Armed in Her Fashion Page 9

  He was all too happy to carry the canister of black powder to the gate and light the match, shielding it with his massive nude back from the arrows and boiling water from above. Like Monoceros’s own, Adolfo’s skin was thick, like golden leather. He might have made it back alive, although maimed, if he had not chosen to shield the canister until its final moment, to keep the match alight.

  For some people courage came like wrinkles; for some courage came like scars, all of a sudden.

  They lost a dozen more chimeras at the gate in the thunderous fire, and many more as the women of Bruges threw rocks and knives and whatever they could from the walls and rooftops. A nasty brood, but they were overpowered now.

  And nowhere, nowhere had he sign any sign of the mercenary, Claude Jouvenal. He had checked every human of even roughly the right size and shape for marks on the right forearm, and found nothing.

  Monoceros was tired. He had the speed and strength of the unicorn within him; he could run from near-Ypres to Bruges within a night, and command a bloody assault in the morning. He had done that, because he always did as he was asked. Yet he was tired.

  He lifted his head, canal water dripping from his horn, and there were two Mantis-men there, waiting for him with their long arms folded up before them, their bug eyes bent down toward him. Their patience galled him.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “We have secured the old castle and the cloth hall. We had to set a fire in the base of the belfry in the market square, but some women who were in the top leaped out, and we believe it’s clear now.”

  He nodded. “No more resistance, then?”

  They shook their wedge-like heads. They were staring at him with a question in their eyes: And what have you been up to, Monoceros, while we have been securing the city?

  He had been searching, searching every house for the mercenary. But of course no one must know the reason for Claude’s importance to the Chatelaine. He was pleased not to give the Mantis-men the satisfaction of an answer to the question they would not ask him.

  He stood and leaned his head to one side then the other, hearing the crack in his neck muscles.

  “Then this city is now the Chatelaine’s, and anyone in it is under her protection. Those without homes can stay in the castle or the cloth hall for now. The beguinage, too, I suppose, if we can spare enough chimeras to guard them. I don’t want any crowds gathering where there are no guards.”

  The second Mantis-man made some sort of chitinous gesture, its upper body clicking and shuffling in place.

  “The main thing is the lack of food.”

  Monoceros nodded, always a satisfyingly deliberate motion now that the horn weighted his head.

  “Tell the people we’ll send word north to the coast that Bruges is open to trade again. Tell them there will be food soon.”

  He was grateful when the Mantis-men strode off on their human legs. He had his own work to do.

  Bruges had been the one place in Flanders where he had not yet searched for Claude, the mercenary crossbowman who somehow figured out what the Chatelaine’s mace was for, who forged a copy of the mace and used it to escape the Hellbeast.

  They had had a few beginnings of conversations, Monoceros and Claude, when the mercenary had been a guest of Hell.

  Monoceros walked through the street, walking around the bodies and the wreckage, until he came to a small stone church tucked in between two smashed wooden houses. He tried to remember when he had last been to Mass. Before the battle the month before, in the church in Cassel, with the Chatelaine, and not since.

  There would be no Mass in Bruges today. But the chimeras were not as prone to looting as other fighters; so far, few of them had chosen to make their homes outside of Hell, and within Hell they had little use for gold monstrances or silver chalices. So the church might be as intact inside as it was outside.

  He pushed the wooden door open.

  People everywhere: women, children, more men than he had expected. They looked up at him with narrow, tired eyes. They filled the nave, sitting or lying in clumps.

  A small, pale man in a brown cloak came shuffling toward him. The priest, by his tonsure.

  The priest held his hands wide.

  “No one here has any weapons,” he said. “They gave them all in at the castle, as they were told. Not so much as a knife to cut meat, if we had any.”

  “I have come to see if the people here may be made more comfortable,” Monoceros said.

  The priest started. “They would be more comfortable if they were not starving.”

  “That will have to wait a day or two, but hunger is what a city ought to expect when it closes its gates to the world, don’t you think?”

  Monoceros walked, picking a pathway through the clumps of people. The priest trotted along behind him. They paused at a boy with a stump of an arm, wrapped in bloody cloth.

  “Any wounded may ask the Chatelaine for new arms, new legs, whatever they desire,” Monoceros said. “If they are willing to pledge their loyalty to her, a new life awaits them.”

  The boy and his mother stared at him, said nothing.

  He kept walking, his gaze hunting for the woman. Up and down the nave, and no sign of her.

  “Tell me,” he muttered, grabbing the priest by his cloak to draw him in close, “Have you seen a woman dressed as a man? With a weapon on her arm, like a chimera, or perhaps a strange scar on one arm?”

  The priest looked like a rabbit. “She is not here anymore.”

  At last.

  These were the moments when Monoceros was most grateful for the horn. It concentrated his thoughts in a knot of mild pain between his brows. It helped him think. It helped him see this priest for what he was: a small man, a frightened man, but an honest one.

  “Tell me.”

  The priest shook his head. “There was a girl with a scar on her arm who had been dressed as a man-at-arms. I took her to the Ooste house, but she left with some other women, yesterday.”

