The glowing girl walked the arcades. She seemed oblivious as the crowd in the courtyard held out their withered limbs and sick children. She ignored them, simply stepping delicately and lightly along the arcade with her shadowed face staring down at the stones. Her steps were feather light. She seemed self-absorbed, lost in her own dream, and the people moaned and called to her, but she did not look at them. She just walked on and the strange light glimmered on her body, and on her arms and legs, and on her long black hair that grew close about her face that was a black mask amidst the eerie glow, but somehow, instinctively perhaps, I sensed that her face was beautiful. She came close to where Issa and I were standing and there she suddenly lifted that jet black shadow of a face to stare in our direction. I smelt something that reminded me of the sea, and then, as suddenly as she had appeared, she vanished through a door and the crowd sighed.

‘What was it?’ Issa whispered to me.

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. I was frightened. This was not madness, but something real, for I had seen it, but what was it? A Goddess? But why had I smelt the sea? ‘Maybe it was one of Manawydan’s spirits,’ I told Issa. Manawydan was the God of the sea, and surely his nymphs would have that salt smell about them.

We waited a long time for the second apparition, and when it came it was far less impressive than the glowing sea nymph. A shape appeared on the palace roof, a black shape which slowly grew to be an armed, cloaked warrior in a monstrous helmet crested with the antlers of a great stag. The man was scarcely to be seen in the dark, but when a cloud slid from the moon we saw what he was and the crowd moaned as he stood above us with his arms outstretched and with his face hidden by the huge helmet’s cheekpieces.