Maze of Moonlight (42 page)

After a long silence, she finally spoke. “I did the best I could, messire. I can only say that I did not act out of anger, but out of a desire to preserve.”

“Saint Brigid?”

“It is so.”

And Christopher, also trying to preserve Saint Brigid, was groping towards his goal with all the surety of a blind man on a battlefield. But Mirya had accomplished her ends by striking a single individual. Christopher, on his part, was determined to slaughter thousands.

Who was right? Who was wrong? His lungs burned, and he hacked again, but they refused to clear. “You're making me crazy.”

She shook her head again. “Now you begin to see as do we. Once, the Lady reminded me that I had no sovereignty over all the patterns.” Her voice turned sad, bitter. “Now, for the most part, I cannot even see them.”

His head ached, and his lungs burned. He gave up and slept. When he awoke, they ate and continued on. The smoke grew thicker as they walked. Another few miles, and he was staggering. He must have blacked out and fallen then, for he was suddenly on his back, and Mirya was bathing his face with water from a skin she carried.

“It's hard going,” he said hoarsely. His lungs ached in protest at the poison he was pumping into them.

She nodded somberly, her face drawn and pale. She looked old. “It'll get worse ahead, I fear. I will do what I can.”

With her help, he got to his feet, but his pride won out then, and he refused her arm. Her face still pale, she nodded, turned, and set off once more. Christopher plodded doggedly after her. Soon, the smoke turned from a drifting fog into a solid presence. They might have been walking along the bottom of a milky lake. And now the heat of the approaching fire added to the pervasive oppression of the drought.

To Christopher's eyes, the world was ashimmer with smoke and smoke inhalation, but he was nonetheless surprised that, somehow, he was staying on his feet. This soup-like atmosphere of smoke and dust was fit for no one. At least—and he eyed Mirya who, head down and stoop shouldered, was trekking onward—no one who was human.

But as they continued on, as dusk fell and the smoke, thickening, blotted out details smaller than a tree, it struck him that, indeed, no one who was human could do this at all. With a sense of cold in his heart, he stumbled forward, grabbed Mirya's arm. “What are you doing to me?”

She turned a corpse-white face on him. The fading light showed that her eyes were sunken, her lips pale and cracked. “I have little,” she said hoarsely. “What I have, I will give. Please accept it, Messire Christopher.”

His sense of cold deepened. “But what the hell are you doing?”

“I am giving you the strength to continue. I am altering all the patterns of which I still have any cognizance so that you may continue to breathe. Come, the flames are close, and the way through is treacherous.”

She took his hand—her grip was like ice—and led him on into the night. Time was passing, the fire advancing. Saint Brigid and all who were willing to call the Elves friends were in danger.

And then Christopher heard it: a long, sustained roaring in the darkness, as of a great hearth, or a forge. The fire.

Smoke was driving into his face as though fanned by the hand of a giant, and his eyes were streaming. He fought for breath, but he knew that with every lungful he took, the Elf weakened. She had little to give, but she was giving it unstintingly.

Again, he dragged her to a halt. “We can't go on.”

“We cannot go back. The fire has lapped about behind us.”

“We're in the middle of it?”

“It is so. The only way out is to continue.” Her face had turned gaunt with effort, its flesh clinging closely to her skull, but her voice maintained its calm. “I have examined the patterns. There is a chance—a chance that I will do my best to make better—that the line of flame ahead will break long enough for us to slip through.”

With a jerk, she pulled him forward. The heat increased, the smoke thickened. Christopher blundered into withering trees, tripped over wilted bushes, went sprawling over felled trunks. Mirya drew him on, picked him up when he fell, encouraged him in a soft contralto that never deviated from dispassionate tranquillity.

Blind, stifling, Christopher clung to the hand that had transformed his grandfather as the roaring of the flames grew into a frenzied crescendo of destruction. Eyes closed, teeth clenched, he drove himself against all instinct into regions of thicker smoke, greater heat, and at last found himself facing a red and yellow wall of flame that stretched form the glowing forest floor to an inferno of burning leaves high above.

Mirya stopped at the sight, put her free hand to her face. “My home . . .” Her voice broke, turned heavy, sobbing. “My home . . .”

Christopher had been clinging to her tranquillity as much as her hand. “It's not all gone.”

