He’s going to pull that one once too often one day. Yolande numbly pushed her way between taller men, heading for the small door beside the altar, under the embroidered hanging. Mercenary companies who change sides in the middle of wars get a bad rep.
But then…six thousand enemies a few miles away, no support for us: time to say “Hey, we have supplies, and we can tell you where there are food caches farther down the coast…”
The handle of the door was rough in her palm. A ring of cold black iron. She turned it, and the heavy bar of the latch lifted. Yolande stepped through.
The air outside hit her. A smell of dry dust, honey, and olive trees. The sun was well up. Did I just spend so long in there?
She walked calmly and with no unnecessary speed down past the olives, past the broken walls of this end of the monastery, and down to where the pig shelters stood.
Here, in the shadow of the southern wall, there were still patches of frost on the earth.
She walked up past the first low hut. The boy was lying at the foot of the flight of stone steps that came down the fort’s wall. His back was toward her. She stopped, reached down, felt him quite cold and dead.
Dead for many hours.
She maneuvered his stiff, chill body around to face her. He was almost too heavy. Frost-covered mud crackled underfoot.
It was not the first time she had felt how someone’s head moved when their neck was broken. Snapped, with the neck held, the jaw clamped into someone’s hand and jerked sideways—
No one will prove it. It looks perfect: He had a fit, and fell.
Spessart will accept it as an accident. It solves all his problems.
No woman’s body to bury; no living man to blame.
She heard the voices of men coming after her.
Yolande turned her head away and stared up at the flight of steps, leaving her fingers on Ric’s smooth, bitter-cold flesh. How easy to take hold of a young man by the iron ring around his neck. Just get close, inside his guard.
He took this from someone he trusted to get close. He was a slave. He didn’t trust many people.
Yolande’s thoughts felt as cold as the boy’s dead body.
I hope Muthari broke his neck from behind.
I hope he let Ric die without ever knowing he had been killed by someone he loved.
Guillaume Arnisout leaned his hip against the rail on the galley’s prow. He braced the burden that he carried.
The thing that had been part of him for so long—his polearm, the hook-bladed bill—was no longer propped beside him, or lying at his feet, or packed in among the squad tents. Because they won’t put me into a line fight now. Not with a broken knee. And I can’t say I blame them.
The warm wood under his hand and the salt air whipping his hair stiff were part of him now, so long had the Saint Tanitta been on its way to Italy. The brilliant sun on the waves was still new—the ship having been Under the Penitence as far as Palermo, on the coast of Sicily.
He looked back down the galley, finding Yolande Vaudin. But nothing fills the gap, after Zarsis monastery—not for her. Nothing.
Archers sprawled on the deck, their kit spread out around them. Every plank was covered with some mercenary, or some mercenary’s gear. Men arguing, drinking, laughing, fighting. Yolande was squatting down with her hand in the crotch of a blond Flanders bowman.
Guillaume could not hear what she said to the big man at this distance. By now, he didn’t need to. It was always the same—and one of the reasons for keeping a distance in the first place.
She tries everything….
Yolande hauled the man up by his arm. He laughed. Guillaume watched them lurch as far as the butt end of the ship. Yolande touched the man’s chest. The two of them vanished behind a great heap of sailcloth and coiled ropes. As much privacy as might be found on shipboard, when all of a mercenary company is crowded into one galley.
He turned back to the rail, shifting his leg under him.
Threads of pain shot through his knee and the bone beneath it.
Better than two months ago in Carthage: at least I can stand up without it giving way.
Guillaume shifted the burden he carried against his chest, moved his shattered and mending knee again, and swore.
Bressac came and leaned on the ship’s rail beside him. He had lost a lot of weight. The other Frenchman made pretense of looking out across the milky blue sea toward Salerno. He sniggered very quietly. “Got left holding the baby again?”
Guillaume looked down at his burden—the child in its tight swaddling bands, resting against his chest.
