Worlds That Weren't

by Walter Jon Williams

  Yolande’s voice sounded low, angry. “She should have been buried before we saw her like this!”

  She knelt down clumsily on the cold stone tiles by Margaret Hammond’s reeking body. The knees of her hose became stained with the body fluids of her friend. She closed her eyes, and Guillaume saw her place her hands across her face—across her nose, likely—and then bring them down to her breast, where she still wore the mail shirt over her gambeson and doublet.

  Layers of wool, for the cold nights…under which would be her breasts, warm and soft.

  Breasts pulled with the suckling of one boy who would be older now than Cassell, if he had lived. I need to forget that. It’s—confusing.

  “What’s she doing?” Cassell asked in a subdued voice.

  “The boy gets visions. Gives visions,” Guillaume corrected himself.

  A mixture of respect and fear was in the air. God has His ways of sending visions, dreams, and prophecies to men. Usually through His priests, but not always. It is not unusual for someone born a peasant, say, in a small village near Domremy, to rise to be a military prophet by God’s grace.

  Guillaume shivered. And if Ricimer is that, too? The Pucelle put the king of France back on his throne. The last thing we need is a male Pucelle out of Carthage, knocking the Turks arse over tit. Not while we’re signed up with the Bloody Crescent.

  The young man brushed past Guillaume, toward Yolande, catching his gawky elbow against the heavy wool cloak. Guillaume watched Ric’s back as he walked up behind her. His voice was gruff, with the cracks of young manhood apparent in it.

  “I still have your rosary.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.” Yolande put her hand to her neck. She let it fall down onto her thighs, where she knelt. “Show me more.”

  “But—these men—”

  “Show me more.”

  It’s nothing but the repetition of the words in a different tone. Guillaume doubted she even knew she was doing it. But her voice carried the authority of her years. And the authority that comes with being shot, shelled, and generally shat on, on the field of battle. The pig-boy doesn’t stand a chance.

  “I need to pray first.” Ric’s thinner frame was silhouetted against the altar, where the second lantern stood. He knelt down beside the crossbow woman. Out of the corner of his eye, Guillaume saw that Bressac and Cassell had both linked their hands across their breasts and closed their eyes. Sentimental idiots.

  Ukridge put his water container to his lips, drank, wiped his face with the back of his hand, and suppressed a loud belch to a muffled squeak.

  The pig-boy sat back on his heels and held up the woman’s rosary. The dark wood was barely visible against the surrounding dimness of the chapel.

  “Look at the light.” Ric’s voice sounded more assured. “Keep looking at the light. God will send you what is good for you to know. Vir Viridianus, born of the Leaf-Empress, bound to the Tree and broken…”

  The words of the prayer were not different enough. They skidded off the surface of Guillaume’s attention. He found himself far from pious, watching the woman and the boy with acute fear.

  Yolande stood up.

  She said, very clearly, “Shit.”

  She fell backward.

  She fell back utterly bonelessly. Guillaume threw himself forward. He got his sheepskin-mittened hands there just in time to catch her skull before it thumped down on the tiles. He yelled with the pain of the heavy weight crushing his fingers between floor and scalp-padded bone. Bressac and Cassell leaped forward, startled, drawing their daggers in the same instant.

  Guillaume stared at the pig-boy across Yolande’s body. Yolande Vaudin, laid out beside Margaret Hammond’s corpse, in precisely the same position.

  “Get her back!”

  Sand had sifted into the gaps between the small flat paving stones so no grass or mold could grow between them. Dry sand. No green grass.

  One of the old Punic roads, Yolande thought. Like the Via Aemilia, down through the Warring States, but this doesn’t look like Italy….

  The oddest thing about the vision, she thought, was that she was herself in it. A middle-aged and tired soldier. A woman currently worrying that hot flashes and night sweats mean she’s past bearing another child. A woman who curses the memory of her only, her dead, son because, God’s teeth, even stupid civilians have enough sense to stay alive—even a goddamned swineherd has enough sense to stay alive, in a war—and he didn’t. He died like just another idiot boy.

