The Cup of the World (39 page)

The page began with a gushing passage on the news of Ulfin's coronation. A casual reader, even a spy, might have looked no further for its purpose, nor seen anything in it more than the witterings of a woman with too much time and too little brain. Phaedra had spent weeks in Evalia's close company. She could almost see Evalia, as she scratched through phrase after silly phrase in the yellow lamplight with her small, cynical smile on her lips and the muffled pouring of the falls in her ears. Martin must have told her that letters might be opened in Tarceny. Even if he had not done so, she would have guessed.

Towards the bottom of the page Evalia had underscored the last phrase of a paragraph. While the line appeared to give emphasis to the empty-headed words
above them, it also marked them off from the two short paragraphs that followed.

E.

The knotted rope – the badge of his monkly order – was for Martin. The seedling was Ambrose. He was safe, and guarded, at the time the letter was written. The garrison at Hayley now supposed Ambrose and his followers to be at Tarceny, just as Tarceny supposed him to be at Hayley or in the hills.

She penned a short acknowledgement to Evalia's letter, as a grand lady might in response to a request for patronage that she did not wish to grant, but that had come from someone she did not wish to offend. The only expansion she allowed herself was to recall the story of diManey's vision, and to add that she had now heard that the monks of the Knot knew of similar things. Indeed she knew one
who had had a vision that was very like. She would write more on this, but the matter was too great for such a letter.

She sealed it, thinking of her son. Did he miss her – did he remember her, and look around, and ask a one-word question of Eridi: ‘Mama?’ There was no way of knowing.

And one part of her did not wish to know the answers. This was less, she thought, from fear of what they might be, than because she did not deserve it. She must stifle her questions and wait. Even the few sentences in Evalia's letter were too much kindness, too much danger. After reading it for the fourth time, by candlelight, alone in her room, she lit it at one corner and dropped it in the grate. She watched the yellow flames creeping around the parchment, blackening, destroying, concealing.
When the time comes you must sacrifice without mercy. Except the King
.

I have castled, she thought. I have placed my king where he may be guarded – by thirty-one white stones, and by the wits of a woman I once despised. I have warned her as best I can. Now I must play.

And she knew that Evalia's final words had not been a veiled plea for patronage, but the sentences of a friend who did not know whether to write farewell.

Long after night had fallen and the parchment had turned to wispy black fragments she sat by the grate, turning over thoughts in her mind. Ulfin, as he ran from her in the dark country. Amanthys and her story. The suffering the war had caused to her, and others. Father. Elward. Maria, lost in Pemini. Ulfin.

Opposite her, under the window, lay huge bales of black and golden silks that had come up the road from Baer that
afternoon. Heaven knew where they had found them, for Baer itself did not make cloth of this quality, and yet it had been but a fortnight since she had gone down to the warehouse and spoken with the merchants there. Some hero must have abandoned all other things (wife? family?) and gone hotfoot to Watermane, haggling and bargaining and doing whatever was humanly possible to please the whim of the new queen in the time she had set for it. And he had done well. He had found precisely the blacks and golds in good silks that had flitted idly into her mind that afternoon in Baer. She should remember to send a reward, if there were enough coin in the castle for that.

The more so because his efforts had been vain. She would have accepted any cloth of any colour that arrived at the gate. The same sweating scullions would have hauled it all the way up the same stairs to her room. The price, any price, would have been paid by any means possible. For the cloth did not matter. What mattered was that when the door was shut and the scullions and Hera were gone, her fingers, questing deep within the roll, should find there what they sought. Others had been busy while the unknown merchant was abroad. And in this they had made no mistakes.

The room was cold. She could hear the low wind droning in the chimney and soughing beyond the thick stones of her wall. She must make her move.

Rising from her place, she took an earthenware bowl in which lay a mass of the little four-pointed moon roses that thronged below the walls in spring. These had been cut a week before. They were limp and lifeless, and going brown at the tips. She tossed them and the water in which
they lay out of the window. Next she took from the foot of her bed the bottle she had brought with her on her dark journey from the hills. She shook it. It still held the water she had drawn from the pool. She pulled the cork.

Slowly she poured the water into the bowl. It splashed and swirled, scattering the candlelight in fragments across its surface. She peered at it, touched it with her fingers. It was just water, smelling sourly of the inside of a leather bottle. The clearest thing was her own reflection, like a hooded shadow on the face of the water. She hesitated.

She was about to do something she had never done before, and that she did not know would work, or why. Ulfin had not answered the letter she had sent urgently to him on her return to Tarceny She had known he might not. So she must try this way. It was a way that she could never, never, discuss with those who might count her a friend. She was in a dark room, feeling for the door.

This was not
the
bowl: not the Cup, which she had seen only in her dreams, like a vast goblet in Ulfin's hand. This was ordinary clay. But the water – the water came from the well under the sky, where the great shape of Beyah plunged reflected into its depths and the priest crept around its rim upon heels three hundred years old. These were the tears that had fallen in love, and rage and darkness, from the eyes of a being of the beginning of the world. She had felt – had drunk from – the love that was in them. Perhaps no one in the world knew the strength of it better than she. She had seen their darkness flitting in nightmare shapes around her son. It had left its mark upon her stair. It was the rage of a goddess who had lost her own son when Wulfram's people came.

This was the power that the cheated prince had turned against the line of his father. ‘We live by truth,’ the bishop had said, and what was the Law but the exercise of truth? Now the priest would place Ulfin, his lie, at the very heart of the Law. Such a rage and darkness – surely Ulfin and his brothers would never have dared to meddle with it, if they had truly understood it! Perhaps only a mother could.

And now she must meddle too.

