Fortress in the Eye of Time (3 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you know you were in danger?”

“No, master Mauryl. And I'm sorry you got wet.”

Mauryl shook at him. So it still wasn't the right answer.

“Boy.
Tristen
. Forget the cursed clothes. It's not the point. Fecklessness is the point. Putting yourself in danger is the point, boy. You're safe in here, inside. Whenever you're outside, you're not completely safe. Be careful. Watch your feet. Watch your head, don't forget what I've told you, and don't forget to think. Gods, every move, every breath, every foolish butterfly on the wind does not deserve your rapt attention!”

He remembered the butterfly. It was how he'd skinned his elbow on the stairs outside. He remembered everything, even the sting, and the tingle of Mauryl's fingers on his skin, and the way the sun lay on the stones when they were dry.

“Boy.” Mauryl's fingers popped against his cheek, lightly, startling him into seeing Mauryl again. Mauryl's eyes were black-centered. Mauryl's face was grim and bitterly unhappy. “I won't be here forever, boy. You can't look to me for all the answers, or to tell you what to do.”

“Why?” That was very unsettling to hear. It frightened him. “Where will you be?”

“I won't be
here
, boy. And you had better know what to do.”

“I don't know what to do!” He was trying to be straightforward with Mauryl, as Mauryl demanded. But he was
beginning to be scared, now. “How long will you be gone, sir? Where will you go?” He did not conceive a place outside this place. He couldn't think of one.

“Things
end
, boy. People go away.”

“No.” He caught at Mauryl's hands. “Don't go away, Mauryl.” He had never thought before that there was anywhere to go, or any other place to look down from, at the woods, or up from, at the sun and the clouds. But there must, then, be other places. “I'll go, too.”

“Not by my choice,” Mauryl said. “Not now. And if you're good, if you think hard, if you study—maybe I won't have to go at all. I could be wrong. I might stay after all. If you're very, very good. If you study.”

“I will study.” He snatched at Mauryl's hands. “I will. I'll try not to make mistakes.”

“Do you know, boy, that your mistakes could open the keep to the Shadows, that you could leave a door unlatched, that you could be outside enjoying the breeze and the rain, and do something so utterly foolish by your inattention to the hour, that they could get
you
while you're outside,—and then what could I do, can you say? I had to come out in the rain just now to get you, foolish lad, and what if it were something worse than rain, what if it only
looked
good and
felt
good to touch, and what if it only felt good for the moment, boy, eh? What if it opened the doors and opened the windows and left you nowhere to run, then what would you do? Can you answer me that?”

“I don't know, Mauryl!”

Mauryl freed his own hands and captured his instead. “Well, you'd do well to figure it out before you do something so foolish, wouldn't you, boy?”

“I want to! I want to, Mauryl!”

“Wanting to won't be enough. Trying won't be enough. After it's got you is far too late.
Before
is the only time you own, lad, the only
before
you can trust is
now
, and you don't even know how long before is, do you, foolish boy?”

“No.” He thought that Mauryl was telling him his answer,
maybe the very means to assure that he would never go away, but he could by no desperate reach of his wits comprehend what Mauryl was saying. “I don't know, Mauryl. I want to know, but I'm a fool. I don't understand anything!”

Mauryl bumped his chin with his finger, and made him look up.

“Then until you do understand, pay very close attention to doors and windows. Don't do stupid things on the parapets. Don't risk your safety. Don't go out in storms, don't let the sun sneak behind the walls when you're not paying attention.”

“I won't, Mauryl!”

“Go practice your letters while the storm lasts. Read and write. These are useful things.” Mauryl stood up and rummaged among parchments on the table, sending several off onto the dusty floor, along with a tin plate and a dirty spoon. Tristen dived down and rescued them, and put them up on the table again; but three and four more hit the floor immediately after, and Mauryl caught his sleeve, compelling his attention to a small codex Mauryl had pulled from among the parchments. Mauryl pressed it into his hands and folded his fingers over the aged leather.

