Worlds That Weren't

“We’ll kill anybody,” Spessart said dryly. “Turk, Jew, heathen; Christian of whatever variety. I understand that’s what they pay us for.”

Abbot Muthari stiffened.

The fat priest is getting his balls back, Guillaume thought. Bad idea, Abbot.

Abbot Muthari said, “We are priests. We are gifted with the grace of God. You cannot force us to perform the small miracles of the day here. You may not need them. Can you know that all your men feel the same way?”

“No.” Spessart’s voice dropped to a harsh rasp. “I don’t care. They’re my men. They’ll do what I tell them.”

The captain raised his head to gaze up at the monks. It might almost have been comic. Guillaume would have bet Johann Christoph Spessart couldn’t even be seen from the back of the crowd: he would be hidden below other men’s shoulders. But that isn’t the point.

Guillaume felt his chest tighten with disgust. Ashamed, he thought, On the field of battle, yes. But killing in cold blood turns my gut. Always has.

Spessart raised his voice to be heard all across the refectory. The voice of the commander of the Griffin-in-Gold was used to carrying through shrieks, trumpets, gunfire, steel weapons ripping into each other, the screams of the dying. Now it eradicated whispers, murmurs, protests.

Spessart said, “Understand me. I know very well, the sea is only a half mile from here. There are caves under this fort. Plenty of places to dispose of an embarrassing corpse. Don’t do it. ”

Spessart paused. An absolute silence fell. Guillaume could hear his own heart beat in his ears.

The mercenary captain said, “If her corpse is moved, if you even attempt the sacrilege of touching her body except to inter it, I will kill every human being over the age of thirteen in this place. ”

Yolande’s lance handed over to Guillaume’s at the Green Chapel without any opportunity for him to speak to her.

He fretted away three hours on guard, while Muthari and his fellow monks celebrated the offices of Sext and Nones, the abbot with his nose screwed up but singing the prayers all the same, carefully walking around the blackening, softening body of Guido Rosso/Margaret Hammond, as if she could not be deemed to share in the previous day’s prayers for their own dead.

Guillaume and the squad occupied the back of the chapel, restless, in a clatter of boots, butt ends of billhooks, and sword pommels rubbing against armor.

“Spessart’ll do it,” the gruff northern rosbif, Wainwright, muttered. “Done it before. But they’re monks.”

“Wrong sort of monks!” Bressac got in.

Wainwright scowled. “They’re Christian, not heathen. I don’t want to go to Hell just because I screwed some monks.”

The Frenchman chuckled. “How if it were nuns, though?”

“Oh, be damned and happy, then!”

It was, to give them credit, ironically said. And I have a taste for gallows humor myself. Guillaume allowed himself a glance down the chapel at the celebrants: all white-faced, many of them counting out prayers on their acorn rosaries. “He’s left us no choice, now.”

There were murmurs of agreement. No man as reluctant as one might hope; long campaigning numbed the mind to such things.

All of the priests sang as if they were perfectly determined to go on this way through Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers…all through the long day until sunset, and beyond. Compline, Matins, Prime. Every three hours upon the ringing of the carved hardwood bell.

I could pray, too, Guillaume reflected grimly, but only that they’ll have given in before my next shift on guard. This place is getting high.

When Nones was sung-with some difficulty, down by the altar, because of the clustering flies-the Lord-Father Abbot paced his way back up the chapel, and stopped in front of Guillaume.

Before the Visigoth clerk could speak, Guillaume said grimly, “Bury Margaret Hammond, master. All you have to do is say a few words over her and put her under the rocks.”

The boneyard was just visible through the open chapel doors-distant, away on the southern hill slopes. Cairns, to keep jackals and kites off. Red and ocher paint put on the rocks, in some weird Arian ceremony. But nonetheless a sort-of-Christian burial.

“Tell me, faris,” the abbot said. “If we were to offer the heretic woman’s heart in a lead casket, to be sealed and sent home to her family and buried there, would that content your captain?”

Guillaume felt an instant’s hope. The Crusaders practiced this. But…

“No. He’s put his balls on the line for a burial here. The guys want it. Do it.”

“I would lose my monastery-the monks, that is.”

Guillaume had an insight, staring at Muthari perspiring in his robes: Power always appears to lie with the leaders. But it doesn’t. Under the surface, they’re all trying to find out what the men need, what the men will leave for if they don’t have it…

Guillaume shrugged.

The abbot pulled out a Green Emperor rosary, kissed it, and returned to the altar.

When Guillaume’s shift ended and he came out into the blazing afternoon sun, he thought: Where the hell is Yolande!