The Cup of the World (14 page)

‘Like a chessboard?’ (Aun had always referred to his board and pieces as ‘black’ and ‘white’, for all that they had been different shades of brown, and irregular at that.)

‘You are still trying to tease me. But yes. Do you play chess?’

‘I have begun to learn in the past year. My favourite piece is the queen. What is yours?’

‘You should not have a favourite piece. You should use them all, as the game requires. When the time comes you must sacrifice them without mercy. Except the King, which you must guard with your life.’

So they began to play chess in the evenings. They played on a large, beautifully made board with pieces the colour of coal and pale ivory Ulfin was skilful – far better,
she judged, than Aun had been. He thought many turns in advance. His game was more subtle too. He loved to move a piece to a position of advantage, to let her worry about it until her hand was hovering over a knight or pawn for the counter-move. Then his head would shake just slightly, and she would look at the board again and see for the first time the bishop or castle his move had unmasked, its baleful threat lancing across to the heart of her defence.

She fought. She harnessed her own growing awareness of the game, of its complexities and tempo. She forced him into sudden exchanges in order to remove some piece that she thought his plans rested on. And so they played, sometimes game after game, in the early spring evenings in the hall at Tarceny where the air moved through the long, slit windows and there was no sound but the clack of the pieces and the faint stirring of the hangings, rich with history, above them. And when her defences were swept away, and her king fell for the last time, she would grimace ruefully and take his outstretched hand, and together they would climb the marble stairs to the velvet dark of the sleeping quarters, where the moon gleamed on silk sheets and their hearts pounded within their cases of skin.

So Phaedra's idyll endured into the early days of February, when the first rain for weeks was spitting lightly into the dust, and the answer from Trant arrived to shatter the dream.

The War Room of Tarceny was lit with torches, and by the windows that looked out on the afterglow of sunset under a mass of cloud. The walls were whitewashed, the furniture was dark polished wood, which gleamed fitfully in the torchlight: a big table with benches on each side of it, and a huge chair, like a throne, carved with fighting scenes at its head. The only ornament on the walls was a portrait of a young man, with the long face of Ulfin's family and a sad look in his eyes.

Phaedra looked round at a dozen men, some unknown, others half-known, but to whom she could still not put a name. Hob, Ulfin's butler and close aide, was there. He occupied a low position at the table. The rest would be knights, each with several farms and manors and a dozen or more armoured men in the saddle. Some wore mail. In Tarceny men went geared for war even on their own lands, it seemed, and for the trodden road to their lord's gate. Most were older than Ulfin by a number of years. And these were none of the homely, if valiant, faces of Trant. They were the men who had followed the old count, hard and silent. They had done what he bid them do.

Now they waited for his son to speak.

‘You know,’ said Ulfin to them, ‘that I have written to my lady's father, offering friendship, waiving dowry, and asking nothing but that he should be pleased to call me son. I have received no answer. My lady has also written, and has received some kind of answer, but little that gives us hope or encouragement. It is chiefly for that reason that
I have asked her to sit with us while we discuss these things.

‘There is also the news that Abernay has brought me, which I shall ask him to tell us shortly. Lastly I have some news myself, which we should all consider and then decide what is best to do.

‘First I shall say again, lest there be any doubt, that my lady consented to marry me of her own will, on March ground and under March law. There is no doubt of this case.’

His right hand, as he spoke, rested on Phaedra's arm. His left lay on a wooden chest, carved with intricate snakes and figures, which stood upon the table like a totem of authority. His language was formal, like a priest's. Phaedra could see the men round the table guessing what they were about to hear.

‘My lady’ said Ulfin, turning in his chair.

‘Sir,’ said Phaedra, and her voice was a whisper. She tried to clear her throat, and spoke again. ‘Sir, my father caused it to be written that he does not own us married, nor would he answer your letter in words.’

Someone grunted. It might have been a laugh, but the sound was too brief for Phaedra to tell if it were rueful or scornful.

‘I do not think we need doubt his meaning,’ said Ulfin.

‘He cannot hope to win,’ said Orcrim, the white-haired knight who was Ulfin's war master. ‘We are five or more to his one.’

‘If that were all, I would agree,’ said Ulfin. ‘However, let us think that, raging though he was, he seems to have delayed eight or ten days before replying to us. That is time to send other messages, and receive answers. We
know the Warden is the King's man. And it seems to me not impossible that a certain royal prince may hold himself offended in this.’

There were one or two smiles around the table. Septimus did not command the respect of the March-knights, it seemed.

‘Abernay where is the King now, and who is with him?’

A knight – one of those in mail – leaned forward. He had a narrow face, with a pointed chin and black hair cut in a circular crop.

‘I spoke with a merchant who had been sent across from Bay to make certain purchases for the King's coming. The King set out from Tuscolo on the last day of Christmas. He is now at Baldwin, but will be at Bay by the end of the month. Both princes are with him, as is the Lord Develin and others. They would be at Trant for a fortnight in mid-March, and would arrive at Jent for Easter.’

‘That was his plan,’ said Ulfin. ‘Now I think it will have changed – at least about where he spends Easter. My piece is this. That an order over the royal seal has gone down all the eastern shores of Derewater, for every ship and boat that may be commanded to be at Trant by the fifteenth day of March.’

There was silence in the room again. Phaedra could hear the flutter of the torches on the wall. At the end of the table, Hob was looking thoughtful. His eyes rested on the little chest beneath Ulfin's hand. Beyond the windows it was almost full night. Rain spat lightly on the sills.

She shuddered with sudden cold.

