Fortress in the Eye of Time

by C. J. Cherryh

  He was bruised through his thin shoes. His right ankle ached, and he had not remembered exactly where that pain had started, until he recalled his flight off the steps, and his fall off the edge of the step. Body as well as spirit, Mauryl had warned him, and the very hour that Mauryl had left him on his own in the keep, he had forgotten the first lesson he had ever learned, and fallen and done himself harm, exactly as Mauryl had warned him not to do.

  He walked and walked, unhappy with himself, following the ancient stonework until the trees grew so close he could no longer find the next white stone to guide him.

  So he had made another mistake. He had lost the Road. He was afraid, standing alone in the dark and trying to know what to do in this place where the path ran out. But it seemed to him that, if there were no white stones, still a long track stretched ahead clear of trees, and that seemed indisputably the right direction to go.

  And, true enough, when he had gone quite far on that 77

  treeless track he saw something in the starlight that he deluded himself was another of the white stones.

  His heart rose. He went toward it as proof that he had solved the dilemma.

  But it was only a broken tree, white inside, jagged ends of wood showing pale in the night.

  Then he was truly frightened, and when he looked about him he saw nothing even to tell him which way he had come. He might have made, he thought, the worst mistake of all the mistakes he had ever made and lost the Road once for all, Mauryl’s last, Mauryl’s most final instruction—beyond which he had no idea in the world what to do.

  At that moment a shadow brushed his cheek, substantial enough to scare him. It settled on a branch of that dead tree, hunched up its shoulders and waited.

  “Owl?” Tristen said. “Owl, is it you?”

  Owl, a sullen bird, only spread his wings and ruffled his feathers with a sound very loud in the hush of the woods.

  “Do you know the way?” Tristen asked him, but Owl did nothing.

  “Have you come on the same Road?” Tristen asked then, since they came from the same place perhaps at the same moment, and Mauryl had set great importance on his being here. “Did Mauryl tell you to come?”

  Owl gave no sign of understanding.

  He had never trusted Owl. He had never been certain but what the smallest birds disappeared down Owl’s gullet, and he was all but certain about the mice.

  But he felt gladder than he had ever thought he should be of Owl’s presence, simply because Owl was a living creature as well as a Shadow, and because Owl was a force whose behavior he knew—and because he was despondent and lost.

  “Do you know where the Road is?” he asked Owl.

  Owl spread his wide blunt wings and, Shadow that he was, flew through the darkness to another tree and perched there.

  Waiting, Tristen thought, and he followed Owl in desperate hope that Owl knew where he was going. Owl flew on again, 78

  which he also followed. A third time Owl took wing, and by now he had no hope else but Owl, because he had no notion as he looked back where he had come from, or where his last memory of the Road might lie.

  Owl kept flying in short hops from tree to tree, never leaving his sight—and by now he feared that he might have done something Mauryl would never have approved, and trusted a bird that Mauryl had never told him was acceptable to trust.

  One of the pigeons he might have relied upon, never questioning its character or its intentions; but Owl was the chanciest of creatures he knew, and he knew no reason Owl should go to such great difficulty to guide him to the Road. Certainly he would have helped Owl. That was a point: creatures should help one another, and perhaps Owl was constrained once there was such calamity.

  He had never apprehended Owl to have great patience with him. He knew no reason Owl should not lead him far astray and then fly away from him. But Mauryl was often peevish himself, and yet Mauryl had never failed him or done him harm.

  So he kept tracking Owl’s flights through the woods, fending branches aside, scratching himself and snagging his clothing on thorns and twigs all the while. His ankle hurt. His hands hurt.

  Owl traveled farther at each flight now, and sometimes left his sight. He struggled to keep up and called out, “Owl! Wait! I’m not so fast as you!” but Owl only took that for encouragement to make his next flight through a low spot filled with water and to lure him up a muddy bank.

  He was altogether out of breath now. “Owl, wait,” he called out. “Please wait!”

