“But—”
He walked away from her, elbowing his way in to the crowd of chimeras watching the scene at the smith. He glanced at each of the fires in turn, at the scraps of bone and charred fur, of horns and blades. He could not see the mace-key. Of course not; if she had brought it here she would have seen it done, in private, not left it lying here. Still he could not help himself.
He was closer in through the crowd now and could see Margriet lying prone on a great anvil. She was shackled, no, more than shackled—she was ringed with iron all down the length of her body and her mouth was open, open wider than Claude would have thought possible. It was hard to tell from a distance but her face did not look pained at all; she looked ferocious, like a lion receiving its prey.
He looked to one side and there his eyes caught Monoceros’s again. The horned man leaned in toward the Chatelaine, who was exulting over Margriet. He said something, and the Chatelaine looked up, toward Claude. Claude turned and walked through the crowd as quickly as he could without causing alarm. As he passed one of the working tables he saw one of Margriet’s gauntlets lying there and he picked it up, like a champion’s token, like a trophy, like something to give Beatrix of her dead mother. For there was no doubt Margriet would be as good as dead, soon enough, that she was now a weapon of war.
Claude strode out through the room and into the hallway. He glanced back just once to see that Monoceros was following him, although silently and alone.
When Claude got near the hall, he could hear a hound yelping and someone screaming. Gertrude!
He ran through the corridor, uphill on the damp surface like loamy earth. He put the gauntlet on his weak hand and with a thought, sent the steel gadlings flying off his knuckles like living things out toward the chimeras gathered there.
He had known, somehow, when he gave these gauntlets to Margriet, that they were more than they appeared. Had Monoceros known as well? Had he given Claude the gauntlets to try to trap him, to turn him into a chimera for once and for all?
But the creatures gathered before him, shooing away the flying gadlings, were not chimeras after all but revenants. Gertrude must have angered them somehow, or else the Chatelaine had given them orders.
Gertrude was struggling with one—Baltazar. The revenant whirled as one of the gadlings hit him in the forehead, and Gertrude managed to grab Beatrix’s distaff from him. The hound leaped up and took a gadling in its dog mouth but then it wheeled like a mad thing, as if it had swallowed a hornet, until Gertrude thrust the end of the distaff into the hound’s chest, hard, and it yelped and its legs shook.
The face on the back end was a woman’s. It grimaced.
The gadlings returned to Claude’s hand. The hand, his mace-hand, throbbed from the chafing of the gauntlet upon it. But the itching, the horrible itching, was gone.
Now Gertrude was pulling the distaff out of the dog, and it wouldn’t come, and Gertrude was yelling something Claude could not make out. Baltazar seemed at a loss. He stood and watched Gertrude.
“Come on,” Claude said. “Monoceros is behind me.”
Gertrude pulled once more on the distaff and it came free. She whacked Baltazar across the head with it, and he fell to the ground.
“Ha,” Gertrude said.
Claude swore, “God’s nails,” and grabbed one handle of the sack and ran, dragging it, but the thing was too bulky and it was a relief when Gertrude came up alongside him and took one handle. They were nearly at the mouth when they heard Monoceros behind, calling, “Claude!”
All was lost.
Claude took the distaff from Gertrude and jabbed it up into the roof of the mouth, but the beast only groaned. Damn thing.
He could open locks, if he had a tool. He thrust the distaff into the scar hole and twisted, bending all his thought on it.
Blood poured out of the scar and the Hellbeast gnashed its teeth.
With a groan, the bridle creaked. Just a crack but it was enough. Claude and Gertrude fell to their knees and pushed the sack out. They half-crawled, half-rolled out into the cold night air.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The Chatelaine did not believe Margriet de Vos, or trust her. A city woman, who smelled of dry fish and babies. A woman who measured her life in coins and cloth, and yet wanted now to be made a weapon. The Chatelaine could not understand it, and the sooner Margriet was put onto the anvil, the sooner it would be clear whether she was lying.
So she had a smith put rings around Margriet. The rings were ready, for she had wanted to try this for some time now. To make a powder weapon more powerful—or at the very least more frightening—than the gonner-chimeras who had blown themselves up at the wall of Bruges. If this worked, she would make more tomorrow. And then Philippe would see what she could do.
Monoceros whispered to her, “I want to see what Chaerephon is up to.”
She nodded. Good of him to remember. Loyal Monoceros, little better than a beast. She must remember not to have any more philosophers around her.
The smiths put the ringed woman through the fire, face first.
“Wait,” said the Chatelaine. She took her fingernail and found a place where the flesh of the woman showed through the rings. She scratched the words ULTIMA RATIO MULIERUM in the blood; the skin shuddered and bled but the woman did not cry out, for she had iron in her throat.
Margriet de Vos came out with her arms and legs fused, with her mouth open and her skin bronzed darker than Monoceros’s, as if her whole skin were armour. She came out silent. The Chatelaine crouched and looked into Margriet’s unblinking eyes, at her mouth, now wide open, but silent.
They put a long tube of iron down Margriet’s throat, and she thought nothing could hurt more than that. She would be dead soon and she was glad of it.
