Fortress of Owls Page 5

  among Amefin folk, who were Bryaltines, it was honor they paid him. They shouted it in delight: Lord Sihhë and Meiden!

  as Crissand waved happily at the onlookers, the partnership of the oldest of Amefin houses with the banner of Althalen, as it had been a hundred years ago, when Meiden was the friend of the Sihhë…was it that they thought of?

  Past the crossing at midtown, they gathered speed on the relatively clear cobbles and jogged briskly downhill past a last few side streets and the last few shops and trades, down to the rougher, more temporary buildings near the walls. The town’s lower gates stood open: they ordinarily did so by broad daylight; and consequently there was no delay at all to their riding out, no more concern for townsfolk and titles or the determined town dogs. The wide snowy expanse beyond the dark stone arch was freedom for a day.

  He found himself lord of a changed land as he rode out…white, white, where the brown of autumn had been, and before that, the green and gold of enchanted summer…all gone, all buried and blanketed and tucked away for the winter.

  All the knotty questions of armies and rivalries and titles and entitlements of lords fell away in broad, bright wonder, for if breath-blurred windows had shown him the surrounding fields and orchards as hazy white, the utter expanse of it had until now escaped him. There just was no cease of it. Boundaries that all summer and fall had said here is one field and here another, here a meadow, there a field…all were overlain until stone fences and sheep-hedges made no more than ridges.

  But while those grand lines had blurred, he had never, at the distance of his windows, imagined the wealth of details written in the new snow, the record of farmers’ traffic that told where men and beasts had

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  walked hours, even days ago. The landing of a bird left traces, like marks on parchment.

  Shadows of birds, too, passed on the snow, prompting him to look up, and then to smile, for his birds flew above them, outward bound, his silly, beloved pigeons, faring out on their business, as by evening they would fly home to the towers and ledges of the fortress, looking for bread and their perches. They circled over once, and flew out ahead, seeming to have urgent business in mind…a barn, perhaps the spill of a granary door: the woods never suited them. The woods were Owl’s domain.

  “Are they the ones from the tower?” Crissand asked, himself looking up.

  “I think they are.”

  “Do they follow you?” Crissand asked.

  “They go where they like. I don’t govern them.”

  Did his birds fly sometimes far afield, and did they sometimes meet the pigeons that nested at Ynefel?

  He was not sure, indeed, that anything lived at Ynefel. He saw them sweep a turn toward the west, indeed, away, away toward the river…and equally toward the stony hills around ruined Althalen. Ruins suited them well: they liked ledges and stonework. Certainly birds that dared nest at Ynefel, if they were the same birds, would never fear Althalen.

  “Nothing of omen,” Crissand wondered in some anxiousness.

  “No,” he said as they rode, “only birds.”

  A cloud came, passed. Many clouds came and went, and fields blazed white after shadow. Snow on bare gray apple branches made lacework of the eastern view. Moving shadows grayed the hills, and the sky was an amazing clear blue with fat wandering clouds, while the morning’s fall cast a winter glamour on common stones and roadside broom. The horses’

  nostrils

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  flared wide, their ears pricked forward in the bracing air. Their steps were willingly quick and light.

  “Is it the South Road we use all the way?” he asked Crissand at a certain point. He had looked at maps; but the hills were a maze of small trails, some missing from the charts, he much suspected, and he was very willing to use a shortcut and go up into the wonderful hills if Crissand knew one.

  “Yes, my lord, south an hour,” Crissand said, “to Padys Spring. There’s an old shrine, and the village track to Levey comes in there, only over the ridge. We’ll leave the main road there.”

  Padys rang not at all off memory, neither the village of Levey, nor Padys Spring…though he was sure there should be water where Crissand described a spring being.

  But, also, to his vague thought, the name of the place was not quite Padys.

  “Bathurys,” he said suddenly, pleased to have caught it.

  “M’lord?”

  “Bathurys,” he said. It seemed increasingly sure to him that that was the proper name of the spring, as sometimes the very old names came to him. There was a shrine, Crissand had already said; but he was less sure of that fact.

