The Cup of the World (22 page)

The pages were uncut from their full size, so she had spread them over the writing desk that Ulfin had given her. They were the beautiful, smooth paper, watermarked with the sails of Velis, that she had sometimes seen at home. Across the cream-like surface Ulfin's hand, curving tightly to make the most use of space, had traced a family tree. At the top was a row of names famous in story: Wulfram the Seafarer, and the seven princes of the Kingdom. Below them Ulfin had listed for each the male line of descent, father to son. There were names she had known all her life – high kings and heroes. There were others she had never seen written or heard in
The Tale of Kings
. She could only wonder how Ulfin had known of them. One by one the lines came to an end. Only the seventh, headed TALIFER, went on and on, outlasting all the others until, at the foot of the third page, it ended in a row of names:

CALYN, ULFIN, PAIGAN.

On her ring the letters
cPu
glittered, and the worm writhed in the weakening light of the flame.

Ulfin must have spent many hours on this, and she had many questions for him – or perhaps just one. But he was not home, and word came rarely from him across the
lake. Sometimes when she slept, or even when she was awake, he would speak to her through the Cup. Such dreams were good but fleeting, and she could not tell when the next would be; nor could she will them to happen as she so often wished to. He was swept up in his war, crossing the Segne in relentless marches, seizing Tuscolo itself by a miraculous raid, and harrying Septimus and Seguin's forces when they turned to recapture it, until their soldiers melted away and Seguin was drowned in the bloody marshes on the road to Bay.

Now a group of barons had offered Ulfin the crown.

The news had come last night, and with it word that Ulfin had refused. Phaedra felt as if she had put a foot over a sudden precipice and had been snatched back before she was aware. Had he reached so far, it would have meant unceasing war. Even with his principal enemies fallen, too many people opposed him. If he lost, then all would be lost. If he won she would be dragged to Tuscolo, with all its whispers and intrigues, and the unceasing games of patronage that she knew she would loathe.

Turning in her sheets, fretting, trying to find a position in which she was comfortable, she had remembered these pages from other times in the library. Her sleeplessness had brought her to read them; to confirm that Ulfin was, or thought he was, the very last of the male line of the first kings. CALYN, ULFIN, PAIGAN. And his brothers were dead, and his child rested within her. He had never told her.

She lifted her eyes from the page. Outside a flight of doves – six or seven of them – whirred past the window. Voices called to one another from the towers and rooftops
as the garrison looked out in the dawn. ‘All clear, all clear. Stand down.’ Men were walking along the battlements above her head, laughing and talking the short, idiot talk that soldiers always talk. The baby squirmed; she shifted. She could hear Orani moving about in the corridor, and someone, released from watch, settled to play his pipe in those long, breathy notes that would speak to her for ever of Tarceny and the hills.

Ulfin had refused. Whatever he thought the right of it was, he had known better than to advance his claim. Now, with these victories, there would surely be a chance of peace, and he would come home. She must start again on the robe, which had lain untouched for most of the summer.

She began to scroll the sheets up again, noticing as she did so that the number of princes at the head of the first page was not seven, but eight. On the right-hand end of the row was a name: PAIGAN. It was the same name as Ulfin's brother. There was no line of descent at all.

‘Orani! Orani!’

She blundered in the darkness. Heaven knew what time it was. It might be midnight, or an hour before the late December dawn. Her foot struck something and she staggered against the side of the bed.

‘Orani!’

There were sounds in the corridor. Hands tried the door to the outer chamber. It shook. Orani's voice came, muffled by wood.

‘It's bolted!’

Of course it was. Phaedra fastened it every night now,
after a dream of a shape in the corridor a week ago. She felt her way across the huge space to the door and struggled with the bolts. As she was drawing the second one, the pain came again. She sank to the floor, bending double. The door jerked inwards and struck her thigh. Orani stood over her in the darkness.

‘Lady?’

It was a moment before Phaedra could speak.

‘What's happening? Orani – what's happening to me?’

She knew of course. It was the child. She had been waiting, day in, day out under the grey skies of November and December for something to begin. Now it had – but what? Was it birth? Was it miscarriage? Were these pains just something that would happen, and go away, and come again? No one had told her. She had not dared to ask.

Was it the beginning of death?

‘Ulfin!’

Orani's hands were under her armpits. Together they staggered back into the bedchamber. Phaedra kneeled on the rug, with her face buried in her arms, while Orani muttered and felt among the bedclothes.

‘Your waters gone, lady?’

‘I— What?’

‘You don't know, do you? Not to mind – you would if they had done. Don't seem to, at least not on the sheets here. Need light.’

‘It hurts!’

‘Is it hurting now?’

‘Yes – no. It will in a minute. What is it?’

For answer the older woman ran her wrinkled hand up Phaedra's thigh to her swollen belly. Phaedra opened
her mouth at the indignity, but said nothing. She knew she needed help. They sat together in the darkness, waiting. Then Phaedra gasped. The pain grew. It went on. She shuddered, and heard herself whimper.

‘Little thing's in a hurry to get out, though,’ Orani was saying as she withdrew her hand. ‘That's what it is. Thought it might come tonight, for Puri's hens all laid together yesterday, even the old one. An' your feet are small, lady, so it'll hurt before it's better.’ She rose to her feet. ‘Need a light.’

‘Send for my lord!’

Ulfin was two hundred miles away, on his way to or from a parley in the Seabord.

‘Need a light, and some help. You bide there, lady. It won't come before I'm back.’

Phaedra heard her leave the room. She stifled another sob. She knew she should be brave. Whatever happened now would happen as the Angels willed it. But there was nothing in her to be brave with. She knew nothing about birth. No one had told her about it, and she had never wanted to ask. She had not expected these terrible spasms. She thought that Orani was right, and that the end would not come for some hours. Yet she had no faith in the maid's rambling birthlore.

