Fortress of Eagles

by C. J. Cherryh

  He felt afraid when he thought of it—he felt guilty at tread FORTRESS OF EAGLES / 29

  ing into that gray space that waited there—guilty at any use of the Sight he did have. Emuin had forbiden it.

  True, Ylesuin would surely have gone down to defeat by sorcery if he had not been on Lewen field at Cefwyn’s side, and if the other lords of Ylesuin preferred not to acknowledge that fact as yet, he knew in his heart that the danger to the realm was not done. Sorcery might not rear up again into the threat they had faced at the end of summer, when shadows had gathered thick and threatening under the leaves of Marna Wood. The enemies they faced in Elwynor now were only Men, not shadows, but they were still fierce enemies who might at any moment resort to wizardry to prevent a Guelen incursion into Elwynor, and the uneasiness that had assailed him on the hilltop nagged at him like a stealthy movement at the edge of his sight.

  Such ventures, free of Emuin’s witness, were rare and brief.

  He worried at the gray space with some furtive sense of need, for if he was distracted by the men around him now, the town toward which he was riding all but blinded him. With its noise and its strangeness, its textures, its smells, its clatter and its truths and its pretenses, it posed a barrier surer than Emuin’s prohibitions.

  He had been afraid on the hilltop. He asked himself now was there a reason for the fear, or was it only the realization of so many questions, so many, many questions about the world which would never find an answer if this year was all he was to have, and if all of the days he did have left were to be spent either sitting in his room or taking brief rides in the company of these men, on permitted roads?

  He longed for a wider freedom. In his earliest days 30 / C. J. CHERRYH

  in the world he could lose himself in the contemplation of the textures of common dust, and in such uncommon sights as Petelly’s mane, in which a yellow leaf had just now lodged.

  But nowadays he had questions not so much of what he saw before him as of what he did not see, or seeing, failed to comprehend. This festival to celebrate the death of the year was one. The constant company of guards against threats he knew dared not assail him was another: while what he most feared they could not so much as imagine—not the king’s men, not even Uwen, whose honesty he never doubted and who had ridden with him into the heart of shadows. Uwen’s this summer was part of it. But not all.

  Still, in this province of Guelessar he did what pleased the king and did his best to comfort his detractors. He emulated the other lords at court in speech and manners. He feigned boredom when he was near them, but he knew he never did it well…Cefwyn had told him from the beginning that he was very bad at lying. From his side, he found their malice tiresome and tedious, while he still found wonders to stare at in the sparkle of glass or the color of a lady’s skirt—and dared not.

  Ask questions of them? He dared not that, either…as, today, he would, if he dared, ask any man the same questions that he had asked Emuin, and still worried at, still unanswered: how long will this autumn last? How long will winter be? How long until the spring? And could Uwen imagine tomorrow…or next year…so easily? A man who was not a Man in the ordinary sense was by no means sure of such matters when wizards talked about the wanderings of the sun. There was so much else, so very much else that Men took for granted and seemed to foresee with such clear assurance, while FORTRESS OF EAGLES / 31

  that gray space Men could not reach was always waiting to draw him in, more real and more truthful than he found comfortable.

  The year, the true Year, by which Men reckoned time, would begin on Midwinter Night. But when spring came, then his year began all over again, or at least he would have reached his own beginning point.

  When spring came, king Cefwyn and all the men said, the kingdom of Ylesuin would go to war across the river to win Lady Ninévrisë her kingdom. Nest spring this and next spring that ran through all court conversations as if winter, this dead, dying, most ominous season, were a negligible affair that they would all endure and think nothing of.

  And perhaps winter and change were negligible, for ordinary men. But in his darkest hours, in everyone’s blithe talk of seasons and this constant repetition of in the spring, he knew that Uwen most surely had a confidence and a vision of things to come that he simply did not have and had never had. Ordinary men, too, took for granted they would fare better in the next year than the last. And he did not have that confidence. He had never seen a year but this one…and the glance homeward this afternoon had struck a strange and persistent uneasiness into his heart, as if he had looked beyond a boundary of more than rock and stone…as if long-stable forces had lurched into movement today, a small slippage in what had been fixed, and he had done it. He had begun it.

