The Cup of the World (4 page)

Maria was watching her. ‘When you said that about your mother – was that in childbirth?’

‘Yes,’ said Phaedra.

‘I see.’ She understood, now.

‘I'm sorry’ Maria said. ‘So did mine.’

Neither of them spoke again for a while.

‘I found out what happened after the witch trial,’ said Maria at last. ‘Do you want to know?’

‘Yes, please,’ said Phaedra, relieved.

‘There was no fight. There was never supposed to be. You were right. The King had agreed to the ordeal to please Baron Seguin, who wanted to do away with that woman, so that he could have her lands. No one was expected to interfere, but of course that dog-knight did. So in the afternoon the King met with Baron Seguin and drove a new bargain. Lady Luguan will keep her life, but will still forfeit her lands to the baron. And diManey is to see that she practises no more magic’

‘Who?’

‘The knight with the hound badge. A hound badge for a dog-knight – very right. It's strange. Yesterday, everyone was sure that woman was a witch. Now it seems they don't know. But they are all furious with the dog-knight, and are running around trying to find out if some rival of Seguin's put him up to it. They are saying he deserved to be killed, and he would have been if the King had not gone out of his way to save him. Both Lady Luguan and he are to be free within the realm, but they are banned with the King's displeasure from his court, his lands and roads.’

‘And do you know,’ Maria went on, ‘Barius himself will marry them together! I suppose the bishops and their priests want as little to do with this as possible. But as a royal prince, of course he has the right to perform the office.’

‘They're
to be married?’

‘Yes. By order of the King. It was a way of solving the
problem of the woman, and punishing diManey at the same time. Poor diManey! Imagine – you wake up as you do every day get dressed, go to the court because everyone else is doing so, and a few hours later you're going to your bed in disgrace, lucky to be alive, betrothed to a complete stranger. A complete stranger, Phaedra – someone you've never heard or thought of before today. And she's a rebel – and worse, probably a witch. And all her lands are forfeit so your marriage has gone for nothing …

‘Still, it was a brave thing he did, whatever his reasons. Perhaps he doesn't even understand them himself. I'm glad Barius has invoked his right to bless them – it isn't much, but it's like him, and more than anything anyone else might have done. I suppose … I suppose it's fair to hope, and even dream, if we know there are at least some good men in the world.’

Phaedra was silent. It seemed to her that even Maria was thinking more of the dog-knight – and, of course, Barius – than of the witch. She could well imagine herself as the witch. And she thought that she would rather have died than be married to the dog-knight.

ah, Trant!

Ambrose, the Warden, rose in his stirrups in the King's courtyard. The early sun gleamed on his high forehead. His brows clenched. His head jerked this way and that at his followers. His men-at-arms were mounted, checking their horses, looking to him from their saddles. Straps were tight, mail gleamed, swords were hung just
so
. The Sun and Oak Leaf danced on a dozen armoured chests. The servants were lashing the last bundles upon the wagon. His daughter's litter was ready. Phaedra herself stood a little way off, in her travelling gown, waiting for a groom to finish checking the harness of the pony that she would ride when it pleased her.

Around them, the long middle enclosure of the castle of Tuscolo was thronged with wagons and men on horseback. People were moving about with sacks and bales of goods, cursing as they got in each other's way. Dogs barked and children ran among the crowd. The castle and the city beyond it were at last beginning to rid themselves of the travellers that had swarmed within them for days like the indigestion of a vast beast.

Ambrose scowled, and hunted among his people for a victim.

His party watched him. They and their families ate every day because they had been born or been chosen by him to be among those who served him. They knew his loyalties and obsessions, and the thousand little things he thought could be done better. They knew the shout that he was bottling in his guts, ready to rip through the crowd at the man who was a moment behind his fellows. He had been hammering at them since the day began. The big, long-bearded, hard-muscled Warden of Trant would not be dallying when it was time to go.

But this time there was no one for him to shout at. They were ready to the last buckle, all of them.

‘Well, good!’ Ambrose muttered at last into his beard. Then, as his daughter was helped into her saddle: ‘Phaedra, my dear. We will see how our reverend fellow traveller is doing.’

Leaving his party to wait where they were, he nudged his horse into a walk. Phaedra let her mount follow.

Halfway down the courtyard the crowds were at their thickest, outside the long barracks where the Bishop of Jent and his huge following had been quartered. Three standards, each with the bishop's House-of-God badge, hung listlessly from poles in the hands of liveried servants. Three wagons were in various stages of loading. In the middle of the fuss the bishop stood, shouting for haste. He was a round man, round-faced and all adorned with his robe, flat cap, ring and staff. No doubt he was intending to travel by curtained litter to save his fine clothes from the dust. He looked up at them from under furious brows as they approached.

Phaedra knew that Father would not be rude outright, for His Grace stood higher in rank than any warden. But of course Father would not be able to resist scoring his point.
Trant rises early …

‘You are ahead of me this morning, Warden. I am grateful that I shall not have to wait for you, at least. Have you eaten, sir?’

‘At dawn, Your Grace. Trant rises early, and knows what he must do.’

‘There is a tray of pasties and beer at the door to my quarter, if you will. I would offer you more, but I would be on our way as soon as we can. Are you all made up?’

Made and fit, Your Grace. Trant wits no delay …

‘Made and fit, Your Grace. I wait only for my new charge.’

‘That scoundrel? He is at the gate, there.’

