Worlds That Weren't

Not a serious wound, unless things have gravely changed-and yet they may have: obviously have, if an arquebus ball is no longer heavy enough to shatter the bones of a shoulder joint.

Yolande saw puffs of dust and stone chippings kick up out of the old Punic road toward her. The hidden man with the arquebus is walking his shots onto target, like a gun crew with a culverin. Sniping, as she does with her crossbow. But the reload time is amazing: crack-crack-crack! all in the space of a few rapid heartbeats.

I can’t be hurt in a vision.

The world went dark with a wrench that was too great for pain, but pain would come afterward, in a split second No pain.

Dark…

It’s dark because this is the chapel, she realized.

The dark of a church, at night, lit only by a couple of lanterns.

She was lying on the glazed tiles, she discovered. Or at least was in a half-sitting position, her torso supported against the knees and chest of Guillaume Arnisout. He was shivering, in the stone’s chill. His wool cloak was wrapped around her body.

She thought she ought to be warm, with his body heat pressed so close against her, but she was freezing. All cold-all except what had been hot liquid between her legs, and was now tepid and clammy linen under her woolen hose.

Embarrassed, she froze. Bad enough to be female, but these guys can just about cope with thinking of her as a beautiful hard case: a woman warrior. If they have to see me as a fat, middle-aged woman, cold white buttocks damp with her own pee…No romance in that.

Ah-the cloak-they can’t see “You had foam coming out of your mouth.” The youngest man, Cassell, spoke. She could hear how scared he was.

“You had a fit.” Guillaume Arnisout sounded determined about it. “I warned you, you stupid woman!”

Ukridge peered out of the dark by the door. “It isn’t Godly! It’s a devil, in’t it!”

Yolande snickered at his expression: a big man wary as a harvest mouse. She extricated her arm from the cloak and wiped her nose.

“It’s grace,” she said. “It’s just the same as Father Augustine when he prays-prayed-over the wounded. Calling on God’s grace for a small miracle. A vision’s the same.”

Guillaume’s voice vibrated through her body. “Is it? ’Lande, you have to stop this!”

She thought Guillaume sounded the least scared so far. And way too concerned. She moved, unseen in the near dark, wrapping the cloak’s folds around her now-chilled thighs.

I hope they can’t read him as easily as I can. He’ll be ribbed unmercifully. And he’s…well. He doesn’t deserve that.

She looked around. “Where’s Ric?”

“Ric is the swineherd?” Bressac inquired, looming up into the candlelight from the darkness by the far door. “We threw him out. No need to be afraid of him, Yolande. We can keep him away from you.”

“But-did he have a fit? Was he hurt?”

Guillaume shrugged, his chest and shoulder moving against her back, unexpectedly intimate.

She realized she was smelling the stink of meat gone off.

Lord God! That’s still Margie, there. Tell me how this vision helps her.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered, frustrated.

Guillaume Arnisout grinned, mock consoling. “’Salright, girl. Me neither!”

Yolande reached her hand up and touched the rough stubble on his jaw.

She would pray, she would sleep, she would question the boy again, and maybe one of the Arian priests, too: she knew that. For this moment, all she wanted to do was rest back against the man who held her, his straggling black hair touching her cheek, and his arms shuddering with cold because he had covered her.

But it’s never that easy.

She got to her feet, fastening the cloak around her neck, and walked to the altar. She reached up and took the carved Face down from the wall.

She heard one of the men curse behind her. It came down easily. Someone had fixed the Face there with a couple of nails and a length of twisted wire, and under it, covered but not expunged, was painted a woman’s face.

Her nose was flat, and her eyes strangely shaped in a way that Yolande couldn’t define. The worn paint on the stone made her skin look brownish-yellow. There were leaves and berries and ferns in her hair, so many that you could barely see her hair was black. Her eyes, also, were painted black-black as tar.

There was no more of her than the face, surrounded by painted flames. Elissa, who died on a pyre? Astarte the child-eater goddess?

“Elissa,” the young man Cassell said, prompt on her thoughts. Still holding the Face in her hands, she turned to look at him.

He blushed and said, “She founded New City, Qarthadasht, before the Lord Emperor Christ was born. She set up the big temple of Astarte. The one the Arians took over, with the dome? She took a Turkish priest off Cyprus, on her way from Tyre-a priest of Astarte. That’s why they think Carthage is their Holy City. The Turks, I mean. Like Rome, for us. Even though there’s no priests of Astarte there anymore.”

Yolande lifted the carved oak Face and replaced it, with a fumble or two, against the bitter chill stone wall.