Mary Gentle - The Logistics of Carthage

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The Logistics of Carthage
Mary Gentle
/ have put this document together from the different sources included in
the Ash papers, and have again translated the languages into modern
English. Where necessary, I have substituted colloquial obscenities to
give a flavour of the medieval original. Let the casual reader,
expecting the Hollywood Middle Ages, abandon hope here.
Pierce Ratcliff, a.d. 2010
MOST women follow their husbands to the wars. . .¦'..I followed my son."
Yolande Vaudin's voice came with the grunt and exhalation of physical effort. Guillaume Arnisout looked
at her down the length of the corpse they were carrying.
He grinned. "Your son? You ain't old enough to have a grown-up son!"
She appeared a wonderfully perverse mix of male and female, Guillaume thought. The clinging of her
belted mail shirt, under her livery jacket, showed off the woman's broad hips. Her long legs seemed plump
in hose, but were not: were just not male. Shapely and womanly . . . He got a kick out of seeing women's
legs in hose: entirely covered, but the shape so clearly defined—and hers were worth defining.
She had her hair cut short, too, like a page or young squire, and it curled sleekly onto her shoulders,
uncovered, the rich yellow of wet straw She had been able to slip her helmet off before the sergeant
noticed: it was buckled through her belt by the chin strap. That meant he could see all of her wise and
wicked face.
She's willing to talk, at least. Can't let the opportunity go to waste.
He put his back against the Green Chapel's doors and eased them open without himself letting go of the
corpse's ankles. Yolande held her end of the dead woman's body tightly under the arms, taking the weight
as he backed through the door first. The blue-white flesh was chill against his palms.
Not looking down at what she held, Yolande went on. "I had Jean-Philippe when I was young. Fifteen.
And then, when he was fifteen, he was called up in the levy, to be a soldier, and I followed."
The partly open door let in the brilliant sunlight from the barren land outside. It glittered back off the
white walls of the monastery's other buildings. Guillaume twisted his head around to look inside the chapel,
letting his eyes adjust, unsure of his footing in the dimness. "Didn't he mind you being there?"
Her own sight obviously free of the morning glare, Yolande pushed forward. The legs of the body were
stiff with rigor, and they shoved against him. Bare feet jabbed his belly. There was black dirt under the
toenails.
He backed in, trying to hold one door open with his foot while Yolande maneuvered the dead
woman's shoulders and head through it.
"He would have minded, if he'd known. I went disguised; I thought I could watch over him from a
distance. . . . He was too young. I'd been a widow five years. I had no money, with his wages gone. I
joined the baggage train and dyed my hair and whored for a living, until that got old, and then I found I
could put a crossbow bolt into the center of the butts nine times out of ten."
The chapel's chill began to cool the sting of sunburn on the back of his neck. His helmet still felt
excruciatingly hot to wear. Guillaume blinked, his sight adjusting, and looked at her again. "You're not old
enough."
Her chuckle came out of the dimness, along with the shape of the walls and tiled floor.
"One thing a woman can always look like is a younger man.' There's her," Yolande said, with a
jerk of her head downward at the rigid dead body between them. "When she said her name was Guido
Rosso, you'd swear she was a beardless boy of nineteen. You take her out of doublet and hose and put her
in a gown, and call her 'Margaret Hammond,' and you'd have known at once she was a woman of
twenty-eight."
"Was she?" Guillaume grunted, shifting the load as they tottered toward the altar. He walked backward
with difficulty, not wanting to stumble and look stupid in front of this woman. "I didn't know her."
"I met her when she joined us, after the fall." Yolande's fingers visibly tightened on the dead woman's
flesh. There was no need to specify which fall. The collapse of Constantinople to the Turks had echoed
through Christendom from East to West, four years ago.
"I took her under my wing." The woman's wide, lively mouth moved in an ironic smile. Her eyes went to
the corpse's face, then his. "You wouldn't have noticed her. I know what you grunts in the line fight are
like—'Archers? Oh, that's those foulmouthed buggers hanging around at the back, always saying "fuck"
and taking the Lord their God's name in vain. . . .' I dunno: give you a billhook and you think you're the only
soldier on the battlefield."
