Fortress of Eagles

by C. J. Cherryh

  They were western lords. The Earl Marmaschen, he with the forked beard, a quiet man: whether he was wise was still to learn; and with him Zereshadd, Moridedd, and Brestandin.

  They were always together,

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  those four, from lands closest about Henas’amef. Their odd names had always been a matter of curiosity: they did not belong in Amefel, and were originally southern, even more than the Ivanim, was his impression, but nothing told him how he was so sure or why nothing else Unfolded.

  Of the easterners fronting Guelessar, there was Durell, who drank far too much at festivities, but who was entirely sober this night; there was Civas, a quiet man, a cipher; there was Lund, who looked more like a farmer than an earl, and Azant, who bordered the river.

  The clerics had come in, too, having now come out of their hiding places to learn the outcome of the struggle. The Teranthine patriarch, Pachyll, did not look at all displeased: immaculate in his gray, fingering his beard and nodding to himself at almost every line as the clerk read the proclamation. The Bryaltine abbot, Cadell, unadorned and without his symbols on this chancy night, gazed at his new duke with eyes bright and high color suffusing his cheeks. But the Quinalt father stood in the shadows against the opposite wall, near the Guelen soldiers tonight, and had his hands tucked in the safety of his sleeves.

  Give the man gifts, Idrys had said. Perhaps that would make him less afraid…for this was a frightened man.

  And Crissand, dark as Amefin in general were dark, stood in the downward shadow of a candle-sconce, shadowed in weariness and misfortune. There was no restraint on him. But no lord stood near him, nor the priests either. He was the center of the night’s misfortune, the heir to an unwanted deed…but heir, too, to an Amefin house, standing to claim Meiden, when he might have absented himself until a time of cooler heads

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  and less danger, or begged a friend or a priest to intercede for him. He had come of his own will to state his own case, and thereby risked everything for himself and his people.

  Meanwhile the proclamation ran toward its end, with the courtesies and tangles of phrase composed in the Guelen court.

  The oaths were coming, a second document the clerk had brought, oaths which were unique and entirely unlike those of the rest of Ylesuin. The Aswyddim had been kings in Hen Amas centuries ago, when the five Sihhë-lords came down; so the Bryalt Chronicle said, the Aswyddim, rather than resisting, had flung open their gates, and Barrakkêth had let the Aswydd king of that day continue to call himself aetheling, or royal, as he wished.

  So had Barrakkêth’s successors permitted it, and so, for expediency, had the Marhanen kings. Thus the Amefin earls swore to a royal power of their own, and since the aetheling was an earl among other earls, that convolute reasoning let the earls of Amefel all continue in their little holdings, earl being a title which Guelen nobility did not acknowledge, but which Amefin folk regarded as each equivalent to duke.

  The earls therefore cherished their uniqueness among the provinces of Ylesuin as vital as heart’s blood, even if they no longer had towers and no longer ruled with separate small troops of men-at-arms on their own land, not since two kings ago, when Selwyn Marhanen had torn all the earls’ towers down, after which most of the earls had taken up residence in houses in Henas’amef, the grand houses all about the square.

  That was the history of the Red Book. That carefully maintained word aetheling let their lord be royal when he was sitting on what the Amefin not too disguisedly called the throne in Henas’amef…and the

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  Marhanen had never contested the matter, seeing the Aswydd aetheling owned himself a Marhanen vassal when he was outside his own borders.

  There was, remotely, an Aswydd heir standing in this chamber, now. But Crissand was not in contention for his father’s claim on that word tonight; so for the first time in the history of Amefel, the earls must either swear to a man neither aetheling nor Aswydd, or they must defy the Marhanen king, precipitating the very crisis Cefwyn had avoided when he deposed and exiled Orien Aswydd and appointed a viceroy over the province.

  The earls of Amefel might no longer live in state on their own land, except a few in the east, like Durell; but in their thinking they were a kingdom, and in their thinking they had a right to their own choice of rulers. Why Edwyll had launched so rash a rebellion was still in question, but the causes were everywhere in this assemblage, and wove serpentines in the ancient prerogatives.

