Neither did this priest of Bruges, this marked man in a marked city, who had given Claude food and shelter, brought him in when he was wounded and close to death. It was more than many men might have done. Claude had, after all, been fighting for the enemy, for the King of France and for the Chatelaine. And more than that, Claude had dressed in a man’s armour, and beneath that, bound his breasts and stuffed his braies. The priest had been kinder to him than some others might have been.
But God’s nails, the priest had taken Claude’s sword. That had been during the fever and he could not remember it. When Claude woke, he was wearing a chemise yellowed at the armpits and a rough blue kirtle. Where were the arms and harness he had fought for, wagered for, killed for? Seven years of his life—or was it eight now?—stripped off him.
The priest gave him back his own shoes, coated with the dust of many countries, the left one with a small bloody hole through the top. Damn Fleming and his goedendag. They gave him back his tinderbox and his dagger. Even a woman may carry a knife.
“Still sore,” he heard, and whirled. The priest was watching him, leaning against a wall with his arms folded. He was a small, pale-skinned man, freckled on his nose and on the bare part of his tonsure where the hair had started to grow in.
“I can manage,” said Claude. He added with a grin, “Although if you’ve got any wine about the place, I can’t say it would go wrong.”
The priest frowned. No wine, then, or at least not for being merry with. Not that sort of priest.
“What will they do to you, if we give you back to them? If they discover you are a woman, that you have lied all this time?”
What would they do to him? The free company, his brothers in arms? The motley gang of Italians, Bohemians, Spaniards, Saracens and Franks he had slept beside and shat beside and fought beside for all these years? He liked to think they would welcome him back. They’d avert their eyes and give him a few minutes to bind his breasts and stuff his braies. Claude liked to think they had known all along. Or anyway, that some small part of their minds had, and that they would wish to carry on now as if no one had told them.
Claude, they would say. Claude, come here and let us get a look at you. Sword arm, eh? Greasy Flemings. We’ll soon have you fighting sinister.
Or perhaps the priest was right, and they would say something quite different.
Could Claude be punished for it, for living in the world as if he hadn’t been called “girl” at birth? He supposed he could. The priest seemed to think so. He had said it was the sin of pride to pretend to be something other than what God had fashioned. His comrades in the Genoa Company didn’t care much about sin, but they didn’t like to be made fools. Truly, had none of them suspected? None other than his dear Janos, of course, who had reason to know. But Janos was long dead.
“I don’t want to see you punished,” the priest said, when Claude did not answer. “There is no real authority left in Bruges. Most of the burghers who weren’t killed in the battle were betrayed soon after, brought out to a parley and killed. I can’t turn you over to the French side, and certainly not to the Chatelaine. God knows what she’d make of you.”
He did not know that Claude had escaped the Chatelaine once already and Claude did not care to tell him.
“You are in luck, father, for I can solve your problem for you,” he said. “I will be going now. I thank you for your help.”
“Your arm is wounded, woman, a wound the like of which I have never seen, and you have a hole nearly clean through your left foot. And you have had a fever.”
Somewhere, the Fleming had long since wiped Claude’s blood off his goedendag. A stupid weapon. Not long enough to be a proper spear, and the pointed head was all wrong for clubbing. Yet it had done Claude in, or near enough. A knot of Flemings had come upon the crossbowmen unawares, from behind. He suspected they’d been fleeing the battle and found themselves with a chance to regain some honour or at least some pelf. As he had struggled to drop his crossbow and pull his sword, his goddamned arm throbbing and itching, he had not even seen the goedendag until the pain seared his foot. Claude had fallen under a pavisier, the stalwart Jehan, and was left for dead under his corpse and the heavy pavise.
When the crows and looters had finished, Claude crawled toward Bruges.
It was the only place with food and water he could reach. And he had sensed, for days, that the mace was in Bruges. The strange weapon he had ripped off his arm a few weeks before. The thing that marked him as the Chatelaine’s. God’s bleeding body, Claude wanted it back.
“I could give you to the beguines,” the priest muttered. “But perhaps—perhaps later, once we know a little better what you are.”
What he was. Claude already knew what he was. Claude Jouvenal, a fighter since the day he struck out on his own when he was barely more than a child. But when he had arrived at the gates of Bruges, he was feverish and muttering. That must have been before the chimeras put the city under siege. He did not remember how he came to the priest’s empty little church, or when he stripped him.
A sound—someone opening the church doors.
Claude held his dagger with his left hand.
A woman walked in. Rich. Surcote embroidered. Hood trimmed with fur. Her skin was quite dark and a few strands of wiry black hair escaped her wimple at the temple.
“Vrouwe Ooste,” said the priest, clapping his hand to his forehead. “You have come.”
The woman waved her hand. “I would never ignore a message from you, father, not even in these darkest days. Is this the stranger who asked after Willem de Vos?”
The priest looked at Claude.
Was this woman a relative of Willem de Vos? A sister, perhaps; half-sister, more likely, given the difference in complexion. If the man were dead, perhaps his property was still here, in Bruges. Claude had nothing to buy the mace with and no way to prove he had sold it to Willem in the first place. But he could work.
