Worlds That Weren't

“He Dieux!” Guillaume rubbed at his back. “That’s why they call it dead weight.”

He saw the dead Rosso-Margaret-was still wearing her armor: a padded jack soaked with blood and fluids. Linen stuffing leaked out of the rips. Every other piece of kit from helmet to boots was gone. Either the jacket was too filthy and slashed up to be worth reclaiming, or else the charred and bloodstained cloth was all that was still holding the body’s intestines inside it.

Yolande squatted down. Guillaume saw her try to pull the body’s arms straight by its sides, but they were still too stiff. She settled for smoothing the sun-bleached, blood-matted hair back. She wiped her hands on her peacock blue hose as she stood.

“I saw her get taken down.” The older woman spoke as if she was not sure what to do next, was talking to put off that moment of decision-even if the decision was, Guillaume thought, only the one to leave the corpse of her friend.

The light from the leaf-shaped ogee windows illuminated Yolande’s clear, smooth skin. There were creases at her eyes, but she had most of the elasticity of youth still there.

“Killed on the galley?” he prompted, desperate to continue a conversation even if the subject was unpromising.

“Yeah. First we were on one of the cargo ships, sniping, part of the defense crew. The rag-heads turned Greek fire on us, and the deck was burning. I yelled at her to follow me off-when we got back on our galley, it had been boarded, and it took us and Tessier’s guys ten minutes to clear the decks. Some Visigoth put a spear through her face, and I guess they must have hacked her up when she fell. They’d have been better worrying about the live ones.”

“Nah…” Guillaume was reluctant to leave the Green Chapel, even if it was beginning to smell of decomposing flesh. He felt cool for the first time in hours, and besides, there was this woman, who might perhaps be an impressed audience for his combat knowledge. “You never want to leave one alive under your feet. Somebody on the ground sticks a sword or dagger up and hits your femoral artery or your bollocks-Ah, ’scuse me.”

He stopped, flustered. She gave him a look.

Somewhere in his memory, if only in the muscle-memory of his hands and arms, is the ferocity with which you hack a man down, and follow it up without a second’s hesitation- bang-bang-bang-bang! — your weapon’s thin, sharp steel edges slamming into his face, throat, forearms, belly; whatever you can reach.

He looked away from the body at his feet, a woman to whom some soldier in the Carthaginian navy has done just that. Goose pimples momentarily shuddered over his skin.

“Christus Viridianus! I couldn’t half do with a drink.” He eased his visored sallet back on his head, feeling how the edge of the lining band had left a hot, sweaty indentation on his forehead. “Say, what did happen to your son? Is he with the company?”

Yolande’s fingers brushed the Griffin-in-Gold patch sewn onto the front of her livery jacket, as if the insignia of their mercenary company stirred memories. She smiled in a way he could not interpret. “I was a better soldier than he was.”

“He quit?”

“He died.”

“Shit.” I can’t say a thing right! “Yolande, I’m sorry.”

Her mouth quirked painfully. “Four months after he went to war. What was I thinking, that I could protect him? He was carrying shot in the first siege we were at, and a culverin inside the castle scored a direct hit on the powder wagon. When I found him he’d had both his hands blown off, and he’d bled to death-before his mother could get to him.”

“Jeez…” I wish I hadn’t asked.

She’s got to be ten years older than me. But she doesn’t look it.

He guessed Yolande had not, like “Guido Rosso,” even temporarily tried to pass as a man.

Because she’s a woman, not a girl.

“Why did you stay with the company?”

“My son was dead. I wanted to kill the whole world. I realized that if I had the patience to let them train me, the company would let me do just that.”

In his stunned silence, Guillaume could hear goat bells jingling outside and some shuffling noises closer to hand. A warm breeze blew in through the Green Chapel door, which had lodged open on a pebble. The smell of death grew more present now, soaking into the air. Like the back of a butcher’s shop in a heat wave.

“Shit.” He wiped at his mouth. “It’s going to get hot later in the morning. By evening…she’s going to be really ripe by Vespers.”

Yolande’s expression turned harsh. “Good. Then they can’t ignore her. She’s going to smell. That should get the bloody rag-heads moving. The captain’s right. This is the only thing to do.”

“But-”

“I don’t care what the fucking priests say. She’s going to be buried here like the Christian soldier she is. ”

Guillaume shrugged. For himself, he would as cheerfully have chucked all the bodies overboard, to go with the Carthaginian Visigoths and feed the fish; evidently this wasn’t the thing to say to Yolande right now. Especially not if you want to get into the crossbow woman’s knickers, he reminded himself.