  But there at least should be a spring at a place called Bathurys, and when he set a right name to it, he far better recalled the lay of the land…thought of a village of gray stone, and flocks of sheep.

  It was not so far a ride, then. He felt happy both in Gery’s free and cheerful movement and in the increasing good temper of the company around him. He even heard laughter among the soldiers behind, and beside him, Uwen, who habitually was shy of lords’ company, was not shy in Crissand’s presence, and bantered

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  somewhat with Crissand’s captain, riding near them.

  The two guard companies, the Dragons and the men of Meiden, had fought each other with bloody determination the night of his arrival; but the Dragons had also rescued Crissand and his men from execution, so with this particular Guelen regiment, the tally sheet of good and bad was mixed. Besides, the Dragons were a Guelen company the Amefin held in higher regard than they had ever held for the Guelen Guard, even before Parsynan’s rule here: the Dragons, better disciplined, had never been hard-handed with the townsfolk, never stolen, never done any of the things the Guelens had done, so he had it reported. So, warily, cautiously, goodwill grew, in the amity of the officers and the lords, so in the ranks.

  And, truth, by the time they had passed the first rest and ridden over the icy bridge, Uwen and the captain of Meiden’s house guard were cheerfully comparing winters they had known, and arguing about the merits of sheep, while the men in the ranks had proceeded to local autumn, local ale, the taverns in Guelemara and those in Amefel, and the women they knew.

  The men found their ways of talking. But Tristen labored in his converse with Crissand as if they were strangers, for all their prior dealings had been policy and statecraft. Now they talked idly, as common men did, about the autumn, the land, the flocks, and the apples. Uwen, who had been a farmer before he was a soldier, knew far more about any of these things, Tristen was sure, but Crissand knew everything there was to know about apples, their type, and their value. All Tristen found to do was ask question and question and question. Crissand did know his people’s trade, down to the tending of apple orchards and sheep, which he had done with his own hands, and had no hesitation in the answers.

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  “The flocks are most of my people’s living,” Crissand said,

  “more so than the orchards in the last five years, since the blight. Lord Drumman’s district is all orchards of one kind and another. So is Azant’s. But we fared well enough in Meiden, since we have both sheep and apples: the barley never does well, to speak of: that comes from the east and from Imor and Llymaryn.”

  And again, after a time, Crissand said, “Lewenbrook was hardest on Levey of all Meiden’s villages. Fourteen dead is a heavy toll for a village of two hundred, six more wounded, seven lost with my guard, a fortnight gone. That’s a quarter of all the village, and every man they had between sixteen and thirty.”

  Tristen had not reckoned the dead in those terms, but it came clear to him, such a hardship.

  “A great many widows for a small village,” Crissand said,

  “and them to do the spring plowing, except I gift younger sons from some of my other villages to go and plant for the widows when they’ve seen to their own fields.”

  “We will not have Amefel for a battle
field again,” Tristen vowed, with all knowledge Cefwyn was going to war and that he must. He would not have the war cross the river. He was resolved on that.

  “Gods grant,” Crissand said fervently.

  Sun flashed about them when Crissand said it. It had been a moment of cloud, which passed…and indeed now there was certainly no tardiness in the heavens, though the wind was still.

  Spots of sunlight came and went with increasing rapidity across the land, glorious patches of light and gray shadow on the snow.

  The talk was, albeit puzzling to him, also enlightening, even in this first part of their ride, of the things Crissand 48 / C. J. CHERRYH

  and the other lords had suffered, and what the villages needed.

  They had a certain shyness of each other at the first, and Crissand seemed to worry about offending him, telling the truth as Crissand would, but everything Crissand said, he heard.

