Worlds That Weren't

“Most women follow their husbands to the wars… I followed my son.”

Yolande Vaudin’s voice came with the grunt and exhalation of physical effort. Guillaume Arnisout looked at her down the length of the corpse they were carrying.

He grinned. “Your son? You ain’t old enough to have a grown-up son!”

She appeared a wonderfully perverse mix of male and female, Guillaume thought. The clinging of her belted mail shirt, under her livery jacket, showed off the woman’s broad hips. Her long legs seemed plump in hose, but were not: were just not male. Shapely and womanly…He got a kick out of seeing women’s legs in hose: entirely covered, but the shape so clearly defined-and hers were worth defining.

She had her hair cut short, too, like a page or young squire, and it curled sleekly onto her shoulders, uncovered, the rich yellow of wet straw. She had been able to slip her helmet off before the sergeant noticed: it was buckled through her belt by the chin strap. That meant he could see all of her wise and wicked face.

She’s willing to talk, at least. Can’t let the opportunity go to waste.

He put his back against the Green Chapel’s doors and eased them open without himself letting go of the corpse’s ankles. Yolande held her end of the dead woman’s body tightly under the arms, taking the weight as he backed through the door first. The blue-white flesh was chill against his palms.

Not looking down at what she held, Yolande went on. “I had Jean-Philippe when I was young. Fifteen. And then, when he was fifteen, he was called up in the levy, to be a soldier, and I followed.”

The partly open door let in the brilliant sunlight from the barren land outside. It glittered back off the white walls of the monastery’s other buildings. Guillaume twisted his head around to look inside the chapel, letting his eyes adjust, unsure of his footing in the dimness. “Didn’t he mind you being there?”

Her own sight obviously free of the morning glare, Yolande pushed forward. The legs of the body were stiff with rigor, and they shoved against him. Bare feet jabbed his belly. There was black dirt under the toenails.

He backed in, trying to hold one door open with his foot while Yolande maneuvered the dead woman’s shoulders and head through it.

“He would have minded, if he’d known. I went disguised; I thought I could watch over him from a distance… He was too young. I’d been a widow five years. I had no money, with his wages gone. I joined the baggage train and dyed my hair and whored for a living, until that got old, and then I found I could put a crossbow bolt into the center of the butts nine times out of ten.”

The chapel’s chill began to cool the sting of sunburn on the back of his neck. His helmet still felt excruciatingly hot to wear. Guillaume blinked, his sight adjusting, and looked at her again. “You’re not old enough.”

Her chuckle came out of the dimness, along with the shape of the walls and tiled floor.

“One thing a woman can always look like is a younger man. There’s her,” Yolande said, with a jerk of her head downward at the rigid dead body between them. “When she said her name was Guido Rosso, you’d swear she was a beardless boy of nineteen. You take her out of doublet and hose and put her in a gown, and call her ‘Margaret Hammond,’ and you’d have known at once she was a woman of twenty-eight.”

“Was she?” Guillaume grunted, shifting the load as they tottered toward the altar. He walked backward with difficulty, not wanting to stumble and look stupid in front of this woman. “I didn’t know her.”

“I met her when she joined us, after the fall.” Yolande’s fingers visibly tightened on the dead woman’s flesh. There was no need to specify which fall. The collapse of Constantinople to the Turks had echoed through Christendom from East to West, four years ago.

“I took her under my wing.” The woman’s wide, lively mouth moved in an ironic smile. Her eyes went to the corpse’s face, then his. “ You wouldn’t have noticed her. I know what you grunts in the line fight are like-‘Archers? Oh, that’s those foulmouthed buggers hanging around at the back, always saying “fuck” and taking the Lord their God’s name in vain…’ I dunno: give you a billhook and you think you’re the only soldier on the battlefield.”

Guillaume liked her sardonic grin, and returned it.

So…is she flirting with me?

They staggered together across the empty interior of the Green Chapel. Their boots scraped on the black and white tiles. He could smell incense and old wood smoke from the morning’s prayers. Another couple of steps…

“I used to help her back to the tents, drunk. She was never this heavy. There!” Yolande grunted.

Just in time, he copied her, letting the stiff ankles of the body slide down out of his dirty grip. The body thunked down onto the tiles at his feet. No one had cleaned it up. The bones of her face were beaten in, the mess the same color as heraldic murrey: purple red.

His skin retained the feel of hers. Stiff, chill, softening.