Worlds That Weren't

by Walter Jon Williams

  She stepped forward, ducking under the awning, her bare feet coming down within inches of the round-bellied and lean-spined beasts.

  The boar is the most ferocious of the wild animals: that is why so many knights have it as their heraldry. And what is a pig but a tame boar?

  And they’re huge. Yolande found herself treading up on her toes, being quiet enough that she heard their breathy snorts and snores. What had seemed no more than dog-sized, walking with Ricimer, was visibly five or six feet long lying down on its side. And their heads, so much larger than human heads. It’s not right for a face to be so big.

  “Now—you can tell me about the vision.” Yolande kept her conciliatory tone with an effort. “And I mean tell me about it. No more putting visions in my head! I don’t know what I’m meant to make of that. What God wants me to do. But I do know it scared me.”

  The young man ignored her.

  “I’m getting a farrowing shed ready.” Ric nodded across to the huts against the wall.

  Yolande saw one with the wooden door standing open, and bracken and thin straw piled inside on sand used for litter.

  So those strip fields do yield a grain or two—I thought we were never going to eat anything else but tunny.

  “Screw your goddamned farrowing shed! I want to know—”

  “So I ought to be working,” he interrupted, glancing around, as slaves do. “I want to speak to you.”

  “What about?”

  Another nod of his head, this time taking in the sprawled and noon-dozing swine. “These. They have to be safe!”

  “Ric, they’re…pigs.” Yolande took her courage in both her hands and squatted down. This close, there was a scent to the pigs—more spicy and vegetable than those back home. Particularly the boars’. And they were not dirty. A little dusty only.

  Mud—that’s what I’m missing. I expected them to be covered in mud and shit…. Maybe they have dust bathshere, like chickens.

  She felt the shaded earth cooler under her hands, and sat down nervously, shifting her gaze from one to the other of the large animals. “Your church is different; Leviticus, I suppose. ‘Unclean flesh.’ We just…eat them.”

  “No, not these!”

  His vehemence startled the animals. One of the younger swine got up from a heap of gilts, with much thrashing and rolling, and stood with its head hanging down, peering directly at Yolande. It began to move toward her, agile now it was on its feet.

  About to jump back, she felt Ric’s large hand grip her upper arm. If she had not been so disturbed, he would not have come that close. She restrained herself only an instant from smashing her elbow into his nose.

  “You can stroke her.”

  Held, Yolande was motionless on the ground for just long enough that the pig ambled up to her, wrinkled its slightly damp snout forward and back, scenting her.

  The boy’s hand pushed her arm forward. Her fingers touched the sow’s warm flank. She expected it to snap; tensed to snatch back her hand.

  It slowly moved, easing itself down toward the earth—and fell over sideways.

  “What?” Yolande said.

  The boy’s hand released her. “Her name is Misrtah—like the salt marshes? Scratch her chest. She likes that.”

  Misrtah had her eyes closed. Yolande sat, more terrified by the animal’s proximity than by the fight on the deck of the galley. It shifted its snout closer to her thigh and—eyes still closed—gave a firm and slightly painful nudge.

  “Hell!” she yelped.

  Ricimer’s strained face took on a grin. “You don’t want her to rootle you hard! Scratch her!”

  Yolande reached out again to the slumped, breathing body of the pig. She encountered a warm, soft pelt. She dug her fingers into the coarse hair over the pig’s ribs. The body rolled—leaning over, disclosing the teat-studded belly. A grunt made the flesh vibrate under Yolande’s fingers. The dense, solid body shifted. She startled.

  “You just got to be careful. They’re big and heavy.” The young man spoke with a quiet professionalism, as if they were not in the middle of a quarrel. “She would only hurt you without meaning it.”

  “Oh, that’s a comfort!”

  The sow’s long body rolled over even further onto its side, with a resonant short grunt. Misrtah stretched out all four long legs simultaneously, as a dog stretches, and then relaxed.

  “It’s solid.” Yolande pushed the pads of her bare fingers against meat-covered ribs. “Hard.”

