The Winter King: A Novel of Arthur Read online

  The bat made Norwenna scream and run to fetch her baby while the rest of us stared in horror at the creature which was trapped in Nimue’s hair. It jerked and flapped, tried to fly, snarled and struggled. The snakes twisted and suddenly the hall emptied. Norwenna ran first, Tanaburs followed, then everyone, even the King, was running for the morning daylight at the eastern door.

  Nimue stood motionless as they fled, then her eyes rolled and she blinked. She walked to the fire and carelessly tossed the two snakes into the flames where they hissed, whiplashed, then sizzled as they died. She freed the bat, which flew up into the rafters, then untied the death-mask from around her neck and rolled it into a bundle before picking up the delicate Roman flask from among the gifts that Gundleus had brought. She stared at the flask for a few seconds, then her wiry body twisted as she hurled the treasure against an oak pillar where it shattered into a scatter of pale green shards. ‘Derfel?’ she snapped into the sudden silence that followed. ‘I know you’re here.’

  ‘Nimue?’ I said nervously, then stood up from behind my wicker screen. I was terrified. Snake fat was hissing in the fire and the bat was rustling in the roof.

  Nimue smiled at me. ‘I need water, Derfel,’ she said.

  ‘Water?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘To wash off the chicken blood,’ Nimue explained.

  ‘Chicken?’

  ‘Water,’ she said again. ‘There’s a jar by the door. Bring some.’

  ‘In there?’ I asked, astonished because her gesture seemed to imply that I should bring the water into Merlin’s rooms.

  ‘Why not?’ she asked, then walked through the door that was still impaled with the great boar spear while I lifted the heavy jar and followed to find her standing in front of a sheet of beaten copper that reflected her nude body. She was unembarrassed, perhaps because we had all run naked as children, but I was uncomfortably aware that the two of us were children no longer.

  ‘Here?’ I asked.

  Nimue nodded. I put the jar down and backed towards the door. ‘Stay,’ she said, ‘please stay. And shut the door.’

  I had to prise the spear out of the door before I could close it. I did not like to ask how she had driven that spearhead through the oak for she was in no mood for questions, so I stayed silent as I worked the weapon free and Nimue washed the blood off her white skin, then wrapped herself in a black cloak. ‘Come here,’ she said when she had finished. I crossed obediently to a bed of furs and woollen blankets that was piled on a low wooden platform where she evidently slept at nights.

  The bed was tented with a dark, musty cloth and in its darkness I sat and cradled her in my arms. I could feel her ribs through the cloak’s woollen softness. She was crying. I did not know why, so I just held her clumsily and stared about Merlin’s room.

  It was an extraordinary place. There were scores of wooden chests and wicker baskets piled up to make nooks and corridors through which a tribe of skinny kittens stalked. In places the piles had collapsed as though someone had sought an object in a lower box and could not be bothered to dismantle the pile, so had just heaved the whole heap over. Dust lay everywhere. I doubted that the rushes on the floor had been changed in years, though in most places they had been overlaid with carpets or blankets that had been allowed to rot. The stench of the room was overpowering; a smell of dust, cat urine, damp, decay and mould all mixed with the more subtle aromas of the herbs hanging from the beams. A table stood at one side of the door and was piled with curling, crumbling parchments. Animal skulls occupied a dusty shelf over the table, and, as my eyes grew accustomed to the sepulchral gloom, I saw there were at least two human skulls among them. Faded shields were stacked against a vast clay pot in which a sheaf of cobwebbed spears was thrust. A sword hung against a wall. A smoking brazier stood in a heap of grey fire-ash close to the big copper mirror on which, extraordinarily, there hung a Christian cross with its twisted figure of their dead God nailed to its arms. The cross was draped with mistletoe as a precaution against its inherent evil. A great tangle of antlers hung from a rafter alongside bunches of dried mistletoe and a dangling clutch of roosting bats whose droppings made small heaps on the floor. Bats in a house were the worst omen, but I supposed that people as powerful as Merlin and Nimue had no need to worry about such prosaic threats. A second table was crowded with bowls, mortars, pestles, a metal balance, flasks and wax-sealed pots which I later discovered held dew collected from murdered men’s graves, the powder from crushed skulls and infusions of belladonna, mandrake and thorn-apple, while in a curious stone urn next to the table was heaped a jumble of eagle stones, fairy loaves, elf bolts, snake stones and hag stones, all mixed up with feathers, sea shells and pine cones. I had never seen a room so crowded, so filthy or so fascinating and I wondered if the chamber next door, Merlin’s Tower, was just as dreadfully wonderful.