And then something did hurt more: the fire was everywhere as her flesh melted into the metal and became metal, as her open mouth became the mouth of a cannon. She felt her eyes sliding backwards, like the eyes of the great sea monster figurehead on the boat that her father had most admired. He had taken her to see it, many times, when she was a child, before the violence of the Matins of Bruges, before he became a smaller man, a reduced man.
When she came out, the pain was a dull throb. She could not hear very well anymore, but she could see, and the worst of it was how cold she felt. How cold the hot air of Hell felt against her metal skin.
She honed her thoughts. The only task that remained to her in this life was to explode, the way the gonner-chimeras had, but bigger. More powerfully. Enough so that the Chatelaine herself might be killed, and if not, at least a part of her army would go. Revenge for Margriet’s lost life. For her daughter, wherever she might be now. For Bruges itself, her beautiful city, the city of canals where Margriet had learned to love the world.
They set her on a cart that did not fit her. They rolled her, rollicking and bumping, up through the throat of the beast. The Chatelaine opened the lock. No sign of Claude or Gertrude. Margriet hoped they had got themselves well clear.
“No sign of Monoceros?” the Chatelaine asked one of her Mantis-men.
The trick would be in fooling them, in drawing them close.
They loaded the powder in and set the match. They put a bolt in her mouth, a long bar of wood that had been a spear, she thought. They did not care much about the bolt itself, how true it would fly; they just wanted to test the powder to see if it worked. They loaded the powder. The Chatelaine retreated to a safe distance.
Margriet had never been a very good liar but she thought she could manage a feint.
She swallowed it down when the powder ignited. All of her bile, all of her hate. She swallowed dampness out of the air and it worked.
They thought it had failed.
“It’s a new mix,” said the chimera loading her, his voice echoing in an empty helmet. “We were hasty, perhaps. We did not mix it wet and let it dry
. No time.”
“Add more, then,” said the Chatelaine.
They added more. Margriet swallowed it down. She let the fire rumble through parts of her they did not know she had. She destroyed it.
The third time, they spilled all they had into her. And the Chatelaine, growing impatient, stood a little closer.
Margriet asked God to bless her enterprise.
This time Margriet forced the fire out of herself, out through all the cracks. She knew nothing more.
Beatrix walked through the darkness. She did not even know which direction to walk. The smell of brimstone was on the air but she could not follow it, could not get a sense of its direction.
A boom resounded through the air and a great light lit up the horizon. The very clouds were bright wounds in the sky afterward, with clouds of black smoke swirling in front. This must be her vision come to pass.
Saint Catherine, she prayed. Where are you? Will you help me?
She wanted to run as far as she could from the fire, but Mother and Gertrude and Claude might have been there, and they might need her help.
And indeed, as she walked closer to it, shielding her eyes against the light, she saw the head of the great Hellbeast. But it was bloodied and torn, a gash breaking through one of its eyes. There were bodies all around, chimera bodies.
A giant egg rolled in front of her. It was as high as her shoulder, and cracked clean across. A very thin hand almost like a human hand, and a long arm, reached out of it.
Then she saw a half-dozen of the eggs lying around, all cracked, with thin arms and legs coming out of them.
The beast itself groaned, and retreated until there was nothing left but the mounded earth where it had been.
“Beatrix!” she heard behind her.
She looked and her eyes had to adjust to the darkness. She saw Gertrude holding her distaff, and she ran to her.
Gertrude handed her the distaff and then kissed her cheek.
“We must leave,” Claude hissed. Some of the fur had fallen off her face in patches but she looked fearsome all the same.
“Mother,” said Beatrix.
“She’s gone,” Claude said. “Dead. She’s the one who did this.”
It was not possible. It was a mistake.
“But how?” Beatrix asked
“No time. It was quick, quicker than the Plague would have been. Come on.”
Beatrix picked up her distaff and felt it wet. She sniffed her hand; blood.
“What happened in there?” she asked Gertrude as they ran.
“I speared a hound,” Gertrude yelled, and laughed.
After a few steps they nearly tripped over the sack.
“You got it,” Beatrix breathed.
“Yes, we got your stupid coins. All that for this,” Claude said, heaving it.
They walked a little more and then they heard a voice in the darkness say, “Claude.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Claude drew his knife when he saw the horned man approaching. He didn’t want to hurt Monoceros but he wasn’t going to let him get in the way.
“Your mistress is dead,” Claude said. “You have no more business with me.”
“I’m not sure she is,” Monoceros answered. “But Hell seems to be going beneath the earth without me in it.”
“Then let us pass,” he said gruffly.
“I am not here to stop you. I am here to walk beside you, if you will allow it.”
Claude squinted at him.
“Come over here,” he said, and pulled Monoceros by the hand, away from Gertrude and Beatrix.
They stood close to each other in the cold night, with the bleak little trees still burning on the horizon. He felt as if he could not see Monoceros very well, that he needed to see him in better light, but there was no better light to be had.
“Why?” Claude asked. “Why did you let me go? You saw me. You knew who I was.”
“I am not sure I know who you are,” Monoceros said slowly. “But I know you are an honourable man.”
