The Cup of the World

by John Dickinson

  ‘Ulfin! Ulfin, I can't see you. Wait!’

  There was no reply.

  She was growing weaker. She had drunk some water, but it had not helped. Something else was missing; some unknown element that nurtured life was absent from this place. Her feet were dragging, and she had begun to stumble when she should not have done.

  At first she had hurried forward, expecting to catch sight of Ulfin almost at once as he emerged from behind some boulder or climbed from some dip in the ground. He had not appeared. Then, when her confidence had failed, she had dithered for a long time on a low ridge and subsequently tried to retrace her footsteps to the point where she had lost sight of him, in the hope that he would return for her. She did not understand how distances worked in this place. When she had gone as far back as she thought she had come forward since losing him, and still had not reached anywhere she recognized, her confidence failed again and she halted.

  She had called, and waited, and called again. There had been no answer. Nothing had moved on that awful scape, where rocks and ridges merged brownly into the upward sweep of the bowl of the world that surrounded her. She was utterly alone.

  At last she had begun to walk again, trying to keep to the direction in which she thought Ulfin had been travelling; hoping to find some sign that would guide her onwards. And her line grew more wayward, as she chose that side of a ridge rather than this, left around a boulder and right along the lip of a gully, until it no longer mattered which way she was headed, for all ways were equal and ran to an end among brown rocks.

  Still that thing within her that more and more she named ‘the bond’ held her up and led her forward. She had followed Ulfin into the mountains, and had found him. She had followed him through the pre-dawn on the high ridges, and had come upon him. In this place too she would find him and pass with him back into the day. She must not think of any other possibility

  She stumbled again. Breathing was hard, and growing harder.

  She came to a halt for a third time in half an hour, swaying, looking around her and the changing, changeless stones.

  Angels, help me.

  She was on her knees; but she had not kneeled to pray. She had fallen painfully, and did not remember falling. She wanted to rise, but did not. All directions were the same.

  It was a place no different from any other in this land. She could see, with eyes accustomed to the gloom, the powdery-dry surface of the rock shaped like a severed pig's head by her right hand. She could see the ill-defined patch of shadow beneath it, in which clustered pebbles and grains that were each as brown and dry and powdery as any of the great boulders around her. She could feel the hard surface, the grit beneath her chin, as she rested against the rock. She could hear, in the ear pressed to the rock, the scrape and sound of the footsteps approaching her.

  Ulfin, help me.

  There was a movement beyond the boulder to her right, and stones slipping beneath a leather-shod foot. A voice calling.

  ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  She felt, in the silence, that the speaker was surprised. That he had expected someone else to answer, or to use different words.

  ‘Who's there?’ he said.

  Who was there? What did a name mean in this place?

  ‘I am,’ she said. Still she rested against the boulder. She was weak, shaking. The man came into view, moving cautiously. He wore a brown robe, roped monk-style at his middle, and his head was bare.

  ‘My – lady?’

  ‘Martin? What – what in heaven's name are you doing here?’

  ‘I followed … He woke me by my campfire. Did you see …?

  ‘Ulfin? My lord?’

  ‘No! Did you not see …?’

  They stared at one another. Then Martin walked to the edge of the slope, looking left and right down it as though sweeping it for some sight of another traveller.

  ‘Well,’ she said, when at last she found her voice. ‘I am glad that whoever it was led you here, Martin. Although you may well not be.’

  He looked around, at the sky and the rocks. ‘What is this place?’

  ‘A place between places. I have been here in my dreams.’

  ‘Are those stars?’ He was pointing at the two lights, low upon the skyline above them. ‘They do not look like—’

  ‘I do not think so.’

  Capuu lies along the rim of the world, and binds it together. If she could somehow climb all the way up there, what would she see?

  ‘The air is trembling.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Distant understandings were beginning to stir in her mind. ‘We are within the Cup.’

  ‘I don't understand.’

