Fortress in the Eye of Time

by C. J. Cherryh

  Ye’ve every reason to be ill, m’lord, and Efanor hain’t th’ viceroy here.”

  “I wish to go,” Tristen said, and went down into the yard as he was. “I want Gery, Uwen. Is she able to go?”

  “Aye, m’lord. I think so. I’ll tell ’em.” Uwen sounded not in the least pleased, and that was painful—but so was it painful to stay pent up: he understood arrest, and had had his fill of it at the Zeide gate, his first night. He heard Uwen shouting orders to the stableboys, amid all the other clatter and shouting about the horses being taken into stable, horses being brought out, forty-four in all, horse gear being called for—it was a flood of motion and color, with the kitchen staff and the house guard and finally the Amefin noblefolk and even a straggle of boys from the town, who should not have gotten past the open fortress gates, coming to see what was the clamor.

  But after they had gotten the horses from the stable saddled, and just as Uwen and no few others were coming back from the armory, all but running and still buckling buckles and tightening laces, the grooms led red Gery in from

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  the pens and flung her saddle-pad on. Gery stood flicking her ears and staring about at the noise and clatter. Tristen soothed Gery with his hands and let the grooms saddle her. Meanwhile they had found the banner-bearers and Cefwyn’s own pages had come running down with Cefwyn’s riding cloak and his gloves, while Cefwyn had come back from the armory with a shield, a helmet, and a pair of light-armored leather breeches like the gear Efanor and his men wore. The Guelen guard were fitting out in like gear, men continuing to fit straps, settle gear on horses, while grooms sweated and tightened girths.

  In all it was very little time until the escort formed up. A page brought Cefwyn a packet of some kind, a sword and his gauntlets. Uwen had put on his plain leather and metal, with the Marhanen Dragon still blazoned on leather at his shoulder.

  Uwen had a sword. Tristen had none. But now the troop was mounting up, the banners were up, the standard-bearers were moving to the fore, where he understood he should be. Tristen climbed up on Gery’s back as all around him men were mounting up.

  “Idrys,” Cefwyn said. “Where is Idrys?”

  “They have not found him,” someone said.

  “Damn.—Boy!” Cefwyn shouted at a page. “Boy, you stay—inform Idrys when you find him. Have him tell Cevulirn, and bring a hundred light horse up to Emwy crossing. Inform the rest of the lords, in whatever order you find them. Bid them stay alert, and be careful—this is important, boy!—be careful of men riding without a banner! There may be Elwynim across the river, but they may equally well be King’s men, spying.”

  Cefwyn pulled his horse about and rode for the gates to lead as much of the Guelen guard as there were at his command, the twenty or so men he had ordered. Six men of Cevulirn’s White Horse blazon fell in with them, and Efanor came with his two squads all on remounts and borrowed horses, twenty or more.

  By now the head of the column was beginning to go out of the gate, sorting itself into order, for

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  there was no room in the courtyard for a file of half a hundred men to spread out. There was no passing room at the gate, either, but Tristen rode after Cefwyn as closely as he could, and Uwen tagged him close behind.

  Cefwyn was afraid. And on Efanor’s word Cefwyn rode for Emwy, where they all knew there was danger, and in a great hurry, with very few of the men who had gathered here. Worse, by Tristen’s estimation, Cefwyn rode with Efanor’s men.

  Men lied. He had seen that in his brief life. Lie was a Word, as Treason was a Word, involving lies told to kings.

  And someone had surely lied. Heryn Aswydd, beyond a doubt.

  But—by all he knew—Brother and Father should mean Love, but Cefwyn had not spoken at all well of his relatives, and it seemed to be the truth: he did not see love or trust in great evidence between Cefwyn and his kin.

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  C H A P T E R 2 1

  C urse his father’s damnable suspicion, Cefwyn thought: and jerked back Danvy’s reins as Efanor’s borrowed mount shied into him in the streets of Henas’amef, missing a potter’s shelves and a startled dog. Efanor was in no good humor, the high-spirited black Efanor had picked out of the remounts was sideways as much forward, and Efanor, the great horseman Efanor, picked this creature on show, not on common sense, all because Efanor had to cut a princely figure on a cross-country run—damn him, he was going to fight the beast all the way.

