The Cup of the World (9 page)

On the seventh night of the new year Phaedra retired to bed as she had a thousand times before. She did not sleep. When she closed her eyes and looked up into darkness, she wondered where she would lay her head tomorrow.

The next morning she attended the Warden's discussions with the King's men. Others from Trant were there too. The visitors spoke in turn. A marshal told them of the size of the King's escort and the accommodation they would need. A clerk wanted details of the complaints that would be brought before the King's justice while he was at Trant. A butler spoke of the personal wants and comforts of the King, and a huntsman about how he might spend his leisure.

Phaedra said nothing. As she listened, she realized why Trant was already beginning to hum around her. The demands on the household would be enormous. There would be fifty knights – fifty! – wanting board and sleeping room, as well as clerks, jesters, cup-holders and chamberlains – enough to eat three months' worth of Trant's provisions in the three weeks they would stay. Both royal princes would be in the party. It was not yet known which of the barons would join the progress, although it was a safe guess that if Develin came both Seguin and Faul
would be along to keep an eye on him. Two princes, three great lords; and the King would not pay a silver piece for the board of his following or theirs for all the season that he was away from Tuscolo. Plainly the crown had good reasons for such a progress, and reinforcing the King's authority in the lands he passed through would only be one of them.

There would be no women with the King's following. The queen was pregnant again (her seventh child, if it lived). She would not travel. The ladies of the court were to remain at Tuscolo out of respect for her.

‘Well you may look pleased,’ said the butler to Phaedra. There were chuckles in the room. Phaedra had to think for a moment before realizing that if ladies of the court had come her work as hostess would have doubled – more than doubled.

There would be over a hundred horses to be stabled and fed, with tack to be mended and all. Trant's stables would overflow. There would be banquets by night and hunts by day. Phaedra knew that without a miracle that night she would be filling every moment with matters of the King's visit for weeks. Still, she found her attention wandering: to the fountain; to the coming night; to the man in the dream. And the voices of the room would dim around her.

‘What of the Baron Lackmere?’ asked Father.

‘A matter that touches the King's justice,’ said the royal clerk. ‘But His Majesty is in my opinion unlikely to make any further judgement concerning him in the course of this progress.’

‘Therefore,’ said the butler, ‘it would be better if the
baron did not meet with the King at any time, nor did eat at the high table, nor at any table with the King's household. What you do beyond that I leave to you.’

So Aun's hope of early release was gone, as he had feared it would be. And there would be no other chance as good as this for a number of years. Father was making no protest. Nor did he when the clerk began to enquire about the ins and outs of the Bay knight's claim on Manor Sevel, feeling out how this dispute between the great houses might go when the King tried them. If Bay must have crumbs, then crumbs would be thrown to Bay. Trant was after a bigger prize. She shut her eyes briefly

I must leave, she thought. I will save him from this.

Afterwards, when the midday meal was ended, she looked for Aun through the castle, and did not find him. At last she came upon his guards, lurking in the upper levels of the north-east tower to be out of the wind and the threat of coming rain. They pointed her to where the baron paced on the northern battlements above the great hall. She saw at once that he already knew what the King's men had said about him. When she approached he turned away, as though fearing she would try to comfort him.

‘It is not a good day, I think,’ she said.

He grunted, and peered over the battlements. She joined him, looking down the grey and white perspectives of the north wall. It was forty feet from the platform where they stood to the base, and another fifteen to the floor of the ditch. The ditch was supposed to be dry, but there was always a little water in it at this time of year.

‘The wall bulges outward near the bottom,’ she said.
‘You don't see it, unless you are up here looking down.’

At another time he might have explained about building techniques – about the need for a broad base to the wall for stability, or some such reason. Today he scowled.

‘I wonder at your workmanship here. The mortar is well enough at this level – no doubt because it is easy to come to. But are there not cracks between the stonework on the face of the wall?’

‘You may be right, sir.’