  Perhaps when he came full circle of a year it would complete something. Mauryl had Called him into being for Mauryl’s reasons, but now that winter was coming and the wedding was near, Cefwyn found no use for him. Emuin had no time. Uwen was at his direction, not

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  the other way around. That left him waiting, at loose ends, unable to imagine what that new year would bring him, or what he would do in it, or what he had ever been meant to do, beyond Mauryl’s purpose for him, which had been to defeat the enemy at Lewen field.

  He had survived the field at Lewenbrook. He had defeated Mauryl’s enemy Hasufin and not ceased to exist afterward, unnatural creation that he was. So that was one great barrier he had passed. Should he not survive the next? He had no least idea now just why the anniversary of his beginning should loom in his thoughts as some mystic demarcation, but he found it did so with increasing force. Perhaps once he passed that day, that anniversary hour of his birth, then he would began to live years as other Men lived, with anticipation of season following season for many, many years.

  And then perhaps he would see something besides gray in his future as other Men did. Or perhaps he would not.

  Or was it possible then that all his gathering of knowledge, none of which precisely answered Mauryl’s purpose for him, was in vain? Was it possible that Mauryl’s spell would only last until it met some boundary of nature, and was it possible the year was that barrier? Might that identical night next spring send him hurtling again into the dark, all that he treasured forgotten, all that he had gathered dispersed with the elements that had made him?

  Next spring would tell him.

  And how long was a winter? How long, again, would autumn last? Did the autumn last the same number of days in every year?

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  He had asked master Emuin that a fortnight ago, trying to approach that greater, more confusing subject with the old man, but Emuin had turned yea and nay on the matter of seasons just when he had thought he understood, and Emuin had said, well, mostly autumn lasted a certain time, and added in the next breath that winter might come late this year, and, no, it was not just when the leaves decided to turn color, it was when the air grew cold.

  And why did that happen? he had asked.

  Because the sun goes early to bed, Emuin had said.

  And why was that, sir?

  Probably it grows weary of questions, Emuin had said with sudden asperity, meaning he, a wizard, and the wisest man Tristen knew, had reached the end of his patience, and the world, again, was more complex than a glance discovered.

  Then Emuin, repenting, had pulled out charts and, all one glorious evening in Emuin’s tower room in Guelemara (and with the jewel-breasted pigeons wandering in and out the window) had showed him the travels of the sun through the stars. Emuin said that a year was fixed, but seasons varied, and showed him the chart of a year as the sun traveled and told him autumn varied.

  So what men knew about the seasons was mostly true and sometimes not; it was guessable but not knowable, discernible by its signs but obscure in its presence and in its moment of ending. It was like so many other things men accepted without wonder. Yet in that uncertainty lay the pivot point of his existence—would h
e continue on, or cease to exist?

  Meanwhile the men talked of mares and bonfires, ale and women, and the road turned and came out of 34 / C. J. CHERRYH

  the woods for a while, overlooking first sheep pastures gone all brown and dry, then the plowed fields that foretold a village.

  On most of the early days in fall when they had ridden this same road, plumes of smoke had marked the horizon once they reached this point, farmers burning off the stubble, adding the stinging smell of burning barley-straw to the smoke that always hung about the valleys.

  But the unsteady wind today, changing from west to south, had made burning off fields and pastures quite foolhardy, so Tristen guessed, or perhaps the farmers were done with burning. The air remained unusually clear and clean as they crossed the edge of the king’s woods near Cressitbrook. A sport of wind, scampering beside the road, whipped up a skirl of leaves out of the wood’s edge uphill of them, and Petelly and Liss danced side by side along a golden path, a last forest enchantment of fire colors, earth colors. Golden fine leaves of alder and birch paved the road under them as they drew a little ahead. The guards jogged to keep up, alongside the substantial stream that came babbling and flowing on their right. It was a walk through a treasure-house, the last thin arch of branches.