  Stubborn pride. Stubborn temper. Play every piece against the other. It ran in the family. His father came out here without telling Efanor why, with no trust in planning with any adviser.

  Haste in execution, with no one, not even his allies advised: Ináreddrin had a reputation for finding information his enemies thought he could never find; and for moving swiftly, for moving ruthlessly, and for striking before a traitor or an enemy looked to see him—

  It was legend and it had succeeded as a tactic, in a long life fraught with petty rebellions and uneasy borders on every hand.

  But to have Efanor aware of their father’s suspicion, and not the son accused; to have their father move so strongly on an Amefin lord’s word—and against him, after he had sat a year on this cursed, hostile, witch-ridden frontier of the realm, dealing with Heryn Aswydd’s tax records, and have their father believe Heryn Aswydd instead of him?

  That stung. That fairly stung, and he knew not whether it was filial duty, personal alarm or heartfelt outrage that sent him out in his father’s own kind of unheralded haste, the other lords unconsulted and unadvised, save Cevulirn, who had the light horse that might avail something quickly enough.

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  But what did he say to the others? Pardon, my lords, but my father calls me to task for summoning you to do my father’s business?

  Pardon, my lords, but my father the King believes a man whose father before him cheated his own people?

  Pardon, my lords, my father believes all men cheat, and if they cheat in ways he knows about he trusts them more?

  Is all this because I have called Heryn’s account due, which my father has tolerated for years?

  Gods, was that my mistake, Father? Have I stumbled on something you allowed, all to keep the Amefin cowed under a thief and his usurers?

  The horses hit a traveling stride as they made the road outside and went along the walls past Cevulirn’s camp, sending up a cloud of dust in this dry spell that gritted in the teeth even of the foremost. Men of the White Horse, encamped near the gate, turned out to stare.

  “Tell the captains,” Cefwyn bade the Ivanim with them, calling them forward, “tell them all you know, bid them saddle a hundred horses against your lord’s arrival, and follow as you can.

  This may be a chase for no reason, but it may not.”

  “Aye, m’lord Prince,” the sergeant said, who rode briefly alongside him, and dropped away again, to bear messages where they needed to go.

  Peasants working in the fields stopped and stared as they passed. Along the wall-road, the camp of Lanfarnesse turned out men to shout questions at them, asking what proceeded in such haste.

  Granted Heryn fell quickly under arrest, they had left Pelumer as senior of lords in the Zeide: Pelumer, then Umanon and, third, gods help them, Sovrag. Pelumer’s chiefest and most immediate duty would be to keep Umanon and Sovrag from each other’s throats; and gods knew where Idrys was, but he would gladly dispose Idrys to duty between Umanon and Sovrag, if Idrys could not rapidly overtake them. The Guard Captain, Kerdin Qwyll’s-son, had the command

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  second to himself now, a man no stranger to Amefin roads: Guelen patrols had been sent full-circuit of Amefel and its neighboring districts, keeping watch on the King’s subjects—and learning the lay of the land.

  Ambush? He looked on his brother, on that damned fancy-footed horse, that had already worked up a lather getting down from the town. Efanor would be heir if something befell him, and, for all the boyhood loyalty they had sworn and all the
love they’d vowed to hold to—he had to ask himself what would be the case if it were not Elwynim that Heryn had supported, all along, but another, more agreeable prince? A prince who could appreciate Heryn’s gold dinner-plates and his high-blooded horses, a prince who had never slept in mud, never faced a bandit ambush, never discommoded himself from what his religion told him was right.

  At least Efanor’s love of their father, he did not doubt—love and the lively suspicion of conspiracy that ran in Marhanen blood. He saw Efanor cast a glance at Tristen, who came up on his other side, and saw Efanor frown—clearly trying to hold brother-love and Sihhë in the same mouthful.

  “Emuin counseled us to do him no harm, brother,” Cefwyn said. “Emuin said deal fairly with him.”

