Fortress of Eagles

by C. J. Cherryh

But now he was angry, and the end of a long day on the road had not improved his own spirits or set him in a more cheerful mood. More, a wagon broke down, just as they were coming down the last fairly steep hill to the border. It was the farrier’s wagon, as it proved.

  “All that iron,” Uwen said, and there was no way for men to lift it. There would have to be a new axle made, the load all shifted off, then on again. It was within sight of their proposed camp, down where Assurnbrook wended along, intermittent with trees and wild meadow.

  “They’ll have it by morning,” Captain Anwyll came riding up beside them to report. “They’ll shape an axle and may have it in good order by daybreak. Otherwise, we can take the rest of the wagons on tomorrow.”

  “Could be we’d ha’ broke ’er in the ford,” Uwen said in an attempt to put the best face on matters, “and have all the farrier’s iron to save. As well it broke now.”

  “That’s so,” he said. “But I wish nothing else breaks before we get there.”

  “Oh, have a care, m’lord, or we’ll all break down in the town gate.”

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  Tristen laughed in spite of his daylong mood. Then he imagined the gates of Henas’amef, as clearly as if he saw them before his eyes. And he recalled the number of camps ahead and saw his company strung out from the monastery at Clusyn to Assurn Ford to Maudbrook in Amefel by tomorrow night, pieces everywhere, and it was not a cheerful prospect.

  Meanwhile the surviving wagons squealed and groaned their way down to Assurn’s edge, and by last light the men were gathering firewood, while he stood on the side of that dark stream with a view of the brushy hills and old walls on the other side of the brook.

  Both sides of Assurnbrook afforded a few moldering stone walls that travelers regularly used for windbreaks and shelter.

  On the Amefin shore was the greater part of the stonework, the ruin of a shrine, but despite the remaining daylight, they had not chosen to cross to that more extensive shelter, not with a wagon under repair higher up the hill. They chose to stay on the Guelessar side of the water, where travelers over decades had set up several well-maintained hearths out of the wind.

  The men stretched out a number of the common tents from the sides of the wagons for shelter; and before Tristen had realized what they intended, they had almost gotten down the pavilion for him, too.

  “No,” he said to the soldiers, stopping all work, and went to Anwyll to protest any unpacking of the larger tents.

  “Your Grace cannot camp in the field.”

  “Do not the soldiers, sir?” He was vexed, seeing nothing but delays, nothing but encumbrances from hour to hour, and he walked away in impatience when

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  Anwyll tried to argue with him. He found warmth by the nearest of the three common fires, and stood there waiting for his supper, whenever it might appear.

  “Did I do wrong?” he asked Uwen, when Uwen came up to stand by him. “Is Anwyll angry with me?”

  “No, m’lord,” Uwen said, who was likewise bound to sleep without a tent tonight, by his decision. “Fewest of these tents we let catch the morning damp, easier to pack. He ain’t that sorry.”

  He said nothing.

  “Ye’re glum,” Uwen observed after a moment more. “Are ye worrit, m’lord?”

  “Anxious to be there,” he said, which had become the all-encompassing truth.

  They had a modest supper, bread from the monastery, sausages to toast in the fire, cheese, and a moderate amount of ale, after which Anwyll seemed in far better humor and the men were tolerably merry. The farrier’s wagon made it down the hill at last, to no little commotion and laughter. Tristen left the fire to see it in, wrapped in his cloak, in a dark outside the fires and the shelters. He sent the weary drivers and the farrier and his crew to a late and anticipated supper, and comforted himself that he had one straggled crew at last accounted for.

  He lingered after, cherishing the quiet after the groaning wheels had passed him. It was a place and an hour for shadows, and with no particular dread he realized the presence of one that lurked forlornly near the light, and that feared his impatience. Curiosity had perhaps drawn it. Others prowled the other shore, unhappy shadows that flitted and tricked the eye among the

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  ruins. He had all but heard shadows breathing above the noise of men drinking and telling tales. They might be shadows that belonged to Amefel…or to Guelessar. He had no idea. He found no harm in them, only a kind of company.