“It is fading . . .”

Shaking, he grabbed her by her tunic. “There's Saint Brigid, and Vanessa, and all those people out there.
It's not all gone.
”

But her eyes, green as emerald, were hollow. She had given all her strength to the baron of Aurverelle. She had kept none for herself.

The flames advanced. Elf and human, clasping hands, stood before them.

“It is here,” said Mirya. “It
must
be here.” Her eyes were clenched. She was still working magic, still funneling her will into the patterns, reweaving them, shaping them to her own ends. She had changed Roger with this power, and she had helped Vanessa. Now she was altering the world.

But her face and grip went suddenly slack, and her knees buckled. She fell, her head hitting the ground with a thump. Her fingers were strengthless: Christopher might have been gripping the hand of a corpse.

Freed from Mirya's magic, the fire blasted and stung his face. Embers sifted down on his clothes, smoldering, working their way even through his mail. He dropped to his knees beside the Elf. “Mirya!”

No answer.

His face blistering, his hair all but on fire, his clothes smoldering slowly, he looked up to curse the fire, to curse that patterns that had collapsed and taken his world with them, to spew his hate at the maze that brought him to this abrupt and incontrovertible dead end. But he uttered not a sound, for he noticed that, not twenty feet away, the flames had split.

Beyond the gap was a dark waste of charred earth, ruined trees, smoldering ashes. In the night, it virtually glowed with the recent passage of unspeakable heat, but it looked to Christopher like a hand offered in gracious salvation.

The gap widened, paused, started to narrow again.

He had to move. The fire could consolidate at any moment. If he ran, unencumbered, he might make it. But . . .

. . . he was still holding Mirya's hand.

His lungs were fighting against the searing and polluted air, but he looked into her still, pale face. This was the being who had altered his grandfather. This was the being who had, indirectly, sent him off to Nicopolis, pushed him into despair, driven him into madness. But this was also the being who had healed Vanessa, who had provided a haven for her, and who had most recently given everything of herself . . . for him.

Determined, angry, with a pigheaded stubbornness that he was certain would have made even the most willful of his ancestors proud, he bent, slung the limp body of the Elf over his shoulder, and staggered towards the fast-closing gap.

***

“Tut,” said Ruprecht, “I have the best armor in the world.”

The barons of Hypprux and Maris had assembled, with their vassals, men, and equipment, a few miles from Furze; and they had set up an encampment to the southwest of the city. There, in pavilions of silk and velvet, with pennants flying and the sound of fine steel meeting grindstones, they spoke of battle and chivalry, and bragged of their accouterments.

Yvonnet was not to be outdone. “I'll remind you of my horse, cousin,” he said, reaching for another half of a chicken from the heap piled on the long dinner table before him.

In other parts of the camp, cooking fires smoked and crackled as men-at-arms gathered for their ration of meat, cheese, and bread; but in the wide space at the center of the baronial pavilions, the nobles of Adria, from the great lords of Maris and Hypprux down tot he barons of such small towns as Friex and Kirtel, were served at a long table set beneath a sky-blue canopy.

Today, it was Yvonnet's chef who was showing off: gilded meats, subtleties, nuts disguised as haslet, beef disguised as fish, fish disguised as beef. Servants in the livery of Hypprux milled, honey sauces and saffron were everywhere, and silver trumpets announced the appearance of the most splendid of the courses.

Ruprecht examined the girth of his fellow baron with a lifted eyebrow. “Yes, yes . . . I must say, he's more than likely a splendid beast.”

The small barons looked nervous. At the far end of the table, Pytor, seneschal of Aurverelle, commander of the forces of the estate and yet for all that a poor and despised relation at this commingling of nobility and display, fretted, picked at his food, watched the sun drop toward the burning forest. Furze was all but destroyed, Shrinerock was uninhabitable, the free companies were loose—somewhere—and Yvonnet and Ruprecht had passed three days in sparring and braggart revelry.

Now the daylight was reddening in preparation for yet another sunset the color of a bloody wound. “I wish that my master were here,” he said slowly.

Ruprecht stared at him. “I wish exactly the same, Pytor.” He insisted upon calling the seneschal by given name rather than by title. It was an insult, but having no illusions about his status, the good Russian peasant was immune to it. “If you think I enjoy living in these wretched surroundings, I would seek to correct you.”

