Armed in Her Fashion

CHAPTER TWO

Claude paced the silent nave, alone. He ground his teeth and curled his fingers around the dagger handle. He tensed his right arm and tried, for the eighty-seventh time that day, to raise it with the dagger in its grip.

This time it reached the level of his unbound breasts before he winced and let it drop. It clattered on the stones.

“Blood of Christ,” he muttered.

He had lived in this body his whole life, and while he had resented its womanish aches and those inconvenient breasts, only now was he truly angry at it. Furious. His right arm, his sword arm, would not obey him.

The wound that encircled his right forearm had healed badly. It left a bracelet of pitted flesh in shining petal pink, each pock surrounded by square yellow ridges, sore to the touch. The fever had gone, though. There was no reason why the muscles of his hand and arm should be so weak. But he could barely hold a little knife, never mind span a crossbow.

God damn the Chatelaine and all her weapons. There must have been some enchantment in that mace Claude took from her strange forges. It had fitted so perfectly on his hand, like a gauntlet. It had felt like a part of him. Ha. A part of him indeed, more than he knew. Now he missed it dearly. He ached for it. His arm itched, and hung useless.

Claude smoothed his hair behind his ear. A few months and it would be long enough to braid, coil, whatever women did with their hair. Here in Bruges, where the shapes of his body had been discovered, people would expect him to answer to “she” and “her.”

A swell of panic rose in his chest. He had to get out of this city. Get a weapon in his hand and his own clothes on.

He picked up his dagger with his left hand and paced. One night in Apulia, he and Janos had dined at the home of a merchant who kept a small leopard—a descendant, the merchant claimed, of the great menagerie of Frederick II. It was a rangy beast. Patches of its fur were missing and one eye wept golden tears. Yet it had paced its cage with a warning on its face. Claude felt that warning on his own face now.

A warning for whom? For Willem de Vos, if the man yet lived? Only if he refused to sell Claude back the mace, or tell him where he might find it now. No, Willem had nothing to fear from Claude.

Neither did this priest of Bruges, this marked man in a marked city, who had given Claude food and shelter, brought him in when he was wounded and close to death. It was more than many men might have done. Claude had, after all, been fighting for the enemy, for the King of France and for the Chatelaine. And more than that, Claude had dressed in a man’s armour, and beneath that, bound his breasts and stuffed his braies. The priest had been kinder to him than some others might have been.

But God’s nails, the priest had taken Claude’s sword. That had been during the fever and he could not remember it. When Claude woke, he was wearing a chemise yellowed at the armpits and a rough blue kirtle. Where were the arms and harness he had fought for, wagered for, killed for? Seven years of his life—or was it eight now?—stripped off him.

The priest gave him back his own shoes, coated with the dust of many countries, the left one with a small bloody hole through the top. Damn Fleming and his goedendag. They gave him back his tinderbox and his dagger. Even a woman may carry a knife.

“Still sore,” he heard, and whirled. The priest was watching him, leaning against a wall with his arms folded. He was a small, pale-skinned man, freckled on his nose and on the bare part of his tonsure where the hair had started to grow in.

“I can manage,” said Claude. He added with a grin, “Although if you’ve got any wine about the place, I can’t say it would go wrong.”

The priest frowned. No wine, then, or at least not for being merry with. Not that sort of priest.

“What will they do to you, if we give you back to them? If they discover you are a woman, that you have lied all this time?”

What would they do to him? The free company, his brothers in arms? The motley gang of Italians, Bohemians, Spaniards, Saracens and Franks he had slept beside and shat beside and fought beside for all these years? He liked to think they would welcome him back. They’d avert their eyes and give him a few minutes to bind his breasts and stuff his braies. Claude liked to think they had known all along. Or anyway, that some small part of their minds had, and that they would wish to carry on now as if no one had told them.

Claude, they would say. Claude, come here and let us get a look at you. Sword arm, eh? Greasy Flemings. We’ll soon have you fighting sinister.

