Fortress in the Eye of Time

CHAPTER 5

He could see Mauryl in the silver reflection, standing behind his shoulder. Mauryl waited, expecting him to cut himself, Tristen was well certain—believing he would cut himself. Mauryl had warned him the blade was sharp and showed him how to hold it.

He might grow a beard, Mauryl said, except Mauryl said that beards were for priests and wizards, that he was neither, and that, besides, it would not suit him. So Mauryl had given him the very sharp blade, a whetstone and, the wonder of the occasion, a polished silver Mirror.

Of course, he thought. Of course, and knew that men could, after all, see their own faces. Mauryl had said magic was what wizards did, and the mirror was clearly a magical thing. Tristen made small grimaces at himself, sampled his expressions to see if they were what he thought, and most of all noticed his imperfections: for one, that his mouth sulked if he frowned, and for another that his eyes had no clear color — unlike Maurylʼs, which were murky blue.

But the beard Mauryl had set him to remove was only a few patchy spots, and a shadow of a mustache — that was the itching, and he agreed with Mauryl about having it off, seeing it looked in no wise like Maurylʼs, no more than his dark, unruly mop of hair looked like Maurylʼs silver mane.

There were virtues to his face, all the same, he thought, in such silver-glazed essence as the mirror showed him. It was a regular face, and he could make it pleasant. His skin was smooth where Maurylʼs was not. His mouth — the mustaches shaded Maurylʼs — seemed more full, his nose was indeed straight where Maurylʼs bent, his brows were dark as his hair, with which he was well acquainted, since it swung this side and that when he worked, and fell in his eyes when he read.

There were certainly worse faces among the images in the walls. Far worse. He supposed he should be glad. He supposed it was a good face.

He guided a last flick of the bronze knife.

“Mauryl, it stings.” There was a dark spot. He wiped it with his fingers and found blood.

“Now does it?”

He rubbed his chin a second time, feeling not the sting of the knife but the tingle of Maurylʼs cures.

“No,” he said, and washed his fingers and the knife in the pan, and looked again. His face seemed too…unexpressive. His hair was always in his way: Maurylʼs behaved; but if he had as much beard as Mauryl, with such dark hair, he would be all shadows.

And Mauryl was shining silver.

He was vaguely disappointed, not knowing why he should care…but he had made up a face for himself out of the shadow in the water barrel, and he found his real one both more vivid and less like Maurylʼs.

Maybe he should cut the hair, too, at least the part that fell in his eyes. But he doubted where, or with what effect.

“A clean face,” Mauryl said. And as he offered the knife back, with the whetstone: “A proper face. — No, keep them. I have no need. And you will have, hereafter.”

Mauryl had stopped talking lately about going away. But since the day Mauryl had threatened that, and given him the Book, every time he heard a hint of change, every time Mauryl talked about not needing this and not caring about that, no matter how small or foolish a matter, he felt a coldness settle on his heart.

He tried. He did try to read the writing Mauryl had said was his answer and their mutual deliverance from danger. But he made no gains. He had no swift answers, the way Maurylʼs writing came to him. It had been days and days with no understanding at all, beyond what few words he thought he read, and he began to doubt those.

Most of all, Mauryl seemed weary with no reason, simply weary and wearier as the days slipped by. Maurylʼs eyes showed it most, and often Mauryl turned away from an encounter as if he carried some besetting thought with him. There was no spirit, no liveliness. Mauryl seemed to lose his thoughts, and to wander away from him in indirection.

“I have no need,” Mauryl said, as if he had forgotten whether he had said that.

“Mauryl,” he said, stopping him in his course to the study table, “Mauryl, what have I done? Have I done something wrong?”

Mauryl regarded him for a moment as if he had thoughts far elsewhere, saying nothing. Then he seemed to reach some resolution, frowned, and said, “No, lad. No fault of yours.”

“Then what fault, master Mauryl?”

“A question,” Mauryl said. “A deep question. — Someday, perhaps sooner than I would wish, Tristen lad, you must make choices for yourself. You must go where you see to go. Do you hear? You should go where you see to go.”

It was by no means the answer he had looked for, none of this ‘sooner than I would wish,ʼ and ‘go where you see to go.ʼ It was not the way Mauryl had promised him.

