Fortress of Owls

by C. J. Cherryh

  Cefwyn had not touched his, having no wish to numb himself.

  358 / C. J. CHERRYH

  But the Patriarch clearly had no caution left tonight.

  “Threats of violence,” the Patriarch said, “omens. There are such, as there is magic.”

  “No man who stood on Lewen field denies that, Holy Father.

  What omens, and is it time we sent to Emuin? If you can’t stop them…”

  The Patriarch shook his head. “No. The Teranthines are no help, and Emuin is less, in this business. I come here…I come here…in hope of reason. Receive the Amefin patriarch, hear him patiently, realizing…realizing that what he says the doctrinists take as the very substance of their fears, so much so…some preach actions…actions which would aim at the lord of Amefel’s life.”

  Idrys was not at all smiling, his dark-mustached face utterly intent on what the old man was saying.

  “Buren,” Idrys said, naming a name which had at least crossed his desk, a hedge-priest, a wild-eyed sort.

  “Buren, Neiswyn, all these barefoot sorts.” The Holy Father manifested no love for them either, and in truth, they were of long standing, going about the countryside praying over cattle and orchards and making their living off charity. They had always been at odds with the well-fed priests of the great Quinaltine. “Ryssand’s priests support them, call them holy. This is what we can’t counter. These are holy men!”

  “Holy troublemakers.”

  “This Buren wanders about,” said Idrys, “prophesying, speaking in vaguest terms about unholiness abroad in the land and blood on the altar. It’s nothing new. He derives a living from it. He always has.”

  Self-made prophets not within the Quinaltine turned up, and vanished, and said things not quite blasphemy, not quite treason…and did so freely, since they couched it in prayers for the cleansing of the

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  kingdom and the Quinalt.

  “Your Majesty,” His Holiness said in anguish, “it’s reached a point of danger. There it is. This has come at a very bad time.”

  “Then I suggest you draw a distinction between sorcery and wizardry in your homilies, Holy Father, start now, and nudge your doctrine toward some measure of reason on the subject of magic…and soon.”

  “I dare not!”

  “I suggest you dare, Holy Father. I more than suggest you dare. You have authority over His Reverence. Wield it! Modify his testimony! Be in command! The doubters and the ones who’d follow you are looking to you to know what side to take. Give them a signal, for the gods’ sake!”

  “I am an old man, Majesty.”

  “Would you be an older one? Act!”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. I’ll try.”

  “Well that you came tonight. Bravely done. Annas, see His Holiness back to the Quinaltine in good order, and dry and warm.”

  “Your Majesty.” It required an effort for His Holiness to rise, between the wine and his exertions on the stairs. Annas assisted, while a page brought the lay brother back, insisted he keep the dry robe, found a dry cloak for him, and helped him on his way.

  All the while Idrys had waited; and as the door latched, and they were alone:

  “Two letters from His Grace of Amefel,” Idrys said, and drew out a small, unsealed missive from his belt. “Yet another messenger chased the lot of them…a postscriptum, at considerable effort. I did read it.”

  “Is it bad?” Cefwyn asked, with a sinking of his heart.

  “Only what we know,” Idrys said. “The Lord Tristen realized the danger in the patriarch’s flight.

  360 / C. J. CHERRYH

  He arrived home, evidently to find this, and bent a great deal of effort for his second rider to reach us before His Reverence and the guardsmen did. I find it worth remarking that he failed…considering his abilities.”

  “I can’t assess his abilities,” Cefwyn said, and took the letter and sat down.

  Be careful of the Quinalt father who has left Amefel and gone to the Quinaltine. He did so while I was absent and Uwen had no authority to prevent him, yet I wish we had done so. He is angry with me.

  Regarding the fortifications at Modeyneth and elsewhere I mean to pay those out of the Amefin treasury. Many of the earls are ready to lend help. Also the earls are willing to lend me men for an Amefin company, which I will set in order by the spring and send you the rest of the garrison at Henas’amef, as well as Anwyll.

  The work on the wall seems likely to go quickly. I hope that in all these things I am doing what you will approve.

