Cartomancy

by Mary Gentle

Genres: Fantasy; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

Mary Gentle is one of Britain's most outstanding writers of imaginative fiction, able to move seamlessly from science fiction to fantasy within the same story. Following on from the success of ASH, 1610: A SUNDIAL IN A GRAVE and the omnibus volumes WHITE CROW and ORTHE, comes CARTOMANCY, the definitive collection of Mary Gentle's short fiction. CARTOMANCY includes the stories from SOLDIERS AND SCHOLARS as well as a number of tales previously unpublished in book form, all with new afterwords and topped and tailed with a specially revised version of her split story 'Cartomancy'.

Release date: May 26, 2016

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

Viewed from the dragon’s back, five hundred feet up, sunlight bleaches all colour from the city of Huirac.

Greatest city of the Twenty-Four Kingdoms, it bathes in the southern noon that whitens palaces, tenements, river bridges, docks, and plaster-walled mansions. The cries of street-vendors echo up from the alleys, and the crash of cartwheels splintering against each other in narrow streets, and carters settling down to a good curse. The stenches of middens rise in the heat.

The dragon circled in a holding pattern. Elthyriel peered down from its scaled back.

Beyond the town quarter, by the river bridge decorated with the statues of heroes, the tall ramparts of the Citadel of Virtue brood. There is an aqueduct running from Huirac’s royal palace to the Citadel, which is no aqueduct but a walkway wide enough, in an emergency, to gallop an armoured horse down, full tilt. For, strategically, he who holds the Citadel holds Huirac, and there have been enough quarrels between Huirac’s royalty and the villainous of this world – or even Huirac’s poorer citizenry – for the Order of Virtue’s Citadel to be a king’s refuge. Virtue is beleaguered, always. But Virtue will, Elthyriel reflects, win in the end; doubtless it is so appointed …

The blue dragon hovered above the Citadel’s inner courtyard. Its filigree wings beat up a storm of dust. Squire-acolytes scurried about with heads bent to avoid the wind-blast. Elthyriel, Elected Pontiff and Knight-Patriarch of the Order of Virtue, sat with his armoured hands folded in his lap, in the howdah attached to the great wyrm’s back.

Esquires with silken scarves bound across their mouths wheeled out a set of wooden steps covered with purple velvet. The dragon’s hovering wings cast spiked shadows against the fortified inner walls of the Citadel. Having it land in the small deep courtyard, with no runway room, would mean a grounded dragon.

Elthyriel unbuckled straps and cords and sprang alertly from his howdah seat. He strode down the steps, dismissing the flocking military aides. The beat of the hovering dragon’s wings blew his mane of azure hair about his pointed, pale ears. He swept hair back from his aquiline face, securing it with a knight’s headband. His golden eyes shone brighter than the sun on his cusped and spiked armour, brighter than the white surcoat with the Key and Blade of the Order of Virtue embroidered on the breast. Tall, slender; as sharp-edged as his own blade, the elvish Knight-Patriarch stood for a moment still.

The first touch of his boots on the Citadel’s flagstones was, despite his elven powers of magery, always something of a relief. Flight made Elthyriel sick.

A flick of his race’s magic dismissed the fire-wyrm from its eye-watering, dust-cloud-raising, ear-splitting hover.

A voice called, ‘Sieur-Father Elthyriel! Wait!’

The elven Knight-Patriarch strode across the heat-soaked courtyard and into the shadow of the cloisters. The noise of beating wings faded.

‘No!’ He spoke sharply in elvish. In the common tongue, he added, ‘I must face this alone.’

He let his golden eyes rest on the human squire-acolyte until she bowed, clashed sword-hilt to breastplate in salute, and stood aside to let him enter the Citadel.

Inside the fortified bastions, the marble walls shone like cream.

