Nimue had stopped crying and now lay motionless in my arms. She must have sensed my wonder and revulsion at the room. “He throws nothing away,” she said wearily, ‘nothing.” I did not speak, but just soothed and stroked her. For a while she lay exhausted, but then, when my hand explored the cloak over one of her small breasts, she twisted angrily away. “If that’s what you want,” she said, ‘go and see Sebile.” She clutched the cloak tight about her as she climbed off the platform bed and crossed to the table cluttered with Merlin’s instruments.
I stammered some kind of embarrassed apology.
“It’s not important,” she dismissed my apologies. We could hear voices on the Tor outside, and more voices in the great hall next door, but no one tried to disturb us. Nimue was searching among the bowls and pots and ladles on the table and found what she wanted. It was a knife made from black stone, its blade feathered into bone-white edges. She came back to the fusty bed and knelt beside its platform so that she could look straight into my face. Her cloak had fallen open and I was nervously aware of her naked, shadowed body, but she was staring fixedly into my eyes and I could do nothing but return that gaze.
She did not speak for a long time and in the silence I could almost hear my heart thumping. She seemed to be making a decision, one of those decisions so ominous that it will change the balance of a life for ever, and so I waited, fearful, helpless to move from my awkward stance. Her black hair was tousled, framing her wedge-shaped face. Nimue was neither beautiful nor plain, but her face possessed a quickness and life that did not need formal beauty. Her forehead was broad and high, her eyes dark and fierce, her nose sharp, her mouth wide and her chin narrow. She was the cleverest woman I ever knew, but even in those days, when she was scarcely more than a child, she was filled with a sadness born of that cleverness. She knew so much. She was born knowing, or else the Gods had given her that knowledge when they had spared her from drowning. As a child she had often been full of nonsense and mischief, but now, bereft of Merlin’s guidance but with his responsibilities thrust on her thin shoulders, she was changing. I was changing too, of course, but my change was predictable: a bony boy turning into a tall young man. Nimue was flowing from childhood into authority. That authority sprang from her dream, a dream she shared with Merlin, but one that she would never compromise as Merlin would. Nimue was for all or she was for nothing. She would rather have seen the whole earth die in the cold of a Godless void than yield one inch to those who would dilute her image of a perfect Britain devoted to its own British Gods. And now, kneeling before me, she was, I knew, judging whether I was worthy to be a part of that fervent dream.
She made her decision and moved closer to me. “Give me your left hand,” she said.
I held it out.
She held my hand palm uppermost in her left hand, then spoke a charm. I recognized the names of Camulos, the War God, of Manawydan fab Llyr, Nimue’s own Sea God, of Agrona, the Goddess of Slaughter, and of Aranrhod the Golden, the Goddess of the Dawn, but most of the names and words were strange and they were spoken in such an hypnotic voice that I was lulled and comforted, careless of what Nimue said or did until suddenly she slashed the knife across my palm and then, startled, I cried out. She hushed me. For a second the knife-cut lay thin across my hand, then blood welled up.
She cut her own left palm in the same way that she had cut mine, then placed the cut over mine and gripped my nerveless fingers with her own. She dropped the knife and hitched up a corner of her cloak which she wrapped hard around the two bleeding hands. “Derfel,” she said softly, ‘so long as your hand is scarred and so long as mine is scarred, we are one. Agreed?”