Toward what short twilight there was in these parts, the woman ran her purse dry and threw her cards down.
“Nothing to spend it on here, anyhow,” Guillaume said, trying to be comforting.
She gave him a sharp look.
“So…ah…you want to walk?” he asked.
A slow smile spread on her face. His belly turned over to see it. He knew, instantly, that she had heard the nickname being bandied about the camp. That she was about to say Walk with you, Stinker? The idea’s a joke.
“I don’t mind,” she said. “Sure. Let’s do it.”
There was no privacy in the tents, and none in the cells of the fort; none, either, down among the packed cargo-cog stores-far too well guarded-and the desert itself would be chilly, snake-ridden, and dangerous.
The woman said, “I know somewhere we could go.”
Guillaume tried to read her expression by starlight. She seemed calm. He was shaking. He tried to conceal this, rubbing his fingers together. “Where?”
“Down this way.”
He followed her back past the keep, stumbling and swearing, and quietening only when she threatened to leave him and go back to the tents. She led him to the back of the fort, and a familiar scent, and he was about to turn and go when she grabbed his arm and pulled him down, and they tumbled on top of each other through a low doorway.
“A pig shed?” Guillaume swatted twigs out of his hair-no, not twigs. A familiar scent of his boyhood came back to him. Bracken. Dried bracken.
“It’s been cleaned out.” Too innocent, the woman’s voice, and there was humor in her face when his eyes adjusted to the dimness. “The occupant doesn’t need it yet. It’s not going to be in use tonight.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that…” Steeling himself to courage- I have known women to back out at this stage — Guillaume reached out his arm for her.
“Now you just wait.”
“What?”
“No, wait. We should sort something out first. What are we going to do, here?”
Despairing, he spluttered. “What are we going to do? What do you think we’re going to do, you dumb woman!”
He intended it as an insult, but it came out comic, fuelled by his frustration. He was not surprised to hear her snort with laughter. Guillaume groped around in the dark until a white glimmer of starlight on skin allowed him to grab her hand. Her flesh was warm, almost hot.
He pushed her hand into his crotch.
“That’s what you’re doing to me! And you ask me what we’re going to do?”
His voice squeaked with the incredulity that flooded him. She laughed again, although it was soundless. He only knew about it by the vibration of her hand.
“That isn’t helping…”
“No.” Fondness sounded in her voice, and amusement, and something breathless. Her face was invisible. Her voice came out of the dark. “I find it helps to sort out these things in advance.”
Guillaume almost made a catastrophic error. You mean you’re arranging a price? He bit his tongue at the last minute. She used to be a whore-but this isn’t whoring.
His understanding of how much hurt the question could inflict on her drained his impatience of its violence.
“Am I going to suck this,” her voice continued, out of the darkness, “and then you lick me? And that would be it? I’m past the age of having a child, but you never know. Or are we going to fuck?”
Guillaume heaved in a harsh breath, dizzy. Her fingers were kneading his crotch, and he could not speak for a moment. He clamped his hand down on top of hers. The throbbing of his penis was all-encompassing, as far as his mind went. His fingers and hers around his cod: oh dear Lord, he prayed, completely unself-consciously, don’t let me spill my seed before I have her!
“I want you,” he said.
He felt his other hand taken, and pressed, and after a second realized that it was pushed up between linen shirt and hot flesh, cupping the swell of a heavy breast. His fingers touched a rock-hard nipple.
“I want you,” Yolande said, out of the dark. “But is it that easy?”
The sounds of the monastery were muffled: the bells for Compline from the Green Chapel, the groaning chorus of hungry pigs, the rattle of boots outside as men went past to the refectory.
“You can have sex whenever you want,” she said, long-eroded anger in her voice. “And it doesn’t change anything. If I have sex, it changes everything. If I ‘belong’ to a man. Or to many. Whether I’m safe to rape. Whether I’m going to be trusted when we’re fighting…”
All true, but… Guillaume grunted in frustration. In comic despair, he muttered, “And on the good side?”
A chuckle came out of the darkness.
She likes me. She actually likes me.
He felt her rest her arm down in the warm, dry bracken, close to his arm. A sudden shine of silver-moonrise-let him distinguish her face as his eyes adjusted.
“On the good side…” she finished, “you’re not in my lance. You’re not another archer. And you maybe won’t commit the cardinal sin if we get into combat…”
Guillaume kept himself still with an effort. “Which is?”
“Trying to protect me.”
He stopped with one hand on her shoulder, the other still inside her shirt. Actually stopped. After a second, he nodded. “Yeah. I get it. You’re right. I won’t.”
Some expression went across her face, so close now to his, that he couldn’t properly make it out. Amusement? Lust? Liking? Respect?
Her nipple hardened under his palm. An immense feeling went through him, which he realized after a moment was relief.
She can’t deny she wants me, too.
She wants me.
A little too straight-faced, Guillaume said, “But it’s not a problem if you can’t have sex often, is it? Men want it all the time, but women don’t really like sex…”
Her anger was only half mockery. “So it doesn’t matter if I have to go without?”
Deadpan, he said, “Of course it doesn’t-”
She threw her arms around his chest. He abandoned caution, tried to kiss her, but she rolled them both over in the bracken. He ended on his back: felt her straddling him.
“’Lande!”
Her voice came out of the darkness, full of joy. “You should have listened to the monks-women are insatiable!”
“Good!” he grunted, reaching up.
One of her hands clamped down on his groin. The other grabbed his long black hair, holding his head still. She brought her mouth down on his.
Guillaume cradled her against him when she fell asleep in his arms, in the rising moon’s light; her clothing half pulled up around her, bracken shrouding her bare shoulders. He was dazzled and aroused again by the glimpse of her rounded belly, striated silver here and there; and her surprisingly large and dark-nippled breasts.
He tightened his embrace and looked down at Yolande’s sleeping face. All the lines were wiped out of her face by relaxation. She appeared a decade younger. It was a phenomenon he was familiar with: it happens when people sleep, and when they’re dead.
“I did know him!” Guillaume exclaimed aloud.
Yolande’s eyes opened. She had evidently picked up the soldiers’ trick of coming awake almost instantly. She blinked at him. “Know who?”
“Your Margie Hammond. Guido Rosso! Bright kid. All boy!”
The moon’s light, slanting into the pen, let him catch a wry smile from Yolande. Too late to explain his definition. Impulsive, dashing, daring.
“You know what I mean! I just didn’t-” Guillaume shook his head, automatically pulling her close and feeling the sweaty warmth of her body against his. “I guess there was no way I was going to recognize the face.”
“When we put her in the chapel, she didn’t have a face.”
Guillaume nodded soberly.
He remembered Rosso now, a young man prone to singing in a husky boy’s voice, always cheerful, even in the worst weather; who would sit out any dancing on the excuse of his very minor damage to one hip and thighbone, and use the time to chat up the women. I prefer to dance with the enemy, he’d say, priming the girls to regard him as a wounded hero-the limp, of course, was very small; enough to give him a romantic, dashing air, but not enough to keep him out of the line fight. He had gone to the archers anyway, and Guillaume had not, at the time, known why.