I looked into her eyes and knew this was no small thing, no childhood game, but an oath that would bind me throughout this world and maybe into the next. For a second I was terrified of all that was to come, then I nodded and somehow managed to speak. “Agreed,” I said.
“And so long as you carry the scar, Derfel,” she said, ‘your life is mine, and so long as I carry the scar, my life is yours. Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” I said. My hand throbbed. It felt hot and swollen while her hand felt tiny and chill in my bloody grip.
“One day, Derfel,” Nimue said, “I will call on you, and if you do not come then the scar will mark you to the Gods for a false friend, a traitor and an enemy.”
“Yes,” I said.
She looked at me in silence for a few seconds, then crawled up on to the pile of furs and blankets where she curled herself into my arms. It was awkward to lie together for our two left hands were still bound, but somehow we made ourselves comfortable and then lay still. Voices sounded outside and dust drifted in the high dark chamber where the bats slept and the kittens hunted. It was cold, but Nimue pulled a pelt over the two of us and then she slept with her body’s small weight numbing my right arm. I lay awake, filled with awe and confusion over what the knife had caused between us.
She woke in the middle of the afternoon. “Gundleus has gone,” she said sleepily, though how she knew I do not know, then she extricated herself from my grip and from the tangled furs before unwrapping the cloak that was still twisted around our hands. The blood had crusted and the scabs tore painfully away from our wounds as we pulled apart. Nimue crossed to the sheaf of spears and scooped up a handful of cobwebs that she slapped on to my bleeding palm. “It’ll heal soon,” she said carelessly, and then, with her own cut hand wrapped in a scrap of cloth, she found some bread and cheese. “Aren’t you hungry?” she asked.
“Always.”
We shared the meal. The bread was dry and hard, and the cheese had been nibbled by mice. At least Nimue thought it was mice. “Maybe the bats chewed it,” she said. “Do bats eat cheese?”
“I don’t know,” I said, then hesitated. “Was it a tame bat?” I meant the animal that she had tied into her hair. I had seen such things before, of course, but Merlin would never talk of them, nor would his acolytes, but I suspected the odd ceremony of our bloody hands would let me into Nimue’s confidence.
And it did, for she shook her head. “It’s an old trick to frighten fools,” she said dismissively. “Merlin taught it to me. You put jesses on the bat’s feet, just like falcon jesses, then tie the jesses to your hair.” She ran her hand through her black hair, then laughed. “And it frightened Tanaburs! Imagine that! And him a Druid!”
I was not amused. I wanted to believe in her magic, not have it explained as a trick played with hawk-leashes. “And the snakes?” I asked.
“He keeps them in a basket. I have to feed them.” She shuddered, then she saw my disappointment. “What’s wrong?”
“Is it all trickery?” I asked.
She frowned and was silent for a long time. I thought she was not going to answer at all, but finally she explained, and I knew, as I listened, that I was hearing the things that Merlin had taught her. Magic, she said, happened at the moments when the lives of the Gods and men touched, but such moments were not commanded by men. “I can’t snap my fingers and fill the room with mist,” she said, ‘but I’ve seen it happen. I crn’t raise the dead, though Merlin says he has seen it done. I can’t order a lightning strike to kill Gundleus, though I wish I might, because only the Gods can do that. But there was a time, Derfel, when we could do those things, when we lived with the Gods and we pleased them and we were able to use their power to keep Britain as they wanted it kept. We did their bidding, you understand, but their bidding was our desire.” She clasped her two hands to demonstrate the point, then flinched as the pressure hurt the cut on her left palm. “But then the Romans came,” she said, ‘and they broke the compact.”