Armed in Her Fashion

CHAPTER NINE

It was pointless to negotiate with the Nix. The creature was as stubborn as an ox, always had been, and if anything it was getting worse. Still, Margriet spoke in its ear, in as kindly a tone as she could muster, whispering so Claude and Beatrix would not hear.

“Carry us down the stream, as near as you can to the abbey of Saint Agatha. It isn’t far.”

“If it isn’t far then you can walk,” the Nix rumbled.

“You must do as I ask.” She made a clicking sound as if urging on a horse. One must speak the language of boats with boats, the language of beasts with beasts, and the language of bullies with bullies, her father used to say.

“My demesne ends at the outer moat of Bruges. You know that, girl. You asked me to take you to Ethiopia when you were a child, don’t you remember? Has your brain gone soft?”

Margriet snorted. Were Claude and Beatrix listening? Beatrix would be astonished, no doubt. But then her daughter was so easily astonished. So susceptible to dreams and wonders, so ready to clap her hands in delight. She had stood no chance against Baltazar and his burning gaze, when he was alive. She stood no chance now against his revenant. Margriet must keep her eyes open.

Everything seemed so quiet out here beyond the city walls; the Nix swam nearly silently. But at any moment the chimeras might appear—or worse, Baltazar. Margriet could only hope her son-in-law’s shade was walking the streets of Bruges now, looking for Beatrix in vain.

“We’ll walk, then,” she said at last to the Nix. “And no thanks to you. If the chimeras catch me I’ll tell them to fit me with a dragon’s head, and then I’ll be back to tell you what I think of you.”

“Believe me,” the Nix muttered, “I devoutly hope that you find a swift road under your feet.”

As soon as the Nix deposited them on the bank of the second moat, with a small unnecessary splash of a tail, they filled their flasks. Then Margriet hurried the young women away from the water, into the bushes.

“We walk west,” said Margriet as they trudged. “Toward Ypres.”

“How do you know?” asked Claude.

Damn it, she might have cause to regret bringing this young mercenary and her delusions of power along.

But now there was no need to hide the fact that she’d gone out before, beyond the city walls. Her secret of the Nix was exposed. And yet it still hurt a bit to speak about it, as if she’d locked the secret away so long away that the key had gone rusty.

“I heard some chimeras talking,” Margriet said, slowly. “I had an errand, outside the walls. I heard them. They said the Hellbeast is in Ypres.”

“Mother!”

“What chimeras? What did they look like?”

“One had a helmet for a head, and nothing within it—a great void. That was one I knew as a boy. He used to hang about my husband’s shop. And the others had metal arms that shot fire.”

“Gonners,” said Claude. “She’s been working on them for a long time. Yet the walls still stand, are still guarded.”

“The fire engulfed them. Is it possible, then? That the Chatelaine of Hell could make arrows of fire shoot out of a man’s arm?”

The mercenary shrugged. “Anything is possible, or almost anything, in her forges. I have seen centaurs and lion-men and a trebuchet with arms. I have seen her forge a visor of glass and steel onto a man’s head to give him the keen sight of an eagle. And I have seen the many, many mistakes she cast aside. The human slag that oozes out of her furnace and then goes somewhere to die.”

“A man with the sight of an eagle!”

“He had been blind, before.”

“A miracle, then.”

Margriet looked at the girl’s face, which was only a few paces from her and yet not quite clear. Nothing had been quite clear to her eyes, since Margriet was a girl. How wonderful, to be given the sight of an eagle!

“I don’t think so,” said the girl. “And you wouldn’t think them miracles, either, if you had dealings with them. We must remember that while we are hunting Willem, they are hunting us.”

“Why?” Margriet asked. “They have no cause. How should they even know we exist?”

“The chimeras hunt everything,” the girl said, after a pause that made Margriet frown. “Some of them are hounds. Hunting is what they do. Once we left the city walls, we became their prey.”

Beatrix looked back. Margriet rolled her eyes so her daughter could see she was not frightened by this girl and her talk.

“Anyway, I am no authority on miracles,” Claude continued more brightly. “You can ask the nuns what they think, when we reach Saint Agatha’s. That is on the way to Ypres, isn’t it? We might try to find out from them if there is a band of chimeras near, find out which roads to avoid. Nuns always know a good deal about the comings and goings of armies, in my experience.”

Margriet frowned at the girl. She had not been brought up properly, no doubt about that, but that was no excuse for her manner. Claude was tall but scrawny—that must have helped her pass for a man. Very little there to hide. If she thought she was going to act the man in Margriet’s company, though, she’d soon learn different. The girl was no older than Beatrix.

“Will we catch up with Father tonight?” Beatrix whispered.

“I don’t think so,” Claude broke in. Know-it-all. “He’s been walking longer than we have, and is no doubt long past Saint Agatha’s abbey by now. But we can walk during the day, and he can’t. It will be a long day, tomorrow, but then tomorrow night we should find him if our course is the same.”

The brook ran due south from Bruges, so they walked perpendicular to it, due west or as near as Margriet could figure, though Claude kept arguing with her, pointing at stars Margriet could not see, and babbling. Margriet had covered this patch of the world several times in the course of her life and needed no stars to guide her. But they were off the road, and she was loath to admit that in the moonlight, every blurry patch of forest on the horizon looked the same.

Then a road cut across their path at an angle.

