Fortress in the Eye of Time

by C. J. Cherryh

  “I can’t, I shan’t, Uwen.”

  Uwen’s hand pressed his. “Lad…m’lord,…I give ye my oath t’ be your man, right and true, by the good gods, by their grace.

  That’s my word on ’t. But ye be careful. Ye keep the prince and the Lord Commander happy wi’ ye. For your own sake.”

  “I shall. As best I can, I shall, Uwen.”

  305

  “Let me get them boots off. Ye’d do better abed.”

  Tristen thrust out his foot and braced himself for Uwen’s pull on one and the other. He shed his clothing and let Uwen put him to bed. He shivered between the cold sheets.

  “Shall I blow out the lights, m’lord?”

  “No. Uwen, please. Let them burn. Let them burn until morning.”

  “Aye, m’lord. If ’t please ye, I’ll send for more candles. We’ll light ’er like a festival, only so’s ye sleep.”

  306

  C H A P T E R 1 7

  T he bell at the lower town gates tolled arrivals. Cefwyn continued to sift through the revenue reports, ignoring the bell until one of the guards outside opened the door and crossed the foyer to report that Lord Heryn Aswydd was demanding admittance.

  Idrys was otherwise assigned. Cefwyn considered, finally rose and gave instructions to grant the demand, with appropriate precautions.

  The lord of the Amefin had brought his twin sisters. Heryn bowed, Orien and Tarien curtsied, and Cefwyn folded his arms and leaned against the dead fireplace, secure if nothing else in the guards who had trailed this trio into the room.

  “What is this at our gates?” Heryn asked.

  “I do hardly know, Your Grace, being here, and not there, and not prophetic, but I will assume they are several of the neighbors.”

  “Send these men of yours away.”

  “Patience.” Cefwyn returned to the table and perched on the corner, amid the tax records. “Though I have limited patience myself. Your tax accounts are exceedingly nuisanceful, Lord Amefel. My master of accounts daily assails me with new complexities of records-keeping.—Do believe that my humor today is not the best.”

  Heryn’s face was all formality. “I shall have my seneschal make account to me where this fault may lie. But do rest assured, my lord Prince, that the Crown has always received its due.”

  “You’ve furnished this hall in grand style, Amefel. I would rather iron and horses than gilt and velvets, with matters as they stand on the far borders.—Or perhaps you don’t count the Elwynim a serious danger to your interests.”

  307

  “I have constantly maintained the requisite levies.” Heryn drew a quick breath and made a wide gesture. “This is not the issue, Your Highness. There are strangers at my gate, that you may call neighbors, but I do not. I protest this treatment of me and my house. I protest the dismissal of my personal guards. I am treated like a lawbreaker. I cannot but believe that Your Highness has lent his ear to malicious influences.”

  “Idrys, mean you? Pray don’t attack him. I fear he’s not here to defend himself. He’s pursuing business you set him.”

  “M’lord prince?”

  “A messenger you managed to dispatch.” Cefwyn raised his voice and the twins backed away. “Where is your man Thewydd?”

  Heryn went white, and for a time no one moved, neither he nor his mirrorlike sisters nor the equally mirrorlike guards who escorted them.

  “Dispatched to your father,” Heryn answered after a moment,

  “that His Majesty the King may know my situation, my duress, and my complaint.”

  Cefwyn let go a long breath, angry, and hoping that a message to Guelemara was the only truth. “You have the right to appeal any grievance to the King. You hardly need subterfuge to effect that, no midnight departures or disguises.”

  “I have the right to walk my own hall unimpeded, but your treatment of that right makes me doubt the others.”

  “You may say so, Amefel. You may complain to my lord father. I’ll seal and stamp the message myself if you like. But you will give account to me and to my father the King when the accounting comes.”

  “I am prepared to do so, Your Highness, in clear conscience.”

  “You have hazarded your man’s life,” Cefwyn said. “If taken, he will pay for your lack of trust in me, since Idrys, as you well know, is not a patient man.”

  “My lord Prince.” Heryn spread wide his hands in an attitude of entreaty. “I protest this arrest. I have done nothing—”

  308

  Cefwyn gestured toward the records. “Nothing improper?

