Armed in Her Fashion

CHAPTER FIVE

A woman was picking through a midden between two houses, a rolling pin in one hand. She looked up when Margriet passed. They peered at each other like suspicious crones, although Margriet was still young enough to bear children and this woman looked not much older than she was.

The fingers around the rolling pin were black. She kept clutching and re-clutching it, as if keeping hold of her weapon by sheer force of will. Already taken by the first stages of the Plague, but her eyes were sharp. It had not been she who let the revenants in to her house.

Soon, her skin would fall away in clumps, leaving bloody welts on her back and chest. The Plague killed from the outside in: first the numb, dead skin, then the attacks of heart and lungs and brain. Her breathing was already laboured, although that might be ordinary fear or want.

Neither of them said a word.

Margriet was not afraid of the woman. The disease did not seem to pass from the living to the living. It came only from the revenants who had started to return to Bruges a few days after the battle of Cassel, men Margriet had known from children. They were dead now: wounded, bleeding, rotting. They swam the moat, uncaring how many hastily made arrows and javelins stuck in their backs. They climbed the city walls after sundown with bare hands and feet. They walked the streets until dawn. They called out names.

Margriet jumped as church bells clanged from all directions, from whatever parts of the city still had a priest or a child to pull a rope.

She turned away from the woman with the rolling pin and the rotting flesh and hurried down an empty street, cleaner than any street of Bruges had ever been in Margriet’s life.

She had a little time between the bells and the revenants.

Her daughter would not want to leave Bruges. Beatrix’s husband, like Margriet’s, had not come back from the Battle of Cassel. Beatrix was living now with Margriet’s father and sister, in the house where Margriet grew up.

Nobody lived now in the rooms Willem and Margriet had shared over Willem’s shop, where the tables stood empty, waiting for their master’s return. Two years ago, after Margriet had lost yet another baby, she had moved in to the Ooste house to nurse little Jacob and help Jacquemine care for her toddler, Agatha. It was a way to make some money. She had not regretted living apart from Willem. There would be no more dead babies for her. She had Beatrix, her first child, her only child. Beatrix was her blessing and Margriet was finally too tired to ask God for more.

As for Willem, he had been a poor husband and a worse merchant. Margriet would be able to sell the house, if he was dead.

If she could return to Bruges, that is. If the houses still stood when she did.

She turned the corner into Casteelstrate and nearly barreled into a man stinking of wine.

“The bells are ringing,” he said, loudly, to be heard over the clanging.

She had not smelled a drunken man for some time. It was hard to find enough wine to get soused in a city that had been besieged for a month. One of the churches must still have had something to be looted.

“I am on my way indoors.” She stepped to one side to get past him.

He let her pass but turned and dogged her steps.

“It’s people like you who let the revenants in,” he puffed. “You think it’s hard to block your ears against their calls when you’re safely in your chamber? It is impossible when you see them face to face. You must not be in the street.”

Just her luck to run into a man in this city of women. The only men of age left in Bruges now were this sort: stooges or cowards. This bullying fool fancied himself some kind of protector, in the absence of better men. Ha. Margriet had helped protect this city from the French when she was a child, before this idiot was even born. She had protected it with the rocks and bricks that came to hand, sitting on the cold rooftops before the dawn.

“Get out of my way.” She pushed him aside.

“Every person in the street when the revenants come will turn traitor. I’ve seen it happen.”

“Then I suppose you must have been in the street yourself.”

“I go into the streets to protect the weak, you stubborn woman.”

“I don’t need the protection of a drunkard. You stink like a friar. Now go, before I make you go.”

“Ha! Make me go how, I’d like to know.”

She had nearly reached the doorway of Willem’s empty shop. Her father’s home was not much farther, but she wanted to be rid of this blackguard.

She stood close to the lock and fumbled for one of the keys she still wore on the chain around her neck, hiding it with her body, as if the key were something secret. She fit it into the lock.

“This is where you’re going? No, too close to the street. Look at these flimsy shutters. You’ll stand no chance against them, in here alone.”

He crowded against her. He wanted to come in.

“I have no need of you. Go.”

“I will enter if I wish.”

“This is my husband’s house,” she spat, “and only I and my husband may enter here. Go, before he comes and knocks that dunderpate clean off your shoulders.”

She swung the door open, not caring whether she hit him, and darted through, slamming the door behind her. She threw the bolt across. The bells stopped ringing just as the door closed; it was as if the door stopped the sound, stopped all sounds, separated her from the world outside. In here it was quiet.

On the other side of the door, the drunkard bellowed, “Troublemaker! Termagant!”

A closed door was no kind of magic. She smiled bitterly and bit back her curses. She would give him a few minutes to move on, then dart out to Beatrix’s house.

It was dark inside. She paced. The place was as she left it, if a bit dusty. No squatters or rats to worry about in these times. No oil in the lamp, no tinderbox to light it, but she did not intend to stay. She must go on to see Beatrix.

