Maze of Moonlight (39 page)

The path shimmered in his sight as much from the pervasive toxins in the air as from the magic that sustained it. Paul stumbled, stumbled again. He wanted to breathe, he had to breathe, but he could find nothing to fill his lungs save smoke, and his heart was empty.

He struck the ground, lay still. “I've failed,” he murmured. “I tried, dear Lady, but it wasn't enough.”

Birds called wildly from the branches far above, exploding into frantic and blind flight as the thickening smoke overpowered their nocturnal reluctance. In the distance, Paul heard the frantic rushings and collisions and bellows and cries of panicked animals as they fled towards the west, warned by the smoke and their instincts that their home was lost.

Lost. Paul was lost, his people were lost, the Elves were lost. Everything was . . .

He looked up to find Martin standing over him. The lad had stripped off his tunic and hat, and had been laboring barechested alongside Terrill and the men of the estate, coaxing, ordering, cajoling, dragging the people towards the dwindling hope of safety. Lithe and strong, Martin was dripping with sweat, his face was gray, and his arms and chest were smeared with dirt and dust, but he knelt beside Paul, took his arm. “Come, my lord. You can't lie here.”

Paul rested his forehead on the ground, his eyes clenched. “I should lie here and die.” Where were his smiles now? His little daft witticisms? His boyish boundings along the halls of Shrinerock? Those, it seemed, belonged to another life, another century, another age. Much better that old doddering men like Paul delMari should just die—along with their friends and their sons—and get it over with.

Martin was not satisfied. He pulled Paul's arm about his neck and stood up, dragging the baron to his feet. “Would you have let me say something like that when you were teaching me how to use a sword?”

Paul turned hollow eyes on him. “What good is it, Martin? You just wanted to hide. You wouldn't even let me knight you, and now you're going to die in the middle of Malvern along with the rest of us.”

“Don't talk like that, my lord.”

Paul hung his head. It had all come to naught.

Gently, with his free hand, Martin touched Paul's cheek. When the baron looked up, the lad was crying. “Don't talk like that . . .” He sobbed. “. . . Father.”

Paul shut his eyes, rested his head against Martin's.

Martin dragged him forward. “Come on, Father,” he said, stumbling over the words. “We have to get to Aurverelle.”

The clouds of smoke were almost opaque now, a sustained chorus of coughing was coming from his people, and Aurverelle was still miles away. It seemed hopeless.

But Paul gripped Martin's hand. “We'll make it, my son.”

***

The loss of the siege guns and of well over a hundred men only delayed Berard's plans. Throughout the remainder of the day, the men of the companies buried their dead, tended their wounded, and established camp, but with the next morning came a shout from Berard and a rushing of armed men at the village of Saint Brigid.

The villagers were ready. The palisade took the brunt of the charge and forced the attackers to either climb over it or break it down in the face of a pelting hail of slingstones, arrows, and sacks of dung. But even if they succeeded in penetrating it, there was no longer a bridge over the deep ditch that lay between them and the village walls, and weighted with armor and weapons as they were, they were forced to stumble down one side and clamber laboriously up the other, now and again catching an ankle or a leg in the pits and traps that pocked the bottom. And while they struggled across, there were, to be sure, more rocks, more arrows . . . and more dung.

It was Christopher who had proposed this last, odoriferous defense, for he knew from personal experience that armor weighing anywhere from one hundred to two hundred pounds was very nearly intolerable to wear even under the best conditions. Given the stifling heat and dust, Berard's men were doubtless anything but happy, and Christopher was eager to add to their misery.

He himself flung a sackful that, trailing a spray of droplets, arced through the air and smacked solidly into Berard's visor. A moment of stunned shock on Berard's part, and then the captain fumbled frantically for the fastenings of his helmet, stripped off the clumsy thing, bent, and threw up.

Christopher was gratified. And his satisfaction increased even more when, a moment later, a cobble-sized stone caught Berard on the head and sent him sprawling onto the ground with a loud clank.

