them to the first brace of his foot and the oncoming assault of the earl’s men. More of his men were landing behind him, one sliding into his back as he braced himself halfway to his feet, trying to deploy his shield for cover to the men by him. Tristen thrust his shield right against the faces of men coming at him in desperate defense. One he flung back with a shove of the shield alone and the man beside him engaged that one; the other won the edge of his sword. For a moment he and two light-armed men were battling a knot of enemy alone, and then Uwen turned up beside him, shield up, sword advanced. Other men came thumping down among the sacks, arraying themselves to shield new arrivals in greater and greater numbers.
They pressed forward from the grain sacks, pushed the enemy that had rushed toward them now into a ragged and increasingly disordered retreat. An officer across the yard tried to rally his forces to oppose what was still a small force, but the earl’s men had obstructed their archers, and the hindmost who had rushed up to the attack began immediately not only to give ground, but to run.
“Open the gate!” Tristen shouted at any man who could hear.
“Open the gate behind us!”
He thought someone had gone. He led his men forward, across the cobbled South Courtyard into the sporadic fire of archers, at all the speed they could muster. Resistance to their advance collapsed as the last men they pursued ran past the thin ranks of the archers and left them undefended.
Then, officers’ shouts notwithstanding, and with a last, sporadic volley of arrows, the shadows of the yard gave up more and more bowmen who otherwise would have remained concealed, archers joining their sword
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and-shield men in retreat until nigh on two hundred men were in sporadic, uncertain rout, giving ground across the yard, past the corner of the building and across its face, running until the rebels’ right flank was against the broad South Stairs and their left was toward the South Gate, all of it so fast-moving that their archers had found no place to stand.
Tristen forged ahead, giving the rebels no space to breathe.
At the rebels’ backs was a second curtain wall, the east, its small single gate shut. But the fortress itself offered nearer refuge to men hard-pressed, and the rebel earl’s men pushed and shoved one another atop the South Stairs as they opened the doors to the interior, and men poured in, seeking shelter in the Zeide’s inner halls and the warren of stairs and corridors inside.
He had far rather the retreat had gone to the east, farthermost small gate of the South Court. He had left them that retreat in hope of their fleeing through the second of the two curtain-wall gates into the East Court. But the rebel officer was drawing his men into a warren of stairs and rooms, where traps might be prepared and where he might have something in mind.
But king’s men held the South Court and the West, undisputed.
“Open the all the gates! Open the South and the East Gates!”
Tristen pointed with his sword for the sake of the Guelenmen, some of whom did not know the East Gate from the one at their backs. “Let Captain Anwyll in by the South! And open up the East!”
“Get both the gates, lads! Go let in Cossell!” Uwen relayed the order in terms the men knew in a voice that echoed off the walls, as their band engaged the last escaping earl’s men on the lower tiers of the South Stairs, the scene of processionals and ceremonies.
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“Forward!” Tristen shouted, and kept pressing up the steps as the rebels inside heaved at the great doors to shut them at the backs of their own hindmost men. Resistance collapsed, men went down, and the last few to reach the other side of the doors tried to push them shut in their faces, but Tristen hewed at the defenders with all his might through the narrowing gap, and Uwen pushed, and more of their men pressed forward and added their weight. The doors gave back and back until courage failed the rebels and the doors gave in a sudden lack of force behind them. They forced jammed doors the rest of the way open, shoving bodies before them and treading over dead and wounded as they reached the dark hall, seeking the enemy.
Then men poured in at their flank, out of the dark. “King’s men!” Tristen shouted, and “King’s men!” the shout went up on either side, Guelenmen narrowly evading each others’ mistaken attack as the viceroy’s force came in from the west wing to join theirs.
“They’ve gone east!” he heard Uwen shout. “M’lord, rebels is to the Temple court!”
