The Cup of the World

by John Dickinson

  ‘Whatever happens, you and Eridi must see that Ambrose is safe. If all else fails, remember that he has friends at Chatterfall. Go there quickly and in secret. The knight and his lady there will help you. Or you may make your way down the lake and seek sanctuary with the bishop at Jent. Orani …’

  ‘Lady?’

  ‘You know my son's enemies are not all of the day’

  ‘Yes, lady’

  ‘Those stones – the charms my lord gave. What did he say should be done with them?’

  ‘He told Eridi, lady, when he first gave them. To keep them round the little one always.’

  Those things could not come at him. All the same, it is right to be watchful.

  ‘See that you do.’

  She turned, and hurried along the dark colonnades to the forecourt. The gateway was black as pitch. She did not see the man in it until she stumbled into him.

  ‘Who …?’

  ‘Who's there?’

  It was the sentry, of course.

  ‘Who is it? Grayme?’

  ‘Buckliss. My lady’ he added, as he recognized her.

  ‘Have you seen my lord?’

  ‘Five, ten minutes ago, my lady. I was watching him go off along the slope. Then I thought he must ha' left the gate open, which he did. So I come down off the roof to close it.’

  ‘Did he look as if he was going far?’

  ‘He'd a loaf with him, my lady’ The man's voice was taking on a wary note, as he registered that the lord was off and the lady seemingly did not know where or why he was gone. Phaedra did not care what the man thought. A loaf would see Ulfin through a day. It would not get him to Hayley but he might find other provisions before the day was ended. She must catch him quickly. But she must be prepared in case she did not.

  ‘Do you have any food or drink with you?’

  ‘Only water, my lady’

  ‘Give it to me, please.’

  He looked at her for a moment. Then stepped out of the gateway and fumbled at his belt. The leather bottle he gave her was almost empty. She did not dare stop for more.

  ‘Which way did he go?’

  ‘Left, my lady, and down a bit.’

  He was not going to Hayley then. He was going back to the pool.

  ‘Let me out, please.’

  The man fumbled with the bolts in the darkness. Grey light cracked from top to bottom of the arch as he pulled one great wooden door open. Outside it was nearly dawn. Phaedra hurried out into the cold mountain wind.

  He had gone to the pool. In that dim light she was unsure of striking the path by which they had returned the previous day. She was unsure too of the loose-pebbled descent under the walls of the house. Instead she took the way she remembered – up the slope, tending to the left, climbing to the viewpoint by the thorns and the white stone. Somewhere the sun must have been rising; but there was little sign of it in the sky except, away to her left, where the mountain ridge above the village stood sharp and black against a pale grey with the slightest flush of rose.

  She paused to listen for some sound beyond the hiss of the low wind in the thorns. There was nothing. Her feet crashed and scraped loudly as she pushed among the undergrowth, looking for the way down. She found it. Before beginning her descent she paused, and faced the white stone. Running her hand over the surface she found an area at the tip which was less smooth than the rest of it. There were indentations, as if of an iron chisel. She could not tell how old they were. There, a piece perhaps the size of a fist had been cut from the rock. Enough, she thought, to mill down to the sort of smooth pebble a child might play with. When she had descended through the scrub far enough to gain a view of the pool and the clifftops she paused to count the other stones.

  There were thirty-one.

  Voices sounded across the space before her. On the far side of the pool, on the very crest, stood the priest in his pale robes. He had his back to Phaedra. Below him, by the fallen monolith, was Ulfin. Only his head and shoulders were visible from where Phaedra crouched below the thorns. The words were indistinct, but the two were arguing.

