Worlds That Weren't

by Harry Turtledove, S. M. Stirling, Mary Gentle

  “Aw—shit!” Guillaume swore, exasperated.

  He saw the thin iron ring welded around the boy’s throat. Some slave skiving off work. Or hiding from the big bad Frankish mercenaries—not that I blame him for that.

  “Hey, you—fuck off out of here!”

  The youth looked up, not at Guillaume, but at Yolande. There was a quiver about him that might have been fear or energy. He looked to be anywhere in his early or middle teens, a pale-skinned Carthaginian Visigoth with dark hair flopping into his eyes. Guillaume realized instantly, She’s thinking he’s fifteen.

  “I wasn’t listening!” He spoke the local patois, but it was plain from his ability to answer that he understood one Frankish language at least. “I was foreseeing.”

  Guillaume flinched, thought, Were we saying anything I don’t want to hear back as gossip? No, I hadn’t got round to asking her if she fucks younger men—And then, replaying the kid’s remark in his head, he queried: “Foreseeing?”

  Silently, the young man pointed.

  Above the altar, on the shadowed masonry of the wall, there was no expected Briar Cross. Instead, he saw a carved face—a Man’s face, with leaves sprouting from the creepers that thrust out of His open mouth.

  The carving was large: perhaps as wide as Guillaume could have spanned with his outstretched hands, thumb to thumb. There is something intimidating about a face that big. Vir Viridianus: Christ as the Green Emperor, as the Arian Visigoths prefer, heretically, to worship Him. The wood gleamed, well polished, the pale silvery grain catching the light. Holm oak, maybe? The eyes had been left as hollows of darkness.

  “I dream under the altar,” the young man said, as hieratic as if he had been one of the monastery’s own priests, and not barefoot and with only a dirty linen shirt to cover his arse.

  Guillaume belatedly realized the scrabbling noise hadn’t ceased with their stillness. The hilt of his bollock dagger was still smooth in his hand. He stepped back to give himself room as the altar cloth stirred again.

  An odd, low, dark shape lifted up something pale.

  Guillaume blinked, not processing the image, and then his mind made sense both of the shape and of the new smell that the odor of the corpse had been masking. A pale flat snout lifted upward. A dark hairy quadruped body paced forward, flop ears falling over bright eyes….

  The young man absently reached out and scratched the pig’s lean back with grimy fingers.

  A pig-boy asleep under the Green Man’s altar? Guillaume thought. Sweet dead Jesus on the Tree!

  “I had a seeing dream,” the young man said, and turned his face toward the living woman in the chapel; toward Yolande. “I think it is for you.”

  Yolande glanced down at the dead body of Margaret Hammond. “Not in here! Outside…maybe.”

  She caught the billman’s nod, beside her. He said, “Yeah, let’s go. We don’t want to be in here now. We got this place under lockdown, but there’s going to be plenty of shit flying before long!”

  The pig’s sharp trotters clicked on the tiles, the beast following as the Visigoth swineherd walked to the left of the altar. The young man pushed aside a wall hanging embroidered with the She-wolf suckling the Christ-child to disclose a wooden door set deep into the masonry. He opened it and gestured.

  Yolande stepped through.

  She came out in the shade of the wall. The world beyond the shadow blazed with the North African sun’s fierceness. A few yards ahead was a grove of the ever-present olive trees, and she walked to stand under them, loving their shade and smell—so little being green after the company’s previous stopover in Alexandria.

  She heard Guillaume stretch his arms out and groan, happily, in the sun behind her. “Time enough to go back to Europe in the summer. Damn, this is the place to have a winter campaign! Even if we’re not where we’re supposed to be…”

  She didn’t turn to look at him. From this high ridge of land she could see ten or fifteen miles inland. Anonymous bleak rock hills lifted up in the west. In that direction, the sun was weak. The blue sky defied focus, as if there were particles of blackness in it.

  The edge of the Penitence. Well, I’ve been under the Darkness Perpetual before now…We have to be within fifty or sixty leagues of Carthage. Have to be.

  Guillaume Arnisout sauntered up beside her. “Maybe Prophet Swineherd here can tell us we’re going to wipe the floor with the enemy: that usually pays.”