  You’ve bled this province white, sir. You’ve made the Crown look rapacious and you’ve appropriated to yourself taxes you declared to the province to be due to the Crown. Is that of advantage to us in our defense of a dangerous border? Does that win the loyalty of the peasants? Have I even cavalry to show for it? No. Gold dinnerplates.” He stalked as far as the windows, lest his anger choke him, turned and paced back, and Heryn stood with Orien and Tarien on either hand, a whey-faced lot and suddenly loathsome to him. “You may regret having appealed to His Majesty, Heryn Aswydd, since, having invoked the King’s law, you will now be unable to stop it. And I, my finely-dressed lord, and ladies, have begun a long list of questions in which my father the King will interest himself when he summons you to Guelemara. We speak of treason, sir, as well as theft.”

  “My lord,” Orien began, and winced as her brother gripped her arm and pulled her back.

  “Do not involve yourself,” Cefwyn advised her. He turned his shoulder to them. The bells rang down at the outer gate, distant and clear on the air, but there was another bell pealing out now, that of Skull Gate, and a clatter of hooves echoed off the inner walls.

  “What have you done?” Heryn asked him.

  Cefwyn looked out the window, ignoring Heryn and all he represented.

  The doors opened. One of the Guelen pages entered, out of breath. Sasian, his name was, an earnest lad. Cefwyn signed to him. “Your Highness,” the lad breathed. “It’s Ivanor’s banner, and Imor’s.”

  Cefwyn’s lips made a taut smile. Cevulirn and Umanon together, neighbors and allies, the horsemen of the southern plains and their city-dwelling allies from across the Lenúalim.

  Here. Safe. Answering immediately to his summons. Breath left him in a long sigh, and he cast a look askance at Heryn’s pallid face.

  “We have guests, Amefel.”

  309

  “To be entertained at my expense?” Heryn cried. “You are quartering Ivanim in my town?”

  “Expense, expense, matters with you do seem to have a single song, Lord Heryn. We are conferring on matters of import to all the region; the others will doubtless be arriving before twilight.”

  Heryn opened his mouth and shut it quickly.

  “No,” Cefwyn agreed, “I would not object in your place, Amefel.” He made a chivalric gesture toward Orien: pale, russet-haired, ambitious Orien. “You will have the opportunity to play hostess to all the region; an opportunity to use all that grand gold dinnerware, all this surplus of servants and display. You should be delighted, dear, vain…lady.”

  Color rose to Orien’s face. Tarien turned white.

  “Out!” Cefwyn said to her and her sister, and she whirled and fled, remembered to curtsy, and fled again. After an opening and closing of her mouth Tarien left in her wake, and two guards went with them.

  “My lord Prince,” Heryn said, choked with rage. “Your treatment of my sisters does you no honor.”

  “Your sisters are charming whores, and do you cry honor, who made them serve where you could not?”

  Heryn swore. The guards moved with a clash of metal and Heryn’s hand stayed from the dirk he wore. For a moment Heryn seemed on the verge of that fatal madness, then wisely mastered his impulses in favor of more diplomatic assault. Cefwyn regarded him with disappointment.

  “You are dismissed, Your Grace.”

  “I am not your servant, to be dismissed so rudely. Or do you fancy yourself alread
y King?”

  “Surely you fancy I shall not be.”

  For a moment Heryn’s face was void of expression, and a chill came on Cefwyn’s skin. A mistake, to have baited the man.

  He had misjudged the threat. Coxcomb, liar, usurer and outright tax-thief that he was, Heryn Aswydd was in fact dangerous.

  Nine assassins, and the last a troop of them, in lands Heryn patrolled.

  310

  Of course the man would not be provoked to draw—and the man knew the prince trod on fragile ground, raising armies.

  Heryn did not know other things shaping quietly in the handiwork of women. He trusted that Heryn did not know. But in those books of account there were debts at outrageous interest that other lords and even tradesmen owed that kept the nobility of Amefel swilling at Aswydd’s trough.

