Maze of Moonlight (5 page)

But Martin . . . Yvonnet settled back, pursed his lips. He knew Martin. Very well, in fact. “Wasn't that the Martin that was at my coming of age party three years ago? Thin, dark lad? Face like a girl's? And other parts of other sorts . . .?”

Lengram flushed. Yvonnet wondered: jealousy? Probably. Lengram would just have to learn his place.

Lengram's eyes had narrowed. “You want Martin, don't you?”

Yvonnet laughed. “Who wouldn't?”

“What about . . . ah . . . Ypris?”

“What the hell are they doing now?”

Lengram cast his eyes up at the ceiling as though choosing words, but Yvonnet knew that it was merely a ploy designed to make him wait for the news. Such was Lengram's revenge for the mention of Martin. “The embassy from Rome that you sent did not . . . ah . . . impress them at all,” he said at last, “even with the soldiers. The good monsignor and his servants were beaten before they could even reach the church, and the burghers . . .” He shrugged. “. . . killed several of the soldiers. I . . . ah . . . heard it was rather the
Maillotins
all over again.”

Yvonnet was on his feet. “Those
bastards
! Doing that to an anointed representative of God!”

Lengram shrugged. “If Avignon sent an embassy to us, what would you do?”

Yvonnet glowered. Lengram was showing his university snobbery again. Such things, the baron was sure, merited a place in hell even more than a few prick-to-prick encounters in a sodomitical bed. “That's different.”

“Is it?”

“Boniface is for God,” said Yvonnet, wondering why he was even bothering to argue. “Benedict is for Satan.”

“Oh . . . indeed . . .” Lengram was nodding a bit too distinctly. “Which explains why the townspeople were . . . ah . . . calling the legate the Antichrist.”

“Shut up.”

Lengram's look was just as ironic as Yvonnet's had been. “Well, what do you propose to do?”

“They're putting on airs down there,” Yvonnet mumbled. “They think themselves as great as Hypprux. If it weren't for Hypprux, the cloth industry wouldn't exist in Ypris.”

Lengram cocked an eyebrow. “I repeat: what do you propose to do?”

Yvonnet sung his legs out of bed and stood. If he could not knock immediate sense into Ypris, he would do it to this insolent chamberlain. And when Martin came, Lengram would see just how fast his place could be filled by the slender lad from Saint Blaise. “
Shut up!
”

Roger's heritage was, once again, effective, and Lengram fell silent.

***

The room finally came back to him.

Lying amid featherbeds, comforters, and pillows, Christopher delAurvre, twelfth baron of Aurverelle, stared at the dark-beamed ceiling. Countless times before, he had been greeted in the morning by this same assortment of dark beams and white plaster, the trio of arched glass windows streaming with new light, the hangings, the bound chests, the heavy wardrobes flanking the fireplace; but now with years and memories intervening, his familiarity possessed no substance, held for him no more reality than a traveling miracle play—painted canvas, wings of glitter and glue, wooden swords, human entrails straight from the butchered pigs—or the fevered dreams of home and safety that had visited him as he had shivered in bracken and caves from Wallachia to Guelders. It was a familiarity reflected distantly and deeply, as from the bottom of a dark pool. He might as well have been a stranger in this place.

He passed a hand over his face and was startled to find himself clean shaven, to run his fingers across bare skin and through hair that barely reached his shoulders. Gone were the briars and the beard, and now he thought he recollected the barber hacking off the mats and tangles, his eyes moist at the sight of his master's condition.

Master?

Christopher closed his eyes and sighed, feeling still the innumerable aches, the rawness of skin burnt by the sun and wind, the fevered clarity of a mind bleached as white as an old man's hair. Master? Master of what? Of Aurverelle? Of himself? Why, who was he? Who was this skeleton of a man lying in state in a bedroom of Aurverelle? The same Christopher who had set off on a May morning with fifty men and a suit of new armor to join the nobility of France on a futile and arrogant quest? No, impossible.

He started to laugh, then: a hoarse, sardonic burst of hilarity that echoed off the walls and rattled the loose panes in the windows. And if the sky fell, they would uphold it on the points of their lances! Of course they would! And Bayazet would fall down on his knees before those most Christian knights and kiss the turds of their horses. To be sure!

