Maze of Moonlight by Gael Baudino (top 20 books to read txt) 📗

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.

Chapter 4

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