Кейт Хартфилд - Armed in Her Fashion

Beatrix shivered.

At the edge of the Minnewater, Mother stopped.

“What are we doing here?” Claude whispered.

“Hush. Wait. You’ll see, soon enough.”

Mother whistled.

Something happened to the surface of the water. A ripple with intention; a few bubbles; a line of spume and then a collection of dark twigs, slick with green.

A face.

Beatrix stumbled backwards.

Two bulbous eyes blinked open and a mouth widened, from a hole rotted and misshapen like the bole of a tree, into a frog-like grimace. Then it lifted its head out of the water on a neck like a dragon’s.

Beside her, the mercenary drew her knife.

“God give you good evening, snake,” Mother said. She inclined her head a little, as she might when she met another merchant’s wife in the street.

The creature spat, a long dirty spout that fountained around him. Was it a him ?

“Margriet,” the serpent spoke, in a low rumble like the sound of the gears that drove the crane-treadmill near the market.

Beatrix decided it was a him. A him who knew Mother. Beatrix looked at her mother as if seeing her for the first time. If Father had kept secrets from them all, then so had she.

“I must go beyond the walls, as far as you will carry me,” Margriet said. “And these two with me.”

“Hold a moment,” said Claude. “ This is your way out? Asking passage from a water-monster?”

The serpent moved his mouth around as if he were chewing mutton.

“All three?” the serpent asked.

Mother nodded, as if she were ordering bread.

“The packs, too?”

Mother put her hand on her hip. “I don’t have all night, you mouldy wiggler.”

Beatrix gasped as her rudeness. “Mother.”

The eyes rolled, the thin inner lids flashed down, and he emitted a grumble like the bubbling of a swamp. To the damp stone wall he swam and drew his long body along it, an expanse of slime and sticks and bits of matted string and floating wood and all the things that lived in a Bruges canal.

“Hop on,” Margriet said, pointing.

Claude took a step backward.

“What is it?” Beatrix asked.

“I’ve never been very good with boats,” admitted Claude with a quiet chuckle. “I was very nearly killed in a storm once. I can’t—I can’t swim.”

“It will bear your weight, don’t fret, bag of bones. And don’t worry—we won’t be seen.”

“And can you promise I won’t be eaten?” Claude whispered, with a grin for Beatrix.

“I’ll go first, then,” said Margriet. “Mother of God, what the hell kind of fighter must you have been? No wonder you were found out.”

Mother slung her bag out over the water and let it drop, none too gently, onto the Nix’s back. The waterworm shuddered, and a film of darkness slimed up and over to cover it, until Beatrix could hardly see the bag at all.

“Now me,” Mother said.

She stepped on and knelt, steadying herself with her hands. She, too, all but disappeared. There was some sort of enchantment about the watersnake. How long had it lived in these waters, keeping itself unseen? Did it have fellows, or family, in these green depths?

Beatrix put her hand out toward the creature.

“May I?” she asked.

It bowed its head, and she touched its cold skin with her fingertips.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Oh for heaven’s sake, Beatrix,” her mother called. It was strange, hearing Mother’s voice but not being able to see her, as though Margriet de Vos had finally been reduced to just her tongue.

“I am a Nix, so you may call me that,” said the Nix.

“And you don’t mind bearing me?”

“He is bound to,” said Margriet. “I beat him in a game, when I was a child. I won the use of him. Hop on, Bea.”

Mother had kept this secret, all these years. To think she could keep silent about anything!

The darkness that came over Beatrix as she crawled onto the creature’s back was cool and damp. Not quite wet; more like the million tiny sparks of mist in the air when God couldn’t decide whether or not to make it rain.

It smelled, though, much less fresh than rain.

Beatrix knelt on the Nix’s back and held her distaff straight in the air at her side like a lance.

Claude stepped awkwardly onto the far side of his body, as if she thought the Nix were a boat that might tip, and her foot slid off and she nearly went into the water. Beatrix grabbed her right arm to help her steady herself but Claude cried out in pain.

“I’m sorry,” Beatrix said, snatching her hand back.

“No, I thank you,” Claude said, with a weary smile.

“Hush, both of you,” said Mother.

Mother had bested the Nix in a game? Mother never did play games of any kind, not that Beatrix could remember. Beatrix tried to imagine her mother as child, lying on the Nix’s back, perhaps wrapping her arms around it, dragging her fingers in the water. That’s what Beatrix would do, if she were here alone. But Mother sat as tall as a lady on a palfrey, and anyway she couldn’t have spread out on the Nix’s back with Claude and Beatrix riding pillion.

As they passed silently down the Minnewater, Beatrix looked back at the city of beggars and merchants, the city sleeping behind houses shuttered and houses marked. It would be morning soon. In the old days there would be mongers in the streets by this hour, and people shouting and hens squawking. But the hens had all been eaten and the mongers had nothing to sell, and no reason to risk coming out of doors before the sun chased all the revenants back to wherever they slept during daylight.

They floated under the shadow of the walls, holding their breath for fear of making a sound and alerting the women and children who stood guard there, who might demand to be taken, too, or might mistake them for traitors or spies. They floated past the first moats, and out of Bruges into the great country of Flanders. And no one saw them.

“Do you grant wishes, Herr Nix?” Beatrix asked.

“He doesn’t,” Margriet said.

“Ha!” the Nix barked. “How do you know?”

“I asked you years, ago, didn’t I? You pompous old liar. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not just to impress the girls.”

“You put a rope around my neck the day we met. Is it any wonder I didn’t grant your wishes, you nasty shrew?”

“Bah. You would have done whatever I asked and you know it. You are becoming a dotard as well as a liar.”

“Hmph,” said the Nix, and plunged its head into the water. A plume of water went up like a fountain; surely anyone watching would see that, even if they couldn’t see the Nix or his passengers.

“It’s all right,” said Beatrix. “There’s no need to argue, Mother. It is quite enough to ask Herr Nix to take us out of the city, without demanding that he grant wishes as well. It was rude of me to ask.”

“What sort of wish would you ask for, if I did grant them?” the creature rumbled.

Beatrix wondered. She wanted only one thing, and that was Baltazar. Oh how she longed for just one glimpse of him. She opened her mouth as if she could call him back to her, to her arms, to her lips, to her thighs. Failing that, to call all the creatures of the night to her now so she could ask them: Have you seen him? Have you word of my love? Or at least to be able to know a little of the future, to know whether he would come back to her safe, so she could stop her heart from hoping.

Something splashed beside her.

“My distaff!” Beatrix cried, too loud.

She had let it drop from her hand.

“Hush,” both her mother and Claude said.

The Nix ducked its head into the water and lifted it out again. Held in its bared teeth was the distaff. Beatrix gently pulled it out.