The Winter King Part 17

"I'm searching for a woman called Nimue," I said.

"Nimue," he said, frowning as he tried to remember the name, "Nimue! Yes indeed, I do recall her now!

A one-eyed girl with black hair. She's gone to the sea folk."

"Drowned?" I asked, appalled.

"No, no." He shook his head. "You must understand we have our own communities on the Isle. You have already made the acquaintance of the gate ghouls. We here in the quarries are the hermits, a small group who prefer our solitude and so inhabit the caves on this side of the Isle. On the far side are the beasts. You may imagine what they are like. At the southern end are the sea folk. They fish with lines of human hair using thorns for hooks and are, I must say, the best behaved of the Isle's tribes, though none are exactly famed for their hospitality. They all fight each other, of course. Do you see how we have everything here that the Land of the Living offers? Except, perhaps, religion, although one or two of our inhabitants do believe themselves to be G.o.ds. And who is to deny them?"

"You've never tried to leave?"

"I did," he said sadly. "A long time ago. I once tried to swim across the bay, but they watch us, and a spear-b.u.t.t on the head is an efficient reminder that we are not supposed to leave the Isle and I turned back long before they could administer such a blow. Most drown who try to escape that way. A few go along the causeway and some of them, perhaps, do get back among the living, but only if they succeed in pa.s.sing the gate ghouls first. And if they survive that ordeal they have to avoid the guards waiting on the beach. Those skulls you saw as you crossed the causeway? They are all men and women who tried to escape. Poor souls." He went silent and I thought, for a second, he was about to weep. Then he pushed himself briskly off the wall. "What am I thinking about? Do I have no manners? I must offer you water. See? My cistern!" He gestured proudly towards a wooden barrel that stood just outside the cave mouth and which was placed to catch the water that cascaded off the quarry's sides during rainstorms. He had a ladle with which he filled two wooden cups with water. "The barrel and ladle came from a fishing boat that was wrecked here, when? Let me see... two years ago. Poor people! Three men and two boys. One man tried to swim away and was drowned, the other two died under a hail of stones and the two boys were carried off. You can imagine what happened to them! There may be women aplenty, but a clean young fisher boy flesh is a rare treat on this Isle." He put the cup in front of me and shook his head. "It is a terrible place, my friend, and you have been foolish to come here. Or were you sent?"

"I came by choice."

"Then you belong here anyway, for you're plainly mad." He drank his water. "Tell me," he said, 'the news of Britain."

I told him. He had heard of Uther's death and Arthur's coming, but not much else. He frowned when I said King Mordred was maimed, but was pleased when he heard that Bedwin still lived. "I like Bedwin," he said. "Liked, rather. We have to learn to talk here as though we were dead. He must be old?"

"Not so old as Merlin."

"Merlin lives?" he asked in surprise.

"He does."

"Dear me! So Merlin is alive!" He seemed pleased. "I once gave him an eagle stone and he was so grateful. I have another here somewhere. Where now?" He searched among a small pile of rocks and sc.r.a.ps of wood that made a collection beside the cave door. "Is it over there?" He pointed towards the bed-curtain. "Can you see it?"

I turned away to look for the precious rattling stone and the moment I looked away Malldynn leaped on my back and tried to drag his small knife's ragged edge across my throat. "I'll eat you!" he cried in triumph. "Eat you!" But I had somehow caught his knife hand with my left and managed to keep the blade away from my windpipe. He wrestled me to the floor and tried to bite my ear. He was slavering above me, his appet.i.te whetted by the thought of new, clean human flesh to eat. I hit him once, twice, managed to twist around and bring up my knee, then hit him again, but the wretch had remarkable strength and the sound of our fight brought more men running from other caves. I had only a few seconds before I would be overpowered by the newcomers and so I gave one last desperate heave, then b.u.t.ted Malldynn's head with mine and finally threw him off. I kicked him away, scrambled desperately back from the onrush of his friends, then stood in the entrance to his bed-chamber where I at last had room to draw Hywelbane. The hermits shrank away from the sword's bright blade.

Malldynn, his mouth bleeding, lay at the side of the cave. "Not even a sc.r.a.p of fresh liver?" he begged me. "Just a morsel? Please?"