  “Yeah, but they do,” a stranger’s voice said, and added in a considering manner: “We do. If shit happens.”

  The stranger was a woman, possibly, and Yolande smiled to see it was another woman disguised as a man.

  This one had the wide face and moon-pale hair of the far north, and a band of glass across her eyes so that Yolande could not see her expression. Her clothes were not very different from those that Yolande was familiar with: the hose much looser, and tucked into low, heavy boots. A doublet of the same drab color. And a strange piece of headgear, a very round sky-colored cap with no brim. But Yolande has long ago discovered in her trailing around with the Griffin-in-Gold that all headgear is ridiculous. Between different countries, different peoples, nothing is so ridiculous as hats.

  “This is Carthage,” Yolande said suddenly. “I didn’t recognize it in the light.”

  Or, to be accurate, it is not far outside the city walls, on the desert side. A slope hides the main city from her. Here there are streets of low, square, white-painted houses, with blank frontages infested with wires. And crowds of people in robes, as well as more people in drab doublets and loose hose.

  And the sky is brilliant blue. As brilliant as it is over Italy, where she has also fought. As bright and sun-infested as it is in Egypt, where the stinging power of it made her eyes water, and made her wear the strips of dark cloth across her eyes that filter out something of the light’s power.

  Carthage should be Under the Penitence. Should have nothing but blackness in its warm, daytime skies.

  This is a vision of the world much removed from me, if the Penitence is absolved, or atoned for.

  “What have you got to tell me?”

  “Let’s walk.” The other woman smiled and briefly took off the glass that shielded her eyes. She had brilliant blue cornflower eyes that were very merry.

  Yolande shrugged and fell in beside her. The woman’s walk was alert, careful. She expects to be ambushed, here? Yolande glanced ahead. There were six or seven men in the same drab clothing. Skirmishers? Aforeriders? Moving as a unit, and this woman last in the team. They walked down the worn paving of the narrow road. People drifted back from them.

  This is a road I once walked, a few years back, under the Darkness that covered Carthage.

  And that, too, is reasonable: it’s very rare for visions to show you something you haven’t seen for yourself previously. This is the road to the temple where she sacrificed, once, for her son Jean-Philippe’s soul in the Woods beyond the living world.

  A stiff, brisk breeze smelled of salt. She couldn’t see the sea, but it must be close. Other people passed their chevauchée, chattering, with curious glances—at the woman in the loose drab hose, Yolande noted, not at herself. The woman carried something under her arm that might have been a very slender, very well-made arquebus, if such things existed in God’s world. It must be a weapon, by the way that the passing men were reacting to it.

  Topping the rise, Yolande saw no walls of Carthage. There was a mass of low buildings, but no towering cliffs. And no harbors full of the ships from halfway around the world and more.

  No harbors at Carthage!

  Of the temple on this hill, nothing at all remained but two white marble pillars broken off before their crowns.

  A dozen boys were kicking a slick black-and-white ball around on the dusty earth, and one measured a shot and sent the ball squarely between the pillars as she watched.

  That’s English football! Margie described it to me
once….

  Yolande watched, walking past, trailing behind the team. Children playing football in the remains of Elissa’s chapel. Elissa, called the Wanderer, the Dido; who founded this city from Phoenician Tyre, eons before the Visigoths sailed across from Spain and conquered it. Elissa, who was never a mother, unless to a civilization, so maybe not a good place for a mother’s prayer.

  Nothing left of Elissa’s temple now, under this unfamiliar light.

  “Is that what I’m here to see?” she asked, not turning to look at the woman’s face as they walked. “Do you think I need telling that everything dies? That everything gets forgotten? That none of us are going to be remembered?”

  “Is that what you need?”

  The strange woman’s voice was measured, with authority in it, but it was not a spiritual authority; Yolande recognized it.

  “Is that it? That you’re a soldier?” Yolande smiled with something between cynicism and relief. “Is that what I’m being shown? That we will be recognized, one day? You’re still disguised as a man.”

