It was harder this time, far harder than it had been before.
He had said that Caw was to keep an armed man posted over Ambrose at all times. Then the damp weather brought chills, and struck four of the garrison down with fever. There were no longer enough men to mount a full war-watch on the walls. Caw lengthened the duties, but the guards became tired and slept at their posts. If Ulfin had been there Caw might have driven his guards to the limit and never breathed a word. But he told Phaedra outright that he saw no reason why his men should rock cradles. In the end she moved Ambrose's day room to the big chamber below the fighting platform in the north-east tower. This meant the servants had to carry enough firewood up the stairs every day to keep the room warm, but also that the soldiers on the roof, which was the castle's main watch-point, were close enough to be deemed to be guarding Ambrose as well, thus releasing an extra man for other duties. (It also meant, from Phaedra's point of view, that Caw would not be tempted to put a half-sick man in the post, to sit and sweat his fevers over her precious son.) She found a gong in the living quarters, so that Eridi or whoever was with Ambrose might summon the guards in an emergency.
Eridi was dubious. She had enjoyed having the company of a man all day.
‘What am I to do if an assassin comes, lady?’
‘Bang the gong and sell your life dearly’ said Phaedra. ‘Just remember to bang the gong first.’
Phaedra kept the iron key to the locked War Room in her jewel box, nestling among the gaudy brooches and rings. Every few days, at times when others were busy, she took it and climbed the stairs past the chapel to see if all was still well. The carved chest rested on the War-Room table with its lid closed. Even without moving it or trying to lift it, she thought she could sense things weighing within. Her fingertips stroked the dark carvings and prised idly at the locked lid. It was shut fast. The nights and days passed silently and the wood was cold.
She shivered.
The touchstone of Ulfin's presence was gone. All the questions she had not needed to ask while he was with her were crowding in again. Doubts wormed in her mind: about the war, and the chances for peace; about her thought that she was spied upon; about the ‘dangerous places’ where they had drunk the water and walked among the rocks for so many years. Over the early Easter, she fasted and kneeled in the chapel. She listed her fears before the silent Angels, murmuring in the quiet room above the sounds of the armed watch around her, the calls and the clink of mail, and the hollow whispers within.
A man from Mistress Massey at Aclete waited for her in the hall, with a letter that bore the seal of the Dancing Hound. Evalia diManey was on her way to Jent on pilgrimage. She would land at Aclete on her way home, and come up the road to Tarceny to her Dear Friend, whom she had not seen for a full year.
There was no enquiry whether it was convenient, and little by way of respectful greeting from the woman of a dog-knight to the lady of one of the highest lords in the land. The boldness of it was striking. Of course, hospitality could not be refused to a gentlewoman on pilgrimage. Phaedra thought of writing that there was contagious sickness at the castle, but she had never told such an outright lie in her life. So she pursed her lips and begged Caw to dispatch the minimum escort to Aclete. And a week later she stood at the top of the hall steps, with the shadow of the doorway across her back; and Evalia diManey rode into the inner bailey, waving from the saddle.
‘Well,’ said Evalia, as they greeted one another on the steps. ‘They tell me that you have had a child, though I could not believe it to look at you.’
‘You are kind,’ said Phaedra, ‘if, I think, less than truthful today. And you have not changed by a hair. It is good of you to come so far out of your way to comfort a lonely woman in her home.’
‘Not so lonely now. Where is he?’
‘Asleep.’ Why was she so eager to lay eyes on Ambrose? ‘We shall not see him again until tomorrow.’
‘Then I must contain myself for a few hours longer. In the meantime’ – Evalia glanced over her shoulder, to where her tiny retinue were dismounting, unloading and leading their beasts away – ‘in the meantime I have brought you a present.’
The man climbing the steps towards them was the secretary of the Bishop of Jent.
‘You were rather cold to him,’ said Evalia, as they walked together on the west wall the next morning, while the priest was at prayer.
