Worlds That Weren't

And this mad woman is not even a soldier. What can it matter to her, digging in the dirt for bodies, whether Margie and I are remembered as what we were?

The woman pointed at her. Yolande realized it was the mail shirt she was indicating. “Why did you do this! War? Fighting?”

“It…wasn’t what I intended to do. I found out that I was good at it.”

“But it’s wrong.” The woman’s expression blazed, intense. “It’s sick.”

“Yes, but…” Yolande paused. “I enjoy it. Except maybe the actual fighting.”

She gave the woman a quick grin.

“All the swanning around Christendom, and gambling, and eating yourself silly, and fornicating, and not working — that’s all great. I mean, can you see me in a nunnery, or as a respectable widow in Paris? Oh, and the getting rich, if you’re lucky enough to loot somewhere. That’s good, too. It’s worth risking getting killed every so often, because, hey, somebody has to survive the field of battle; why not me?”

“But killing other people?”

Yolande’s smile faded. “I can do that. I can do all of it. Except…the guns. I just choke up, when there’s gunfire. Cry. And they always think it’s because I’m a woman. So I try not to let anyone see me, now.”

The dark-skinned woman rested her brush down on the earth.

“More sensitive.” The last word had scorn in it. She added, without the ironic tone, “More sensible. As a woman. You know the killing is irrational.”

Yolande found herself self-mockingly smiling. “No. I’m not sensible about hackbuts or cannon-the devil’s noise doesn’t frighten me. It makes me cry, because I remember so many dead people. I lost more than forty people I knew, at the fall.”

The other woman’s aquiline face showed a conflicted sadness, difficult to interpret.

Yolande shrugged. “If you want scary war, try the line fight. Close combat with edged weapons. That’s why I use a crossbow.”

The woman’s dignified features took on something between sympathy and contempt.

“No women in close-quarters fighting, then?”

“Oh, yeah.” Yolande paused. “But they’re idiots.”

Guillaume’s face came into her mind.

“ Everybody with a polearm is an idiot… But I guess it’s easier for a woman to swing a poleax than pull a two-hundred-pound longbow.”

The other woman sat back on her heels, eyes widening. “A poleax? Easier? ”

“Ever chop wood?” And off the woman’s realization, Yolande gave her a there you are look. “It’s just a felling ax on a long stick…a thinner blade, even. Margie said the ax and hammer were easier. But in the end she came in with the crossbows, because I was there.”

And look how much good that did her.

“Not everybody can master the skills of crossbows or arquebuses…” This was an argument Yolande had had before, way too often. “Why does everybody think it’s the weapons that are the difficult thing for a woman fighting? It’s the guys on your own side. Not the killing.”

The fragments of bone and teeth in the earth had each their own individual shadow, caused by the sun lifting higher over the horizon.

“The truth is important.” Yolande found the other woman watching her with wistfulness as she looked up. Yolande emphasized, “That’s the truth: she was a soldier. She shouldn’t have to be something else just so they can bury her.”

“I know. I want proof of women soldiers. And…I want no soldiers, women or men.” The woman recovered her errant lock of hair and pushed it back again. Yolande saw the delicate gold of an earring in the whorl there: studded barbarically through the flesh of the ear’s rim.

“Of course,” the woman said measuredly, getting to her feet, “we have no idea, really. We guess, from what we dig up. We have illuminations, dreams. I visualize you. But it’s all stories.”

She stared down at Yolande.

“What matters is who tells the stories, and what stories never get told. Because people act on what the histories are. People live their lives based on nothing better than a skull, a fragment of a mail ring, and a misremembered battle site. People die for that ‘truth’!”

Moved by the woman’s distress, Yolande stood up. She rubbed her hands together, brushing off the dust, preparatory to walking forward to help the woman. And it was the oddest sensation possible: she rubbed her hands together and felt nothing. No skin, no warm palms, no calluses. Nothing.

“Yolande! Yolande! ”

She opened her eyes-and that was the most strange thing, since she had not had them shut.

Guillaume Arnisout squatted in front of her, his lean brown fingers holding her wrists in a painful grip. He was holding her hands apart. The skin of her palms stung. She looked, and saw they were red. As if she had repetitively rubbed the thin, spiky dust of the courtyard between them.

A cool, hard, flexible snout poked into her ribs, compressing the links of her mail shirt. Yolande flinched; turned her head. The sow met her gaze. The animal’s eyes were blue-green, surrounded by whites: unnervingly human.

What have I been shown? Why?

A yard away, Ricimer lay on his side. White foam dried in the corners of his mouth. Crescents of white showed under his eyelids.