  “Emuin’s advice has not always been godly advice,” Efanor said. “He was the old wizard’s disciple. What else should he say?”

  That, from the prince the Quinalt loved much better than it loved Ináreddrin’s elder son.

  “Emuin should say what benefits the Crown,” Cefwyn shot back as they rode side by side, “not what serves others’ revenues and their power. Beware those godly sorts, younger brother.

  The Quinalt line their nests no less than the rest of their ilk and they’ve far more nests to line.”

  “What do they teach in this province?” Efanor asked him in dismay.

  “Clear-sightedness,” he retorted, but the brother who’d once traded him barb for barb looked offended and self-righteous.

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  This is Efanor’s one chance, he said to himself. Should I fall from grace, and Heryn’s charges prove true, then he and his men fly nobly to Father’s side, and I am put to disgrace and worse. The Quinalt would declare festival on that day.

  The priests have stirred him up, the cursed priests have shaken Efanor from his meditations and been at Father’s ear, too, once Heryn’s protestations gave them the chance.

  Hence Efanor arrives—to do what? rescue me from imprudent book-keeping? What has Heryn said to them?

  Good gods grant we be in time. This is Heryn’s most desperate move: attack the King, blame the heir. Gods witness I never thought the man had it in him.

  Only Heryn never believed his own arrest was possible. Heryn never believed that I would move. Take that for a lesson for all years to come.

  He hoped to the gods, too, that Idrys had found Heryn, and that he had not fled to shelter somewhere troublesome—like Elwynor. Please the good gods he could reason with his father, and not run head-on into that Marhanen tendency to trust blackguards before another Marhanen. Heryn had questions aplenty to answer, questions that he remotely feared might involve Efanor, once he began to talk, even if they were lies; and there might also be talk that his father the King would wish to silence, Cefwyn said that to himself, too,—if his suspicions were true just how the Aswyddim had evaded detection in their fraud for two, perhaps three generations.

  He did not want to think that Ináreddrin would sacrifice his own heir to keep Heryn from saying what that arrangement was: he did not want to think his father knew the extent and evil of Aswydd’s pilferage, the way he still, on the strength of a childhood only intermittently rivalrous, did not want to think that Efanor himself was secretly in Heryn Aswydd’s friendship.

  But he dared not confront anyone around him with such possibilities—except Idrys, damn him, who might have agreed with him, but who was not here for reasons he hoped 360

  were duty elsewhere. He was worried for Idrys’ safety. He knew that Idrys might be the first to suffer in a plot to bring him down.

  He could not discuss matters with his brother. He did not want the Guelen guard and Ivanim alike to witness the Marhanen at each other’s throats.

  The hills enfolded them softly on all sides, the same craggy tree-crowned hills that they had passed on a much more leisurely ride to Emwy, and again at the end of a nightmarish ride by night. When they crossed the old Althalen road (though no one spoke the name) where it joined the road to Emwy district, they began to ride over the recent tracks of a fair number of riders—their father had a hundred twenty men with him, Efanor said, and that was where, if their father had wished to pass by Henas’amef unnoticed and unreported, he would have picked up the Emwy road.

  By then they had passed beyond cultivated fields and into pasturages, and into the pastures of remote and smaller villages.

  They aimed the horses for a brief pause for breath and a limited watering at a stream that crossed the road, and came in on ground trampled by horses and now occupied by sheep. The shepherd was waving his staff and calling his dogs to gather the flock back again. The sheep bleated in panic and scattered from their horses down the narrow banks of the streamside.

  “Have you seen riders today?” Cefwyn called out over the racket, as he got down from the saddle.

  “Aye, m’lord,” the shepherd said, with his dogs yapping and his sheep in a panicked knot, climbing over one another at the high bank, “yea, m’lord, I seen a great lord wi’ red banners, a great lord, like he was a king…”

  “That he is,” Cefwyn said shortly. “How long ago, man?” and the man glanced at the sun and swung his stick at a growling dog.

