Armed in Her Fashion

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Claude rode behind the horned man, his hands tied around the chimera’s thick waist. Monoceros’s steel armour was grafted into his skin, so that its edges formed welds or cicatrices; it was hard to say exactly which. Claude felt a childish urge to run his fingers along their lumpy, shiny surfaces, an urge like running a tongue over a sore in the mouth, or picking a scab.

The horned man’s skin, where it was exposed, was ruddy, but it was hard to say what colour it had been before the Chatelaine got to him. Her furnace had strange effects sometimes.

It was, despite the lumpy joins, a much more attractive result than most. And Monoceros seemed happy enough to serve the Chatelaine.

Monoceros pulled the rein to turn the horse onto the road. His armour shifted strangely over his muscles, pulling the skin taut against his spine. Claude wondered if it had hurt. Had the unicorn been wearing plate when it went into the fire with Monoceros? Or did the Chatelaine throw in a bit of plate to the mix, like a cook making pottage?

At the thought, his stomach growled.

Monoceros laughed. “Been a long time since your last meal, Claude Jouvenal?”

The bite of bread in the camp. He’d meant to give the rest to Margriet and Beatrix. It was in his bundle now with his old clothes and the ill-fitting gauntlets and boots. The women must be hungry.

He looked to his right, where Margriet was riding behind a Bird-man. She looked even more foul-tempered than usual.

“Not as long for me as for my companions,” he said. “You only want me. Let them go.”

Monoceros was quiet for a moment. “We found the mace in Willem de Vos’s sack. Those women were trying to get it. The Chatelaine will want to speak with them.”

“Bah, they don’t know anything about it. She’s just a stubborn widow who wants every last sou she has coming to her. They are hungry, and footsore, and recently bereaved. Have pity, Monoceros.”

“We’ll stop soon enough to eat,” Monoceros said.

Claude was a mercenary; he could work for anyone if the pay was right. But the Chatelaine did not hire mercenaries. She made herself servants. Claude was his own master. This was his body, even now; and when he got the mace back that would be his, too. His muscles and bones were the only truth he could trust. The thought of being bound in service made him shudder.

And now he was going back there, to the red place. In bonds. Once the Chatelaine had tortured him into scraps, she would kill him. She would never willingly let him take the mace-key back. He would have to steal it somehow, and his chances of doing that from within Hell’s oubliettes for a second time didn’t strike him as high.

He had seen Monoceros there, the first time. Usually in the company of many others, but once alone, in the cell. The Chatelaine had sent him to try to persuade Claude to go into the fire. Monoceros had told Claude then a little of his own origin, but only a little. Only what the world already knew: that Monoceros had been the first of the Chatelaine’s chimeras, that a brigand and a unicorn had gone into the furnace and this great-shouldered, hulking, horned man had come out.

People said that Monoceros could run, on his own two feet, faster than any horse. But whether that was true or not, today he rode.

“You never told me your name,” he said to the horned man. He spoke more softly now, softly enough that none of the other chimeras riding could hear.

“Monoceros. Have you forgotten?”

“No,” he said. “Your real name.”

“You first.”

“My real name is Claude.”

“My real name is Monoceros.”

Claude smiled, knowing Monoceros was smiling, too, although neither of them could see the other’s face. They rode for a few moments in silence, Claude’s sword banging against both their thighs, Claude’s helmet and other things nearly spilling out of the saddlebag.

“That’s my harness you’re wearing, as I suppose you know,” said the horned man.

He hadn’t known.

“This mail, and aketon, and helmet, and all? All yours? Well. You shouldn’t have left it lying around.”

Monoceros raised an eyebrow; the horn moved. “I didn’t. How did you pick the lock?”

Claude ignored the question. “Then that was you in the camp? Sleeping in the tent while I … while I was there?”

He shook his head; Claude watched the horn coming into view, once twice. “Ha! I was in Bruges. If I had been there, things would have gone differently for you, I’m sure. I have been campaigning hither and yon and what I did not want to carry, I left in my tent, guarded. I had sore words for the guards.”

“It wouldn’t fit you anymore anyway. What were you going to do, have a hole cut in the helmet?” He imagined the mail straining to fit over Monoceros’s armoured chest. He must have been much smaller, before he went through the Hellfire.

“I planned to give it to a page, when I got around to getting one. Anyway, it doesn’t fit you either.” He picked his teeth. “I remember you, and not just from Hell. From before we captured you. When we fought together at Poperinge. The Genoa Company fought well.”

“I don’t suppose you could tell me where they are now.”

“Why?”

“I fought with them for many years. They are my brothers.”

Monoceros paused a long while, looking into the trees, away from him. Finally he said, “I heard they went to Scotland. The young English king is fighting there, you know.”

“Indeed I do know. The Flemings had hoped he would fight for them instead, turn his attention south rather than north, and take down King Philippe. They whine about it in Bruges all the time.”