It was a bright day, and there was birdsong, and a light breeze flapped the standards against the flagpoles above their heads. Below them was the silent hillside of lank grass and massed flowers, and away to the west the low cloud-shapes that were the mountains.
‘Cold? Was I?’
‘You hardly spoke to him at all. Poor Martin. He was telling me he had pressed His Grace most particularly for this post.’
‘It surprises me. I think we displeased each other in Jent.’
‘Perhaps he does not remember that the same way. However, if you are wondering why he left such an excellent position to come here, so did I.’
It was precisely what Phaedra had been wondering. Chaplain to a noble house was a good place, but to be secretary to a bishop must be even better.
‘I will tell you. He wants to go among the hill people. The heathen.’
‘Heathen? The March was converted long ago!’
‘No, the real heathen, beyond the March. My dear, I have brought you a young Tuchred.’
‘He wants to go into the mountains?’
‘He is hoping you will release him at times. I hope you will too. He is very earnest.’
It fitted with what she remembered of him, and this far it was plausible.
‘So long as he does not require much escort,’ she murmured.
Jent, an influential player, had taken neither side in the troubles of the Kingdom. So this Martin might indeed be all he appeared to be. He might even be a sign that His Grace wished to please the more successful party in the struggles. To refuse the bishop's own secretary would be a public insult to a powerful man, and Ulfin's enemies would be quick to ask why. Yet she remembered the bishop's hostility towards Ulfin, shown even before the raid on Trant. She remembered his implausible plea that he had no one around him at that time. She could see now that he must have understood at once how she planned to use any priest he gave her to strengthen her case against her father and the King. A year later he had chosen to send her his own secretary – his creature, not hers. To accept this man into the household would be a leap in a dark place.
Her eyes lingered on a shadow, impenetrable, in the window of the western tower. Nothing moved there.
Ulfin had warned her to be careful. She would have to watch closely what this man did at Tarceny If he wanted to be away from the household for long periods, well, it would not be difficult to grant him leave – so long as he truly went into the wild mountains and was not spying around the March. She would need to make sure. If either bishop or secretary showed a false sign, then insult there would be.
She felt so much older than the girl who, a year ago, had gone in her silks to beg His Grace for a priest.
‘Well,’ she said at last. ‘May the Angels be pleased to help us, so long as he chooses to be among us.’ And if that sounded trite, their help was no more than she truly wished for.
Evalia did not reply at once. She was looking ahead of her into the great spaces of Tarceny, with the little frown of thought upon her smooth face.
‘The help of Angels is a rare thing,’ she said. ‘Of course you hear often of new appearances or wonders, seen by someone you have never heard of. No doubt they are grown many times in the telling. I have seen nothing with my own eyes, and nor, I suppose, have you. But diManey thinks he has seen an Angel. And the strangeness is that you were there.’
‘Your husband?’
‘Yes … yes, my husband … Do you know – I began by hating him? When I came out of my fright and was able to think for myself, I mean, which was not for days after the trial. I thought he had fallen in
love with me as I walked past. A bumpkin panting so hard for a pretty woman that he would risk death for it! Oh …’
‘It is what some of us thought, in the gallery’
‘When I knew him better I saw there was more to it. Of course he was outraged by the way they had arranged the ordeal to kill me, but if it had been just that he'd still have been wondering what to do when they cut my head off. He is a good man. Once you see beyond his looks there is no fault you can lay at his door. If there is a fault it is in me. If I cannot be at peace in diManey's house at Chatterfall, then where in all the world? But he is not …’
Not? Not who?
‘It took me months to prise it out of him. He says there was one, dressed roughly, who appeared beside him in the throng while the accusations were being read out. You know that Raphael is portrayed on altars in a peasant's or a pilgrim's garb. Adam does not remember what the pilgrim said. He says he only remembers that when the man had spoken he felt he knew exactly what to do.’
