Armed in Her Fashion

CHAPTER EIGHT

Beatrix was glad of the moon. It was just past full and dappled the streets with puddles of silver. Mother, though, insisted they keep to the shadows.

The bundle tied to her back was light: a few smallclothes, her spindle, and a wooden bowl. Her water flask was slung over one shoulder and banged on her right hip; on the other, her knife weighted her belt. Her fur-lined hood, her wedding gift from Baltazar, opened into a short cape to cover her shoulders.

Beatrix felt like a pilgrim, using her distaff as if it were a walking stick.

Mother carried the small bag of oats and the little copper pot in her bundle.

A revenant came walking toward them and Mother pulled Beatrix into an alley. They stood there, not quite hidden but of no interest to the revenant, who called “Alberic, Alberic, little Alberic.” He was a young man, about Baltazar’s age, and Beatrix could not help but stare at his skin, and wonder if it were the moonlight that made it so pallid.

As it passed, Beatrix looked sidelong at the mercenary beside her. Claude was taller than either of them and did not seem afraid. She was dressed like any other woman, although shabbily, and her hair was plain, undressed and uncovered under her hood. If she was telling the truth about having been a man-at-arms, those slender hands had killed, what, a dozen men, a hundred, a thousand? Had they all been at the end of a crossbow, or had Claude ever fought with her hands, with a knife?

It was the coldest part of night, and the air by the canal was damp. They walked on toward the south end of the city, and came at last to the open water called the Minnewater. It flashed like a battlefield in the moonlight. At the far side squatted the beguinage, silent and dark. Would any revenants dare knock on those doors? Would they have any names to call? Who loved those women, those poor sisters?

Beatrix shivered.

At the edge of the Minnewater, Mother stopped.

“What are we doing here?” Claude whispered.

“Hush. Wait. You’ll see, soon enough.”

Mother whistled.

Something happened to the surface of the water. A ripple with intention; a few bubbles; a line of spume and then a collection of dark twigs, slick with green.

A face.

Beatrix stumbled backwards.

Two bulbous eyes blinked open and a mouth widened, from a hole rotted and misshapen like the bole of a tree, into a frog-like grimace. Then it lifted its head out of the water on a neck like a dragon’s.

Beside her, the mercenary drew her knife.

“God give you good evening, snake,” Mother said. She inclined her head a little, as she might when she met another merchant’s wife in the street.

The creature spat, a long dirty spout that fountained around him. Was it a him?

“Margriet,” the serpent spoke, in a low rumble like the sound of the gears that drove the crane-treadmill near the market.

Beatrix decided it was a him. A him who knew Mother. Beatrix looked at her mother as if seeing her for the first time. If Father had kept secrets from them all, then so had she.

“I must go beyond the walls, as far as you will carry me,” Margriet said. “And these two with me.”

“Hold a moment,” said Claude. “This is your way out? Asking passage from a water-monster?”

The serpent moved his mouth around as if he were chewing mutton.

“All three?” the serpent asked.

Mother nodded, as if she were ordering bread.

“The packs, too?”

Mother put her hand on her hip. “I don’t have all night, you mouldy wiggler.”

Beatrix gasped as her rudeness. “Mother.”

The eyes rolled, the thin inner lids flashed down, and he emitted a grumble like the bubbling of a swamp. To the damp stone wall he swam and drew his long body along it, an expanse of slime and sticks and bits of matted string and floating wood and all the things that lived in a Bruges canal.

“Hop on,” Margriet said, pointing.

Claude took a step backward.

“What is it?” Beatrix asked.

“I’ve never been very good with boats,” admitted Claude with a quiet chuckle. “I was very nearly killed in a storm once. I can’t—I can’t swim.”

“It will bear your weight, don’t fret, bag of bones. And don’t worry—we won’t be seen.”

“And can you promise I won’t be eaten?” Claude whispered, with a grin for Beatrix.

“I’ll go first, then,” said Margriet. “Mother of God, what the hell kind of fighter must you have been? No wonder you were found out.”

Mother slung her bag out over the water and let it drop, none too gently, onto the Nix’s back. The waterworm shuddered, and a film of darkness slimed up and over to cover it, until Beatrix could hardly see the bag at all.

“Now me,” Mother said.

She stepped on and knelt, steadying herself with her hands. She, too, all but disappeared. There was some sort of enchantment about the watersnake. How long had it lived in these waters, keeping itself unseen? Did it have fellows, or family, in these green depths?

Beatrix put her hand out toward the creature.

“May I?” she asked.

It bowed its head, and she touched its cold skin with her fingertips.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Oh for heaven’s sake, Beatrix,” her mother called. It was strange, hearing Mother’s voice but not being able to see her, as though Margriet de Vos had finally been reduced to just her tongue.

