Worlds That Weren't

Ten or twelve or fifteen large pigs ran around between her and the altar, screaming and honking and groaning. And two dozen soldiers, easily. And the monks who had come in to celebrate Prime. A sharp smell of pig dung filled the air. There were yellow puddles on the tiles where pigs had urinated in fear or anger.

“Who…” she stuttered. “Who let them in here?”

The nearest man, a broad-shouldered elderly sergeant, bellowed, “Clear the fucking House of God! Get these swine out of here!”

Yolande shoved forward, then slowed. Men moved forward past her. The lean-bodied pigs were not large. But heavy. All that muscle.

A knight had his legs and arms wide, trying to herd a young black sow away from the altar. The animal shoulder-charged past him, bowling him over in a tangle of boots and armor. Yolande realized, on the verge of hysteria, that she recognized the beast-Ric’s favored sow, Lully.

The black-haired pig scrabbled past her as Yolande dodged aside. The tiled floor was covered in dark dust. Boot prints, the marks of pigs’ trotters, the prints of bare feet. Dust damp with the early morning’s dew.

And something white, kicked and trodden underfoot.

Yolande bent down. She kept close to the wall and out of the way of the struggle ahead-men flapping their arms, clapping, shouting, doing everything to harry the pigs away from their focus, a few yards in front of the altar. She squatted, reached out, and snared the object.

It had a rounded, shiny end. The back of it had a bleached stump, and blackened meat clinging to it. She recognized it all in a split second, although it took moments for the realization to plod through her mind. It’s a bone. A thigh joint. The thigh bone’s been sheared off it By the jaws of pigs.

That guy was right. They ate her.

She thrust her way between the men, ignoring the skid of her heels in pig dung on the floor. She got to the altar. What was in front of her now were pig backs, lower down than anything else. Hairy sharp rumps. Pigs with their snouts snuffling along the tiles, wrenching and snatching things between them. Heads lifting and jaws jerking as they swallowed.

Bones.

Meat.

There was not enough left to know that it had been a human skeleton.

The pigs had had her for a long time before they were caught, Yolande could see. Almost all of the flesh was gone. He did say his pigs ate carrion…‘garbage disposal.’ Most of the bone fragments had been separated from each other. There was nothing left of Margie’s skull or face. Only a fragment of bottom jaw. Pigs can cut anything with their shearing teeth.

“Margie,” she whispered under her breath, not moving her fingers away from her mouth. Her breath didn’t warm her stone-cold flesh.

Now there is nothing to bury. Problem solved.

She felt wrenching nausea, head swimming, mouth filling with spit.

I didn’t always like her. Sometimes I hated her guts. There was no reason we should have anything in common, just because we were two women…

The body of Margaret Hammond, Guido Rosso, such as it was now, was a number of joints and bones and fleshy scraps, on the floor and in the jaws of pigs. She saw the captain, Spessart, reach down to grab one end of a femur. He yelled, cursed, took his hand back and shook it. Yolande saw red blood spatter, and then the brass-bearded man was sucking at the wound and swearing at one of the monks while it was bound up.

“You knew this would happen!” Spessart bawled.

The round face of Abbot Lord-Father Muthari emerged into Yolande’s notice. She saw he stood back from the fracas. One white hand held his robe’s hem up from the mess of rotten flesh and dung on the tiles.

“I did not know,” Muthari said clearly.

“You knew! I swear-execute- every one of you over thirteen — ”

“This is an accident! Obviously the slave in charge of the animals failed in his duty. I don’t know why. He was a good slave. I can only hope he hasn’t had some accident. Has anyone seen him?”

Yolande stood perfectly still. Memory came back to her. She could hear it. The shrill complaints and groans of hungry pigs. The stock know when their feeding time is. And if they’re not fed…

We heard them. They weren’t fed last night. That’s why they’re so hungry now. That’s why they’ve-eaten everything in here.

Her hands dropped to her sides. She made fists, pressing her nails into her palms, trying to cause enough pain to herself that she would not shout hysterically at the abbot.

Ric would have fed them last night.

And these animals have been locked in here, she thought, dazed, staring back at the door where the crowd was parting. Or they’d be off at the cook tent, or foraging…

Someone stabbed a boar, sending it squealing; others, flailing back from the heavy panicking animal, began to use the hafts of their bills to push the swine back and away.

A European mercenary in dusty Visigoth mail pushed through the gap in the men-at-arms, grabbing at Spessart’s shoulder, shouting in the captain’s ear.

Yolande could hear neither question nor answer, but something was evidently being confirmed.