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

The courtiers were leaving, likewise the servants. Yvonnet grabbed Martin's hand. “You're coming with me, little girl. And you'll do what I want.”

Martin wilted, but Yvonnet could not help but wonder whether he wilted from apprehension or from knowledge: Vanessa might well have already told him everything that was going to happen in the baronial bed that afternoon. Margot was leading Vanessa out of the room.

Those eyes . . .

***

Christopher continued to grow stronger, and as May lengthened, he began weapons practice in the courtyard. He trained doggedly, swinging a sword against bales of hay and two-inch saplings until the muscles of his arms and shoulders burned, tilting at the quintain for hours in heavy armor augmented with lead weights, clashing with Ranulf until they were both dizzy.

It was something to do. Once he had realized that, because of his ignorance regarding even the most basic agricultural theory and practice, he was actually hindering his people more than he was helping them—and worrying them considerably: what kind of baron labored in the fields like a serf?—he had courteously withdrawn from direct participation in the tillage and husbandry. But without the distraction of physical labor, he had been left with free time, time which had allowed his memories of his grandfather and Nicopolis ample opportunity to rise up and obsess him; and the severity of his depression had frightened him.

He had no taste for needless hunting or hawking, and only extended and brutal combat practice, therefore, offered Christopher a daily occupation. It was a chance to forget himself in a bath of steel and sweat, a chance to lash out vicariously at those things he had come to hate: hypocrisy, folly, perhaps even himself.

But he still kept up his nighttime walks, still made frequent rounds of the fields, looked in on the mill, examined personally the oven, the stables, the cowshed, the barracks. He was still hungry, still looking for a taste of real and immediate life. He was still a ghost. And he was still prowling, snuffling after the scent of blood.

And perhaps it was that odor that made him pause outside the door to the great hall as he came slogging in from another round of practice in the heat-drenched courtyard. Otto, the owner of the Green Man Inn, was talking to Jerome. And he was upset.

“It's the legate from Avignon, m'lord bailiff,” Otto was saying. “It's not that he don't pay his reckoning—many folk don't pay till they leave. He's got expensive likes, to be sure, and it's a strain on me to have to pay for things long before I get paid for them. And like I said, he's got expensive tastes.”

Jerome, arms folded in his sleeves despite the heat, listened gravely. “If it's not the bills, Otto, then what is it?”

“Well . . . it's hard to say, m'lord bailiff. I could say that it's the way of him. But that wouldn't be saying it right. And I could say it's his men, but that wouldn't be saying it right, either.”

“My good man—” said Jerome.

“And then I could say—”

Christopher stumped into the room and flung himself onto a chair. The flies buzzing in the hot room caught the scent of his sweat-soaked mail and made immediately for him, but he was too tired to do anything about it. “What is it, Otto? Tell me.”

“He's breaking up all my furniture, m'lord,” said Otto after bowing deeply and dropping to one knee before the baron. Christopher motioned for him to get up, and he did, but he looked half ready to fall to the floor in submission as he spoke. “And I particularly don't like the way he treats my folk. He knocks the stable boys about something fierce, and they've done nothing with his horses that's any different than what they do with anyone else's. And then the girls . . .”

Christopher pulled off a glove of steel links and dropped it on the table with a loud chink. “The . . . girls . . .”

“Aye, m'lord . . . they're working girls, you know.” Another look at Jerome. “But I wouldn't have you be thinking that I get a penny of what they get from the men they entertain. I don't run that kind of establishment, and I make sure I don't know at all what they do. It's their business, not mine, and I make sure that I don't profit at all by such unholy deeds.”

Jerome cleared his throat. “Perish the thought, my son,” he said, though everybody in Aurverelle knew that Otto took a little more than a tithe from the young women who plied their trade in the common room of his inn.

Christopher put an elbow on the arm of the chair and propped his chin in his hand. Etienne had not given up. Christopher could not really blame him: Avignon was far away, embassies were expensive, and even a sycophant of the most limited persistence would make at least a token effort toward gaining an audience after a journey that had doubtless lasted well over a month. “What about the girls . . . that you don't know anything about.”

“He treats them bad, m'lord,” said Otto. “Knocks them about worse than the lads. Little Suzanne went off with a broken crown just last night, and the day before, Dolores—you know, the one with the big, dark eyes . . .”

Jerome coughed. Christopher smiled. Spies of the intellect, perhaps, but not of the body.

“. . . wound up with both of them blacked, and she thinks her nose is broke, too.”

Jerome crossed himself. “I wish that Etienne were not a fellow churchman,” he said, “so that I could justify wishing him as much ill as I do.”

Otto shrugged apologetically. “Beggin' your pardon, m'lord bailiff. I haven't told you about the rest.”

“I don't think I want to hear it,” said Jerome.

“Nor do we have to,” said Christopher. He was angry. This was Aurverelle. This was his town. If Etienne had for some