The Cup of the World

by John Dickinson

  ‘They think I'm you, Your Majesty’ she said, and waved at the crowd below. ‘I think they'd like to see you, if you are willing.’

  ‘If that is what they want. But I shall not be called “Your Majesty”, Hera – by you or them.’

  ‘No, mam.’

  ‘That's to be quite clear. Let the word be sent from the door. I shall want to go out in the town soon, for I have Sarcen silks to order for my lord's robes. I do not want to find myself part of a procession.’

  ‘No, mam.’ Hera was still smiling, waving from the window. ‘What colours, please, mam?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What colour silks, mam?’

  ‘Oh. Black, I suppose. And gold,’ she added sourly.

  Gold for a king. And green – the green cloth of Trant, hanging from the window of the lodge: a signal for the man from the reeds of Derewater.

  Lying awake in the night, remembering. And will he refuse it a third time? I wonder. She could picture the scorn in Lackmere's eyes as he had spoken to her of her own naivety. In politics it is often necessary to refuse more than once what you would most have others give you. So now Ulfin had what he had sought from the beginning.

  Again and again she remembered his face as they had talked in the fountain court about Ambrose's name. Without saying a word that was untrue, he had led her to believe the opposite of what was true. He had duped her so many times, and most of all about his will to be King – the Fount of the Law, which in him would be founded on lies.

  She could not sleep for anger.

  Once she cried his name aloud. ‘Ulfin!’

  She remembered how, in that very room, she had heard a woman's voice crying the name of Ulfin's brother in the night. Even Evalia's loss, she thought, was less terrible than her own. At least for Evalia the memory of Calyn was whole.

  The small hours of the night seeped past. She turned in her sheets, dozing, dreaming among images of Ulfin smiling, Ulfin speaking, Ulfin frowning in thought as he offered her the white stones for Ambrose. The white stones now lay scattered in a room where Ambrose slept. Such little things they were, hidden in the darkness. The shadows moved. Something cracked beneath a clawed foot close by. She saw Ambrose wake and begin to cry. She saw Eridi lift her head from the pillow to listen. Across the chessboard Phaedra met the eyes of the priest.

  When the time comes you must sacrifice without mercy, he said. Except the King, which you must guard with your life.

  She looked down and did not answer. There were very few pieces on the board, and most were black. She prodded another white stone into place around her son, and prayed that the ring might hold.

  A day and a half of dull riding south of Baer, as they were plodding slowly through low-limbed woods, a horseman surged onto the path ahead of them. He was helmed and armoured. Another followed at his tail, and others with him – five, eight, more.

  ‘Put up your arms,’ one shouted.

  A crashing among the bushes behind her told that others were emerging from the woods to cut off their retreat back down the road. The sergeant who led her escort reined around, looking for a line of escape as his half-dozen men fumbled for their weapons. The ground among the trees was rocky and treacherous.

  The horsemen were beginning to close from the front. In a few seconds they would charge.

  ‘You had better do as he says,’ said Phaedra.

  The sergeant was neither young nor noble-born, and had the sense the moment needed. He grunted an order to his men, who dropped their weapons to the ground. The ambush party approached from front and rear. Orders were being given – to her own men – Move over there, put your arms up, hands together, do it, damn you. She looked around, but could not see any face that she recognized. The leader towered over her on his charger. He took the reins of her horse. He did not say anything. His helm hid most of his face, although a mane of black hair peeped from under it, and there was something distantly familiar about his eyes. A rider nearby spat at her. She watched dumbly the little fleck rolling down the pommel of her side-saddle.

  ‘ Vixen!’ one screamed at her.

  Then they put a sack over her head.

  Patience, patience. She had gone in the dark before. The hood rasped at her cheek and chin, and her breath huffed in the cloth before her lips. There were chinks of daylight rising from where it opened around her neck. And she did not have to see. All she had to do was ride, and wait, for however many hours it would be until they lifted the hood from her head again.

