Arthur summoned me the following week. I found him in the palace hall where he was eating his midday meal with Guinevere. He ordered a couch and more food to be fetched for me. The courtyard outside was crowded with petitioners. “Poor Arthur,” Guinevere commented, ‘one visit home and suddenly every man is complaining about his neighbour or demanding a reduction in rent. Why don’t they use the magistrates?”
“Because they’re not rich enough to bribe them,” Arthur said.
“Or powerful enough to surround the courthouse with iron-helmed men?” Guinevere added, smiling to show that she did not disapprove of my action. She wouldn’t, for she was a sworn opponent of Nabur who was a leader of the kingdom’s Christian faction.
“A spontaneous gesture of support by my men,” I said blandly, and Arthur laughed.
It was a happy meal. I was rarely alone with Arthur and Guinevere, yet when I was I always saw how contented she made him. She had a barbed wit that he lacked, but liked, and she used it gently, as she knew he preferred it used. She flattered Arthur, yet she also gave him good advice. Arthur was ever ready to believe the best about people and he needed Guinevere’s scepticism to redress that optimism. She looked no older than the last time I had been so close to her, though maybe there was a new shrewdness in those green huntress eyes. I could see no evidence that she was pregnant: her pale green dress lay flat over her belly where a gold-tasselled rope hung like a loose belt. Her badge of the moon-crested stag hung around her neck beneath the heavy sun-rays of the Saxon necklace that Arthur had sent her from Durocobrivis. She had scorned the necklace when I had presented it to her, but now wore it proudly.
The conversation at that midday meal was mostly light. wanted to know why the blackbirds and thrushes stopped singing in the summer, but neither of us had an answer, any more than we could tell him where the martins and swallows went in winter, though Merlin once told me they went to a great cave in the northern wilderness where they slept in huge feathered clumps until the spring. Guinevere pressed me about Merlin and I promised her, upon my life, that the Druid had indeed returned to Britain. “He’s gone to the Isle of the Dead,” I told her.
“He’s done what?” Arthur asked, appalled.
I explained about Nimue and remembered to thank Guinevere for her efforts to save my friend from Sansum’s revenge.
“Poor Nimue,” Guinevere said. “But she is a fierce creature, isn’t she? I liked her, but I don’t think she liked us. We are all too frivolous! And I could not interest her in Isis. Isis, she’d tell me, is a foreign Goddess, and then she would spit like a little cat and mutter a prayer to Manawydan.”
Arthur showed no reaction to the mention of Isis and I supposed he had lost his fears of the strange Goddess. “I wish I knew Nimue better,” he said instead.
“You will,” I said, ‘when Merlin brings her back from the dead.”
“If he can,” Arthur said dubiously. “No one ever has come back from the Isle.”
“Nimue will,” I insisted.
“She is extraordinary,” Guinevere said, ‘and if anyone can survive the Isle, she can.”
“With Merlin’s help,” I added.
Only at the meal’s end did our talk turn to Ynys Trebes, and even then Arthur was careful not to mention the name Lancelot. Instead he regretted that he had no gift with which he could reward me for my efforts.
“Being home is reward enough, Lord Prince,” I said, remembering to use the title Guinevere preferred.
“I can at least call you Lord,” Arthur said, ‘and so you will be called from now on, Lord Derfel.”
I laughed, not because I was ungrateful, but because the reward of a warlord’s title seemed too grand for my attainments. I was also proud: a man was called lord for being a king, a prince, a chief or because his sword had made him famous. I superstitiously touched Hywelbane’s hilt so that my luck would not be soured by the pride.