Fortress in the Eye of Time

by C. J. Cherryh

“I’m no Scribe. Nor’s he, by the look of ’im. A thief, I’d say.”

  Thief. Stealing. Theft. Crime. Gallows. Hanging.

  Dreadful images. Terrifying images, from his position, in pain and unbalanced—the man had a knee in his back, and his eyes were watering with the pull on his hair.

  “Well?” the man asked him, shaking him. “Where did ye come by it, thief?”

  “The Book is mine,” Tristen said. “I am no thief, sir.”

  “It ain’t like honest writing to me,” the grim man said.

  And the other, holding it out in front of his eyes: “What’s it say? Eh?”

  “I can’t read it.”

  “Ye can’t read it, eh? So you are a thief. A brigand. A 115

  robber. Who did you kill to get them fine clothes, eh?”

  From Stealing to Killing. He shook his head. “No, sir, I killed no one.”

  “Another lurking after the Marhanen,” one said to his fellows.

  “He might be,” the third man said. “He might, that, but do they send a fool?”

  “I am no thief,” Tristen said. The very word was strange to his mouth. He fought to get a foot and a knee beneath him, and the man let him, but no more. “It is my Book, sirs. Please let me up.”

  “And what would you do wi’ a book, hey, if you can’t read it?”

  “A novice priest, by ’is talk, I’d say,” said the man at his head.

  “Stole a book an’ run, by me. Killt somebody for the clothes.”

  “No, sirs,” Tristen said desperately. “It belongs to me. I’m not to lose it.”

  “Not to lose it,” the man in charge said. “And who said?”

  “My master, sir.”

  “Ah. Now His Lordship has finally owned a master. And who would that be?”

  “My master said—” He knew dangerous questions by some experience now; and not to name Names carelessly. “My master said—I should follow the Road.”

  “And who said this?”

  “My master, sir.” He truly did not want to answer that question. He feared that they had their minds made up that he was in the wrong, and the men in the woods had liked least of all where he had come from. He was light-headed from hunger and from exhaustion, and he began to fear they would hit him again.

  “Please give me the Book, sir.”

  “He’s mad,” the man on his feet said.

  “And never will answer the question.—Who is this master, man? Answer, or I’ll become angry with you.”

  He feared to answer. He feared not to. He had no knowledge how to lie.

  116

  “Mauryl,” he said, and by the look on the man’s face once he said that Name, he feared it would have been far better for him to have kept still, no matter what they did.

  117

  C H A P T E R 9

  T he assizes were done, the evening headache, promoted by a boundary dispute and a squabbling lot of voices, had given way to a pleasant warmth of wine, and a wind from the west stirred the air from the open window-panels above a candlelit tumble in the silken sheets. Orien and Tarien were a red-haired bedful, a welcome diversion on this night when Cefwyn felt the need to forget the day’s necessities. Together the twins had the wit of half the council combined, a more astute judgment, a keener humor; and their perfumed oil, Orien’s hands and Tarien’s lips were a potent, delirious persuasion to think of nothing else at all and hold himself as long as he could manage—

  Which he could do, thinking of the water rights of Assurn-brook and two border lords at each other’s throats. He could distract himself quite effectively for perhaps a breath or two, asking himself whether bribery, diversion, or main force was the appropriate answer to fools—a mandated marriage, perhaps: Esrydd’s light-of-wit son, the thane of Assurn-Hawasyr, and Durell’s plump wayward daughter, both with ambitions, both lascivious, both—

  Was it through the female line the lands of Payny could descend? The earl’s daughter by a second wife…that could pose a problem.

  The intricacies of Amefin titles were another source of headache, the thane of this and the earl of that, and the province of Amefel as a whole ruled over by the Aswydds, ducal in the Guelen court at Guelemara in Guelessar, and styling themselves aethelings, though discreetly, in their own provincial and very luxurious court…

  “Gods,” he moaned, the vixen proving she had teeth. The other threatened Tarien with the pillow, and he took the game 118

  for what it was, rolled Tarien under and suffered a buffeting of feathers and a flank attack, Orien complaining she was slighted.