“Here is the answer, boy. Here is your answer to all your questions. Here is the way. Learn it. Study it. Become wise.”

Tristen opened the book to its center. Its pages were thick with copywork, a bold and heavy hand that was not at all like the writing on the parchments Mauryl trampled underfoot, not written in the delicate, rapid letters Mauryl used.

Someone else copied this, Tristen thought, and although that ‘someone else' was not the thunderstroke of a Word, it was a thought he had never framed in his mind, a thought that there could be someone else, or anyone else, now, or ever.

But there had been. There were, in the same way there were, Mauryl hinted, other places. There must be other someones.

There must be, in those other places, as naturally as there must be a sun over those places and a wind to rattle their shutters, someone like Mauryl and someone like himself.
There was more than one dove, was there not, that lived in the loft?

There was more than one mouse in the lower hall. There were at least six, that Mauryl called sneaking little thieves, and yet put out bits of bread for them, because Mauryl said they were old, too, and moving more slowly now than they had.

So things had greater numbers than one, and mice grew old, and doves flew out over the woods Mauryl said to fear—and yet came back safe to their roosts in the loft, which had no shutters to bolt. There were many, many of them.

And someone other than Mauryl had written the copywork in this book, using straight, black letters that crossed the page in rigid dark masses, when Mauryl's flowed like the tracks of mice across the dust.

“Boy!”

He had walked straight ahead, thinking of the precious book in his hand, not the stairs before him. He had forgotten, first of lessons, the single step down. He caught himself, at Mauryl's voice, and made the little step safely, feeling shame burn in his face as he looked back.

Mauryl shook his head, out of patience with a fool.

So, shamefaced, he took his little book down to the table where the wall sconces were. He took the waxed straw from the holder and carried fire from the watch-candle, which was his task to renew every night and every morning, and lit the three candles.

Candles don't come like dewdrops, Mauryl had said, when once he left the drafty kitchen door open and the watch-candle had burned out. Mauryl had been out of sorts and had him light his straw instead off the embers in the hearth, which ate up half the straw at once, Mauryl grumbling all the while about fools leaving doors unlatched, and saying candles were hard come by, and they should be burning knots of straw by winter if his husbandry was so profligate.

Winter was a Word, howling white and bitter cold. Straw was a little one, yellow and dusty and hot. Dewdrops he
knew from spiderwebs on the shutters, and the old keep had many spiders.

But where did candles come from, that they were at once so scarce, and yet vanished every handful of days for new ones to fill their holders?

They were like the little book, written in another hand, evidence of something outside, and of things more than one. Once he began chasing that thought, it seemed clear to him that candles came from somewhere.

And where then did their clothes come from, when Mauryl said, Mauryl had said it just this morning, that it was one thing to conjure something to do what it would do anyway, and one thing to make things seem better than they were, and quite another, Mauryl had said disgustedly, to conjure a new shirt, which had to come of a good many herb bundles, and which he'd torn on a splinter in the loft.

Mauryl had taught him how to patch it, and made him do it many times until he made it right.

Mauryl gave him such an important thing as this book, on which Mauryl said everything rested, and he thought only about shirts and candles, his thoughts skittering about as they always did, chasing down so many, many steps and stairs of his imaginings, into all the rooms that were there, that only had other doors behind the ones he knew. He tried not to go wit-wandering. He tried not to think of questions.

He sat down at the study table, in the old chair that was most comfortable, except for Mauryl's. He opened the book and smoothed flat the stiff pages. His own copywork, scattered all around him, was wearing the parchments down by layers in attempts at such orderly rows as this: he copied Mauryl's mouse-track writing and his fingers found ways to ink not only the parchment but himself, the quills, and other parchments. His quills threw ink into small spots he never suspected existed until he put his hand on them. He could write
Tristen
and keep it straight. But line after line, this marched straight and true, in masterful strokes of writing so heavy and dark it drew the eye straight to it and did not let it go.