  The reading was done. The echoes died. The clerk rattled up the second document. “The oaths, the recorded oaths, as last sworn. His Grace the duke of Amefel summons your lordships each to swear fealty according to the terms written herein…”

  What will you do? Tristen wondered. And will you swear, or will you not?

  I think you will swear. For the peace and your own welfare, I wish you to swear.

  Cuthan ducked his head a moment, took a firmer grip with both hands on his gold-headed staff, then looked up as the clerk finished the passage. “Your Grace,” Cuthan said, in a voice thready with age and a manner feeble in all but the steadiness of the glance

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  he cast up. “Your Grace, for all my years I would never have guessed His Majesty in Guelessar would have proposed us Mauryl’s heir to succeed the Aswyddim.”

  Proposed. Proposed, the man said, and not decreed, nor chosen. This was a wily old man with a will to find a way to accept the inevitable and still to leave the key principle of Amefin sovereignty alive.

  “And will you swear?” Tristen asked.

  “Aye,” Cuthan said, and nodded decisively. “Aye, to Mauryl’s heir, aye, I will.”

  Fine as dust. Another dicing of loyalties and attachments, a clever, careful, dangerous wording that might itself one day be a matter of contention, and they had no clerk with pen in hand free to record it. “Aye,” was the word behind Cuthan, from lords all about the chamber, even Prushan and Edracht, thorns in Cefwyn’s side, opposed to Cefwyn’s appointment of Parsynan, or any Guelen viceroy; opposed to Edwyll, who wanted to succeed Orien Aswydd. By reason of this old man’s cleverness of phrase, obstacles tumbled. There was reason to be grateful to Cuthan. But a man who could settle tempests so cleverly…could also raise them, both for his own purposes. The man’s aims were yet to discover. Oh, he had seen far more than he wished in Guelessar this autumn.

  “I am here both as Mauryl’s heir and as His Majesty’s friend,”

  Tristen said quietly, doggedly insistent on them, including Cuthan, knowing that from the very beginning. “Lord Edwyll is dead. I did not kill him. As for Lord Parsynan, I have ordered him to leave Amefel, and I order the garrison, now.”

  There was a cold, deep silence in the hall. Not a man moved, not even the random stirring of a large company.

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  “I wish you all well, and safe.” His eye swept the earls, the clerics…and Crissand, standing apart. “The clerk has the oaths exactly as you last swore to Lord Heryn. If you will swear, swear.”

  “We are all here to swear,” Cuthan said with a clearing of his throat, hands clenched whitely on the head of his stick.

  Other heads nodded. The young clerk whispered something urgent to Uwen, who told him some answer, and the clerk, with the document of oaths in hand, leafed back through it with a crackling of heavy paper.

  “The clerk don’t know the order of precedence,” Uwen said in a low voice, at Tristen’s elbow, “except by the book. The earl of Meiden, his heir an’ all…’ at’s the first name.”

  “The earl of Bryn,” Tristen said instead, and saw Crissand stand thin-lipped and still as Cuthan, Earl of Bryn, took the precedence.

  The Amefin swore standing, and clasped right hands, but did not kneel: only their duke did, when he had to swear to the Marhanen king, in an homage even the Sihhë-lord had never asked of Amefel.

  So Tristen stood up to take the old man�
�s hand, looking him in the eye as the clerk began to read, stumbling over the Amefin names. But the old man ran past the prompting at the first pause and set forth his own oath loud and clear by memory:

  “I Cuthan, Earl of Bryn, for Taras and Bru Mardan, and all their thanes, swear to defend the rights of him holding Hen Amas, to march to war under his command, to gather levies and revenues, to acknowledge him lord and sovereign over its claims and courts and to abide by his judgments in all disputes.”

  Sovereign was that surviving word that was the 364 / C. J. CHERRYH

  uniqueness of the province. Cefwyn had demanded no changes.

  “I Tristen holding Hen Amas,” the clerk read out for him, and Tristen repeated…Hen Amas, the old name, as before the citadel had become simply the Zeide it had been the Kathseide.

