‘The Prince.’
People around her were kneeling.
‘What's this, lads?’ His voice was round and jovial, as if he were scolding a pack of truants. ‘Holding a court? From whom did you have your licence, in this our realm?’
No one replied. The crowd remained kneeling, heads bowed.
‘Law is a thing for debating,’ Aun was saying. His voice sounded harsh after that of Septimus. ‘But I would speak with the one who let off a horn in this camp for all the world to hear.’
The woman was at Phaedra's elbow, pulling gently at her arm. Phaedra found her feet were unsteady. She had to lean on her companion's shoulder. They made their way towards one of the awnings, where a few big logs were set on end for stools.
‘Thank you. I can manage,’ she was saying, even as her knees trembled and made her lean more heavily.
The priest! What part had he played in all this?
‘Are you all right?’
‘I'm not hurt. Just shaken. Dear Angels!’
‘Can I bring you some water?’
‘In – in a moment. That would be kind. One thing …’
‘What is it?’
‘I thought I saw – is there an old man among you? He's someone I have met before.’
‘Jan Brig? He's not very old—’
‘No.’
‘With a scar on his face? That's Jan Brig.’
‘No scar, and much older. I thought he wore a pilgrim's or a priest's dress.’
The woman was puzzled. She looked around. ‘I can't think who you mean. I'd know if anyone new had come to us—’
‘No matter. I – I must have been mistaken.’ Phaedra eased herself down onto the log and buried her head in her hands.
The priest. He had been talking to the boy who had taken her side. Then the boy had come forward to fight for her, as Adam had done. What did it mean? The bird-song of the forest mingled with her bewilderment. The wind stirred the branches but there were no answers in the blowing of the leaves.
What did it mean?
She had been expecting the woman to go and fetch water. She had not moved. After a moment Phaedra looked up at her, wondering what was wrong. The woman was watching her, with her head cocked and her brow furrowed.
‘Do you know I've been hating you?’
Phaedra stared at her.
‘You don't remember me, do you?’ the other said. ‘Amanthys diGuerring – although that was not my name then. We sneaked up and watched a witch trial from the King's balcony in Tuscolo, and it all went wrong, like this one did. And afterwards you and I fell out over something silly that one of us said.’
‘I – remember.’
‘I've often thought about you since. And just now I heard you quoting poor Maria at them – as if I were seeing the past played out for me again, and all my sins with it. I knew the baron and the prince were walking by the stream, and I had to find them. You were lucky. I might have been looking yet. Water, was it? Nothing stronger?’
‘I'm all right. I just need time. In fact, I need talk. Can you stay a little? Tell me what you're doing here.’
‘Very well.’ She settled on a log beside Phaedra. ‘It isn't happy, but I'll tell you if you like. I am the camp master, I suppose. I don't fight. I just see that there is food for the men, hay for the horses, water, that the camp is clear of filth, that the fires don't give us away, that we pack and go in the right order – oh, all the things that they don't have the sense to do for themselves. In a moment I should go over and see that your men are comfortable. We can't untie them, I'm afraid …
‘Why am I doing this? That's the unhappy bit. I got angry. About eighteen months ago, I think.’
She stopped, and looked at Phaedra. ‘You have a child, don't you. Alive?’
‘Please Heaven.’
‘I lost mine. I was pregnant when my new husband joined the host that was coming to clear yours out of Tuscolo. I rode in a litter most of the way to see the fun. Well, you know what happened. My horses were taken by all those brave squires and soldiers in their hurry to get away. I was staggering in the mud with all the others. By nightfall I had lost it – and my husband too, although I did not know about that until later. He was not a bad man. I remember lying all bloody in the back of someone's wagon with six wounded men and thinking what a horrible, horrible incompetent mess it had all been …
‘That's why I hated you, for a time. We all did. And the men go on hating. It's what keeps them going after all the defeats. It's been bad since they heard about this last one, and those knights your husband had beheaded because he claimed that they had changed sides. Sometimes they do stupid things, or try to – like Tancrem just now. We make all the mistakes in this war. Your side doesn't. But they won't give up.’