  She caught the billman’s sardonic expression focused on the pig-boy. Guillaume’s much better looking when he’s not trying so hard, she thought. All long legs and narrow hips and wide shoulders. Tanned face and hands. Weatherworn from much fighting. Fit.

  But from where I am, he looks like a boy. Haven’t I always preferred them older than me?

  “If you’re offering to prophesy,” Yolande said to the swineherd, more baldly than she intended, “you’ve got the wrong woman. I’m too old to have a future. I haven’t any money. If any of us in the company had money, we wouldn’t be working for Hüseyin Bey and the goddamn Turks!”

  “This isn’t a scam!” The boy pushed the uncut hair out of his eyes. His people’s generations in this land hadn’t given him skin that would withstand the sun—where there was sun—and his flush might have been from the heat, or it might have been shame.

  She squatted down, resting her back against one of the olive tree trunks. Guillaume Arnisout immediately stood to her left; the Frenchman incapable of failing to act as a lookout in any situation of potential danger—not even aware, perhaps, that he was doing it.

  And how much do I do, now, that I don’t even know about? Being a soldier, as I am…

  “It’s not a scam,” the boy said, patiently now, “because I can show you.”

  “Now look—what’s your name?”

  “Ricimer.” He’d evidently watched more than one Frank trying to get their tongues around Visigoth pronunciation and sighed before she could react. “Okay—Ric.”

  “Look, Ric, I don’t know what you think you’re going to show me. A handful of chicken bones, or rune stones, or bead-cords, or cards. Whatever it is, I don’t have any money.”

  “Couldn’t take it anyway. I’m the Lord-Father’s slave.”

  “That’s the abbot here?” She held her hand high above the ground for theoretical illustration, since she was still squatting. “Big man. Beard. Loud.”

  “No, that’s Prior Athanagild. Abbot Muthari’s not so old.” The boy’s eyes slitted, either against the sun off the white earth or in embarrassment: Yolande couldn’t tell which.

  She frowned suddenly. “What’s a priest doing owning slaves?”

  Guillaume put in, “They’re a load of bloody heathens in this monastery: who knows what they do? For fuck’s sake, who cares?”

  Ric burst out, “He owns me because he saved me!” His voice skidded up the scale into a squeak, and his fair skin plainly showed his flush. “I could have been in a galley or down a mine! That’s why he bought me!”

  “Galleys are bad.” Guillaume Arnisout spoke after a moment’s silence, as if driven to the admission. “Mines are worse than galleys. Chuck ’em in and use ’em up, lucky if you live twenty months.”

  “Does Father Mu—” She struggled over the name. “—Muthari know you go around prophesying?”

  The boy shook his head. The lean pig, which had been rootling around under the olive trees, paced delicately on high trotter toes up to his side. Sun glinted off the steel ring in its black snout. Yolande tensed, wary.

  The vicious bite of the pig will shear off a man’s hand. Besides that, there is the stink, and the shit.

  The pig sat down on its rear end, for all the world like a knight’s hound after a hunt, and leaned the weight of its shoulder against Ricimer’s leg. Ric reached down and again scratched through the hair on its back, and she saw its long-lashed eyes slit in delight.

  “Hey!” Guillaume announced, sounding diverted. “Could do with some roast pork! Maybe the rag-heads will sell us a cou
ple of those. ’Lande, I’ll go have a quick word, see what price they’re asking. Won’t be much; we got ’em shit-scared!”

  He turned to go around the outside of the Green Chapel, calling back over his shoulder, “Kid, look us out a couple of fat weaners!”

  The thought of hot, juicy, crunchy pork fat and meat dripping with sauce made Yolande’s mouth run with water. The memory of the smell of cooked pork flooded her senses.

  If you burn the meat, though, it smells exactly the same as the Greek fire casualties on the galley.

  “Demoiselle!” Ricimer’s eyes were black in a face that made Yolande stare: his skin gone some color between green and white. “Pigs are unclean! You can’t eat them! The meat goes rotten in the heat! They have tapeworms. Tell him! Tell him! We don’t eat—”

  Yolande cut off his cracking adolescent voice by nodding at the long-nosed greyhound-pig. “What do you keep them for, then?”

