The Cup of the World

by John Dickinson

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘There was!’ cried Phaedra. ‘On the stair, two of them!’

  ‘All right!’ Caw swore under his breath. ‘All right, let's do this properly. Up the stairs, you, and sound the alarm.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Sound the alarm! Something's been here. Either that or you and your fellow have been pissing down the steps, to make it stink like this. Get the inner gatehouse to drop the portcullis and keep it down until I say otherwise. Then the two of you clear the roof of the living quarters. It's the only place for them to have gone. Hurry’

  ‘Sir!’ Feet clattered on the stairs, fading.

  ‘Now, dear, don't cry’ Orani was saying, as she prised Ambrose from his mother's grip. ‘There, there. Next time you turn round an' come down backwards, that's the way. Nasty fall, was it? There, there …’

  Ambrose wailed on, but less loudly. Phaedra looked at her hands, and found she was shaking. She wanted to cry too.

  And no one else had seen anything.

  ‘Take that child down to the gatehouse, quick,’ said Caw. ‘It'll be safe enough there until we have sorted this out.’

  ‘And you get out too!’ he barked.

  Eridi had appeared in the door with an armful of wood, and was gawping at them. Orani hustled her out, babe in one arm. Ambrose's keening receded. The door closed. Above, a trumpet began to sound the harsh notes of the alarm.

  Phaedra was left in the room with Caw, still perched on the stairs.

  ‘I suppose you think I'm mad,’ she whispered.

  He looked at her, as though he was about to agree. Then he said: ‘You'd better see this.’

  Phaedra climbed up the steps towards him – nine, ten, eleven: he was standing precisely where the crouching thing had been. He moved his foot as she approached. Sunk into the lip of the step was the mark.

  It was if the stone had been worn, or crushed by some impossible weight. She touched the stone. It was damp. The place stank.

  It was smaller than a man's print. Smaller even than her own. And rounder. On one side of it was another mark that might have been a little claw. Other pits and blemishes in the surface of the step showed where the creature had rested. The stairs above and below were clean.

  Phaedra stared at it. The mutilated step. The fresh sweep of the step below, with one of the Ambrose's white play-stones resting on it. It had been that close. And the face of the man she had seen on the stair, intent upon the capture.

  Footsteps above them roused her. Caw replaced his foot on the marks as the soldiers came into view and hurried out onto the parapet above the living quarters. Then he removed it and bent over the step.

  ‘I think I can get this slab up,’ he said in a low voice. ‘We'd better give out it was worn, so the child slipped.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Hide it. Bury it, when I can.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why do you think?’ He looked up angrily. ‘It needs just one loose mouth about this, and we're all done. My lord too. And that's another thing. Don't go writing any of this to him.’

  ‘What!’ Ulfin was the only one who could possibly help.

  ‘Not in writing. I'll send him messages to get him back here. You can do the same. If you like, we'll craft it so that if he reads both together he'll get the idea. But they go separately. There's to be nothing anyone can read about this. Damn! I need a chisel.’ He stood up, breathing heavily

  ‘You stay here,’ he said. ‘Make sure no one sees it. Act mad, or whatever. In fact, that would be a good idea, for they'll find nothing on the roof and will wonder what it was all about. I'll be back as soon as I can.’

  Without waiting for an answer, he turned and hurried down the steps and out of the room. Phaedra sat heavily on the step below the marks – she could not bring herself to sit on them – and tried to think about what he had said.

  Tell no one. And what if they came again? Tell no one. Not the guards, not Orani, not Eridi. Try to get Ulfin back here without telling him why.

  Dear Angels!

  She played absently with the white pebble, thinking: Tell no one, not even Caw. Not about the face on the stair, beyond the crouching thing. Tell no one that it was the pale priest of the knoll.

  They found nothing. Phaedra's anger ran like a wave through the household. A kitchen boy was put in the stocks for failing to deliver the wood. Eridi was beaten by Orani for leaving her post to get it. Men scurried when the lady expressed a wish, and watched her sideways, wondering.