“You said if I should read the Book, master Mauryl, you said you would stay.”

“Have you read the Book?” A sharp, fierce look of Maurylʼs eyes transfixed him. “Have you?”

“No,” he had to say. “I know the letters. I see the shapes. But they donʼt go together, master Mauryl.”

“Then itʼs very doubtful you can prevent my going, isnʼt it?”

“What am I supposed to do, master Mauryl? Tell me what I need to find. Tell me what I need to learn!”

“Something will occur to you. Youʼll know.”

“Mauryl, please!”

“Over some things in our lives we have no governance, Tristen lad. Magic works by a certain luck and sometimes it fails by lack of that luck. What we individually deserve isnʼt as much as what we collectively merit. Thatʼs a profound secret, which few understand. Most people believe they live alone. Thatʼs very wrong.”

“I donʼt understand. I donʼt understand, Mauryl. What people? Where are they?”

“They exist. Oh, thereʼs a wide world out there, Tristen. Thereʼs a before and a now and a yet to come. All this matters. But in order to know how it matters, one has to know — one has to know more than I can teach you. Tristen lad, you have to find for yourself.”

“Where? Where shall I look? If I found it, would you not go away?”

“Oh, I doubt that, Tristen lad.” Mauryl seemed disheartened and made less and less sense to him. “I should never have feared your Summoning. It was my failing, when I Shaped you. Doubt, I swear to you, is a foolʼs best ally, and a wise manʼs worst. The work of decades, and I flinched. But mending, such as I might, I have done. — And if I go away, doubt not at all: take the Road that offers itself.”

“But it goes south,” he said. “You said never go on the south side.”

“How do you know that it goes south?”

“Does it not?” It was the only Road he knew, a Word and a guilty secret that had troubled him ever since he had stepped up where he knew in his heart of hearts he was not supposed to venture. It was a Word that from that very moment had smelled of dust and danger and sadness. It was the way he thought Mauryl might go, if Mauryl made good his threat to leave.

Now he saw he had betrayed himself. He had thought because Mauryl had said what he had said that Mauryl might, after all, have meant him to discover it — but clearly not so, by Maurylʼs quick and thunderous frown.

“And where, young sir, have you known about this Road?”

“From the loft,” he said, shamefacedly.“ — But I didnʼt go on the parapet. I looked through the hole the storm made.”

“And said nothing of it to me?”

“I — saw it only once, Mauryl. I never looked again.”

Mauryl still frowned, but not so angrily. “And what else have you seen from this vantage?”

“Water. Woods. — Stones.”

“Ruins. Ruins of long ago. What more?”

“Mountains.” That Word tumbled onto his heart, when he remembered the horizon above the forest.

“Hills. The foothills of Ilenéluin, which stretch far up to the Shadow Hills in the north. There are far greater mountains in the world. — What more have you found, in this escapade?”

“The sky. The clouds. Only that.”

For a moment Mauryl stood with his arms folded, still seeming angry. “Names are power over a thing, for a wizard or for a man. This fortress has a name: Ynefel. The forest is Marna. A river lies between the walls of Ynefel and Marna Wood and it winds beyond Marna Wood again: Lenúalim is the river. These are their names. Do you take all of that, Tristen?”

They were not names. They were each of them Words — Words that came to him with dark, and cold, and terror; with trees and branches and depth and cold. They were Words that carried the world wider than he could see, and full of threats he did not guess, and animals and birds and creatures far more terrible than Owl.

Ilenéluin: stone and storm and ice.

Lenúalim: secrets and division, and dreadful dark.

Ynefel —

He wanted not to know. He saw the stones around him, that was all, a place of rickety stairs and balconies spiraling up a stone-walled height, stone faces staring at them, stone hands reaching and never escaping the walls.

“Some things happen against our wishes,” Mauryl said, “and some things we desired come in ways we would gladly refuse.” Mauryl laid his hand on his shoulder. Mauryl wanted his strict attention, and that frightened him more than all things else. “Tristen, there will come a day. Soon. You have all I could give you, all I could mend afterward. Beware of trust, boy, but most of all beware of doubt. Both are deadly to us.”

It was a stifling fear Mauryl laid on him. “I try to understand what you tell me, Mauryl. I do try.”

“Go to your studies. Go find your Book. Itʼs upstairs, is it not?”

