Fortress in the Eye of Time

by C. J. Cherryh

Master Rosyn, at the height of his dreams, was obsessed with secrecy and cursing the necessity of dealing with what cloth two very rivalrous and doubtless gossip-prone merchants of Henas’amef had in hand.

  He did not count his tailor’s requirements for secrecy quite on a par with the reports that were not coming in from the border. He privately feared there would be no ceremony at all, and that the oath-taking would be on horseback and soon: the account-books on his table now weighed down a set of maps also far more secret than master Rosyn’s forays to the drapers’

  shops. The books contained the Aswydds’ reckonings of the armories and the Amefin levies; and, on separate parchments, a small curling pile, were the voluntary but probably far more accurate accounts of the other southern barons detailing their resources. War at least on some scale was all but a foregone conclusion to the building of those bridges, and the death of the Regent (if Emuin’s wizardly knowledge was accurate and Uleman Syrillas was in fact dead and not leading his forces across the river) did not mean peace: it would not affect the Elwynim rebels except to encourage more reckless moves inside and outside Elwynor.

  But their fighting each other under such circumstances was a possibility, and he hoped such a war was long and very wearing on them before the victor turned any other direction.

  If, in order to gain the advantage of surprise over the Elwynim before they spilled over the river, he went to war immediately, he might face an enemy divided and vulnerable. If he raised an army, however, it meant taking men from the harvest in his own lands, a harvest now in progress and already suffering from the rains—and he would have angry lords and hungry peasants on his hands, especially if later intelligence proved it unnecessary.

  He had also to consider that there would be no demonstrable gain of land or property from such a war, as he was certain there would not be: they

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  could hold Elwynor out of Amefel, but never hope to take and hold Elwynim territory—while Elwynor could gain a province, if it could peel away Amefel.

  The warring earls of Elwynor might unite if he attacked, uneasy and fragile union though it might be. And he himself was a new King, bolstered with the popular expectations of a new reign and vulnerable to those expectations turning very quickly to apprehensions: any early reverse could make the new King of Ylesuin look a fool, not even considering the reasonable anxiousness over Mauryl’s demise, and the shifting of all balance of power in the region—which certainly his barons were considering. In any loss of confidence in him, the barons north and south would have their heads together in two opposing councils making plans to take certain decisions into their own hands, and to assure their own survival.

  There was all that at risk in going to war. But if he wagered everything that the Elwynim would not move until spring, and if he acted too late, and could not hold the Elwynim out of his land, they could be defending Henas’amef from siege it was ill-prepared to sustain. The walls of his only walled town in the province were not modern. The inner citadel’s defenses were the only ones up to modern standard, which said a great deal about where Heryn Aswydd regarded his real threats to be, but the outer town defenses were, he had seen from the first hour he rode up on the town, generally too low to protect against the engines he was certain Elwynim engineers were as capable of building as were his own engineers. Modern ballistae would send fire and stones of tremendous weight right over the wall which two generations of Marhanen kings had not seen fit to authorize raised, and which Heryn probably had never asked to raise, preferring to spend the money on his marble floors and his wardrobe.

  Two generations of Marhanen kings, however, had not considered as urgent the possibility they would be the besieged inside Henas’amef and not the besiegers outside.

  All of which argued to him that Efanor might be right, and that perhaps he should retreat to the capital immediately. But 534

  his leaving Amefel would virtually cede a rich and generally willing province to Elwynor: Amefel had no loyal lord, the earls were divided, and its fall was certain in the absence of a strong royal hand on the reins. If it did fall, in the stead of a deep and treacherous river, Elwynor’s southern frontier with Ylesuin would be a wide land boundary defined by nothing more than a meandering brook—a vast, open approach with well-maintained roads leading right to the heart of Ylesuin and Guelessar itself.