  She told herself that it was important that they should treat her as a prisoner. It must not seem to her soldiers that she was being handled any differently by their enemies. She wondered why Lackmere had chosen so open a way of contacting her. (If he had chosen it, for she had not seen him yet.) She had been expecting him to fall in with her company disguised as a priest or a merchant, so that they could speak privately on the road. She had taken a small escort because it increased the chances of finding a moment to talk unheard – not because it would make falling into an ambush easier. There would be a lot of explaining to do at Tarceny if she returned there after this.

  If she returned. She had no idea what would happen now. She could hear, not far away, the sound of Hera whimpering as they rode. Presumably she too was blindfolded. Phaedra could feel the sound sawing at her own nerves. She wanted to utter some rebuke, sharply at this silly girl whom she barely knew. She did not. Hera had much less idea than she why they had suddenly been pounced upon. Earlier that afternoon she had been still blissful in her sudden proximity to the new queen, full of dreams and thoughts about the future. Now she was being herded along by rough, armed men. Angels knew what fears were in her mind.

  And no doubt Hera had a sweetheart somewhere who still loved her – who had not abandoned her and to whom she had expected to return. Perhaps she had not betrayed her own father to death. Perhaps she still thought the world was a place in which good things would happen and go on happening, in which a soul might be free of its own guilt and seek for something more than just the undoing of what could not be undone.

  ‘Hera,’ she called, trying to keep her voice soft so that no one would be tempted to shut her up. ‘Hera.’

  There was no answer, but the whimpering stopped.

  ‘It won't last, this. It won't last for ever.’

  Still there was no answer. Whatever Hera was thinking, she was silent in her hood. Phaedra rode on, and did not know whether she pitied her maid or envied her.

  It did not last. An hour later, after a steep climb and then a long descent by running water, her horse was pulled sharply to her left. She could hear others of the party ahead of her. They had slowed. Her mount plodded forward under somebody's guidance, and began to climb a slope. Instead of the scrape-clip-scrape of hooves on rocky paths there were dry leaves and twigs under its feet. The sounds had changed. They were not in the open. The noise of wind in branches was overhead as well as around them. They had turned off the path and plunged into trees. Instinctively she crouched in the saddle, hunching her shoulders against the imagined sweep of low branches. She wondered if her captors would care if she caught a knock or a twig in the eye.

  ‘Take our masks off,’ she said.

  No one answered.

  ‘Take them off,’ she said. ‘We can't remember the way now. And it won't help you if we crack our skulls or fall in the bushes.’

  There was a halt, and low words spoken among their captors. A horse rode up close to her left. A hand hauled the hood roughly from her head. Light exploded in her eyes.

  They were, as she had thought, in a wood. It might have been any wood anywhere in Tarceny for it had the same steep slope and green leaves and the sound of rushing water somewhere below. Down there a rearguard of their captors had assembled, sweeping leaves across their tracks. Others were taking the hoods off her followers. Her men, she saw, were bound. Hera's face looked drawn and miserable. Phaedra tried to give her a smile.

  Lackmere was still nowhere to be seen.<
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  ‘Forward,’ said the leader.

  He had removed his helm, and his thick curling hair fell in a mane to his neck. Watching his back, as he rode a slanting path ahead of her up the slope, she saw the faded design on his surplice. There, faint on the brown and weather-stained cloth, an eagle spread its wings above a battlemented tower: Baldwin. He was one of Elward's brothers – probably Tancrem, the middle one, as the youngest could barely be carrying arms yet. That was why she had thought she recognized him. And Phaedra felt a slight chill in her stomach. For while it was something to know her captor's name, she could not think that any in the House of Baldwin would be well-disposed towards her.