  Raising an Amefin company for his guard instead of the Guelens was well within sense. The duke of Amefel had that grant of power from his hands. It was the only thing in the message that was clearly within Tristen’s grant and honor.

  “You’ll note the bit about fortifications,” Idrys remarked.

  “My grandfather’s decree to bring down their strongholds was a good idea then. It no longer is. I regretted not having them this summer.”

  “Will you tell that to Ryssand?”

  “Damn Ryssand. Damn the Amefin patriarch.” He folded the letter and tucked it into his own belt. “At least we’re prepared in the south. What he’s doing will turn the war north, when Tasmôrden hears it, mark

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  me. He’s being left no choice. And if he doesn’t move toward him, we’ll be the hammer and Amefel the anvil. Damn Ryssand twice and three times, he and Murandys will catch the arrows if Tasmôrden invades. And as for Ryssand…I may let my brother’s marriage go forward.”

  “You jest.”

  He swung around and fixed Idrys with a direct stare. “Artisane’s husband would inherit, were Ryssand to fall in a ditch.

  My brother might be duke of Ryssand and duke of Guelessar.”

  “Shall I find the ditch?” Idrys said.

  “After the wedding.” He found himself well out on a limb, far, far from safe ground. “But maybe not. I’m not my grandfather.”

  “Your grandfather died in bed, my lord king, a grace the gods did not grant your late father, who spared his enemies.”

  “My grandfather died fearful of ghosts, master crow.”

  “And does my lord king fear them?”

  “There has to be a wedding, before an inheritance. I’ll think of it then.”

  “Think now, my lord king. If not Ryssand, then these troublesome priests. The Quinalt won’t fault you.”

  “One doesn’t win by killing priests. They multiply. They become martyrs. Gods know we need none. His Reverence of Amefel will get his comeuppance, when His Holiness wakes up and uses his wits. Then Ryssand will have his, if my brother weds the Ryssandish minx. He far underestimates my brother.”

  “As my lord king wishes,” Idrys said, “and again, as my lord king wishes. And a third time, as my king wishes.”

  “Plague on you! You don’t approve. Say so!”

  “Consider, I say, that Tristen himself would have 362 / C. J. CHERRYH

  wished his messenger arrived timely; but he came too late. Our revenant is still fallible. Wizards failed.”

  “He asked a man to make up days on His Reverence. He failed. It’s not portentous.”

  “His Reverence fell in a ditch. And alas, survived it. Failed, I say.”

  “He’d not wish for a death,” Cefwyn said, and wondered in himself why he held his hand. He had not been so moderate once. He followed a wizard’s path without a wizard’s power.

  He wished not to be his grandfather, that was the truth. He wished to win his battles on the field, not in some ditch.

  He wished not to become the king his grandfather had been.

  That dark pit was always there, a defensible place, a lonely, loveless place…and he had been on his way there, when he had met Tristen, and met Ninévrisë. He had listened to Heryn Aswydd, adorned his gate with heads of men who might have been his best allies, had he only known how he was deceived.

  Then in Tristen’s company, seeing the mystery of fore
st leaves and the wonder in a water-polished stone, a light had come on him, a bright, bright hope, that this was the true world, all around him, truer than his darkening sight. And ever after that and forever, he hoped for himself, and whenever he thought of dark and practical deeds, why, that light distracted him toward this dream he had, and made him, perhaps, not a good or a reasonable king, but a king who wanted to be better, a king who wanted all his kingdom to enjoy their lives.

  “My lord king?” Idrys prompted him, and he knew he had been woolgathering, looking toward that nonexistent but oh, so real light, dreaming, not being responsible toward his duties.

  “Let’s trust His Holiness,” he found himself saying, FORTRESS OF OWLS / 363

  covering that soft part of his soul that could deal with Tristen and his crownless queen, and finding the reason to gloss it over, undetectable by Idrys’ critical eye. “He sees his danger: it’s inside the Quinalt. Let’s see what he can do about it.”

  C H A P T E R 9

  The wind blew and blew in the dark of night, battering at the windows in the dark, spitting rain, not snow, wailing around the eaves and rattling shutters.

