Fortress in the Eye of Time

by C. J. Cherryh

  In the west were lower hills. The forest was that way. Marna Wood lay that way, and south. He knew. He gazed in that direction, remembering that dark path, remembering the wind in the leaves.

  “A long walk.” Cefwyn’s voice startled him.

  “Yes, m’lord.”

  “A fearsome walk.”

  “It was, m’lord.”

  “Would it fright you now?”

  “Yes, m’lord.” He did not think they would ride that way. He hoped they had no such plans. “The horses could not cross the bridge.” That thought came to him.

  “Bridges can be mended.”

  “The stones are old.”

  “Wizardry raised them. Wizardry could mend them, could it not?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Mauryl would have known. Emuin might know. We never saw any men, ever.”

  “Elwynim press at us. The skulls above the gate? Those are Elwynim.”

  “Did those men steal sheep from Emwy?”

  “They came to kill me.”

  He found it shocking. “I don’t know about that, sir.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “No, sir. M’lord Prince. I don’t at all.”

  “Mauryl knew. Mauryl assuredly knew.”

  “He didn’t tell me, sir. He didn’t tell me everything.” He became afraid, here, riding alone with Cefwyn, with no advice from anyone, and with the talk drifting to killing and stealing.

  “What should I know?”

  “Uleman.”

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  “Is that a name, sir?”

  “One might say,” Cefwyn said, seeming in ill humor. Then Cefwyn said:

  “The Regent of Elwynor. That must mean something to you.”

  Names, again. Words. Tristen shut his eyes a moment, and there was nothing in his thoughts, only confusion, Words that would not, this morning, take shape. “I don’t know. I don’t know, sir.”

  “I thought you just—knew things.”

  “Reading. Writing. Riding. Words. Names. But I don’t know anyone in Elwynor, sir. Nothing comes to me.”

  He was afraid to have failed the test. For a time Cefwyn looked at him in that hard and puzzled way, but, unable to answer, he found interest in Gery’s mane. It was coarser than a man’s hair.

  It was clipped short, and stood up straight. He liked to touch it. It was something to do.

  “Tristen,” Cefwyn said sharply.

  “Sir.” His heart jumped. He looked to find what his fault was.

  Perhaps even his respectful silence. Cefwyn kept staring at him as they rode side by side. He was afraid of Cefwyn when Cefwyn looked like that.

  “Ninévrisë. Does that name come to you? Does Ilefínian, perchance?”

  “Ilefínian is the fortress of the Elwynim.”

  “And Ninévrisë? What does that name conjure?”

  He shook his head. “I have no idea, m’lord. Nothing.”

  “Such names don’t come to you.”

  “No, m’lord.”

  “Do you take me for a fool?”

  “No, sir. I don’t think you are at all.”

  “And where do you find your truths? Do they come to you—”

  Cefwyn waved his hand. “—out of the air? The pigeons tell you, perhaps.”

  “My teachers do.”

  “Your teacher is dead, man. Emuin is gone. He fled to holy sanctuary. Who teaches you now?”

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  “You, m’lord.”

  “I? I am many things—but no teacher, I assure you. And damned certainly no moral guide.”

  “But I have to believe you, my lord. I have no other means to know.” He was afraid, and shaken by Cefwyn’s rough insistence on what he knew must be the truth. “The philosophy I read makes no sense of Names. Rarely of Words.”

  “Gods witness,” Cefwyn said after a moment, “gods witness I am a man, not a cursed priest. Choose some other. At large and random you could fare better.”

  “Emuin said to listen to you.”

  “Then damn Emuin! I am not your guide, man. Moral or otherwise.—Would you believe anything I told you?”

  “I believe everything you’ve told me, m’lord Prince.” The prospect of doubt in things he had taken for true was sufficient to send sweat coursing over his skin. “I must believe you, sir. I have no other judgment, except to judge the people that tell me.”

  “Gods.” Cefwyn slumped in his saddle, then suddenly took up the reins. “Follow me!” he said, and spurred around Idrys and past the vanguard.

  Tristen followed; Idrys and Uwen would have, but Cefwyn turned and shouted, ordering their separate guards back. Their lead widened until they two rode alone with the escort far too distant to hear.

