Worlds That Weren't

by Walter Jon Williams

  Yolande lifted the carved oak Face and replaced it, with a fumble or two, against the bitter chill stone wall.

  “They’ll be pleased when they get here,” Guillaume’s gruff voice said behind her. “The Beys. She looks one tough bitch, too.”

  “They used to burn their firstborn sons as sacrifices to her,” the Frenchman, Bressac, added. “What? What did I say?”

  “I’m going back to my tent,” Yolande said. “Guillaume, if you don’t mind, I’ll give you the cloak back in the morning.”

  Guillaume Arnisout slipped out in the early morning for his ablutions.

  If I move fast, I can call on Yolande before rollcall….

  It was just after dawn. The air was still cool. He picked his way among the thousands of guy ropes spider-webbing between squad tents. A few early risers sat, shoulders hunched, persuading camp fires to light. Moisture kept the dust underfoot from rising as his boots hit the dirt. He scratched in the roots of his hair as he walked down past the side of the monks’ compound to the lavatory.

  It was a knock-together affair—whatever the Arian monks were, they weren’t carpenters. A long shack was built down the far side of the compound on the top of a low ridge, so that the night soil could fall down into the ditch behind, where it could be collected to put on the strip fields later.

  Best of luck with mine, Guillaume thought sardonically. Usually, with the wine in these parts, I could do it through the eye of a cobbler’s needle. Now? You could load it into a swivel gun and shoot it clear through a castle wall….

  The lavatories were arranged on the old Punic model: a row of holes cut into wooden planks, and a sponge in a vinegar bowl. With a sigh, Guillaume pulled the lacing of his Italian doublet undone. He slid doublet and hose down in one piece, to save untying the points at his waist that joined them together. Slipping his braies down, he sat. The morning air was pleasant, cool with just his shirt covering his torso.

  So—am I going to make my approach to Yolande? Because I think the door is unbarred. I think so…

  He sat peacefully undisturbed for a number of minutes, having the place to himself. He listened to the clatter of pans from the monks’ kitchen, and heard a rustling of rats here and there across the courtyard and below him in the ditch. There was more movement now the sun was up, but this yard remained deserted.

  Abbot Muthari and his monks rang for service every hour through the night. They can’t keep that up; they’re bound to quit today and plant her…she’s starting to leak over the floor.

  If it was me, I wouldn’t worry about a dead archer, no matter how smelly she’s getting. I’d worry about the live archer. Two visions! You can’t tell me she didn’t have another one, in the chapel. I need to get ’Lande away from that damned kid….

  “Ah, Dieux!” Guillaume folded his arms across his belly and bent forward a little to alleviate his sudden cramp. A spasm eased him. He sighed with happiness, feeling his body begin another.

  A cold, hard object suddenly shoved up against his dilated anus.

  It hit with surprising force, lifting him an inch off the plank. Before he could react in any way, something warm and wet wiped itself almost instantaneously from his scrotum down the crack of his arse, and finished at his anus again.

  He was not conscious that he screamed, or that his flesh puckered up and shut in a fraction of a second. The next thing he knew, he was hopping out into the courtyard, his hose trapped around his ankles, hobbling him, and the rest of his clothes pulling behind him through the dust.

  “It’s a demon!” he shrieked. “It’s a demon! I felt teeth!”

  Two monks came running up at the same time as Bressac and one of the company’s artillerymen.

  “What?” Bressac yelled. “Gil!”

  His shirt was caught under his armpits and the wind blew chill across his bare arse.

  I knew we shouldn’t have left an unblessed corpse in a chapel, I knew it, I knew it!

  “It’s a demon!”

  “Where?” The foremost monk grabbed Guillaume by the arm. It was the abbot, Muthari, his liquid eyes alert. “Where is this demon?”

  “Down the goddamned shit-hole!”

  The abbot goggled. “Where?”

  “Fucking thing tried to climb up my arse!” Guillaume bellowed, hauling hopelessly at his tangled hose. He gave up, grabbed the abbot by the arm, and hobbled back across the courtyard toward the long shed. “You’re a fucking monastery! You didn’t ought to have demons in the lavatory!”

