Mary Gentle (12 page)

A thrashing body rolled past me: the Nihonese man, his thick arms wrapped around a bloodied European. One of the wounded. I stuck the sword-rapier down, piercing the man’s back at his kidneys, and he spasmed into stiffness.

Desperate, I swung around.

Dariole—too far away for me to reach in a half-heart-beat.

One cut at him from behind, one man thrust from the left, and two more men from the right.

Dariole spun, dropped his rapier inverted over his shoulder in a glissade and caught the first blade. Simultaneously, he stabbed the man on his left in the groin, and stepped away. One man out of the fight.

As the first wounded man dropped to his knees, Dariole twisted under a slashing cut on the right and continued his spin, and engaged the third man’s blade and licked his point in to take him in the face, through the eye and into the brain.

Dariole recovered his sword, dropped down on one knee, and thrust up simultaneously with rapier and left-hand dagger.

His sword cut through the throat of the remaining man on his right. Blood geysered across Dariole and the trampled sand. His dagger ripped up the doublet of the man behind him—and jarred across mail or plates sewn inside it. That man brought his blade up, feinted, and thrust, botta in tempo.

I sprinted towards them.

Dariole took no notice of the feint. He sprang up and brought his rapier down across the man’s sword-hand wrist, cutting forward at the same time as he moved back.

The edge hit so hard there was an audible sound above the wind and the yelling: a sound like a butcher splitting a pork knuckle.

The man’s sword fell away. His hand hung from his wrist by a tearing strip of flesh.

Dariole thrust perfectly into his throat, turned, and took the first wounded man’s blade, and deflected it by sheer force. Dariole slid his rapier up the other sword’s edge, and his point went into the man’s mouth, shattering teeth, and out of the back of the skull.

The noise and their shrieks were drowned by surf.

Two of us stood panting, staring at each other, dripping red onto the churned sand. The wind on the wetness soaking me, chilled me through breeches and hose.

I have seen that precision before. At Zaton’s
.

Quiet: a deserted beach: no movement from the village or on top of the headland….

“We should have kept one alive,” I said, aware that my chest was heaving now, taking in air. “To find out if there are more. And where they have left their horses.”

The young man Dariole wiped his forearm across his face, and only succeeded in reddening the linen cuff at his wrist. “There’s one alive over there. I think he’s alive.”

Dariole stepped over one body and bent down to examine the next one: a blond man with a pearl at his ear. The sand was soaked dark under his face. Dariole’s teeth showed with a grin that had nothing to do with humour, but only with the exultation that comes after a fight:
I live, you live, they do not
.

“No.” Dariole straightened up. “He’s dead. I killed him. We’ve taken twelve men’s lives in as many minutes.”

There was a light in his eyes and a spring in his step. This is what makes bullies of some of us. The knowledge that we
can
take another man’s life. We can kill armed men. We can do what we please.

Four men at the one time
. I shook my head. “I admit it, messire,” I said, with precise gravity. “You are—very good.”

He grinned.

I looked down at the men, spread across the yards of sand, some dead, possibly some still dying.

“And you are very stupid,” I added. “If I tell you to stay somewhere, then
stay where I tell you!
”

His grin widened; he did not seem at all taken aback by the rebuke. “That’s helpful advise, messire—from the man who was about to shoot me!”

I confess I glared at him. To be witness to such bloodshed, to have come safe through a skirmish, to be rid of the Medici’s courtiers, and
still
to be faced with the ineradicable problem of his presence—it galled me more than I can say. It would have been remarkably convenient if he—and the “demon”—could have contrived to get themselves murdered in the course of this butchery.

“Besides,” Dariole added, “you can’t kill me. I’ve saved your life.”

“
You?
You saved
my
life?” I found myself waving my arm at the bodies on the beach. “What was
I
doing here!”

I would have added more, but the Nihonese “demon” wiped his mouth and got to his feet unsteadily, and made a motion that was strange to me. As I realised it might be some kind of foreign bow, he fixed his black eyes on M. Dariole.

“Truly,” he said in English, “you are very skilled, honoured mistress.”

My first thought was:
He does not understand the language
.

This sea-farer, who comes from who knows what Eastern country, no wonder he cannot make himself rightly understood in this mixture of languages from
England
,
Spain
, and
Portugal
.

