Armed in Her Fashion

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Late into the night, they worked. Gertrude used the forge-hammer to shape metal. Beatrix and Jacquemine sewed and wired.

They armed themselves in the morning.

Claude was cutting rabbit skin. Gertrude had stamped the holes in her copper cauldron with her forge-hammer and a sharp bit of twisted scrap iron. She put it on and looked ridiculous; she had meant it to look like a helm, but it looked like a cauldron with holes in it.

“I am not wearing that,” Margriet said.

“Good,” said Gertrude, taking it off. Her face was even redder than usual. “I’ll wear it. I’ll die the same with a cauldron on my head as I would with a great steel helm with an ostrich feather.”

Margriet had picked up a stone at the age of eleven, and clambered up onto the rooftops of burning Bruges, and hurled her stone down at the first lurching, bleeding figure who came into sight. That stone had missed but the next brick hadn’t. She had brained him, a killer at eleven, her first blood before her first blood. It did not require a fancy blade or a plumed helmet to be a fighter.

“How would you all like to die?” Margriet asked. She had been thinking about death, when she was alone, in the night, retching her bloody guts up in the privy.

There was a long moment when no one spoke. They were all thinking of her Plague, of the fact that she would be dead in a moment. Damn her loose tongue. They were pitying her.

“Is that a threat?” asked Claude at last, a little too lightly.

“I suppose I’d want to go painlessly,” said Gertrude after a moment, with a world of pain in her voice. Margriet wondered what she had watched, her children. Margriet had watched her own children die, one after another, little blue dolls curdy and bloody.

“You know,” Margriet said, remembering childbirth, “I don’t want a painless death. I would rather have pain, and no fear.”

“It isn’t one or the other,” said Gertrude.

“It is,” Margriet retorted. “I remember with my third baby, the pain and blood would not stop. I got so cold, and all I could think about was the pain. I did not care whether I lived or died; my sister was there to watch over Beatrix. And a few days later when I had recovered I took comfort, and that moment I knew I would not fear death, so long as it came when I was in pain, because then I would welcome it, and so I would not be afraid.”

Beatrix said, “You need not fear anyway, Gertrude, because you will live again in paradise.”

“Yes,” said Gertrude with a sigh, “but I won’t be here, will I? And what if there is something I’ll miss? What if there are no figs?”

“I think there are figs,” said Beatrix with a smile, a smile that faded to a look of horror. She was remembering, no doubt, how she had promised to bring figs home for her grandfather. Remembering that her grandfather and her aunt were dead, that she would have been, too, if Margriet had let her stay in Bruges.

Gertrude had made a smaller helmet out of a piece of iron, hammering it over and over again, shaping it into something like a bowl.

“I’ll take that,” Margriet said. She put it on her head. “I don’t need much. I have my gauntlets. I’ll wear those. And a breastplate, Gertrude, if you can make me one. Punch a couple of holes in that silver plate from the church, for a leather strap.”

“What would you ask for, if you were going to be a chimera?” Claude asked.

Margriet looked sharply at her.

“Why?”

“Well, why not?”

Margriet thought. “There was an alderman of Bruges, dead now, who had a pair of spectacles. He was insufferable about them. Every time the boys would play outside his house, he would tut and hold his spectacles up high. Folding things, you know, bits of glass in bone.”

“You want a set of spectacles?” Jacquemine asked.

“I did not know your vision was so poor,” Beatrix said.

“It isn’t,” Margriet snapped. “Not for things that are close up. But sometimes I want to look at things that are far away.”

The Chatelaine looked over the new recruits. Boys. Boys would be willing to do what she asked.

She had so little—not enough armour, not enough swords. She had to make what she had stretch farther. She needed to sow fear; she needed chimeras.

But these were the boys left over after wartime. The dregs. Cowards who used violence only in small mean ways, to feed off the women and children left behind. They looked at her resentfully, though she had given them no cause.

“You are my warriors,” she said to them in a loud clear voice like a horn of war blown across a battlefield. They shuffled their feet.

“You have a choice before you. You can choose any enhancement you like. But because you are strong, I will offer you a choice many never get. Would you like that?”

The biggest one nodded.

“Good. Now have any of you ever heard of the fire powder from the East? No? Let me demonstrate.”