  Or was it, after all, Tarien?

  He let himself be wrestled onto his back, and a furious battle ensued between the twins, in which he was the disputed territory, and in which he had an enchanting view of both well-bred ladies, before they smothered him in unison, and not with pillows.

  He was taking random choice, then, perilous decision, when came one thump at the inner door, and a second.

  And a third. Which roused his temper, which defeated other processes in midcourse, and left him utterly confused between the twins, who wanted him to continue, and his door, at which some fool continued a hammering assault.

  “Gods damn you!” he cried, flat on the battlefield, overwhelmed and unhorsed. “Gods damn your knocking and battering, what do you want that’s worth your neck?”

  “M’lord,” came from the other side of the doors. “Forgive me…”

  “Not damned likely!”

  “…but there’s a stranger in hall. Master Emuin said you should hear this.”

  “Master Emuin has no natural impulses,” he muttered, and drew a pillow over his face, momentary refuge. “Master Emuin has no—”

  Thump. “My lord?”

  He groaned and tossed the pillow aside. Orien—or was it Tarien?—kissed him on the mouth and clung to his arm. Her twin tossed a wealth of red-gold hair over a sullen shoulder and gathered the wine-stained sheet about her, rising.

  He rolled to the doorward end of the bed, sighed as his feet found the fleece rug, searched blindly down the bed for remnants of his clothing.

  “My lord?”

  “Idrys,” he said to the batterer, “—Idrys, damn you, go down, tell them I’m aware, awake, bothered, duly alarmed, and duty-bound, I shall be there in a gods-cursed moment—I 119

  can dress myself, I learned at my lady mother’s knee, curse you all—”

  Orien cried out as he snatched her by the wrist, squealed as he fell atop her and recovered his moment, at least enough to serve.

  After which…after which: “I’m duty-bound,” he said. “Tomorrow night.”

  “Perhaps,” said Orien—he believed it was Orien. Lord Heryn’s sisters did as they pleased, and she would please herself again, or Tarien would, or both together. They played pranks on their lovers, which were more numerous than Heryn Aswydd accounted of…but not many more, one could guess. Their lord brother, His Grace the Duke of Amefel, aetheling of the Amefin, was much about the court himself, in and out of this bed and that, trading gossip in every profitable ear.

  One talked no affairs of state with the twins, who never asked gifts—least of all from him, whose acceptance they courted, oh, so gladly, since Luriel’s abrupt departure from the court…but wager that this untimely knocking would clatter straight to Heryn’s ear for whatever value it had.

  Emuin, about at this hour. A stranger, with some matter of import, enough to bring the old man from his bed.

  Idrys, moved to rattle his doors to have him to some meeting.

  Business with a stranger smelled of assassins, aimed at him or aimed at someone who wished to point a finger. Conspiracy was constant in this gods-cursed and often rebel district, and it could well wait until morning—late morning. Or three mornings hence for what he cared tonight. The headache was recurring.

  He pulled on his hose, struggled, servantless, with the boots, and found the shirt…not overly rumpled. The doublet—no. He damned such formalities. He wore the shi
rttail out, splashed cold rose-scented water into his face, groped after the towel and blotted his beard and eyebrows dry—a cursory brushing of his hair, then, an apology to a

  120

  braiding on his way out of the bedroom and to the door—the hell with it, he decided, and left the bedroom for the foyer doors.

  A clash of arms resounded as, passing through the foyer, he left his apartment, four guards relieved at least of their nighttime boredom and mandated to endless discretion. The senior two went with him without asking. The junior and less privileged pair, with a second noisy salute, settled back to night-watch over his rooms as he went toward the east stairs.

  The twins would dress and find their way out, and his guards would ignore their departure as they ignored their presence.

  Such tedious games they played, when it involved dynasty, and heir-getting, Amefin ladies, and the Marhanen prince’s bed.

  Avoiding gossip. Avoiding…public acknowledgment of a known situation.

