The Cup of the World (17 page)

The thought she clung to was that the bishop was testing her. He had wanted her to show a sign of humility If she gave comfort to a friendless pilgrim he might after all give her what she had come for. That was why she was
going to help the woman. That was why she did not recall Vermian, or send a brisk message around to Lady diManey's quarters, telling her to make other arrangements. There was still a chance of bringing home a priest, and so of making her marriage sure.

The bishop wanted Tarceny to have a priest. He had said so. He had said …

For a moment she stared unseeing at the warped timbers of the room around her.

If the eyes of the Angels were opened in Tarceny again
.

Could the woman be a spy?

ow Michael guard us, my lady,’ said the witch in the dawn.

The gate of Jent rang loudly with the hoofs of thirty horses, sidling and ordering in the narrow passage. The light was dim under the arch tunnel. The same battering wind that had blown for days shook the wooden doors on their hinges and flustered the black-and-white drapes of the litter of Tarceny from which Lady diManey's face peered out at the throng around her.

‘And Raphael guide our way’ Phaedra replied shortly. She did not complete the prayer. Nor did she acknowledge the diManey's look, or allow the conversation to continue. With a great groaning sound, light cracked from the top of the gates to the bottom ahead of her. Thunder, the big gelding Phaedra was riding, shouldered forward as the doors of the city opened to show him the road home.

Thunder was an idiot: Phaedra neither liked nor trusted him, for all that he was one of the first gifts that Ulfin had given her. The thought of a week on his back was bad for her temper. On the few long journeys she had made before, she had always been accompanied by a litter,
slung between two horses with a canopy under which she could rest when she tired of riding or the sun. Now she had had to solve the shortage of time and horses by sending her litter round to Lady diManey's lodgings. But at least she could still choose where in the cavalcade she should ride, and when or indeed whether she had to speak with her fellow traveller.

The night had been sleepless, with war and witchcraft and anger all circling in her head. No word had come from the bishop. No priest had presented himself suddenly, with a letter from His Grace in his hand. It was hardly likely now that some galloping chaplain would overtake them (and even if one did, she would have lost her chance of choosing the man). For the first time in her life she had failed absolutely to get what she wanted. She could not have believed that such a disaster could happen to one of her new rank: the wife of Jent's most powerful neighbour, and the child of an old friend, who had come so certain that His Grace would receive her well.

That a father should be so served … That the royal house should be slighted …

Father, and the bishop, and the King – it was so wrong that the pillars of the world should fall into outrage, so unthinkingly against her! They thought that custom and a daughter's duty and respect for the royal house were nothing to her. They did not understand. She knew how far she had parted from the accepted way (at least, she did now). Yet if love was an offence against which bishops cursed and knights took up arms in outrage, then she must offend. Her past had nothing to offer. It was as empty as the obstinate road behind her. Their stupidity meant
danger, danger for the whole Kingdom. And if there was to be war between Trant and Tarceny, between Tarceny and the King, there was only one side that she could be on; and she must follow it. Love ran deeper than blood, and truer than the Fount of the Law.

They
were the ones who could not see.

So she rode, and brooded to herself, and rode on in the cold northerly gusts for the first hour of her journey, until her conscience and the manners of her upbringing revolted at last against her own behaviour. Then she reined back to the litter, whose occupant might be entirely innocent, but would certainly have guessed by now that her patroness was sulking.

‘These damned winds,’ Phaedra said. ‘It has blown this way for days, and may do so for many more. I dislike what it may portend.’

It was a day of superficial talk and long silences. DiManey was correct in her speech, and unforthcoming. Perhaps she was offended; or perhaps embarrassed. She showed no sign of wanting to ingratiate herself with the wife of a high noble, as a poor knight's woman might have done. Phaedra rode, and fretted about the daggers of politics around her. The memory of the bishop's red face returned and returned.

The first night of the return journey was spent at one of Ulfin's manor houses on the southern fringes of the March, where the knight who held it laughed loudly at the table and talked of fighting. Phaedra retired early, leaving him to bore the Lady diManey into the small hours. The man's lights were mere rushes, and the paper, like the
pieces that the innkeeper had found for her the day before, was poor stuff, watermarked from a mill in Jent rather than the majestic, smooth pages from Velis that Phaedra was used to. Nevertheless, she needed to write her thoughts down. She wanted to make her case to the Kingdom. There was still one person living east of the lake who might understand.

She began by describing Ulfin's looks, his voice, the deep intelligence behind his eyes. She wrote of her wedding on Talifer's Knoll, so that she could state firmly (and at the same time remind herself) that it had been a true ceremony, however short. She turned over in her mind, word for word, the few things the priest had said to them. Speak the truth to one another. Their lives to be a mirror to one another. She decided that if she had had a hundred bishops preach sermons at her ceremonies, she could not have heard better. Between man and wife there must be truth, first and last, and true knowledge; like mirrors, they must show to each other the other's very self.

Keep your promises. There had been none, except in their hearts.

She must be careful, now. A letter from Tarceny to the heart of the Kingdom could well be read by others, before or after it reached its destination. Even her own words could be twisted by hostile tongues.

