The Cup of the World (33 page)

There was no moon. A quality in the night, perhaps the very blackness of the mountain shapes against the pale sky, told her dawn must be near.

And now she was truly afraid. For if Ulfin could have
gone nowhere far in the mountains at night, the presence of dawn opened numberless possibilities.
I am in the wrong place
. Where did he think the right place might be? Was he trying, even now, to get there? Twice before in their marriage he had risen like this and gone away to the war. Never before had he left without warning. And why so suddenly, if not to ensure that he could not be followed?

For a moment she stood there, with her knees quivering in the air of the night and the stones of the court gritty beneath her bare feet. She thought of leaving Ulfin to disappear, to come back (if he would) that evening, or the next day, or – when? They had food, guards – surely he had not taken the guards. They could keep themselves here. And if need be they could return to Hayley unless for some reason the mountain folk were suddenly grown hostile.

No. He was slipping beyond her reach. She did not know when he would return, and whenever it was might be too late. She must be quick.

She hurried back to her door, pausing to give Orani a shake as she passed. In the room she found her clothes and shoes by feel, and threw them on. Orani was sitting bolt upright among her blankets when she emerged again.

‘Lady?’

‘Orani, my lord has gone out. I do not know where or for how long. It may be nothing. But I am going to follow him.’

‘Now, lady?’

‘It's nearly dawn. You are to stay here. If we return today, well and good. If not …’ She paused, thinking. ‘If not, you must go, at dawn tomorrow. This place is
dangerous in ways I do not understand. You must make the men take you back to Hayley Massey will do it, if you tell him I asked it.’

Orani was staring at her. Phaedra wondered how much she had understood. She did not have time to repeat herself. She spoke again more slowly.

‘Whatever happens, you and Eridi must see that Ambrose is safe. If all else fails, remember that he has friends at Chatterfall. Go there quickly and in secret. The knight and his lady there will help you. Or you may make your way down the lake and seek sanctuary with the bishop at Jent. Orani …’

‘Lady?’

‘You know my son's enemies are not all of the day’

‘Yes, lady’

‘Those stones – the charms my lord gave. What did he say should be done with them?’

‘He told Eridi, lady, when he first gave them. To keep them round the little one always.’

Those things could not come at him. All the same, it is right to be watchful
.

‘See that you do.’

She turned, and hurried along the dark colonnades to the forecourt. The gateway was black as pitch. She did not see the man in it until she stumbled into him.

‘Who …?’

‘Who's there?’

It was the sentry, of course.

‘Who is it? Grayme?’

‘Buckliss. My lady’ he added, as he recognized her.

‘Have you seen my lord?’

‘Five, ten minutes ago, my lady. I was watching him go off along the slope. Then I thought he must ha' left the gate open, which he did. So I come down off the roof to close it.’

‘Did he look as if he was going far?’

‘He'd a loaf with him, my lady’ The man's voice was taking on a wary note, as he registered that the lord was off and the lady seemingly did not know where or why he was gone. Phaedra did not care what the man thought. A loaf would see Ulfin through a day. It would not get him to Hayley but he might find other provisions before the day was ended. She must catch him quickly. But she must be prepared in case she did not.

‘Do you have any food or drink with you?’

‘Only water, my lady’

‘Give it to me, please.’

He looked at her for a moment. Then stepped out of the gateway and fumbled at his belt. The leather bottle he gave her was almost empty. She did not dare stop for more.

‘Which way did he go?’

‘Left, my lady, and down a bit.’

He was not going to Hayley then. He was going back to the pool.

‘Let me out, please.’

The man fumbled with the bolts in the darkness. Grey light cracked from top to bottom of the arch as he pulled one great wooden door open. Outside it was nearly dawn. Phaedra hurried out into the cold mountain wind.

He had gone to the pool. In that dim light she was unsure of striking the path by which they had returned the previous day. She was unsure too of the loose-pebbled
descent under the walls of the house. Instead she took the way she remembered – up the slope, tending to the left, climbing to the viewpoint by the thorns and the white stone. Somewhere the sun must have been rising; but there was little sign of it in the sky except, away to her left, where the mountain ridge above the village stood sharp and black against a pale grey with the slightest flush of rose.

She paused to listen for some sound beyond the hiss of the low wind in the thorns. There was nothing. Her feet crashed and scraped loudly as she pushed among the undergrowth, looking for the way down. She found it. Before beginning her descent she paused, and faced the white stone. Running her hand over the surface she found an area at the tip which was less smooth than the rest of it. There were indentations, as if of an iron chisel. She could not tell how old they were. There, a piece perhaps the size of a fist had been cut from the rock. Enough, she thought, to mill down to the sort of smooth pebble a child might play with. When she had descended through the scrub far enough to gain a view of the pool and the clifftops she paused to count the other stones.

There were thirty-one.

Voices sounded across the space before her. On the far side of the pool, on the very crest, stood the priest in his pale robes. He had his back to Phaedra. Below him, by the fallen monolith, was Ulfin. Only his head and shoulders were visible from where Phaedra crouched below the thorns. The words were indistinct, but the two were arguing.

If either looked her way, she would be in plain view. But the light was dim and her clothes were dull. If she did not move she might go unseen. She strained to catch the
voices. Ulfin was the louder – urgent, angry. She could almost hear his words. The priest's voice was softer and more level. And yet she thought that he too was angry. What was happening? At one moment Ulfin seemed to be urging, almost begging, for something the priest would not consider. The next he was waving the words of the priest away with a furious gesture, and placing his hand upon the fallen monolith in a manner that appeared intended as a threat. Now the priest was answering again. At length Ulfin nodded, as if he were still not satisfied with the bargain, but knew that he was going to accept. Together they walked down to the water's edge. Phaedra watched as Ulfin kneeled before her enemy, and drank water that the priest had lifted from the pool with his hands.

