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

turned their horses and pelted down the road, vanishing around a distant turn as Berard, the wind knocked out of him, struggled to rise, gasping out calls for his men to regroup and follow as soon as they could.

Grimly, he dragged himself to his mount, climbed into the saddle, prodding it into motion. Christopher was ahead. Christopher was going to die.

His horse was weak with a morning's fill of running, but he kept its head pointing to the west. The east wind was a hand at his back, and the telltale dust from the passage of three sets of hooves encouraged him. The signs were obvious. Berard did not need trackers to tell him where the baron and his friends had gone.

And, indeed, it was not long before he saw a village ahead. Its walls were stout and ringed by a ditch and a palisade, but it was still just a village. A small village. A small village that had only men with pikes and a few weedy boys to defend its walls.

He stopped a good distance away and examined it. Just a village. But Christopher was in that village. And Christopher was going to die.

A clatter of hooves behind him. One of his men approached. “Captain!”

“Go fetch the rest of the troops, Raoul,” said Berard without turning ahead. “They shouldn't be any more than a day behind us. I want this village surrounded. I want it taken. I want it destroyed. And I want everybody inside it killed.” At last he swung around. “Do you understand?”

Raoul regarded him from dark eyes, and Berard saw his puzzlement. A little village? Throw four thousand men against a little village? For what? Sacks of beans?

“Do it,” he said. “Just do it.”

Still plainly confused, Raoul nodded, turned his horse, and set off at a trot.

Berard turned his eyes back to the village. “Miserable little monkey.”

***

Christopher and Abel lost no time in preparing Saint Brigid for imminent siege. Within hours, sweating groups of men armed with shovels and baskets had deepened the trench that surrounded the walls and had studded it with pits and traps, and the women had gone out into the fields and gathered in anything that was even vaguely ripe. As the massed body of the free companies approached, raising clouds of dust that echoed the smoke streaming into the distant sky, the gates of the town were shut, fastened, barred, and the gatehouse was rammed full of earth.

Christopher handled shovel and basket along with the rest and supervised the sealing of the gate. “I daresay it's all right,” he remarked to Abel. “I don't think we'll be wanting to leave anytime soon.”

He tried to sound casual and optimistic, but he was dismayed. He was trapped in Saint Brigid along with the villagers, and though the fact that the free companies had now left Shrinerock had made it even more imperative that he get word to the alliance, there was now no way that he could do so.

All day long, the companies poured into the fields that surrounded Saint Brigid and examined with ironic faces the little village that had arrayed itself against them. But at the end of the long columns came the siege guns: great squat things with huge bores. They could batter down walls much thicker than Saint Brigid's in a matter of hours. Tipping and bucking on their tumbrels, they rumbled down the road, and Berard had them brought forward and aimed directly at the gate.

“Now you see why I wanted the dirt in the gate,” said Christopher as he and Abel watched from the wall. Beside them, the monkey looked worried. That was all right, though: Christopher was worried, too.

Abel rose, squinted at the guns. “You're a shrewd man, Baron Aurverelle.”

“No, I'm mad. Ah . . . stay down, Abel: Berard has a way with crossbows.”

Abel nodded and crouched behind the parapet, but the monkey capered in the open, making lewd gestures at the companies. Christopher, laughing without mirth, dragged it into cover. “I wish we could do away with them that easily, little friend,” he said. But then he thought of the monkey as he had seen it once, cradled in the arms of an Elf, and, shuddering, he let it go to resume its dance and its gestures.

He sighed. Christopher and the monkey: still identical twins.

Below, in the village, the people were boarding up their windows. Abel's apprentice was directing the men who were putting up chains across the streets in case Berard's men managed to break through, and Vanessa and Charity were helping Dom Gregorie, the village priest, herd the younger children and the pregnant women into the church, which, thick-walled and at th center of town, offered distance and protection from the fighting.

Christopher settled himself on the inner edge of the wall, dangling his feet, watching. Pikes, swords, farm tools, stones, buckets of molten pitch and seething oil. Poles. Hatchets . . .

Ypris had fallen, and Furze had fallen. How could Saint Brigid—and Vanessa—hope to survive?

A flash of red-gold hair. Mirya, elven and silent, was ascending the steps to the top of the walls. Aside from her garb and her sword, she was much as Christopher remembered her from her visit to Aurverelle. Invariably polite and gracious, even in the middle of a battle, she regarded everything from out of emerald-green eyes that mirrored a deep tranquillity, and yet when she addressed Christopher it was always with a sense of deference.

She, too, seemed to be well known in Saint Brigid, and the villagers, though dismayed by Natil's wound, had welcomed Mirya cordially when she had entered the gate with Christopher. They had stood aside respectfully, even admiringly, as she had healed Natil's arm, and they seemed glad and relieved when she had told that them she would be staying in the village to help in the fight against the mercenaries. Now she climbed to the parapet and examined the siege guns. Christopher did not bother to warn her about the crossbows. She