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

the night before. But that did nothing to explain the curious silence that hung about Castle Aurverelle. Where there should have been movement, shouts, the clatter of boots and spurs up and down steps, and the intermittent explosions of David's artistic temperament down in the kitchen, this morning there was nothing.

Christopher looked up and down the hall, strained his ears, heard only a faint, distant humming.

Odd. Leaving the boy asleep, he tottered down the corridor with one hand on the wall for support, following the half-felt, half-heard sound that had made itself a part of the morning. It led him to the stairwell, down, along another hallway.

Empty. All empty. Castle Aurverelle was as empty as its baron. He might well have been wandering through one of those deserted cities of African legend: food still steaming on the table, wine in the cups, merchandise left out in the marketplace . . . but no people. Just gone.

He stepped out into the courtyard. The sunlight was dazzling after his long stay indoors, and he blinked at the walls about him and at the great keep that rose up one hundred and eighty feet. Far above, the black ensign of the delAurvres—a knight standing against a lion—was fluttering in the breeze, but with the exception of one lone watchman standing guard on the lofty parapet (ah, not quite entirely deserted, then!) he was alone.

As he crossed the court towards the chapel, the humming resolved itself into voices. Plainchant. Snatches of polyphony. Still unsteady, still blinking, he climbed the steps to the heavy church door and pulled it slowly open. Incense and song rolled out to meet him. The walls were streaming with the glory of stained glass, candles glowed on the altar, and the chapel was full of worshipers kneeling in prayer.

Anna's words—wheedling, prying—came back to him: A fitting deed for a delAurvre. A battle for God.

For God? Nonsense. For booty, perhaps; for a chance to force one's manhood between the thighs of some struggling, conquered, and thoroughly filthy girl; for the chance to hear one's name praised in the name of chivalry or prowess—but not for God.

Yet God had sent him off to Nicopolis. Someone else—the Devil, maybe—had brought him back, but God had sent him off. And Christopher, standing in the doorway of a chapel washed in the brilliant hues of morning and the misty glory of worship, felt no sense of the holy or the mystical, only a dull ache of unfulfilled mission and quest denied.

And what did you get out of Nicopolis, Lord? What did my sufferings give to you? They certainly didn't give anything to me.

Shaking his head, about tot urn and depart as silently as he had come, he noticed that the choir had faltered into silence. The priest—old Efram, was it not?—was staring silently at him, and, one by one, those gathered for Mass turned to look also. Christopher heard gasps and whispers, and off to one side he saw Pytor, who had apparently compromised for once his stalwart Orthodoxy, kneeling along with the rest, staring along with the rest.

Pytor found his voice. “Master.”

Christopher looked about, still numb. “What's going on? The whole castle is empty.”

Efram, vested in white and gold, answered from the altar. “My lord baron, it is Christmas Day.”

“Oh.” Another silence. Feet shuffled. Glances were exchanged. Christopher saw the unspoken question. Just how mad was the baron.

He lifted his arm, pointed out into the courtyard. “Will someone tell me why in God's name that monkey is roaming about loose?”

Mad enough.

“Master,” said Pytor, “it was Lady Anna's. It escaped shortly before she died.”

Christopher stifled a bitter laugh. The monkey had escaped. He had not. “Well, have someone catch it. It's throwing fruit about.”

The eyes that were turned towards him—young and old, male and female—were wide.

“And have someone fetch me some breakfast when you're done,” he added. “I'm tired of gruel. Get me some black bread.” He turned for the door, stopped, turned back. “The kind with beans in it.”

Leaving the startled congregation behind, thwarting with a single gesture Pytor's desire to follow him, Christopher made his way back across the courtyard. His legs were shaking with fatigue and his vision was blurry, but he did not return to his room. Rather, he climbed, doggedly, step by step, up to the top of the great keep. The startled watchman made as if to kneel to him, but Christopher told him brusquely to stay on guard.

Turning away, the baron rested his elbows on the parapet and stared out, first at the horizon where distant Furze and Belroi were smears of soot and smoke, then at Malvern, gray and flecked with snow, and finally at the castle itself: towered and walled with the ponderous efficiency of the most belligerent, prideful, and arrogant family in all of Adria.

Generation upon generation of delAurvres. And then his grandfather . . .

He had the Free Towns in his pouch and let them go again!

. . . and then himself.

A flash of movement. The monkey scuttled across a roof, bounded along a gutter, and then went hand-over-hand up a drain pipe, losing itself amid the rank of buttresses along the south edge of the chapel.

Christopher watched. “Don't let them catch you,” he said softly. “Don't ever let them catch you.”

Chapter Five

Christmas at Shrinerock was splendid. Of course it was. It had to be. It was always splendid. The fireplace roared with the trunks of whole trees, singers came from as far away as Castile to sing the elaborate villancicos that made everyone want to get up and dance to the quickly syncopated rhythm, the tables were covered with food and wine and subtleties. Laughter. Songs. Acrobats.

Outside, where the open tables were laid in invitation to any, haughty or lowly, who would come to share in the celebration, firelight flickered on the courtyard walls late into the night, and even the dusting of snow that fell seemed no more than a layer of frosting on a particularly delightful cake. Tenants who had