The Bloody Cup (6 page)

The floors were flagged, an unusual feature in these climes, and were softened with woven rugs and knotted whorls of brilliantly coloured rag. Soft, brain-tanned hide was stretched over cunningly shaped wooden benches to provide seating and, in a series of pegged shelves, racks of crude glass jars stood like miniature soldiers along the stone walls. Those jars had survived the long journey from Cadbury, and now the flames from the fireplace played over their surfaces, hiding their contents under the sheen of scarlet and gold.

The woman turned as she felt the cold air stir her knee-length, braided hair. She rose with unconscious grace and moved to the troublesome shutters with a hank of new wool in one hand. Her eyes sharpened in the chill draught and, with concentration, she rammed the wool into the narrow gap, checked with her hand that no more cold air could intrude into her sanctuary and then returned to her seat.

The grey-muzzled wolfhound at her feet didn’t bother to rise from its comfortable rug.

Beauty and sorrow hung on Nimue like a rich, invisible cape.

Her face remained unlined, although she was almost thirty-nine years of age. Unlike Queen Wenhaver, the advance of middle age had only brought Nimue gravity and fine-boned elegance. Her hair was still silver, but it was now exceptionally long and was bound at several lengths by argent clasps. She wore grey, as was her habit, but the colour was pale and tinged with a memory of green, like still water under full moonlight.

Nimue’s face was unchanged, but her eyes showed the passage of long, hard years. The deep blue of her irises no longer snapped with the curiosity and the fire of her youth, for the Maid of Wind and Water was now wholly dead. Her essence had fled on that doleful evening when Myrddion Merlinus went to his gods upon a huge pyre on the mountain peak. The Lady of the Lake now ruled her inner depths with patience, compassion and a never-ending, adamantine determination.

As she twisted her spindle and drew out the raw, cleansed wool into a fine thread, her mind ranged upon the night wind, far to the north, to the west, and to the south - seeking, asking and questing for the object of her search. Nimue had never cared for magic, nor truly believed in the secret world of spells and curses. Such primitive superstitions had been the subject of much mirth between herself and Myrddion in those happy days when her children were young, before his eyes clouded with blindness.

‘I see better now that I’m sightless than ever before, sweet Nimue,’ he had consoled her. ‘My spirit leaves my body, and sees you as you are. It journeys far, beyond my fleshly strength, to watch my friend, Artorex, and the struggles he must fight in the south and in the east. Even Morgan, poor sad Morgan, feels the edges of my presence. How she jumps as she darts around her malodorous, old woman’s room and searches for me.’

They had laughed without malice, but in her heart Nimue had not believed him. Myrddion had sensed her anxiety that his mind was failing and her blue eyes had welled with tears, even while she had laughed at his jokes. There were times, deep in the night, when he had woken and begun to speak in a voice she scarcely knew, describing strange wagons that needed no horses, spears that destroyed cities of glass and the great tapestry of human history that stretched out before his eyes to the ends of time. She wondered then if her husband was truly the wisest man alive, or only lost in the dreams of crazed old age.

She had recorded his visions, for he had no memory of them once he had spoken them aloud, and then husband and wife had puzzled over their meaning.

‘Most of the future is closed to me, my dear,’ he had told her, his craggy, still-handsome face turned towards the light. ‘You should consign my dreams to the fire. Magic doesn’t exist but, perhaps, some inner vision does. And if such insight is true, it can trick us into relying on it when our minds and hearts are what should guide us. So put my dreams aside, my beloved, for they are only the shadows of shadows.’

But Nimue had disobeyed him and had begun to weave and embroider her wool into a fitting record of the glory of his blindness. Nimue believed in her heart that her man was not a magician but a great poet and that towering images crowded his still-young brain. But then, after the funeral pyre, so filled was she with hot, scarfing grief that her three sons had had to carry her back to their mountain villa and her mind had descended into a pit of madness.

Wild-eyed, she had threshed and fought through unspeakable nightmares until her sons had been forced to bind her to her bed. Bleeding willow trees, scorched rosebuds, crucified women and blind dragons had assailed her in her horrors, until her sons had quailed to see the welts rise on her white flesh as she mutilated herself.