Phaedra nodded. She was worrying at that other, elusive thought which teased in the back of her mind; a name unspoken, bitten off a second before it was uttered. Ulfin? That was the contrast; but Evalia had never met Ulfin (nor did Phaedra want her to). No, it would have been the man that Evalia herself had loved, and his name had been stifled because it was too painful – because she had remembered that it would not mean anything to Phaedra. Or perhaps because it would …
‘Adam says he seemed to be an old man, a priest in a long, pale robe and hood.’
Evalia looked sideways at her. She knew what she had said.
Her words were like doors that opened on dark corridors that led in bewildering directions. She seemed to be so much older than Phaedra, and cleverer. Phaedra did not know which way to turn.
Be careful. Be careful.
‘So he stepped out in front of all those people and went up to the swords. I do not know what he thought would happen – whether God would give him the victory, or the King quail before the revealed Truth, or whether he would die then and there because he had been told to. The one thing he had forgotten was that his house was under the King's protection.’
‘It became clear that there was something like that to it,’ said Phaedra.
‘His father had been crippled in the King's service. When you think about it, the King must have scores of obligations like that – to look after so-and-so's children here, and somebody's widow there, as if he did not have enough to do looking after the Kingdom as a whole. A king must need a memory deep as a well to keep them all.’
Deep within Phaedra's memory a name stirred. Calyn.
Calyn? She had heard Evalia cry it aloud in the night, in the lodge at Baer. And had not Lackmere said it too, all those years ago at the round table in the inn? Or was she overlaying on both memories a name she already knew?
Evalia was waiting for her to speak. Phaedra knew she was expected to follow up the story, and that the best thing would be to do so with a witless stream of questions, as if she were a devout woman who had entirely missed the meaning Evalia had intended. She could not put the thoughts together. She stood in that air of sunlight, bird-song and moon roses, staring firmly into the distance, saying nothing because she could not think what to say.
Her companion turned away with a movement of her shoulder which said, Well, if you won't …
‘I have been waiting to ask if you know what is the meaning of the shape on the Moon,’ said Evalia at length. ‘It has such a sinister look.’
Phaedra looked up at the limp banners, and felt her face draw into a smile. ‘Sometimes it is one thing, and sometimes it is another,’ she heard herself answer. ‘Different hands have their own interpretations. I believe some have held it to be a moon rose, which has one black petal and the rest white. My lord's father ordered that it should be a bat wing.’
‘What a thing to wear on your badge!’
‘Such was the man …’
Words were coming at last to give her the space she needed, with the force of the anger she nursed at that evil lord.
‘Such was the man,’ she said. ‘He lived in armour and thought of nothing beyond his stomach and his sword. There was once a settlement below these walls, but there is none now. Who would rest so close to a lord that might burn the roof-trees of his own people for a whim? And he tried to raise his sons in his image. I have long wondered why there were no playthings in the house from the boyhood of my lord and his brothers. But my lord has told me that they were allowed no toys but wooden swords …’
Now it was her turn to watch sidelong, for a change in Evalia's face.
My first toy was the head of a man, Ulfin had said at last, when she had pressed him on this the night before his departure. All dried with the eyes gone. Some enemy or unfortunate that we rolled around between us. I remember it. I wish I did not.
She saw Evalia's eyes flicker. The woman knew what she had left out: that grisly plaything the lord had given to please his sons. Calyn had remembered it too, and how could he not? Calyn of the Moon Rose, Ulfin's elder brother. Perhaps the same sighs had escaped him when his lover had led him to speak of his ruined childhood.
‘Now the old lord is gone,’ Phaedra went on, as levelly as she could. ‘Dead at his hearth after a life of wrongdoing. The Moon is free of his stain. As for my lord, he says he has no fixed idea what the shape should signify Sometimes he thinks it is a mouth – that the Moon is pulling a face at what it sees here in the world.’
