The Cup of the World

by John Dickinson

  I must speak with you. A silence had fallen upon the men under the banner. She sensed a sudden wariness among them, as they watched her look to her lord. They knew what he knew, and she did not. They knew what he had to say.

  She walked down the gentle slope to where he stood.

  ‘Ulfin, what is the matter?’

  He looked up. His face was pale and he was ill-shaven. There was a darkness like bruising below his eyes.

  ‘Phaedra – I … The truth is I do not know how to tell you …’

  ‘Is it Father?’

  He hesitated for a moment. Then he said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You look terrible.’

  She said it, and felt her face smile. The corners of her mouth twitched and the tiny muscles pulled at the edges of her eyes, even as his words as she had heard them crashed slowly though her guts.

  ‘It has been a heavy season. The King and Prince Barius are also … So much has happened. Phaedra – the King is disappeared.’

  She turned away and looked across the lake. She felt for the first time the keenness of the wind up here, which blew the folds of the banner out straight behind them. It flew into her eyes and teased them to tears. The land across the water was misty indeed. Father was gone. Dead, and the King with him?

  Father!

  She blinked. They would call her the worst traitor in the Kingdom.

  ‘Why – why did it happen?’

  ‘Because he was a good man! Because he didn't keep his dungeon in order!’ The words exploded from Ulfin like protesting hounds. ‘We were holding him and some others in a storeroom. It was not made for holding men. They broke out, and attacked my people. They were ill-armed, but they took us by surprise. My men defended themselves. By the time I got there he was dead, and two others with him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I do not know the names, Phaedra. I can find out …’

  She shook her head. At that moment, she did not want to know. ‘I asked you to send him to me.’

  He said, ‘I did not have his word of conduct.’

  Father would have been angry and ashamed. He might not even have listened. She had been asking too much, and dreaming that it would all be all right, because she had asked that it should. She could not blame Ulfin.

  She took Ulfin's hand and held it.

  ‘It is good to have you back again,’ she said at last. ‘I have missed you so much.’

  ‘Phaedra – I cannot stay’

  She looked up. ‘You must stay! You must! I can't …’

  She broke away from him and ran a few steps, jamming her fist into her mouth. There was nowhere on all that wide, grey slope to go to. And she had no home any more – not Tarceny without Ulfin. Not Trant, without Father, no! All those memories! Just a world of hillsides and grey skies and the wondering eyes of the soldiers above her.

  I must not weep.

  Ulfin caught her by the shoulders.

  ‘Phaedra. It is grievous, yes. Now of all times I should be with you. But war may already be on us. I sent men under a flag of truce to the King's camp on the road to Bay, but the King and Barius were both vanished from it. Do you understand?’

  She shook her head, choking with tears, and buried her face in his shoulder. Yet a part of her mind was watching from some unshaken platform in the middle of her brain. She felt it look askance, like an adult at the tantrum of some toddler. Are you crying for Father, it seemed to ask, or because your husband has other things on his mind besides yourself?

  ‘I cannot tell what will happen now. I have eighty men on the far side of Derewater, holding Trant for you. I must return at once, with eight hundred – a thousand. I cannot delay’

  It is both, she thought. Both. And if there is more fighting I may lose him too.

  ‘One night,’ she said hoarsely. ‘One night. Ulfin, please. I – I have something to tell you as well.’

  She felt him hesitate. She felt too the slightest shift in his embrace as he held her less tightly. The tension in his shoulders as he squared himself for what was coming.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I think I am with child.’

  She had not believed it when Orani had told her for the first time, what her tiredness and sickness meant. She had not believed it because she could not allow it to be true. Even when her body, and the household's looks, had given her the lie, she had resisted the knowledge. It was only as she spoke the words that she surrendered to it at last.

  Ulfin broke from her grip and walked a few steps away down the slope, looking out across the grey waters below. Then he turned to her again, and at last a slow smile crept across his face. And in her grief and her fear it did not seem strange that he too should think this was the most terrible news of all.

  PART II

  THE PALE PRIEST

  X

  Pain

  scroll in the library of Tarceny held a fragment of The Tale of Kings that she had not heard or read before. It told of a prince who led his followers into the pagan hills and there was surrounded by foes. Climbing to a high place, he raised his horn to summon his brothers to his aid. Many times he blew, but they were busy with hunts or wars, were at feasts, or yawned among their sheets of silk. They did not come to help him.

  Once more the prince blew, calling across the leagues to the King, his father. Come Wulfram, come, as in wrath you came from the sea! The horn-note soured among the mountainsides. In his heart he felt his father's answer:

  Wind whispers your words in dust

  On dying leaves. Thorns wave.

  Still are my steeds, my knights stir not.

  I lie among a hundred brave.

  Earth stops cold my mouth.

  My bones are litter in the grave.

  Ambushed, Phaedra wept.

  She had not gone to his burial. She could not have stood by his coffin, with the eyes of the crowd upon her and Ulfin's swords guarding her from her own people. She had sent word that he was to be laid with Mother and the children, and a stone set by theirs in the chapel wall. One day she would visit, to see that it had been done.

