Fortress in the Eye of Time

by C. J. Cherryh

  Tap. Tap-tap.

  It sounded more frantic. Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap. It wanted in.

  It was a bird he knew. Perhaps for some strange reason it had decided to take his offerings of food from his hand and wanted him to feed it. But he would have to open the little windowpane, and he hesitated to do that.

  He tapped the glass with his fingernail to see if that would deter it. Silly bird, he thought. But it hammered the glass with its beak, more and more frantically, beating with its wings. Then it dived away into the dark.

  That was very odd, he was thinking; and of a sudden the bird came flying out of the dark and hit the window so hard it left feathers stuck to the glass. It was gone. It had fallen into the dark—broken. He could see in the light from the window a smear on the glass and its soft down stuck there.

  He was shaken.

  More, he knew who was responsible, and that it was a prank, nothing but a wretched, cruel prank, using a creature he had taught to trust that window for good things.

  He was angry. He was very angry.

  — Hasufin, he challenged the dark and the Wind. That was

  not brave. It showed me nothing new about you. I have

  met a man like you, vain, and sneaking, and a liar.

  — It was only a bird, the Wind said. You should worry

  about other things.

  Hasufin was trying to scare him. The latch rattled and the pane rocked back and forth.

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  — You have much more to lose than this, the Wind said, and with a thump at the windowpane, it was gone.

  Then it began to rain, a brief spatter that showed drops against the pane, and washed away the feathers and the blood.

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  C H A P T E R 3 0

  T he next was one of those silken satin mornings, the sort with puddles in the yard, the air smelling fresh, and clouds of pink and silver trying to be gold—it was impossible, in Uwen’s cheerfulness, to be down-hearted; and Uwen was right: it was a good morning to nip down the back stairs and through the warm and noisy kitchens, to beg their breakfast still warm from the ovens, bread too hot to hold, with abundant butter, and mugs of tea the kitchen girls brought them on the steps. The bread and the tea alike sent up steam in the nippish morning air and the warm air from the kitchens carried smells almost as good as tasting them.

  He decided not to worry Uwen about the bird. Uwen wanted to talk about horses, excited and trying to contain it. So was he looking forward to the trip down to the pastures, and once the mugs went back to the kitchen, they headed out to the stables in the morning chill.

  He rode out on Petelly, and Uwen on a bay, Gia, that was his favorite—but today-Gia was Uwen’s horse, for good, as Petelly was his; and the pleasure Uwen had in the fine-looking bay was that of a man who, Uwen said, had never owned his own horse, and never looked to own one at all, let alone one so fine as this.

  “So ye brought me luck, m’lord,” Uwen said. “Tell His Majesty, because he don’t share converse much wi’ me, of course, that I’m glad, I’m very, very glad, and I won’t for the life of me make him sorry he was so generous.”

  “I shall tell him so,” Tristen said. They rode down through the gate and down the main street, among the first abroad on this all but eerily quiet morning. The Zeide court had been cluttered with business yesterday, but now they rode all the way to the main gate seeing nothing but a handful 637

  of early wagons and the craftsmen opening their shops.

  They rode out the gates and there was nothing but trampled ground and a small camp of wagons and horses where the camps of the lords had stood. The mud was deeply tracked, showing the tracks of all the horses taking out in their various directions home, some south, some east.

  But strangest of all, the trees—the trees had gone overnight to red and brown, as the grasses had already gone to gold and pale browns.

  “The border lords are all leaving,” Tristen said as they rode along the wall eastward, toward the pastures. “It looks so bare.

  It frightens me, Uwen. The leaves—the leaves are all dying.”

  “Why, lad, of course they die. It’s autumn.”

  “Autumn?” It was a word of brown and falling leaves. Like Winter. Like snows white and deep.

  “Aye, lad. Of course.”

  “But they come back.”

  “In Spring? Of course they do.”

