Maze of Moonlight (15 page)

He talked to her, asked her questions, found that she remembered who she was and what had happened. That was good. Christopher had seen strong men reduced to idiocy by much smaller head wounds. Apparently the talents and methods of Mirya and Terrill—whoever and whatever they were, but let that pass—included the painstaking reassembly of a mind.

He told her where she was and how she had gotten there, but as Vanessa's eyes flitted about the room, taking in stolid Pytor and Jerome, matronly Raffalda, Christopher still sensed her fear. Deep-seated. Relentless.

“It's all right,” he said. “You're safe here, and you'll be fine. You had some good doctors.” Good doctors, indeed! But he squelched the thought. He was determined to keep up the charade of Vanessa's bandages for the stipulated length of time. Best, therefore, not to let her know that it was a charade at all.

“An' Martin wa' wounded,” she said, her eyes, restless, still examining the room as though it might suddenly shift into another form.

“Yes,” said Christopher. “He's with his parents now.”

“Aye . . . tha' I saw. Tha' I knew.” She suddenly focused on Christopher. “Wi' are you doing thi' for such as me?”

Christopher smiled. “You fought Etienne of Languedoc. That means we're on the same side. Think of it as a gesture of a comrade in arms.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jerome and Pytor exchange glances. Yes, he supposed that he was sounding like a madman again, but the seneschal and the bailiff would just have to get used to that.

And Vanessa's eyes, luminous, bright, bored in at him. “You di' it because o' the battle, din't you?”

Nicopolis. She could see it. Christopher suddenly understood why Vanessa's traveling companions had been so frightened of her.

He pursed his lips. “Yes,” he said. “I did.”

His brutal honesty seemed to shock her a little, but she only nodded.

Though she had to remain bandaged, Christopher saw no reason to keep her confined to bed. He urged her not to exert herself too much—he had, after all, no real understanding of the intricacies of the healing that she had received—but, much to the distress of Pytor and Jerome, he gave her the freedom of the castle and, since her fingers were still clumsy with linen wrappings, insisted upon feeding her with his own hands.

He was feeding himself. He was freeing himself. He was nurturing himself. He struggled constantly to be aware of the fact that Vanessa was a peasant girl, that she had her own sorrows and her own burdens, but privately, he allowed himself to use her—in fine delAurvre style, he admitted—as a means to his own ends. If he could help Vanessa, if he could make her happy, then he himself had a chance.

But Vanessa gave him little chance to forget her individuality, for when she was not with Christopher, she wandered through the deserted corridors of Aurverelle like a restless, wide-eyed bird, trailing her sham bandages like broken feathers. No one was safe from her knowing eyes, nor from the strange, unpredictable comments she made that struck unerringly at her listener's most private and sensitive thoughts.

“It wa' the monastery, wan't it?” she said to Jerome. “You were a' fighting among yourselves about the pope?”

The Franciscan stood as though struck, crossed himself without thinking.

“It's a' right,” said Vanessa. “You di' well to leave.”

Jerome fled.

And Pytor heard about Medno, about the money he had borrowed at a ruinous rate of interest by indenturing himself and his family, about his failure to repay it, about the sickness that had taken his wife and daughters because he could not afford a doctor. And David was confronted with wide brown eyes and reassurances about his talents and abilities. And Ranulf was told about the daughter that he had always wished that he had. And . . .

Only Christopher, who freely admitted the existence of his personal demons, was unshaken by Vanessa's words. He did not cross himself or flee: he simply nodded. He did not fear her. How could he? He
was
her.

When he found that she could read, he made sure that she saw the library and he issued orders that she be given whatever books she wanted—a relief to many, because she began to spend much time in her room with heavy volumes open on her lap. He took her for walks in the gardens that his grandfather had planted. He sang for her, taught her courtly dances, ordered several fine gowns for her. But when, on a whim, he growled for her and capered like a bear, she looked distressed and shushed him quickly. “Dan do tha'” she said. “Dan do tha' to yourself.”

Christopher dropped his arms. “To myself, Vanessa?”

“It hurts you to do tha',” she said. “You di' too much o' it . . . before.”