  Ceding Amefel, whether by policy or by defeat in war, was not a viable option: Amefel one summer, and an Elwynim army coming right down those well-maintained highroads by the next spring. The Elwynim need not spend any time consolidating their hold on a province the commons of which were of the same customs and religion as themselves, and considering they had both been the heart of the Sihhë holdings only eighty years ago.

  He had never conducted a war. Skirmishes, yes; the wide-scale movement of fair-sized forces against bandit chiefs on the edges of Ylesuin…but no outright war between Ylesuin and another kingdom.

  He had the dicta of his grandfather, helpful advice such as: Make the first strike and make the last one; Taking prisoners encourages surrender (this from the man who had butchered the Sihhë at Althalen); and, lastly, Never outmarch your baggage.

  The latter seemed sensible advice. Tents and supper were a reasonable requisite for men who had to keep all Elwynor from pouring across the bridges—who might already, if the silence out of Emwy was an indication, have established themselves in fortified positions across the river. He had read about fortifications such as the Sihhë of the middle reigns, notably Tashânen, had built. One could see remnants of them in the ditches all about Amefel.

  The earthworks Tashânen’s Art of War described had been his despair in Emuin’s hard tutelage. Even the copied Guelen version, in the modern alphabet, had not been easy going for 535

  a nine-year-old. But it had stayed with him. It was part of him.

  When he was twelve he and Efanor had dug a miniature of such earthworks in the middle of the herb garden, which had won them severe reprimand: cook’s wife had turned an ankle and fallen very painfully in their siege of the thyme and the goldenseal.

  He did not forget the old lessons. There had been no place to use them. Earthworks and rapidly advanced entrenchments ill-suited a bandit war in the stony terrain of the foothills eastward. But defending a valley of villages and farms and prosperous towns was another matter.

  Tashânen had dug in along the Lenúalim’s lower course in his war, combining mobility behind the fortifications with clever design, reshaping the land itself to make it more convenient for his enemy to do what he wanted his enemies to do. More, Tashânen, relying, as Sihhë would, only seldom on war engines, and far more on mobility, had still set outlying defenses to make their use against him impossible. He had had no hesitation to attack in winter, at planting or harvest, or any other time inconvenient for the enemy—possible, since the Sihhë of those days had had a large standing army that did not go home on the annual schedule of farmers: it had been hellish famine in the lands where that war was fought, but Tashânen had kept it out of his own territory, another lesson.

  The warfare of the Marhanens had never been so elaborate or so deliberate: Grandfather had been one of Elfwyn’s generals, but, again, King Tashânen had subdued the whole south when, consequent of a rift in the Sihhë royal house, a claimant to the throne had broken away and fortified himself, as he had thought, invincibly in what was now Imor Lenúalim. Grandfather in his day had faced no such advanced threat or tactical necessity: Grandfather in the wars he had undertaken for the Sihhë had faced nothing but what existed today, a matter of subduing isolated rebels and pacifying the perpetually troublesome Chomaggari border—skirmishes that required mobility over strength, and on

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  which various lords of Men had gained fair reputations of gen-eralship.

  Entrenchments had not been the style, not for hundreds of years, not since Tashânen’s dynasty had dwindled away in foolish grandsons, enabled by Tashânen’s brilliance to be foolish and to
base their court in luxurious, unwalled Althalen. The Art of War had existed in one known copy, which his grandfather had taken and had copied for his own use along with various other Sihhë works—fortunately not burned by the Quinalt like so much else. It was one of his grandfather’s best acts, the saving of such Sihhë wisdom—granted Grandfather had burned the library at Althalen, not intending the fire, so he claimed.

  And if a general taught by some other surviving copy of Tashânen’s Art of War were ordering things on the Elwynim side, it was possible he could look not only for bridge-building across the river at several points, not one, and on the land border a series of incursions to establish fortifications at various points along the frontier, where the enemy would dig in behind steep wall-and-trench formations designed to funnel cavalry into brutal traps; that situation could last for several seasons, the enemy seeming to claim no more than a few hundred paces of territory.