The fair-haired boy walked past. He barely noticed them. He had a bruise on his soft, round face and a faraway look in his eyes, as if he had been talking with Angels.
After a little Phaedra said: ‘It is not my side any more, Amanthys. That is why I came to speak with Aun. I will talk to Septimus too, if he will hear me.’
It was Amanthys's turn to digest what had been said. ‘I'm sure he will. He probably intends to come over anyway, when he has finished cracking heads. I'll see if I can fetch him.’
The crowd was still on its knees, heads down while the prince scolded them. He had authority, that man, after all his disasters.
‘What is he doing here?’
‘He's trying to get back to his friends. Your husband's soldiers cut him off from Develin. So he crossed the lake to give them the slip. Lackmere went to meet him, which is why he wasn't here when we got news of you coming south. If Tancrem had realized they were back he might have thought twice before launching his bloody little play.’
‘One more thing,’ said Phaedra, as her companion rose.
‘Yes?’
‘You said “poor Maria”. What happened?’
A shadow crossed Amanthys's face. ‘She was in Pemini when it fell. You know that your people sacked it. That was six months ago, and I have heard nothing since then.’
The priest had sent that boy to stand for her; as he had sent Adam diManey to stand for Evalia before the steps of the King. If he had sent Chawlin, then it was he who had roused Martin from his camp and led him among the dark rocks to find her. Did he think she was his pawn, or did he merely want her to live to see her son taken at last by the dark things that surrounded him? She could not guess what twisted reasons had moved him. But she had trusted Ambrose to two men who thought this deadly enemy was a sending from Heaven, and to one flawed woman who had once been in his power. Now there was nothing she could do.
Amanthys had gone. On the flat hilltop people were moving around the camp. Phaedra sat and stared unseeing across the trampled grass, like a player at a board who has seen that all her pieces are in check.
XX
Phaedra's Price
letter came a few days after her return to Tarceny. In the bare writing chamber Phaedra looked closely at the seal. The brown wax, set with the Dancing Hound, had not been tampered with. And when she broke it she found that Evalia had been careful.
The page began with a gushing passage on the news of Ulfin's coronation. A casual reader, even a spy, might have looked no further for its purpose, nor seen anything in it more than the witterings of a woman with too much time and too little brain. Phaedra had spent weeks in Evalia's close company. She could almost see Evalia, as she scratched through phrase after silly phrase in the yellow lamplight with her small, cynical smile on her lips and the muffled pouring of the falls in her ears. Martin must have told her that letters might be opened in Tarceny. Even if he had not done so, she would have guessed.
Towards the bottom of the page Evalia had underscored the last phrase of a paragraph. While the line appeared to give emphasis to the empty-headed words above them, it also marked them off from the two short paragraphs that followed.
Adam is well, although in truth I must say that I
suppose him to be well, for he is so taken with his diggings and his plantings that I have hardly had the luck to speak with him in these past few days. First in his heart is a little oak seedling that came with a knotted rope around it one day. It seems to thrive where we have set it, for all that the ground is stony here. We watch it closely.
Dearest Phaedra, I remember my first sight of you. I cannot say why your face stood out among those around you, but I did wonder even then who you were and what it was you thought of what was before you. I do not know what you are going to do now. I do know you must be busy. But wherever you go, remember that there are many who wish you happiness, and among them remember first your
E.
The knotted rope – the badge of his monkly order – was for Martin. The seedling was Ambrose. He was safe, and guarded, at the time the letter was written. The garrison at Hayley now supposed Ambrose and his followers to be at Tarceny, just as Tarceny supposed him to be at Hayley or in the hills.
