Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles (42 page)

“I’ll bring one,” Uwen said, and did, from a soldier’s water flask. It tasted strongly of sulfur, and Clusyn monastery.

But before he had taken more than two sips of it, the Amefin lords began to come in, exhausted men, indignant men, frightened men.

He gave the flask back to Uwen, and his hand trembled doing it, less to do with the cold stone seat than with utter weariness. He still had blood and soot on his garments, and he faced the tatters of a Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles court, one missing one of its strongest men, one whose alliances bound smaller houses together and made peace between great ones.

“Where is thane Crissand?” he asked Uwen, in a low voice. “Has he gone or is he here?”

“’S under close guard outside,” Uwen said. “He went to his house an’ he come back. His wish is to come into hall an’ stand in his father’s place, an’ there, I’ve delivered ’is message to ye, an’ the rest ain’t in my hands, m’lord. Shall we let ’im in?”

The son of a rebel, the son of a decimated house, with grievances the lord viceroy had made real and just, was a weight not only in the world of Men. He foreknew Anwyll’s objection. And there
were
consequences. Mauryl had dinned that into his very heart, first principle of wizardry and first in governing.

“Not so easily,” Tristen said. “But bring him in.”

“Your Grace,” Anwyll said, coming up the low steps of the dais also to lean close. “Shall I have the clerk read the document again?

Some may not have heard it. Then Your Grace may ask they give the oaths, if it please Your Grace, which you should very soon.”

The Guelenfolk guarding him were anxious that there be ceremony, always that there be ceremony and oaths: it was the sort of magic they felt they could work, the setting of wards such as they could do, indeed wards of some potency, if he could judge; and Anwyll, who had his instruction directly from Idrys, was extremely anxious that this at least go smoothly. Otherwise, he pitied Anwyll his return to Guelessar.

“Do so,” he said, and at Anwyll’s bidding the clerk positioned Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles himself in the spot of best light from the candles in the sconces, canted the parchment for the clearest view and read out the proclamation in good ringing tones, with fewer mistakes than when he had read it before the gates.

This time, in this solemn hall, however, and among these sober men, there were no cheers of
Lord Sihhë
! And this time Tristen paid the reading little heed, instead watching the faces of the earls as he struggled to gather up names he had not used in two months…

Cuthan, there, foremost of them, had not been in the stable-court when the arrows were flying, but understandably so. He was elderly, a wisp of a man, doddering to look at him, but not so in wits or power: he recalled that from his sojourn here in the summer.

Cuthan was a power among the earls, the one man Cefwyn might have made duke of Amefel if Cuthan had been willing; but Cuthan had begged off on account of his age and health. Then Edwyll had put forward his own claims to the honor, and with the man he would choose unwilling and with the man who
was
willing blood-tied to the Aswydds he had just exiled, Cefwyn had installed Lord Parsynan instead.

More agreeable was Murras, a fat, cheerful man, and bravest of the earls was Drumman, lean as a post and one of the youngest, bearing a bloody bandage with evident pride and good humor, his badge of honor from the stable-court. Dusky-skinned Edracht, and gray-streaked Prushan: neither of them loved old Cuthan, which might have made them natural allies for other factions, but neither of them loved his brother lords any better, so far as he had observed.

They were western lords. The Earl Marmaschen, he with the forked Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles beard, a quiet man: whether he was wise was still to learn; and with him Zereshadd, Moridedd, and Brestandin. They were always together, those four, from lands closest about Henas’amef. Their odd names had always been a matter of curiosity: they did not belong in Amefel, and were originally southern, even more than the Ivanim, was his impression, but nothing told him how he was so sure or why nothing else Unfolded.

Of the easterners fronting Guelessar, there was Durell, who drank far too much at festivities, but who was entirely sober this night; there was Civas, a quiet man, a cipher; there was Lund, who looked more like a farmer than an earl, and Azant, who bordered the river.

The clerics had come in, too, having now come out of their hiding places to learn the outcome of the struggle. The Teranthine patriarch, Pachyll, did not look at all displeased: immaculate in his gray, fingering his beard and nodding to himself at almost every line as the clerk read the proclamation. The Bryaltine abbot, Cadell, unadorned and without his symbols on this chancy night, gazed at his new duke with eyes bright and high color suffusing his cheeks.