The elven Elected Pontiff let his armoured fingers brush the cool stone as he walked through the galleries. The patterned marble beneath his knightly feet – red, green, cream, brown – reflected the painted ceilings and friezes in the airy halls. Elthyriel quickened his pace. In passing stone statuary he caught polished fragments of his reflection: tall and slender in cusped silver armour, his surcoat whirling about his ankles. With pricked ears and long eyes: the first of his race to wear the Blade and Key.

He paused at the foot of a curving flight of marble steps, and drew an unsteady breath. He walked up the narrowing gyre of the stairs. Tapestries on the walls were figured with constellations as they would appear from the Drowned Lands, and elven maidens playing multi-stringed instruments beneath forgotten or mythical Trees. No rustle from the cloth, now, only the clash of the Knight-Patriarch’s steel sabatons.

‘O rider of the martial steed,’ a voice husked in one of the Far South’s barbaric tongues, ‘behold!’

The Elected Pontiff turned to face the entrance to the Long Gallery. He lowered his gaze. Huirac’s sunlight fell through high windows, bringing a sallow glow to the skin of the being before him.

‘Sieur-Father: the work is complete!’

The flaring, bushy mane of her hair shone brown and red, pinned back from her face with the carved bones of small animals; and her eyes were large and lustrous enough to make him suspect some lamia ancestry. Her miniature bronze lips curved. As she strode forward, the minuscule leather-and-chain coverings of her generous breasts and groin clinked. Leather bands and golden torcs bound her upper arms, and she wore calf-strapped sandals, and the empty sheath of a blade that, for her, would have been a greatsword, but that Elthyriel could have wielded as a dagger.

The halfling barbarian stood, hands on her hips, and shoulders proudly back, some three feet and six inches tall.

‘All honour to you, Sieur-Father.’ Her voice sounded low and musical as she switched to the common tongue.

Averting his eyes from her barely covered breasts, Elthyriel looked over her head into the airy gallery. A hulking form blocked most of the archway; its low-ridged brow, gleaming piggy eyes, and leathery greyish skin marking it as one of the northern orcs. The red headband of a mercenary was knotted about its misshapen skull.

‘We done it good! Mistress and me.’ The orc beamed dimwittedly. Its swinging knuckles brushed the marble floor tiles. One gristly, powerfully-clawed thumb jerked in the general direction of the gallery walls. ‘I done dat.’

The halfling barbarian grinned and reached up to give the orc’s bulging loincloth a playful tweak. ‘You think I can’t do without you, don’t you? Muscle, this is the Head of the Order of the Knights of Virtue. You remember the nice elf, Muscle.’

‘Duh …’

‘You can see to it that the Sieur-Father and I are not disturbed.’

‘Yur.’ The orc shifted its muscular bulk to one side as Elthyriel walked into the gallery, and then sat down firmly on the floor at the entrance. Elthyriel raised one doubtful, elegantly arched brow, in no doubt as to who the orc thought it guarded. He returned his attention to the halfling (or semi-halfling) barbarian.

‘Well, Zerra?’

‘Well enough.’ She whirled with a movement reminiscent of the jungles beyond the Mines of Sulphur, a great-cat swiftness in her small step. Copper coins clanked in her hair and the odour of musk trailed dizzily behind her. ‘Who better than a traveller between the worlds to make your maps for you, Eminence? And who better than I, uncivilised and barbaric—’

Glancing back and up, she caught his eye. The Pontiff opened his mouth to contradict her, remembered the Oath of Verity, and closed his mouth again.

‘—I, who do not fear to get my hands dirty, to make maps such as these?’

She threw her small arms wide.

Gauze covered the high windows so that the sunlight entered into the gallery as a pale glow and not a searing whiteness.

The air shone with the blue of seas.

From floor to ceiling, twenty feet in height, the gallery’s walls were covered in vast frescoed maps.

To Elthyriel’s left and right, maps gleamed like great portals. The seas shone a royal blue, the lands rich green and ochre, lettered in gold.

He took a few steps down the gallery.

