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

from as ancient a lineage as I. And considerably more honorable. One of his people bore the Savior on his back. The delAurvres just climb up on everyone else's. Natil, Brunellus. Brunellus, Natil.”

To his surprise, the mule and the harper seemed to acknowledge one another's presence with a look and a brief nod. But when Natil spoke, she spoke to Christopher. “You need to go to bed, my lord. Mules have straw, and foxes have dens, but men have sheets and blankets.”

He laid his head back down on the mule's rough coat. “I don't care.”

Natil took him by the shoulders. She was surprisingly strong for a woman, and in a moment, she had dragged him to his feet. “Christopher,” she said gently. “You are acting like an ass.”

She had called him by name, had spoken to him in terms to which his grandfather would have instantly responded with a lethal blow. But, indeed, he no longer cared. “Of course I'm acting like an ass. All the delAurvres have acted like asses. Me, my father, my grand—” He broke off, sobbed. It was too close. He was only wounding himself. He wanted to stop, but he could not.

Natil sighed softly. “Dear Lady, what have we done?”

More pity. He did not want pity. He wanted—what? Explanation? Death? Wandering? He still did not know.

But the harper put her head to his, and he smelled green leaves and wildflowers: a forest after a rain. The whirl of his thoughts slowed, and though the tears still ran down his face, his soul ached a little less.

“Come, my lord,” she said, “come to bed. I will sit with you, if you wish, and keep your tormentors away, but you must rest.”

“Vanessa . . .”

“She is safe, my lord.”

“But for how long?”

Natil, he judged, knew the answer to that question no better than he, but slowly, calmly, seemingly breathing her own tranquillity into him, she guided him across the courtyard. Pytor, searching frantically for his master, stumbled upon them at the door to the baronial residence, and together the harper and the seneschal bore Christopher up the stairs and down the corridor to his room.

Natil called for basin and cloth and herself cleaned the tears and dirt from his face. She would have sung for him, but he told her not to. “I'm too drunk to listen,” he said, but what he did not say was that he was still afraid of her, afraid of her self-possession, afraid that she would do . . . something . . .

Something like what? Like magic? But was that not really what he wanted? Vanessa had been healed in the space of an hour. Christopher did not dare expect anything so dramatic, but he could at least hope that, as some kind of interventions—human, deific, or diabolical, he did not care—had raised Vanessa from what surely would have been her deathbed, he, who had taken the girl as a symbol of himself, might be similarly favored. Mirya and Terrill had touched Vanessa; perhaps Natil . . .

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I want you to sing and play tomorrow.”

A cool hand on his forehead. Natil's eyes were blue and shining. There was pity in them. But maybe there was understanding, too. “And what would my lord wish to hear?”

The magic. He wanted magic. He wanted healing. “Something . . .” he mumbled. “Something to bring it all back. You know . . . something.”

***

“Wool.”

For what must have been the fiftieth time in two weeks, Berard of Onella prodded the large, heavy sack with his toe and shook his head in disgust.

“There are fifteen more just like it in the wain,” said Jehan delMari. “And ten wains. That makes one hundred and fifty sacks, and at three hundred and eighty pounds per sack that makes . . .” He frowned as he calculated mentally.

“More wool than we know what to do with,” said Berard sourly.

He prodded again at the sack. There was not much one could do with wool wains. The sacks, packed tightly with rolled fleeces, were too heavy to move easily, and if cut open, their contents would burst out like pus from a lanced boil. The only fit place for a woolsack was in the market place of a weaving town—like Ghent, for instance—and Ghent was exactly where this particular pack train had been headed . . . until the Fellowship of Acquisition had stepped in.

Now Berard was stuck. His men were grumbling—not loudly, but grumbling nonetheless—about the lack of pay and plunder, and all that he had managed to come up with in this clean-picked wasteland of southern France was a pack train full of wool. And, of all things, Aurverelle wool at that. Everyone knew about the delAurvres.

“I suppose we could try to sell it off in Picardy,” he said. “There are a few weavers there.”

Jehan glared at him. “Or how about Paris?” he said with ice in his tone. “We could haul it right up the Rue Saint Denis, and I'm sure that all the townsfolk would come out to wave their banners at the brave knights.”

“Now, Jehan . . .”

“I tell you, I'm sick of this! I won my spurs in battle, good solid battle. Sword against sword and men falling at my feet. And what are we doing now? In France, the capital of chivalry, we're stealing wool!”

Berard ran a hand over his face. It was July, and it was hot. He was rather glad that Jehan's obsession with chivalry and knightly battle had not born any recent fruit, for he was sure that, in armor, they would have all wound up boiled like crabs. The king of France had lost his wits, it was said, because of armor and heat, and Berard did not want to try the experiment himself: he was too close to going mad over one hundred and fifty sacks of wool.

“I admit this wasn't what I had in mind,” he said.

“I'd rather be back in Italy,” said Jehan. “There was