The tears were born of the eyes of the goddess. What Phaedra needed now was their sight. If there was a way, it was here. Here, within this film of water, within the rough clay surface beneath, which shifted as the water moved, grown like rocks on a barren landscape. The light was dim. There was something wrong, or odd, about the distances. The water knew her. She could see the outlines of rocks in the bowl.

The world was a bowl. Every place in the world had its point on the bowl's surface. She need only look. So – how to find it?

Ulfin had done this. Or at least, his presence had come to her, waking or sleeping, as she went about the ways of Trant and Tuscolo long ago. She was not now walking from one place across the dark land to emerge in another. She was sending thought, a dream, as Ulfin had done. And thoughts should fly

She bent over the bowl again, more confidently now. She remembered the way into the place of brown rocks. She remembered Ulfin. She felt for him, away to the east, camped with an army of iron around him, resting or sleeping.
~Yes
, and the water knew him too. A mind as beautiful and cold as a mountain valley, where the clefts flow darkling with
corrupted streams. She stood, it seemed, on a flat-topped rock like a million others in that place, looking down into the space before her. There was a room, lit by torches. It was the upper floor of some lodge, on a road from Tuscolo to the south. Distant campfires glittered at the windows. A mailed foot shifted beyond the door. The room was scattered with papers, clothes, armour. A dirty plate and an empty goblet stood upon a low table by the bed, and on the bed itself he lay face down and stirred as she watched him.

Ulfin.

He muttered and shook his head. His sleep was heavy. She did not have much time.

Ulfin, come
.

‘Phaedra?’ He moaned. He was seeing her.

Ulfin, come quickly
.

Her vision was fading. The water in the bowl intruded. Candlelight danced on its surface and marked the shadow of her reflection. She could see both that and at the same time the room beyond, where Ulfin was starting from his sleep.

‘Phaedra! What are you doing?’ His voice was faint. Her reflection on the water blocked her view into the room, like a hooded shape. A hooded shape. It was not her reflection. The picture of a face floated there. Pale eyes glittered. Its lips moved, and spoke.

‘What price will you pay?’

She looked down into the face of the priest, on the surface of the water. She had almost expected it.

‘What price will you pay me, woman, for my power?’

Phaedra! No!
A voice that drifted from a hundred miles away.

‘I? Pay you?’ She gathered herself. ‘Nothing!’

Her fist banged upon the table. The water slopped. Even as it settled, she saw the face reforming on its surface. Like a paper mask, it had no depth to it. It reflected nothing – she was well back from the bowl now, trembling a few feet from the table. Yet it floated there, as if it meant to stay. After a moment she took a scarf and draped it over the bowl, so that she would not have to look at what lay inside.

She was shivering.

Pay? There was nothing to pay. This was not knowledge she had had from him. This was not the Cup he had carved. These were the tears of Beyah, which she herself had gathered and he had never owned; never, for all the terrible strength in his eyes. It was well that she had not spoken longer with him.

Phaedra
, said Ulfin behind her.

‘No!’ She jerked round.

He was gone.

Of course, he would try to reach her at once. She had not thought of that. He would be desperate to know how she had done what she had done, what bargain she had struck; whether his powers were now under threat. That was right. But he must not get the answer through the Cup. He must come himself. And it was beginning to dawn on her how difficult it might be to make him.

The room was cold and empty. The hour was late. She should build up the fire.

On the table her bowl sat, covered by the green scarf. Outwardly it was plain. There was no sign of what had been floating on its surface when she had last seen it. Had it gone? If it had gone, perhaps she might be able to use
the water again. She could keep calling Ulfin until he came. She reached for the corner of the cloth. Before she lifted it her fingers checked.

It had gone. Surely it had gone now.

There was no sign, no sound within the bowl. The cloth was chilly to her touch, the colour faded and yellow in the lamplight. She knew what must lie beneath it, floating like a mask on the surface of the water. She dropped the cloth and let it lie.

Phaedra! What have you done?

‘What price have I paid, Ulfin?’ she asked, with her eyes on the bowl.

The low wind droned and stirred the ash-motes in the grate.

‘Would you tell
me?’
she shouted, and spun to where he must be standing. A shadow flitted, and the vision was broken. There was nothing there.

After thirty heartbeats, waiting for him to come again, she kneeled and began to make up the fire.

What was her price, to bargain or to sell? In a leafy clearing in the woods, three days to the south, with the wind thrashing in the treetops and the grey skies flowing by above them, she had set it, watching the tubby young man with the brown stubble whom half the Kingdom held to be the Fount of their Law. He had not returned her look, but stared at a point before him on the gold-brown mush of the forest floor, and listened as she spoke.

‘I have a son … less than two years old. When I last saw him he was just beginning to walk.’ (Little Ambrose,
rising to his feet in a world of three mortal dangers. The first, the nightmares in the twilight beyond the ring of little white stones. The second, the chills and the fever that daily robbed mothers of their sons all through the Kingdom. The third …)

‘… Of all men living I suppose he must be counted among your greatest enemies. Your soldiers would think they did you a service if they killed him, for some see him as the heir to your throne.’

The prince, nodding as though she had made a reasonable point in some scholarly argument. Aun, sitting on the far side of him frowning. Perhaps he did not like to be reminded of her son and, by him, of her marriage.

‘I do not ask the throne for him,’ she had heard her own voice say. ‘Nor riches, nor titles.’

She remembered the face of the prince, as he thought. The man whom she would have been made to marry. So ordinary: so desperate after his latest disaster that he had fled deep into his enemy's heartland to escape pursuit. Perhaps he knew – surely he must know – how much less of a figure he was than his brother, or even his father. By his own admission it had been one of his frequent head-colds that had kept him from joining them on their last, fatal hunt. Did he grudge them their lost glory? Or was it for their sake, and the sake of those around him who had lost their true kings upon that terrible day, that he had carried on?