The knight screamed as the mallet came down a final time, almost catching Kassad’s hand as the hammer drove the blade through the visor slit like a ten-inch tent peg. The man-at-arms arched, lifting Kassad and sixty pounds of armor clear of the ground in a final violent spasm and then fell back limply.
Kassad rolled onto his side. His rescuer collapsed beside him. Both were covered with sweat and the dead man’s blood. Kassad looked at his savior. The woman was tall and dressed in clothes not dissimilar to Kassad’s. For a moment they merely lay there and gasped for air.
“Are you … all right?” Kassad managed after a while. He was suddenly struck by her appearance. Her brown hair was short by current Worldweb fashion, short and straight and cut so that the longest strands fell from the part, just a few centimeters left of the center of her forehead, to just above her right ear. It was a boy’s haircut from some forgotten time, but she was no boy. Kassad thought that she was perhaps the most beautiful woman he had ever seen: bone structure so perfect that chin and cheekbones were shaped without being too sharp, large eyes glowing with life and intelligence, a gentle mouth with a soft underlip. Lying next to her, Kassad realized that she was tall—not so tall as he but obviously not a woman from the fifteenth century—and even under her loose tunic and baggy trousers he could see the soft swell of hips and breast. She appeared to be a few years older than Kassad, perhaps in her late twenties, but this fact barely registered as she continued staring into his face with those soft, beguiling, endlessly deep eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asked again. His voice sounded strange even to himself.
She did not answer. Or, rather, she answered by sliding long fingers across Kassad’s chest, ripping away the leather thongs which bound the rough vest. Her hands found his shirt. It was soaked with blood and ripped halfway down the front. The woman ripped it open the rest of the way. She moved against him now, her fingers and lips on his chest, hips already beginning to move. Her right hand found the cords to his trouser front, ripped them free.
Kassad helped her pull off the rest of his clothes, removed hers with three fluid movements. She wore nothing under her shirt and coarse-cloth trousers. Kassad’s hand slid between her thighs, behind her, cupped her moving buttocks, pulled her closer, and slid to the moist roughness in front. She opened to him, her mouth closing on his. Somehow, with all of their motion and disrobing, their skin never lost contact. Kassad felt his own excitement rubbing against the cusp of her belly.
She rolled above him then, her thighs astride his hips, her gaze still locked with his. Kassad had never been so excited. He gasped as her right hand went behind her, found him, guided him into her. When he opened his eyes again she was moving slowly, her head back, eyes closed. Kassad’s hands moved up her sides to cup her perfect breasts. Nipples hardened against his palms.
They made love then. Kassad, at twenty-three standard years, had been in love once and had enjoyed sex many times. He thought he knew the way and the why of it. There was nothing in his experience to that moment which he could not have described with a phrase and a laugh to his squadmates in the hold of a troop transport With the calm, sure cynicism of a twenty-three-year-old veteran he was sure that he would never experience anything that could not be so described, so dismissed. He was wrong. He could never adequately share the sense of the next few minutes with anyone else. He would never try.
They made love in a sudden shaft of late October light with a carpet of leaves and clothes beneath them and a film of blood and sweat oiling the sweet friction between them. Her green eyes stared down at Kassad, widening slightly when he began moving quickly, closing at the same second he closed his.
They moved together then in the sudden tide of sensation as old and inevitable as the movement of worlds: pulses racing, flesh quickening with its own moist purposes, a further, final rising together, the world receding to nothing at all—and then, still joined by touch and heartbeat and the fading thrill of passion, allowing consciousness to slide back to separate flesh while the world flowed in through forgotten senses.
They lay next to each other. The dead man’s armor was cold against Kassad’s left arm, her thigh warm against his right leg. The sunlight was a benediction. Hidden colors rose to the surface of things. Kassad turned his head and gazed at her as she rested her head on his shoulder. Her cheeks glowed with flush and autumn light and her hair lay like copper threads along the flesh of his arm. She curved her leg over his thigh and Kassad felt the clockwise stirring of renewed passion. The sun was warm on his face. He closed his eyes.
When he awoke she was gone. He was certain that only seconds had passed—no more than a minute, certainly—but the sunlight was gone, colors had flowed out of the forest, and a cool evening breeze moved bare branches.
Kassad dressed in torn clothes made stiff with blood. The French man-at-arms lay still and rigid in the unself-conscious attitude of death. He already seemed inanimate, a part of the forest. There was no sign whatsoever of the woman.
Fedmahn Kassad limped his way back through the woods, evening gloom, and a sudden, chilling drizzle.
The battlefield still held people, living and dead. The dead lay in heaps like the piles of toy soldiers Kassad had played with as a child. Wounded men moved slowly with the help of friends. Here and there furtive forms picked their way among the dead, and near the opposite tree line a lively group of heralds, both French and English, met in conclave with much pointing and animated conversation. Kassad knew that they had to decide upon a name for the battle so that their respective records would agree. He also knew that they would settle on the name of the nearest castle, Agincourt, even though it had figured in neither strategy nor battle.
Kassad was beginning to think that this was no simulation, that his life in the Worldweb was the dream and that this gray day had to be reality, when suddenly the entire scene froze with outlines of human figures, horses, and the darkening forest becoming as transparent as a fading holo. And then Kassad was being helped out of his simulation creche at the Olympus Command School and the other cadets and instructors were rising, talking, laughing with one another—all seemingly unaware that the world had changed forever.
For weeks Kassad spent every free hour wandering the Command School grounds, watching from the ramparts as the evening shadow of Mons Olympus covered first the Plateau forest, then the heavily settled highlands, then everything halfway to the horizon, and then all the world. And every second he thought about what had happened. He thought about her.
No one else had noticed anything strange in the simulation. No one else had left the battlefield. One instructor explained that nothing beyond the battlefield existed in that particular segment of the simulation. No one had missed Kassad. It was as if the incident in the forest—and the woman—had never happened.
Kassad knew better. He attended his classes on military history and mathematics. He put in his hours at the firing range and gym. He walked off barracks punishments on the Caldera Quadrangle, although these were rare. In general, young Kassad became an even more excellent officer cadet than he had been. But all the while he waited.