Meg and her followers crossed the bridge, marching through Alvarez’s blood and leaving scuffed trails in the process. When the women finally reached the bastion of the Caballistas del Camino, three rows of pikemen blocked the little army’s way. Cavalrymen flanked them, their horses steaming and pawing the ground, anxious for battle after months of boredom and sour oats.
Meg stopped when she smelled their sobriety, a rare, almost exotic scent in these lands. She knew what it meant and that the outcome was totally predictable. She had been marching forward when it cut the air and made her stop. The women behind her slowed to see what happened. Meg raised the long black sword she had taken from Alvarez and held it sideways to make a gate beyond which nobody should pass, holding her withering ground. The ranks of pikemen parted to let a horseman and a guard come through to parlay.
“What do thee want, gentle Mother, on this unkind day so close to Lent?”
His voice was of a primness she had never heard before, and it made her shrink in her long-worn-out boots. She gathered the tatters of her own voice and tried to push it out, but the rectitude of this new force shredded her courage. She faltered and murmured about stolen goods, the brutality of the Camino, and the disappearance of her son. The officer spoke down to his guard, who scurried off as the officer sat back in his high, upright saddle.
“Very well. I hear your complaint.”
The women behind her were all talking, a muddy lumpen murmur arising. It was hushed by three men who pushed a handcart from their barracks through the ranks of pikemen and set it before them. The cart contained a pile of items stolen from their homes and farms, mainly poorer-quality tat that got shoveled up with the treasures.
“Take it and be gone,” shouted the officer.
The women pushed forward behind Meg in a throng that had changed shape and purpose.
“But what of our sons and daughters? Where are they now? When will you bring them out?” begged Meg.
The officer’s horse whinnied, also being a thoroughbred, and the officer laughed.
“There is no parlay for criminals and heretics. They are beyond your voice, woman. Be gone in the grace I give you.”
Meg’s eyes filled with burning tears and she lowered the black sword. The movement was seen by the women as a sign to come forth, and by the soldiers as a posture of battle. The officer was swallowed back into the ranks of men who now set their pikes at a different angle.
Meg was just about to speak again when the first three women pushed forward to investigate the cart of compromise. They grabbed dented vases and doglegged candlesticks. One recognized a chipped plaster angel and called back over Meg’s head to her neighbor, who tottered forward to retrieve her beloved possession.
The three guards who had brought the cart stood back from the fray and grinned at one another. One turned and stared at Meg, calling out, “I knows you, don’t I?”
She wavered for a moment, holding back her fury while she tried to recognize this man. They all looked the same in their uniforms. She knew only the one who she had just triumphantly gutted by his rich green helmet. They were all the same. She had killed one. Why not another? As she raised the heavy sword, a sudden black light filled her eyes, blocking her view. An odd spinning moon of a thing with the guard’s words bellowed behind it.
“Here, hag, have a bit of treesoor. It’s worth more than the corpse of your stupid kid.”
He had thrown a small black iron skillet that hit her full in the face. The soldier enjoyed the sight of the pan bouncing off her so much that he began to guffaw. It was the funniest thing he had seen all week, and it made him roll about in uncontrollable laughter.
Dazed and furious, Meg swung forward with the full weight of the long sword, dizzying the air before her, but her swing coincided with the guard grabbing his knees, and the whistling blade passed clean over his head. Meg saw what would happen next and tried to brake the arc of the steel, but her reflexes were not enough to stop it before it embedded into the back of Willeke Dijkstra’s head.
“Ooh!” Willeke yelled, turning one of her short arms backward to rub at what seemed to be a minor blow and finding the cold thickness of the blade lodged in her skull. “Ooh…” she said, and lifted her other arm to trace the full length of the injury, tottering around to find Meg on the other end of the sword.
“Wat is dat, Meg?”
Meg had nothing to say; she only wanted the mistake to go away. Without thinking, she grabbed Willeke’s head with one hand in a motion akin to lifting a frozen turnip but being surprised by its lopsided weight. With her other hand still gripping the hilt of the sword, she began levering the blade out of the tight wound in a series of back-and-forth agitations. Meg was now crying in full and apologizing to her dear friend while trying to soothe the malicious injury. The guard and his two comrades were on their knees in hysterics. Everyone else seemed blissfully unaware of the predicament until the blade snicked out, taking a sliver of bone and a bright spurt of blood with it. Meg snatched a small china vase from the cart and quickly put it in Willeke’s hand, pushing the lip of the vase to the lip of the wound in a grotesque kiss.