  Owl flitted on.

  He tried to run, and caught his foot on a stone in the tangle of brush and fell to his knees, bruising them and his hands and sticking his left palm with thorns.

  But the stone on which he had fallen was pale, a tilted, half-buried paving of the Road, and he sat there catching his breath, seeing other stones before him.

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  “Who?” he heard a strange voice calling. “To-who?” He had never heard Owl’s voice, but something said to him that that was indeed Owl speaking his question into the night.

  And it struck him that it was like Mauryl’s questions, and that he had no answer, since the world was far wider and the Road was far longer than he had ever imagined.

  “Come back,” he said to Owl, rising to his feet. He tried to follow Owl further, but Owl left the pale trace that was the Road, and he gave up the chase, out of breath and sweating in the clammy night air.

  But he could have no complaint of Owl. He kept walking, comforted that he was not alone in the woods, and hearing from time to time Owl’s lonely question.

  In the black, branch-woven sameness of the woods, the Road seemed finally to acquire a faint glow in the night, a glow against which Tristen could see the detail of branches in contrast. And slowly thereafter the whole world of black branches and pale stone Road widened around him until, looking up, he could tell the shadow of the trees from the gray sky. It was the dawn creeping through, not with a bright breaking of the sun, but a stealthy, furtive dawn that took a long, long time to insinuate itself into the black and gray of the woods. He might not have made any progress at all. Nothing looked different from where he had lost the light.

  He had walked the night through without resting, and he supposed that since he had somehow reached the dawn un-harmed he had done something difficult that Mauryl would approve, but he felt no comfort in his situation. He was very thirsty, there was no breakfast, he was bruised from his falls, and he missed Mauryl’s advice and asked himself whether Mauryl had ever given any hint, any remote hint if, after Mauryl had gone away, he might ever find him again—because without Mauryl, he had no idea what to do next, or what he should be thinking of doing.

  Use your wits, Mauryl was wont to say, but one had to 80

  know on what question to use one’s wits in the first place—like wondering how long his ankle and his knees would hurt when there was no Mauryl to make the pain stop, and wondering how long and how far the Road went, and wondering where Owl was and why Owl had followed him, out of all the birds he liked far better.

  His thinking had become merely a spate of like questions with nothing to suggest the answers, and long as he walked, the sights around him never changed, one tree being very much like another to his opinion.

  Sitting down, which he did when his legs were utterly exhausted, offered him only time to think up more questions, so he proceeded slowly and steadily, in pain that was more persistent than acute, pain that might, for what he knew, go on forever, as the Road might—in his worst imaginings.

  But after a measureless time he found a little trickle of water running down from rocks beneath the roots of trees, at the side of the Road, a trickle that ran away and lost itself beneath a layer of leaves, but where it emerged from the rocks it was bright and clear.

  And the mere fact it existed made this a Place, not just a part of the endless Road. It was not more trees and more Road; it existed as a difference in his condition, it offered relief from thirst, and he bent down by it and dran
k—then washed his face and his hands to the elbows and then his head and hair in the good, clear water, not caring that it chilled him through. He scrubbed and scrubbed until he began to shiver in the light breeze that blew, because Mauryl had taught him to love being clean.

  He knew a Place along the Road, then, that offered him water, if he began to be desperate—clean water, as pure as that from the cistern at Ynefel, and it occurred to him that he could stay by it and not be thirsty today; at the very least, he could sit for a while and rest. He could let his head down against the mossy stones. He could shut his eyes a moment in the sunlight, knowing he could drink again any time he wished.

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  He found a dark gray nothing behind his eyelids. It shadowed with wings like the wings of his birds, quiet, dizzy movements, like their gliding in the sky, and he rode that for a precious few moments, content to be rocked in it, absorbed in it.

  “Owl?” he asked then of that vision, remembering that Owl had followed him; and he saw the loft again, but they were only silly pigeons that came and went, and their voices lulled him deeper into sleep.

