Worlds That Weren't

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

  Screen? A little sardonically Yolande reflected, We are not the class of people who are put into tapestries, you and I. The best I’ll get is to be one of a mass of helmets in the background. You might get to be a fieldworker, while the nuns spend all their skills embroidering the lord’s bridle and all his other tack.

  “If you believe?” Yolande repeated it as a question.

  “If there was a God, would He let children die in thousands just because of dirty water?”

  If the specifics evaded Yolande, the woman’s emotion was clear. Yolande protested, “Yes, I’ve doubted, too. But I see the evidence of Him every day. The priests’ miracles—”

  “Oh, well. I can’t argue with fundamentalism.” The woman’s mouth tugged up at the side. “Which medieval Christianity certainly is.”

  A voice interrupted, calling unintelligibly from somewhere off in the destroyed village settlement.

  “I’m coming!” the woman shouted. “Hold on, will you!”

  The settlement’s layout was not familiar, Yolande realized with relief. It was not the monastery.

  So if I am fated to die on this damned coast, it isn’t yet.

  The woman turned her head back. There was an odd greediness about the way she studied Yolande’s face.

  “They’ll put it into the books as ‘village militia.’ Any skeleton with a female pelvis who’s in a mail shirt must have picked up armor and weapons as an act of desperation, defending her town.”

  There was desperation in her tone, also. And self-loathing; Yolande could hear it.

  And this mad woman is not even a soldier. What can it matter to her, digging in the dirt for bodies, whether Margie and I are remembered as what we were?

  The woman pointed at her. Yolande realized it was the mail shirt she was indicating. “Why did you do this! War? Fighting?”

  “It…wasn’t what I intended to do. I found out that I was good at it.”

  “But it’s wrong.” The woman’s expression blazed, intense. “It’s sick.”

  “Yes, but…” Yolande paused. “I enjoy it. Except maybe the actual fighting.”

  She gave the woman a quick grin.

  “All the swanning around Christendom, and gambling, and eating yourself silly, and fornicating, and not working—that’s all great. I mean, can you see me in a nunnery, or as a respectable widow in Paris? Oh, and the getting rich, if you’re lucky enough to loot somewhere. That’s good, too. It’s worth risking getting killed every so often, because, hey, somebody has to survive the field of battle; why not me?”

  “But killing other people?”

  Yolande’s smile faded. “I can do that. I can do all of it. Except…the guns. I just choke up, when there’s gunfire. Cry. And they always think it’s because I’m a woman. So I try not to let anyone see me, now.”

  The dark-skinned woman rested her brush down on the earth.

  “More sensitive.” The last word had scorn in it. She added, without the ironic tone, “More sensible. As a woman. You know the killing is irrational.”

  Yolande found herself self-mockingly smiling. “No. I’m not sensible about hackbuts or cannon—the devil’s noise doesn’t frighten me. It makes me cry, because I remember so many dead people. I lost more than forty people I knew, at the fall.”

  The other woman’s aquiline face showed a conflicted sadness, difficult to interpret.

  Yolande shrugged. “If you want scary war, try the line fight. Close combat with edged weapons. That’s why I use a crossbow.”

  The woman’s dignified features took on something between sympathy and contempt.

  “No women in close-quarters fighting, then?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Yolande paused. “But they’re idiots.”

  Guillaume’s face came into her mind.

  “Everybody with a polearm is an idiot…. But I guess it’s easier for a woman to swing a poleax than pull a two-hundred-pound longbow.”

  The other woman sat back on her heels, eyes widening. “A poleax? Easier?”

  “Ever chop wood?” And off the woman’s realization, Yolande gave her a there you are look. “It’s just a felling ax on a long stick…a thinner blade, even. Margie said the ax and hammer were easier. But in the end she came in with the crossbows, because I was there.”

  And look how much good that did her.

  “Not everybody can master the skills of crossbows or arquebuses….” This was an argument Yolande had had before, way too often. “Why does everybody think it’s the weapons that are the difficult thing for a woman fighting? It’s the guys on your own side. Not the killing.”

