Worlds That Weren't

His mind presented him with the sheer line of her body from her calf and knee to her shapely thigh. The lacing of her doublet, stretched taut over the curves of her breasts. He felt the stir and fidget of his penis under his shirt, inside his cod-flap.

“Good God, Arnisout,” the lanky blond billman, Cassell, said, walking beside him toward the tents. “We know what you’re thinking! She’s old enough to be your grandmother.”

“Yours, maybe,” Guillaume said dryly, and was pleased with himself when Cassell blushed, now solely concerned with his own pride. Cassell was a billman very touchy about being seventeen.

“Catch you guys around.” Guillaume increased his pace, walking off toward the area where the camp adjoined the old fort.

Yolande Vaudin-oh, that damn woman! Is she all right? Did she really have a vision?

He searched the clusters of tents inside the monastery walls, the crowded cook wagon, the speech-inhibiting clamor of the armorers’ tent, and (with some reluctance) the ablutions shed. He climbed up one flight of the stone steps that lined the inner wall of the keep, with only open air and a drop on his right hand, and stared searchingly down from the parapet.

Fuck. He narrowed his eyes against the sun that stung them. Where is she?

Yolande walked down the shadow of the western wall, in the impossible afternoon heat. She pulled at the strings of her coif, loosening it, allowing the faint hot breeze to move her hair. Off duty, no armor, and wearing nothing but hose, a thin doublet without sleeves, and a fine linen shirt, she still sweated enough to darken the cloth.

The rings in their snouts had not been sufficient to prevent the pigs rootling up the earth here. Fragments, hard as rock, caught between her bare toes. She paused as she came to the corner of the fort wall, reaching out one arm to steady herself and brushing her hand roughly across the sole of her foot.

As she bent, she glimpsed people ahead under a cloth awning. Ricimer. The abbot Muthari. Standing among a crowd of sleeping hogs. She froze. They did not see her.

The priest swiftly put out a hand.

What Yolande assumed would be a cuff, hitting a slave in the face, turned out to be a ruffle of Ric’s dark hair.

With a smile and some unintelligible comment, the Lord-Father Muthari turned away, picking his way sure-footedly between the mounds that were sleeping boars.

Yolande waited until he had gone. She straightened up. Ricimer turned his head.

“Is that guy Guillaume with you? Is he going to kill my pigs?”

“Not right now. Probably later. Yes.” She looked at him. “There isn’t anything I can do.”

He was white to the thighs with dust. Yolande gazed at the lean lumps of bodies sprawled around him in the shade cast by linen awnings on poles. Perhaps two dozen adult swine.

“You have to do something! You owe me!”

“Nobody owes a slave!” Yolande regretted her spite instantly. “No-I’m sorry. I came here to say I’m sorry.”

Ric narrowed his eyes. His lips pressed together. It was an adult expression: full of hatred, determination, panic. She jerked her head away, avoiding his eyes.

Who would have thought? So this is what he looks like when he isn’t devout and visionary. When he isn’t meek.

The young man’s voice was insistent. “I gave you God’s vision. You left me. You owe me!”

Yolande shook her head more at herself than him as she walked forward. “I shouldn’t have left you sick. But I can’t do anything about your pigs. We won’t pass up fresh pork.”

One of the swine lifted a snout and blinked black eyes at her. Yolande halted.

“I want to talk to you, Ric,” she said grimly. “About the vision. Come out of there. Or get rid of the beasts.”

The boy pushed the flopping hair back out of his face. The light through the unbleached linen softened everything under the awning. She saw him glance at her, at the pigs-and sit himself down on the earth, legs folded, in the middle of the herd.

“You want to talk to me,” he repeated.

Yolande, taken aback, shot a glance around-awnings, then nothing but low brick sheds all along the south wall, driftwood used for their flat roofs. Pig sheds. Stone troughs stood at intervals, the earth even more broken up where they were. A dirty, dangerous animal.

“Okay.” She could not help her expression. “Okay.”

She stepped forward, ducking under the awning, her bare feet coming down within inches of the round-bellied and lean-spined beasts.

The boar is the most ferocious of the wild animals: that is why so many knights have it as their heraldry. And what is a pig but a tame boar?

And they’re huge. Yolande found herself treading up on her toes, being quiet enough that she heard their breathy snorts and snores. What had seemed no more than dog-sized, walking with Ricimer, was visibly five or six feet long lying down on its side. And their heads, so much larger than human heads. It’s not right for a face to be so big.