‘I should say so. Perhaps it will fall down one day, and then I shall be free.’

‘You have better hopes of being freed, Aun.’

‘Have I?’ he said sharply. ‘I suppose if you marry this prince of yours, you'll be a princess, and if you bear him the right number of sons, he'll listen to you. Then if His kind Majesty and Barius would only die without further issue, you'll be Queen Consort one day.
Then
you can persuade someone to let me out of here – if I haven't died or gone mad waiting.’

Phaedra paused, fighting the sudden anger in herself that would make her walk away. It was knowing he would not care that stopped her. And he had good reason to be distressed – as much as she did, she thought.

‘I'm not supposed to know about that,’ she said quietly.

‘Neither am I. Neither is half the castle. Do you think anyone would tell me if it hadn't been rattling around the corridors since yesterday? These gabbling Tuscolo gaylords!’

‘I do not wish to—’

‘You're very young, my girl. May I give you some advice?’

‘Do.’

‘Don't think of making your father play your game. He can't, this time. And he won't try. What he has done for you has already been beyond all reason – another man would have birched the skin off his child for crossing him so. If the prince wants to marry you, he will – although if you ask me, he'll suffer for it in the Kingdom. But he can do it. Your father would not be warden for long if he interfered. I'm not telling you this because I like it. I'm telling you because that's the way things are.’

It might be a sort of comfort, to a man like him, to know that someone else was being constrained against their will. Rain began to fall in individual drops upon the stonework around them. After a while she spoke again.

‘Sir, I would like to forget what you have said. For too many men are nothing but armoured bullies. And I think that when you have taken a man's arms and bullying away from him, and find there is nothing more, then he likewise is nothing more. And you and he and the Kingdom are the poorer for it.’

He glared at her, and she met his look, as she always did. Then she left him. When she looked back she saw him leaning over the battlements again, with the rain beating heavily around him.

So she spent the rest of the afternoon drifting round the castle, watching the men and women at their work and telling them absently what she thought would be needed when the King came. Then she went to the north-west tower to watch the evening. The rain had gone. So had Aun. The battlements below her were empty. The grey
underbellies of clouds ranked one after the other, on and on towards the pale gleams of sunset. The weather was changing. The wind blew from the south. It was strangely warm. She looked down towards the olive trees that hid the fountain and thought: I must go. Even if he does not come tonight, I shall go. Perhaps I shall make the sail-folk take me down the lake to Jent, and ask the bishop to let me enter a convent there.

At the sixth hour that evening she sat through her last supper at Trant, with the oil lamps flaring above her. Looking down from her place at the high table, where she sat between the King's huntsman and his butler, she could see the household at the long tables below her. They had seated Aun on the one to her right, among the knights at the head of it. She could see him watching her, but could not read his face. When she looked again midway through the meal he was gone.

The tables clattered with fists and dishes, and Joliper the merryman came up with his lute and his banter to entertain the high table. The sights and the sounds touched her eyes and ears, but reached only to the edge of her mind. The King's butler was talking with Brother David, but she did not listen. The thought of the old court beneath the oak trees lay in her head like a dark, quiet pool. The supper went on in uproar along the banks, but the surface of the water was still.

‘… So Wulfram came from the sea,’ Joliper was saying in his sing-song story voice.

‘… In Three Ships he brought Four Angels, and with them our people to a strange shore.

‘There he bade his Seven Sons each take land for their own, and in their hands he placed One Thing.

‘And the Thing was Iron.

‘Iron in the hands of the Seven Sons won the Kingdom, and Iron in the hearts of their children shall see that it never is at peace.’

Joliper had ridden with Father in the long harrying of the Seabord when the last rebels had finally been put down. He would never stand up to Father, or indeed to any man that Phaedra could think of. But his hatred of what he had seen stirred in the lines of his ballads – even before the King's own men. (He also mentioned lice and dysentery whenever he thought Father would let him get away with it.)

