Maze of Moonlight (19 page)

“My lord?” Natil. Quiet, calm, tranquil. She might have been sitting down with her harp instead of kneeling in a stinking stable.

“Leave me alone.”

“That I will not, my lord,” she said softly. “I agreed only to cease playing at your order. I said nothing about leaving you alone and friendless.”

“I'm not friendless,” he said dully. He thumped the mule. “This is my friend, Brunellus. He comes from as ancient a lineage as I. And considerably more honorable. One of his people bore the Savior on his back. The delAurvres just climb up on everyone else's. Natil, Brunellus. Brunellus, Natil.”

To his surprise, the mule and the harper seemed to acknowledge one another's presence with a look and a brief nod. But when Natil spoke, she spoke to Christopher. “You need to go to bed, my lord. Mules have straw, and foxes have dens, but men have sheets and blankets.”

He laid his head back down on the mule's rough coat. “I don't care.”

Natil took him by the shoulders. She was surprisingly strong for a woman, and in a moment, she had dragged him to his feet. “Christopher,” she said gently. “You are acting like an ass.”

She had called him by name, had spoken to him in terms to which his grandfather would have instantly responded with a lethal blow. But, indeed, he no longer cared. “Of course I'm acting like an ass. All the delAurvres have acted like asses. Me, my father, my grand—” He broke off, sobbed. It was too close. He was only wounding himself. He wanted to stop, but he could not.

Natil sighed softly. “Dear Lady, what have we done?”

More pity. He did not want pity. He wanted—what? Explanation? Death? Wandering? He still did not know.

But the harper put her head to his, and he smelled green leaves and wildflowers: a forest after a rain. The whirl of his thoughts slowed, and though the tears still ran down his face, his soul ached a little less.

“Come, my lord,” she said, “come to bed. I will sit with you, if you wish, and keep your tormentors away, but you must rest.”

“Vanessa . . .”

“She is safe, my lord.”

“But for how long?”

Natil, he judged, knew the answer to that question no better than he, but slowly, calmly, seemingly breathing her own tranquillity into him, she guided him across the courtyard. Pytor, searching frantically for his master, stumbled upon them at the door to the baronial residence, and together the harper and the seneschal bore Christopher up the stairs and down the corridor to his room.

Natil called for basin and cloth and herself cleaned the tears and dirt from his face. She would have sung for him, but he told her not to. “I'm too drunk to listen,” he said, but what he did not say was that he was still afraid of her, afraid of her self-possession, afraid that she would do . . . something . . .

Something like what? Like magic? But was that not really what he wanted? Vanessa had been healed in the space of an hour. Christopher did not dare expect anything so dramatic, but he could at least hope that, as some kind of interventions—human, deific, or diabolical, he did not care—had raised Vanessa from what surely would have been her deathbed, he, who had taken the girl as a symbol of himself, might be similarly favored. Mirya and Terrill had touched Vanessa; perhaps Natil . . .

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I want you to sing and play tomorrow.”

A cool hand on his forehead. Natil's eyes were blue and shining. There was pity in them. But maybe there was understanding, too. “And what would my lord wish to hear?”

The magic. He wanted magic. He wanted healing. “Something . . .” he mumbled. “Something to bring it all back. You know . . . something.”

***

“Wool.”

For what must have been the fiftieth time in two weeks, Berard of Onella prodded the large, heavy sack with his toe and shook his head in disgust.

“There are fifteen more just like it in the wain,” said Jehan delMari. “And ten wains. That makes one hundred and fifty sacks, and at three hundred and eighty pounds per sack that makes . . .” He frowned as he calculated mentally.

“More wool than we know what to do with,” said Berard sourly.

He prodded again at the sack. There was not much one could do with wool wains. The sacks, packed tightly with rolled fleeces, were too heavy to move easily, and if cut open, their contents would burst out like pus from a lanced boil. The only fit place for a woolsack was in the market place of a weaving town—like Ghent, for instance—and Ghent was exactly where this particular pack train had been headed . . . until the Fellowship of Acquisition had stepped in.

