‘Your feet are bleeding,’ I said.
‘They heal,’ and she turned and skipped on. ‘Come!’ she called. ‘Come to the time before kings!’
‘Does Merlin wait for me there?’ I asked.
That name stopped Olwen. She stood, turned back again, and frowned at me. ‘I lay with Merlin once,’ she said after a while. ‘Often!’ she added in a burst of honesty. That did not surprise me. He was a goat. ‘Is he waiting for us?’ I asked.
‘He is at the heart of the time before kings,’ Olwen said seriously. ‘At its utter heart, Lord. Merlin is the cold in the frost, the water in the rain, the flame in the sun, the breath in the wind. Now come,’ she plucked at my sleeve with a sudden urgency, ‘we cannot talk now.’
‘Is Merlin a prisoner?’ I asked, but Olwen would not answer. She raced ahead of me, and waited impatiently for me to catch up with her, and as soon as I did she ran ahead again. She took those steep paths lightly while I laboured behind, and all the time we were going deeper into the mountains. By now, I reckoned, we had left Siluria behind and had come into Powys, but into a part of that unhappy country where young Perddel’s rule did not reach. This was the land without law, the lair of brigands, but Olwen skipped carelessly through its dangers.
The night fell. Clouds filled from the west so that soon we were in a complete darkness. I looked about me and saw nothing. No lights, not even the glimmer of a distant flame. It was thus, I imagine, that Bel found the isle of Britain when he first came to bring it life and light. Olwen put her hand into mine. ‘Come, Lord.’
‘You can’t see!’ I protested.
‘I see everything,’ she said, ‘trust me, Lord,’ and with that she led me onwards, sometimes warning me of an obstacle. ‘We must cross a stream here, Lord. Tread gently.’
I knew that our path was climbing steadily, but little else. We crossed a patch of treacherous shale, but Olwen’s hand was firm in mine, and once we seemed to walk along the spine of a high ridge where the wind whistled about my ears and Olwen sang a strange little song about elves. ‘There are still elves in these hills,’ she told me when the song ended. ‘Everywhere else in Britain they were killed, but not here. I’ve seen them. They taught me to dance.’
‘They taught you well,’ I said, not believing a word she said, but strangely comforted by the warm grip of her small hand.
‘They have cloaks of gossamer,’ she said.
‘They don’t dance naked?’ I asked, teasing her.
‘A gossamer cloak hides nothing, Lord,’ she reproved me, ‘but why should we hide what is beautiful?’
‘Do you lie with the elves?’
‘One day I shall. Not yet. In the time after the kings, I shall. With them and with golden men. But first I must lie with another salty man. Belly to belly with another dry thing from the Cauldron’s heart.’ She laughed and tugged at my hand and we left the ridge and climbed a smooth slope of grass to reach a higher crest. There, for the first time since the clouds had hidden the moon, I saw light. Far across a dark saddle of land there lay a hill, and in the hill there must have been a valley that was filled with fire so that the nearer brow of the hill was edged with its glow. I stood there, my hand unconsciously in Olwen’s hand, and she laughed with delight as she saw me gazing at that sudden light.
‘That is the land before kings, Lord,’ she told me. ‘You will find friends there, and food.’
I took my hand from hers. ‘What friend would put a curse on Ceinwyn?’
She took my hand back. ‘Come, Lord, not far now,’ she said, and she tugged me down the slope, trying to make me run, but I would not. I went slowly, remembering what Taliesin had told me in the magical mist he had drawn across Caer Cadarn; that Merlin had ordered him to save me, but that I might not thank him for it, and as I walked ever nearer that hollow of fire I feared I would discover Merlin’s meaning. Olwen chivvied me, she laughed at my fears and her eyes sparkled with the reflection of the fire’s glow, but I climbed towards the livid skyline with a heavy heart. Spearmen guarded the edge of the valley. They were savage-looking men swathed in furs and carrying rough-shafted spears with crudely fashioned blades. They said nothing as we passed, though Olwen greeted them cheerfully, then she led me down a path into the valley’s smoky heart. There was a long slender lake in the valley’s bed, and all around the black lake’s shores were fires, and by the fires were small huts among groves of stunted trees. An army of people was camped there, for there were two hundred fires or more.
‘Come, Lord,’ Olwen said and drew me on down the slope. ‘This is the past,’ she told me, ‘and this is the future. This is where the hoop of time meets.’
This is a valley, I told myself, in upland Powys. A hidden place where a desperate man might find shelter. The hoop of time did nothing here, I assured myself, yet even so I felt a shiver of apprehension as Olwen took me down to the huts beside the lake where the army camped. I had thought the folk here must be sleeping, for we were deep into the night, but as we walked between the lake and the huts a crowd of men and women swarmed from the huts to watch us pass. They were strange things, those people. Some laughed for no reason, some gibbered meaninglessly, some twitched. I saw goitred faces, blind eyes, hare lips, tangled masses of hair, and twisted limbs. ‘Who are they?’ I asked Olwen.
‘The army of the mad, Lord,’ she said.
I spat towards the lake to avert evil. They were not all mad or crippled, those poor folk, for some were spearmen, and a few, I noticed, had shields covered with human skin and blackened with human blood; the shields of Diwrnach’s defeated Blood-shields. Others had Powys’s eagle on their shields, and one man even boasted the fox of Siluria, a badge that had not been carried into battle since Gundleus’s time. These men, just like Mordred’s army, were the scourings of Britain: defeated men, landless men, men with nothing to lose and everything to win. The valley reeked of human waste. It reminded me of the Isle of the Dead, that place where Dumnonia sent its terrible mad, and the place where I had once gone to rescue Nimue. These folk had the same wild look and gave the same unsettling impression that at any moment they might leap and claw for no apparent reason.
‘How do you feed them?’ I asked.
‘The soldiers fetch food,’ Olwen said, ‘the proper soldiers. We eat a lot of mutton. I like mutton. Here we are, Lord. Journey’s end!’ And with those happy words she took her hand away from mine and skipped ahead of me. We had reached the end of the lake and in front of me now was a grove of great trees that grew in the shelter of a high rocky cliff.
A dozen fires burned under the trees and I saw that the trunks of the trees formed two lines, giving the grove the appearance of a vast hall, and at the hall’s far end were two rearing grey stones like the high boulders that the old people erected, though whether these were ancient stones, or newly raised, I could not tell.
Between the stones, enthroned on a massive wooden chair, and holding Merlin’s black staff in one hand, was Nimue. Olwen ran to her and threw herself down at Nimue’s feet and put her arms about Nimue’s legs and laid her head on Nimue’s knees. ‘I brought him, Lady!’ she said.
‘Did he lie with you?’ Nimue asked, talking to Olwen but staring fixedly at me. Two skulls surmounted the standing stones, each thickly covered in melted wax.
‘No, Lady,’ Olwen said.
‘Did you invite him?’ Still Nimue’s one eye gazed at me.
‘Yes, Lady.’
‘Did you show yourself to him?’
‘All day I showed myself to him, Lady.’