Griffid knew Nimue was Merlin’s beloved and possessed of the
Druid’s power and he was shaking with fear of her curse. “Please,” he said as Nimue turned back to face him.
She walked past his lowered spear-point and struck him hard on the cheek with her staff. “Down,” she said. “All of you! Down! Flat! On your faces! Flat!” She struck Minac. “Get down!”
They lay on their bellies in the mud and, one by one, she stepped on their backs. Her tread was light, but her curse heavy. “Your deaths are in my hand,” she told them, ‘your lives are all mine. I will use your souls as gaming-pieces. Each dawn that you wake alive you will thank me for my mercy, and each dusk you will pray that I do not see your filthy faces in my dreams. Griffid ap Annan: swear allegiance to Derfel. Kiss his sword. On your knees, dog! On your knees!”
I protested that these men owed me no allegiance, but Nimue turned on me in anger and ordered me to hold out the sword. Then, one by one, with mud and terror on their faces, my old companions shuffled on their knees to kiss the tip of Hywelbane. The oath gave me no rights of lordship over these men, but it did make it impossible for any of them to attack me without endangering their souls, for Nimue told them that if they broke this oath their souls were doomed to stay for evermore in the dark Otherworld, never to find new bodies on this green, sunlit earth again. One of the spearmen, a Christian, defied Nimue by saying the oath meant nothing, but his courage failed when she prised the golden eye from its socket and held it towards him, hissing a curse, and in abject terror he dropped to his knees and kissed my sword like the others. Nimue, once their oaths were sworn, ordered them to lie flat again. She worked the golden ball back into her eye socket and then we left them in the mud.
Nimue laughed as we climbed out of their sight. “I enjoyed that!” she said, and there was a flash of the old, childish mischief in her voice. “I did enjoy that! I do so hate men, Derfel.”
“All men?”
“Men in leather, carrying spears.” She shuddered. “Not you. But the rest I hate.” She turned and spat back down the path. “How the gods must laugh at little strutting men.” She pushed back her hood to look at me. “Do you want Lunete to go to Corinium with you?”
“I swore to protect her,” I said unhappily, ‘and she tells me she’s pregnant.”
“Does that mean you do want her company?”
“Yes,” I said, meaning no.
“I think you’re a fool,” Nimue said, ‘but Lunete will do as I tell her. But I tell you, Derfel, that if you don’t leave her now, she’ll leave you in her own good time.” She put her hand on my arm to check me. We had come close to the villa’s porch where the crowd of petitioners was waiting to see Arthur. “Did you know,” Nimue asked me in a low voice, ‘that Arthur is thinking of releasing Gundleus?”
“No.” I was shocked by the news.
“He is. He thinks Gundleus will keep the peace now, and he thinks Gundleus is the best man to rule Siluria. Arthur won’t release him without Tewdric’s agreement, so it won’t happen yet, but when it does, Derfel, I’ll kill Gundleus.” She spoke with the terrible simplicity of truth and I thought how ferocity gave her a beauty that nature had denied her. She was staring across the wet, cold land towards the distant mound of Caer Cadarn. “Arthur,” she said, ‘dreams of peace, but there never will be peace. Never! Britain is a cauldron, Derfel, and Arthur will stir it to horror.”
“You’re wrong,” I said loyally.
Nimue mocked that assertion with a grimace and then, without another word, she turned and walked back down the path towards the warriors’ huts.
I pushed through the petitioners into the villa. Arthur glanced up as I came in, waved a casual welcome, then returned his attention to a man who was complaining that his neighbour had moved their boundary stones. Bed win and Gereint sat at the table with Arthur, while to one side Agricola and Prince Tristan stood like guards. A number of the kingdom’s counsellors and magistrates sat on the floor, which was curiously warm thanks to the Roman way of making a space beneath that could be filled with warm smoky air from a furnace. A crack in the tiles was allowing wisps of the smoke to drift across the big chamber.