Would Claude’s arm still itch? Forever?
Claude smiled.
“You smile at me,” said Monoceros. “You pity me, perhaps.”
“No. Pity you? The Chatelaine’s marshal? No, I smile at my own strange fancies.”
“You have fancies stranger than me? Stranger than this?” He spread his arms wide.
Claude shook his head.
“Tell me what you came here for, Monoceros, and leave me to them.”
“The Chatelaine wishes you to declare yourself.”
“Declare myself what?”
“Friend or foe.”
What had Claude thought he was in for, when the Genoa Company had agreed to take King Philippe’s money and ride north to fight alongside the Chatelaine? He had been curious, of course, as they were all curious. They wanted to see the chimeras, and it seemed wiser to see them as allies than not. If only they had not taken the commission. If only Claude had been ill, unable to ride. He would still have his crossbow and his horse, his money, his good name. He would still have his right arm. And he would not have this yearning for a weapon he had never even learned how to wield.
“I thought she was my foe, whether or not I am hers.”
“Answer the question.”
“I am a mercenary. I am no one’s friend and no one’s foe. I am neither fish nor fowl.”
“Do you support the claim of the women you traveled with?”
Claude frowned. “You mean the claim on the sack full of goods?”
Monoceros nodded gravely, slightly, as if he were in the habit of being careful with the movements of his head.
Claude shrugged. “I’m no lawyer. I just want the mace I commissioned, and then I shall go very far from here.”
He’d be able to fight properly again, able to present himself to any free company between Gibraltar and Guangzhou, with the mace on his arm. No longer a crossbowman, no. But something new. Someone strong.
“My lady cannot agree to that. But she will give you your life, Claude Jouvenal. And all you need to do is speak when you are asked to speak. You will tell the Chatelaine everything about how you turned Gobhan Og into a traitor, how you escaped. You will tell no one else, ever, so long as you live. And then, when the trial comes, you will tell the bishop that you took the mace from here and sold the mace to Willem de Vos.”
“You wish me to tell the truth at the trial?”
“The truth, but only part of the truth. The Chatelaine does not wish anyone to know that the mace is anything other than the weapon it seems to be. You must not say how it was made or why. Say—say only that you stole it. Say you wanted it for a weapon. Say it was pretty. Say anything but do not tell the secret of how the mace opens the gate to Hell.”
“Not such a secret, if you know it.”
“The Chatelaine trusts me in all matters.”
Claude wondered. She did not seem a trusting woman. But she had made Monoceros, and he was the first of her servants. Loyal to her through and through. It was the unicorn in him, Claude supposed; they were fabled to be noble creatures. How much the Chatelaine must love Monoceros, to have given up such a priceless creature in the making of him.
“I thought the argument was about whether Willem de Vos is living or dead.”
“I am no lawyer either. That is a question for wiser heads than yours or mine. Whether he had any right to every item in that chest in the first place, whether he had a claim on the mace that opens Hell, that is something perhaps that simpler people such as you and I can answer, and be rewarded.”
“Rewarded?”
“You will live.”
“And what would happen to the mace then?”
“It stays with its rightful owner.”
Claude shook his head.
“I do not want the keys to Hell. God knows. But I cannot stand the lack of the mace at my side. I feel it there, always, like a ghost.”
Monoceros looked into his face for a long moment, and nodded.
“I would feel the same, if I lost my horn. It is a part of you now, a part of you in a way no other part of your body will ever be. But you chose to remove it. If you take the Chatelaine’s side, you will have a chance to ask her for a new arm.”
“A new arm?”
“Yes. Something to take the longing away. I cannot promise you will get it, but if you say what I tell you to say, you will live long enough to plead your case.”
Claude had done what he promised; he had kept Margriet and Beatrix safe on the road, delivered them to Hell. After that, what did it matter to him if Margriet and Beatrix got their little coins and plates and cups? They were women in wartime; they would take what was coming to them, and if all that was coming to them was nothing they should count themselves thankful.
But to say he had stolen the mace was dangerous, too. He might well be let go from Hell only to be hanged for a thief. He could not trust the word of Hell’s mistress.
“You wish me to lie to the King of France,” he said, looking into Monoceros’s golden eyes. “And, then, you say, I shall walk free from this place, having declared myself a thief?”
“I give you my word.”
Claude laughed. “God’s teeth, your word. Let us put your word and mine on the scales and see which is worth more than a sparrow fart.”
Monoceros looked, not insulted, not exactly amused, but pleased and sorrowful all at the same time, like an executioner trying to pretend to a hatred of bloodshed. “Is that the answer you wish me to give?”
“You may tell your mistress that I am considering her offer.”
He inclined his head again, this time much less carefully, so that Claude had to shrink back to avoid the dip of the great horn.
“Well, neither fish nor fowl, here is your fish,” Monoceros said, and put the bowl down on the warm red floor. “It is Friday, after all. Even in Hell we mark the calendar now. We are respectable.”
It was Friday; Claude had lost count of the days.
