The Cup of the World (2 page)

Now the whispering increased. The change was palpable. Without a champion the woman would have been a witch. Her sentence would have been passed and done before nightfall. One man had thrown the matter open. Men would die to close it.

The dazzle of the light was fading; high above the hall thin clouds veiled the sun. The contrasts blended into detail that became clearer to the eye. The baron and his knights were looking woodenly at their opponent. The newcomer wore the gear of a poor manor lord – one of the ‘dog-knights’ of the Kingdom, who owned no master but the King and no follower but some faithful hound. He was looking at his feet, at the throne, to the woman at his back. Perhaps the full implications of what he was doing had only just come to him. The woman too was no longer fixed by the row of armed men before her. Her eyes moved from her feet to the crowd, and then up to the gallery. She was slender, and wore a simple blue dress. Her long hair shone a deep brown, and was adorned with a few sparse yellow gems. For a moment Phaedra looked down into a pale, triangular face, with large eyes and a pronounced nose: an expression bewildered and alone. Phaedra saw she was afraid.

‘They'll kill them both, now,’ muttered a voice in the gallery. ‘Him, then her.’

It was like a dream – worse than a dream, for Phaedra felt that in her dreams she was never as helpless as here. She wanted to turn away, leave the hall, and not see how it ended. But she did not know her way through the dark of the King's house.

And, just as in a dream, she could suddenly see her father's face clearly. He stood among the nobles in the opposite aisle. He had not looked up. His big, bearded face was frowning at the scene before him. He did not like what he saw. What could he do? Phaedra felt sure he wanted to do something. He was quick enough to say what he thought was right and wrong at home. Would he tell the King, in front of all these people, that this trial was wrong? Surely not. The King had said that it should take place.

Would he come out and be a champion?

But then he would have to fight! Fight men who wanted to kill him, one after another, with none of his soldiers to help! She did not dare think what might happen.

Near where Father stood, a young man stepped out from his place and stared down the hall. He must be thinking that if someone else would take up the second sword for the witch, then he would take the third. The third man would fight last, and would have the best chance of surviving. But no one else moved, and the hand of an older knight pulled the young man back. The sibilants of fierce whispers carried across the floor. And Father had not moved, either.

She wanted to look away. Somehow she would find her way down the back corridors and out of this place.
Still she did not move. Neither did the three fighters, the woman, or the man of the Dancing Hound.

Come on. Come on. Come on.

The knights looked to the trumpeter, who looked to the King. The King did not sign for the last trumpet. He had turned in his throne and was talking with a herald and a counsellor. The point of his finger moved gently as he spoke. The princes were leaning from their seats to hear. For a moment all the hall strained to catch the King's words. The herald and the courtier were looking doubtful. The King seemed to repeat a short phrase, twice, and again. He turned back to meet the gaze of the baron. The herald was coming forward to stand beside the trumpeter at the lip of the dais.

‘Men have declared themselves willing to die for the right
.

‘But before blood is shed, the King will consider this further. The justice day is ended. The subjects of the King will depart.’

At once the crowd broke into sound. They were surprised – even alarmed. The thing was incomplete. If it wasn't settled one way or another, what then? The long dismissal fanfare began, raggedly, as though the trumpeters had been caught unawares. Now the door guards understood that the audience was over. The doors were thrown open. The packed ranks of the knights and courtiers dissolved from their places into a milling, talking, shouting mass. Phaedra saw the baron standing stock-still in his place. She could not see his expression, for he was staring away from her up at the throne. The white-bearded King looked back at him, unmoved.

The woman had disappeared somewhere, presumably under guard. Courtiers were arguing with the knight of
the hound. A marshal looked up and saw the gallery was occupied, and by whom. He waved them away with the back of his hand, frowning, as though there had been something obscene or improper that the onlookers should not have seen. A guard joined him, repeated his gestures, and called for a comrade. The girls fled.