  As for Emuin and the absent rest of their company, Emuin, it seemed, had gone to bed for the night, and attempted a fitful sleep, with no word to him.

  —Are you well, sir? he attempted to ask at last, mustering his last remnant of charity.

  —Here is no place, no safe place, was all he had in reply, an impression of an old man’s worry…but more than that, more than that, he had a sudden clear sense that master Emuin was determined not to be in his company or in converse with him at all.

  In the next moment he received a rebuff and felt a departing presence as strongly as if Emuin had slammed a door.

  It was maddening.

  And it was not like Emuin.

  —Master Emuin! he called out to no avail, and he paced the shore, seeking to overcome his own angry misgivings that Emuin had not behaved reasonably, that if wagons broke down it was not, perhaps, accident, and that if he had better advice or earlier advice he might not be standing on the side of Assurnbrook blind to the night around him, with his adviser a full day behind and with a king’s herald letting loose rumor in Amefel.

  —What am I to do? he asked the unresponsive night.

  The gray place ebbed away utterly, until he heard the running water and the sounds of the horses and the distant voices of men.

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  —What am I to do, master Emuin? Answer me!

  Mauryl had used to scare him so. He found himself trembling only partly with the cold, and heard the approach of footsteps in the dark, along the pebbled shore.

  “M’lord. M’lord, is ever’thing in order?”

  “There’s no danger,” he said to Uwen’s inquiry, and as he said it knew he had just told a great lie, and that he had been telling it to himself all day. “Master Emuin will not be here in anything like good time. He has gone to bed. He will overtake us as he can. Perhaps in Henas’amef.”

  “Ah, well,” Uwen said with a sigh, “gods know what he loaded on them axles.”

  That was so common a piece of sense he all but laughed despite his temper, and his structure of reasoned disaster tumbled down. It was common, it was maddening, and it was very like the old man: he could well imagine Emuin had found last-moment items that must go onto the wagons, no matter what the advice of the drivers; and here they were, he and Emuin, Emuin’s wagons moving far too slowly, the utmost the oxen could pull, and he and Emuin were two fools arguing in the night with the world upheaved and tottering. Emuin had drunk deep of the fine ale, eased his aches, and now he would become oblivious to him and his anxious questions, perhaps to feel a little less foolish and to be in a better humor in the morning.

  “I wish we might go faster,” he said to Uwen, the two of them standing on the dark shore. “I wish we were on the other side tonight.”

  “It’d ha’ been wet horses and a cold wind for camp tonight.”

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  That was another piece of common sense: with no enemy to deal with, it was folly to press this hard.

  “It’s a notorious place, besides,” Uwen said, “and folk supposes there’s haunts.”

  “There are,” he said. “There are, here. But none harmful that I can tell.” Last night he had wished to know that all the doors were secure. Tonight, in the open and the face of shadows, he feared none of them. He felt, rather, safe. They would not assail any man of his. He was sure that this place was safe.

  But he was equally sure that something… something wanted him on the
other side.

  “Wind’s cold,” Uwen said, a polite suggestion, he was sure, that he come in out of the dark and sit by a warm fire where Uwen had far rather be.

  Two days on the road had proved a determined sheep could amble faster than the heavy wagons could roll. And within any three days lately, it might rain. Or snow.

  It was Amefel on the other side of that brook, and the delay of a night was too long.

  He walked back to the fire with Uwen, he sat and drank with Uwen and Captain Anwyll, and listened to Anwyll say they were doing very well, very well indeed, considering the roads and the load on the axles. If they were lucky, none of the wagons would break down coming out of the ford. It was a good gravel bottom. The far bank was the question. So was the overcast sky tonight.

