Worlds That Weren't

by Walter Jon Williams

Blood leaked out of the abbot’s mouth. “I—None!”

  “Lying shitbag,” Spessart announced reflectively. He shifted his grip expertly on the war hammer, grasping the leather binding at the end of the wooden shaft, and lightly stroked the kneeling man’s scalp with the beaked iron head. A streak of blood ran down from Muthari’s tonsure.

  “None, none, I haven’t sent anybody!”

  “All right.” Guillaume saw the captain sigh. “When you’re dead, we’ll see if your prior’s any more cooperative.”

  Spessart spoke in a businesslike tone. Guillaume tried to judge if that made it more frightening for the abbot, or if the chubby man was decoyed into thinking the captain didn’t mean what he said. Guillaume’s pulse beat harder. Every sense keyed up, he gripped the wooden shaft of the bill he carried, ready to swing it down into guard position. Constantly scanning the monks, the hall, his own men…

  “Tessier.” Spessart spoke without looking over his shoulder at the down-at-heels knight. “Make my point for me. Kill one of these priests.”

  Guillaume’s gut cramped. Tessier already had his left hand bracing his scabbard, his thumb breaking the friction seal between that and the blade within. His other hand went across to the hilt of the bastard sword. He drew it in one smooth movement, whipping it over and down, aiming at a tall skinny novice at the front of the group.

  The skinny novice, not over twenty and with a badly cropped tonsure, froze.

  A tall monk with wreathes of gray white curls flowing down to his shoulders and the face of an ex-nazir, a Visigoth corporal, straight-armed the skinny guy out of the way.

  The novice stumbled back from the outstretched arm—

  Tessier’s blade hit with a chopping, butcher’s counter sound. Guillaume winced. The nazir’s arm fell to the floor. Cut off just below the elbow. Arterial blood sprayed the six or seven men closest. They jolted back, exclaiming in disgust and fear.

  The ex-nazir monk grunted, his mouth half open, appalled.

  “He Dieux!” Tessier swore in irritation. He ignored the white-haired man, stepped forward, and slammed the yard-long steel blade toward the side of the skinny novice’s head.

  Guillaume saw the boy try to back up, and not make it.

  The sword’s edge bit. He dropped too fast and too heavily, like a falling chunk of masonry, smacking facedown into the flagstones. A swath of red and gray shot up the whitewashed wall, then dripped untidily down. The young man sprawled on the stone floor under it, in widening rivulets of blood.

  There is no mistaking that smell.

  Tessier, who had brought two hands to the hilt on his stroke, bent and picked up a fold of the dead man’s robe to clean his sword. He took no notice of the staring eyes a few inches away from his hand, or of the shouting, screaming crowd of monks.

  Two of them had the white-haired man supported, one whipping his belt around the stump, the other talking in a high-pitched voice over the screaming; both of them all but dragging the man out—toward the infirmary, Guillaume guessed.

  In the silence, one man retched, then vomited. Another made a tight, stifled sound. Guillaume heard a spatter of liquid on the flagstones. Someone involuntarily pissing from under their robes.

  The tall, ancient prior whispered, his voice anguished and cracking. “Huneric! Syros…”

  It looked as if he could not take his eyes off the young novice’s sliced, bashed skull and the tanned, freckled forearm and hand of the older man.

  The limb lay with the body on the stone floor, in wet blood, no one willing to touch it. Guillaume stifled a nauseous desire to laugh.

  He saw Tessier glance back at the captain, face red. Anger and shame. Messy. Not a clean kill. The knight sheathed his sword and folded his arms, glaring at the remaining monks.

  Guillaume understood the silence that filled the refectory. He had been on the other side of it. Men holding their breaths, thinking, Not me, oh Lord God! Don’t let me be next! One of the slaves back at the kitchen door sniveled, crying wetly. His own chest felt tight. The captain of the Griffin-in-Gold has long held to the principle that it’s easier to kill one or two men at the beginning to save hassle later on.

  Guillaume wiped his mouth, not daring to spit in front of the captain. He’s right. Of course. Usually.

  “Now.” Spessart turned back briskly toward Abbot Muthari, signing to Tessier with his hand.

