Maze of Moonlight (38 page)

Angry, Berard threw his weight forward, pounded his horse into obedience, and lashed out with his sword at the dark-haired woman. He landed only a glancing blow, but her arm opened at the shoulder, and her blood was as red as any man's.

“Natil!” Christopher was screaming, and before Berard could get in a killing strike, he was again face-to-face with the baron of Aurverelle.

Christopher's gray eyes were hot, his sword quick, and Berard was suddenly parrying frantically, fighting off a raging flood of blows and thrusts. He looked for help, but his men were still struggling with their horses, and the other woman, the one with the sword, had already plunged in among them and wounded several. Berard's previously favorable odds were suddenly tipping in distressing directions.

But the woman with the sword swept past Christopher. “My lord of Aurverelle,” she said with strange courtesy, “I would advise you to flee.”

The baron smashed another stroke into Berard's parry. “I should have known it was going to be you, Mirya.” He sounded almost irritated. “What about Natil?”

The wounded woman's face was pale. “I will follow. Go, my lord!”

Christopher backed. Berard saw his opportunity and lunged, but a stinging blow from Mirya's sword toppled him from his saddle. Christopher and his rescuers turned their horses and pelted down the road, vanishing around a distant turn as Berard, the wind knocked out of him, struggled to rise, gasping out calls for his men to regroup and follow as soon as they could.

Grimly, he dragged himself to his mount, climbed into the saddle, prodding it into motion. Christopher was ahead. Christopher was going to die.

His horse was weak with a morning's fill of running, but he kept its head pointing to the west. The east wind was a hand at his back, and the telltale dust from the passage of three sets of hooves encouraged him. The signs were obvious. Berard did not need trackers to tell him where the baron and his friends had gone.

And, indeed, it was not long before he saw a village ahead. Its walls were stout and ringed by a ditch and a palisade, but it was still just a village. A small village. A small village that had only men with pikes and a few weedy boys to defend its walls.

He stopped a good distance away and examined it. Just a village. But Christopher was in that village. And Christopher was going to die.

A clatter of hooves behind him. One of his men approached. “Captain!”

“Go fetch the rest of the troops, Raoul,” said Berard without turning ahead. “They shouldn't be any more than a day behind us. I want this village surrounded. I want it taken. I want it destroyed. And I want everybody inside it killed.” At last he swung around. “Do you understand?”

Raoul regarded him from dark eyes, and Berard saw his puzzlement. A little village? Throw four thousand men against a little village? For what? Sacks of beans?

“Do it,” he said. “Just do it.”

Still plainly confused, Raoul nodded, turned his horse, and set off at a trot.

Berard turned his eyes back to the village. “Miserable little monkey.”

***

Christopher and Abel lost no time in preparing Saint Brigid for imminent siege. Within hours, sweating groups of men armed with shovels and baskets had deepened the trench that surrounded the walls and had studded it with pits and traps, and the women had gone out into the fields and gathered in anything that was even vaguely ripe. As the massed body of the free companies approached, raising clouds of dust that echoed the smoke streaming into the distant sky, the gates of the town were shut, fastened, barred, and the gatehouse was rammed full of earth.

Christopher handled shovel and basket along with the rest and supervised the sealing of the gate. “I daresay it's all right,” he remarked to Abel. “I don't think we'll be wanting to leave anytime soon.”

He tried to sound casual and optimistic, but he was dismayed. He was trapped in Saint Brigid along with the villagers, and though the fact that the free companies had now left Shrinerock had made it even more imperative that he get word to the alliance, there was now no way that he could do so.

All day long, the companies poured into the fields that surrounded Saint Brigid and examined with ironic faces the little village that had arrayed itself against them. But at the end of the long columns came the siege guns: great squat things with huge bores. They could batter down walls much thicker than Saint Brigid's in a matter of hours. Tipping and bucking on their tumbrels, they rumbled down the road, and Berard had them brought forward and aimed directly at the gate.

“Now you see why I wanted the dirt in the gate,” said Christopher as he and Abel watched from the wall. Beside them, the monkey looked worried. That was all right, though: Christopher was worried, too.

Abel rose, squinted at the guns. “You're a shrewd man, Baron Aurverelle.”