She held out her hand and a Match-woman handed her a little sack full of black powder. She was one of a half-dozen Match-men and Match-women she had made a month before; she was the only one who had not yet blown herself up. Her left arm twisted and narrowed into a thin rope. She snapped the flinty fingers on her right hand and sparked the end of the rope a few times, until it caught and glowed orange.

“Stand back,” the Chatelaine told the boys.

The Match-woman’s rope-arm snaked into the air and she brought the glowing end down to the powder. A bang, a puff of dirty smoke. One of the boys yelled, but the Chatelaine thought it had something of a war-whoop in it, under the fear.

“Good,” she said. “Good. Now imagine what this powder could do, if we put one end at the bottom of a jar, and a crossbow bolt or a quarrel at the top. Imagine if you had such a weapon on your arm all the time, a weapon that could never slip or miss, a weapon that would obey you as easily as your own fingers and feet obey you now. Who would not fear you, from here to Prester John’s kingdom? You would be the most feared men in Christendom, maybe even the world. Are you ready for it, boys?”

She looked at their eager faces. Five. She’d lose two in the smithy, most likely, and perhaps another later. But that left two, which was two more than the King of France would have. Ha. Let him come. A few more days and she would be ready for him. She’d scare him away.

They bade farewell to Jacquemine early in the morning, while the children were still sleeping. Claude watched Margriet kiss their foreheads, and wondered. She was such a kind-hearted woman, really. She just husbanded that kindness, as if it would run out.

The walk to Hell was long. They avoided Ypres, turning south when they saw its spires on the horizon. Claude was in front, as he knew he would be, and he walked even faster so as not to think. Margriet was tripping over her feet, of course, and Beatrix walked like a puppy and Gertrude was fat. Gertrude swung her ersatz helmet as she walked.

In the thin sunlight, they found a copse where they could watch the road. Gertrude handed out bits of salt fish. Claude was so sick of salt fish and weak ale. It was long past time to get back to the countries of olives and wine.

He pulled something out of his pocket: a bundle of dried figs he had brought in Ypres to surprise them. It had been Margriet’s money, but he had saved that money by letting Monoceros buy him a meal and a drink, so it had seemed to even out.

Beatrix squealed. “Figs!”

“Who’s that?” Margriet hissed, as a merchant jingled past them on an ass. Life, normal life, after the war.

“The Queen of Sheba,” said Claude, and the others tittered.

In the distance, a church rang the bells for Nones. Nobody else came along the road.

As they trudged south, nobody spoke. It felt familiar, four fighters walking to battle. But his companions were not soldiers, only women dressed in fur and strange metal. And they were not going to battle but to a raid.

They stopped after an hour to rest and drink. Margriet struggled to pull her helmet off. Her fingers scrabbled at it uselessly until she finally used the heels of her hands to yank it off. A trickle of blood ran down her temple, which she seemed not to notice.

She looked very grey and very old.

“I want you to pledge something,” Margriet said, to Claude quietly, looking at the dirt. “If I am killed and you recover the sack.”

Claude nodded. “I will bring it to Beatrix, if I have it, and if I have breath in my body.”

Margriet looked at him balefully. “I believe you,” she said. “And I believe that you have a right to that mace. The key of Hell! To think of it. But you made it. You have a right to it. And I will see it on your arm.”

Claude nodded again. He owed Margriet nothing. But she was his friend, in the only way she knew how.

“My father was an arkwright,” Claude said slowly, remembering. “He made the most lovely little boxes, with gold and silver clasps. I used to love to open them with the little keys he made. I wonder what he would have thought, to learn that his child could open locks, any locks, the locks of Hell itself.”

“Where is your family now?” Gertrude asked, wide-eyed.

“Dead,” Claude said. “Long dead. Long after I ran away to become a man-at-arms. It was some years afterward that I heard what had happened. You remember, the Shepherd’s Crusade came down from the north. They killed the Jews in Cahors and in Toulouse.”

He had not even told Janos all of this, only bits and pieces here and there.

He could not interpret the way they looked at him. Some mixture of revulsion or pity, and something else. Admiration, perhaps? Hatred of his Jewishness?

He spit a soggy fig-stem into the dirt. There were only a few more hours of daylight left to them, and if they hoped to reach Hell before the revenants awoke, they would have to be on their way.

“No sense dallying,” said Margriet, and stood up.

He smiled. Margriet always had to be the leader.