  “Wait!” The Lord-Father sprawled back untidily on the floor, his bare legs spread and visible under his robe. “Yes! I sent a novice!”

  “Only one?”

  The man’s eyes were dazed. Muthari looked as though he could not understand how he came to be on the floor in front of his juniors, undignified, hurt, bleeding.

  If he had any sense, he’d be grateful. Could be him dead or maimed. The captain is only keeping him alive because his men are used to him as their leader.

  “No! Two! I sent Gauda, but Hierbas insisted he would go after.”

  “That’s better. Which way did you send them?”

  “Due west,” the abbot choked out. Not with pain or fear, Guillaume saw, but shame. He’s betraying them in front of his congregation. “I told them to stay off the main road from here, from Zarsis—”

  Ah, is that where we are? And is it anywhere near where we should have dropped the supply cache?

  Close enough to Tarbulus for the Turks to get here in time?

  Guillaume kept his face impassive.

  “They will be aiming for the garrison at Gabès. But traveling slowly. Because it is so far.” The Lord-Father Muthari sat motionless, terror on his face, watching Spessart.

  “There. I knew we could come to a mutual agreement.”

  The German soldier bent down, which did not necessitate him bending far, and held out his hand.

  Too afraid not to, the fatter and taller man reached up and gripped it. Guillaume saw Spessart’s face tense. He hauled the monk up onto his feet with one pull and a suppressed grunt of effort.

  “This place will do as well as any for us to wait for our employers. Tessier, take your men out and find and capture the novices.”

  “Sir.”

  Tessier beckoned Marchès. Guillaume glanced back and got his team together and ready with only eye contact.

  “You cannot behave like this!” he heard Athanagild protesting; and Muthari’s voice drowning the bearded man out: “Captain, you will not harm any more of us; we are men of God—”

  Three or four hours’ searching in the later part of the afternoon had brought them up with the fleeing novices. To Guillaume’s surprise, Tessier kept them alive. Guillaume, mouth filled with dirt by far too much scrambling up rocky slopes and striding down dusty gullies, was only too happy to prod them home with blows from the iron-ferruled butt end of his billhook.

  He had seen the fugitives as he marched back into the refectory today. One, his gaze full of hatred, had whispered loudly enough to be heard. “I’ll see you in Hell!”

  Guillaume had grinned. “Save me a seat by the fire…”

  Whether or not it was deliberate, today the German captain halted on the spot where the skinny, tall novice had been killed eighteen hours earlier.

  The flagstones were clean now, but the whitewashed wall held a stain. The scrubbed, pale outlines of elongated splashes.

  “I have no more patience!” Spessart snapped.

  “Captain…qa’id…” Muthari blinked soft brown eyes as if in more than just physical pain. “Syros is dead. Huneric has now died. There must be no more killing—over a woman.”

  At the mention of the ex-nazir monk Huneric, Guillaume saw Tessier assume an air of quiet satisfaction. Vindication, perhaps.

  “I don’t want to kill a monastery full of priests,” the captain remarked, his brilliant gaze turned up to Muthari. “It’s bad luck, for one thing. We’re stuck here until the Turkish navy turns up with expert carpenters, or the Turkish army turns up as reinforcements. Meantime, I’d rather keep you priests under lockdown than kill you. I will kill yo
u, if you put me in a situation where I have to.”

  The abbot frowned. “Who knows who will come first? Your Turkish masters—or a legion from Carthage?”

  “Oh, there is that. It’s true we won’t be popular if some Legio turns up on the doorstep here and finds an atrocity committed.”

  Johann Spessart smiled for the first time. Guillaume, as ever, could see why he didn’t do it that often. His teeth were yellow and black, where they were not broken.

  “Then again, if Hüseyin Bey and his division come up that road…they’ll want to know why we didn’t crucify every last one of you on the olive trees.”

  Prior Athanagild looked appalled. “You would kill true Christians for a Turkish bey?”

  “We’ll kill anybody,” Spessart said dryly. “Turk, Jew, heathen; Christian of whatever variety. I understand that’s what they pay us for.”

  Abbot Muthari stiffened.

  The fat priest is getting his balls back, Guillaume thought. Bad idea, Abbot.