  How strange, he thought, to dream of falling asleep. That was twice asleep. And very, very deep this sleep within a sleep seemed to be, layer upon layer of it folding him over like thick quilts on a chill night.

  He looked for Mauryl in the grayness of the loft, then. He looked for Mauryl, but he saw only birds walking to and fro.

  He saw only dust on the boards, and there was a gap in the boards of the dividing wall that the storm had made, toward which he knew he ought not to look. He did not know why he ought not now, when he had ventured to explore the other side of that gap back at Ynefel. But it seemed to him that the gap in that barrier was a source of dreadful harm.

  He hid in the loft, instead, and something came searching for him, something he could not put a shape to, or understand. He thought it was a Shadow. He tucked himself deep within the nook he had found between the rafters and hoped for it to go away.

  It brushed by him. It came back again. It seemed he was not in the loft at all, but lying on moss-covered stone, among the leaves, and for some reason a deep leaf-shadow was on him, protecting him from the presence that paced along the Road.

  Looking for him, it was, he thought. He did not know what else it might be looking for.

  The Book burned the skin of his waist where he had tucked it, as that presence paused beside his broad daylight hiding-place.

  It was not at all the loft now that sheltered him, and it was not the birds coming to and fro that made that strange 82

  sound, it was a patter of rain drops falling on the forest’s discarded leaves.

  And in the awareness of that sound the presence he had felt so strongly had ceased to be there.

  Something loomed above him instead, spreading wings between him and the sky. It was Owl, out by daylight, perched on a leafless branch and peering fiercely off into the distances up the Road as Owl would do—Owl suspected things, and he seemed to suspect this one intensely.

  “What do you see, Owl?” he asked, awake, as he thought, with his heart beating harder than a dream warranted. “What was it?”

  But Owl flew off down the Road with a sudden snap of his wings and gave him not a second glance.

  He was still afraid, then—of what, he had no idea, but the Place no longer seemed safe. Neither did the Road behind him, now that Owl had fled it in such haste. But he gathered himself up immediately and set out walking, following Owl.

  The notion of danger behind him in the endless woods—and the notion of Ynefel also lying behind him and at the heart of the woods—was a new thought to him: the Road had at least one end, and he had come from there. The water was a Place.

  So he began to form in his mind then the notion that the Road might equally well go to Places, as doors did, and that to must be at least as important as from.

  Then he thought that tomorrow or this evening must at least be at least as substantial as yesterday—and that tomorrow and toward a yet-to-find Place was where Mauryl had wanted him to go. Owl had gone, showing him the way in great urgency.

  So there was somewhere to be, and somewhere to have been, and somewhere yet urgently to go, which Mauryl had assigned him. And his slowness had made him almost fall into the Shadow. It was another mistake to have delayed at all to rest—a mistake to have been wandering as much as walking, not knowing he had a place to be, not, he had to admit to himself, really wanting to follow Mauryl’s instruction, not 83

  wanting to be anywhere but Ynefel, because he had conceived of nowhere else despite the Names that Mauryl had told him.

  Of course there were other Places. Mauryl had tried to tell him, but like rain off the shingles, it had slid right off his mind, as everyday sights did, until the Word was ready to come. Or—and this one had done that—a Word would come partway, and he would go on attaching more and more pieces of it all day or for days after, until a new and startling idea came to him with all its various pieces attached.

  Now he feared that other Place he was going as possibly one that would take him in and close off to him forever the Place that he had been. He refused to imagine a world in which Mauryl was gone for good. It terrified him, such a Place, which could exist, now that he began to think about such things as tomorrow, and tomorrow after that.

  Owl’s precipitate flight frightened him. It drove him to desperate haste, far beyond his ordinary strength.

  And when the dark came down again in his walking on the Road he was afraid to sit down and sleep, hungry and thirsty and miserable as he was, because the shadows were abroad. He kept walking until he was staggering with exhaustion and light-headed with hunger.