  The fragments of bone and teeth in the earth had each their own individual shadow, caused by the sun lifting higher over the horizon.

  “The truth is important.” Yolande found the other woman watching her with wistfulness as she looked up. Yolande emphasized, “That’s the truth: she was a soldier. She shouldn’t have to be something else just so they can bury her.”

  “I know. I want proof of women soldiers. And…I want no soldiers, women or men.” The woman recovered her errant lock of hair and pushed it back again. Yolande saw the delicate gold of an earring in the whorl there: studded barbarically through the flesh of the ear’s rim.

  “Of course,” the woman said measuredly, getting to her feet, “we have no idea, really. We guess, from what we dig up. We have illuminations, dreams. I visualize you. But it’s all stories.”

  She stared down at Yolande.

  “What matters is who tells the stories, and what stories never get told. Because people act on what the histories are. People live their lives based on nothing better than a skull, a fragment of a mail ring, and a misremembered battle site. People die for that ‘truth’!”

  Moved by the woman’s distress, Yolande stood up. She rubbed her hands together, brushing off the dust, preparatory to walking forward to help the woman. And it was the oddest sensation possible: she rubbed her hands together and felt nothing. No skin, no warm palms, no calluses. Nothing.

  “Yolande! Yolande!”

  She opened her eyes—and that was the most strange thing, since she had not had them shut.

  Guillaume Arnisout squatted in front of her, his lean brown fingers holding her wrists in a painful grip. He was holding her hands apart. The skin of her palms stung. She looked, and saw they were red. As if she had repetitively rubbed the thin, spiky dust of the courtyard between them.

  A cool, hard, flexible snout poked into her ribs, compressing the links of her mail shirt. Yolande flinched; turned her head. The sow met her gaze. The animal’s eyes were blue-green, surrounded by whites: unnervingly human.

  What have I been shown? Why?

  A yard away, Ricimer lay on his side. White foam dried in the corners of his mouth. Crescents of white showed under his eyelids.

  Yolande turned her wrists to break Guillaume’s grip on her forearms. The sow nosed importunately at her. It will bite me! She knelt up, away from it; leaned across, and felt the boy’s face and neck. Warm, sweaty. Breathing.

  “Kid had a fit.” Guillaume was curt. “’Lande, I met your sergeant: the Boss wants us. The report on Rosso. I had to say you were praying. You okay? We got to go!”

  Yolande scrambled up onto her feet. It was cowardice more than anything else. There was no assurance that the boy would live. She turned her back on him and began to walk away, past the chapel.

  Visions! Truly. Visions from God—to me—!

  “No. I’m not okay. But we have to go anyway.”

  “What did you see? Did you see anything? ’Lande! Yolande!”

  The captain’s wiry brass-colored beard jerked as he bellowed at the assembled monks.

  “She will have a soldier’s burial!” His voice banged back flatly from the walls of the monastery’s large refectory. “A Christian burial! Or she stays where she is until she rots, and you have to bury her with a bucket!”

  Johann Christoph Spessart, the captain of the company of the Griffin-in-Gold, was the usual kind
of charismatic man. Guillaume would not have been in his company if he had not been. He was no more than five feet tall, but he reminded Guillaume of a pet bantam that Guillaume’s mother had kept—a very small, very bright-feathered cock that intimidated everything in the yard, chicken or not, and gave the guard mastiffs pause for thought.

  He was a lot more magnificent back in France, Guillaume reflected, when he wore his complete, if slightly battered, Milanese harness. But even highly polished plate armor doesn’t lend itself to the hot sun of the North African coast.

  Now, like half his men, Spessart was in mail and adopted a white Visigoth head cloth and loose trousers tucked into tough antelope-hide boots.

  Still looks like a typical Frankish mercenary hard case. No wonder they’re shitting themselves.

  “You. Vaudin.” The Griffin captain pointed to Yolande. The woman’s head came up. Guillaume’s gut twisted at her blank, bewildered stare.

  Dear God, let the captain take it for piety and think she’s been praying for her dead friend! What happened back there?

  “Yes, sir?” Her voice, too, was easily recognizable as female. The monks scowled.