  From orchards and sheep they talked on about this and that, gossiped about various of the lords, but none unkindly: Drumman’s ambition for a new breed of sheep, Azant’s daughter’s two marriages, her widowed at Lewenbrook, only seven days a bride—but not the only tragedy. Parsynan, so he had no difficulty understanding at all, had done nothing to mend the situation in the villages, nothing to recover Emwy from its destruction, nothing to help Edwyll’s heavy losses, only to collect taxes for the coronation levy and further punish the villages that had helped win the day.

  “Then the king’s men came counting granaries and sheep again,” Crissand said, “and that was the thing that pushed my father toward rebellion, my lord. We’ve no villages starving yet, but by next year they’d be eating the seed corn, and that, that, my lord, there’s no recovering. So the Elwynim offer tempted my father, and the king’s men made him angry. That’s the truth of it. I don’t excuse our actions, but I report the reason of them.”

  “I’ve yet to understand all Parsynan’s reasons,” Tristen said,

  “but at least by what I’ve seen, he built nothing. And I want the repairs made and no great amount spent, and no gold ornaments, and none of this. Yet they want to carve the doors, which is a great deal of expense, and more time, yet everyone, even the servants, say I should do it…while the villages want food. Is that good sense?”

  “Our duke shouldn’t have plain doors,” Crissand said, “and if he understands the plight of the villages and sees to it they have grain, there’s no man will complain about the duke’s doors.”

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  “I need troops to the riverside more,” Tristen said in a low voice, still discontent with the delays for wood-carving, more and more convinced he should never have been persuaded to agree to it at all. “Any door would do to shut out the cold. I need canvas, I need bows, and I need horses and food.”

  “To attack Elwynor, my lord?”

  “To keep the war out of Amefel. And the armory. There’s another difficulty. Parsynan did nothing to maintain it; Lord Heryn kept it badly; Cefwyn set it to rights, and when the master armorer left to go with the king, Parsynan set no one in charge of it, and there’s no agreement between the tally and what’s there. I brought a good man back with me, Cossun, master Peygan’s assistant, and he can’t find records there or in the archive.”

  “I fear there was theft,” Crissand said. “I even fear my men did some of it. But those weapons we have…” Crissand did not look at him when he added, “…even today. But Meiden wasn’t the only one to take weapons. The garrison made free of it, if my lord wants the truth. The Guelen Guard.”

  “Yet where are the weapons?”

  “Sold in the town, and pledged for drink, and such, in the taverns. The weapons are there, my lord, just not in the armory.

  Except if there was gold or silver, and that might have gone gods know where. To the purveyors of wine and ale and food, not to mention other things.”

  It was a revelation. So were many things, in this fortnight of his rule here. Everywhere he looked there was another manifestation of Parsynan’s flagrant misrule, another particular in which a self-serving man had stripped the town and the garrison of whatever value might have served the people of Amefel. The Guelens, lax in discipline under Parsynan’s rule, had 50 / C. J. CHERRYH

  seemed to view the Amefin armory as a place from which to take what they would—and knowing what he knew, yes, he could believe no officer had prevented it.

  “Did you hear that, Uwen?”

  “Aye,” Uwen said, soberly. “An’ I ain’t surprised if those weapons is scattered through town, an’ I ain’t surprised if a lot of legs has helped’em walk there, not just the Guelens.

  Metal’s metal, m’lord, an’ a good blade for a tanner or a wheelwright, that ain’t unlikely at all. Is it?” Uwen asked of the Meiden captain.

  The man agreed. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “And the archive?” Tristen asked Crissand.

  “A man who wanted to remove a deed or change one,”

  Crissand said, “could do that, for gold. That was always true.

  Which is as good as stealing, but in one case it was done twice, once by Lord Cuthan, and then by a lord I’ll not willingly name, my lord, changing it back, so it never went to trial, because the archivist was taking money from both, and the last won. So I’d not believe any record that came to the assizes, my lord, because any could be forged. Some lands have two deeds, both sworn and sealed, and only the neighbors know the truth. So it comes to the court, and so my lord will decide on justice.”

  He had not yet dealt with the question of contested lands, of which he knew there were several cases pending, and he found it even more daunting by what Crissand said.

