Armed in Her Fashion

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Margriet had been shouting her daughter’s name long enough for her throat to get raw. She had started shouting the moment she saw Beatrix slipping in the saddle, and kept shouting while the chimera in front of Beatrix stopped her horse and tried to raise the girl, and kept shouting while the whole party stopped, and they unbound Beatrix’s hands and lowered her to the ground.

Claude and Margriet were unbound now, but there was no point in trying to run and any way Margriet would not have left Beatrix there, staring, unaware, barely breathing.

Another shout and a shake, a splash of water in the face, and at last, at last, Beatrix blinked and rolled over and vomited on the ground.

Margriet knelt behind her and held her, wiped her chin with a linen clout from her pack.

“I saw …” Beatrix whispered.

“What?” Claude asked sharply.

“A new city,” Beatrix said. “And a dragon, or some enormous beast.”

“Some device of the Chatelaine’s,” said Margriet.

“It was not here,” Beatrix said. “The world was changed. The people. There was fire.”

“You chose a poor time to have a vision,” Claude grumbled.

“She doesn’t have visions,” Margriet said.

She heard the quaver in her own voice. Damn that Baltazar and his brown eyes! Damn him! This madness was the first sign of the Grief, surely. So many in Bruges had run into the streets, claiming to see things that no one else could. Within days, they wanted nothing more to do with the living world. Their revenants took them away, willing captives.

It would not happen to Beatrix.

“She has not slept or eaten properly,” Margriet said, more firmly. “It was a dream. Nothing to fuss about. What more do you expect, not even letting us stop to drink and eat and pass water?” She raised her voice at the end and looked at the horned man, who seemed to be the leader of this gang.

“We’ve stopped now,” he said, looking down at her with a smirk. “Over there. Hildegard will take you.”

Hildegard was the big chimera with the steel arms. She stood and watched while the three of them relieved themselves in the long grass. Beatrix wobbled a little on her feet but she insisted she could walk on her own; she also insisted on taking her distaff with her. She had always been prey to notions; this was not the first time Margriet had wished she had been able to set her daughter right, set her working smoothly again, the way the men of Bruges used to repair the workings of the great treadmill in the marketplace, where Margriet had once walked with all the other burghers’ children.

Margriet’s breasts hung heavy and sore now. Two days, only. Two days since she had nursed little Jacob for the last time, nursed any baby for the last time.

And so what? Would she miss it? It was a relief to have her body to herself, to not have be tied to the household. But yes, she would miss it, would miss the little insistent tug of life, the quiet, the blue eyes staring up at her, content. She would miss it, in the time that remained to her.

Two days since her loutish husband had given her a death sentence.

As they walked back to the fire, with Hildegard’s knife drawn at their back, a man with insect arms pulled up to his chin squealed, “I see the man-woman squats to piss after all!”

A few chimeras laughed.

“An aketon does not make a man!” shouted a Bird-man.

Claude seemed to ignore them, as Monoceros gestured for the three of them to sit with their backs to a fallen log. A Bird-man—not the one who’d hooted—tied their three legs together, with Margriet in the middle, one ankle bound to Claude, one to Beatrix. Then Monoceros gave them each a bit of dark bread and sausage and a flask of weak ale.

“However did you manage it, before?” Margriet asked.

“Before? You mean—”

“I mean fooling everyone. When you were a man-at-arms.”

Claude stayed silent. It was awkward to turn and look at her, tied side by side like this, so Margriet ate more of her bread. If Claude wanted to hold her tongue, so be it. They were on their way to the Chatelaine now, and it seemed the hellkite had reason to want Claude. Perhaps she only wanted her for her army; the presence of Hildegard showed the hellkite was willing to take women into the ranks. She was trying to set herself up as the Countess of Flanders. So be it, then. One ruler was the same as another, so long as they left the people of Bruges to themselves, and meted out justice….

“I cast a spell on my comrades,” Claude said, breaking Margriet’s thoughts.

“Hmm?” she said.

“Ha!” Beatrix laughed weakly. “You should be careful making such jokes. You might be taken for a witch.”