The sea wind blew over the churned beach. It did not carry away the stink of blood and shit. The young man Dariole stood motionless, his messy rapier in his right hand, his dagger still jutting from a corpse. Blood dried dark red on his face and soaked ruff.

A light came into his eyes.

He laughed, recovering his dagger and swiping his blades on his breeches to rough-dry them against later rust. The sun was on his face, and the light showed every tiny flaw in his skin.

I saw, in that intense light, the shadow of hair on his upper lip. It
was
no more than a shadow—no more than a smear of dirt, put on and brushed off again, leaving a ghost of darkness and
men see what they expect to see
.

The black eyes and flat face of the rescued Nihonese “demon” turned towards me. From far away, manners will differ, dress will differ, and so, because his customs are not ours, he instantly sees—

“I had think she was your sword teacher, honour-sir?” the misshapen man said, in bad English. “That you are samurai, and she your teacher with a blade?”

Dariole began to smile.

It was easier to see him as male. The hair, loose because he had lost his hat in the fighting, was cut short as no woman’s hair ever is. Wearing breeches, fighting—what woman
fights?

It was as if the world clicked into a different focus.

Not a young man heavy with fat, but an adolescent girl just filling out at the hip. The mouth, womanish on a boy, is plain on a woman; so also the arch of the eyebrows. The fashion of doublets does not display her breasts, and yet….

It was a wrench that split the world apart. Once I saw it, I could not stop seeing it. Could not understand how I had ever
failed
to see it.

“Thank you.” She inclined her head in a mock-modest bow; either to the “demon” from Nihon or to me, I was too shocked to tell.

“Messire Dariole.” My voice, embarrassingly, came out as a croak, all the after-shock of the fight and this revelation flooding through me. “Messire Dariole, you are a woman.”

T
he best of a man’s judgement may be overwhelmed when he has just finished fighting for his life.

The stink of warm blood came in waves off the sand, roused up by the wind off the sea. The minor wrenches and strains of physical effort began to make themselves felt in my muscles. I regarded her face, gazing at me over the ploughed sand—and felt my temper snap as plainly as if it were a hamstring.

“You’re a woman!”

I still had my sword in my hand. I felt my fingers clench on the grip and finger-ring, bringing up the blade. The young woman took a precise pace back. What spread over her face was a wide, impudent grin.

“You tricked me!”

I hardly knew what I shouted, and I doubt any man who heard me could have understood the inarticulate roar. The sand betrayed me as I staggered forward into the churned-up hummocks and holes, stumbling past sprawled bodies, lurching against the grains that yielded and let me slip.

Ahead of me, she backed up, half-dancing, light enough to run over the drying surface without bogging down. A master of arms could have used the prints of her feet in the sand to illustrate a manual of defence.

“You made—a
fool
of me!”

I punctuated the words with flung stones and weed, kicking at the foreshore in a fury, sending up clots and showers of wet sand. The wind off the sea snatched my voice and drowned it. Blind frustration and fury made me choke. I was heavier: she could reach the shingle and the hard rock before me. And then she would run like the sea-wind, and likely she could hide long enough for the tide and the
Willibrod
to necessarily remove me from this coast—

Drenched in hot sweat, I panted to a halt, the woman still five yards beyond me, poised on light feet to keep the distance open between us.

“Masculine whorish
bitch!
”

I wrenched myself round and called the stone horse. The stink of blood made him skittish. He—and any consequent advantage to me in pursuit—cantered off down the beach. I turned quickly back.

Her blades threatened.

The Italian rapier and dagger in her grip were smeared dark red, like her clotted doublet. She halted on the sand, lead foot forward, shoulders back and balanced, point raised, so perfectly in a guard position that she
must
be male,
could not
be the middling-tall young woman that I now saw.

Shifting her weight back onto her hip, Dariole pursed her lips and kissed the air at me, in perfect imitation of an effeminate young man.

“You didn’t know. You
didn’t know!
Messire Rochefort, what sort of a spy are you? You’re supposed to spot things like this!”

“
Catamite!
” I exploded. One of my boots came into contact with something more solid. I bent down, scooping a jagged basalt rock up in my left hand, and flung it with all my strength at her.

She skipped aside, laughing; turned, and sprinted towards the village.

“I
thought
I got away with it!” she crowed, her voice coming back shrill against the sea-wind.

I struggled against the clinging sands, came to firmer footing, and was suddenly filled with a hard excitement: Now I can run, now I can catch him—her—it!