  Cefwyn turned to the page, who stood the while frozen in horror. “Go back, lad; see the lords at the gate offered all courtesies and welcome. Have the master-at-arms run up the flags of all our guests beside mine and Amefel’s, as they arrive. Go.

  Haste.”

  The boy sketched a hasty bow and fled. Cefwyn returned to his table, sat down, and found his place in the records. “Perhaps,”

  he said to Heryn, “you would care instead to assist me in my reckonings of the proper tax. Doubtless you can explain these accounts and the source and disposition of these revenues.”

  There was absolute silence. No one moved, neither Heryn nor the guards. Heryn leaned insolently against the table by the door, red-bearded, elegant Heryn, who had succeeded after all in surprising him with an audacity and mental quickness greater than he would have believed in the man.

  Cefwyn, seething with anger, turned a massive page, the numbers on which swam in front of him.

  Tax the people at more than the Crown rate, then lend them money back to pay the tax—collecting interest through the town’s moneylenders who let the income out again through their fingers. Those books also his men were searching for, this time in town. Well it was to have probed the man to the quick, he decided. Almost he had regretted pressing him thus far, but now at least he knew the temper of the man, underestimated as it had been.

  “We shall go down,” he said, “and meet Amefel’s other guests.

  It should be time. Will you join me, Your Grace?”

  “Of course, Your Highness,” Heryn said.

  311

  He closed the book, and swept up with his own guard the Guelen guardsmen with Heryn, men whose eyes were shadowed with a service in which they alternated sleep and duty. The duty would be lessened with the arrival at that gate, with troops other than Guelen and Amefin available to dispose about the Zeide.

  They went out and down the hall at a brisk pace, down the steps, and got no further than the turn toward the doors before, shadows against the light, a troop of men came in.

  Cevulirn and Umanon together, travel-stained, dusted from the road, and weary from a day’s ride. “Pages!” Cefwyn called out. “The lords’ baggage to their quarters. Rouse out Lord Kerdin and see to their men!” He met the lords with a handclasp and a clap on the arm that raised dust, the consequence of a large troop in a dry spell on the roads. “Welcome, welcome, both. A long day, a long ride. You are the earliest. I trust my men have been down by the gate to provide your captains what they need.”

  “Prompt and well-prepared, Your Highness. Your Grace.” The latter Cevulirn addressed to Heryn, who met them as if he had remained undisputed lord in Henas’amef.

  “Your Highness, Your Grace.” Umanon was a smallish, stout man with drooping mustaches and the figure of a wheel blazoned in white on his green surcoat: lord of Imor Lenúalim, and a master of rich farmlands and the great high road. Cevulirn stood at his shoulder, a thin, tall man whose colorless hair and mustache and gray surcoat made him curiously obscure to the eye; his device was a white horse that betokened the wide plains of Ivanor, the good grasslands and sleek horses that were the wealth of the unfenced south.

  “We’ve arranged water and wood for your encampments,”

  Cefwyn said. “We trust you’ll leave your captains in charge and enjoy the hospitality of the hall. We expect more of your brother lords to arrive, and this evening we’ll make formal reception in the grand hall, granted the rain stays at bay and our other guests arrive in timely fashion. At worst, good food and good company for those of us who do meet.”

  312

  “At your pleasure, my lord Prince,” said Umanon; and in his dark eyes, as in Cevulirn’s gray stare, was keen curiosity; but they were too prudent to ask questions where answers had not been advanced in the letters or put foremost in the meeting.

  “It is not war,” Heryn said, “nor is anyone taken ill. I am as puzzled as yourselves at this gathering. But welcome, my lords, welcome, all the same.”

  Cefwyn smiled tautly at Heryn’s conscious malice and brazen effrontery, and saw dismay leap into the lords’ eyes, a second glance at him,—and caution.

  “His Grace Lord Heryn is not in favor, today, as you see. He even sends to His Majesty in protest of my orders. But I am jealous of my life, my lords, as I assure you is my royal father, and Heryn has lately been most careless in that regard. You surely noticed the ornaments of our south gate. I urge you take precautions for yourselves: assassins of some stamp or other have been a damned pest in Amefel this summer. Heryn does of course swear they’re Elwynim. But overtaxed farmers can grow desperate, and even blame their prince for their plight.”

