Maze of Moonlight (6 page)

It was refreshing, he decided, to work only for himself and his men, to have told the squabbling city states of northern Italy to go to the Devil along with their schemes, their grand plans, and their intrigues. What had that Bolognese affair been about, anyway? He still was not sure. Probably Florence and Milan again, with Gian Galeazzo paying off the Pavanese to make enough trouble for Padua that Venice would have to give up its very temporary support for the Signoria and turn its attention to its closer ally; which meant, of course, in the twisted drainage pattern that was Italian politics, that Florence would have been stymied in its efforts to bring Genoa under control, since Gian Galeazzo was far enough away from the city to allow for a quick strike. Bologna, then, abandoned by Ferrara and Ravenna (which would, naturally, ally themselves with Venice), would fall in behind Genoa and arrange for a troublesome band of
condottiere
in the employ, or perhaps not, of Modena, which might have been supporting the Florentines, or might not (it was never wise to commit oneself), to be eradicated.

Something like that.

In the end, though, only Giovanni da Barbiano, the captain of the mercenary band, had been executed. No ransom, no chance for an exchange of prisoners, no appeal. Caught, killed. That was it.

And Berard, elected leader in a quick agreement whispered among the men in the Italian night, had led the company away into the darkness, thoroughly disgusted with the vagaries of politics. He had actually thought Giovanni to have been on Bologna's side. But, then again, maybe not.

Yes, this was better. No politics, just money. For a minute, as the prisoners were taken away to be sorted, sold, killed, or kept—the men with bowed heads, the women weeping with fear at the prospect of being used bloody that night—Berard toyed with names for his little band.
The Fellowship of Acquisition.
That sounded good. Very good. It said it all. Simple, straightforward.

He looked up to see his lieutenant, Jehan delMari, approaching on horseback, cantering across the fields with a soldier's casual ease. “Well, Messire Jehan,” Berard said as the young man drew near, “what do you think of today's work?”

“Not bad at all.” Jehan, blond and boyish, glanced at the prisoners, the stacked sacks of grain, the chests of valuables: Montalenghe had been small but well off. “Though I think I'd rather fight other knights. That would smack a trifle more of the noble than this . . .” He examined the peasants. An hour ago some of them had been up in the church tower heaving down stones. Now the valiant defenders shuffled through the dust, thoroughly dejected. “. . . pigsticking.”

Berard laughed. “I'm sure that the rewards will flavor this pork to your liking. I imagine that we'll all eventually be quite well off. Possibly as rich as—”

“I don't want to talk about that,” Jehan said quickly. “Total up your accounts and give me my share, but leave me out of commoners' work. If I'd wanted to soil my hands with money, I could have stayed in Saint Blaise and sold cheese.”

“Hmm. More gold in Saint Blaise than cheese, unless things have changed a great deal since I left Adria.”

“The mayor makes cheese.” Jehan wrinkled his nose. “Just make sure I get my share, and I'll be satisfied.”

Jehan was younger than he looked, Berard had decided long ago. Younger, and still hot with the fire of the blood that turned even commonplaces into matters of life, death, and personal reputation. To be sure, the lad could fight—for all Jehan's disdain, the burghers of Saint Blaise had obviously trained him well enough—and it was because of his temper and his rash decision to risk a skirmish at idiotic odds that only Giovanni had perished as a result of Bologna's liquid allegiances. Still, Jehan had risen about as far as Berard estimated was safe to allow.

“You did well today,” was all he said.

Jehan shrugged. “Fighting is my life. It's simple, direct, straightforward. I like it that way.”

Ah, the surety of the young. Berard smiled and folded his arms. “Tell me: don't you ever have any regrets about leaving Adria? After all, you could be master of Shrinerock if you went back. Baron of Furze and all that.”

Jehan wrinkled his nose again. “The master of Shrinerock reads in his library, rides occasionally to the hunt, and entertains visitors elegantly.”

“Visitors? Oh, yes: I've heard stories about the Elves . . .”

Jehan glared at him, unsettled and angry both. “Be serious, Berard.”