  ‘There is a cup, or bowl that …’ She stopped, her mind grappling for words that could make plain the mysteries that she was beginning to unravel. ‘The surface of the Cup encompasses the whole world. Each point upon it compares with a place in the world. Those who are able to, may travel from one place across the bowl to another, arriving there many hours or days before they might have done if they had taken the ordinary road.’

  Martin looked around him. ‘Have you water?’

  She gave him her bottle. He shook it, then seemed to change his mind.

  ‘Better that we save it,’ he said, as he handed it back to her. ‘How do we get out?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  He seemed to think about what she had said.

  ‘We are not meant to fail, my lady. We can be sure of that.’

  ‘Where were you camped?’

  ‘In a valley in the foothills on the edge of the March. A day west and south of Hayley’

  So she was south and east of where she had started her journey. And she had come a distance that would have taken her at least four days of ordinary travel, if the way had been passable at all.

  She closed her eyes and rested against the stone for a moment, drawing strength – strength from this knowledge; from Martin's presence in the desolate place.

  When she opened her eyes again she looked around. Away to her left and right the light-brown dusk melded with the rising background in the same monotonal hue that it had done ever since she had entered the place. But before her, she now saw, it drew together darkly and seemed more close. Something lay there, half-concealed in the distance. Or maybe it was nothing. A place where the brown earth dropped away into nothing. A vast cleft running from half to her left away to her right almost as far as she could see. A cleft. A place that lay deep in the mind of the world.

  ‘It's Derewater,’ she said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There before us. There! He must be somewhere this side of it. He is going to Tarceny, to rally men and take them across in ships. If we are quick we may catch him.’

  She struggled to her feet and set off again across the dry land. Martin followed.

  ‘My lady – who did you say was ahead of us?’

  She had forgotten that he could have no idea how she had come here. ‘My lord himself. Ulfin, March-count of Tarceny. He was in a hurry Martin,’ she went on. ‘So he came this way. I followed him, for I did not know what he was about. We must catch him, and speak with him quickly.’

  With the loom of Derewater to guide them, Phaedra had some confidence in her direction; but she was still weak. She stumbled often, and once or twice she fell. And although she would pick herself doggedly up, mouthing Ulfin's names to herself like a litany, and set herself to walk on, she knew her mind was tiring and her legs were growing less steady. Martin was stronger, for he had been less long in this place. At first he simply put out a hand to steady her if she tripped. Later he was walking alongside her, with her arm in his as if she were some ageing relative whose limbs had grown frail with years.

  Once he said a prayer to Raphael, aloud. A little later she made him repeat it. Then she tried to get him to teach it to her, for it was not one that she knew. The words slipped quickly from her brain, and she was left each time only with fragments.

 
They bore on together across that dark land.

  It was their third or fourth rest in what might have been an hour. She was leaning against a rock, for she did not dare to sit or lie down now. And she was bracing to push herself upright again when she paused, and looked at the place around her. The ground sloped gently up to her right, as she faced back the way they had come. The rocks were like any of a thousand other rocks in view. And yet a sense of recognition itched somewhere in her mind, where her memory could not reach it.

  The more she looked, the more certain she became. In some dream or memory, she had met with Ulfin here. Perhaps they had drunk the water from the bowl beneath the big finger of stone on the ridge above her, once, or many times, when he had wooed her from afar as a child.

  ‘This way’ she muttered, lurching from the stone.

  Martin followed.

  She turned to her right, and pressed on uphill. She knew the slope of brown, jumbled stones that climbed towards the ridge, which was suddenly glowing as if with the last light of a sunset in all that sunless land. The landscape was scattered with huge boulders that looked like crooked people, all the same. Her feet were guided only by what seemed to be the angle of the slope on this rough ground. Still she stumbled upwards, skirting a double-peaked crag to emerge upon a lip of rock in the last sun.