I left him. The other hermits plucked at my cloak as I pa.s.sed through the quarry, but none tried to stop me. One of them laughed as I left. "You'll have to come back!" the man called to me, 'and we'll be hungrier then!"

"Eat Malldynn," I told them bitterly.

I climbed to the Isle's ridge where gorse grew among rocks. I could see from the summit that the great rock hill did not extend all the way to the Isle's southern tip, but fell steeply to a long plain that was hatched by a tangle of ancient stone walls; evidence that ordinary men and women had once lived on the Isle and farmed the stony plateau that sloped towards the sea. There were settlements still on the plateau: the homes, I supposed, of the sea folk. A group of those dead souls watched me from their cl.u.s.ter of round huts that stood at the hill's base and their presence persuaded me to stay where I was and wait for dawn. Life creeps slow in the early morning, which is why soldiers like to attack in the first light and why I would search for my lost Nimue when the mad denizens of the Isle were still sluggish and bemused with sleep.

It was a hard night. A bad night. The stars wheeled above me, bright homes from where the spirits look down on feeble earth. I prayed to Bel, begging for strength, and sometimes I slept, though every rustle of gra.s.s or fall of stone brought me wide awake. I had sheltered in a narrow crack of rock that would restrict any attack and as a result I was confident I could protect myself, though only Bel knew how I would ever leave the Isle. Or whether I would ever find my Nimue.

I crept from my rock niche before the dawn. A fog hung over the sea beyond the sullen turmoil that marked the entrance of Cruachan Cave and a weak grey light made the Isle look flat and cold. I could see no one as I walked downhill. The sun had still not risen as I entered the first small village of crude huts. Yesterday, I had decided, I had been too timid with the Isle's denizens. Today I would treat the dead like the carrion they were.

The huts were wattle and mud, thatched with branches and gra.s.s. I kicked in a ramshackle wooden door, stooped inside the hut and grabbed the first sleeping form I found. I hurled that creature outside, kicked another, then slashed a hole in the roof with Hywelbane. Things that had once been human untangled themselves and slithered away from me. I kicked a man in the head, slapped another with the flat of Hywelbane's blade, then dragged a third man out into the sickly light. I threw him to the ground, put my foot on his chest and held Hywelbane's tip at his throat. "I seek a woman named Nimue," I said. He stammered gibberish at me. He could not speak, or rather he could only talk in a language of his own devising and so I left him and ran after a woman who was limping into the bushes. She screamed as I caught her, and screamed again as I placed the steel at her throat. "Do you know a woman called Nimue?"

She was too terrified to speak. Instead she lifted her filthy skirts and offered me a toothless leer, so I slapped her face with the flat of the sword's blade. "Nimue!" I shouted at her. "A girl with one eye called Nimue. Do you know her?" The woman still could not speak, but she pointed south, jabbing her hand towards the Isle's seaward tip in a frantic effort to make me relent. I took the sword away and kicked the skirts back over her thighs. The woman scrambled away into a patch of thorns. The other frightened souls stared from their huts as I followed the path south towards the churning sea. I pa.s.sed two other tiny settlements, but no one tried to stop me now. I had become part of the Isle of the Dead's living nightmare; a creature in the dawn with naked steel. I walked through fields of pale gra.s.s dotted with bird's-foot trefoil, blue milkwort and the crimson spikes of orchids and told myself I should have known that Nimue, a creature of Manawydan's, would have found her refuge as close to the sea as she could find it.

The Isle's southern sh.o.r.e was a tangle of rocks edging a low cliff. Great waves crashed into foam, sucked through gullies and shattered white into clouds of spray. The cauldron swirled and spat offsh.o.r.e. It was a summer morning, but the sea was grey like iron, the wind was cold and the sea birds loud with laments.

I jumped from rock to rock, going down towards that deathly sea. My ragged cloak lifted in the wind as I turned around a pillar of pale stone to see a cave that lay a few feet above the dark line of oar weed and bladder wrack stranded by the highest tides. A ledge led to the cave, and on the ledge were piled the bones of birds and animals. The piles had been made by human hands, for they were regularly s.p.a.ced and each heap was braced by a careful latticework of longer bones and topped by a skull. I stopped, fear surging in me like the surge of the sea, as I stared at the refuge as close to the sea as any place could be on this Isle of doomed souls. "Nimue?" I called as I summoned the courage to approach the ledge.

