The Cup of the World (25 page)

‘It is nothing,’ she replied. ‘I think – shall … shall we see if Ambrose is awake? I would like to see how he is.’

‘Is anything the matter? Can I help?’

Phaedra made herself smile as she shook her head. ‘It is nothing,’ she said.

t was nothing. It was always nothing; when she looked round, or raised her light, or turned the corner of the corridor. The nooks and passageways were empty They were frames of wood and stone and plaster that held no image and perhaps only the faintest smell – so thin that she could not have described it. She would wait and listen, staring at the blank walls for some sign. Nothing.

The incidents were fleeting, gone almost before she was aware of them. Her mind was playing tricks. And she remembered herself as a nine-year-old girl (half her life ago now), starting and turning when a man's voice spoke at her side; and when she turned, he would be gone. But he had been real. He had been Ulfin. And this … Ulfin had not seemed able to say.

As a girl, she had learned not to look. She had found that if she kept her eyes on some point ahead of her, he would remain, and could be spoken to. She had believed he was her brother Guy at first, who had not after all allowed death to make him abandon her. And by the time
she had understood that he was not, she had already begun to trust him. This was different. She could not be still when she felt the presence of the watchers. To sit, watching her fingertips, thinking that one of
them
might be behind her – she neither dared nor wished to dare. It was better to look, knowing as she did so that the shadows would be empty. Let them trick her. Let them mock her, so long as the looking drove them away.

There was no one to talk to. She did not want to frighten Orani or Eridi: she could not afford to lose either of them. She dared not trust Brother Martin. As for Caw, if he had seen anything he gave no sign of it, although she watched him closely at chess and at other times. Perhaps the things were as invisible to him as the pale priest had been to Vermian on the road from Baer. Or perhaps he had indeed seen something, but was pretending he had not. Why? What did he guess? To speak to him would be to ask for help – even to be believed. She was not sure he would grant her either. He was more sullen than ever now that Ulfin had come and gone again, and left him once more in the post he hated.

So she spoke to no one of her trouble. She was Trant's daughter and Ulfin's wife – the Lady of Tarceny who should not be afraid. If the shapes she saw meant harm, then maybe they could be harmed, and she had armed men within call who could do harm if it came to that. For now, what she was seeing (if she was seeing it) had as much substance as the flick of a bat's wings. They troubled her pulse-rate; nothing more. She could school that. She could treat them as if they were the insects that swarmed from the hillsides. Madness came from the
blood, she had heard. There was none, surely, in
her
family.

They came and went at the edge of the light. Very well; there would be more light. She complained of eye-ache in the lengthening dusks of summer, and had lamps placed in every corridor and around every room in use in the living quarters. Forty rushes burned every evening in the great hall, and the night bugs from the dewy hillsides wove and died among them in hundreds. She watched the servants from the corner of her eye for signs that they thought her wasteful, or deranged, or heedless of the risks of fire. And perhaps she saw it. But she thought that they too were glad of the light. Rushes were replaced as they burned low. Doors on dark, unused rooms were shut, and kept locked.

Ulfin did not come home that summer. Instead, he wrote more frequently than he had done (perhaps because he was writing at the same time to Caw, for money and more soldiers). The malady of the Kingdom persisted. He held the Segne, the heart of the land. She heard that nobles had rallied to him. But to north and east and south other powers watched. Some were openly hostile – especially in the south, where the Develin was strong. Elsewhere, the barons used the weakness of the Kingdom to do as they would; and who was to stop them? The Fount of the Law was dry.

Raid was followed by counter-raid. The strength of some lord was tested, and his villages withered in fire. Orcrim hammered interminably at the gates of Bay, but the household that had been shamed at Trant crouched behind its walls and would not yield. In June Pemini fell,
bloodily, to some of Ulfin's allies, and the town was sacked. Phaedra sent anxiously for news of Maria when she heard, but no answer came.

One September morning, more news arrived.

Phaedra was on the north-west fighting platform, looking out over the hills and groves of Tarceny She was remembering the view from the walls of Trant, which would have been all busy with people harvesting in the fields at this time of the year, when she heard a footstep behind her, and a man spoke.

‘My lady?’

It was Martin, the priest, standing alone on the fighting platform.

‘Good morning to you, Martin.’

She thought, once again, that she should find time to ask him how he liked his post, and to talk about what more he might do here. She felt guilty that she had so little for him to be busy with, other than leading in prayer the house-servants and kitchen staff and those others of the household whom she could compel to attend chapel. At the same time she still wanted to watch how he did, and in particular how often he wrote letters to Jent and other places. He was correct and polite, but she could neither bring herself to trust him, nor decide that she definitely did not trust him. It had crossed her mind more than once that she should have his letters intercepted, but she had done nothing. He remained a stranger.

‘I heard the men-at-arms talking in the courtyard, my lady. Word from the Segne has come to Caw. I thought perhaps it would concern you.’

Dear Angels, what had happened now?

‘I think you were acquainted with Elward of Baldwin, my lady?’

‘Yes.’ Elward. Young, handsome, high-born … She remembered him clearly, standing before Father's chair. ‘I almost agreed to marry him.’

‘Then I
–
I grieve to tell you, my lady, that he is dead.’

Dead.

Down below the walls, the olive groves whispered in the light breeze. Once, she might have thought that a man like that could not possibly die. She knew better now.

‘Did we do it?’

‘My lady?’

She sighed. Of course
we
had.
We
seemed to do everything.

‘How did it happen, Martin?’

