Fortress of Eagles

by C. J. Cherryh

  But meanwhile the heavens truly would not oblige master Emuin’s observations tonight. So perhaps Emuin would have time to spend.

  “Tassand,” he said, “the basket for master Emuin. has it gone up yet?”

  “No, m’lord,” Tassand said. “Against the likelihood, m’lord.”

  They knew his decisions before he made them. He was pleased, annoyed and, over all, amused. He had grown fond of Tassand in the months they had served him, Tassand and all the staff that bore with his oddities and his lapses, and perhaps, yes, they took unseemly liberties (there was, even as he thought it, a peal of merriment from the hall beyond) but, yes, indeed he encouraged them.

  And perhaps master Emuin would turn him away; FORTRESS OF EAGLES / 141

  last night Emuin had not even opened his door to take the evening offering.

  But this night he would get Emuin’s attention, or he would stand there till it opened. If Tassand had made a special feast, then Emuin would enjoy it.

  “Bring it,” he said, and when the basket came, along with it came and entire small keg of ale. So it was clearly conspiracy among all his guards and servants and now himself to bring the holiday feast to master Emuin. He said not a word about the keg, only tucked in the little treasures, too, which he had set by for master Emuin. In high spirits and great resolution he carried the basket himself as he and Uwen left the apartment, gathering up Lusin and the men on the way.

  So they marched down the hall, him with the basket, Uwen carrying the keg, and Lusin and the three others clumping heavily behind, clattering with weapons, bearing a second basket of the poppy-seed cakes, which had somehow ended up part of Emuin’s breakfast arrangements. He saw that several cups had also come in the substantial basket of cakes; he suspected sweets in the bottom of the basket, and his guards were extraordinarily cheerful as they opened the door that led to the drafty stairs.

  Emuin maintained no guard himself, at least no visible one, only that loud bell that rang below when someone opened this door leading up to the tower where he was now solitary. It was a deafeningly loud bell, when one was standing by it, enough to wake the old man when he was sleeping. Wind swept through, damp with rain. The drafts that swept through Emuin’s chambers above were constant. The servants before they had left had complained that powders Emuin was mixing ended up drifting over all his books and onto 142 / C. J. CHERRYH

  the floor. Likewise smokes of his frequent combustions had sooted the rafters far beyond reason. Books turned their own pages in the tower, and the servants had claimed haunts. But there was no magery about it, only ill-fitting shutters and a tower that drew like a chimney. One could feel the waft of cold air up there at every opening of the downstairs door that led to the tower stairs, and Tristen hoped that their opening of the door had not disturbed any of master Emuin’s charts or blown rain in to soak his books: he had wished his guards to shut the door as quickly as possible and to hurry up the steps.

  Thunder cracked. He stopped midway, daunted, wondering if it had been overhead.

  “That were close,” Uwen said behind him. Tristen looked down on a spiral of his men as Uwen signed against harm, he and Lusin and Syllan and the rest, ale keg and all. Close indeed, but there was no sign of damage above. Tristen ran up in haste to make up for the pause, the men clattering and panting behind him, and at the little landing outside the study, rapped at the rough wooden door, not at all expecting an answer, in master Emuin’s ordinary way of hospitality, but simply because it always seemed polite to do before trying the latch.

  Hearing nothing from inside, he pulled the cord and let himself in, leaving Uwen and the guards to sit at their ease on the steps, as they did habitually when they attended him here.

  Simply in opening the door to admit himself he loosed a gale that dislodged a half score of parchments inside, and he quickly and guiltily shut it at his back.

  “Bother!” Emuin was at his worktable, having just slapped a measuring rod won to pin an array of parchments across the table surface.

  FORTRESS OF EAGLES / 143

  “Supper, sir,” Tristen said cheerfully, “a holiday supper.

  Breakfast, of sorts. But there’s the holiday ale. There’s a keg of it outside, in Uwen’s keeping.”

  “Breakfast,” Emuin said. “No ale. Ale muddles the wits and I need mine, young sir. But tea would be very welcome. Cursed rain.” Emuin composed a rattling stack of selected parchments and cleared a small space on his huge chart table. Then, with some ado, he poked up the embers in the entirely inadequate fireplace, added tinder, then a few sticks, and raised a little fire.

