Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles (34 page)

A wizard’s spells could outlive the wizard, in terms that Men understood. But in another and more disturbing sense, in a knowledge he tried to set far from his ordinary thinking,
then
and
now
were not unbreachable walls. It was, in fact, easy to do. It was dangerously easy, for him to do… and Emuin did not seem to have that power.

But if it were done, by him, by another… then things were not safe… were not
safe
, in ways that he felt, but could not define in simple words. Done was not done. Sealed was not sealed. Dead…

was not dead. That was the very least of what Mauryl might have done.

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles An owl called.

And called again.

Owl
, he called back to it, for an unthinking and unguarded moment reaching out into the gray and the surrounding sky. He had never expected Owl in Guelessar, not really. But the crossing at Assurnbrook was another matter altogether, and that sound drew him, welcomed him, though in one part he feared and did not love and yet missed the creature.

Owl?

The sound did not come again. So maybe it was not Owl, only
an
owl, out hunting for its supper.

The morning came with still wind and cold. At the edge of the firelight, a thin shelf of ice showed along the shallow edge of Assurnbrook. Men huddled close at their small fires, having a little breakfast before the orders came to move. But Tristen walked to the edge of the water and stared off into Amefel with an uneasiness that now would not leave him.

“M’lord?” Uwen asked from behind him. “Is aught amiss?”

He was embarrassed, realizing Uwen had asked him at least once before. “We should leave the wagons and cross,” he said, and having said it, he found the whole world tumbling into a new order, not a good one, not a bad one, only that when he said it, he was
back
in the reckoning of things, and he had hung outside them, pondering the shapes, all the night.

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles

“M’lord?”

Anwyll had ordered things without him this morning, assumed he was in charge and that the camp would break immediately. That was beginning. Poles were falling. Canvas was being rolled.

“I shall be lord of Amefel over there,” he said to Uwen, with a nod toward the far side of the stream, “and over there we shall go on ahead of the wagons. Anwyll may not wish us to do it. But I think half the men and the drivers had as soon keep beside their warm fires and sit here at the ford waiting for master Emuin. So tell the captain if he objects, he will gain nothing but packing up and getting a soaking. If he agrees, all the men might stay warm and dry and comfortable. Over there where I am lord, I will order it.”

Uwen looked a good deal set aback, perhaps turning all the conditions of that over in his mind a second time. But then he nodded. “Aye, m’lord, better warm an’ dry.”

Uwen left to relay the order, and Tristen stood and waited.

He was relieved to have decided. The king’s courier would be there today, and he had no doubt at all that the rumors would fly, rumors ranging from an unanticipated royal visit to the garrison being strengthened for a winter campaign—and the province viewed the Guelen Guard with as much suspicion as the Guelen Guard viewed the province.

All these possibilities. But there was only one truth. There was only one act that satisfied the magic that was pulling on him. Only one decision sent the stone rolling back into the place it fit.

Anwyll came walking toward him in some distress, with Uwen Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles trailing behind. “Your Grace,” Anwyll began. “I beg Your Grace consider… we have wagons and gold in our charge…”

“And soldiers to defend them.”

“And the need to defend Your Grace. His Majesty gave me orders…”

“On the other side of the brook, I command. The men will only get wet and be unhappy. Or have to leave the wagons, which they ought not to do. Or will you prevent me?”

“I have orders to defend Your Grace.”

“But none to prevent me.”

“No, Your Grace.”

“Then there’s no good taking down the canvas, sir. The wagons and all the baggage can wait for master Emuin. We shall need men with us, enough here to guard the wagons, and we’ll take the best horses with us.” Now that he had seized command, the necessities of command took shape in him with perfect certainty. “No wagons, equipage like the Ivanim. One of the sergeants to bring in the column with master Emuin.”

A deep breath. A moment’s consideration. “Yes, Your Grace.”