  “Do not,” Cefwyn said, “ever confess to any man what you have just told me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They rode in silence a time. “I have never lied to you,” Cefwyn said at last, and quietly. “At least that I can recall.—Do you know who I am, Tristen? Do you really understand?”

  “You are the King’s son,” Tristen said, looking at him, “of Ylesuin.”

  “Of Ináreddrin, King of Ylesuin, son, yes, his heir; and of Amefel, by His Majesty’s grace, his viceroy in Henas’amef and over Amefel and its uneasy borders.” Cefwyn looked down his nose at him, a narrow stare. “Most men—and

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  women, oh, especially the women—have ambitions to share that grace. I have a vast multitude of devoted followers, and from none but a handful of my guard would I take untasted wine. What say you, Tristen?”

  “Of untasted wine?”

  “Poison. Poison, man. Poison in the cup, a knife in the dark.

  I defend this cursed tedious border against old resentments, and the Amefin, in particular those Amefin who are opposed to the Aswyddim on account of their burdensome taxes, would prefer another heir, since me they cannot manage, and they have discovered that. Now with nine heads on Henas’amef’s gates, the Elwynim sue for peace and the Regent offers me his daughter.

  And the Amefin like that well, save Heryn Aswydd and his lovely and well-traveled sisters, who like that least of all.” He lifted his hand to the east, where Henas’amef itself showed small and remote, now, falling behind them. “And should you lack for suspect affections or affiliations, or even bedmates, why, my dear sir, consider Guelemara. The capital. My father, my kith and kin, another pack of wolves, but with far better and courtly graces.

  The capital is vastly more civilized than here. They poison only fine vintages. You’ve been treated far more shabbily, having experienced Henas’amef’s rough hospitality.”

  “I find it kind,” Tristen said, “mostly.”

  “You are quite mad, you know.”

  “Most have been kind to me.”

  “Mad, I say.”

  “I think I am not, sir, please you.”

  Cefwyn’s hand moved to a medallion he had at his throat, like Emuin’s. “Do you not suffer midnight impulses to revenge?

  Do you not resent what certain folk did to you? Do you not think remotely of serving them in kind?”

  “Who, sir?”

  “A man has a right—” Cefwyn’s words tumbled one over the other in a passion and fell to a halt.

  “Sir?”

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  “Don’t look at me like that! I am not Emuin. Don’t look to me for answers, damn you, don’t you dare look to me for answers! I’m no arbiter of virtue! You’ll not trap me in that!”

  “Emuin said you were a good man. But he said not to copy what you did.”

  Cefwyn’s mouth opened. And shut. Cefwyn stared at him.

  “I ought not to have said that,” Tristen said. “Ought I?”

  “Gods. You will terrify the court.”

  He was terrified, too. And lost. Cefwyn used words very cleverly, very quickly turning them from the course Tristen thought they would take.

  “Or is such your humor?” Cefwyn asked.

  “What, sir?”

  “Cry you merc
y, Tristen. I have never met an honest man.”

  “You confuse me,” Tristen said. He felt cold, despite the sun.

  “I don’t understand, sir, I fear I don’t.”

  “I don’t ask that you understand,” Cefwyn said, “only so you don’t ask too much of me. Emuin did tell you the truth.”

  The sun climbed the sky, and far past the view of the town, even beyond the reach of the fields, they took a westward road that ran up among low hills. The guard had long since swept them up again within their ranks and Idrys rode with a small number out to the fore, sometimes entirely out of sight as the road bent back and forth.

  But it seemed the land declined, then, and in very little time the hills gave way to meadow, where a breeze that had made the day a little chill grew warmer and stronger, and lifted the banners and pennons.

  They kept a moderate pace over an hour or so, between pausing to rest the horses. One such rest, as the sun passed its zenith had bees buzzing about a stand of white and pink flowers, and the horses cropping grass and the blooms of meadow thistles. Their company disposed themselves on a grassy slope and shared out a portion of the food they had brought.