His men saw him fall, hesitated. But as two of his companions hauled him to his feet, he was already shouting at them to continue. They turned and went on, slogging through obstacles and disgust to reach the walls, only to find themselves flooded with boiling oil and flaming pitch and pounded with rocks the size of boulders.

Berard lost men. Inevitably, so did the villagers. Berard's crossbowmen were staying out of range of dung and missiles, but their weapons, windlassed up to two hundred and fifty pounds of tension, easily cast twelve-inch bolts as far as the walls. At such an extreme distance, their aim was not good, so they clustered their attacks; and after a few bracketing shots, heavy rains of pointed steel periodically dropped into the village.

Behind the walls, the village women took charge of the wounded, and what they could not cure with bandages and water was attended to by elven hands, for Natil harped and healed, and Mirya left her sword in its sheath as her magic closed wounds and stanched of blood. Starlight and music mingled with the dust and din of battle as the Elves did their work.

Christopher raged and catcalled at Berard, scampering from one side of the ramparts to the other as fast as if he had indeed been a monkey. He threw stones and dung, helped hoist boulders into position, even grabbed a bow and sent off a few arrows himself.

“Surrender!” Berard was shouting, but he had drifted too close, and one of Christopher's bodkin-pointed missiles caught him in the chest. The steel plate turned the head, but Berard looked shaken, then enraged. “Damn you! Yield!”

“No!” Christopher shouted back with a foppish lilt to his voice. “You'll hurt us!” And another arrow clanked against Berard's cuirass.

Berard had several thousand men, and eventually, simply as the result of pressure and momentum, they reached the walls. Scaling ladders went up, clattering into place against the stones of the parapet. The hands of the villagers went out with pikes and staves and forked sticks. The scaling ladders went back down.

But they went up once more, and then again, rising like reeds from a turbulent lake. The crossbowmen cranked, loaded, released; and shouting encouragement to one another, Berard's men swarmed upwards.

A group of nearly fifty mounted a thicket of ladders near Christopher, and he signaled frantically to the men who were hoisting a cauldron of pitch into place. A nod from them, and brimming with boiling and smoking liquid, the cauldron pivoted at the end of its crossbeam, swinging towards him, missing the heads of the defenders by only a hand's breadth.

Christopher grabbed the lip of the hot vessel with his gloved hands and muscled it into place directly above the mass of climbing brigands. “Give up?” he called down to them.

He heard curses from below. With a shrug, he let the pitch go.

It flooded down, burning, scalding. Berard's men fell back, some plainly on fire, some suffocating in their layers of plate and mail, some simply but obviously demoralized. Another rain of stones and shit, and they started away from the walls. They slid and stumbled back down into the ditch and began struggling up towards the confining palisade. But, black and vengeful, Abel rose up with a huge sledgehammer, took aim, and hurled the tool at the props that were supporting an improvised dam in the stream that ran hard by the town.

The drought had reduced the stream to a trickle, but over time, the dam had built up a sizable reservoir behind it. Abel's hammer smashed directly into the props, and the waters leaped forward with a roar, rushed down the canal, and inundated the ditch.

Christopher watched Berard's men flail and drown as he wiped the sticky pitch from his gloves. “Thank you, Abel. And they'll have a devil of a time mining under that now, too,” he said.

“Aye,” said Abel, “but they're not going to give up that easily.”

“No. I daresay it'll be siege engines next.”

“They'll have to get 'em over the ditch.”

“They've got the time.” Christopher looked out at the retreating men, could not resist another catcall. But a crossbow bolt smacked into the ramparts inches from him and cut it short.

Indeed, Berard had plenty of time. Saint Brigid was besieged, and its people, including Christopher and the Elves, were trapped. The free companies could amuse themselves, hunt, and wait for the food supplies of the village, already scant because of the drought and the time of year, to give out.

Berard, though, did not appear to be overly interested in starving the village into submission. He had attacked actively, and since he was now shouting orders that had to do with battering rams and assault towers, he obviously was going to continue along similar lines. Christopher had no idea why. Perhaps, he considered, Berard was as crazy as a certain Christopher delAurvre.