As though in response to his laughter, the door opened. Pytor entered, his face concerned, and he did not look much relieved when Christopher, after taking a good look at his seneschal, burst out with second round of giggles.

“Master is pleased to be merry this morning,” said Pytor.

Christopher stifled his humor. Even if it did not frighten Pytor it racked a pair of what were obviously fluid-filled lungs. He considered coughing for a moment, but decided that if he started, he might not stop for some time. Best to save the retching and gagging for later. “What else is there to be?”

Pytor looked suddenly hopeful. “Does master know me?”

Christopher sighed. Pytor would doubtless address him in the third person on his deathbed. “Yes, yes, I know you, Pytor.” He lifted his head, looked at the windows. How long? Three years? No, more. This might well be his deathbed. “Have I been raving?”

“For weeks now, master.”

“Quite mad, then.”

Pytor colored, looked away. “I . . .”

“Come on. Come on. Tell me. Was I out in the courtyard eating grass? Copulating with the mares, perhaps?”

The seneschal shook his head. “Master was delirious with fever.”

Pytor was being polite. It was more than a fever, and Christopher knew it. There were many things that could destroy a soul, and he had been intimate with at least two of them.

Upon attempting to sit up, Christopher found that his head was splitting and, with a grimace, fell back onto the pillows. Pytor came forward, took a cup from the side table, and held it to his master's lips. Christopher gagged on the contents. “What . . . is this? It's like being clubbed over the head with an ivy bush.”

“Guillaume brought it. He says that it is good for master.”

Fluids, Christopher thought. Fluids and herbs. It made sense. No, he would not die. Living was worse. He would live: that was, unfortunately, the best he could expect.

He took another swallow, forced it down, gasped at the taste. “Grandfather wouldn't have put up with this. He wouldn't have needed it, either.”

“Baron Roger was a . . . considerably more robust man,” said Pytor, gently but insistently proffering the cup.

Pytor was being polite again. In his youth, Roger had killed boars with his bare hands, had survived, undoctored, wounds that would have killed another. His political machinations had been as grandiose as his stature, as enormous as the vices he had embraced in his youth . . . and then suddenly abjured in his prime.

The sudden change was legendary. There was even a song about it.
He had the Free Towns in his pouch and let them go again!

Something had happened. . . .

Well, Christopher thought, something had happened at Nicopolis, too. And now Roger's descendent—the family sperm perhaps getting a little tired out after twelve generations of plotting, fighting, magnificently lecherous delAurvres—lay like a sick girl, lapping slimy decoctions out of a silver cup.

Christopher drank until the medicine was gone, and then he coughed for the better part of an hour. Pytor held him while he hacked up the fluid and phlegm, and when his master was finished and exhausted, laid him back down, blotted his forehead, and tucked the covers around him.

Like a sick girl. And what had happened to Roger that he had spent his last forty years puttering in his garden, planting an avenue of peach trees, and fishing in that part of the river least likely to reward him with fish?

“Did many people see me when I was mad?” said Christopher.

“None who would recognize master.”

“Well, maybe I'll have to do a few capers around the town . . . just so that they'll remember me. Did I make a good bear? I'd like to believe that a delAurvre can do something right.”

Pytor looked disturbed, groped for words. “Master had a hard journey home.”

Christopher snorted weakly. “Journey? Ha!
Journey
implies a beginning, an end, and a goal. We
journeyed
, for example, to Nicopolis. Beginning: for the French, Dijon—for me, Aurverelle. End for everyone: disaster. Goal . . .”

“The Holy Land,” Pytor prompted hopefully.

“Vainglory,” said Christopher. He tried to roll over and found that he was too exhausted to manage it. Well, then, best to lie here like a log. A sweaty log. A sweaty log from a weak-loined family. “Now, coming home was no journey. It was wandering. The wandering of a madman. Capering here, capering there. Begging black bread with beans in it—it's rather good, you know, when your belly's empty—and an occasional cup of soup for the mercy of God, but not often, because the monasteries didn't want my sort of riff-raff cluttering up their hospices. . . .” Christopher fell silent for a moment, and then the delAurvre temper flared. “And where in hell's name was God's mercy when we climbed the plateau of Nicopolis?” he raged hoarsely. “Back in the monasteries with ale and fat capons and nice thick night-boots?”

