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.”
“Did he now?”
Elisabeth frowned at her. Would she ask again, how Margriet came to be outside the city walls during a siege? No, she would not. Margriet recognized that expression. It said: I am not asking. It was an expression they had all learned, all the residents of this cursed city who had been children during the bloody so-called Matins of Bruges in 1302. As Elisabeth and Margriet had both been.
When they were children, Elisabeth used to walk ahead of Margriet on the great treadmill that powered the crane in the market square, that loaded and unloaded the goods on the canal boats. The people of Bruges turned their children into machines and the city prospered.
And then when the French attacked, in 1302, they turned their children into weapons. Up on the rooftops, bricks in hand.
Margriet had sometimes wondered, in the intervening years, whether she would have to pay with one dead child for every Frenchman she had killed in her own childhood. Trouble was, she did not know how many she had killed, how many had died from the rocks and bricks she threw from the rooftop with her family. One had died, at least. She knew about one.
Perhaps, she had thought on more than one silent night, cradling a stillborn baby in her arms, God was taking his due. Perhaps God had not been paying attention the night that Beatrix was born, alive.
Like a market-woman distracted by one thief while the other helps himself to the contents of her cart, God had let her get away with her first child, her only child now.
Margriet must get to her Beatrix, now, to tell her that the chimeras were trying to bring down the walls. They had not succeeded today. Tomorrow, they might.
Elisabeth Joossens, who had been up on those rooftops, too, was not going to ask any citizen of Bruges to account for their actions. This was their code, their silent password.
“Hie to your house, shrew, and be grateful I saved your life,” pimply Pieter hissed, too young to know the code, emboldened by his new position, now that all the men had gone from Bruges. “Do you not see the sun is nearly down?”
It was. The streets were grey and empty. The revenants were coming, and soon enough Pieter would be fending them off. Within the city, Jacquemine Ooste would be worried, fretting over little Jacob. But first Margriet must see to Beatrix, tell her to prepare to leave the city. They must go. Tomorrow, they must go. They must take refuge where they could—some religious house, if any were left unburnt.
Damn the chimeras.
Margriet darted up the wooden steps to the top of the city wall, hearing Pieter yelling behind her. She leaned over the wall and shouted at the carnage below.
“Go to the devil, all of you, and save yourselves the shame of leaving with your tails between your legs!”
Margriet stumbled down the stairs again, back to where Elisabeth Joosens was still standing guard inside the gate. She whispered, “They will take down the walls, Elisabeth One way or another. It’s time to prepare.”
Elisabeth nodded, gripped her broomstick, as if that would help.
Margriet walked into her city crookedly, bent, holding her ribs with her right hand and the bunched-up corner of her apron full of thistles with her left. The city was silent: no horseshoes ringing on the cobbles, for the horses had all been eaten. No carts wheeled over the stones. No children played and the canals were empty save a few small boats tied up to posts.
Outside the besieged city were the chimeras, but the greater danger to the people of Bruges was within.
All the houses were shuttered, with evening coming on; the only way to tell which walls hid healthy people and which hid those touched by the revenant Plague were the marks scratched into the doors: a rectangle, wider than it was tall, with rounded corners. The Hellmouth.
And sometimes, on the richer houses, by the words Domine Miserere Nobis. Or the letter H, for Helpest.
The Helpest, the revenant Plague, meant death. Painful, hideous, but mercifully quick, and mere bodily death was not the worst weapon the revenants carried.
Far, far worse was the Grief, which drove out reason and weakened the will. Every night, revenants flew over the skies of Bruges, and called the names of the living, over and over. Every night, some of the living went mad. They saw strange sights, and tore their hair and flesh, and would not eat or drink.
And, then, one of two things would happen:
The Grief-stricken would go pale and thin until they, too, became revenants, and walked out of their houses to take the hands of their beloveds, and walk away, over the walls, though the living (sometimes) tried to hold them back.
Or the newly Grief-stricken opened their doors and let the revenants in, willingly. Once a revenant entered a house, everyone who lived there would be dead of the Plague within days.
Buried death or walking death: those were the only outcomes, once the revenants’ call opened the heart of a living person.
But Margriet did not fear the dead. Willem might well be dead, that she knew. Three weeks since the Battle of Cassel, and no sign of her husband. He might well have been among the prisoners fed to the Hellbeast, in which case he would be a revenant. What of it? If she heard him call, she would be glad, for she would know she was truly a widow. Her husband could call her name all he liked, and she would only smile, knowing he was dead. There was no crack in her heart by which the Grief could enter.
The Chatelaine paced the rolling floor of her private chamber, swinging the mace that fit over her hand like a gauntlet, that bit into her flesh and seemed now to grow out of her arm, at her side.
Her husband’s house had many rooms and most of them were red. Great halls that glistened red, deep wormholes that glowed red, wiggling passages that pulsed red. The Chatelaine was fluent in all its hues and meanings.