Worlds That Weren't

The baby began to wail, hungry again. Guillaume looped the board back on one shoulder and slid a finger under the linen band. He tucked the baby’s still white-blonde birth hair carefully back underneath.

“Maybe I could do with a vision,” he said wryly. “Not that they helped ’Lande. Or the kid. What’s the point of seeing things centuries on? He needed to see what that son of a bitch Muthari was like now.”

“One of us would have to have done it,” Bressac observed, his long horse face unusually serious. “You know that? If there wasn’t going to be a massacre?”

Guillaume heard sudden voices raised.

Farther down toward the slim belly of the galley, Yolande Vaudin was standing now, shouting-spitting with the force of it-into the face of the company’s new priest.

The priest evidently attempted to calm her, and Guillaume saw Yolande slap his hand away, as a woman might-and then punch him in the face, with the strength of a woman who winds up a crossbow for cocking.

“’ Ey! ” The sergeant of the archers strode over, knocked Yolande Vaudin down, and stood over her, yelling.

Guillaume felt himself tense his muscles to hand the baby to Bressac and run down the deck. And…run? The sergeant abruptly finished, with a final yell and a gesture of dismissal. Guillaume felt frustration like a fever.

Yolande got to her feet and walked unevenly up toward them at the prow. One hand shielded the side of her face.

She halted when she got to them. “Stupid fucking priest.”

Bressac reached out to move her hand aside. Guillaume saw him stop, frozen in place by the look she shot him.

“Want to take the baby?” he offered.

“I do not.” Yolande moved her hands behind her back.

A bruise was already coming up on her cheek. Red and blue, nothing that arnica wouldn’t cure. Guillaume didn’t stand. He lifted the baby toward her.

Her gaze fixed on its face. “Damn priest said I was asking him to do fortune-telling. It isn’t fortune-telling! I wanted to know if what I saw was real. And he won’t tell me.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know.”

“Maybe.” Yolande echoed the word with scorn. “He said… he said none of it was a half millennium in the future. He said the heathen boy had been telling my future-that I’d never be recognized. That I’d die a mercenary soldier, shot by some hackbutter. And that foretelling my future was witchcraft, and so it was right the abbot should kill such a boy-that’s when I hit him.”

Guillaume found himself nodding. The sensation of that possible future being truncated-of it being a translated form of this woman’s desires and terrors-eased some fear he had not been aware he still had. Although it had given him nightmares in the infirmary, after his wound.

I don’t like to think about five, six hundred years in the future. It makes me dizzy. But then…

“Priest might be frightened it is true foresight,” Guillaume said quietly. “Either way…as a future, are you so in love with it?”

The old Yolande looked at him for a moment, her expression open and miserable. “You know? I can’t think of anything better. Recognition. Acceptance. And a better death than disease. I wanted it for so long… Now I know I ought to be able to think of something better than this. And…I can’t.”

Guillaume rested the baby back against him. He didn’t say anything about families, farms, retirement into city trades.

What’s the point? Neither of us are going to stop doing what we do. No matter what. This is what we are now.

No wonder she drinks. I wonder that I don’t.

“Been doing it too long.” The other Frenchman’s voice was gently ironic. Bressac nodded down the deck toward the sergeant of archers, who was standing with his fists on his hips, talking to one of the corporals, glaring after Yolande Vaudin. “All the same…That isn’t the way to behave to a sergeant.”

“Oh, so, what am I supposed to be afraid of?” Scorn flashed out in her tone. “A black mark against my name on the rolls? It’s not like they’re ever going to make me an officer, is it? A woman giving orders to men!”

So easily caught by those old desires, Guillaume thought. If I could go back into the line fight, as the team’s boss…How long would I hesitate? A heartbeat? Two?

Bressac grinned. “You want to do leadership the way Guillaume here does it-he finds out what we’re going to do, then he tells us to do it!”

There was enough truth in that that Guillaume couldn’t help smiling. Bressac’s face clouded.

“As Guillaume here used to do it,” Guillaume commented.

The wind smelled suddenly of fish and blood as it veered-the stink of the fish-shambles, in Salerno. A brown-haired woman, the wet nurse, approached from the direction of the other rail. Guillaume noticed she ignored Yolande pointedly.

In a stilted French, she said, “Master, I’ll take the baby; she needs changing now.”

“Oh-sure, Joanie.” Guillaume shifted, grunting with his knee’s pain, and handed over the infant. Whatever was passing between the two women was not accessible to him, although he could see there was unspoken communication. Condemnation. On both sides?