She re-read her letter, amended it and, working late by rush-light, wrote out the fair copy. Then she signed it, folded it and added the direction: ‘To My Good Friend Maria, at the House of Sir Hector Delverdis, in Pemini’. Last of all she sealed it with the ring that Ulfin had given her. She looked down at the impression of the letters
cPu
superimposed upon the moon of Tarceny, in the stiffening wax.

The royal sun for duty, but the moon for love. It was already too long since she had lain in Ulfin's arms.

On the road the next morning she brought Thunder alongside the litter and made an honest effort at conversation with Lady diManey She had decided that if her fellow traveller were a friend, she deserved more courtesy than Phaedra had shown her the day before, and that if
she were indeed an agent of the bishop or the crown it would do no harm for her to learn how firmly set Phaedra was upon the path that she had chosen, and why.

The same thought led her to begin talking of Ulfin.

‘So much changed for me after we returned from Tuscolo,’ Phaedra said, as Thunder picked his way along the very verge of the narrow track beside the litter. ‘All those wretches wanting me to marry! They made everything different, even Father, even my home. In the end I had to find a way to leave. And it was as if I found some strong under— I mean, undercurrent, bearing me out of there like a leaf on water. There was nothing left but my lord's voice telling me not to be afraid …’

There was a sudden alertness in Lady diManey's eyes – even surprise. Perhaps she had sensed that Phaedra had changed a crucial word, even as it had left her tongue. Perhaps she was just offended by the contrast that Phaedra had half-intended between their marriages. Phaedra met her look and waited, inwardly daring her fellow traveller to try to follow up what she had said, and at the same time resolving that she would be fifty times more careful over her words in future. Then Lady diManey dropped her gaze, and muttered an apology. They rode on in silence.

A little while later Phaedra caught the look again.

And yet with that moment they seemed to cross some threshold of intimacy in Evalia diManey's mind, for now she began to talk more; and of herself. She said that she made the journey to Jent every year, for penitence, and to seek solace from Heaven. She spoke a little of her new husband's manor house below the foot of the lake. She referred to him occasionally, mostly to say that he would
be waiting her return; and once or twice she mentioned episodes from her childhood.

She was considerate too. The further they pushed into the steep hills of true Tarceny, the more trouble the doltish Thunder was having with the roads. Phaedra was tiring more quickly than she had expected. It was proving an effort to ride, to manage her idiot horse alongside the litter, and to keep a conversation going at the same time. Around noon of the third day Evalia diManey insisted, with some grace, that they should change places that afternoon. When they set out again, she somehow fell into conversation with the normally tongue-tied Squire Vermian, so that they naturally rode side by side, and the litter dropped behind. Phaedra found she could do what she really wanted, which, unusually for her, was to curl up among the cushions and have an afternoon's rest. The slow jog, jolt, jog of the litter was peaceful under the bright skies of Tarceny. Even the thought that she had given Vermian no warnings about their fellow traveller was little more than an ugly moment as she plunged beyond the borders of sleep and so out of the world.

It was the evening of the fifteenth of March: the night of the attack on Trant. Phaedra was sitting with Evalia diManey after supper in the long upper living chamber of Ulfin's lodge at Baer. Each had a bowl of wine to finish. The drink seemed to be on the diManey's tongue.

‘… It was horrible. I was sick with it. I could think of nothing but the swords. When diManey appeared, I did not wonder who he was, or why he should risk his life. I don't think I could have done. Only I remember realizing
that at least I would not be killed there and then, in front of everybody. Afterwards I even felt that it would be better to die indeed than to live those moments again.’

And a cup later, she said, ‘You are very young. You have looks, yes. More, you are happy. You don't yet know that the only happiness worth having is the hope that it will continue. And how will you keep it? How?’

Phaedra looked into her bowl. She could feel sorry for her companion. She could even like her now. But she did not need lectures on being ‘happy’. Happiness was a blossom that would come and go, but for someone else. For herself, she could see two lives opening before her – one maimed, one whole. She was not one person, she thought. She was a half of two, bound with a link as deep as dark lakewater, for ever. And now the small-boats of Tarceny would be stealing up to the jetty by the ruined court in the olive grove. She felt she could bear anything, any outcome at all, but that Ulfin should be killed.

She had lost her taste for wine. She turned and turned the remains of her cup around the bowl in a slow swill, praying to the Angels – keep him safe, keep him safe. Send that, for some reason, he does not try to lead his men over the wall. Send that the guard sleeps. Keep him safe, and let him come home.

When she raised her eyes again her companion was looking away, into the olivewood fire and some thought of her own. Her eyes were shining wetly and blinking as they shone. So Phaedra watched the fire too, for a moment. And when they spoke again it was about other things.

She was woken that night by a queer sound, close to her bed. She lay and listened for it to come again. The
night was still. The moon was up, behind a thin veil of cloud that dulled its light. Nothing moved in her room. But as she shifted in her blankets she heard it once more. It came from somewhere nearby, through the boards of a wall. A voice which moaned aloud, and then spoke. A woman's voice, which cried the name
Calyn
, and followed it with sounds of weeping. The weeping went on for some time. It pursued her into her dreams, where she climbed a slope of brown, jumbled stones towards a ridge from which the afterglow of the sun was fading. The landscape was scattered with huge boulders that looked like crooked people, all the same. She was losing her way.