"Nimue?"

I climbed to the narrow rock platform and walked slowly between the heaped bones. I feared what I would find in the cave. "Nimue?" I called.

Beneath me a wave roared across a spur of rock and clawed white fingers towards the ledge. The water fell back and drained in dark sluices to the sea before another roller thundered on the headland's stone and across the glistening rocks. The cave was dark and silent. "Nimue?" I said again, my voice faltering. The cave's mouth was guarded by two human skulls that had been forced into niches so that their broken teeth grinned into the moaning wind either side of the entrance. "Nimue?" There was no answer except for the wind's howl and the birds' laments and the suck and shudder of the ghastly sea. I stepped inside. It was cold in the cave and the light was sickly. The walls were damp. The shingle floor rose in front of me and forced me to stoop beneath the roof's heavy loom as I stepped cautiously forward. The cave narrowed and twisted sharply to the left. A third yellowing skull guarded the bend where I waited as my eyes settled to the gloom, then I turned past the guardian skull to see the cave dwindling towards a dead, dark end.

And there, at the cave's dark limit, she lay. My Nimue.

I thought at first she was dead for she was naked and huddled with her dark hair filthy across her face and with her thin legs drawn up to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and her pale arms clutching her shins. Sometimes, in the green hills, we would risk the barrow wights to dig into the gra.s.sy mounds and seek the old people's gold, and we would find their bones in just such a huddle as they crouched in the earth to fend off the spirits through all eternity.

"Nimue?" I was forced to go on hands and knees to crawl the last few feet to where she lay. "Nimue?" I said again. This time her name caught in my throat for I was sure she must be dead, but then I saw her ribs move. She breathed, but was otherwise still as death. I put Hywelbane down and reached a hand to touch her cold white shoulder. "Nimue?"

She sprang towards me, hissing, teeth bared, one eye a livid red socket and the other turned so that only the white of its eyeball showed. She tried to bite me, she clawed at me, she keened a curse in a whining voice then spat it at me, and afterwards she slashed her long nails at my eyes. "Nimue!" I yelled. She was spitting, drooling, fighting and snapping with filthy teeth at my face. "Nimue!" She screamed another curse and put her right hand at my throat. She had the strength of the mad and her scream rose in triumph as her fingers closed on my windpipe. Then, suddenly, I knew just what I had to do. I seized her left hand, ignored the pain in my throat, and laid my own scarred palm across her scar. I laid it there; I left it there; I did not move.

And slowly, slowly, the right hand at my throat weakened. Slowly, slowly, her good eye rolled so that I could see my love's bright soul once more. She stared at me, and then she began to cry.

"Nimue," I said, and she put her arms around my neck and clung to me. She was sobbing now in great heaves that racked her thin ribs as I held her, stroked her and spoke her name. The sobs slowed and at last ended. She hung on my neck for a long time; then I felt her head move.

"Where's Merlin?" she asked in a small child's voice.

"Here in Britain," I said.

"Then we must go." She took her arms from around my neck and settled on her haunches so she could stare into my face. "I dreamed that you'd come," she said.

"I do love you," I said. I had not meant to say it, even if it was true.

"That's why you came," she said as though it were obvious.

"Do you have clothes?" I asked.

"I have your cloak," she said. "I need nothing else except your hand." I crawled out of the cave, sheathed Hywelbane and wrapped my green cloak around her pale shivering body. She pushed an arm through a rent in the cloak's ragged wool and then, her hand in mine, we walked between the bones and climbed the hill to where the sea folk watched. They parted as we reached the cliff's top and did not follow as we walked slowly down the Isle's eastern side. Nimue said nothing. Her madness had fled the moment my hand touched hers, but it had left her horribly weak. I helped her on the steeper portions of the path. We pa.s.sed through the hermits' caves without being troubled. Perhaps they were all asleep, or else the G.o.ds had put the Isle under a spell as we two walked our way north away from the dead souls.

The sun rose. I could see now that Nimue's hair was matted with dirt and crawling with lice, her skin was filthy and she had lost her golden eye. She was so weak she could hardly walk and as we descended the hill towards the causeway I picked her up in my arms and found she weighed less than a ten-year-old child. "You're weak," I said.

