The Cup of the World (6 page)

It was a relief to be home, after days of strange places and new faces. It was good to see the water after the parched landscapes of the journey and the frenzies of the King's house. Peace, whispered the lake breeze in the branches. The air was a little cooler here among the scented groves than it had been upon the sunbeaten road. The trees were heavy with their small fruits. There would be an olive harvest soon.

Hoofbeats sounded behind her. To her surprise, it was the Baron Lackmere and his two guards. The rest of the party were still out of sight below the curve of the ridge.

‘Is this country tame enough that you wander so far ahead without care? I am little use to you myself indeed. But it seemed to me that if I joined you these two fellows would not be far behind, and then we should be better placed if any ill befell.’

‘You are good, sir, but it was needless. This is my father's land. Look.’ She pointed to the lake.

‘I have seen. How far, now?’

‘The road follows the lakeside. We should see Trant from the next rise.’

‘Let us go, then. Is that a manor?’

Below them, and to their left, she could glimpse between the trunks the familiar roofs of Manor Gowden.

‘One of my father's holdings, sir.’

‘Rich?’

‘I do not know if you would call it so. There is a large house of wood and stone, surrounded by huts and farm buildings, all within a stockade, and outside that strip fields and orchards.’

‘But much land?’

‘From the ridge to the lake and a half-hour's walk in either direction. There is a fishing hamlet on the shore that is counted part of it.’

The track bore them on round to the right through the olive trees, and ran gently downhill. The baron stooped in his stirrups to peer among the whispering, deep-smelling trees.

‘So green, so green,’ he said. ‘What do you grow here?’

‘Why olives, as you see, sir. And vines, fruits and grain. We have oak woods too, from which we take our badge. For livestock we have mostly sheep and goats. What do you have in Lackmere?’

‘The same – where we can. But it is poorer country. A man needs much land to make a fair living – much more than your Gowden. And there are no big towns to bring us wealth or rich goods.’

‘Is it very dry? Is that why they call you Lackmere?’

‘We have nothing like this,’ he said, gesturing to the lake. ‘Not one tenth nor one hundredth of the size. Our streams and pools are mostly waterless in summer, and the grass is as yellow as straw. It is not desert, but thorn forest. Many miles of it. Good land for wolves. Hard land for shepherds and goatherds, who must guard their flocks with sometimes no more than a cut-thorn staff’ He touched his badge.

‘Wolves? Are they big and fierce?’

He looked at her. His eyes were green. ‘Small and scrawny and fierce. And always hungry’

They came out of the grove and the track rose, keeping the lake on their left. Near the top they halted. Looking back, she could see the rest of their party emerging from the trees.

‘Trant is just over this rise.’

‘I should like to see it.’

‘We should wait here. My father will want us to top the rise together, blowing his horn.’

‘Let us go forward and look, all the same. I do not know how long this place will be my prison. I shall feel easier to see it first in your company’

He kicked his mount forward. She followed reluctantly, for she did not like what she had heard him say. The rise dropped away to show the familiar mass of Trant bulking on the next hillside. It was just the same as it always had been, after all her long journey. Beyond it the lake stretched away to the north and was lost to sight. She was home.

‘Hm. Strong,’ said the baron.

‘It is not so big as the King's.’

Trant was a single compact courtyard, closed in with five huge towers. Below it were other buildings and a wide area surrounded with a dyke that ran down to the lakeside.

‘No indeed. But your father has no need to house a thousand men-at-arms in a night, nor to feed and protect a city My own walls are not so high as these, and yet mine is not the least strong place in the south. What other castles are nearby?’

‘There are not many. Tower Bay must be the closest, but it is more than a day’

‘Whose lands are those, then?’ He pointed across the lake.

‘The mountains you see are beyond the Kingdom. The hill people there are heathen. But the lands on this side of them are the March of Tarceny’

The baron looked sour. ‘The Doubting Moon. I cannot commend you on your neighbours.’

‘So they say, sir. Although it has also been said to me that the evil that was done – the harrying of his people and his neighbours – was the work of the old lord there. He died at his hearth some years ago. I have not met the new march-count or his house, and they did not come to Tuscolo for the King's feast. Our sail folk have some dealings with theirs. Otherwise they do not disturb us. Father always left us a strong guard when he was abroad in the recent troubles. But it was not needed.’

‘Hm.’ The baron was scowling across the lake now.

She should have remembered that he was one of those whom Tarceny could have helped by attacking from across the lake during the uprising. Maybe he and his friends had
been begging Tarceny for such a move, as the King's men had closed in on their last strongholds. If it had come, maybe he would not have been a prisoner now. And all this land that he had admired for its greenery would have been black with the trails of war. He would not have cared.

She had to breathe deeply for a moment, and feel the sunlight on her skin, to remind herself that the vultures of Tarceny had stayed at home, and that Trant flourished in its delicate green.

‘So,’ said the baron. ‘No visitors then? No suitors yet?’

‘A few.’

‘And what do you do here, between waiting for them to come for you?’

‘What I please, sir.’

‘What? I did not suppose you were a prisoner, like myself!’

‘I am my father's daughter, sir!’

‘Of course.’

Father was riding up with the rest of his party. She might now just watch him come, and that would be the end of this conversation. But she knew that she would have to spend many hours in this man's company. Once he had understood that she would talk to him as an equal, or not at all, there was no more point in fencing with him. Like it or not, they would know one another better before long.

‘I read sometimes,’ she said. ‘Often I walk and think by myself

‘You read?’

‘Yes, and I have learned arithmetic’

‘This is rare. My own lady can do neither. Nor can I.’

So he had a lady of his own. Of course – Father had
talked of his family. And now Father himself had laboured up the slope and reined in, six yards away.

