Page 132 of Bitter Burn
Nearly a year passed after that, and on a hot July day, a visitor came to the door.
It was Nimue, having stopped off at Morois before meeting Merlin and their child in Wales for a long summer stay. She wanted to go on a walk by the sea, and having expected a visit like this for some time, I agreed.
We drove the short distance to the village of Tintagel, parked, and walked northeast, striking for the cliffs facing Tintagel Castle. Or rather the ruins of Tintagel Castle, a smattering of half-crumbled walls and isolated courtyards and green, windswept grass. The waves crashed against the rocky walls of the headland, and a stiff breeze waved the coastal wildflowers around our feet—sheep’s bit and sea campion and thrift. We sat next to a patch of nodding oxeye daisies and didn’t speak for a long time.
“It used to be more impressive,” I finally said, as if I’m apologizing to a guest for a messy house. “There were over a hundred buildings on the island alone.”
“Larger than London at one time,” Nimue agreed.
“There were always sails on the horizon.”
“Sheep and cattle on the hills,” she added. “Tin coming from the mines.”
My eyes strayed to the top of the headland, beyond most of the ruins. It was impossible to see from where we were, but there was a low stone outline of a long-ago garden, now gone to grass. The bones buried there would be gone now, taken by the acidic coastal soil, and there would be nothing left of the hazel tree that grew on top of one, or the honeysuckle vine that grew from the other.
“Do you remember?” asked Nimue. “The first time?”
The first time.
The life I’d led across the cove, the life I’d led with a sword in my hand.
It was unbelievable in the most literal sense…as in it couldn’t be believed. That there had been a Mark in Tintagel, that he had been married to a woman named Isolde who fell in love with his best knight. That the three of us had done this already, the jealousy and the lust and the lies, and it had ended with two petal-strewn graves and a broken king.
That somehow the three of us were here, again.
“Yes,” I said. “I remember.”
“You read the book?”
I had.
I hadn’t planned on reading it—hadn’t even planned on bringing it to Cornwall—but I found myself packing it anyway. It had sat on my grandfather’s desk for months, through our first summer and the long, sweet autumn that followed, until finally, on a dim winter day, I picked it up.
Something had moved through me then, a slow but urgent current, a sharp and translucent kind of clarity.
When I’d opened the book to the first page, I heard the sea.
“I still don’t understand.” I watched as the waves broke under a small cave set into the cliff. “But when I remember it, I don’t feel like I need to. It just is.”
“You’re so much like you were then,” she said. “Pragmatic to a fault. Uninterested in any fate that you didn’t make for yourself.”
I thought of the garden above the rest of the castle, haunted by the wind. “I didn’t make a very good fate for myself, if that’s the case.”
“You chose differently this time. You chose mercy. You chose them even when it meant letting them choose each other.” She paused. “Will you tell them? Tristan and Isolde?”
“Do you think I should?”
Nimue’s eyes had narrowed—not in doubt, only in thought—and as I watched her stare at the sea, I remembered this too from another life. Asking for her counsel as the water roared below and the birds wheeled in a blue sky above us.
“Yes,” she said finally, “but when it makes the most sense to you. There won’t be graves in your garden again, Mark. You have time.”
At the end of the summer, we got a notice from the post office that they’d been holding a package for me for over a year. Baffled, I went to the post office, signed for it, and then took the small box home, where I opened it on my grandfather’s desk while the dog snored nearby. The package had been mailed from Rome, but my name had been filled in as the sender’s name, and the sending address was a Roman post office.
I opened the box to find a typed note. Finely milled paper, the kind that might dissolve in water.
I hope you have a chance to wear this again before the end. I’m sorry, sir.
- s