  The woman looked down at herself, seemingly startled, and then grinned. “Of course. That’s what it would look like, to you. And you’d think my dress blues were indecent, I should think. Skirts at knee-level.”

  Yolande, ignoring what the woman was saying in favor of the tone in which it was said, frowned at what she picked up. “You…don’t think I’m here, do you?”

  The other woman shook her head. “This is just a head game. Something I do every time we check out the ruins.”

  The woman’s strange accent became more pronounced.

  “We’re not over here to fight. We’re here to stop people fighting. Or, that’s what it should be. But…”

  A shrug, that says—Yolande fears it says—that things are still the same as they ever were. Yolande thought of the “archaeologist,” her hands muddy with digging, her face impassioned with revulsion at the prior behavior of what she unearthed.

  “Why are we doing this?” she said.

  “You mean: it’s such a shit job, and we don’t even get the recognition?” The woman nodded agreement. “Yeah. Good question. And you can never trust the media.”

  A grinding clatter of carts going past sounded on the road at the foot of the hill. No, not carts, Yolande realized abruptly. Iron war wagons, with culverin pointed out of the front, like the Hussites use in battle. No draft beasts drawing them, but then, this is a vision.

  “Judges, chapter one, verse nineteen!” Yolande exclaimed, made cheerful. Father Augustine used to read the Holy Word through and through, at his classes with the prostitutes in the baggage train. She remembered some parts word for word. “‘And the Lord was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron’!”

  “K78s.” The other woman grinned back. “Counter-grav tanks. They’re crap. The K81’s much better.”

  Yolande peered down toward the road. Dust drifted up so that she could no longer see the pale-painted chariots of iron. “So why not use the—K81—instead?”

  The other woman’s tone took on a familiar and comfortable sound. Soldiers’ bitching.

  “Oh…because all the tank transporters are built to take the K78. And all the workshops are set up for it, and the technicians trained to repair it. And the aircraft transport bay pods are made to the width of the K78’s tracks. And the manufacturers make the shells and the parts for the K78, and the crew are trained to use the K78, and…”

  She grinned at Yolande, teeth white below her strip of dark glass. “Logistics, as always. You’d have to change everything. So we end up with something that’s substandard because that’s what we can support. If we had the K81s, we’d be stuffed the first time one of them stripped its gears….”

  Yolande blinked in the amazing Carthaginian sunlight. “To change one thing…you have to change everything?”

  The other woman stepped back from the edge of the bluff, automatically scanning the positions of the men in her team. “Yeah. But, be fair: the K78 was state-of-the-art in its day. It just takes decades to get the next version up and running and into the field—”

  A black hole appeared on the woman’s shoulder, far to the right, just below the collarbone.

  In a split second, Yolande saw the woman’s white face turn whiter and her hand go to her doublet. Saw her scream, her hand pressing a box fixed to her breast. Saw the neat wound flow out and darken all the cloth around it. And heard, in the dry morning, the very muffled crack that was too quiet, but otherwise resembled gunfire.

  Soldiers shouted, orders erupting. The woman took three long, comically staggering steps and ended rolling into the shade and cover of one of Elissa’s pillars. There were no children. The slick-surfaced ball remained, perfectly still on the sun-hardened earth.

  “Doesn’t anything change?” Yolande demanded. She stood still, not diving for cover. “Why are we doing this?”

  The woman shouted at the small box as if it could help her.

  Not a serious wound, unless things have gravely changed—and yet they may have: obviously have, if an arquebus ball is no longer heavy enough to shatter the bones of a shoulder joint.

  Yolande saw puffs of dust and stone chippings kick up out of the old Punic road toward her. The hidden man with the arquebus is walking his shots onto target, like a gun crew with a culverin. Sniping, as she does with her crossbow. But the reload time is amazing: crack-crack-crack!, all in the space of a few rapid heartbeats.

  I can’t be hurt in a vision.

  The world went dark with a wrench that was too great for pain, but pain would come afterward, in a split second—

  No pain.

