Guillaume whistled quietly.
“He—she—always seemed so cheerful.”
“Yes. Well.” Out of the silver shadows, Yolande’s voice was dry. That was not so disconcerting as the feeling of withdrawal in all the flesh she pressed against him: skin and muscle tensing away from his body. “Wouldn’t she be? Misery gets no company.”
“Uh—yeah.” He reached over to touch her cheek and got her mouth instead. Wet saliva, the sharpness of a tooth. She grunted in discomfort. He blushed, the color hidden by the dark, but the heat of it probably perfectly apparent to her.
Does she think I’m a boy? he wondered. Or is she—I don’t know—Is this it: over and done with? Do I care, if it is?
“’Lande…”
“What?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I’m awake now.” She rummaged about in the dark, and he felt her haul at something. She pulled the woolen cloak that covered them up around her own shoulders, uncovering Guillaume’s feet to the cold. He said nothing.
The moon rose on up the sky. The strip of white light shining in between the hut’s walls and roof now barely let him see the shine of her naked flesh in the darkness. He put his hand on her, stroking the skin from thigh, buttock, belly, up to her ribs. Warm. Soft. And hard, under the soft surface.
“So Crip joined the company because no man would have her?” He hesitated. “Oh…shit. That was meant to come out as a joke.”
He couldn’t distinguish her expression. He didn’t know if Yolande heard his rueful truthfulness and credited it.
After a second, she spoke again. “Margie told me she ran away on the journey to the nuns. I don’t know how she got as far south as Constantinople, but she was already dressing as a man. That’s why she got raped, before she joined the company. Revenge thing, you know?”
Guillaume froze, his fingers pressing against her warm skin. He heard her voice falter.
“They had the fucking nerve to tell her she was ugly, while they were doing it. ‘Crip.’”
The bracken moved under him and crackled. There was a grunt from the next shed over. One of the sows rising, with a thrash of her trotters, and then settling again.
Guillaume winced. “Nothing I could say would be right. So I’ll say nothing.”
There was the merest nod of her head visible in the dim light. Yolande’s muscles became tense. “The name stuck, after she signed on with the company.”
“Stuck?” He felt as if his pause went on for a whole minute. His heart thumped. Incredulous, he said, “It was one of us who raped her?”
“More than one.” She kept her voice deliberately bland. Still she shook, held within his arms.
Guillaume felt cold. “Do I know the guys that did it?”
“I don’t know their names. She wouldn’t tell me.”
“Do you think you know?”
“How could I tell?”
He almost burst out, Of course you can tell the difference between one of us and a rapist! But recalling what she would have seen at sacks of towns, he thought, Perhaps she has cause to doubt.
“We wouldn’t have treated her like that,” he said. “Not when she was one of us.”
Not out of morality—lives depend on loyalty. Men-at-arms and archers together, each protecting the other, and the bows bringing down cavalry before it could ever reach the foot soldiers. And the billmen keeping the archers safe from being ridden down. Safe.
Yolande’s voice came quietly as her body leaned back against him. “I guess she didn’t think about the rape much, later. We could all die any time, the next skirmish, field of battle, whatever. What’s the point of remembering old hurts if you don’t have to?”
An obscure guilt filled him. Guillaume felt angry. Why must women always talk at moments like this? And then, on the heels of that, he felt an immense sadness.
“Tell that to your Ric,” he said. “When his master’s dead.”
She was silent momentarily. He was fairly sure she thought he had not been listening to her recounting the day’s happenings. She confirmed it, a note of surprise in her voice.
“I didn’t think you were paying attention.”
“Ah, well. Full of surprises.”
A small, spluttered chuckle; her relief apparent. “Evidently. You’re—not quite what I expected you to be.”
He didn’t stop to work out what that might mean. Guillaume hitched his freezing feet up under his cloak. “His pigs are safe. But…Spessart might not kill Ric, but I’d take a bet with you that Muthari won’t make it—or I would, if I had any money.”
She gave him a look he couldn’t interpret at money.