  “It’s all muscle. That’s how come they move so fast? Bang!” His illustration, palms slammed together, made a couple of the larger boars lift their heads, giving their swineherd a so-human stare.

  “One minute they’re standing, next second they’re in your lap. All muscle. Three hundred pounds. You can’t force them out of the way. If they want something, they’ll push their way to it.” Ric gave her a mock malicious grin of warning. “Whatever you do, don’t stop scratching….”

  There was something not entirely unpleasant about sitting on the dry ground, surrounded by breathing clean animals, with her fingers calling out a response of satisfaction from Misrtah.

  “Oh…I get it.” Yolande ran tickling fingers down the hairless skin. The pig in front of her let its head fall back in total abandon, four legs splayed, smooth belly exposed. It grumpled. “They’re like hounds.”

  He pounced. “So how can you eat them!”

  “Yeah, well, you know what they say about hounds—eight years old, they’re not fit to do more than lick ladles in the kitchen. Nine years old, they’re saddle leather.”

  “Shit.” Ric put his hand over his mouth.

  “No one’s going to listen to me, frankly,” Yolande said. “If I go to Spessart…He’s over in the command tent right now, thinking, ‘Rosso’s giving me trouble even when she’s dead.’ What’s he going to say if another woman comes in and asks him to please not slaughter the local swine? I’ll tell you what he’ll say: ‘Get the fuck—’”

  “All right!”

  Her thoughts completed it: Get the fuck out of here and back to the baggage train; quit using the crossbow, because you’re plain crazy.

  Prostitution again, at my age?

  Ric glared at her, rigid and angry. His fury and disappointment stung her in a raw way she had thought could no longer happen.

  “Ask Guillaume Arnisout.” The words were out of her mouth before she thought about them. But it isn’t that stupid an idea. “Guillaume’s a man. He might get listened to. If you can get him to speak for you. Wouldn’t the abbot try to speak for you? He’s your master?”

  “My master—”

  He broke off. A different pig heaved herself up, walked forward, dipped her snout to Ric’s knee where he sat, and with slow deliberation let herself fall down with her spine snug up against his leg.

  “Lully…” The boy slid his fingers down behind her ear, into the soft places. Yolande thought, Dear God, I recognize a pig. This is the one he had at the chapel.

  “I’ve been here since I was eight.” Ric’s girl-long lashes blinked down. “I don’t remember much before. A banking house. The men used to travel a lot. I used to hold the horses’ reins for them.”

  Yolande could picture him as a page, small and slender and dark-haired. He would have been attractive, which was never an advantage for a slave.

  I wonder how much the fat Lord-Abbot paid for the boy? And how much he would ask for him now?

  She caught herself. No. Don’t be a fool. The most you can afford is a few derniers for someone from the baggage train to help armor you up. You can’t pay the price needed to get a full-time page or varlet.

  Maybe I could borrow the money….

  “And then,” Ric said. “And—then. The Lord-Father came. Abbot Muthari. I have to know!”

  Her expression must be blank, she realized.

  “My master. Your qa’id’s going to kill him, isn’t he?”

  “If he doesn’t bury Margaret.”

  “He won’t do th
at.” Ricimer wiped at his face, leaving it white with dust, his eyes showing up dark and puffy. “He won’t. I know he won’t.”

  “Look, you’ll be all right; you can pass for under thirteen, if you try—”

  “That’s not it!” His anger flashed out at her. “The Lord-Father—he mustn’t be killed! You’re not going to kill him. Please!”

  “Muthari?” Yolande found herself bewildered. “You want Muthari’s life, too? Your master?”

  “Yes!”

  He spoke vehemently, where he sat, but with a restraint unlike such a young man. Certainly her son Jean-Philippe was never prone to it.

  He doesn’t want to startle his animals.

  “I’ll tell.” His eyes fixed on her. “I’ll tell my abbot and your qa’id. You had a vision. You did sorcery.”

  Yolande stared. A threat? “You said it was from God! That’s what I came here to ask—what it means—what I’m supposed to do with—Sorcery?”

  “It was from God. But I’ll say it wasn’t.”