Or perhaps the priest was right, and they would say something quite different.

Could Claude be punished for it, for living in the world as if he hadn’t been called “girl” at birth? He supposed he could. The priest seemed to think so. He had said it was the sin of pride to pretend to be something other than what God had fashioned. His comrades in the Genoa Company didn’t care much about sin, but they didn’t like to be made fools. Truly, had none of them suspected? None other than his dear Janos, of course, who had reason to know. But Janos was long dead.

“I don’t want to see you punished,” the priest said, when Claude did not answer. “There is no real authority left in Bruges. Most of the burghers who weren’t killed in the battle were betrayed soon after, brought out to a parley and killed. I can’t turn you over to the French side, and certainly not to the Chatelaine. God knows what she’d make of you.”

He did not know that Claude had escaped the Chatelaine once already and Claude did not care to tell him.

“You are in luck, father, for I can solve your problem for you,” he said. “I will be going now. I thank you for your help.”

“Your arm is wounded, woman, a wound the like of which I have never seen, and you have a hole nearly clean through your left foot. And you have had a fever.”

Somewhere, the Fleming had long since wiped Claude’s blood off his goedendag. A stupid weapon. Not long enough to be a proper spear, and the pointed head was all wrong for clubbing. Yet it had done Claude in, or near enough. A knot of Flemings had come upon the crossbowmen unawares, from behind. He suspected they’d been fleeing the battle and found themselves with a chance to regain some honour or at least some pelf. As he had struggled to drop his crossbow and pull his sword, his goddamned arm throbbing and itching, he had not even seen the goedendag until the pain seared his foot. Claude had fallen under a pavisier, the stalwart Jehan, and was left for dead under his corpse and the heavy pavise.

When the crows and looters had finished, Claude crawled toward Bruges.

It was the only place with food and water he could reach. And he had sensed, for days, that the mace was in Bruges. The strange weapon he had ripped off his arm a few weeks before. The thing that marked him as the Chatelaine’s. God’s bleeding body, Claude wanted it back.

“I could give you to the beguines,” the priest muttered. “But perhaps—perhaps later, once we know a little better what you are.”

What he was. Claude already knew what he was. Claude Jouvenal, a fighter since the day he struck out on his own when he was barely more than a child. But when he had arrived at the gates of Bruges, he was feverish and muttering. That must have been before the chimeras put the city under siege. He did not remember how he came to the priest’s empty little church, or when he stripped him.

A sound—someone opening the church doors.

Claude held his dagger with his left hand.

A woman walked in. Rich. Surcote embroidered. Hood trimmed with fur. Her skin was quite dark and a few strands of wiry black hair escaped her wimple at the temple.

“Vrouwe Ooste,” said the priest, clapping his hand to his forehead. “You have come.”

The woman waved her hand. “I would never ignore a message from you, father, not even in these darkest days. Is this the stranger who asked after Willem de Vos?”

The priest looked at Claude.

Was this woman a relative of Willem de Vos? A sister, perhaps; half-sister, more likely, given the difference in complexion. If the man were dead, perhaps his property was still here, in Bruges. Claude had nothing to buy the mace with and no way to prove he had sold it to Willem in the first place. But he could work.

“God keep you, child,” said the woman. She looked only a little older than he was.

“God has been keeping me here, madame,” he said with a smile. His Flemish was improving. He had picked it up years ago on a campaign near Lille, but it had got rusty.

Then his smile froze and he clasped his right arm with his left. The itch was almost unbearable, but his own light touch was so painful he didn’t dare scratch.

“You know Willem de Vos?”

Claude smiled. “I cannot say I know him, no. I met him, some months ago. I sold him something, a thing I much regret selling now. I know nothing but his name and that he was a merchant of Bruges. A man of about ordinary height, losing his hair.”

The woman laughed nervously. “That describes him, yes. Also describes half the city, or it would have, a month ago. Are you a visitor?”

