The Cup of the World (34 page)

‘They have their orders. They will be as safe, I suppose, as at any time since I wed you.’

‘I must go far and fast. To linger is to die, in this place. You cannot come with me.’

‘I shall come with you, my lord—’ ‘If you come it is your choice and I am not responsible—’

‘Indeed. And you shall tell me what it is—’ ‘Shall I?’

‘You are sworn to, if you remember, by the one you left on the hillside above us.’

Ulfin muttered an exclamation, turned and began walking at a brisk pace across the brown land. Phaedra followed.

For a while she judged it better not to speak. In a little while he would have controlled his anger and surprise. When he had come to accept her company, they might talk. For now she must concentrate on keeping up – if she could. It was not so easy in this strange place.

Strange? She had been here before. She had walked among rocks like these a hundred times, in the dreams when Ulfin had met her with the Cup in his hand. She remembered them. She had never seen them with her waking eyes. She had never felt how dry the land was, or the emptiness of the humming air upon her cheek. She had never seen so clearly how the distant scapes of the world reared up all around her, as if she were walking within a vast bowl.

The light was dim. The ground was rough. There was a curious, oppressive quality to the place that teased her senses. Sounds were flattened and distorted. And sight – there was something wrong, or odd, about the distances. Perhaps she was confused by the way the world curved. The outlines of rocks were clear and sharp, but the way they shifted in her sight as she passed them did not match where her mind placed them. She could not tell without reaching out to touch them quite how close they were.

She stumbled, but did not fall. He was waiting for her. She had fallen behind again.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked as she came up.

He turned away. ‘Tarceny’ he said. ‘I must lay my hands on every man and beast and get them across the lake in a week. Less.’

It was the war then. Strange, that the explanation should be so understandable.

‘Why? I thought campaigning was done for the summer.’

‘They have been cunning. The widow's soldiers threaten Tuscolo, so Orcrim has drawn men from the garrison at Trant to aid the capital. But the real target is Trant. Trant is the key. If I had ever had the time to attend properly to Bay it would be different. Now they have seen that without Trant I cannot reinforce across the lake. Septimus is leading a column against it now. Orcrim is unaware. I must head Septimus off’

‘How do you know this?’

‘I saw it in the pool yesterday’

She found she was not surprised by his answer. It chimed with so many things: the way he had watched and stirred the water; his behaviour then and on the way back; the cleft from which the Cup had been carved, in the rock beside the pool.

The pool that held the tears of Beyah.

Stride, stride, stride, swiftly across the shifting landscape of brown stones. He was ahead again slightly, although not so far that he could pretend not to hear her.

‘Why did you not send Orcrim a dream – since you seem to be using your under-craft again?’

He neither stopped nor turned round; but she could tell that the question had made him angry again.

‘I cannot reach anyone with thought from here. The pool is not the Cup. I do not own it. I would need power over it that I do not have.’

‘Who does then?’

He did not answer.

‘Ulfin, who is the Prince Under the Sky?’

‘If you know enough to ask, you must already know the answer. Or do you mean, why is he called that? If you want to know, it was because he had no land. His brothers took everything there was. So he came here.’

‘He is no priest, Ulfin.’ In her hurry to keep pace she almost jostled against him. He turned, and his face was angry.

‘I never told you he was. No, if you think, Phaedra, I did not. And before you speak, you would do well to ask yourself why I should have troubled myself to say more, when you plainly could not believe what already I had told you. Do you imagine that I did not know why you sought, at such risk, to bring an outsider, a priest, into our household? Did you think to persuade me to go through an empty ceremony that would make meaningless our hour upon the knoll? My lady, you are wed to me, and with the force of all the laws of our people, for there is no one living with more right to bind us than he who has his royalty straight from the loins of Wulfram.’

‘You yourself have proved that you and your brothers were the last living of Wulfram's line. I have seen the scroll.’

