Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  The black eyes and flat face of the rescued Nihonese “demon” turned towards me. From far away, manners will differ, dress will differ, and so, because his customs are not ours, he instantly sees—

  “I had think she was your sword teacher, honour-sir?” the misshapen man said, in bad English. “That you are samurai, and she your teacher with a blade?”

  Dariole began to smile.

  It was easier to see him as male. The hair, loose because he had lost his hat in the fighting, was cut short as no woman’s hair ever is. Wearing breeches, fighting—what woman fights?

  It was as if the world clicked into a different focus.

  Not a young man heavy with fat, but an adolescent girl just filling out at the hip. The mouth, womanish on a boy, is plain on a woman; so also the arch of the eyebrows. The fashion of doublets does not display her breasts, and yet….

  It was a wrench that split the world apart. Once I saw it, I could not stop seeing it. Could not understand how I had ever failed to see it.

  “Thank you.” She inclined her head in a mock-modest bow; either to the “demon” from Nihon or to me, I was too shocked to tell.

  “Messire Dariole.” My voice, embarrassingly, came out as a croak, all the after-shock of the fight and this revelation flooding through me. “Messire Dariole, you are a woman.”

  Rochefort, Memoirs

  8

  T he best of a man’s judgement may be overwhelmed when he has just finished fighting for his life.

  The stink of warm blood came in waves off the sand, roused up by the wind off the sea. The minor wrenches and strains of physical effort began to make themselves felt in my muscles. I regarded her face, gazing at me over the ploughed sand—and felt my temper snap as plainly as if it were a hamstring.

  “You’re a woman!”

  I still had my sword in my hand. I felt my fingers clench on the grip and finger-ring, bringing up the blade. The young woman took a precise pace back. What spread over her face was a wide, impudent grin.

  “You tricked me!”

  I hardly knew what I shouted, and I doubt any man who heard me could have understood the inarticulate roar. The sand betrayed me as I staggered forward into the churned-up hummocks and holes, stumbling past sprawled bodies, lurching against the grains that yielded and let me slip.

  Ahead of me, she backed up, half-dancing, light enough to run over the drying surface without bogging down. A master of arms could have used the prints of her feet in the sand to illustrate a manual of defence.

  “You made—a fool of me!”

  I punctuated the words with flung stones and weed, kicking at the foreshore in a fury, sending up clots and showers of wet sand. The wind off the sea snatched my voice and drowned it. Blind frustration and fury made me choke. I was heavier: she could reach the shingle and the hard rock before me. And then she would run like the sea-wind, and likely she could hide long enough for the tide and the Willibrod to necessarily remove me from this coast—

  Drenched in hot sweat, I panted to a halt, the woman still five yards beyond me, poised on light feet to keep the distance open between us.

  “Masculine whorish bitch!”

  I wrenched myself round and called the stone horse. The stink of blood made him skittish. He—and any consequent advantage to me in pursuit—cantered off down the beach. I turned quickly back.

  Her blades threatened.

  The Italian rapier and dagger in her grip were smeared dark red, like her clotted doublet. She halted on the sand, lead foot forward, shoulders back and balanced, point raised, so perfectly in a guard position that she must be male, could not be the middling-tall young woman that I now saw.

  Shifting her weight back onto her hip, Dariole pursed her lips and kissed the air at me, in perfect imitation of an effeminate young man.

  “You didn’t know. You didn’t know! Messire Rochefort, what sort of a spy are you? You’re supposed to spot things like this!”

  “Catamite!” I exploded. One of my boots came into contact with something more solid. I bent down, scooping a jagged basalt rock up in my left hand, and flung it with all my strength at her.

  She skipped aside, laughing; turned, and sprinted towards the village.

  “I thought I got away with it!” she crowed, her voice coming back shrill against the sea-wind.

  I struggled against the clinging sands, came to firmer footing, and was suddenly filled with a hard excitement: Now I can run, now I can catch him—her—it!

  The sand gave way to rocks, great slabs pitted with holes worn smooth by the tides and covered with glistening weed. I sprang after the woman. My boot came down on bladder-wrack and water. I twisted and lurched forward, and only by instinct kept my sword-blade up as my knee and left hand hit the rocks.

