Fortress in the Eye of Time

by C. J. Cherryh

  folds into unresisting, uncooperative fingers. To his vexation, he had even to close the young man’s hand to hold it.

  “Boy.” Mauryl sat down at arm’s length from him on the bench and, seizing the folds of the cloak in either hand, compelled the youth to face about and look him full in the eyes. “Boy, do you understand me? Do you?”

  The youth blinked. The dip of his head that followed might have been a nod of acceptance.

  Or an avoidance—as the gaze skittered aside to the fire.

  Mauryl put out a hand, turned the face toward him perforce.

  “Boy, do you recall, do you remember…anything?”

  Another redirection, a blink, an eclipse of gray eyes, blank and bare as a misty morning. It might have been confirmation.

  It might equally well have been feckless bewilderment.

  “A place?” Mauryl asked. “A name?”

  “Light.” The youth’s voice began as a breath and grew stronger. “A voice.”

  “No more?”

  The youth shook his head, eyes solemnly fixed on his the while. Mauryl’s shoulders sagged. His very bones ached with loss.

  The eyes still waited for him, still held not the slightest comprehension, and Mauryl drew a breath, thought of one thing to say, that was bitter, and changed it to another, that accepted all he had.

  “Tristen. Tristen is your name, boy. That name I give you.

  That name I call you. To that name you must answer. By that name I compel you to answer. My name is Mauryl. By that name you will call me. And I do need you, I do most desperately need you—Tristen.”

  The gray eyes held…perhaps a spark of life, of further, dawning question. Mauryl let go the cloak, stared at the boy as the boy stared at him, open to the depths, utterly naked, with or without the cloak.

  “Have you,” Mauryl asked, “no thought of your own? Have you no question? Do you feel, Tristen? Do you feel at all? Do you want? Do you desire? Do you think of anything?”

  8

  For a moment the lips looked as if they might frame a thought.

  The brow acquired the least small frown, but nothing…nothing followed.

  In the collapse of hope, Mauryl snatched his hand away, slid aside from the boy, fumbled after the staff that, rebel object, slid away from his hand away the wall.

  Arm reached. Young fist closed on the ancient wood, flesh and bone certain as youth, quick as thought. Mauryl caught a breath, put out an insistent and demanding hand and clenched it on the staff, fearful of the omen.

  He tugged gently, all the same, and the youth yielded the staff back to his grip, seeming as confused as before.

  “You reflect,” Mauryl said, holding his staff protected in his arms, regarding the Shaping with despair, “you only reflect, like still water. I was much too cautious. I restrained what I called, and it crippled you, poor boy. You’ve nothing, nothing of what I want.”

  There was no response at all but acute distress, mirrored maddeningly back at him. Mauryl turned his face from the sight, and for a moment there was silence in the hall.

  A whisper of the cloak lining warned him, and the movement of a bare arm toward the fire…Tristen reached, and in a fit of anger Mauryl grasped the hand, hard.

  “No. No, you witling! Do you at all understand pain? Fire burns. Water drowns. Wind chills you.” He shoved the young man, he flung him from the bench, scattered embers as the boy fell, his hand against the fire-bricks.

  The boy cried out, recoiled, made a crouched knot of pain, rocking like a child, while smoke went up about the cloak edge that lay smoldering within the fire.

  “Fool!” Mauryl shouted in rage, and snatched the boy away from the leap of fire, stepped on the hem of his own robe and, betrayed in balance, clenched his arms about the youth to save himself as he fell to his knees.

  Young arms clenched about his frail bones, young strength hugged tight, young body trembled as his trembled, in a stench of smoking cloth, a burning pain where a cinder 9

  burned his shin. His own arms locked. He had no power to let go. The boy had no will to. That was the way they were, creator and creature, for the space of breath and breath and breath.

  Maybe it was pain that brought water seeping from beneath his tight-shut lids. Maybe it was some motion of the heart so long ago lost he had forgotten what it was, after so long without a living, breathing presence but himself.

  Maybe it was even remorse. That…was much longer lost.

  Undo what I have done? Unmake this Shaping?

  I might have strength enough. But it would finish me.

