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.
She always had an appetite for talk, but that evening it was insatiable. She wanted news and I gave it to her, but then she wanted more detail, always more detail, and every detail she obsessively fitted inside a scheme of her own devising so that the story of the last year became, at least for her, like a great tiled floor where any one tile might seem insignificant, but added to the others it became a part of an intricate and meaningful whole. She was most interested in Merlin and the scroll he had snatched from Ban’s doomed library. “You didn’t read it?” she asked.
“No.”
“I will,” she said fervently.
I hesitated a moment, then spoke my mind. “I thought Merlin would come to the Isle to fetch you,” I said. I was risking offending her twice, first by implicitly criticizing Merlin and secondly by mentioning the one subject she did not talk about, the Isle of the Dead, but she did not seem to mind.
“Merlin would reckon I can look after myself,” she said, then smiled. “And he knows I have you.”
It was dark by then and the stream rippled silver under Lugh-nasa’s moon. There were a dozen questions I wanted to ask, but dared not, but suddenly she began to answer them anyway. She spoke of the Isle, or rather she spoke of how one tiny part of her soul had always been aware of the Isle’s horror even as the rest of her had abandoned itself to its doom. “I thought madness would be like death,” she said, ‘and that I wouldn’t know there was an alternative to being mad, but you do know. You really do. It’s as though you watch yourself and cannot help yourself. You forsake yourself,” she said, then stopped and I saw the tears at her one good eye.