  If either looked her way, she would be in plain view. But the light was dim and her clothes were dull. If she did not move she might go unseen. She strained to catch the voices. Ulfin was the louder – urgent, angry. She could almost hear his words. The priest's voice was softer and more level. And yet she thought that he too was angry. What was happening? At one moment Ulfin seemed to be urging, almost begging, for something the priest would not consider. The next he was waving the words of the priest away with a furious gesture, and placing his hand upon the fallen monolith in a manner that appeared intended as a threat. Now the priest was answering again. At length Ulfin nodded, as if he were still not satisfied with the bargain, but knew that he was going to accept. Together they walked down to the water's edge. Phaedra watched as Ulfin kneeled before her enemy, and drank water that the priest had lifted from the pool with his hands.

  Suddenly Ulfin had risen and was striding quickly up the slope towards the fallen stone. The priest was looking up towards where Phaedra crouched on the cliffside. She could not tell, at that distance, whether he had seen her. Her mind's eye saw again the cold smile she had seen on the stair of Tarceny Then he too turned away, and the hillside was empty of him.

  Perhaps he had gone behind some rock that she could not see. Perhaps he would emerge in a moment, following Ulfin or walking by the edge of the pool. Phaedra crouched, counting. He would come in sight in a few seconds. In ten. In twenty.

  He did not. And neither her memory nor the growing light suggested that there was any boulder on the far rim of the bowl behind which a man might have disappeared so. He was gone into the rock, and she was alone above the pool.

  Ulfin had passed the ridge. She must not be left behind again. She must not be deceived by light or lover; led to think this had been a chance meeting, any more than Ulfin had meant the white pebbles to be a child's toy. Somewhere down there the truth had glimmered for a moment, like a fish below water. She must catch it. As quickly as she dared, she committed herself to the descent.

  Ulfin had met the priest. He had known – he must have known – that he would find the priest here.

  Quickly, quickly. Don't fall.

  He had brought her here, knowing the priest to be in this place.

  He had let Eridi and Orani into his secrets. Why? Because they would not ask questions of him. They would take his pebbles, those little childish pebbles that had seemed to get everywhere, and make sure that Ambrose was surrounded with them, because he had told them to. As he must have told them not to tell her. And she, mother of the child, wife of the lord, had been left unaware, just as she had never been told that Caw was her father's killer.

  ‘Ulfin!’ she groaned, as she landed by the pool.

  He hadn't told her because she would ask questions he did not want to answer. Yet he had always had answers for the questions she did ask – Tell the truth, he had sworn. And surely they had been true, as true as they had been deft and slanted to leave her as accepting and ignorant as before. They had left her trusting in the bond between them; the bond that now drew her on.

  Quickly, quickly.

  She was slow. The rocks were uneven, the water, where she splashed briefly into it to ankle-depth, shockingly cold. And now she was nearing the point where the priest had stood. She did not know if he had been aware of her before he had disappeared. She did not know where he had gone. She had a horror of meeting him and, worse still, the things that might be with him. She was going more cautiously, pausing to look around her. A man who disappeared so easily might reappear again without warning.

  Angels! He had been here !

  Her caution gave other parts of her mind time to think. Ulfin had gone back down the slope, the way he had come. He might have been going back to the house. He might be halfway there by now. She did not think so. He had taken provisions. Whatever his business with the priest, he was starting on a journey. She had nothing but t
hin shoes, thin clothes and a water-bottle that was almost empty.

  The latter at least could be cured. She paused for a moment at the water's edge and looked around. Nothing moved. Uncorking the bottle, she thrust it into the water and watched the silver air bubbles gollop out until it was full. Another look around. Still nothing. She corked the bottle and hurried up the low slope to the point where the priest had stood.

  She looked into a different world.

  She should have been halfway down a steep mountainside, with the dawn growing in the pink sky and the green of the thorns and scrub-grass beginning to start from the grey and the distant ridges black against the sky. Now the colours had changed. The land seemed darker, as if thick clouds had dimmed the rising sun. The shape of the hillsides had altered, although they retained in their low rises and ridges a suggestion of the mountains they had been. The sky was heavy as if with thunder, and yet there was no breath of wind in the air.

  Ulfin was in view, not far off, but walking away from her down a slope.