The maps had the property of seeming to grow sharper in detail the closer one came. Elthyriel felt himself tense; threatened. Twenty feet high, intricately drawn, each map seemed to centre on a single realm or aspect of a world – mountains drawn with snow-capped peaks, each river with its oxbow bends, each port with outgoing ships, each city with its buildings of great name …

‘Here is what lies beyond the world of the Twenty-Four Kingdoms,’ the barbarian halfling said softly. ‘Upon your left hand, the worlds of magia. Here is the White Mountain and Prague, whose mercenary soldiers do not know they fight in lands that hide more than the Hermetic knowledge of the Rose … And here, the World’s Edge, made all of city; where subversion is lit by naphtha flares, and gamblers tell fortunes with bone dice. There is the war-savaged coast of Tunis, where men live on the edge of that Darkness called the Penitence, and disguises and visions of Time abound. Here are the shamans and stone beehive-huts of Tulkys, among islands where the Kraken does not sleep … Here, Bazaruk and the Hundred Isles – Keshanu – Orindol and Zu— Oh, and there, a fort held by warriors much like my companion—’

Elthyriel snorted.

The halfling hesitated. He waved her to continue, taking a further step between the towering high maps as he did so.

Zerra’s rich lilt sounded behind him:

‘On your right hand lie the worlds of scientia. Silver ships that make their descent upon an azure grassland, where gifts of spun glass do not ensure safety … Flesh that is made subject to artifice, and cities may be grown and tended, though some creations are less – wise – than others. Here is Tekne, where ships ride the air, and marriages are made between many. And here, in a half-collapsed city that you could not fly across in a single day, there is betrayal in a single room. And more …’

The elf Pontiff bent closer to the painted wall, scrutinising the miniature merchant ships in Carthage’s sunless harbour. Someone with knowledge of ropes and prevailing winds had painted this – or (he glanced at the barbarian halfling’s sword-callused hands, the orc’s paws) somehow caused it to take pictorial shape.

‘And is the information in these maps … reliable?’

Zerra pushed her hands through her dark sunburst of hair. The movement of her arms lifted her scantily covered breasts. ‘Sieur-Father, they can tell only the truth, as it happens, where it happens. I sought far and wide for such magics – from a nine-tailed fox spirit, and a brother and sister far too much akin, to those philosophers who play with the art of shadows, and women and men who suffer, nameless, under the tyranny of grey armies. From children; from lovers; from solitary survivors. Now all is done.’

‘It must tell the truth.’

The female halfling paced onward down the gallery, cat-like; passing from shadow to dim sun and back. The metal bangles on her ankles flaring. ‘For what you are offering as reward? Sieur-Father, you have it. These maps are truth-tellers. If the dimensions, planes, and strata of existence are different from those that you yourself know – if hearts are strange, and bodies alien – truth is still truth, within those minds. And you have truth here.’

Elthyriel straightened, only then conscious of how close to the frescoed surface he had been leaning. It seemed that the gold-edged wavelets lapped, the boreal cloud-winds blew, the endless alien grasses on the great Plains of Talinor rippled under two differently-coloured suns, and the stews and slums of New Cabotsland heaved with painted humanity. He swallowed, his mouth dry. Magery prickled in the tips of his inhumanly long fingers.

The Elected Pontiff turned, his hand reaching for the wheel-pommel of his sword.

‘And this map-magic works – how?’

The barbarian halfling drew a pin from her hair. The end glinted: a two-centimetre miniature blade. ‘Draw blood, Sieur-Father, and shed it on the corner of each map. Then you have but to say I name thee – whatever world it shall please you – and you will immediately witness what happens there. And because it is your blood, you shall be the only one who can witness these people. You will see as they see, feel as they feel, know what they know.’

Elthyriel slowly unbuckled the spiked steel gauntlet from his left hand. He dropped it with a clash on the marble tiles. Noon’s city heat, ever different from the Forest’s shadowed leaves, baked him even through the Citadel’s stout walls.

