Armed in Her Fashion

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The fat moon lay in its bed of silver clouds, holding its belly and groaning in pleasure at all the stars it had eaten. The beech trees were the columns of fairy cathedrals, but the shadows were many and dark among them. What would move there, what would approach, if Beatrix dared close her eyes?

“Will you tell me a story?” she asked.

Mother grunted.

“A fox story,” Beatrix said. “Reynard and Ysengrim.”

“Tell it to yourself. You know it by heart.”

Beatrix lay on her back and stared up at the moon and the stars, spinning her distaff over and over in her hands. A lovely view but it was a shame one had to be cold and damp and hungry to sleep under it. Perhaps heaven was a sky of stars with a warm, soft bed underneath it, and loaves fresh out of the oven and greasy bacon and as many figs and raisins as you could eat. She licked her lips.

Baltazar was always teasing her about Cockaigne, about her always growling stomach.

If he were here, with her now, what would she say to him? Probably nothing at all, nothing but kisses. And his warm body curled around her, his hand over her own; those knobby knuckles.

She closed her eyes and let herself pretend, for just one moment, that he was with her. In the darkness she slid her left hand through the sides of her kirtle and let her fingers rest between her legs, let them rest there, pushing slightly, a weight, a locus of longing. With her right she held her distaff tight.

Mother’s voice shook Beatrix out of a doze a little while later, with a vague tight headache and a sour taste on her tongue.

“Who’s there?”

Mother was sitting up, holding her knife out. Beatrix propped herself up on an elbow and pointed her distaff as if it were a spear.

“I don’t hear anything, Mother,” she said.

After a while she lay back down, but gently, noiselessly. Her mother stayed sitting up.

“That fool Claude. What can be keeping her?”

Out of the blackest shadows under the trees, a man stepped.

Beatrix recognized him as a revenant first, and as Baltazar second.

It was something about his eyes. Something about the way he looked at her, as if she were nothing.

“Beatrix,” he said. “Beatrix.”

Margriet sprang to her feet. She brandished her knife.

“Get out of here. You have no business here.”

“So you are dead,” Beatrix said.

Baltazar kept walking forward.

“I’ll use this knife,” Mother shrieked. “Get one step closer to my daughter and I’ll cut your balls off. You might not die of the bleeding but it will give me satisfaction.”

Mother had always liked Baltazar. Everyone had liked Baltazar. Because he had a laugh or smile or kiss for everyone. And now that beautiful mouth was slack.

And now Mother was terrified of him.

“My love, where have you been?” Beatrix whimpered.

Baltazar stopped walking and held out his hands to both of them. “Beatrix, I was a long time dying, before the Chatelaine found me, and saved me.”

Saved him?

“Stay back,” hissed Mother. “How did you find us here? Do we draw our revenants with us when we leave our homes behind?”

He shook his head. “We go to the places we lived, we look for our loved ones there. I never would have found you had Beatrix not called me here.”

“What?” Mother snapped.

Beatrix shook her head.

“I did not call him, Mother.”

Did she? Could she have called him to her just by thinking of him? If you speak of the devil, Grandfather used to say, the devil will appear. She thought of the fireflies. And then she shook her head again. She had thought of Baltazar countless times in the last month. She had spent whole hours thinking only of him, under the covers. Why should she be able to call him tonight, of all nights?

She remembered the fireflies.

“Mother, how could I, we have been together the whole time,” Beatrix muttered, talking to Mother but looking now at Baltazar as if she could ask him a question without a word. “Mother, I have not left your side. How could I have called him here? What am I, a sorceress that I can call the dead?”

Mother frowned. “Why do you say she called you, then? Are you lying? Are you lying to me?”

He turned his head, oddly, and looked at Mother.

“All I know is I felt myself drawn here. More powerfully even than I was drawn to our home in Bruges.”

“Well, then,” Mother huffed. “Don’t slander my daughter if you know nothing about it.”

“I have no reason to lie,” he said. “I have left all that behind. I am saved.”

Saved. His face hurt her gaze, his face so much the same, and so changed. She focused on his hand, his left hand, resting at his side as if he were a living man. How strange that the dead should act like the living, should move their hands, like any living man. Like any living man. Yet there was something about him, about the way he looked at her. As if his desires were not his own, but only moved through him like water through a wheel.

“Won’t you stay with me, Baltazar?” she whispered to him, dropping the distaff and holding out her hands for him to take.

“Beatrix!” Mother hissed.

Her husband looked down at her hands, as if they were an animal that had come begging, an animal with sores and fleas.

Beatrix snatched her hands back. Her throat closed up. This, this thing that had been done to her husband, was worse than death.

She swallowed. “What are you? What are the revenants?”

He stared just over her shoulder.

“Some people call us wanderers; have you heard that? Strange, because in fact we cannot wander. We always have a destination. We go either to our homes, to call the people who loved us in life, or we go like moths to Hell. I have come for you, Beatrix. And together we will go. Your Father is but a little way ahead of us. We can join him.”

He stood tall as a birch tree but he leaned a little, as if the wind swayed him.

“Father!”

“Where is Willem?” Mother asked, still brandishing the knife.

