To pause in the cooling glade is sweet. I am already tired and feeling my age. I stumble, twigs cracking underfoot. A cloud of butterflies billows from a bush, sunlight speckling their wings. Beyond the bush I see the mouth of the cave.

Nimue knows the way but I brush past her. Hooking aside a veil of trailing roots with my staff, I duck inside the dark opening.

I feel her resentment, the student ambitious to surpass her teacher, her one time lover.

I could have brought torches to light our path, but as Nimue had said, "Light spells to a Mage Lord are but a trifle."

At a word my magic staff glows, throwing arching shadows across the cave roof. We descend a rubble slope snaking between bolders. Far off the boom of rushing water. As we go deeper I feel the press of stone about me. Un-named dread stalks me.

After weary hours we reach a place where the path divides. Ahead still the sound of water. Left a narrower way. What is this fear?

I am startled by Nimue's smooth arms sliding round me in an embrace. She pushes her body against mine, her warmth is a shock. "Nearly there my love," she says. Only now she casts her own light spell. Taking the lead she enters the left hand path.

We emerge suddenly from a tunnel into a grotto of wonders.

The walls about us glint. In the rock are the shapes of petrified sea creatures.

Great carbuncles of smooth rock like melting candles dangle down the walls. In places a filligree of slender columns bar our way. We thread our path across a rippling surface dotted with stumps of stone. The contorted walls resemble faces of gods or demons, illusions which disappear as we move. All about us the walls blush blue and purple shot through with streaks of black and glinting gold.

At the centre of the cavern Nimue stops beside an enormous boulder. She drops to her knees and whispers, “There, look there!”

A corner of the rock has fractured revealing a chamber beneath. There is a gap only big enough for my arm. I thrust my staff into the fissure. Below I see a room, at one end an altar, covered by a cloth of gold, and on it stands a drinking vessel of great antiquity. I am dumbfounded.

“Can you reach it” Nimue asks eagerly? I cannot. I focus my will upon the cup but my spell is useless. This treasure exerts some force I don't understand

“Perhaps our joined powers could raise the rock?” Nimue offers, her face impassive. I laugh dismissively suspecting a trap.

I puzzle the problem. “I will shapeshift into a giant serpent and slide through the crack to retrieve the cup. When the spell wears off we will return to the surface.”

I detect no disappointment in Nimue at this change of plan. Perhaps my suspicions of her motives are unfounded.

I am close to exhaustion. Melding my form into a serpent is both painful and taxing. It is only Nimue's strength which finally enables the completion of the spell.

The grotto seems even stranger through my reptillian eyes. My tongue tastes the air nervously. Despite scales which easily grip the ridged floor I am tiring quickly. Something is not right. I seem to be battling a great pressure, like a wind roaring from the fissure. Now at the threshold of the opening the pressure is terrifying. My serpent form shimmers in the blast. I raise my coils up and lunge forward with desperate strength.

All is silent. Down here there is a pure white light emanating from the altar. By this light I see my true form again. My spell has been vanquished by the Holy Grail. Dread siezes.

“Nimue, help me,” I cry but she laughs and takes up my staff.

I try to reach the grail, to fling it out through the hole but Nimue brings down an avalanche of rock to seal my tomb.

“Goodbye Merlin, and may you and the Grail keep good company until the end of the world.” She sings a sweet mocking song of trees and fields, mountains and brooks. Her haunting refrain echoes and fades as she leaves me, trapped for ever, far from the world until the end of time.




(c) Bill West