With an old campaigner’s disregard for minor pain, he slashed the pad of his seventh finger and slowly went down one side of the gallery and up the other, anointing each great map.

‘Cartomancy is one of the neutral magics,’ he acknowledged as he came back to where Zerra stood beside the orc at the entrance, ‘but I dislike blood-magery, it often has an evil taint.’

The air shimmered blue and gold. Muscle lifted his almost neckless head, tusks glinting, and crooned in a husky bass, ‘Pretty …’

Still speaking the formal tongue of the southern cities, Zerra said, ‘We have endeavoured to serve the Sieur-Father as well as we may.’

‘You will have served Virtue,’ Elthyriel corrected her. He turned, bare and armoured hands clasped behind his back, to survey the long bright perspective of the gallery. ‘We are increasingly besieged by evil – the Horde of Darkness gathers its battalions, east of the Twenty-Four Kingdoms, and prophecies of the Last Battle abound. But that is not our greatest danger. Were it but battle, we might stand on the virtue of good swords and true hearts. But there is a dangerous corruption at work within our borders. We are beset! In friendly fields, in our own streets, in our own houses and hearts – evil conquers the best of us, before we even see its face.’

The silence of the Citadel pressed down on the bright gallery.

‘We must have knowledge. Here.’ Elthyriel’s fist struck his breastplate over the Key and Blade embroidered on his surcoat, and over his heart. Steel clanged dully. ‘Forewarned is forearmed. Evil knows us, but we do not know Evil! As Head of this Knightly Order, I take it upon myself to learn. And when I have learned the weaknesses of Evil, that knowledge I will pass on, and so the Darkness in our hearts will be defeated.’

The curvaceous barbarian halfling bowed, flesh shifting, jewellery and empty scabbard chinking. ‘A wise and cunning plan, Sieur-Father.’

Elthyriel turned briskly. The elven Elected Pontiff’s surcoat swept the marble, hissing; and his armoured feet clanged. His long golden eyes narrowed, looking down at the barbarian cartographer and up at her orc assistant.

‘It is an intelligence-gathering technique.’ Elthyriel stood with inhuman grace and a swordsman’s balance, drawing the authority of a knightly campaigner and an elven mage suddenly about himself.

A snap of his fingers brought the sound of halberds grounded to attention on the marble flagstones one floor below.

‘There are at least three hundred of the Knights of Virtue in residence here,’ Elthyriel said. The diminutive barbarian and the orc exchanged glances. Elthyriel smiled grimly. ‘I am utterly defended against all evil magic. I am also a veteran of the eastern wars, and I have more combat experience, madam, than you and your over-muscled friend put together. I do not particularly think I am unaware of the nature of those who provide magic at a price – for anyone may pay, and you will have had dealings with Evil as well as Virtue.’

‘Sieur-Father …’ The halfling’s long-lashed eyes widened. She, unconsciously it seemed, ran her hands down her tiny naked flanks and all-but-naked hips.

‘And you may spare me the tricks learned from your succubus mother! If I were to succumb to the temptations of debauchery, I would have done it before now – besides which, the trials for election to Knight-Pontiff remove not only the temptations of the flesh, but the means by which to satisfy them. And as for you—’

Elthyriel gazed at the orc as it rose menacingly to its clawed feet.

‘—sit down.’

Helplessly responding to authoritative magery, the orc sat down squarely on its rump and regarded its mistress with bewildered anguish. Zerra put her diminutive fists on her hips and glared up at Elthyriel.

‘Don’t you bully him!’

The elvish Pontiff drew his sword. It caught the gallery’s blue light and shone. A smile touched Elthyriel’s thin, ascetic lips.