  Nimue had stopped crying and now lay motionless in my arms. She must have sensed my wonder and revulsion at the room. ‘He throws nothing away,’ she said wearily, ‘nothing.’ I did not speak, but just soothed and stroked her. For a while she lay exhausted, but then, when my hand explored the cloak over one of her small breasts, she twisted angrily away. ‘If that’s what you want,’ she said, ‘go and see Sebile.’ She clutched the cloak tight about her as she climbed off the platform bed and crossed to the table cluttered with Merlin’s instruments.

  I stammered some kind of embarrassed apology.

  ‘It’s not important,’ she dismissed my apologies. We could hear voices on the Tor outside, and more voices in the great hall next door, but no one tried to disturb us. Nimue was searching among the bowls and pots and ladles on the table and found what she wanted. It was a knife made from black stone, its blade feathered into bone-white edges. She came back to the fusty bed and knelt beside its platform so that she could look straight into my face. Her cloak had fallen open and I was nervously aware of her naked, shadowed body, but she was staring fixedly into my eyes and I could do nothing but return that gaze.

  She did not speak for a long time and in the silence I could almost hear my heart thumping. She seemed to be making a decision, one of those decisions so ominous that it will change the balance of a life for ever, and so I waited, fearful, helpless to move from my awkward stance. Her black hair was tousled, framing her wedge-shaped face. Nimue was neither beautiful nor plain, but her face possessed a quickness and life that did not need formal beauty. Her forehead was broad and high, her eyes dark and fierce, her nose sharp, her mouth wide and her chin narrow. She was the cleverest woman I ever knew, but even in those days, when she was scarcely more than a child, she was filled with a sadness born of that cleverness. She knew so much. She was born knowing, or else the Gods had given her that knowledge when they had spared her from drowning. As a child she had often been full of nonsense and mischief, but now, bereft of Merlin’s guidance but with his responsibilities thrust on her thin shoulders, she was changing. I was changing too, of course, but my change was predictable: a bony boy turning into a tall young man. Nimue was flowing from childhood into authority. That authority sprang from her dream, a dream she shared with Merlin, but one that she would never compromise as Merlin would. Nimue was for all or she was for nothing. She would rather have seen the whole earth die in the cold of a Godless void than yield one inch to those who would dilute her image of a perfect Britain devoted to its own British Gods. And now, kneeling before me, she was, I knew, judging whether I was worthy to be a part of that fervent dream.

  She made her decision and moved closer to me. ‘Give me your left hand,’ she said.

  I held it out.

  She held my hand palm uppermost in her left hand, then spoke a charm. I recognized the names of Camulos, the War God, of Manawydan fab Llyr, Nimue’s own Sea God, of Agrona, the Goddess of Slaughter, and of Aranrhod the Golden, the Goddess of the Dawn, but most of the names and words were strange and they were spoken in such an hypnotic voice that I was lulled and comforted, careless of what Nimue said or did until sudde
nly she slashed the knife across my palm and then, startled, I cried out. She hushed me. For a second the knife-cut lay thin across my hand, then blood welled up.

  She cut her own left palm in the same way that she had cut mine, then placed the cut over mine and gripped my nerveless fingers with her own. She dropped the knife and hitched up a corner of her cloak which she wrapped hard around the two bleeding hands. ‘Derfel,’ she said softly, ‘so long as your hand is scarred and so long as mine is scarred, we are one. Agreed?’

  I looked into her eyes and knew this was no small thing, no childhood game, but an oath that would bind me throughout this world and maybe into the next. For a second I was terrified of all that was to come, then I nodded and somehow managed to speak. ‘Agreed,’ I said.

