  “It will bear your weight, don’t fret, bag of bones. And don’t worry—we won’t be seen.”

  “And can you promise I won’t be eaten?” Claude whispered, with a grin for Beatrix.

  “I’ll go first, then,” said Margriet. “Mother of God, what the hell kind of fighter must you have been? No wonder you were found out.”

  Mother slung her bag out over the water and let it drop, none too gently, onto the Nix’s back. The waterworm shuddered, and a film of darkness slimed up and over to cover it, until Beatrix could hardly see the bag at all.

  “Now me,” Mother said.

  She stepped on and knelt, steadying herself with her hands. She, too, all but disappeared. There was some sort of enchantment about the watersnake. How long had it lived in these waters, keeping itself unseen? Did it have fellows, or family, in these green depths?

  Beatrix put her hand out toward the creature.

  “May I?” she asked.

  It bowed its head, and she touched its cold skin with her fingertips.

  “What is your name?” she asked.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, Beatrix,” her mother called. It was strange, hearing Mother’s voice but not being able to see her, as though Margriet de Vos had finally been reduced to just her tongue.

  “I am a Nix, so you may call me that,” said the Nix.

  “And you don’t mind bearing me?”

  “He is bound to,” said Margriet. “I beat him in a game, when I was a child. I won the use of him. Hop on, Bea.”

  Mother had kept this secret, all these years. To think she could keep silent about anything!

  The darkness that came over Beatrix as she crawled onto the creature’s back was cool and damp. Not quite wet; more like the million tiny sparks of mist in the air when God couldn’t decide whether or not to make it rain.

  It smelled, though, much less fresh than rain.

  Beatrix knelt on the Nix’s back and held her distaff straight in the air at her side like a lance.

  Claude stepped awkwardly onto the far side of his body, as if she thought the Nix were a boat that might tip, and her foot slid off and she nearly went into the water. Beatrix grabbed her right arm to help her steady herself but Claude cried out in pain.

  “I’m sorry,” Beatrix said, snatching her hand back.

  “No, I thank you,” Claude said, with a weary smile.

  “Hush, both of you,” said Mother.

  Mother had bested the Nix in a game? Mother never did play games of any kind, not that Beatrix could remember. Beatrix tried to imagine her mother as child, lying on the Nix’s back, perhaps wrapping her arms around it, dragging her fingers in the water. That’s what Beatrix would do, if she were here alone. But Mother sat as tall as a lady on a palfrey, and anyway she couldn’t have spread out on the Nix’s back with Claude and Beatrix riding pillion.

  As they passed silently down the Minnewater, Beatrix looked back at the city of beggars and merchants, the city sleeping behind houses shuttered and houses marked. It would be morning soon. In the old days there would be mongers in the streets by this hour, and people shouting and hens squawking. But the hens had all been eaten and the mongers had nothing to sell, and no reason to risk coming out of doors before the sun chased all the revenants back to wherever they slept during daylight.

  They floated under the shadow of the walls, holding their breath for fear of making a sound and alerting the women and children who stood guard there, who might demand to be taken, too, or might mistake them for traitors or spies. They floated past the first moats, and out of Bruges into the great country of Flanders. And no one saw them.

  “Do you grant wishes, Herr Nix?” Beatrix asked.

  “He doesn’t,” Margriet said.

  “Ha!” the Nix barked. “How do you know?”

  “I asked you years, ago, didn’t I? You pompous old liar. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not just to impress the girls.”

  “You put a rope around my neck the day we met. Is it any wonder I didn’t grant your wishes, you nasty shrew?”

  “Bah. You would have done whatever I asked and you know it. You are becoming a dotard as well as a liar.”

  “Hmph,” said the Nix, and plunged its head into the water. A plume of water went up like a fountain; surely anyone watching would see that, even if they couldn’t see the Nix or his passengers.

  “It’s all right,” said Beatrix. “There’s no need to argue, Mother. It is quite enough to ask Herr Nix to take us out of the city, without demanding that he grant wishes as well. It was rude of me to ask.”

  “What sort of wish would you ask for, if I did grant them?” the creature rumbled.

  Beatrix wondered. She wanted only one thing, and that was Baltazar. Oh how she longed for just one glimpse of him. She opened her mouth as if she could call him back to her, to her arms, to her lips, to her thighs. Failing that, to call all the creatures of the night to her now so she could ask them: Have you seen him? Have you word of my love? Or at least to be able to know a little of the future, to know whether he would come back to her safe, so she could stop her heart from hoping.

  Something splashed beside her.

  “My distaff!” Beatrix cried, too loud.

  She had let it drop from her hand.

  “Hush,” both her mother and Claude said.

  The Nix ducked its head into the water and lifted it out again. Held in its bared teeth was the distaff. Beatrix gently pulled it out.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “There,” the Nix said. “I do grant some wishes, you see. Because you, unlike some people, are kind.”

  “By all the saints,” groaned Margriet. “I’d almost rather swim.”

  “I could grant that wish as well,” the Nix grunted.

  But he carried them a little further to where the water went as black as pitch and they were out of sight of the city walls, and then they were out of Bruges, and into the Chatelaine’s territory. The land opened darkly before them.

  The Chatelaine invited the King of France to a feast in Hell. He brought his own food: boars, swans, even a blackbird pie, which erupted in birds when it was cut. The birds fluttered up and into the high corridors, where they woke the bats to screeching and people looked up. Black feathers floated down over the feast and a bird fell with a thud.

  The Chatelaine, along
with her chimeras, ate what they always ate: the blood of the beast. It rushed from the golden spigots along the walls of the Great Hall and splashed into bowls and cups.

  A Mantis-man carried a platter of bloodseeds to her. They were piled high, glittering like red gems in the lamplight. She gestured to Philippe, and smiled when the king cringed at the offered food.

  “It feels something like roe on the mouth,” she said. “And something like pomegranate. Thicker, though. Rougher. We mix the beast’s blood with the beast’s spittle and cook the drops in the furnaces.”

  “Your furnaces are the greatest marvel in the world, madame.”

  The Chatelaine grasped the handle of one of the long silver spoons and ladled the bloodseeds into her bowl. The body of the Beast; the food of Hell. She had been eating it so long, she remembered no other.

  She took a few with her fingers and ate. It was a sweeter, milder taste than the thick, fresh blood that ran from the spigots, that must run even now into her husband’s mouth from whatever scratches and scrapes he had made in the walls of his oubliette.

  The greasy meat in front of King Philippe hardly looked like food; it smelled like death, not life. But let him celebrate in his way and she would celebrate in hers.

  This was her victory feast, although it was mostly for show, because Bruges had not yet fallen. She had invited the king to remind him: she had done what he required. He had asked her to defeat the Flemish rebels and she had. Her army of chimeras had won the day at Cassel. She had spent nearly her whole army on it, so many of her precious creations killed. She had earned her reward. He must make her Countess of Flanders; perhaps even tonight.

  And perhaps Bruges was falling even now, if her gonner-chimeras had done their work.

  Chaerephon sat to her left. He never ate now. She could remember him eating, years and years before, when her husband was still master of Hell. Chaerephon had always been thin but now he looked like a skeleton wearing skin. She suspected he was becoming a revenant of a kind, that he and the Beast had come to some kind of arrangement. But she had not asked him; she could not think how to phrase the question.