“Dragons with me!” Tristen shouted, and turned his own men toward the deep dark, past the junction of stairs, chasing the distant noise of retreat in a thunderous advance of their own, all the way past what must be the great hall. The retreat echoed differently then, and his ears told him the rebels had reached the end of the hall and the downward stairs to the East Court. “Shields!” he shouted, as they came rushing up. “Stairs to the right!”
Men met them out of the blind dark, rear guard for the men on the stairs, and for a brief, sharp encounter everything was blind, men striking at men they could not see, pushing resisting men down steps and against
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the upward push of bodies. Tristen struck few blows himself, pushed with his shield, hit with the flat of his blade, his footing unsteady on unseen steps and fallen men entangling the feet of the living. The halls and stairwell rang with shouts and the clash of arms, and the battle anger was so close, so very close he dared not charge headlong. He pushed as much as fought, used his shield, forced the rebels down the narrow stairs to the door he knew was there. He heard Uwen’s voice. He heard the rebels shouting, “Lord Sihhë!” this time in panic, men pressing ahead at the last by sheer weight.
The earl’s men tried to stand. There was no room. Then a seam of night sky broke behind the heads of the defenders, and widened, as someone opened the east door. A few escaped outward, and now the battle choked into another panic as men jammed the doors to the outside in utter disorder.
Men with more presence of mind tried to rally once more through and shut that door against Tristen’s force, a door which Tristen was equally determined should stand open. He battered them with his shield, pressed back, trampled on the fallen, a moment of extreme peril, and the door, by reason of men fallen in the gap, could not shut again. He reached the open air of the steps, facing the shrines, and a knot of rebels who had run headlong against a fatal wall of Dragon Guard waiting for them, a grim line with shields locked.
Anwyll and Cossell had both come in.
The hammering din of battle and the shouts of armed men spreading out from the doors behind him fell away to a growing, knife-edged silence. A band of maybe sixscore rebels was left standing, half as many more wounded huddled at their feet. He had no doubt that some of the earl’s men had disappeared inside, to 326 / C. J. CHERRYH
lose themselves in the halls. The columned shrines and tombs that towered up on either hand of this small courtyard might have sheltered the rebels: the Bryaltine, the Quinaltine, the Teranthine shrines, next the crypts of holy men and Aswyddim were a maze of narrow aisles. The roofs of the fortress itself might have been to fear, but no attack had come from that direction.
And Cossell had shut the gate again at his back, keeping that way barred from all comers. That wall of Dragon Guard shields was absolute and unyielding.
The silence grew as even smaller movements stopped, throughout, attackers and defenders alike.
C H A P T E R 6
Where is Earl Edwyll?” Tristen asked the earl’s men from atop the steps. His voice echoed in the quiet of the yard, and he looked on men who could do nothing other than what their lord bade them. He settled no blame there. He was, among other matters, anxious to see the officer who had managed the defense, who, if he had had battle-hardened men, would have made matters far worse than he had. “Who stands for these men?”
There was some little hesitation, and then swords slanted down disconsolately. But one young man grounded his shield forward of the others, took off his helm
one-handed and cast him a defiant look. “Crissand Adiran, thane of Tas Aden, son of Edwyll son of Crissand, son of Edwylls before there ever were Aswyddim in Henas’amef! I stand for my father’s men, of the house of Meiden!”
A strange feeling went through Tristen’s heart then, as if he had heard a spell uttered in the words, in the names, in the Unfolding of a history he might, at some time, in a life before this life, have known, in the titles of a young man who had for a time stood successfully against him.
“And why do you oppose me?” he asked this defiant young man. And that, too, he seemed to remember saying.
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There was quiet, in which the flame of torches thumped and a step grated on stone, and men on every hand, fresh from their exertions and in danger still, breathed deep and hard.
“For justice,” the young thane said. “For justice!”
He said then the third thing it seemed he had once said:
“And do you think I shall not be a just lord?”
Again the silence, in which a man of his own company coughed, a dry, exhausted sound, as of a man who had been running. From the South Court was a distant tumult that sounded as if the townsfolk might be at the gates, no further.