Margriet glanced around. Hildegard was standing, probably within earshot, but not if they spoke quietly. But what had they to keep secret, now?

“If the Chatelaine has not been taken for a witch yet,” Claude said, “I think I’m safe.”

“Only because that upstart king of France protects her,” said Margriet.

Claude snorted. “There is still a pope in Avignon, and although he tuts, you will notice he put an interdict on Flanders, not on the Chatelaine.”

“Hmph,” said Margriet. “A pope who is as close to the French king as my left breast to my right.”

“People say the devil took her to be his bride,” Beatrix said. “People say that’s who she is.”

“And so where is he, then?” Margriet jumped in. “Where is the devil in all this? Why does she command the army? Why does she cavort with King Philippe?”

Claude frowned. “I don’t presume to know the devil’s business.”

“I think he’s dead,” Margriet said.

“But surely the devil can’t die,” Beatrix said.

“Why not? If God can die, why not him, too?”

Beatrix’s eyes went wide at her mother’s words.

Claude laughed. “A blasphemer! I never would have thought it.”

“It isn’t blasphemy,” Margriet snapped, and this time she did turn to look the girl in the face, awkward though it was to be so close. “God died, and rose again. How is that blasphemy? Tell me? Are you a scholar? Do you pretend to be a scholar, just as you pretend to be a man?”

Claude’s face went red.

“I am no scholar,” she admitted, “but I know a little more of the Chatelaine than you do. She is wily. She is secrets upon secrets upon secrets.”

“I may not know much of the Chatelaine but I am a wife as she is, and I think she is a widow like me, too. Maybe she killed him herself; I can’t say I didn’t dream of it a few times with old Willem. So if she is a widow, who better to understand a widow’s rights?”

Claude’s eyes went wide.

“You mean to ask her for your husband’s goods?” he whispered, with a glance at Hildegard. The chimera kept her back to them.

Yes. She did mean to ask. Let the woman show whether she meant to be a true Countess.

“Mother,” Beatrix began.

“Do you remember,” Mother said, keeping her voice low and light, “how the stories of Reynard the Fox began? How they all began?”

Beatrix nodded. As a child she had asked for those stories every night, the ones about Reynard, the rogue, and how he bested all the other animals.

“King Nobel had a court at Whitsuntide …” Beatrix whispered.

“And Ysengrim the Wolf made a complaint against Reynard, saying he had his way with Ysengrim’s wife and pissed on his cubs. And all the other animals laid their complaints, and Cuwaert the hare brought the corpse of his dead daughter on a bier, to show what Reynard had done. And so the king summoned Reynard to court.”

“Hmm,” said Claude. “It’s madness. But it’s as good as any other plan.”

It was not mad at all. It was justice.

“If the Chatelaine wants to act like the Queen of Flanders, let her show it,” Margriet said. “We will put our case before her and let her show how she intends to rule, with justice or without. After all she is a woman and a wife. She has an interest in the rights of wives.”

The horned man walked over to them and nodded to Hildegard, who loosened their bonds, at knifepoint, and they were each put back onto a horse with their wrists tied around a chimera again. Beatrix still looked pale, but at least now she had some food in her, some ale.

After they had been travelling on the road a little way, Margriet thought she heard something, footsteps out of rhythm with the horses, behind them. She glanced behind, thinking she’d see the two dead husbands walking behind, staring.

But it was only the hounds, gamboling. Of course; it was daylight, and the revenants would be hiding somewhere, for now.

Philippe looked well-rested, as he always did. His dark curls sat glossy on his velvet shoulders. Philippe of Valois, the green shoot on the moribund stump of the Capetian dynasty. Philippe the fortunate, who had made himself king, and knew it. It made him gloat.

He was so young; just thirty-five. Older than she had been, of course, when she had been taken to Hell. Old enough to be dangerous.

Beside him, a varlet held a pole with a hooded bird upon it. It was white as ermine, with a scatter of black spots all down its back and wings. The Chatelaine’s breath caught and she very nearly clapped her hands together like a girl.

Instead she knelt, squatting low, her knee not quite touching the muddy ground outside the Hellmouth. She stood again quickly.