‘And you have misread it, for the last born we were, but the last living we were not. My lady, you and I were wed by the last of Wulfram's sons, Paigan, who has no issue, nor any need of issue, for he walks in his own flesh to this day’

She stared at him. For a moment her mind was accepting what he was saying, incorporating it, linking it with other knowledge – Paigan, the prince. The eighth son at
the head of Ulfin's scroll. Landless. Came here after the conquest of the March. His settlement failed. The stone throne looking over the valley …

‘Ulfin, do not spin me stories. Do not try to scare me—’

‘Think what you like.’ He was hurrying forward again.

‘He would have to be
hundreds
of years old.’

‘He is.’

‘Ulfin – you don't mean it! Dear God! He
married
us. What price did he—?’

‘Enough of this, Phaedra!’

Ulfin leaped a dry stream bed and started up the far side without waiting. He was trying to put more distance between them.

‘He is the intermediary isn't he?’

‘What?’ The question had stopped him.

‘The intermediary The one who has given you your power. And there's something in that pool that is the source of it.’

The tears of Beyah. The pool held the tears of Beyah, which the world-worm had brought to the earth in his teeth.

‘How do you know these things? Who have you spoken to?’

‘You are not the only one who has treated with him, Ulfin. You know Calyn did before you, and used his power to aid his rebel friends. No doubt your brother Paigan did too—’

‘My brother Calyn feared too much, and failed. My brother Paigan did no more or less than you, my lady. Do not judge—’

‘And what price did you pay?’

He turned his back and began to climb out of the gully they were in. She looked at the stream bed and judged it too far to leap. So she scrambled down into it and then out the far side. Ulfin was near the top of the slope, black against the brown sky.

‘What price did you pay Ulfin?’

As he crossed the skyline, he broke into a run.

‘Ulfin!’

The slope was steep. She forced herself up it, panting. Pebbles gave way beneath her toe and she slid, grazing her hands. Then she recovered. Hurry!

She gained the ridge. The landscape before her tilted gently down to her right before rising again. It was thick with boulders, and the light was dim. Ulfin was nowhere to be seen.

‘Ulfin! Ulfin, I can't see you. Wait!’

There was no reply.

She was growing weaker. She had drunk some water, but it had not helped. Something else was missing; some unknown element that nurtured life was absent from this place. Her feet were dragging, and she had begun to stumble when she should not have done.

At first she had hurried forward, expecting to catch sight of Ulfin almost at once as he emerged from behind some boulder or climbed from some dip in the ground. He had not appeared. Then, when her confidence had failed, she had dithered for a long time on a low ridge and subsequently tried to retrace her footsteps to the point where she had lost sight of him, in the hope that he would
return for her. She did not understand how distances worked in this place. When she had gone as far back as she thought she had come forward since losing him, and still had not reached anywhere she recognized, her confidence failed again and she halted.

She had called, and waited, and called again. There had been no answer. Nothing had moved on that awful scape, where rocks and ridges merged brownly into the upward sweep of the bowl of the world that surrounded her. She was utterly alone.

At last she had begun to walk again, trying to keep to the direction in which she thought Ulfin had been travelling; hoping to find some sign that would guide her onwards. And her line grew more wayward, as she chose that side of a ridge rather than this, left around a boulder and right along the lip of a gully, until it no longer mattered which way she was headed, for all ways were equal and ran to an end among brown rocks.

Still that thing within her that more and more she named ‘the bond’ held her up and led her forward. She had followed Ulfin into the mountains, and had found him. She had followed him through the pre-dawn on the high ridges, and had come upon him. In this place too she would find him and pass with him back into the day. She must not think of any other possibility

She stumbled again. Breathing was hard, and growing harder.

She came to a halt for a third time in half an hour, swaying, looking around her and the changing, changeless stones.

Angels, help me.

She was on her knees; but she had not kneeled to pray. She had fallen painfully, and did not remember falling. She wanted to rise, but did not. All directions were the same.