“Yes. But—” He became convinced of secrets, of some deception Mauryl played at his expense. He knew his questions wearied Mauryl and his mistakes vexed Mauryl, and his slowness was Maurylʼs despair. “Can you not help me a little, Mauryl, only a little? Show me just a word or two. Other things come to me without my even trying. This — that I most want to learn — I make no sense of it. It will not come.”

“It will. In its own time, it will. Magic is like that.” Maurylʼs fingers squeezed his arm. “Be clever. Be no fool, boy. Tristen. Go.”

He was disheartened at that. He took his gifts from Mauryl, the little mirror, the razor and the stone to sharpen it, he bowed politely, and went toward the stairs.

A sound rattled off the walls — a strangely muffled thunder that made him glance away to the study wall. Thunder, he thought. Rain would make the loft untenable. He would have to come downstairs to study, then, and perhaps, after all, Mauryl would take pity and give him at least a hint.

He laid his hand on the banister. And it was not thunder that made the banister tremble. He looked up in alarm as that rumbling came again.

“Go,” Mauryl said.

“Thereʼs a sound, Mauryl. What is it?”

“Go upstairs.”

“But—” He had almost protested it came from upstairs. But it came then from all about, and it rattled and thundered like nothing he had ever heard. Mauryl left him and stood staring toward the farther hall — it seemed to be coming from there, at the moment. It shook at the doors they never opened, never unbarred. It hammered. The thunder echoed through the stones.

“Mauryl!”

“Upstairs!” Mauryl slammed a heavy codex shut, and dust flew out in a cloud. “These are no threat to me. A petty nuisance. A triviality. — Get upstairs, I say!”

The hammering had become a steady, regular thumping. The huge book had overset the inkpot as Mauryl shut it, and a trail of ink ran over the table, snaked among the parchments, and dripped on the floor as Tristen wavered between saving the parchments and obeying Mauryl — but then Mauryl shouted at him a Word without a sound to his ears, and a stifling fear came over him, a fear that left him no thought but to do what Mauryl had told him, while the hammering and banging racketed through the lower hall and shook the walls and the wooden steps.

He ran up the stairs faster than he had ever climbed. He reached his own balcony and ran for his own room — flung open the door and shut it again, trembling as he leaned against it, thinking then, by Maurylʼs mastery of things, to have safety. But the hammering downstairs seemed to shake the wooden floor under his feet. The room felt dank and precarious — it smothered, it held him prisoner.

No safety, no hiding place, something said to him, and he felt a sense of peril so imminent he felt he had to have the door open again or suffocate. Mauryl had said no. Mauryl had said be here, but the thundering in the stone walls seemed to come from right below his window. He saw a crack run up the wall. To his horror he saw it advance rapidly along the mason-work and right up to the wooden frame of the horn-paned window itself — then around the latched side of the frame. The latch parted, the gap grown too wide, and white daylight came through.

He hardly knew what he was thinking, then, in that stifling terror, except of the Book, Maurylʼs Book, that Mauryl had said was what he had to know, and he had to have — he snatched it from the table and thrust it into his shirt and grasped the door latch.

But after that nothing could stay the panic. He fled the room, sped down the balcony as the wooden supports quaked to the hammering at the doors — up, Mauryl had said, go upstairs, and his room was not safe. He ran the stairs that spiraled up and up past Maurylʼs balcony, as the whole structure of the balconies creaked and groaned — he raced up into the high, mad reach of braces and timbers, and the narrow, low-ceilinged stairs that led into the shadow of the loft.

He could scarcely get his breath. He went to the boarded division of the loft, seeking a place sheltered from the holes and gaps in the shingles, a hidden place, a stable place. He clambered out under the eaves, guarding his head from the rafters, an arm braced against the dust-silked wood. Cobwebs, the work of determined spiders, tangled across his face and hair; he brushed them away, while all about him the fortress resounded to the hammering and the air tingled and rumbled.

Came a moaning, then, as if the entire fortress were in pain — and a rising babble, like rain dancing into the cistern, he thought, and crept further into his nook, tucked up with his arms about him. He shivered, as pigeons fluttered in alarm and more and more of them took wing out the gaps in the boards of the loft.