It was done, then. Anwyll went off; Uwen, too, with increasing enthusiasm for moving quickly. To equip like the Ivanim meant every cavalryman with his remount at lead, and though it was not the Guelen habit, the Guard who had been at Lewenbrook knew what was meant. Anwyil had offered no objections to that aspect of his orders at all, and in a very short time, with a brief commotion in the camp—shouting up and down, personal baggage stowed in Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles wagons and horses traded about until those men to go had no encumbrance but their weapons and the fastest and best horses to carry them—they were ready.

That meant Dys and Cassam and their grooms stayed behind, too; they were not the horses for a race. Uwen chose Liss and Gia.

Tristen chose high-spirited Gery for the start of their ride, and Petelly to go at lead.

“Banner-bearers!” Anwyil ordered. “Forward!” And the standard-bearers rode first into the cold, ice-rimmed water. Tristen followed, with Uwen, Anwyil overtaking them to make a third as they crossed. Water came not quite over the stirrups, splashed and chilled where it struck. Horses’ breath steamed in the early sunlight as the bottom began to rise, as they rode dripping out of Assurnbrook into Amefel.

“Your Grace,” Anwyil said, when they had reached that ground,

“you are now in your province.”

“And will be in Henas’amef tonight,” he said, but it seemed to him Anwyil doubted that part of it.

Time after that, however, seemed to him at last to move at an acceptable rate, not creeping along at the somnolent pace of the wagons. The road led up the brushy shore, past the ruins, to the Amefel he remembered, a gently undulating meadowland, low wooded hills all about.

In another hour the road itself, overgrown with dry weeds and likely little used since summer’s end, showed droppings of sheep and goats, occasionally those of cattle, traces of varying ages. At one Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles and another place throughout the morning the sheep-traces they met crossed the road and led off to well-worn trails. Shepherds and farmers used the common land and paid their taxes to Henas’amef, and such tracks went to villages full of peaceful folk, little concerned with the affairs of lords and kings except as it affected their taxes, their sheep, their sons being called to war or left at peace.

Such things mattered, in the accounting he had to give hereafter.

If it meant replacing the lord viceroy without the show and ceremony the viceroy might have preferred, still, everything that protected the villages and the shepherds in these hills was reeling and slipping, and had been since the lightning stroke let the rain into the Quinaltine.

“Ye seem so grim, lad,” Uwen said when they were at a momentary rest. “Is summat amiss?”

He considered the question, standing, staring, with his hands on Gery’s side. He shook his head then. “No. Less so now. But the messenger will be there by now.”

“Aye, m’lord, that he will. Is that a concern?”

He considered that, too, and nodded slightly. “It may be. I feel things out of balance, Uwen, but steadier than they were.”

Uwen gazed at him as Uwen would when he was considering a difficult point.

“Lad,” Uwen said, “is there wizards afoot?”

It was a third good question. “Always,” he said. “Always, for me, there might be wizards.”

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles
CHAPTER 4

«
^
»

The banners flew, in the hands of men who had chosen to bear them, in the land they protected. Far away a curl of smoke reported some blacksmith’s fire, some sign of work across the land: it was an odd time for cooking fires.

Just after noon they reached Maudbrook, which would have been their stop tonight, had they kept the wagons with them, and where Emuin would camp, likely tomorrow night. The thick planks thundered beneath them as they passed easily over Maudbrook Bridge… not a bridge for the wagons: the wagons when they came would use the ford and cross far more slowly.

It was a succession of hills after that, sheep-grazed, tree-crowned, rocky and rough. The streams were a brisk jog across, the brushy sides of the road offered no surprises more than a flight of startled birds and the occasional fox or scuttling hare, invisible but for a whisk of gray. Deer stared from the far distance, alarmed at such haste, but unsure what they ought to do.

They reached the next bridge, a wood-and-stone one, had a cold supper sitting on the margin beside it, with fresh water to drink if they walked down a little. The fires of a village in the distance this time were more numerous, evening fires, chimneys sending up advisement of other folk at supper.