It was an old tease, but Jehan reacted no better to it for that. Berard spread his hands. “Elves or not, it doesn't sound like a bad life at all,” he said. “I wouldn't mind having Shrinerock for a house. I'd have silks and a golden cup, and I'd make the peasants dance for me every night. At least when I didn't have a pretty girl in my bed.”

Jehan laughed. “And you'd never get near it.”

Berard contemplated the provisions and money that now were his and his men's. Italy, though, was not the place to stay. Perhaps, come spring, they could cross into France and see what the other free companies had left of the place. For now, though, his men would be comfortable. “Impregnable, eh?”

“Oh, yes,” said Jehan. “There are ways in, of course, that aren't normally guarded because almost no one knows about them, but the defenses are otherwise magnificent. David of Saint George designed it back in my great--great-grandfather's day, and it's actually been improved upon since then.”

Shrinerock . . . and ways in. Berard found himself considering the future. He did not care about what he did not have, but he cared a good deal about what he
might
have. “Ah . . . by the way, Jehan,” he said. “I think I've come up with a name for our little band. What do you think of 'The Fellowship of Acquisition'?”

Jehan looked at him with a twisted mouth. “Berard, that is evidence either of the most abominable taste of the most magnificent humor I can imagine.”

Shrinerock. Interesting. What a life! “Do you like it?”

Jehan did not answer for a time. The stacked bags and chests glowed in the sunlight. “It will do.”

The flames crackled and snapped. Berard heard a girl crying out somewhere.

***

“
SCREEAARRAACH!
”

Christopher opened his eyes, sat up in bed, and found his startled gaze returned by a hairy caricature of a man squatting on the windowsill. Cold winter air was pouring in through the unfastened shutters, and the caricature was waving its over-long arms about as it clutched the mushy remains of what had once been a pear. Its face, as hairy as the rest of it, writhed and contorted, alternately puckering up and opening out like a mass of dough being kneaded.

Christopher blinked. The monkey blinked back. On an impulse, Christopher bared his teeth and stuck out his tongue. The monkey did likewise.

“Very good,” said the baron. “You'd make a fine nobleman.”

The remains of the pear smacked into the headboard inches from his head. With a derisive wave and a lewd gesture, the monkey fled through the open window and down the outside wall of the castle.

Christopher got up and staggered to the window. The monkey was gone. “A fine nobleman, indeed,” he murmured.

He closed and fastened the shutters, then turned around to face a room with which he had become much too familiar during his convalescence. Flat on his back, spoon fed sops and broth by Pytor or Raffalda or one of the maids from the kitchen, lifted bodily from bed to chamber pot and then back again, he had been given ample opportunity to count the number of chisel marks on the ceiling beams, enumerate the gilt threads in the bed hangings, learn the intricacies of tapestry stitches.

Today, though, he felt well enough to get up . . . or at least to make faces at monkeys. This was a distinct improvement. Perhaps the wretched stuff that Guillaume and Pytor had been ladling down his throat possessed some virtue after all.

Dizzy and weak now more from long inaction than from illness, he lurched to the side table, poured water from the ewer into its companion basin, and washed, still marveling at the feel of a shaved face and groomed hair. The open shutters had allowed the room to chill, and though, naked as he was, he shivered, it was a good shiver, one that told him that he was alive.

“I suppose I should be grateful,” he said to himself, running his hands back through his hair. “To whom and for what, I'm not exactly sure.”

He shivered again. Time for clothes. Anna's wardrobe, he discovered after opening it out of curiosity, was empty. He shrugged. Perhaps she had been buried with all her gowns. That would have been fitting.

His own, though, was well stocked, and holding tightly to the door so as not to topple, he pawed one-handed through the silks and satins and velvets. The delAurvres dressed well. So did the nobles of France, though Nevers and his company had, he recalled, preferred green. Green gowns. Green livery. Green tents. Green saddle blankets. Had it been possible to make green gold for the tableware, he was certain that it would have been done.

And then there were the lances and the tabards, the pennons and the banners and the twenty-four wagons full of delicacies and sweet wines. And that was just for the lordling of Burgundy and his immediate retinue. . . .

Christopher, spirals of light swirling through his vision, groped until he found tunic and stockings of plain black. Black, that was it. Mourning. Mourning for Aurverelle. Mourning for poor dead Christopher, who, though still alive, had seen what shabbiness underlay this glittering business of nobility.