But the Quinalt father stood in the shadows against the opposite wall, near the Guelen soldiers tonight, and had his hands tucked in the safety of his sleeves.

Give the man gifts, Idrys had said. Perhaps that would make him less afraid… for this was a frightened man.

And Crissand, dark as Amefin in general were dark, stood in the downward shadow of a candle-sconce, shadowed in weariness and misfortune. There was no restraint on him. But no lord stood near him, nor the priests either. He was the center of the night’s Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles misfortune, the heir to an unwanted deed… but heir, too, to an Amefin house, standing to claim Meiden, when he might have absented himself until a time of cooler heads and less danger, or begged a friend or a priest to intercede for him. He had come of his own will to state his own case, and thereby risked everything for himself and his people.

Meanwhile the proclamation ran toward its end, with the courtesies and tangles of phrase composed in the Guelen court. The oaths were coming, a second document the clerk had brought, oaths which were unique and entirely unlike those of the rest of Ylesuin. The Aswyddim had been kings in Hen Amas centuries ago, when the five Sihhë-lords came down; so the Bryalt Chronicle said, the Aswyddim, rather than resisting, had flung open their gates, and Barrakkêth had let the Aswydd king of that day continue to call himself aetheling, or royal, as he wished.

So had Barrakkêth’s successors permitted it, and so, for expediency, had the Marhanen kings. Thus the Amefin earls swore to a
royal
power of their own, and since the aetheling was an earl among other earls,
that
convolute reasoning let the earls of Amefel all continue in their little holdings, earl being a title which
Guelen
nobility did not acknowledge, but which Amefin folk regarded as each equivalent to duke.

The earls therefore cherished their uniqueness among the provinces of Ylesuin as vital as heart’s blood, even if they no longer had towers and no longer ruled with separate small troops of men-at-arms on their own land, not since two kings ago, when Selwyn Marhanen had torn all the earls’ towers down, after which most of Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles the earls had taken up residence in houses in Henas’amef, the grand houses all about the square. That was the history of the Red Book.

That carefully maintained word
aetheling
let their lord be royal when he was sitting on what the Amefin not too disguisedly called the throne in Henas’amef… and the Marhanen had never contested the matter, seeing the Aswydd aetheling owned himself a Marhanen vassal when he was outside his own borders.

There was, remotely, an Aswydd heir standing in this chamber, now. But Crissand was not in contention for his father’s claim on that word tonight; so for the first time in the history of Amefel, the earls must either swear to a man neither aetheling nor Aswydd, or they must defy the Marhanen king, precipitating the very crisis Cefwyn had avoided when he deposed and exiled Orien Aswydd and appointed a viceroy over the province.

The earls of Amefel might no longer live in state on their own land, except a few in the east, like Durell; but in their thinking they were a kingdom, and in their thinking they had a right to their own choice of rulers. Why Edwyll had launched so rash a rebellion was still in question, but the causes were everywhere in this assemblage, and wove serpentines in the ancient prerogatives.

The reading was done. The echoes died. The clerk rattled up the second document. “The oaths, the recorded oaths, as last sworn.
His
Grace the duke of Amefel summons your lordships each to swear
fealty according to the terms written herein
…”

What will you do? Tristen wondered. And will you swear, or will you not?

I think you will swear. For the peace and your own welfare,
I wish
Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles
you to swear
.

Cuthan ducked his head a moment, took a firmer grip with both hands on his gold-headed staff, then looked up as the clerk finished the passage. “Your Grace,” Cuthan said, in a voice thready with age and a manner feeble in all but the steadiness of the glance he cast up. “Your Grace, for all my years I would never have guessed His Majesty in Guelessar would have proposed us Mauryl’s heir to succeed the Aswyddim.”

Proposed.
Proposed
, the man said, and not
decreed
, nor
chosen
.

This was a wily old man with a will to find a way to accept the inevitable and still to leave the key principle of Amefin sovereignty alive.

“And will you swear?” Tristen asked.

“Aye,” Cuthan said, and nodded decisively. “Aye, to Mauryl’s heir, aye, I will.”