Guillaume liked her sardonic grin, and returned it.
So ... is she flirting with me?
They staggered together across the empty interior of the Green Chapel. Their boots scraped on the
black and white tiles. He could smell incense and old wood smoke from the morning's prayers. Another
couple of steps . . .
"I used to help her back to the tents, drunk. She was never this heavy. There!" Yolande grunted.
Just in time, he copied her, letting the stiff ankles of the body slide down out of his dirty grip. The body
thunked down onto the tiles at his feet. No one had cleaned it up. The bones of her face were
beaten in, the mess the same color as heraldic murrey: purple red.
His skin retained the feel of hers. Stiff, chill, softening.
"HeDieux!" Guillaume rubbed at his back. "That's why they call it dead weight."
He saw the dead Rosso—Margaret—was still wearing her armor: a padded jack soaked with blood and
fluids. Linen stuffing"leaked out of the rips. Every other piece of kit from helmet to boots was gone.
Either the jacket was too filthy and slashed up to be worth reclaiming, or else the charred and
bloodstained cloth was all that was still holding the body's intestines inside it.
Yolande squatted down. Guillaume saw her try to pull the body's arms straight by its sides, but they were
still too stiff. She settled for smoothing the sun-bleached, blood-matted hair back. She wiped her hands on
her peacock blue hose as she stood.
"I saw her get taken down." The older woman spoke as if she was not sure what to do next, was talking
to put off that moment of decision—even if the decision was, Guillaume thought, only the one to leave the
corpse of her friend.
The light from the leaf-shaped ogee windows illuminated Yolande's clear, smooth skin. There
were creases at her eyes, but she had most of the elasticity of youth still there.
"Killed on the galley?" he prompted, desperate to continue a conversation even if the subject was
unpromising.
"Yeah. First we were on one of the cargo ships, sniping, part of the defense crew. The rag-heads turned
Greek fire on us, and the deck was burning. I yelled at her to follow me off—when we got back on our
galley, it had been boarded, and it took us and Tessier's guys ten minutes to clear the decks. Some Visigoth
put a spear through her face, and I guess they must have hacked her up when she fell. They'd have been
better worrying about the live ones."
"Nah . . ." Guillaume was reluctant to leave the Green Chapel, even if it was beginning to smell of
decomposing flesh. He felt cool for the first time in hours, and besides, there was this woman, who might
perhaps be an impressed audience for his combat knowledge. "You never want to leave one alive under
your feet. Somebody on the ground sticks a sword or dagger up and hits your femoral artery or your
bollocks— Ah, 'scuse me."
He stopped, flustered. She gave him a look.
Somewhere in his memory, if only in the muscle-memory of his hands and arms, is the ferocity with
which you hack a man down, and follow it up without a second's hesitation—bang-bang-bang-bang!—
your weapon's thin, sharp steel edges slamming into his face, throat, forearms, belly; whatever you can
reach.
He looked away from the body at his feet, a woman to whom some soldier in the Carthaginian navy has
done just that. Goose pimples momentarily shuddered over his skin.
"Christus Viridianus! I couldn't half do with a drink." He eased his visored sallet back on his head,
feeling how the edge of the lining band had left a hot, sweaty indentation in his forehead. "Say, what did
happen to your son? Is he with the company?"
Yolande's fingers brushed the Griffin-in-Gold patch sewn onto the front of her livery jacket, as if the
insignia of their mercenary company stirred memories. She smiled in a way he could not interpret. "I was a
better soldier than he was."
"He quit?"
"He died."
"Shit." I can't say a thing right! "Yolande, I'm sorry."
Her mouth quirked painfully. "Four months after he went to war. What was I thinking, that I could
protect him? He was carrying shot in the first siege we were at, and a culverin inside the castle scored a
direct hit on the powder wagon. When I found him he'd had both his hands blown off, and he'd bled to
death—before his mother could get to him."
"Jeez ..." I wish I hadn't asked.