Her eyes were as strange and knowing as ever, but her voice was full of concern. Christopher considered, nodded, and taking her arm, set off once more along the avenue of peach trees. “You know,” he said, “you really distress people when you go on like that.”

Vanessa drooped. “I know. I see tha', too.”

“Why do you do it, then?”

“I . . .” She looked up at the interlacing leaves and incipient fruit. Criss-crossing branches reflected in her eyes. She had told Christopher about the patterns that she saw: patterns that contained everything, patterns that interlaced with greater complexity than even these pleached and twined branches, patterns that allowed her—forced her—to see into people's lives . . . and, with maddening regularity, into the future. “I can't help it,” she said.

“Have you ever thought to simply remain silent?”

Vanessa hung her bandaged head, clung to his arm as though blind. “The patterns say tha' I can't. They tell me I ha' to talk. They say there's no other way. An' so I say wha' I see, an' then e'eryone hates me.”

“They don't hate you, Vanessa. They're just afraid.”

“People hate what they're afraid o'.” The brown eyes were filling with tears now. “Tha's wi' my ma and da sent me awa'. That's wi'the folk i' my village din't talk to me. That's wi' your folk run awa' now.”

There was a bench at the end of the avenue, and Christopher pulled her down onto it and held her while she wept. For a few minutes, she was no longer a feral little fox that had trotted into the main hall of Castle Aurverelle; she was, rather, simply a girl of fifteen summers, a girl who had seen too much pain and loss.

“It doesn't work,” said Christopher, rocking her gently. “If it doesn't work, then don't do it any more. Don't even try. I learned that at Nicopolis.”

“The . . .” She was seeing again. “. . . the battle.”

“Yes.” He smiled thinly. “You saw that right off, didn't you, my dear girl? Practically the first words out of your mouth.”

She bit her lip, and the tears welled again. Christopher shook his head.

“No,” he said. “No, don't cry. I didn't say that to wound. You saw it because it's become me, just like your patterns have become you. I don't play at knighthood anymore because it hurts me, and it hurts everyone around me. I gave it up. It doesn't work.” He took her hands, grimaced at the intervening bandages, and, without thinking, freed her fingers from their linen swaddling.

Flesh against flesh. That was good. To his grandfather before his reform, it would have been an encouragement to strip off Vanessa's gown and put her on her back in the middle of the lawn, but Christopher, though he had possessed his share of country maidens—and, God help him, his wife, Anna—was content with the holiness of this simple touch: one abandoned soul taking the hands of another and finding in that gentle clasp a faint assurance of companionship.

And maybe, someday, healing.

“Don't try, Vanessa,” he said softly. “Don't even try. Something my grandfather taught me: if you don't say anything at all, people will hear what they want to hear.” And was that bit of counsel the product of the years before or after Roger's remarkable reform? He did not know. He found that at present he did not care.

“But the patterns . . .” She was shaking her head violently. “The patterns say I must. The patterns show wha' must be, an' so tha's the way it is . . . unless . . .” She drooped. “. . . unless . . .” There was a sudden flash of fear in her eyes, the same that he had seen that first morning: the look of an animal caught in a trap.

“Unless?”

Her fear was stark, uncompromising. “I saw them change,” she said softly. “The patterns. I didn't think they could change, but when the legate cam up to me, I saw them change. He changed them. Everything turned about, an' then there wa' a different future. . . .”

Christopher finally understood. It was not Etienne's attack itself that had so shattered Vanessa. It was, instead, that the churchman's unexpected violence had fragmented her world of absolute predestination into an infinitude of maybes. Now, sundered from her firm, fixed, tragic universe, she was adrift in a sea of uncertainty.

“An' I dan understand it now,” Vanessa was sobbing. “I dan understand anything. Wha' does it mean?”

Christopher looked back along the avenue to the castle. Straight. Unswerving. He and Vanessa had walked the length of it to the bench they now occupied. But where they went from here—whether to the arbor across the open expanse of lawn, to the fountain that spurted cool water on even the hottest of days, or to the stand of beech trees that Roger had left deliberately haphazard and unkempt so as to better resemble a little piece of deep forest—was open to choice. Anything was possible. Even God did not know everything that would happen. Or if He did, He at least had the courtesy—

No. Courtesy had nothing to do with it. It was free will. “It means,” he said, “that you're just like the rest of us, Vanessa.”

