The Chatelaine looked over the new recruits. Boys. Boys would be willing to do what she asked.
She had so little—not enough armour, not enough swords. She had to make what she had stretch farther. She needed to sow fear; she needed chimeras.
But these were the boys left over after wartime. The dregs. Cowards who used violence only in small mean ways, to feed off the women and children left behind. They looked at her resentfully, though she had given them no cause.
“You are my warriors,” she said to them in a loud clear voice like a horn of war blown across a battlefield. They shuffled their feet.
“You have a choice before you. You can choose any enhancement you like. But because you are strong, I will offer you a choice many never get. Would you like that?”
The biggest one nodded.
“Good. Now have any of you ever heard of the fire powder from the East? No? Let me demonstrate.”
She held out her hand and a Match-woman handed her a little sack full of black powder. She was one of a half-dozen Match-men and Match-women she had made a month before; she was the only one who had not yet blown herself up. Her left arm twisted and narrowed into a thin rope. She snapped the flinty fingers on her right hand and sparked the end of the rope a few times, until it caught and glowed orange.
“Stand back,” the Chatelaine told the boys.
The Match-woman’s rope-arm snaked into the air and she brought the glowing end down to the powder. A bang, a puff of dirty smoke. One of the boys yelled, but the Chatelaine thought it had something of a war-whoop in it, under the fear.
“Good,” she said. “Good. Now imagine what this powder could do, if we put one end at the bottom of a jar, and a crossbow bolt or a quarrel at the top. Imagine if you had such a weapon on your arm all the time, a weapon that could never slip or miss, a weapon that would obey you as easily as your own fingers and feet obey you now. Who would not fear you, from here to Prester John’s kingdom? You would be the most feared men in Christendom, maybe even the world. Are you ready for it, boys?”
She looked at their eager faces. Five. She’d lose two in the smithy, most likely, and perhaps another later. But that left two, which was two more than the King of France would have. Ha. Let him come. A few more days and she would be ready for him. She’d scare him away.
They bade farewell to Jacquemine early in the morning, while the children were still sleeping. Claude watched Margriet kiss their foreheads, and wondered. She was such a kind-hearted woman, really. She just husbanded that kindness, as if it would run out.
The walk to Hell was long. They avoided Ypres, turning south when they saw its spires on the horizon. Claude was in front, as he knew he would be, and he walked even faster so as not to think. Margriet was tripping over her feet, of course, and Beatrix walked like a puppy and Gertrude was fat. Gertrude swung her ersatz helmet as she walked.
In the thin sunlight, they found a copse where they could watch the road. Gertrude handed out bits of salt fish. Claude was so sick of salt fish and weak ale. It was long past time to get back to the countries of olives and wine.
He pulled something out of his pocket: a bundle of dried figs he had brought in Ypres to surprise them. It had been Margriet’s money, but he had saved that money by letting Monoceros buy him a meal and a drink, so it had seemed to even out.
Beatrix squealed. “Figs!”
“Who’s that?” Margriet hissed, as a merchant jingled past them on an ass. Life, normal life, after the war.
“The Queen of Sheba,” said Claude, and the others tittered.
In the distance, a church rang the bells for Nones. Nobody else came along the road.
As they trudged south, nobody spoke. It felt familiar, four fighters walking to battle. But his companions were not soldiers, only women dressed in fur and strange metal. And they were not going to battle but to a raid.
They stopped after an hour to rest and drink. Margriet struggled to pull her helmet off. Her fingers scrabbled at it uselessly until she finally used the heels of her hands to yank it off. A trickle of blood ran down her temple, which she seemed not to notice.
She looked very grey and very old.
“I want you to pledge something,” Margriet said, to Claude quietly, looking at the dirt. “If I am killed and you recover the sack.”
Claude nodded. “I will bring it to Beatrix, if I have it, and if I have breath in my body.”
Margriet looked at him balefully. “I believe you,” she said. “And I believe that you have a right to that mace. The key of Hell! To think of it. But you made it. You have a right to it. And I will see it on your arm.”
Claude nodded again. He owed Margriet nothing. But she was his friend, in the only way she knew how.
“My father was an arkwright,” Claude said slowly, remembering. “He made the most lovely little boxes, with gold and silver clasps. I used to love to open them with the little keys he made. I wonder what he would have thought, to learn that his child could open locks, any locks, the locks of Hell itself.”
“Where is your family now?” Gertrude asked, wide-eyed.
“Dead,” Claude said. “Long dead. Long after I ran away to become a man-at-arms. It was some years afterward that I heard what had happened. You remember, the Shepherd’s Crusade came down from the north. They killed the Jews in Cahors and in Toulouse.”
He had not even told Janos all of this, only bits and pieces here and there.
He could not interpret the way they looked at him. Some mixture of revulsion or pity, and something else. Admiration, perhaps? Hatred of his Jewishness?
He spit a soggy fig-stem into the dirt. There were only a few more hours of daylight left to them, and if they hoped to reach Hell before the revenants awoke, they would have to be on their way.
“No sense dallying,” said Margriet, and stood up.
He smiled. Margriet always had to be the leader.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Beatrix kissed her mother, who smelled the same as she always had: slightly sour, like old milk. She walked away with the wetness of her mother’s kiss on her lips, and forced herself not to look back.
Beatrix trudged with her distaff, away from the road and across an open field.
She needed to get well away of the others, well away of Hell. She could not call the revenants before sundown, so she knew she should be wishing the sun would hurry up and go to bed. But she wished the opposite: just one more breath of daylight, and another, and another, before she had to do it.
The sun was melting into the edge of the world and the shadows were long but Beatrix still didn’t feel she’d gone far enough. She finally stopped and looked back. All she could see was the horizon, without even the line of the road. But in the half-light it was difficult to know how far she had gone.
The field dipped down to a little stream, where willows grew, bending their pale arms in the dim. A good place to get a drink—she had not thought to bring a flask with her, of course, because she was stupid—and to keep herself hidden. A strange thought, since she was calling her enemy to her.
Beatrix clambered down and found a little rock, flat enough and dry enough, on the bank of the stream. She held her distaff high although she didn’t think it mattered; she had simply had it beside her, in her hand, when she’d called Baltazar. Still, it felt good to wield it, to pretend for a moment she had a weapon.
She shut her eyes and wished. She wished for all the creatures of night to vacate Hell. All the bats and the night moths, all the revenants. No shudder went through her distaff, no lightning crashed. There was nothing to tell her whether it had worked. So she kept wishing, imagining the horde of them. How many were there?