The Enterprise of Death (27 page)

Manuel was waiting for them by the north gate with two horses Monique had acquired for their journey, a large bay and a dappled mare hardly bigger than a pony. The rapidity and thoroughness of his palm’s recovery, as well as Monique’s drying lesions, pleased Manuel greatly, and he waved his scarred hand at them as they approached. While Monique quibbled with Manuel over the strapping of the saddles, Awa tried to calm her unhappy heart enough to recite her farewell speech to her first and best friend among the living, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern.

“What’s this?” Manuel interrupted her before she really got the tangle of her words sorted out. “But I’m, that is, we’re sharing a horse, aren’t we?”

“What?” Awa could scarcely believe it. “But we’re not going to Bern.”

“Well, yes, but I thought I might—”

“Earn some coin,” said Monique. “I hired us some muscle for the road, lean though it fuckin is. Bern’s got ’ores, bein a civilized spot, an’ so we’ll pop in there long the way.”

“Really?” Awa could hardly believe it. “I can see your ladies!”

“Ah,” said Manuel, picturing himself riding up his walk with Awa and Monique, picturing his wife and niece and servants and maybe his already disapproving father-in-law coming out to meet them. “Ahhhh. Maybe we could, I suppose. I wouldn’t want to, you know, slow you down.”

“Don’t worry, Awa,” said Monique, swinging onto the larger horse. “There’ll be ladies aplenty soon enough, an’ ones what’ll put up with his queerness!”

Manuel turned a very deep shade of crimson, arousing Awa’s
curiosity, but when she asked him about it later he muttered something about being an artist and having responsibilities to his craft. In the meantime, he simply blushed and got onto the smaller horse. Awa had never been so close to one of the beasts, let alone ridden one, and was more than a little reluctant. Her insistence that she walk along beside them was met with derisive laughter from Monique, who wasted no time in hoisting Awa onto the saddle before her.

“You’re a fuckin big girl, right enough,” Monique breathed in Awa’s ear. “Fit enough ta wrestle me down, maybe, and sure enough wrestle down a Manuel or two. You like wrestlin, Awa?”

“I’m not …” Awa began, but then Monique nudged the horse into a canter and whatever words Awa had on the matter escaped along with her breath. They were moving far too fast for the necromancer’s liking, but Monique’s burly arms anchored her reasonably well, meaty hands holding the reins in Awa’s lap. They were on the road and making good time, Manuel trying to keep up on the little horse, and once she triumphed over her motion sickness and vertigo Awa leaned back into Monique’s solid chest and tried to enjoy the ride.

Awa and Monique fucked twice before arriving in Bern. The first time Manuel had insisted on sleeping in a tavern’s common room because he claimed his back would never sit right again if he did not have one honest night’s sleep on a pallet, please, and as Monique was more frugal with her money she camped in the foothills outside the hamlet’s walls with Awa. Dusk drifted down through the grove of red willows as Monique and Awa washed the road dust, grime, and sweat from themselves in the frigid stream running beside their camp, both women growing less and less subtle in the glances they took of each other’s shivering bodies.

“Your nips’re pink enough, for a blackamoor,” observed Monique as she squatted in the stream, gasping as the current struck the warmest part of her body.

“Thank … thank you?” Awa scrambled over the rocks to quit the stream when Monique grabbed her arm, tight but not unwelcomely so.

“Why doncha rinse like I done?” The seriousness in Monique’s eyes made Awa turn away.

“It’s cold, and—”

“Ya wanna fuck, Awa?”

“What?” Awa blinked at the dripping, scarred mercenary, Monique’s freckled face and beech hair glistening in the twilight.

“Not sayin I wanna make ya my sweetin, Awa, I’m jus askin if ya wanna ’ave a nice little fuck while Manuel’s off cryin ta himself in the tavern. Ya don’t like what I’m doin call it off, an’ if ya do ya throw me some face, aye?”

“Just … just fuck each other?” Awa swallowed.

“Never fucked a—yeah, jus fuck each other. Do. You. Wanna. Fuck?”

Awa did, unreservedly, though the Dutch giantess was a far cry from what she had previously considered beautiful. Monique was, however, a tremendous amount of fun in bed, or would have been if they had a bed to employ. They built up the fire then went deeper into the grove lest a traveler come upon them, and Monique proceeded to give Awa something she had been lacking for years. The woman’s hands and lips were no softer than the rest of her but the strength in them felt wonderful to Awa, the feeling of breath on her neck and ears and breasts and stomach and everywhere else a novel sensation, and a welcome one. The warmth of Monique seemed to burn Awa as her partner reached her destination and began running her scalding tongue up the sides of Awa’s labia, and when that slick, blazing tongue gently spread Awa open and took its time reaching her clit the younger woman began to buck uncontrollably. Fingers and tongue rhythmically pressing toward one another with only Awa’s most sensitive region between them, Monique finished her partner with aplomb.

“That storm a yours’ been brewin awhile, yeah?” Monique grinned as she crawled up beside Awa, who stared at her wide-eyed and awed. Then Awa burst into tears and threw her arms around Monique, who awkwardly tried to soothe her so she might find some recompense sooner rather than later. When she finally got her settled into place between her thighs Monique found Awa every bit as enthusiastic as she was clumsy and inexperienced, but eventually Awa brought her friend to an occasion,
the woman nearly tearing out a patch of Awa’s scalp as she gripped her hair and ground against her face and fingers.

