Кэролайн Черри - Fortress in the Eye of Time

“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.