  “Like a spring wind,” Lusin said, “an’ us not to Midwinter yet.”

  Tristen remembered the gray rain curtains that had swept down on darker gray towers, and knew with a vague edge of fear that at last his year was coming full circle: someone named a characteristic of the coming season and it did not Unfold to him; he recalled very keenly the look and the feeling of it at Ynefel, the crack of thunder, rain, creeping wormlike along the horn-paned window of his room.

  Here, his servants went anxiously about, even Tassand casting worried looks at the besieged windows, and saying it was unnatural.

  “It’s only wind,” Tristen said. “A true wind.”

  Yet he had wished fair weather on the south and all the ill to the north, on Tasmôrden’s army, and if it rained here, he thought it might snow to the north.

  It was still his wish, and for more of it, but he feared such tampering with nature. He thought, as the storm raged and thunder rolled above the roof, of going to master Emuin and asking. But Emuin slept, when he wondered: was snug in his blankets in the tower, ignoring the

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  fuss in the heavens, and would not be nudged to wakefulness.

  If master Emuin could sleep through the racket, he supposed it was not so harmful…but he could neither sleep nor ignore it.

  Neither, it seemed, could Uwen, who had been down to the stables and now came back with his boots wet and his cloak dripping.

  “Not natural, m’lord, for it to be so warm so late in the year.

  The yard’s a mud puddle.”

  “No trouble, however.”

  “All’s well, as I saw.” Uwen slung the cloak off, and a servant took it. “It blew the lantern out, and the horses is all glad to be in. Liss don’t like the thunder.”

  “Take a cup of ale,” he said, for he knew Uwen liked it at the end of a long day, and so they shared a cup, and talked of other things, the building of a second barracks in the scant free space of the Zeide court. That would go faster in warmer weather; and so would the training of the Amefin guard, which Uwen meant to oversee.

  Uwen went off to bed, then the thunder quieted, and Tristen felt the pigeons all snugged close, a sleepy feeling, somewhere near in the eaves and the stable loft. Warm, warm together, and peaceful, they felt.

  And with master Emuin sleeping, and all the world quiet, the fire crackling and the spatter of rain against the windows, he found sleep still eluding him. He read…read philosophy, the sound of the rain comforting and peaceful. When he slept, he slept in the chair, and so Tassand found him in the small hours of the night, and threw a blanket over him.

  In the morning Tassand called him to the window, that portion of clear glass amid the colored, and showed him the hills.

  They all showed brown, with patches of white. The 366 / C. J. CHERRYH

  snow had gone, bringing the land back to autumn, all in a night.

  “Do you see?” he said to Uwen, as he came in for breakfast.

  “Aye,” Uwen said, “and a soggy mess of mud. I saw it from the stable-court steps: I weren’t goin’ down in the muck before breakfast. Did ye ever see such weather?” Then Uwen laughed.

  “O’ course ye hain’t. All’s to find.”

  “Have you?”

  “No. A manner o’ speakin’, m’lord, ha’ ye ever seen? I ain’t, not like this. The streets is runnin’ torrents, an’ the streams’ll Flood.”

  Flood Unfolded to him in a dismaying instant, bridges hit hard by trees, livestock and houses swept away. He had not thought of that in his wish. He wondered how much water was bound up in the snow.

  “Are the villages in danger?” he asked. “The bridges?”

  “The bridges is to ask,” Uwen said, “but the villages is generally set high, the countryfolk bein’ no fools. Amefel’s had floods afore this, an’ they’ll have brung up their sheep last night, I’ll warrant, when they heard the rain.”

  He had been careless. He had cast hardship on people who trusted him, without thinking of the consequence to them. “I wish the weather may be kinder,” he said.

  “It was you,” Uwen said.

  “I think that it was,” he confessed. “And just as much rain as fell here, I wished snow on Tasmôrden…not enough to prevent the people from crossing the river. Now I wish the ground may dry.”

  “Then if it don’t happen by unnatural sort, I wager the winds’ll blow,” Uwen said. “An’ blow for days.”

