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.