The lengths of linen bands bound it to a flat board. He had had the carpenter drill a couple of holes in the wood, and now he had loops of rope over his shoulders to hold the swaddling board against his body. It left the child facing him. All that could be seen of her were her bright eyes that followed his movements everywhere.
“I don’t mind. She’s all right, for a Visigoth.” Guillaume spoke carelessly, edging one linen band down and giving her a finger to suck. “Have to find the wet nurse soon. Right hungry little piglet, she is. Ain’t you, Mucky-pup?”
“Daah,” the baby said.
Bressac snickered again.
The red tile roofs of Salerno became distinct, floating above the fine blue haze. Birds screamed.
Bressac said, not laughing now, “She ought at least to come and look at the damn brat, after we went to so much trouble to get it.”
Guillaume took his finger back from the hard gums, and the baby gave him a focused look of dislike. He said, “First time in the entire bloody voyage this little cow hasn’t been crying, or puking up all over me. Looks cute enough to get her interested in it again.”
At Bressac’s look, Guillaume admitted, “Well, maybe not that…”
“She’s drinking too much to have the infant. Drop it overboard, probably.” Bressac glanced over his shoulder and then, sentimental as soldiers anywhere, said, “Give it here.”
Guillaume slid the ropes of the swaddling board off his shoulders and handed the baby over to rest her nose against Bressac’s old and smelly arming-doublet. To his surprise, she neither cried nor puked. Can’t win, can I?
“Yolande’s drinking too much,” he said. “And angry too much.”
Bressac joggled the baby. “She keeps going on about that pig-boy—‘Oh, the abbot killed him; oh, it was murder.’ I mean, it’s been half a year, we’ve had an entire damned campaign with the Carthaginian legions; you’d think she’d get o—” His voice cut off abruptly. “Damn! Kid just threw up all over me!”
“Must be your tasteful conversation.” Guillaume took the baby back as she began to wail, and wiped her face roughly clean with his kerchief. The wail changed from one of discomfort to one of anger.
Bressac, swiping at himself, muttered, “Green Christ! It’s just some slave’s brat!”, and wiped his hands on the ship’s rail.
Above him, the company silk pennant cracked, unrolling on the wind: azure field merging with azure sky, so it seemed the gold griffin veritably flew.
Bressac said, “’Lande was drunk, remember? Kept saying she wanted a baby and she was too old to have one. She insisted we haul this one out of goddamn Carthage harbor. Now she’s bored with it. Green Christ, can’t a bloody slave commit infanticide in peace?”
“You think it was a slave?”
“Hell, yes. If the mother had been freeborn, she could have sold it.”
“Maybe we should find a dealer in Salerno, for the Turkish harems.” Guillaume was aware he was only half joking.
If she’s got bored with the kid…so have I.
Merely being honest about moral failings is not an excuse.
It’s not boredom. Not for Yolande. It’s just that the kid isn’t Ric—or Jean-Philippe. Saving this kid…isn’t the same. And that’s not the baby’s fault.
“This isn’t a place for a baby.” Guillaume looked guiltily around at the company. “Kid deserves better than old sins hanging
round her neck as a start in life. What can she ever hope for? Like ’Lande keeps on saying, to change anything—”
The words are in his mind, Yolande repeating the words with the care of the terrifyingly drunk:
“To change anything…we’d have to change everything. And I don’t have the time left that that would take.”
Blue sea and white foam streaked away in a curve from this side of the galley’s prow. He went as far as unknotting the ropes from the swaddling board and sliding them free.
Splash and gone. So easy. A lifetime of slogging uphill gone. When we meet under the Tree, she’ll probably thank me.
Bressac’s voice broke the hypnotic drag of the prow wave. “So. You going to talk it over with the master gunner? Ortega will have you for one of the gun crews; they’re shorthanded now. Not much running about, there…”
There was a look in Bressac’s eyes that made Guillaume certain his mind and proposed action had been read. Not necessarily disapproved of.
