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
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!”