  Spessart demanded, “Is Margaret Rosso’s body laid out before the altar of God?”

  Guillaume saw Yolande’s mouth move, but she did not correct the captain’s mangling of the dead woman’s name. After a second, voice shaking, she said, “Yes, sir.”

  It could have been taken for grief: Guillaume recognized shock.

  “Good. Organize a guard roster: I want a lance on duty at the chapel permanently from now on, beginning with yours.”

  Yolande nodded. Guillaume watched her walk back toward the main door. I need to talk to her!

  He found himself uncomfortably on the verge of arousal.

  “Arnisout?”

  “Yes, Captain.” Guillaume looked down and met the German soldier’s gaze.

  “What does the Church say about Christian burial, Arnisout?”

  Guillaume blinked, but let the sunlight coming off the refectory’s whitewashed walls be the excuse for that. “Corpses to be buried the same day as they die, sir.”

  “Even a foot soldier knows it!” The Griffin captain whirled around. “Even a billman knows! Now, I don’t go so far as some commanders—I don’t make my soldiers carry their own shrouds in their packs—but I keep to the Christian rites. Burial the same day. She died yesterday.”

  “I appreciate your point of view, qa’id.” The abbot of the monastery hid his hands in his flowing green robes. Guillaume suspected the man’s hands were shaking, and that was what he desired to hide. “I hesitate to call anyone damned for heresy. Christ knows who worships Him truly, no matter what rite is used. But we cannot bury a scandalous woman who dressed as a man and fought—killed.”

  Guillaume found himself admiring the small spark of wrong headed courage. The abbot spoke painfully, from a bruised and swollen mouth.

  “Qa’id, the answer is still no.”

  And now he calls Spessart qa’id, general!

  Guillaume grinned at the plump abbot: a man in his early middle age. Not surprising, given what happened yesterday…

  Guillaume had been up on the ramparts, squinting across the acres of sun-scalded rock to see what progress the hand chain was making. From up here, the men had looked tiny. A long line of figures: crates and barrels being passed or rolled from one man to the next, all the way up the chine from the desolate beach. Food. And—

  One of the men ducked out of line, arms over his head, a sergeant beating him; shouting loudly enough that Guillaume could hear it. A water barrel had splintered and spilled. Okay, that’s down to nine hundred-odd…

  Guillaume, squinting, could just see part of the hull of the beached galley. The round-bellied cargo ships were anchored a few hundred yards offshore, in deeper water; the side boats ferrying the stores ashore as fast as they could be rowed. White heat haze hung over the blue sea and islands to the north.

  A shadow fell on Guillaume’s shoulder. The corporal, of course: he has to catch me the one minute I’m not doing anything.

  “If we’re really lucky, there could be any number of Visigoth galleys out there, not just the two that bushwhacked us…” Lance Corporal Honoré Marchès came to stand beside Guillaume, gazing satirically out to sea. “Not like we’re up the Turkish end of the Med now, with their navy riding shotgun on us.”

  “We could do with the Turkish shipwrights.” At Marchès’ look, Guillaume added, “Carpenters say they were right, sir. Patching up the galley is going to need skilled work. They can’t do it. We’re stuck here.”

  “Oh, Boss is going to love that! How’s the unloading coming along, Arnisout?”

  “Good, sir.” Guillaume turned around, away from the coast. It was obvious to a military eye: the monastery here had taken over an ancient Punic fort. One from the days when it had been a forested land, and any number of armies could march up and down this coast road. Now the fort was covered with monastic outbuildings as a log is covered with moss, but the central keep would be still defensible in a pinch.

  “I’ve got the lances storing the cargo down in the deep cellars, sir.”

  A large enough cargo of food that it could feed an army—or at least a Turkish division coming up from Tarbulus, somewhere to the east now, which is what it’s intended for. And water. On this coast, water. The days when you could bring an army up the coast road from Alexandria to Carthage without resupplying by sea are gone with the Classical age.

