“I am innocent!” the ealdorman in question cried, appalled and staring wildly around at the crowd.
He is lying, Tristen thought, but questions and answers of minor nature mattered very little to him until he might pass the gates and do Cefwyn’s bidding.
Then Uwen shouted out, “His Majesty has made His Grace the duke of Amefel! And he’s come to do justice and defend the righteous men of this province! The clerk has the proper decree! Shall he read it out?”
“Read it!” someone cried, and “Read it!” all the crowd echoed. “Read it, read it, read it!”
“Quiet for the clerk, then!” Uwen shouted, and the clerk who had ridden with them struggled with his reins and the unrolling of a heavy parchment, while people at the rear of the crowd were still calling for quiet.
The clerk cleared his throat and called for light, and someone brought a torch from a bracket and handed it to a guardsman on horseback, who held it aloft as a murmur began again in the back of the crowd.
“Read it!” Uwen said, with all trembling on the knife’s edge of the crowd’s patience, so read it the man did, beginning with:
“By the grace of the gods and the holy Quinalt…” and going on to: “I Cefwyn king do grant…” The order was set forth in the high court language, and precious few of the townsfolk understood
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the words, Tristen feared. But when the clerk came to the part that said, duke of Amefel, the crowd cheered. At each occurrence of the words duke of Amefel after that, the townsfolk cheered, and by the end of the reading, in the part that required the lord viceroy to turn over all documents, records, persons, and property of the province to His Grace the duke of Amefel, there was pandemonium in the adjacent streets.
“Fall back, fall back there!” Uwen cried, and rode a line which the people respected, clearing back from him. The banner-bearers followed him, visible to all the crowd, even those far behind, and with the torches and lanterns lighting them if nothing else.
“Guard!” Uwen ordered. “Fall in behind! Form a line!” Uwen gathered a number of the guard in a slow sweep back across the face of the crowd, pressing the crowd back with the presence of the horses, and, moving like a weaver’s shuttle, had the gate sealed off from the crowd while the crowd was still cheering and waving at the banners.
“M’lord,” Uwen said, and with a sweep of his arm indicated the way inside for all of them in the center of his circle: the lord viceroy, and the earls and thanes and ealdormen who had joined them. Well-done, Tristen thought, proud of Uwen, and with the same deliberate dispatch he led the way beneath the gate arch, under the portcullis, and into the stable-court of the Zeide.
“File in!” he heard Uwen shouting behind him, and in a series of orders none of which ever left the men at standstill, Uwen drew their guard in after them, until only five were left guarding the outside and holding the line. Then Uwen shouted, “Shut the outer gates!” and ordered the portcullis down after them, a great rattling and clamor of iron, as their last five men quickly rode
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in, and men in the gatehouse winched the gates shut. They had shut the crowd outside, had shepherded the nobles inside…and were themselves, with the viceroy, in possession of the stable-court of the Zeide—a crooked court with the stables and the grain sheds and a few pens on the left, the scullery yard, too, and then a broader area with a stairs going up to the torchlit landing and the western doors of the Zeide. These were barricaded and braced with timbers. So was the scullery door barricaded, as Tristen could see at the edge of the lanternlight.
So, to the south, was the wide double gate of the curtain wall that sealed them from the South Court, where they reported the rebels to be.
“Search the stables!” Tristen ordered.
“Yes, m’lord!” Uwen said, and gave those orders.
“The stables are ours, Your Grace,” the viceroy said, at his knee…Tristen did not look down to see the man, but by now he knew the voice.
“Nonetheless,” he said. He trusted nothing Uwen had not passed his eye over, and still scanned the yard for detail. “Does the earl hold the scullery and the lower hall, as well as the South Court?” It would need more men than they had at their disposal to hold off attacks over all the citadel.
“Doubtful, Your Grace, but we have the water, the grain, the horses, and a gate. The kitchen stores as well.”
“Well-done in that.” He judged it quiet enough to dismount and stepped down from Gery’s back, passing the reins to a dismounted guardsman. Immediately all the earls and thanes pressed close to him for reassurance and to urge their views on him. “Secure the scullery from inside,” he ordered the sergeant of the 314 / C. J. CHERRYH
guard. “Prepare to enter the halls. No harm to the servants!”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“We have the scullery fortified,” Lord Parsynan protested. “If Your Grace will wait till morning…”
“I have men arriving at the South Gate,” he said, “and the East.”
“How many men?”
“Fifty.”
“Each?”
“Together.”
“They cannot breach the gates.”
“Then we must open this one.” This with a glance to the South Courtyard.
“They have fortified it from the other side. Your Grace, the town cannot be trusted. You must not commit yourself to a battle here.”
“There will be no battle,” he said. What he proposed was far under that scale. “We will open the gates. sir.”
“These people will cut our throats!”
“Lies!” Earl Drumman cried. “We are with Your Grace! Open the gates! Let us bring in Amefin men!”
“Folly!” the viceroy said, with a disparaging wave of his arm.
“As good let in armed bandits!”
