The Cup of the World

by John Dickinson

  That was at Manor Sevel. Ambrose held court there more often than any of his other manors, because a knight in the service of Tower Bay had once tried to claim the place, and it was still important to be sure that both Bay and Sevel understood who Sevel's lord was.

  Phaedra had ridden over with Baron Lackmere for the hearings, but was not present when Father had his temper fit because her guest had wandered away with his guards to the grape presses to sniff at the stew of juice and pulp and twigs (and flies), and to carp at her about the way things were done. Half an hour listening to the Warden's justice had been enough for Lackmere. It was not manor cases that interested him, but the distant possibility of a clash with Bay. Perhaps he imagined that the Warden might give him a sword and let him ride as a knight against Trant's enemies – if only for an hour.

  He was often in her company. He was not easy to entertain. For although he was treated with respect and held in comfort, and permitted to go where he would on Trant's lands under escort, he had little to do but brood and wait for orders of release that did not come. She did what she could. She rode with him all over the castle manors, and walked with him on the walls. She tried to read to him, although he had little use for The Lamentations of Tuchred, or any of the half-dozen other holy meditations that made up Trant's library. She wrote, at his dictation, a letter to his lady, in which his words and greetings were so stiff that they betrayed his guilt that his family was now protected and his lands held by those he had chosen as enemy.

  She wanted him to see Trant as she saw it – a homely place, even to an exile. She wanted him to see beyond the little signs of wealth that he noted, such as the silver plate from which he was served, the numbers of woven hangings or the smooth craftsmanship of the joined tables and benches. She wanted him to show that he understood how lucky he was to have been sent here rather to any other house in the Kingdom: how he might laugh with James the housemaster or Joliper the merryman; or call Sappo the huntsman to take him fowling along the lakeside. She was annoyed when he spoke grudgingly about the dishes the kitchen produced, or complained about some detail. He spoke little with Brother David, the gnarled, greying castle priest, and attended holy service only when duty required.

  She took him outside the walls to her favourite place in all Trant, the small oak grove near the lake edge below the castle, where the ruined fountain court stood among the trees with its colonnades open to the sky. She walked with him around the old stonework, thinking that he might be impressed with the deep silence there, under the whispering branches. She told him how she had escaped from the King's feast in Tuscolo to find a little fountain court like this, which reminded her of home. He did not seem very interested.

  And one rainy day she walked with him into the chapel to show him the line of stones in the wall cut with the names of her mother, and of her four brothers and sisters, only one of whom had lived past the age of three.

  He looked at the stones, and his face was set like stone too. Perhaps he remembered having hopes for children whom he had then had to bury, like these.

  ‘You were the eldest?’

  ‘The second. Guy was the eldest. He is the only one I remember well. He died of a fever a year before Mother. After me there was a gap, and then …’ She gestured to the row of stones that ended in her mother's name.

  ‘Why did your father not re-marry?’

  Why did people always think that? ‘He does not want for wealth, sir.’

  ‘All men want sons.’

  ‘He has sworn he will not. He says the Angels have given him his portion and he will be content with it.’

  ‘Hm. And when one of these fine suitors has carried you off, what will be left of his portion then?’

  She hated it when he spoke of things like that. It was like hearing a drunk singing bawdy songs in a cathedral or a quiet street. But, like a drunk, he would not be put off. It seemed there was little else left that he was willing to talk about. She did not want to think of suitors any more than she wanted to think of what Father would do.

  ‘He has sworn he will not.’

  A strange oath, said her companion, as they sat together on the brown hillside of her dreams. He fingered the stone cup that he held in his left hand.

  Do you remember the first time?

  He nodded. I remember. You were just a child, peeping over the edge of the pool. I saw you very clearly. It was why I spoke to you.

  I thought you were my brother, she said.