  Abbot Muthari said, “We are priests. We are gifted with the grace of God. You cannot force us to perform the small miracles of the day here. You may not need them. Can you know that all your men feel the same way?”

  “No.” Spessart’s voice dropped to a harsh rasp. “I don’t care. They’re my men. They’ll do what I tell them.”

  The captain raised his head to gaze up at the monks. It might almost have been comic. Guillaume would have bet Johann Christoph Spessart couldn’t even be seen from the back of the crowd: he would be hidden below other men’s shoulders. But that isn’t the point.

  Guillaume felt his chest tighten with disgust. Ashamed, he thought, On the field of battle, yes. But killing in cold blood turns my gut. Always has.

  Spessart raised his voice to be heard all across the refectory. The voice of the commander of the Griffin-in-Gold was used to carrying through shrieks, trumpets, gunfire, steel weapons ripping into each other, the screams of the dying. Now it eradicated whispers, murmurs, protests.

  Spessart said, “Understand me. I know very well, the sea is only a half mile from here. There are caves under this fort. Plenty of places to dispose of an embarrassing corpse. Don’t do it.”

  Spessart paused. An absolute silence fell. Guillaume could hear his own heart beat in his ears.

  The mercenary captain said, “If her corpse is moved, if you even attempt the sacrilege of touching her body except to inter it, I will kill every human being over the age of thirteen in this place.”

  Yolande’s lance handed over to Guillaume’s at the Green Chapel without any opportunity for him to speak to her.

  He fretted away three hours on guard, while Muthari and his fellow monks celebrated the offices of Sext and Nones, the abbot with his nose screwed up but singing the prayers all the same, carefully walking around the blackening, softening body of Guido Rosso/Margaret Hammond, as if she could not be deemed to share in the previous day’s prayers for their own dead.

  Guillaume and the squad occupied the back of the chapel, restless, in a clatter of boots, butt ends of billhooks, and sword pommels rubbing against armor.

  “Spessart’ll do it,” the gruff northern rosbif, Wainwright, muttered. “Done it before. But they’re monks.”

  “Wrong sort of monks!” Bressac got in.

  Wainwright scowled. “They’re Christian, not heathen. I don’t want to go to Hell just because I screwed some monks.”

  The Frenchman chuckled. “How if it were nuns, though?”

  “Oh, be damned and happy, then!”

  It was, to give them credit, ironically said. And I have a taste for gallows humor myself. Guillaume allowed himself a glance down the chapel at the celebrants: all white-faced, many of them counting out prayers on their acorn rosaries. “He’s left us no choice, now.”

  There were murmurs of agreement. No man as reluctant as one might hope; long campaigning numbed the mind to such things.

  All of the priests sang as if they were perfectly determined to go on this way through Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers…all through the long day until sunset, and beyond. Compline, Matins, Prime. Every three hours upon the ringing of the carved hardwood bell.

  I could pray, too, Guillaume reflected grimly, but only that they’ll have given in before my next shift on guard. This place is getting high.

  When Nones was sung—with some difficulty, down by the altar, because of the clustering flies—the Lord-Father Abbot paced his way back up the chapel, and stopped in front of Guillaume.

  Before the Visigoth clerk could speak, Guillaume said grimly, “Bury Margaret Hammond, master. All you have to do is say a few words over her and put her under the rocks.”

  The boneyard was just visible through the open chapel doors—distant, away on the southern hill slopes. Cairns, to keep jackals and kites off. Red and ocher paint put on the rocks, in some weird Arian ceremony. But nonetheless a sort-of-Christian burial.

  “Tell me, faris,” the abbot said. “If we were to offer the heretic woman’s heart in a lead casket, to be sealed and sent home to her family and buried there, would that content your captain?”

  Guillaume felt an instant’s hope. The Crusaders practiced this. But…

  “No. He’s put his balls on the line for a burial here. The guys want it. Do it.”

  “I would lose my monastery—the monks, that is.”

  Guillaume had an insight, staring at Muthari perspiring in his robes: Power always appears to lie with the leaders. But it doesn’t. Under the surface, they’re all trying to find out what the men need, what the men will leave for if they don’t have it….

  Guillaume shrugged.