She's got to be ten years older than me. But she doesn't look it.
He guessed Yolande had not, like "Guido Rosso," even temporarily tried to pass as a man.
Because she's a woman, not a girl.
"Why did you stay with the company?"
"My son was dead. I wanted to kill the whole world. I realized that if I had the patience to let them train
me, the company would let me do just that."
In his stunned silence, Guillaume could hear goat bells jingling outside and some shuffling noises closer to
hand. A warm breeze blew in through the Green Chapel door, which had lodged open on a pebble. The
smell of death grew more present now, soaking into the air. Like the back of a butcher's shop in a heat
wave.
"Shit." He wiped at his mouth. "It's going to get hot later in the morning. By evening . . . she's going to
be really ripe by Vespers."
Yolande's expression turned harsh. "Good. Then they can't ignore her. She's going to
smell. That should get the bloody rag-heads moving. The captain's right. This is the only thing to do."
"But—"
"I don't care what the fucking priests say. She's going to be buried here like the Christian soldier she is."
Guillaume shrugged. For himself, he would as cheerfully have chucked all the bodies overboard, to go
with the Carthaginian Visigoths and feed the fish; evidently this wasn't the thing to say to Yolande right
now. Especially not if you want to get into the crossbow woman's knickers, he reminded himself.
"If the abbot can ignore the stink she's going to make . . ." He let his grin out, in its different context.
"What do you bet me he'll send for the captain before Sext? Hey, tell you what... I bet you a flagon of
wine she's buried by midday, and if I lose, I'll help you drink it tonight. What do you say?"
What she would have answered wasn't clear from her expression, and he didn't get to hear a reply.
The scuffling noise that had impinged on his consciousness earlier grew louder, and he spun around and
had his bollock dagger out of its sheath at his belt and pointing at the altar a full second before a boy rolled
out from under the altar cloth and sat staring down at the woman soldier's corpse.
"Aw—shit!" Guillaume swore, exasperated.
He saw the thin iron ring welded around the boy's throat. Some slave skiving off work. Or hiding from
the big bad Frankish mercenaries—not that I blame him for that.
"Hey, you—fuck off out of here!"
The youth looked up, not at Guillaume, but at Yolande. There was a quiver about him that might have
been fear or energy. He looked to be anywhere in his early or middle teens, a pale-skinned Carthaginian
Visigoth with dark hair flopping into his eyes. Guillaume realized instantly, She's thinking he's fifteen.
"I wasn't listening!" He spoke the local patois, but it was plain from his ability to answer that he
understood one Frankish language at least. "I was foreseeing."
Guillaume flinched, thought, Were we saying anything I don't want to hear back as gossip? No, I hadn't
got round to asking her if she fucks younger men— And then, replaying the kid's remark in his head, he
queried: "Foreseeing?"
Silently, the young man pointed.
' Above the altar, on the shadowed masonry of the wall, there was no expected Briar Cross. Instead, he
saw a carved face—a Man's face, with leaves sprouting from the creepers that thrust out of His open
mouth.
The carving was large: perhaps as wide as Guillaume could have spanned with his outstretched hands,
thumb to thumb. There is something intimidating about a face that big. Vir Viridianus: Christ as the Green
Emperor, as the Arian Visigoths prefer, heretically, to worship Him. The wood gleamed, well polished, the
pale silvery grain catching the light. Holm oak, maybe? The eyes had been left as hollows of darkness.
"I dream under the altar," the young man said, as hieratic as if he had been one of the monastery's own
priests, and not barefoot and with only a dirty linen shirt to cover his arse.
Guillaume belatedly realized the scrabbling noise hadn't ceased with their stillness. The hilt of his bollock
dagger was still smooth in his hand. He stepped back to give himself room as the altar cloth stirred again.
An odd, low, dark shape lifted up something pale.
Guillaume blinked, not processing the image, and then his mind made sense both of the shape and of the
new smell that the odor of the corpse had been masking. A pale flat snout lifted upward. A dark hairy
quadruped body paced forward, flop ears falling over bright eyes. . . .