  Cold sweat sprang out on my forehead. To lose control, and in such a disastrous manner—

  She halted a yard or two away, her balance on the slippery rocks apparently perfect. The wind took her hair forward, catching her small ruff. She grinned and looked down. “I told you I could make you kneel to me.”

  I heated, I think from my neck to my hair; I knew I must look foolishly red, and that knowledge enraged me still further. And at this worst of all possible moments, I felt my prick stir in my breeches.

  I scrambled awkwardly to my feet, panting; salt water soaking my knee, hose, and boot. To be reduced to mere words almost made me weep, if a man may weep from rage and frustration. “I swear—I’ll kill you!”

  “You nearly did kill me!” she yelped. “You were going to shoot me! I saw you. You were going to shoot me in the back!”

  “You—What right have you to be angry?” I made a gesture that, if we had not become turned around on the beach, would have been directed towards the south-east and Paris. “You are a mere brat! My business is to put an end to risks to my master—”

  “We were supposed to be fighting, Rochefort! Dueling! You weren’t even going to draw sword, you were just going to pistol me!”

  “You’re angry because you didn’t get your duel?”

  I saw her shift her grip on the hilt of her dagger, making it more secure.

  “Let’s try it, messire. Sword against sword. Let’s see which of us is going to walk out of here!”

  I fought for composure, bit back words, breathing heavily. Something of wit came back to me. I have at least the intelligence to work out that, if a young woman is passing as a young man for some reason, the last thing she will desire is to be treated as female.

  “But no. Mademoiselle is a woman. Therefore I cannot fight you, mademoiselle. You are safe from me.”

  A scarlet flush rose up her cheeks. I rejoiced.

  She spoke steadily. “A woman showed you up in Zaton’s, Messire Rochefort. Where you wished you’d been safe from me.”

  I felt as if I had been struck in the body, below the joining of the ribs: robbed of breath, and left gaping.

  “I proved that you’re not a man of honour, Rochefort. Proved it! So long as you get to stay alive, you’ll stand there and take anything.”

  “I should have shot you,” I said flatly. “You are a freak and a monster; a man would be doing the world a service to put you out of it.”

  She broke into a smile, sword and dagger in hand, dressed in breeches as she was, and dropped a curtsey. “Careful, messire, I’m going to think you still fancy me.”

  “Stupid bitch! You are a whoreson disgrace!”

  She grinned even more triumphantly. “Oh? This from the man who had his prick up my bum-hole?”

  The memory of what happened in the stables at Ivry drenched me in an abrupt hot sweat.

  Yes, that too was Messire Dariole—and therefore that, too, was this young…woman .

  “I….” I found myself blushing. “I would never have forced—I, who have never found it necessary to force a woman in my life—!”

  She let out a peal of laughter.

  The wind tugged at the tabs of her doublet. She was a trompe l’oeil paint
ing. In one heartbeat, I could see the half-grown young man, a little plump and effeminate. And in the next moment, I saw a woman of a middling-tall stature, with her hair chopped monstrously short, her legs obscenely visible in breeches and hose.

  I do not suppose there is a lady at Henri’s court who has not dressed as a page to see her paramour fight a duel, or to lend some spice to their later sexual exploits by wandering the safer alleys around the palace. Spurred by natural disgust, I thought: At least they have the decency to abandon the pretence, once they have achieved their object.

  I stepped down off the unreliable rocks, boots going deep in the churned sand, salt water seeping around my ankles.

  “You are a pretty piece for a jaded man’s palate,” I said, clearly enough that she could not mistake me. “Is that where you learned your whore’s act? Did ‘Messire Dariole’ turn tricks when she needed money? You will have been popular, with your boy’s arse and your girl’s cunny!”

  She followed me to the edge of the rocks, stopping in primo, her chin up. Her gaze met mine. “I’m not a whore. I’m a duelist.”

