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

Pytor squirmed. “They support master.”

The baron's mood had darkened, and he turned around and regarded the castle, its walls, the huge tower that dominated all. The sun was westering, and the shadows fell on the town, putting a chill into the air.

“It's all useless,” he said. “It's all stupid: just a bunch of boys playing camping, chasing a ball about the fields and hurting everyone. Maybe I should just let Yvonnet have it all.” He hung his head for a minute. Pytor and Jerome exchanged worried glances. But then Christopher lifted his head and forced an ironic smile. “But that's just what Grandfather did, isn't it? Let them have it all?”

He wavered, sagged against Pytor, passed a hand over his face. “I'm tired,” he said softly. “Take me home, gentlemen. I want black bread and some soup fit for dogs.”

Chapter Six

Spring came late that year to Aurverelle, the warm weather of January leading directly back into snow and sleet that only grudgingly yielded to the coldest of March rains. The farmers fretted about the frosty nights that nipped at the now premature barley and peas, and the dairymaids coddled their calves and piglets through the all-pervasive damp.

Christopher's strength improved. By the beginning of February, he was taking extended walks about the castle and the town, and late in the month he began once again to hold the weekly courts that Jerome and Pytor had been supervising during his absence and recuperation. His outlook, though, remained gloomy, and March and even April found him still brooding, still vacillating between manic capers and black depression.

The rumor that Christopher delAurvre was mad had, seemingly, entrenched itself in the thoughts of Adria, and far from doing anything to dispel it, Christopher actually furthered it, violating convention and custom by turning away travelers and pilgrims and refusing entrance to musicians and storytellers. This worried Pytor and Jerome greatly, for even if the insulted performers did not do their best to spread the unpleasant rumors about the baron of Aurverelle, the matter of the rejected travelers was serious indeed, since hospitality was a cornerstone of existence in Europe. Barbarians, perhaps, could turn away those in need, but even a beggar was entitled to a bowl of soup and a heap of straw by the fire in the world of civilized men.

But Christopher persisted in his increasing isolation. Even a wandering friar, sick and weary, found no bed in Castle Aurverelle and had to make do with the severe hospitality of the Carthusian charterhouse at the base of the hill.

This was too much for Jerome. “My lord,” he said one day, “forgive my bluntness, but hasn't this gone on long enough?”

Christopher looked up from his loaf of black bread. Deliberately, he crunched through the half-cooked beans and spit out a bit of unhusked spelt. “Long enough?”

“That friar . . .”

“Dom Henri told me two days ago that the chapter house sent that friar packing when they caught him with a girl.”

Jerome murmured an oath and crossed himself.

Christopher munched his bread noisily. “Things haven't changed much since I rode off with the crusaders, have they? Are you going to lecture me now about not going to church and taking the sacraments? You'll have to wait in line. Efram is ahead of you.”

The Franciscan shook his head, folded his arms inside his sleeves. “My lord, it's the rumors. It's being said in the marketplaces of Adria that Aurverelle has no will to maintain itself. It's being said in the castles, too.”

Christopher shrugged. “It's not Aurverelle's will that's lacking.” He laughed without mirth. “It's mine.”

“Yvonnet—”

“—is so concerned about the rebellion in Ypris that he doesn't have time to worry about Aurverelle,” Christopher finished. He noted Jerome's surprised look. “Yes, I've been reading the reports as they come in. You leave them on my bed, I read them. I don't care what they say, but I read them. They're more entertaining than counting stitches in the tapestries or bubbles in the windowpanes.”

Exasperated, Jerome tried once more. “Christopher, your people are concerned.”

Christopher put down his bread, struck by the fact that Jerome had been driven to such extremes that he was willing to address his lord by name . . . and with such vehemence. “How so, Fra Jerome?”

Jerome regained his composure. “They love you, my lord, but their morale is dropping quickly. They are your people.”

His people. Christopher did not want anyone to be his people, but he understood. Adria was of no concern to him, neither was the reputation of the estate. The former, as far as he was concerned, could go to hell; the latter was already soiled far beyond his power to add or to detract by his grandfather's excesses and subsequent docile reform—and Christopher still could not say which of the two disturbed him more, or for which he had been trying to make restitution when he heeded the blandishments of his wife and set off with the crusaders of France.

But Jerome had a point. It was to people like those who worked the lands of Aurverelle that he owed his survival during his trek back from the crusade. Peasants—well-off, poor, utterly destitute—had taken him in, fed him bowls of lentil soup and black bread full of beans, given him a place to sleep when the monasteries and abbeys had turned him away.

“Thank you, Jerome,” he said. “I'll think about that.”

And he did. And when spring finally arrived, and when the iron-nosed plows began creeping across damp fields, the farmers and tenants of Aurverelle were surprised to find Christopher out in the fields with them. But not only did he direct the first furrow himself, holding a sword high while the plowman carved a forty-yard slice towards him as smoothly as a man might draw a paintbrush the length of a fence: as April continued and the weather turned fine, Christopher was working—ditching and hedging, pulling basketfuls of mud out of the marshes to repair the causeway and increase the