‘This is no game. I am no pigeon to be plucked or fool to be drawn into Evil’s grasp. Now you will sit quietly, madam, until I have tested your cartomancy. Either it will be the greatest weapon in Virtue’s armoury, exposing the secrets of evil to me, or it is a snare and a delusion. And if it is a cheat, or corrupt, then you will face the anger of Virtue – which, you may believe me, is more terrible to the wicked than the wrath of Darkness.’

The halfling barbarian’s gaze shifted for the first time away from Elthyriel’s face. Her dark eyes fixed on the sword’s point. She backed away until the edge of the arched entrance caught her shoulder, and shivered at the touch of bare skin against marble. From below came the sound of Knights of Virtue drilling.

‘I have been honest, Sieur-Father, I swear! Give me my payment and let me go – take the orc if you will, they’re creatures of Evil, and he’s but a hod-carrier after all!’ She looked wildly up through dishevelled hair. ‘Pay me and spare me!’

‘Neither, yet. You must wait. If you are virtuous, you have nothing to fear.’

Elthyriel turned his back on the halfling and the orc. Pacing the length of the gallery, feeling the tingle of cartomancy along his drawn blade, he spoke as if to himself:

‘Which first? Which shall it be? There is always Evil – so much, so much of it …’

The noon sun shone into the gallery, as bright and warm as the sensation of cartomancy in the air.

‘There.’ The Pontiff Elthyriel lifted his slender elven blade and pointed it at one of the intricately drawn and painted maps, and spoke the first name:

‘North Africa’s barren shore …’

I have put this document together from the different sources included in the Ash papers, and have again translated the languages into modern English. Where necessary, I have substituted colloquial obscenities to give a flavour of the medieval original. Let the casual reader, expecting the Hollywood Middle Ages, abandon hope here.

PIERCE RATCLIFF, AD 2010

‘Most women follow their husbands to the wars … I followed my son.’

Yolande Vaudin’s voice came with the grunt and exhalation of physical effort. Guillaume Arnisout looked at her down the length of the corpse they were carrying.

He grinned. ‘Your son? You ain’t old enough to have a grownup son!’

She appeared a wonderfully perverse mix of male and female, Guillaume thought. The clinging of her belted mail shirt, under her livery jacket, showed off the woman’s broad hips. Her long legs seemed plump in hose, but were not: were just not male. Shapely and womanly … He got a kick out of seeing women’s legs in hose: entirely covered, but the shape so clearly defined – and hers were worth defining.

She had her hair cut short, too, like a page or young squire, and it curled sleekly onto her shoulders, uncovered, the rich yellow of wet straw. She had been able to slip her helmet off before the sergeant noticed: it was buckled through her belt by the chin strap. That meant he could see all of her wise and wicked face.

She’s willing to talk, at least. Can’t let the opportunity go to waste.

He put his back against the Green Chapel’s doors and eased them open without himself letting go of the corpse’s ankles. Yolande held her end of the dead woman’s body tightly under the arms, taking the weight as he backed through the door first. The blue-white flesh was chill against his palms.

Not looking down at what she held, Yolande went on, ‘I had Jean Philippe when I was young. Fifteen. And then, when he was fifteen, he was called up in the levy, to be a soldier, and I followed.’

The partly open door let in the brilliant sunlight from the barren land outside. It glittered back off the white walls of the monastery’s other buildings. Guillaume twisted his head around to look inside the chapel, letting his eyes adjust, unsure of his footing in the dimness. ‘Didn’t he mind you being there?’

Her own sight obviously free of the morning glare, Yolande pushed forward. The legs of the body were stiff with rigor, and they shoved against him. Bare feet jabbed his belly. There was black dirt under the toenails.

He backed in, trying to hold one door open with his foot while Yolande manoeuvred the dead woman’s shoulders and head through it.

‘He would have minded, if he’d known. I went disguised, I thought I could watch over him from a distance … He was too young. I’d been a widow five years. I had no money, with his wages gone. I joined the baggage train and dyed my hair and whored for a living, until that got old, and then I found I could put a crossbow-bolt into the centre of the butts nine times out of ten.’