He brooded on the wreck of a body he had brought back to his castle. “IF you hadn't found me in the tavern, I'd have probably wandered off into the Aleser in the morning. I didn't even know where I was. Good riddance.”

“My master came home,” said Pytor softly, his deep voice a gentle rumble, and Christopher heard the grief that his angry words had caused. “We are all very glad to have master with us once again. There was great joy in the town when I announced his arrival, and many masses are being said for his recovery.”

And there it was. Though Christopher could not keep his nose from wrinkling at the thought, Aurverelle, all of it, from Pytor down to the filthiest stable boy or the most debauched prostitute, was happy that their boyishly handsome baron was home. They cared nothing about his failure or his grandfather's failure. Their master was home: that was all that mattered.

It disturbed him that he felt so little in response. Even the sight of this room with his favorite tapestries on the walls and the sun rising swiftly over the battlements of Aurverelle brought no flicker of joy, no sense of welcome. Baron? He was no more a baron than his horse—and the Bulgarian peasants had eaten that. Noble? Nobility was a lie, a tedious deception, a bunch of men adorning themselves with metal and jewels and riding about with big words and sharp swords and wagons full of silks and cushions and pavilions and brass stoves with which to make little pies.

And Christopher had played his last part in it.

He stared up at the ceiling, uncaring, numb. Pytor was wringing his hands raw with worry. And the village was saying masses for him. Jerome, doubtless, was busy with his accounts. And—

“And where's my wife, Pytor?” he said suddenly. “Where's Anna? Is she happy I'm back?”

Pytor shifted uncomfortably. “She is dead, master. The plague took her two years ago.”

Dead. Anna with her piety and her vigils and her incessant and compulsive tithes and endowments. Rosaries in the morning, vespers with the priest. . . .

It was Anna who had pressed him most earnestly to join the crusade.
A fitting gesture for a nobleman,
she had said.
A fitting deed for a delAurvre. A battle for God.
And she had kept at him, prattling on, perhaps knowing in her woman's heart—wordlessly, instinctively—that his weaknesses would eventually give her the advantage.

Easy enough for her: she had not had to face the swords and stakes at Nicopolis. And now he was home, alive, and now Anna was dead. No more rosaries. No more vespers. No more
but we can't: it's a holy day, Christopher.

It was too perfect, too ironic, too well-balanced a fate; and suddenly Christopher was laughing again, a long, braying series of mirthless guffaws that clawed at his throat, pounded at his aching head, and sent Pytor running for Guillaume.

They gave him something to make him sleep.

The town burned as towns burn: red flames fluttering like banners against the blue Italian sky, smoke streaming away like a young girl's scream, sudden and brittle topplings of towers and walls. Above all, like the skeleton of a bishop's miter, rose the gutted tower of the church in which the last band of citizens had held out for one or two additional hours.

But pikes and pitchforks had been no match for spears and swords, and now the former inhabitants of Montalenghe—those who were left alive—stood huddled and under guard as their town crackled and snapped itself into charcoal. Some, to be sure, had fled into the foothills of the Alps, but Berard of Onella was not one to care about what he did not have, and therefore those who had escaped had already ceased to exist for him. The town was destroyed, he and his men had its money and its food, and there were a few servants and slaves out of the bargain. Why worry about what was not in one's pocket?

What was in one's pocket, though, was a different matter, and when one of the girls of the town broke away and ran for the fields, lifting her long skirts to free her legs, Berard, laughing, shouted to his men. One of them rode after her, caught her easily, and returned, dragging her by the hair. Berard rubbed the stubble of his beard appraisingly. She was fortunate: she was not bad looking. She would find a place in the camp.

He tipped his head back, shifted his rubbing to the back of his neck where his helmet had chafed throughout a warm day. Good weather, good profit—a good day all around. The rest of the winter would be, if not luxurious, then at least comfortable. Not bad for a band of mercenaries who had so recently faced near-annihilation at the hands of the Bolognese.