“All right!”
Her thoughts completed it: Get the fuck out of here and back to the baggage train; quit using the crossbow, because you’re plain crazy.
Prostitution again, at my age?
Ric glared at her, rigid and angry. His fury and disappointment stung her in a raw way she had thought could no longer happen.
“Ask Guillaume Arnisout.” The words were out of her mouth before she thought about them. But it isn’t that stupid an idea. “Guillaume’s a man. He might get listened to. If you can get him to speak for you. Wouldn’t the abbot try to speak for you? He’s your master?”
“My master-”
He broke off. A different pig heaved herself up, walked forward, dipped her snout to Ric’s knee where he sat, and with slow deliberation let herself fall down with her spine snug up against his leg.
“Lully…” The boy slid his fingers down behind her ear, into the soft places. Yolande thought, Dear God, I recognize a pig. This is the one he had at the chapel.
“I’ve been here since I was eight.” Ric’s girl-long lashes blinked down. “I don’t remember much before. A banking house. The men used to travel a lot. I used to hold the horses’ reins for them.”
Yolande could picture him as a page, small and slender and dark-haired. He would have been attractive, which was never an advantage for a slave.
I wonder how much the fat Lord-Abbot paid for the boy? And how much he would ask for him now?
She caught herself. No. Don’t be a fool. The most you can afford is a few derniers for someone from the baggage train to help armor you up. You can’t pay the price needed to get a full-time page or varlet.
Maybe I could borrow the money…
“And then,” Ric said. “And-then. The Lord-Father came. Abbot Muthari. I have to know!”
Her expression must be blank, she realized.
“My master. Your qa’id ’s going to kill him, isn’t he?”
“If he doesn’t bury Margaret.”
“He won’t do that.” Ricimer wiped at his face, leaving it white with dust, his eyes showing up dark and puffy. “He won’t. I know he won’t.”
“Look, you’ll be all right; you can pass for under thirteen, if you try-”
“That’s not it!” His anger flashed out at her. “The Lord-Father-he mustn’t be killed! You’re not going to kill him. Please!”
“Muthari?” Yolande found herself bewildered. “You want Muthari ’s life, too? Your master?”
“Yes!”
He spoke vehemently, where he sat, but with a restraint unlike such a young man. Certainly her son Jean-Philippe was never prone to it.
He doesn’t want to startle his animals.
“I’ll tell.” His eyes fixed on her. “I’ll tell my abbot and your qa’id. You had a vision. You did sorcery.”
Yolande stared. A threat? “You said it was from God! That’s what I came here to ask-what it means-what I’m supposed to do withSorcery? ”
“It was from God. But I’ll say it wasn’t.”
Slaves have to be shrewd. She had seen slaves in Constantinople who maneuvered the paths of politics with far more skill than their masters. Being able to be killed with no more thought than men give to the slaughter of a farmyard animal will do that to you. Slaves listen. Notice. Notice what Spessart says to Muthari, and how the Lord-Father reacts, and what the mercenary captain needs right now…because knowledge, information, that’s all a slave has.
Ric said, “I counted. There’s a hundred of you. There are seventy monks here. Your qa’id needs the place kept quiet. If he hears about a woman having visions from God…that’s trouble. He can’t have trouble.”
Well, damn. Listen to the boy.
Yes, the company’s no larger than a centenier right now. And, yes, he can threaten to tell Spessart. The captain’s always been half and half about women soldiers: wants us when we’re good, doesn’t want any of the trouble that might come with us.
“I’ll tell them you made me do it,” he added. “The sorcery. They’ll believe it.”
“They will, too.” Yolande gazed down at him. Because I’m old enough to be your mother. “They probably would burn me. Even Spessart wouldn’t tolerate a witch,” she said quietly. “But Spessart doesn’t have any patience. He solves most problems by killing them. Including heretic priests who have heretic visionaries in their monastery.”
Ric stared, his face appalled.
Yolande put her hands in the small of her back, stretching away a sudden tension. “The Griffin-in-Gold is a hard company. I joined to kill soldiers, not noncombatants. But there’s enough guys here who just don’t care who they kill.”
A crescent of light ran all along both underlids of the boy’s eyes. A gathering of water. She watched him swallow, shake his head, and suppress all signs of tears.
“I won’t have the Lord-Father die. I won’t have my pigs eaten.”
“You may not be able to stop it.” Yolande tried to speak gently.
“I had another dream.”
For a second she did not understand what he had said.
His voice squeaked: adolescent. “I don’t understand it. I didn’t understand the first one.”
Yolande’s breath hitched in her throat. No. He’s lying. Obviously!
“Another dream for me?”
Another vision?
This is some kind of threat to strong-arm me into protecting his pigs and Muthari’s arse… Muthari. His master. His pigs.
He’s just trying to look after his own.
Without preamble, not stopping for cowardice, she demanded, “Give me this second vision, then!”
The wind blew the scent of rock-honey, and pigs, and she was close enough to the young man to smell his male sweat. Ric’s dark eyes met hers, and she saw for the first time that he was fractionally taller than she.
He said, “I have to! It’s God’s. If I could hold it back any longer, until you promise to help…I can’t. We have to go to the Green Chapel!”
There’s no time. I’m on duty again in an hour. And how can I sneak him in there to have a vision- if I do-with the captain’s guard on the place?
The next thought followed hard on that one, and she nodded to herself.
“Meet me outside the chapel. Two hours. Vespers. We’ll see if you’re lying or not.”
A young voice emerged from the depths of the dimly lit Green Chapel. “Christ up a Tree, it stinks in here!”
Guillaume grinned as he entered from checking the sentries. “Cassell, I think that’s the idea…”
Ukridge and Bressac snickered; Guillaume decided he could afford not to hear them. The more bitching they do about this duty, the less likely they are to slide off to the baggage-train trollops and make me put them up for punishment detail in the morning.
Bressac got up and paced around on the cold tiles, evidently hoping to gain warmth by the movement. He did not look as though he were succeeding. Now that it was past Vespers, it was cold. Guillaume pulled his heavy lined wool cloak more securely around him. The other Frenchman walked over to the woman’s body, where it lay swollen and chill in front of the altar, under a lamp and the face of Vir Viridianus.
“You’d think she wouldn’t smell so much in this cold.”
“This is nothing. You want real smell, you wait until tomorrow.” Guillaume, feeling the tip of his nose numb with cold, found it difficult to remember the blazing heat of the day. He kept it in his memory by a rational effort.
Bressac paced back to the group. “I went to an autopsy once. Up in Padua? Mind, that corpse was fresh; smelled better than this… They were doing it in a church. Poorbitch had her entrails spilled out in front of two hundred Dominican monks. And she was some shop owner’s wife: doubt she even showed an ankle in public before.”
“Some of those Italians…” Ukridge gave a shrill whistle at odds with his beef-and-bread English bulk. “Over in Venice, they wear their tits out on top of their gowns. I mean, shit, nipples and everything…”