The Chatelaine by Kate Heartfield

Author:Kate Heartfield [Heartfield, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2023-06-08T12:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A dark hill – that’s all it was, from a distance, to Margriet’s eyes. But this was flat country and Hell was a big beast. As they approached in the grey morning light, she saw two great circles gleaming like white eggs or blisters on the top of its head. Eyes, she realized with a shock. Unblinking eyes that stared not at the chimeras and their captives approaching on the ground but off into the distance, into the sky.

She was so tired that her head felt like a rotten turnip, and her ears felt as if they were filled with water whenever she moved her head.

The chimeras stopped and unbound the captives and let them slide off the saddles. Margriet’s arse was numb, and so were her fingers, for different reasons. When her feet touched the ground they felt odd, too. The plague was progressing.

She stood with Beatrix to her left and Claude on her right. Claude was breathing hard. Beatrix was muttering: prayers, probably.

The great mouth yawned open and Margriet gasped. A row of long ivory teeth gleamed, each one of them pointed like an incisor. One side of the nose was pierced by a copper ring that could have bounded both Margriet and Beatrix with room to spare.

A lick of the lips with a great red tongue, and then the mouth closed.

The horned man walked to the Beast and said something softly, so softly that Margriet could not hear.

Was there a password? The equivalent of scilt ende vrient in whatever language this beast spoke?

The Hellbeast opened its mouth slowly, as though someone were cranking a portcullis, and out came a mantis-man. He dropped to one knee.

‘Here comes King Philippe,’ breathed Beatrix.

‘Can you see him so sharply from here?’

‘I wouldn’t know his face. But look how the man goes on his knee. And look how the king stands. It’s him, I know it’s him.’

‘False-dealing, arrogant, unnatural knave,’ said Margriet.

‘What shall we do?’

‘What can we do?’

The answer rang like a horn in her mind: They could change tack, appeal to the king’s mercy as well as the Chatelaine’s – or at least his curiosity. His sense of justice? That was a laugh. The man had no right to be king, and no right to impose the rule of a rotten count over the will of the people of Flanders. And yet he had done so, and made a deal with Hell to do it. Could she truly appeal to such a king?

Beatrix grabbed her arm. ‘Look.’

Two figures had come to the door of Hell. One was tall and thin, a man, she thought. The other, by the shape of the white gown and the headdress, was a woman.

‘Is it her?’ Margriet asked. ‘What does she look like? Her skin is dark, that much I can see.’

‘Darker than Jacquemine Ooste’s. And her hair is black and fuzzy, and coiled up on two sides of her head in horns, and all wrapped in gold threads with gold cloth over it. She is not wearing a wimple.

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