Meg put her arms around her confused friend. “Quick now, go home,” she said, pointing away from the bubbling hoard. “Hold it tight and go home.”
Willeke nodded and moved away without knowing exactly what had happened. The truth was that she had been thinking about claiming the vase for herself before Meg’s rude actions overtook all. It was the delicate blue pattern against the bright white shine of the china that had so taken her: A filigree motif of leaves and flowers framed a tiny scene of rural farmlands, and a windmill stood boldly amid the bushy trees and flying clouds, so delicately set in motion by the small flocks of birds gracing the distant sky. A river or a pond in the foreground captured the reflection of the windmill and trees with great authority. Willeke could not see it now, held in such an odd position, but she hoped she might keep the pretty thing when she finally reached home and the terrible pain in her head stopped.
Unfortunately, the spurt of blood had hit one of the laughing soldiers mid-tunic, and he assumed he had been stabbed, so he pulled his sword and waved it above his head. This was the real sign that a battle had begun. The pikes were lowered to a horizontal position, and the ranks walked forward: inevitable, mechanical, and ruthless.
Meg saw the bristling wave approaching and screamed at the top of her lungs. Most of the women understood and ran, clutching all manner of worthless and broken goods to their once-kind, ample, and fast-beating hearts. A few of the duller ones dithered over the diminished contents of the cart. Meg screamed again, and they turned to look about themselves, saw the marching horror, and ran.
Just before the humpbacked bridge, the women dispersed, some dropping the goods they had deemed so worthy. Meg picked up a stained sack of cups and a smashed basket of dented plates and cutlery. They were the only tokens of her bold affray, and she decided there and then to keep them all. As she plodded across the bridge, she thought of her lost son and of her stupid husband, who would be telling her for days about the glories of his battle in the town square and exactly how long he had managed to stay upright on the fat barrel on its fat wheels. She did not know how many hours or days she would have to wait for the door to be kicked in, to be dragged out to face the justice of the caballistas. She considered running, but it was a waste of time. She had only her duties to hide behind; only drudgery to suffocate the horrors she imagined and the horrors that were inevitable. The swollen oafishness of the man she had once loved would be her only companion as she waited, and the thought of that made it worse.
She looked over the bridge into the sluggish water and envied all that lived in it. She would not cross this way again. One of the metal cups fell out of the basket and landed with the dull clatter of an impoverished bell. She could not even be bothered to pick it up. Maybe one of the imps that frequented this place could use it. The thought amused her, but none of the wondrous array of muscles that lived in her face could respond. Instead she wiped her bruised, dripping nose with the back of her hand, swallowed what was left of her pride with a great sniff of phlegmy remorse, and turned her head toward home.
As she did so, she felt something move beneath her hand. Something in the small, shabby sack of loot. She stopped and peered down the beak of her face to an equally pointed snout looking up at her from its hiding place.
“Gef,” she said, and he grinned at her. The Filthling managed to free one of his tiny, yellow, almost-human hands from the tight mouth of the sack and waved at her. Instinctively her face ignited and she grinned back.
“ ’Tain’t the end, Mother. ’Tain’t the beginnings. We are in the middles.”
His voice was pure and light.
“Mother Willeke will get better and forgive you. The guards will be too busy to remember you because the man you opened up on the bridge was not one of them. He was an impostor wearing a stolen hat. Your son still lives, and when we complete our business, I will bring him home to you. We can find our ways into and out of any man-made hollows; we have many shapes and sizes.
“Also soon your husband will die, but he will not sleep with the angels and will not haunt his house, which will be yours.”
His grin was now even bigger.
“How do you know these things?”
“Because I am the Eighth Wonder of the world. Next time we cross the bridge, we will all be together.”
“Together?”
“It will be the last days of my kind in these lands, and we’ll join you and the other mothers to punish these cruel men for their cruel words and deeds.”
Gef’s words filled Meg with a great warmth, and their truth tasted of deliverance and honey. She took a full, involuntary breath of new air, and the hollow bell-like space inside her breastplate opened, giving enough room for the Eighth Wonder to swivel up and nestle in her bosom as she marched home.