  “Left? While the city was besieged? How?”

  The priest shrugged. “Margriet de Vos and her daughter found some way out. Would you like to speak with Jacquemine Ooste? She saw them last.”

  Monoceros nodded, and followed the priest to a dark-skinned woman crouching with two children in a dark corner.

  Yesterday, the priest said. They could not have got far. If Monoceros could take his swiftest chimeras, and call the hounds, they would capture the girl. The Chatelaine would be so pleased. So long as that girl was free, so long as the counterfeit mace that opened all the doors in Hell was out in the world, the Chatelaine would never be easy in her mind.

  “Vrouwe Ooste, you said the soldier girl left Bruges before the assault?”

  The woman stared at the priest, and then at Monoceros.

  “You are looking for her?” she asked, her voice rough.

  “I wish her no harm. But yes, I am looking for her. I understand that she left with Margriet de Vos and her daughter.”

  “Oh, I believe that you wish her no harm, the same sort of no harm you have done to our city, to all its people. My house, burned to the ground, and you mean me no harm. Yes, I believe that.”

  Monoceros knelt beside her. The little boy, barely more than an infant, squalled. He put out his finger and the boy grabbed it, and quieted.

  “I can offer you safe passage as far as Ypres,” he said. “I have other business or I would take you myself. But I have a broad-backed friend who can carry you.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “You are free to stay here with your children and wait for food to come to the city, if you prefer. Wait for your turn, when it comes.”

  “And all I must do is tell you what I know about that woman? What is she to you?”

  “A friend,” said Monoceros. It did not have the feel of a lie. Not entirely a l
ie.

  Jacquemine Ooste sniffed.

  “Show me your friend and his broad back and I shall tell you what I know about Claude Jouvenal.”

  Beatrix dreamed of strange hounds with two heads: each had one dog head and one human.

  The hounds were nearly home, nearly home to Hell, when one of them stopped, the muscles in its thick chest quivering. It raised one of its heads—its dog head, jowled and brindled—and sniffed the air.

  Its other head, with its pallid human face, shushed the other hounds, as if they needed shushing. The faces sometimes acted out of human instinct, still.

  “This is not our quarry,” said the one with the brindled muzzle on one head and the jowls on the other. Beatrix felt herself speaking out of that mouth, felt the doggish weight of that heavy body, those strong legs.

  “All quarry is ours,” said the one with the black around its nose and the scar on its forehead, and then Beatrix was in that dog, full of rage and gall.

  “We are hunting the girl,” growled the brindled one.

  “I smell charcoal as well,” said another, and Beatrix felt it, a loyal dog, a dog who only wanted to be happy. “If we find charcoal we will please the mistress. She needs it for her gonners. She will scratch our ears and give us the best meat from her table and call us her good soldiers.”

  “It’s coming from this way,” said another hound’s human face, and they all went racing over wooded hills toward a little millrace that ran ashy and sluggish.

  They snuffled along its edge until it veered to the south. They whined with pleasure. They smelled charcoal, yes, but also chickens. Beatrix smelled the chicken meat out of many noses, and in some part of her sleeping mind she thought: this is the chicken on the spit, this is what I ate, giving me strange dreams. Stolen meat, accursed.

  The pack of dogs with Beatrix’s mind in them came to a road, and along the side of it, the urine of six different humans. A pile of fresh horse droppings, all grass and flies, in the middle of the road.

  The pack yipped.

  They ran along the road swift and nearly silent, until they came to a place where the scent of horse and human shifted into a nearby field. They found the chickens, and fought and killed a mangy grey dog, revelling in the death. But Brindled would not let them eat before they found the humans, in case they had an archer among them. Beatrix, inside the mind of the brindled dog, felt the rightness of the argument, sharp as a bone.

  They caught the humans in their house, a great square thing with a water wheel. A family of humans, a man and several children, all quivering.

  “Where is your charcoal?” asked Brindled out of his human mouth, a mouth Beatrix felt working, the tongue thick and wet.

  “In the bloomeries,” said the man. “Outside. And in the pit beside them. You may take all you find.”

  “And where are your weapons?”

  “This is a forge-mill,” said the man. “We have no weapons.”

  “This is a place of metal. I smell it everywhere. I smell things that may be made into weapons. You lie.”

  “Anything may be made into a weapon,” said the man.

  They ripped out the human’s throats and dragged their bodies into the stable and left them, because the chickens made better eating. Beatrix revelled in the killings and felt herself, her human self, writhing and weeping. The small grey nag they left alive, staring balefully at the bodies of its humans. Then they knocked a candle into the stable and watched until they were sure it had caught fire.

  After that the pack was thirsty so they drank out of the troughs by the stable, slaking both kinds of mouth, before they ran on again toward the setting sun, back to Hell.

  Margriet took a sip of her water and collected a stray drop from her chin. She could see the drop on her fingertip but couldn’t feel it: not cold, not wet, not anything.