He put his hands to his head in frustration. “I've got to get to Furze. Everything Berard's got is right here at Saint Brigid. It's too good to let go. Dammit . . .”

He looked up to see the monkey perched on the parapet before him. It stuck out its tongue, and viciously, Christopher returned the gesture, then repeated it at Berard who, though still giving orders regarding further assault, appeared to be completely bewildered by his opponent.

But, a moment later, Christopher was also bewildered, for above the sound of the rushing water in the ditch, the cries from the men who still floundered in it, and the clatter of staves and shouts of triumph from the so-far successful defenders of Saint Brigid's walls, he heard Natil screaming at him:

“Christopher! Vanessa! The Church!”

The two Elves had their hands full of bleeding men, but their faces told Christopher everything. Without bothering to shove his way to steps or ladder, he leaped from the wall, caught the end of the rope that had held the cauldron, and used his momentum to carry him out over the street and down tot he ground. He was already running when his feet touched down, and when he exploded into the church, he found that Vanessa, Charity, Dom Gregorie, and several of the pregnant women, armed with heavy candlesticks and staves, were attempting to hold a dozen armed and mailed men away from the other women and children who had taken shelter within the thick walls.

Christopher understood. Taking advantage of the battle at the main gate, a group of free company men had obviously scaled the wall on the other side of the village with the intent of doing as much damage as they could.

A pool of blood and a scattering of soft corpses about the nave told of the men's success, but Vanessa and her companions were fighting on. Vanessa herself, with only a stick in her hand, was confronting a man easily three times her size. “Christopher!”

The baron did not wait. Leaping forward, he slashed the man's legs out form under him, then followed through with a chop to his face. The man's features were abruptly buried in blood, and as his companions turned to face this new threat, one fell beneath Gregorie's candlestick. Overweight, pop-eyed, and unspeakably angry, the priest waded towards another, and the soldier seemed torn for a moment between terror and laughter.

He went down a moment later beneath several of the pregnant women. Their faces white with rage and streaked with the blood of their sisters and their children, they toppled him to the floor with staves and held him down with their weight of their own bodies. Someone produced a hammer, and the man was battered into lifelessness in an instant.

The other men were counterattacking, but the women, unarmored and quick, scattered from them. Christopher struck again, killing one, and kicked another into the arms of the women. The hammer fell once more.

Gregorie attempted to repeat his success, but he was backhanded across the room. The priest stumbled, fell. One of the soldier pointed at Christopher, who was already closing on him. “That's ten thousand florins right there, mates. Seal the doors.”

The man was skilled, but—strike, parry, riposte, backslash—he dropped with a clatter that echoed off the high ceiling of the church. The interchange, though, had given the others a chance to surround Christopher, and when he felt a mailed fist grab his hair, he knew that a sword through his neck was imminent.

The hand in his hair wavered, and a high, determined cry told him that Vanessa had thrown herself on the back of his assailant and was beating on his helmeted head with her fists, looking for eye slits, openings, something . . .

Cursing, the soldier reached back for her, groping. Christopher got his hair loose, kicked the two attackers away, and turned around, slashing. But the man was already down, for an unexpected ally had joined the baron. Tall, slender, deadly, Mirya had appeared, and her sword was no longer sheathed.

“
Elthia!
”

She drove into the free company men, her movements as hypnotic as they were lethal. Sidestepping and weaving, she simultaneously blocked counterstrokes from two opponents, backflipped behind them, spun, and killed them both with the same strike, her sword slicing through leather and iron as though through dry leaves.

Berard's men gave up on the doors and closed on Christopher and the Elf. One grabbed Vanessa and dragged her away. He started to put his sword to her belly, but Charity appeared and smashed a pewter candle holder down onto his head. He reeled, dropped Vanessa. The girl seized the candlestick from her teacher and began beating his helmet into a piece of bent metal.

Christopher was attempting to fight his way to her side, but while one of his opponents went down, another planted a heavy boot in his stomach. He staggered back, caught his feet on the altar steps, and crashed into the statue of the Virgin that stood at the edge of the sanctuary.