Bernard Cornwell - Excalibur

‘There’ll be time for rest later,’ I said, watching the Druid shuffle off into the dark. Morwenna put her arms around me and rested her head on my shoulder. She had hair as golden as Ceinwyn’s had been, and it smelt like Ceinwyn’s. ‘Maybe it isn’t a magic at all,’ she said. ‘If it weren’t magic,’ I said, ‘then she would have died.’ ‘There’s a woman in Powys who is said to have great skills.’

‘Then send for her,’ I said wearily, though I had no faith in any sorcerers now. A score had come and taken gold, but not one had lifted the sickness. I had sacrificed to Mithras, I had prayed to Bel and to Don, and nothing had worked. Ceinwyn moaned, and the moan rose to a scream. I flinched at the sound, then gently pushed Morwenna away. ‘I must go to her.’

‘You rest, father,’ Morwenna said. ‘I’ll go to her.’

It was then that I saw the cloaked figure standing in the centre of the courtyard. Whether it was a man or a woman I could not tell, nor could I say how long the figure had stood there. It seemed to me that only a moment before the courtyard had been empty, but now the cloaked stranger was in front of me with a face dark shadowed from the moon by a deep hood, and I felt a sudden dread that this was death appearing. I stepped towards the figure. ‘Who are you?’ I demanded.

‘No one you know, Lord Derfel Cadarn.’ It was a woman who spoke, and as she spoke she pushed back the hood and I saw that she had painted her face white, then smeared soot about her eye sockets so that she looked like a living skull. Morwenna gasped.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded again.

‘I am the breath of the west wind, Lord Derfel,’ she said in a sibilant voice, ‘and the rain that falls on Cadair Idris, and the frost that edges Eryri’s peaks. I am the messenger from the time before kings, I am the Dancer.’ She laughed then, and her laughter was like a madness in the night. The sound of it brought Taliesin and Galahad to the door of the sickroom where they stood and stared at the white-faced laughing woman. Galahad made the sign of the cross while Taliesin touched the iron latch of the door.

‘Come here, Lord Derfel,’ the woman commanded me, ‘come to me, Lord Derfel.’

‘Go, Lord,’ Taliesin encouraged me, and I had a sudden hope that the lice-ridden Druid’s spells might have worked after all, for though they had not lifted the sickness from Ceinwyn, they had brought this apparition to the courtyard and so I stepped into the moonlight and went close to the cloaked woman.

‘Embrace me, Lord Derfel,’ the woman said, and there was something in her voice that spoke of decay and dirt, but I shuddered and took another step and placed my arms around her thin shoulders. She smelt of honey and ashes. ‘You want Ceinwyn to live?’ she whispered in my ear.

‘Yes.’

‘Then come with me now,’ she whispered back, and pulled out of my embrace. ‘Now,’ she repeated when she saw my hesitation.

‘Let me fetch a cloak and a sword,’ I said.

‘You will need no sword where we go, Lord Derfel, and you may share my cloak. Come now, or let your lady suffer.’ With those words she turned and walked out of the courtyard.

‘Go!’ Taliesin urged me, ‘go!’

Galahad tried to come with me, but the woman turned in the gate and ordered him back. ‘Lord Derfel comes alone,’ she said, ‘or he does not come at all.’

And so I went, following death in the night, going north.

All that night we walked so that by dawn we were at the edge of the high hills, and still she pressed on, choosing paths that took us far from any settlement. The woman who called herself the Dancer walked barefoot, and skipped sometimes as if she was filled with an unquenchable joy. An hour after the dawn, when the sun was flooding the hills with new gold, she stopped beside a small lake and dashed water onto her face and scrubbed at her cheeks with handfuls of grass to wash away the mix of honey and ashes with which she had whitened her skin. Till that moment I had not known whether she was young or old, but now I saw she was a woman in her twenties, and very beautiful. She had a delicate face, full of life, with happy eyes and a quick smile. She knew her own beauty and laughed when she saw that I recognized it too. ‘Would you lie with me, Lord Derfel?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘If it would cure Ceinwyn,’ she asked, ‘would you lie with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘But it won’t!’ she said, ‘it won’t!’ And she laughed and ran ahead of me, dropping her heavy cloak to reveal a thin linen dress clinging to a lissom body. ‘Do you remember me?’ she asked, turning to face me.

‘Should I?’

‘I remember you, Lord Derfel. You stared at my body like a hungry man, but you were hungry. So hungry. Remember?’ And with that she closed her eyes and walked down the sheep path towards me, and she made her steps high and precise, pointing her toes out with each high step, and I immediately recalled her. This was the girl whose naked skin had shone in Merlin’s darkness. ‘You’re Olwen,’ I said, her name coming back to me across the years. ‘Olwen the Silver.’

‘So you do remember me. I am older now. Older Olwen,’ she laughed. ‘Come, Lord! Bring the cloak.’

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘Far, Lord, far. To where the winds spring and the rains begin and the mists are born and no kings rule.’ She danced on the path, her energy apparently endless. All that day she danced, and all that day she spoke nonsense to me. I think she was mad. Once, as we walked through a small valley where silver-leaved trees shivered in the little wind, she pulled off the dress and danced naked across the grass, and she did it to stir and tempt me, and when I doggedly walked on and showed no hunger for her, she just laughed, slung the dress across her shoulder and walked beside me as though her nakedness was no strange thing. ‘I was the one who carried the curse to your home,’ she told me proudly.

‘Why?’

‘Because it had to be done, of course,’ she said in all apparent sincerity, ‘just as now it has to be lifted! Which is why we’re going to the mountains, Lord.’

‘To Nimue?’ I asked, knowing already, as I think I had known ever since Olwen had first appeared in the courtyard, that it was to Nimue we were going.

‘To Nimue,’ Olwen agreed happily. ‘You see, Lord, the time has come.’

‘What time?’

‘Time for the end of all things, of course,’ Olwen said, and thrust her dress into my arms so that she was unencumbered.

She skipped ahead of me, turning sometimes to give me a sly look, and taking pleasure in my unchanging expression. ‘When the sun shines,’ she told me, ‘I like to be naked.’

‘What is the end of all things?’ I asked her.

‘We shall make Britain into a perfect place,’ Olwen said. ‘There will be no sickness and no hunger, no fears and no wars, no storms and no clothes. Everything will end, Lord! The mountains will fall and the rivers will turn on themselves and the seas will boil and the wolves will howl, but at its ending the country will be green and gold and there will be no more years, and no more time, and we shall all be Gods and Goddesses. I shall be a tree Goddess. I shall rule the larch and the hornbeam, and in the mornings I shall dance, and in the evenings I shall lie with golden men.’

‘Were you not supposed to lie with Gawain?’ I asked her. ‘When he came from the Cauldron? I thought you were to be his Queen.’

‘I did lie with him, Lord, but he was dead. Dead and dry. He tasted of salt.’ She laughed. ‘Dead and dry and salty. One whole night I warmed him, but he did not move. I did not want to lie with him,’ she added in a confiding voice, ‘but since that night, Lord, I have known nothing but happiness!’ She turned lightly, dancing a twisting step on the spring grass.