“Yeah. At least the pigs won’t die.” She sounded surprised by her own thought. “These pigs, I mean…more like dogs than pigs.”
“All pigs are.” Guillaume could just see surprise on her face. He shrugged. “We had pigs. My dad always got in a hell of a black mood when it came to slaughtering day. Loved his pigs, he did. Hated his sons but loved his pigs…”
“So what happened to you and Père Arnisout and the pigs?”
“What always happens in a war. Soldiers killed my father, raped my mother, and took me away to be their servant. They burned the house down. I would guess they ate the pigs and oxen; it was a bad winter….”
Her arms came around him. Not to comfort him, he realized after a second of distaste. To share closeness.
She said dispassionately, “And now you’re on this side of the fence.”
He put his hand up past his head, where his sword lay in the bracken, and touched the cross-hilt. “Aren’t we all….”
“I’ll have to see Ric again.” The moonlight was gone now, her face invisible; but her voice was sharp and determined.
“About Muthari?”
“About the visions.” Her hands sought his arms, closing over his muscles. “Two of them, Gil. And I don’t understand either. Maybe things would be clearer if I had another.” Her tone changed. He felt her laugh. “Third time lucky, right? Maybe God believes things come in threes, too.”
“Well, fuck, ask him, then—the pig-boy,” Guillaume clarified. “Maybe he can tell you when the enemy’s going to drop on us from a great height. I’d also give money to know who’ll turn up first, Hüseyin Bey or the Carthaginian navy. If I had any money.” He grinned. “Poverty doesn’t encourage oracles, I find.”
She sounded amused in the dark. “And he might know why God bothers to send visions to some mercenary soldier….”
“Or not.”
“Or not…”
He depended on sensation—the softness of her waist under his hand, the heat of her skin against him. The smooth, cool wool that sheltered them from the night’s cold. The scent of her body, that had been all day in the open air.
He felt his way carefully, as if speech could be tactile. “What we were saying—about Crip Rosso?”
“Yes.” No hint of emotion in her voice.
“I was going to ask…were you ever raped?” Guillaume was suddenly full of raw hatred that he could not express. “I—hope not. Just the thought’s made my prick wilt, and talking about that isn’t the way to bring it up again. Not in my case. Though I’ve soldiered with men who would come to attention instantly at the thought.”
His eyes adjusted to starlight. It illuminated shapes—the precise curlicues of bracken, and the crumpled linen mass of his doublet under them, colorless now; and her own hand, where it rested on his chest.
Guillaume whispered, “I’d take all your hurts away if I could,” and bent his head to nip at her heavy breasts.
“Yes…” Yolande smiled.
He felt her body loosen.
Her voice became half-teasing. “But that’s because you’re one of the good guys. I think.”
“Only think?” he gasped, mouth wet from trailing kisses across her body, under her pulled-up shirt. He reached down and put her hand on him, to encourage his prick upright again. “I’m good. What do you want, letters of recomm
endation?”
She spluttered into a giggling laugh.
“You see? In the dark, you could be sixteen.” He put her remaining hand to his face, and let her fingers trace his grin. “I knew I could make you happy again.”
With Prime and Vespers always at six A.M. and six P.M. here, it made the hours of the day and the night the same length, which Guillaume found odd.
On the cusp of dawn, he began a dream. Forests where it was hot. Holm-oak woods. Dwarf elephants, no bigger than horses. Men and women in red paint, who burned their children alive—sacrifices to deforestation, so that cities could survive. A scream that was all pain, all desolation, all loss. Then he was lost in the African forests again. And again.
He woke with a start, the nightmare wrenching him awake. Cold drafts blew across the pen, counteracting the bracken’s retained heat. Cool blue air showed beyond the half door.
Morning.
“Green Christ! What time is it? ’Lande.” He untangled himself gracelessly, shaking her awake. His breath showed pale in the cold air. “’Lande! It’s past roll call! We’re meant to be on duty—oh, shit.”