  He lay under a canvas roof this night, listening to the water of Assurnbrook flowing nearby, and to the snap and crackle of the fire outside, thinking of the last time he had seen this particular camp, and with what hopes and fears he had ridden into Guelessar with Cefwyn, not

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  knowing what Guelenfolk would think of his presence.

  He knew now…and feared that he should have stayed in Amefel, although he supposed that without his sojourn in Guelessar he would never have seen the court, and without seeing the court and knowing the northern lords he would have found Cefwyn’s actions puzzling and unreasonable.

  But he was coming back, now, like a stone rolling back to the hole it had shaped around itself, others’ intentions not withstanding. He fit, in Amefel, or at least he perceived he might do so, better than anywhere else in his small experience.

  And in his strong suspicion, when he moved with that sort of inevitability, that feeling of things settling firmly into a well-shaped place, then it was not chance moving them. He was returning to the place shaped for him. But he had barked his shins on Mauryl’s steps too often not to have learned some lesson, and the lesson he had learned from those steps was to look not always at what drew his eye without being aware of the ground on which he stood.

  And that ground, in this case, was his nature as Mauryl’s Shaping…or Summoning. There was a dreadful, a perilous difference…Whether Mauryl had Shaped him of many elements or Summoned him entire, of one dead soul, at one moment, out of prior moments each with their bonds to a certain shape of things.

  So to what small pit was necessity taking him? Was it Mauryl’s purpose that was still being satisfied? Or was something else being satisfied?

  A wizard’s spells could outlive the wizard, in terms that Men understood. But in another and more disturbing sense, in a knowledge he tried to set far from his

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  ordinary thinking, then and now were not unbreachable walls.

  It was, in fact, easy to do. It was dangerously easy, for him to do…and Emuin did not seem to have that power.

  But if it were done, by him, by another…then things were not safe…were not safe, in ways that he felt, but could not define in simple words. Done was not done. Sealed was not sealed. Dead…was not dead. That was the very least of what Mauryl might have done.

  An owl called.

  And called again.

  Owl, he called back to it, for an unthinking and unguarded moment reaching out into the gray and the surrounding sky.

  He had never expected Owl in Guelessar, not really. But the crossing at Assurnbrook was another matter altogether, and that sound drew him, welcomed him, though in one part he feared and did not love and yet missed the creature.

  Owl?

  The sound did not come again. So maybe it was not Owl, only an owl, out hunting for its supper.

  The morning came with still wind and cold. At the edge of the firelight, a thin shelf of ice showed along the shallow edge of Assurnbrook. Men huddled close at their small fires, having a little breakfast before the orders came to move. But Tristen walked to the edge of the water and stared off into Amefel with an uneasiness that now would not leave him.

  “M’lord?” Uwen asked from behind him. “Is aught amiss?”

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  He was embarrassed, realizing Uwen had asked him at least once before. “We should leave the wagons and cross,” he said, and having said it, he found the whole world tumbling into a new order, not a good one, not a bad one, only that when he said it, he was back in the reckoning of things, and he had hung outside them, pondering the shapes, all the night.

  “M’lord?”

  Anwyll had ordered things without him this morning, assumed he was in charge and that the camp would break immediately. That was beginning. Poles were falling. Canvas was being rolled.

  “I shall be lord of Amefel over there,” he said to Uwen, with a nod toward the far side of the stream, “and over there we shall go on ahead of the wagons. Anwyll may not wish us to do it. But I think half the men and the drivers had as soon keep beside their warm fires and sit here at the ford waiting for master Emuin. So tell the captain if he objects, he will gain nothing but packing up and getting a soaking. If he agrees, all the men might stay warm and dry and comfortable. Over there where I am lord, I will order it.”

  Uwen looked a good deal set aback, perhaps turning all the conditions of that over in his mind a second time. But then he nodded. “Aye, m’lord, better warm an’ dry.”

  Uwen left to relay the order, and Tristen stood and waited.

