The Cup of the World (13 page)

Outside, the lights burned on above the tables at Ulfin's door. The people talked and drank and laughed; the pipers played their breathy notes on and on as they had done for hours after their lord and his new countess had retired.

Here, in the closeness of his embrace, Phaedra had found pain, and indescribable sweetness. But most wonderful of all was this drift, drift drift on the edge of sleep in the arms of the man she loved.

merging from the high coolness of the hall, leaning on his arm, she heard the water playing a second before she understood where she was.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘It's like home. And like Tuscolo!’

She had been expecting the dusty inner courtyard where they had dismounted on their arrival. Instead she stood in a small paved court with two low fruit trees and a fountain. On all four sides were whitewashed colonnades, roofed with tiles, which gave shade from the sun. The air smelled sweet from the grey-green bushes – mint and rosemary – that stood in huge clay jars at the bases of the pillars.

‘I thought you would like it,’ said Ulfin. ‘And it is in better repair than the one where we met in Trant, which must have been abandoned long ago. Can you name the seven houses of the Kingdom?’

‘Tuscolo and Velis, Baldwin and Bay, Trant, Ferroux and Tarceny’

‘Exactly Seven houses for seven princes, and you will find a court like this – or the remains of one – in each.
For that is the way we built when we first came over the sea.’

‘Were there really seven princes? Are you descended from one?’

‘No and yes.
The Tale of Kings
has been written and remembered many times, and in different ways. In each telling Wulfram rides up out of the sea in three ships, fleeing some war or disaster across the water that we do not recall. Straight away, he divides the land among his seven sons. Yet the seven are not always given the same names in the different tellings I have heard or read. I have counted eight names altogether. So I believe there were not seven princes, but eight. And some of them cannot have been born until well after Wulfram led our people over the sea. From his landing to the time my ancestor Talifer rode from Jent to conquer the March must have been twenty or thirty years.’

‘Where is Ferroux? You do not hear of it now.’

‘It is an unimportant manor house in Develin's country. There are those who claim descent from the line, of course, but the claim is false. The other houses also fell, one by one. The first house of Baldwin stands ruined since the end of the High Kings – although Faul and Seguin and all the royal house claim descent. And the traitorous stewards raised their tower on a nearby hill and call themselves Baldwin to this day. Trant is now in wardenship, as you know. Bay has a better story, but—’

‘I liked Baldwin.’

‘Not too much, I hope.’

‘Don't be jealous. I did not marry him, did I?’

He laughed. He seemed surprised that anyone should speak to him that way.

‘So you read histories, my lord?’

‘There are some histories in the castle. And other works. Yes, I read. My intent is to understand how the Kingdom has come to the state it is in. Why is it that we, who are more numerous and better armed than all the wretched tribes around us, have warred for so long among ourselves and never sought to open up the lands that must exist beyond our borders? I wish the hillmen no ill. Yet it is a marvel to me that the strength of our people is turned so ruinously against ourselves. Surely our kings should rule us better.’

‘I should like to see your books.’

‘Everything I have is yours.’

Which was true, or seemed to be. A few hours ago she had been shown to a room and found a wealth of objects waiting for her – books, combs, mirrors, clothes, ornaments … A maid had been there – an elderly woman called Orani, who had a narrow face and that bird-like look that Phaedra was beginning to associate with the hill people. And already messages had been issued, to a dressmaker in Baer, the largest town in the March, and a jeweller in Watermane, to present themselves at the castle on the earliest date possible.

Best of all was the beautiful, beautiful writing desk, of wood so dark that it was almost black, with thin legs carved in the shapes of sinuous, scaled creatures. Running her fingers over its surface had made her want to fall in love with him all over again.

‘You have been very kind. And I must ask for yet more.’

‘Of course. What is it?’

‘Pen, parchment and wax. I must write to my father
and bring him to accept what we have done. Also I have no signet ring as your wife.’

‘Pen, parchment and wax you shall have at once. And I should write to your father too, for I have done him an injury and it must not become an insult. A signet ring will be more difficult. You could use mine—’

‘For other letters, yes, but this …’

‘Of course. And it will take any jeweller a week to prepare one … Wait.’ He seemed to hesitate for a second, and then drew something from an inner pouch.

‘There is this. It belonged to my younger brother. I had been wondering whether to give it to you, but – I think he would have liked you to have it.’

It was a signet ring, too large for her finger. On the boss was a single letter ‘P’ upon the moon of Tarceny On either side of it letters – a ‘c’ and a ‘u’ – were carved into the outer surface of the ring. The ring itself was silver, shaped like the body of a tiny dragon that wove round and round on itself like rope, so that the boss of the ring was borne by its head, and its eyes peered out beneath the letter of her name.

‘The dragon for eternity’ she murmured.

‘Among our kind, of course that is true. But for the hill people his name is Capuu, the worm that lies along the rim of the world and binds it together; and he means faithfulness. You see him in jewellery and totems and even’ – his finger touched the stonework – ‘carved upon the rim of this fountain. There were three of us, my brothers and I, and each with a ring like this bearing the letters of each other's names alongside our own. Now they are fled, and dead, and I am the master of the house.’