  Uwen laughed and he felt foolish. Of course they did. He suddenly apprehended that they did. It was far rarer nowadays that a Word that vast came leaping up at him out of something constantly underfoot and never, till then, comprehended. But of course it was autumn, and the nip that had been in the air was part of those changes, and Snow might come. He was fascinated by the thought.

  And there, in a set of stallion paddocks insulated from each other by tall hedges and strong fences, they had brought in the heavy horses, huge creatures with platter-sized feet and heads the size of apple baskets—wonderful, powerful creatures he had seen hitherto only in scant numbers: Cefwyn’s big black, Kanwy, and Umanon’s gray, both of which the grooms had exercised in the practice yard.

  They dismounted at the stables that lay alongside the paddocks and some distance down the lane, leaving Petelly and Uwen’s bay in the care of one of Haman’s boys, and walked down the high-hedged lane in the direction the boy

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  told them, deep into the maze of paddocks separated by old hedges. In the paddocks they passed, boys with buckets were grooming and clipping and braiding the manes of several of the horses; and in one, a farrier and a number of apprentices and grooms were tending feet and seeing to the immense shoes the heavy horses wore—not an easy job, as it looked: the horse in question was not wanting to put his foot up.

  They were watching that, when an old man on a pony rode up behind them to say the horses they wanted were right along next, and to come with him.

  The next hedged paddock, that at a crossing of lanes, held a horse so like Kanwy that Tristen at first thought that was the horse he was seeing—a huge black fellow with abundant feather over vast feet. The horse looked up, and there were no eyes, just a nose under a huge fall of hair, with ears coming through it.

  He had to laugh.

  “He wants clipping,” the man said, having slid down beside them. “His name is Dys…Dysarys, but we call him Dys. His Majesty’s Kanwy is his full brother, and their sister, Aryny, she’s staying up in the hills: His Majesty don’t risk her, no, Lord Warden. I’ll hail up his trainer.”

  The old man led the pony down a side lane on that errand.

  Tristen put out his hand, and Dys came over to smell his fingers and look him over from the secrecy of his fall of bangs.

  “Gods, he’s fine,” Uwen said reverently. “Pretty, pretty lad.”

  He knew Uwen most wanted to see what they had for him.

  He reached out his hand further, and Dys went off with a flip of a thick tail, kicking up immense heels.

  The trainer came walking up from the paddock next, a middle-aged man who introduced himself faintly as, “Aswys, m’lord. I come with ’im, and hopin’ to stay with ’im a while, courtesy of His Majesty. I’m trainer to Dys, here, and to Cassam, next over, who’s to be your man’s horse.”

  “I would be very pleased, sir,” Tristen said. “Thank you.” The horse had come over again, clearly accustomed to the 639

  trainer, who patted the huge neck that extended across the rail at this gate-end of the paddock. He did not think, regarding taking Aswys along with the horses, that he needed doubt Aswys’

  skill: Cefwyn would not have a man who was not competent, and he saw nothing in the way the man looked at the horse that told him otherwise.

  “He’s hard mouthed,” Aswys said, “if ye have a hard hand, m’lord, but if ye go a little easy, he’ll heed ye far better.” The trainer was worried, Tristen heard that, and saw it on his face.

  “Should I saddle him up, m’lord, by your leave?”

  The trainer wished him to
ride and not wait until later. The trainer hoped he would like the horse and appreciate him. The man was, if anything, very proud and fond of this horse that he could never own, and Cefwyn had given Dys away to a lord with no land and—Sulriggan had said it yesterday—no good reputation.

  “Do, please,” he said, and the trainer looked at least moderately encouraged, and ordered the boys to fit Dys up with his tack while he showed them the other horse in his charge.

  That pen held a blue roan gelding that Cefwyn had bestowed on Uwen, a bow-nosed fellow with a beautiful satin coat; Cassam was, their guide and now trainer said, also of the King’s stable, not related to Kanwy or Aryny, but out of a Marisal mare and a Guelen stallion.

  “Can we have ’im under saddle, too, sir?” Uwen asked hopefully, and while they arranged that, Tristen went back to the other paddock, where at that very moment the thump of large feet hitting the mud beyond the hedge told him Dys was not accepting saddling quietly.

