Maze of Moonlight (46 page)

He was almost blind now, and he did not know whether his blood-filled throat would be able to shout, but he sucked air into his lungs and forced it out again:

“Fire the mines! Full assault! Straight up the middle!”

The ground tipped, and his useless arm flapped like the piece of dead meat that it was, He fought to stay on his feet, but his legs rebelled against him, and he spun in little circles like a crippled dog. He could hear shouts, cries of confusion. Were they giving up?

He tried to shout, to curse, to repeat his orders, but his words, drowned in his own blood, burbled and wheezed out in a crimson froth.

There was a roaring, then: a sudden blare of horns and hoofbeats and challenges. Berard managed to focus on a black banner streaming in the east wind. It was approaching him quickly, like the urgent herald of a King coming into his Kingdom, and though he could not see who bore it, his failing sight gave him a last, fading glimpse of what was on it: the figure of a standing knight lifting a sword against an attacking lion.

Aurverelle.

He stared, but the blood loss overwhelmed him then and left him in a sightless world. He felt the ground come up to meet him like a fist, felt his breath flutter to a stop, felt the fires of his wounds go cold. And all that penetrated the husk that he was, all that stirred it into a momentary recognition and remembrance of life and living before it slid into finality was the sound of a battle cry that rose from many throats as from one:

“
Elthia!
”

Unfurling banners and pennants and shouting out their challenge, the forces commanded by Christopher and Paul swept down from the east and north, charging out of morning mist thick with the smoke of the forest fire, driving straight into the startled ranks of the free companies.

Spears hit their mark, striking deadly and centered upon steel carapaces. Horses reared, lashing out with their hooves, pummeling and battering the archers before they had a chance to nock an arrow. Axes and maces and swords lifted and fell . . . and Berard's men fell beneath them.

But even in the midst of the initial charge, Christopher had realized that there was a strange sense of indecision and hesitancy about Berard's men. Some had been arguing, shouting, gesticulating animatedly. Servants had been running in and out of Berard's tent. A few groups of soldiers had appeared to be actually walking away.

It was too good to be true, and to Christopher's utter surprise and shock, it remained too good to be true. The forces of the Aurverelle alliance met with startled faces, a complete lack of morale . . . and little else. They plowed and furrowed the human field with which they were presented and left behind a scattered mass of panic.

Dismounted for the assault, hemmed in by the village and the forest, Berard's men had no chance whatsoever to fight before they were ridden down, hacked, spitted, and crushed. Christopher, resplendent in the golden armor he had taken from the Shrinerock armory, found himself surrounded by men who were not so much running or fighting as floundering like so many stranded fish. The outcome of a battle, it was said, could be determined by the loosing of the sixth arrow, but here there were no arrows—the archers had been among the first to go down—and the outcome, it seemed, had been determined even before the charge.

No quarter had been asked, and none would have been given in any case, for Christopher had pronounced sentence upon the free companies nearly two weeks ago. The business of killing, therefore, turned into hot, revolting work; and since his spear had broken after his third charge, Christopher now used the plain, unadorned sword that had replaced the relic-laden wonder he had lost, along with his illusions, at Nicopolis.

He still had no illusions. The French, he knew, would have issued a challenge and waited politely while the free companies formed up—or perhaps negotiated. Not so Christopher. Surprise, like thrown apples or breaking into noblemen's bedrooms, was unchivalrous, but effective. Still, though, what he was seeing as he stood up in his stirrups and smashed his weapon down on the steel helmets and visors of men who wept and cried out and struggled ineffectively was much more than surprise alone could account for. Something else had happened.

Across the field he saw Martin and Paul delMari, both clad in Aurverelle armor, fighting side by side through the shuddering mass of milling, frightened man-flesh. Martin was young, strong, and, yes, by the Lady, he could indeed fight. There was no mincing nervousness or sense of craven apology here, just strong shoulders, an obviously cool head, and regardless of his choice of bedmates, a lusty, male swagger.

The three met in the middle of death. As his horse pranced spiritedly among the armor-clad bodies lying thick on the ground, Paul raised his visor, lifted his sword in salute. “The baron of Furze and his son greet the baron of Aurverelle!”