  And now he knew at least two things he was sure Crissand had drawn him out here to say, and none of it favoring the Guelen Guard or the viceroy’s rule here. The lord viceroy was gone; but the Guelen captain was not, and since the war needed the Guelen troops, their usefulness presented him a dilemma, two necessities, one for troops, the other simply not to have theft proceeding, especially of equipment.

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  The province had mustered for the war, he began to understand, and the weapons had just not gone back to the armory: the town was armed, and had been so, and yet the young men had no great skill in using the weapons. Hence so many of them had died at Lewenbrook. He did not like what he heard, not of the treatment of the contents of the armory, not of the forgery of records.

  “They should not go on doing this,” Tristen said with firm intent. “They will not go on doing it.”

  “Your Guelen clerk has taken no bribes,” Crissand said. “An honest man in office has thrown certain lords into an embarrassing position: the last man to change a document may not be the right man, as everyone knows him to be, and there’s a fear the whole thing will come out. Trust none of Cuthan’s documents, and be careful of Azant’s, on my honor…he’s a good man, my lord, but he’s done what he had to do, to counter Cuthan’s meddling. He regrets it, and now he’s afraid.

  If Your Grace asked all of them to return the deeds to what they were under Lord Heryn, it might be a fair solution. I say so, knowing I’ll lose and Azant will gain by that, but I think it’s fair, and it would make Azant very happy with Your Grace.”

  He heard that. He heard a great many things of like import.

  “This is all Levey’s care,” Crissand said finally, as they came over a hill. Gray haze of apple trees showed against the snow, acres of them. “These are their orchards. But the hills about here are sheep pasture…good pasture, in summer. A prosperous village, if it hadn’t lost so many men. The spring’s not far now, my lord.”

  The snow had confounded all landmarks. He knew 52 / C. J. CHERRYH

  he had ridden past this place before, but it was all strange to his eye, and no villager had stirred, here…the snow ahead of them was pure, trackless, drifted up near the rough stone walls of the orchard.

  “Do you hunt, my lord?” The wind picked up, and Crissand pull
ed up the hood of his cloak. “There’s fine hunting in the woods eastward, past the orchards. Hare and fox.”

  “No,” Tristen said, flinching from the thought, the stain on the pure snow. “I prefer not.”

  None of your tallow candles, master Emuin had said. Nothing reeking of blood and slaughter. Nothing ever, if he had his way. He had seen blood enough for a lifetime.

  There was a small silence. Perhaps he had given too abrupt a refusal. Perhaps he had made Crissand ill at ease, wondering how his lord had taken offense.

  “Yet Cook must have something for the kitchens, mustn’t she?” Tristen said, attempting to mend it. “So some will hunt.

  I don’t prefer it for myself.”

  “What do you favor for sport, my lord?”

  He blinked at the shifting land above Gery’s ears and tried to imagine all the fair things that filled his idle hours, a question he had asked himself when he saw laughing young men throwing dice or otherwise amusing themselves, cherishing their hounds or hawks.

  Or courting young women. He was isolate and unused to fellowship. Haplessly, foolishly, he thought of his pigeons, and the fish sleeping in the pond in the garden, and of his horses, which he valued.

  Riding was something another young man might understand, of things that pleased him.

  “His Grace is apt to thinking,” Uwen said in his long silence.

  Uwen was wont to cover his lapses, especially when his lord had been foolish, or frightened people.

  “Forgive me,” Tristen said on his own behalf. “I FORTRESS OF OWLS / 53

  was wondering what I do favor. Riding, I think.” That was closest. So was reading, but it was rarely for pleasure, more often a quest after some troubling concept. “So long as the snow is no thicker than this, we might ride all about the hills and visit all the villages, might we not?”

  “Snow never comes deep before Wintertide, not in all my memory.”

  “And I had far rather wade through this than answer questions about the doors.”

  “As you are lord of Amefel you may have carved what you like, and do what you like. The people do love you. So do we all, my lord, all your loyal men.”