The chapel’s chill began to cool the sting of sunburn on the back of his neck. His helmet still felt excruciatingly hot to wear. Guillaume blinked, his sight adjusting, and looked at her again. ‘You’re not old enough.’

Her chuckle came out of the dimness, along with the shape of the walls and tiled floor.

‘One thing a woman can always look like is a younger man. There’s her.’ Yolande said, with a jerk of her head downward at the rigid dead body between them. ‘When she said her name was Guido Rosso, you’d swear she was a beardless boy of nineteen. You take her out of doublet and hose and put her in a gown, and call her “Margaret Hammond”, and you’d have known at once she was a woman of twenty-eight.’

‘Was she?’ Guillaume grunted, shifting the load as they tottered toward the altar. He walked backward with difficulty, not wanting to stumble and look stupid in front of this woman. ‘I didn’t know her.’

‘I met her when she joined us, after the fall.’ Yolande’s fingers visibly tightened on the dead woman’s flesh. There was no need to specify which fall. The collapse of Constantinople to the Turks had echoed through Christendom from East to West, four years ago.

‘I took her under my wing.’ The woman’s wide, lively mouth moved in an ironic smile. Her eyes went to the corpse’s face, then his. ‘You wouldn’t have noticed her. I know what you grunts in the line fight are like – “Archers? Oh, that’s those foulmouthed buggers hanging around at the back, always saying ‘fuck’ and taking the Lord their God’s name in vain …” I dunno: give you a billhook and you think you’re the only soldier on the battlefield.’

Guillaume liked her sardonic grin, and returned it.

So … is she flirting with me?

They staggered together across the empty interior of the Green Chapel. Their boots scraped on the black and white tiles. He could smell incense and old wood smoke from the morning’s prayers. Another couple of steps …

‘I used to help her back to the tents, drunk. She was never this heavy. There!’ Yolande grunted.

Just in time, he copied her, letting the stiff ankles of the body slide down out of his dirty grip. The body thunked down onto the tiles at his feet. No one had cleaned it up. The bones of her face were beaten in, the mess the same colour as heraldic murrey: purple-red.

His skin retained the feel of hers. Stiff, chill, softening.

‘He Dieux!’ Guillaume rubbed at his back. ‘That’s why they call it dead weight.’

He saw the dead Rosso – Margaret – was still wearing her armour: a padded jack soaked with blood and fluids. Linen stuffing leaked out of the rips. Every other piece of kit from helmet to boots was gone. Either the jacket was too filthy and slashed up to be worth reclaiming, or else the charred and bloodstained cloth was all that was still holding the body’s intestines inside it.

Yolande squatted down. Guillaume saw her try to pull the body’s arms straight by its sides, but they were still too stiff. She settled for smoothing the sun-bleached, blood-matted hair back. She wiped her hands on her peacock-blue hose as she stood.

‘I saw her get taken down.’ The older woman spoke as if she was not sure what to do next, was talking to put off that moment of decision – even if the decision was, Guillaume thought, only the one to leave the corpse of her friend.

The light from the leaf-shaped ogee windows illuminated Yolande’s clear, smooth skin. There were creases at her eyes, but she had most of the elasticity of youth still there.

‘Killed on the galley?’ he prompted, desperate to continue a conversation even if the subject was unpromising.

‘Yeah. First we were on one of the cargo ships, sniping, part of the defence crew. The rag-heads turned Greek fire on us, and the deck was burning. I yelled at her to follow me off – when we got back on our galley, it had been boarded, and it took us and Tessier’s guys ten minutes to clear the decks. Some Visigoth put a spear through her face, and I guess they must have hacked her up when she fell. They’d have been better worrying about the live ones.’

‘Nah …’ Guillaume was reluctant to leave the Green Chapel, even if it was beginning to smell of decomposing flesh. He felt cool for the first time in hours, and besides, there was this woman, who might perhaps be an impressed audience for his combat knowledge. ‘You never want to leave one alive under your feet. Somebody on the ground sticks a sword or dagger up and hits your femoral artery or your bollocks – Ah, ’scuse me.’