  The name Hen Amas conjured a tower, not a town, to him, conjured a village and orchards against familiar hills; more, the next words Unfolded to him, and he had no need of the clerk to say, at the second swearing,

  “…to defend your rights against all claims and incursions and to judge rightly as your sovereign lord.” His part was all the same, while the reciprocal oath was longer for some, shorter for others, ending with, in all cases,

  “And so you are true to your oath so I hold to mine before the gods. ”

  But it seemed to him those last few words the clerk had given him were the wrong words, and that it should not be before the gods. Despite the book he had against his ribs he could not truthfully swear to Efanor’s gods, nor even to Emuin’s Nineteen, the wizards’ gods. How could he bind himself by that, as Men did?

  And why should he think he had ever said differently? he asked himself, and why should he remember orchards where the lowermost streets of the town now stood, and where the outlying stables were?

  And why should he remember this the lesser hall as the great hall, and choose this for the oath-taking—except that it was the right place? In his earliest days things had Unfolded so rapidly and with such force he had fallen in fits. Now a kind of dizziness came on him. He received other oaths, he said the clerk’s words without objection, and hands clasped his hand, hands hard

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  with weapons practice and hands soft with age, hands missing first fingers…swordsman’s bane…and hands so ringed and jeweled they were all but armored in wealth and power. Rustic Amefel did have rich men, and these earls, like Henas’amef, had had wealth unplundered since earliest days.

  Love them? No. Not yet. He armored his heart against them as he had learned to do with the lords of Ylesuin. He looked steadily at them as they swore, and some few looked back, but he remembered that Edwyll had not done what he had done in disregard of the rest of the province.

  The last of them in the order of precedence was Lund. Crissand still stood, pale and set of countenance, awaiting some word, some acknowledgment, some dismissal or decision. Once the first and the second had sworn, then he had surely known he would not be the third, or the fifth, but that he would swear last, if at all. The order of precedence was not an empty matter.

  It was like a banner, like the device on a shield, the land rights, the claim on mutual defense, and not a man in the hall could have forgotten that Crissand stood waiting and empty-handed.

  Might anger guide this young man to imprudence? He would know it, if that became the case. Ought he to do differently, or show more mercy? He had been generous, until now.

  “Crissand, thane of Tas Aden.”

  He knew trials: Mauryl had set very hard ones; and now he set a severe one, and knew not what way Crissand might turn in the next moment, but now, too, he understood how greatly Mauryl had struggled to restrain himself from wishes and wizardry, not to constrain or create what he would draw out.

  Cuthan was

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  wise and clever, a great treasure in a hall. But this young man…this was the one that touched him. This was the one of all of the earls who would dare his wrath to his face or stand by him to the last.

  “May I trust you?” he asked Crissand.

  “Your Grace.”

  “May I trust you?” he said again. He had not heard my lord from Crissand Adiran or any man of Meiden. Not yet.

  There was a small silence, and the hall was cold, evoking shivers from weary bodies.

  “What does Your Grace ask?” Crissand said in the deep silence of all the lords.

  “Truth.”

  “And will Your Grace believe me, whatever I say?”

  He reached into the gray space, just a breath of a touch, and Crissand flinched.

  “Yes,” he said to Crissand, thought, So, and saw a glimmering of fear staring back at him.

  “My lord,” Crissand said, half a whisper, and no more.

  “Now you say so.” He let the silence linger a moment…did not draw Crissand deeper into the gray space. But this was a young man with wizard-gift. This was an Aswydd, in a hall where his kin had been kings, dispossessed now, and he, at least tonight, was the agent of that dispossession. The silence went on, and on, and the wind blew through that other place, but softly so. “Will you tell me the truth?” Tristen asked.

  “My lord,” Crissand said, with a lift of his chin, “what truth will you? Truth of my father’s life? Truth of his death? Which truth?”

  “The truth. No other. Nothing less. Did your father deal with Tasmôrden?”

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  The earls were thunderstruck, caught on the outskirts of treason, all, all of them but Cuthan, who clenched his staff tightly, and set his jaw like granite. The hands of king’s men strayed closer to their swords. And none else in this room were armed.