She penned a short acknowledgement to Evalia's letter, as a grand lady might in response to a request for patronage that she did not wish to grant, but that had come from someone she did not wish to offend. The only expansion she allowed herself was to recall the story of diManey's vision, and to add that she had now heard that the monks of the Knot knew of similar things. Indeed she knew one who had had a vision that was very like. She would write more on this, but the matter was too great for such a letter.
She sealed it, thinking of her son. Did he miss her – did he remember her, and look around, and ask a one-word question of Eridi: ‘Mama?’ There was no way of knowing.
And one part of her did not wish to know the answers. This was less, she thought, from fear of what they might be, than because she did not deserve it. She must stifle her questions and wait. Even the few sentences in Evalia's letter were too much kindness, too much danger. After reading it for the fourth time, by candlelight, alone in her room, she lit it at one corner and dropped it in the grate. She watched the yellow flames creeping around the parchment, blackening, destroying, concealing. When the time comes you must sacrifice without mercy. Except the King.
I have castled, she thought. I have placed my king where he may be guarded – by thirty-one white stones, and by the wits of a woman I once despised. I have warned her as best I can. Now I must play.
And she knew that Evalia's final words had not been a veiled plea for patronage, but the sentences of a friend who did not know whether to write farewell.
Long after night had fallen and the parchment had turned to wispy black fragments she sat by the grate, turning over thoughts in her mind. Ulfin, as he ran from her in the dark country. Amanthys and her story. The suffering the war had caused to her, and others. Father. Elward. Maria, lost in Pemini. Ulfin.
Opposite her, under the window, lay huge bales of black and golden silks that had come up the road from Baer that afternoon. Heaven knew where they had found them, for Baer itself did not make cloth of this quality, and yet it had been but a fortnight since she had gone down to the warehouse and spoken with the merchants there. Some hero must have abandoned all other things (wife? family?) and gone hotfoot to Watermane, haggling and bargaining and doing whatever was humanly possible to please the whim of the new queen in the time she had set for it. And he had done well. He had found precisely the blacks and golds in good silks that had flitted idly into her mind that afternoon in Baer. She should remember to send a reward, if there were enough coin in the castle for that.
The more so because his efforts had been vain. She would have accepted any cloth of any colour that arrived at the gate. The same sweating scullions would have hauled it all the way up the same stairs to her room. The price, any price, would have been paid by any means possible. For the cloth did not matter. What mattered was that when the door was shut and the scullions and Hera were gone, her fingers, questing deep within the roll, should find there what they sought. Others had been busy while the unknown merchant was abroad. And in this they had made no mistakes.
The room was cold. She could hear the low wind droning in the chimney and soughing beyond the thick stones of her wall. She must make her move.
Rising from her place, she took an earthenware bowl in which lay a mass of the little four-pointed moon roses that thronged below the walls in spring. These had been cut a week before. They were limp and lifeless, and going brown at the tips. She tossed them and the water in which they lay out of the window. Next she took from the foot of her bed the bottle she had brought with her on her dark journey from the hills. She shook it. It still held the water she had drawn from the pool. She pulled the cork.
Slowly she poured the water into the bowl. It splashed and swirled, scattering the candlelight in fragments across its surface. She peered at it, touched it with her fingers. It was just water, smelling sourly of the inside of a leather bottle. The clearest thing was her own reflection, like a hooded shadow on the face of the water. She hesitated.
She was about to do something she had never done before, and that she did not know would work, or why. Ulfin had not answered the letter she had sent urgently to him on her return to Tarceny She had known he might not. So she must try this way. It was a way that she could never, never, discuss with those who might count her a friend. She was in a dark room, feeling for the door.
This was not the bowl: not the Cup, which she had seen only in her dreams, like a vast goblet in Ulfin's hand. This was ordinary clay. But the water – the water came from the well under the sky, where the great shape of Beyah plunged reflected into its depths and the priest crept around its rim upon heels three hundred years old. These were the tears that had fallen in love, and rage and darkness, from the eyes of a being of the beginning of the world. She had felt – had drunk from – the love that was in them. Perhaps no one in the world knew the strength of it better than she. She had seen their darkness flitting in nightmare shapes around her son. It had left its mark upon her stair. It was the rage of a goddess who had lost her own son when Wulfram's people came.