The young man absently reached out and scratched the pig's lean back with grimy fingers.
A pig-boy asleep under the Green Man's altar? Guillaume thought. Sweet dead Jesus on the
Tree!
"I had a seeing dream," the young man said, and turned his face toward the living woman in the chapel;
toward Yolande. "I think it is for you."
Yolande glanced down at the dead body of Margaret Hammond. "Not in here! Outside . . . maybe."
She caught the billman's nod, beside her. He said, "Yeah, let's go. We don't want to be in here now. We
got this place under lockdown, but there's going to be plenty of shit flying before long!"
The pig's sharp trotters clicked on the tiles, the beast following as the Visigoth swineherd walked to the
left of the altar. The young man pushed aside a'wall hanging embroidered with the She-wolf suckling the
Christ-child to disclose a wooden door set deep into the masonry. He opened it and gestured.
Yolande stepped through.
She came out in the shade of the wall. The world beyond the shadow blazed with the North African
sun's fierceness. A few yards ahead was a grove of the ever-present olive trees, and she walked to stand
under them, loving their shade and smell—so little being green after the company's previous stopover in
Alexandria.
She heard Guillaume stretch his arms out and groan, happily, in the sun behind her. "Time enough to go
back to Europe in the summer. Damn, this is the place to have a winter campaign! Even if we're not where
we're supposed to be . . ."
She didn't turn to look at him. From this high ridge of land she could see ten or fifteen miles inland.
Anonymous bleak rock hills lifted up in the west. In that direction, the sun was weak. The blue sky defied
focus, as if there were particles of blackness in it.
The edge of the Penitence. Well, I've been under the Darkness Perpetual before now . . , We have to
be within fifty or sixty leagues of Carthage. Have to be.
Guillaume Arnisout sauntered up beside her. "Maybe Prophet Swineherd here can tell us we're going to
wipe the floor with the enemy: that usually pays."
She caught the billman's sardonic expression focused on the pig-boy. Guillaume's much better looking
when he's not trying so hard, she thought. All long legs and narrow hips and wide shoulders. Tanned face
and hands. Weather-worn from much fighting. Fit.
But from where I am, he looks like a boy. Haven't I always preferred them older than me?
"If you're offering to prophesy," Yolande said to the swineherd, more baldly than she intended, "you've
got the wrong woman. I'm too old to have a future. I haven't any money. If any of us in the company had
money, we wouldn't be working for Hiiseyin Bey and the goddamn Turks!"
"This isn't a scam!" The boy pushed the uncut hair out of his eyes. His people's generations in this land
hadn't given him skin that would withstand the sun—where there was sun—and his flush might have been
from the heat, or it might have been shame.
She squatted down, resting her back against one of the olive tree trunks. Guillaume Arnisout
immediately stood to her left; the Frenchman incapable of failing to act as a lookout in any situation of
potential danger—not even aware, perhaps, that he was doing it.
And how much do I do, now, that I don't even know about? Being a soldier, as I am . . .
"It's not a scam," the boy said, patiently now, "because I can show you."
"Now look—what's your name?"
"Ricimer." He'd evidently watched more than one Frank trying to get their tongues around Visigoth
pronunciation and sighed before she could react. "Okay—Ric."
"Look, Ric, I don't know what you think you're going to show me. A handful of chicken bones, or
rune stones, or bead-cords, or cards. Whatever it is, I don't have any money."
"Couldn't take it anyway. I'm the Lord-Father's slave."
"That's the abbot here?" She held her hand high above the ground for theoretical illustration, since she
was still squatting. "Big man. Beard. Loud."
"No, that's Prior Athanagild. Abbot Muthari's not so old." The boy's eyes slitted, either against the sun
off the white earth or in embarrassment: Yolande couldn't tell which.
She frowned suddenly. "What's spriest doing owning slaves?"
Guillaume put in, "They're a load of bloody heathens in this monastery: who knows what they do? For
fuck's sake, who cares?"
