Worlds That Weren't

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.”

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.