Nennius listened to this open-mouthed, his huge, lustrous eyes glistening and gleaming above the lines of black kohl painted on their lower lids. He made no attempt to interrupt Nemo, but as soon as the other had finished speaking, he waved a hand expressively and nodded deeply, saying he could understand perfectly why Nemo should have been so upset. But really, he added then, his eyes gleaming wickedly, it was not really accurate to speak of the young woman as "some young wench." Her name was Deirdre, and she was the Commander's new wife.
Pretending to be startled. Nemo raised herself up on one elbow, her face, as much as she could make it, a picture of astonishment. The Commander's wife? Commander Merlyn was married? When had that happened, and how? Ten days before, Nennius said, smiling still at the effect of his announcement . . . No, Nemo had heard absolutely nothing, had known nothing. If word had gone to Cambria, to King Uther in Tir Manha, then it had clearly passed Nemo on the road. Ten days since the wedding? But the woman was big . . . about to give birth. Where had she sprung from? Where had Merlyn Britannicus been hiding her?
Nennius threw up his hands and shook his head before slapping Nemo on the bare flank to indicate that their session was at an end. The birth was far from imminent, he said, despite appearances. From what he had been told, there yet remained at least two months of carrying time before the Lady Deirdre's burden would be dropped. But then, as Nemo sat upright on the edge of the stone plinth, tucking the large towel into place about her hips, Nennius admitted that, to his great frustration, he had been unable to unearth any information from anywhere about the woman's former whereabouts. She was from Eire, the daughter of some heathen Eirish King, that much he could affirm, for she had turned out to be the sister of the Eirish Prince Donuil, the big fellow Merlyn had taken as a hostage two years earlier during Lot of Cornwall's first attack on Camulod. She could not have come directly to Camulod from Eire, however, gravid as she was, not without dire sorcery of some kind being involved, for Merlyn had not been away from Camulod for longer than two or three days at a time in more than a year.
Whence, then, had come the pregnancy? As far as Nennius had been able to discover, and as plain logic dictated, the Lady Deirdre must have been living somewhere nearby throughout the entire year, at least. Yet no one in Camulod—no one anywhere, for that matter— had ever seen her before the day she had ridden into the fortress, close on a month earlier, blooming with health and beauty and yet nonetheless as ethereal as a mountain sprite, riding on a light cart and accompanied by Caius Merlyn and his great-aunt, Luceiia Varrus.
Nemo expressed surprise then, in her usual surly manner, that Nennius had not been able to worm some kind of information about the young woman from some of her servants or associates. She must have said something in the course of a month to indicate where she had been and where she had come from . . . unless she was mute.
But she was mute, Nennius replied, and Nemo felt as though every vestige of air in her lungs had been kicked out as her mind made a sickening series of connections and a number of things all fell into place at the same time.
The Cassandra woman! No wonder the Lady Deirdre hail looked so familiar at first sight—though the well-dressed, high-born lady with the hugely swollen belly bore but little resemblance to the pallid, emaciated waif Nemo had found kneeling in the forest so many months before. How long ago had that been? Nemo thought back quickly and realized that nigh on three whole years had passed since then.
They had found the girl, an insipid, lacklustre little thing, while on a routine perimeter patrol of the Colony, and she had ridden back to Camulod behind Uther's saddle, with her arms clutching him around the waist. In lime they had discovered that she was mute, and they had called her Cassandra. Three years ago!
Realizing that she had stiffened into immobility and that Nennius was watching her closely, his head tilted to one side with the force of his concentration, Nemo made an enormous effort to relax her body and breathe normally while she simultaneously fought to school her face into betraying nothing of her shock. She muttered something barely audible about mute people, and then, suddenly inspired, she looked Nennius in the eye and asked him if mute people could hear anything. His eyes flew wide and he spread his hands, suggesting that he did not know, and Nemo nodded her head sagely and walked away slowly while he was still confused, offering her thanks as she left. Then, highly pleased with her own unusually glib performance, she dressed quickly and left the bathhouse, her mind teeming with thoughts of the Cassandra woman.
Cassandra . . . the very name twisted Nemo's guts, because it struck directly to the root of the trouble between Uther and Merlyn. She remembered that night . . . in the private quarters Uther and Merlyn once referred to as their games room. Nemo had never been able to discover precisely what had occurred, because only Uther and Merlyn were present at the time and neither of them spoke of it afterwards. The waif Cassandra had been there too, however, along with a small number of other women, all of whom disappeared from public sight the following day, permanently, leaving Camulod in a covered cart.
Nemo had witnessed only a few important scenes of the drama: Cassandra bursting from the games room, apparently running for her life. Merlyn appearing at the door a few moments later, unclothed, but ducking back inside and closing the door when he saw the guard watching him. Uther storming out, clearly in a fury. She discovered later that Uther, accompanied by a small group of his Dragons, rode out of Camulod then and returned home to Cambria. The girl Cassandra had been abducted that same night and dragged or carried into a barn, where she had been beaten, ravaged and brutalized, and then abandoned by her attacker, who had clearly thought her dead, and whose identity was never established.
Cassandra had been discovered the following morning, barely alive, and Germanus, the senior military physician in Camulod, had worked hard for hours to save her life while Merlyn Britannicus, as Officer in Command during his father's absence on a patrol, fearing for the young woman's safety, arranged to have her placed under heavy, constant guard. And then, in the middle of the following night, the woman called Cassandra had disappeared without a trace, evidently by sorcery, from a building that was heavily guarded inside and out.
Rumours had flown in all directions for a long time after that, including one that Merlyn had foreseen Cassandra's disappearance in a dream. That rumour formed the basis for the other whisperings that Merlyn was a sorcerer of some kind. Nemo had also heard a rumour, believed by some, that Uther had been responsible for beating the girl, but that was clearly so foolish and so contradictory to the facts that Nemo merely shook her head and disregarded it completely.
One thing she did know, however, and it came from no rumour. The lifelong bond between Merlyn Britannicus and Uther Pendragon was broken that night of the fight in the games room. From then onward, the two men, who had been inseparable for so long, were seldom in each other's company again.
Nemo had never dared come out openly and ask Uther what had happened between them that night, and he had never offered to tell her, but she had been convinced then, and was still convinced, that the woman Cassandra was at the bottom of it. Before Cassandra had been found in the forest, Uther and Merlyn had been closer than brothers for five and twenty years, but then, within three days of her appearance in their lives, that bond had been severed.
It had taken no great leap of imagination at that time for Nemo to connect Cassandra with all the kitchen tales of witchcraft and malice that she had absorbed during her miserable childhood among the Druid's people, and she had quickly come to perceive her as a witch, sent to destroy the bonds between the two magnificent young men who had become known throughout the countryside as the Princes of Camulod. How else could she have escaped, unseen, from a guarded room? Once convinced, Nemo had then spent months looking for the woman, determined to force the creature, somehow, to undo the damage she had done, or failing that, to ensure that she would no longer pose a threat to Uther Pendragon. But Cassandra, it seemed, had indeed vanished, swallowed up and absorbed by the darkness of night.