  Slaves have to be shrewd. She had seen slaves in Constantinople who maneuvered the paths of politics with far more skill than their masters. Being able to be killed with no more thought than men give to the slaughter of a farmyard animal will do that to you. Slaves listen. Notice. Notice what Spessart says to Muthari, and how the Lord-Father reacts, and what the mercenary captain needs right now…because knowledge, information, that’s all a slave has.

  Ric said, “I counted. There’s a hundred of you. There are seventy monks here. Your qa’id needs the place kept quiet. If he hears about a woman having visions from God…that’s trouble. He can’t have trouble.”

  Well, damn. Listen to the boy.

  Yes, the company’s no larger than a centenier right now. And, yes, he can threaten to tell Spessart. The captain’s always been half and half about women soldiers: wants us when we’re good, doesn’t want any of the trouble that might come with us.

  “I’ll tell them you made me do it,” he added. “The sorcery. They’ll believe it.”

  “They will, too.” Yolande gazed down at him. Because I’m old enough to be your mother. “They probably would burn me. Even Spessart wouldn’t tolerate a witch,” she said quietly. “But Spessart doesn’t have any patience. He solves most problems by killing them. Including heretic priests who have heretic visionaries in their monastery.”

  Ric stared, his face appalled.

  Yolande put her hands in the small of her back, stretching away a sudden tension. “The Griffin-in-Gold is a hard company. I joined to kill soldiers, not noncombatants. But there’s enough guys here who just don’t care who they kill.”

  A crescent of light ran all along both underlids of the boy’s eyes. A gathering of water. She watched him swallow, shake his head, and suppress all signs of tears.

  “I won’t have the Lord-Father die. I won’t have my pigs eaten.”

  “You may not be able to stop it.” Yolande tried to speak gently.

  “I had another dream.”

  For a second she did not understand what he had said.

  His voice squeaked: adolescent. “I don’t understand it. I didn’t understand the first one.”

  Yolande’s breath hitched in her throat. No. He’s lying. Obviously!

  “Another dream for me?”

  Another vision?

  This is some kind of threat to strong-arm me into protecting his pigs and Muthari’s arse…. Muthari. His master. His pigs.

  He’s just trying to look after his own.

  Without preamble, not stopping for cowardice, she demanded, “Give me this second vision, then!”

  The wind blew the scent of rock-honey, and pigs, and she was close enough to the young man to smell his male sweat. Ric’s dark eyes met hers, and she saw for the first time that he was fractionally taller than she.

  He said, “I have to! It’s God’s. If I could hold it back any longer, until you promise to help…I can’t. We have to go to the Green Chapel!”

  There’s no time. I’m on duty again in an hour. And how can I sneak him in there to have a vision—if I do—with the captain’s guard on the place?

  The next thought followed hard on that one, and she nodded to herself.

  “Meet me outside the chapel. Two hours. Vespers. We’ll see if you’re lying or not.”

  A young voice emerged from the depths of the dimly lit Green Chapel. “Christ up a Tree, it stinks in here!”

  Guillaume grinned as he entered from checking the sentries. “Cassell, I think that’s the idea….”

  Ukridge and Bressac snickered; Guillaume decided he could afford not to hear them. The more bitching they do about this duty, the less likely they are to slide off to the baggage-train trollops and make me put them up for punishment detail in the morning.

  Bressac got up and paced around on the cold tiles, evidently hoping to gain warmth by the movement. He did not look as though he were succeeding. Now that it was past Vespers, it was cold. Guillaume pulled his heavy lined wool cloak more securely around him. The other Frenchman walked over to the woman’s body, where it lay swollen and chill in front of the altar, under a lamp and the face of Vir Viridianus.

  “You’d think she wouldn’t smell so much in this cold.”

  “This is nothing. You want real smell, you wait until tomorrow.” Guillaume, feeling the tip of his nose numb with cold, found it difficult to remember the blazing heat of the day. He kept it in his memory by a rational effort.

  Bressac paced back to the group. “I went to an autopsy once. Up in Padua? Mind, that corpse was fresh; smelled better than this…. They were doing it in a church. Poorbitch had her entrails spilled out in front of two hundred Dominican monks. And she was some shop owner’s wife: doubt she even showed an ankle in public before.”