  And indeed by the time breakfast was done, the FORTRESS OF OWLS / 367

  wind had risen. When Tristen took the accustomed tribute of bread to the pigeons on the ledge, their feathers were ruffled, and their wings beat hard when bad manners shoved one another off the edge.

  But despite the wind the morning was bright blue and clear beyond the glass, and the change in the land was a curiosity.

  “I may ride a turn, today,” Tristen said to Uwen, who stood by to watch. “I should see how the streams run. Dys wants exercise.”

  “It’ll be muddy,” Uwen said. But all the same they laid their plans, for they had very many horses due to arrive, and before this master Haman had had men out in the snow and the frozen ground walking the fences and building weather shelters and moving hay and straw—against the belief that the winter was sure to deepen, and that what they must do by Midwinter they must do now. Now the whole effort to prepare the province waited for boats, and streams swollen with melted snow ran to the Lenúalim, on which transport of grain depended—all such things had become a worry. They had sent a message to Olmern, overland…a cold and soggy messenger, last night, if he had not stopped in a village…that, too, his wishes had done.

  He vowed more caution, and went down to a muddy yard somewhat sheepishly, not to confess the reason of the sudden turn in the weather, or the source of the rising of the wind that tugged at canvas shelters and whistled through the eaves, on this bright blue morning.

  “A fine mornin’,” Uwen said, seeming to take it all in stride.

  “Only so’s we get cold for a few days yet, enough to freeze the fleas in the sheds, as I can swear ain’t happened yet.”

  “Do they freeze?”

  “Time was ye were askin’ me what winter was,”

  368 / C. J. CHERRYH

  Uwen said, “an’ now ye’re sendin’ it away. Aye, fleas do.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to wish against what wants to come,” Tristen said, “and master Emuin slept through it all. He calls me a fool, which is probably true. It shouldn’t have rained last night. But I didn’t think of rain. I thought of snow and ice melting and never thought of rain at all.”

  “So will we have fine weather for ridin’ today?”

  “I think we will,” he said. “Except the wind.”

  The pigeons walked about in the morning, slightly damp, looking confused as they dodg
ed among the puddles, but dodging about on very important business, always, at least to look at them.

  Haman’s lads, as Uwen called them, saddled Gia and Gery and the guard horses, for Lusin was coming down, with Syllan and the rest.

  “It’s a muddy mess down there, m’lord,” Haman advised them as they waited. “And there’s only piles of timbers as yet where the shelters will stand.”

  “We’ll have a look, all the same,” Tristen said. “Uwen says the streams will be up.”

  “The east meadow’ll be under, afore all,” Haman said, “but the timber’s on the high end, where we’re building, m’lord.

  There’s nothing lost, I’ll wager, and grass laid bare, which if it dries before the horses tramp it down, is no bad thing.”

  It meant less need of hay, less clearing of stables…perhaps no need of shelters at all for many of the horses if the weather held; but dared he do that? They were not at Midwinter yet.

  Had the heavens a store of snow that must fall, before all was done?

  He saw he needed to face master Emuin and have his word on it, if master Emuin would tell him a thing.

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  He saw he needed inquire afresh about the state of the villages, and pay at his own charge any losses: fair was fair, as Uwen said, and none of the folk of Amefel had merited flooded fields.

  He could not have done such a thing when he walked the parapets at Ynefel. He could not have done it before Lewen field. He was not sure when or how the gift had Unfolded in him, perhaps that very day that he and Cevulirn rode home and he foresaw the plight of the fugitives in Elwynor, harried by armed men. Pity and anger had moved him; and could he say he had thought as much as he ought before his heart swept the hills clear?

  Young lord, he could hear Emuin chide him, in that tone of disapproval, don’t ask me.

  How could he ask Emuin…when by all he knew Emuin had no such strength in him, and old man and frail, and very likely this time to disapprove what he had done. He did not look forward to that meeting, and did not want to face Emuin with only a guess how the land had fared. He wished to see it, and assure himself by the sight of what he could see that he had not done too great a harm, that villages and the settlement at Althalen alike would have come through it undamaged.