  There was a lifting of heads, scant glances toward Heryn: there was no great bond among the southern lords, and with that handful of blunt words he marked Heryn as plague-touched.

  Heryn’s poisonous tongue merited him a visit to the cellars, but to have the man delivered to prison in his own hall, particularly under witness of the neighbors, was extreme. Heryn’s boldness so far had saved him from his own prison, and his answer had, as happened, neatly warned the visiting lords, always jealous of their privileges, that they well might be cautious: that the Marhanen prince might be exceeding the authority the King had lent him.

  But now Heryn bowed, all humble, and was oh, so far from the drawing of a weapon that alone would give the prince clear cause to remove a baron of Ylesuin to his own well-stocked cellars. Clever man, he thought, and far braver than he had reckoned him.

  “This evening, my lords,” Cefwyn murmured, and they 313

  bowed in courtesy, prepared to go off with an assortment of pages and attendants.

  Heryn, too, took his chance to leave under that general dismissal, bowing and sweeping up the Guelen guards assigned to him, so that his treatment in his own hall would be clear to his unasked guests. The man had a gift and an instinct for epic.

  Heryn was Amefin, he was noble, accepted by the Amefin lords as well as by the peasants he abused, at least as one of their own.

  There had not been another choice but the Aswydds and their ilk to rule the province. There might be, now. Annas had been instructing Tristen in protocols, in manners, in courtly matters, and Annas reported him a quick and gracious hearer. “A pleasure, m’lord,” was Annas’ assessment of him.

  He climbed the stairs, went back to his apartment and to, as he planned, the cursed books, wherein his accountant had placed small papers and notes explaining the artistry with which the Aswyddim had entered here and entered there their meandering sums.

  He left his guard at the doors, went through with the sergeant of the detail to open the door for him, and went inside.

  A movement, dark and unexpected, by the window, caught his eye.

  Idrys.

  Cefwyn dropped his hand from his dagger and the beating of his heart began again.

  “My lord,” said Idrys. “We could not overtake the messenger.

  A horse was hidden for him at the Averyne crossing.”

  “He is to my father,” Cefwyn said, on his second whole breath.

  “So swears Heryn.”

  “That was his direction, my lord.” Pale du
st overlay Idrys’

  black armor and etched lines into his face, making his eyes starker and more cruel than their wont. “I returned when I 314

  saw that there was no likelihood of my both overtaking him and reaching the town again by dark; I dispatched men in pursuit, but if he rides to the limit, on that horse, he may escape them.

  That he is bound for your father may be the truth; but that is not the assumption the guard will make if he lags within arrow-flight of them. Unfortunate man.”

  Cefwyn frowned and folded his arms. “We have come to a point of final reckoning with Heryn. He trusts he knows my limits. He is about to learn he does not. I am glad you did return.”

  “You have reckoned the consequences, my lord, both personal and general, of a breach with the Aswyddim?”

  “I have reckoned them. This Heryn Aswydd is a soft-surfaced man, but there is steel beneath the velvet, Idrys. We were well rid of him as Duke of Amefel. He trusts I dare not do it. And he thinks he knows my resources. He’s probed for Tristen’s provenance as other than Ynefel, he seems to hold suspicions that I’ve contrived accusations against him merely as a threat, nothing of substance I dare actually carry through. And in that matter he is very ill informed.”

  315

  C H A P T E R 1 8

  T he sun was far declined and red when the remaining lords arrived. Black-bearded Sovrag of Olmern and his rivermen hit the town out of the northwest, having navigated the Lenúalim through Marna, and having caused the gate wardens of the lower town great consternation when he insisted to bring a large clutch of his own guards about him into the town, the men of the Black Wolf banner, rougher and less mannered than their lord.

  So Cefwyn heard on a message run up from lower town. He sent down to the Zeide gate to let the man and his escort in, and met him in the lower hall, himself, to his guards’ dismay.