The Cup of the World (30 page)

‘And will he refuse it a third time? I wonder.’

‘He has refused it. And he did not desire my father's death, nor did I, nor that of anyone at Trant. You have my oath on that!’

It was Aun's turn to pause, looking away across the reeds to some vision of war beyond them.

‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘I suppose I came to find if you were a willing accomplice in Tarceny's doings, or a victim of abduction in hiding from your so-called husband. I had hoped it was the second, and what gave me hope was to find you this side of the water when I know Tarceny is hurrying back to the other.

‘It seems you are more the first, although you may not realize, for example, that a fighting man cannot set out to take another's house without wishing him other than the most grievous harm. Or that in politics it is often necessary to refuse more than once what you would most have others give you. Perhaps you have been bewitched. At all events you are yet young, my lady. I do not forget that.
And one day you may need my help. Well, if you do, I have told you how you may come by it. Maybe it is better for both of us if we say no more now.’

‘You were very calm,’ said Evalia, as they picked their way back along the lakeshore in the sun.

‘Was I? I did not feel it.’

‘I'm no good at times like that. I cannot move or speak. I feel like a mouse.’

‘He would not have hurt us,’ said Phaedra, thinking that if Evalia had believed there would be serious danger, she deserved more credit than she was giving herself for following Phaedra into the reeds. ‘He loathes my lord – I guess because my lord would not side against the King in the Seabord rising. But that is a different matter. I do not think he will tell others that I am here. He was a captive at Trant. For eighteen months I was almost his only company. You would not think it to hear him speak perhaps; but I am afraid …’

Pace, pace, along the dusty track where yellow grass tufted among the hard ruts, and a skylark singing somewhere in the blue overhead.

‘I am afraid he is in love with me.’

How time shifted the perspective of things! She had barely thought of Lackmere in the past two years. Now she could see that his bitterness and despair at Trant had not only been caused by his imprisonment. At the time she had been receiving suitor after suitor, and he was already married to a woman with whom he barely corresponded. And then he had risked his neck to escape, and yet had turned aside while still in earshot of the walls – had roused
the castle, indeed – in an attempt to prevent Ulfin from carrying her away. Madness. Now he had sought her out again.

‘Of course, he may be changing his mind even as I speak. It was a most depressing talk in a number of ways.’

Evalia was waiting to ask her a different question.

‘I see the servants did not stay for us,’ Phaedra continued sourly, looking up at the wooded hillock where they had rested earlier. ‘I suppose we will have to walk home.’

‘I sent them back to the house,’ said Evalia.

‘Did you? Why?’

‘Because— Ah!’

A rider had appeared on the track ahead of them. Dust rose in a low plume from the hooves of his mount. He was moving heavily, and yet seemed to be hurrying. Sunlight gleamed dully on mail and helm. Now she could hear the double thud of the hooves: a lumbering trot that rose to a canter as the rider saw them. Evalia waved her arm. They could see the lance-pennant, flickering darkly about the tiny point of iron. Now they could feel the ground shake beneath their ankles with the vast weight of the approach. He was almost on them – a mountain of flesh and jingling harness, mail and weapons. The rider's visor was up. It was Adam diManey puffing and pulling and bringing his huge beast to a stop on the track where they stood. Phaedra blinked in the dust.

‘He's gone,’ Evalia was saying. ‘He had a rowboat and went off across the lake. No harm has been done.’

DiManey looked about him, searching the reed beds and the surface of the lake. He was gasping for breath.

‘Came as – quick as I could. Who was it?’

‘One of Septimus's followers. He wanted to parley only.’

‘I don't think he'll come back,’ said Phaedra.

DiManey was without leg-armour, shield or surplice. He had not stopped to put on his padded undercoat, but had thrown his mail on over his shirt when the servants reached him. He was still panting. His horse had been ridden hard. Phaedra saw him exchange glances with Evalia. They had been afraid.

‘The others are following with horses for you,’ Adam said. ‘I suggest we find some shade until they arrive.’ He swung himself ponderously down from his perch, and began to lead his mount up the slope.

Phaedra followed, thinking that if Aun had found her, then others might do so, even without his help. They would find that Ambrose was there too. DiManey might be able to keep his lands free of petty outlaws, but he could not stand against a baron's raiding party. If they came here she would have to surrender at once, or it would mean a bloody death for diManey and possibly a traitor's death for Evalia too. But Ulfin was across the lake now …

‘Is it not Caw of Enderby whom your lord has set to hold Tarceny?’ Evalia murmured in her ear.

‘It is.’ It was the question she had known Evalia would ask.

She could sense Evalia expecting outrage. And, in part, she was right. Phaedra had never even asked herself whose hands had swung the blade that had cut into her father's flesh: who had stood over him as he had choked and bubbled in his own blood until at last he was still for ever. She had barely wondered what embarrassment it was
Caw had caused to Ulfin that he should be consigned to his appointment, eating at her table a thousand times, slow to meet her eye, rude when she spoke of home, and anxious that his lord should release him from his duty! And yet she knew that Ulfin must have known, and moreover, that he had chosen Caw for that very reason.

She had no sense of betrayal. She thought she could see the matter as Ulfin had done, looking Caw scornfully in the eye. You killed this man. You guard his child, and grandchild, and eat in silence the guilt of what you have done. He had not explained to her, but she saw now that he had not needed to. What he had chosen to do was wisdom: dark and cool as water in a cup of ancient stone.

‘I must go back,’ she said.

‘Back!’

‘To Tarceny My lord is there now.’

Once again, that long stare. She met it. It was Evalia who dropped her gaze.

‘Say what you are thinking.’