  But Crissand spoke in firm, clear tones. “Yes, my lord, he did—Her Grace the Regent being betrothed to the Marhanen, my father dealt with the likeliest rebel in Elwynor.”

  Treason, treason laid out plain to see. The lord viceroy had advised him of the truth, after all.

  But not an irredeemable truth. These lords had sworn. So had he. And all the truth and all the misdeeds that had existed an hour before were in the past, sealed.

  “I dismiss your truth. I forgive it,” he said to the thane of Tas Aden. “And what say you now?”

  “That the Sihhë are back in Hen Amas.” The gray space shivered, settled with final force. And Crissand bent the knee and knelt there on the steps of the dais, with the earls and the Dragon Guard for witness. “That you are my lord and my king.”

  Breath might have ceased in the hall.

  But it was no more nor less than the Amefin oath, stripped of niggling words like aetheling.

  “I Crissand, Earl of Meiden, swear so…” It had become the oath of fealty, an Amefin lord kneeling before him, and what in turn was he to answer? Prudence said he should stop the proceeding, set the self-made earl on his feet by main force, and bind himself to nothing. But he felt the little shiver in the gray space that Ninévrisë could make, or now and again someone passing near him.

  The Sihhë are back in Hen Amas.

  Dared he say so? Dared Crissand? And dared an 368 / C. J. CHERRYH

  aetheling kneel in this hall, as to an overlord?

  The clerk frantically searched his pages, a crackle of paper in the stillness, and looked up in consternation. The earl of Meiden finished his brief swearing, with: “So I will be faithful to you, on my oath and my honor,” and the hapless clerk searched for his place in an appalled silence.

  “I Tristen…”

  Another flurry of the clerk’s pages.

  “…swear you are the earl of Meiden, and have the governance of the land of Meiden, and its villages and rights and privileges.

  I shall defend you and your rights and lands as you defend me and mine. To all this I swear by my life.”

  The clerk looked up openmouthed, and he realized he had not said the clerk’s words. He drew Crissand to his feet. He ignored the stares of the clerk, the earls, the priests, and of his own men, and looked the h
eir of the Aswydds straight in the eye.

  “Tell me true, Meiden: are Elwynim forces across the river?”

  The rustle of pages had ceased. Everything had ceased.

  “The rising would signal them to cross,” Crissand said, and he knew he had heard the truth, more, that what Crissand confessed was no surprise to any man in this hall.

  “Then I fear you are deceived,” Tristen said. “I suspect Tasmôrden would not have crossed, not with His Majesty set to plunge into Elwynor from his northern frontier. But he would gladly divert Cefwyn’s attention south to Henas’amef over the next fortnight or so while he takes Ilefínian, which he has just moved to do. Once there, he will slaughter Her Grace’s men and winter in

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  more comfort, recovering his forces. He would leave you to engage Cefwyn this winter, all to his profit, and aid you only sufficient to keep the king fighting here until the spring.” He was as sure as he said the words, as if they had Unfolded, but even the guess he made was not as great as the hazard to their lives he felt in the gray space. “Tasmôrden opposes me, and he would never have crossed the river until he was sure Cefwyn was here and weakened by the encounter, in a hostile province.

  Then, yes, he would fight in Amefel and spare his own fields.

  You have provoked the lord viceroy only to Tasmôrden’s gain and none of your own.”

  “My lord Sihhë,” Crissand began, and would have sunk back to one knee.

  And must not. Tristen seized him by both arms this time and looked him straight in the eye. “Your Grace is the title I own.

  I hold it from His Majesty, his gift, no other.”

  “My lord, then,” Crissand said faintly as Tristen set him back.

  “At your will.”

  “What I will is a secure border. Heryn Aswydd collected too much tax and spent too much money on dinnerplates. Amefel will muster in the spring and set the Lady Regent on the Regent’s throne in Ilefínian. That is what I will, sirs.”

  The latter part was certainly no news to them. Cefwyn had made no secret of his plans, not even from Tasmôrden. He looked out over the assembled earls, saw great sobriety and consternation at his bluntness and at Crissand’s, and perhaps a reassessment of Tasmôrden’s offers of alliance.