  As he came back in view, Dys was snuffing the air, then came across the pen at a run, appearing to move slowly, by the very size of him, but carrying himself lightly all the same.

  And the boys went over the fence.

  Then the trainer came back and whistled at him, ducked through the fence and whistled again. Dys came trotting up and let himself be caught. The trainer buckled a chain to his 640

  halter, jerked it as Dys snapped peevishly at the boys that brought the tack through the fence, not intending to strike them, Tristen marked that as he leaned on the top rail. Dys did not like strangers in his paddock; and Dys was a fretful horse even while the saddling went on in the hands of a man he trusted.

  Dys observed everything about every movement around him, and wanted to keep all strangers including the one at the fence where he could see them: his skin shivered up his forelegs, his nostrils were wide, and even from where Tristen was standing he could see that Dys had begun to sweat.

  And the trainer had known it when he sent the boys in—ar-ranging to show m’lord what a young and stubborn lord might not heed in the way of warnings.

  This lord heeded. The trainer called him over. Tristen ducked through the fence, keeping clearly in Dys’ sight, and Dys, snorting and snuffling as he walked up, lowered his head and stretched out his neck to smell him over. Dys was interested in his fingers and his coat as they brought up the mounting block.

  He did not believe the calm for a moment. “Give me the brush,” he said, and took it from the trainer and went over Dys’

  shoulder and neck and patted him. He ran his hands over Dys’

  legs and, trustful at least of the mail shirt he had on under his coat, let Dys smell his back and around his face.

  Then he quietly took the reins and with a quick use of the block, rose into the saddle.

  Dys moved out a few paces and turned a quiet circle, wanting more rein, maneuvering to have his way. And did not get it.

  It was different than riding Gery’s light, quick motions. But a Name almost came to him, a Name, not a Word; and as they picked up speed around the enclosure, Dys answered his call for this lead and that, shaking his neck when the pressure went off the reins. The boys opened the paddock gate and they went off down the lane between the pens, the boys and a stray, yapping dog chasing after.

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  Trees passed in a screen on either hand. They went as far as the sheep-meadow beyond, and he asked turns of the horse, while the foolish dog, outdistancing the boys, nearly came to grief: Dys kicked out unasked, clipped the hound, and turned, and the dog after that kept his distance as Dys made long passes and turns across the meadow.

  Then Tristen gave him a free run, which happened to be to the west, toward Ynefel, and the thought came simply to run and run and run, and somehow to escape, and to take Dys, too, where he need not do what all his existence aimed at doing—to be safe, and free, and doing no harm. He began to like this horse—but not what his training had made him; and what they both were created to do.

  But they reached the end of the meadow, and a fence; and when he rode back again, Uwen was out with the roan gelding.

  Dys accepted his stablemate quite reasonably. There was a little to-do, a little fighting the rein; but they rode out together for some little distance, and Dys began taking the rein very well, changing leads with ease, making nothing of rough ground, quite willing to have the roan behind him or beside him on either hand.

  They were out for long enough for the horses to work up a good sweat, and, mindful that the horses had been moved in yesterday, and on the road for days, they rode back again, the horses breathing easily, shaking themselves and seeming to have enjoyed the turn outside.

  The trainer did not doubt either of them now, Tristen thought, when he turned Dys back to him at the paddock gate. And one of the boys said, not intending to be overheard, Tristen was sure, that the Sihhë were known to bewitch horses, and he had bewitched that one.

  After that, for, in anticipation of dealing with horses and mud, neither of them had worn their best, they took a hand in the unsaddling and the brushing-down, to the amazement of the boys who usually did such things for lords and their men.

  But by then Aswys was talking to them both, going on at 642

  length about how Dys had been foaled late in the season and how Cass, for so they called the blue roan, had been one of those horses into everything—had gotten himself up to his neck in a bog when he was a yearling and fallen in a storm-swollen stream the next year: “Keep ’im away from water,” was Aswys’

  advice on Cass. “He’ll drown, but he’s too stubborn to die.”

