THE DEATH OF NIMUë

ESTHER FRIESNER

“Are we there yet, child?” asked the old woman. Her eyes, once blue and bottomless as the waters of the holy lake, were filmed with age. She rested her ringless hand on her guide’s slim shoulder, feeling with satisfaction the thick silk of the younger woman’s cloak. By my power, she said inwardly. Mine.

“I think so, Mother,” came the reply. She was small, the old woman’s daughter, but straight as a poplar, her pearly face framed in a tangle of blue-black curls. Her mother named her Raven; the last-born, the best-loved. “You said it was an oak?”

“An oak, aye. You would not mistake it, once having seen it. Here, take my eyes, child.”

The old woman laid her hands across her sightless eyes, then groped for her daughter’s face. Obediently the girl tilted back her head to receive her mother’s soft finger tips across her eyelids. The old woman felt the thick lashes kiss her hands like frightened butterflies. Sunlight fell greet through the arched branches. The forest was heavy with summer, thick with the earth-smells, the old, familiar calls from root and fruit and flower. Under the moss, hidden in the shadows of a vixen’s cub-filled lair, half-dreaming in the murmur of a running stream, the voices sang. Come away Oh, come away But the old woman would not listen and the young one could not hear.

“I see it now,” said Raven, gently removing her mother’s hands. The old woman’s skin was papery soft, like the petals of a dying briar rose. Strands of gray hair escaped the loose confinement of her woolen mantle, green as the distant sea. Once, her hair had been a golden net to snare and bind. Now she used other means.

“Then find it, my love. I am tired.”

Raven replaced her mother’s ringless hand on her shoulder. A stray shaft of sun pierced the leafy canopy to dance and die along the polished length of the old woman’s staff. Black and thick, a ring of silver crowned it, and the hand holding it wore a ring whose stone had been wrenched from the living heart of a wave. “Come,” said Raven. “We’re almost there.”

The oak tree stood ageless. Red deer came to drink from a crystal spring welling at its roots. Gray squirrels and their quarrelsome red cousins darted in and out among its branches, and the white ghost eyes of mistletoe glowed faintly from between its leaves. Raven stopped, taking in the tree with her eyes, trying to read its secrets. Patiently the older woman waited. A sigh shook Raven’s shoulders. All she could see was a large oak, matching the image her mother’s magic had planted in her brain; for Raven, alone, only a tree like many other trees.

“We are here,” breathed Nimuë. She released her daughter and began to feel out the terrain with her staff. “Yes, yes, here is the spring – I hear the water bubbling! And here the roots should surge up suddenly, like a giant’s knee – ah! So they still do, after all this time. Now come here, my child. Come and tell me, do you see a place where the moss doesn’t grow? Look near the roots on the far side of the bole and tell me.”

The younger woman looked and found a slab of stone. Wood violets fringed its steely edge, but its surface was bare; nothing dared grow there.

“I see it, Mother. Does it mark – his place? Was it here—?” Raven faltered. Old, old tales told to her in the cradle returned, stories of when her mother was still young and hungering for the power. Remembered firelight danced in Nimuë’s eyes as she leaned close to breathe secrets to her child.

“His place, aye, the place where I lured and left him. He was a husk, sucked dry of all magic. I was ripe with it. I could feel it swelling my blood, throbbing beneath my skin. You have many sisters, Raven, but not one of all my brood ever strained so strongly, ever demanded birth so urgently as the magic I drank from that sad old man.” She sighed and brushed memories away from her sightless eyes. “I will raise the stone now,” she said.

The silver-crowned staff touched the rock almost casually. The older woman murmured words in strange cadence, her rod scraping an answering music from the stone. The violets trembled, and their scent filled Raven’s head as the stone yawned back, crushing them, releasing darkness.

“Old man! Come out, old man!” called Nimuë. Echoing blackness replied. “Merlin awake! The sleep I laid on you is done. Come out into the daylight again and take back what I would give you freely.”

Raven edged closer to the lip of the pit. Shallow steps cut from the earth itself descended into lightlessness. Drafts of air from below blew strangely dry and warm, without a trace of mold or corruption. Nothing answered Nimuë’s call. The women waited.

At last the old woman lost patience. She flailed her staff high overhead and brought it down hard on the tilted stone. Blue-white lightnings arched and crackled.

“Merlin, come!’’ Her summons was a treble shriek. “By every power I or you ever held, I command you!” The lightnings wreathed themselves around her silver head, then plummeted into the crypt, filling it with a momentary flash of starfire.

