Balig plucked an arrow from the sternpost, twisted away its iron head that he tucked into a pocket for safe keeping, then tossed the feathered shaft overboard. ‘Don’t like the look of that,’ he said to me, jerking his chin towards the west. I turned and saw there were black clouds far out to sea.
‘Rain coming?’ I asked.
‘Could be a bite of wind in it, too,’ he said ominously, then spat overboard to avert the ill-luck. ‘But we don’t have far to go. We could miss it.’ He leaned on the steering oar as the boat was swept about the last great loop of the river. We were going west now, hard into the wind, and the river’s surface was choppy with small, white-flecked waves that shattered on our bow and splashed back across the deck. The sail was still lowered. ‘Pull now!’ Balig called to our oarsmen. The Saxon had one oar, Galahad another, Taliesin and Culhwch had the middle bench and Culhwch’s two sons completed the crew. The six men pulled hard, fighting the wind, but the current and tide still helped us. The banners at prow and stern snapped hard in the wind, rattling the arrows trapped in their weave. Ahead of us the river turned southwards and it was there, I knew, that Balig would hoist the sail so that the wind would help us down the long sea reach. Once at sea we would be forced to keep inside the withy-marked channel that ran between the wide shallows until we reached the deep water where we could turn away from the wind and race across to the Dumnonian shore. ‘It won’t take long to cross,’
Balig said comfortingly, glancing at the clouds, ‘not long. Should outrun that bit of wind.’
‘Can the boats stay together?’ I asked.
‘Near enough.’ He jerked his head at the boat immediately in front of us. ‘That old tub will lag behind. Sails like a pregnant pig, she does, but near enough, near enough.’
Nimue’s horsemen waited for us on a spit of land that lay where the river turned south towards the sea. As we came closer she rode out from the mass of spearmen and urged her horse into the shallow water, and as we came closer still I saw two of her spearmen drag a captive into the shallows beside her. At first I thought it must be one of our men taken from the stranded boat, but then I saw that the prisoner was Merlin. His beard had been cut off and his unkempt white hair blew ragged in the rising wind as he stared blindly towards us, but I could have sworn that he was smiling. I could not see his face clearly, for the distance was too great, but I do swear he was smiling as he was pulled into the small waves. He knew what was about to happen.
Then, suddenly, so did I, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. Nimue had been carried from this sea as a child. She had been captured in Demetia by a band of slave-raiders, then brought across the Severn Sea to Dumnonia, but on the voyage a storm rose and all the raiders’ ships were sunk. The crews and their captives drowned, all but for Nimue who had come safe from the sea onto Ynys Wair’s rocky shore and Merlin, rescuing the child, had called her Vivien because she was so plainly beloved by Manawydan, the sea God, and Vivien is a name that belongs to Manawydan. Nimue, being cross-grained, had ever refused to use the name, but I remembered it now, and I remembered that Manawydan loved her, and I knew she was about to use the God’s help to work a great curse on us.
‘What is she doing?’ Arthur asked.
‘Don’t watch, Lord,’ I said.
The two spearmen had waded back to shore, leaving the blinded Merlin alone beside Nimue’s horse. He made no attempt to escape. He just stood there, his hair streaming white, while Nimue drew a knife from her sword belt. It was the Knife of Laufrodedd.
‘No!’ Arthur shouted, but the wind carried his protest back in our boat’s path, back across the marshes and the reeds, back to nowhere. ‘No!’ he called again.
Nimue pointed her Druid’s staff towards the west, raised her head to the skies and howled. Still Merlin did not move. Our fleet swept past them, each boat coming close to the shallows where Nimue’s horse stood before being snatched southwards as the crews hoisted their sails. Nimue waited until our flag-hung boat came near and then she lowered her head and gazed at us with her one eye. She was smiling, and so was Merlin. I was close enough to see clearly now, and he was still smiling as Nimue leaned down from her saddle with the knife. One hard stroke was all it needed. And Merlin’s long white hair and his long white robe turned red.
Nimue howled again. I had heard her howl many times, but never like that, for this howl mingled agony with triumph. She had worked her spell.
She slid off the horse and let go of her staff. Merlin must have died quickly, but his body still thrashed in the small waves and for a few heartbeats it looked as though Nimue was wrestling with the dead man. Her white robe was spattered with red, and the red was instantly diluted by the sea as she heaved and pushed Merlin’s corpse further into the water. At last, free of the mud, he floated and she pushed him out into the current as a gift for her Lord, Manawydan.
And what a gift she gave. The body of a Druid is powerful magic, as powerful as any that this poor world possesses, and Merlin was the last and the greatest of the Druids. Others came after him, of course, but none had his knowledge, and none his wisdom, and none had half his power. And all that power was now given to one spell, one incantation to the God of the sea who had rescued Nimue so many years before.
She plucked the staff from where it floated on the waves and pointed it at our boat, then she laughed. She put her head back and laughed like the mad who had followed her from the mountains to this killing in the waters. ‘You will live!’ she called to our boat, ‘and we shall meet again!’
Balig hoisted the sail and the wind caught it and snatched us down the sea reach. None of us spoke. We just stared back towards Nimue and to where, white in the turmoil of the grey waves, the body of Merlin followed us towards the deep.
Where Manawydan waited for us.
We turned our boat south-east to let the wind drive into the tattered sail’s belly and my stomach heaved with every lurching wave.
Balig was struggling with the steering oar. We had shipped the other oars, letting the wind do the work, but the strong tide was driving against us and it kept pushing our boat’s head round to the south where the wind would make the sail slap, and the steering oar would bend alarmingly, but slowly the boat would come back, the sail would crack like a great whip as it filled again, and the bows would dip into a wave trough and my belly would churn and the bile rise in my throat. The sky darkened. Balig looked up at the clouds, spat, then heaved on the steering oar again. The first rain came, great drops that spattered on the deck and darkened the dirty sail. ‘Pull in those banners!’
Balig shouted, and Galahad furled the forward flag while I struggled to free the flag at the stern. Gwydre helped me bring it down, then lost his balance as the boat tipped on a wave crest. He fell against the gunwale as the water broke over the bow. ‘Bail!’ Balig shouted, ‘bail!’
The wind was rising now. I vomited over the boat’s quarter, then looked up to see the rest of the fleet tossing in a grey nightmare of broken water and flying spindrift. I heard a crack above me, and looked up to see that our sail had split in two. Balig cursed. Behind us the shore was a dark line, and beyond it, lit by sunlight, the hills of Siluria glowed green, but all around us was dark and wet and threatening.
‘Bail!’ Balig shouted again, and those who were in the belly of the boat used helmets to scoop the water from around the bundles of treasure, armour and food.
And then the storm hit. Till now we had suffered only from the storm’s outriders, but now the wind howled across the sea and the rain came flat and stinging above the whitened waves. I lost sight of the other boats, so thick was the rain and so dark the sky. The shore disappeared, and all I could see was a nightmare of short, high, white-crested waves from which the water flew to drench our boat. The sail flogged itself to ragged shreds that streamed from the spar like broken banners. Thunder split the sky and the boat fell off a wave crest and I saw the water, green and black, surging up to spill across the gunwales, but somehow Balig steered the bow into the wave and the water hesitated at the boat’s rim, then dropped away as we rose to the next wind-tortured crest.