“Compliments to you both!” Christopher shouted above the cries, the clanks, the screams. He stared at Martin. Son?

But Paul and Martin had already turned, spurred their horses, and struck at the heart of a body of brigands who were attempting to mount some kind of concerted defense, Abbot Wenceslas led another party in from the other side, and just then, Abel and perhaps two score Saint Brigid men armed with swords and axes swung down from the village walls on ropes, assembled, and stormed across the intervening ground.

The defense collapsed. Berard's men broke and fled. Even the bravest, who seemed ready to stand their ground, seemed to reconsider when it became obvious that their valor would consist of nothing more than being dismembered.

Flight, however, consisted of little else. This was not battle. This was rout. This was slaughter. This was easy killing, pathetically easy. Berard's men screamed, ran . . . and died. One or two of Christopher's people fell, dragged down by the brigands more for their horses and possible escape than for any hope of combat; but on the whole, the Aurverelle alliance reaped its way across the field, turned, and reaped its way back, unhindered, unopposed.

Within a half an hour, it was over. Silence fell, the clouds of dust dissipated. The knights and men of the alliance dismounted, wiped and sheathed swords, and, almost puzzled by what they had done, stared at the carnage. Christopher, too, slid from his saddle in the eerie stillness, wondering at the dead who lay tumbled like logs left by a flood.

A grinding of metal as a body shifted. Footsteps. A muffled voice. “It's ridiculous,” Jamie was saying to someone, perhaps to no one in particular. “They didn't even put up a fight.”

“I won't complain,” said Christopher. But he had been expecting a fight. His blood had been—was still—pounding. Within his armor he was damp and acrid with nervous sweat. And this . . . simple butchery. He almost felt cheated.

“Master! Master!”

“Over here, Pytor.”

The seneschal, wearing mail covered with dirt and blood, ran to him and, after bowing, began trying to help him out of his armor. “It is hot,” he said, “master will suffer.”

“I'm all right, Pytor. Really.”

Jamie was still perplexed, and he scuffed towards Christopher, his visor up. “But where's the glory in this?”

Angered, Christopher stepped away from Pytor, threw down his sword. It struck the ground point first, quivering. “Dammit, where's the glory in anything? They're dead! They're just dead, that's all! That's what we wanted, wasn't it?”

Chagrined, Jamie groped for words. “I mean . . . I . . .”

Christopher shook his head. Yes, he felt cheated. Something had happened. “I know what you mean.” He prodded a crushed and bloody body with his foot, then looked up suddenly. “Where's Berard? Where
is
That son of a bitch?”

“We have been looking,” said Pytor. “No one has seen him?”

“Did he escape?”

“

Christopher's anger seethed again, and he grabbed his sword and stomped across the battlefield, turning over bodies, peering into dead and bloody faces. But not until he reached the free company camp did he find what he was looking for. Berard was lying on the ground just outside his tent, face down and unarmored. His side was open, one arm was gone, and the flies were clustering thickly about him.

A few feet away, Jehan delMari also lay dead. A sword was in his hand, but the gilt of the delMari surcoat was tarnished and thick with blood and dust. What had happened was obvious.

“God of my fathers,” said Pytor. “It was Jehan.”

“He did us a great favor,” said Jamie.

Christopher nodded. Jehan had found his own solution to the maze of patterns that had surrounded him. “It's . . . incredible, though,” he said. “No wonder it all went so easily. If there were a more precise way to break the free companies, I can't think of what it would have been.”

With Pytor's help, he unbuckled his helmet and dropped it on the ground. The heat was insufferable, and the weight of metal encasing him seemed suddenly to be more than he could bear. But it was not the heat or his armor that suddenly made him stagger. It was everything else. The siege had been broken. Saint Brigid was safe. His grandfather was, finally, dead.

He looked down at Berard. Incredible. It was all incredible.

“Christopher?”

He recognized the voice . . . or so he thought. Turning, he saw that a slender maiden was stepping towards him. Her hair was dusty, her clothing only of homespun, but she picked her way through the desolation of the battlefield and the overturned camp as though at once utterly untouched by it . . . and yet stricken by its very existence.