“I have brought you a present,” said the king, “in gratitude for your service. And we shall have a mass of thanksgiving for the fall of Bruges. When you come to one of my estates, we will take her hunting. The hunting here is poor.”

The Chatelaine inclined her head. Was this display of favour from Philippe a sign of more to come? Or a clue that he was preparing her for disappointment? He had said: give me Bruges, and you will be Countess of Flanders.

“It is a gift fit for a queen,” she said. “Or perhaps, at least, a countess.”

Beside her Chaerephon coughed, reminding her to be politic, to be patient. Philippe frowned. She had spoken wrongly, again. She had been so long under the Earth, so long among the people of Hell, who had nothing to hide.

“Fit, I hope, for your famous menagerie,” said the king. “I would like to see it. I have heard—”

“What?”

“Rumours,” he said, spreading his arms wide.

The Chatelaine did not want him to visit her menagerie. She wanted him to go away, so she could get acquainted with the marvellous bird. Poor creature.

“You are kind, my king. My menagerie is much depleted of late.”

This was the truth. One of the unicorns had gone into making Monoceros, and that was the beginning. That was the first of her animals to be sacrificed. She had whole rooms full of insects and others, high-ceilinged, full of birds; the Mantis-men and Moth-men and Bird-men had come from those. When an animal and a human went through the fires of Hell together they emerged bonded, mixed, in an alchemy not even Chaerephon could explain.

Philippe smiled. “I know you have sacrificed, and that this is only one gyrfalcon. But she is a very pretty gyrfalcon, and she is a killer.”

The bird was very pretty indeed, and when a powerful man asked himself inside your home it was not a request. That much she did not need to learn; that much she remembered.

The unicorn had been a gift. Hundreds of years ago, when she still had the strength to fight her husband in the night, when she still remembered her birth name and the life from which she’d been ripped. It was too late, by then, for the unicorn her husband gave her to be any kind of test. It was a gift, freely given, but not freely taken, for the new, young Chatelaine of Hell had not been free.

She had loved the unicorn, though, and her husband was pleased.

She loved Monoceros, now, partly on the beast’s behalf, and partly because she had made him; he was her own.

“What’s this?” the king asked as they entered the first red room, deep inside Hell.

They were four; she told the king he could bring only one of his men because the animals were skittish and the quarters cramped, but she took Chaerephon, too. She wanted him by her, listening and watching the king. This was the room for large birds, the new home for the gyrfalcon.

“I have never seen such a thing,” the king said, laughing.

Philippe held his finger out but pulled it back when the dodo snapped its sharp beak and lifted its wings, angry. The Chatelaine shushed it. In the corner, the old lovebirds twittered. There were so many empty poles in this room. There had been another dodo, this one’s mate, but the damn things had never bred. The Chatelaine was a good breeder, of everything from snakes to bears. She made an effort with everything, if she could get a pair. Everything except the blemmyes and the wodewoses; it had seemed wrong to breed them and she had secretly been pleased when they died, after the long unhappy life given to them by the food of Hell. Although her husband had mocked her for it, she had not liked the idea of breeding people.

Now she had cause to regret her squeamishness—the army she might have by now!—but she had been so much younger, then, and had not yet understood that people turn each other into weapons.

“I am pleased with the reports from Bruges,” Philippe said, walking the room and peering at the birds. “For a moment there I feared the siege would be long and uncertain. They are stiff-necked, these Flemings. Are you sure you wish to rule them?”

He had a way of pulling the conversation out from under her. She would have to watch that.

“I have no doubt of my ability to manage them.”

“That would certainly put you one up on Count Louis. I would be more than happy to find some replacement for him, some man I could trust to quiet Flanders down and let me get on with the English.”

She stopped and looked at Chaerephon, who gave her a little rueful smirk, as if to say, we knew this would happen.

“Some man?” she said, speaking lowly, carefully. “We agreed, my king, that if I could put down the rebellion, Flanders would be mine.”

“And yours it will be. I am a man of my word. We need to find some way to do it properly, though. We’ll have to find you a new husband. I imagine it won’t be difficult to get an annulment for your …”

He’d overstepped, and knew it, looking at her face. She kept her features perfectly still for a moment and let him flounder.

