Worlds That Weren't

“If the abbot can ignore the stink she’s going to make…” He let his grin out, in its different context. “What do you bet me he’ll send for the captain before Sext? Hey, tell you what…I bet you a flagon of wine she’s buried by midday, and if I lose, I’ll help you drink it tonight. What do you say?”

What she would have answered wasn’t clear from her expression, and he didn’t get to hear a reply.

The scuffling noise that had impinged on his consciousness earlier grew louder, and he spun around and had his bollock dagger out of its sheath at his belt and pointing at the altar a full second before a boy rolled out from under the altar cloth and sat staring down at the woman soldier’s corpse.

“Aw-shit!” Guillaume swore, exasperated.

He saw the thin iron ring welded around the boy’s throat. Some slave skiving off work. Or hiding from the big bad Frankish mercenaries- not that I blame him for that.

“Hey, you — fuck off out of here!”

The youth looked up, not at Guillaume, but at Yolande. There was a quiver about him that might have been fear or energy. He looked to be anywhere in his early or middle teens, a pale-skinned Carthaginian Visigoth with dark hair flopping into his eyes. Guillaume realized instantly, She’s thinking he’s fifteen.

“I wasn’t listening!” He spoke the local patois, but it was plain from his ability to answer that he understood one Frankish language at least. “I was foreseeing.”

Guillaume flinched, thought, Were we saying anything I don’t want to hear back as gossip? No, I hadn’t got round to asking her if she fucks younger men-And then, replaying the kid’s remark in his head, he queried: “Foreseeing?”

Silently, the young man pointed.

Above the altar, on the shadowed masonry of the wall, there was no expected Briar Cross. Instead, he saw a carved face-a Man’s face, with leaves sprouting from the creepers that thrust out of His open mouth.

The carving was large: perhaps as wide as Guillaume could have spanned with his outstretched hands, thumb to thumb. There is something intimidating about a face that big. Vir Viridianus: Christ as the Green Emperor, as the Arian Visigoths prefer, heretically, to worship Him. The wood gleamed, well polished, the pale silvery grain catching the light. Holm oak, maybe? The eyes had been left as hollows of darkness.

“I dream under the altar,” the young man said, as hieratic as if he had been one of the monastery’s own priests, and not barefoot and with only a dirty linen shirt to cover his arse.

Guillaume belatedly realized the scrabbling noise hadn’t ceased with their stillness. The hilt of his bollock dagger was still smooth in his hand. He stepped back to give himself room as the altar cloth stirred again.

An odd, low, dark shape lifted up something pale.

Guillaume blinked, not processing the image, and then his mind made sense both of the shape and of the new smell that the odor of the corpse had been masking. A pale flat snout lifted upward. A dark hairy quadruped body paced forward, flop ears falling over bright eyes…

The young man absently reached out and scratched the pig’s lean back with grimy fingers.

A pig-boy asleep under the Green Man’s altar? Guillaume thought. Sweet dead Jesus on the Tree!

“I had a seeing dream,” the young man said, and turned his face toward the living woman in the chapel; toward Yolande. “I think it is for you.”

Yolande glanced down at the dead body of Margaret Hammond. “Not in here! Outside…maybe.”

She caught the billman’s nod, beside her. He said, “Yeah, let’s go. We don’t want to be in here now. We got this place under lockdown, but there’s going to be plenty of shit flying before long!”

The pig’s sharp trotters clicked on the tiles, the beast following as the Visigoth swineherd walked to the left of the altar. The young man pushed aside a wall hanging embroidered with the She-wolf suckling the Christ-child to disclose a wooden door set deep into the masonry. He opened it and gestured.

Yolande stepped through.

She came out in the shade of the wall. The world beyond the shadow blazed with the North African sun’s fierceness. A few yards ahead was a grove of the ever-present olive trees, and she walked to stand under them, loving their shade and smell-so little being green after the company’s previous stopover in Alexandria.

She heard Guillaume stretch his arms out and groan, happily, in the sun behind her. “Time enough to go back to Europe in the summer. Damn, this is the place to have a winter campaign! Even if we’re not where we’re supposed to be…”

She didn’t turn to look at him. From this high ridge of land she could see ten or fifteen miles inland. Anonymous bleak rock hills lifted up in the west. In that direction, the sun was weak. The blue sky defied focus, as if there were particles of blackness in it.

The edge of the Penitence. Well, I’ve been under the Darkness Perpetual before now…We have to be within fifty or sixty leagues of Carthage. Have to be.