Maze of Moonlight by Gael Baudino (read with me TXT) 📕

Stones, mortar, and the cold slumber of an ancient keep. Endless battlements and towers and stairs. More armor and weapons than the remaining men-at-arms really needed. More fields than a depleted peasantry could work. More rain (yes, it was drumming on the roofs even now, and Raffalds was bawling for the few remaining maids and kitchen boys to run and fasten the shutters) than anyone could use.

God knew best. Florins and ducats. Few saved, many damned.

Dark thoughts, Pytor, he told himself. Dark thoughts. The master never liked that studied, Russian melancholy any more than he liked being addressed in the third person.

But the master was gone—there was now no reason to give up any of it—and the dark thoughts accompanied Pytor down the corridors of Aurverelle as he wondered about his master and considered the future.

Aurverelle, deserted and cheerless though it was, was nonetheless one of the largest estates of Adria, and Pytor and Jerome both knew that the other barons were already looking for ways to acquire it. There were any number of relatives of the delAurvre line scattered throughout the manor houses and castles of the land, and it would be a relatively simple matter for one of the more powerful of them to make a claim to Aurverelle. All very correct, all very legal, all very formal.

And that would be the end of it. Pytor wondered again about Castile. Franciscans and runaway slaves were not to everyone's taste. It would be a long walk.

As though to defy the sunny land to the southwest, he went to his room and took a thick cloak from the peg, then plunked down several more flights of stairs to the outer court. The rain pounded on the cloak and the mud sucked at his boots as he stepped from the cobbled gateway into the streets of the town, but he hardly noticed: he was wondering—despite his words to Jerome—whether there was still hope, whether he would ever again sleep on the floor in front of Christopher's room in the knowledge that his master slept peacefully and safely in his own bed.

A pair of goats wandered across Pytor's path, butting one another and dipping their heads for morsels bobbing in the mud and sewage that had pooled in the middle of the street. Slaughter time was near, and a pig snorted and rooted its last days away in its mire of an alley. Pytor sloshed past them, turned a corner, and pushed into the fevered light and noise of a small inn's common room. Had he so desired, he could have stayed up at the castle and drunk all the wine and beer that he could hold—drunk himself into a stupor, in fact, as he often did—but the castle was too dark tonight, the master's absence too palpable for him to find any solace there.

Over three years now. Three years and five months. And no word. And Jean de Nevers and Boucicaut, strutting their way through France in their jewels and their finery as though they had won a battle rather than lost the whole campaign, taxing their already starving peasants to pay the ransoms that Bayazet had demanded, acting the courtly clowns—

Grimacing, Pytor slammed the door behind him and threw back his hood just as a burst of laughter bounced off the walls and lingered boisterously among the dark beams of the ceiling. “Come, master beggar,” someone was shouting, “tell us of your begging.”

“I . . . beg . . .” A thin voice, halting, quavering, and oddly disturbing for that. In the light of the big fire on the hearth, Pytor could see a man as thin as his voice, as thin as the japing monkey that still lurked among the slate roofs and battlements of Castle Aurverelle, a man who lifted his hands and waved them about his head as though to gather strength from the smoky air. “I beg to live . . . and I live to beg. Gig-a-gig! God only knows how I hae run and jumped from here to the Danube!”

The beggar's sing-songing prattle followed Pytor to a bench in a dark corner. He sat down, signed to the tapster: his usual, dark and ripe with barley and malt and in the biggest tankard in the house. Inevitably, it was the same brew that Raffalda and her wenches had cooked up, so Pytor was paying money for something he could have had for nothing. But he excused himself for his profligacy: he was not paying for beer. He was instead paying for the right to occupy a seat in a wretched room that was not in the castle, not empty, not without a master—and for the dubious pleasure of watching some of the townsmen taunt an old, half-wit beggar.

“And did you see bears?” said Walter, the turner. “Did you?”

“Aye,” quavered the beggar. “Many a bear. And lions. Ho-ho-ho! The arms and shields hang low, and there's many a Christian knight hangs on a pole this evening!”

“You're blaspheming!” said Walter. “The priest will hear about this.”

“No man—ha-ha—can serve two master . . .” The half-wit crouched low, then sprang up, shaking as though possessed, his body a gaunt shape against the flames. “But, you know, they follow me.”

“Follow?” said someone else. “Who?”

“The fiends. The fiends in their gowns and their staves and their turned-up shoes, the ones who play pick-a-back with the popes—there's two, you know.”

“Two?”

“Two popes. One for each side: black and white. But no one knows . . .” The beggar whinnied like a horse. “. . . which is which. Or which way the board is turned. And they won't until the end.”

The men who had gathered to hear the performance drew back a little. The schism was not something about which to joke. It had been said that since Clement had been elected in direct opposition to Urban, not a soul had entered Paradise.

Few saved, many damned. As though many would enter Paradise in any case!

Pytor accepted a brimming tankard