Armed in Her Fashion

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

In the year of our Lord 1328, the beast called Hell was driven under the Earth. No one knew what became of its mistress. Some say she walks the Earth, still, and some claim to have seen the Hellspawn, scrawny creatures hatched from the eggs of the beast.

Nine years later, the King of England challenged the right of Philippe of Valois to the throne of France, and those two countries began a war that would last a hundred years and more. A new plague came to the world, and at first many feared that it was a return of the Hell-Plague, but it was instead something far worse.

There were many stories born during this time, as the people were afraid. People told stories of a band of women, led by a Flemish widow, who donned armour made of pots and pans, and raided Hell itself. People called this woman Dulle Griet in the Flemish tongue, or Margot-la-Folle in French, or Mad Meg in English. The city of Ghent constructed a great bombard and named it Dulle Griet.

From time to time there were stories of revenants left wandering, the remnants of the brief sojourn of Hell on the surface of the earth.

The wise say the creature was not Hell, but only some chthonic creature, whose doings have been so confused in the imagination of ordinary folk that it might as well have been. The wicked say that this beast must have emerged from time to time in the story of the world, and that it might one day rise again to trouble us.