This was the power that the cheated prince had turned against the line of his father. ‘We live by truth,’ the bishop had said, and what was the Law but the exercise of truth? Now the priest would place Ulfin, his lie, at the very heart of the Law. Such a rage and darkness – surely Ulfin and his brothers would never have dared to meddle with it, if they had truly understood it! Perhaps only a mother could.
And now she must meddle too.
The tears were born of the eyes of the goddess. What Phaedra needed now was their sight. If there was a way, it was here. Here, within this film of water, within the rough clay surface beneath, which shifted as the water moved, grown like rocks on a barren landscape. The light was dim. There was something wrong, or odd, about the distances. The water knew her. She could see the outlines of rocks in the bowl.
The world was a bowl. Every place in the world had its point on the bowl's surface. She need only look. So – how to find it?
Ulfin had done this. Or at least, his presence had come to her, waking or sleeping, as she went about the ways of Trant and Tuscolo long ago. She was not now walking from one place across the dark land to emerge in another. She was sending thought, a dream, as Ulfin had done. And thoughts should fly
She bent over the bowl again, more confidently now. She remembered the way into the place of brown rocks. She remembered Ulfin. She felt for him, away to the east, camped with an army of iron around him, resting or sleeping. ~Yes, and the water knew him too. A mind as beautiful and cold as a mountain valley, where the clefts flow darkling with corrupted streams. She stood, it seemed, on a flat-topped rock like a million others in that place, looking down into the space before her. There was a room, lit by torches. It was the upper floor of some lodge, on a road from Tuscolo to the south. Distant campfires glittered at the windows. A mailed foot shifted beyond the door. The room was scattered with papers, clothes, armour. A dirty plate and an empty goblet stood upon a low table by the bed, and on the be
d itself he lay face down and stirred as she watched him.
Ulfin.
He muttered and shook his head. His sleep was heavy. She did not have much time.
Ulfin, come.
‘Phaedra?’ He moaned. He was seeing her.
Ulfin, come quickly.
Her vision was fading. The water in the bowl intruded. Candlelight danced on its surface and marked the shadow of her reflection. She could see both that and at the same time the room beyond, where Ulfin was starting from his sleep.
‘Phaedra! What are you doing?’ His voice was faint. Her reflection on the water blocked her view into the room, like a hooded shape. A hooded shape. It was not her reflection. The picture of a face floated there. Pale eyes glittered. Its lips moved, and spoke.
‘What price will you pay?’
She looked down into the face of the priest, on the surface of the water. She had almost expected it.
‘What price will you pay me, woman, for my power?’
Phaedra! No! A voice that drifted from a hundred miles away.
‘I? Pay you?’ She gathered herself. ‘Nothing!’
Her fist banged upon the table. The water slopped. Even as it settled, she saw the face reforming on its surface. Like a paper mask, it had no depth to it. It reflected nothing – she was well back from the bowl now, trembling a few feet from the table. Yet it floated there, as if it meant to stay. After a moment she took a scarf and draped it over the bowl, so that she would not have to look at what lay inside.
She was shivering.
Pay? There was nothing to pay. This was not knowledge she had had from him. This was not the Cup he had carved. These were the tears of Beyah, which she herself had gathered and he had never owned; never, for all the terrible strength in his eyes. It was well that she had not spoken longer with him.
Phaedra, said Ulfin behind her.
‘No!’ She jerked round.
He was gone.
Of course, he would try to reach her at once. She had not thought of that. He would be desperate to know how she had done what she had done, what bargain she had struck; whether his powers were now under threat. That was right. But he must not get the answer through the Cup. He must come himself. And it was beginning to dawn on her how difficult it might be to make him.
The Cup of the World Page 29