It was a place no different from any other in this land. She could see, with eyes accustomed to the gloom, the powdery-dry surface of the rock shaped like a severed pig's head by her right hand. She could see the ill-defined patch of shadow beneath it, in which clustered pebbles and grains that were each as brown and dry and powdery as any of the great boulders around her. She could feel the hard surface, the grit beneath her chin, as she rested against the rock. She could hear, in the ear pressed to the rock, the scrape and sound of the footsteps approaching her.

Ulfin, help me
.

There was a movement beyond the boulder to her right, and stones slipping beneath a leather-shod foot. A voice calling.

‘Are you there?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

She felt, in the silence, that the speaker was surprised. That he had expected someone else to answer, or to use different words.

‘Who's there?’ he said.

Who was there? What did a name mean in this place?

‘I am,’ she said. Still she rested against the boulder. She was weak, shaking. The man came into view, moving cautiously. He wore a brown robe, roped monk-style at his middle, and his head was bare.

‘My – lady?’

‘Martin? What – what in heaven's name are you doing here?’

‘I followed … He woke me by my campfire. Did you see …?

‘Ulfin? My lord?’

‘No! Did you not see …?’

They stared at one another. Then Martin walked to the edge of the slope, looking left and right down it as though sweeping it for some sight of another traveller.

‘Well,’ she said, when at last she found her voice. ‘I am glad that whoever it was led you here, Martin. Although you may well not be.’

He looked around, at the sky and the rocks. ‘What is this place?’

‘A place between places. I have been here in my dreams.’

‘Are those stars?’ He was pointing at the two lights, low upon the skyline above them. ‘They do not look like—’

‘I do not think so.’

Capuu lies along the rim of the world, and binds it together
. If she could somehow climb all the way up there, what would she see?

‘The air is trembling.’

‘Yes,’ she said. Distant understandings were beginning to stir in her mind. ‘We are within the Cup.’

‘I don't understand.’

‘There is a cup, or bowl that …’ She stopped, her mind grappling for words that could make plain the mysteries that she was beginning to unravel. ‘The surface of the Cup encompasses the whole world. Each point upon it compares with a place in the world. Those who are able to, may travel from one place across the bowl to another,
arriving there many hours or days before they might have done if they had taken the ordinary road.’

Martin looked around him. ‘Have you water?’

She gave him her bottle. He shook it, then seemed to change his mind.

‘Better that we save it,’ he said, as he handed it back to her. ‘How do we get out?’

‘I do not know.’

He seemed to think about what she had said.

‘We are not meant to fail, my lady. We can be sure of that.’

‘Where were you camped?’

‘In a valley in the foothills on the edge of the March. A day west and south of Hayley’

So she was south and east of where she had started her journey. And she had come a distance that would have taken her at least four days of ordinary travel, if the way had been passable at all.

She closed her eyes and rested against the stone for a moment, drawing strength – strength from this knowledge; from Martin's presence in the desolate place.

When she opened her eyes again she looked around. Away to her left and right the light-brown dusk melded with the rising background in the same monotonal hue that it had done ever since she had entered the place. But before her, she now saw, it drew together darkly and seemed more close. Something lay there, half-concealed in the distance. Or maybe it was nothing. A place where the brown earth dropped away into nothing. A vast cleft running from half to her left away to her right almost as far as she could see. A cleft. A place that lay deep in the mind of the world.

‘It's Derewater,’ she said.

‘Where?’

‘There before us. There! He must be somewhere this side of it. He is going to Tarceny, to rally men and take them across in ships. If we are quick we may catch him.’

She struggled to her feet and set off again across the dry land. Martin followed.

‘My lady – who did you say was ahead of us?’

She had forgotten that he could have no idea how she had come here. ‘My lord himself. Ulfin, March-count of Tarceny. He was in a hurry Martin,’ she went on. ‘So he came this way. I followed him, for I did not know what he was about. We must catch him, and speak with him quickly.’