  “Some of those Italians…” Ukridge gave a shrill whistle at odds with his beef-and-bread English bulk. “Over in Venice, they wear their tits out on top of their gowns. I mean, shit, nipples and everything…”

  “So that’s how you know the Italian for ‘get your tits out for the lads’?” Cassell’s chuckle spluttered off into laughs and yelps as the big man got him in a headlock and ruffled his coarse brown hair.

  A voice over by the door exclaimed, “Viridianus! I prefer the company of real pigs to you guys.”

  Yolande! Guillaume saw Bressac look up and chuckle with an air of familiarity as Lee and Wainwright, outside, passed the crossbow woman in. She certainly picks her moment.

  Bressac called, “Come on in, ’Lande. Bring a bit of class to the occasion.”

  Guillaume managed to stop himself from bristling at the other Frenchman’s informality. It was no more than the usual way of treating her: somewhere between a whore and a friend and a mother. For a moment he felt shame about his desire for the older woman.

  A shorter figure emerged from the dark shadows behind the crossbow woman. Ric’s still alive, then, Guillaume thought sourly.

  Not that much shorter, he abruptly realized. Is she really no taller than a youth?

  “You ought to be pious,” the boy said, with an apparent calm that Guillaume found himself admiring. It took courage to face down heavily armed Frankish mercenaries. “If she’s your friend, this dead woman, you don’t want to disgrace her.”

  “Little nun!” Ukridge jeered, but it was sotto voce.

  Guillaume judged it time to speak. “The boy’s right. Rosso’s still one of the company. This is a dead-watch, no matter why the Boss put her here. Let’s have a little respect.”

  There was muttering, but it seemed to be in general agreement, with no more than the normal soldiers’ dislike for being told to do something.

  “She’s still working for the company,” Guillaume added. “Or she will be, when the sun comes up.”

  Bressac snickered approvingly.

  Guillaume nodded to Yolande, feeling awkwardly formal in his command role—even if it is only five grunts and the metaphorical dog…hardly company commander. He studied her as w
ell as he could in the light of two pierced-iron lanterns. Even with the door of one lantern unlatched—he leaned over and unhooked the catch—it was difficult to read her expression by a tallow candle’s smoky, reeking light.

  Yolande’s mouth seemed tightly shut, the ends of her lips clamped down in white, strained determination. Her eyes were dark, and they met his with such directness that he almost flinched away, thinking she could read his lust.

  But she doesn’t seem to mind that.

  She’s afraid, I think.

  “I might need you to bring me back, Guillaume.”

  Ignoring the puzzled remarks of the other men, Guillaume exploded. “You’ve come here for that? You’re not letting that damn pig-boy practice sorcery on you again!”

  She flinched at the word. “It isn’t sorcery. He has grace. It’s prayer.”

  “It’s dangerous.” Guillaume blinked a sudden rolling drop of sweat out of one eye. The moisture was stingingly cold. “You were somewhere else, ’Lande. Your spirit was. What happens if you don’t come back? What happens if he has another fit! What if you do? What if God’s too much for you?”

  The holm-oak carving over the altar was only a collection of faint highlights off polished wood, not distinguishable as a face.

  With a shudder he would have derided in another man, Guillaume said, “I believe in God. I’ve seen as many miracles as the next man. I just don’t believe in a loving God.”

  “It’s all right.” Her smile suggested that she was aware of his reasons for being overprotective. He searched for signs that she was angry. He saw none.

  “I’m going to pray now.” She walked to the altar. Guillaume saw her reach for the lantern there. She bent down, holding it close to the corpse.

  “Shit…” The stench made Yolande clamp her hand over her mouth.

  By the lantern’s light, Guillaume saw that Margaret Hammond’s bare hands and feet were white on top, purple underneath, flesh shrinking back to the bone. On duty here, you could watch her flesh shrink, swell, bubble. The front of her head, where her face had been, was black, lumpy, wriggling with mites. Her slim belly had blown out, and contained by the jack she wore, it made her corpse look ludicrously pregnant.