  ‘And so long as you carry the scar, Derfel,’ she said, ‘your life is mine, and so long as I carry the scar, my life is yours. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. My hand throbbed. It felt hot and swollen while her hand felt tiny and chill in my bloody grip.

  ‘One day, Derfel,’ Nimue said, ‘I will call on you, and if you do not come then the scar will mark you to the Gods for a false friend, a traitor and an enemy.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She looked at me in silence for a few seconds, then crawled up on to the pile of furs and blankets where she curled herself into my arms. It was awkward to lie together for our two left hands were still bound, but somehow we made ourselves comfortable and then lay still. Voices sounded outside and dust drifted in the high dark chamber where the bats slept and the kittens hunted. It was cold, but Nimue pulled a pelt over the two of us and then she slept with her body’s small weight numbing my right arm. I lay awake, filled with awe and confusion over what the knife had caused between us.

  She woke in the middle of the afternoon. ‘Gundleus has gone,’ she said sleepily, though how she knew I do not know, then she extricated herself from my grip and from the tangled furs before unwrapping the cloak that was still twisted around our hands. The blood had crusted and the scabs tore painfully away from our wounds as we pulled apart. Nimue crossed to the sheaf of spears and scooped up a handful of cobwebs that she slapped on to my bleeding palm. ‘It’ll heal soon,’ she said carelessly, and then, with her own cut hand wrapped in a scrap of cloth, she found some bread and cheese. ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ she asked.

  ‘Always.’

  We shared the meal. The bread was dry and hard, and the cheese had been nibbled by mice. At least Nimue thought it was mice. ‘Maybe the bats chewed it,’ she said. ‘Do bats eat cheese?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, then hesitated. ‘Was it a tame bat?’ I meant the animal that she had tied into her hair. I had seen such things before, of course, but Merlin would never talk of them, nor would his acolytes, but I suspected the odd ceremony of our bloody hands would let me into Nimue’s confidence.

  And it did, for she shook her head. ‘It’s an old trick to frighten fools,’ she said dismissively. ‘Merlin taught it to me. You put jesses on the bat’s feet, just like falcon jesses, then tie the jesses to your hair.’ She ran her hand through her black, hair, then laughed. ‘And it frightened Tanaburs! Imagine that! And him a Druid!’

  I was not amused. I wanted to believe in her magic, not have it explained as a trick played with hawk-leashes. ‘And the snakes?’ I asked.

  ‘He keeps them in a basket. I have to feed them.’ She shuddered, then she saw my disappointment. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Is it all trickery?’ I asked.

  She frowned and was silent for a long time. I thought she was not going to answer at all, but finally she explained, and I knew, as I listened, that I was hearing the things that Merlin had taught her. Magic, she said, happened at the moments when the lives of the Gods and men touched, but such moments were not commanded by men. ‘I can’t snap my fingers and fill the room with mist,’ she said, ‘but I’ve seen it happen. I can’t raise the dead, though Merlin says he has seen it done. I can’t order a lightning strike to kill Gundleus, though I wish I might, because only the Gods can do that. But there was a time, Derfel, when we could do those things, when we lived with the Gods and we pleased them and we were able to use their power to keep Britain as they wanted it kept. We did their bidding, you understand, but their bidding was our desire.’ She clasped her two hands to demonstrate the point, then flinched as the pressure hurt the cut on her left palm. ‘But then the Romans came,’ she said, ‘and they broke the compact.’

  ‘But why?’ I interrupted impatiently, for I had heard much of this already. Merlin was always telling us how Rome had shattered the bond between Britain and its Gods, but he had never explained why that could happen if the Gods had such power. ‘Why didn’t we beat the Romans?’ I asked Nimue.

  ‘Because the Gods didn’t want it. Some Gods are wicked, Derfel. And besides, they have no duty to us, only we to them. Maybe it amused them? Or maybe our ancestors broke the pact and the Gods punished them by sending the Romans. We don’t know, but we do know that the Romans are gone and Merlin says we have a chance, just one chance, to restore Britain.’ She was talking in a low, intense voice. ‘We have to remake the old Britain, the real Britain, the land of Gods and men, and if we do it, Derfel, if we do it, then once again we will have the power of Gods.’