  I hoped to see her flush again; instead, she looked bright-eyed and pleased. I realised all her balance was in her belly, now, on this uncertain footing. Usually she walked as a man does, from the shoulder. I should have guessed when she fought me. But men assume.…

  “I learned that ‘whore’s act’ from a whore, of course, messire. The girls in Les Halles are very helpful. What, you think I want to get a baby in my belly?”

  I managed to sound dry. “What we were attempting is certainly not the way to go about it!”

  I have no natural brats, after a long career of fornication; something for which most married women of my acquaintance have been grateful. At this moment I did not in the least desire to hear Dariole speculate on the subject.

  A harsh voice broke in, in accented English:

  “You discipline your unruly servant, lady-sama! If he servant, and not you?”

  The foreign man stared at me with what I would, in a European, have taken to be embarrassment or disapproval.

  Dariole lowered her point.

  “Arcadie-Fleurimonde-Henriette de Montargis de la Roncière.” She inclined her head to the foreigner in a young man’s formal bow. “You can call me Dariole; it’s the name I travel under.”

  The stranger grunted, apparent comprehension coming to his face. “Women travel disguised as men for safety. You are a rustic samurai family?”

  She shot a glance at me, continuing in the badly accented English that he seemed to comprehend better than my Spanish. “What’s that mean? Noble?”

  “Hai. Noble, samurai, yes.”

  Who else but the nobility will have had money and leisure for instruction in swordsmanship from childhood on? I vaguely knew her family—as one of many: provincial, insignificant, little interested in court politics, and keeping their heads down as far as matters of Catholic and Huguenot are concerned. And from such a prosaic and conservative background—what are they doing educating a daughter to be a duelist!

  The Nihonese man bellowed up into my face. “You are her servant? Bondsman? Eta? Slave?”

  “I am not!” I exploded, with far more temper than caution. It was the last pack on the mule’s back, and I confess I broke. I spat out: “I am the Sieur Valentin Raoul St Cyprian Anne-Marie Rochefort de Cossé Brissac and no man’s servant, let alone servant to this ill-mannered bitch!”

  The sallow man seemed not to like the intemperate outburst. Mlle Dariole, wide-eyed, said in French: “Oh, no man’s servant—does M. de Sully know you’ve resigned?”

  I ignored her barb. There is one consolation, I reflected bleakly. Mademoiselle de la Roncière is far too young to have heard of my scandal. It was before her birth. And this stranger is from far enough away that the doings of the French court twenty years ago are as distant as the moon.

  I sweated, nonetheless. Dariole’s brilliant eyes had skin creasing at the corners, and she wore the look of a cat with a plump mouse. No matter that I have spoken in quick temper, she will remember the words.

  “‘Brissac?’ The Marshal has a by-blow?”

  I shrugged, content to let her think so. He would not be the only Marshal of France to have a bastard at court, and I am long past the point where I care about slurs against my legitimacy.

  “Won’t anything make you duel, Rochefort?!”

  “Go down the rue St Denis and look up,” I said coldly to her—to “Mademoiselle Dariole,” as I told myself I must now think of this abomination. “I have been responsible for more deaths at Montfaucon than in duels. My business is to see nothing threatens the Duc de Sully. How I solve such problems—I do not have time to play the gentleman!”

  Her face altered at the mention of the gibbets at Montfaucon, where they hang traitors and criminals up for Paris to gawk at.

  “Montfaucon’s where you’ll end up now,” she snapped, “and probably Sully with you!”

  I slitted my eyes against the wind, looking out over the oncoming tide at the St Willibrod. The pulse of apprehension that went through me took my attention from the boy-girl. For a moment I could only think: Suppose I have not saved Sully? Suppose the Queen’s man that infiltrated the Bastille has killed him? Suppose all my warnings came too late? Suppose I have had the King killed for nothing?

  I have been set running by the mere chance of M. Ravaillac’s success. Now I have very nearly run far enough. Chance cannot rule all, after all; a man must make some shift to shape his own destiny.

  Into the moment’s silence, the foreigner gave a great laugh. He said gutturally, “You and she, you have a joke with each other, yes?”