The sand gave way to rocks, great slabs pitted with holes worn smooth by the tides and covered with glistening weed. I sprang after the woman. My boot came down on bladder-wrack and water. I twisted and lurched forward, and only by instinct kept my sword-blade up as my knee and left hand hit the rocks.

Cold sweat sprang out on my forehead. To lose control, and in such a disastrous manner—

She halted a yard or two away, her balance on the slippery rocks apparently perfect. The wind took her hair forward, catching her small ruff. She grinned and looked down. “I told you I could make you kneel to me.”

I heated, I think from my neck to my hair; I knew I must look foolishly red, and that knowledge enraged me still further. And at this worst of all possible moments, I felt my prick stir in my breeches.

I scrambled awkwardly to my feet, panting; salt water soaking my knee, hose, and boot. To be reduced to mere words almost made me weep, if a man may weep from rage and frustration. “I swear—I’ll kill you!”

“You nearly
did
kill me!” she yelped. “You were going to shoot me! I saw you. You were going to shoot me in the
back!
”

“You—
What right have you to be angry?
” I made a gesture that, if we had not become turned around on the beach, would have been directed towards the south-east and Paris. “You are a mere brat! My business is to put an end to risks to my master—”

“We were supposed to be
fighting,
Rochefort! Dueling! You weren’t even going to draw sword, you were just going to pistol me!”

“You’re angry because you didn’t get your
duel?
”

I saw her shift her grip on the hilt of her dagger, making it more secure.

“Let’s try it, messire. Sword against sword. Let’s
see
which of us is going to walk out of here!”

I fought for composure, bit back words, breathing heavily. Something of wit came back to me. I have at least the intelligence to work out that, if a young woman is passing as a young man for some reason, the last thing she will desire is to be treated as female.

“But no. Mademoiselle is a woman. Therefore I
cannot
fight you, mademoiselle. You are safe from me.”

A scarlet flush rose up her cheeks. I rejoiced.

She spoke steadily. “A woman showed you up in Zaton’s, Messire Rochefort. Where
you
wished you’d been safe from
me
.”

I felt as if I had been struck in the body, below the joining of the ribs: robbed of breath, and left gaping.

“I proved that you’re not a man of honour, Rochefort. Proved it! So long as you get to stay alive, you’ll stand there and take
anything
.”

“I should have shot you,” I said flatly. “You are a freak and a monster; a man would be doing the world a service to put you out of it.”

She broke into a smile, sword and dagger in hand, dressed in breeches as she was, and dropped a curtsey. “Careful, messire, I’m going to think you still fancy me.”

“Stupid bitch! You are a whoreson disgrace!”

She grinned even more triumphantly. “Oh? This from the man who had his prick up my bum-hole?”

The memory of what happened in the stables at Ivry drenched me in an abrupt hot sweat.

Yes, that too was Messire Dariole—and therefore that, too, was this young…woman
.

“I….” I found myself blushing. “I would never have forced—I, who have never found it necessary to force a woman in my life—!”

She let out a peal of laughter.

The wind tugged at the tabs of her doublet. She was a trompe l’oeil painting. In one heartbeat, I could see the half-grown young man, a little plump and effeminate. And in the next moment, I saw a woman of a middling-tall stature, with her hair chopped monstrously short, her legs obscenely visible in breeches and hose.

I do not suppose there is a lady at Henri’s court who has not dressed as a page to see her paramour fight a duel, or to lend some spice to their later sexual exploits by wandering the safer alleys around the palace. Spurred by natural disgust, I thought:
At least they have the decency to abandon the pretence, once they have achieved their object
.

I stepped down off the unreliable rocks, boots going deep in the churned sand, salt water seeping around my ankles.

“You are a pretty piece for a jaded man’s palate,” I said, clearly enough that she could not mistake me. “Is that where you learned your whore’s act? Did ‘Messire Dariole’ turn tricks when she needed money? You will have been popular, with your boy’s arse and your girl’s cunny!”

She followed me to the edge of the rocks, stopping in primo, her chin up. Her gaze met mine. “I’m not a whore. I’m a duelist.”

I hoped to see her flush again; instead, she looked bright-eyed and pleased. I realised all her balance was in her belly, now, on this uncertain footing. Usually she walked as a man does, from the shoulder. I should have guessed when she fought me.
But men assume.
…

“I learned that ‘whore’s act’ from a whore, of course, messire. The girls in Les Halles are very helpful. What, you think I want to get a baby in my belly?”