  “Garbage disposal,” he said briefly. “Frankish demoiselle, please, tell that man not to ask the Lord-Father!”

  So many things are so important when you’re that age. A year or two and you won’t care about your pet swine.

  “Not up to me.” She shrugged; thought about getting to her feet. “I guess the fortune-telling is off?”

  “No.” Still pale and sweaty, the young man shook his head. “I have to show you.”

  The determination of a foreign boy was irritating, given the presence of Margaret Hammond’s dead body in the chapel behind her. Yolande nonetheless found herself resorting to a diplomatic rejection.

  Young men need listening to, even when they’re talking rubbish.

  “If it’s a true vision, God will send it to me anyway.”

  The boy reached out and tugged at her cuff with fingers dusty from the pig’s coarse hair. “Yes! God will send it to you now. Let me show you. We’ll need to sit with Vir Viridianus and pray in the chapel—”

  The face of the woman came vividly into her mind, as it had been before the bones were bloodied and the flesh smashed. Margie—Guido—grinning as she bent to wind the windlass of her crossbow; mundane as a washerwoman wringing out sheets between her two hands.

  “Not with Margie in there!”

  “You need the Face of God!”

  “The Face of God?” Yolande tugged at the leather laces that held the neck of her mail shirt closed. She fumbled down under the riveted metal rings, between her gambeson and linen shirt and her hot flesh, and pulled out a rosary. “This?”

  Dark polished beads with a carved acorn for every tenth bead; and on the short trailing chain, carved simply with two oak leaves and wide eyes, the face of the Green Christ.

  The boy stared. “Where’d you get that?”

  “There’s a few Arians in the company: didn’t you know?” She laughed softly to herself. “They won’t stay that way when the company goes north over the seas again, but for now, they’ll keep in good with God as He is here. Doesn’t stop them gambling, though. So: you want me to pray to this? And then I’ll see this vision?”

  He held his hand out. “Give it to me.”

  Reluctantly, Yolande passed the trickle of beads into his cupped palms. She watched him sort through, hold it, lift the rosary so that the carved Green Man face swung between them, alternately catching shafts of sunlight and the darkness of shade. Swinging. Slowing. Stopping.

  A pendant face, the carved surface of the wood softly returning the light to her eyes.

  Where I made my mistake, she thought later, was in listening to a boy. I had one of my own. Why did I expect this one to be as smart as a man?

  At the time, she merely slid under the surface of the day, her vision blurring, her body still.

  And saw.

  Yolande saw dirt, and a brush. Dusty dirt, within an inch or two of her face. And it was being swept back with a fine animal-hair brush, to uncover—

  Bones.

  Yolande was conscious of sitting back up on her heels, although she could not see the bits of one’s body one usually sees out of peripheral vision. She looked across the trench, conscious that she was in an area of digging—someone throwing up hasty earth-defenses, maybe?—and not alone.

  A woman kneeling on the other side of the gash in the dirt sat up and put a falling swath of dark hair back behind her equally dark ear. Her other hand held the small and puzzling brush.

  “Yes,” the woman said thoughtfully. “I suppose you would have looked just like that.”

  Yolande blinked. Saw cords staked a few inches above the ground. And saw that what also poked out of this trench, blackened in places and in some cases broken, were teeth.

  “A grave,” Yolande said aloud, understanding. “Is it mine?”

  “I don’t know. How old are you?” The brown woman waved her hand impatiently. “No, don’t tell me; I’ll get it. Let me see…. Mail shirt: could be anywhere from the Carthaginian defeats of Rome onward. But that looks like medieval work. Western work. So, not a Turk.” Her shaped thick eyebrows lowered. “That helmet’s a giveaway. Archer’s sallet. I’d put you in the fifteenth century somewhere. Mid-century…A European come over to North Africa to fight in the Visigoth-Turkish wars, after the fall of Constantinople. You’re around five and a half centuries old. Am I right?”

  Yolande had stopped listening at helmet. Reaching up, startled, she touched the rim of her sallet. She fumbled for the buckle at her jaw.