Running feet thumped past outside. Lots of running feet. Men shouting. Hauling his clothes on, wrenching at knotted points, clawing under the bracken for a missing boot, he gasped, “It’s an attack! Listen to them out there!”
Loud voices blared across the morning. He cursed again, rolling over, trying to pull on his still-laced-up boot.
Damn! Hüseyin Bey’s division ought to be a fortnight behind us at most. At most. We can stand a siege—if there hasn’t already been a battle to the east of us. If Hüseyin’s Janissaries aren’t all dead.
“Don’t hear the call to arms!” Yolande pulled her shirt down and her hose up. She finished tying off her points at her waist, and knelt up in the bracken like a pointing hound.
“What? What, ’Lande?”
“That’s at the chapel!”
“Bloody hell.”
He struggled out of the pig shed behind her, shaking off bracken, not worrying now if anyone saw them together. It was a bright crisp morning, sometime past Prime by the strength of the dawn. So the rag-head monks would be there, to celebrate mass, and this racket must mean—
“Rosso! Margie!” he grunted out, having to run to keep up with Yolande.
“Yes!” Impatient, she elbowed ahead of him, forging into the crowd of mercenary soldiers already running toward the chapel doors.
He tried to catch a hackbutter’s arm, ask him what was the matter, but the other man didn’t stop. Guillaume heard the captain’s voice way ahead, piercing loud above the noise, but couldn’t make out all the words. Only one came through, clean and clear:
“—sacrilege!”
Yolande barged through the black wooden doors into a rioting mess of men and—pigs?
She reared back from the smell. It hit her as soon as she was through the doors. Hot, thick, rich. Rotten blood, fluids, spoiled flesh. Dung. And the eye-watering stink of concentrated pig urine. Yolande gasped.
In front of her, an archer bent down, trying to stop a sow. The small, heavy animal barged into him and knocked him away without any effort. Yolande caught at his arm, keeping him upright.
“What the hell is this?” she shrieked over the noise of men bawling, pigs shrieking and grunting, metal clattering and scraping against stone.
“The fucking pigs et her!” the archer bawled back. His badge was unfamiliar, a tall man from another lance, his face twisted up in rage or anguish, it was impossible to guess which.
“Ate her?” Yolande let go of him and put one mud-grimed hand over her mouth, muffling a giggle. “You mean—ate her body?”
The archer swore. “Broken bones of Christ! Yes!”
Another pig charged past, jaws gaping. Yolande jumped back against the Green Chapel’s wall as the gelded boar, mouth wide open to bite, chased a green-robed monk toward the open doors.
“Grab it!” the monk yelled, holding the Host in its holm-oak box high over his head. “Grab that animal! Help!”
Yolande’s hand pressed tight against her mouth, stifling another appalled snicker.
Ten or twelve or fifteen large pigs ran around between her and the altar, screaming and honking and groaning. And two dozen soldiers, easily. And the monks who had come in to celebrate Prime. A sharp smell of pig dung filled the air. There were yellow puddles on the tiles where pigs had urinated in fear or anger.
“Who…” she stuttered. “Who let them in here?”
The nearest man, a broad-shouldered elderly sergeant, bellowed, “Clear the fucking House of God! Get these swine out of here!”
Yolande shoved forward, then slowed. Men moved forward past her. The lean-bodied pigs were not large. But heavy. All that muscle.
A knight had his legs and arms wide, trying to herd a young black sow away from the altar. The animal shoulder-charged past him, bowling him over in a tangle of boots and armor. Yolande realized, on the verge of hysteria, that she recognized the beast—Ric’s favored sow, Lully.
The black-haired pig scrabbled past her as Yolande dodged aside. The tiled floor was covered in dark dust. Boot prints, the marks of pigs’ trotters, the prints of bare feet. Dust damp with the early morning’s dew.
And something white, kicked and trodden underfoot.
Yolande bent down. She kept close to the wall and out of the way of the struggle ahead—men flapping their arms, clapping, shouting, doing everything to harry the pigs away from their focus, a few yards in front of the altar. She squatted, reached out, and snared the object.