He thought about summoning servants, but decided against it. He had gaped and capered through much of Europe without servants: he could put on his own clothes now. Odd, though, that the screech from the monkey had not brought everyone running.

Sitting on the side of the bed and resting frequently, he dressed; but when he knelt, opened a chest, and looked for shoes, he could find only a few of the pointed, curled, stuffed-toe monstrosities favored by his peers. Impatiently, he tossed them aside, and by the time he found a pair of soft boots that were as unfigured and unadorned as the rest of his somber garb, he was panting with exertion and wondering whether, now that he was dressed, he would actually be able to reach the door.

But as he had forced himself across a continent, so he drove himself across the room. Let Nevers and Boucicaut whimper about not having beds and viands of sufficient delicacy. This shambling wreck here was a delAurvre.

The door swung open on greased hinges and presented him with the sight of a serving boy sound asleep on the floor just outside the bedroom. Well, Christopher considered, it was early in the morning, and judging from the odor of wine, the lad had doubtless been carousing the night before. But that did nothing to explain the curious silence that hung about Castle Aurverelle. Where there should have been movement, shouts, the clatter of boots and spurs up and down steps, and the intermittent explosions of David's artistic temperament down in the kitchen, this morning there was nothing.

Christopher looked up and down the hall, strained his ears, heard only a faint, distant humming.

Odd. Leaving the boy asleep, he tottered down the corridor with one hand on the wall for support, following the half-felt, half-heard sound that had made itself a part of the morning. It led him to the stairwell, down, along another hallway.

Empty. All empty. Castle Aurverelle was as empty as its baron. He might well have been wandering through one of those deserted cities of African legend: food still steaming on the table, wine in the cups, merchandise left out in the marketplace . . . but no people. Just gone.

He stepped out into the courtyard. The sunlight was dazzling after his long stay indoors, and he blinked at the walls about him and at the great keep that rose up one hundred and eighty feet. Far above, the black ensign of the delAurvres—a knight standing against a lion—was fluttering in the breeze, but with the exception of one lone watchman standing guard on the lofty parapet (ah, not quite entirely deserted, then!) he was alone.

As he crossed the court towards the chapel, the humming resolved itself into voices. Plainchant. Snatches of polyphony. Still unsteady, still blinking, he climbed the steps to the heavy church door and pulled it slowly open. Incense and song rolled out to meet him. The walls were streaming with the glory of stained glass, candles glowed on the altar, and the chapel was full of worshipers kneeling in prayer.

Anna's words—wheedling, prying—came back to him:
A fitting deed for a delAurvre. A battle for God.

For God? Nonsense. For booty, perhaps; for a chance to force one's manhood between the thighs of some struggling, conquered, and thoroughly filthy girl; for the chance to hear one's name praised in the name of chivalry or prowess—but not for God.

Yet God had sent him off to Nicopolis. Someone else—the Devil, maybe—had brought him back, but God had sent him off. And Christopher, standing in the doorway of a chapel washed in the brilliant hues of morning and the misty glory of worship, felt no sense of the holy or the mystical, only a dull ache of unfulfilled mission and quest denied.

And what did you get out of Nicopolis, Lord? What did my sufferings give to you? They certainly didn't give anything to me.

Shaking his head, about tot urn and depart as silently as he had come, he noticed that the choir had faltered into silence. The priest—old Efram, was it not?—was staring silently at him, and, one by one, those gathered for Mass turned to look also. Christopher heard gasps and whispers, and off to one side he saw Pytor, who had apparently compromised for once his stalwart Orthodoxy, kneeling along with the rest, staring along with the rest.

Pytor found his voice. “Master.”

Christopher looked about, still numb. “What's going on? The whole castle is empty.”

Efram, vested in white and gold, answered from the altar. “My lord baron, it is Christmas Day.”

“Oh.” Another silence. Feet shuffled. Glances were exchanged. Christopher saw the unspoken question. Just how mad was the baron.

He lifted his arm, pointed out into the courtyard. “Will someone tell me why in God's name that monkey is roaming about loose?”