  The boy grew quiet in his arms. The stray ember had branded his shin and quenched itself in singed cloth. The pain of the burning and the pain of everything lost became one thing, as if it had always been, as if there had been, in all his planning and preparation, no choice at all. It was foolish for an old man to sit on the floor in the ash and cinders, it was foolish for him to cling to a hope—most foolish of all, perhaps, for him to plan beyond so signal and absolute a failure.

  With gnarled fingers, he lifted the boy’s face. The tears had ceased, leaving reddened eyes, reddened nose. The face was no longer quite smooth. Something had been written there. The eyes were no longer blank. Awareness flickered, lively though pained, within that gray and open gaze.

  There was before and after, now. There was then and now.

  There was time to come. There was question and there was need, aching need, for some order in remembrance.

  “I know,” Mauryl said, “I know, a rude welcome—and you have everything to learn, everything to find.” He lifted the boy’s hand, passed his thumb over the reddened palm, working a small, soothing illusion. “The hurt is gone now, is it not?”

  Tristen blinked. Tears spilled, mere aftermath. Tristen looked down, rubbing pale, smooth fingertips against each other.

  “It will mend,” Mauryl said, and felt with only mild foreboding—perhaps a fey, wicked magic lingered—a net settling over the net-caster as well. All his anger was pointless against 10

  the youth, all his long solitude was helpless against the spell of warm arms, the quickening…not of understanding, but of youthful expectations; the centering of them—on an old man long past answering his own. But he told the lie. He said in an unused, gruff voice, a second time, because the sound of it was strange to him, “It will mend, boy.” He reached for his fallen staff, he struggled with it to bring his aching knees to bear, and stumbled his way to his feet.

  Tristen also stood up—and let slide the singed cloak, as if such things in no wise mattered.

  Mauryl smothered anger, caught the robe with his staff, patiently adjusted it again about the boy’s bare shoulders. Tristen held it and moved away, his attention drawn by something else, the gods knew what—perhaps the clutter of vessels and hanging bunches of herbs in the room beyond.

  “Stop!” Mauryl snapped, and Tristen halted and looked back, all unwitting.

  Mauryl reached his side and with his staff tapped the single step to draw his attention downward, to the hazard he had never looked down to see.

  “Tristen,” he said, “now and forever remember: you are flesh as well as wishes, body as well as spirit, and whenever you let one fly without the other, then look to suffer for it. Do you understand me, Tristen?”

  “Yes,” Tristen said faintly. Tears welled up again, as if the rebuke and the burning were of equal pain.

  “Tristen, thou—”

  He discovered something long lost, long ago relinquished, and it swelled larger and larger in his heart until his heart seemed about to burst with pain. He tried to laugh, instead, who had neither wept nor laughed since…since some forgotten change, some gradual slipping away of the inclination. He made a sound, he hardly knew of what sort, knew not what to do next, and cleared his throat, instead—which left a silence, and the young man still staring at him. In the absence of all understanding, he put out a hand and wiped an unresisting face.

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  “An
unwritten tablet, are you not? And a perilous, perilous one to write. But write I shall. And learn you will. Do you say so, Tristen?”

  “Yes,” the boy said, tears gone, or forgotten, cloud passed.

  There was tremulous expectation, as if learning should happen now, at once, in a breath.

  And perhaps it should. Perhaps he dared not wait so long as a night.

  “Come sit at the table,” he said. “No, no, gods, thou silly, hold the cloak, mind your feet…” Calamity was a constant step away: unsteadiness threatened at every odd set of time-worn stones, so age must take the hand of youth, infirmity must guide strength that went wit-wandering in the search for a fallen cloak—and dropped the cloak again in utter startlement as a chair leg scraped across the stones.

  Age found itself hungry, then, and warmed yesterday’s supper in the pot. Shadows lurked and flickered about the edges of the room. The thunder of a passing rain wandered away above the roof. But such things the Shaping more easily ignored, perhaps as a natural part of the world.

  Waiting, between his stirrings of the iron pot, he came back to the table, where the youth hung on every word he offered, eyes fixed with rapt attention on him when he spoke—though gods knew how many bits and pieces of that flotsam a foolish boy could store away, or how he understood them at all.