‘I like that no better.’
‘I think he likes that it may be one thing or it may be another. The Moon sees everything, and yet what it sees leaves it uncertain. That is why it is the Doubting Moon – the secret of truth.’
‘Meaning the more you know, the more you know you don't know.’
‘Indeed.’
Indeed. A few moments ago this woman's poise had wavered – unbalanced by the sudden weight that had stirred at Phaedra's word ‘husband’. For a moment she had become again the inward, unhappy woman from their journey the year before. Now she was as smooth as the surface of a lake; as bold and well-spoken as when she had ridden in through the gates, and yet almost certainly lying, or at least hiding things that it would have been honest to tell. What of it? That she was hiding her past with Calyn proved nothing. But it was an important truth, and she was concealing it, even as she made her gambit about the pale priest.
For that matter, her whole story about diManey might be a concoction. Phaedra had herself given her all the material she would have needed, when they passed the priest in the litter. So! She would take more care in what she said. And when the woman was gone, she might think again about this Martin who had been served up to her so suddenly—
A movement at the turret door caught her eye.
‘… A man whose mind leans to uncommon places,’ Evalia was saying. ‘He must be a strange one to live with. You must love him very much, for all that I think he may have done a foul thing to you. What is the matter?’
Phaedra turned back from the turret to meet her look carefully, keeping her face blank. Distracted once again, she had barely heard what Evalia had just said.
‘It is nothing,’ she replied. ‘I think – shall … shall we see if Ambrose is awake? I would like to see how he is.’
‘Is anything the matter? Can I help?’
Phaedra made herself smile as she shook her head. ‘It is nothing,’ she said.
XII
On the Stair
t was nothing. It was always nothing; when she looked round, or raised her light, or turned the corner of the corridor. The nooks and passageways were empty They were frames of wood and stone and plaster that held no image and perhaps only the faintest smell – so thin that she could not have described it. She would wait and listen, staring at the blank walls for some sign. Nothing.
The incidents were fleeting, gone almost before she was aware of them. Her mind was playing tricks. And she remembered herself as a nine-year-old girl (half her lif
e ago now), starting and turning when a man's voice spoke at her side; and when she turned, he would be gone. But he had been real. He had been Ulfin. And this … Ulfin had not seemed able to say.
As a girl, she had learned not to look. She had found that if she kept her eyes on some point ahead of her, he would remain, and could be spoken to. She had believed he was her brother Guy at first, who had not after all allowed death to make him abandon her. And by the time she had understood that he was not, she had already begun to trust him. This was different. She could not be still when she felt the presence of the watchers. To sit, watching her fingertips, thinking that one of them might be behind her – she neither dared nor wished to dare. It was better to look, knowing as she did so that the shadows would be empty. Let them trick her. Let them mock her, so long as the looking drove them away.
There was no one to talk to. She did not want to frighten Orani or Eridi: she could not afford to lose either of them. She dared not trust Brother Martin. As for Caw, if he had seen anything he gave no sign of it, although she watched him closely at chess and at other times. Perhaps the things were as invisible to him as the pale priest had been to Vermian on the road from Baer. Or perhaps he had indeed seen something, but was pretending he had not. Why? What did he guess? To speak to him would be to ask for help – even to be believed. She was not sure he would grant her either. He was more sullen than ever now that Ulfin had come and gone again, and left him once more in the post he hated.
So she spoke to no one of her trouble. She was Trant's daughter and Ulfin's wife – the Lady of Tarceny who should not be afraid. If the shapes she saw meant harm, then maybe they could be harmed, and she had armed men within call who could do harm if it came to that. For now, what she was seeing (if she was seeing it) had as much substance as the flick of a bat's wings. They troubled her pulse-rate; nothing more. She could school that. She could treat them as if they were the insects that swarmed from the hillsides. Madness came from the blood, she had heard. There was none, surely, in her family.
The Cup of the World Page 18