"I was born weak, Derfel," she said, 'and life is spent pretending otherwise."

"You need some rest," I said.

"I know." She leaned her head against my chest and for once in her life she was utterly content to be looked after.

I carried her to the causeway and over the first wall. The sea broke on our left and the bay glimmered a reflection of the rising sun on our right. I did not know how I was to take her past the guards. All I knew was that we had to leave the Isle because that was her fate and I was the instrument of that fate, and so I walked content that the G.o.ds would solve the problem when I reached the final barrier. I carried her over the middle wall with its row of skulls and walked towards Dumnonia's dawn-green hills. I could see a single spearman silhouetted above the final wall's sheer, smooth face of stone and I supposed some of the guards had rowed across the channel when they saw me leaving the isle. More guards were standing on the shingle bank; they had stationed themselves to bar my pa.s.sage to the mainland. If I have to kill, I thought, then kill I shall. This was the G.o.ds' will, not mine, and Hywelbane would cut with a G.o.d's skill and strength.

But as I walked towards the final wall with my burden light in my arms the gates of life and death swung open to receive me. I half expected the guard commander to be there with his rusty spear, ready to turn me back; instead it was Galahad and Cavan who waited on the black threshold with their swords drawn and battle shields on their arms. "We followed you," Galahad said.

"Bedwin sent us," Cavan added. I covered Nimue's awful hair with the cloak's hood so my friends would not see her degradation and she clung to me, trying to hide herself. Galahad and Cavan had brought my men who had commandeered the ferry and were holding the Isle's guardians at spear-point on the channel's farther bank. "We would have come looking for you today," Galahad said, then made the sign of the cross as he stared down the causeway. He gave me a curious look as though he feared I might have come back from the Isle a different man.

"I should have known you would be here," I told him.

"Yes," he said, 'you should." There were tears in his eyes, tears of happiness. We rowed across the channel and I carried Nimue up the road of skulls to the feast hall at the road's end where I found a man loading a cart with salt to carry to Durnovaria. I laid Nimue on his cargo and walked behind her as the cart creaked north towards the town. I had brought Nimue out of the Isle of the Dead, back to a land at war.

I took Nimue to Gyllad's farm. I did not put her in the big hall, but rather used an abandoned shepherd's cottage where the two of us could be alone. I fed her on broth and milk, but first I washed her clean; washed every inch of her, washed her twice and then washed her black hair and afterwards used a bone comb to tease the tangles free. Some of the tangles were so tight they needed to be cut, but most came free and when her hair hung wet and straight I used the comb to find and kill the lice before I washed her once again. She endured the process like a small obedient child, and when she was clean I wrapped her in a great woollen blanket and took the broth off the fire and made her eat while I washed myself and hunted down the lice that had gone from her body on to mine. By the time I had finished it was dusk and she was fast asleep on a bed made from newly cut bracken. She slept all night and in the morning ate six eggs I had stirred in a pan over the fire. Then she slept again while I took a knife and a piece of leather and cut an eyepatch with a lace she could tie around her hair. I had one of Gyllad's slaves bring clothes and sent Issa into town to find what news he could. He was a clever lad with an easy open manner so that even strangers were happy to confide in him across a tavern's table.

"Half the town says the war's already lost, Lord," he told me on his return. Nimue was sleeping and we spoke beside the stream which ran close beside the cottage.

"And the other half?" I asked.

He grinned. "Looking forward to Lughnasa, Lord. They're not thinking beyond that. But the half that are thinking are all Christians." He spat into the stream. "They say Lughnasa's an evil feast and that King Gorfyddyd is coming to punish our sins."

"In which case," I said, 'we'd better make sure we commit enough sins to deserve the punishment." He laughed. "Some say Lord Arthur daren't leave town for fear there'd be a revolt once his soldiers are gone."

I shook my head. "He wants to be with Guinevere at Lughnasa."

"Who wouldn't?" Issa asked.

"Did you see the goldsmith?" I asked.

He nodded. "He says he can't make an eye in under two weeks because he's never done one before, but he'll find a corpse and cut out its eye to get the size right. I told him he'd better make it a child's corpse, for the lady isn't big, is she?" He jerked his head towards the cottage.