He stared. Something about her . . . “Vanessa?”

“I . . . I think so.”

And when she stood before him, he understood the reason for her hesitancy. This was Vanessa, true: the same blond hair, the same brown eyes, the same curiously defiant set to her fine chin. And yet it was as if a veil had been torn from a window so as to let the sun stream through unimpeded. She seemed luminous, light, and there was a radiance in her eyes.

Christopher stared, then, almost afraid, reached out to her, touched her shoulder. Solid flesh and blood, but . . . something else, too.

“I did it, Christopher,” she said, and he heard in her voice another accent than that of Furze Hamlet. “I did it.”

“What . . . what did you do?”

She struggled with words, struggled seemingly with her body. “I changed the patterns,” she managed at last. “I did it like Mirya showed me . . . but this time I changed them for everyone . . . and I . . .”

She was shaking. She lifted her hands, stared at them.

“There were stars out there . . . and I used them . . . and I did something . . . to myself, too. . . .”

She was lovely and frightening both. Jamie was staring. Pytor unconsciously crossed himself.

Vanessa looked up. “I told you not to make plans, Christopher. I told you that you might not want me after.”

Christopher was rooted. “What . . .?”

Vanessa forced herself to say the words, slowly, carefully, all the while shuddering as though the sound of the alteration in her voice was itself a horror. “It was I who made Jehan decide to kill Berard. He was almost upon the decision himself, and when I shifted the patterns so that the siege would not be anymore, he chose.”

Christopher stared into eyes that seemed to reflect too much light, into a face that was touched with elvishness. “No . . .”
You might na wan' me after.
“No . . . it's just a coincidence.”

She shook her head, shook her hands to indicate herself. “Is this a coincidence, Christopher?” Her eyes were streaming. “Too much starlight . . . too much starlight.” She put her hands to her face, jerked them away as though recoiling from the touch of the near-luminous flesh. Her resolve broke then, and she cried out: “
Dear Lady, Christopher, I do not think I am human anymore!
”

***

The free companies were destroyed. Many were dead, many were wounded, many more were prisoners.

The sun rose through the roiling smoke of the forest fire, the fields grew hot even to the unarmored, and the sky remained a rainless blue. The villagers and the men of the alliance buried the dead—Dom Gregorie blessing the graves of brigand and ally alike with sad but divine impartiality—and the women of Saint Brigid tended the wounded.

Christopher watched from the shadow of the forest. Out there were the dead and the wounded, but here, at his side, Vanessa was a casualty, too. Though she was sitting on the ground, speaking haltingly with the Elves, the sound of her voice and the radiance of something beyond health that was about her told of a wound more profound than any that could have been given by sword, arrow, or spear.

Angered by the death of Charity, her teacher and her friend, threatened with the loss of the village that had become her home after she had been driven from her birthplace, Vanessa had fought the only way she could. She had known something of the patterns, she had known that they could be changed, and so she had changed them.

But in altering reality, she had altered herself. She perhaps could not be considered entirely elven now, but as she had suspected—and as Mirya, Natil, and Terrill had reluctantly confirmed—she was no longer quite human.

Still gripped by an aching weariness that seemed about to wring a sob from his heart, Christopher stared out across the battlefield, watched bodies being taken away, wounds being dressed. A casualty. She had tried to fit in, she had tried to be simply, mortally, wonderfully human . . . and now both were forever beyond her.

And perhaps beyond him.

“Can I na . . . not undo it?” Vanessa was asking Mirya. “I mean, after all, I did it to begin with.”

Mirya shook her head, her green eyes sad. “Consider,” she said, her voice as soft as the whisper of the dry leaves above her head, “Abel can take ore from the earth, and he can smelt it and turn it into steel. But he cannot turn that steel back into ore. The steel remains steel.”

Yes, that was it. Vanessa was steel. Pure steel. But though Christopher smiled at the rightness of the thought, he wondered whether his resolve was firm enough to clasp that metal to his heart.