Yet she did not like to stand in the gloom, with her husband’s tables and shelves, empty now of his wares, squatting around her like beasts.

She felt a stare upon her. She turned around and saw, in the doorway, her husband. The shape of him, looming against the dim golden evening.

“Dear God, Willem,” she gasped. “You gave me a fright.”

“Margriet.”

At the sound of her name she almost was grateful to see him. Old familiarity. Nothing more.

“You’re home, then? Might have given me some word, but of course men never think of women, never think how they worry. How did you get into the city, with those chimeras ringed all around the walls?”

She did not approach him. He stood, pale in the dark room; she had to squint to see his face. It was bloodied about the mouth, as if he had walked here straight from the battlefield without pausing to bathe his wounds or rest.

“Margriet, I am come home.”

She stood, unsure what to do with herself, as she had stood on their wedding night. She had last seen him, when? Five, six weeks ago, a little more, as he and the other men went off to wait for battle in their tents, or whatever it was men did. Yet he seemed like a stranger. Perhaps it was a consequence of killing; perhaps it changed a man. Her father on that bloody night of 1302, holding his dagger to a Frenchman’s breast, had not been the same man who once plied his boat through the canal, who taught her the boatmen’s songs.

And she, as a child, sitting on the roof tiles with a rock in her hand. She had changed that night, too. She had taken up arms, in the fashion of women and children, and had never quite let them drop again.

“Margriet.”

She should be a patient wife to him, and forgiving; but alas, those were not her virtues.

“Have you eaten, Willem? You’ll have to bathe, too, before you go to bed. You’re covered in muck.”

Blood, she had wanted to say, but changed the word at the last moment.

He shook his head a little too slowly, grinding his head from side to side as if he were trying to rid himself of a crick in the neck.

“Margriet,” he said. “Margriet, Margriet, Margriet.”

She stared at him and she understood. In the hollow of her stomach. Dead. Her rotten husband, dead. She drummed her fingers against her thigh. Her brain screamed the word she refused to speak.

“You’re different,” she whispered. “You’ve changed.”

“I have returned.”

“For what?” Her voice was hoarse, as if she had been screaming, or crying. “What do you want?”

His face was dull as a doll’s. Some of his teeth had been knocked out since she saw him last.

“I am on the Chatelaine’s business.”

She had expected him to say that he wanted her: as his bride, or even as his property. It was a relief that he did not. Even so she felt a lurch in her gut, as if she were all alone in a sinking boat.

She tried not to think of the door, of the Plague mark that must soon be set upon it. A revenant. A revenant had entered her house. Was this her house? Not truly, not anymore. She just happened to be inside it.

Of course, with Willem dead, it was her house now. Hers and Beatrix’s.

“How did you get in here?” she whispered.

“You invited me, Margriet. ‘My husband may enter here,’ you said.”

Her stomach turned.

“That’s not right,” she said. “That can’t be enough. I didn’t want you. You did not even call me. It isn’t just.”

Willem stared.

“I am here.”

That goddamned drunkard in the street. May he live to be flayed alive. With a dull knife. And she would use his skin for a book, and write all her accounts in it with ink of gall and wormwood. She would gut him, if she ever saw him again.

Willem, or the revenant who had been Willem, walked to a shelf and pulled one of the rough, empty sacks down. He turned to one side and began to pace the floor between the tables, stepping with care, listening the squeak of each board. She walked closer to him, circling him as though he were a rabid creature. In his back, a red hole gaped, a hole as thick as a lance. The hole from which his life had ebbed. She thought she could see clear through it, but it was hard to say, in the gloom.

“What happened, Willem? How did you die?”

He stopped pacing for a moment and looked into the distance, as though remembering. No trace of sadness, or of any feeling at all, crossed his face.

“A poleaxe through the back. But somehow I did not die, not at first. I lay there as men trampled me. I was so very cold, so very thirsty. I remember that, more than the pain. And I remember looking up into the bluest sky I had ever seen. And then the Crow-women came.”

“Crow-women?”

“Chimeras. They lifted us up into the sky. Margriet, I thought I was being carried to heaven, but it was Hell. The Crow-women dropped us at the mouth of the Hellbeast. Baltazar was there, too. His head was bashed and bloodied and he could barely burble when he saw me. The Hellbeast opened its mouth, and a great tongue reached out and took us, and I knew no more for a time. When I awoke I no longer felt thirsty or cold, or anything at all. I felt nothing, except that I knew I must come for my life’s work, my wealth. It was a great relief, to feel nothing else.”

“Baltazar is dead, then,” she said. Beatrix would be beside herself, poor girl. She would not be safe. “He is a revenant? Is he here? Willem, is he here?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. Not tonight.”

She must warn Beatrix, for all the good that warning would do. No, she must keep her safe, take her with her to Jacquemine Ooste’s, where Margriet could be sure to stop her ears. Beatrix had loved her husband. The Grief would find her an easy target.