At a gesture from Ruprecht, a servant ran up, his feet soundless on the thick carpet, and filled the baron's silver goblet from a brimming ewer.

“He's the best horse in the world,” Yvonnet insisted loudly.

“I will admit,” said Ruprecht, “that you're amply provided for.”

“As are the coffers of Avignon,” Yvonnet snapped. Ruprecht stiffened. Pytor winced: of all things to bring up, papal allegiance was undoubtedly the most idiotic. “But if those wretched brigands show their faces . . .”

Ruprecht's eyes narrowed. Pytor winced again. Wretched brigands! It was Yvonnet who had brought them into Adria in the first place!

“. . . I'd show you what a horse is made of. He bounds form the earth. He leaps about as though he had rabbit for guts! He trots . . . well . . . he trots . . .”

“Very well,” prompted one of the small barons.

“Well . . . yes,” said Yvonnet. “Very well.”

A cry of sentry in the distance, and a challenge. Pytor recognized the voice of one of the Aurverelle men, and he listened hopefully, but, no, nothing more.

A young page appeared at Pytor's elbow. “Is there anything I can get you, my lord seneschal?”

“Yes,” said the Russian heavily. “A monkey.”

The boy looked confused. “I'm . . . sorry, my lord. I don't think we have one of those.”

Pytor nodded, lifted his arms dramatically. “Then we are lost.”

Ruprecht glared at the seneschal. “See here, my man, I'm tired of your gloom. If you can't say pleasant things, then go and eat with the servants.”

A number of the small barons murmured. Pytor might not be noble, but he was still the seneschal of Aurverelle. Ruprecht was being deliberately rude.

But Pytor stood up. “I'm gloomy, lord baron of Maris, because I am Russian. We Russians are always gloomy . . . except when we are gay.”

Ruprecht flushed above his black beard. “You're being impertinent, Pytor. I don't like impertinence.”

Pytor kept wishing for monkeys and apples. “I am attempting to civilly remind the honored gentlemen that we have a purpose for gathering here.”

Ruprecht sat back, stuck his eating knife into the table. “What do you want, serf? Command of the army?”

Pytor was becoming a little angry. “I would remind the baron . . .”

“That you're seneschal of Aurverelle? I assure you, I know that.”

“. . . that I am not a serf. I am a slave.”

Ruprecht's eyes were the color of flint. “Yes, Pytor. I think we all know that. And I'm sure you know that Maris is a member of the Hansa. As is Novgorod. There's a price paid for escaped slaves, isn't there?”

Pytor felt his jaw tighten. It was true.

“Sit down, Pytor.”

But another voice, one that rose from beyond the canopy, called out: “No, Pytor, stay on your feet: Mirya here needs your chair.”

Pytor whirled to find Christopher approaching the table with a woman on his arm. His face was blistered and black with soot and dirt, his hair was charred in places, and his clothes had been half burnt off his back. The woman with him was like none that Pytor had seen before, for though her face was pale and gaunt, her eyes seemed overly bright, and she was dressed in some outlandish imitation of men's garb.

Pytor ran to Christopher, fell on his knees at his feet, kissed his hand. “Master!”

“Up, Pytor,” said the baron. “These . . .” He eyed the assembly in their silks and finery. “. . . gentlefolk don't know the intricacies of the Russian character. I'm afraid they'll think ill of you for being so steadfastly loyal.”

“But where has master been?”

“Running through forest fires,” said Christopher. “Where does it look like I've been?” Gently, he conducted the woman to Pytor's chair and eased her down. She nodded bleary thanks, and Christopher himself poured a cup of wine for her and put it into her hands. “My thanks, my dear Mirya. My infinite, infinite thanks.”

Pytor stared.

Mirya nodded mutely, drank. Christopher turned to Pytor. “You remember Mirya, don't you, Pytor? One of the kind . . . ah . . . physicians who healed Vanessa? Well, now she's saved my life, too.”

Ruprecht was on his feet. “What is the meaning of this, Christopher?”

Christopher patted Mirya's shoulder and strode alongside the table until he faced Ruprecht and Yvonnet across three feet of laden trenchers and platters. “The meaning of this, my good lords, is that the free companies are besieging Saint Brigid. All of them.”