  The snow might come before they rode this way again. All the colors would vanish from the land, buried in white and gray and cold.

  They rounded the hill where the road forked. They took the right-hand choice, and that led them to the wooden bridge where a marker stone stood, a pillar beside the bridgehead with the king’s mark on it. Another such post, this one of wood, stood just the other side. They rode across the planks and startled a flight of blackbirds from their brigandage in the stubble of the barleyfield beyond.

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  The stone marker defined the point the road left the king’s preserve. The fields just the other side of the bridge—indeed, the plowed land visible before this—belonged to the village of Wys-on-Cressit, not to be confounded with Wys-on-Wyettan or Wys in Palys-under-Grostan…there were very many Wyses, very much, alike, all Guelen, even the one in Palys province, so he had heard from Uwen, who himself was Guelen (as opposed to Ryssandish, the other, dark-haired folk common in northern Ylesuin) and who had lived in such a village before he became a soldier.

  Wys-on-Cressit was a place of grainfields and apple orchards and small gardens. They passed the walls of Wys necessarily as they rode down among the fields, he and his guards, and were the day’s sole sensation, a band of King’s men and a lord… the Sihhë-lord, the people called him, not always out of earshot, as they made sings against wizardry not quite hidden from his sight.

  It happened in all the villages. At first, in his folly, he had thought himself less remarkable than Uwen. Uwen’s hair had grown longer now that he was a captain, almost long enough that it stayed in its short tail, and by that dark-shot silver hair Uwen looked more the lord, at least to an eye impressed by a look of experience and a fine horse such as Liss was. So Tristen thought. But the villagers had known the stranger from the first, a dark-haired young man, common soldier’s coat or no.

  Guelenfolk were commonly fair and he was not; and his reputation having gone before him, townsmen and villagers alike shut their doors when he rode by.

  But lately Wys-on-Cressit had begun to take liberties…that was what Uwen called it. They took

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  liberties, and seemed to expect him on certain days. Today, a new height of confidence from their beginning weeks ago of shy, curious faces peeping from doorways, the oldest and most brash of the children burst out of cover near a pigpen and ran along beside the horses as they skirted the house walls, dogs barking and chasing at the horses’ heels.

  “Get along there,” Uwen called to the boys, and waved his arm. “Gods bless, ye fools, ’ware the horses! Ye’ll find yoursel’s kicked to Sassury and gone!”

  The children lagged behind. Petelly was a forgiving, good-natured—even lazy—horse. Liss was steady but not as forgiving, while the guards’ unmatched mounts were drawn from the general cavalry string and were both fierce and unpredictable.

  But no one had suffered. They had ridden beyond the village, disturbing nothing, and one wondered what impertinence the children would venture next time. The village had lightened his spirits—as indeed his time in Guelemara had begun to have such little anticipations, such little visions that made inroads in the gray. Might he yet gain a word of welcome from the elders? It might be. If the children grew bolder, he might yet coax Wys village not to fear him. It would be one village less out of two score villages and a score of other provinces that feared his very shadow on their streets; but, alas, there was no mending fear except by patience and habit, or by the chance of some great service he could do them.

  Still he had won a bit more, and not had it spoiled by having Petelly kick someone. He wondered would it be possible to ride here in winter. He hoped so, and hoped the children would still venture out—but it was one of those foolish questions, he feared, and he was reluctant to spoil the peace with a question that led to

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  will-be and may-be and men’s enviable imagining.

  Two hills more and the turning of the road, at the second pasture beyond Wys village, was where they had come to expect their first sight of the town of Guelemara in the far, far distance.

