The Bloody Cup by M. K. Hume Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    But, late at night, when the wind blew from the east, he struggled with the warning implied by the Bloody Cup. He imagined a large golden goblet decorated with huge, raw-cut stones. It hovered in the deepest recesses of his mind, growing daily in size as his imagination fed on it. Ghastly and grisly, blood spilled down its sides and blurred the rich embossing and the fair gems. Within the rim, the blood swirled in a viscous spiral that dragged Taliesin down into impossible and fathomless depths.
    He woke from such dreams drenched in sweat and trembling with terror but, in his waking hours, he mastered his face so that Nimue would miss the telltale pallor of his dread.
    Both mother and son lied wordlessly to each other.
    Winter had gripped the mountain country in its iron fists when Taliesin prepared to leave the only home he had ever known. On the morning of his departure, he rose early, expecting to find his mother in the kitchens or drying fleece before the fire, but the house had that curious, empty hollowness that only manifests itself when its soul is absent.
    Two bare feet had tracked a path from the kitchen quarters, across the coarse stubble of field, and into the line of wild forest. The light footsteps had barely disturbed the dead grasses, but where a light dusting of frost had settled, Taliesin could trace the route taken by his mother.
    As quiet as any wild young animal, he followed her footsteps into the trees and along the edge of an ice-bound rivulet that sank into a steeply sloping fold in the hills. At the bottom a black mere lay partially frozen over, glistening in the weak morning light like a slice of polished agate.
    Taliesin halted and watched as his mother stepped on to the frozen lake. Her furs trailed from her shoulders, dark and slick as an otter’s coat under the silver fall of her unbound hair. Words sang in Taliesin’s head as Nimue cast off her furs and stood half-naked on the frozen lake, with her slender white arms raised upwards towards the rising sun. He could see the mark of the dragon as it coiled up her leg, and he could visualise the ice beneath her feet puddling slightly beneath the warmth of her feet.
    Before she turned to retrace her steps to the Stone House, she bowed to the sky, the water and the willows that defined the far edges of the mere. Around her neck, Myrddion’s electrum necklace gleamed like fish scales.
    ‘She is, in truth, the Lady of the Lake.’ Taliesin hugged the trunk of the oak tree that hid him in its shadow as his mother glided past him, her furs now returned to her shoulders and her flesh pearly-white in the half-light.
    Later that day, when a weak sun had risen in a grey sky, the song was already growing in Taliesin’s head as he rode away from his home with only his favourite hound for company and protection.
    Nimue wept.

    Three other women faced the same sunrise with similar stirrings of emotion, powerful and scouring.
    Far to the north, in a bothie of thatch, willow lathes and mud, Morgan brooded over her