She blinked at him, bewildered. “I dan understand.”

“You see patterns, you say . . .” Not having Vanessa's eyes, Christopher had no real idea what he was talking about, but he was mad, and therefore perhaps his babblings—like the ravings of madmen everywhere—might, by chance, contain a particle of truth. “Maybe what you see doesn't cause the world. Maybe it only reflects it. Etienne changed the patterns because he made a choice. You can change them by making a choice, too. You can keep silent.”

“So . . .” Vanessa looked at her fingers. The nails, after two weeks in bandages, were long and smooth. “So I shouldn't say anything about wha' I see?”

Christopher shook his head. “Not because you shouldn't. Because you don't have to. It's your decision.”

Vanessa had obviously become accustomed to heeding the maze of images in her mind as though they were immutable decrees, had fallen into the habit of passively accepting what came as inevitable. Now Christopher was telling her something different. But he was telling himself the same thing, for he had himself accepted passively, as a redeeming standard to set up against his grandfather's vices and virtues, the tortured logic of a theory of conduct and society devised by men who had never confronted the arid plateaux of Nicopolis . . . and his world had fragmented when it had been proven false.

She was looking at him with bright eyes. “Your grandfather . . .”

He caught his breath. Unerringly, positively unerringly, she had laid her finger upon his heart.

But Vanessa started to cry again. “See? I've done it again. Now you'll send me awa'.”

Christopher shook his head, still amazed. “Where . . . where on earth would I send you?”

“I'm going to Saint Blaise. I've got to go t' Saint Blaise. The patterns say I've got to go.”

Christopher grappled with the wound that she had touched. He had to ignore it for now. It was important that he ignore it. “Do they . . . do they say that you
have
to? Or just that you will if you don't choose to do otherwise?”

Her tears stopped abruptly, and she stared out of her bandaged face. “But . . . where else would I go?”

“Do you have family? I mean, besides in Furze Hamlet?”

It was a foolish question, one that came from a nobleman with blood ties that caught all of Adria and much of Europe in their meshes. What family could Vanessa possibly have outside of Furze Hamlet?

But to his surprise, she nodded. 'My grandma is in Saint Brigid. If she's still alive.”

Saint Brigid? There was a story in that, he was sure. “Might she accept you for what you are? Patterns or not?”

“I . . . I dan know. Da said that she wa' always different, too.” She stared out at the peach avenue. One of many paths. Only one of many. It was a frightening thought, but a liberating one, too. “I dan know . . . I dan know what to think.”

“Give yourself a chance.” Christopher pulled out a handkerchief and dried her tears. “Think about it. You can do whatever you want. Think about that.”

He took her back to her bedroom and told her to rest, then went down to the kitchen and found David. “I want a feast tomorrow night,” he said.

David had looked uncertain at Christopher's entrance, as though he half-expected him to seize a barrel of apples and begin pelting the kitchen boys with fruit; but at the baron's words, he broke out in smiles. “My lord, it would give me no greater
pleas
ure. May I ask whom we shall be entertaining?”

“Vanessa. Her bandages are coming off this evening.” Really, though, his orders had little to do with her bandages. They had, rather, to do with her soul. Or maybe his soul. He was not sure. Or maybe it did not really matter.

At the mention of Vanessa, David's face turned uncertain again. “Ah . . . as you wish, my lord.”

Lips pursed with annoyance, Christopher stalked towards the door and, on the way out, fired an apple straight at the chef. David caught it. Between the monkey and the baron, he was getting quite good at such things.

***

“You don't approve of her either, do you, Jerome?”

It was evening, and Christopher was readying himself for the banquet he had arranged for Vanessa. True, he had rushed the removal of her bandages by a few weeks, but she was obviously healed, and had been, in fact, since Terrill and Mirya (whoever they were) had finished their treatment (whatever that was). And so the bandages had come off, and for the first time since he had left for Nicopolis, Christopher had called for his baronial finery. Now Raffalda was lacing him into a silk undershirt and the crimson velvet tunic with the slashed sleeves and the embroidery, diamonds, and pearls; and now Jerome was standing by the door, a frowning apparition.