“The road to Torhout,” Margriet said with some relief. “If we follow it, we’ll be on the right path, and should make the abbey by noon. They’ll give us shelter and food.”

“But we must take care when we get there,” Claude said. “I don’t think there are likely to be chimeras at such a small abbey, but if there are any signs of them, we must not go in.”

“Why are you so eager to avoid the chimeras?” Margriet asked. “We are walking to Hell after all. We’ll see them sooner or later.”

“Your faith in my skills as a bodyguard is flattering,” the girl said. “But upon the road, the chimeras will do to two women travelling what all soldiers do when they come upon women travelling, and I do not wish to test my skills alone against a band of them, if I can help it.”

Margriet only looked at her dumbly for a moment. Claude truly did act like a man sometimes.

“If we were going to stay inside any time we might meet a band of soldiers eager to celebrate a victory upon our bodies, or take their vengeance thereupon, we women would never leave the house.”

Claude shrugged. “As you like. To the abbey we go, but I say we stay a bit off the road and keep our eyes and wits sharp, that’s all.”

“Obviously,” Margriet snapped.

After a few hours, as the sky grew silver-pink to the east, she noticed that the mercenary had a slight limp, although she walked in front. Stubborn thing.

“You need to rest?” Margriet called.

The girl turned. “No. But if you need to—”

“We’ll stop to rest in that clump of oaks, there,” Margriet said.

“That’s beech,” Claude said. “But it’s a good place to stop.”

“All the better,” Beatrix said brightly. “Nuts.”

After they found a place to piss they sat down in the copse together, huddled under their cloaks. Margriet wished the Nix’s darkness could cover them still.

Her nose was running and she was feeling, now, the lack of sleep. There was a time when she could stay up late, with a baby, and not feel it in her bones and her brain. That time had long passed. She felt drunk, ill in the head and the gut. The grey morning light made her sick.

“We can only rest a little,” Margriet said. “Until we get our bearings.”

“That way’s east,” said Claude, pointing at the dawn with a grin.

“I see I’ve brought a wise-ass along. Lovely.”

Beatrix, thinking of her stomach of usual, gathered a pile of beechnuts, peeled and ate a few, then put her head down on the ground and went to sleep, her arm around her distaff.

Claude looked as fresh as a flower, idly testing her knife on the pad of her finger and staring out into the grey morning.

What unthinking insults these girls were to Margriet, both of them: one who could fall sweetly asleep on the cold damp ground and one who did not even care to. Young women. They did not even know to be grateful for their youth, and would not know until it had gone.

Claude turned to her and grimaced.

“Why are you looking at me as if I were a chimera?”

Margriet hadn’t realized she had been. She was in the habit of frowning, largely because she was in the habit of squinting. It was not her fault her eyes were dim.

“I’m wondering why the hell I chose a child for my bodyguard,” she answered.

“I’m well past twenty.” The girl paused, and then continued with a little bark of a laugh: “At least, I think I must be.”

“I’ve lived two of your lives.”

“I’ve known children who’ve lived several lives, and old men who’ve yet to live a single life that counted.”

“Years are all that matter,” Margriet sighed. “Years are a standard measure. They weigh the same in France as they do in Abyssinia.”

“I don’t know about that.”

The face was a child’s face, young and fresh, but Claude had a scar over one eye and there was something tough in her. There would have to be. What on God’s earth could have sent the girl off to that life, the life of a man-at-arms?

“If you’re not going to sleep, you can build a fire. You have a tinderbox, I hope? If not, you can use mine.”

“You want to risk a fire?” Claude asked. “There could be chimeras about.”

“You and the chimeras. I almost hope they catch us. It would be a relief. If you can build one without smoke, we should be fine. We need to eat. It’s another long march to the abbey.”

Margriet gave up on sleep, and found a large flat rock and a small one while Claude built the fire. Margriet peeled and ground the beechnuts, set the meal to soak for a little while, then mixed it in with a little of Vrouwe Ooste’s oats. She spread the dough on the flat rock and set it near the fire.

She stretched out on the grass next to her daughter. Already the September sun was baking some of the dampness out of the ground. Beatrix was snoring gently, her distaff by her side, her bundle under her wimpled head.

Margriet wanted nothing more than to close her eyes, if only for a few minutes. She did not like the thought of sleeping with the mercenary watching over her. This wench had taken money to fight for the Chatelaine, had shot her crossbow’s quarrels into many good citizens of Bruges. She had probably killed many of Margriet’s neighbours, men she had known her whole life. She might have killed Jacquemine Ooste’s husband. Or Beatrix’s. It might even have been Claude who killed Willem, come to that, although that hole in Willem’s back looked as though it had been made by something bigger than a crossbow quarrel.

But she had made the decision to take this girl along in Bruges, and there was no going back on it now, here, out in the open.

“Keep watch on that bread or whatever we can call it,” she muttered to Claude, “and wake me when it’s done, if I fall asleep.”

She rubbed her fingertips together, to make sure they could still feel, that there was no numbness coming upon her. You are marked by death, Willem had said, but Margriet could not quite believe it. No, she did not have the Plague. Surely not. It had been a trick, and she felt nothing.

“Do you always imitate a cricket before you sleep?” Claude asked with one of her shameless grins.

“Bah,” Margriet said. “Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. And don’t let me sleep too long. We must catch Willem.”