  “Yeah, that should do it.” Marchès turned, signaling with a nod, and led the way down the flight of stone steps from the parapet to the ground. Over his shoulder, he remarked, “Fucking lot of work, but the Boss is right: we can’t leave it on board. Not with no galley cover. Okay, Arnisout, get your team and come along with me; Boss is going to have a little talk with the abbot here.”

  Guillaume nodded obedience and bellowed across to Bressac and the others who shared the ten-man tent that made them a team. Bressac waved a casual hand in acknowledgment.

  Marchès snapped, “Now, Arnisout! Or do you want to tell the Boss why we kept him waiting!”

  “No, sir! Bressac!”

  There was some advantage in having one’s officer be part of the captain’s command group, Guillaume thought as he yelled at his men, pulling them out of the chain of sweating mercenaries swearing with all apparent honesty that physical labor was for serfs and varlets, not honest soldiers.

  One is never short of news to sell, or rumors to barter. On the other hand—we get to be there when Spessart proves why he’s a mercenary captain.

  Guillaume had arrived sweating in the big central hall the monks used as their refectory, and not just because of the heat. A barked order got his men into escort positions around the captain—a round dozen European mercenaries in jacks and hose, most with billhooks resting back across their shoulders in a gleam of silver gray, much-sharpened metal.

  “Nothing until the Boss says so,” Marchès warned.

  The familiar tingle of tension and the piercing feeling in the pit of his belly began to build into excitement. Guillaume halted as Spessart did. A great gaggle of entirely unarmed men flooded into the hall from the door at the far end, wearing the green robes of the heretic Christianity practiced here. All uncertain, from their expressions, whether these Franks considered them proper clerks and so a bad idea to kill.

  The hall smelled of cooking. Guillaume’s gut growled as he stood at Marchès’ shoulder. The older man kept his gaze on the hefty oak doors by which they had entered, in case someone should try to interrupt the captain during his deliberations. A wind blew in from the arid land outside, smelling of goats and male sweat and the sea.

  Guillaume was conscious of the stiff weight of the jack buckled around his chest and the heat of plate leg harness, articulations sliding with oiled precision—and of how safe one feels, ribs and groin and knees protected. A delusional safety, often enough; but the feeling obstinately remains.

&
nbsp; “I understand there’s trouble with the burials,” Spessart rasped. His eyes swept over the African priests as a group, not bothering, evidently, to concern himself with who exactly might be their Father-in-Christ. “What’s the problem? Bury the bodies! We’re not working for your masters, but common Christian charity demands it. Even if you are the wrong sort of Christians.”

  Ah, that’s our tactful captain. Guillaume bit his lip to keep his smile from showing.

  A tall man with a black-and-white badger beard stepped forward, waving his arms. “She isn’t a man! She is an abomination! We will not have her soil the rocks of the graveyard here!”

  “Ah. It’s about Rosso. Now look, Father Abbot—”

  A shorter, plumper man, perhaps five and thirty years old, stepped past the bearded man to the front of the group. He interrupted.

  “I am abbot here. Prior Athanagild speaks for us all, I am afraid. We will bury no heathen whores pretending to be soldiers.”

  “Ah, you’re the abbot. Tessier! I ordered you to find this man for me before now.”

  “Sir.” The knight who was the officer of Guillaume’s lance glared at Corporal Marchès.

  Before there could be recriminations, which was entirely possible with Tessier—the Burgundian knight was not a man to keep his mouth shut when it was necessary—Spessart turned back to the plump abbot.

  “You, what’s your name?”

  “Muthari,” the monk supplied. Guillaume saw a flash of annoyance from the man’s eyes. “Abbot Lord-Father Muthari, if we are being formal, Captain.”

  “Formal be fucked.” Spessart took one step forward, reversing the grip he had on his war hammer. He slammed the end of the shaft into the abbot’s body between ribs and belly.

  The monk sighed out a breathless exclamation, robbed of air by sheer pain, and dropped down on his knees.

  “How many messengers have you sent out?” Spessart said. He stared down, evidently judging distance, drew back his boot, and kicked the gasping man. It would have been in the gut, but the abbot reared back and the boot caught him under his upper lip. Guillaume bit his own lip again to keep from laughing as the captain nearly overbalanced.