“Frying pan,” Claude mumbled with the cup to her mouth.
The children woke and the women set about preparing the day’s meal, and Beatrix took up the distaff and excused herself.
Outside, the day was cold, with the sun slanting through the trees on the horizon. It was quiet. Here, at last, let this distaff be of some use.
She shut her eyes and held the distaff out in front of her. Will we succeed? Will we get the mace, and the sack, and get out alive?
Her vision blurred and she saw a great fire, and Gertrude walking away from it, her face bloody and sooty, but smiling, and in her hand was Willem’s sack.
Beatrix took a step toward the vision but Gertrude vanished.
Then the ground erupted and there was the wail of something horrible coming from above, and the ground boomed again. This was another vision, another possibility?
Another screeching wail and something hit her and she fell to the ground.
Someone was shaking her, calling her name.
She looked up into the faces of Mother and Jacquemine.
“Foolish girl!” Mother said.
Beatrix shook her head, and smiled. “I have seen a vision, Mother. I think we shall succeed. But the distaff always wants to show me another vision, every time I think of the future. It is as if that vision is so strong, so stamped on the future memory of this land, that I cannot help but call it to mind. I have seen again this vision of terrible war, of chimeras and thundering fire. Weapons of the Chatelaine’s, I think. She will bring war like we have never seen. All of Flanders turned to mud, flattened by this horrible war. Burned to the ground. All of it.”
Margriet frowned. “Then we must get far away from here, as soon as we have got our due. You must go, Jacquemine Ooste, as quickly as you can.”
But Jacquemine was shaking her head, her face so pale it was nearly grey.
“You have seen what the Chatelaine can do,” she said. “If you can weaken her, if a band of women can raid Hell and live, then perhaps the people of Ypres and Roeselare and Poperinge will rise up. Do you think so? Do you think they might?”
Mother nodded. “Yes. We have seen them rise before, haven’t we?”
“I cannot bring the children to Hell, and I cannot risk leaving them an orphan, but I will stay and help you until you are ready. I—I am a good hand with a needle!” She laughed. “Agatha is doing better. We can wait a few more days. I will help make your disguises, and cook your food.”
“But the moment we leave,” Mother said, “you must take the children and go, quickly. If we fail, the Chatelaine may send her hounds, looking for our friends.”
Jacquemine Ooste nodded, her face set.
“Vrouwe Ooste,” said Beatrix wonderingly.
Jacquemine knelt by her and smiled, taking her hand. “This is what we have always been taught, Beatrix de Vos. It is in the tradition of Bruges, in the tradition of our fathers, who always found a way to bite the hunter’s hand once the trap had sprung. Has your mother never told you the stories of the Matins of Bruges of 1302, when the women of our city fought off the French soldiers with rocks and bricks?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Chatelaine rode home on her pale palfrey, its hair braided with red and yellow ribbons. This horse had been with her in Hell two years now, stabled in one of the narrow chambers with uneven floors that were useless for anything else, and it was starting to show signs of it: it was ever more bony, its eyes wild, its nostrils flared. She had not given it a name, not even in secret, for she knew well enough that this beast might soon be destined for the fires of Hell, to make a chimera.
The Mantis-man and Roach-man had gone before them. Her hounds ran alongside, yapping with delight in the cool, bright day. Their human faces grimaced at Chaerephon where he sat. He made them nervous, and this pleased him.
“You are out of humour,” he said mildly.
“If you hadn’t noticed, we have lost all hope of reward from the king, the ally we have served two years now. We are betrayed.”
“Not so. He asked you to do a task for him. Kings only ask their most trusted favourites to do their dirtiest business. Ergo, he is showing you favour.”
“He is showing me who is king.”
“Yes. And did you ever challenge that? At the very beginning, when you came out of the earth, you came looking for a man to bestow land upon you, instead of seizing land for your own.”
“Perhaps that was an error. It was your advice, as I recall.”
“And still good advice. What could you have done, with your revenants? Slowly throttle Bruges, the greatest and richest city of Europe, into grey death? Leave it waste? If you want land, good land peopled by living people to farm and mine and trade, you need to earn it, not conquer it.”
“Unless I can make better weapons, and win faster.”
“Yes,” said Chaerephon. “Or you could do as the king asks, and gain his trust.”
The Chatelaine frowned. She would have thought Chaerephon, of all people, would understand. It was one thing to send her armies to war alongside Philippe as an ally, even as a vassal. It was another to put Hell itself at his command, to make revenants of whomever he wished. Who would truly hold the key, then, even if remained upon her hand?
They were nearly home now. Hell was before them, its mouth shut tight, its eyes closed nearly completely, with just a slit of red light where the lashless lids met. The Beast seemed to have piled up fresh earth around itself in a kind of burrow.
The Chatelaine dismounted, strode to the mouth and put her mace to the lock at one side of the Beast’s bridle. She used her left hand to twist the mace, the end of which rotated until the great bridle creaked open and the sulphurous red mouth yawned before them.
The sooner they were gone from here, the better.
She walked her palfrey into the Mouth, the hounds trotting alongside on the thick red tongue as if it were a Roman road.