“You are suggesting I find some scion of the ruling house, some cousin of Louis’, perhaps, and marry him. Some weak-willed man I can control.”

“I have no doubt you could control any man, no matter how strong his will.”

His black eyes flashed. Sometimes he looked womanish himself, with his soft curls brushing his narrow chin.

She tried to stop her heart from beating. She wanted nothing more to do with marriage. She wanted her demesne to be hers by right, a right no one could challenge. She spoke slowly, looking just past Philippe to where Chaerephon stood.

“I lost my memory of my parentage, as you know. But I feel sure that your clerks are clever enough to discover who I truly am, to discover that I am in fact the next heir to the county of Flanders, once Louis is … dealt with.”

“Wouldn’t matter,” said the king, and turned to look at the rest of the room. “Can we move on?”

She inclined her head and led him to the next room, the wet room.

Water spilled over the top of a large wooden tank, into a second smaller tank, and then again into a third, like three ponds connected by small waterfalls. It was a clever design of her own, run by tubes and floats much like the great clock. It kept the water fairly fresh. Even so it did not smell fresh in here; it smelled like wet fur and mold.

“God save me, is that a beaver?” the king said, putting his hands on his knees and bending forward to get a better look. Philippe’s varlet was holding a torch; he walked closer. The beaver stared at them balefully, then slid into the water with a light splash.

“Is it true that they bite off their own balls and throw them at attackers to save themselves?” the king turned to ask her, with a wink.

She knew what he was doing; he was unbalancing her by bringing her close. And it was working despite her wariness. She wanted to show him she could be a friend to him, that she could keep up with his mind. She resisted the temptation.

“Why would it not matter if I had the pedigree to entitle me to Flanders?” she asked doggedly.

He straightened, and sighed.

“My very clever clerks cannot find you to be the heir to Flanders, because my very clever clerks have already determined that a woman cannot inherit in any of the Salic Lands, which includes Flanders. A very important point of law, that. If it were not the case, I would not be king. The she-wolf Isabella would have a better claim than mine, and her patricide son would be king of France as well as of England.”

He was false. He was a traitor. He had never intended to give her her due. She looked at Chaerephon, not a plea but a hard look of command. If Philippe was going to chop law, well, she had just the man for the purpose.

And Chaerephon did speak, but he said, “Sire, perhaps you could solve a riddle that has long puzzled me. How would you classify a creature with a bill that lays eggs? Would you call it a bird?”

“Indeed,” said the king.

“What about a creature with fur that feeds its young milk from its body. A beast, yes? Like a bull or a dog?”

“Of course.”

“And if you will indulge me, what about an animal that poisons its enemies with venom?”

“A snake.”

“Would you like to see the strangest animal in the world?”

Philippe laughed. “Do you have anything here stranger than man?”

Chaerephon smiled thinly. “Perhaps not. The strangest animal in our collection, then.”

He pulled the goad off the wall and fished around in the lowest tank until the creature scrambled out unhappily. She was old and her beady fishwife eyes were rheumy. But the king barked with laughter at the sight of the black duckbill, the glistening fur. He circled around it as Chaerephon kept it in place with the goad.

“One of your chimeras?” he asked the Chatelaine.

“No,” she said softly. “They are born this way. We got a pair of them off a trader in China. He had them in a cage. They cost us a fortune. I bred them and she laid two eggs. One was this creature, which has never lived anywhere but Hell. The other never hatched. I have it in my rooms, still uncracked.”

“Astounding. And what is it called?”

The Chatelaine was silent, not looking at Chaerephon. She had given it a name in the language of Hell, her husband’s language, but that tongue was forbidden now, by the Chatelaine’s own command. Everyone in Hell was told to speak French.

“It has no name, so far as I know,” she said. “Perhaps you would like to name it?”

“Me?”

She nodded. “Who better than a king, to give the animals their names?”

He barked a short laugh. “I can’t think of anything except that the poor thing looks as if God had a few odds and ends left over and couldn’t think of a use for them. So I’ll call it Hochepot.”

