Worlds That Weren't

Yolande turned her wrists to break Guillaume’s grip on her forearms. The sow nosed importunately at her. It will bite me! She knelt up, away from it; leaned across, and felt the boy’s face and neck. Warm, sweaty. Breathing.

“Kid had a fit.” Guillaume was curt. “’Lande, I met your sergeant: the Boss wants us. The report on Rosso. I had to say you were praying. You okay? We got to go!”

Yolande scrambled up onto her feet. It was cowardice more than anything else. There was no assurance that the boy would live. She turned her back on him and began to walk away, past the chapel.

Visions! Truly. Visions from God-to me — !

“No. I’m not okay. But we have to go anyway.”

“What did you see? Did you see anything? ’Lande! Yolande!”

The captain’s wiry brass-colored beard jerked as he bellowed at the assembled monks.

“She will have a soldier’s burial!” His voice banged back flatly from the walls of the monastery’s large refectory. “A Christian burial! Or she stays where she is until she rots, and you have to bury her with a bucket!”

Johann Christoph Spessart, the captain of the company of the Griffin-in-Gold, was the usual kind of charismatic man. Guillaume would not have been in his company if he had not been. He was no more than five feet tall, but he reminded Guillaume of a pet bantam that Guillaume’s mother had kept-a very small, very bright-feathered cock that intimidated everything in the yard, chicken or not, and gave the guard mastiffs pause for thought.

He was a lot more magnificent back in France, Guillaume reflected, when he wore his complete, if slightly battered, Milanese harness. But even highly polished plate armor doesn’t lend itself to the hot sun of the North African coast.

Now, like half his men, Spessart was in mail and adopted a white Visigoth head cloth and loose trousers tucked into tough antelope-hide boots.

Still looks like a typical Frankish mercenary hard case. No wonder they’re shitting themselves.

“You. Vaudin.” The Griffin captain pointed to Yolande. The woman’s head came up. Guillaume’s gut twisted at her blank, bewildered stare.

Dear God, let the captain take it for piety and think she’s been praying for her dead friend! What happened back there?

“Yes, sir?” Her voice, too, was easily recognizable as female. The monks scowled.

Spessart demanded, “Is Margaret Rosso’s body laid out before the altar of God?”

Guillaume saw Yolande’s mouth move, but she did not correct the captain’s mangling of the dead woman’s name. After a second, voice shaking, she said, “Yes, sir.”

It could have been taken for grief: Guillaume recognized shock.

“Good. Organize a guard roster: I want a lance on duty at the chapel permanently from now on, beginning with yours.”

Yolande nodded. Guillaume watched her walk back toward the main door. I need to talk to her!

He found himself uncomfortably on the verge of arousal.

“Arnisout?”

“Yes, Captain.” Guillaume looked down and met the German soldier’s gaze.

“What does the Church say about Christian burial, Arnisout?”

Guillaume blinked, but let the sunlight coming off the refectory’s whitewashed walls be the excuse for that. “Corpses to be buried the same day as they die, sir.”

“Even a foot soldier knows it!” The Griffin captain whirled around. “Even a billman knows! Now, I don’t go so far as some commanders-I don’t make my soldiers carry their own shrouds in their packs-but I keep to the Christian rites. Burial the same day. She died yesterday.”

“I appreciate your point of view, qa’id.” The abbot of the monastery hid his hands in his flowing green robes. Guillaume suspected the man’s hands were shaking, and that was what he desired to hide. “I hesitate to call anyone damned for heresy. Christ knows who worships Him truly, no matter what rite is used. But we cannot bury a scandalous woman who dressed as a man and fought-killed.”

Guillaume found himself admiring the small spark of wrong headed courage. The abbot spoke painfully, from a bruised and swollen mouth.

“ Qa’id, the answer is still no.”

And now he calls Spessart qa’id, general!

Guillaume grinned at the plump abbot: a man in his early middle age. Not surprising, given what happened yesterday…

Guillaume had been up on the ramparts, squinting across the acres of sun-scalded rock to see what progress the hand chain was making. From up here, the men had looked tiny. A long line of figures: crates and barrels being passed or rolled from one man to the next, all the way up the chine from the desolate beach. Food. And One of the men ducked out of line, arms over his head, a sergeant beating him; shouting loudly enough that Guillaume could hear it. A water barrel had splintered and spilled. Okay, that’s down to nine hundred-odd…

Guillaume, squinting, could just see part of the hull of the beached galley. The round-bellied cargo ships were anchored a few hundred yards offshore, in deeper water; the side boats ferrying the stores ashore as fast as they could be rowed. White heat haze hung over the blue sea and islands to the north.