Maze of Moonlight (20 page)

But even though they had died for nothing, they had died believing in themselves. That, Christopher considered, was something, at least. It was a small something, to be sure,w hen weighed against all the needless death, but it gave back to the tawdry little tale of pigheadedness something of a sense of grace. Roland might have been an idiot, but unlike the current baron of Aurverelle, he was at least a consistent idiot.

“
'Sire cumpainz, faites le vus de gred?

Ja est ço Rollanz ki tant vus soelt amer.'
”

The sentiment was curt, monosyllabic, and Christopher, filled with the memories of the absurdity that had taken place on the plateaus of Bulgaria, could well imagine the feelings behind Roland's words. Men about him, dead and dying, more Saracens closing in, Oliver—or maybe it was Coucy or Philippe de Bar or Odard de Chasseron: the memories pressed about Christopher, and for an instant, he did not know where he was—blind with blood and wounds and lashing out at anything that came within reach. And yet, with despair hovering over him like a dark angel, still Roland—or Christopher, perhaps?—had spoken with affection:
Sir Friend, did you strike me on purpose
?

And that look from Coucy as Bayazet had swept in. . . .

Despite Nicopolis, despite madness, despite a bitterness that had driven a stake of wormwood through his heart, Christopher found that he was weeping. Yes, they had believed in themselves and their actions. And how much did he himself believe in Christopher delAurvre?

I am the master of Aurverelle.

Master of what?

The
Chanson
was a long tale, and no harper regardless of skill or endurance could hope to finish it in a single night. The custom had always been to end the first evening with the death of Roland, and to take up Charlemagne's revenge, the Moors' defeat, and Ganelon's execution on the second. So Natil appeared to be intending, for her music and her voice soared up plaintively as she sang of Roland's care of the dying Oliver, and then finally of the count's own death.

“
Devers Espaigne gist en un pui agut

A l'une main si ad sun piz batut . . .
”

And perhaps that was for the best, after all. Roland had played his part, and he would never have wanted to finish out his days in France, an old man in his dotage, planting peach trees in the garden. No, he would die a conqueror, his face toward Spain, his arrogance and his pigheadedness undiminished. Smaller, lesser men would come after, pick up the pieces, fit together some sort of an accommodation that would hobble along until another Roland rose up and ground it into the earth.

Christopher wept. But it was late, and Natil was drawing her song to a close.

“
Sun destre guant en ad vers deu tendut

Angle del ciel I descendent a lui.

Aoi.
”

Christopher lifted his head. Natil sang on:

“
Sun destre guant a deu en puroffrit

E de sa main seinz Gabriel lad pris;

Desur sun braz teneit le chief enclin

Juintes ses mains est alez a sa fin.

Deus li tramist sun angle cerubin

E Seint Michiel de la mer del peril

Ensemble od els Seinze Gabriels I vint

L'anme del cunte portent en pareis.

Aoi.
”

Natil's final cry rose up, filled the space beneath the vaulting of the hall and, with a shimmer of harpstrings, faded to silence.

No one in the hall moved. Christopher was prepared to believe that no one, including himself, was even breathing, and he saw that he was not the only one with tears on his face. Old Jerome, dried up and pragmatic, had covered his face with his hands and was sobbing, and Pytor had fallen to his knees. Raffalda had left off her spinning and was crying openly, and even Ranulf, veteran of a thousand battles, noble and ignoble, was wiping his eyes.

But as Natil, as though exhausted by her performance, sat with bowed head, a single line of her song was still ringing in Christopher's memory, shining out like a star from all the death and the futility. He had wanted the magic, and he was suddenly wondering if he might have been given a little piece of it, just enough so that he could, perhaps, find his way back to the rest on his own.

Sun destre guant en ad vers deu tendut . . .

Roland's last act was something that, though sparkling with the same chivalric glitter that had dusted the rest of his gleaming life with diamonds, had a touch of the humble to it, an acknowledgment of his limitations.

His right glove he lifted up to God.