It had a rounded, shiny end. The back of it had a bleached stump, and blackened meat clinging to it. She recognized it all in a split second, although it took moments for the realization to plod through her mind. It’s a bone. A thigh joint. The thigh bone’s been sheared off it—
By the jaws of pigs.
That guy was right. They ate her.
She thrust her way between the men, ignoring the skid of her heels in pig dung on the floor. She got to the altar. What was in front of her now were pig backs, lower down than anything else. Hairy sharp rumps. Pigs with their snouts snuffling along the tiles, wrenching and snatching things between them. Heads lifting and jaws jerking as they swallowed.
Bones.
Meat.
There was not enough left to know that it had been a human skeleton.
The pigs had had her for a long time before they were caught, Yolande could see. Almost all of the flesh was gone. He did say his pigs ate carrion…‘garbage disposal.’ Most of the bone fragments had been separated from each other. There was nothing left of Margie’s skull or face. Only a fragment of bottom jaw. Pigs can cut anything with their shearing teeth.
“Margie,” she whispered under her breath, not moving her fingers away from her mouth. Her breath didn’t warm her stone-cold flesh.
Now there is nothing to bury. Problem solved.
She felt wrenching nausea, head swimming, mouth filling with spit.
I didn’t always like her. Sometimes I hated her guts. There was no reason we should have anything in common, just because we were two women….
The body of Margaret Hammond, Guido Rosso, such as it was now, was a number of joints and bones and fleshy scraps, on the floor and in the jaws of pigs. She saw the captain, Spessart, reach down to grab one end of a femur. He yelled, cursed, took his hand back and shook it. Yolande saw red blood spatter, and then the brass-bearded man was sucking at the wound and swearing at one of the monks while it was bound up.
“You knew this would happen!” Spessart bawled.
The round face of Abbot Lord-Father Muthari emerged into Yolande’s notice. She saw he stood back from the fracas. One white hand held his robe’s hem up from the mess of rotten flesh and dung on the tiles.
“I did not know,” Muthari said clearly.
“You knew! I swear—execute—every one of you over thirteen—”
“This is an accident! Obviously the slave in charge o
f the animals failed in his duty. I don’t know why. He was a good slave. I can only hope he hasn’t had some accident. Has anyone seen him?”
Yolande stood perfectly still. Memory came back to her. She could hear it. The shrill complaints and groans of hungry pigs. The stock know when their feeding time is. And if they’re not fed…
We heard them. They weren’t fed last night. That’s why they’re so hungry now. That’s why they’ve—eaten everything in here.
Her hands dropped to her sides. She made fists, pressing her nails into her palms, trying to cause enough pain to herself that she would not shout hysterically at the abbot.
Ric would have fed them last night.
And these animals have been locked in here, she thought, dazed, staring back at the door where the crowd was parting. Or they’d be off at the cook tent, or foraging…
Someone stabbed a boar, sending it squealing; others, flailing back from the heavy panicking animal, began to use the hafts of their bills to push the swine back and away.
A European mercenary in dusty Visigoth mail pushed through the gap in the men-at-arms, grabbing at Spessart’s shoulder, shouting in the captain’s ear.
Yolande could hear neither question nor answer, but something was evidently being confirmed.
Spessart swung round, staring at Abbot Lord-Father Muthari.
“You’re damned lucky!” the captain of the Griffin-in-Gold snarled. “What’s coming down the road now is the Legio XIV Utica, from Gabès. If the Turkish advance scouts were coming up the road, I’d give them this monastery with every one of you scum crucified to the doors!”
Yolande began to move. She walked quite calmly. She saw Muthari’s face, white in the shadows away from the ogee windows, blank with shock.
“So consider yourself fortunate.” The captain’s rasp became more harsh as he looked at the fluid pooled before the altar. “We have a contract now with the king-caliph in Carthage. You and I, Muthari, we’re—allies.”
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