  But from those initial castellations, the enemy would extend wall-and-trenchworks to the left and right until they formed a formidable earthwork, increasingly difficult to take, and a screen behind which the enemy might shift forces about and arrange surprise excursions into the countryside: then try to dislodge them, or prevent their taking one set of villages, and the next, and the next.

  Considering the Sihhë wars, which had been fought on this very land, before, there was indeed a way to attack and hold a territory the size of a kingdom. Barrakkêth had done it first, through wars rarely involving siege; and the halfling Tashânen, whether by his own genius or by relying on some other work now lost, had repeated Barrakkêth’s feat and written down his tactics.

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  But Barrakkêth, one of the five true Sihhë, had relied on magic, wizardry, whatever Sihhë truly used, as well as arms, and come down from the Hafsandyr, where Men were, if anything, a distant rumor and where, one supposed, wizards’ towers were common as haystacks—more common, granted there was, by other account, nothing but barren ice to live on, as far as the eye could see, and gods knew what sustained a people there besides magic.

  What then, did one do, if one’s opponents could work magic?

  He had seen in the last two days the efficacy of wizardry at getting messages passed—while his own couriers could not. The whole question was a matter Tashânen’s book had scanted, though supposedly there had been Sihhë and magic on both sides. And Tashânen, mortally disappointing for the boy of nine who had expected magic as his reward for pressing on in a very demanding text, had not so much as mentioned it except in reference to Barrakkêth. He wondered why now. He wondered was it forbidden, or simply buried between the lines so matter of factly his eyes could not see it. Did the Sihhë put some sort of magical barriers about them? Did they curse their enemies?

  Was there simply some point of honor about war and wizardry?

  There was Tristen. If they could find him, there was Tristen for advantage—if Tristen had any sense of what to do. He could lose abundant sleep on that score.

  Worse, he was not in Tashânen’s position, able to snap his fingers and move an army without destroying his own source of supply: he sat, instead, at the edge of harvest, with winter approaching, in a town vulnerable to siege, with no earthworks to defend it—although that was at least one thing he could change at Henas’amef, if he was willing to sacrifice the three-hundred-year-old orchards and pasture hedges.

  But that fortification set him inside entrenchments that were a damned embarrassing trap to be in, a king of Ylesuin sitting still while the Elwynim hammered at him. They had gotten ahead of him with their bridges. He might try to take 538

  them down without their using them. But it was a long river, and action at one place might bring action at another—besides that he had limited numbers of men to take away from the fields to create such an elaborate defense.

  They would more than lose their harvest for certain if Henas’amef fell.

  And, with all disadvantages, the notion of making Henas’amef too tough a nut to crack did tie the Elwynim down to a siege in which they could be under attack from the other provinces, unless they wished to rush past an untaken town to attack Guelemara. That would be a mistake if they did it, exposing their supply lines to attack from Henas’amef.

  Fortifying Henas’amef with earthworks would not please the peasantry, of course, nor the lords who derived income from those fertile, long-tilled fields, which in turn thrived on the sweepings of the lordly stables.

  But fortifying that outer wall might be an answer to the town’s other defensive faults.

  He had the book with him. It was in his small chest of personal items. He was reading it again, had it under lock and key so as not to have it disappear to the Amefin, and hoped the Elwynim earls did not have a better book. They might. The Quinalt burning of the libraries had not gotten to their side of the river, and gods knew what they had, as gods knew what was sitting in Mauryl’s tower, prey to the mice and Tristen’s fancied enemy.

  He wished he could see how magic worked into Tashânen’s account. Emuin had professed not to know, except to say the Sihhë had used it—or wizardry, which distinction Emuin had drawn in Tashânen’s case, and an angry nine-year-old had not paid strictest attention: gods, he’d deserved the stick, and not gotten it at the right times.

  He also wished he could believe he had months to prepare.