After Monoceros had left, after Claude had licked the bowl clean, he lay in the dim dark floor and put his hands over his closed eyes for a moment, for the length of a wordless prayer. A very old habit of which he had thought himself long cured.
He used to do it in his tent, on Friday nights when he was missing home, in total silence as he slept next to his new comrades, to remind himself of the days when he had helped his mother light the Shabbat candles.
Beatrix was almost grateful for the cramps in her gut, for the pain that she could locate, that she could blame for the way her stomach lurched with every step. She used her distaff like a walking stick, digging it into the muddy ground with violence, using each wound in the earth to pull herself forward.
Baltazar’s wounds.
She had called the owl. She had torn apart that beloved body, that face that she had kissed so many times. Claws tearing through the dry soft skin of the temple, where kisses were light and dry. Claws tearing at the ears she had sucked. Claws tearing at—
“In Ypres,” said Mother, “we’ll get you something to eat. My purse is still tied around my waist, thank God.”
God only knew where Margriet was getting the energy to walk, although it was taking its cost: Mother was grey-faced and short of breath. Beatrix’s thighs were as uncertain as aspic. She’d be happy of a meal at least. Perhaps that would settle her stomach.
“Beatrix, you know that is not your husband. And that is not your father.”
It came out of nowhere, as so many of her mother’s pronouncements did. When she was a child, Beatrix had thought her mother must hear her thoughts, for so often she spoke as if in answer to them. Then she had grown up, and learned that her mother did not know her thoughts at all, and she had never quite forgiven her for it.
Beatrix swallowed back tears. She agreed that this Baltazar was not her Baltazar, of course she ag
reed, but she wanted to make her mother argue. It would be something to distract her, like the pain in her gut.
“They are very good copies, then. Don’t you care about father? Doesn’t it hurt to see him?”
“Dear child, desire dies like everything else. In a year, what you felt for Baltazar will be a memory.”
When Beatrix was a child, they had slept all three of them to a bed, and Mother had kept Beatrix between herself and father. Somehow they had got babies, all those babies who died, when Beatrix was very small. But later, when she was old enough to have woken in the night, old enough to remember, she had never once heard her parents together, not even talking. How horrible it must be to hate one’s husband.
“I don’t want to forget him,” said Beatrix softly. “I pray for him every night, for his soul, although I do not know whether it is still in his body.”
“Of course it isn’t. It has gone to where souls go, and on the last day, it will return to take up residence in his body. Your father’s, too. Of course they may find those bodies terribly used by then.”
Beatrix winced. The claws, the silent wings, the flesh opening without blood, without screams.
“It is your inheritance after all,” said Mother. “If you think I am doing wrong, say so.”
“I am not a monk or a lawyer,” Beatrix said. “I don’t know anything about God’s laws except that I try to keep them, in my way. But how do we keep them now? When we do not even know if our husbands are dead or alive?”
“They are dead,” said Mother firmly.
She did not sound as though she grieved.
Together. A living woman and a revenant. His skin cold like leather. And yet his mouth, the twist of his mouth, was as it had always been. Pale, as though in sickness. And perhaps it was only a kind of sickness that had befallen him, the deepest kind of Grief. What sort of wife was she, to abandon her husband in such straits? What sort of lover was she, to let love decay?
If Heloise could love her Abelard after they’d castrated him and he’d shut her up in a convent, having no use for her body anymore, could not Beatrix love her husband no matter his condition? If Orfeo could go after his wife all the way to the fairy king’s underworld and bring her home again, could not Beatrix bring her husband back from Hell?
They reached Ypres when the sun was high, although it was only a pale white presence between the cold grey sky, like a daytime moon. Beatrix had never been to a city other than Bruges. She looked at each street as if it were a miracle, so familiar to the people who walked them, their heads down as they went about their business.
They had drunk the last of their water flasks hours before, so they bought a drink of beer from a cart, from a tired woman in a floppy hat like a pilgrim’s. She had a long steel fork strapped to her right arm with metal bands.
“That’s three times what I would have paid a year ago,” Mother grumbled as she handed over the coins.
“A year ago, there was food and drink aplenty in Flanders,” said the woman, almost cheerfully. “War is a terrible thing.”
They walked through the market lane until they found a ragman, a tall grey-bearded man with a lean face who had sewn onto the back of his brown cloak two wings as dirty and mottled as a pigeon’s, stuffed and quilted but still drooping to the earth. They bought a bundle of mostly clean rags from him; Margriet gave him a denier and he handed back a few bits of thin clipped coins.
It was, it seemed, the fashion in Ypres. Woman peered out of shop windows with brass fixtures around their necks, decorated with wheels and gears. A peddler bent under the weight of a lion’s head resting on his own, its ratty and flea-ridden skin falling down his crooked back.
“Does that fool Jew truly believe he looks anything like a chimera?” Margriet muttered as they walked. “And that woman with the fork on her arm, how ridiculous.”
“Perhaps they don’t want to be taken for chimeras, but for people who like chimeras,” said Beatrix. “They want to be seen to be copying them. Perhaps it’s a kind of protection.”
