The woman who had discovered Wlenca was squatting close by and hissing threats at him, but another of the women declared that Wlenca had taken no part in the raping that had followed their capture. Griffid, feeling relief at having some booty to take home, declared that Wlenca could live and so the Saxon was stripped naked, put under a woman’s guard and marched west towards slavery.
That was the last expedition of the year and though we declared it a great victory it paled beside Arthur’s exploits. He had not only driven Aelle’s Saxons out of northern Gwent, but had then defeated the forces of Powys and in the process had chopped off King Gorfyddyd’s shield arm. The enemy King had escaped, but it was a great victory all the same and all of Gwent and Dumnonia rang with Arthur’s praises. Owain was not happy.
Lunete, on the other hand, was delirious. I had brought her gold and silver, enough so she could wear a bearskin robe in winter and employ her own slave, a child of Kernow whom Lunete purchased from Owain’s household. The child worked from dawn to dusk, and at night wept in the corner of the hut we now called home. When the girl cried too much Lunete hit her, and when I tried to defend the girl Lunete hit me. Owain’s men had all moved from Caer Cadarn’s cramped warrior quarters to the more comfortable settlement at Lindinis where Lunete and I had a thatched, wattle-walled hut inside the low earth ramparts built by the Romans. Caer Cadarn was six miles away and was occupied only when an enemy came too close, or when a great royal occasion was celebrated. We had one such occasion that winter on the day when Mordred turned one year old and when, by chance, Dumnonia’s troubles came to their head. Or perhaps it was not chance at all, for Mordred was ever ill-omened and his acclamation was doomed to be touched by tragedy.
The ceremony happened just after the Solstice. Mordred was to be acclaimed king and the great men of Dumnonia gathered at Caer Cadarn for the occasion. Nimue came a day early and visited our hut, which Lunete had decorated with holly and ivy for the solstice. Nimue stepped over the hut’s threshold that was scored with patterns to keep the evil spirits away, then sat by our fire and pushed back the hood of her cloak.
I smiled because she had a golden eye. “I like it,” I said.
“It’s hollow,” she said, and disconcertingly tapped the eye with a fingernail. Lunete was shouting at the slave for burning the pottage of sprouted barley seeds and Nimue flinched at the display of anger. “You’re not happy,” she said to me.
“I am,” I insisted, for the young hate to admit making mistakes.
Nimue glanced about the untidy and smoke-blackened interior of our hut as though she was scenting the mood of its inhabitants. “Lunete’s wrong for you,” she said calmly as she idly picked from the littered floor half an empty egg-shell and crunched it into fragments so that no evil spirit could lurk in its shelter. “Your head is in the clouds, Derfel,” she went on as she tossed the shell fragments on to the flames, ‘while Lunete is earth-bound. She wants to be rich and you want to be honourable. It won’t mix.” She shrugged, as though it was not really important, then gave me her news of Ynys Wydryn. Merlin had not come back and no one knew where he was, but Arthur had sent money captured from the defeated King Gorfyddyd to pay for the Tor’s reconstruction and Gwlyddyn was supervising the building of a new and grander hall. Pellinore was alive, as were Druidan and Gudovan the scribe. Norwenna, Nimue told me, had been buried in the shrine of the Holy Thorn where she was revered as a saint.
“What’s a saint?” I asked.
“A dead Christian,” she said flatly. “They should all be saints.”
“And what about you?” I asked her.
“I’m alive,” she said tonelessly.
“Are you happy?”
“You always ask such stupid things. If I wanted to be happy, Derfel, I’d be down here with you, baking your bread and keeping your bedding clean.”