Then, as sudden as her violent descent into madness had come, her senses had returned. That night, she had dreamed of struggling through a wilderness of half-sentient trees that guided her towards bloody water and a willow tree that hid an unimaginable horror. Screaming, she had been impelled by unseen hands to part the weeping foliage of the tree while her eyes had willed themselves to close, for she knew she would find her own self beneath the blood-soaked branches.

But her strength was as nothing against the power of the dream.

‘Nimue!’ the demon had called. His strong, right hand had gripped hers, while his left hand had shielded her eyes. Then, just as she was fainting with terror, he had drawn her back into the hollow tree and the comforting nest of her bed. Her dark-haired lover had kissed away every burn, scald and tear that her hands had branded on to her flesh. His dark eyes had drunk her in until she feared her soul would be lost to this demonic creature of the shadows and the chaos between the worlds, and she had wept in her loneliness and her loss.

‘It’s only me, Nimue. I’m your old husband. Don’t you know me?’

And then she knew that the dream still consumed her, for this creature was not Myrddion in withered age but in all the power of mature youth. How beautiful he was, and how his hair caught at hers in a net of darkness. She would have pulled away, but his eyes were the same as when she had first met him, lustrous, amused and full of pain.

‘But you’re dead, Myrddion! You must leave me to my sorrows, for your cooled ashes already lie in the burial urn. I would rather be crazed or lifeless than trapped in a hopeless search for you.’

He had kissed her thread-scarred fingers.

‘You will live on, my beloved. You will live long, and when you call, I will come and we will talk and laugh as we did when I breathed in the fashion of men. You can send for me in your thoughts, and I will be here.’

So Nimue had been forced to acknowledge what Odin, the least learned of her old friends, had always instinctively known, although they had never spoken of it: the soul goes on, and some fortunate few can send their spirits out upon the wind and find the souls of those who call to them, beyond grief, beyond sorrow and beyond the small indignities of death.

‘Mother?’ a voice called from the kitchen.

Her reflection was broken.

As she entered the room, a servant girl from the hill people was in the act of clouting Nimue’s youngest son with a crude ladle. He had stolen bread and was dipping the crusts into the mutton stew. Her eldest son, Taliesin, was attempting to wrestle the dripping morsel from his brother’s hand.

Nimue simply raised her index finger. ‘Enough!’ The word fell like a single pebble into a still pond.

‘Forgive me, Mother,’ Taliesin apologized and dropped his brother’s arm. ‘I should know better than to disturb your peace.’

‘You owe me no apologies, but Gerda shouldn’t be made to look foolish by the behaviour of any of my sons.’

Like all of her kin who eked out a precarious living in the mountains, Gerda was short and very dark. Both of Nimue’s sons towered over the irritated woman whose ancestry must have gone back to the little painted people who had lived peacefully in the isles for thousands of years. Nimue felt a flash of shame for her thoughtless children and pressed Gerda’s hand lightly in apology.

Taliesin promised to present his second greatest song to Gerda if the servant would deign to forgive him. His eyes were so distressed that the maidservant put away her indignation.

‘Have done with your glooming, boy. I knew you and your brother when you were both still soiling your loincloths, so neither of you had better touch Gerda’s stew until I decide to give it to you.’ The kitchen maid, who was little older than a girl herself, brought the wooden ladle down sharply, but without hurt, across the crowns of two repentant heads.

Nimue’s sons were the wonders of the hill country. The boys were alien creatures to the simple folk because they were so unlike each other that, had the people not known of the lovers’ devotion towards each other, they would have sworn cuckoos had been placed in the Stone House nest.

Taliesin was a reincarnation of his father, a symphony of black and white, but with eyes that were almost too blue to be human. He had fashioned a harp during his youth and had found the gift of music in his fingers as he learned to play the instrument. The grandams in the village spied the mark of white hair at his temples and nodded in archaic understanding of his qualities.

