“What is it?” I asked. I confess I was more tempted by the smell of roasting pork that came from Uther’s hall than by whatever momentary trance had so exhausted Nimue.
She held out her scarred left hand and I hauled her to her feet. “We have one chance,” she said to me in a small, frightened voice, ‘just one chance, and if we lose it then the Gods will go from us. We will be abandoned by the Gods and left to the brutes. And those fools in there, the Mouse Lord and his followers, will ruin that chance unless we fight them. And there are so many of them and so very few of us.” She was looking into my face, crying desperately.
I did not know what to say. I had no skills with the spirit world, even though I was Merlin’s foundling and the child of Bel. “Bel will help us, won’t He?” I asked helplessly. “He loves us, doesn’t He?”
“Loves us!” She snatched her hand away from mine. “Loves us!” she repeated scornfully. “It is not the task of Gods to love us. Do you love Druidan’s pigs? Why, in Bel’s name, should a God love us? Love! What do you know of love, Derfel, son of a Saxon?”
“I know I love you,” I said. I can blush now when I think of a young boy’s desperate lunges at a woman’s affection. It had taken every nerve in my body to make that statement, every ounce of courage I hoped I possessed, and after I had blurted out the words I blushed in the rain-swept firelight and wished I had kept silent.
Nimue smiled at me. “I know,” she said, “I know. Now come. A feast for our supper.”
These days, these my dying days that I spend writing in this monastery in Powys’s hills, I sometimes close my eyes and see Nimue. Not as she became, but as she was then: so full of fire, so quick, so confident. I know I have gained Christ and through His blessing I have gained the whole world too, but for what I have lost, for what we have all lost, there is no end to the reckoning. We lost everything.
The feast was wonderful.
The High Council began in mid-morning, after the Christians had held yet another ceremony. They held a terrible number of them, I thought, for every hour of the day seemed to demand some new genuflection to the cross, but the delay served to give the princes and warriors time to recover from their night of drinking, boasting and fighting. The High Council was held in the great hall that was again lit by torches, for although the spring sun was shining brightly the hall’s few windows were high and small, less suited for letting the light in than the smoke out, though even that they did badly.
Uther, the High King, sat on a platform raised above the dais reserved for the kings, ed lings and princes. Tewdric of Gwent, the Council’s host, sat below Uther and on either side of Tewdric’s throne were a dozen other thrones filled this day by client kings or princes who paid tribute to Uther or Tewdric. Prince Cadwy of Isca was there, and King Melwas of the Belgae and Prince Gereint, Lord of the Stones, while distant Kernow, the savage kingdom at Britain’s western tip, had sent its ed ling Prince Tristan, who sat swathed in wolf fur at the dais’s edge next to one of the two vacant thrones.
In truth the thrones were nothing more than chairs fetched from the feasting hall and tricked out with saddle cloths and in front of each chair, resting on the floor and leaning against the dais, were the shields of the kingdoms. There had been a time when thirty-three shields might have rested against the dais, but now the tribes of Britain fought amongst themselves and some of the kingdoms had been buried in Lloegyr by Saxon blades. One of the purposes of this High Council was to make peace between the remaining British kingdoms, a peace that was already threatened because Powys and Siluria had not come to the Council. Their thrones were empty, mute witness to those kingdoms’ continuing enmity towards Gwent and Dumnonia.