  “Oh, not so long. I was up to there on the height, m’lord, an’

  I was bringing the sheep down—but ’is silly ewe had got 361

  herself down a bank, an’ I come down and around the long way, m’lord…”

  The tracks of horses, filled with water where the sheep had not trampled, told their own story. “Not that long,” Cefwyn called out, having walked a little distance up the stream and had a close look. He kept Danvy moving, not letting him fill up on water. But Efanor had not gotten down, and had let his horse stand, instead arguing with the reins—which itself annoyed him.

  Blessed chance his lordly brother Efanor would ever ask an Amefin shepherd the evidence of his eyes, or understand the man’s brogue if he did. The brother who had adventured in the sheep-meadow with him had gone; the younger prince of Ylesuin had rather argue with his horse than soil his boots, or deign to company with him and read the clues with him. He did not understand, or want to understand, Efanor’s state of mind at the moment. “We can overtake them before Emwy,” he said, rising into the saddle. “The horses have rested all we can afford.”

  But banners at a distance was not the only thing the shepherd had seen today; he was looking straight at the emblem Tristen wore, and, on the sudden resolution of their remounting, tried to approach him. But Uwen prudently turned Tristen toward the horses and set himself with his back to the man, affecting not to see his approach.

  Then Tristen looked back, on his own, staring at the shepherd, who, thus confronted, reached for amulets of gods knew what sort at his neck—until Uwen maneuvered the red mare between, put the reins in Tristen’s slack hand and gruffly bade him mount at once as Tristen went on staring.

  Not one of his fits, Cefwyn prayed, not a lapse in front of Efanor, and not a shepherd going on his knees to an outlawed symbol. They were near Althalen, and cursed ground, and he damned the whole miscarried day, as he rode Danvy between, to head off unwanted peasant adorations.

  “Uwen,” he said, leaning from the saddle to catch Uwen’s attention, “well done. Keep him from all mischief, either speaking or doing. Hear me. Althalen is very near this road.

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  Do not, do not let him ride apart from us, and do not indulge his fits or his fancies if you must take the reins from him by force.”

  It was all he could afford to say, for immediately there was Efanor riding close as the column formed. He said, “Good you should mention it,” to Uwen, and put Danvy across the stream, as the standards, his and Efanor’s, grouped to move to the front.

  “What was that?” Efanor asked, overtaking him. “What do you fear? Heryn? Or some other?”

  “At Emwy,” he said, “men of ours died for reasons I suspect were Heryn’s malfeasance if not his maleficence. We have men in the region now trying to fin
d answers. Our father may well fall in with them—or fall afoul of them, gods know. But by what this shepherd says we have every hope of overtaking him before he can ride into Emwy. His start is longer but our horses are fresher.”

  “What happened there?” Efanor said. “What happened at Emwy? A plague on your evasions!”

  “Treason,” he said. “Bluntly, treason, brother. Heryn is dealing with the Elwynim. No evasions. And high time you should ask.

  Heryn’s a thief and the son of a thief. He’s either conniving with certain of the Elwynim to kill me, or conniving simply to keep profitable hostilities going. If I knew which, I’d have beheaded him before this.”

  “On what proof?” Efanor asked. “On what damned proof, brother mine?”

  “The books. His books. I’d written to Father. If anyone read my reports. Or if my men, gods help them, ever got through to him.”

  “And the reports of Elwynim marriage offers?”

  “Is that what brought this on?”

  “That? That, do you say, as if it’s nothing?”

  “It’s nothing until I answer the offer, one way or the other, and I’ve not answered it, nor would have answered it without Father’s advisement. But that was not my report. Who said so?

  Heryn?”

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  “I heard it in Father’s camp. Last night.” Efanor lifted a gloved hand. “I know nothing. No one takes me in confidence.”

  He bit his tongue. He did not say what he thought, which was bleak and accusatory: At least you knew Father was coming.

  At least you heard, brother, at least he aimed no inquiry at you, after setting you to investigate your host.

  Or was Heryn to spy on me?

  “Was it not,” he said instead, as they rode knee to knee, “the way Grandfather dealt with his sons? And did we not swear together Father should never do the same to us?”

  “Yet here we are,” Efanor said. “And you suspect me, and never a reason for it. I swear to you, I did come to warn you, as well as to secure the books, brother.”