‘Is it …’ Evalia shook her head, as though suppressing her thought. Then she seemed to change her mind again. ‘Is it – what that man said? Are you sure you are not bewitched?’

The air was thick with heat. In the puddles of the stream Phaedra could see the pale shapes of the oak-leaves of last summer, lying drowned and still.

Suddenly she laughed. Because Ulfin was across the lake, and treading the soil of Tarceny.

‘Bewitched? My dear friend, I am: utterly’

mbrose had grown in the weeks at Chatterfall. He had taken his first steps on Phaedra's nineteenth birthday, with Evalia releasing his hands in the olive groves and Eridi beckoning him across the grassy floor. He showed far more interest in their homeward journey than Phaedra remembered him doing on their flight from Tarceny In the boat, he wanted to sit by the rail and reach out to the brown wavetops, running just beyond his fingers' reach below the taffrail. When one splashed up at him, he sat back, startled but not unhappy ‘Ooh! We'h!’

‘Yes, darling,’ said Phaedra.
‘Very
wet. Please be careful.’ So he spent half the remaining trip at the rail of the boat, with Orani, Eridi and Phaedra all taking turns to keep an arm around him while he leaned over the side in his efforts to catch another wave, or watched the wrinkling lake-surface with solemn eyes that gave no sign of what he was thinking. His child's face hinted more strongly now of the long and delicate features of his father's house, but the way his black hair was beginning to curl at his ears
and collar reminded Phaedra suddenly of her own mother. She thought that if Father could see him, perhaps he would not be altogether ashamed of her now.

Orchard had crossed the lake the day before, to retrieve their horses from the manor to which they had been entrusted. He was waiting with them at Neff's Jetty when the boat landed. He had news too. Ulfin had indeed crossed the lake. But he was not at Tarceny He had set out a day or two before, for Hayley in the northern part of the March. No one had been able to say why.

‘Very well,’ Phaedra said. ‘We will go to Hayley’

The narrow tracks took them through a part of the March that she did not know, where the hills rose more steeply to rugged, bare crests, so that once or twice a day when the path lifted above the tree line she could turn in the saddle and look back to astounding views east and south over the March. She found that Thunder was more easy to manage than she remembered, and realized that this was not because he had changed, but because she had. She no longer expected him to behave like old Collen, but knew him as a horse in his own right, with ways and reactions that she was coming to understand rather than fight. She began to pay attention to her own riding, and to feel an improvement as she did so.

The true mountains crept nearer, showing white flecks and patches on their high peaks, where the snow lay packed in shady gullies and still had not melted.

Hayley was a single, square keep within a curtain wall. Pennants flew from its battlements, but Ulfin's standard was not there. Phaedra almost cried aloud with disappointment, and hurried down to the gate to demand
admittance and news. The castle warden, astounded by the appearance within a few days first of his lord, whom he had supposed to be fighting deep in the Segne of the Kingdom, and then of his lady, who had disappeared without trace for a full season, could give only the barest of information. Ulfin had been at Hayley Indeed, most of his escort was still there. My lord himself had gone on into the hills, accompanied only by two herders and a small flock of goats. The warden did not know why. It was a thing my lord had done before, although not recently. He would return in a week, maybe a few weeks. The warden would do everything to see that my lady was comfortable until then …

‘I am going to follow him,’ she said.

The mountains rose in line after line of disappearing blue. They were vast enough to hold a dozen armies unseen from one another. They were silent: bare slopes and deep valleys; lonely huts; the crowns of cloud that gathered above each peak, so that a clear sky at dawn changed slowly to a huge mass that billowed along the mountaintops by evening. North and west of Hayley a valley ran between two great forested spurs. The path Ulfin had taken went in that direction. Phaedra demanded trackers from the warden, and four more escorts, whom she had Massey pick from the garrison as though he were a sergeant. She took donkeys and provisions, dogs for hunting and to keep guard. She had them ready at dawn, every strap and bundle as her father would have done; cried the Traveller's Prayer aloud in the court-yard; and led her small cavalcade from Hayley's gate as the tips of the mountains turned gold.

They passed the March-stone before evening that day.
‘For what it is worth,’ Massey said. The Kingdom had no real border here. Some years all the villages for a week's journey beyond the stone might pay tribute. And now? Massey shrugged. With the garrison at Hayley stripped for the war, it was doubtful that my lord's law ran any further than the warden could spit from its walls.

Where are you, Ulfin? What madness has lured you from the battle for a kingdom, from the hunt for your wife and child, and brought you alone to these places? Are you seeking something, or fleeing it? I am groping among your footsteps, looking for signs in this empty land. I have only my feet, my eyes and my will. By day I look for goat droppings and the far sun-flash of metal, by night the spark of a distant fire. Let the Angels lead me to you, if only they fly in this land.

The going was slow. The paths were not paths but bare places where men and beasts might go with care. A day's journey would take them into, along and across a single valley. They saw no one, nor any beast but the big-winged carrion birds that turned lazily above the hillsides. The mountains were vast.

They were vast, but the ways among them were few. And slow though horses and donkeys might be, a goat flock travelled more slowly still. They did come across droppings, signs of grazing and, once, an old campfire. Even so, Phaedra was not prepared for the moment when, following a tiny path, they crossed over a shoulder between two peaks and came upon a score of goats stripping bark off young trees, watched by a pair of boys just sprouting their first beards, and beyond them a man in mail, sitting on a rock. He looked up as she approached.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if it was you.’

‘You knew we were following?’

‘Since yesterday. This morning we saw you carried the pennants of Hayley so I waited for you to come up.’

‘What are you doing out here?’

‘I am on a journey which, I hope, will put both your troubles and mine behind us. Do you want to come along?’