In the sleepless hours of misery and rage she had told herself that she could hardly be dead to him if he were about to set out across the lake to bring her back by force. He never meant the things he said in anger. If she were in Trant she could have faced him, and won. She could have told him that Tarceny was only an enemy if he chose to make it one. She might have made him see that this was the only way for her, and so have been forgiven. It was because she was here that she could do nothing.

But there was little comfort in such thinking. The truth was that she had fled because she was powerless, and that she had hardly asked herself what he would think or say. It had been a long time since Father had raged to her face. A part of her had forgotten what it was like. Written in reported speech, by a man trying hopelessly to soften what his lord had hurled at him to say, the words had hurt her in a way for which she had simply not been prepared.

And there had been Joliper's frantic, undictated postscript:

They would take her from Ulfin!

His right hand still rested on her arm. She brought her own right hand across to grip it, hard. As if prompted by her touch he spoke again.

‘You will know, friends, that since my father died we have given the King no cause to hate us. Yet I judge that he will think he has no cause to love us either, since we have not danced to the tune at his court, or made all his quarrels our own. At all events, I have no wish to wait until the King and my lords Baldwin, Bay and Develin are ready to meet me. If I do, I do not doubt that we should be hard put to it and that the terms of any parley would be harsh indeed. So – the key to their preparation is Trant. There they will gather their boats. There they will summon such of their knights as are not already with them. There the King will come, on the fifteenth day of March …’

The King, who was the Fount of the Law. He too was against her.

‘… if we do not forestall him. So I mean to take Trant. With a royal castle in our hands, I guess we shall hear better terms.’

It was as if she was looking through a window into the room, seeing it from outside as he spoke. Her mind was in some other place, as his words fell calmly, naturally, into the talk of a world gone mad. She saw some of the knights nodding, as though defying the King to war was something that they had not thought of doing until now, but did not doubt that they could.

Others were frowning. Take Trant? Just like that?

‘It must be the right stroke,’ said Orcrim, from his seat at Ulfin's left. ‘Better still if we wait until most of the boats are gathered there, so that we may seize them for our own use. Yet it must be done before the King arrives.’

‘Indeed,’ said Ulfin. ‘I would not be known in the Kingdom as one who attacked his lord before any challenge was issued.’

‘Ulfin!’

It was her own voice. She recovered herself.

‘My lord. If you love me – no one at Trant is to be killed for my sake.’

‘I know why you ask this,’ said Ulfin. ‘Although it is asking much. In war nothing can be certain. But,’ he went on, looking around. ‘But I too would not willingly shed any blood of the house of the man I would call Father. Therefore we must plan to come on them in such a way that no one in the house has a chance to draw sword.’

Now they were shocked.

‘It's impossible!’ someone protested.

‘We'd have to have someone inside!’

‘Not impossible,’ said Ulfin. ‘Difficult, yes. Difficult. But who tells me that what I would do is impossible?’

There was another silence, thicker this time. No one answered him.

‘Good, then.’ And he turned to Phaedra.

‘Is there any way that we can come within the walls of Trant unseen? A tunnel, perhaps?’

Afterwards, when she looked back on that moment, Phaedra remembered his face looking down at her in the
torchlight, her own heart beating within her, and the desperate need to help him persuade that room of war-scarred men of what must be done.

‘There is no tunnel,’ she said. ‘Nor any stream or drain large enough for a man to crawl through.’

‘How did you escape the castle, then?’

‘By the postern door. It is in the lakeside wall, under the north-west tower. It opens into the ditch, and on the inside it leads into the courtyard. It is kept bolted from within. You will not force it without alerting the guard. But …’ She hesitated.

‘But?’

They were all looking at her. There was something in her that did not want to speak. She heard herself say: ‘I was not the only one to escape the castle that night.’

‘Lackmere?’

She nodded.

‘He had chisels in his room, and a few blankets. When I saw him on the day before he was examining the north wall – how it bulged outwards at the base, how the masonry was cracked. I think he must have let himself out of his window, which was at the top of that tower, and worked his way down the wall, forcing his chisels between the stones for hand- and footholds.’

‘Desperate.’

‘He was in the mood to risk it. And there is no guard on the wall in peace. It may be a way for you.’

They did not like it.

‘We'll have to get two-score men over the wall, in fighting gear!’

‘Not two score,’ said Ulfin. ‘Only enough to reach the
postern from within. And it will be easier to climb than it was to descend.’

‘That's true,’ said someone. ‘This Lackmere must have been mad.’

‘Either he was mad, or we are. I never heard of a place like Trant being taken in such a way!’

‘Enough,’ said Ulfin. ‘If a man can get out, a man can get in. One way or another, we must – and shall – reach that postern unseen. Now, my lady. The door is open. Where are the fighting men quartered?’

She leaned over the table, meeting no one's eye, and began to trace with her fingertips the outlines of her home on the dark wood. The air in the room around her was as thick as coming thunder.

An hour later, the gathering broke up. No one spoke. The knights filed from the room with set faces. Phaedra stood at Ulfin's hand, listening to the armoured heels crashing down the steps past the chapel door, where someone must have said something to rouse that bitter laugh from the others. The footsteps faded at last behind the futile
pit-pit-pit
from outside the window, of rain too thin to fill the tanks and cisterns or do any good but rouse the smell of dust from the land. Ulfin lounged in his chair, thinking. Slowly she curled up onto her stool and leaned across the armrest of the throne until her head was upon his shoulder. He put his arm round her.

‘They are good fighters, but narrow,’ he said. ‘They only think in certain ways. Phaedra, I am sorry he has chosen this. It was not my intention. Yet with good luck we may yet laugh at it all from the other side.’