“God keep you, child,” said the woman. She looked only a little older than he was.
“God has been keeping me here, madame,” he said with a smile. His Flemish was improving. He had picked it up years ago on a campaign near Lille, but it had got rusty.
Then his smile froze and he clasped his right arm with his left. The itch was almost unbearable, but his own light touch was so painful he didn’t dare scratch.
“You know Willem de Vos?”
Claude smiled. “I cannot say I know him, no. I met him, some months ago. I sold him something, a thing I much regret selling now. I know nothing but his name and that he was a merchant of Bruges. A man of about ordinary height, losing his hair.”
The woman laughed nervously. “That describes him, yes. Also describes half the city, or it would have, a month ago. Are you a visitor?”
Claude nodded, gritting his teeth against the pain in his arm. A visitor. A burden. A wounded bird.
Claude could overcome being stripped of arms and harness, stripped of coins and horse, alone in the world and wearing women’s clothes. He had been that way before. He had gone out into this rotten world as a child with nothing to his name and he had found his own strength within himself. He had breathed that ember into flame.
A man with honour has no need for friends, Janos used to say. Claude had been hurt, the first time Janos said that. Now Claude turned the phrase over on his tongue, in seven languages, before he slept every night.
Given a little time and freedom he could make a life for himself again—but now his strength was not within himself, not entirely. That infernal weapon had stolen his strength, withered his sword arm.
“I don’t know what to do with her,” the priest said, gesturing at Claude. “She was in the Chatelaine’s army in some fashion, it seems, but not a grotesque. And not … not a camp follower. She was found raving of fever outside the city gates. Dressed as a crossbowman. As a man.”
The woman looked him up and down. Claude felt his skin redden.
“However did you manage that?” said the townswoman.
“Not well enough, it seems.” He smiled, as best as he could through the itch of his arm.
“She has been wounded,” said the priest. “I don’t know what to do with her.”
Claude was close to the mace now, so close. If he had the mace and a way out of this city, he could make something new of himself. Find a company of mercenaries. Start again. The first step was getting out of this church, and understanding this woman’s connection to the mace.
The woman frowned. “Willem de Vos, I am sorry to say, did not come back from the battle of Cassel. His wife, though, is my children’s wet nurse. If you would like to speak with her, come with me. I warn you it is a dour house in these dark times. My wet nurse is a funny old thing and my cook is so frightened she barely does anything but shake.”
The priest nodded his head. “Vrouwe Ooste, you are a marvel. God will reward you.”
“Thank you. I will be whatever help to you I can, in return.” Claude turned to the priest. “And I shall leave an offering for the church, in gratitude for your kindness. Where shall I find my belongings?”
The priest looked puzzled. Claude listed in French the things he had carried on his body: sword, dagger, crossbow, helmet, cap, camail, hauberk, aketon, belt, spanning hook, chausses, chausses of mail, poleyns, gloves, quiver, quarrels (he claimed twenty, although some had found their marks in his last battle). The priest frowned. Claude went on: shirt, braies. The priest frowned deeper.
“Your man’s clothing and armaments have been given out among the guards at the walls. This city is under siege, and neither you nor I would be alive now if the beardless of Bruges were not keeping the chimeras at bay as best they can. Your food, in these desperate times, has cost more than our coffers have seen in a year. We have no help, here, now, from anyone but God. A more than fair arrangement, unless you have some other means of paying for your room and board?”
He swallowed. “I had a purse, yes.”
The priest shook his head. “If so, it did not come here with you.”
He might be lying. What did it matter? If the priest had taken it, it would be gone by now, spent on food, most likely.
“Oh, and a phylactery, a little thing on a leather string,” Claude remembered aloud. Given to him by funny old Guillot before he expired of ague in Genoa last summer.
It came to Claude, then, like a blow to the gut, that he had truly lost everything. His tunics and hoods. His game pieces. His good grey courser, with him since Catalonia, his through a very lucky wager, and no doubt stolen or dead now. His friends.
“I am Jacquemine Ooste,” said the woman in French. “What is your name?”
“Claude,” he said, the name he had chosen at fourteen.
The priest frowned at him. Claude stared back, daring him to question it. He could not remember now, if he had deliberately chosen to call himself Claude because it could belong to a man or a woman. Perhaps he had, perhaps he had been unsure, then, when he had been barely old enough to bleed. He was not unsure now.
“Is that the name you were christened with?”
Claude almost smiled at that. He had not been christened at all. But it hurt to remember the name of his childhood, and anyway that name would not be welcome here. He was pushing his luck enough already, without announcing himself as a Jew.
“Claude,” he said. “Claude is my name.”
CHAPTER THREE
Excerpt from the Chronicles of Zonnebeke Abbey
In the year of our Lord 1326, a woman drove the beast called Hell up to the surface of the Earth. Its great mouth opened first in the mountains of northern Italy and for several months no one noticed.
One day a wandering French brigand, fleeing revenge, came upon what he thought was a cave. He put his cloak over his mouth and entered, paying no heed to the stalactites that stretched down from the mouth of the cave like fangs, paying no mind to the sulphurous fumes.
