Page 47 of The Quest for Excalibur
I shook my head, steering the conversation away from Morgana. “But underwater? For over a century? It would rust to nothing, surely?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. But you owe it to Arthur to look. They call the sword I embedded in that rockthe sword of destiny, but it isn’t. This one is.”
“Nimuë told me I had to give it to Arthur…”
“I think it must be vital to him.”
I hesitated. “Then I’ll have to tell him. I’ll choose the time myself, though.”
“Don’t wait too long,” Merlin said. “I have a feeling time presses hard on us, and that sword has a part to play.”
*
With the midsummerfestivities behind us, the corn began to ripen in fields that resembled a patchwork quilt of colors from green through to golden, taking in the blue of flax and the pale tawny of hayfields cut and cleared. Wagons lumbered up the hill bringing in the tribute from the farms– loads of hay, vegetables, and meat on the hoof ready for butchering. Summer was a time of plenty.
A week after my conversation with Merlin, I dreamed of Nimuë again.
I’d been working all day with the green young horses we’d brought up from the grazing lands, and had come in hot and tired, but satisfied that the horses were coming on nicely. I’d picked out a rangy mare I thought would suit Amhar now he was finally growing, and spent some time working with her on foot, looking forward to the moment when I’d tell him she was his. Tomorrow, we’d be backing her. Maybe I could let Amhar play a part and be the first to test her with his weight. A good idea. I could get Arthur to tell him he could do that, in an attempt to repair the broken links between them.
Sleep took me the moment my head hit the pillow, and nothing Arthur could have done would have kept me awake, even if he hadn’t been as tired as me.
In the deep of the night, something jerked me out of my slumbers. For a moment I lay still, heart hammering, sweat springing out all over my body, sensing the urgency of whatever it was that had disturbed my sleep. Then I opened my eyes. Moonlight streaming through our unshuttered window spotlit a small, solitary figure standing six feet from our bed, bathing her from head to toe in an ethereal glow.
I’d have known her anywhere. A thin sleeping shift covered her slight body, and her small, pale feet were bare. Long dark hair so like her mother’s hung to her waist, but the eyes that regarded me solemnly from shadowed sockets were Merlin’s.
Was she a ghost? Had she died in far off Viroconium and come to haunt me? I blinked and pushed myself upright in bed, but her image didn’t waver. And surely an image was all it could be. She couldn’t really be here, in my chamber at night, over a hundred and fifty miles from her home.
I stared, mesmerized.
For a minute that lasted an eternity, we regarded one another. Then the apparition glanced over her shoulder as though expecting an interruption. When she turned back to face me, her solemn expression had vanished, replaced, instead, by anxious fear.
She leaned toward me. “Take him to the sword.” Her lips never moved, but her words hissed around the quiet chamber. “Fulfil the prophecy. Set Excalibur in his hands.” Her voice held sweetness and urgency, mingled with that cold fear. A child’s clear treble, and yet the voice of something older than the world I knew.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “How can I take him somewhere I don’t know? Tell me?
But her image was fading. Through her shimmering body, I saw the cold brazier, the table, the closed door to the hall.
“Don’t go,” I cried. “Tell me where I have to take him. I don’t know where to go.”
Her image rippled, like a reflection in water. Eyes now stretched wide with fear, she held up her hand and pointed. Northwest. Toward Ynys Witrin.
“Don’t go!” I shouted the last words, reaching out my hands toward her as her image dissipated like smoke in the wind.
“Gwen.” Hands shook me and my eyes flew open. I grabbed wildly, trying to snatch Nimuë back into reality, and found solid flesh. Arthur was leaning over me in the dim light of early morning, his face barely visible in the gloom. “Wake up, you were having a nightmare. Wake up.”
I blinked.
He heaved a deep sigh. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Of course. He thought I meant him. “I’m all right now,” I whispered as I nestled against his warm body, his arm tight around me. “I had a dream.” It was now or never. “Like the one I had after my accident.”
He drew me a little closer. “You were shouting. You woke me up.”
For a moment I saw Nimuë’s slender figure again, this time in my mind’s eye, with her arm extended and her slender finger pointing. “There’s something we have to do,” I whispered, my cheek against his chest. “Something you and I have to do together.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
With the dambroken, the words came spilling out. I couldn’t stop them. I told Arthur everything I’d seen in my dream and what Merlin had shared with me. I finished by telling him what Merlin suspected might be the truth about the sword. Arthur listened attentively, making no comment until I’d finished, and the pale light of dawn was creeping through our open window.