  Dark…

  It’s dark because this is the chapel, she realized.

  The dark of a church, at night, lit only by a couple of lanterns.

  She was lying on the glazed tiles, she discovered. Or at least was in a half-sitting position, her torso supported against the knees and chest of Guillaume Arnisout. He was shivering, in the stone’s chill. His wool cloak was wrapped around her body.

  She thought she ought to be warm, with his body heat pressed so close against her, but she was freezing. All cold—all except what had been hot liquid between her legs, and was now tepid and clammy linen under her woolen hose.

  Embarrassed, she froze. Bad enough to be female, but these guys can just about cope with thinking of her as a beautiful hard case: a woman warrior. If they have to see me as a fat, middle-aged woman, cold white buttocks damp with her own pee…No romance in that.

  Ah—the cloak—they can’t see—

  “You had foam coming out of your mouth.” The youngest man, Cassell, spoke. She could hear how scared he was.

  “You had a fit.” Guillaume Arnisout sounded determined about it. “I warned you, you stupid woman!”

  Ukridge peered out of the dark by the door. “It isn’t Godly! It’s a devil, in’t it!”

  Yolande snickered at his expression: a big man wary as a harvest mouse. She extricated her arm from the cloak and wiped her nose.

  “It’s grace,” she said. “It’s just the same as Father Augustine when he prays—prayed—over the wounded. Calling on God’s grace for a small miracle. A vision’s the same.”

  Guillaume’s voice vibrated through her body. “Is it? ’Lande, you have to stop this!”

  She thought Guillaume sounded the least scared so far. And way too concerned. She moved, unseen in the near dark, wrapping the cloak’s folds around her now-chilled thighs.

  I hope they can’t read him as easily as I can. He’ll be ribbed unmercifully. And he’s…well. He doesn’t deserve that.

  She looked around. “Where’s Ric?”

  “Ric is the swineherd?” Bressac inquired, looming up into the candlelight from the darkness by the far door. “We threw him out. No need to be afraid of him, Yolande. We can keep him away from you.”

  “But—did he have a fit? Was he
hurt?”

  Guillaume shrugged, his chest and shoulder moving against her back, unexpectedly intimate.

  She realized she was smelling the stink of meat gone off.

  Lord God! That’s still Margie, there. Tell me how this vision helps her.

  “I don’t understand,” she whispered, frustrated.

  Guillaume Arnisout grinned, mock consoling. “’Salright, girl. Me neither!”

  Yolande reached her hand up and touched the rough stubble on his jaw.

  She would pray, she would sleep, she would question the boy again, and maybe one of the Arian priests, too: she knew that. For this moment, all she wanted to do was rest back against the man who held her, his straggling black hair touching her cheek, and his arms shuddering with cold because he had covered her.

  But it’s never that easy.

  She got to her feet, fastening the cloak around her neck, and walked to the altar. She reached up and took the carved Face down from the wall.

  She heard one of the men curse behind her. It came down easily. Someone had fixed the Face there with a couple of nails and a length of twisted wire, and under it, covered but not expunged, was painted a woman’s face.

  Her nose was flat, and her eyes strangely shaped in a way that Yolande couldn’t define. The worn paint on the stone made her skin look brownish-yellow. There were leaves and berries and ferns in her hair, so many that you could barely see her hair was black. Her eyes, also, were painted black—black as tar.

  There was no more of her than the face, surrounded by painted flames. Elissa, who died on a pyre? Astarte the child-eater goddess?

  “Elissa,” the young man Cassell said, prompt on her thoughts. Still holding the Face in her hands, she turned to look at him.

  He blushed and said, “She founded New City, Qarthadasht, before the Lord Emperor Christ was born. She set up the big temple of Astarte. The one the Arians took over, with the dome? She took a Turkish priest off Cyprus, on her way from Tyre—a priest of Astarte. That’s why they think Carthage is their Holy City. The Turks, I mean. Like Rome, for us. Even though there’s no priests of Astarte there anymore.”