"You told him the eye had to be hollow?"

"I did, Lord."

"You did well," I told him. "And now I suppose you want to do your worst and celebrate Lughnasa?" He grinned. "Yes, Lord." Lughnasa was supposedly a celebration of the imminent harvest, yet the young have always made it a feast of fertility and their festivities would begin this night, the feast's eve.

"Then go," I told him. "I'll stay here."

That afternoon I made Nimue her own bower for Lughnasa. I doubted somehow that she would appreciate it, but I wanted to do it and so I made a small lodge beside the stream, cutting the wit hies and bending them into a hooded shelter into which I wove cornflowers, poppies, ox-eyes, foxgloves and long tangling swathes of pink convolvulus. Such booths were being made all across Britain for the feast, and all across Britain, late next spring, hundreds of Lughnasa babies would be born. The spring was reckoned a good time to be born for the child would come into a world waking to summer's plenty, though whether this year's planting would lead to a lucky crop depended on the battles that must be fought after harvest.

Nimue emerged from the hut just as I was weaving the last foxgloves into the bower's summit. "Is it Lughnasa?" she asked in surprise.

"Tomorrow."

She laughed shyly. "No one ever made me a bower."

"You never wanted one."

"I do now," she said, and sat under the flowery shade with such a look of delight that my heart leaped. She had found the eyepatch and donned one of the dresses Gyllad's maid had brought to the hut; it was a slave's dress of ordinary brown cloth, yet it suited her as simple things always did. She was pale and thin, but she was clean and there was a blush of colour in her cheeks. "I don't know what happened to the golden eye," she said ruefully, touching her new patch.

"I'm having another eye made," I told her, but did not add that the goldsmith's deposit had taken the last of my coins. I desperately needed a battle's plunder, I thought, to replenish my purse.

"And I'm hungry," Nimue said with a touch of her old mischievousness. I put some birch twigs in the bottom of the pan so the broth would not stick, then poured in the last of the broth and set it on the fire. She ate it all, and afterwards she stretched out in the Lughnasa bower and watched the stream. Bubbles showed where an otter swam underwater. I had seen him earlier, an old dog with a hide scarred by battle and near misses from hunters' spears. Nimue watched his bubble trail disappear beneath a fallen willow and then began to talk.

She always had an appet.i.te for talk, but that evening it was insatiable. She wanted news and I gave it to her, but then she wanted more detail, always more detail, and every detail she obsessively fitted inside a scheme of her own devising so that the story of the last year became, at least for her, like a great tiled floor where any one tile might seem insignificant, but added to the others it became a part of an intricate and meaningful whole. She was most interested in Merlin and the scroll he had s.n.a.t.c.hed from Ban's doomed library. "You didn't read it?" she asked.

"No."

"I will," she said fervently.

I hesitated a moment, then spoke my mind. "I thought Merlin would come to the Isle to fetch you," I said. I was risking offending her twice, first by implicitly criticizing Merlin and secondly by mentioning the one subject she did not talk about, the Isle of the Dead, but she did not seem to mind.

"Merlin would reckon I can look after myself," she said, then smiled. "And he knows I have you." It was dark by then and the stream rippled silver under Lugh-nasa's moon. There were a dozen questions I wanted to ask, but dared not, but suddenly she began to answer them anyway. She spoke of the Isle, or rather she spoke of how one tiny part of her soul had always been aware of the Isle's horror even as the rest of her had abandoned itself to its doom. "I thought madness would be like death," she said, 'and that I wouldn't know there was an alternative to being mad, but you do know. You really do. It's as though you watch yourself and cannot help yourself. You forsake yourself," she said, then stopped and I saw the tears at her one good eye.

"Don't," I said, suddenly not wanting to know.

"And sometimes," she went on, "I would sit on my rock and watch the sea and I would know I was sane, and I would wonder what purpose was being served, and then I knew I would have to be mad because if I was not then it was all to no purpose."

"There was no purpose," I said angrily.