They ran down the ill-lit corridors and stairways that wove in rigid tangents around the royal kitchens and storerooms. Hands rattled latches that stuck and gave way. Their feet clattered and voices called to one another in the dark and hurry. There was alarm and laughter in them, which rose more loudly and with more laughter as they drew further from the hall and dropped to the level of the little courtyard from which they had gained entrance an hour before. The door was ajar, as they had left it. It swung under the hand of the leader to admit the heat and glare of the day. They poured into the courtyard, blinking, breathing hard.

‘Oh!’ said one. ‘Was any of them more handsome than Barius?’

They were a half-dozen young ladies of the court. Phaedra, at fifteen, was the youngest. None was older than twenty. Like Phaedra, they were children of important men who had come for the great banquet the King would hold that night to mark the final victories over the rebel barons, the end of summer and the knighthood of his second son. With all the fighting around the Kingdom, it was years since there had been an occasion like it. Phaedra was not the only one who had never been to court before. Most of them had only met the previous day.

They were dressed informally, for they had no ceremony
until the feast that evening (and certainly no business attending the King's justice). Even so their long, lightly woven gowns in blue and green and yellow made them a gay party in that stony little courtyard with the well and the stunted olive tree.

‘Do you think he saw us?’

‘Who?’

‘Prince Barius, of course—’

‘Why didn't they fight? What will they do?’

‘I'll swear they were going to drag her up and cut her head off on the steps – right in front of us …’

‘… I
waved
to him. I'm sure he looked up at me.’

‘Someone put that dog-knight up to it. I wonder who?’

‘Maybe he fell in love with her – then and there!’

‘Dibourche was gobbling, wasn't he? Like a turkey. He nearly had us seized. If he saw me he'll speak to my father and I'll be packed off to the city convent for the rest of our stay’

‘If you are lucky. He's looking for a wife, I hear. Maybe he'll ask your father—’

‘No, no! Amanthys, don't say that …’

‘Gobble, gobble …’

More laughter. The sun beat upon the courtyard with the full force of early afternoon. Two or three of the girls were sitting on the rim of the well, catching their breath in the shade of the tree.

‘I suppose a prince can't just step down from his throne and defend an accused woman. But I'm sure he wanted to …’

‘Perhaps we should all commit witchcraft …’

‘Oh!’

‘… or
say
we had, tonight. Then we would be tried one by one before the throne until he chose which of us to rescue!’

The air was hot in the little well-court, and very still. Nothing stirred the shadows of the olive boughs, or the dry leaves upon the cobbles.

‘That is the silliest idea I have heard since Hallows,’ said the girl called Amanthys.

‘You'd be killed—’

‘You might be rescued by some dog-knight from the back of nowhere who would throw you over his carthorse and lump you off to a flea-ridden two-roomed manor house to stone olives for the rest of your life. And good riddance.’

‘Do you know,’ said the oldest girl, whose name was Maria, ‘that because some dog-knight from the back of nowhere is ready to fight, that woman may be innocent? But if none of them had been prepared to fight those cutthroats Baron Seguin had with him, we'd have known she was guilty and had her killed? And now the King says he's going to think about it. Why didn't they think before? They can't just leave it like that—’

‘It was a show,’ Phaedra broke in. ‘The King had agreed with the baron what was going to happen. All justice is a show, like that.’

The others looked down at her, half-strangers.

‘You've made a study of these things, I suppose.’ said Amanthys.

Phaedra was from a lonely house. She was not used to company like this, as well-born as she, and a little older.

All justice-giving is a play' she told them. ‘If a man
is good at the play, and settles the quarrels in ways that stay settled, the people he judges are happier to be ruled by him. And then they don't fight. When Father holds court at Trant he tries to fix or agree the outcome beforehand. Then he summons everybody to his court, where he puts the King's keys of the castle on the table in front of him, to remind everyone that the King has chosen him to be Warden. He makes Brother David – our priest – stand behind his chair, to show that justice comes from Heaven. And they try the case and decide what he's already decided.’

‘Trant?’

‘Yes. My father is Ambrose, Warden of Trant Castle. Our badge is the Sun and Oak Leaf …’

Now Phaedra realized that she was being led on. The others were waiting, for …

Amanthys frowned lightly, as if with an effort of memory. ‘Trant? Oh, yes … Fat and noisy That one.’