Charge? Scoundrel? Looking round, Phaedra saw a party of the king's men on foot at the gate to the upper courtyard. They did not seem to be doing much. But Father was bowing in his saddle to the bishop and wheeling his horse away through the crowd. She watched him ride back up the courtyard, signalling men and horses from his own group to join him. He reached the king's men and bowed again, this time to a short, fair man who stood among the soldiers and bowed in return. A Trant horse was led up. The man mounted, and the king's men withdrew.

‘Now your company is made up,’ said the bishop, standing beside her stirrup. ‘And my fools will be another hour yet. Trant is confident, to travel with so few.’

It dawned on Phaedra that Father had abandoned her
in the presence of this unpredictable churchman, whom she knew only from his forceful reputation.

‘He might be confident indeed, sir,’ she said carefully. ‘When he knew we were to travel two-thirds of our way home with you.’

‘Ha! His sort are supposed to protect me, and not the other way about. Next time I come to Tuscolo I too will think less of my honour and more on speed. We do not need armies about us this year. Have a pasty, girl. There will be more delay yet.’

Phaedra bowed her head and nudged her pony away. She was thankful to be dismissed. At her knee a bored servant raised a tray of mutton-bones and other breakfast things. She shook her head and returned to the Trant party to wait for things to happen.

It was typical of Father, she thought crossly, both that he should have left her like that in the company of a man he had just needled, and that they should now be faced with this wait. He had roused them all at dawn, and bullied them through packing, not in spite of but
because
of the size of the bishop's party, which would delay them long after every last Trantish strap was tied down. Now they would stand here, perhaps for hours, with their comforts packed away and the sun climbing higher above the dust and heat of the middle courtyard. She wondered why she had not taken more time over her own preparations, to be ready at her convenience, rather than Father's. She could even have made him a fool in front of all the others whom he had harried to be ready.

She might have done it. Now that home beckoned, she could feel herself straining to break out of the mould
of the demure daughter that she had worn here, and to live more as she did in her own house. He knew better than to try to punish her if she did not do as he wanted. There had been a moment that morning when he had hung in her doorway as she and her maid Dilly were packing her things – her clothes, her precious book, her cup-and-ball game, candles and candlestick, basin, soap, jewels. He had seen she was going about her part with a will. And there had been relief in his voice as he had turned to bellow at the next man he met upon the stairs.

All the same, this was a victory for Trant. Small in number, they could still start their journey with their heads high among the bishop's great company, for they had shown that Trant knew its business. She was of Trant, no less than Father. And she too was longing to be home.

Horse-steps and harness sounded by her. Father towered over her on his big charger. Beside him was the fair-haired man she had seen at the gate, mounted now, and looking down at her out of the sun. She put up an arm to shield her eyes.

‘My daughter and only living child, sir, Phaedra, who will be your hostess at Trant. Phaedra, this is the Baron of Lackmere, Aun, who is to be our guest.’

A guest. And
why
should she endure a stranger at Trant?

This baron was an unsmiling man. He was probably younger than Father – between thirty and forty years – but his lined and unpleasant face, with heavy brows and a pointed chin, made him seem older. He was indeed short – a head below Father as he sat in the saddle, and not much more above Phaedra than the difference between his
horse and her pony. He wore his hair shoulder length, and had no beard, after the fashion of the provinces. His surplice was white and blue, and his badge appeared to be a staff held crosswise before a wolf's head. She guessed that he must be one of the lesser barons of the south. He seemed to have no attendants of his own.

‘Now Michael guard us, my lady’ said the man, for whom the prayer of fellow travellers was, it seemed, an empty formality.

‘And Raphael guide our way, for we are far from home,’ Phaedra replied. ‘You are to be our guest? Sir, with pleasure. For how long?’

Father's look told her she had said the wrong thing.

‘Longer than you or I would wish, I fear,’ the baron answered. ‘Let us not bear each other ill-will for it.’

Then she realized that he was not carrying a sword. The scabbard that hung at his saddle was empty. Two Trant men-at-arms hovered on their horses close behind him.

They had been travelling for an hour across the sun-hammered plain around Tuscolo before Phaedra could bring her pony alongside her father's mount.

‘I regret that I have embarrassed our house, sir.’

‘You mean Lackmere? I should not trouble on it. Another time remember that no good hostess asks how long her guests intend to stay’

‘Another time I shall be forearmed, and perhaps forewarned as well,’ she said, to make her point.

He brooded on her words, as he would do for no one else.

‘He was wished on me in the last hearings yesterday. By the time I returned to our quarters you were asleep, and rightly so. He remains with us until the King pleases otherwise. He was lucky to escape with so little harm.’

‘What has he done?’

‘He has been a rogue and a fisher of troubled waters for years. But he was rebel and an ally of rebels when we caught up with him. Good men were lost bringing him down. He might have been blinded and stripped of his lands. The King was moved to grant him clemency because he would not ask for it. We have to teach him gentility girl.’

Phaedra looked ahead to where the baron rode bareheaded in the sun. So that small man, riding insolently in advance of the banners, was one of the faceless enemy against whom Father had ridden four times through the wasted fields of the Kingdom. He was not looking back at the long procession that followed him. He would neither acknowledge them, nor pick his way in the dust of the men who were his captors. What might he do? The two Trant men-at-arms rode a short space behind him.

‘Will he try to escape?’ she asked.

In the distance sun glinted on mail. Outriders of the column were moving slowly along the top of a low rise to the south of their line of march. Phaedra could see the smudge of dust raised by their hooves against the solid blue of the sky. A horn-blast would bring them sweeping in to head off the runaway.

‘Who knows? I have his word. And if he runs, he will be outlawed and his lands forfeit. He has a family who will
suffer. If he bears the King's sentence he may yet see his home in peace again.’