Here the young thane faced him in stony silence.
“What would you say justice should be?” Tristen asked in that hush.
“Pardon for them,” the young thane said, with a haughty nod toward the men behind him. But an older man moved forward then, with a clatter of metal and a heavy step. “No, m’lord,”
the man said, “none of that for me. I stand with my lord the earl and with my lord’s son.”
Tristen thought of Uwen, seeing that man, a soldier, who would not leave the earl’s son to save his life. Other men moved then, four of them, the earl’s men, standing with the young man, defying him and his offer of justice. In the same moment and with no animosity at all, Uwen moved a little closer to him, and had his shield up and his sword ready for any attack.
Another man joined the five, and then another, all expecting to die, Tristen thought, and every man in the lot surely yearning to join them, and every man else in the courtyard either glad he had no such choice to make or envying the courage they saw.
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“I pardon you,” Tristen said. “I pardon you all.”
“M’lord,” Uwen said under his breath, “don’t let ’em free, not that easy.”
“And I forgive the earl, if he will swear to me.” He knew it set him against the viceroy’s opinion, and perhaps against the law, but he had no desire to harm such men as the young thane and the men who defended him. “And provided he has not harmed the king’s messenger.”
“We have the king’s herald a prisoner,” the young thane said, with this time a small tremor in his voice and a fear in his eyes…or it was the uncertain torchlight and the bitter wind.
“We have not harmed him. And I will wait to see what this promise is worth.”
“This is a dangerous young man.” It was Anwyll who stood just behind: Tristen knew the voice. “Lewen’s-son’s advice is also the law. Do not release these men, Your Grace. You must not.”
“I have already given my promise,” Tristen said. “And the king will regard it.”
Again a silence, and slowly the young man let down his sword, as he had already let down the shield.
“What my father wills,” Crissand said. “That I will, with my men, so you keep your word, sir.”
“Where is your father?”
Crissand cast a glance up the height of the Zeide itself, and that seemed his answer.
“Have them all lay down their weapons, Your Grace,” Anwyll said. “I beg you don’t offer any more assurances.”
He had no need of Anwyll’s advice at the moment. He wished Anwyll silent, but:
“Do as he asks,” Crissand said to his men, and 330 / C. J. CHERRYH
slowly the ranks came and cast down their weapons, a clang of iron and a thump of shields cast one onto the other. Crissand added his own, among the last.
“Lusin,” Uwen said quietly, “His Grace will have that young man handled wi’ due respect, and the seven of them”—Uwen surely meant the men who had joined the thane—“under special guard. —Ye’re on m’lord’s word, young lord. Ye come up here.”
The seven were not willing, but the young man cast a forbidding glance and went of his own accord as far as the steps.
“Your lordship,” Crissand said. “I rest on your word, I and the men with me, and my father, sir, I ask that.”
“And where is the king’s messenger?”
“In the Aswydds’ apartment. With my father.”
To have taken that set of rooms was entirely understandable in a man who claimed the Aswydds’ place and titles. It was equally within Tristen’s understanding that he could not permit that situation to go on, whether or not it mattered a whit to him: it mattered greatly to Cefwyn and it certainly mattered to the Amefin earls. Edwyll was the nearest kin to the Aswydds Cefwyn had allowed to remain in Henas’amef when he exiled Lady Orien and her sister, and that mercy was now repaid by a gesture every Amefin understood. More, removing the earl with any force would entail damage that itself was significant to the Amefin.
And removing him even by persuasion and the good offices of the man’s son would entail going into that place and claiming it for the night, when he had as lief camp in the courtyard tonight, or sleep in the stables, rather than that cursed premises.
He wished he
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had a choice, and he wanted nothing more now than to sit down where he stood.
“Let him come out with no harm and we will settle all the rest by daylight.”