  It was wonderful, in Tristen’s mind: he sat on the grass next 215

  to Cefwyn and Idrys and Uwen, and felt a pleasant camaraderie with these rough soldiers—a joking exchange which Cefwyn and all the rest seemed to find easy, and in which the respect men had to pay Cefwyn seemed quickly to fall by the wayside.

  There was laughter, there was nudging of elbows at what might be cruel remarks, but the object of them rolled right off a stone, feigning mortal injury, and got up again laughing. Tristen was entranced, thinking through the way these men joked with one another, laughter a little cruel, but not wicked: he understood enough of their game to see where it was going, involving a flask that emptied before its owner regained it; there was mock battle, the man laughed, and Tristen thought that if he were so approached, he could laugh, too. It was good not to be on the outside watching from a distance, and Cefwyn laughed—even Idrys looked amused.

  It was good not to be protected into safe silence. He wished the men would play jokes on him. He had not understood jokes before, not this sort. Mauryl had had little laughter in him.

  But he saw Cefwyn easier, saw Uwen grinning from ear to ear—even Idrys flashed half a grin. He hadn’t known the man had another expression; and he doubted it after he had seen it—but it made him know other things about the man.

  Afterward, though, when they were mounting up again, Cefwyn said they should go warily, and Uwen said he should stay close, that thereafter they were crossing through more chancy territory. There was a woods ahead, which the King’s men had wanted to cut down, but Heryn Lord Aswydd, as Tristen gathered Uwen meant by naming the Duke of Amefel, had lodged strong protest, because of the hunting and because of the woodcutters of Emwy village and others, and had undertaken to keep the law there himself.

  “So,” Tristen said, “can the Duke of Amefel not find the sheep?”

  And Idrys said, “Well asked.”

  Cefwyn, however, looked not at all happy with the question, so he guessed he had wandered into a matter of 216

  contention between them, and he was well aware that Idrys had begged Cefwyn to choose some other direction.

  But Cefwyn, unlike boys growing up with wizards, was a prince and did what he pleased, when he pleased, and what he pleased was to ride in this direction. So Tristen thought, and began to worry—

  Still the soldiers seemed to take the news of their direction as a matter of course, and Idrys had almost laughed at noon. It seemed, at least, the men felt confident of accomplishing what Cefwyn wished at Emwy village, whether that was finding lost sheep, or Elwynim, or outlaws.

  He thought about it as they rode, and patted Gery’s neck and wondered if the horses thought at all about danger: it seemed to him, one of those things he knew along with riding, that he might rely on Gery’s sense of things, and on all the horses to be on the watch for danger of a sort horses understood.

  In late afternoon they had woods in sight on their left hand, and the land grew rougher, less of meadows and more of stony heights, on which forest grew.

  They traveled until forest stretched across their path. The woods was not Marna, Tristen judged: it was green. But it was very likely part of that forest that lay on Amefel’s side of the Lenúalim, a thick and deep-looking forest all the same, reminding him of hunger and long walking.

  The men talked about the river lying close.

  “Is it the Lenúalim?” he asked Uwen.

  “Aye,” Uwen said. “And Emwys-brook. And Lewen-brook’s not far. Not a good place we’ve brushed by, the last hour and more, m’lord.”

  “Because of the woods? Or because of the Elwynim?”

  Uwen did not answer him at once. “Ghosts,” Uwen said finally, which was a Word of death and grief and anger. It disturbed him. He looked at the trees on either hand as they rode into that green shade, and so did the men, who said very little, and seemed anxious.

  But he looked to the green branches, even hoping to see a 217

  feathery brown lump somewhere perched on a limb. Since their excursion planned to stay a night near this wooded place, he even hoped for Owl to find him—if Owl would haunt any place outside Marna, such a place as this seemed exactly what Owl would favor. The whispering leaves sounded of home to him.

  It made him think of standing on the parapet at Ynefel and listening to the trees in the wind. And he thought it would be a very good thing if he could find Owl and bring him back to Henas’amef. But the men around him looked not to be comforted at all by what they saw or heard.

  “It’s not so dark as Marna,” he said, to make Uwen feel safer.

