His eyes adjusted to starlight. It illuminated shapes-the precise curlicues of bracken, and the crumpled linen mass of his doublet under them, colorless now; and her own hand, where it rested on his chest.
Guillaume whispered, “I’d take all your hurts away if I could,” and bent his head to nip at her heavy breasts.
“Yes…” Yolande smiled.
He felt her body loosen.
Her voice became half-teasing. “But that’s because you’re one of the good guys. I think.”
“Only think?” he gasped, mouth wet from trailing kisses across her body, under her pulled-up shirt. He reached down and put her hand on him, to encourage his prick upright again. “I’m good. What do you want, letters of recommendation?”
She spluttered into a giggling laugh.
“You see? In the dark, you could be sixteen.” He put her remaining hand to his face, and let her fingers trace his grin. “I knew I could make you happy again.”
With Prime and Vespers always at six A. M. and six P. M. here, it made the hours of the day and the night the same length, which Guillaume found odd.
On the cusp of dawn, he began a dream. Forests where it was hot. Holm-oak woods. Dwarf elephants, no bigger than horses. Men and women in red paint, who burned their children alive-sacrifices to deforestation, so that cities could survive. A scream that was all pain, all desolation, all loss. Then he was lost in the African forests again. And again.
He woke with a start, the nightmare wrenching him awake. Cold drafts blew across the pen, counteracting the bracken’s retained heat. Cool blue air showed beyond the half door.
Morning.
“ Green Christ! What time is it? ’Lande.” He untangled himself gracelessly, shaking her awake. His breath showed pale in the cold air. “’Lande! It’s past roll call! We’re meant to be on duty-oh, shit.”
Running feet thumped past outside. Lots of running feet. Men shouting. Hauling his clothes on, wrenching at knotted points, clawing under the bracken for a missing boot, he gasped, “It’s an attack! Listen to them out there!”
Loud voices blared across the morning. He cursed again, rolling over, trying to pull on his still-laced-up boot.
Damn! Huseyin Bey’s division ought to be a fortnight behind us at most. At most. We can stand a siege-if there hasn’t already been a battle to the east of us. If Huseyin’s Janissaries aren’t all dead.
“Don’t hear the call to arms!” Yolande pulled her shirt down and her hose up. She finished tying off her points at her waist, and knelt up in the bracken like a pointing hound.
“What? What, ’Lande?”
“That’s at the chapel!”
“Bloody hell.”
He struggled out of the pig shed behind her, shaking off bracken, not worrying now if anyone saw them together. It was a bright crisp morning, sometime past Prime by the strength of the dawn. So the rag-head monks would be there, to celebrate mass, and this racket must mean “Rosso! Margie!” he grunted out, having to run to keep up with Yolande.
“Yes!” Impatient, she elbowed ahead of him, forging into the crowd of mercenary soldiers already running toward the chapel doors.
He tried to catch a hackbutter’s arm, ask him what was the matter, but the other man didn’t stop. Guillaume heard the captain’s voice way ahead, piercing loud above the noise, but couldn’t make out all the words. Only one came through, clean and clear:
“-sacrilege!”
Yolande barged through the black wooden doors into a rioting mess of men and- pigs?
She reared back from the smell. It hit her as soon as she was through the doors. Hot, thick, rich. Rotten blood, fluids, spoiled flesh. Dung. And the eye-watering stink of concentrated pig urine. Yolande gasped.
In front of her, an archer bent down, trying to stop a sow. The small, heavy animal barged into him and knocked him away without any effort. Yolande caught at his arm, keeping him upright.
“What the hell is this?” she shrieked over the noise of men bawling, pigs shrieking and grunting, metal clattering and scraping against stone.
“The fucking pigs et her!” the archer bawled back. His badge was unfamiliar, a tall man from another lance, his face twisted up in rage or anguish, it was impossible to guess which.
“Ate her?” Yolande let go of him and put one mud-grimed hand over her mouth, muffling a giggle. “You mean-ate her body?”
The archer swore. “Broken bones of Christ! Yes!”
Another pig charged past, jaws gaping. Yolande jumped back against the Green Chapel’s wall as the gelded boar, mouth wide open to bite, chased a green-robed monk toward the open doors.
“Grab it!” the monk yelled, holding the Host in its holm-oak box high over his head. “Grab that animal! Help!”
Yolande’s hand pressed tight against her mouth, stifling another appalled snicker.
Ten or twelve or fifteen large pigs ran around between her and the altar, screaming and honking and groaning. And two dozen soldiers, easily. And the monks who had come in to celebrate Prime. A sharp smell of pig dung filled the air. There were yellow puddles on the tiles where pigs had urinated in fear or anger.
“Who…” she stuttered. “Who let them in here?”
The nearest man, a broad-shouldered elderly sergeant, bellowed, “Clear the fucking House of God! Get these swine out of here!”
Yolande shoved forward, then slowed. Men moved forward past her. The lean-bodied pigs were not large. But heavy. All that muscle.
A knight had his legs and arms wide, trying to herd a young black sow away from the altar. The animal shoulder-charged past him, bowling him over in a tangle of boots and armor. Yolande realized, on the verge of hysteria, that she recognized the beast-Ric’s favored sow, Lully.
The black-haired pig scrabbled past her as Yolande dodged aside. The tiled floor was covered in dark dust. Boot prints, the marks of pigs’ trotters, the prints of bare feet. Dust damp with the early morning’s dew.
And something white, kicked and trodden underfoot.
Yolande bent down. She kept close to the wall and out of the way of the struggle ahead-men flapping their arms, clapping, shouting, doing everything to harry the pigs away from their focus, a few yards in front of the altar. She squatted, reached out, and snared the object.
It had a rounded, shiny end. The back of it had a bleached stump, and blackened meat clinging to it. She recognized it all in a split second, although it took moments for the realization to plod through her mind. It’s a bone. A thigh joint. The thigh bone’s been sheared off it By the jaws of pigs.
That guy was right. They ate her.
She thrust her way between the men, ignoring the skid of her heels in pig dung on the floor. She got to the altar. What was in front of her now were pig backs, lower down than anything else. Hairy sharp rumps. Pigs with their snouts snuffling along the tiles, wrenching and snatching things between them. Heads lifting and jaws jerking as they swallowed.
Bones.
Meat.
There was not enough left to know that it had been a human skeleton.
The pigs had had her for a long time before they were caught, Yolande could see. Almost all of the flesh was gone. He did say his pigs ate carrion…‘garbage disposal.’ Most of the bone fragments had been separated from each other. There was nothing left of Margie’s skull or face. Only a fragment of bottom jaw. Pigs can cut anything with their shearing teeth.
“Margie,” she whispered under her breath, not moving her fingers away from her mouth. Her breath didn’t warm her stone-cold flesh.
Now there is nothing to bury. Problem solved.
She felt wrenching nausea, head swimming, mouth filling with spit.
I didn’t always like her. Sometimes I hated her guts. There was no reason we should have anything in common, just because we were two women…
The body of Margaret Hammond, Guido Rosso, such as it was now, was a number of joints and bones and fleshy scraps, on the floor and in the jaws of pigs. She saw the captain, Spessart, reach down to grab one end of a femur. He yelled, cursed, took his hand back and shook it. Yolande saw red blood spatter, and then the brass-bearded man was sucking at the wound and swearing at one of the monks while it was bound up.