  So it was beginning. The Plague. How long did she have? Days, yes. Weeks, perhaps, if she were lucky. Long enough to get her due from that greedy grubbing bastard and see Beatrix off safe somewhere with money in her purse and food in her belly. On a ship to England, where the new young king had reason to be kind to Flemings.

  She glanced at Beatrix, sleeping on the cold dirt, clutching her distaff. Poor child. But she was safer here, with Margriet, than in Bruges where any day now the revenant that had been Baltazar would surely have found her.

  Perhaps she ought to speak to her more gently about her father, offer to say a prayer for the lying knave. But how to begin?

  Claude sat cross-legged on the ground, licked her fingers and began to whittle a stick with her knife.

  Margriet stripped off her kirtle. The late September sunlight, however bright, was not enough to warm her but she must take care of her bindings before they walked any farther. Her chemise was dotted with two spots of milk; she smelled sour. And her breasts were heavy and sore. Who would have thought it, that these old dugs would miss little Jacob Ooste tugging at them, after all this time? She sighed and pulled off her chemise and stood in her braies and binding. She started to re-wind the binding tighter to keep them more comfortable and stop the milk from leaking.

  Another day or two and the milk would be gone, her breasts dry, and her body useless. What did it matter, now that she was nearly a corpse?

  She glanced over at Claude and saw the girl looking at her, frowning.

  “Something I can do for you?” Margriet asked gruffly.

  Claude coloured, then laughed.

  “I’m sorry, Vrouwe de Vos. I didn’t mean to stare. I didn’t—this will sound ridiculous, but I didn’t realize women bound their breasts. I mean, I did, but I—well, I am different, aren’t I?”

  Margriet almost felt pity for the girl. Living among men so long, keeping her secrets.

  “When they’re as big as mine, you bind them, or use linen bags and straps. I’m binding them now to stop the milk. It hurts like the devil. I had thought my milk nearly gone, but a day without little Jacob pulling at them and they’re full. So if I am not my usual pleasant self, that’s the reason.”

  Claude grinned.

  “I never had very much to bind,” Claude said. “But I admit I feel strange with nothing but a chemise now. Christ on the cross, I miss my own clothes.”

  “You never learned how women keep their breasts from bobbling about, but you certainly learned to swear.”

  Claude grinned and held up two little bits of wood. “And I learned how to make dice out of just about anything.”

  Beatrix shouted, “No! Stop!”

  Her face was contorted. A bad dream.

  Margriet pulled her kirtle over her head hastily and knelt beside her daughter. She shook Beatrix awake, shook the strange expressions of horror and cruelty off her beautiful face. Shook her screams into whimpers. Beatrix’s wimple fell away and Margriet brushed the golden hair, matted with sweat, off her daughter’s brow. Her daughter, her beautiful child, the one thing left to her.

  “What is wrong with you, child?” she asked as Beatrix panted and clutched at her.

  Beatrix shook her head. Tears streaked her face.

  “I had the most horrible dream, of hounds with two heads, one a dog and one human, and they came to a mill and they killed the people there. Children.”

  “I have seen such hounds,” said Claude, standing behind them. “The Chatelaine has hounds like that.”

  “Hush,” said Margriet, and gathered Beatrix to her. Someone must have told Beatrix about the Chatelaine’s hounds, some fool with nothing better to do than prattle about the works of the devil. And with little food in her belly, little sleep the night before, and her father dead and come back as a haunt, was there any wonder if Beatrix had nightmares? “Soon, soon, everything will be better.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  They walked through a sunset of gold and—what was that colour, staining the clouds? Beatrix ought to give it the na
me of a flower but instead it reminded her of nothing so much as fish blood, watery red. It used to pool in between the cobbles of the streets nearest the canal.

  It was over in a moment anyway, the red going out of the clouds and the night reaching around them with cold fingers. Beatrix was not happy to be walking, not anymore. Her feet ached and every movement of her legs was an effort. How much worse it must be for Mother, and for the mercenary with her hurt foot. Her limp was getting worse as they walked on.

  Finally they stopped, and stooped with their hands on their knees, all three of them. It was fully dark now.

  “We must be near him,” said Mother. “And he’ll be out, walking. He can’t be far ahead of us. But where is he?”

  They were near a little wood, walking along the edge of it, so they were out in the moonlight and starlight and so they could see the road, a dark ribbon of beaten earth far to their right. But Father might be anywhere. He might be in the wood itself.

  Claude shook her head. “In this darkness, he could be anywhere. We’ll have to get ahead of him, I think, and then try to put ourselves into his path. A bridge, or a city … but would he go through a city? I need to think.”

  “Well,” said Mother, “I’ll ease my bones for an hour, then, while you think.”

  Beatrix lay her distaff on the ground beside her and pulled her cloak around her against the evening air. The damp from the night before still clung to it.

  Something rustled in the copse beside them. Beatrix sat straight up and Mother took a step toward the sound.

  “Willem?” she called.

  Nothing.

  Claude drew her knife and stared. She took a few steps into the woods.

  “Nothing here,” she called out after a moment. “A rabbit or something.”

  “Cuwaert,” said Beatrix.