“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 couple 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-”