Raven thought it was a bat. Its wings were gray as ashes, but their leathery shape was more proper to a monstrous butterfly. Wisps of snowy hair trailed its flights as it rose out of the shadows. “Well, Nimuë,” its voice creaked, “how long?”

“Long enough,” replied the old woman. “Long enough for me to have all I wanted from your magic. Now I return it to you. I release you from the spell of sleeping. Now it is my turn to sleep.”

The gray creature chuckled, a musty sound that made Raven feel winter’s chill early, even under summer branches. “Ever the same, eh Nimuë? Age cannot change us that much. Still you see no desires beyond your own. But this time, my love, you shall not have them. You cannot force magic back, once drawn off. It is yours, my magic; yours until time’s end!” The nightmare wings flapped wide in exultation. Raven cried out, revolted as they caressed her cheek in passing flight.

Nimuë’s lips went thin. She clutched her staff with both hands and ground it into the soil. “You will take it back, Merlin,” she said fiercely. “I had powers of my own before yours. I can compel—”

“Nothing,” answered the thing. “I am beyond your world of spells and conjurings. Only the willing vessel can hold magic to the brim. Oh, I waited long for you, sweet Nimuë! I waited long for one fool enough to desire my powers. Little by little I fed them to you, and you were proud, thinking you tricked a doting old man. But who is the trickster now? Who – seeing the marks of sorcery on your face – will ever believe magic is a prize? Farewell, Nimuë! Rest will never come to your bed.” It soared once, then fell like a comet into the dark.

And Nimuë wept by the side of Merlin’s tomb. She sat among the violets and wept like a poor, tired old woman. The dark staff lay beside her as her hands caught the tears.

“Mother?” Raven’s arms were around her. “Mother, don’t cry.”

“I will never rest. Never!” wailed the sorceress, pulling away from her daughter’s embrace. “He said what I have suspected for many ages. I am the power’s slave, now and forever. Who but a fool would ever enter slavery half so willingly as I?”

“Don’t cry,” said Nimuë’s daughter. “You will rest.” She stroked her mother’s hair. “I will accept the power.”

Nimuë’s hand fluttered for her child’s face. Raven took it and pressed it to her cool lips. “No.” The old woman shook her head violently. “Not you.”

“Give it to me, Mother. I can bear it. And I will be wise enough, when the time comes, to rid myself of the burden.” She held her mother’s hand more tightly. “Mother, give me what I was born to have!”

The sorceress’s hands broke free to trace the contours of Raven’s face, while in her rheumy eyes there seemed to glow a spark of long-lost sight. The squirrels, frightened by the stone slab’s strange rising, returned to their branches. At last, Nimuë said only, “Yes,” and with a dry kiss she breathed all magic into her daughter’s body.

“Now I can go,” she said. She left her staff, her green mantle, and her emerald ring in the grass. Her steps were firm as any sighted woman’s. She descended the earthen stair with the grace of a queen newly come into her inheritance. Raven watched until the gray head was no more than a lone star, floating down into the heart of the world.

Then the power took her. Ring and staff leaped into her hand like living things, and the blue mantle wrapped itself around her. She screamed with the burning of it, the green balefire now invading her. Merlin was there, branding her inner eye with his image, wresting from a hellspawn the same powers she now controlled and contained. Nimuë was there, still young, still beautiful, drinking the magic greedily from Merlin’s body. And the chain of power stretched back, back, each possessor eager to tear it from its former vessel, each eager to add his own measure of ambition to the hoard. Raven’s eyes burned. She struck out against the ghosts with her silver-tipped staff, and they scattered. Then she sank down beneath the oak tree.

The grove was quiet.

They came to her there. They came, the small voices. The slab of gray stone drifted softly back into place, the crushed wildflowers bloomed unharmed, and the voices came. She heard them singing, whispering, welcoming, and the fire inside her was gone. A sweetness of cool waters filled her, healed her eyes. The magic stirred inside her; she smiled a waiting mother’s smile.

On her hand the ring glowed pure and white as the luster of a unicorn’s horn. The staff she took up rivaled it for whiteness. Her black hair gleamed against the filmy blue of her mantle, and in her eyes she held all the mysteries of birth and renewal, life, and creation out of love. She sang, and the voices answered.

Raven knelt on the slab and gently stroked the seamed rock, seeking a face she loved. “Sleep well, Mother,” she whispered. “If you – if any before you – had come into the power as I have, you would never have come to see magic as a curse. You saw its shine and wanted it as a child wants every shiny thing it sees. But I heard its music. Farewell.”

And the song on her lips was the song of true enchantment as Nimuë’s daughter retraced her steps to the sea.