“Don’t,” I said, suddenly not wanting to know.
“And sometimes,” she went on, “I would sit on my rock and watch the sea and I would know I was sane, and I would wonder what purpose was being served, and then I knew I would have to be mad because if I was not then it was all to no purpose.”
“There was no purpose,” I said angrily.
“Oh, Derfel, dear Derfel. You have a mind like a stone falling off a cliff.” She smiled. “It is the same purpose that made Merlin find Caleddin’s scroll. Don’t you understand? The Gods play games with us, but if we open ourselves then we can become a part of the game instead of its victims. Madness has a purpose! It’s a gift from the Gods, and like all their gifts it comes with a price, but I’ve paid it now.” She spoke passionately, but suddenly I felt a yawn threatening me and try as I might I could not check it. I did try to hide it, but she saw anyway. “You need some sleep,” she said.
“No,” I protested.
“Did you sleep last night?”
“A little.” I had sat at the cottage door and dozed fitfully as I listened to the mice scrabbling in the thatch.
“Then go to bed now,” she said firmly, ‘and leave me here to think.”
I was so tired I could scarcely undress, but at last I lay on the bracken bed where I slept like the dead. It was a great, deep sleep like the rest that comes in safety after battle when the bad sleep, the one interrupted by nightmare reminders of near spear thrusts and sword blows, has been washed away from the soul. Thus I slept, and in the night Nimue came to me and at first I thought it was a dream, but then I woke with a start to find her chill naked skin next to mine. “It’s all right, Derfel,” she whispered, ‘go to sleep,” and I slept again with my arms around her thin body.
We woke in Lughnasa’s perfect dawn. There have been times in my life of pure happiness, and that was one. They are times, I suppose, when love is in step with life or perhaps when the Gods want us to be fools, and nothing is so sweet as Lughnasa’s foolishness. The sun shone, filtering its light through the flowers in our bower where we made love, then afterwards we played like children in the stream where I tried to make otter bubbles under water and came up choking to find Nimue laughing. A kingfisher raced between the willows, its colours bright as a dream cloak. The only people we saw all day were a pair of horsemen who rode up the stream’s far bank with falcons on their wrists. They did not see us, and we lay quietly and watched as one of their birds struck down a heron: a good omen. For that one perfect day Nimue and I were lovers, even though we were denied the second pleasure of love which is the certain knowledge of a shared future spent in a happiness as great as love’s beginning. But I had no future with Nimue. Her future lay in the paths of the Gods, and I had no talent for those roads.
Yet even Nimue was tempted from those paths. In Lughnasa’s evening, when the long light was shadowing the trees on the western slopes, she lay curled in my arms beneath the bower and spoke of all that might be. A small house, a piece of land, children and flocks. “We could go to Kernow,” she said dreamily. “Merlin always says Kernow is the blessed place. It’s a long way from the Saxons.”
“Ireland,” I said, ‘is further.”
I felt the shake of her head on my chest. “Ireland is cursed.”
“Why?” I asked.
“They owned the Treasures of Britain,” she said, ‘and let them go-‘
I did not want to talk of the Treasures of Britain, nor of the Gods, nor of anything that would spoil this moment. “Kernow, then,” I agreed.
“A small house,” she said, then listed all the things a small house needed: jars, pans, spits, winnowing sheets, sieves, yew pails, reaping hooks, croppers, a spindle, a skein winder, a salmon net, a barrel, a hearth, a bed. Had she dreamed of such things in her damp, cold cave above the cauldron? “And no Saxons,” she said, ‘and no Christians either. Maybe we should go to the isles in the Western Sea? To the isles beyond Kernow. To Lyonesse.” She spoke the lovely name softly. “To live and love in Lyonesse,” she added, then laughed.