  But today, with the last leaves on the trees along that fence row fallen, they gained their first sight of the town far in advance of that, almost by the time they had cleared the second hill beyond Wys…saw it as a distant walled town that spilled down off its hill onto the flatland, if one counted as part of Guelemara the outlying establishments of stables, craft sheds, orchards, and drying sheds, alike the lease-land, where the Crown allowed the settlement of some less permanent buildings.

  All that sprawl the king granted to relieve the press inside the defensive walls, structures none of which must be allowed to stand if their Elwynim enemies came onto Guelen soil next spring—he could not but ride through that sprawl and imagine how the people would suffer if the war went amiss.

  It would not, however, go amiss, he insisted to himself…it was a disorganized enemy, a small effort, if war came early and moved quickly. All their estimates counted on carrying the attack into Elwynor and not receiving any attack in return; and those estimates would hold true. He would not permit it, he would not, by the skills he had. The king would call on him at his need, and he waited for that one grim event that he did understand, in a season full of doubts. There was his purpose.

  There was a reason he might live through spring and into another year: war…at which he was very skilled.

  They reached their turn and met the Guelemara road, then, approaching the town across a generally flat 38 / C. J. CHERRYH

  extent of pastures, apple orchards, and last year’s barleyfields, the town appearing to drift in the sky on a sea of gray apple branches.

  It had three walls, all pale stone. The hill’s crown of walls and its centermost buildings were limestone brought up from the south, white by day, but gilded now with a late sun above the orchards; and the Guelesfort, the citadel, stood as the town’s highest ornament, mere planes of light and shadow at this distance, next to a second, smaller height, a second rise of planes and angles of shadow—and that sight brought no cheer.

  That second height was the other power in Guelemara, the Quinaltine, where the His Holiness the Patriarch sat, immune to the threat of war and disapproving of any act of wizardry.

  There was, all at a blink, both the sunlight and the shadow in Ylesuin: the king’s citadel of the Guelesfort, where the sun rested; and the Quinaltine, where true shadows moved. The palace was his home, as his home must be wherever king Cefwyn decreed; the sun loved the Guelesfort precinct, and for all Cefwyn’s tales of Sihhë ghosts and haunts and cold spots on the great central stairs of the main hall, he had himself seen nothing of the sort,
not a shadow, not a hint of one that had ever been. It was the shrine, the great shrine of the Quinalt, that was the truly haunted precinct, and he detested it.

  He had that far view before him for a long way. Uwen talked about barley harvest. He was content to have the comfort of Uwen’s voice, although farming did not Unfold to him as knowledge Mauryl had bespelled him to have—or it simply was not knowledge a long-dead Sihhë-lord had ever needed, if what

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  Men believed of him was true. He listened to Uwen, and learned about barley, how it grew, what conditions were good for it, how the harvest had come in tidily before the rains, and how at harvesttide and with the wedding in a fortnight and a day, they were going to have ale to swear by.

  C H A P T E R 3

  Petitions, writs, and a proposed decree lay in the pile on the desk in the royal study this late evening, not a one of them without a tangle to the tale. The stack contained every argument and counterclaim the king had heard, and heard, and heard a third time for good measure since he had returned to Guelemara, none of them as serious as the matter of the census tallies, thank the gods, but among them, and as potentially damaging to his plans, lurked the discontent of the Holy Father…whose distemper was not all on account of the pigeons.

  Supper was in the offing. Someone had come in, two pages had gone out, and Annas his household steward, now a king’s chamberlain, passed his desk moving as fast as his ancient legs would carry him. Cefwyn became unavoidably aware of gesticulations by the door, then of confused pages shooed off in conflicting directions, and more sober doings between Annas, a small man of modest pale browns and great dignity, and the commander of the King’s Guard, Idrys, a tall, mustached man of black armor and numerous weapons. Those two generally debated matters and questions that the king was very glad to leave to the pair of them, and he pursued his letters, not expecting to intervene unless disaster was at the gates.