Ric burst out, "He owns me because he saved me!" His voice skidded up the scale into a squeak, and
his fair skin plainly showed his flush. "I could have been in a galley or down a mine! That's why he bought
me!"
"Galleys are bad." Guillaume Arnisout spoke after a moment's silence, as if driven to the admission.
"Mines are worse than galleys. Chuck 'em in and use 'em up, lucky if you live twenty months."
"Does Father Mu—" She struggled over the name. "—Muthari know you go around prophesying?"
The boy shook his head. The lean pig, which had been rootling around under the olive trees, paced
delicately on high trotter toes up to his side. Sun glinted off the steel ring in its black snout. Yolande tensed,
wary.
The vicious bite of the pig will shear off a man's hand. Besides that, there is the stink, and the shit.
The pig sat down on its rear end, for all the world like a knight's hound after a hunt, and leaned the
weight of its shoulder against Ricimer's leg. Ric reached down and again scratched through the hair on its
back, and she saw its long-lashed eyes slit in delight.
"Hey!" Guillaume announced, sounding diverted. "Could do with some roast pork! Maybe the
rag-heads will sell us a couple of those. 'Lande, I'll go have a quick word, see what price they're asking.
Won't be much; we got 'em shit-scared!"
He turned to go around the outside of the Green Chapel, calling back over his shoulder, "Kid, look us out
a couple of fat weaners!"
The thought of hot, juicy, crunchy pork fat and meat dripping with sauce made Yolande's mouth run with
water. The memory of the smell of cooked pork flooded her senses.
If you burn the meat, though, it smells exactly the same as the Greek fire casualties on the galley.
"Demoiselle!" Ricimer's eyes were black in a face that made Yolande stare: his skin gone some color
between green and white. "Pigs are unclean! You can't eat them! The meat goes rotten in the heat! They
have tapeworms. Tell him! Tell him! We don't eat—"
Yolande cut off his cracking adolescent voice by nodding at the long-nosed greyhound-pig. "What do you
keep them for, then?"
"Garbage disposal," he said briefly. "Frankish demoiselle, please, tell that man not to ask the
Lord-Father!"
So many things are so important when you're that age. A year or two and you won't care about your pet
swine.
"Not up to me." She shrugged; thought about getting to her feet. "I guess the fortune-telling is off?"
"No." Still pale and sweaty, the young man shook his head. "I have to show you."
The determination of a foreign boy was irritating, given the presence of Margaret Hammond's dead body
in the chapel behind her. Yolande nonetheless found herself resorting to a diplomatic rejection.
Young men need listening to, even when they're talking rubbish.
"If it's a true vision, God will send it to me anyway."
The boy reached out and tugged at her cuff with fingers dusty from the pig's coarse hair. "Yes! God will
send it to you now. Let me show you. We'll need to sit with Vir Viridianus and pray in the chapel—"
The face of the woman came vividly into her mind, as it had been before the bones were bloodied and
the flesh smashed. Margie— Guido—grinning as she bent to wind the windlass of her crossbow; mundane
as a washerwoman wringing out sheets between her two hands.
"Not with Margie in there!"
"You need the Face of God!"
"The Face of God?" Yolande tugged at the leather laces that held the neck of her mail shirt closed. She
fumbled down under the riveted metal rings, between her gambeson and linen shirt and her hot flesh, and
pulled out a rosary. "This?"
Dark polished beads with a carved acorn for every tenth bead; and on the short trailing chain, carved
simply with two oak leaves and wide eyes, the face of the Green Christ.
The boy stared. "Where'd you get that?"
"There's a few Arians in the company: didn't you know?" She laughed softly to herself: "They won't stay
that way when the company goes north over the seas again, but for now, they'll keep in good with God as
He is here. Doesn't stop them gambling, though. So: you want me to pray to this? And then I'll see this
vision?"
He held his hand out. "Give it to me."
Reluctantly, Yolande passed the trickle of beads into his cupped palms. She watched him sort through,
hold it, lift the rosary so that the carved Green Man face swung between them, alternately catching
shafts of sunlight and the darkness of shade. Swinging. Slowing. Stopping.
