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

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.

Chapter Twenty-seven

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