  It had been not long after Mother died, in that empty time when she had woken each day to find that everything had changed and yet everything was the same. One evening at table, as she sat in Mother's place, Father had begun to list aloud the sisters and daughters of local lords with whom he might make an alliance. He had done it without any great interest, but he would not stop. And she had screamed at him over the table, with her child's voice cracking, that he had killed Mother and would kill her too, if he did this. Then she had gone to her room and refused food. She had refused it for days. The pain had come like grief, and when it had gone she felt her grief had gone with it, and she had begun to dream wonderful, sunlit dreams of watching Mother sewing robes (Don't come too close, lamb) or of the lakeside with the ripple, ripple of light from the water on the underside of the leaves and on Mother's skin. And she would wake to find Mother dead, and Guy dead, and Father raging, or begging beside her that she should eat, and she had wanted to sleep again.

  But his pride had broken on the twelfth day, and he had wept and vowed he would not marry again, nor would Trant change, so long as Phaedra lived. Then she had closed her eyes, and a dream had come that was not of her mother but of a pool in a deep bowl among the mountains, with the shapes of stones like fists against the sky, and of the man she had thought was her brother, who had moved in the shadow and spoken to her as she paused over the water and the impossible depth beneath it.

  She had forgiven her father. She had set aside her fast to sip at the salty gruel they made for her, which stung in her throat like tears. With her legs still trembling from weakness she had come down the stairs to take Mother's place at the table again. So she had sealed her promise with him. No new bride came to their gate, to bury what had been lost beneath the foundations of a new family. And in its long mourning Trant was their home.

  She had come to love her later childhood, drifting alone from room to room where the servants were busy, playing quietly with her cup and ball, watching the seasons from the castle walls. She knew all the household, was happy with them, and could rule every one of them if she wanted, because of Father. Once a year she would make him, as Mother had done, a belt or a robe that he might wear at Easter and other high days, to show him that she was being faithful too. And she had never been afraid of his anger again.

  Her friend listened to her and said no more that night. She thought that he touched her shoulder lightly as she finished, and the memory of his touch was with her when she woke.

  The ‘foppoons’ were no part of the bargain. Their voices and footfalls were a new sound in Trant, and one she did not like. Young men, gaily clad, they came one after another. The knights from the manors showed themselves more often at the castle as winter drew on. Noblemen and their sons rode by, who had never come before. Word of her looks had spread. The rich and unambitious might have come for that alone, for her dowry was no more than that of many a good knight's daughter. But what they all knew, whether they had laid eyes on her or not, was that she was the only child of a man who held fifteen manors around Trant, where the King had nine, and no one else above three. When Ambrose died her husband would be the King's choice to succeed as warden, holding twenty-four manors for his wife and the crown, and with them one of the great castles of the land. Without knowing it, Phaedra had become one of the finest prizes outside the court at that time. By spring, and her sixteenth birthday, it seemed that not a month passed without some new campaign beginning for her hand.

  She knew that marriage was the natural state for
a woman (unless she were a nun), and that many married at her age. But she could think of other women who had never married, or who were not married yet. She was not ready to leave her home, where the wind heaved in the oak woods and darkened the water. And she hated the men who might make her do so.

  She was cold to them. She rebuffed them. Some – those she thought of as the ‘good’ ones – accepted it when she asked them not to seek her hand any more. Others did not listen, although they went home quickly enough if Father told them they were unsuitable. The worst were the two or three who believed that they were truly in love and that their love for her was so strong that it must surely triumph in the end. All the popular ballads told of women who refused and refused, testing their suitors in extremes of combat and devotion, until finally yielding with grace. That was how they saw her; and they counted each snub as just another passage of arms in the long siege for her soul.

  ‘My father once said you were beneath me, Phaedra,’ said one baron's son, smiling, when she asked him to pursue her no more. ‘But oh, he was wrong. You are so far above me, like a lark singing unseen.’

  He had no right to think like that!

  She tried to explain this to Brother David one morning, after they had visited a woman who was sick. The priest nodded agreeably, as if he had understood. Then he said something about taking her time, which showed that he had not. None of them did.