The fire had burned low but they built it back up, drinking and talking and smiling at one another, Monique occasionally pinching or throwing her arm around Awa. Late in the evening Monique withdrew one of her matchlock pistols at Awa’s request and passed her the weapon. “Aye, I ’ad the same look in my eye, Lord’ll vouch, first time I got close enough ta see what they was an’ what they was bout. See, ta tell it right it went like this …”

The girl grew up amidst the estuaries of what had been the Groote Waard before the Flood of Saint Elizabeth transformed fertile countryside and village alike into an inland sea of sweet, brown water. On the newly formed banks willows grew, and on the islands that had once been hillocks many leagues from any stream or pond more willows grew, and the girl grew up on these banks, on these islands. They cut the willows, the girl and her mother and father and brothers and sisters, and they sold the willow bark, which was good for doctors, who ground it up with their mortars and pestles for their medicines, and they sold the willow wood, which was good for everyone else, as it smelled sweet and burned slow and hot, and they sold the baskets they wove from the willow boughs, which were good for doctor and farmer alike, being light but strong and sturdy.

The girl was named Monique, and her parents sold the willow, and when times grew lean they sold Monique. She was stronger than all her brothers and sisters, and so the man who needed bellows worked thought himself fortunate, for in addition to being an ox Monique was also a woman, and so there would be no risk of her pursuing more recompense than her master gave her. This man was a smith of small arms, and he knew the family because he found the willow ash to be the best for making powder, and like any good smith he tested everything before selling it, and testing guns meant using powder, and that meant
either buying it or making it, and there was nothing the smith would buy if he could make it himself—that both his wife and would-be heir died in childbirth was the only reason he sought outside help in working his works.

Monique worked very, very hard for the smith in his shop in Rotterdam, and guarded his forge when he went off to broker deals or simply get out for a little while, and being far from stupid she paid much mind to what the smith did to build his guns. When he was out she examined the castings, the tools, and the pictures in the manuals she could not read, and as years passed and the smith grew older she unobtrusively began helping more and more with finer and finer details of the smithing process, until quite without his knowing it she was as good an apprentice as any craftsman could seek.

When the smith decided to sell his shop, having made enough coin from the French sojourns into Lombardy politics and the accompanying need for lots and lots of guns and powder, he tearfully dismissed Monique with a few coins and the clothes on her back. When her request for a letter certifying her skill at smithing was laughingly rebuked, she asked what exactly she was meant to do with her life, and he suggested whoring. The guns she took with her would have afforded her a comfortable purse had she sold them, but Monique had no intention of parting with them, especially as they might prove useful if the smith recovered from the drubbing she had given him and sent men after her.

She knew the guns she had helped make had always gone south, and so did she, hoping to find one willing to overlook her gender and employ her in a smithy. None did, not in Burgundy and not in France and certainly not in northern Spain and not in the Empire and not in the Swiss Confederacy, but there at last she found some work that enabled her to earn coin while working with guns. During the years of traveling and seeking out wealth she had found herself in many, many dangerous circumstances,
and had been in countless fights, and one evening in a tavern, after she beat three disrespectful Swiss mercenaries to a pulp, their captain, a brute named von Stein, hired her on the spot.

Monique was so overjoyed to find someone willing to take her on despite her being a woman that she did not even realize what she was hired for until the next day, when she was sober and enlisted. If anyone asked she was supposed to tell them she was an unfortunately feminine-looking man, but usually the willow-cutter’s daughter simply responded by pistol-whipping the offending party in the mouth, and that seemed to get the job done well enough. She recognized better than most the limited capabilities of her preferred weapon and, courtesy of von Stein, received dispensation to occasionally act in a more traditional mercenary capacity while still carrying her guns, instead of always being left behind with the rest of the often ineffectual gunners.

“In the fuckin shitstorm’s where the blood gets hottest,” she concluded, “which is ’ow me and Manuel got so fuckin close— boy kin stick’em like a born butcher.”

“You’re amazing!” said Awa at last. “You overcame your cruel master and lived to tell the tale!”

“He weren’t such the motherfucker,” said Monique. “I felt a bit bad, for a time, seein’s he was nigh sixty when I laid’em out, an’ lay’em out I fuckin did. Some men ’alf ’is age don’t recover from a beatin like that, teeth everywhere, an’ he did teach me what I know, or knew. Don’t wager I could cast a turd out my ass after these years without a smithy.”

“I’m sure you could!”

“Well, maybe I could cast that,” admitted Monique. “But what’s your yarn, little sister? How’d a nun come ta drink with the damned, eh?”

“That’s a story for a colder night,” Awa said nervously. “I just, I don’t—”

“No worries, no hurries,” said Monique. “I’ll hear it when ya tell it, an’ not a day fore then.”

“Thank you,” said Awa, her severity giving Monique pause.

“Well, we waited down the stars, so ta bed then?”

The next morning Awa found herself more than a little infatuated with Monique, but the woman was far cooler than she had previously been with Awa, and positively glacial compared to the previous night. Still, the hurt of Monique’s standoffishness was slight compared to the pain Omorose had caused her, and Awa attributed her friend’s demeanor to not wanting Manuel to pick up on the shift in their relationship. Awa focused instead on the sharp green pines and sharper gray stones girding the road, the pale blue sky and paler wisps of cloud wreathing the peaks as they rode into the Alps—being once again enclosed by mountains was a comfort to the necromancer.

The second time they fucked all three had been drinking by the fire, and they snuck off when Manuel became viciously sick, throwing up and moaning like a gluttonous hound that had eaten too much of a stolen roast. This encounter was just as disappointing as the first time had been fulfilling, with Monique bringing along one of her pistols and insisting Awa rub the barrel against herself while the mercenary watched, masturbating, and only when the heavy, cold bronze became too abrasive and Awa stopped did Monique consent to giving her partner the laziest of attentions with her tongue. Awa’s orgasm was little more pleasurable than those she gave herself, which were also less embarrassing than rubbing a weapon over her most delicate parts as her paramour drunkenly gave her instructions and pleasured herself rather than having Awa assist.