Claude nodded, gritting his teeth against the pain in his arm. A visitor. A burden. A wounded bird.

Claude could overcome being stripped of arms and harness, stripped of coins and horse, alone in the world and wearing women’s clothes. He had been that way before. He had gone out into this rotten world as a child with nothing to his name and he had found his own strength within himself. He had breathed that ember into flame.

A man with honour has no need for friends, Janos used to say. Claude had been hurt, the first time Janos said that. Now Claude turned the phrase over on his tongue, in seven languages, before he slept every night.

Given a little time and freedom he could make a life for himself again—but now his strength was not within himself, not entirely. That infernal weapon had stolen his strength, withered his sword arm.

“I don’t know what to do with her,” the priest said, gesturing at Claude. “She was in the Chatelaine’s army in some fashion, it seems, but not a grotesque. And not … not a camp follower. She was found raving of fever outside the city gates. Dressed as a crossbowman. As a man.”

The woman looked him up and down. Claude felt his skin redden.

“However did you manage that?” said the townswoman.

“Not well enough, it seems.” He smiled, as best as he could through the itch of his arm.

“She has been wounded,” said the priest. “I don’t know what to do with her.”

Claude was close to the mace now, so close. If he had the mace and a way out of this city, he could make something new of himself. Find a company of mercenaries. Start again. The first step was getting out of this church, and understanding this woman’s connection to the mace.

The woman frowned. “Willem de Vos, I am sorry to say, did not come back from the battle of Cassel. His wife, though, is my children’s wet nurse. If you would like to speak with her, come with me. I warn you it is a dour house in these dark times. My wet nurse is a funny old thing and my cook is so frightened she barely does anything but shake.”

The priest nodded his head. “Vrouwe Ooste, you are a marvel. God will reward you.”

“Thank you. I will be whatever help to you I can, in return.” Claude turned to the priest. “And I shall leave an offering for the church, in gratitude for your kindness. Where shall I find my belongings?”

The priest looked puzzled. Claude listed in French the things he had carried on his body: sword, dagger, crossbow, helmet, cap, camail, hauberk, aketon, belt, spanning hook, chausses, chausses of mail, poleyns, gloves, quiver, quarrels (he claimed twenty, although some had found their marks in his last battle). The priest frowned. Claude went on: shirt, braies. The priest frowned deeper.

“Your man’s clothing and armaments have been given out among the guards at the walls. This city is under siege, and neither you nor I would be alive now if the beardless of Bruges were not keeping the chimeras at bay as best they can. Your food, in these desperate times, has cost more than our coffers have seen in a year. We have no help, here, now, from anyone but God. A more than fair arrangement, unless you have some other means of paying for your room and board?”

He swallowed. “I had a purse, yes.”

The priest shook his head. “If so, it did not come here with you.”

He might be lying. What did it matter? If the priest had taken it, it would be gone by now, spent on food, most likely.

“Oh, and a phylactery, a little thing on a leather string,” Claude remembered aloud. Given to him by funny old Guillot before he expired of ague in Genoa last summer.

It came to Claude, then, like a blow to the gut, that he had truly lost everything. His tunics and hoods. His game pieces. His good grey courser, with him since Catalonia, his through a very lucky wager, and no doubt stolen or dead now. His friends.

“I am Jacquemine Ooste,” said the woman in French. “What is your name?”

“Claude,” he said, the name he had chosen at fourteen.

The priest frowned at him. Claude stared back, daring him to question it. He could not remember now, if he had deliberately chosen to call himself Claude because it could belong to a man or a woman. Perhaps he had, perhaps he had been unsure, then, when he had been barely old enough to bleed. He was not unsure now.

“Is that the name you were christened with?”

Claude almost smiled at that. He had not been christened at all. But it hurt to remember the name of his childhood, and anyway that name would not be welcome here. He was pushing his luck enough already, without announcing himself as a Jew.

“Claude,” he said. “Claude is my name.”