He stared. No smile crossed his lips and there was nothing in those brown eyes, nothing but the memory of desire, something so sundered now from his thoughts and his soul that it was wordless instinct, like the trotting a dog after its master.

She had called him, or so he said. If she could call him, she could draw him.

“Lead us toward him, Baltazar,” she said.

He stared. He made no move.

What, then? She had thought—she had been sure that the fireflies went where she pointed the distaff. And she had been holding the distaff when she thought of her husband, wished him near.

Beatrix did not think. If she thought about it, it wouldn’t work. She grabbed the distaff off the ground and she pointed it at her dead husband and said, “Walk. Walk toward the revenant that was my father.”

He walked.

There are always ways in to a tent. Claude snuck along the back of a row of tents behind the carts and jumbles. He loosened a peg and wriggled in between the tent wall and the ground, into the darkness. The ground was damp; the kirtle would be filthy. Oh well.

Firelight filtered through the tent walls, weak and red. He stayed down on the ground until his breath eased.

Then he went up on his knees and tried to get his bearings in the dark.

There was one person sleeping on a pallet. A chimera, although of what shape and kind Claude could not tell. Someone important, to have his own tent. At the door, silhouetted by firelight, a guard stood, shuffling. Someone very important, then, or someone guarding something very important. It was hard to tell what sort of chimera it was, from a shape under a blanket. He breathed so softly Claude could not hear him, but the blanket rose and fell.

Claude’s hand went to his knife. He had no reason to think the chimera was pretending to be asleep, but if someone wriggled into Claude’s tent late at night, that’s what he would have done, biding time until the moment of attack.

With the sleeping chimera in the edges of his vision, he stepped to the side, to a small table. Under the table lay a long chest, locked, with half a loaf of bread upon it.

He knelt beside the chest, as though he were praying, and held the padlock, letting it rest on the palm of his weakened right hand while he fiddled with it with the fingers of his left. The night was chilly and the metal felt damp against his skin.

Claude thrust the point of his knife between the iron hasp and the wood of the lid. He prised it with all his force until the dagger snapped and the padlock banged against the chest. God’s teeth.

The chimera stirred and Claude turned his face back to him, trying to breathe in silence. There was a rustle at the tent flap and Claude shrank back into the shadow. For a few breaths he waited but the guard did not come in and the chimera did not stir under the blanket.

Was the hasp loose enough now that Claude could pull it? He rested the padlock in his withered right hand gently, so it would not bang, and with his left he tried to find purchase under the lid.

In his right hand, the black iron padlock stirred, as if it were alive.

Claude dropped it again, startled, and again it banged. His heart thumped against his ribs but not only now because of the guard outside, the sleeping chimera. Iron that lived? Was this some new sorcery from Hell? What would it do, bite his hand off?

He picked the padlock up again, this time in his stronger left hand, and waited. Nothing.

He put it into his right and there it was, the sensation of stirring, as if the iron were sleeping.

The sorcery was in him. In the hand that had borne the mace. And why not? The mace was after all a key—the key. Had it left behind not only this itching wound, this terrible yearning, but something of its power?

Gritting his teeth with the effort, he tightened his grasp and moved his fingertips along the cold, gritty iron. Reluctantly, slowly, something inside it shifted. The shackle popped out.

Claude squatted a moment more, just staring. Then he gently pulled the padlock out and rested it on the trampled ground.

He lifted the lid and saw in the darkness the beautiful gleam of steel.

A sword! And a good one, too, by the rich scabbard. He’d have that. He gently eased the sword out of its scabbard and balanced it in his right hand. A good blade, clean and true, although with an ordinary single-handed hilt, so he’d have trouble putting much weight into it with his weakened right arm. Well. Soon he might be a left-handed swordsman, one way or the other, if he got the mace back for his right. Time to learn.

What else? A pair of gauntlets, heavy and ornamented, and greaves and boots. All too big for Claude but he’d take them anyway and sell them on if he couldn’t adjust them. A skullcap and a gleaming bascinet helmet with a visor. Too big but with a bit of padding…. Chausses! Good God above, wool chausses and a quilted aketon so he could finally dress in man’s clothes again. And a mail hauberk which would fall to Claude’s knees, but still, useful. No dagger; the chimera probably slept with it.

All of this was the Chatelaine’s ultimately, and poor payment for Claude’s weakened draw arm, but it was a start.

Very slowly, he took one item at a time and pushed each through the bottom of the tent to the outside, on the far side from where the guard was posted. He kept his face turned toward the sleeping chimera.

He grabbed the heel of bread off the ground and squeezed back to the outside.

The easiest way to transport the loot was to wear it. He drew the loathly kirtle over his head, wincing as he pulled his injured arm out. His breath came faster as he tugged on the clothing. It was too big, all of it. Whoever the chimera was, he had a chest like an ox. Claude tied up the chausses and hoped they would not drop around his ankles.

He tried the gauntlets but they scraped over his sore right hand and pained him. For selling, then. He wrapped them up with the bread in the kirtle.

He could not wear the helmet without drawing attention to himself, could he? No one walks through camp armed cap-a-pie. Well, perhaps he could. Here he might be taken for one of the chimeras who had built-in armour. Better that than being taken for a woman.