A pendant face, the carved surface of the wood softly returning the light to her eyes.
Where I made my mistake, she thought later, was in listening to a boy. I had one of my own. Why did I
expect this one to be as smart as a man?
At the time, she merely slid under the surface of the day, her vision blurring, her body still.
And saw.
Yolande saw dirt, and a brush. Dusty dirt, within an inch or two of her face. And it was being swept
back with a fine animal-hair brush, to uncover—
Bones.
Yolande was conscious of sitting back up on her heels, although she could not see the bits of one's body
one usually sees out of peripheral vision. She looked across the trench, conscious that she was in an area of
digging—someone throwing up hasty earth-defenses, maybe?—and not alone.
A woman kneeling on the other side of the gash in the dirt sat up and put a falling swath of dark hair
back behind her equally dark ear. Her other hand held the small and puzzling brush.
"Yes," the woman said thoughtfully. "I suppose you would have looked just like that."
Yolande blinked. Saw cords staked a few inches above the ground. And saw that what also
poked out of this trench, blackened in places and in some cases broken, were teeth.
"A grave," Yolande said aloud, understanding. "Is it mine?"
"I don't know. How old are you?" The brown woman waved her hand impatiently. "No, don't tell me; I'll
get it. Let me see. . . . Mail shirt: could be anywhere from the Carthaginian defeats of Rome onward. But
that looks like medieval work. Western work. So, not a Turk." Her shaped thick eyebrows lowered. "That
helmet's a giveaway. Archer's sallet. I'd put you in the fifteenth century some-where.
Mid-century ... A European come over to North Africa to fight in the Visigoth-Turkish wars, after the fall
of Constantinople. You're around five and a half centuries old. Am I right?"
Yolande had stopped listening -ax. helmet. Reaching up, startled, she touched the rim of her sallet. She
fumbled for the buckle at her jaw.
Why do I see myself dressed for war? This is a divine vision: it's not as though I can be hurt.
The helmet was gone. Immediately, all the sounds of the area rushed in on her. Crickets, birds; a dull
rumbling too close to be thunder. And a clear sky, but air that stank and made her eyes tear up. She ruffled
her fingers through her hair, still feeling the impress of the helmet lining on her head. The cool wind made
her realize it was morning. Early morning, somewhere in North Africa ... in the future that exists in God's
mind?
"Is that my grave?"
The woman was staring at her, Yolande realized.
"I said, is that my—"
"Don't know." The words bit down sharply, overriding her own. The dark eyes fixed on her face in
concentration, evidently seeing more of it now the sallet was off.
Yolande drew composure around her as she did before a fight, feeling the same churning bowel cramps.
/ thought it would be like a dream. I wouldn 't be aware / was having a vision. This is terrifying.
"I won't know," the woman said, more measuredly, "until I get to the pelvis."
That was curious. Yolande frowned. Some of this I will only discover the meaning of by prayer
afterward. Pelvis? Let me see: what do I remember of doctors—is that what she is, this woman,
grubbing in the dirt? Odd kind of medic.
"I have borne a child," Yolande said. "You don't need to find my bones: I can tell you that myself."
"Now that would be something." The woman shook her head. "That would be really something."
The woman wore very loose hose, and ankle boots, and a thin doublet with the arms evidently unpointed
and removed. Her Turkish-coffee skin would take the sunlight better, Yolande thought. But I would still
cover up long before Nones, if it were me.
The woman sounded sardonic. "Finding a female soldier who was a mother—what kind of an icon
would that be?"
Yolande felt a familiar despair wash through her. Why is it always the women who don't believe me?
"Yes, I've been a whore; no, I'm not a whore now." Yolande repeated her catechism with practiced
slickness. "Yes, I use a crossbow; yes, I have the strength to wind the windlass; yes, I am strong enough to
shoot it; yes, I can kill people. Why is it so hard to believe? I see tradeswomen in butcher's yards every
day, jointing carcasses. Why is it so difficult to think of women in a similar trade? That's all this is."