And what delAurvre had ever lifted up his right glove to anyone? What delAurvre had ever done anything that was motivated in the least bit by humility? Even Christopher's journey to Nicopolis had, at bottom, been an attempt to burnish up what he had seen as the tarnished honor left behind by his grandfather.

Sun destre guant en ad vers deu tendut . . .

If he could do that: offer his glove to . . . to someone. Not to God. That would not work. He did not want to pledge himself to any transcendent being whose existence had been used alternately as a lure and a club for the last fourteen centuries. If he, a delAurvre (and there it was again, that overweening pride) was to offer service, it had to be to something untainted by exploitation or profit. It had to be humble, without reward, and it had to smack of common humanity, of that Kingdom that included all the Hobs and Tims and Toms—and Vanessas—of the world.

He stood up. The hall seemed to breathe again. “My thanks, dear harper, for your song.”

Natil lifted her head, stood, and curtsied. “Have I pleased you, my lord?” Her eyes were luminous, as though gleaming with starlight. “Did I give you what you desired?”

Christopher nodded. Humility. Common humanity. And he knew what he could do. “You did indeed. Thank you.”

***

Paul delMari, baron of Furze, read the letter a second time. When he finished, he was just as puzzled as he had been the first time. He sat back in his chair and contemplated trying the letter a third time, but he knew that he had understood it perfectly well the first time. Reading it twice had been superfluous. Thrice would be the mark of an idiot.

“What do you make of this, Isabelle?” he asked his wife as he rose and offered her the parchment.

Isabelle set aside her embroidery and took it. She knew how to read better than most educated men, and for an instant, her eyebrows lifted at the salutation, but then she skimmed rapidly over the words, her lips barely moving.

She finished, dropped the letter onto her lap. “Christopher delAurvre?”

Paul nodded. “Christopher, indeed. He appears to have recovered from his trip home from Nicopolis, although whether also from his madness remains to be seen.”

“Asking for help?”

Paul shrugged. At times like this, without any clear-cut problem or solution at hand, possessed only of a sense of bewilderment, he was inclined to be at a loss. Perhaps that was why Jehan had left him: the boy had recognized his father as something of a ditherer. “It's for a worthy cause.”

Isabelle shook her head, pondering. “Didn't his grandfather kill your grandfather?”

Paul shrugged again, uncomfortably. “That was fifty years ago,” he said, “and a case of misunderstanding, I believe. Roger was always a bit hasty. Except toward the end.”

Isabelle usually kept her feelings to herself, but a bubble of incredulity rose to her normally tranquil surface, broke, and spread openly across her face. She held up the letter. “Husband . . . I'm not sure at all about this.”

“Well, it's very simple,” said Paul. He rose and took a turn about the bedroom, hands behind his back. “He's worried about the free companies destroying Adria—as though we need much help these days—and he wants an alliance. He's certainly not being underhanded about it.”

Isabelle snorted delicately. “The delAurvres have always been underhanded.”

“Not since Roger reformed. They've actually been rather exemplary since then.”

Isabelle set the parchment aside and resumed her embroidery: an ornate chasuble for Abbot Wenceslas of the Benedictine monastery across the valley. “What do you want to do?”

“Well,” said Paul, “initially, I want your opinion of getting entangled with Aurverelle.” Politics. He did not like them, but his position occasionally forced him to roll up his sleeves and plunge his hands into the stink. “I think I have it, though.”

“The delAurvres are too unpredictable,” said Isabelle as she tied off a thread. “Look at Roger: one day he's about to destroy the Free Towns, and the next he's turned completely around. Everyone knows that story. He came back from Beldon Forest a changed man. Some minstrel even went and composed a song about Roger of Tarsus.”

“And was promptly flattened by Roger for his temerity, as I recall.”

Isabelle went back to her embroidery. “You must admit that it was a sudden conversion.”

“I suspect there were . . . reasons for that.” Paul went to the window. If he craned his neck, he could peek around the corner of the tower to the left and catch a glimpse of Malvern Forest. So few these days. And fading fast. Isabelle had not known about the Elves when she had married him, but she had reconciled herself to their existence and visits as befitted the dutiful and honorable wife that she was. She did not like to talk about them, true, but she had accommodated them.