“No, I'm mad. Ah . . . stay down, Abel: Berard has a way with crossbows.”

Abel nodded and crouched behind the parapet, but the monkey capered in the open, making lewd gestures at the companies. Christopher, laughing without mirth, dragged it into cover. “I wish we could do away with them that easily, little friend,” he said. But then he thought of the monkey as he had seen it once, cradled in the arms of an Elf, and, shuddering, he let it go to resume its dance and its gestures.

He sighed. Christopher and the monkey: still identical twins.

Below, in the village, the people were boarding up their windows. Abel's apprentice was directing the men who were putting up chains across the streets in case Berard's men managed to break through, and Vanessa and Charity were helping Dom Gregorie, the village priest, herd the younger children and the pregnant women into the church, which, thick-walled and at th center of town, offered distance and protection from the fighting.

Christopher settled himself on the inner edge of the wall, dangling his feet, watching. Pikes, swords, farm tools, stones, buckets of molten pitch and seething oil. Poles. Hatchets . . .

Ypris had fallen, and Furze had fallen. How could Saint Brigid—and Vanessa—hope to survive?

A flash of red-gold hair. Mirya, elven and silent, was ascending the steps to the top of the walls. Aside from her garb and her sword, she was much as Christopher remembered her from her visit to Aurverelle. Invariably polite and gracious, even in the middle of a battle, she regarded everything from out of emerald-green eyes that mirrored a deep tranquillity, and yet when she addressed Christopher it was always with a sense of deference.

She, too, seemed to be well known in Saint Brigid, and the villagers, though dismayed by Natil's wound, had welcomed Mirya cordially when she had entered the gate with Christopher. They had stood aside respectfully, even admiringly, as she had healed Natil's arm, and they seemed glad and relieved when she had told that them she would be staying in the village to help in the fight against the mercenaries. Now she climbed to the parapet and examined the siege guns. Christopher did not bother to warn her about the crossbows. She was an Elf. She saw the patterns. And sometimes, he recalled, she changed them.

The thought was an ache in his stomach.

“An hour, perhaps, before they are fired,” she said.

“So soon?” Christopher got to his feet. Yes, Berard was ordering them set up immediately, even before his camp was finished. “That's odd.”

“They have no respect for a small village,” said the Elf. “They expect an easy conquest.”

Abel struck fist into palm. “Well, they'll be dard surprised when they dan get it.”

The smith was tense, and Christopher heard the dairyland accent coming out strongly in his speech. He smiled, recalling Vanessa's quaint way with words. “You're from Furze?”

“Nay, m'lord. But my grandda came from tha' part of the country. Francis. The man who made the gates.”

Another grandfather. Christopher seemed to move along the shadows of grandfathers. “Well,” he said, “we'll soon see how they hold up against guns.”

Mirya spoke. “They will not hold.”

Christopher turned on her, annoyed. “Thank you, Mirya, for your kind encouragement.”

She turned calm eyes on him. “My people see a little more than yours, Baron Christopher. Pray make use of what we have to offer while we are still able to offer it.”

“You don't think I've been doing exactly that? How's Natil?”

“She is well.”

Just another change of the patterns for Mirya. Effortless. Just like . . .

He grinned to cover the twinge. “See? I use you like I use everyone else.”

Mirya smiled. “You are merry, Baron Christopher.”

“No,” he said, “I'm crazy, remember?” But she knew, he suspected, his thoughts, and he turned back to the guns.

At Nicopolis, siege equipment had been considered dishonorable and unsporting. Real knights, Jean de Nevers had declared, could take the strongest city with only a few ladders and their belief in God. Well, whether Berard possessed belief in God or not, he certainly possessed guns.

“I wonder how long they can keep firing,” he said.

“Long enough, I'm afraid,” said Abel.

Mirya suddenly lifted her head. “It is unfortunate for them that they have stacked the casks of powder so close to the guns.”

Christopher was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

Mirya shook her head, bowed to them in the elven manner, and descended the stairs.

“They're a strange people,” said Abel. “But I can't blame her. Malvern's burning like a tallow drip, and Terrill's out there in't.”

“Baron Paul, too,” said Christopher. “And Mirya and Natil are trapped in here.”

“I wouldn't ever say that an Elf was trapped, Baron Christopher.”

“Well, what would you call it?”

