I heard, at my back, the sound of a belt sliding through a buckle. I stood very still. There was the rush and thud of clothes hitting the floor. Then a faint splash, followed by a sigh of sheer pleasure, half stifled, which made the muscles of my stomach tighten unaccountably. Perhaps your body was not merely a tool, after all.
After a while you asked, in a languorous, amused voice I hardly recognized, “Did you seek a bath only for my sake? Was I so rank?”
You were, I reminded myself firmly, the Virgin Saint. You couldn’t understand the temptations and impurities of the less chaste. I kept my back virtuously turned. “Do—do men and women not bathe separately?”
“They do.”
I asked, haltingly but not entirely facetiously, “And are you—not a woman?”
A sharp sound, not quite a laugh. “Turn around and see.” I did not; this, I thought, was the sort of behavior that ought to earn a man a medal.
Eventually you sighed a little. Water splashed. “A woman may not dress as I do, or bear arms, or carry any device that is not her husband’s or father’s. Yet I do these things, and I am not punished by church or crown—and so it is easier for most people if I am not a woman.”
“Do you mind it?”
More splashing sounds, the rattle of soap on the ledge. “I couldn’t say. Yvanne dresses me in fine gowns sometimes, for holy days and feasts. The first time I tripped over my own hem, and the whole court laughed and laughed. I am not sure which I prefer: To be taken for something I am not, or to fail at being what I am.”
A weird shock went through me, as if I’d caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror I hadn’t known was there: I knew what it was, to feel that you were doing a poor impression of what you were. I said, “I would not laugh at you.”
“You would prefer me in a dress, then?” You asked it lightly, as a joke, but there was a bitter edge to your voice that made me turn.
Whatever I meant to say was instantly obliterated by the sight of your bare back: the pale streaks of scars, the ridged muscles on either side of your spine, the shadowed divots behind your shoulders. The white tangle of your hair falling over them, wet and soap-slick. You stretched, carelessly.
I looked away. My mouth was very dry. “I would prefer you—however you chose to be.”
“No one chooses that, boy.” You sounded so sad and so human that I had the wild urge to turn back around, to step closer—but no. You were Saint Una the Everlasting, and I would not profane you.
Instead, I left the room and waited in the hall. I struck up a conversation with one of the attendants, and by the time you emerged—fully dressed once more, no longer talkative or languorous—I had two new tales of the Red Knight to replace the memory of your bare skin.
I made a habit of collecting stories about you, after that.
I was good at it, talking to strangers, pulling gossip from them like twine from the spool. It was not unlike working in the archives: sifting through the various contradictory accounts, plucking threads from each tale and weaving them into a single whole.
I was less good at talking to you. But I found if I repeated what the villagers told me, you might be provoked into correcting them (I had him disarmed in six moves, not threeor, fondly,No, never. I’d wager Ancel started that rumor himself), and in this way you, too, told me your story.
You told me of the Brigand Prince and the False Kings, of your first duel and of the happy fortnight you spent in Morvain’s bed, beguiled by nothing other than her dimpled white thighs and clever hands. You were caught together, and Morvain was sent to the convent—where, you had heard, she was not altogether unhappy.
I fell silent for a little while after this last story, thinking of the chastity vows young girls sometimes took in the name of the Virgin Saint, and of the army nurse I’d known who was discharged for possession of unnatural literature, and of Professor Sawbridge’s dictum that if the history you were reading wasn’t filthy then someone had censored the good bits.
Thinking, too, of you: not as a symbol or a saint—pure, inviolate, beyond both desire and desiring—but as a human, with human appetites. I wondered a little wildly if you enjoyed men at all, or if you were like that army nurse I’d known.
I adjusted my collar, which had grown tight and overwarm, and found you watching me with something like amusement. “Have I shocked you?”
“No,” I lied. “It’s just—well, one expects a certain—from a saint—”
The amusement deepened. You said, “I promise you, I am no saint,” in alow, wry voice which told me Morvain was neither your first nor your last such affair, and which cost me several hours of sleep that night.
The one subject you would not discuss was the Black Bastion. Of that battle—your grandest victory, which won the First Crusade and made Dominion the greatest nation of your time or mine—you would say nothing at all. You would only tighten your jaw and watch the fire, with something red and awful in your eyes.
I ducked my head and kept writing.
It was difficult work, transmuting all the dull indignities of travel—the gristly dinners and the grueling miles, the blisters and the stiff joints and pissing in ditches—into a tale to lift the hearts and minds of a nation. Line by line I made you—shattered and silent, half blind—into Sir Una Everlasting, hero of Dominion.
I could almost see her sometimes, a shining, heroic figure transposed over you. One day, I knew, she would replace you entirely, so that there would be no trace of you left at all.
At this thought I would be overtaken by a wash of inexplicable melancholy and put my work away.
But then, without the work, troubling thoughts would sometimes come to me. I might wonder if I’d ever return to my own time, or if I was lost here, like an arrow loosed into the past and never recovered. Or if dragons could really breathe fire hot enough to melt plate armor, and if you could truly face one alone.