  The messages left for Ulfin within a day of each other, bearing as much as Caw would allow them to say. Letters from him arrived almost at once, so for a moment Phaedra believed that he already knew what had happened, and was giving them the answer. But when the seals were broken her hope faded. War was deepening in the Kingdom. He was leading a column to harry the Seabord, drawing soldiers from Trant and Tuscolo. Caw must send replacements to the weakened garrisons, in case Septimus raided from Develin. He must also send money. The letters bore no thought of troubles west of the lake.

  Caw swore, and rode the next morning for Baer and the south of the March, where he reckoned there were manors that had yet to give as much as Ulfin's other lands to their lord's cause. He took only three riders with him, and yet with sickness, and messengers abroad, his departure left the garrison with just nine fighting men until the recruiting party should return. Caw's last words to her were: ‘Remember – tell no one. We all depend on it.’

  Phaedra nodded dumbly, and watched him ride out of the gate. She liked him so little. Yet to lose him now was almost more than she could bear.

  For the first time she was truly mistress in her own house. And yet she had never been so ill-prepared for it. Indecision took her, even as she gave instructions for the simplest tasks. For at the same time as ordering the day-to-day functions of the garrison, she must also try to guard against the enemy they had never seen and could not be allowed to know existed, but might appear at any moment among them. How far would Patter be at that time? Would Arianda be within call? Was it safe to let Barnay gather wood on his own? Her mind grappled with the movements, and the recurring need to find reasons for tasks to be done in unusual ways. If her brain was too slow, as it often seemed to be, she would take refuge in irrationality and order them to do it anyway. And when they had bowed and left (shaking their heads, no doubt, as soon as they were out of sight) she would lose faith in her own decision, and call them back, or struggle to stop herself calling, and yet wish that she had done. She would watch them secretly, and yet suspect that they knew she was watching; but she could not rid her mind of the images of clawed shadows rising from the well or the woodpile around the servant who, in the last few seconds, would become her son. Then she would turn abruptly to walk the walls or corridors, waiting for another half-hour to pass so that she might reasonably visit Ambrose again, wondering when she might hear from Ulfin, and what she would do that evening when the light faded. And at dusk she took her blankets and lay beside Eridi on the floor of Ambrose's room, rising every hour to tend the lights around him before they failed.

  Ulfin did not answer. Night came, and came again, and still he did not answer.

  Sometime on a dark evening she went with a single candle to her writing desk. There, heavy with exhaustion, she broke the word that she had indeed never truly given to Caw. She wrote a short side of parchment to Evalia diManey Trust her or not, she did not know. But if Ulfin would not or could not answer, she would treat with the one person who might know what was to be done.

  … I have seen again that person I sought on the road from Baer. It is in my mind that you bade me then to have care. It would confirm me greatly if I knew your reason …

  She knew, as she wrote, that it must look and read like the scrawlings of a madwoman. But she did not have the strength to write it out again, or the will to wait until strength might return.

  The message went, and the garrison reduced to eight men. The house watched
her from under lowered eyes and ignored her bidding when they thought she would not notice. She could not trust them. Yet she could not watch for ever. Her blood sank, and her head lurched with the heaviness of sleeping and the horror of being asleep. She dreamed that she moved among shadows, in strange halls and corridors where people passed and spoke to her, and then passed without speaking, and at last ceased to appear at all. She was climbing the long stairs in the bishop's palace, leading up and up to the chamber where he waited to tell the penitent that their shadows were their own and would hunt them no more. The place was empty of people. The stairs were not wood but stone, and after a long time they were narrow and began to curl to the right. Something scuffled above her, and turning a corner she saw the small round clawed prints in the stone, with a film of water in the bottom that smelled of the edge of pools. They led up towards the room where Ambrose lay in his cot, playing silently with a bishop's robes. And she followed with her heart and feet stumbling together, knowing that the door to his room was already opening, and still the tracks led on and on and on up the empty stair.