He stopped, flustered. She gave him a look.

Somewhere in his memory, if only in the muscle-memory of his hands and arms, is the ferocity with which you hack a man down, and follow it up without a second’s hesitation – bang-bang-bang-bang! – your weapon’s thin, sharp steel edges slamming into his face, throat, forearms, belly; whatever you can reach.

He looked away from the body at his feet, a woman to whom some soldier in the Carthaginian navy has done just that. Goose-pimples momentarily shuddered over his skin.

‘Christus Viridianus! I couldn’t half do with a drink.’ He eased his visored sallet back on his head, feeling how the edge of the lining band had left a hot, sweaty indentation in his forehead. ‘Say, what did happen to your son? Is he with the company?’

Yolande’s fingers brushed the Griffin-in-Gold patch sewn onto the front of her livery jacket, as if the insignia of their mercenary company stirred memories. She smiled in a way he could not interpret. ‘I was a better soldier than he was.’

‘He quit?’

‘He died.’

‘Shit.’ I can’t say a thing right! ‘Yolande, I’m sorry.’

Her mouth quirked painfully. ‘Four months after he went to war. What was I thinking, that I could protect him? He was carrying shot in the first siege we were at, and a culverin inside the castle scored a direct hit on the powder wagon. When I found him he’d had both his hands blown off, and he’d bled to death – before his mother could get to him.’

‘Jeez …’ I wish I hadn’t asked.

She’s got to be ten years older than me. But she doesn’t look it.

He guessed Yolande had not, like ‘Guido Rosso’, even temporarily tried to pass as a man.

Because she’s a woman, not a girl.

‘Why did you stay with the company?’

‘My son was dead. I wanted to kill the whole world. I realised that if I had the patience to let them train me, the company would let me do just that.’

In his stunned silence, Guillaume could hear goat bells jingling outside and some shuffling noises closer to hand. A warm breeze blew in through the Green Chapel door, which had lodged open on a pebble. The smell of death grew more present now, soaking into the air. Like the back of a butcher’s shop in a heat wave.

‘Shit.’ He wiped at his mouth. ‘It’s going to get hot later in the morning. By evening … she’s going to be really ripe by Vespers.’

Yolande’s expression turned harsh. ‘Good. Then they can’t ignore her. She’s going to smell. That should get the bloody rag-heads moving. The captain’s right. This is the only thing to do.’

‘But—’

‘I don’t care what the fucking priests say. She’s going to be buried here like the Christian soldier she is.’

Guillaume shrugged. For himself, he would as cheerfully have chucked all the bodies overboard, to go with the Carthaginian Visigoths and feed the fish; evidently this wasn’t the thing to say to Yolande right now. Especially not if you want to get into the crossbow woman’s knickers, he reminded himself.

‘If the abbot can ignore the stink she’s going to make …’ He let his grin out, in its different context. ‘What do you bet me he’ll send for the captain before Sext? Hey, tell you what … I bet you a flagon of wine she’s buried by midday, and if I lose, I’ll help you drink it tonight. What do you say?’

What she would have answered wasn’t clear from her expression, and he didn’t get to hear a reply.

The scuffling noise that had impinged on his consciousness earlier grew louder, and he spun around and had his bollock-dagger out of its sheath at his belt and pointing at the altar a full second before a boy rolled out from under the altar cloth and sat staring down at the woman soldier’s corpse.

‘Aw – shit!’ Guillaume swore, exasperated.

He saw the thin iron ring welded around the boy’s throat. Some slave skiving off work. Or hiding from the big bad Frankish mercenaries – not that I blame him for that.

‘Hey, you – fuck off out of here!’

The youth looked up, not at Guillaume, but at Yolande. There was a quiver about him that might have been fea