“I came by choice.”
“Then you belong here anyway, for you're plainly mad.” He drank his water. “Tell me,” he said, 'the news of Britain."
I told him. He had heard of Uther's death and Arthur's coming, but not much else. He frowned when I said King Mordred was maimed, but was pleased when he heard that Bedwin still lived. “I like Bedwin,” he said. “Liked, rather. We have to learn to talk here as though we were dead. He must be old?”
“Not so old as Merlin.”
“Merlin lives?” he asked in surprise.
“He does.”
“Dear me! So Merlin is alive!” He seemed pleased. “I once gave him an eagle stone and he was so grateful. I have another here somewhere. Where now?” He searched among a small pile of rocks and scraps of wood that made a collection beside the cave door. “Is it over there?” He pointed towards the bed-curtain. “Can you see it?”
I turned away to look for the precious rattling stone and the moment I looked away Malldynn leaped on my back and tried to drag his small knife's ragged edge across my throat. “I'll eat you!” he cried in triumph. “Eat you!” But I had somehow caught his knife hand with my left and managed to keep the blade away from my windpipe. He wrestled me to the floor and tried to bite my ear. He was slavering above me, his appetite whetted by the thought of new, clean human flesh to eat. I hit him once, twice, managed to twist around and bring up my knee, then hit him again, but the wretch had remarkable strength and the sound of our fight brought more men running from other caves. I had only a few seconds before I would be overpowered by the newcomers and so I gave one last desperate heave, then butted Malldynn's head with mine and finally threw him off. I kicked him away, scrambled desperately back from the onrush of his friends, then stood in the entrance to his bed-chamber where I at last had room to draw Hywelbane. The hermits shrank away from the sword's bright blade.
Malldynn, his mouth bleeding, lay at the side of the cave. “Not even a scrap of fresh liver?” he begged me. “Just a morsel? Please?”
I left him. The other hermits plucked at my cloak as I passed through the quarry, but none tried to stop me. One of them laughed as I left. “You'll have to come back!” the man called to me, 'and we'll be hungrier then!"
“Eat Malldynn,” I told them bitterly.
I climbed to the Isle's ridge where gorse grew among rocks. I could see from the summit that the great rock hill did not extend all the way to the Isle's southern tip, but fell steeply to a long plain that was hatched by a tangle of ancient stone walls; evidence that ordinary men and women had once lived on the Isle and farmed the stony plateau that sloped towards the sea. There were settlements still on the plateau: the homes, I supposed, of the sea folk. A group of those dead souls watched me from their cluster of round huts that stood at the hill's base and their presence persuaded me to stay where I was and wait for dawn. Life creeps slow in the early morning, which is why soldiers like to attack in the first light and why I would search for my lost Nimue when the mad denizens of the Isle were still sluggish and bemused with sleep.
It was a hard night. A bad night. The stars wheeled above me, bright homes from where the spirits look down on feeble earth. I prayed to Bel, begging for strength, and sometimes I slept, though every rustle of grass or fall of stone brought me wide awake. I had sheltered in a narrow crack of rock that would restrict any attack and as a result I was confident I could protect myself, though only Bel knew how I would ever leave the Isle. Or whether I would ever find my Nimue.
I crept from my rock niche before the dawn. A fog hung over the sea beyond the sullen turmoil that marked the entrance of Cruachan Cave and a weak grey light made the Isle look flat and cold. I could see no one as I walked downhill. The sun had still not risen as I entered the first small village of crude huts. Yesterday, I had decided, I had been too timid with the Isle's denizens. Today I would treat the dead like the carrion they were.
The huts were wattle and mud, thatched with branches and grass. I kicked in a ramshackle wooden door, stooped inside the hut and grabbed the first sleeping form I found. I hurled that creature outside, kicked another, then slashed a hole in the roof with Hywelbane. Things that had once been human untangled themselves and slithered away from me. I kicked a man in the head, slapped another with the flat of Hywelbane's blade, then dragged a third man out into the sickly light. I threw him to the ground, put my foot on his chest and held Hywelbane's tip at his throat. “I seek a woman named Nimue,” I said. He stammered gibberish at me. He could not speak, or rather he could only talk in a language of his own devising and so I left him and ran after a woman who was limping into the bushes. She screamed as I caught her, and screamed again as I placed the steel at her throat. “Do you know a woman called Nimue?”
She was too terrified to speak. Instead she lifted her filthy skirts and offered me a toothless leer, so I slapped her face with the flat of the sword's blade. “Nimue!” I shouted at her. “A girl with one eye called Nimue. Do you know her?” The woman still could not speak, but she pointed south, jabbing her hand towards the Isle's seaward tip in a frantic effort to make me relent. I took the sword away and kicked the skirts back over her thighs. The woman scrambled away into a patch of thorns. The other frightened souls stared from their huts as I followed the path south towards the churning sea. I passed two other tiny settlements, but no one tried to stop me now. I had become part of the Isle of the Dead's living nightmare; a creature in the dawn with naked steel. I walked through fields of pale grass dotted with bird's-foot trefoil, blue milkwort and the crimson spikes of orchids and told myself I should have known that Nimue, a creature of Manawydan's, would have found her refuge as close to the sea as she could find it.
The Isle's southern shore was a tangle of rocks edging a low cliff. Great waves crashed into foam, sucked through gullies and shattered white into clouds of spray. The cauldron swirled and spat offshore. It was a summer morning, but the sea was grey like iron, the wind was cold and the sea birds loud with laments.
I jumped from rock to rock, going down towards that deathly sea. My ragged cloak lifted in the wind as I turned around a pillar of pale stone to see a cave that lay a few feet above the dark line of oar weed and bladder wrack stranded by the highest tides. A ledge led to the cave, and on the ledge were piled the bones of birds and animals. The piles had been made by human hands, for they were regularly spaced and each heap was braced by a careful latticework of longer bones and topped by a skull. I stopped, fear surging in me like the surge of the sea, as I stared at the refuge as close to the sea as any place could be on this Isle of doomed souls. “Nimue?” I called as I summoned the courage to approach the ledge.