  For even in the times she despaired, and began listing to herself the two or three she would be most prepared to marry if she had to, she could not imagine the life she would lead with them in their strange houses, waiting and waiting to come home to a Trant where Father would no longer stalk the floors. She could not imagine her dreams. And she was afraid.

  It had been years since the last new baby at Trant. The infants Phaedra remembered had grown to noisy brats that scampered around the stone halls. But she could recall clearly going to peer at them in their cradles and weigh them lightly in her arms. And she remembered the small cold voices that had stirred in her heart, as she clung to those frail things. She thought of the little graves that men would prepare for her children, as they had done for her brothers and sisters. She saw herself burying the children she had borne – even dying herself after birth, watching with her last sight her child being carried crying from her room, never knowing how it might be cared for or whether it would prosper. Some day – most probably – she must run such chances, but she did not know how. In the way that opened before her it could only be wrong. She knew what the end would be.

  She refused, and refused, and would not change.

  ‘This is foolish,’ said Father in the early summer. ‘I'll not ask you to bear company that is unkind, so that it is in my power to have it otherwise. But marry you must, and I must lose you. Among these men are the best in the Kingdom. So choose and have done, or we shall settle for worse in the end.’

  Still he would not order her to marry, and they both knew it. In his heart the demands of his peers and their sons were at war with his desire to keep his daughter for one more year, and with his fear, perhaps, of what she might do if she were wed against her will. But each time that he had to offend the son of a neighbour, or outrage a friend, was a wound to him. After the harvest was in, and the nights began to come early, he sat alone drinking wine in fits of muttering and silence.

  I must marry, she said to the knight in her dream.

  Do you wish to?

  No, she said. But Father is changing. It cannot go on.

  It seemed to her that they stood in the ruined fountain court under the shadow of the oak trees. There was a light wind blowing, and the trees sighed with it. Before her the bowl of the fountain was full of dark, still water, on which a fallen oak leaf drifted with no power of its own.

  It will not be Bay, she said. If one of Bay became warden after my father's death, they would have most of the east coast of the lake. In peace or war, nothing could cross it, and little move up or down it, without their let. That is too much for the King, or Father, to permit.

  And not Tarceny, either?

  Does the hare wed the hell-hawk? Father sent his heralds packing the hour that they arrived.

  The old lord of Tarceny is dead, remember.

  You have said that to me before. But it makes no odds. One more or less makes no odds. Trant cannot be the same any more. I must choose one of them, and let him take me away. If Baldwin presses his suit, perhaps. He is young, at least, and it will please Father.

  They stood side by side in silence. She was wondering what would happen to him when she left Trant for good. He had followed her to Tuscolo a year ago. Could he do so to Baldwin? She could not imagine it. Of all the things in her life, he was the one that had not changed. To lose him might be the deepest loss of all.

  He sighed, and put his hands upon the fountain. Under his fingers, it became – it seemed it always had been – the stone cup, which he was lifting to her. A tiny oak leaf still turned in a slow circle upon the surface.

  He said: Shall we drink, now?

  Yes.

  There came a terrible day, the eve of All Saints', when Phaedra sat rigid in her seat in the hall of Trant, looking down at the handsome young noble before her, with a score of men in gay cloth and polished armour at his back. She could feel herself trembling as Father rose slowly and told the man that, although his suit was worthy and his gifts generous, although his blood was of the highest and his truth beyond doubt, yet it did not please Trant's daughter to accept him. And Elward, first son of Tower Baldwin and counted among the flower of the land, stared at them both in disbelief Then, his cheeks flaming, he bowed and led his retinue of twenty knights clashing from the hall. Shock settled on the castle as they rode from the gates. People who had greeted the riders of Baldwin with garlands as they came, who had never believed that Phaedra and her father could turn down such a match, stared at her and muttered behind her back. A grown woman must marry. Without marriage there was no future. Phaedra met each glance as it came, but no one spoke to her. Brother David was tight-lipped in the chapel. Father ate in silence that evening and hugged his fur coat around himself like an angry bear. She lay awake in her room with the thoughts circling restlessly for hours in her head, and the taste of water in her mouth.