  He poured ale, that being the best he had. The youth first tasted it with a grimace and a puzzlement. He served yesterday’s beans—and the youth ate with a child’s grasp of the spoon, then, with the bowl unfinished, upon one cup to drink, fell quite sound asleep, head propped against his hand.

  Mauryl took the spoon away, took the bowl, moved the arm, left him sleeping with his forehead pillowed on his arm on the tabletop, wrapped in an ill-pinned cloak.

  It was a minuscule beginning of wizardry. Mauryl stood, hugging his staff, asking himself in a small fluttering of despair what he had done and what he was to do to mend it.

  Wrap a blanket about the boy, he supposed, condemned 12

  now, to simple, workaday practicalities. Ale had done its work.

  Magic had done what it could, and flesh and bone slumbered at peace, stirring forgotten sentiment in a wizard who had nothing to gain by it…nothing at all to gain, and all the world to lose.

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  C H A P T E R 2

  S patters of rain on the dust.

  Trees whispering and nodding and giving up leaves, twigs sent flying. Smell of stone, smell of bruised leaves, smell of lightnings and rain-washed air.

  Taste of water. Chill of wind. Flash of lightning that hurt the eyes. Boom of thunder that shook heart and bone.

  It was like too much ale. Like too much to eat. Like too much heat and too much cold. Everything was patterns, shapes, sounds, light, dark, soft, sharp, rough, smooth, stone-cold, life-warm, and all too much to own and hold at once. Sometimes he could hardly move, the flood of the bright world was so much and so quick.

  Tristen stood on the stone parapet, watched the lightning flashes fade the woods and sky and watched the trees below the wall bow their heads against the stone. Thunder rumbled. Rain swept in gray curtains against the tower, spattered the surface of the puddles and cascaded in streams off the slate of the many roofs. Tristen laughed and breathed the rain-drenched wind, raised hands and face to catch the pelting drops. They stung his palms and eyelids, so he dared not look at them. Rain coursed, cold and strange sensation, over his naked body, finding hollows and new courses, all to the shape of him.

  It was delight. He looked at his bare feet, wiggled his toes in puddles that built in the low places of the stonework and made channels between the stones in the high places. Water made all the dusty gray stonework new and shiny. Rain made slanting veils across the straight fall off the eaves and played music beneath the thunder-rumble. Tristen spun on the slick stones and slipped, recovering himself against the low wall of the parapet and laughing in surprise as he saw, below him, 14

  where the gutters made a veritable flood, brown water, where the rain was gray. A green leaf was stuck to the gray stone. He wondered why it stayed there.

  “Tristen! ”

  He straightened back from his headlong dangle, arm lingering to brace himself on the stone edge as he looked toward Mauryl’s angry voice. He blinked water from his eyes, saw Mauryl’s brown-robed figure. Mauryl’s clothes were soaked through, Mauryl’s gray hair and beard were streaming water, and Mauryl’s eyes beneath his dripping brows were blue and pale and furious as Mauryl came to seize him by the arm.

  He had clearly done something wrong. He tried to cipher what that wrong thing was as Mauryl took him from the wall.

  Mauryl was hurting his arm, and he resisted the pull, only enough to keep Mauryl’s fingers from bruising.

  “Come along,” Mauryl said, and held the harder, so he thought saving his arm was wrong, too. He let Mauryl hurt him as he hurried him back along the parapet, Mauryl’s black boots and his bare feet splashing through the puddles. Mauryl’s robes dripped water. Mauryl’s hair made curling ropes and water dripped off the ends. Mauryl’s shoulders were thin and the cloth stuck to him and flapped about his legs and leather boots. The staff struck crack, crack-crack against the pavings, but Mauryl hardly limped, he was in such an angry hurry.

  Mauryl took him to the rain-washed door, shoved up the outside latch with the knob of his staff, and drew him roughly inside into the little, stone-floored room. Light came only through the yellowed horn panes, storm-dimmed and strange, and the rain was far quieter here.

  Mauryl let go his arm, then, still angry with him. “Where are your clothes?”

  Was that the mistake? Tristen wondered, and said, “Downstairs. In my room.”