  “Few places would be,” Uwen said, and made a sign folk made when they grew frightened. So he did not think he dared say more than that.

  But in a little more riding, the track they followed, leaf-strewn and hardly more substantial than the Road he had followed through Marna, brought them through a thinning screen of trees and brush, into yet another broad valley, with fair grasslands and fields and hills open to the afternoon sun.

  “This is Arys-Emwy,” Uwen said. “They’re mostly shepherd-folk.”

  So they were still in Amefel, Tristen decided. He remembered the pale lines on the map. He saw the Name in his memory.

  Sheep had left their tracks about the meadow and on the road, although they saw none grazing.

  They came on stone-fenced fields beyond the next hill, and crops growing, and further on they could see the thatched roofs of a village—Emwy village, Uwen said, which seemed a pleasant place. It had no outer walls, just a collection of low stone fences.

  The buildings were gray stone, two with slate roofs and a number with thatch. Shutters were open in most of the houses, and many of the doors likewise were open. Men and women were working in the fields closest to the village, and thin white smoke was going up from a few of the chimneys.

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  Folk stopped work as they saw what was riding down their road, folk came in from the fields, and dogs ran and barked alongside the horses, as slowly the people gathered.

  “Hold,” Cefwyn said, and the column halted; he gave some order to Idrys about searching the houses, and Idrys and the men around him, with none of the banner-carriers, went riding off quickly into the single street of the village.

  “Where are the young men?” Cefwyn asked of the silent villagers, who leaned on hoes and gathered behind their stone fences.

  And they were all old, or young women or children.

  “Answer the Prince!” a man of the guard said, and lowered his spear toward the people.

  “Off wi’ they sheep,” an old man said. “Off seekin’ after they sheep, m’lord.”

  “Who is the head man, here?”

  “Auld Syes. She is, m’lords.” The man nodded toward the village, and all the people pointed the same way.

  Cefwyn drew his horse
about and bade them ride on toward the village itself, where Idrys and his men going in advance of them had turned out a number of villagers from their houses, a number of children, Tristen saw. Dogs were barking.

  “This ain’t good,” Uwen said. “If village lads is off searching for any sheep, they should have the dogs along. They’re lyin’, m’lord.”

  What Uwen said to him echoed in Tristen’s head as they rode up on the village and into its street. There were two girls—a number of children, many very young. There were old folk. Cefwyn’s men, those afoot, who had been searching, and others sitting on their horses, were looking this way and that, hands on weapons. Idrys came riding slowly closer to them.

  “Not a one of the youths on the rolls,” Idrys said, out of some far distance. “So much for Heryn’s law-keeping.”

  Tristen drew a sharp, keen breath, feeling a shiver in the air.

  Dust moved aloud the street as a stray gust of wind blew 219

  toward them. The gust gathered bits of straw, whipped a frame of dyed yarn standing by a doorway, and one woman, one old woman was in that doorway.

  “Are you Auld Syes?” the sergeant asked.

  “I am,” the old woman said, and lifted a bony arm, pointing straight at Cefwyn. “Marhanen! Bloody Marhanen! I see blood on the earth! Blood to cleanse the land!” The wind danced around her rough-spun skirts, it skirled through the tassels of her gray shawl and the knots of her grayer hair. She wore neck-laces not of jewels but of plain brown stones and knots of straw.

  She wore bracelets of knotted leather. Tristen looked at this woman, and the woman looked at him. She feared him. He knew that look. She stretched out her arm at him and pointed a finger, and cried a Word without a sound; and now in dreadful slowness Cefwyn’s men were making a hedge of their weapons.

  The wind wrapped around and around the old woman, winding her skirts and shawl about her until she was a brown and gray bundle in the midst of the dust.

  The Word was still there. He couldn’t hear it. People were screaming and running and Gery was plunging and snorting under him, crazed, as the wind whipped away from them, taking straw and dust with it, still blowing in and out among the houses, still whipping at the skeins of yarn. The frame fell over on the woman, covering her in hanks of yarn. Dogs were growling and barking, but some had run away. A handful of old men and women and a boy with one foot all stood where they had, and Cefwyn was shouting at the riders—“Up the lane!