  Suddenly there was a change. The air was moving with the wind of the day. The terrible, brown world was gone. There were colours around her. It was sunset – a living sunset. The horizon was level with her eyes again. The green and gold of the land was fading into evening. And the stone was even beneath her feet. It was level, because it was paved. And before her a low wall rose battlemented, and she stumbled to it and clutched the edge of it.

  She stood on the north-west fighting platform of Tarceny, and the banner of the Doubting Moon cracked overhead in the wind of the living world.

  She rose and turned. Martin was sitting slumped by the parapet, but he picked himself up as she approached. There were no guards in sight. Voices were calling distantly from the outer court.

  ‘Let us be inside,’ she said. ‘There may still be time.’

  He followed her down the steep and narrow steps that descended from the platform, past the War-Room door, to the passage below. Here Martin grunted and, turning to his right, entered the chapel. Looking back, Phaedra saw him drop to his knees before a stained-glass window and bow his head. Above him the figure of Raphael, Friend of the Hapless, trudged on across a weary landscape with his staff in hand. She left him.

  She made her way from the chapel to the living quarters, from the living quarters down through the hall to the upper bailey. Voices were calling. She passed servants, who stopped from their hurrying to stare at her as she walked by. The guard at the gate was watching the outer courtyard, and did not see her approach. When he found her at his elbow he jumped visibly Phaedra ignored him.

  The outer court was a turmoil of horses and wagons. There were forty or fifty men in the saddle, and others hurrying to marshal on foot. There were banners, knights riding to and fro, their voices hoarse as they bellowed for the fiftieth time for speed. Ulfin was among them, scowling at the mess. He must mean to set out now, with every man and more that he had brought with him to Tarceny three weeks ago. And it would be dark in two hours. Perhaps he was planning to march through the night.

  Trumpets were sounding, and the gates were open. At the far end of the bailey the troops were beginning to file out into the evening. Ulfin had seen her. He sat still for a moment, and met her eyes. Then he was urging his horse over towards her, gesturing for the guard at the gate to fall back.

  He bent in the saddle to talk down to her. ‘I have one thing to say to you, my lady’ he said. ‘If you love your son, let him not near me again.’

  ‘Ulfin …’

  And she saw in his eyes that he loathed her.

  He did not wait for her to answer, but turned his beast in a great clatter and dust to join the companies that were filing through the outer gate. Pikemen, horsemen, banners and bowmen, merging into one black mass of helmets and weaponry as they passed out beneath the reddening sky.

  She stood for a long, long time at the inner gate. Night fell, and the distant sounds of the march faded to nothing. When the torches winked upon the walls, she turned and went indoors.

  In the living quarters, the writing desk and a number of other items had already gone. There was no paper, so she went to the library and cut a strip from the bottom of one of Ulfin's scrolls. On this she penned a few lines: a bald appeal to him to return and speak with her. As she finished, a kitchen boy came hurrying in to ask if she had everything she needed. The household must have gone into convulsions at their lord's sudden arrival and departure, and the realization that their lady was among them, without so much as a maid attending her.

  ‘A special messenger for this, to follow my lord as swiftly as may be. I will go to my chambers now.’

  ‘Food and drink, my lady?’

  ‘Water, to my chambers, but no food. No food.’

  Why? Why did he not love her? What had she done – what had she not done? Loved him, waited for him, upheld his war, borne him his son. He had no reason to hate her. He had loved her. He should love her! He had said that he did.

  Then why did he not come?

  ‘Dear Angels!’ Her voice broke as she uttered her cry.

  How many days had it been now? Eight? They passed one after another in endless, endless pains and dreams, in sips of lukewarm water and rising with the dawn to pen, each time more laboriously, another appeal to him to return. And every day some stupid maid or servant would try to bring her bread or broth, and she would curse them brokenly until they took it away.

  Father was watching, from under Michael's wings.

  Somewhere beyond one of these nightfalls he must be waiting. She tried to rehearse the words with which she would justify her life. I did not betray you. If you had only understood, not tried to force me, it would have been well!

