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.”