Yolande made a brief gesture at what she could feel now: her mail shirt and the dagger and falchion
hanging from her belt.
"It's just butchery. That's all. The only difference is that the animals fight back."
She has been making the last remark long enough to know that it usually serves only to show up any
ex-soldiers in a group. They will be the ones who laugh, with a large degree of irony.
The dark-haired woman didn't laugh. She looked pained and disgusted. "Do you know what I was before
I was an archaeologist?"
Yolande politely said, "No," thinking, A what?
"I was a refugee. I lived in the camps." Another shake of the other woman's head, less in negation than
rejection. "I don't want to think there has been five, six hundred years of butchery and nothing's changed.'"
The wind swept across the diggings. Which evidently were not defenses, since they made no military
sense. They more resembled a town, Yolande thought, as one might see it from a bluff or cliff overlooking
it from a height. Nothing left but the stumps of walls.
"Every common man gets forgotten," Yolande said. "Is that what this is showing me? I— Is this her
grave, not mine? Margie's? I know that few of us outlive our children's memories. But I—I need to know
now that she's recognized for what she is. That she's buried with honor."
Margaret would have died fighting beside any man in the company, as they would have died at her
shoulder. This is what needs recognition, this willingness to trust one another with their lives.
Recognition—and remembrance. Honor is the only word she would think of that acknowledged it.
The woman reached down and brushed delicately at the hinge of a jawbone. "Honor. . . yes. Well.
Funerals are for the living."
"Funerals are for God!" Yolande blurted, startled.
"If you believe, yes, I suppose they are. But I find funerals are for the peopte left behind. So it's not just
one more body thrown into a pit because cholera went through the tents, and it was too dangerous to leave
the bodies out, and there was no more wood for pyres. So they've got a grave marker you can remember,
even if you can't visit it. So they're not just—one more image on a screen."
Screen? A little sardonically Yolande reflected, We are not the class of people who are put into
tapestries, you and I. The best I'll get is to be one of a mass of helmets in the background. You might get to
be a fieldworker, while the nuns spend all their skills embroidering the lord's bridle and all his other tack.
"If you believe?" Yolande repeated it as a question.
"If there was a God, would He let children die in thousands just because of dirty water?"
If the specifics evaded Yolande, the woman's emotion was clear. Yolande protested, "Yes, I've doubted,
too. But I see the evidence of Him every day. The priests' miracles—"
"Oh, well. I can't argue with fundamentalism." The woman's mouth tugged up at the side. "Which
medieval Christianity certainly is."
A voice interrupted, calling unintelligibly from somewhere off in the destroyed village settlement.
"I'm coming!" the woman shouted. "Hold on, will you!"
The settlement's layout was not familiar, Yolande realized with relief. It was not the monastery.
So if I am fated to die on this damned coast, it isn't yet.
The woman turned her head back. There was an odd greediness about the way she studied Yolande's
face.
"They'll put it into the books as 'village militia.' Any skeleton with a female pelvis who's in a mail shirt
must have picked up armor and weapons as an act of desperation, defending her town."
There was desperation in her tone, also. And self-loathing; Yolande could hear it.
And this mad woman is not even a soldier. What can it matter to her, digging in the dirt for bodies,
whether Margie and I are remembered as what we were?
The woman pointed at her. Yolande realized it was the mail shirt she was indicating. "Why did you do
this! War? Fighting?"
"It. . . wasn't what I intended to do. I found out that I was good at it."
"But it's wrong." The woman's expression blazed, intense. "It's sick."
"Yes, but. . ." Yolande paused. "I enjoy it. Except maybe the actual fighting."
She gave the woman a quick grin.
"All the swanning around Christendom, and gambling, and eating yourself silly, and fornicating, and not
working—that's all great. I mean, can you see me in a nunnery, or as a respectable widow in Paris? Oh,
and the getting rich, if you're lucky enough to loot somewhere. That's good, too. It's worth risking getting
killed every so often, because, hey, somebody has to survive the field of battle; why not me?"
"But killing other people?"