  Once under the tiled roof, the abbot pulled his arm out of Guillaume’s grip. Guillaume glared, breathless. The abbot leaned a hand against the wooden pillar that supported the lavatory’s roof, and peered down the hole. His shoulders convulsed under his robe. For a split second Guillaume thought the monk was becoming possessed.

  Bressac shoved past, pushed the abbot aside, and stared down the hole. A cluster of monks and soldiers was growing out in the yard. Guillaume stood with his clothes still around his ankles. He yanked the tail of his shirt down, gripping it in a fist with white knuckles. The feeling of cold, unnatural hardness prodding at his most vulnerable area was still imprinted in his skin. That, and the warm, wet sensation that followed. He felt he would never lose the belly-chilling fear of it.

  “God damn it, let me see!” Guillaume heaved his way bodily between Bressac and the Visigoth.

  The hole in the plank opened into emptiness.

  Beneath the plank was a shallow gully full of rocks and the remnants of night soil. And something else. A recent-looking landspill from the far side had raised the level of the gully here, until it was only a yard or so under the wooden supports.

  As he watched, a quadruped shape turned back from waddling away down the slope and lifted its head toward him.

  He gazed down through the hole at a brown-snouted pig.

  It gazed back hopefully at him, long-lashed eyes slitted against the bright light.

  “Jesus Christ!” Guillaume screamed. “It was eating it. It was eating my fucking turd while I was shitting it!”

  Bressac lost it. The abbot appeared to control himself. His eyes were nonetheless very bright as he waved other approaching monks back from the shed.

  “We feed the pigs our night soil.” Muthari raised his voice over Bressac’s helpless and uncontrolled howling. “It appears that one of them was anxious to, ah, get it fresh from the source.”

  The faintest stutter betrayed him. Guillaume stared, affronted. The Lord-Father Abbot Muthari went off into yelps and breathless gasps of laughter.

  “It’s not funny!” Guillaume snarled.

  He bent down, this time managing to untangle his dusty hose and his doublet and pull them up. He dipped his arms into his sleeves, yanking his doublet on, careless that he was rucking his shirt up under it. He shuddered at the vivid remembrance of a hot, overlarge tongue. A pig’s tongue.

  Taken by surprise by a realization, Guillaume muttered, “Oh, shit—!”, and Bressac, who had got himself upright, sat down on the plank and wept into his two hands.

  “Shit,” Guillaume repeated, deliberately. He ignored all the noise and riot and running men around him. Ignored the mockery that was beginning as the story was retold. He stared down the shit-hole again at the thoughtfully chewing pig.

  “Shit…we were going to eat one of those.”

  There was no more talk of pork. But there was endless discussion of the incident, and Guillaume glimpsed even Spessart smile when one of the archers yelled “Stinker Arnisout!” after him.

  “Animal lovers are never appreciated,” Bressac said gravely, strolling beside him. “St. Francis himself was exiled, remember?”

  “Ah, fuck you!”

  Bressac whooped again. “Only—trying—to help!”

  Guillaume passed the day in anger and hunched humiliation, going through his duties in a haze. He registered another row between Spessart and the monks—the captain swearing quietly afterward that it would be better to kill every man of the Visigoths here
, and that he would do it, too, if the company’s only priest had not been killed on the galleys. Guillaume thought ironically that it was not just he who missed Father Augustine.

  He stood escort for the captain again after the hot part of the day, when tempers flared in another confrontation at the chapel door, and Spessart knocked down Prior Athanagild, breaking the elderly man’s arm. That would have been the signal for a general massacre, if Gabès had not been uncomfortably close to the west, and men difficult to control when they are panicking and dying. Both parties, monks and soldiers, parted with imprecations and oaths, respectively.

  Off duty, Guillaume hung about the fringes of the camp as the evening meal was served, and afterward found himself wandering among the ordered rows of tents that led out from the fort’s main courtyard to the sand that ran unobstructed toward Carthage. Tent pegs had been driven hard into the ocher earth. The outer ring of the camp should have been wagons, if this were a normal war, but arriving by sea meant no wagons to place. They had settled for stabling the few knights’ horses at that end, knowing that any strange scent would have them bugling a challenge.