  His death was a presence, beyond the colourless doings of each day. It cast shadows in her mind. When they found the bodies of the King and Prince Barius in the thickets off the road from Tower Bay, covered with terrible wounds as if they had been mauled by beasts, no explanation had accompanied the news; but Phaedra could not feel surprised. It seemed to her that these deaths, though separated from it by days and distance, were swallowed into the one great Death that had happened at Trant. No further reason existed.

  Grief made her eyes and shoulders ache. She suffered rashes, mouth-sores and a pain in the throat that lasted for days. There seemed to be a pit of emptiness in her stomach, which forced her to keep gulping. Her brain fogged when she tried to concentrate, and when she wanted to sleep it raced and would not rest. She wondered what kind of creature she was, to have allowed and even aided an attack on her own father's house. She was angry: in brief, spasmodic moments. Her nails dug into her palms, and she would stop to curse the world that had never warned her how frail her hopes would be. Sometimes she would be seized with anger even against Ulfin, who had sworn no harm would come, and yet had not been there to stop the swords as they cut into Father's flesh.

  Most of all she raged against Father. His pride had brought the crisis. It was he who had called on the King, planned the invasion, and he who like a child had chosen to wreck everything when Tarceny had upset those plans without a life lost. Stupid, proud, blind, selfish man! What had he been thinking of, he and his unarmed handful, when they had prised the boards apart and rushed upon Tarceny's mailed fighters? All he had done was bring misery to those who loved him, and to his daughter most of all.

  Life was so frail. It went cased in the thinnest of mail shirts among the swords of its enemies. The keystones of the Kingdom had fallen. The fighting might start any day. Malevolent chance had but to stretch its finger a
gain, this time to touch Ulfin in the middle of some skirmish and steal him for ever. The thought came to her on the stair, on the edges of sleep, in dreams. Sometimes she found she expected to dream of him one last time, to say a final farewell and so close their brief lives together. At others she thought they would walk in without warning and tell her that he was dead. Then she feared that the servants were looking for her, and that when they had found her they would say that it had happened. So she avoided them, retreating to the passage above the hall gallery, listening for footsteps, and when she heard anyone pacing into the hall below, fleeing through the living quarters to the chapel, built into the north-west bastion below the War Room. There she would try to pray.

  The chapel was a shell. Heaven did not rest there. She found a candlestick to stand for the Flame, but the light kept going out. She had no priest to perform the offices, or to promise her comfort or forgiveness. No word had arrived from Jent, and after these terrible events surely none would. In the stained and grimy windows the angels frowned: Michael the Warrior and Gabriel the Messenger, frozen in their postures above the altar. Raphael, Friend of the Hapless, stalked past without a sign. Umbriel, Judge of the World, wrote in his book as she kneeled before him. Her footprints showed in the layer of light dust upon the floor. She had never been so alone.

  Yet even in her loneliness there was one that was with her, unwelcome, unspeaking, all the time.

  It was nothing she could see or touch. It was weakness, sickness, a debilitating disease that stretched for months ahead of her. It softened her mind, so that she could no longer think clearly. It made her a slave to her own feelings. Soon it would begin to pull at her body, to swell it and distort it until she was hideous to look upon. She would waddle grotesquely down Ulfin's elegant corridors, resting at each corner as if she had travelled a mile. And then …

  Mother had died in childbirth. Other women had done so too, in pain and blood. She could not imagine it. All she could think of was redness and screaming. It would come. She did not know how she would bear it. Sometimes she thought that perhaps she would survive it, but that the child would be born dead, or would die quickly afterwards, as her younger brother and sisters had all done. She tried to imagine herself and her son or daughter, playing together in a sunlit room as she remembered doing with Mother. She could not picture the child clearly. She did not believe such a future could be. There were moments when, exhausted by grief and from fear, she thought herself certain to miscarry. She would be free, and if all the world shamed her for it she felt she would not care. She would find ways never to be pregnant again. Still the child clung stubbornly within her, and she grew as the weeks passed.

  There was a silent, grey-haired knight called Caw, who was left in charge of the castle while Ulfin was away. He had a lean face, white skin, and an inner hardness as though of flint. He did not seek her company; and she avoided his, except over supper, when custom demanded that they should sit together at the high table. They had little to say to one another. But one morning he came clanking in his mail and gear along the living-quarter passage and found her in Ulfin's library, trying to compose a letter to Ulfin at her great black writing desk. She looked up from the page at which she had been staring blankly for a quarter of an hour, and saw the knight frowning into the room. The sight of him there reminded her suddenly of the library at Trant, of another letter and another half-strange knight in the doorway. For a moment she wondered if Caw had come to ask her whether she played chess. Instead he showed her three folded papers that he held in his gauntleted hand.

  ‘There are messages for you,’ he said curtly.

  ‘Come in, Sir Caw.’ She supposed the letters must be the normal business of the March – suits, complaints or petitions – that would normally have gone to Ulfin, but in his absence were brought to her. She supposed that she was lucky there had not been more before this. At another time she might have been ready, even eager, to start learning the ins and outs of the day-to-day issues that must fill so much of Ulfin's time. But her mood was very low today.

