“The Three Wounds?” I asked, never having heard of them before.
“The Wound to the Body,” Nimue explained, ‘the Wound to the Pride,” and here she touched herself between her legs, ‘and the
Wound to the Mind, which is madness.” She paused as a look of horror crossed her face. “Merlin has suffered all three, and that is why he’s such a wise man. Morgan had the worst Wound to the Body that anyone can imagine, but she never suffered the other two wounds which is why she will never truly belong to the Gods. I’ve suffered none of the three, but I will. I must!” She spoke fiercely. “I must because I was chosen.”
“Why wasn’t I chosen?” I asked.
She shook her head. “You don’t understand, Derfel. No one chose me, except me. You have to make the choice for yourself. It could happen to any of us here. That’s why Merlin collects foundlings, because he believes orphaned children might have special powers, but only a very few do.”
“And you do,” I said.
“I see the Gods everywhere,” Nimue said simply. “They see me.”
“I’ve never seen a God,” I said stubbornly.
She smiled at my resentment. “You will,” she said, ‘because you must think of Britain, Derfel, as though she were laced with the ribbons of a thinning mist. Just tenuous strands here and there, drifting and fading, but those strands are the Gods, and if we can find them and please them and make this land theirs again then the strands will thicken and join to make a great, wonderful mist that will cover all the land and protect us from what lies outside. That’s why we live here, on the Tor. Merlin know that the Gods love this place, and here the sacred mist is thick, but our task is to spread it.”
“Is that what Merlin is doing?”
She smiled. “Right at this moment, Derfel, Merlin is sleeping. And I must too. Haven’t you work to do?”
“Rents to count,” I said awkwardly. The lower storehouses were filling with smoked fish, smoked eels, jars of salt, willow baskets, woven cloth, pigs of lead, tubs of charcoal, even some rare scraps of amber and jet: the winter rents payable at Beltain which Hywel had to assay, record on tallies, then divide into Merlin’s share and the portion which would be given to the High King’s tax-collectors.
“Then go and count,” Nimue said, as if nothing odd had happened between us, though she did reach over and give me a sisterly kiss. “Go,” she said and I stumbled out of Merlin’s chamber to face the resentful, curious stares of Norwenna’s attendants who had moved back into the great hall.
The equinox came. The Christians celebrated the death feast of their God while we lit the vast fires of Beltain. Our flames roared at the darkness to bring new life to the reviving world. The first Saxon raiders were seen far in the east, but none came close to Ynys Wydryn. Nor did we see Gundleus of Siluria again. Gudovan the clerk supposed that the marriage proposal had come to nothing and he gloomily forecast a new war against the northern kingdoms.
Merlin did not return, nor did we hear any news of him.
The Edling Mordred’s baby teeth came. The first to show were in his lower gums, a good omen for a long life, and Mordred used the new teeth to bite Ralla’s nipples bloody, though she went on feeding him so that her own plump son would suck a prince’s blood along with his mother’s milk. Nimue’s spirits lightened as the days grew longer. The scars on our hands went from pink to white and then to shadowy lines. Nimue never spoke of them.
The High King spent a week at Caer Cadarn and the Edling was carried there for his grandfather’s inspection. Uther must have approved of what he saw, and the spring omens were all propitious, for three weeks after Beltain we heard that the future of the kingdom and the future of Norwenna and the future of Mordred would all be decided at a great High Council, the first to be held in Britain for over sixty years.