  He looked into the sooted teapot, seemed to decide there was sufficient water, and swung it over the fire on its dragon-shaped hook, the tower room’s one elegance.

  “Well, sit down, sit down,” Emuin said, and Tristen set out ham and bread on the table, settling himself as Emuin set out two chipped pottery cups and a spoon of dubious recent history.

  Emuin wore nothing like the finery he had worn to the king’s hall two days ago. Emuin’s second-best gray robe, the Teranthine habit, had threadbare spots and the hem was out, not to mention the ink stains. Ink blackened his thumb and two fingers. His white hair hung in ringlets, looking damp, probably from a determined look at the heavens. As Men went, he was old, quite, quite old, Tristen had come to understand—older, perhaps, than most Men ever came to be, and Emuin had lost patience with things he had seen too many times. That was what he had said about the court and his servants alike.

  But novel things interested him. “I thought you would enjoy these,” Tristen said, laying out the oak gall and the bird’s egg.

  “Thrush,” Emuin said of the egg, and that Word Unfolded in a delightful song, a moderate-sized brown 144 / C. J. CHERRYH

  bird, ample reward for his care in bringing it back unbroken.

  “Ah,” Emuin said, and admired the oak gall. “Very useful.” He set it by in a place of honor. They sat near the only warmth, and wisps of Emuin’s hair, drying somewhat, flew about in the drafts, what of it he did not braid into an immediately unwinding pigtail.

  The water boiled while they talked of autumn colors and the leaves and why evergreens did not cast their leaves at all, a conversation Tristen was sure he never could have had in the king’s gathering below, for all his regret of the jeweled ladies.

  They poured tea as the sounds of merriment wafted up from the town square through the unshuttered windows.

  “The fools,” Emuin said, in the chilly drafts. “They’ll be soaked. It’s for the young and the foolish out there tonight, no question.”

  “Burning sins, Uwen said.”

  “Would they could get all of them. I’ve a few to contribute.

  We could toss Lord Corswyndam on the pyre.”

  He could discern Emuin’s levity. Not so with everyone he dealt with. He could laugh at the image of someone carrying stiff old Lord Corswyndam like a log of wood and flinging him onto the fire. The lord of Ryssand was not Cefwyn’s friend, not was he Emuin’s. Corswyndam and Lord Prichwarrin of Murandys, however, were very good friends, to no one’s comfort that he knew of. “Do they do the same in Amefel? Do they burn sins?”

  “No. Not in Amefel. They burn straw men. But they’ll be dancing and drinking everywhere across the northern land tonight, in Guelessar, in every province, Panys and Murandys, Teymeryn, Isin and Marisal.”

  “Everyone calls them northern.”

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  “They do.”

  “But they lie east.”

  “Only from Amefel.”

  That was a perplexing thought. There was something about Emuin’s remark on sin-burning that had begun to trouble him, as if something very troubling were trying to Unfold, and he resisted it, knowing it could only upset him on a night when he had no wish to be disturbed, only comfortable in Emuin’s company.

  “Devils try to come in on the wind,” Emuin said, “so northern folk say, so they chase them with fires. In the south t
hey celebrate the first day of winter, and on Midwinter Day they light the fires again, to encourage the sun.”

  “And do they? And does it?” he asked, hovering close to the thought of bonfires as warmth, and remembering a book, not Efanor’s little book. He had burned that book in a like great fire, but the words of it, words he himself might have written, kept bobbing up to the surface of very dark waters. They were words he had written…if he was Barrakkêth. He huddled his long limbs close, fearing with all his soul what Emuin might say next.

  “There are no devils and the sun does very stubbornly as it will. But one is north and one is south. What the old people did, their descendants do, not even remembering why. Now in the northern duchies they burn up sins. I truly doubt its efficacy, but the Quinalt has never put a stop to it, only made it sins, instead of enemies.”

  Great fires like the fire at Henas’amef. They had burned Lord Heryn’s men. Had that pyre burned their sins with him? Fear of the fire had not daunted Lady Orien or her sister Lady Tarien, but it daunted him.