A seabird wheeled away, screaming, searching their wake for food. The perpetual noise of sliding chains from the belly of the ship, where the rowers stood and stretched to the oars, quickly drowned out the bird’s noise.
“Sure,” Guillaume said. “A gunner: sure. That’d suit a crip, wouldn’t it?”
The baby began to wail, hungry again. Guillaume looped the board back on one shoulder and slid a finger under the linen band. He tucked the baby’s still white-blonde birth hair carefully back underneath.
“Maybe I could do with a vision,” he said wryly. “Not that they helped ’Lande. Or the kid. What’s the point of seeing things centuries on? He needed to see what that son of a bitch Muthari was like now.”
“One of us would have to have done it,” Bressac observed, his long horse face unusually serious. “You know that? If there wasn’t going to be a massacre?”
Guillaume heard sudden voices raised.
Farther down toward the slim belly of the galley, Yolande Vaudin was standing now, shouting—spitting with the force of it—into the face of the company’s new priest.
The priest evidently attempted to calm her, and Guillaume saw Yolande slap his hand away, as a woman might—and then punch him in the face, with the strength of a woman who winds up a crossbow for cocking.
“’Ey!” The sergeant of the archers strode over, knocked Yolande Vaudin down, and stood over her, yelling.
Guillaume felt himself tense his muscles to hand the baby to Bressac and run down the deck. And…run? The sergeant abruptly finished, with a final yell and a gesture of dismissal. Guillaume felt frustration like a fever.
Yolande got to her feet and walked unevenly up toward them at the prow. One hand shielded the side of her face.
She halted when she got to them. “Stupid fucking priest.”
Bressac reached out to move her hand aside. Guillaume saw him stop, frozen in place by the look she shot him.
“Want to take the baby?” he offered.
“I do not.” Yolande moved her hands behind her back.
A bruise was already coming up on her cheek. Red and blue, nothing that arnica wouldn’t cure. Guillaume didn’t stand. He lifted the baby toward her.
Her gaze fixed on its face. “Damn priest said I was asking him to do fortune-telling. It isn’t fortune-telling! I wanted to know if what I saw was real. And he won’t tell me.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know.”
“Maybe.” Yolande echoed the word with scorn. “He said…he said none of it was a half millennium in the future. He said the heathen boy had been telling my future—that I’d never be recognized. That I’d die a mercenary soldier, shot by some hackbutter. And that foretelling my future was witchcraft, and so it was right the abbot should kill such a boy—that’s when I hit him.”
Guillaume found himself nodding. The sensation of that possible future being truncated—of it being a translated form of this woman’s desires and terrors—eased some fear he had not been aware he still had. Although it had given him nightmares in the infirmary, after his wound.
I don’t like to think about five, six hundred years in the future. It makes me dizzy. But then…
“Priest might be frightened it is true foresight,” Guillaume said quietly. “Either way…as a future, are you so in love with it?”
The old Yolande looked at him for a moment, her expression open and miserable. “You know? I can’t think of anything better. Recognition. Acceptance. And a better death than disease. I wanted it for so long…. Now I know I ought to be able to think of something better than this. And…I can’t.”
Guillaume rested the baby back against him. He didn’t say anything about families, farms, retirement into city trades.
What’s the point? Neither of us are going to stop doing what we do. No matter what. This is what we are now.
No wonder she drinks. I wonder that I don’t.
“Been doing it too long.” The other Frenchman’s voice was gently ironic. Bressac nodded down the deck toward the sergeant of archers, who was standing with his fists on his hips, talking to one of the corporals, glaring after Yolande Vaudin. “All the same…That isn’t the way to behave to a sergeant.”
“Oh, so, what am I supposed to be afraid of?” Scorn flashed out in her tone. “A black mark against my name on the rolls? It’s not like they’re ever going to make me an officer, is it? A woman giving orders to men!”
So easily caught by those old desires, Guillaume thought. If I could go back into the line fight, as the team’s boss…How long would I hesitate? A heartbeat? Two?