“I will go up and try to persuade him, by your leave,” the young thane said, much as if it were something he had tried before, even many times, to no avail, and so saying, Crissand looked suddenly overwhelmed, more than he had when faced with weapons. “Or my father’s men might, where I cannot. Let them speak to him, sir, on your good word.”
The men Crissand proposed were the seven men Uwen had ordered under special guard, he well guessed. And they were not the men he would set free with the earl in reach.
But he had promised, and no good came of breaking his word at the outset.
“You will try. Come with me. We shall both try. Bring a torch.”
“Your Grace,” Anwyll began as he reached the uppermost step, and he found himself very weary of hearing those words in that tone of voice. “Your Grace,” Anwyll persisted. “These men have no pardon. I must urge your lordship—”
“Am I duke of Amefel?” he asked shortly, “And did not Lord Heryn do as he pleased in his own hall?”
“Far too much,” Anwyll said on a breath. “And died for it, Your Grace.”
He knew that it was heart-sent advice. Anwyll had done nothing amiss and a great deal right, and faced him with dogged courage and no ill will.
“I hear all you say,” he said, the two of them paused, he on the upper step. “And I take it much to heart, sir. But I will pardon them, all the same. Take
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them and these other men under guard and under my protection and hold them some safe place elsewhere. How does it stand in the South Court?”
“The gates are shut,” Anwyll said. “The town has turned out in the street, Your Grace, with knives and staves, all shouting for your lordship, but we dare not let the mob in.”
He could hear the uproar past the throbbing in his ears—heard it now beginning beyond the East Gate, in that blind and little-used street that tucked up between storehouses and Zeide defenses. The aid the town offered was dangerous, and he needed none of it now.
But the town also had need of reassurances. He strode down the steps, his personal guard hastening to overtake him, and went past the heap of weapons, into the columned end of the courtyard. At the gatehouse and its first defen
ses, three of Cossell’s men had stayed and gotten the oaken gate shut again.
“Open the inner gate,” he said, and they raised the bar and dragged the oak doors back.
Townspeople pressed at the bars beyond the portcullis, a mob with the hazard of torches, and bearing all manner of weapons. But seeing him, they began to shout, “Lord Sihhë!”
He lifted his sword, and gained a silence enough to speak.
“The earl’s men have surrendered and I have taken them under my protection—do no harm! Hear me! Do no harm! Tell it through the town!”
“Lord Sihhë!” the answer came in jubilation—and he walked back through the East Court as he had come, leaving the gates open for the crowd to witness through the bars whatever might befall here.
“Take these men to safekeeping,” he ordered FORTRESS OF EAGLES / 333
Anwyll regarding the prisoners. “Uwen! Bring the thane with us. And bear a light inside. Five men with us, to persuade the earl to surrender and end this.”
“Lights,” Uwen called out as he climbed the steps and men opened the doors into darkness. “Light, there, on the duke’s order!”
Then: “Bring a light here!” he heard soldiers echo inside, up the short stairs and down the hall.
He went in, up dark and bloody steps, past moaning wounded, with men treading cautiously beside him, until he reached the level of the main hall and a crazily spreading firelight along the ceiling. From the far other end of the corridor a man came carrying a torch.
Illumination flared erratically along a hallway littered with wounded and dead, shone on polished floors, on ornate carvings. “Light the hall!” he heard men still shouting to the farthest doors as they trod a crooked course among the dead.
The light-bearer reached them, then guided them to the center of the building.
“Come with us,” Tristen said to the man with the torch, and started up the left-hand stairs, with Uwen, with his guards, with Crissand. He had his shield, and Uwen carried his own, but his guards, who had had the banners, had their hands unencumbered, and Sergeant Gedd took the idea to snatch a stub of a candle from its holder and borrow fire from the torchbearer. Then Gedd went ahead, enterprisingly setting light to at least one candle in every sconce, all the way to the upper floor, making the steps more visible, bringing a wan, ordinary light to the heart of the Zeide.