She imagined the ragman turning his face to heaven, the quilted wings lifting and beating until his thin body rose into the sky.
“I don’t think a couple of bedraggled wings or a meat-fork would be much protection against the bitch of Hell and her hounds,” said Mother.
They came to a stone inn with a sign of a deer swinging mournfully over the archway. They walked through into the courtyard of dried mud, where the horse shit was dry and scattered, days old or even weeks. But a faint smell of food came from the hall door.
The room was dark but there was a trestle table with several people sitting at it, and they looked up only briefly at their arrival.
A woman came toward them. She wore a brass trumpet at one ear, its stem curving around to fit. The smiths and wrights of Ypres must have been doing a brisk business, these last weeks.
“We have one room only,” she said. “And one bed.”
“That will do us,” said Margriet. “What price?”
“No horses?”
Hard-headed woman. The food smell was driving Margriet mad; it must be driving Beatrix madder. The girl thought with nothing but her stomach. And this woman was hell bent on haggling as if the times were ordinary.
“If we had horses,” said Margriet, “we would have brought them in with us, as heaven knows no groom came to us in the courtyard to take them.”
There were a few titters. The woman narrowed her eyes.
“Two deniers for the bed, and six deniers for three meals with wine and meat. Eight deniers together.”
“Half that, I think,” Margriet said.
“Mother,” Beatrix whispered.
“God save you, but you’re a bold one,” said the innkeeper. “Half that, eh? Not in these times. There is a shortage of roofs left standing in Flanders, if you hadn’t noticed, and if you can turn your nose up at good beef pottage I will be very surprised indeed.”
Margriet held out one Flemish groat, worth about six deniers. The women looked at it, sighed, and pocketed it.
“Do you know of a good messenger? I need to send word to Zonnebeke Abbey. We were expected there but changed course.”
The innkeeper frowned. “I have a reliable boy with a donkey, but that will cost you, too.”
“Of course.”
“You can wash yourselves over there, and by the time you’re back I’ll have your pottage set. Come to me when you’ve finished and I’ll give you your candle.”
They washed in a little alcove, where a cistern held water that looked as though it had seen too many travellers.
The pottage was surprisingly good, or perhaps it was their hunger.
As they were eating, a woman came in the door with a baby on one hip and a child by the hand. Margriet squinted to be sure it was who she thought it was.
Jacquemine Ooste.
She walked toward her and to her surprise, Vrouwe Ooste embraced her, baby Jacob between them.
“Margriet, oh, I am happy to find you alive, at least,” she whispered.
“At least?” Margriet pulled back to look at her face, to read what she could in it.
“The chimeras broke down the gate and took the city. Many people died.”
“My father. My sister.”
Beatrix was behind her shoulder now, listening.
Jacquemine nodded. “I am sorry to bring you such news. Yes, they are among the dead, and their house burned. A fire started at one end of Casteelstrate and ripped down the whole street.” Beatrix made a little choking sob. Margriet took her hand.
Father’s house gone. Willem’s house gone. Father, dead. Her sister, dead. And Margriet herself, dying. Beatrix would be alone in the world by Christmas, haunted and alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Beatrix curled up on a blanket on the floor. One bed, the innkeeper had said, and it was bar
ely that, but Jacquemine and the children must have it.
Poor little Jacob was squalling, as Mother walked him up and down, bouncing and cooing.
“If he wants your milk, aren’t you just tormenting him by holding him?” Jacquemine asked at last, where she sat on the bed, rubbing her temples.
“I haven’t got any milk left, Vrouwe Ooste,” said Margriet quietly.
“Of course. It’s not your fault. The poor child hasn’t slept,” said Jacquemine. “I do not blame him. The creature who bore us from Bruges had the most horrible spines all up and down its back, and it rolled like a ship in a storm with every step. But it was that or walk, with the baby and Agatha.”
“And how is little Agatha’s fever now?”
Jacquemine put her hand to the girl’s forehead. “Still hot as Hell. Poor lamb.”
“There, there,” cooed Margriet, as baby Jacob choked and sputtered into red-faced silence, and gave a little exhausted gasp, and closed its eyes. “Off to sleep, little one.”
“Is Bruges overrun with chimeras, then?” Beatrix asked.
Her throat was hoarse with unshed tears. She wanted to weep for grandfather but Mother said perhaps it was God’s mercy, that it was a quick death by fire or a long one by starvation.
Jacquemine nodded wearily. “They blew open the gate, the Smedenpoort, with some sort of spell of the Chatelaine’s. People said they heard a sound like thunder and there was fire everywhere. It must have been a fire straight from Hell, to blow the gate open.”
“Was it chimeras with metal arms that did it?” Margriet asked.
“Hmm?” Jacquemine asked. “No, I don’t think so. Some sort of battering ram, or so they thought at the gate. But the ram was just a pretext, I think, for getting some hidden thunder-fire into place. Some of the chimeras were blown to bits, people said. They must have known they would die—do you think they knew?”
“When men go to war, they always know that some of them are going to die,” said Mother.
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