  Down the hall he went with his guard about him, boots resounding on marble, and down the broad white stairs, on which the Guelen staff, instigated by his majordomo, made profligate expenditure of candles (your father the King, they began, when he protested the cost).

  His father the King, in the capital at Guelemara, a province away, in the heart of the realm of Ylesuin, had an extravagant fear of the dark. And of assassins.

  Entirely justified, as it happened, by Grandfather’s example.

  Hence the guards. But it had not been for want of candles that Grandfather had died.

  Clatter and rattle down the steps behind him: his bodyguard, ready to defend the Prince of Ylesuin from axe-wielding priests and jealous lovers.

  Himself, he dreaded only the dank, after-midnight chill of the marble halls, undiminished by the candles. He walked, followed by clatter and clank, toward the open doors, the gathering of guards, the fuss and bother of wakened staff in the lower halls.

  A page overtook him, clearly wakened from sleep, having brought his cloak, which in summer and after

  121

  the heat of his exertions he could well have done without, but the cloak was there, the air was always cooler in the audience hall than elsewhere, and he slung it on, freed his hair from it, encountered Emuin just inside the doors, along with a clot of night-staff and guards.

  “This had better be worth it,” he muttered to Emuin, whose habit, in former years common cloth and perpetually inkstained, now was the immaculate gray of the Teranthine order—although within the court he wielded secular power his monastic and meditative order abhorred.

  “I assure Your Highness…” Emuin began, but he brushed past, sleepy, by now, and not in any good humor.

  “My lord Prince—”

  His captain of the guard, Idrys, slipped up to him like a pike to a passing morsel, a black pike, wily, and veteran of hooks.

  Cefwyn waved a hand, a limp, circular signal that said to Idrys what he had just said to Emuin, in less polite terms, and stalked up the dais steps to the gilt, antique and unwarrantably uncomfortable throne, on which he disposed himself in no formality.

  He hooked a knee over the arm, heaved a sigh, and blinked, bleary-eyed, at the scatter of political expediencies that cluttered this midnight audience. He could list agencies that might be behind this undoubted ploy to obtain the unaware, uninformed state in which he found himself. Certain courtiers would have the stomach to play these games, such courtiers as aimed for his ear, his table, his bed, such noble families of the Guelenfolk from the capital as constantly plied their politics in this chamber; such of the Amefin locals as lurked in the aisles on feast days to catch his attention, hand him a petition—offer him an assignation with their sisters.

  Little difference, one from the next, except he mortally loathed the ones that arrived after midnight, determined to have his ear privily and at unusual length regarding some piece of skulldug-gery gone awry before the other side of the business, no more nor less at fault, could counter it with appearances and protestations of their own.

  122

  Emuin. With Idrys. One did hope for consideration from one’s intimates, at least. And was disappointed.

  One did expect, being roused at this ungodly hour by those same intimates, at least something of spectacle, an Elwynim assassin, a clutch of lordly conspirators…a ravished and indignant lady of high degree.

  And what was there? A dark-haired and dirty fellow in the ruins of good clothing restrained by two of the Guelen guard, a desperate case, to be sure, but hardly worth two armored men.

  Tall for any Elwynim. Lanfarnesseman, perhaps; many were tall and slender, although most were as fair as the Guelenfolk and very few Lanfarnessemen went beardless. The prisoner stared consistently at his feet and one could not be otherwise certain of the features, but the bare, well-muscled forearms and the slender hands, alike the face, said young; and youthfulness said maybe fool enough—counting nine skulls of would-be assassins bleached and raven-picked on the Zeide’s south gate, in his year-long tenure here—to carry some personal pique against him, for hire or for, gods save them, the ancestral Amefin grudge.

  He truly hoped not to have that old business begin again.

  “So what have we?” he asked, swinging his foot in deliberate contempt of amateur intrigues. “A stolen mule? A pig-napper?

  And two of you to restrain him? Good gods.”

  “Highness,” Idrys said. “This were best heard in private.”

  “Well, well, my bed chamber was private, at least, the while.