She said, ‘It is perfect, Ulfin. I will take care of it, I promise. What was his name?’

‘Paigan.’

‘A strange name.’

‘An ancient one. And it should have lived on in him, but did not.’

‘You must have loved him very much.’

He nodded. She waited, but he was looking firmly into the bowl of the fountain, and did not speak. So she stood in silence beside him, and looked at the steep roofs and towers of Tarceny around her.

The place was still bewildering. It seemed far larger than Trant, although not, of course, the size of the King's castle at Tuscolo. Its towers were taller, and thinner, and had looked almost graceful when her eye had first met them. She had ridden out of the forest and found herself on the lip of a broad, level valley in the hills, with the castle rearing from its steep and lonely spur opposite. The floor of the valley was covered in olive groves and had looked, from above, much like a huge garden. The afternoon light had played on the walls, and on the masses and masses of white flowers that grew in the tangled briars of the castle spur. As the cavalcade had poured down towards the trees the hills had rung with horn music.

Her hand traced the curves of the vast and sinewy beast that was carved around the rim of the fountain. She reached out to the jet of water that arched in uneven spurts from the centre. It was cool, but not cold. The droplets danced from her skin in the last of the sun. Somewhere, unseen, an ass or donkey must be turning the pump that made the water play, and a man must watch
her do it. Perhaps they were in the base of the little turret on the corner of the court, which jutted into the inner bailey. Surely they would not have been there all day. Ulfin would have commanded them there from other duties on his arrival, to add this little stroke of beauty to her welcome.

She turned, and with the base of her spine to the bowl, leaned back to look up at the sky. It was pure blue on this mid-January day, framed by the towers and battlements of Tarceny Beside her, Ulfin stirred from his memories. She could feel his leg pressed against hers through the thickness of cloth. His hands were on her shoulders. Her skin rushed with blood, and he bent to kiss her neck as she had hoped he would.

She wrote it carefully, with many crossings out and insertions, and she was still not satisfied with it. It should have been longer, and yet she could not think of anything more to say that would not repeat what she had written already. She had great difficulty trying to explain when she had fallen in love. She did not want Father to think that in the end she had married on a whim. But she could not possibly tell him how, or for how long, she had known Ulfin before she had left Trant.

She had also wanted to copy the whole letter out neatly herself, so that all the page would be in her hand. But she took so long over drafting it that there was no time. Ulfin was waiting for her at the stables, to show her the new horse that he had acquired for her. So she gave the draft to one of Ulfin's clerks to copy onto a blank page that she had signed. Father, who could not write well, would in any case rely upon Joliper or someone to write his reply for him. And now that she had clerks in the house, she might as well use them like the great lady that she had become. The same thought led her to amend her opening greeting to a more neutral ‘Right worshipful sir’, and to
delete the word ‘humbly’ from the first sentence. Then she hurried down to the stables.

Later, she regretted making those changes. And she thought, too, that she should have offered Father more apology than ‘If I have ever caused you grief, lately or in my whole life’. (If!) But by then the letter had gone.

The towers looked out across wave upon wave of steep and wooded slopes, ridges sharp-backed and ragged with outcrops of rock, fading into the mists of the great mountains beyond. In the deep clefts streams rushed unseen, and roads the width of rabbit-tracks wound among the valleys, climbing and falling steeply. The villages were small, and far apart. In the day and a half of slow riding from Aclete they had passed no castles or manors. The first midday rest had been at a group of four huts by the roadside; the second, at a fork in the road.

It was an empty place, after the close, busy world of Trant: empty without and within. There was no priest – a thing which should have been shocking and which Phaedra knew she must change before Father and the others of her world learned about it. Apart from that, Ulfin's household was larger than the Warden's, but it was quieter and more ordered. The big rooms imposed something of their stillness upon the humans that moved between them. The hall rose three storeys to its high rafters, with the door to the upper bailey halfway down its length and a hearth spaced evenly either side of it. White steps ran up to the black-stained wood of the gallery, beyond which lay their sleeping quarters, and the floor alternated squares of black with white marble
paving in a pattern that was almost regular – but not quite.

‘Someone has been careless, sir,’ she said one afternoon. ‘For here there are three – no, five – black flagstones adjoining one another all higgledy-piggledy at this hearth. I am surprised you permit this disarrangement.’

He did not seem to be in a mood to be teased.

‘The black stone comes from quarries beyond Baer. But the white is from Velis. At the time the stones were damaged, rebellion was beginning in the Seabord. Nothing passed south from the coast. We did what we could, and I have grown used to it.’

Phaedra had not seen a room designed around a single combination of colours before – not even at Tuscolo.

‘Black and white are far more than the colours of my house,’ said Ulfin. ‘They are the colours of truth. They are clear, precise, and without decoration.’