  “Downstairs. Downstairs! What good do they do you downstairs?”

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  He was completely bewildered. It seemed to him that Mauryl had said not to spoil them. Mauryl’s were dripping wet. So were Mauryl’s boots, and his were downstairs, dry. It had seemed very good sense to him, and still did, except Mauryl lifted his hand in anger and he flinched.

  Mauryl reached for his shoulder, instead, and shook him, deciding, he hoped, not to hit him. Mauryl would indeed strike him, sometimes when Mauryl was angry, at other times Mauryl said he had to remember. It was hard to tell, sometimes, which was which, except Mauryl would seem satisfied after the latter and far angrier than he had started after the former, so he wished Mauryl had simply hit him and told him to remember.

  Instead, Mauryl beckoned him to the wooden stairs, and led him down and down the rickety steps. The soaked hem of Mauryl’s robe made a trail of rain drops on the wood, in the wan, sad light from the horn panes set along the way.

  Clump, tap, clump, tap, clump-tap, downward and down.

  Tristen’s bare feet made far less sound on the smooth, dusty boards. He supposed rain didn’t spoil the clothes after all, and that he had guessed wrong. The water on the dust beneath his feet felt smooth and strange. He wasn’t sorry to feel it. But he supposed he was wrong.

  And confirming it, when Mauryl reached the walkway that led to his room, Mauryl banged his staff angrily on the floor.

  His robe shook off more drops and made a puddle on the boards.

  “Go clothe yourself. Come down to the hall when you’ve done. I want to talk to you.”

  Tristen bowed his head and went to his own room, where he had left his clothes on his bed. The puddles he left on the board floor showed faintly in the light from the unshuttered horn panes.

  His hair streamed water down his back and down his shoulders and dripped in his eyes. He wiped it back and tried to squeeze the water out. It made dark tangles on his shoulders, and his clothes stuck to his body and resisted his pulling them on. So did the boots. His hair soaked the

  16

  shoulders of his shirt, and he combed the tangles out, to look as presentable as he could.

  Maybe Mauryl would forget. Maybe Mauryl would forget he had asked him to come downstairs and tell him to go away.

  Sometim
es Mauryl would, when he was lost in his books.

  The thunder was still booming and talking above their heads, and the water was still running down the horn panes—the horn was yellowed and sometimes brown: it had curious circles and layers and fitted together with metal pieces. The horn colored the light it let in, and the shadow of raindrops crawled down its face, which he loved to see. A puddle had formed on the sill, where a joint in the horn let raindrops inside. Sometimes he made patterns with the water on the stone. Sometimes he let it stand until it spilled down off the sill and he waited and waited for the moment.

  But he was cold now, and with his hair making his shoulders wet, he began to be cold all over. He took his cloak from the peg and slung it about his shoulders, hugged it about him as he went out into the wooden hall and clumped down the wooden steps, down and down to the study, making echoes that Mauryl couldn’t help but notice. He was here. He was obeying, as Mauryl said.

  Mauryl was standing by the fire. Mauryl had changed his clothes and wrapped himself in his cloak, too. Mauryl’s hair had begun to dry, a silver net around his ears, not combed, and Mauryl had his arms folded, so he looked like a bird puffed up in its feathers, cold and cross.

  “Sir,” he said. Mauryl seemed not to notice him. He waited what seemed a long while for Mauryl to look at him, and wondered if Mauryl would after all forget he was angry. Or change his mind.

  Then abruptly, fiercely, Mauryl turned his shoulder to the fire and looked him over, head to foot and back again, searching, perhaps, for another disappointment—disappointment was in the set of Mauryl’s shoulders. Fault was in that stare. Tristen stood, hands clasped before him, downhearted, too, that he had so failed Mauryl’s expectations.

  17

  Again.

  His feet were numb with cold. He bent his toes in his boots, deciding he deserved to be cold, and maybe he could have fallen off the wall, but he did look where he was putting his feet, he truly did. Or he was quick enough to stop himself. He remembered slipping. He stood very respectfully in the archway, awaiting invitation to approach the fire, wondering if he should tell Mauryl how he’d saved himself.