I managed to sound dry. “What we were attempting is certainly not the way to go about it!”

I have no natural brats, after a long career of fornication; something for which most married women of my acquaintance have been grateful. At this moment I did not in the least desire to hear Dariole speculate on the subject.

A harsh voice broke in, in accented English:

“You discipline your unruly servant, lady-sama! If he servant, and not you?”

The foreign man stared at me with what I would, in a European, have taken to be embarrassment or disapproval.

Dariole lowered her point.

“Arcadie-Fleurimonde-Henriette de Montargis de la Roncière.” She inclined her head to the foreigner in a young man’s formal bow. “You can call me Dariole; it’s the name I travel under.”

The stranger grunted, apparent comprehension coming to his face. “Women travel disguised as men for safety. You are a rustic samurai family?”

She shot a glance at me, continuing in the badly accented English that he seemed to comprehend better than my Spanish. “What’s that mean? Noble?”

“Hai. Noble, samurai, yes.”

Who else but the nobility will have had money and leisure for instruction in swordsmanship from childhood on? I vaguely knew her family—as one of many: provincial, insignificant, little interested in court politics, and keeping their heads down as far as matters of Catholic and Huguenot are concerned. And from such a prosaic and conservative background—
what are they doing educating a daughter to be a duelist!

The Nihonese man bellowed up into my face. “You are her servant? Bondsman? Eta? Slave?”

“I am
not!
” I exploded, with far more temper than caution. It was the last pack on the mule’s back, and I confess I broke. I spat out: “I am the Sieur Valentin Raoul St Cyprian Anne-Marie Rochefort de Cossé Brissac and no man’s servant, let alone servant to this ill-mannered bitch!”

The sallow man seemed not to like the intemperate outburst. Mlle Dariole, wide-eyed, said in French: “Oh, no man’s servant—does M. de Sully know you’ve resigned?”

I ignored her barb.
There is one consolation,
I reflected bleakly. Mademoiselle de la Roncière is far too young to have heard of my scandal. It was before her birth. And this stranger is from far enough away that the doings of the French court twenty years ago are as distant as the moon.

I sweated, nonetheless. Dariole’s brilliant eyes had skin creasing at the corners, and she wore the look of a cat with a plump mouse.
No matter that I have spoken in quick temper, she will remember the words
.

“‘Brissac?’ The Marshal has a by-blow?”

I shrugged, content to let her think so. He would not be the only Marshal of France to have a bastard at court, and I am long past the point where I care about slurs against my legitimacy.

“Won’t
anything
make you duel, Rochefort?!”

“Go down the rue St Denis and look up,” I said coldly to her—to “Mademoiselle Dariole,” as I told myself I must now think of this abomination. “I have been responsible for more deaths at Montfaucon than in duels. My business is to see nothing threatens the Duc de Sully. How I solve such problems—I do not have time to play the gentleman!”

Her face altered at the mention of the gibbets at Montfaucon, where they hang traitors and criminals up for Paris to gawk at.

“Montfaucon’s where you’ll end up now,” she snapped, “and probably Sully with you!”

I slitted my eyes against the wind, looking out over the oncoming tide at the
St Willibrod
. The pulse of apprehension that went through me took my attention from the boy-girl. For a moment I could only think:
Suppose I have not saved Sully?
Suppose the Queen’s man that infiltrated the Bastille has killed him? Suppose all my warnings came too late? Suppose I have had the King killed for nothing?

I have been set running by the mere chance of M. Ravaillac’s success. Now I have very nearly run far enough. Chance cannot rule all, after all; a man must make some shift to shape his own destiny.

Into the moment’s silence, the foreigner gave a great laugh. He said gutturally, “You and she, you have a joke with each other, yes?”

“A joke,” I repeated grimly. I looked down at the woman dressed as a man as she stepped onto the sand. It would take very little for me to keep seeing her as the pretty boy she was, in her close-fitting doublet, and the slops that curved around her hips. She was an icon such as one might see in a book:
Hic Mulier,
the Mannish Woman, or
Haec Vir,
the Effeminate Man.

I suppose that I should have been grateful—if she was a woman, my arousal when sleeping next to her was explained. I had not got a cock-stand over a young man.

And yet this is worse
. I have been moved to desire a monster: a woman who dresses in man’s clothes.