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

“I—”

“Besides,” Berard yawned, “Gonzago is in charge. We follow his orders.” He glanced sideways at Jehan, who was now peering anxiously at Gonzago's plumed helmet. “There's always a way in. A good attacker exploits whatever opening comes his way. A good defender does his best to stop him . . . or at least keeps the openings from being discovered in the first place.”

Jehan's temper, always faintly simmering, was rising to full boil.

“Like your father,” said Berard, moving a bishop. “A very wise man.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he entrusted the secret of the hidden access to Shrinerock only to you.”

“I'm his only son! Of course he'd tell me!”

“It must be quite a burden . . .”

Jehan was forthright. As usual. “None whatsoever.”

“. . . to know something like that.” Berard reached up to scratch his head. His fingers were interrupted by his helmet. He shrugged philosophically: a soldier's lot. “Why did he construct such a thing in the first place?”

Jehan was hot and angry. “He didn't construct it. It's a part of the mountain. You'd spend ten years and several fortunes trying to fill up all those caves.”

Berard nodded, edged a pawn forward another square. “That wouldn't do at all.”

“Shrinerock is safe enough. Who but a coward or a thief would come up from the spring, anyway?”

The second bishop now. “The spring?”

“Saint Adrian's spring. You know, that holy place that all the pilgrims are always visiting. Surely you remember Saint Adrian, Berard. He's the patron of this whole country.”

Gonzago's plume was in motion now, the commander dispatching a flock of messengers to bear his decision to the captains of the individual companies. Stealth? Berard wondered. No. Probably a fight. But not—please God!—a frontal assault. Gonzago was a better man than that.

Loot, and a few women, and wine. It would be a hard day, a good night. But Berard had a few moments left to pursue his game. “Yes,” he said, idly reaching for a knight, “I remember Saint Adrian.” He chuckled. “How ironic that his spring should contain the greatest weakness of the castle that guards it!”

“Yes . . .” said Jehan, watching the messengers apprehensively. “Ironic.”

Berard positioned the knight and turned to hear what the messengers had to say. Mate in two, if he were lucky.

***

The April afternoon was cool, with just a trace of a breeze from the sea, and the streets of Maris were crowded with townsfolk and visitors come for the celebration. Mimes and acrobats worked and busked the plazas. Servants in Ruprecht's livery rode along the main thoroughfares, scattering coins and flowers. Everyone was to be happy, everyone was to participate.

And Christopher delAurvre, not one to spoil the mood, leaped and tumbled in the middle of the great common that lay before the fortress of Maris. His hair and beard, left to grow for the last two months, were shaggy, unkempt, and deliberately spattered with mud; and his clothing was ragged and fantastic with tatters and scarves. He looked like an itinerant savage, and, indeed, he played the part well, growling like a bear at the children, scattering them amid feigned and sincere squeals of fright, propositioning a donkey so sincerely—and graphically—that the bystanders howled. And when Natil, laughing as hard as the rest, at last swallowed her mirth and struck a chord on her harp, he grinned brightly, turned his cap upside-down, and broke into an expansive dance.

Everyone clapped. Christopher was a good dancer, and an even better madman. The perfect oddity to compliment such a pretty harper whose modesty was such that she actually blushed at the applause given her. But Natil, regardless of her origins or her reasons for serving Christopher so steadfastly, seemed to be almost innately modest, whether about her skills as a harper . . . or her knowledge of the Elves.

Natil actually knew a great deal about them, and listening to her stories that winter, Christopher had begun for the first time to understand something of the maze of patterns that surrounded his family.

No one—perhaps deliberately, perhaps because those who had firsthand knowledge were dead—had ever told Christopher that his ancestors had all been obsessed with the Elves, seeing in their effortless, sylvan existence a challenge to the delAurvre dominion over man, field, and forest. Some had actually made a practice of hunting them, and that ferocity had gone so far as to infect the people of the estate in general. Nearly four hundred years before, went one tale (and Natil, overcome by her own skill, had wept when she had told it), two Elves, male and female, had been captured alive by Aurverelle men. The female had been raped and tortured to death, but the male had escaped, only to return some time later to slaughter the captors and their families.

It was a horrible little story of witless violence, anger, and revenge, perfectly in keeping with delAurvre excess. Roger, it seemed, had been but the last and most bestial of his family, pursuing his vices in open defiance of any kind of decency and justice.

Elves. Christopher did not doubt that within the flamboyant conventions of the storyteller's art lay the grain of truth for which he had been searching. They existed. They had power. Roger himself had mentioned them. It had not been madness, then, that had caused the old man's sudden shift in allegiance and behavior: it had been magic.

But though Christopher had been elated by the revelation that lay within Natil's stories and tears, still it chilled him that an ancestor, someone he had known, had been so struck by such inhuman powers, and that those same energies had, indirectly, touched his own life. It was because of Roger's inexplicable change that Christopher had been moved to try to make up for his grandfather's dichotomous failure of character, to finally journey to Nicopolis and have his last particle of belief dashed almost irrevocably.

Almost irrevocably, but not quite. Vanessa had come, and she had awakened his compassion. And then Natil had arrived . .