  From Tarceny to diManey's house at Chatterfall it was three days, in anything but an easterly wind. Phaedra expected no answer for a week. When she looked up on the evening of the fifth day and saw her messenger standing in the hallway door, her heart dropped to her shoes. The winds had been wrong. He had failed to get a boat. He had given her precious message to someone to take when they could. He had shrugged his shoulders and come back to tell her that he would not do as she had bid. She felt her face harden. Bitter words rose within her. The man stepped forward and offered her a paper that was not her own. It bore the Sign of the Hound.

  ‘She said I was to have five in silver if you got this ‘fore sundown today.’

  Phaedra blinked, and broke the seal at once. On the paper was a single line of writing.

  ‘Yes. Yes, thank you,’ she heard herself say.

  Evalia had committed no secrets to the page. The line read:

  Come to Chatterfall. Bring your son and whoever you need, but come at once.

  E.

  XIII

  Chatterfall

  t the head of the Derewater stood a knot of flat-topped, tumble-sided hills, thickly fleeced with low thorns. Here the lake, flooding north, divided and embraced the massif in two great arms. The main body of water washed the western and then the northern slopes as it bent to crash at last over the great falls. But the lesser arm turned east at once, wandering in a narrowing creek through the steep hillsides.

  Up this sleeve of water crept a boat under oars. The thorn slopes towered ahead and on both sides. Their reflections darkened the surface of the lake. The sun was falling to the west. It was a still evening, with very little wind. Beyond the constant splash, splash of the oars the rough banks slipped backwards and gave no sound.

  Phaedra, crouching in the bows, saw the faces of her party all bathed in that soft light. The fishermen, father and son, who worked the oars: the old man's brown skin was lined as deep as yew wood. Orani, Eridi, Ambrose; and the two guards huddled uncomfortably in the stern. One of the men was a recruit called Massey He was a poor cousin-by-marriage to Elanor Massey of Aclete, with a burly, red-bearded look that lent confidence. Phaedra had chosen him because she found it easier to trust a new man than any of the guards at Tarceny who had either seen nothing all year long and thought her mad, or had seen or guessed too much, and had done not a thing to help her.

  The other man was a fellow with a lean, dark-dog face and a tendency to chat regardless of whether he was receiving a response. His name, of all things, was Orchard, and Phaedra would most certainly not have chosen him if chance had not picked him to carry her earlier messages and proved that he could find his way to Chatterfall with speed. It had been his infernal optimism that had led them on into the wilderness the night before, until it had become plain even to Phaedra that it was too dark to carry on to the lakeshore in safety; but it was also he who had led them on down to Neff's Jetty in the morning, and had found a crew of father and son from east of the lake who were willing to take a gentle lady and her retainers back with them that day.

  Just two men. She had not dared to reduce the household further. Until the recruiting parties returned, the garrison was already so weak that any passing band of brigands might take the castle if they had enough rope. Moreover, she wished to travel in secret. Without a full troop of soldiers her best protection from ordinary enemies was anonymity. Her party carried no banners and showed no devices.

  She had travelled in fear. The memory of the night still pressed upon her – her very first in open camp, tossing in the dark of the wasteland above the lake, with its whispering scrub and hard little rocks edging up from every foot of flat ground. The dawn had been terrible: she had cursed and tried not to weep as her guard challenged again and again something that blundered and stirred among the thorns. Friend, foe or wild animal? Nothing had come forward. The wind had hammered them on the march, flapping cloaks, tossing the thorn-scrub and flinging sudden spits of rain at cheek and eye; she had turned constantly in her saddle to look back at the overcast hillsides and at the man riding last behind her, to see that he was still there, and still a friend. She had waited restlessly among the huts and rocks around the jetty while the guards haggled with the fishermen for passage; fighting the urge to barge past her men and push coins into the fishermen's hands, knowing that she could not. For who could such a woman be, travelling almost unescorted with her son and paying for haste in gold?

  They had boarded at last, and the water had widened between her and the shore. The wind had steadied out of the north, bellying the sail and drawing the boat swiftly along in a broad reach across the head of the lake. The hills of Tarceny had receded slowly behind her, and the menace that she felt among them had receded too. She had lived all her life above the Derewater, and although these parts were strange to her she still felt it was a friend. Somehow she did not believe that the sorcery could chase her easily across the deep water. She had slept for a while, pillowed on Orani's knee. By the time she had woken again the wind had dropped, blocked by the close hills. The crew had lowered the sail and were shipping oars for the last stretch to the landing.