She twisted the mace again to close the mouth, and then they were enclosed in the beast’s mouth. The air here was warm and close; safe.
“Where should we go, Chaerephon?” she asked.
“You are running away, then?”
“I am finding a new place, where I will be the mistress. No more asking for scraps.”
Chaerephon shrugged. “If you are determined to give up the work of these two years—”
“Not give it up. We have dozens of grotesques now, and more revenants than before. We have learned a great deal about war and we are perfecting the black-powder weapons. We will be stronger the next time.”
Chaerephon sighed. “Then let us find a place where the people are more civilized, and the weather is warmer.”
The Chatelaine left her mace in the bridle and said to the Beast in the language she had forbidden, “Go south. South and east, until you come to water.”
The Beast shuddered but did not move.
“Go now,” she said. “Down into the earth. I hold the keys of Hell. You must obey.”
This time the Beast did not so much as shudder.
“It will not obey,” she whispered, hearing the high note of panic in her own voice. “Chaerephon, what do I do?”
“Perhaps it is injured,” he said. “Let us go out again and see what we can see.”
For a moment the Chatelaine wondered whether the Beast had ceased entirely to obey, whether they were trapped in Hell forever. But it opened its mouth obligingly, letting the daylight in.
She sent the dogs scampering and whimpering inside, and she and Chaerephon stepped out into the cold world. Chaerephon nosed his way around the Hellbeast’s mouth, to the side of its head, where there was a very narrow space between its body and the wall of its burrow.
“In there?” the Chatelaine asked. “We’ll be buried alive if it so much as sneezes.”
“Wait for me, then,” he said,
and was hidden behind the earth.
In a moment he came out again.
“I think you will find this worth seeing with your own eyes,” said Chaerephon.
They squeezed in. The fur of the beast was slick as velvet. The Chatelaine ran her hand along it to keep herself upright in the shifting tunnel, until her hand came to a matted protuberance. She looked, and saw the sleek body of a tick, the size of a rat. She winced and kept her hands to herself.
“Here,” said Chaerephon. “Step very carefully.”
He squeezed over into the body of the beast to make room for her to come beside him. There beside the beast were three pale eggs as large as boulders, the shells like ivory.
“What are these?” said the Chatelaine. “Surely not.”
“Your husband,” said Chaerephon carefully, “was always in the habit of calling the Hellbeast ‘she.’ ‘Hell is a female creature,’ he used to say.”
“But what—what is in the eggs?”
“I would very much like to see them hatch. Hmm. That is fascinating.”
“Indeed, that is one word for it.”
“Eggs! Who would have thought it, of a furred creature? Just like the—what was the new name the king gave it? The Hochepot, in your menagerie.”
The fool was in love with the sound of his own voice, and they were stuck here, and meanwhile the King of France would be sending an army against them. Philippe wanted control of the Beast, and if he could not control it through the Chatelaine, he would take it. Soon she would be in a dungeon somewhere, and God knew what would happen if the King of France was foolish enough to find and free her husband.
“The question is,” said Chaerephon, “is Hell is the mother, then who is the father?”
She did not care to know, or even to wonder.
“Can we smash them with our hands?” she whispered, in French, although she was not entirely confident the Beast had not learned French. It only obeyed the language of Hell, and spoke no word itself. “Shall I fetch a rock?”
The beast rumbled and dirt fell onto their heads.
Chaerephon put his fingers to his lips. “I would not harm Hell’s young, not for all of Midas’s gold.”
“Then what?”
“Eggs hatch. We wait.”
“But how long?” she asked. “We don’t know how close they are to hatching. Once they hatch, she may not want to move even then.”
The Chatelaine shut her eyes. How long could she stall with Philippe? She could pretend to be on his side, pretend to be preparing to take the King of England. She could even tell the truth about the Hellbeast and the eggs, although she did not want to give Philippe any information he might try to use to his advantage.
Without saying another word to Chaerephon, she walked toward the burrow’s exit and waited for him to follow. She had been so pleased when he took her side. He had even encouraged her to act against her husband; without him, she might have waited longer.
Had he known about the eggs? Was it all a plot against her?
A thought came to her, a beautiful, horrible thought. Whatever hatched from those eggs would be hers, hers to guide and guard from birth. Hellbeasts of her own, whose loyalty was not in doubt. She would not need a key for them. She would make them into a new army, her third army.
The only thing she could trust was strength. She would need more chimeras, too, and more powerful ones. She needed weapons that could level a city. She would put Philippe off as long as she could, but in the meantime she would get stronger.
“While we wait, I want to make more gonners, better ones, and more black powder,” she said to Chaerephon over her shoulder. “Set the Mantis-men to scraping the bat grime off the walls of the great hall. I’ve never been so happy that the Beast shits brimstone. But we’ll need more charcoal. Check on our burners, and send riders out farther this time to collect more from the smithies and forges.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Margriet sat and brooded while Gertrude and Beatrix set about making a pottage with some uncertain mushrooms and cress.