  I wanted to believe her. How I wanted to believe that our short, disease-ridden and death-stalked lives could be given new hope thanks to the goodwill of supernatural creatures of glorious power. ‘But you have to do it by trickery?’ I asked, not hiding my disillusion.

  ‘Oh, Derfel.’ Nimue’s shoulders slumped. ‘Think about it. Not everyone can feel the presence of the Gods, so those who can have a special duty. If I show weakness, if I show a moment of disbelief, then what hope is there for the people who want to believe? They’re not really tricks, they are…’ She paused, seeking the right word. ‘… insignia. Just like Uther’s crown and his torques and his banner and his stone at Caer Cadarn. Those things tell us that Uther is the High King and we treat him as such, and when Merlin walks among his people he has to wear his insignia too. It tells people that he touches the Gods and people fear him for that.’ She pointed at the door with its splintered spear-rent. ‘When I walked through that door, naked, with two snakes and a bat hidden under a dead man’s skin, I was confronting a king, his Druid and his warriors. One girl, Derfel, against a king, a Druid and a royal guard. Who won?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘So the trick worked, but it wasn’t my power that made it work. It was the power of the Gods, but I had to believe in that power to make it work. And to believe, Derfel, you must devote your life to it.’ She was speaking with a rare and intense passion now. ‘Every minute of every day and every moment of every night you must be open to the Gods, and if you are, then they will come. Not always when you want them, of course, but if you never ask, they’ll never answer; but when they do answer, Derfel, oh, when they do, it is so wonderful and so terrifying, like having wings that lift you high into glory.’ Her eyes shone as she spoke. I had never heard her speak of these things. Not long ago she had been a child, but now she had been to Merlin’s bed and taken on his teaching and his power, and I resented that. I was jealous and angry and I did not understand. She was growing away from me and I could do nothing to stop it.

  ‘I’m open to the Gods,’ I said resentfully. ‘I believe them. I want their help.’

  She touched my face with her bandaged hand. ‘You’re going to be a warrior, Derfel, and a very great one. You’re a good person, you’re honest, you’re as foursquare as Merlin’s Tower and there isn’t any madness in you. Not a trace; not even a wild, desperate speck. Do you think I want to follow Merlin?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, hurt. ‘I know you do!’ I meant, of course, that I was hurt because she would not devote herself to me.

  She took in a deep breath and stared into the shadowed roof where two pigeons had flown through a smoke hole and were now shuffling along a rafter. ‘Sometimes,�
� she said, ‘I think I would like to marry, have children, watch them grow, grow old myself, die, but of all those things, Derfel’ – she looked at me again – ‘I will only have the last. I can’t bear to think of what will happen to me. I can’t bear to think of enduring the Three Wounds of Wisdom, but I must. I must!’

  ‘The Three Wounds?’ I asked, never having heard of them before.

  ‘The Wound to the Body,’ Nimue explained, ‘the Wound to the Pride,’ and here she touched herself between her legs, ‘and the Wound to the Mind, which is madness.’ She paused as a look of horror crossed her face. ‘Merlin has suffered all three, and that is why he’s such a wise man. Morgan had the worst Wound to the Body that anyone can imagine, but she never suffered the other two wounds which is why she will never truly belong to the Gods. I’ve suffered none of the three, but I will. I must!’ She spoke fiercely. ‘I must because I was chosen.’

  ‘Why wasn’t I chosen?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘You don’t understand, Derfel. No one chose me, except me. You have to make the choice for yourself. It could happen to any of us here. That’s why Merlin collects foundlings, because he believes orphaned children might have special powers, but only a very few do.’

  ‘And you do,’ I said.

  ‘I see the Gods everywhere,’ Nimue said simply. ‘They see me.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a God,’ I said stubbornly.

  She smiled at my resentment. ‘You will,’ she said, ‘because you must think of Britain, Derfel, as though she were laced with the ribbons of a thinning mist. Just tenuous strands here and there, drifting and fading, but those strands are the Gods, and if we can find them and please them and make this land theirs again then the strands will thicken and join to make a great, wonderful mist that will cover all the land and protect us from what lies outside. That’s why we live here, on the Tor. Merlin knows that the Gods love this place, and here the sacred mist is thick, but our task is to spread it.’