  Tristen liked Aswys. Aswys had gone from guarded, worried, and unhappy to a man, as Uwen put it, they’d drink with: a Guelen man, moreover, Uwen said. Not that the Amefin lads hadn’t the knack with the horses, but, Uwen said, Guelenfolk and the heavy horses talked a special language.

  And Uwen was very pleased with Cass, as he himself was with Dys, though he was still taken with Petelly, and made it clear to Petelly, as they rode up to the gates again, that he was still in good favor. Uwen said, regarding Cass, that he was the best horse he’d ever had under him.

  “I do like the big ’uns,” Uwen remarked as they rode through the streets. “There ain’t no foolery about ’em. But if you ever get one hard-mouthed, gods, I rode one once in my foolish youth, the grooms was tryin’ to saddle and he took down a shed with both heels and dragged me an’ four boys through the fence.

  Gods, I hated that horse. I rode him four years, till a damn Chomaggari ran him through the heart. And I cried me eyes out.”

  It was, Tristen believed, all the truth. And they went up to the hill for baths and a change of clothes, and talked horses for hours.

  Uwen was the happiest he had ever known him. And Tristen sat down while Uwen watched and wrote a note to Cefwyn, saying how pleased they were, and how fine the horses were.

  The door guards when Uwen delivered it said that Cefwyn was sleeping, which was good, and that Emuin had given him a sleeping-potion to achieve it—which was not good.

  But Tristen thought that Cefwyn would be glad to have the note, or any other expression of cheer, and for what it was 643

  worth, he sat down by the fire and wished Cefwyn well, as hard as he could.

  That evening he shut his inner doors again, wanting quiet—and leaving Uwen the chance to come and go on his own business.

  He had saved a little bread from yesterday, and set it out for the pigeons that frequented his window—but they were shyer than usual, and perhaps afraid. There might be the smell of blood about the window, for all he knew. He waited a little while, then gave up and in the fading sunlight laid out both his Book and Mauryl’s little kit on the table.

  It had occurred to him that Mauryl had given him both gifts, and that more than the Book might be magical—or, a new thought, it might take both gifts together.

  But the mirror was only a mirror, silver polished bright; and it reflected only himself, Tristen no-one’s son, an
d not any dreadful Sihhë lord, and certainly no potent magician.

  He mused over perhaps going to Emuin with Book and mirror in hand and asking him—if he knew precisely what he would ask, or in what way the two might be connected. He had been foolish once today, although Uwen had laughed at him very gently about the falling leaves. Certainly he couldn’t take for granted that he understood things as ordinary folk did.

  But no understanding came to him—and the mirror, reflecting the evening sun, made no sense. He stared at the Book, and he leafed through it, and all it did was call back, in its aged parchment and battered, worn leather, memories of Ynefel, which he told himself were dangerous in the extreme.

  He caught then what he thought was Emuin’s presence, although Emuin had been very strict and at him instantly if he transgressed into the gray space. He had an impression of many candles, and of pain in the joints, and thought that Emuin might be at his prayers, somewhere nearby, perhaps just a slippage.

  But underlying that, he caught the touch of some other 644

  presence, and guessed that it was Ninévrisë thinking on what he was not sure, but he feared she was thinking of Althalen, which was dangerous.

  — Be careful, he wished her.

  And the presence went away, either afraid or guilty.

  She was very beautiful. She was very sensible, for as young as she was, and she was brave. He wanted to see her. He wanted to talk with her, even to tell her about the horses, and—to talk to her about the gray place, and about discovering the hazards there, because he knew that she had good sense, and he wanted the opinion of someone else who had something in common with him. He found her his safe doorway to the mysteries women posed him—he wanted just to sit and look at her very closely, as he had begun, today, to look at the autumn; he wanted to listen to her, and let unfold to him, in what seemed a far kinder, more truthful person than Orien Aswydd, all the things she was.