She rubbed her chin with the back of her hand. There was a patch of three or four stiff hairs poking through, just long enough to be annoying. Her fingertips could not feel the hairs, only the skin on the back of her hand. That annoyed her, too. She missed her tweezers, sitting in her little chest in the Ooste house. She missed chairs and beds. She missed the bells of Our Lady’s church. She missed Bruges, when it came to it: the city where she was born, where she had lived her whole life. The greatest city in Christendom, it had been, until the Chatelaine had decided to strangle it.
“Anyway,” Margriet said, pulling her hands away from her chin with a tiny act of will, as though someone had spoken, “has anyone got any tweezers?” she asked.
Beatrix laughed. “Tweezers, Mother? You’re worried about your eyebrows at a time like this?”
“Chin hair,” Magriet grumbled. “It’s not about how it looks. It’s annoying, that’s all.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” said Gertrude, who was between Beatrix’s age and Margriet’s. “You are too young to know but one day you’ll understand. Margriet, I had some lovely tweezers, but they were in the house. If they are still there, they are somewhere in the ashes.”
“Bah, never mind,” said Margriet.
“I could make you something,” Gertrude said.
Margriet waved her away. “I can live with a beard if need be.”
The girl Claude was looking at her. Her own chin was narrow, her little bird bones coming to a sharp point beneath smooth sun-brown skin.
“What did you do about it?” Margriet wondered aloud. “Didn’t they ever ask why you never shaved?”
Claude raised her eyebrows. “Everyone always wants to know the most boring things. How I pissed. How I shaved. Nobody wants to know how I shot eleven soldiers with only ten bolts at the battle of Zappolino.”
Impudent girl. As if it were a thing to be proud of, killing people. As if any child couldn’t do it, if they were forced. Margriet shrugged. “I assume you slaughtered people, as mercenaries are paid to do.”
There was a pause.
“Well, I want to know all of it,” Beatrix said. “The soldier parts and the other things. I guess you could just pretend to shave, couldn’t you?”
Claude shook his head. “Not since I was very young. It was too obvious. We would march for days, fleeing, or without fresh water, and not a shadow on my face. No, I had a beard made.”
“Ah,” said Margriet. “The pitch in spirits.”
“Yes. I made a false beard with my own hair. I carried a little bottle of pitch mixed in Italian spirits, and I used that to glue it on whenever it came loose after a battle, with the sweat and rain and blood. Easier to pretend to trim a short beard than to pretend to shave. Anyway it helped me not look so much like a woman.”
The girl looked wistful. She wanted to go back to it, not only the fighting and the riding horses and whatever else, but the being a man, too. She didn’t make a very good woman, Margriet had to admit. She couldn’t imagine Claude spinning or cooking or cuddling up to a worksore husband at the end of the day.
Of course, Margriet had never done any of those things very well, either, come to think of it.
“It sounds like a hassle,” Jacquemine said.
“It was a pain in the ass,” Claude answered with a grin. “But I got used to it. No more a pain than braiding one’s hair or plucking one’s eyebrows or whatever it is women do.”
“Yes, but if our hair comes tumbling down out of its braids, we won’t be—” said Gertrude loudly. She said everything loudly. She was loud just sitting there. The women looked at each other. “Anyway,” she continued, red in her round face, “what I mean is that it would matter so much, that beard. I imagine it must have always been a worry. I admire you. For being able to fight and everything, and keep e
verything else perfect. Keep your breasts and everything hidden and whatnot.”
“Not much to hide,” Claude said with another grin. “Not like you and Margriet. How do you walk around like that? Isn’t it a great weight? Don’t they flop around? I don’t know how you manage it.”
“We all have our crosses to bear,” Gertrude said seriously, with a heavy sigh, and Beatrix giggled and Claude laughed out loud like a soldier, and even Margriet had to smile.
“Come on, then,” said Margriet, patting her lap. “Agatha, come over. Who wants to hear a story?”
“Will you tell us about Reynard?” Agatha asked, scrambling over.
Margriet looked up at her daughter. She wanted to show her in her face that she forgave her, that she understood. But she knew how her own face looked. It scowled. It grimaced. It was incapable of anything kinder.
“What would you like to hear, Beatrix?” she asked. “Reynard, or something else?”
“Reynard, always,” Beatrix said with a little smile.
“Sometimes,” Margriet said, “you think you know what an animal will be like, because of its kind. So you think all foxes are tricky. Did you know that Frenchmen won’t even say the word goupil, the word for fox in their language? They think it is unlucky. So they call them renard instead. Isn’t that silly? I think Reynard laughs.”
“I am not afraid to say it,” said Agatha. “Goupil. Is that right?”
“That is right,” said Margriet. “But my name is Fox, too, isn’t it? Margriet de Vos, Margriet the fox. Yet I am not tricky at all.”
“But you have whiskers,” Agatha said with a grin and put her little finger to Margriet’s chin.
Claude and Beatrix roared with laughter.
Margriet kissed Agatha’s forehead, held her close, for what might be the last time. She nuzzled her with her whiskered chin. A few more days and she would be dead. She would go to her grave with whiskers on her chin. At the day of judgement, when her body was raised, would it go to Paradise with whiskers on her chin? Or would all her imperfections be taken away? If God took away Margriet’s imperfections, she would look nothing like herself.
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