Suddenly Ulfin had risen and was striding quickly up the slope towards the fallen stone. The priest was looking up towards where Phaedra crouched on the cliffside. She could not tell, at that distance, whether he had seen her. Her mind's eye saw again the cold smile she had seen on the stair of Tarceny Then he too turned away, and the hillside was empty of him.

Perhaps he had gone behind some rock that she could not see. Perhaps he would emerge in a moment, following Ulfin or walking by the edge of the pool. Phaedra crouched, counting. He would come in sight in a few seconds. In ten. In twenty.

He did not. And neither her memory nor the growing light suggested that there was any boulder on the far rim of the bowl behind which a man might have disappeared so. He was gone into the rock, and she was alone above the pool.

Ulfin had passed the ridge. She must not be left behind again. She must not be deceived by light or lover; led to think this had been a chance meeting, any more than Ulfin had meant the white pebbles to be a child's toy. Somewhere down there the truth had glimmered for a moment, like a fish below water. She must catch it. As quickly as she dared, she committed herself to the descent.

Ulfin had met the priest. He had known – he must have known – that he would find the priest here.

Quickly, quickly. Don't fall.

He had brought her here, knowing the priest to be in this place.

He had let Eridi and Orani into his secrets. Why? Because they would not ask questions of him. They would take his pebbles, those little childish pebbles that had seemed to get everywhere, and make sure that Ambrose was surrounded with them, because he had told them to. As he must have told them not to tell her. And she, mother of the child, wife of the lord, had been left unaware, just as she had never been told that Caw was her father's killer.

‘Ulfin!’ she groaned, as she landed by the pool.

He hadn't told her because she would ask questions he did not want to answer. Yet he had always had answers for the questions she did ask –
Tell the truth
, he had sworn. And surely they had been true, as true as they had been deft and slanted to leave her as accepting and ignorant as before. They had left her trusting in the bond between them; the bond that now drew her on.

Quickly, quickly.

She was slow. The rocks were uneven, the water, where she splashed briefly into it to ankle-depth, shockingly cold.
And now she was nearing the point where the priest had stood. She did not know if he had been aware of her before he had disappeared. She did not know where he had gone. She had a horror of meeting him and, worse still, the things that might be with him. She was going more cautiously, pausing to look around her. A man who disappeared so easily might reappear again without warning.

Angels! He had been
here
!

Her caution gave other parts of her mind time to think. Ulfin had gone back down the slope, the way he had come. He might have been going back to the house. He might be halfway there by now. She did not think so. He had taken provisions. Whatever his business with the priest, he was starting on a journey. She had nothing but thin shoes, thin clothes and a water-bottle that was almost empty.

The latter at least could be cured. She paused for a moment at the water's edge and looked around. Nothing moved. Uncorking the bottle, she thrust it into the water and watched the silver air bubbles gollop out until it was full. Another look around. Still nothing. She corked the bottle and hurried up the low slope to the point where the priest had stood.

She looked into a different world.

She should have been halfway down a steep mountainside, with the dawn growing in the pink sky and the green of the thorns and scrub-grass beginning to start from the grey and the distant ridges black against the sky. Now the colours had changed. The land seemed darker, as if thick clouds had dimmed the rising sun. The shape
of the hillsides had altered, although they retained in their low rises and ridges a suggestion of the mountains they had been. The sky was heavy as if with thunder, and yet there was no breath of wind in the air.

Ulfin was in view, not far off, but walking away from her down a slope.

‘Ulfin!’ she shrieked.

He seemed not to hear her, and she sprang forward. Almost at once she lost her footing, for in the light and the slope there was something deceptive, and her feet did not strike rock where they expected it. She stumbled and slid, rolling and banging and bruising herself down the slope. When she checked herself, Ulfin was looking back at her from twenty yards off

‘Wait!’ she said. Her voice sounded flat in her ears.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Following you.’

‘Why the devil …?’

There was something wrong about his voice too. Just as there was about the light, and the dark brown-rubbled landscape around her.

She knew this place. She had stood among rocks like these in a hundred dreams. Around her was the same barren landscape and the impossible curve of the distant ground, upward and upward until it seemed to be all cliffs of a gigantic scale that rose to a skyline far above her head. Away to her left two great lights glowed above the world's rim. The air throbbed with a sound so deep that it was almost beyond hearing. And everything was brown.

‘You cannot stay here,’ Ulfin said. ‘You must go back.’

She looked back the way she thought she had come.
A few paces away, up a shallow slope, was the edge of a dark pool that lay among a jumble of boulders. Around it, standing stones rose like the teeth of some vast beast. She had dreamed of it last night. And she could remember now, years ago, how a nine-year-old girl had crept among its rocks in the dreams after her mother's death, peering into the black depths until the man had spoken in the shadow beside her.

‘No,’ she said.

e seemed to realize that even if she had wanted to find her way back to the daylight, she could not.

‘He's let you through,’ he said. ‘To make a fool of me, I suppose.’ He hesitated. He was wondering whether to lead her back up the slope, and presumably whether he could find the way back out of the brown rocks that she could not. ‘I am in a hurry, Phaedra.’ ‘I am coming with you,’ she said. ‘You cannot. The others—’