  He had not tried to force her in anything. His eyes would look on her, daughter-traitor, witless and deceived. Impossible to get forty men in war gear over the wall. There would have to be a man inside. In the Cup he can pass where men cannot pass – from the wilderness to the north-west bastion of Tarceny; from the lakeside to the postern passage within the walls of Trant. Who tells me that what I would do is impossible?

  ‘No!’

  Father was dead. That could not be undone. Ulfin was gone. He might yet return. And somewhere beyond this grey world was a place where Ambrose played in the sun. And she would plod, plod, plod until she came there.

  The image of him (sitting on the dust, looking round for her) reappeared through the clouds of exhaustion. It troubled her that if Ulfin did not come, then Ambrose might not see her again. She would never see how he grew.

  ‘Amba,’ she whispered, over and over. ‘You are all that is left of the world.’

  She dreamed that he nodded and ran ahead, dodging among the brown rocks. Careful, my darling. It is easy to get lost here. He ran on in his clumsy child fashion, knowing the way. She followed. Her legs ached and her feet tripped. She lost sight of him. The ground dipped, and she followed it, treading around the stones that looked like people, until she saw the child, looking down into the great, rock bowl and the shadowed pool that she remembered.

  Amba, come back.

  Shapes flitted and stirred among the stones. Rock broke with a small, crunching sound under immense weight. There were tracks – clawed prints in the ground. They smelled of the edge of dank pools. Ambrose was gone.

  She was peering over the edge in his place. Somewhere a mountain wept for the child that was lost. The pool below her was lightless, deep and black, like the pit of the world. She looked into it, and there was nothing: deep nothing that weighed around her neck and dragged her down towards it. She had been here before, one half of her life ago. In the shadow beside her a man moved and spoke.

  Will you drink?
/>   I thought you would never come, she said. Why have you been so long?

  He smiled, and held out the great Cup. The water was dark within it. She lifted it to her lips.

  It was different. It crashed sharply upon her tongue, like the sudden shock of salt. She looked up, surprised and hurt, into the eyes of the man beside her. He was smiling at her still, terribly, as a snake might smile at a young bird. His eyes were deep pits. Something like a chain shattered in her mind, and she thought that she screamed.

  For a father, the life of a son, said the pale priest. For a king, the life of a king.

  She sat bolt upright in her bed. Martin stood beside her, with a bowl in his hands that smelled of some gamey gruel.

  ‘He won't come,’ he said. ‘For Raphael's sake, you must eat.’

  The gruel too tasted salty; like tears.

  PART III

  THE TRAITRESS

  XVIII

  Cold Morning

  he War Room was lit with the first grey light of the world. The face of dead Paigan was a shadow in the corner. The benches and the chair were empty. The table was bare, its writhing carvings lost in the dimness. On it, bolted to the woodwork, stood the low chest. Phaedra ran her fingers along it, and they tingled at the touch. She reached out her hand and tried to lift the lid. It stuck for a moment, and then opened with a grunt of metal as the hasp freed. There was nothing in it.

  The inside was lined with dark cloth. Objects had rested there, and the fabric was crushed. She probed with her fingertips, trying to make sense of the marks. At one end had sat something heavy, with most of its weight pressing in two places. Its rounded surfaces had scored two ruts into the lining of the chest. She thought instantly of the Cup. She had never seen it with her waking mind, but the size and the weight and the shape that she remembered were right for it to have rested on its side and stem there.

  At the other end of the chest was a fainter mark: a small rectangle, as of a box containing something heavy. She could not tell how old it was, but it might from the size of it have been the little box of white stones that Ulfin had given to Ambrose, without telling her why, over a year ago. She thought that the cloth might retain an impression for that length of time. Between them had been something else, large and rectangular. It had lain there more recently than the box, although its edges were not as sharp. She looked and prodded for a long time before deciding that it might have been a book.