Bressac snickered again.
The red tile roofs of Salerno became distinct, floating above the fine blue haze. Birds screamed.
Bressac said, not laughing now, “She ought at least to come and look at the damn brat, after we went to so much trouble to get it.”
Guillaume took his finger back from the hard gums, and the baby gave him a focused look of dislike. He said, “First time in the entire bloody voyage this little cow hasn’t been crying, or puking up all over me. Looks cute enough to get her interested in it again.”
At Bressac’s look, Guillaume admitted, “Well, maybe not that…”
“She’s drinking too much to have the infant. Drop it overboard, probably.” Bressac glanced over his shoulder and then, sentimental as soldiers anywhere, said, “Give it here.”
Guillaume slid the ropes of the swaddling board off his shoulders and handed the baby over to rest her nose against Bressac’s old and smelly arming-doublet. To his surprise, she neither cried nor puked. Can’t win, can I?
“Yolande’s drinking too much,” he said. “And angry too much.”
Bressac joggled the baby. “She keeps going on about that pig-boy-‘Oh, the abbot killed him; oh, it was murder.’ I mean, it’s been half a year, we’ve had an entire damned campaign with the Carthaginian legions; you’d think she’d get o-” His voice cut off abruptly. “Damn! Kid just threw up all over me!”
“Must be your tasteful conversation.” Guillaume took the baby back as she began to wail, and wiped her face roughly clean with his kerchief. The wail changed from one of discomfort to one of anger.
Bressac, swiping at himself, muttered, “Green Christ! It’s just some slave’s brat!”, and wiped his hands on the ship’s rail.
Above him, the company silk pennant cracked, unrolling on the wind: azure field merging with azure sky, so it seemed the gold griffin veritably flew.
Bressac said, “’Lande was drunk, remember? Kept saying she wanted a baby and she was too old to have one. She insisted we haul this one out of goddamn Carthage harbor. Now she’s bored with it. Green Christ, can’t a bloody slave commit infanticide in peace?”
“You think it was a slave?”
“Hell, yes. If the mother had been freeborn, she could have sold it.”
“Maybe we should find a dealer in Salerno, for the Turkish harems.” Guillaume was aware he was only half joking.
If she’s got bored with the kid…so have I.
Merely being honest about moral failings is not an excuse.
It’s not boredom. Not for Yolande. It’s just that the kid isn’t Ric-or Jean-Philippe. Saving this kid…isn’t the same. And that’s not the baby’s fault.
“This isn’t a place for a baby.” Guillaume looked guiltily around at the company. “Kid deserves better than old sins hanging round her neck as a start in life. What can she ever hope for? Like ’Lande keeps on saying, to change anything-”
The words are in his mind, Yolande repeating the words with the care of the terrifyingly drunk:
“To change anything…we’d have to change everything. And I don’t have the time left that that would take.”
Blue sea and white foam streaked away in a curve from this side of the galley’s prow. He went as far as unknotting the ropes from the swaddling board and sliding them free.
Splash and gone. So easy. A lifetime of slogging uphill gone. When we meet under the Tree, she’ll probably thank me.
Bressac’s voice broke the hypnotic drag of the prow wave. “So. You going to talk it over with the master gunner? Ortega will have you for one of the gun crews; they’re shorthanded now. Not much running about, there…”
There was a look in Bressac’s eyes that made Guillaume certain his mind and proposed action had been read. Not necessarily disapproved of.
A seabird wheeled away, screaming, searching their wake for food. The perpetual noise of sliding chains from the belly of the ship, where the rowers stood and stretched to the oars, quickly drowned out the bird’s noise.
“Sure,” Guillaume said. “A gunner: sure. That’d suit a crip, wouldn’t it?”
The baby began to wail, hungry again. Guillaume looped the board back on one shoulder and slid a finger under the linen band. He tucked the baby’s still white-blonde birth hair carefully back underneath.
“Maybe I could do with a vision,” he said wryly. “Not that they helped ’Lande. Or the kid. What’s the point of seeing things centuries on? He needed to see what that son of a bitch Muthari was like now.”
“One of us would have to have done it,” Bressac observed, his long horse face unusually serious. “You know that? If there wasn’t going to be a massacre?”
Guillaume heard sudden voices raised.
Farther down toward the slim belly of the galley, Yolande Vaudin was standing now, shouting-spitting with the force of it-into the face of the company’s new priest.
The priest evidently attempted to calm her, and Guillaume saw Yolande slap his hand away, as a woman might-and then punch him in the face, with the strength of a woman who winds up a crossbow for cocking.
“’ Ey! ” The sergeant of the archers strode over, knocked Yolande Vaudin down, and stood over her, yelling.
Guillaume felt himself tense his muscles to hand the baby to Bressac and run down the deck. And…run? The sergeant abruptly finished, with a final yell and a gesture of dismissal. Guillaume felt frustration like a fever.
Yolande got to her feet and walked unevenly up toward them at the prow. One hand shielded the side of her face.
She halted when she got to them. “Stupid fucking priest.”
Bressac reached out to move her hand aside. Guillaume saw him stop, frozen in place by the look she shot him.
“Want to take the baby?” he offered.
“I do not.” Yolande moved her hands behind her back.
A bruise was already coming up on her cheek. Red and blue, nothing that arnica wouldn’t cure. Guillaume didn’t stand. He lifted the baby toward her.
Her gaze fixed on its face. “Damn priest said I was asking him to do fortune-telling. It isn’t fortune-telling! I wanted to know if what I saw was real. And he won’t tell me.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know.”
“Maybe.” Yolande echoed the word with scorn. “He said… he said none of it was a half millennium in the future. He said the heathen boy had been telling my future-that I’d never be recognized. That I’d die a mercenary soldier, shot by some hackbutter. And that foretelling my future was witchcraft, and so it was right the abbot should kill such a boy-that’s when I hit him.”
Guillaume found himself nodding. The sensation of that possible future being truncated-of it being a translated form of this woman’s desires and terrors-eased some fear he had not been aware he still had. Although it had given him nightmares in the infirmary, after his wound.
I don’t like to think about five, six hundred years in the future. It makes me dizzy. But then…
“Priest might be frightened it is true foresight,” Guillaume said quietly. “Either way…as a future, are you so in love with it?”
The old Yolande looked at him for a moment, her expression open and miserable. “You know? I can’t think of anything better. Recognition. Acceptance. And a better death than disease. I wanted it for so long… Now I know I ought to be able to think of something better than this. And… I can’t.”
Guillaume rested the baby back against him. He didn’t say anything about families, farms, retirement into city trades.
What’s the point? Neither of us are going to stop doing what we do. No matter what. This is what we are now.
No wonder she drinks. I wonder that I don’t.
“Been doing it too long.” The other Frenchman’s voice was gently ironic. Bressac nodded down the deck toward the sergeant of archers, who was standing with his fists on his hips, talking to one of the corporals, glaring after Yolande Vaudin. “All the same…That isn’t the way to behave to a sergeant.”
“Oh, so, what am I supposed to be afraid of?” Scorn flashed out in her tone. “A black mark against my name on the rolls? It’s not like they’re ever going to make me an officer, is it? A woman giving orders to men!”