Worlds That Weren't

She said, very clearly, “Shit.”

She fell backward.

She fell back utterly bonelessly. Guillaume threw himself forward. He got his sheepskin-mittened hands there just in time to catch her skull before it thumped down on the tiles. He yelled with the pain of the heavy weight crushing his fingers between floor and scalp-padded bone. Bressac and Cassell leaped forward, startled, drawing their daggers in the same instant.

Guillaume stared at the pig-boy across Yolande’s body. Yolande Vaudin, laid out beside Margaret Hammond’s corpse, in precisely the same position.

“Get her back!”

Sand had sifted into the gaps between the small flat paving stones so no grass or mold could grow between them. Dry sand. No green grass.

One of the old Punic roads, Yolande thought. Like the Via Aemilia, down through the Warring States, but this doesn’t look like Italy…

The oddest thing about the vision, she thought, was that she was herself in it. A middle-aged and tired soldier. A woman currently worrying that hot flashes and night sweats mean she’s past bearing another child. A woman who curses the memory of her only, her dead, son because, God’s teeth, even stupid civilians have enough sense to stay alive-even a goddamned swineherd has enough sense to stay alive, in a war-and he didn’t. He died like just another idiot boy.

“Yeah, but they do,” a stranger’s voice said, and added in a considering manner: “ We do. If shit happens.”

The stranger was a woman, possibly, and Yolande smiled to see it was another woman disguised as a man.

This one had the wide face and moon-pale hair of the far north, and a band of glass across her eyes so that Yolande could not see her expression. Her clothes were not very different from those that Yolande was familiar with: the hose much looser, and tucked into low, heavy boots. A doublet of the same drab color. And a strange piece of headgear, a very round sky-colored cap with no brim. But Yolande has long ago discovered in her trailing around with the Griffin-in-Gold that all headgear is ridiculous. Between different countries, different peoples, nothing is so ridiculous as hats.

“This is Carthage,” Yolande said suddenly. “I didn’t recognize it in the light.”

Or, to be accurate, it is not far outside the city walls, on the desert side. A slope hides the main city from her. Here there are streets of low, square, white-painted houses, with blank frontages infested with wires. And crowds of people in robes, as well as more people in drab doublets and loose hose.

And the sky is brilliant blue. As brilliant as it is over Italy, where she has also fought. As bright and sun-infested as it is in Egypt, where the stinging power of it made her eyes water, and made her wear the strips of dark cloth across her eyes that filter out something of the light’s power.

Carthage should be Under the Penitence. Should have nothing but blackness in its warm, daytime skies.

This is a vision of the world much removed from me, if the Penitence is absolved, or atoned for.

“What have you got to tell me?”

“Let’s walk.” The other woman smiled and briefly took off the glass that shielded her eyes. She had brilliant blue cornflower eyes that were very merry.

Yolande shrugged and fell in beside her. The woman’s walk was alert, careful. She expects to be ambushed, here? Yolande glanced ahead. There were six or seven men in the same drab clothing. Skirmishers? Aforeriders? Moving as a unit, and this woman last in the team. They walked down the worn paving of the narrow road. People drifted back from them.

This is a road I once walked, a few years back, under the Darkness that covered Carthage.

And that, too, is reasonable: it’s very rare for visions to show you something you haven’t seen for yourself previously. This is the road to the temple where she sacrificed, once, for her son Jean-Philippe’s soul in the Woods beyond the living world.

A stiff, brisk breeze smelled of salt. She couldn’t see the sea, but it must be close. Other people passed their chevauchee, chattering, with curious glances-at the woman in the loose drab hose, Yolande noted, not at herself. The woman carried something under her arm that might have been a very slender, very well-made arquebus, if such things existed in God’s world. It must be a weapon, by the way that the passing men were reacting to it.

Topping the rise, Yolande saw no walls of Carthage. There was a mass of low buildings, but no towering cliffs. And no harbors full of the ships from halfway around the world and more.

No harbors at Carthage!

Of the temple on this hill, nothing at all remained but two white marble pillars broken off before their crowns.

A dozen boys were kicking a slick black-and-white ball around on the dusty earth, and one measured a shot and sent the ball squarely between the pillars as she watched.

That’s English football! Margie described it to me once…