Someone shrieked, and put her hand to her mouth. Others giggled. Phaedra felt herself going red.

Of course Father was big (and loud); and she would not be surprised if people chose to dislike him. But – but to insult him – and at the same time pretend they barely knew who he was …

And
noisy
had not been aimed only at Father.

‘My father's fat,’ said Maria. ‘He says it's so he can stand a proper siege.’

‘
Your
father has all the burghers of Pemini paying dues to him,’ said someone else. ‘Unlike some. Warden of Trant! Oh, dear girl. If your father doesn't even own his own roof – then who will want to marry you?’

‘Is that all you think about?’ asked Phaedra, with her cheeks hot.

‘Fat as a pig,’ another girl murmured. ‘Do all the Trant horses have bowed legs? I wouldn't like to be your mother.’

That was easy.

‘My mother's dead.’

And it was easier still to walk away.

The King's castle of Tuscolo was a complex of courtyards and walled enclosures, some vast, others just pockets of stone buildings like the well-court where the girls chattered on about the princes. A short climb up a cobbled ramp and under an archway brought Phaedra, seething with hurt, to the main upper courtyard. The huge space before her was scattered with straw and mess, and busy with many people. To her right the tall keep punched upwards to the sky. To her left was the royal chapel, with its bell towers and long windows. Carved figures massed in their stone niches about and above the chapel doors. A party of monks glided down the broad steps as she approached it. They wore brown robes, with the Lantern badge of their order, and walked in silence through the bustle of the King's house.

She had seen so many monks in her short stay here. At home there was only Brother David to lift his hands to Heaven and bring its blessing upon the people of Trant. But here the castle and the city beyond it swarmed with monks of all orders. At first she had assumed that Tuscolo was a very holy place. Now she thought that the royal capital must need this many priests because it was really very wicked. She was certainly finding it so.

The doors of the chapel stood open. In the blue light of the windows statues brooded on the holiness within. Phaedra walked boldly up the long, paved aisle. She bowed to the altar on which stood the Flame of Heaven: the sign of Godhead, bright, formless and unknowable in a world of shadows.

On this altar the Flame was a great, four-armed thing, far larger than the simple gilt candlestick in the chapel of Trant. Each of its arms was cast in the shape of one of the angels that the Godhead had sent into the world to struggle for souls. And above the altar the same angels reared in four stained-glass windows that dominated the chapel. Michael the Warrior swung his huge sword and grinned, his mouth square in battle-frenzy. Beside him Gabriel the Messenger bent from Heaven with flame upon his wings. Raphael trod an endless road with his staff in hand, and Umbriel looked down with seven eyes and wrote in the book in which all things were written. They were bigger, more garish and less human than in the hangings of home; but Phaedra knew them. She did not feel that she should be shy of them, even here. Under their gaze she felt her anger settle within her, not fading, but going deeper, to places where it would be remembered and yet would no longer tie her tongue.

After a little she found her way to a bench and sat down.

People drifted by and glanced at her, but she ignored them and they passed on. Voices rose behind her, coming her way. Men were talking heatedly. She felt no surprise when Prince Barius, dark and angry, stalked past in the aisle with his brother and a half-dozen others at his heel.
The party halted barely six feet from her, at a doorway that led to the King's cloisters. No one seemed to notice her.

‘In that case, my lord, my father is forsworn whatever course he chooses,’ said Barius. ‘You shall say that to him from me. And say he must now choose either wisely, or well. Many, no doubt, would have him choose wisely. I for one would have him choose well!’

A chamberlain bowed, and looked to Prince Septimus as if to ask whether he wished to add to his brother's advice. The prince simply nodded, and the men bowed again before hurrying back the way they had come, on the track of some fast-moving matter of state. Barius had already disappeared through the low doorway to the chapel cloisters. Septimus, a man barely older than she was, hesitated for a moment. He had seen her, an unknown girl who must have overheard what the men had been saying. Then he smiled, as if sharing with her the absurdity of what was happening, and followed his brother through the low doorway.