Some time after the seventh hour, when they came to fill the cups for the second time, Phaedra rose to leave. She kissed Father goodnight, as she had done every night since she was small, and let her lips linger just a fraction longer than usual on his hairy cheek. If he noticed, he did not show it. But he smiled at her and there was warmth in his hug, which had not always been there in the last few months. Then he turned to the royal clerk beside him, and began to test the water about his long dispute with Falco of Bowerbridge, who claimed to be a free knight rather than to hold his manor from the Warden. Perhaps not one for the King himself, but for a panel of right men appointed to judge?

Father was not a bad man. He played the game as he must, like chess, and this was too good a chance for him to miss. A gift in the right place, even to this clerk, would bring a royal letter that would finish tiresome old Falco's
claim to be a dog-knight as surely as if Father had burned him out of his home and killed anyone who tried to help him. It would be a manor to set against Sevel, if he lost that: a fair exchange for Trant, whatever came of the marriage. Phaedra walked from the hall without looking back.

The corridors were dark to her eyes after the lights of the hall. Purple splashes drifted in her sight as she walked. Her feet knew the way. Up the stair, turning after a dozen steps, and up again to the gallery from which she had heard Father and the prince's man talking weeks before. An emptiness was growing within her as she walked.

Now to the right. A torch hung above her door, shedding a pool of light in the passage. She went in and fumbled for the things she had placed below her bed: a light cloak, and the bundle small enough to hide under it. She was leaving almost everything behind. Even her cup-and-ball game lay in her chest alongside the dusty rag dolls that she had not played with for years. There would be nothing, as she hooked the cloak around her neck, to show that she was doing more than taking a short stroll within the castle before retiring.

She was ready. It must be almost the eighth hour.

She stood alone at the window a little while, looking westwards down to the lake. There was a moon out there, somewhere above thin clouds. The oaks about the fountain clustered in a mass of black below her, and the lake-face spread in deep blue-grey into the night beyond. She thought she could just – just? – make out a pale patch that might be the full-bellied curve of a sail, dipping silently above the water. She could not be sure.

There was one more thing to do. She left her room and felt her way along the corridor to the north-west tower, where she took the spiral steps down to the ground. The corridor here was unlit, but she walked forward confidently, running her fingers along the right-hand wall past one, two, three doorways. When her fingers touched wood for the fourth time, she stopped and groped for the door ring. The hinges opened with a moan.

The chapel was empty. The Flame of Heaven still fluttered on the altar, but the roof and the aisles were lost in darkness. She crossed slowly to the far aisle, bowing to the Flame as she had done every day for a dozen years, and walked down the chapel until she came to the stones in the wall.

She could hardly see them in this light, but she did not have to. She stood before them. After a moment she opened her mouth to say something, but stopped herself. Instead she reached out and touched each stone lightly, feeling for the names cut in the cold surfaces. Goodbye, Guy. Goodbye, Ellen, Anfred, Ina. Goodbye, Mother. I must go.

She thought, as she walked down the aisle to the main door, that families should weep at parting. But for seven years she had had only five stones and Father. Stones could not weep, and neither did she.

Set in Trant's west wall, under the lee of the northwest tower, was the small postern door. It was unguarded. Huge bolts held it on the inside, but her hands drew them back. The hinges groaned as it opened. She stepped through and closed it as softly as she could behind her.

Immediately she knew she was in the wrong place. She
had never been this side of the walls after dark before. She scrambled quickly down into the ditch (ankle-deep in cold water) and up the far side. No one called to her from above. Lights burned up there, but Trant's custom in time of peace was to man the gatehouse and let the walls look to themselves.

Down the hill, and the ground was soft beneath her feet. Her cloak was dark. She was beyond the reach of the torchlight now. There seemed to be no sound but the steady whisper of the wind and the slight scuff of her shoes on the grass. The first trunks of the grove loomed at her out of the night. She went more slowly, straining her eyes for the sign of anyone moving or standing beneath the trees.