“I am a Nix, so you may call me that,” said the Nix.

“And you don’t mind bearing me?”

“He is bound to,” said Margriet. “I beat him in a game, when I was a child. I won the use of him. Hop on, Bea.”

Mother had kept this secret, all these years. To think she could keep silent about anything!

The darkness that came over Beatrix as she crawled onto the creature’s back was cool and damp. Not quite wet; more like the million tiny sparks of mist in the air when God couldn’t decide whether or not to make it rain.

It smelled, though, much less fresh than rain.

Beatrix knelt on the Nix’s back and held her distaff straight in the air at her side like a lance.

Claude stepped awkwardly onto the far side of his body, as if she thought the Nix were a boat that might tip, and her foot slid off and she nearly went into the water. Beatrix grabbed her right arm to help her steady herself but Claude cried out in pain.

“I’m sorry,” Beatrix said, snatching her hand back.

“No, I thank you,” Claude said, with a weary smile.

“Hush, both of you,” said Mother.

Mother had bested the Nix in a game? Mother never did play games of any kind, not that Beatrix could remember. Beatrix tried to imagine her mother as child, lying on the Nix’s back, perhaps wrapping her arms around it, dragging her fingers in the water. That’s what Beatrix would do, if she were here alone. But Mother sat as tall as a lady on a palfrey, and anyway she couldn’t have spread out on the Nix’s back with Claude and Beatrix riding pillion.

As they passed silently down the Minnewater, Beatrix looked back at the city of beggars and merchants, the city sleeping behind houses shuttered and houses marked. It would be morning soon. In the old days there would be mongers in the streets by this hour, and people shouting and hens squawking. But the hens had all been eaten and the mongers had nothing to sell, and no reason to risk coming out of doors before the sun chased all the revenants back to wherever they slept during daylight.

They floated under the shadow of the walls, holding their breath for fear of making a sound and alerting the women and children who stood guard there, who might demand to be taken, too, or might mistake them for traitors or spies. They floated past the first moats, and out of Bruges into the great country of Flanders. And no one saw them.

“Do you grant wishes, Herr Nix?” Beatrix asked.

“He doesn’t,” Margriet said.

“Ha!” the Nix barked. “How do you know?”

“I asked you years, ago, didn’t I? You pompous old liar. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not just to impress the girls.”

“You put a rope around my neck the day we met. Is it any wonder I didn’t grant your wishes, you nasty shrew?”

“Bah. You would have done whatever I asked and you know it. You are becoming a dotard as well as a liar.”

“Hmph,” said the Nix, and plunged its head into the water. A plume of water went up like a fountain; surely anyone watching would see that, even if they couldn’t see the Nix or his passengers.

“It’s all right,” said Beatrix. “There’s no need to argue, Mother. It is quite enough to ask Herr Nix to take us out of the city, without demanding that he grant wishes as well. It was rude of me to ask.”

“What sort of wish would you ask for, if I did grant them?” the creature rumbled.

Beatrix wondered. She wanted only one thing, and that was Baltazar. Oh how she longed for just one glimpse of him. She opened her mouth as if she could call him back to her, to her arms, to her lips, to her thighs. Failing that, to call all the creatures of the night to her now so she could ask them: Have you seen him? Have you word of my love? Or at least to be able to know a little of the future, to know whether he would come back to her safe, so she could stop her heart from hoping.

Something splashed beside her.

“My distaff!” Beatrix cried, too loud.

She had let it drop from her hand.

“Hush,” both her mother and Claude said.

The Nix ducked its head into the water and lifted it out again. Held in its bared teeth was the distaff. Beatrix gently pulled it out.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“There,” the Nix said. “I do grant some wishes, you see. Because you, unlike some people, are kind.”

“By all the saints,” groaned Margriet. “I’d almost rather swim.”

“I could grant that wish as well,” the Nix grunted.

But he carried them a little further to where the water went as black as pitch and they were out of sight of the city walls, and then they were out of Bruges, and into the Chatelaine’s territory. The land opened darkly before them.

The Chatelaine invited the King of France to a feast in Hell. He brought his own food: boars, swans, even a blackbird pie, which erupted in birds when it was cut. The birds fluttered up and into the high corridors, where they woke the bats to screeching and people looked up. Black feathers floated down over the feast and a bird fell with a thud.

The Chatelaine, along with her chimeras, ate what they always ate: the blood of the beast. It rushed from the golden spigots along the walls of the Great Hall and splashed into bowls and cups.

A Mantis-man carried a platter of bloodseeds to her. They were piled high, glittering like red gems in the lamplight. She gestured to Philippe, and smiled when the king cringed at the offered food.