  146 / C. J. CHERRYH

  Great fires, pages of a book curling and catching fire, and bodies of men blackened and twisted. The smell of it came to him, a memory, or a spell-wrought understanding. If he was Barrakkêth, he had had no mercy on his enemies, so they wrote.

  If he was Barrakkêth, he had overthrown lost Galasien centuries ago, and reigned over Men in fire and blood. So his books said.

  In fire and blood the Sihhë dynasty had risen; in fire and blood it had gone down at Althalen, when Cefwyn’s grandfather had burned the last halfling king, another great fire.

  Was it for his sins?

  If he had burned, was he pure? And if he had come back into the world, had he come sinless? Men thought not, it was clear. Even Emuin thought not.

  There had been five true Sihhë. Five who had come down out of winter, bringing their weapons, their knowledge of war, their innate magic. They had not been wizards, to call on magic, or sorcerers, to reach where wizards scrupled to reach. The five had been Sihhë, and the magic was in them, without any line of demarcation between the bright and the dark: they had lived long, very long, and the magic in their halfling progeny had run thinner and thinner and thinner, until it all ended in fire, in unwalled Althalen.

  Only then had Mauryl withdrawn entirely from Men and shut himself in the fortress of Ynefel. Only then hat the realm split in two: Ylesuin had had the Marhanen kings; and Elwynor had declared the Regency under Uleman, then a young man, and settled down to wait…for a true king, a Sihhë king, the king to Come, so long as Uleman lived.

  Now Elwynor had grown weary of waiting. Now every hedge in Elwynor produced a claimant, a rebel, a FORTRESS OF EAGLES / 147

  man who wished to deny the Regency could pass to Uleman’s daughter Ninévrisë…certainly many Elwynim were ready to deny Ninévrisë if she married a Marhanen king. So Elwynor burned villages for their sins. He saw the bright, bright fire, and the black shadows that had been Men in his dreams of Althalen. They hoped to stop the burning, he and Cefwyn, and put an end to fire and sword.

  “Why do they say north?” He had been chasing that thought, among worse ones, through the mazy paths of the oak grain on the tabletop, and he was suddenly moved to ask a question, to escape the chance of something more Unfolding. North was a potent question. It was the question of the Sihhë. But the sudden query confused Emuin: he saw that. “North of what mark do they reckon, sir, to call Amefel the south?”

  “Ah,” said Emuin, then, and appeared to consider the question. “That is to say, north of the Amynys before it flows into the Lenúalim. That was the old boundary, the Guelen boundary, if you would know.”

  “And where is that river? Well south and east?”

  “East and bending north, if you would know. Between Marisyn and Marisal.”

  “Yet Amefel is north of that, too. And Amefel they always reckon south.”

  “So they do. And slant their maps out of true to make their own lands seem more level, gods forbid that Ylesuin should tilt.”

  “So why should all the land this side of Assurnbrook be called north when it clearly lies due east?”

  “Because in the old days, when the Sihhë ruled, one dared not say Men.”

  That was a curious notion. It was also more talk on 148 / C. J. CHERRYH

  that score than he had had of Emuin since the day Emuin hat shown him the travels of the sun. He had a sip of tea and rested his elbow on the scarred table. “And how would that be?”

  “Because the Sihhë ruled, and by north, one quietly meant the lands above the Amynys, and that meant all that was the freehold of Men. All the provinces the Marhanen held…so when one spoke of the north doing a thing, it generally and far more quietly meant the Marhanen dukes did a thing. This was before they became reigning kings, of course. And rather than ever say, the provinces where Men ruled, as opposed to Sihhë, it was the fashion to say, the northern provinces. They were a restless lot, fomenting rebellions. The north did this. The north did that. You’re quite right, of course. But there were the lands loyal to the Sihhë, at Althalen; and there were the lands to the south. All the lands. The Sihhë ruled to the sea, young lord.”

  Blue water. An endless water, sometimes blue, sometimes gray or green.

  White headlands and low marsh.