Bressac grinned. “You want to do leadership the way Guillaume here does it—he finds out what we’re going to do, then he tells us to do it!”
There was enough truth in that that Guillaume couldn’t help smiling. Bressac’s face clouded.
“As Guillaume here used to do it,” Guillaume commented.
The wind smelled suddenly of fish and blood as it veered—the stink of the fish-shambles, in Salerno. A brown-haired woman, the wet nurse, approached from the direction of the other rail. Guillaume noticed she ignored Yolande pointedly.
In a stilted French, she said, “Master, I’ll take the baby; she needs changing now.”
“Oh—sure, Joanie.” Guillaume shifted, grunting with his knee’s pain, and handed over the infant. Whatever was passing between the two women was not accessible to him, although he could see there was unspoken communication. Condemnation. On both sides?
He watched the wet nurse kneel down, untie the swaddling bands from the board and then from the child, and coil up the soiled wrappings and set them aside. The smell of baby shit and milk was way too familiar for a billman-turning-gunner.
“Joanie will keep it with her,” Yolande announced, over the other woman’s bent head. “I don’t want anything more to do with this.”
“’Lande—”
“It was a mistake. She isn’t…I’m sorry for the child, but…Joan, I’ll bring you money, out of my pay; you’ll continue to feed it, and keep it by you—yes?”
The brown-haired woman nodded without looking up. “As long as I’m paid.”
She fumbled down her bodice for clean linen bands. The baby, laid facedown on the warm wooden deck, hitched with elbows and knees and made a slight wriggling progression. Evidently she had not been used to swaddling bands before she fell into the hands of a Frankish nurse.
Guillaume bent down, picked the baby up from under so many feet, and tucked it under his arm. The infant made vague, froglike motions.
“How long will that last?” he demanded.
Joanie got up, dusting her hands on her skirt. “I have forgotten the new bands. Look after it now, master, while I fetch them.” She walked away toward the head of the gangway.
Yolande shrugged.
She turned and leaned her forearms on the rail, beside Guillaume. She had something in her hands—the Arian rosary, he saw. She trickled it from one hand into the other, while the wind and spray whipped her short hair in
to her eyes.
“Some people have the grace of God,” she said, just audibly. “Some people can look down the chain of our choices and tell us what might happen in future years.” She held the use-polished Christus Imperator up in front of her face. “I’m not one of them. Never will be. Ric was. And he…”
She opened her hand. The carved holm-oak rosary fell and disappeared, lost in spray and the Gulf of Salerno.
Yolande cast an eye up at Bressac. “Shall we walk?”
It was an invitation, although not as whorish a one as Joanie had been giving earlier in the day, Guillaume noted. The other Frenchman began to smile.
“See you,” Yolande said neutrally, looking down at Guillaume. She was more than mostly drunk, Guillaume could see, if he looked at her without illusion.
Too many months’ practice in hiding it, that’s all. And now she’s brawling with priests, and fucking who she pleases, and out of control. She’ll cause fights, and bad discipline, and she wants to.
Someone has to pay for Ricimer—and if it’s not going to be Muthari, I guess she’s decided it’s going to be her….
Yolande walked away across the deck. Bressac gave Guillaume a look compounded both of apology and of disbelief in his own good luck, and followed her.
The woman wore a pleated velvet doublet against the wind’s chill, and the sunlight illuminated how it nipped in at her waist, and the skirt of it ended just short of her lower hip, so that the curve of her lower buttocks could be seen as she walked away. And all the long length of her shapely legs. A woman in doublet and hose: the cast lead Griffin badge pinned to her upper arm and even the sunlight showing the worn patches in the velvet could not spoil her attraction.
She’d still fuck, if I asked.
I think she knows I won’t ask.
That’s not what I ended up wanting from her.
Guillaume sat back on the oak chest, his spine against the rail, the infant firmly in the crook of his elbow. He felt her warm, solid, squirming. If I put her down now, she’d be across this deck in a heartbeat, no matter how few months she has to her. It’s in her. It’s in all of us, surely.
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