Worlds That Weren't

Her nipple hardened under his palm. An immense feeling went through him, which he realized after a moment was relief.

She can’t deny she wants me, too.

She wants me.

A little too straight-faced, Guillaume said, “But it’s not a problem if you can’t have sex often, is it? Men want it all the time, but women don’t really like sex…”

Her anger was only half mockery. “So it doesn’t matter if I have to go without?”

Deadpan, he said, “Of course it doesn’t-”

She threw her arms around his chest. He abandoned caution, tried to kiss her, but she rolled them both over in the bracken. He ended on his back: felt her straddling him.

“’Lande!”

Her voice came out of the darkness, full of joy. “You should have listened to the monks-women are insatiable!”

“Good!” he grunted, reaching up.

One of her hands clamped down on his groin. The other grabbed his long black hair, holding his head still. She brought her mouth down on his.

Guillaume cradled her against him when she fell asleep in his arms, in the rising moon’s light; her clothing half pulled up around her, bracken shrouding her bare shoulders. He was dazzled and aroused again by the glimpse of her rounded belly, striated silver here and there; and her surprisingly large and dark-nippled breasts.

He tightened his embrace and looked down at Yolande’s sleeping face. All the lines were wiped out of her face by relaxation. She appeared a decade younger. It was a phenomenon he was familiar with: it happens when people sleep, and when they’re dead.

“I did know him!” Guillaume exclaimed aloud.

Yolande’s eyes opened. She had evidently picked up the soldiers’ trick of coming awake almost instantly. She blinked at him. “Know who?”

“Your Margie Hammond. Guido Rosso! Bright kid. All boy!”

The moon’s light, slanting into the pen, let him catch a wry smile from Yolande. Too late to explain his definition. Impulsive, dashing, daring.

“You know what I mean! I just didn’t-” Guillaume shook his head, automatically pulling her close and feeling the sweaty warmth of her body against his. “I guess there was no way I was going to recognize the face.”

“When we put her in the chapel, she didn’t have a face.”

Guillaume nodded soberly.

He remembered Rosso now, a young man prone to singing in a husky boy’s voice, always cheerful, even in the worst weather; who would sit out any dancing on the excuse of his very minor damage to one hip and thighbone, and use the time to chat up the women. I prefer to dance with the enemy, he’d say, priming the girls to regard him as a wounded hero-the limp, of course, was very small; enough to give him a romantic, dashing air, but not enough to keep him out of the line fight. He had gone to the archers anyway, and Guillaume had not, at the time, known why.

“We used to call him Crip,” Guillaume said. “He limped. And he was a girl? That girl-that woman-we carried into the chapel…? That’s Crip Rosso, and he was female?”

“She wouldn’t marry the man her parents picked out for her. Her mother locked her in her room and beat her with a stick until she couldn’t stand. That’s where she got the limp.” Yolande stared past him, into the darkness of the pig shed, apparently seeing pictures in her mind. “She limped to the altar on her bridal day. When she’d had a couple of children that lived, her husband said he’d let her go to a nunnery, because she was a bad influence on them. She ran away before she got there.”

Guillaume whistled quietly.

“He-she-always seemed so cheerful.”

“Yes. Well.” Out of the silver shadows, Yolande’s voice was dry. That was not so disconcerting as the feeling of withdrawal in all the flesh she pressed against him: skin and muscle tensing away from his body. “Wouldn’t she be? Misery gets no company.”

“Uh-yeah.” He reached over to touch her cheek and got her mouth instead. Wet saliva, the sharpness of a tooth. She grunted in discomfort. He blushed, the color hidden by the dark, but the heat of it probably perfectly apparent to her.

Does she think I’m a boy? he wondered. Or is she-I don’t know-Is this it: over and done with? Do I care, if it is?

“’Lande…”

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“I’m awake now.” She rummaged about in the dark, and he felt her haul at something. She pulled the woolen cloak that covered them up around her own shoulders, uncovering Guillaume’s feet to the cold. He said nothing.

The moon rose on up the sky. The strip of white light shining in between the hut’s walls and roof now barely let him see the shine of her naked flesh in the darkness. He put his hand on her, stroking the skin from thigh, buttock, belly, up to her ribs. Warm. Soft. And hard, under the soft surface.

“So Crip joined the company because no man would have her?” He hesitated. “Oh… shit. That was meant to come out as a joke.”

He couldn’t distinguish her expression. He didn’t know if Yolande heard his rueful truthfulness and credited it.