  Then she saw that the letters were addressed not to Ulfin, but to herself. She broke the seals and peered at the first one. It was badly written, in a hand she did not know, from a place called Hayley which she thought must be somewhere in the north of the March.

  Caw was standing by the doorway, watching her.

  ‘It's a reply to my letter about the priest,’ she said at last.

  ‘Priest?’

  ‘The man who wed my lord and me.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘The others … Yes, they are the same. I thought they must be petitions. Do people in the March not petition their lord?’

  ‘They do,’ he said. He sounded surprised at her question. Perhaps he had been thinking about priests.

  ‘In my lord's absence …’

  He shrugged. ‘They come to me.’

  ‘To you?’ Why not to her?

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked at him. She, not Caw, was the wife of Ulfin and therefore the person of Ulfin in his absence. She should be doing more for Ulfin than she was. But Caw knew the March. He knew how to resolve the cases that could be resolved. He could advise her what to do; but a man like this would not willingly prop up a woman young enough to be his own child. So he was running all the March himself. He had said nothing of it to her. He probably saw nothing strange in what he was doing.

  Her thoughts bickered wearily with one another, and she could not feel that it mattered.

  He was waiting for her.

  She turned back to the letters, and leafed listlessly through them. Two of them seemed to say that such a one as my lady had written of was seen near their village on such-and-such a day, but no one knew where he had gone. The third wove the most credulous tales around some mountain hermit, and gave him names such as John o' Locklegs, Grey Matt and Prince Under the Sky.

  They were meaningless. And there would more of them, many more. And all meaningless.

  Caw stirred, and cleared his throat. ‘Must I hold the man who brought them?’

  ‘No.’ Even if replies were needed, she was not going to write them at once.

  ‘It was important then,’ she said. ‘Now that all this has happened – I do not know.’

  ‘All this?’

  ‘Father, and the King.’

  He said nothing. But she thought that he tensed at her words, as if he were afraid of what she would say next. He must think she was about to weep. A man like this must hate women who wept. Perhaps he just hated women.

  Father, and the King. And still he was waiting for her. And suddenly she knew she could not keep her voice level.

  ‘I don't see why!’ she said hoarsely. ‘I don't see what I have done!’

  For a long moment it seemed that all of high, empty Tarceny was still around her.

  ‘It is not your doing,’ said Caw at last.

  ‘No.’ She put her hand on the letters and did not look up. At last she was able to say, ‘Thank you, Sir Caw. If there are more, you may bring them to me.’

  He left her.

  A long time afterwards, she wondered if he had said: ‘It is not your doing.’

  She did not challenge Caw about the cases and complaints from the March, although she knew it was her task, not his, to hold court in Ulfin's name. She knew too that she, not Caw, should be touring the manors, shaking out the fighting men for her husband's war. But she rested at Tarceny watching the March passing below her walls. And every day brought bands of men from the north or west of the land to sound their horns at the gates, to pause and water before hurrying on down to the lakeshore; for Ulfin was calling the March to arms beyond Derewater. There were knights from Hayley under banners, foot soldiers from valleys beyond Bellisfell under rough standards, settlers with hooks and hunting spears. The castle garrison was stripped to twenty men. Caw stalked and fretted, but did not speak. All he gave to her were matters that concerned her directly: the merchant who came to talk of the silk for Ulfin's
robe, and the letters that came in answer to her notice about the priest.

  There were many of these, ill-written, useless. She could see in their rude scribblings the reeves and elders huddled together over the page, thrilled to receive a writing from the Lady of the March, jumbling together all they could think of to please her, and – where the manor lord was absent – adding all the things he might want her to know about the running of their lands (or, in a few cases, a number of things he clearly would not). Many seemed to assume that there would be a reward of money for finding the priest. Phaedra thought that before long she would have the courtyard seething with all the beggars and mendicants of the March, and every one claiming to be the man she sought.

  None appeared. Whether they stayed away because of the fearsome reputation of Ulfin's house, or they did come, and Caw conscripted them for the war, she did not know.

  One letter was unlike the others. Somehow, as spring grew towards summer, it had found a way across the lake to her. The script and spelling were clear, the hand familiar, if unusually hurried and disordered.

  … He should have been a man of God, as he wanted. As prince he was too good for us. Now the Angels have him, and our hope with him, we are left in a dark place. The men are talking of omens. I do not know what will come. I fear the most terrible things. This cup had gall enough in it, but the more that we are now so set against ourselves and the men all arming for war. Some here who think themselves friends of Septimus will say you are bewitched. Others, though I would not listen to it, will say that even you yourself are a party to unholy things. Dearest madam, forgive me that I should write this, yet I believe it is truer friendship to say to you and not conceal from you that few will hear me when I speak for you, and that I am brought to write this to you in secret. Yet believe however I do in this, I know you still in my heart. And so I pray you forgive,

  Your friend Maria Delverdis, who writes this to you on the fourteenth day from the death of the King, and of his son Prince Barius, of whom no equal has walked nor will again.