Glynn ap Myrddion was Nimue’s middle son. He was barely seventeen years of age, and was as fair as Taliesin was dark, but his eyes were wholly inherited from his father. Glynn’s black eyes were made doubly powerful by the fairness of his eyebrows and the golden hue of his skin. Taliesin’s passion for music, poetry and song did not lure Glynn, but the healing trade called him, as it had his father, and he had trailed old Myrddion like a small shadow as the old man collected and prepared his herbs and medications. Seamlessly, Glynn had become his father’s strong right hand and, even now, the lad was treating sick children with feverwort at a village over the hills. The hill people swore that his hands had some magic in them, but they also understood that Taliesin’s fingers were likewise blessed.

As for Rhys, now sixteen and very full of his mathematical talents, the art of construction was his métier. Tinkering always, he had constructed his mother’s favourite loom, he adored the menial tasks of thatching and he coaxed wood and stone to give up their ancient secrets.

All three were well versed in the small miracles of the soil and green and growing things, so Nimue had little cause to find fault in any of her tall and slender sons. Rhys was the most powerfully built of them all, recalling ancestors that Nimue had never known. And now that he had heard of a smith in a nearby village who needed an assistant, Nimue expected him to depart for several months before returning to construct a working forge of his own.

Yet she sighed.

The wind blew fiercely on their hilltop. Even as they shared their meal in the kitchens with Gerda and her mute, sheepherder husband, Col, she could hear the voices as they called on the night gales.

‘Taliesin must leave the hill country to stand with King Artor in Cadbury and beyond,’ the voices told Nimue. ‘Obey us, Woman of Water, for your son is needed. Artor’s way is ending. Although your son is still young in years, you must allow him to finish what his father started, for the Bloody Cup is soon to come.’

Nimue had heard the voices for three successive nights, and even though she stuffed all the wool in Powys into the corners of her house to silence the intrusive wind, the messengers of her dreams would not be muffled.

Taliesin reached across the table and stroked her left hand gently, massaging her palm with his thumbs just as his father had once done.

‘Why are you so unhappy, Mother?’ he asked. ‘Are there no songs that would lighten your load? Or must I write a new trifle to sing you back to happiness?’

‘Whether I want it or not, it’s important that you be at Cadbury by Samhein,’ she told her son, and Taliesin watched her eyes mist with tears. ‘I don’t fully understand why you must go there and I don’t desire you to leave my house in the dead of winter, but the voices tell me that you must record the passing of the king.’

Taliesin’s mouth gaped, but Rhys laughed in the fashion of a simple countryman at the consternation that was written plainly on his older brother’s face.

‘Cadbury? What would I do at such a place?’ Taliesin exclaimed irritably. ‘How could I serve the High King? Father shamed us with his brilliance and my skills are few by comparison. Surely my place is here with you?’

Nimue smiled ruefully. ‘I wish I could keep you by my side forever, but the wind would never let me rest if I ignored its message. You’ve been called, so you must sing for the High King. You will offer comfort to him with song and fable, and through lessons too, if the great King Artor will listen. He must be told that the Bloody Cup is coming.’>

Rhys laughed. ‘And what might that be? Did the wind bother to explain itself to you?’ His laughter died as he realized that his words were wounding his mother. ‘Please forgive me,’ he apologized. ‘But the wind, or whatever it is, asks a great deal of you. Father has only been dead one year.’

‘Taliesin must go to Artor’s court,’ Nimue repeated. ‘I cannot prevent it, for a mother sends a son down perilous roads if she stands in the path of her child’s destiny.’ A single tear snaked down her cheek.

Abruptly, Nimue wiped away her fears. Her spine straightened and she tossed back her marvellous hair.

‘The family of Myrddion Merlinus has always served the High King of the Celtic tribes, and it was only for love of me that your father deserted his adored Artor. I’m sending Myrddion back to the High King in the guise of my firstborn son. You must do your duty, Taliesin, so your father can be proud of you from beyond the sea of death.’

I don’t want to go, Taliesin thought mulishly. He was angry at the voices that spoke to his mother. He resented the needs of the High King that disturbed his life, but he was excited too, for young men love adventure. Above all else, he could deny his mother nothing, for the skeins of her love bound him more strongly than iron chains.

So Taliesin agreed to put aside his doubts and prepare for the journey, choosing to spend his idle hours, few as they were, with his mother and his brothers. If Glynn or Rhys resented his part in the history of the west, they never permitted him to see their envy.