“Then why aren’t you?”
She spat in the fire to ward off my stupidity. “Gundleus lives,” she said flatly, changing the subject.
“Imprisoned in Corinium,” I said, as though she did not already know where her enemy was.
“I’ve buried his name on a stone,” she said, then gave me a golden-eyed glance. “He made me pregnant when he raped me, but I killed the foul thing with ergot.” Ergot was a black blight that grew on rye and women used it to abort their young. Merlin also used it as a means of going into the dream-state and talking with the Gods. I had tried it once and was sick for days.
Lunete insisted on showing Nimue all her new possessions: the trivet, cauldron and sieve, the jewels and cloak, the fine linen shift and the battered silver jug with the naked Roman horseman chasing a deer about its belly. Nimue made a bad pretence of being impressed, then asked me to walk her to Caer Cadarn where she would spend the night. “Lunete’s a fool,” she told me. We were walking along the edge of a stream that flowed into the River Cam. Brown brittle leaves crunched underfoot. There had been a frost and the day was bitterly cold. Nimue looked angrier than ever and, because of that, more beautiful. Tragedy suited Nimue, she knew it and so she sought it. “You’re making a name for yourself,” she said, glancing at the plain iron warrior rings on my left hand. I kept my right hand free of the rings so I could keep a firm grip of a sword or spear, but I now wore four iron rings on my left hand.
“Luck.” I explained the rings.
“No, not luck.” She raised her left hand so I could see the scar. “When you fight, Derfel, I fight with you. You’re going to be a great warrior, and you’ll need to be.”
“Will I?”
She shivered. The sky was grey, the same grey as an unpolished sword, though the western horizon was streaked with a sour, yellow light. The trees were winter black, the grass sullenly dark, and the smoke from the settlement’s fires clung to the ground as though it feared the cold, empty sky. “Do you know why Merlin left Ynys Wydryn?” she asked me suddenly, surprising me with the question.
“To find the Knowledge of Britain,” I answered, repeating what she had told the High Council in Glevum.
“But why now? Why not ten years ago?” Nimue asked me, then answered her own question. “He has gone now, Derfel, because we are coming into the bad time. Everything good will get bad, everything bad will get worse. Everyone in Britain is gathering their strength because they know the great struggle is coming. Sometimes I think the Gods are playing with us. They are heaping all the throw pieces at once to see how the game will end. The Saxons are getting stronger and soon they’ll attack in hordes, not war-bands. The Christians’ she spat into the stream to avert evil ‘say that very soon it will be five hundred winters since their wretched God was born and claim that means the time for their triumph is coming.”
She spat again. “And for us Britons? We fight each other, we steal from each other, we build new feasting halls when we should be forging swords and spears. We are going to be put to the test, Derfel, and that’s why Merlin is gathering his strength, for if the kings will not save us then Merlin must persuade the Gods to come to our aid.” She stopped beside a pool of the stream and stared into the black water that had the gelid stillness that comes just before freezing. The water in the cattle hoofprints at the pool’s edge was already frozen.
“What of Arthur?” I asked. “Won’t he save us?”
She gave me a flicker of a smile. “Arthur is to Merlin what you are to me. Arthur is Merlin’s sword, but neither of us can control you. We give you power’ she reached out her scarred left hand and touched the bare pommel of my sword ‘and then we let you go. We have to trust that you will do the right thing.”