“It feels something like roe on the mouth,” she said. “And something like pomegranate. Thicker, though. Rougher. We mix the beast’s blood with the beast’s spittle and cook the drops in the furnaces.”

“Your furnaces are the greatest marvel in the world, madame.”

The Chatelaine grasped the handle of one of the long silver spoons and ladled the bloodseeds into her bowl. The body of the Beast; the food of Hell. She had been eating it so long, she remembered no other.

She took a few with her fingers and ate. It was a sweeter, milder taste than the thick, fresh blood that ran from the spigots, that must run even now into her husband’s mouth from whatever scratches and scrapes he had made in the walls of his oubliette.

The greasy meat in front of King Philippe hardly looked like food; it smelled like death, not life. But let him celebrate in his way and she would celebrate in hers.

This was her victory feast, although it was mostly for show, because Bruges had not yet fallen. She had invited the king to remind him: she had done what he required. He had asked her to defeat the Flemish rebels and she had. Her army of chimeras had won the day at Cassel. She had spent nearly her whole army on it, so many of her precious creations killed. She had earned her reward. He must make her Countess of Flanders; perhaps even tonight.

And perhaps Bruges was falling even now, if her gonner-chimeras had done their work.

Chaerephon sat to her left. He never ate now. She could remember him eating, years and years before, when her husband was still master of Hell. Chaerephon had always been thin but now he looked like a skeleton wearing skin. She suspected he was becoming a revenant of a kind, that he and the Beast had come to some kind of arrangement. But she had not asked him; she could not think how to phrase the question.

“How does it go with Bruges?” Philippe asked, low enough that people would not hear above the noise of eating and talking.

He ate only a little of his stinking food, a little of each dish, as if he owed each one a favour.

“It would go better if I had a few trebuchets and ballistas, and a company of knights.”

“It’s a city of women!”

“Women can throw rocks and boiling water.”

“It could be worse. It could be Greek fire.”

“When we bring a ram to the gate, they throw down rocks and burning branches and boiling water and kill the men. I don’t have enough archers to take them off the walls. When we put up ladders, the women throw them down.”

“But the revenants get in.”

“Yes. The revenants get in. If we leave it to the revenants, it will be a charnel city by the time we take it.”

“All the better for you, since you find the burghers such an obstacle. If you can’t control Bruges, you can’t control Flanders,” said Philippe. “Before I was born, the people of that accursed city killed the flower of French nobility. When I was a child, the people of Bruges ambushed Frenchmen in the streets and stoned them to death—the men, women, children all. If you hope to be countess of these vicious people, you must be able to keep them in check without running to me every year, as Count Louis did. If you can’t, I shall return poor Louis to his rightful place.”

The Chatelaine bit her tongue. Louis had men, and machines. All she had were ghosts and chimeras. The ghosts worked slowly and strangely, and the chimeras now were few. She would need proper weapons and knights, and if Philippe would not give her them, she would need to make them herself. But it was not so easily done. The forges of Hell only worked on the willing. It took time to convince people, one by one, to become chimeras. And there were losses; there were mistakes.

At the far end of the hall, Monoceros ambled alongside a young man on crutches. A recruit! Missing one leg, but he seemed sound in body otherwise.

She beckoned to Monoceros, who came and knelt by her side, opposite Philippe.

“Do you come from Bruges?” she whispered to him as they exchanged kisses. “You ran, I think. You stink to heaven.”

Monoceros had gained the speed of the unicorn who had all but disappeared within his man’s body when the two went into the forges together.

“The gonner-chimeras are lost,” he muttered. “They blew themselves to bits and did not breach the walls. The powder must have been too strong.”

She froze, still embracing him. Her nails dug into the leathery skin of his bare shoulder.

“But the last time it was too weak,” she whispered.

Monoceros said nothing. She thrust him from her and turned back to her place.

She wanted nothing but to run, far from here, to a quiet corner of the Beast where she could think. They had been working with various recipes for the black powder for months, but none seemed quite right. They refined the saltpeter from the bat droppings in the Beast’s nostrils; they took the fuming yellow brimstone from the Beast’s innards. But somehow the recipes never came out right; perhaps there was something about the sulphur that was not the same as the stuff on the surface. And each experiment cost them more in charcoal, which they had to buy or steal, and which was not cheap in this country, with its little woods and far between.

“Is anything amiss?” Philippe asked smoothly.

She smiled at him, shook her head.

She looked over the heads of the chimeras assembled at the tables all around the hall. It had been much emptier in her husband’s day; he had left most of his guests in the oubliettes or the torture chamber.