Several days later, he emerged bigger than he had been, with his skin bronzed tougher than leather, and with a long metal horn jutting from the middle of his forehead. The woman who drove the Hellbeast emerged behind him.
She was tall and dark and her hair fell in long twists, singed at the ends. She was clad in burnt leather. The woman told Giovanni Saranzo, the Doge of Venice, that she had been so long in the belly of that Beast that she had forgotten her birth name.
“Was it Persephone? Was it Hel? Was it Lilith?” The scholars asked her. She shook her head, and said it might have been, but then again it might not.
“We thought Hell was a place,” they said.
“It is,” she said. “It is also a Beast. A capacious Beast; it carries multitudes within it.”
“Are you the Queen of Hell?” they asked her.
She shook her head. “I have no right to that kingdom as it had no right to me,” she said. “But I am, for now, its mistress and manager. I hold the keys. You may call me, perhaps, its Chatelaine.”
“It is a wonder,” they said, “that you speak the languages of the Earth so well. Do they speak French in Hell, then?”
And the Italians smirked.
She shook her head, and smiled, showing all her gleaming teeth. She reached up and scratched the horned French brigand behind the ears as if he were a pet. He smiled, too, and said nothing.
The two of them disappeared, then, back into the mouth of Hell, and when messengers from the pope came, they found the Hellmouth gone.
Two years later it emerged again, this time near Paris. It swallowed the village of Minou-sur-Marne and all its sixty inhabitants and all its animals. Out came the Chatelaine and her marshal again.
“Were they all sinners, those of the village of Minou-sur-Marne?” people asked her.
She gave no answer, and professed herself confused.
“But then why were they damned? Why did Hell swallow them?”
“They were unlucky,” she said. “The Beast takes all kinds. It does not require sin.”
Then the Emperor warned that one might expect the devil’s wife to lie.
But there were some who said the Beast was not truly Hell after all, but only a kind of copy, the way the Earthly Paradise mirrors Heaven. No one had counted all the revenants but there seemed to be too few. If this was Hell, where was Judas? Where was Nero?
One of those who made that argument was the Emperor’s rival, Philippe of Valois, King of France.
(And indeed some few foolish people whispered that this Beast must be Cockaigne itself, for the people who lived within it were never hungry.)
In King Philippe, the Chatelaine found an ally. Here was a man who bore the pale flowers of death embroidered on his clothing. They seemed fated to work together, each to further the other’s cause.
King Philippe was in some difficulty at that time in Flanders, where the common people were in revolt against him and against his vassal, their own count. And the Chatelaine had some ambition of her own. Clad now like a noblewoman of France, in ermines and linens, she set about helping the French king by raising an army: an army of the dead or near-dead, and of the altered living. There were many among the weak-minded, the sick and the lame, who were tempted by her gifts.
With this army, and some few mercenaries sent by the king to help, she set about pacifying Flanders.
Whenever anyone asked her about her husband, she refused to answer, and she did not like the question. It was she who held the reins of Hell; that was all anyone could discover about it.
CHAPTER FOUR
Margriet ran onto the causeway under the gate, slipping in the dust at the edge of the road, her feet finding purchase in the weeds.
Had the terrible thunder blasted the walls open? As the smoke cleared she saw it still standing, the wooden door unmarred by
the greasy black smoke in the air.
As she approached the gate, she screamed, “Open, open in the name of Christ! They’re behind me!”
Her right leg was still numb from squatting and her breath was in her throat. She fell against the wooden door and banged.
“Open! If you let me die I swear I shall haunt you. I will come back as a revenant and call your names. By God I swear it. Let me in, you ninnies!”
She could not hear over the ringing in her ears. Should she leap into the moat? Would the Nix find her there, after all?
Her city. Her city, where she had worked and fought and bled. Its very stones owed her.
The door creaked, and she squeezed through as it opened. Someone took her roughly by one arm and flung her into the darkness. It was cool and damp, and she leaned against the stone wall to catch her breath.
Young Pieter de Groote, pimpled and scrawny, leaned against the door and barred it, glaring at her.
“What in God’s name have you done?” he asked her.
“Me? That was nothing to do with me. That was a passel of chimeras. Blowing themselves back to Hell. They’re trying to blow the walls down.”
“And what in Hell were you doing out there?”
“Don’t know your job, Pieter,” she said. The words tumbled out of her, a release. She heard how shrill her voice sounded, her throat constricted by fear. “Letting a woman wait at the mercy of Hell’s envoys. You were always a bad one, from the days you ran with a hoop in the street and tortured your little sister with dead rats. Oh, yes, someone was watching. Someone was watching and it was me.” She poked her own chest. “And now God is watching, and sees how you leave a woman out at the mercy of monsters.” She pointed up at Him. Since the arrival of Hell from below, the orientation of Heaven seemed all the more certain.
“Such gratitude,” Pieter grumbled.
Elisabeth Joossens came up to them and frowned at them each in turn. She held a broomstick with a dagger blade notched and bound into one end.
“How the devil did you get out there? Lucky I know your voice, Margriet de Vos, or I would have thought you a spy for the Chatelaine. Pieter here wanted to leave you out there.”
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