Worlds That Weren't

Guillaume Arnisout sauntered up beside her. “Maybe Prophet Swineherd here can tell us we’re going to wipe the floor with the enemy: that usually pays.”

She caught the billman’s sardonic expression focused on the pig-boy. Guillaume’s much better looking when he’s not trying so hard, she thought. All long legs and narrow hips and wide shoulders. Tanned face and hands. Weatherworn from much fighting. Fit.

But from where I am, he looks like a boy. Haven’t I always preferred them older than me?

“If you’re offering to prophesy,” Yolande said to the swineherd, more baldly than she intended, “you’ve got the wrong woman. I’m too old to have a future. I haven’t any money. If any of us in the company had money, we wouldn’t be working for Huseyin Bey and the goddamn Turks!”

“This isn’t a scam!” The boy pushed the uncut hair out of his eyes. His people’s generations in this land hadn’t given him skin that would withstand the sun-where there was sun-and his flush might have been from the heat, or it might have been shame.

She squatted down, resting her back against one of the olive tree trunks. Guillaume Arnisout immediately stood to her left; the Frenchman incapable of failing to act as a lookout in any situation of potential danger-not even aware, perhaps, that he was doing it.

And how much do I do, now, that I don’t even know about? Being a soldier, as I am…

“It’s not a scam,” the boy said, patiently now, “because I can show you.”

“Now look-what’s your name?”

“Ricimer.” He’d evidently watched more than one Frank trying to get their tongues around Visigoth pronunciation and sighed before she could react. “Okay-Ric.”

“Look, Ric, I don’t know what you think you’re going to show me. A handful of chicken bones, or rune stones, or bead-cords, or cards. Whatever it is, I don’t have any money.”

“Couldn’t take it anyway. I’m the Lord-Father’s slave.”

“That’s the abbot here?” She held her hand high above the ground for theoretical illustration, since she was still squatting. “Big man. Beard. Loud.”

“No, that’s Prior Athanagild. Abbot Muthari’s not so old.” The boy’s eyes slitted, either against the sun off the white earth or in embarrassment: Yolande couldn’t tell which.

She frowned suddenly. “What’s a priest doing owning slaves?”

Guillaume put in, “They’re a load of bloody heathens in this monastery: who knows what they do? For fuck’s sake, who cares?”

Ric burst out, “He owns me because he saved me!” His voice skidded up the scale into a squeak, and his fair skin plainly showed his flush. “I could have been in a galley or down a mine! That’s why he bought me!”

“Galleys are bad.” Guillaume Arnisout spoke after a moment’s silence, as if driven to the admission. “Mines are worse than galleys. Chuck ’em in and use ’em up, lucky if you live twenty months.”

“Does Father Mu-” She struggled over the name. “-Muthari know you go around prophesying?”

The boy shook his head. The lean pig, which had been rootling around under the olive trees, paced delicately on high trotter toes up to his side. Sun glinted off the steel ring in its black snout. Yolande tensed, wary.

The vicious bite of the pig will shear off a man’s hand. Besides that, there is the stink, and the shit.

The pig sat down on its rear end, for all the world like a knight’s hound after a hunt, and leaned the weight of its shoulder against Ricimer’s leg. Ric reached down and again scratched through the hair on its back, and she saw its long-lashed eyes slit in delight.

“Hey!” Guillaume announced, sounding diverted. “Could do with some roast pork! Maybe the rag-heads will sell us a couple of those. ’Lande, I’ll go have a quick word, see what price they’re asking. Won’t be much; we got ’em shit-scared!”

He turned to go around the outside of the Green Chapel, calling back over his shoulder, “Kid, look us out a couple of fat weaners!”

The thought of hot, juicy, crunchy pork fat and meat dripping with sauce made Yolande’s mouth run with water. The memory of the smell of cooked pork flooded her senses.

If you burn the meat, though, it smells exactly the same as the Greek fire casualties on the galley.

“Demoiselle!” Ricimer’s eyes were black in a face that made Yolande stare: his skin gone some color between green and white. “Pigs are unclean! You can’t eat them! The meat goes rotten in the heat! They have tapeworms. Tell him! Tell him! We don’t eat-”

Yolande cut off his cracking adolescent voice by nodding at the long-nosed greyhound-pig. “What do you keep them for, then?”

“Garbage disposal,” he said briefly. “Frankish demoiselle, please, tell that man not to ask the Lord-Father!”

So many things are so important when you’re that age. A year or two and you won’t care about your pet swine.

“Not up to me.” She shrugged; thought about getting to her feet. “I guess the fortune-telling is off?”

“No.” Still pale and sweaty, the young man shook his head. “I have to show you.”