Worlds That Weren't

Bressac shoved past, pushed the abbot aside, and stared down the hole. A cluster of monks and soldiers was growing out in the yard. Guillaume stood with his clothes still around his ankles. He yanked the tail of his shirt down, gripping it in a fist with white knuckles. The feeling of cold, unnatural hardness prodding at his most vulnerable area was still imprinted in his skin. That, and the warm, wet sensation that followed. He felt he would never lose the belly-chilling fear of it.

“God damn it, let me see!” Guillaume heaved his way bodily between Bressac and the Visigoth.

The hole in the plank opened into emptiness.

Beneath the plank was a shallow gully full of rocks and the remnants of night soil. And something else. A recent-looking landspill from the far side had raised the level of the gully here, until it was only a yard or so under the wooden supports.

As he watched, a quadruped shape turned back from waddling away down the slope and lifted its head toward him.

He gazed down through the hole at a brown-snouted pig.

It gazed back hopefully at him, long-lashed eyes slitted against the bright light.

“Jesus Christ!” Guillaume screamed. “It was eating it. It was eating my fucking turd while I was shitting it! ”

Bressac lost it. The abbot appeared to control himself. His eyes were nonetheless very bright as he waved other approaching monks back from the shed.

“We feed the pigs our night soil.” Muthari raised his voice over Bressac’s helpless and uncontrolled howling. “It appears that one of them was anxious to, ah, get it fresh from the source.”

The faintest stutter betrayed him. Guillaume stared, affronted. The Lord-Father Abbot Muthari went off into yelps and breathless gasps of laughter.

“It’s not funny!” Guillaume snarled.

He bent down, this time managing to untangle his dusty hose and his doublet and pull them up. He dipped his arms into his sleeves, yanking his doublet on, careless that he was rucking his shirt up under it. He shuddered at the vivid remembrance of a hot, overlarge tongue. A pig’s tongue.

Taken by surprise by a realization, Guillaume muttered, “Oh, shit — !”, and Bressac, who had got himself upright, sat down on the plank and wept into his two hands.

“Shit,” Guillaume repeated, deliberately. He ignored all the noise and riot and running men around him. Ignored the mockery that was beginning as the story was retold. He stared down the shit-hole again at the thoughtfully chewing pig.

“Shit…we were going to eat one of those.”

There was no more talk of pork. But there was endless discussion of the incident, and Guillaume glimpsed even Spessart smile when one of the archers yelled “Stinker Arnisout!” after him.

“Animal lovers are never appreciated,” Bressac said gravely, strolling beside him. “St. Francis himself was exiled, remember?”

“Ah, fuck you!”

Bressac whooped again. “Only-trying-to help!”

Guillaume passed the day in anger and hunched humiliation, going through his duties in a haze. He registered another row between Spessart and the monks-the captain swearing quietly afterward that it would be better to kill every man of the Visigoths here, and that he would do it, too, if the company’s only priest had not been killed on the galleys. Guillaume thought ironically that it was not just he who missed Father Augustine.

He stood escort for the captain again after the hot part of the day, when tempers flared in another confrontation at the chapel door, and Spessart knocked down Prior Athanagild, breaking the elderly man’s arm. That would have been the signal for a general massacre, if Gabes had not been uncomfortably close to the west, and men difficult to control when they are panicking and dying. Both parties, monks and soldiers, parted with imprecations and oaths, respectively.

Off duty, Guillaume hung about the fringes of the camp as the evening meal was served, and afterward found himself wandering among the ordered rows of tents that led out from the fort’s main courtyard to the sand that ran unobstructed toward Carthage. Tent pegs had been driven hard into the ocher earth. The outer ring of the camp should have been wagons, if this were a normal war, but arriving by sea meant no wagons to place. They had settled for stabling the few knights’ horses at that end, knowing that any strange scent would have them bugling a challenge.

Guillaume found Yolande sitting between two tents, in a circle of men, playing at cards round the fire pit. She smiled absently as he sat down beside her. He put his arm around her shoulder, heart thudding. She didn’t object. She was playing hard, and for trivial amounts of money, and losing, he saw.

Toward what short twilight there was in these parts, the woman ran her purse dry and threw her cards down.

“Nothing to spend it on here, anyhow,” Guillaume said, trying to be comforting.

She gave him a sharp look.

“So…ah…you want to walk?” he asked.