  ‘Ulfin!’ she shrieked.

  He seemed not to hear her, and she sprang forward. Almost at once she lost her footing, for in the light and the slope there was something deceptive, and her feet did not strike rock where they expected it. She stumbled and slid, rolling and banging and bruising herself down the slope. When she checked herself, Ulfin was looking back at her from twenty yards off

  ‘Wait!’ she said. Her voice sounded flat in her ears.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Following you.’

  ‘Why the devil …?’

  There was something wrong about his voice too. Just as there was about the light, and the dark brown-rubbled landscape around her.

  She knew this place. She had stood among rocks like these in a hundred dreams. Around her was the same barren landscape and the impossible curve of the distant ground, upward and upward until it seemed to be all cliffs of a gigantic scale that rose to a skyline far above her head. Away to her left two great lights glowed above the world's rim. The air throbbed with a sound so deep that it was almost beyond hearing. And everything was brown.

  ‘You cannot stay here,’ Ulfin said. ‘You must go back.’

  She looked back the way she thought she had come. A few paces away, up a shallow slope, was the edge of a dark pool that lay among a jumble of boulders. Around it, standing stones rose like the teeth of some vast beast. She had dreamed of it last night. And she could remember now, years ago, how a nine-year-old girl had crept among its rocks in the dreams after her mother's death, peering into the black depths until the man had spoken in the shadow beside her.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  XVII

  The Deep of the Cup

  e seemed to realize that even if she had wanted to find her way back to the daylight, she could not.

  ‘He's let you through,’ he said. ‘To make a fool of me, I suppose.’ He hesitated. He was wondering whether to lead her back up the slope, and presumably whether he could find the way back out of the brown rocks that she could not. ‘I am in a hurry, Phaedra.’ ‘I am coming with you,’ she said. ‘You cannot. The others—’

  ‘They have their orders. They will be as safe, I suppose, as at any time since I wed you.’

  ‘I must go far and fast. To linger is to die, in this place. You cannot come with me.’

  ‘I shall come with you, my lord—’ ‘If you come it is your choice and I am not responsible—’

  ‘Indeed. And you shall tell me what it is—’ ‘Shall I?’

  ‘You are sworn to, if you remember, by the one you left on the hillside above us.’

  Ulfin muttered an exclamation, turned and began walking at a brisk pace across the brown land. Phaedra followed.

  For a while she judged it better not to speak. In a little while he would have controlled his anger and surprise. When he had come to accept her company, they might talk. For now she must concentrate on keeping up – if she could. It was not so easy in this strange place.

  Strange? She had been here before. She had walked among rocks like these a hundred times, in the dreams when Ulfin had met her with the Cup in his hand. She remembered them. She had never seen them with her waking eyes. She had never felt how dry the land was, or the emptiness of the humming air upon her cheek. She had never seen so clearly how the distant scapes of the world reared up all around her, as if she were walking within a vast bowl.

  The light was dim. The ground was rough. There was a curious, oppressive quality to the place that teased her senses. Sounds were flattened and distorted. And sight – there was something wrong, or odd, about the distances. Perhaps she was confused by the way the world curved. The outlines of rocks were clear and sharp, but the way they shifted in her sight as she passed them did not match where her mind placed them. She could not tell without reaching out to touch them quite how close they were.

  She stumbled, but did not fall. He was waiting for her. She had fallen behind again.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked as she came up.

  He turned away. ‘Tarceny’ he said. ‘I must lay my hands on every man and beast and get them across the lake in a week. Less.’

  It was the war then. Strange, that the explanation should be so understandable.

  ‘Why? I thought campaigning was done for the summer.’

  ‘They have been cunning. The widow's soldiers threaten Tuscolo, so Orcrim has drawn men from the garrison at Trant to aid the capital. But the real target is Trant. Trant is the key. If I had ever had the time to attend properly to Bay it would be different. Now they have seen that without Trant I cannot reinforce across the lake. Septimus is leading a column against it now. Orcrim is unaware. I must head Septimus off’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘I saw it in the pool yesterday’

  She found she was not surprised by his answer. It chimed with so many things: the way he had watched and stirred the water; his behaviour then and on the way back; the cleft from which the Cup had been carved, in the rock beside the pool.