“We shall open that gate with the men we have,” Tristen said, with a shrug at the curtain wall that separated them from Earl Edwyll’s men. “And we shall open the South Gate.” That was the town-entry gate in the court where the earl’s men were.
“Then Amefin men can come in.”
“Your Grace,” the viceroy protested.
“Your Grace!” the earls began to shout all together, but he had no interest at the moment in their argument FORTRESS OF EAGLES / 315
with the viceroy. The scullery was unbarred, the sergeant he had sent was about to take men into the fortress itself, and he strode in that direction and shouted further orders.
“Four men to hold the scullery stairs!”
“Aye, Your Grace!” the sergeant shouted back, and the men went in, quickly.
“Stable’s ours, m’lord.” Uwen reported. He had come back afoot and out of breath.
“The scullery is open,” Tristen said, “and we will have those stairs inside.” He envisioned going up that familiar scullery stairway and seeking out the earl in the interior of the Zeide, but for that feeling of opposition he had had a few moments ago. Unease still nagged at him.
And he did not know why he felt uneasy with that western route into the building. But, direct as it was and offering an attack on the enemy’s flank, he would not take it.
“Bring axes,” Tristen ordered, and nodded toward the curtain wall that divided them from the South Court. “We will have open that gate. Then we will talk to the earl.”
“You cannot talk to the earl!” Lord Parsynan said. “And I beg Your Grace trust only his Guelen troops and not open the South and East Gates to let in even your own men. Twenty-five men on a side is folly! They can never hold the rabble; the entire town will pour in behind them and loot the place if they do nothing worse! Listen to me, Your Grace! If we must move, take the upper floors, the high windows. The courtyard is open from above. Assault from the secure position! Rain archery down from the windows!”
“It would kill very many and ruin the windows, sir.”
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“Ruin the windows, good lack!”
/> “I would not ruin the windows. No, if your lord-ship please.”
“Your Grace, listen to me!”
“I do listen, sir. But the South Courtyard also has very many places not in view of the windows, where arrows will not reach.
If we had enough men, we might take the fortress halls, but we have not.—Uwen, shout it over at the earl’s men to open the gates and come swear loyalty to me. They should have the chance before we open them by force.”
“They are traitors!” Parsynan said. “There is no pardon!”
“Uwen,” he said, and Uwen left him in haste to follow his orders.
“The man laid hands on a king’s herald!” Parsynan cried.
“No, Your Grace! Death is the penalty, and Edwyll well knows it. So do all these men! Your Grace cannot pardon these men.”
“They were not wicked men,” he said, fixing Parsynan with a stare, and heard in the distance Uwen’s shouting near the gate. He knew in his heart the viceroy had the right of the law in ways he had lately understood in Guelessar…but when had old men grown so desperate in Amefel as to make such a useless gesture, taking the citadel of Henas’amef, or half of it, as if the king or the king’s men would not come to take it back? He said, defending the earl he had known, however distantly:
“They were not rebels, sir, until these few days.”
“Yet does he answer you?” Parsynan asked. “Does he open the gate? No, nor will. They are all in collusion. I beg Your Grace trust none of them and by no means open the outer gates!”
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“We are loyal men!” Earl Drumman said. “We were always loyal men!”
“Your Grace,” Lord Parsynan said sternly, “you cannot pardon treason.”
“Your lordships,” he heard at his left, and a breathless Guelen guardsman pointed to the building. “Our men is up there, engaged. The earl’s trying to come into the west wing by the upstairs and attack our men with axes.”
And from his right, Uwen: “M’lord, the earl’s men shout through the gate that they’ll carry word to the earl. I don’t hear
’em rushin’ to open up on the other side. And they’re still shootin’ across the wall. They just ain’t hearin’ ye.”
“Let us bring down the gate,” he said. And to Lord Parsynan:
“Sir, your men to the fortress hall. Keep it open, sir. That is essential.”
“Your Grace, prudence would suggest—”
“They are breaking through the fortress halls, sir, at this moment. I suggest you take your men there as you suggested and try to come through the halls. I’ll meet you at the south doors, inside.” He strode off in some haste toward the curtain wall, sweeping Uwen with him as Parsynan shouted protests at his orders, and then cursed his own men, bidding them rally to the kitchen stairs.
Uwen snagged a man by the arm to give quick orders. The man left running as an arrow hit the pavings and almost clipped his heels.
It was not the only arrow to fall. It was all blind fire coming from the other side of the wall, uncaring what it hit—a hazard primarily to men trying to open the gate. But if he could breach the South Courtyard, he could let in Captain Anwyll to assist him, and the
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South Courtyard doors to the Zeide itself would give them command of the center stairs, where all halls met inside. That was where he had told Lord Parsynan to meet him…and if they did not hold that intersection of stairs and prevent movement between the two wings, they would see bloody battle rage in the three floors of the palace.
More, while the viceroy had possession of all the water, the earl had the smithy and its hammers and bars, as well as the armory. That meant the earl’s men in the South Court had no shortage of weapons or arrows, as well as materials with which to bar doors against them, and if he could not press them hard from this side, and soon, they might end by having to besiege the south doors and break door by door into every connected chamber and corridor in that end of the Zeide, including the new great hall, where arrows might again be a fear. It would be folly to seek a battle in that crowded, many-staired interior, and fighting would likely be largely in the dark.