  “A joke,” I repeated grimly. I looked down at the woman dressed as a man as she stepped onto the sand. It would take very little for me to keep seeing her as the pretty boy she was, in her close-fitting doublet, and the slops that curved around her hips. She was an icon such as one might see in a book: Hic Mulier, the Mannish Woman, or Haec Vir, the Effeminate Man.

  I suppose that I should have been grateful—if she was a woman, my arousal when sleeping next to her was explained. I had not got a cock-stand over a young man.

  And yet this is worse . I have been moved to desire a monster: a woman who dresses in man’s clothes.

  An experienced swordsman must expect to see younger challengers. To have been subjected to such acute humiliation by a younger man at Zaton’s, to have felt such intense and helpless hatred for him—well, no matter how my reputation hung in tatters, I had at least the consolation that it would be considered natural. Older duellists in time meet the man who will defeat them, and sometimes it is a remarkably gifted younger man.

  I have been beaten by a woman.

  Fumbling to return my rapier to the scabbard, I dropped it. I snatched it up again, recovering it from the sand, and succeeded at a second attempt. I felt on the edge of vomiting as the realisation finally sank in.

  “We must clear up,” I said harshly, gathering my wits. “Drag the bodies into the sea. Take purses and any documents. The tide will make it look as if they are seamen from the wreck. And—you—wash yourself off!”

  I turned away without looking at her again, strode down the beach, and reached down to grab the stiff doublet collar of the nearest man—Maignan’s killer, all the front of his doublet sopping red. I heaved him bodily after me as I went towards the waves. As I went, I stooped to grab another still-warm man under the sweat-soaked armpit and drag him, rejoicing in the plain strength that allows me to manhandle dead weight. She cannot match this! She nor most men….

  It is no exaggeration to say I was bloodied from head to foot. I let that be my excuse for splashing waist-deep into the oncoming waves before I let the bodies go. I dipped my head, and ducked under the surface; rising to shake wet hair out of my face, and shiver under the bright sun.

  Whether or not it would rinse blood out of my clothes—and how long the stuffed and padded garments would take to dry—I did not know or care.
I stood, chilled, realising that I inflicted cold water on my body because of its rebellion. Because when I look at the young man who is a young woman, my prick stands proud, and I would die rather than let her see that.

  I gazed out across the shifting waves. The sea-haze would hide the beach from the ship: the Willibrod’s crew would have made out nothing of what went on here. They would not suspect the skirmish, or murders; however a man chose to think of them.

  Can I be as obsessed with her as when she was a boy? Impossible. Unnatural. Perverse!

  Fighting the under-tow of the waves, I splashed back into shallow water. Mlle Dariole abandoned a body for me where the incoming tide touched its boots, and turned to trudge back to the others—let her do a man’s work of disposing of corpses, I thought bitterly, since she is so ready to make them.

  I glanced down. The man’s hair had been muddy blond even before the sea soaked it. He had a close-trimmed beard, a doublet of plates, leather trunk-hose; all this along with a rapier that had snapped just below the extravagant pierced steel hilt. Sea-water turned all his clothing black. I do not know his name, but here is an end to him.

  Dariole reached the remaining bodies, far over on the sand. The Nihonese foreigner was to the other side of me, poking along the weed that marked the upper tide-line.

  He bent suddenly to the sea-weed again, disentangling something from the bladder-wrack. Metal flashed, and colour.

  He scooped at the sand frantically, as if he expected there to be more; ran as far as the nearer rocks, kicking at the weed; apparently uncovered nothing, and fell down on his knees with a great shout of rage and misery.

  I could not tell if the cry were anguish or aggression. Instantly, I drew my rapier and checked the beach.

  Dariole—down-wind, and too far away to have heard shouting over the noise of the waves—stalked the Andalusian jennet as he picked his way across wet sand, leaving vanishing hoof-prints. She did not look.

  No man else, except corpses, was visible out to where the sea-haze shut us in.

  The foreign man cried out again.

  I could not see his sword, or where he might have put it. Taking a firm grip across to my own hilt, aware that I had no certain guide to his reactions to anything, I strode wetly up the shore to the weeds.