Now Berard was stuck. His men were grumbling—not loudly, but grumbling nonetheless—about the lack of pay and plunder, and all that he had managed to come up with in this clean-picked wasteland of southern France was a pack train full of wool. And, of all things, Aurverelle wool at that. Everyone knew about the delAurvres.

“I suppose we could try to sell it off in Picardy,” he said. “There are a few weavers there.”

Jehan glared at him. “Or how about Paris?” he said with ice in his tone. “We could haul it right up the Rue Saint Denis, and I'm sure that all the townsfolk would come out to wave their banners at the brave knights.”

“Now, Jehan . . .”

“I tell you, I'm sick of this! I won my spurs in battle, good solid battle. Sword against sword and men falling at my feet. And what are we doing now? In France, the capital of chivalry, we're stealing wool!”

Berard ran a hand over his face. It was July, and it was hot. He was rather glad that Jehan's obsession with chivalry and knightly battle had not born any recent fruit, for he was sure that, in armor, they would have all wound up boiled like crabs. The king of France had lost his wits, it was said, because of armor and heat, and Berard did not want to try the experiment himself: he was too close to going mad over one hundred and fifty sacks of wool.

“I admit this wasn't what I had in mind,” he said.

“I'd rather be back in Italy,” said Jehan. “There was gold there, and people who respected us. Not these illiterate peasants who go and hole up in caves at the first sign of our approach.”

“Can you blame them?”

“They're peasants,” said Jehan. “They're there for us to use. It's very simple: they get in our way, we ride them down.”

Berard himself had been away form his peasant origins long enough that he did not feel as much rancor at Jehan's statements as he might have once. “Well, maybe we can use a few of them to unload this wool.”

“Commerce? Pah!”

“Well,” said Berard, “you can
pah
! Your way on over to the men and explain to them why we can't do anything with their hard-earned plunder.”

He pointed to the camp. Tents, horses, idle and irritated men. As much as Jehan had not counted on the commercial aspects of brigandage, so the men had not foreseen the lean periods.

And what was worse, most of France was a lean period. The Fellowship of Acquisition, for all its dignified and mercenary background, was but a gleaner left with a field that had been thoroughly picked over by wave after wave of free companies out to support themselves in the only way they knew: war and plunder.

That night, though, a company from Avignon rode into the camp, and its leader was Eustache de Cormeign, a representative of Bardi and Peruzzi. The firm, having failed as a banking house in Italy, had reestablished itself as a brokerage in France and, as a matter of course, had contacts with a wide assortment of clients. Bardi and Peruzzi dealt in everything. Arms, armor, jewels, clothing, grain . . .

“Wool?” said Berard.

Eustache blinked. “Wool?”

“Fifty-seven thousand pounds of wool,” said Jehan. He glanced at Berard. The captain read his eyes:
The fruits of chivalry. Pah!

But Eustache had recovered from his surprise. He cleared his throat. “We can handle it. We can handle anything.”

Berard, already interested because of the wool, was suddenly more interested. “Anything?”

Eustache seemed affronted by the tacit doubt. “Anything.”

Anything, indeed. Eustache traveled with a secretary, a group of well-armed guards he jokingly called his
kataphraktoi
, and enough money for a down payment. They struck the bargain that night. The Fellowship of Acquisition had but to guard the wool for another week, and then, after tendering the rest of the gold, Bardi and Peruzzi would take possession of the troublesome cargo.

But a few days later, another man arrived, and not only did his words brighten the prospects of the Fellowship even more, but they also fired Berard's imagination far beyond that, for the messenger was from Adria, and he brought greetings and a tentative offer of employment from Yvonnet a'Verne of Hypprux.

An ass.

Precisely, Christopher thought, what he was. Having acted the proper fool in Aurverelle for months now, thereby sending Pytor and Jerome into fits and piquing Yvonnet's hopes of an eventual claim to the estate, he had compounded the idiocy by revealing his weakness to a female harper about whom he knew absolutely nothing.

Now it was evening, and Natil would play for him. Wearing the fashionable clothing that Vanessa's presence had encouraged him to take up, he sat in the great hall of the castle, occupying his official chair with the fringed canopy as though he were the perfect baron. In truth, he felt the perfect idiot, but as Natil entered, he saw not a shred of patronization or contempt in her demeanor. She stepped into the room as though she were royalty, true, but as she stood before him in her deep blue gown and her gray cloak, her eyes met his with a gaze as of a sympathetic equal.

