Fortress in the Eye of Time by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online Page B

kitchen door in the morning.
    And when, after breakfast and morning chores, he went up to the loft with his Book and a napkin of crumbs—he opened the door and saw shafts of sunlight where no sunlight had been before. It was bright and beautiful. Pigeons and doves and sparrows were flying in and out of the openings.
    But he saw the sodden straw and knew the storm had blown rain through the sheltered places. The little birds were all fledged and flying, but it had been a hard night for the nests.
    And, worse, a glance toward the other wall showed a board down between the pigeon loft and Owl’s domain.
    That would not do, Mauryl would say. That would simply not do. He feared what might already have happened, and if it had not happened yet, because of the storm raging, it would happen tonight.
    He could come and go safely with Owl. The board was not on this side of the dividing wall, it had fallen on the other, so he tucked his Book into his shirt for safekeeping, unlatched the door and came through into the huge barren loft that was Owl’s alone.
    There was a hole in the roof, a rib of the roof was down, and slates lay broken on the loft floor. Owl’s den had become drafty and lighter, which he thought would not at all please Owl.
    Owl sat puffed and sullen on his perch.
    He picked up the fallen board. The pegs were still in their holes, and a little effort put it where it belonged and set the pegs back in their sockets, though not so far as they should sink. He took up a roof slate and pounded with it, and finally pounded the pegs with his fist on a piece of the slate, after it had broken, and the board settled where it had been.
    Owl had ruffled up at the clatter and the thumping. Owl refused to look at him, perhaps because he had liked the hole into the pigeon loft.
    But there was nothing to do for the hole in the roof, which Tristen found far beyond his skill. He went and looked out, and found the hole a new window, on a side of the keep he had never seen, a view of forest that went on and on, and, as he stepped closer, a view of a parapet of the keep he had never seen.
    He wondered how one reached it.
    He stepped up on the fallen beam, worked higher, with his arm on the roof slates, and from that vantage, with his head and shoulders out the hole in the roof, he saw a gate in the wall that ringed the keep, looking down on it from above. He saw a dark band of water lapping at the very walls of the fortress and, spanning that, a series of arches. From those arches outward into the woods that lined the far shore, he saw an aged stonework which vanished in among the trees.
    He was astonished and troubled. He could imagine the course of the stonework thereafter. He saw a trace of a line among the treetops, where trees preserved just a little more space than elsewhere through the forest.
    A Bridge and a Road, he thought, in the breathless way of Words arriving out of nowhere. A Road suggested going out, and then—
    Then it came to him that if Mauryl went away then the Road was the way Mauryl would go, through the gate and over that dark water and through the woods.
    He felt the Book weighing against him as he climbed down, reminder of a task on which Mauryl had hung so very, very much, and in which he had so far failed. But the Road was out there waiting to call Mauryl away and the Book could prevent Mauryl going, so he held it secret that he had seen the Road, as he feared that he had, by accident, seen something Mauryl had never told him, and which, perhaps, Mauryl would tell him only if he could not solve the matter Mauryl set him to do.
    It was not in his power to patch the hole the wind had made. He put up a few boards, but for the most part the holes were out of reach. He had at least, for the pigeons, patched the one that would have let their Shadow in, and the pigeons and the doves as well as Owl would have to bear with the rain when it came.
    He said nothing of the hole in the roof when he came down