  For a while the hills ranked close on both sides, falling steeply to the water. But around sundown the slopes to the south eased. The hills retreated a few hundred yards. There were trees, a track, the occasional building. The reeds grew. A forest of pale yellow stalks reached six feet above the level of the water. Wild fowl landed in flights of grey wings, shrieking as dusk fell. Splash, splash went the oars, casting ripples in widening rings on the dark surface, stirring the pale-yellow stalks that glowed in the last of the sun.

  There was a channel cut to the shore, a makeshift jetty and a group of huts nearby. There they landed and stretched their limbs. There was an inn of sorts, smelling of wood smoke. The party was able to rest and drink clean water while someone was sent at the run down the track to warn the house at Chatterfall of the arrival of a gentlewoman, with her child and retainers. The inn folk loaned them lanterns, so that they could walk the last hour to Chatterfall in the dusk. There were no horses, but it was possible to hire the single donkey, which Eridi rode with Ambrose, wrapped and asleep before her. The track topped a rise and fell steeply through an oak wood that rang to the sound of water falling. Down and down it went, in long looping curves, for the northern slopes of these hills dropped several hundred feet further than the southern, towards the Seabord plain. They saw lights moving through the trees ahead of them. There were men's voices, shapes moving on the track in the twilight that resolved into a figure on a large horse, and others on foot bearing lanterns, calling as they approached.

  ‘Adam diManey my lady’ said a pudgy voice. ‘Come to welcome you in my own lady's name.’ He was addressing the shape of Eridi, who was the only one in the party on any sort of mount.

  ‘Sir, you are good,’ said Phaedra from the darkness by his stirrup. ‘And I thank you f
or your welcome and your protection.’

  ‘… Come to welcome you,’ said the knight, recovering. ‘And to let you ride my horse, if you can manage a knight's seat. Alas, my lady's saddle is still a-mending.’

  ‘But I shall be happy to walk, if it is not far.’

  ‘Then I shall walk with you,’ he said, and he swung himself heavily down. ‘It is not far – a furlong or two. You can hear the falls clearly. These are my acres, and I am glad to welcome you to them. I have heard much about you.’

  ‘Sir, if I were frank with you, that is little comfort.’

  ‘I meant that I have heard much of you from my lady. And you need have no fear of what she has said.’

  ‘She has been kind indeed.’

  Firelight, and the second evening since her arrival. She was not so tired now, after a day of doing little by the small wooden manor house, among its stockaded outbuildings and in the olive groves under the waterfall nearby. She could look around at the room, flickering dimly with the light of the small flames from the stone hearth. If her eyes lingered on a patch of shadow, it was more from habit than anxiety. The shapes that had haunted Tarceny had no place among the undecorated timbers of diManey's house. She was confident of that, at least for now. There would be time to rest here.

  There would be time to watch Evalia with her lord. Phaedra saw the formality between them, which was proper, and guessed that it persisted in private. An hour ago, when the tables had been cleared and Ambrose put to bed, Evalia had produced her husband's flute and wheedled him into playing before their guest. He had played a number of airs, not badly, and had talked with Phaedra about the pipes of the hill people, and why the sound they made was so different, from their size and from the very reed of which they were made. He played them the Great Lament of the hill folk: a solemn, simple air that Phaedra remembered at once, and that yet sounded purer and more controlled from diManey's pipe and under his roof-tree. And then he had switched once again, and played ‘South Wind’ – the song of the lake-sailor, homeward bound, which each of them had known from their childhoods. Phaedra caught Evalia's half-smile and knew that her friend had led diManey to talk of things he felt confident of and play as he would have wanted to play for his high-ranking guest. She watched Evalia watching her husband fall gently asleep in his chair, and saw two people who had been thrown together on a long journey. She wondered what they thought of when they lay side by side in the darkness.