  Morning would not do for this? Nothing would serve but I come down myself, over cold floors and colder—”

  “Highness,” Emuin chided him, his tutorial voice.

  Cefwyn waved his hand. “Have your play, then. Proceed.”

  The hall was emptying of servants and of the curious, a last few lingering near the door; but scribes, the borderland of needful elements of the court, and occasionally discreet, stayed. “Out,”

  he ordered the lingerers. “No record of this. Back to your beds.

  Shut the doors.”

  The doors shut. He swung his foot, and frowned at the 123

  prisoner, who still studied the marble steps in front of him. “So what have we?” he addressed said prisoner, but it was unproductive of answers.

  Idrys came to him and offered him a small book, a codex, leather-bound, old, the worse for wear. He flipped the pages open at random, saw a blockish, antique hand, a forgotten—per-haps wizardly—language.

  His heart skipped a beat—a little skip, true, and he would not betray the fact, nor mend his posture, no, not for this, which he began to suspect as some priestly game with him. He did not think it was Emuin’s doing. It had the smell of a priestly matter, illicit and heretical practice, meaning the Bryalt faith, dominant in this province, could again be afoul of the orthodox Quinaltines, who had probably come a long and dusty ride from the capital to urge some obscure point of theology and rant to the Prince about cults and conspiracies on the borders.

  But that it came through Emuin set it above the inconsequential and the purely theological.

  He shut the book, left it idly in his lap, and cast a narrow look at his old tutor. “Well, old master. I take it the pig-thief came bearing this. And of course I must be roused out most urgently.”

  “He claims it as his, Highness.”

  Not likely his, Cefwyn thought, the youth being a youth, and lacking in every sense the plausibility of the occasional graybeard who gulled the villagers and roused—if merely for a season—Amefin expectations and Amefin disaffections from the Crown.

  He considered Aman and Nedras, the gate-guards who were the anomaly in this gathering of court and guards—not the re-strainers of the culprit, but those whose part in this doubtless intrigue-ridden malfeasance he had yet to hear. They were the ones who had brought with them, as he supposed, this head-hanging, straw-bedecked youth, the unwilling center of all this commotion. He would have thought, abs
ent the gate-guards in the affair, that the Quinalt

  124

  and the Teranthines were at odds over some point of abstract logic—but, gods, he had thought better of Emuin than to wake him for some priestly rivalry; and the matter did look to be some arrival at the Zeide gate.

  “Man,” he said, curiosity aroused, “pig-thief. Look up. Look up here. Whose book is this?”

  The prisoner had been considerably knocked about. He seemed to need the guards’ holding him on his feet, and needed a shake from Aman to have his attention.

  That brought his head up, jolted him to alertness…and for a moment in Cefwyn’s awareness there was nothing—nothing—but that pale gaze.

  Fear, Cefwyn thought, heart racing in his breast, his sense derived of judicial experience reasserting reason. It was fear he saw in most faces that came before him under such compulsion; far rarer, however, was the courage to look him in the eyes; and, he was ready to swear, although he had never met it in this court…

  He saw innocence. Absolute, stark, terrifying innocence.

  He had moved without thinking—had dropped his knee off the arm without knowing it; had held his next breath and feared the whole assembly in the hall had seen, did see. He was not accustomed to be so moved by anyone, and he was vexed with himself. He felt no threat in the stare, only an uncanny, helpless attraction toward this creature, an attraction all but physical, unprecedented, and intimate, so acute that he felt exposed in that motion of his heart. He had never been so set aback in his life; and he was afraid, as this creature seemed afraid, this…youth, this…man, this…

  He had no way to name what he felt or what he saw; he had no reckoning even how much time had passed in the creature’s looking up, and shaking back his loose and tangled hair, and meeting him stare for stare.

  But he knew that the men who held him were no restraint at all, if this bedraggled, fragile, glorious creature should decide to contest them.

  Did no one but him see it? Did not Emuin, who was 125

  reputed wise in such matters, know that this threatening youth was not in any sense held by the guards? They had beaten him.