“No thanks to you, you pitiful worm,” Guinevere said. “The Christians ran away. Plucked up their skirts and scampered east. The rest of us stayed, and Lanval, the Gods be thanked, saw Cadwy off.” She spat towards the new church. “In time,” she said, ‘we’ll be free of enemies, and when that happens, Derfel, I shall pull down that cattle shed and build a temple fit for a real God.”
“For Isis?” Sansum enquired slyly.
“Careful,” Guinevere warned him, ‘for my Goddess rules the night, toad, and she might snatch your soul for her amusement. Though the Gods alone know what use your miserable soul would be to anyone. Come, Derfel.”
The two deer hounds were collected and we strode back up the hill. Guinevere shook with anger. “You see what he’s doing? Pulling down the old! Why? So he can impose his tawdry little superstitions on us. Why can’t he leave the old alone? We don’t care if fools want to worship a carpenter, so why does he care who we worship? The more Gods the better, I say. Why offend some Gods to exalt your own? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Who is Isis?” I asked her as we turned into the gate of her villa.
She shot me an amused look. “Is that my dear husband’s question I hear?”
“Yes,” I said.
She laughed. “Well done, Derfel. The truth is always astonishing. So Arthur is worried by my Goddess?”
“He’s worried,” I said, ‘because Sansum worries him with tales of mysteries.”
She shrugged off the cloak, letting it fall on the courtyard tiles to be picked up by a slave. “Tell Arthur,” she said, ‘that he has nothing to worry about. Does he doubt my affection?”
“He adores you,” I said tactfully.
“And I him.” She smiled at me. “Tell him that, Derfel,” she added warmly.
“I shall, Lady.”
“And tell him he has nothing to worry about with Isis.” She reached impulsively for my hand. “Come,” she said, just as she had when she had led me down to the new Christian shrine, but this time she hurried me across the courtyard, jumping the small water channels, to a small door set into the far arcade. “This,” she said, letting go of my hand and pushing the door open, ‘is the shrine of Isis that so worries my dear Lord.”
I hesitated. “Are men allowed to enter?”
“By day, yes. By night? No.” She ducked through the door and pulled aside a thick woollen curtain that was hung immediately inside. I followed, pushing through the curtain to find myself in a black, lightless room. “Stay where you are,” she warned me, and at first I thought that I was obeying some rule of Isis, but as my eyes grew accustomed to the thick gloom, I saw that she had made me stop so I did not stumble into a pool of water that was set into the floor. The only light in the shrine came around the edges of the curtain at the door, but as I waited I became aware of a grey light seeping into the room’s far end; then I saw that Guinevere was pulling down layer after layer of black wall hangings, each one supported on a pole carried by brackets and each woven so thick that no light could come through the layered cloths. Behind the hangings, that now lay crumpled on the floor, were shutters that Guinevere threw open to let in a dazzling flood of light.
“There,” she said, standing to one side of the big, arched window, ‘the mysteries!” She was mocking Sansum’s fears, yet in truth the room was truly mysterious for it was entirely black. The floor was of black stone, the walls and arched ceiling were painted with pitch. In the black floor’s centre was the shallow pool of black water and behind it, between the pool and the newly opened window, was a low black throne made of stone.
“So what do you think, Derfel?” Guinevere asked me.
“I see no Goddess,” I said, looking for a statue of Isis.
“She comes with the moon,” Guinevere said, and I tried to imagine the full moon flooding through that window to gloss the pool and shimmer on the deep black walls. “Tell me about Nimue,” Guinevere ordered, ‘and I will tell you about Isis.”