Chaerephon coughed.

“Sire, had you ever heard of a creature of fur that lays eggs, before this?”

The king shook his head. “Indeed I had not.”

“So when we say, a woman cannot inherit, we are speaking in generalities, just as when we say that birds lay eggs. But in certain circumstances, just as God sees fit to fit a bill and webbed feet on a furred creature, a woman can take on some of the characteristics of a man to suit the needs of the people. Your cousin Joan is Queen of Navarre in her own right.”

“And yet she was barred from the throne of France. Different lands, different laws,” he said, as if he were speaking of some far-off and mythical kingdom where monopods and griffins roamed. “I had no claim on that throne anyway.”

Tread carefully, Chaerephon, the Chatelaine thought. This was not going to work.

“Yes,” Chaerephon continued smoothly, “but here in Flanders, a hundred years ago, Joan of Constantinople became Countess of Flanders after the death of her father in the Holy Land. Is that not so?”

“Indeed. And there is a man named Pietro Rainalducci in Italy who calls himself Pope, and any knave or emperor who does not like my pope in Avignon calls this man Pietro Pope, too. But they are not right. A woman may put on the mask of a man but it does not turn her into one. The law is the law.”

“You are right, of course,” she said, impatient now with Chaerephon’s attempt at sophistry. “The path of inheritance is closed to me. But the path of simple force of arms is not. This land is mine because I have taken it. If Isabella could take England, if the Empress Matilda could do so before her—”

“It is not right that a woman should rule,” he said angrily, the mask slipping at last. “It is not God’s will. You can command an army, certainly. You cannot be the father of your people. You cannot dispense the law.”

She could command her army indeed; she could command it to fight for the throne of France, and then let Philippe of Valois, Philippe the fortunate, tell her what God intended. But not yet, not yet. It was too risky still. She could not command any knights; then she needed better weapons, bigger weapons. She needed a fortress on the surface that she could hold, and from there she could grow.

A Roach-man scuffled to her side.

“Monoceros is here,” he hissed. “He has returned.”

He looked nervous, and for a moment the Chatelaine thought something had befallen her army. They had found a way to break them, to destroy them all. She would be left without friends. She would be cast into Hell’s depths, in place of her husband. Or worse: with her husband.

But it was merely the way of the Roach-man to look nervous. It was his gift, the gift of anxiety. All her insects had it. They made good messengers but horrible spies.

“Monoceros is here?”

“At the mouth. He has brought prisoners.”

She looked back at Philippe, who was watching her, not even pretending not to be listening.

“Monoceros said,” said the Roach-man, with something like an insect smile, or perhaps an insect grimace, “you would want to see them outside, that he did not wish to bring her in without your judgement. Shall I tell him he was wrong?”

It looked like the prospect gave the Roach-man some satisfaction. There was something mutinous in him. She would have to watch this one. She would have to watch them all. She had been a fool not to see it in Gobhan Og, but any one of them might harbour a secret ambition, a hatred, a desire. Oh for a Hell peopled only with shades, without desires of their own. But the revenants were weapons, and imprecise ones; they were not soldiers.

“Monoceros speaks with my voice. I will deal with her, but briefly, after my audience with the king.”

“Do not delay on my account,” the king said. “Your men are no doubt tired. I shall come with you. To see how a woman dispenses justice to prisoners.”

The Chatelaine could think of no way to refuse. She walked behind him, as he led the way as if Hell were his.

Even when Hell was at the surface, it kept most of its great body under the earth. When she rode it, the Chatelaine stood in its mouth, holding her mace-key in the mechanism of the scold’s bridle that kept its mouth open, that forced it up to the surface.

So the mouth of Hell when it opened looked like a great cave opening out of the earth, like a hill broken open to reveal a sanguine gullet. The great teeth like rocks were wrapped in the bridle of iron, and two great iron chains like columns stretched from top to bottom on either side. She knew how it must look to the king and his men, how it frightened them, no matter which way they approached those rows of teeth. Let them be frightened.

To that great door the Chatelaine walked, robed in ermine, with her black hair coiled and netted in gold in two points at the sides of her head, very like horns.