The Isle's southern shore 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 offshore. 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 spaced 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 breasts and her pale arms clutching her shins. Sometimes, in the green hills, we would risk the barrow wights to dig into the grassy 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 passed through the hermits' caves without being troubled. Perhaps they were all asleep, or else the Gods 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 Gods 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 passage to the mainland. If I have to kill, I thought, then kill I shall. This was the Gods' will, not mine, and Hywelbane would cut with a God'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.