  He caught himself, bumped the teacup with his elbow—was dizzy for a moment. A Word had come to him. He knew the sea. In this world, the sky thundered and flashed with light, and in the other the waves thundered, and crashed against a shore.

  “Guelenfolk came out of Nelefreíssan, a long time ago,”

  Emuin said, and helped himself to the ham that had come up in the basket, twice over for good measure. “And probably so did the Elwynim, part and parcel with the Guelenmen and even the other sorts of Men, the Chomaggari and the Casmyndanim on the coast, truth be told, but never whisper that suspicion in the Quinalt’s hearing, good gods, no, the FORTRESS OF EAGLES / 149

  Chomaggari are twice-damnéd heathen dogs and the folk of Nelefreíssan are of course distinct even from Guelenmen, who have the gods-given right to have the capital in Guelemara. So Guelessar is ever so much more Guelen than the Nele-freimen…if you ask a man from Guelessar. Ask a Nelefreiman, and he’ll tell you the opposite. But to both the whole coastland is damned.”

  “Do the Teranthines think so?”

  “Oh, aye, that the Chomaggari are damned, so any man that raids a Teranthine shrine as the hillmen are wont to do is clearly damned, quite heartily and justly so in my opinion, too. But the Teranthines are rather sure—and I agree with them—that in the very long ago most of Men in the whole world were living up in Nelefreíssan and Isin. Now, this becomes important for you to know, now that you ask. This was at the same time when the Galasieni were lording it in the south and up and down the Lenúalim. Then Mauryl comes into the tale.”

  “Was it long ago?”

  “Very. Nine hundred years at least. And Mauryl’s magic brought down Galasien, conjuring the Sihhë to do it for him…or he brought the five Sihhë-lords down from the north, as you please, which I think is the truer telling…” Emuin cast him a sidelong glance, head ducked, under a fringe of wind-stirred, grizzled hair, a close, questioning look. “Would you know how that was, lad?”

  “No, sir,” Tristen said uncomfortably, hoping that he never did know. He heard tales of nine hundred years and of centuries of Sihhë rule and hoped that the ancient wars never fully Unfolded to him. “I truly do not.”

  150 / C. J. CHERRYH

  “Well, well, but be that as it may, the Galasieni vanished, or whatever befell, Ynefel became as strange as it is, so strange even the Sihhë left it and built Althalen instead. The Guelenfolk and their Ryssandish kin came pouring down from the north like bandits—hence the real root of their identifying themselves all as northern now, if you take my guess, long after they have ceased to be northerly at all; hence the more northerly, the purer Quinaltine. We southerners, we of Amefel—”
/>
  “Are you of Amefel?” He was not sure he had ever heard Emuin admit it.

  “As near as I am of any place. Aye, say I am of Amefel. And in the Guelen thinking, the pure Guelen thinking, we who are both Men and out of Amefel or anywhere to the south of there are fallen from Guelenish purity. If you want the deepest secret, the one for which the Guelenfolk despise the south, we mingled with the Sihhë and, gods save us all, the lowly Chomaggari.”

  “But are not the Elwynim northerly and more north than anyone?”

  “But mingled their blood most of all. Yes. Hence may they be damned, in the Quinalt’s thinking—or that is the house the Quinalt scholars have built themselves into, a house without a door in it, if you ask me. A highly inconvenient house, since you came: they have said very many things they have now a unsay or damn their own king. And that would not be good.”

  “Damn Cefwyn?” He was appalled.

  “Some did wish Efanor to be king. —Is it only your men outside, men you know? Are you sure of them?”

  “Yes,” Tristen said, wondering what Emuin might intend to say on this chancy night. Harm seemed to tremble in the air.

  He found himself afraid for no rea

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  son, or perhaps for every reason. “Uwen is there. And Lusin and his men.”

  “Good. Good. What are they about out there?” This as a voice outside became a little louder and fell off sharply.

  “Ale,” Tristen said, and reminded him: “They have the keg.”

  “I’d not have strangers’ ears to the door while I ask you: how did the business this morning go? Are you still damned, or perhaps sanctified and blessed now, perchance? I see that Quinalt trinket of yours. I burn with curiosity.”