  The abbot pulled out a Green Emperor rosary, kissed it, and returned to the altar.

  When Guillaume’s shift ended and he came out into the blazing afternoon sun, he thought: Where the hell is Yolande!

  His mind presented him with the sheer line of her body from her calf and knee to her shapely thigh. The lacing of her doublet, stretched taut over the curves of her breasts. He felt the stir and fidget of his penis under his shirt, inside his cod-flap.

  “Good God, Arnisout,” the lanky blond billman, Cassell, said, walking beside him toward the tents. “We know what you’re thinking! She’s old enough to be your grandmother.”

  “Yours, maybe,” Guillaume said dryly, and was pleased with himself when Cassell blushed, now solely concerned with his own pride. Cassell was a billman very touchy about being seventeen.

  “Catch you guys around.” Guillaume increased his pace, walking off toward the area where the camp adjoined the old fort.

  Yolande Vaudin—oh, that damn woman! Is she all right? Did she really have a vision?

  He searched the clusters of tents inside the monastery walls, the crowded cook wagon, the speech-inhibiting clamor of the armorers’ tent, and (with some reluctance) the ablutions shed. He climbed up one flight of the stone steps that lined the inner wall of the keep, with only open air and a drop on his right hand, and stared searchingly down from the parapet.

  Fuck. He narrowed his eyes against the sun that stung them. Where is she?

  Yolande walked down the shadow of the western wall, in the impossible afternoon heat. She pulled at the strings of her coif, loosening it, allowing the faint hot breeze to move her hair. Off duty, no armor, and wearing nothing but hose, a thin doublet without sleeves, and a fine linen shirt, she still sweated enough to darken the cloth.

  The rings in their snouts had not been sufficient to prevent the pigs rootling up the earth here. Fragments, hard as rock, caught between her bare toes. She paused as she came to the corner of the fort wall, reaching out one arm to steady herself and brushing her hand roughly across the sole of her foot.

  As she bent, she glimpsed people ahead under a cloth awning. Ricimer. The abbot Muthari. Standing among a crowd of sleeping hogs. She froze. They did not see her.

  The priest swiftly put out a hand.

  What Yolande assumed would be a cuff, hitting a slave in the face, turned
out to be a ruffle of Ric’s dark hair.

  With a smile and some unintelligible comment, the Lord-Father Muthari turned away, picking his way sure-footedly between the mounds that were sleeping boars.

  Yolande waited until he had gone. She straightened up. Ricimer turned his head.

  “Is that guy Guillaume with you? Is he going to kill my pigs?”

  “Not right now. Probably later. Yes.” She looked at him. “There isn’t anything I can do.”

  He was white to the thighs with dust. Yolande gazed at the lean lumps of bodies sprawled around him in the shade cast by linen awnings on poles. Perhaps two dozen adult swine.

  “You have to do something! You owe me!”

  “Nobody owes a slave!” Yolande regretted her spite instantly. “No—I’m sorry. I came here to say I’m sorry.”

  Ric narrowed his eyes. His lips pressed together. It was an adult expression: full of hatred, determination, panic. She jerked her head away, avoiding his eyes.

  Who would have thought? So this is what he looks like when he isn’t devout and visionary. When he isn’t meek.

  The young man’s voice was insistent. “I gave you God’s vision. You left me. You owe me!”

  Yolande shook her head more at herself than him as she walked forward. “I shouldn’t have left you sick. But I can’t do anything about your pigs. We won’t pass up fresh pork.”

  One of the swine lifted a snout and blinked black eyes at her. Yolande halted.

  “I want to talk to you, Ric,” she said grimly. “About the vision. Come out of there. Or get rid of the beasts.”

  The boy pushed the flopping hair back out of his face. The light through the unbleached linen softened everything under the awning. She saw him glance at her, at the pigs—and sit himself down on the earth, legs folded, in the middle of the herd.

  “You want to talk to me,” he repeated.

  Yolande, taken aback, shot a glance around—awnings, then nothing but low brick sheds all along the south wall, driftwood used for their flat roofs. Pig sheds. Stone troughs stood at intervals, the earth even more broken up where they were. A dirty, dangerous animal.

  “Okay.” She could not help her expression. “Okay.”