“But if we blow the doors off, that may be all we need to do,” he said. “The city fathers have all been executed. Those who remain are women and children, or old men, and more than half dead of the Plague, thanks to the revenants.”
Mary, Mother of God—it was young Julius. It must be. She knew that voice; he had hung about Willem’s shop, begging, since he was beardless. Most days he had his earnings stolen from him, poor child, or gave them away to some hard-hearted bully. It did not take much to trick Julius.
And yet here he was, a chimera, commanding other chimeras, by the looks of it. And he did not sound so foolish now.
With his new head, it seemed, came a new intelligence, issuing from what seemed to be empty space. Julius had never been able to drive a bargain.
Margriet did not like to look at that void or the bird within it, so she looked down, to where the gargantuan helmet was welded to a lumpy cicatrice all around his neck.
“Bah,” said one of the men with metal arms. “The revenants work too slowly. It will be a city of corpses if we leave it to the revenants. Not worth taking.”
“That, my clever friend, is why you are here.”
Julius! What an edge his sweet voice had now.
The gate was so near. She could run to it in a matter of a minute, if it were not for these evil creatures in her way.
In the old days there would have been people, carts, horses, going in and out. She and Willem had gone through this gate so many times, on their way to trade in Poperinge or Roeselare, bickering on their little cart while their pony flicked its ears.
She had eaten the pony last week, she and Father and Beatrix and Katharina; its lean meat had been as sweet as its disposition, poor thing. And now the gate was shut, although she had no doubt of her ability to get in; she had planned to bang on the postern door, to shout the names of the boys and women who stood guard there with their improvised pikes, even, if need be, to shout the shibboleth the people of Bruges had used in her childhood to separate the city folk from the invading French, who could not pronounce it: scilt ende vrient.
She crawled forward an inch, and waited. They did not seem to notice the movement. She wished her breath were not so loud, hissing out of her nose like steam from a kettle, and her heart fluttering like that trapped bird.
If only she could go back the way she had come, riding the Nix, secretly by the canal out into the moat. But the stubborn old water-snake would not come to her out here. He obeyed her only within the city gates, in the canals where she had met him all those years ago, when she had tricked him into promising her his service. The slimy serpent was like a wool merchant who picked the last bit of fluff off the scales; he kept his promise to come to her anywhere within the city, but offered not one mote more.
How long would the chimeras stand here? They had not been here when she alighted from the Nix’s back and made her way with sodden shoes from the moat to the field. Not even an hour before. The barricades were on the roads, a little distance from each city gate.
Margriet crept forward in the weeds, her thighs burning with cramping. She allowed herself a silent grimace. She husbanded her curses.
The men with the metal arms lined up, facing the Smedenpoort, while the little dog with the steam rising from its back ran back and forth.
“People of Bruges!” shouted the chimera who had been Julius, his echoing voice louder than any human’s ought to be. “You have been warned. The Chatelaine would like to end your suffering. But as you have refused, time and time again, to open the gates to her, we have been sent to take down your walls.”
The silence was filled only by the insects of the afternoon.
The chimera who had been Julius whistled, without lips, and the little steaming dog trotted to one end of the line of chimeras. Each in turn dipped the end of a rope-arm onto its back and rose up with the end glowing red.
“Ready,” said Julius.
He spoke with such authority now.
The chimeras raised their arms and the ropes flailed in the wind, throwing sparks like fireflies, and then came to rest on the metal of their other arms.
A boom and a flash like the day of judgement ripped through the world.
Margriet went flat on the ground, her arms over her head, whispering, “Mary, save me. Mary, Mother of God.”
Someone was screaming.
She raised her head.
Smoke rose black into the sky.
Two of the chimeras had been blown in half. Another had been blown to bits. His head, with a metal beak like a bird’s, rolled straight to her. A man with a new nose and new arms—these men had been lepers, perhaps, before the Chatelaine made her bargain with them.
The smoke filled the air so thick she could not see the walls. Had the thundering fire breached them? She must get in. She must find her daughter.
Margriet ran through the smoke and screaming, toward the walls of her city.
CHAPTER TWO
Claude paced the silent nave, alone. He ground his teeth and curled his fingers around the dagger handle. He tensed his right arm and tried, for the eighty-seventh time that day, to raise it with the dagger in its grip.
This time it reached the level of his unbound breasts before he winced and let it drop. It clattered on the stones.
“Blood of Christ,” he muttered.
He had lived in this body his whole life, and while he had resented its womanish aches and those inconvenient breasts, only now was he truly angry at it. Furious. His right arm, his sword arm, would not obey him.
The wound that encircled his right forearm had healed badly. It left a bracelet of pitted flesh in shining petal pink, each pock surrounded by square yellow ridges, sore to the touch. The fever had gone, though. There was no reason why the muscles of his hand and arm should be so weak. But he could barely hold a little knife, never mind span a crossbow.
God damn the Chatelaine and all her weapons. There must have been some enchantment in that mace Claude took from her strange forges. It had fitted so perfectly on his hand, like a gauntlet. It had felt like a part of him. Ha. A part of him indeed, more than he knew. Now he missed it dearly. He ached for it. His arm itched, and hung useless.
Claude smoothed his hair behind his ear. A few months and it would be long enough to braid, coil, whatever women did with their hair. Here in Bruges, where the shapes of his body had been discovered, people would expect him to answer to “she” and “her.”
A swell of panic rose in his chest. He had to get out of this city. Get a weapon in his hand and his own clothes on.
He picked up his dagger with his left hand and paced. One night in Apulia, he and Janos had dined at the home of a merchant who kept a small leopard—a descendant, the merchant claimed, of the great menagerie of Frederick II. It was a rangy beast. Patches of its fur were missing and one eye wept golden tears. Yet it had paced its cage with a warning on its face. Claude felt that warning on his own face now.
A warning for whom? For Willem de Vos, if the man yet lived? Only if he refused to sell Claude back the mace, or tell him where he might find it now. No, Willem had nothing to fear from Claude.
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.