“My lord,” she said softly, “you asked me to play this night. I am here.”

Christopher's hand was clasped about Vanessa's pendant, his only link to anything approaching hope. Here was the pendant, and there, somewhere else, was Vanessa. Yes, he would remember her, he would always remember her. He hoped that, among the maze of patterns that twined about her life, she would remember him.

He opened his hand and the pendant thumped down against his chest. Natil was suddenly looking at it, her flashing eyes intent. But she smiled warmly, as though she had just seen the best thing in the world.

“What would you have me play?” she said.

What indeed! What could counter Nicopolis? What his grandfather. “Anything, Natil,” he said, the bitterness a sharp edge among his words. “I'm sorry now that I asked. But I asked. So play.”

Natil was unruffled. Her eyes were still sympathetic. “Anything?”

“Anything.”

She curtsied and went to the stool that was waiting for her near the hearth. As she sat down and arranged her gown and cloak, Pytor, standing across the hall, shifted his feet. His head was lowered in discouragement. He had hoped that Natil would bring his master some cheer, but Christopher read in his posture that he was accepting his mistake and the disappointment that came with it.

Jerome, too, was here, and he was attentive, as were Ranulf, some of the senior men of the castle guard, and one or two ranking bailiffs and provosts. Raffalda was off in the corner, spinning, David was waiting expectantly. Whether or not the baron found what he was looking for, it was nice to have music in the castle again.

Natil's hands went to the strings, and a chord rang out—root, fifth, octave—a spare flash of crystalline brilliance that seemed to light the hall as brightly as the torches and the blaze on the hearth. For a few minutes, she played an intricate arrangement of a simple but vaguely familiar melody, weaving it in and out, now allowing it to shine forth majestically, now almost burying it in countermelody. Her eyes were lowered as though in thought, but her playing was such that when she lifted her head and took a breath, the baron found himself leaning forward in his chair, his hands clenched apprehensively about Vanessa's pendant.

And Natil sang, her voice pure, sweet, touched with an inflection that Christopher could not place:

“
Carles li reis nostre emperere magnes

Set anz tuz pleins ad estet in Espaigne

Cunquist la tere tresque en la mer altaigne

Ni ad castel ki devant lui remaigne

Murs ne citez ni est remes a fraindre . . .
”

Christopher caught his breath.
The Song of Roland.
Natil had chosen the most glittering of the old
chansons de geste
, the one most weighted with mystique, most fraught with luminous image and valorous act. In quaint, limpid French that was at once two and a half centuries out of date and all the more compelling for exactly that reason, Natil began the account of the betrayal of Charlemagne and the death of Roland and the peers of France. It was a martial tale, a man's tale, but somehow, even the harper's maidenly voice contributed a fitting energy and a passionate drive to her song.

Christopher could have stopped her with a gesture, but he sat, rigid, listening. An hour went by, two hours,
laisse
after
laisse
chanted and plucked masterfully by the slender woman who was as much an actor as a harper, for with her voice and a hand she freed occasionally and momentarily from the strings, she added interpretation and gesture to the music and the words; and he did not ask her to stop.

If music was magic, this was it. If a maid's voice could touch with splendor a world that had fallen into leaden dullness, this was it. The Saracen plot. The glitter of the French battalions. Lives of valor, the breaths of which were edged in bright color. Listening to Natil, Christopher saw it all as though it blazed forth in the stained glass of a cathedral.

And yet, through the splendor, he saw the charade, too. It was not Roland's piety that distinguished him, but rather his single-minded, belligerent pursuit of an abstraction that he himself had created. The lives were valorous, true, but only because the men who lived them ignored everything else. Natil made no effort to disguise either, and yet she sang on, telling of the charge, the fighting, her voice now grating with frantic determination as Oliver and Roland and Turpin battled desperately, now turning soft and sweet as Oliver and Roland met for the last time and took hands in the midst of the slaughter.