So she had shared many meals with her husband here alone, or nearly alone; often in later centuries Chaerephon was there, and anyway no one was ever alone in Hell. Her husband had bought her a throne in Samarkand: lacquered red, wide enough for her to sit cross-legged on a silk cushion, and with two great dragons leaping out on the armrest. She had that throne cast into the furnaces after she cast her husband down into his private hell. She sat now on what had been his throne: a chair made of the carved and polished bones of some unnamed beast.

The noise in the hall was strange and satisfying, even if it did distract her, when she could not afford to be distracted. King Philippe required unstinting watchfulness.

She needed to show him she could manage Flanders. She needed more chimeras, better chimeras.

The Chatelaine turned back to her dear Monoceros, who crouched as though he were trying to make himself small. Dear thing. Dear loyal thing. The very first thing she had made for her very own.

Let Philippe see what soldiers she could make, out of nothing but peasants and fire. Let him see his chance to buy her friendship now, while it was cheap.

“Bring me that man with the missing leg,” she said.

Monoceros went silently. Good Monoceros. The pure expression of her will.

She let the young man go down upon his only knee, let him pull himself back up again, red-faced, before she spoke. The Chatelaine showed mercy in her own way and her own time, and the mercy she would show this young man would be subjection to her.

“You have come here because you wish to be transformed?” she asked.

He nodded. “I ask you for a leg. I am a farmer, my lady. Since I lost my leg, my family has had to pay for help. I have three children.”

“And in return? I must put something into the fire, you see, along with you. What will you will give me for my pains?”

He set his jaw. “I can work. Set me a task and I will do it.”

“Bah, I have no need of peasant labour. Can you fight?”

He bit his lip and inclined his head.

She glanced at Philippe but could read nothing in his expression. Did he not see? Did he expect her to make an army of men such as this? A farmer who had never wielded anything but his fists?

If only she had the use of those mercenary bands that Philippe used, then she would show him what she could do. But they had gone to England, to fight the Scots for the boy king. They refused to fight alongside the chimeras any longer. It was true that her centaurs had trampled through a line of Genoese crossbowmen but the crossbowmen had been taking too long.

Her poor centaurs, all dead now.

And here was a young man in want of a gait.

“One can never be sure how the fire will do its work,” she said, smiling at the young man. “When I put Monoceros in with a unicorn I thought he would come out with four legs, like a centaur. Instead, he barely seems equine at all, does he? The unicorn in him went … elsewise. But horses, now, they are more predictable. Every time I have put a man in with a horse, he’s come out with four strong legs to gallop and two strong arms for swords.”

The man’s red face drained to white.

“And what else of them is horse-like?” Philippe asked with a straight face. “Always distracted by curious camp followers, I imagine. Give me a knight any day.”

Yes, you son of a whore, give me a knight, she thought. Give me all the knights who owe their allegiance to the useless Count Louis of Flanders, whose battle I just fought. Give me my due.

But she said, “Knights cost a fortune to harness, and they need squires and destriers, and after the battle they go home. My chimeras live within their harness, and they are loyal to me, always.”

The man cleared his throat. “I do not wish to be a centaur. I am no knight, either. I only want something to help me walk the fields.”

“But I can make you better than you ever were, even with your leg! I can do more than fit a new part on you. I can make you whole!”

He said very quietly, “I am whole.”

She threw up her hands. “Go, then,” she said. “The fires only take willing men, and you are unwilling. You have wasted my time. Pray this is the last time you see the inside of Hell.”

She called a Mantis-man to take him away. She did not look at Philippe, at his smug face.

But when his Fool began to perform for her, tumbling and farting and juggling coloured balls, she called Monoceros to her side and beckoned so he bent low, so close she could smell his coppery skin.

“We bring down the walls of Bruges tomorrow,” she whispered. “I cannot wait longer.”

“We will lose many men,” said Chaerephon, leaning in.

She had forgotten Chaerephon was listening; of course he was listening. He listened to every report from Monoceros. He had even given Monoceros his name.

“Then lose them,” she snapped. “What good are men to me, if they cannot take a city of women? Use all the remaining black powder and blow the gate to heaven.”

“Suicide for whoever carries the powder,” said Chaerephon. “We could dig mines, if we can get under the moat.”

“No time,” she snapped.

The king turned toward them.

“Go now,” she whispered, leaning closer in to Monoceros, so that his horn nearly rested on her shoulder. “Ride back to Bruges, my pet. My remaining chimeras are encamped and waiting to take Bruges; let them wait no longer. Do not fail me.”

“I am yours to command.”

“And when you get inside the city,” she said, “show them mercy, but show them we are not to be trifled with. If you meet any resistance, slaughter to your heart’s content.”

Monoceros smiled. “What low regard you must have for my heart, my lady.”