  A letter had arrived from Maria – the third since they had parted in the fountain court at Tuscolo. It exclaimed at the stories that came from Trant to the court, and to Maria at the house of her father in Pemini. She laughed at the discomfort of so many preening knights. Her cousin had now wed the man her parents wanted. But Maria, herself still unmarried, urged Phaedra to go on resisting all until she found the one who was right, regardless of rank or politics. She wrote well, in her own hand, saying so many of the things that Phaedra wanted to hear and that no one would tell her, until now. Reading the letter in the early light, Phaedra felt as if birdsong were twittering to her from somewhere beyond a window in a high wall.

  That afternoon she settled in the library to compose her reply. She was staring at a hanging of saints and trying to find words to explain to Maria why, so far as she knew, no man could be ‘right’, when someone came whistling into the room behind her.

  ‘Good day, Sir Aun.’

  ‘Good day to you. How did you know it was me?’

  ‘There are not many in the house today who sing as they climb the stairs.’ And there were none who were that tuneless. She looked over her shoulder. The baron wore the long blue-and-white doublet of Lackmere, and seemed more cheerful than he had in a long time. His guards lounged discreetly in the doorway.

  ‘More fool they’ he said.

  ‘I am to blame.’

  ‘If that is what you think, then you must bear it. I came to ask if you play chess.’

  ‘Why no. I do not believe there is a set of pieces in all Trant.’ There were plenty of knucklebones and jack balls, and even her own cup-and-ball game, but no one played chess that she knew of.

  ‘That was true until a week ago. Will you
come to see what I have been at since your father allowed me wood and chisels?’

  He was quartered in a room set into the north-west tower, a level above Phaedra's own. His bed was screened by a hanging. The rest of the room was largely taken with a wardrobe and a wooden trestle table, set under the big window that looked along the wall. A neat row of wood tools lay on its surface against the wall, and a set of carved pieces, some stained with dye, stood on a rough chequered board at the near corner. The baron invited her to one of two stools at the table.

  Phaedra picked up one of the pieces and looked at it curiously. It was a little wooden statue of a man on horseback, his head and upper body grotesquely out of proportion to the stubby horse he rode, and to his own little legs traced in relief down its sides. The face had a lopsided, staring look, as though the rider were crazed in the saddle.

  ‘I did not know you could carve,’ she said.

  ‘Nor could I until these last months. And I have spilt my own blood more than once in cutting these things. Still, I learn slowly, and may replace the worst of them in time. At least these all stand on their feet. Now, pay attention. The game is for two players. Each piece moves differently The pawn is the simplest – so …’

  She listened, and realized that his briskness was not, as she had thought, because he did not wish to beg her to entertain him, but because he understood that she herself needed company, and did not know how to offer it without embarrassment. Strange that such a man would want to comfort her. She had not supposed him capable of it before. As time passed, she was learning more about the people she thought she already knew. Perhaps that was part of growing into a woman.

  The game was impersonal, and that too was an advantage. She found herself caught by the way in which it moved from ordered rows to a net of staggering complexity and then to simplicity again as all but the last few pieces were taken from the board. At any other time she would have declined every game after the first, for she lost easily, and did not like to lose. But after that morning at his work-table she played with him daily – sometimes twice a day. It gave them both something they could control. To Phaedra, the mounting pressure of the baron's attack on her position echoed the pressure of the world upon herself, and yet in the game she could develop her defences with pieces that went where they were ordered and did what they were supposed to do. She knew her play was improving, and set herself to hold him as long as possible. And if she ever became frustrated at another defeat, she could tease the baron about the quality of some piece or other, and leave him whetting his chisels to set the fault right.