The monkey suddenly determined that it was going to sit directly on top of Christopher's head. Christopher attempted to dissuade it, and it shrieked and squawked alarmingly.

Abel pointed: the men of the companies were loading the guns. “We'd better go.”

“A moment please,” said Christopher, and mindful still of crossbow bolts, he stood up on the top of the parapet. “Is that bitch's whelp Berard out there?” he called.

“I'm here,” came the answer.

The monkey crawled determinedly to his head. Christopher folded his arms and pretended not to take nay notice of his new hat. Let them wonder. He actually wished that he had a few pieces of fruit. “How does it feel to be the loser, Berard?”

But on a hunch, he suddenly leaped down and ducked just as a crossbow bolt whizzed by. “He's quick,” he said to Abel. “I'll grant you that.”

Berard was shouting orders as Abel dragged Christopher away from the vicinity of the gate, but the baron insisted upon staying on the wall to watch. “Remember,” he said. “I'm crazy.”

“Yer as sane as me.”

“Yes, and you're up here on the wall, too, aren't you?”

Abel growled, but the two men and the monkey peered out from behind a crenel as the guns were loaded and aimed at the mass of iron and earth that blocked the gate. One of Berard's men applied a smoldering fuse to a touchhole. In a moment, a flash of light.

Abel clamped his hand on Christopher's shoulder and shoved him down as the roar of igniting powder combined with the crash of rending metal from the gate. The wall shook, and Christopher knew that only a few more such projectiles would level it.

But, a moment later, another detonation thundered through the air, and then another, and another: a long, sustained series of rumbles and booms that made Christopher, in spite of the danger, rise up to take a cautious look.

The mercenary camp was filled with smoke and more smoke. The casks of powder, stacked in haste much too close to the cannon, had obviously caught a stray spark, ignited, and exploded in an incendiary blast that had destroyed the guns, toppled the wagons, overthrown tents, dismembered men, and leveled everything within twenty yards.

Another cask blew up. Smoke, fire, and splinters rolled out. Berard's men were running, and not a few were dying.

Christopher stared, recalling Mirya's words. Powder, peach trees: it was all the same to the Elves.

An east wind was gusting through the canopy of leaves and branches that formed the roof of Malvern Forest, but though its force among the trunks was muted, smoke was nonetheless filtering along the elven path, first as tendrils that groped deep into the wood, then as a haze that stung the throats of Paul delMari and his people, then as a gray cloud that burned in their lungs and threatened to choke them.

Terrill still led the way, waiting patiently for his human charges to stagger along as fast as they could, but always encouraging them and urging them onward. As the smoke thickened and the humans' pace consequently slowed, though, his eyes narrowed and his mouth acquired a determined set. At present, he told Paul, it was not the flames that were the danger: it was the smoke. Another day or more lay between the refugees and the western edge of the forest, and by then . . .

Despair was growing on the baron. He watched his people grope their way through the acrid clouds. “Maybe you should just go on without us,” he said heavily.

The Elf looked offended. “I said that I would lead you through Malvern.”

“But . . . the smoke. Even Elves have limits, Terrill.”

“I believe that the Inquisition has proven that, my good lord.” Terrill's gray eyes lost none of their dispassionate calm, but he shrugged as though willing a painful thought to pass. “I will just have to lead you more quickly.”

And so, it seemed, he did, for he redoubled his efforts, and Paul began to suspect that the Elf was giving aid of a non-physical sort to those who were weakening under the strain of what had become a forced march through a poisonous atmosphere. Beneath his hands, those who were nearly strangling with the smoke rose to walk again, and even Prunella, whose eight-and-a-half-month belly appeared bent on putting her on the ground, managed a wan smile and staggered on.

All through the day and into the night they struggled, measuring out their rests by minutes, their meals by mouthfuls. But the smoke continued to thicken. Paul guessed that the fire was raging hellishly by now, eating its way through a dry forest, urged on by the continuing east wind. And that, too, he was sure, was a strain on Terrill, for the forest was as much of a home as the Elves had ever known. With what emotions did the Elf confront this final insult to his fading kind? Paul, fresh from having lost his castle, could only guess. He had lived in Shrinerock for forty years, but the Elves had been one with Malvern since the time of the first saplings.