Fine as dust. Another dicing of loyalties and attachments, a clever, careful, dangerous wording that might itself one day be a matter of contention, and they had no clerk with pen in hand free to record it.

“Aye,” was the word behind Cuthan, from lords all about the chamber, even Prushan and Edracht, thorns in Cefwyn’s side, opposed to Cefwyn’s appointment of Parsynan, or any Guelen viceroy; opposed to Edwyll, who wanted to succeed Orien Aswydd.

By reason of this old man’s cleverness of phrase, obstacles tumbled.

There was reason to be grateful to Cuthan. But a man who could settle tempests so cleverly… could also raise them, both for his own purposes. The man’s aims were yet to discover. Oh, he had seen far Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles more than he wished in Guelessar this autumn.

“I am here both as Mauryl’s heir and as His Majesty’s friend,”

Tristen said quietly, doggedly insistent on them, including Cuthan, knowing that from the very beginning. “Lord Edwyll is dead. I did not kill him. As for Lord Parsynan, I have ordered him to leave Amefel, and
I
order the garrison, now.”

There was a cold, deep silence in the hall. Not a man moved, not even the random stirring of a large company.

“I wish you all well, and safe.” His eye swept the earls, the clerics… and Crissand, standing apart. “The clerk has the oaths exactly as you last swore to Lord Heryn. If you will swear, swear.”

“We are all here to swear,” Cuthan said with a clearing of his throat, hands clenched whitely on the head of his stick. Other heads nodded. The young clerk whispered something urgent to Uwen, who told him some answer, and the clerk, with the document of oaths in hand, leafed back through it with a crackling of heavy paper.

“The clerk don’t know the order of precedence,” Uwen said in a low voice, at Tristen’s elbow, “except by the book. The earl of Meiden, his heir an’ all… ’
at’s the first name
.”

“The earl of Bryn,” Tristen said instead, and saw Crissand stand thin-lipped and still as Cuthan, Earl of Bryn, took the precedence.

The Amefin swore standing, and clasped right hands, but did not kneel: only their duke did, when he had to swear to the Marhanen king, in an homage even the Sihhë-lord had never asked of Amefel.

So Tristen stood up to take the old man’s hand, looking him in the Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles eye as the clerk began to read, stumbling over the Amefin names.

But the old man ran past the prompting at the first pause and set forth his own oath loud and clear by memory:

“I Cuthan, Earl of Bryn, for Taras and Bru Mardan, and all their thanes, swear to defend the rights of him holding Hen Amas, to march to war under his command, to gather levies and revenues, to acknowledge him lord and sovereign over its claims and courts and to abide by his judgments in all disputes.”

Sovereign
was that surviving word that was the uniqueness of the province. Cefwyn had demanded no changes.

“I Tristen holding Hen Amas,” the clerk read out for him, and Tristen repeated… Hen Amas, the old name, as before the citadel had become simply
the Zeide
it had been the Kathseide. The name Hen Amas conjured a tower, not a town, to him, conjured a village and orchards against familiar hills; more, the next words Unfolded to him, and he had no need of the clerk to say, at the second swearing,

“… to defend your rights against all claims and incursions and to judge rightly as your sovereign lord.” His part was all the same, while the reciprocal oath was longer for some, shorter for others, ending with, in all cases,

“And so you are true to your oath so I hold to mine before the gods.

”

But it seemed to him those last few words the clerk had given him were the wrong words, and that it should not be
before the gods
.

Despite the book he had against his ribs he could not truthfully Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles swear to Efanor’s gods, nor even to Emuin’s Nineteen, the wizards’

gods. How could he bind himself by that, as Men did?

And why should he think he had ever said differently? he asked himself, and why should he remember orchards where the lowermost streets of the town now stood, and where the outlying stables were?

And why should he remember
this
the lesser hall as the great hall, and choose this for the oath-taking— except that it was the right place? In his earliest days things had Unfolded so rapidly and with such force he had fallen in fits. Now a kind of dizziness came on him. He received other oaths, he said the clerk’s words without objection, and hands clasped his hand, hands hard with weapons practice and hands soft with age, hands missing first fingers…