This was wonderful in itself. Writing held Words, and one never knew when one might encounter such a powerful thing: writing like this was to fear, and hold carefully, and puzzle over, because some shapes were like Mauryl's writing and many had tails and straight, strong lines where Mauryl's had twists; and more had shapes he could not quite tell apart, or where one letter stopped and another began.

Certainly it was not Mauryl's writing.

Someone else's. Someone—of strong and straight strokes, lacking those whips and tails he'd thought were part of the letters, which he'd copied in his shaky attempts that turned the quill in wrong directions and spattered ink, or left a bead of ink that took sometimes a day to dry.

Another wizard? he asked himself. Mauryl said he was a wizard, and he, Tristen, was a boy, and that being a wizard, Mauryl knew what a boy needed to know.

Had he never heard what Mauryl had said? Not, The wizard; but, A wizard. Of course there was more than one of everything. Mauryl had always implied so. Mauryl had never told him there was only one.

Mauryl had said there were dangers and they came from outside. As the shadows did. And there was more than one of them. There were many more things in the world than one of each.

Mauryl spoke of this book as if it were a Word, filled with more and greater meanings than other books. This book was, Mauryl said, the source of what he needed. The Book itself might come from elsewhere and tell him what those other things were. Mauryl had said he need not go away if he could find the answers in this Book.

But try as he would to hook the letters together into words, puzzling out the strange ones, and trying them as this letter and that—he found not one word in it he could read.

 

The pigeons held the floor of the loft, and the doves held the highest rafters, up by the roof, in nooks the pigeons couldn't fit, living on different levels of the loft and filling it with their
soft voices. The loft was a wonderful, dusty place. Shingles covered part of it. Slates covered one wing. Thatch covered some of the holes, but the birds that stole the blackberries stole the straw for nests, which they tucked into inaccessible nooks along the other rafters, and squabbled and flapped their wings along the dusty boards when they both wanted the same place.

All the birds of whatever sort had learned that he brought crumbs. So had a furtive few mice, which dared the owl—oh, the owl!—that held sway in the west end of the loft. But an inside wall divided the two, and the owl, which ruled the sunset side alone and grumpy, seemed not to hunt among the mice and the pigeons on this side, although, Mauryl said, owls ate mice.

That seemed cruel.

But the owl would take nothing that he brought and was a sullen and retiring bird, solitary on his side. He wanted not, evidently, to be disturbed, and glared with angry yellow eyes at a boy's offerings, and let them lie. Mauryl said he slept by day and hunted by night, and he was probably angry, Tristen thought, at being waked.

The owl flew out among the shadows at night and came back safely to sleep in the loft. But that not one bird and not one mouse crossed into Owl's side, and that all the boards were bare of nests or straw, might tell a boy finally that Owl wanted no company.

It might tell a boy that Owl was, if not content, not a bird like the other birds, but rather a mover among the Shadows, and possibly a bird other birds feared. Perhaps, Tristen thought, Owl was
their
Shadow, and the reason they flew home at twilight to stay until the sunrise. Perhaps there was a Shadow that hunted wizards, and one that hunted boys, and one that wanted mice and birds, and he'd stumbled on its daytime sleeping place—he supposed that, like Owl, Shadows had to have them. But if Owl was one of the dreadful things, he thought he should be glad Owl only flared his wings and glared at him.

Perhaps up in the rafters were other Shadows asleep, and if he waked
them
, they'd pounce on him. But there were rules for Shadows, as he could guess, that by day they had to sleep, and if one forbore to rouse them, then they forbore to wake.

So he went no more to Owl's side. He told Mauryl that he thought the Shadows might sleep in the loft: Mauryl said the Shadows slept in all sorts of places, but certainly he should be out of the loft well before the sun set, and he should be careful up there, Mauryl said, because the boards were rotten with age, and he might fall straight through and break his neck.

Mauryl was always thinking of disasters. That was what wizards did, Tristen thought, and boys had to learn to read, so he took his Book there and sat in the sunlight.