More, he did not want to bring harm and death into the place from which he would command the Amefin, and he felt, as strongly as if it were Unfolded to him, that the courtyard was the path they had to take, there, under the safe and open sky, not inside. He led men already on the verge of exhaustion, and if the pace slowed overmuch and their bodies chilled and their spirits began to flag, then the strength would run out of them like water.
“There are hammers and nails in the farrier’s shed,” he said to Uwen. “The hinges are on their side of the doors. Get ladders, if you can find them—timbers, else. Haste!”
“We’ll do our best, m’lord.” Uwen sent the nearest FORTRESS OF EAGLES / 319
men running and Tristen stared in frustration at the wall and gate that separated them from the South Court. Axes had scarred the center of that gate already, clearly to no avail. The town outside the fortress walls might join them in force if he let them in, but they presented a hazard to the citadel and the lives of the king’s men, with officerless men joining the fray, and with unskilled, unarmored townsfolk pitted against a lord’s armed men. They already risked riot having townsmen behind Guelenfolk at the South and the East Gates, Parsynan was not far from the truth, and he only hoped Anwyll had gotten through unscathed. He did not delude himself the mob would remain peaceful once blood was shed…and at this moment all their affairs and the town’s safety seemed balanced precariously on a knife’s edge, with three of the loyal earls trailing perilously after him, and not so much as a shield among them.
“Protect yourselves!” he shouted at them. “Go back to the stables!” And just then a spent arrow struck Lord Drumman a glancing blow in the shoulder. “Get back!”
He could not delay himself further. An ambitious old man, ill prepared, had launched the rebellion for what might seem foolish reasons, but whoever commanded the rebel forces was no fool, and had no shyness at all to seize the best hold on the Zeide itself he could obtain and to harry them with a constant rain of arrows. That told him the mettle of the man in charge, and if he let that officer have room, he feared a rapidly moving attack chasing through the citadel and into an archer’s warfare in the great hall or in the garden and the East Court. Deaths of Guelenfolk or of Amefin could not serve him, a slaughter pressed on
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him, he suspected, half at least by Lord Parsynan.
But that might happen, it might well happen, the earl having set himself in an impossible position with the king’s authority.
There had already been disrespect of the king’s messenger, at very least.
And he had to ask himself how long the other earls, those now at his back, would bear Parsynan’s insults. Right now they were supporting a Guelen force in their town, and that was unprecedented. But Amefin pride had bent as far as it could bend.
Meanwhile the thump of unavailing axes alternated with that of hammers attempting the hinges and fittings of the gates—and time they spent at that task gave that rebel officer a chance to lay ambushes, and time wore down his travel-weary men, who had begun to stand about in dazed uncertainty. They had to move.
The stable grain stores, he said to himself, and went running, a lord’s dignity to the wind. He seized a number of soldiers from the number watching the axemen and brought them along to the stable.
“Open the door of the shed!” he cried. “Go into the stables!
Gather up sacks, barrels, whatever you can lay hands on, and bring them to the wall! Pile them as high as you can!”
They set to, and by the time the shed door was open, Uwen joined him. So did Lusin, Syllan, and his other guards, the banners set by, their hands freed for work as they all, even he, began a rapid conveyance of sacks and planks from the stable yard to the south wall.
“Bring ’em!” Uwen shouted at any man they met
, and as exhausted men stared at their piling sacks and barrels below the wall they took the idea and brought anything they could set hand to.
More sacks arrived, a steady stream of stored grain FORTRESS OF EAGLES / 321
carried to the heap through the hazard of arrows, making a small mountain reinforced by poles from the horse run and the barrow they used for manure. A man went down, an arrow through his arm, his sack spilled, and they carried him away to safety, and carried his sack to the pile. In wild cheerful invention the frustrated Guard began bringing tables and gear from the kitchens, then small barrels from some other place.
They heaved a half-constructed ladder up to men atop and near the crest of the wall. The two men who reached the top of the wall shouted for more sacks, more sacks, and as men passed them up, gathering them from scattered elements at the base of the pile, they flung them down on the other side, a steady stream of them, affording a route to the top for more than one man at a time, and a landing on the other side.
Well-done, Tristen thought, seeing his way clear. Encumbered though he was by shield and sword, he climbed up the pile among the Guard passing up the sacks, with the men calling out both first an encouragement and then realizing in dismay that they were being left behind.
He heard Uwen shout that he was coming, as with an elbow atop the narrow wall he had a view of the armory, the smithy, and the earl’s men rushing from the South Gate to the defense of the wall in sudden realization that the assault was on them sooner than expected and that the arrows that struck and shattered there were not enough. The lighter-equipped men who had been flinging down sacks jumped with no more than swords in hand as Tristen heaved himself up to the crest with a thump of the hindering shield. He rolled over the jagged masonry rim and plummeted down to the steep hill of the grain sacks below, leaned back and slid down
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