Maze of Moonlight, Gael Baudino [ebook reader screen TXT] 📗

said Yvonnet, wondering why he was even bothering to argue. “Benedict is for Satan.”

“Oh . . . indeed . . .” Lengram was nodding a bit too distinctly. “Which explains why the townspeople were . . . ah . . . calling the legate the Antichrist.”

“Shut up.”

Lengram's look was just as ironic as Yvonnet's had been. “Well, what do you propose to do?”

“They're putting on airs down there,” Yvonnet mumbled. “They think themselves as great as Hypprux. If it weren't for Hypprux, the cloth industry wouldn't exist in Ypris.”

Lengram cocked an eyebrow. “I repeat: what do you propose to do?”

Yvonnet sung his legs out of bed and stood. If he could not knock immediate sense into Ypris, he would do it to this insolent chamberlain. And when Martin came, Lengram would see just how fast his place could be filled by the slender lad from Saint Blaise. “Shut up!”

Roger's heritage was, once again, effective, and Lengram fell silent.

***

The room finally came back to him.

Lying amid featherbeds, comforters, and pillows, Christopher delAurvre, twelfth baron of Aurverelle, stared at the dark-beamed ceiling. Countless times before, he had been greeted in the morning by this same assortment of dark beams and white plaster, the trio of arched glass windows streaming with new light, the hangings, the bound chests, the heavy wardrobes flanking the fireplace; but now with years and memories intervening, his familiarity possessed no substance, held for him no more reality than a traveling miracle play—painted canvas, wings of glitter and glue, wooden swords, human entrails straight from the butchered pigs—or the fevered dreams of home and safety that had visited him as he had shivered in bracken and caves from Wallachia to Guelders. It was a familiarity reflected distantly and deeply, as from the bottom of a dark pool. He might as well have been a stranger in this place.

He passed a hand over his face and was startled to find himself clean shaven, to run his fingers across bare skin and through hair that barely reached his shoulders. Gone were the briars and the beard, and now he thought he recollected the barber hacking off the mats and tangles, his eyes moist at the sight of his master's condition.

Master?

Christopher closed his eyes and sighed, feeling still the innumerable aches, the rawness of skin burnt by the sun and wind, the fevered clarity of a mind bleached as white as an old man's hair. Master? Master of what? Of Aurverelle? Of himself? Why, who was he? Who was this skeleton of a man lying in state in a bedroom of Aurverelle? The same Christopher who had set off on a May morning with fifty men and a suit of new armor to join the nobility of France on a futile and arrogant quest? No, impossible.

He started to laugh, then: a hoarse, sardonic burst of hilarity that echoed off the walls and rattled the loose panes in the windows. And if the sky fell, they would uphold it on the points of their lances! Of course they would! And Bayazet would fall down on his knees before those most Christian knights and kiss the turds of their horses. To be sure!

As though in response to his laughter, the door opened. Pytor entered, his face concerned, and he did not look much relieved when Christopher, after taking a good look at his seneschal, burst out with second round of giggles.

“Master is pleased to be merry this morning,” said Pytor.

Christopher stifled his humor. Even if it did not frighten Pytor it racked a pair of what were obviously fluid-filled lungs. He considered coughing for a moment, but decided that if he started, he might not stop for some time. Best to save the retching and gagging for later. “What else is there to be?”

Pytor looked suddenly hopeful. “Does master know me?”

Christopher sighed. Pytor would doubtless address him in the third person on his deathbed. “Yes, yes, I know you, Pytor.” He lifted his head, looked at the windows. How long? Three years? No, more. This might well be his deathbed. “Have I been raving?”

“For weeks now, master.”

“Quite mad, then.”

Pytor colored, looked away. “I . . .”

“Come on. Come on. Tell me. Was I out in the courtyard eating grass? Copulating with the mares, perhaps?”

The seneschal shook his head. “Master was delirious with fever.”

Pytor was being polite. It was more than a fever, and Christopher knew it. There were many things that could destroy a soul, and he had been intimate with at least two of them.

Upon attempting to sit up, Christopher found that his head was splitting and, with a grimace, fell back onto the pillows. Pytor came forward, took a cup from the side table, and held it to his master's lips. Christopher gagged on the contents. “What . . . is this? It's like being clubbed over the head with an ivy bush.”

“Guillaume brought it. He says that it is good for master.”

Fluids, Christopher thought. Fluids and herbs. It made sense. No, he would not die. Living was worse. He would live: that was, unfortunately, the best he could expect.

He took another swallow, forced it down, gasped at the taste. “Grandfather wouldn't have put up with this. He wouldn't have needed it, either.”

“Baron Roger was a . . . considerably more robust man,” said Pytor, gently but insistently proffering the cup.

Pytor was being polite again. In his youth, Roger had killed boars with his bare hands, had survived, undoctored, wounds that would have killed another. His political machinations had been as grandiose as his stature, as enormous as the vices he had embraced in his youth . . . and then suddenly abjured in his prime.

The sudden change was legendary. There was even a song about it. He had the Free Towns in his pouch and let them go again!

Something had happened. . . .

Well, Christopher thought, something had happened at Nicopolis, too. And now Roger's descendent—the family sperm perhaps getting a little tired out after twelve generations of plotting, fighting, magnificently