  The pool that held the tears of Beyah.

  Stride, stride, stride, swiftly across the shifting landscape of brown stones. He was ahead again slightly, although not so far that he could pretend not to hear her.

  ‘Why did you not send Orcrim a dream – since you seem to be using your under-craft again?’

  He neither stopped nor turned round; but she could tell that the question had made him angry again.

  ‘I cannot reach anyone with thought from here. The pool is not the Cup. I do not own it. I would need power over it that I do not have.’

  ‘Who does then?’

  He did not answer.

  ‘Ulfin, who is the Prince Under the Sky?’

  ‘If you know enough to ask, you must already know the answer. Or do you mean, why is he called that? If you want to know, it was because he had no land. His brothers took everything there was. So he came here.’

  ‘He is no priest, Ulfin.’ In her hurry to keep pace she almost jostled against him. He turned, and his face was angry.

  ‘I never told you he was. No, if you think, Phaedra, I did not. And before you speak, you would do well to ask yourself why I should have troubled myself to say more, when you plainly could not believe what already I had told you. Do you imagine that I did not know why you sought, at such risk, to bring an outsider, a priest, into our household? Did you think to persuade me to go through an empty ceremony that would make meaningless our hour upon the knoll? My lady, you are wed to me, and with the force of all the laws of our people, for there is no one living with more right to bind us than he who has his royalty straight from the loins of Wulfram.’

  ‘You yourself have proved that you and your brothers were the last living of Wulfram's line. I have seen the scroll.’

  ‘And you have misread it, for the last born we were, but the last living we were not. My lady, you and I were wed by the last of Wulfram's sons, Paigan, who has no issue, nor any need of iss
ue, for he walks in his own flesh to this day’

  She stared at him. For a moment her mind was accepting what he was saying, incorporating it, linking it with other knowledge – Paigan, the prince. The eighth son at the head of Ulfin's scroll. Landless. Came here after the conquest of the March. His settlement failed. The stone throne looking over the valley …

  ‘Ulfin, do not spin me stories. Do not try to scare me—’

  ‘Think what you like.’ He was hurrying forward again.

  ‘He would have to be hundreds of years old.’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘Ulfin – you don't mean it! Dear God! He married us. What price did he—?’

  ‘Enough of this, Phaedra!’

  Ulfin leaped a dry stream bed and started up the far side without waiting. He was trying to put more distance between them.

  ‘He is the intermediary isn't he?’

  ‘What?’ The question had stopped him.

  ‘The intermediary The one who has given you your power. And there's something in that pool that is the source of it.’

  The tears of Beyah. The pool held the tears of Beyah, which the world-worm had brought to the earth in his teeth.

  ‘How do you know these things? Who have you spoken to?’

  ‘You are not the only one who has treated with him, Ulfin. You know Calyn did before you, and used his power to aid his rebel friends. No doubt your brother Paigan did too—’

  ‘My brother Calyn feared too much, and failed. My brother Paigan did no more or less than you, my lady. Do not judge—’

  ‘And what price did you pay?’

  He turned his back and began to climb out of the gully they were in. She looked at the stream bed and judged it too far to leap. So she scrambled down into it and then out the far side. Ulfin was near the top of the slope, black against the brown sky.

  ‘What price did you pay Ulfin?’

  As he crossed the skyline, he broke into a run.

  ‘Ulfin!’

  The slope was steep. She forced herself up it, panting. Pebbles gave way beneath her toe and she slid, grazing her hands. Then she recovered. Hurry!

  She gained the ridge. The landscape before her tilted gently down to her right before rising again. It was thick with boulders, and the light was dim. Ulfin was nowhere to be seen.