Suddenly the ridge was milling with horsemen: the whole party twenty-strong including the wagon, holding their mounts in check and looking to the Warden. He waved an arm. A rider came up, with the big Sun and Oak Leaf banner beginning to lift and blow in the lake-wind. Under the brave device curled the Warden's motto: WATCH FOR WHO COMES. The herald sounded the long flourish of Trant, and the party poured forward from the ridge. Horns, fragmented by distance, sounded from the castle on the far hill.

So Phaedra came home for the last time, under the banner of her father.

rant wallowed in the harvest.

In the mornings and evenings, when it was cool enough to work, the hillsides swarmed with people among their strips and vines. The grapes were still picking. The grain was in. From every barn came the steady
whack, whack
of flails upon the threshing floor. The thin months were over. The food was here to be gathered, and every day counted. Every man hurried to bring his own crop in before he did his work for the manor, and every manor knight wanted all that was due to him before he thought of what might be owed to Trant. Ambrose was everywhere, riding from one manor to the next to bully the people into giving what they owed to him and to each other. One day he flew into a rage in the middle of a hearing and had three men from the same village put into stocks over their failure to do the labour due. For five days, three women and their children, down to a six-year-old, worked on without the help of their men at the most vital time of the year.

That was at Manor Sevel. Ambrose held court there more often than any of his other manors, because a knight
in the service of Tower Bay had once tried to claim the place, and it was still important to be sure that both Bay and Sevel understood who Sevel's lord was.

Phaedra had ridden over with Baron Lackmere for the hearings, but was not present when Father had his temper fit because her guest had wandered away with his guards to the grape presses to sniff at the stew of juice and pulp and twigs (and flies), and to carp at her about the way things were done. Half an hour listening to the Warden's justice had been enough for Lackmere. It was not manor cases that interested him, but the distant possibility of a clash with Bay. Perhaps he imagined that the Warden might give him a sword and let him ride as a knight against Trant's enemies – if only for an hour.

He was often in her company. He was not easy to entertain. For although he was treated with respect and held in comfort, and permitted to go where he would on Trant's lands under escort, he had little to do but brood and wait for orders of release that did not come. She did what she could. She rode with him all over the castle manors, and walked with him on the walls. She tried to read to him, although he had little use for
The Lamentations of Tuchred
, or any of the half-dozen other holy meditations that made up Trant's library. She wrote, at his dictation, a letter to his lady, in which his words and greetings were so stiff that they betrayed his guilt that his family was now protected and his lands held by those he had chosen as enemy.

She wanted him to see Trant as she saw it – a homely place, even to an exile. She wanted him to see beyond the little signs of wealth that he noted, such as the silver plate
from which he was served, the numbers of woven hangings or the smooth craftsmanship of the joined tables and benches. She wanted him to show that he understood how lucky he was to have been sent here rather to any other house in the Kingdom: how he might laugh with James the housemaster or Joliper the merryman; or call Sappo the huntsman to take him fowling along the lakeside. She was annoyed when he spoke grudgingly about the dishes the kitchen produced, or complained about some detail. He spoke little with Brother David, the gnarled, greying castle priest, and attended holy service only when duty required.

She took him outside the walls to her favourite place in all Trant, the small oak grove near the lake edge below the castle, where the ruined fountain court stood among the trees with its colonnades open to the sky. She walked with him around the old stonework, thinking that he might be impressed with the deep silence there, under the whispering branches. She told him how she had escaped from the King's feast in Tuscolo to find a little fountain court like this, which reminded her of home. He did not seem very interested.

And one rainy day she walked with him into the chapel to show him the line of stones in the wall cut with the names of her mother, and of her four brothers and sisters, only one of whom had lived past the age of three.

He looked at the stones, and his face was set like stone too. Perhaps he remembered having hopes for children whom he had then had to bury, like these.

‘You were the eldest?’

‘The second. Guy was the eldest. He is the only one
I remember well. He died of a fever a year before Mother. After me there was a gap, and then …’ She gestured to the row of stones that ended in her mother's name.

‘Why did your father not re-marry?’

Why did people always think that? ‘He does not want for wealth, sir.’

‘All men want sons.’

‘He has sworn he will not. He says the Angels have given him his portion and he will be content with it.’

‘Hm. And when one of these fine suitors has carried you off, what will be left of his portion then?’

She hated it when he spoke of things like that. It was like hearing a drunk singing bawdy songs in a cathedral or a quiet street. But, like a drunk, he would not be put off. It seemed there was little else left that he was willing to talk about. She did not want to think of suitors any more than she wanted to think of what Father would do.

‘He has sworn he will not.’

A strange oath
, said her companion, as they sat together on the brown hillside of her dreams. He fingered the stone cup that he held in his left hand.

Do you remember the first time?

He nodded.
I remember. You were just a child, peeping over the edge of the pool. I saw you very clearly. It was why I spoke to you
.

I thought you were my brother
, she said.

It had been not long after Mother died, in that empty time when she had woken each day to find that everything had changed and yet everything was the same. One
evening at table, as she sat in Mother's place, Father had begun to list aloud the sisters and daughters of local lords with whom he might make an alliance. He had done it without any great interest, but he would not stop. And she had screamed at him over the table, with her child's voice cracking, that he had killed Mother and would kill her too, if he did this. Then she had gone to her room and refused food. She had refused it for days. The pain had come like grief, and when it had gone she felt her grief had gone with it, and she had begun to dream wonderful, sunlit dreams of watching Mother sewing robes
(Don't come too close, lamb)
or of the lakeside with the ripple, ripple of light from the water on the underside of the leaves and on Mother's skin. And she would wake to find Mother dead, and Guy dead, and Father raging, or begging beside her that she should eat, and she had wanted to sleep again.