Yolande's smile faded. "I can do that. I can do all of it. Except. . . the guns. I just choke up, when
there's gunfire. Cry. And they always think it's because I'm a woman. So I try not to let anyone see me,
now."
The dark-skinned woman rested her brush down on the earth.
"More sensitive" The .last word had scorn in it. She added, without the ironic tone, "More sensible. As
a woman. You know the killing is irrational."
Yolande found herself self-mockingly smiling. "No. I'm not sensible about hackbuts or cannon—the
devil's noise doesn't frighten me. It makes me cry, because I remember so many dead people. I lost more
than forty people I knew, at the fall."
The other woman's aquiline face showed a conflicted sadness, difficult to interpret.
Yolande shrugged. "If you want scary war, try the line fight. Close combat with edged weapons. That's
why I use a crossbow."
The woman's dignified features took on something between sympathy and contempt.
"No women in close-quarters fighting, then?"
"Oh, yeah." Yolande paused. "But they're idiots."
Guillaume's face came into her mind.
"Everybody with a polearm is an idiot. . . . But I guess it's easier for a woman to swing a poleax than
pull a two-hundred-pound longbow."
The other woman sat back on her heels, eyes widening. "A poleax? Easier?'
"Ever chop wood?" And off the woman's realization, Yolande gave her a there you are look. "It's just a
felling ax on a long stick ... a thinner blade, even. Margie said the ax and hammer were easier. But in the
end she came in with the crossbows, because I was there."
And look how much good that did her.
"Not everybody can master the skills of crossbows or arquebuses. . . ." This was an argument Yolande
had had before, way too often. "Why does everybody think it's the weapons that are the difficult thing for a
woman fighting? It's the guys on your own side: Not the killing."
The fragments of bone and teeth in the earth had each their own individual shadow, caused by the suri
lifting higher over the horizon.
"The truth is important." Yolande found the other woman watching her with wistfulness as she looked
up. Yolande emphasized, "That's the truth: she was a soldier. She shouldn't have to be something else just
so they can bury her."
"I know. I want proof of women soldiers. And ... I want no soldiers, women or men." The woman
recovered her errant lock of hair and pushed it back again. Yolande saw the delicate gold of an earring in
the whorl there: studded barbarically through the flesh of the ear's rim.
"Of course," the woman said measuredly, getting to her feet, "we have no idea, really. We guess, from
what we dig up. We have illuminations, dreams. I visualize you. But it's all stories."
She stared down at Yolande.
"What matters is who tells the stories, and what stories never get told. Because people acton what the
histories are. People live their lives based on nothing better than a skull, a fragment of a mail ring, and a
misremembered battle site. People die for that 'truth'!"
Moved by the woman's distress, Yolande stood up. She rubbed her hands together, brushing off the dust,
preparatory to walking forward to help the woman. And it was the oddest sensation possible: she rubbed
her hands together and felt nothing. No skin, no warm palms, no calluses. Nothing.
"Yolande! Yolatukr
She opened her eyes—and that was the most strange thing, since she had not had them shut.
Guillaume Arnisout squatted in front of her, his lean brown fingers holding her wrists in a painful grip. He
was holding her hands apart. The skin of her palms stung. She looked, and saw they were red. As if she
had repetitively rubbed the thin, spiky dust of the courtyard between them.
A cool, hard, flexible snout poked into her ribs, compressing the links of her mail shirt. Yolande flinched;
turned her head. The sow met her gaze. The animal's eyes were blue-green, surrounded by whites:
unnervingly human.
What have I been shown? Why?
A yard away, Ricimer lay on his side. White foam dried in the corners of his mouth. Crescents of white
showed under his eyelids.
摘要：

TheLogisticsofCarthageMaryGentle/haveputthisdocumenttogetherfromthedifferentsourcesincludedintheAshpapers,andhaveagaintranslatedthelanguagesintomodernEnglish.Wherenecessary,Ihavesubstitutedcolloquialobscenitiestogiveaflavourofthemedievaloriginal.Letthecasualreader,expectingtheHollywoodMiddleAges,aba...

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