  Guillaume found Yolande sitting between two tents, in a circle of men, playing at cards round the fire pit. She smiled absently as he sat down beside her. He put his arm around her shoulder, heart thudding. She didn’t object. She was playing hard, and for trivial amounts of money, and losing, he saw.

  Toward what short twilight there was in these parts, the woman ran her purse dry and threw her cards down.

  “Nothing to spend it on here, anyhow,” Guillaume said, trying to be comforting.

  She gave him a sharp look.

  “So…ah…you want to walk?” he asked.

  A slow smile spread on her face. His belly turned over to see it. He knew, instantly, that she had heard the nickname being bandied about the camp. That she was about to say Walk with you, Stinker? The idea’s a joke.

  “I don’t mind,” she said. “Sure. Let’s do it.”

  There was no privacy in the tents, and none in the cells of the fort; none, either, down among the packed cargo-cog stores—far too well guarded—and the desert itself would be chilly, snake-ridden, and dangerous.

  The woman said, “I know somewhere we could go.”

  Guillaume tried to read her expression by starlight. She seemed calm. He was shaking. He tried to conceal this, rubbing his fingers together. “Where?”

  “Down this way.”

  He followed her back past the keep, stumbling and swearing, and quietening only when she threatened to leave him and go back to the tents. She led him to the back of the fort, and a familiar scent, and he was about to turn and go when she grabbed his arm and pulled him down, and they tumbled on top of each other through a low doorway.

  “A pig shed?” Guillaume swatted twigs out of his hair—no, not twigs. A familiar scent of his boyhood came back to him. Bracken. Dried bracken.

  “It’s been cleaned out.” Too innocent, the woman’s voice, and there was humor in her face when his eyes adjusted to the dimness. “The occupant doesn’t need it yet. It’s not going to be in use tonight.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that….” Steeling himself to courage—I have known women to back out at this stage—Guillaume reached out his arm for her.

  “Now you just wait.”

  “What?”

  “No, wait. We should sort something out first. What are we going to do, here?”

  Despairing, he spluttered. “What are we going to do? What do you think we’re going to do, you dumb woman!”

  He intended it as an insult, but it came out comic, fuelled by his frustration. He was not surprised to hear her snort with laughter. Guillaume groped around in the dark until a white glimmer of starlight on skin allowed him to grab her hand. Her flesh was warm, almost hot.

  He pushed her hand into his crotch.

  “That’s what you’re doing to me! And you ask me what we’re going to do?”

  His voice squeaked with the incredulity that flooded him. She laughed again, although it was soundless. He only knew about it by the vibration of her hand.

  “That isn’t helping….”

  “No.” Fondness sounded in her voice, and amusement, and something breathless. Her face was invisible. Her voice came out of the dark. “I find it helps to sort out these things in advance.”

  Guillaume almost made a catastrophic error. You mean you’re arranging a price? He bit his tongue at the last minute. She used to be a whore—but this isn’t whoring.

  His understanding of how much hurt the question could inflict on her drained his impatience of its violence.

  “Am I going to suck this,” her voice continued, out of the darkness, “and then you lick me? And that would be it? I’m past the age of having a child, but you never know. Or are we going to fuck?”

  Guillaume heaved in a harsh breath, dizzy. Her fingers were kneading his crotch, and he could not speak for a moment. He clamped his hand down on top of hers. The throbbing of his penis was all-encompassing, as far as his mind went. His fingers and hers around his cod: oh dear Lord, he prayed, completely unself-consciously, don’t let me spill my seed before I have her!

  “I want you,” he said.

  He felt his other hand taken, and pressed, and after a second realized that it was pushed up between linen shirt and hot flesh, cupping the swell of a heavy breast. His fingers touched a rock-hard nipple.

  “I want you,” Yolande said, out of the dark. “But is it that easy?”

  The sounds of the monastery were muffled: the bells for Compline from the Green Chapel, the groaning chorus of hungry pigs, the rattle of boots outside as men went past to the refectory.