‘He must have been with Septimus in Develin. Early this month he rode north with a small troop. He slipped past my lord's force at Tuscolo and arrived unexpectedly at Baldwin. The gates were open – there were harvest trains coming and going – and they got in. But they were too few, and the garrison was alert. They were cut down in the courtyard – Elward and all his followers.’

Cut down in the courtyard: in the courtyard where he must have played as a child. He deserved to have loved someone else.

‘He was an honourable man, Martin. I knew no wrong of him.’

And yet another love would not have saved him, because he had also loved the house where he would have brought her to live. He must have hated the thought that the flag of Tarceny had been placed so easily on his walls.
He would have brooded on it, during all the dreary months of campaigning, until he could no longer bear to wait for the chances of war to return him home. Then he had taken such as would follow him, to his end and theirs.

‘We should say a rite for him, Martin.’

‘At noon? Will you summon the house?’

‘No, now. Just you and I.’

He led the way down to the chapel (so much cleaner, lighter and better ordered than it had been before he had come). There they kneeled side by side for a long hour before the Flame. She followed him through the prayers and responses, and listened to his address to Umbriel, in which he prayed the Watcher of Heaven to count twice every good deed the dead man had done. He said the ancient words as though they were new, and marked each appeal with a silence, in which she could almost feel the air drawn past her cheek to the stillness of his prayer.

Afterwards they walked the fountain court together, among the scents of mint and thyme.

‘My thoughts are with his mother,’ Phaedra said. ‘To have lost both her husband and now her son … As a wife and mother myself it seems to me a grief beyond bearing. I cannot think that the Angels intend such things.’

‘I doubt that they do, my lady’

‘Then why do they permit them to happen – and to the best among us?’

‘The Angels do not permit, nor do they prevent. That is not their charge. Nor do they busy themselves only for those who are counted good. “If the miser gives gold to
a poor man,” Holy Tuchred tells us, “we have seen Raphael move his heart. When the coward knight turns upon his pursuers, there Michael rides upon his helm. And if a lying man speaks prophesy, you may look for Umbriel behind his eyes.” Their paths are within us, in the most secret places of our thoughts. In as little as a gesture or a word, we may glimpse their light among the evil we have made.’

‘But evil walks. It may touch us in so many ways!’ cried Phaedra in frustration. She was thinking of the evil that might walk in shadows, rather than on sword-edges or sickness; but she dared not be more specific. ‘What hope have we if the Angels do not themselves take body to intervene?’

He frowned. ‘The body is only the battleground. The true fight – where we need all the help the Angels give – is for the mind and soul.’

Dogma, dogma, thought Phaedra.

‘Do you know my lady diManey's story – how she was delivered from an ordeal that was meant to kill her?’ she asked.

‘I know what Adam diManey thinks he saw. And I know that His Grace and the lady spoke of it behind a closed door before you came to take her home, but neither have said what they think is the truth. Yet I know His Grace will have told her, as he has said to me, that if the Angels came to rescue each victim and right every wrong, they would long ago have led us back to Paradise, and left none of us the wiser.’

Phaedra was silent. She needed comfort, and it was not being given. If the Angels did not protect, or cure, or
avert evil – what good could they bring in this world where disaster followed disaster in terrible succession?

Looking back, she could remember the days at Trant when she had almost agreed to marry Elward. Then she had met one more time with Ulfin, had drunk once more from the Cup, and had found the strength to resist, one more time. What if she had not? There would have been no war. Father would have been alive. Baldwin, in its sunbeaten pastures, might yet have been as good a home as Tarceny with its loneliness and shadows. Ulfin; her son Ambrose; everything bad and good in her life seemed to have flowed from that moment when she had lifted the Cup to her lips and seen the tiny oak leaf circling on the face of the water.

‘Is it well with you, my lady?’ asked Martin suddenly.

He was looking at her closely. And he was either a very good actor, or the concern in his eyes was real. She was sure she did not deserve it. She could imagine how she had seemed to him since he had arrived at Tarceny – cold, distracted, distrustful. She must be a poor mistress. And even an honest man would ask himself what it was she so feared.

‘I was wondering – how much longer will you be with us before you go into the mountains?’

He frowned slightly. ‘We agreed I should leave after All Hallows, my lady. But that I would return before the Lenten Days.’

‘I shall be sorry to lose you.’

She had not answered his question, but they both knew that that in itself was an answer. He could not press her again. After a moment she thanked him and
dismissed him, thinking that even if he was indeed the bishop's man, Tarceny would be lonelier yet when he was gone.

And the past was a closed door. Elward was dead, and it was idle to dream of having married him, for she never would have done. Even then, Ulfin in his absence had been more real to her than any man she had met in the light of day. Now – how many times more so! She could close her eyes and remember the depth of his look, and the
thud, thud
of her heart as he held her in his arms. He might be hundreds of miles away, and yet she could still feel the witchcraft of his touch upon her skin.

And there was Ambrose. Squalling, petulant child: his uncle's long face was indeed showing now, where Orcrim had claimed so implausibly to see it; but the boy's clear eyes and (she believed) his mulish spirit were all his own. She would not have changed one moment of her past if it meant that he would never be.

Then she laughed, and she flung her arms to the sky as she had seen Ulfin do when he first met her son.

Martin left in the late autumn. He went on foot, with a donkey, some rude gear, and no protection but a staff and the appearance of little to steal. He seemed determined to find some hill settlement where he could spend midwinter, but promised to return in the spring. Phaedra watched him dawdle at the slow pace of his beast in and out of the olive groves below the castle, until he was finally hidden from sight. Now the chapel was empty again, and there was just Caw at her table in the evenings.