  “Owl?” he begged of the formless dark. “Owl, can you hear me?”

  It was the hour for Owl to be abroad. But perhaps Owl was busy. Or ignoring him, as obstinately as Mauryl would, when he interrupted Mauryl at his ciphering, and if he persisted, then Mauryl’s next answer—and, he suspected, Owl’s—would not be polite at all.

  But he wished, oh, he wished Owl would come back. There were clearly sides to the Road which went on unguessably far, forest into which Owl could go, but he dared not venture. The air as he walked grew cold and the woods grew frightening.

  There were stirrings and movements in the brush where by day he had heard nothing. The place felt bad, the way the stairs and balconies of the keep, safe and familiar by day, had felt dangerous when the Shadows were free to move about.

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  No Owl, no Mauryl, no shelter and no door to lock. There was no safety for him tonight, and nowhere to stop. He sat down only when morning came sneaking into the woods, and he sat and hugged his knees up to his chest for warmth, his head both light and aching. He had no idea where he was, except beside the Road. He had no idea yet where he was going, or how far he had already come. The world remained measureless to him on all sides now.

  And when he waked he was so light-headed and so miserable he tried eating a leaf from the bushes that sheltered him, but its taste was bitter and foul and made his mouth burn. He wished he had the water he had found yesterday, but there was no food there, he knew that for very certain. So he ate no more leaves, and after a long time of walking his mouth quit burning.

  Then his stomach seemed to give up the idea of food at all.

  He was not quite hungry. He told himself he could keep going—he had gone farther than he had ever thought he could, he was stronger than he had ever thought he was, and miserable as he was, nothing had laid hands on him, nothing had stopped him, nothing had daunted him from Mauryl’s instructions.

  “Who?” came from overhead. Owl was back. Owl flew off from him with no time for questions.

  Owl intended, perhaps, encouragement, since of Words there were, Owl was not profligate, and Owl asked his question without an answer.

  Who? indeed. “Tristen! Tristen is my name, Owl! Do you hear me?”

  “Who?” came from the distance now, beckoning him, a known vo
ice, if not a friendly voice.

  “Owl, did you eat the mice?”

  “Who?” came again.

  Owl denied everything, and flew away from him, too distant now for argument. Tristen saw him, a feathered lump, far, far through the branches.

  But Owl guided him. Owl seemed to hold some secret, and constantly flitted out of his reach—but Mauryl had done that, 85

  too, making him learn for himself: he knew Mauryl’s tricks.

  He called out: “Are you Mauryl’s, Owl? Did he send you?”

  “To-who?” said Owl, and flew away out of sight.

  But the mere sound of voices, Owl’s and his own, had livened the leaden air, an irreverent fracture of the silence, and once the deathly silence was broken, from seeing for days now only the gray and the black of dead limbs, he began to see shafts of sunlight, green moss growing, and green leaves lit by the passage of sunbeams.

  Perhaps the sunbeams had always been there, working their small transformations, but Marna, when it had first come to him as a Word, had seemed a name for darkness and loss; his eyes until this moment might have been seeing only the dark. But now that he looked without expecting gloominess, Marna showed itself in a new and livelier way—a tricky and a change-able place, as it seemed.

  But then, Ynefel itself ran rife with terror and darkness, so long as the Shadows ruled it—and, again, Ynefel shone warm with firelight and smelled of good food, and Mauryl sat safe by the fireside, reading. Were not both…equally…Ynefel, to his mind? And were not both…equally and separately…true?

  So perhaps Marna Wood could be fair and safe at one time and have another aspect altogether when the Shadows were abroad.

  And if he could think—as he had—one way and then the other about its nature, and if the forest could put on an aspect according to his expectations, then it seemed to him much wiser to think well instead of ill of the place, and to expect sunlight here to shine brightly as the sunlight came to the loft at home, to fall as brightly here as it fell on the pages of his Book when he read his lessons among the pigeons.