  “You can have sex whenever you want,” she said, long-eroded anger in her voice. “And it doesn’t change anything. If I have sex, it changes everything. If I ‘belong’ to a man. Or to many. Whether I’m safe to rape. Whether I’m going to be trusted when we’re fighting…”

  All true, but… Guillaume grunted in frustration. In comic despair, he muttered, “And on the good side?”

  A chuckle came out of the darkness.

  She likes me. She actually likes me.

  He felt her rest her arm down in the warm, dry bracken, close to his arm. A sudden shine of silver—moonrise—let him distinguish her face as his eyes adjusted.

  “On the good side…” she finished, “you’re not in my lance. You’re not another archer. And you maybe won’t commit the cardinal sin if we get into combat…”

  Guillaume kept himself still with an effort. “Which is?”

  “Trying to protect me.”

  He stopped with one hand on her shoulder, the other still inside her shirt. Actually stopped. After a second, he nodded. “Yeah. I get it. You’re right. I won’t.”

  Some expression went across her face, so close now to his, that he couldn’t properly make it out. Amusement? Lust? Liking? Respect?

  Her nipple hardened under his palm. An immense feeling went through him, which he realized after a moment was relief.

  She can’t deny she wants me, too.

  She wants me.

  A little too straight-faced, Guillaume said, “But it’s not a problem if you can’t have sex often, is it? Men want it all the time, but women don’t really like sex….”

  Her anger was only half mockery. “So it doesn’t matter if I have to go without?”

  Deadpan, he said, “Of course it doesn’t—”

  She threw her arms around his chest. He abandoned caution, tried to kiss her, but she rolled them both over in the bracken. He ended on his back: felt her straddling him.

  “’Lande!”

  Her voice came out of the darkness, full of joy. “You should have listened to the monks—women are insatiable!”

  “Good!” he grunted, reaching up.

  One of her hands clamped down on his groin. The other grabbed his long black hair, holding his head still. She brought her mouth down on his.

  Guillaume cradled he
r against him when she fell asleep in his arms, in the rising moon’s light; her clothing half pulled up around her, bracken shrouding her bare shoulders. He was dazzled and aroused again by the glimpse of her rounded belly, striated silver here and there; and her surprisingly large and dark-nippled breasts.

  He tightened his embrace and looked down at Yolande’s sleeping face. All the lines were wiped out of her face by relaxation. She appeared a decade younger. It was a phenomenon he was familiar with: it happens when people sleep, and when they’re dead.

  “I did know him!” Guillaume exclaimed aloud.

  Yolande’s eyes opened. She had evidently picked up the soldiers’ trick of coming awake almost instantly. She blinked at him. “Know who?”

  “Your Margie Hammond. Guido Rosso! Bright kid. All boy!”

  The moon’s light, slanting into the pen, let him catch a wry smile from Yolande. Too late to explain his definition. Impulsive, dashing, daring.

  “You know what I mean! I just didn’t—” Guillaume shook his head, automatically pulling her close and feeling the sweaty warmth of her body against his. “I guess there was no way I was going to recognize the face.”

  “When we put her in the chapel, she didn’t have a face.”

  Guillaume nodded soberly.

  He remembered Rosso now, a young man prone to singing in a husky boy’s voice, always cheerful, even in the worst weather; who would sit out any dancing on the excuse of his very minor damage to one hip and thighbone, and use the time to chat up the women. I prefer to dance with the enemy, he’d say, priming the girls to regard him as a wounded hero—the limp, of course, was very small; enough to give him a romantic, dashing air, but not enough to keep him out of the line fight. He had gone to the archers anyway, and Guillaume had not, at the time, known why.

  “We used to call him Crip,” Guillaume said. “He limped. And he was a girl? That girl—that woman—we carried into the chapel…? That’s Crip Rosso, and he was female?”

  “She wouldn’t marry the man her parents picked out for her. Her mother locked her in her room and beat her with a stick until she couldn’t stand. That’s where she got the limp.” Yolande stared past him, into the darkness of the pig shed, apparently seeing pictures in her mind. “She limped to the altar on her bridal day. When she’d had a couple of children that lived, her husband said he’d let her go to a nunnery, because she was a bad influence on them. She ran away before she got there.”