The spear whistled as it flew towards me. For a second I could not move, transfixed by the sight of that heavy pole with its glittering steel head hurtling towards us, but then the weapon thumped past me to bury its blade in the punt’s reed gunwale. I grabbed the quivering ash staff and used it as my quant pole to drive the boat hard and quick out into the waterways. We were safe there. Some of Gundleus’s men ran along a wooden track way that paralleled our course, but I soon turned away from them. Others leaped into coracles and used their spears as paddles, but no coracle could match a reed punt for speed and so we left them far behind. Ligessac fired an arrow, but we were already out of range and his missile plunged soundlessly into the dark water. Behind our frustrated pursuers, high on the green Tor, the flames leaped hungrily at huts and hall and tower so that grey churning smoke rose high in the blue summer sky.
“Two wounds.” Nimue spoke for the first time since I had snatched her from the flames.
“What?” I turned to her. She was huddled in the bow, the black cloak wrapped about her thin body and with one hand clasped over her empty eye.
“I’ve suffered two Wounds of Wisdom, Derfel,” she said in a voice of crazed wonderment. “The Wound to the Body and the Wound to the Pride. Now all I face is madness and then I shall be as wise as Merlin.” She tried to smile, but there was a hysterical wildness in her voice that made me wonder whether she was not already under the spell of madness.
“Mordred’s dead,” I told her, ‘and so are Norwenna and Hywel. The Tor is burning.” Our whole world was being destroyed, yet Nimue seemed strangely unmoved by the disaster. Instead she almost seemed elated because she had endured two of the three tests of wisdom.
I poled past a line of willow fish traps, then turned into Lissa’s Mere, a great black lake that lay on the southern edge of the marshes. I was aiming towards Ermid’s Hall, a wooden settlement where Ermid, a chieftain of a local tribe, kept his household. I knew Ermid would not be at the hall for he had marched north with Owain, but his people would help us, and I also knew that our boat would reach the hall long before the swiftest of Gundleus’s horsemen could gallop around the lake’s long, reed-thick and marshy banks. They would have to go almost as far as the Fosse Way, the great Roman road that ran east of the Tor, before they could turn around the lake’s eastern extremity and gallop towards Ermid’s Hall, and by then we would be long gone south. I could see other boats far ahead of me on the mere and guessed that the Tor’s fugitives were being carried to safety by Ynys Wydryn’s fishermen.
I told Nimue my plan to reach Ermid’s Hall and then keep going southwards until the night fell or we met friends. “Good,” she said dully, though I was not really sure she had understood anything I had said. “Good Derfel,” she added. “Now I know why the Gods made me trust you.”
“You trust me,” I said bitterly, and thrust the spear into the muddy lake bottom to push the boat forward, ‘because I’m in love with you, and that gives you power over me.”
“Good,” she said again, and said nothing more until our reed boat glided into the tree-shaded landing beneath Ermid’s stockade where, as I pushed the boat still deeper into the creek’s shadows, I saw the other fugitives from the Tor. Morgan was there with Sebile, and Ralla was weeping with her baby safe in her arms next to Gwlyddyn her husband. Lunete, the Irish girl, was there, and she ran crying to the waterside to help Nimue. I told Morgan of Hywel’s death, and she said she had seen Guendoloen, Merlin’s wife, cut down by a Silurian. Gudovan was safe, but no one knew what had happened to poor Pellinore or to Druidan. None of Norwenna’s guards had survived, though a handful of Druidan’s wretched soldiers had reached the dubious safety of Ermid’s Hall, as had three of Norwenna’s weeping attendants and a dozen of Merlin’s frightened foundlings.