“Fat chance of that. This parricide Edward will be just like his father, another Tumbledown King. Not dependable. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, of course.”

“No,” Claude said, but it might have. The chimeras were terrifying but few, and the French forces were divided, uncertain, and unwilling to fight with the chimeras. King Philippe had left the fight against the Flemings to the Chatelaine and to mercenaries like him. Poperinge had gone well for the Chatelaine but Cassel had been hard fought, as Claude knew too well.

“Your company could have stayed on here to clean up,” Monoceros said. “They said they were done fighting for the French king because the pay was so bad.”

“You sound like you don’t believe that.”

“I don’t. I think they don’t want to fight alongside chimeras anymore. Alongside people like us.”

Claude heard that the “us” included him, and he shivered.

“I can tell you, the pay is indeed bad,” he said, but his voice was not as strong as he would like. “I argued against coming north, to fight in this war.”

“Did you now? Well, I suppose your word wasn’t worth much, as a woman.”

“They didn’t think I was a woman.”

“Ah, yes. Tell me, how did you manage that?”

How do you piss, how do you fuck? Not how did you manage to sink seven crossbow bolts into the centre of a target in Toulouse, or how did you manage to fight off three brigands in Florence, half-drunk. No: how did you manage the stuffing and the pissing, Claude? Everyone wanted to peel Claude like a shrimp and see what was underneath now.

“I killed everyone who asked me how I managed it.”

Monoceros chuckled. The armour moved on the shoulders again.

“What drove you to that life, anyway?”

Claude opened his mouth to say something clever. Instead he found he was too tired. Too heartsore.

“I wanted to be a man-at-arms,” he said simply.

Monoceros reached up and scratched his ear, brushed one of his bright curls behind it.

“Fair enough,” he said.

They let Beatrix keep the distaff. Probably because it was an awkward thing to pack, and the only sumpter horse was already loaded down with Father’s sack. The thing they had come for, to stop the Chatelaine getting it, and now the Chatelaine was getting it anyway, and them, too. Mother never would learn to accept the will of God.

Beatrix was pleased, for no good reason, that the distaff was strapped to her back, the bottom resting against the horse’s flank and the top over Beatrix’s shoulder. Probably the chimeras didn’t know it was a weapon, and certainly never expected someone who looked like Beatrix to wield one.

That it was a weapon, she was sure, although not of the sort anyone might think. It had called the fireflies. It had called Baltazar. It had let her control him.

She was a knight, a captured knight, riding off to negotiations with her weapon still strapped to her back. But bah, the dream popped like a bubble. What negotiations? What could the Chatelaine possibly want with Beatrix and Margriet, other than to feed them to the Beast and turn them into revenants, too?

If she were truly in possession of a weapon, now would be the time to use it.

Beatrix’s hands were tied around the waist of the chimera in front of her, a big woman with both arms made all of shining steel, not armour but the very shape of flesh.

Did she need to hold the distaff? Or was it enough to simply have it on her person? She closed her eyes and felt the weight of the distaff between her shoulder blades. She could call—who? How far were they from Ypres? Would anyone get here in time? Perhaps there were people closer who would come, but would they be strong enough and in enough numbers?

Birds. She would try birds. Something dangerous, and she would hope that she could control them when they arrived, as she had controlled Baltazar.

She would call them as she had called the fireflies. For an hour, longer, she stared into the pale sky and called all the hawks, all the vultures, all the eagles.

The sky was empty.

In the cold light of morning it was silly, of course it was silly. The fireflies had gone where they wanted and she had played a child’s game, thinking she could predict their appearance. And then Baltazar … well, all revenants were drawn to the people they loved, weren’t they? He had said he was called but perhaps he was confused, perhaps the dead lied. He was not Baltazar, could not be her Baltazar. But perhaps he was a shadow, a memory, and she could live as his wife even if he were no longer quite her husband. In the daytime she would grieve him and at night he would come to her, and stand in the doorway, and she would look upon his blood-stained face and love him.

Could such a life be? If only she knew the future, she could begin to grieve the past.

Something on the horizon was moving. Seven black shapes against the sky like insects against a church window.

Her birds—could it be her birds? Had she called them?

The wind rose like the sound of a million insects, then it roared like a whirlwind, and something enormous and dire rose up over the northwest horizon.

A creature of the sky, a dragon with a blunt face like a mole and grey skin gleaming like steel. It filled heaven, and beneath it the people on the horizon were small. It soared without moving its vast wings. The roar grew louder as the dragon approached. There was a flash of fire from the ground to the south, and there were people running, running from the low shapes of buildings that had not been there a moment before.

A city, a city of metal and glass.

The people were dressed strangely and running along roads like ribbons of stone.

Everything was screaming; the world was screaming.

Beatrix screamed, too, and as she screamed she fell, until she was floating in the air and all the ages of the world were rushing past her.