The babbling swelled, sounding now like voices, as if — as if, he thought, trying to reason in himself what it was — the whole fortress were full of people, all trying to be heard. The hammering had stopped, and began again, a sharp sound, now, ringing off the walls — the sound of an axe, he thought, and at first was bewildered, then knew, like a Word, that it was the doors that sound threatened.

Then — then the howling began, the same horrid sound that had frightened him from his bed — and if it was from inside, Mauryl must have called it, he said to himself. He felt it drawing at him. He felt Maurylʼs presence tingling in the air around him. Wind swept in and scoured the straw from the floor; wind ripped holes in the shingles that patched the slates; wind sent a blast of straw out of the nests in the peak of the roof. He ducked and covered his eyes, and finally — finally in desperation locked his arms over his head and squeezed his eyes shut against the gale.

The howling hurt his ears, dust choked him — there were voices upon voices, rumbling, deep ones, and shrill and piercing: the stone faces everywhere about the keep, openmouthed, might have come alive — stones might scream like that. He might have. He shook. He clenched his arms and legs up close, as the howling and the shrieking and the rumbling quivered through the boards.

The birds must have fled. They had wings. He had none. He could only stop his ears with his hands and endure it as long as he could.

Then the light he could perceive began to fade. He squinted through the wind, fearing if the sun was going it might never come back. A gust in that moment ripped planks loose from the facing, planks that fell and let in the howling of a stronger wind.

He recoiled and caught hold of a rafter, blinded by the flying straw and grit and dust. He felt the Book slip from his shirt, reached for it, saw, with tears running on his face, its pages whipped open by the wind. A crack opened in the floor, the dusty planks separating as the stones had parted in his room, and the gap spread beside the Book as the pages flipped wildly toward the opening. The Book began to go over—

He let go the beam to seize it, bending pages haphazardly with his fingers. He held it against him as the very timbers of the loft creaked and moaned in the blasts.

“Mauryl!” he cried, having reached the end of his courage. “Mauryl! Help me!”

But no answer came.

There was no more strength. Mice perished, poor surrogate victims, sorry vengeance for Galasien. Birds flew in the high reaches of the tower and battered themselves against the stone, falling senseless and dying to the floor far below….

The wind roared, and Mauryl shuddered at the chaos that poured through the rents in the walls.

— Gods, he murmured, gods, thou fool, Hasufin.

— The gods are gone, the Wind said. The first to flee us were all such gods as favored us, did you mark that, Gestaurien? But I may Summon thee back to my service. What do you think of that?

— Ludicrous, Mauryl said, and slipped, perilously so, toward the horror always thick about the fortress. The imprisoned spirits wailed, mindless in their despair, wailed and raveled in the winds, powerless now.

— So where is your Shaping, old Master? asked the Wind. Where is your defender, this champion of your poor crumbling hall? Cowering amongst the pigeons? Hiding from me?

— I thought you knew. Ask wiser questions. I wait to be astonished.

— Mock what you like. Banish me this time, old fool. Tell me this time whoʼs the greater.

— Time, Mauryl said, and drew a breath laden with dust. He cracked his staff against the stones, once, twice, three times, and the towers quaked, sifting down dust. Time is ripped loose, fool, it is undone: we exist, thou and I, only for what will be; we dream, you and I, we dream, but no hand have we on the world. All is done, Hasufin, all for us is past, and failed, our candle is out, and worms are the issue of our long contention. Have done, thou arrant, prating fool, and let it rest here.

The wind breathed in sudden hush between the gusts, sported about the courtyard, whirled among dead leaves that…for a moment…showed a dust-formed cloak and cowl.

— Destroy the Shaping, the man of dust said. Do that, my old mentor, and, aye, we might together sleep the sleep. Will that content thee? Come, take my hand, let us kiss like brothers. Destroy him. And we shall sleep in peace.

— Whoreson liar. Worms, I say, worms for your bed, Hasufin, thou braggart, thou frail, mistaken fool. I weary of the war.

— Lies for lies, thou lord of delusion.

The dust whipped away, stung the face, blinded the eyes. Mauryl flung it back, and Hasufin struck in kind.

The stones, the former inhabitants of Galasien, screamed with all their voices.

Chaos closed around. The thunder of the staff kept rolling, echoing, cracking stone.

Then came silence. Long silence.