Very few now, though, were willing to accommodate them. Very few, in fact, believed in them at all, nor, indeed, had any cause to. Perhaps for that very reason, it had been a long time since anyone from Malvern had come to Shrinerock. Times were changing. Getting darker. Much darker. Autumn had taken hold of the world.

“Reasons?”

“Ah . . . reasons.”

Isabelle looked at him, inquiring, and he was afraid that he was going to have to talk about the whole messy incident when the door opened and his sister Catherine strode in, tall, blond, and strong. She was clad in simple garments of green and gray: a tunic, and breeches that bloused just above soft, knee-high boots. “Look at this,” she said. “I've been looking for these for years, and I finally found them. They weren't with Mother's things at all: they were up in a chest in the third storeroom. They fit, too!” Hands out from her sides, she modeled the garments. “Well, what do you think?”

Paul had sat down hard when she had entered, and now he caught his breath. “Dear Lady, Catherine, you gave me a turn. I thought one of the Elves had come.”

Catherine beamed at the compliment, but Isabelle was shaking her head fondly. “Perhaps you'll be moving to the forest full-time now, sweet?”

Catherine smiled at her. “Only when you and Paul move with me, dear sister.”

Smiling affectionately, Isabelle plunged her needle into the embroidery once again.

But Catherine's sudden appearance had started Paul thinking. Roger had changed. And now Christopher, after remaining cloistered for months, had suddenly offered his hand in friendship to all of Adria. Transformation, reconciliation. But why should the few remaining Elves turn their attention toward a family that had in the past been so cruel to them? Roger's fate had been, perhaps, appropriate. But Christopher . . .

Christopher had taken care of Martin after the incident with the papal legate, but who was Martin Osmore to the Elves? No, there was something else.

Then he recalled Lake's daughter, Vanessa. And Vanessa . . .

Catherine was reading the letter now, plodding through it laboriously, mannishly. She had always preferred horses, weapons, and forestry to learning and huswifery, and at thirty, she was still a spinster. Hugo of Belroi had tried to tame her, but faced with his demand that she obey him, she had thrown him out of his own bedroom and gotten a good night's sleep before returning home. With her dowry. No one in the city had even considered trying to stop her.

“Dear Lady,” she said when she finished. “What's gotten into Christopher?”

“I wonder . . .” said Paul.

Christopher was fighting a battle. To be sure, it had nothing to do with swords and armor, but it was a battle nonetheless, for he was fighting complacency, habit, and the deep rift of schismatic alignment. The first skirmish, however, was discouraging. Of the fifty odd barons, great and small, to whom he wrote,k only Paul delMari expressed a willingness to cooperate. The others, for the most part, replied evasively, expressing a vague interest that had nothing to do with actual commitment. The smaller barons, as Christopher expected, were looking to Hypprux and Maris, the centers of economic and military power in Adria, for guidance.

But Yvonnet's answer came almost by return messenger, and it was abrupt and unequivocal: he had simply scrawled
NO!
at the bottom of Christopher's letter and sent it back. And though Ruprecht a'Lowins of Maris sent a long, official document—in Latin—full of erudite turns of phrase and frequent untranslated quotations from the Greek philosophers, it proved, when Jerome and Natil had plowed through its intricacies and ornaments, to say the same thing. Ruprecht simply did not take the threat seriously. He, after all, occupied the multiple-walled fortress that had been built up four hundred years ago by Alfonse-Dylan IV, the ill-fated king of Adria who had been concerned about the very kind of baronial uprisings that had eventually deposed him and ended Adria's days as a kingdom. Ruprecht, taking a lesson from the king's downfall, was not about to be lured out of his stronghold for frivolous reasons.

“
And so . . .
” Natil was reading the letter out loud once more. She really did know Greek and Latin extremely well, and translated on the fly. Even Jerome, who considered woman to be very much the weaker vessel, was impressed enough by her learning that he had not objected to her inclusion in Christopher's councils. “
. . . as the great Aristotle says—
”

“Kill them all,” Christopher finished sourly. “Let God sort them out.”