"Oh, Derfel, dear Derfel. You have a mind like a stone falling off a cliff." She smiled. "It is the same purpose that made Merlin find Caleddin's scroll. Don't you understand? The G.o.ds play games with us, but if we open ourselves then we can become a part of the game instead of its victims. Madness has a purpose! It's a gift from the G.o.ds, and like all their gifts it comes with a price, but I've paid it now." She spoke pa.s.sionately, but suddenly I felt a yawn threatening me and try as I might I could not check it. I did try to hide it, but she saw anyway. "You need some sleep," she said.

"No," I protested.

"Did you sleep last night?"

"A little." I had sat at the cottage door and dozed fitfully as I listened to the mice scrabbling in the thatch.

"Then go to bed now," she said firmly, 'and leave me here to think." I was so tired I could scarcely undress, but at last I lay on the bracken bed where I slept like the dead. It was a great, deep sleep like the rest that comes in safety after battle when the bad sleep, the one interrupted by nightmare reminders of near spear thrusts and sword blows, has been washed away from the soul. Thus I slept, and in the night Nimue came to me and at first I thought it was a dream, but then I woke with a start to find her chill naked skin next to mine. "It's all right, Derfel," she whispered, 'go to sleep," and I slept again with my arms around her thin body.

We woke in Lughnasa's perfect dawn. There have been times in my life of pure happiness, and that was one. They are times, I suppose, when love is in step with life or perhaps when the G.o.ds want us to be fools, and nothing is so sweet as Lughnasa's foolishness. The sun shone, filtering its light through the flowers in our bower where we made love, then afterwards we played like children in the stream where I tried to make otter bubbles under water and came up choking to find Nimue laughing. A kingfisher raced between the willows, its colours bright as a dream cloak. The only people we saw all day were a pair of hors.e.m.e.n who rode up the stream's far bank with falcons on their wrists. They did not see us, and we lay quietly and watched as one of their birds struck down a heron: a good omen. For that one perfect day Nimue and I were lovers, even though we were denied the second pleasure of love which is the certain knowledge of a shared future spent in a happiness as great as love's beginning. But I had no future with Nimue. Her future lay in the paths of the G.o.ds, and I had no talent for those roads. Yet even Nimue was tempted from those paths. In Lughnasa's evening, when the long light was shadowing the trees on the western slopes, she lay curled in my arms beneath the bower and spoke of all that might be. A small house, a piece of land, children and flocks. "We could go to Kernow," she said dreamily. "Merlin always says Kernow is the blessed place. It's a long way from the Saxons."

"Ireland," I said, 'is further."

I felt the shake of her head on my chest. "Ireland is cursed."

"Why?" I asked.

"They owned the Treasures of Britain," she said, 'and let them go-'

I did not want to talk of the Treasures of Britain, nor of the G.o.ds, nor of anything that would spoil this moment. "Kernow, then," I agreed.

"A small house," she said, then listed all the things a small house needed: jars, pans, spits, winnowing sheets, sieves, yew pails, reaping hooks, croppers, a spindle, a skein winder, a salmon net, a barrel, a hearth, a bed. Had she dreamed of such things in her damp, cold cave above the cauldron? "And no Saxons," she said, 'and no Christians either. Maybe we should go to the isles in the Western Sea? To the isles beyond Kernow. To Lyonesse." She spoke the lovely name softly. "To live and love in Lyonesse," she added, then laughed.

"Why do you laugh?"

She lay silent for a while, then shrugged. "Lyonesse is for another life," she said, and with that bleak statement she broke the spell. At least she did for me, because I thought I heard Merlin's mocking laughter cackling in the summer leaves, and so I let the dream fade as we lay unmoving in the long, soft light. Two swans flew north up the valley, going towards the great phallic image of the G.o.d Sucellos that was carved in the chalk hillside just north of Gyllad's land. Sansum had wanted to obliterate the bold image. Guinevere had stopped him, though she had not been able to prevent him from building a small shrine at the foot of the hill. I had a mind to buy the land when I could, not to farm, but to stop the Christians gras sing over the chalk or digging up the G.o.d's image.

"Where is Sansum?" Nimue asked. She had been reading my thoughts.

"He's the guardian of the Holy Thorn now."

"May it p.r.i.c.k him," she said vengefully. She uncurled from my arms and sat up, pulling the blanket up to our necks. "And Gundleus is betrothed today?"

"Yes."

"He won't live to enjoy his bride," she said, more in hope, I feared, than in prophecy.