  Why do I see myself dressed for war? This is a divine vision: it’s not as though I can be hurt.

  The helmet was gone. Immediately, all the sounds of the area rushed in on her. Crickets, birds; a dull rumbling too close to be thunder. And a clear sky, but air that stank and made her eyes tear up. She ruffled her fingers through her hair, still feeling the impress of the helmet lining on her head. The cool wind made her realize it was morning. Early morning, somewhere in North Africa…in the future that exists in God’s mind?

  “Is that my grave?”

  The woman was staring at her, Yolande realized.

  “I said, is that my—”

  “Don’t know.” The words bit down sharply, overriding her own. The dark eyes fixed on her face in concentration, evidently seeing more of it now the sallet was off.

  Yolande drew composure around her as she did before a fight, feeling the same churning bowel cramps. I thought it would be like a dream. I wouldn’t be aware I was having a vision. This is terrifying.

  “I won’t know,” the woman said, more measuredly, “until I get to the pelvis.”

  That was curious. Yolande frowned. Some of this I will only discover the meaning of by prayer afterward. Pelvis? Let me see: what do I remember of doctors—is that what she is, this woman, grubbing in the dirt? Odd kind of medic…

  “I have borne a child,” Yolande said. “You don’t need to find my bones: I can tell you that myself.”

  “Now that would be something.” The woman shook her head. “That would be really something.”

  The woman wore very loose hose, and ankle boots, and a thin doublet with the arms evidently unpointed and removed. Her Turkish-coffee skin would take the sunlight better, Yolande thought. But I would still cover up long before Nones, if it were me.

  The woman sounded sardonic. “Finding a female soldier who was a mother—what kind of an icon would that be?”

  Yolande felt a familiar despair wash through her. Why is it always the women who don’t believe me?

  “Yes, I’ve been a whore; no, I’m not a whore now.” Yolande repeated her catechism with practiced slickness. “Yes, I use a crossbow; yes, I have the strength to wind the windlass; yes, I am strong enough to shoot it; yes, I can kill people. Why is it so hard to believe? I see tradeswomen in butcher’s yards every day, jointing carcasses. Why is it so difficult to think of women in a similar trade? That’s all this is.”

  Yolande made a brief gesture at what she could feel now: her mail shirt and the dagger and falchion hanging from her belt.

  “It’s just butchery. That’s all.
The only difference is that the animals fight back.”

  She has been making the last remark long enough to know that it usually serves only to show up any ex-soldiers in a group. They will be the ones who laugh, with a large degree of irony.

  The dark-haired woman didn’t laugh. She looked pained and disgusted. “Do you know what I was before I was an archaeologist?”

  Yolande politely said, “No,” thinking, A what?

  “I was a refugee. I lived in the camps.” Another shake of the other woman’s head, less in negation than rejection. “I don’t want to think there has been five, six hundred years of butchery and nothing’s changed.”

  The wind swept across the diggings. Which evidently were not defenses, since they made no military sense. They more resembled a town, Yolande thought, as one might see it from a bluff or cliff overlooking it from a height. Nothing left but the stumps of walls.

  “Every common man gets forgotten,” Yolande said. “Is that what this is showing me? I—Is this her grave, not mine? Margie’s? I know that few of us outlive our children’s memories. But I—I need to know now that she’s recognized for what she is. That she’s buried with honor.”

  Margaret would have died fighting beside any man in the company, as they would have died at her shoulder. This is what needs recognition, this willingness to trust one another with their lives. Recognition—and remembrance. Honor is the only word she would think of that acknowledged it.

  The woman reached down and brushed delicately at the hinge of a jawbone. “Honor…yes. Well. Funerals are for the living.”

  “Funerals are for God!” Yolande blurted, startled.

  “If you believe, yes, I suppose they are. But I find funerals are for the people left behind. So it’s not just one more body thrown into a pit because cholera went through the tents, and it was too dangerous to leave the bodies out, and there was no more wood for pyres. So they’ve got a grave marker you can remember, even if you can’t visit it. So they’re not just—one more image on a screen.”