“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
