“Half the town says the war's already lost, Lord,” he told me on his return. Nimue was sleeping and we spoke beside the stream which ran close beside the cottage.
“And the other half?” I asked.
He grinned. “Looking forward to Lughnasa, Lord. They're not thinking beyond that. But the half that are thinking are all Christians.” He spat into the stream. “They say Lughnasa's an evil feast and that King Gorfyddyd is coming to punish our sins.”
“In which case,” I said, 'we'd better make sure we commit enough sins to deserve the punishment.“ He laughed. ”Some say Lord Arthur daren't leave town for fear there'd be a revolt once his soldiers are gone."
I shook my head. “He wants to be with Guinevere at Lughnasa.”
“Who wouldn't?” Issa asked.
“Did you see the goldsmith?” I asked.
He nodded. “He says he can't make an eye in under two weeks because he's never done one before, but he'll find a corpse and cut out its eye to get the size right. I told him he'd better make it a child's corpse, for the lady isn't big, is she?” He jerked his head towards the cottage.
“You told him the eye had to be hollow?”
“I did, Lord.”
“You did well,” I told him. “And now I suppose you want to do your worst and celebrate Lughnasa?” He grinned. “Yes, Lord.” Lughnasa was supposedly a celebration of the imminent harvest, yet the young have always made it a feast of fertility and their festivities would begin this night, the feast's eve.
“Then go,” I told him. “I'll stay here.”
That afternoon I made Nimue her own bower for Lughnasa. I doubted somehow that she would appreciate it, but I wanted to do it and so I made a small lodge beside the stream, cutting the wit hies and bending them into a hooded shelter into which I wove cornflowers, poppies, ox-eyes, foxgloves and long tangling swathes of pink convolvulus. Such booths were being made all across Britain for the feast, and all across Britain, late next spring, hundreds of Lughnasa babies would be born. The spring was reckoned a good time to be born for the child would come into a world waking to summer's plenty, though whether this year's planting would lead to a lucky crop depended on the battles that must be fought after harvest.
Nimue emerged from the hut just as I was weaving the last foxgloves into the bower's summit. “Is it Lughnasa?” she asked in surprise.
“Tomorrow.”
She laughed shyly. “No one ever made me a bower.”
“You never wanted one.”
“I do now,” she said, and sat under the flowery shade with such a look of delight that my heart leaped. She had found the eyepatch and donned one of the dresses Gyllad's maid had brought to the hut; it was a slave's dress of ordinary brown cloth, yet it suited her as simple things always did. She was pale and thin, but she was clean and there was a blush of colour in her cheeks. “I don't know what happened to the golden eye,” she said ruefully, touching her new patch.
“I'm having another eye made,” I told her, but did not add that the goldsmith's deposit had taken the last of my coins. I desperately needed a battle's plunder, I thought, to replenish my purse.
“And I'm hungry,” Nimue said with a touch of her old mischievousness. I put some birch twigs in the bottom of the pan so the broth would not stick, then poured in the last of the broth and set it on the fire. She ate it all, and afterwards she stretched out in the Lughnasa bower and watched the stream. Bubbles showed where an otter swam underwater. I had seen him earlier, an old dog with a hide scarred by battle and near misses from hunters' spears. Nimue watched his bubble trail disappear beneath a fallen willow and then began to talk.
She always had an appetite for talk, but that evening it was insatiable. She wanted news and I gave it to her, but then she wanted more detail, always more detail, and every detail she obsessively fitted inside a scheme of her own devising so that the story of the last year became, at least for her, like a great tiled floor where any one tile might seem insignificant, but added to the others it became a part of an intricate and meaningful whole. She was most interested in Merlin and the scroll he had snatched from Ban's doomed library. “You didn't read it?” she asked.
“No.”
“I will,” she said fervently.
I hesitated a moment, then spoke my mind. “I thought Merlin would come to the Isle to fetch you,” I said. I was risking offending her twice, first by implicitly criticizing Merlin and secondly by mentioning the one subject she did not talk about, the Isle of the Dead, but she did not seem to mind.
“Merlin would reckon I can look after myself,” she said, then smiled. “And he knows I have you.” It was dark by then and the stream rippled silver under Lugh-nasa's moon. There were a dozen questions I wanted to ask, but dared not, but suddenly she began to answer them anyway. She spoke of the Isle, or rather she spoke of how one tiny part of her soul had always been aware of the Isle's horror even as the rest of her had abandoned itself to its doom. “I thought madness would be like death,” she said, 'and that I wouldn't know there was an alternative to being mad, but you do know. You really do. It's as though you watch yourself and cannot help yourself. You forsake yourself," she said, then stopped and I saw the tears at her one good eye.
“Don't,” I said, suddenly not wanting to know.
“And sometimes,” she went on, “I would sit on my rock and watch the sea and I would know I was sane, and I would wonder what purpose was being served, and then I knew I would have to be mad because if I was not then it was all to no purpose.”
“There was no purpose,” I said angrily.
“Oh, Derfel, dear Derfel. You have a mind like a stone falling off a cliff.” She smiled. “It is the same purpose that made Merlin find Caleddin's scroll. Don't you understand? The Gods play games with us, but if we open ourselves then we can become a part of the game instead of its victims. Madness has a purpose! It's a gift from the Gods, and like all their gifts it comes with a price, but I've paid it now.” She spoke passionately, but suddenly I felt a yawn threatening me and try as I might I could not check it. I did try to hide it, but she saw anyway. “You need some sleep,” she said.
“No,” I protested.
“Did you sleep last night?”
“A little.” I had sat at the cottage door and dozed fitfully as I listened to the mice scrabbling in the thatch.
“Then go to bed now,” she said firmly, 'and leave me here to think.“ I was so tired I could scarcely undress, but at last I lay on the bracken bed where I slept like the dead. It was a great, deep sleep like the rest that comes in safety after battle when the bad sleep, the one interrupted by nightmare reminders of near spear thrusts and sword blows, has been washed away from the soul. Thus I slept, and in the night Nimue came to me and at first I thought it was a dream, but then I woke with a start to find her chill naked skin next to mine. ”It's all right, Derfel,“ she whispered, 'go to sleep,” and I slept again with my arms around her thin body.