  They breasted the slope, and suddenly there was a camp before them. It occupied most of the flat top of the hill, under three huge oaks with awnings spread from their branches. There were a score of men and a few women there, watching them as they rode up. There were horses in lines, and a cooking fire with the thinnest wisp of smoke above it. It was a strong place, defensible, in that the hill was steep sided; well concealed, for until you climbed to this level you did not know it was there; and yet it lay within ten minutes of at least one path, and offered its inhabitants the whole cloak of the forest to hide in if some force were to come against them.

  Faces were turned towards her. She was scanning them for signs of Lackmere when Tancrem, dismounted, appeared at her knee.

  ‘Down,’ he said, and held out his hand.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said as she alighted. ‘It is good to see, and to walk, after so long.’

  ‘Stand there.’ He was pointing to a spot in the middle of the camp. She turned and walked silently to where she was told. Her other followers were being hustled off somewhere. People were gathering around her, in a half-ring. She looked round at them, and found that it was impossible to look a crowd in the eye.

  Men came forward with drawn swords. They laid them down in a row on the leafy forest floor.

  There were six. Three pointed towards her, and three away. A young man, bareheaded, stepped forward and began reading from a scroll.

  It was a charge of witchcraft.

  All the voices that had spoken to her, murmuring in her ears now. In the rustle of the leaves she could hear Father talking, but she could not catch the words. Evalia – how hard it was to think at a moment like this! Little Ambrose cried ‘Mama’, and looked around for her. And still she stared across at the young man reading, on and on, and could not speak.

  It was the accusations themselves that steadied her. The reedy voice bore in upon her confusion. It stated this, described that, all things that she was supposed to have done; things that even her bewildered mind could reject at once. This was not, as she had for some terrible moments supposed, her confession to Martin returned to bring her to her ruin. This was a credulous, ludicrous concoction; a miscellany of all the frightened whispers that man could pass to man in a defeated army. Martin had not betrayed her. He must still be striding north to Hayley as she had bidden him, to meet her son and take him to safety. And knowing that, she could think again.

  They were going to kill her. They were going to blow a horn three times and then take her somewhere and cut her head off Now the thing that she felt most clearly was anger. Anger not because she had come in good faith to talk with them – they were armed men and enemies and might kill her if they chose – but that they should go through this mummery first, to give themselves the excuse, which would stand in no one's eyes except their own, that what they would do was both holy and right.

  She looked around at the faces in the ring. A score, two score of them, crowded several deep on her left, strung thinly around behind her and to her right. On that side there was a young fighter with bowl-cut blond hair, and a tall woman, whose face recalled a shadow of a memory. The woman was frowning at what she saw before her. They were a beaten, sullen band. They would barely enjoy this little revenge.

  The young man had finished speaking. Lackmere was not to be seen.

  The horn blew. Tancrem and two others stepped up to the swords. The others were young, like him, and like the one who had read the charge. They were Tancrem's clique – a little sub-group in this desperate band. So Tancrem was the one behind this. He stood there, with his dark eyes burning with the memory of his brother, waiting to hack the head from the woman his brother had loved.

  ‘Should I not answer first?’ she asked, pitching her voice to carry clearly across to the ring.

  She saw Tancrem frown.

  ‘Be quick,’ he said.

  She paused, and looked around her. She must speak calmly, and keep speaking. The charges – she had barely been listening to them, except to register that her dark arts were supposed to be behind their defeats, that she was the mastermind, urging her husband on to bring misery on the world. She could not let those idiocies go unchallenged. But even admitting that she had charges to answer seemed to play the game for her killers.

  Another voice was in her mind: far back, in the sun by a well in Tuscolo.

  ‘She has nothing to say’ said Tancrem.

  ‘I was just thinking. I've seen something like this once before. After it was over, one of my friends said – what was it? That because some dog-knight from the back of nowhere was ready to fight, the woman who was on trial might be innocent. But if no one had wanted a fight with the cut-throats who had been put up against her, we'd have known she was guilty and had her killed.

  ‘What she meant was that any man who steps forward to fight, on either side, must think he can change the past, as well as the future. Which is more even than the Angels may do. And as she said – what do knights do but fight?’