  He was relieved to have decided. The king’s courier would be there today, and he had no doubt at all that the rumors would fly, rumors ranging from an unanticipated royal visit to the garrison being strengthened for a winter campaign—and the province viewed the

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  Guelen Guard with as much suspicion as the Guelen Guard viewed the province.

  All these possibilities. But there was only one truth. There was only one act that satisfied the magic that was pulling on him. Only one decision sent the stone rolling back into the place it fit.

  Anwyll came walking toward him in some distress, with Uwen trailing behind. “Your Grace,” Anwyll began. “I beg Your Grace consider…we have wagons and gold in our charge…”

  “And soldiers to defend them.”

  “And the need to defend Your Grace. His Majesty gave me orders…”

  “On the other side of the brook, I command. The men will only get wet and be unhappy. Or have to leave the wagons, which they ought not to do. Or will you prevent me?”

  “I have orders to defend Your Grace.”

  “But none to prevent me.”

  “No, Your Grace.”

  “Then there’s no good taking down the canvas, sir. The wagons and all the baggage can wait for master Emuin. We shall need men with us, enough here to guard the wagons, and we’ll take the best horses with us.” Now that he had seized command, the necessities of command took shape in him with perfect certainty. “No wagons, equipage like the Ivanim. One of the sergeants to bring in the column with master Emuin.”

  A deep breath. A moment’s consideration. “Yes, Your Grace.”

  It was done, then. Anwyll went off; Uwen, too, with increasing enthusiasm for moving quickly. To equip like the Ivanim meant every cavalryman with his remount at lead, and though it was not the Guelen

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  habit, the Guard who had been at Lewenbrook knew what was meant. Anwyll had offered no objections to that aspect of his orders at all, and in a very short time, with a brief commotion in the camp—shouting up and down, personal baggage stowed in wagons and horses traded about until those men to go had no encumbrance but their weapons and the fastest and best horses to carry them—they were ready.

  That meant Dys and Cassam and their grooms stayed behind, too; they were not the horses for a race. Uwen chose Liss and Gia. Tristen chose high-spirited Gery for the start of their ride, and Petelly to go at lead.

  “Banner-bearers!” Anwyll ordered. “Forward!” And the standard-bearers rode first into the cold, ice-rimmed water.

&
nbsp; Tristen followed, with Uwen, Anwyll overtaking them to make a third as they crossed. Water came not quite over the stirrups, splashed and chilled where it struck. Horses’ breath steamed in the early sunlight as the bottom began to rise, as they rode dripping out of Assurnbrook into Amefel.

  “Your Grace,” Anwyll said, when they had reached that ground, “you are now in your province.”

  “And will be in Henas’amef tonight,” he said, but it seemed to him Anwyll doubted that part of it.

  Time after that, however, seemed to him at last to move at an acceptable rate, not creeping along at the somnolent pace of the wagons. The road led up the brushy shore, past the ruins, to the Amefel he remembered, a gently undulating meadowland, low wooded hills all about.

  In another hour the road itself, overgrown with dry weeds and likely little used since summer’s end, showed droppings of sheep and goats, occasionally those of cattle, traces of varying ages. At one and another place

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  throughout the morning the sheep-traces they met crossed the road and led off to well-worn trails. Shepherds and farmers used the common land and paid their taxes to Henas’amef, and such tracks went to villages full of peaceful folk, little concerned with the affairs of lords and kings except as it affected their taxes, their sheep, their sons being called to war or left at peace.

  Such things mattered, in the accounting he had to give hereafter.

  If it meant replacing the lord viceroy without the show and ceremony the viceroy might have preferred, still, everything that protected the villages and the shepherds in these hills was reeling and slipping, and had been since the lightning stroke let the rain into the Quinaltine.

  “Ye seem so grim, lad,” Uwen said when they were at a momentary rest. “Is summat amiss?”

  He considered the question, standing, staring, with his hands on Gery’s side. He shook his head then. “No. Less so now. But the messenger will be there by now.”

  “Aye, m’lord, that he will. Is that a concern?”