She might go down into red darkness before Ulfin heard of it, before the messenger even left the castle. She, the start of all the Kingdom's troubles, would disappear in a meaningless end; and the Kingdom would war on, oblivious.

Then the pain began again.

Orani returned, her face lit from beneath by a lamp,
so that her nose and chin cast demonic shadows up her eyes and cheeks. There were other faces with her. Other people, people of the castle, were being brought into their lady's bedchamber to see her shudder and shriek in gross-ness upon her pillows. Phaedra cared, but did not care enough to try to send them away. She bit her wrist when the pain returned, and it helped. She did it again and again, until they noticed and bound it and gave her a leather strap to bite, which was not half as good. There was warmth and wetness over her legs and belly, and warm, wet cloths mopping at her face. She began to scream.

Sometime when the grey light was seeping in through the window, she knew she was about to die. She tried to say prayers between her spasms, but the pain came relentlessly and stopped all the words, so that she had to begin again. She opened her eyes and looked up at Orani.

‘Fetch the priest!’ she gasped.

‘Still a while. You're doing not bad, lady. Puri's said she's seen better an' I say I've seen worse …’

Either she had not heard or she had not understood.

‘The grey priest! The one who married us!’
Ulfin, where are you?

‘Him! You don't want
him
. You'll be fine with us. And we'll need a wet nurse, though maybe you don't want to think of that now.’

‘The priest!’

Whatever else Orani said vanished in Phaedra's rush of agony. She could not think. She could only wait for the next. And the next.

And so on, for hours.

There was a strange time, when the pain ended and the weight left her. It was daylight. The sheets were bloody, and her legs were bloody, and women gathered and showed her a bundle of white cloth, in the middle of which was a small face of red and purple with its eyes shut and its mouth open in a thin, wheezing bawl that went on and on.

‘Boy!’ cried the women excitedly. ‘Boy!’ And someone ran out and down the corridor, calling.

Phaedra dragged herself to a sitting position on the bed and peered at the bundle. The eyes remained fast shut. There was a thick, black thatch of hair upon its head. She took it gingerly.

‘So light!’ she gasped. ‘Is this all there is?’

Someone laughed. They were all laughing. And outside, voices were calling. A bell was ringing. Horns and trumpets sounded from the walls as Tarceny declared its heir to the world. The purple mouth opened and wheezed. The limbs, like rolled cloths, moved feebly.

‘Hush, baby’ said Phaedra, rocking it. ‘Hush, little thing. You can rest now.’

he woke suddenly in the chair in her living chamber. It was deep night. The lamp at her hand had sunk to the merest green spark. The air was close. Some sound had roused her from her dreams. She stirred. She was still fully dressed. In her hands she held the great belt she was making to go with the robe. She had been trying to decide whether it should be re-made with eight precious stones, one for each of the first princes. She must have fallen asleep over it. She remembered dreaming that it had become a great chain of shimmering water, which bound Ulfin and her together as they lay among the brown rocks. Ulfin had wept and pulled at it, but he had remained bound as the shadows of his enemies crawled from the boulders to reach him. Then the dream had changed, or she had moved into another dream; because Ulfin had gone, and the shadows had gathered around the cradle that held her son. She remembered long, clawed fingers which had reached in over the cradle's rim as the baby had squirmed in his swaddles and tried to cry.

Her heart was lurching, and she felt sick. She listened.

There had been a sound. It had entered her dream. It had been – it might have been – footsteps in the corridor.

She got to her feet, and picked up the lamp. The oil was nearly gone.

People in the corridor, at this hour? Orani, still awake and wondering if her mistress was ever coming to bed? Unlikely.

Then, unmistakably, she heard the sound of a door-latch lifting. It came from the corridor. It must have been the latch of the library.

The library was where the baby now slept, with Orani and his new wet nurse. She fumbled her way to the door of her room, drew the bolts and stepped out into the corridor. There was almost no light. She lifted her lamp, but it told her nothing.

‘Who's there?’

There was a movement, she thought, in the darkness by the library door. For a moment she had the impression that the shadows had shapes.

‘Who's there?’ she said, advancing with her feeble spark in her hand.

She reached the library door. There was no one there.

She thought there might have been a footstep – but only one. Even then, her hearing had been confused by her own movements.

The library door was slightly ajar.

She leaned on the door-frame, and peered in. She heard the rumbles and sighs of Orani, sleeping on the floor. There was no sound at all from her niece Eridi, the wet nurse, or from the cot that held the child. There was no one else there.

Holding her breath, trying to still the rustle of her clothes, she crept forward to the cot. The baby was there – quite still. She bent closer. There was still no sound. She put out her hand, and drew it back. She did not dare to touch him. So she hovered and waited through the long, impossible moments for the breaths that did not come.

Then, with her head only a few inches above the swaddles, she heard it at last: the faintest sigh. And again. And again. The child lived softly in the little locked world of his sleep.

Phaedra straightened in the dark room, and lifted her lamp. One of the sleepers had raised her head from her pillow and was looking at her. It was Eridi – the new girl, whom the Orani had brought to the castle when the baby was born.

‘Did anyone come in here?’ Phaedra whispered.

Eridi took a moment to reply. Phaedra crouched at her bedside, holding the lamp so that they could see each other's faces.

‘Who came in?’ she asked again.

‘You did, lady’

In Eridi the mixing of hill-blood and Kingdom had produced a big face, with a straight strong nose like a mare's. Her eyes were dark. Now they seemed like black marble as they stared at Phaedra.