  She looked around at the ring, to make them understand that it was them she was talking to. The young fighter with the bowl-cut hair was bending to catch something that his hooded neighbour was saying. The woman beside him was turning away from the crowd. Perhaps she was disgusted with the scene. Others were listening. Phaedra knew she must keep talking – talking like the elder sister that she had never been. Now, as if to the young man who had read the charges: ‘I did not catch all you said. I don't think I needed to. Where did you get all that from? I have never conjured anyone – unless you count praying that my husband would come home. I have never enslaved anyone, by any means. I have never killed or tried to kill anyone’ – she thought for an instant – ‘except myself. And for that I have been penitent before the Angels and a sanctified priest—’

  ‘That's enough,’ broke in Tancrem. ‘She has denied the charges. Blow the horn.’

  As if she had not heard him, and still to the man who had read the charges, she continued. ‘… A sanctified priest. You're not a priest, are you? For a moment I thought you must be. You do know that justice must be blessed? Anything else would be a terrible risk. But I think it would be hard to find any priest within a hundred leagues of Jent who would do this without the bishop's permission. He is very firm against ordeals – he's told me so himself

  ‘That's enough. You've had your time and wasted it.’

  ‘Do you doubt me? You could ask the Baron of Lackmere. He was present at the time. So if you really want to press these complaints I suggest we had all better go—’

  ‘No! Blow again!’

  Tancrem was in a hurry. He had not denied knowledge of Aun. So this was Aun's party. She should insist that she had come to see him. But Tancrem would know that. He was trying to get his bit of murder done while his leader's back was turned.

  Think of something – anything!

  ‘A moment!’ she cried. The man who had read the charges hesitated, with the horn part-way to his lips.

  ‘I see you have not untied my men—’

  ‘They are dishonoured. Tarred with your brush.’

  ‘They are low-born, Tancrem,’ said someone else.

  ‘Low-born!’ he repeated.

  ‘In the eyes of Heaven, does that matter?’ She must be careful about this. No farmer put in a mail shirt would stand a chance against
a war-trained knight. ‘If they were to choose my side, and my side was right, then—’

  ‘Enough! Blow.’

  The horn rang through the forest. Its harsh tone blotted her train of thought. It was one more step closer to death. She could feel her control slipping. She wanted to grab one of the swords and fight. But they would love that, these sweaty bullocks. It would give them everything they wanted. They would chop her up like butcher's meat.

  Someone had walked up to stand at her left. It was another youngster – the boy with the bowl-cut hair. He stood at the hilt of a sword that pointed from her.

  ‘Chawlin!’ Tancrem's voice mixed scorn and exasperation. ‘Get back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Chawlin!’ the others cried. ‘You idiot!’

  He shook his head stubbornly. He must be a misfit here, part suffered, part mocked by the main band, with little to commend him but a mind of his own. Still, his appearance at her side made no sense. And now one – two of her men were on their feet beyond the ring, calling hoarsely for their bonds to be untied so that they might stand for the swords too.

  ‘Chawlin, for Michael's sake, this is serious.’

  ‘I'm serious.’

  The moment of farce was a gift. She exclaimed loudly and marched towards the gap he had left in the ring. Tancrem yelled, but she kept walking. They were not stopping her. The show was falling apart. There was no one in front of her but the old man in the hood, who lifted his eyes as she approached.

  Cold eyes, and a cold smile that she had seen before.

  She must have halted. Someone's hand had closed on her wrist. Somebody gripped her shoulders. Behind her the men were scuffling. She saw the priest turn and vanish, and no one else had seen him. They were herding her back towards the middle of the ring, where the boy Chawlin was on his hands and knees, trying to rise as others pinned him. A voice called. The fuss stilled. Three newcomers had appeared from the forest, pushing their way into the throng. One was the tall woman whom she had seen earlier. Beside her was Aun of Lackmere. And the third was a plump young man whom she also knew.