Worlds That Weren't

Spessart swung round, staring at Abbot Lord-Father Muthari.

“You’re damned lucky!” the captain of the Griffin-in-Gold snarled. “What’s coming down the road now is the Legio XIV Utica, from Gabes. If the Turkish advance scouts were coming up the road, I’d give them this monastery with every one of you scum crucified to the doors!”

Yolande began to move. She walked quite calmly. She saw Muthari’s face, white in the shadows away from the ogee windows, blank with shock.

“So consider yourself fortunate.” The captain’s rasp became more harsh as he looked at the fluid pooled before the altar. “We have a contract now with the king-caliph in Carthage. You and I, Muthari, we’re-allies.”

He’s going to pull that one once too often one day. Yolande numbly pushed her way between taller men, heading for the small door beside the altar, under the embroidered hanging. Mercenary companies who change sides in the middle of wars get a bad rep.

But then…six thousand enemies a few miles away, no support for us: time to say “Hey, we have supplies, and we can tell you where there are food caches farther down the coast…”

The handle of the door was rough in her palm. A ring of cold black iron. She turned it, and the heavy bar of the latch lifted. Yolande stepped through.

The air outside hit her. A smell of dry dust, honey, and olive trees. The sun was well up. Did I just spend so long in there?

She walked calmly and with no unnecessary speed down past the olives, past the broken walls of this end of the monastery, and down to where the pig shelters stood.

Here, in the shadow of the southern wall, there were still patches of frost on the earth.

She walked up past the first low hut. The boy was lying at the foot of the flight of stone steps that came down the fort’s wall. His back was toward her. She stopped, reached down, felt him quite cold and dead.

Dead for many hours.

She maneuvered his stiff, chill body around to face her. He was almost too heavy. Frost-covered mud crackled underfoot.

It was not the first time she had felt how someone’s head moved when their neck was broken. Snapped, with the neck held, the jaw clamped into someone’s hand and jerked sideways No one will prove it. It looks perfect: He had a fit, and fell.

Spessart will accept it as an accident. It solves all his problems.

No woman’s body to bury; no living man to blame.

She heard the voices of men coming after her.

Yolande turned her head away and stared up at the flight of steps, leaving her fingers on Ric’s smooth, bitter-cold flesh. How easy to take hold of a young man by the iron ring around his neck. Just get close, inside his guard.

He took this from someone he trusted to get close. He was a slave. He didn’t trust many people.

Yolande’s thoughts felt as cold as the boy’s dead body.

I hope Muthari broke his neck from behind.

I hope he let Ric die without ever knowing he had been killed by someone he loved.

Guillaume Arnisout leaned his hip against the rail on the galley’s prow. He braced the burden that he carried.

The thing that had been part of him for so long-his polearm, the hook-bladed bill-was no longer propped beside him, or lying at his feet, or packed in among the squad tents. Because they won’t put me into a line fight now. Not with a broken knee. And I can’t say I blame them.

The warm wood under his hand and the salt air whipping his hair stiff were part of him now, so long had the Saint Tanitta been on its way to Italy. The brilliant sun on the waves was still new-the ship having been Under the Penitence as far as Palermo, on the coast of Sicily.

He looked back down the galley, finding Yolande Vaudin. But nothing fills the gap, after Zarsis monastery-not for her. Nothing.

Archers sprawled on the deck, their kit spread out around them. Every plank was covered with some mercenary, or some mercenary’s gear. Men arguing, drinking, laughing, fighting. Yolande was squatting down with her hand in the crotch of a blond Flanders bowman.

Guillaume could not hear what she said to the big man at this distance. By now, he didn’t need to. It was always the same-and one of the reasons for keeping a distance in the first place.

She tries everything…

Yolande hauled the man up by his arm. He laughed. Guillaume watched them lurch as far as the butt end of the ship. Yolande touched the man’s chest. The two of them vanished behind a great heap of sailcloth and coiled ropes. As much privacy as might be found on shipboard, when all of a mercenary company is crowded into one galley.

He turned back to the rail, shifting his leg under him.

Threads of pain shot through his knee and the bone beneath it.

Better than two months ago in Carthage: at least I can stand up without it giving way.

Guillaume shifted the burden he carried against his chest, moved his shattered and mending knee again, and swore.