But Willem—why was he kneeling on the floor? He used his fingernails to pry a board up, fingernails which had grown long, and as he pried, the head of the nail pulled his fingernail off, leaving only a hideous flat of quick, the grey-pink of salmon skin.

He did not seem to notice.

Willem, or the revenant that had been Willem, pulled the floorboard up, then straddled the space and yanked a box up out of the cavity. It was a massive thing, a chest with handles, and with an iron padlock.

“What in God’s holy name have you been keeping from me?” Margriet breathed.

“I was a trader,” he said.

“You were the worst trader in Bruges. As wicked as the devil but not half as clever. Always trying to cheat people too smart to be cheated. Always came home with less than you had to start with.”

“I had wealth. I lied to you.”

He said it plainly, baldly. Then he plucked a small iron key from a fold by his waist and opened the chest.

Margriet’s breath caught at the gleam of it. Willem had been a trader in cloth, but there was no cloth in this chest. A silver ewer, fine and tall. Daggers. A small sword in a fine scabbard. Bits of plate armour. Piles and piles of coins. She knelt beside her dead husband, leaned forward and ran her hands through the coins: silver and gold in all kinds, groats and pennies and florins.

“Where did you get it, Willem?” She could smell the battlefield on him: clay and decay.

“I kept some of my earnings apart, all the years of my life. I did not trust you with the keeping of it. You would have spent it on women’s things.”

“You dishonest, misbegotten knave. I rue the day I married you. What did you do to get all this, then? Was I married to a usurer?”

“Yes,” he said simply. “Some of this is war-wealth. Some I traded. This,” he said, and picked up a flanged mace, nearly the length of the chest itself, “I bought it off a young mercenary. The last thing I got before I was killed. He sold it to me for the clothes I stood up in. I hid the goods and came home in my braies and shirt—I told you I had been robbed.”

“I remember.” She snatched the mace from him. It was heavy, but not as heavy as it looked. The handle was strangely hollow.

He took it back from her; he had lost none of his strength.

“This is all the Chatelaine’s now,” he said.

He piled it all into the sack, coins and silver, weapons and gold.

“You lying lickspittle, it isn’t yours to give her,” she said, hoarsely. She licked her lips. “Not now. You’re dead.” She forced herself to say it out loud, as though the words could break whatever sorcery held his bones upright and bellowed his breath. “Your daughter is a widow, you tell me, and yet you would take her inheritance?”

He put his head on one side. It flopped just a little too far over.

“Neither of you are widows. Baltazar is the Beast’s now. He still walks the earth.”

She shook her head. “You’re dead; you’re nothing. Nothing but meat. Food for flies. A bag of bones walking. You’re dead. This is mine. Mine and Beatrix’s. Flemish law says a widow gets one third, the child the rest.”

He stared at her.

“Everything is the Chatelaine’s,” he said. “She holds the reins of Hell and Hell holds me. I am hers, and all my wealth.”

“No, it isn’t. For years, Willem, I farm myself out like a cow. Our daughter spins until her hands are raw. My father wears hose that are all over patches. And all the while you sit on a fortune!”

“You are mine. This is mine.”

He slammed the lid down on the empty chest and stood, holding one end of the sack. It was not quite full but heavy. The sack dragged on the floor as he took one step toward her.

“My husband is dead,” she said again, standing straight up to face him. She had a right to that truth. She was entitled to her widowhood, to the sympathy and respect of her neighbours, to the deference of younger women. To these walls and these tables and to her husband’s wealth, no matter how he’d got it.

“I am hers and you are mine. And you are marked by death now, Margriet. The Plague will take you. You are not a widow for I am not truly dead. It is right that a wife should die, when her husband has no further need of her.”

“I only married you because I had to,” she screamed. “Because you had a good business from your father, before you squandered it, and my father was sick from the wars. You selfish bastard.”

He trudged through the open door into the night, dragging the sack behind him like his sins. The sight of Willem, stolid, balding Willem, walking out into the road just as he had in life. No one would dare take his wealth from him now.

But it was hers. It belonged now to her, and to Beatrix.

She ran out into the empty street and grabbed the sack but he was too strong; he kept walking and she fell forward. So she grabbed him from behind, her arms wrapped around him almost as though they were lovers. He did not stop. She scraped her nails into his dead flesh but he kept walking and did not even cry out. She pulled on his thin hair and it came out in her hands and she fell away from him, tumbled to the ground in horror, looking at Willem’s hair falling out of her grasp to the cobbles.

An arm grabbed her from behind and she smelled sweat and wine.

“Got you.” The swaggering drunk, damn him.

Margriet dropped her hips as if she were sitting in her rocking chair, and felt his arms loosen. She stomped her heel on his right toe and then ran after Willem, leaving the drunk cursing behind her.

She ran, calling his name, screaming it, as around her the plaintive calls of the revenants calling the names of their beloved drifted into the sky. Willem had gone. He’d be over the city walls by now, and she couldn’t follow, not through the gates anyway.

“You were a great disappointment!” she screamed.