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles It was Ardenbrook, so they all agreed, and this streamside would have been their second camp in Amefel, with yet another night on the road to spend and another day’s travel before them, if not more, asking nothing of the villages. They had in one day’s riding made up two days as the oxcarts measured time, even pressing hard; and the men might rightfully look to sit and have their supper, such as it was, with a warm fire for the night. A full two days closer to Henas’amef than anyone in the town could expect, they had gained time on the king’s messenger. Tristen saw the weary horses, saw the looks of men who hoped that they might have had the order to make camp.

“We go on,” he said, and said it louder, so all the men could hear, not only Anwyll. “We go on. We will camp in sight of the town, if then. It is needful.”

There was no muttering, only looks, fearful looks and weary looks, and he had no complaint from Captain Anwyll, either, only a shake of the head as if he thought better, knew better, had intended better, and was dissatisfied.

The horses, too, laid back their ears, puffing against the girths, unwilling, now, to be taken another distance on the road. Petelly was the horse for this last, hard effort; and he sighed and hung his head and stood on three feet, weary and uncooperative.

But back to the road again it was, with the sun lowering in the sky.

They struck a steady pace, went on until the sun was a recent memory on the horizon.

Then, in that last wan light, the landmarks were all familiar ones, Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles and the men’s spirits began to rise again as a sergeant pointed out a stone outcrop, another saying he knew the lightning-blasted tree at the bottom of the hill, and that there was a sheepfold in the hills yonder, and they were not, after all, that far from the capital.

Petelly suddenly knew where he was, Tristen became sure of it. At a time when the other horses, out of Guelen stables, had become weary, sullen, and inclined to go slower and slower, Petelly suddenly put his ears up and redoubled his pace, nostrils wide, knowing there was a stable, and grain. Gia and Gery, likewise stabled in the citadel this summer, seemed to take the notion from Petelly, and they picked up speed. The other horses, horselike, took their pace from them until the whole company was moving far, far faster than would have been likely after a long day’s effort.

There was a twisted tree remembered from the summer’s end, the milestones beneath a knob of a hill.

And over a steep roll of the land they first caught sight of another shadowy height, the ancient citadel, under a dim sky, itself under a smudge of evening fires. Purer lights gleamed from the crest of that hill, lights which would be the tall, unshuttered windows above the inner walls of the citadel. The defensive walls obscured the rest, but not the few lights outside the walls, the scattered gleam of some lantern in the stables.

The bare branches of the orchards that stood on this approach screened them from view. They had come from the east, but had swung southerly, the East Gate of the town being all but unused and what men named the East Road passing to the south, joining the South Road before the walls.

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles

“We’re just a wee bit behind the gate-closing,” Uwen said, which it was, clearly. And after a moment more: “Will ye go ahead in, m’lord? Or camp?”

“Go in,” Tristen said, with hardly a thought in it. They were here.

They had come closer than he had planned. Now the stone rolled entirely, solidly, fate-guided back to its place.

“I’d take just the banners on, m’lord, and ye hold back with the troop till we have the gates open. Ye might sit and have a sip and stay warm the while an’ come in like a lord.”

Henas’amef was a more cautious, a more wary town than Guelemara. The gates had used to shut at the first dimming of the light, and still did, as seemed. The king’s messenger had delivered word of his arrival, surely; but even so, riding up out of the night, a hundred men were an unsettling sight. Couriers would have to run back and forth between the town gate and the citadel informing the viceroy, who would have to send down to open the gates, and all the while this was going on, the town would be in doubt and their own company would have to stand outside on horses that would see no reason not to go aside to the stables outside the wall, stables which Petelly in particular well knew were at hand. It was in all points, on an ordinary day, more sensible to camp until daylight.

But he burned to be inside the walls, to have uncertainties settled, no matter the inconveniences to all concerned. And he sought a quieter course, one which a slight persuasion might affect.

“You and I and the banners,” he said to Uwen.

“Your Grace.” Captain Anwyll had maintained a glum silence for Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles the last bitter hour, but now he protested. “In His Majesty’s name, I counsel you, no. Never entertain such a notion. Make camp, wait here. His Majesty would never approve Your Grace riding up alone.