Claude stepped back, thinking hard. Monoceros knew the shape of his body. He had looked it over often enough, when he was crouched in the cell wearing nothing but a tunic.
“Yes,” Claude said simply. “A man who failed to become a chimera.”
He held up his right hand with Margriet’s gauntlet still chafing it.
Monoceros, in answer, put his hand to it, and pressed it down to Claude’s side, and in that moment he moved closer to him and kissed him on the mouth. It was a hard kiss, a soldier’s kiss. He smelled of brimstone.
“You are trying to trick me,” Claude said after a moment. He let his hands linger on the skin like armour.
“No,” Monoceros said. “Yes. I am a brigand. I can’t be trusted. And I am a unicorn. The noblest of creatures.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Then let me walk beside you for a while, and we’ll see if we understand each other then.”
Claude glanced behind his shoulder, at Beatrix and Gertrude.
“I have to see her to the coast, to get a ship for England. It’s what Margriet wanted.”
“No,” said Beatrix, stepping forward. He had not known she could hear. “We’re going to Spain. As pilgrims. But we’ll walk with you as far as Paris, and farther, if you’re going south.”
The Chatelaine lay dying. She knew she was dying, she knew from the froth of blood in her own mouth, the bubbles of blood pushing at the packed dirt in her nostrils. From the sense that she was distant from her own body.
At the edges of her vision she saw eggs running on spindly legs. The beast’s spawn. The reason she was dying. The beast screamed, and opened its mouth wider than it ever had before. The egg-creatures scampered inside and down came those jaws, clamped tight. The Hellbeast slid into its burrow, back beneath the Earth.
Carrying her husband in its belly, her husband locked away with a key that only she held. She sobbed and turned her face into the cold mud.
They would find her body, and her mace-key on it.
A tree was afire, a little way into the distance. If she could get to that fire, she could thrust the mace into it, and hope to destroy it. No one should have the key to Hell.
And the other mace? The one she had given Monoceros to destroy? Her loyal Monoceros. He had said he would destroy it, and no doubt he had.
She crawled in her torn kirtle and surcote through the mud. Every movement was a dagger in her breast. She crawled under the burning tree and when a flaming limb fell she lifted her arm and slammed her arm, the one bearing the mace, into the fire. A small fire, but perhaps it would be enough.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Excerpt from the Chronicles of Zonnebeke Abbey
In the year of our Lord 1328, the beast called Hell was driven under the Earth. No one knew what became of its mistress. Some say she walks the Earth, still, and some claim to have seen the Hellspawn, scrawny creatures hatched from the eggs of the beast.
Nine years later, the King of England challenged the right of Philippe of Valois to the throne of France, and those two countries began a war that would last a hundred years and more. A new plague came to the world, and at first many feared that it was a return of the Hell-Plague, but it was instead something far worse.
There were many stories born during this time, as the people were afraid. People told stories of a band of women, led by a Flemish widow, who donned armour made of pots and pans, and raided Hell itself. People called this woman Dulle Griet in the Flemish tongue, or Margot-la-Folle in French, or Mad Meg in English. The city of Ghent constructed a great bombard and named it Dulle Griet.
From time to time there were stories of revenants left wandering, the remnants of the brief sojourn of Hell on the surface of the earth.
The wise say the creature was not Hell, but only some chtho
nic creature, whose doings have been so confused in the imagination of ordinary folk that it might as well have been. The wicked say that this beast must have emerged from time to time in the story of the world, and that it might one day rise again to trouble us.
Acknowledgements
One of my late grandfathers was named Claude, like one of the main characters in this book, and his ancestors came from France. The other was one of the British Expeditionary Force soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk at the beginning of the Second World War. His account of a desperate journey west from Belgium was in my mind as I wrote this book.
No one in my family—including my two very practical grandmothers, each of them armed in her fashion—ever doubted my writing. My dad’s always there to read a draft or help me research or lend confidence. My mom, the most thoughtful reader and dedicated fan a writer could want, has taken many tasks off my shoulders to give me more time to write. I thank Shirley Warren for her unwavering pride and support. The indomitable Linda Nicholson-Brown’s enthusiasm and affection have been a gift to me and to my writing. My siblings, and their families, multiply every joy.
My partner and first reader, Brent Warren, has had more cause than anyone to question all the hours I spend writing fiction. He never has. I owe him, and our son Xavier, all my thanks.
Jennie Goloboy, my agent, is the sharpest reader I know and a true partner in my writing career.
Thanks as well to Dawn Frederick at Red Sofa Literary for her work to bring this book into the world.
I’m grateful to everyone at the creative powerhouse that is ChiZine Publications, but especially to Sandra Kasturi and S.M. Beiko for believing in this book, to S.M. Beiko for editing and layout, and to Erik Mohr for the perfect cover.
Those who read and commented on early drafts, in whole or in part, include Michal Wojcik, Michel Schellekens, Merc Rustad, Effie Seiberg, Gwen Phua, Beth Tanner, Jared Oliver Adams, Derek Künsken, Paul Krueger and Kat Howard. Any remaining errors or oversights are entirely mine.
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