  But the system of scouts and post riders he had instituted (lacking magic or a wizard reliably willing to inform him) had been supposed to shuttle back and forth with messages regularly from a watch on every bridgehead on the river, and 539

  settling King’s men in way stations or villages, whichever happened to be feasible.

  It was supposed to keep him constantly apprised of events on the river, and damn it, the system, like any new system, began with problems: the messengers from two of the three sites had come trailing in, one two hours late, complaining of heavy rain, and the other confessing that he had mistaken an intersection of roads in the dark and the bad weather and ridden an hour and more along a road that proved to lead to a sleeping and terrified village.

  But the rider from Emwy-Arys never had made it in at all. He hoped it was for as silly a reason, but it was making him increasingly concerned—the man never had shown up, and now, at midafternoon, he reckoned he could begin looking for the return of the messenger who had to check on the messenger.

  And if that man failed, they could assume that their entire scheme had worked and that something had gone very wrong on the section of border nearest Marna, the section where they had patrols out, the section where his father had been ambushed, and where they had a village of dubious loyalty.

  If something had happened to that messenger, (and he was down to asking Emuin whether he could see that matter, once Emuin’s headache subsided) it meant a siege of Henas’amef, he would wager, before snowfall, the Elwynim intending to disrupt the harvest and prevent Henas’amef from storing adequate food, as well as to rampage through the villages during a time when the roads did not make relief easy.

  It meant, of course, that the Elwynim disrupted their own harvest by taking men away from the farms, but if in years previous they had had the foresight to hold reserves of their grain, they could bring it from Elwynor, managing the extended supply that Grandfather had declared was the most important item to have secured: Never rely on the farmers for food, was another of Grandfather’s rules; it makes the farmers mad, gives your enemy willing reports, and it never amounts to what you think it will once you most need it.

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  Grandfather was silent on the problems of feeding the farmers of Amefel while the armies of five provinces and all the enemy camped on their fields and their sheep-meadows—when the Amefin were farmers and shepherds of the chanciest loyalty in all Ylesuin. As well the King did stand on their pastures; holding Amefel otherwise would not be possible.

  And damn Efanor’s Quinalt priest, who had been sniffing around the local market, and had this very morning, in these unset
tled times, had the town guard arrest a simples-seller who happened to have the old Sihhë coinage for amulets in her stock.

  Efanor of course supported the priest. Efanor—

  The door opened, a guard holding the door and a windblown, panting page unable to get out his message. “Your Majesty!” the boy said, turning a bow into a hands-on-knees gasp for wind.

  He had run the stairs, by the look of him. “Your Majesty. The Elwynim—”

  It was a cursed bad word on which to run out of breath.

  “—with banners and all, coming on the gates, Your Majesty!”

  “The whole army?”

  A wild shake of the head. “No, Your Majesty. No.” Another space for breath. “With the Ivanim, down by their camp. They’ll be coming in the gates and right through the town next! So the messenger said!”

  “Will they?” Cefwyn did not think so. He pushed back from the table and levered himself to his feet. “Boy, run down to the stable, have horses saddled. Taywys,—” That for the guard who had brought the boy. “Advise the Lord Commander, and have men to ride down with me. Go!” The leg hurt and he did not look forward to the stairs. He had arranged his whole day so that he need not go down those steps today, and now the damned page had gone, the guard had gone, the servants were not at hand, and, needing to dress for outdoors, he was daunted by the prospect of doing it alone: he had begun to measure such small distances as that to the door and back as he had only a fortnight ago measured distances between provinces.

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  But the whole Elwynim troop could be riding through the gates and measuring his inadequate town walls if he delayed to call Annas and the pages and put on the prudent mail shirt or the elegant velvet coat with the royal crest. If he had to deal with some Elwynim demand for territory or a challenge to combat, he could cut a martial enough figure on horseback with a soldier’s cloak slung about him, and damn what was beneath.