“There lies the Lake,” she said. “In a little while we will be within walls, and there will be fire, and food and drink.”
“I shall be glad of all three,” Morgaine said.
“Are you tired, Morgaine?”
“A little,” the girl said diffidently, “but I am sorry to see this journey end. I like seeing new things, and I have never gone anywhere before.”
They halted their horses at the water’s edge, and Viviane tried to see the familiar shore as it would appear to a stranger—the dull greyed waters of the Lake, the tall reeds edging the shore, silent, low-hanging clouds, and tufts of weed in the water. It was a silent scene, and Viviane could hear the girl’s thoughts: It is lonely here, and dark, and dismal.
“How do we get to Avalon? There is no bridge—surely we do not have to swim the horses?” Morgaine asked her, and Viviane, remembering how they had had to do just that at a ford swollen by spring rains, reassured her quickly.
“No; I will call the boat.”
She raised her two hands to cover her face, shut out unwanted sight and sound, and sent out the silent call. Within moments, over the greying surface of the Lake, a low barge appeared. Draped at one end in black and silver, it glided so silently that it seemed to skim over the water like some waterfowl—there was no sound of oars, but as it came nearer they could see the silent oarsmen, wielding their paddles without the slightest splash or sound. They were dark little men, half naked, their skins tattooed with blue woad in magical patterns, and Viviane saw Morgaine’s eyes widen at the sight; but she said nothing.
She accepts all this too calmly, Viviane thought. She is young enough that she does not see the mystery of what we do; somehow I must make her aware of it.
The silent little men moored the boat, securing it with a curiously woven rope of plaited reed. Viviane signalled to the girl to dismount, and the horses were led on board. One of the tattooed men held out his hand to Morgaine to help her step on board, she half expected it to be insubstantial, a vision like the boat, but instead his hand felt callused, hard as horn. Last, Viviane took her place at the prow, and the barge moved out, slowly and silently, into the Lake.
Ahead of them rose the Isle and the Tor with its tall tower to Saint Michael; over the silent water, the sound of church bells rang a soft Angelus. Morgaine, from habit, crossed herself, and one of the little men gave her so sharp a frown that she flinched and dropped her hand. As the boat skimmed over the water through the overgrown reeds she could make out the walls of the church and the monastery. Viviane could sense the young girl’s sudden fear—were they going, after all, to the Isle of the Priests, where convent walls would close about her forever?
“Are we going to the Island church, Aunt?”
“We will not come to the church,” Viviane replied tranquilly, “though it is true that an ordinary traveller, or you yourself, if you set out upon the Lake alone, would never come to Avalon. Wait and see, and ask no questions; that is to be your lot while you are in training.”
Rebuked, Morgaine fell silent. Her eyes were still dilated with fear. She said in a low voice, “It is like the folktale of the fairy barge, which sets sail from the islands to the Land of Youth. . . .”
Viviane paid no attention. She stood in the prow of the boat, breathing deeply, summoning her strength for the magical act she was about to perform; for a moment she wondered if she still had the strength for it. I am old, she thought with momentary panic, yet I must live until Morgaine and her brother are grown. The peace of all this land depends on what I can do to safeguard them!
She cut off the thought; doubt was fatal. She reminded herself that she had done this almost every day of her adult life and by now it was so natural to her that she could have done it in her sleep or if she were dying. She stood still, rigid, locked into the tension of magic, then stretched out her arms, extending them full length, raising them high above her head, palms toward the sky. Then, with a swiftly exhaled breath, she brought them down—and with them fell the mists, so that the sight of the church was wiped out, and the shores of the Isle of the Priests, and even the Tor. The boat glided through thick, impenetrable fog, dark as night around them, and in the darkness she could hear Morgaine, breathing quickly like a small, scared animal. She began to speak—to reassure the girl that there was nothing to fear—then, deliberately, held her peace. Morgaine was now a priestess in training and must learn to conquer fear as she conquered fatigue and hardship and hunger.
The boat began to glide through the mists. Swiftly and surely—for there were no other boats on this Lake—the boat poled through the thick, clinging damp; Viviane felt it on her hair and eyebrows, soaking through her woolen shawl. Morgaine was shivering with the sudden cold.
Then, like a curtain being pulled back, the mist vanished, and before them lay a sunlit stretch of water and a green shore. The Tor was there, but Viviane heard the young girl in the boat catch her breath in shock and astonishment. Atop the Tor stood a circle of standing stones, brilliant in the sunlight. Toward it led the great processional way, winding upward in a spiral around the immense hill. At the foot of the Tor lay the buildings where the priests were housed, and on the slope she could see the Sacred Well and the silver flash of the mirror pool below. Along the shore were groves of apple trees and beyond them great oaks, with the golden shoots of mistletoe clinging to their branches in midair.
Morgaine whispered, “It is beautiful . . .” and Viviane could hear the awe in her voice. “Lady, is it real?”
“It is more real than any other place you have ever seen,” Viviane told her, “and soon you will know it.”
The barge moved toward the shore and scraped heavily on the sandy edge; the silent oarsmen moored it with a rope, and assisted the Lady to step on shore. Then they led the horses to land, and Morgaine was left to step on shore by herself.
She was never to forget that first sight of Avalon in the sunset. Green lawns sloped down to the edge of the reeds along the Lake, and swans glided, silent as the barge, over the waters. Beneath the groves of oak and apple trees rose a low building of grey stone, and Morgaine could see white-robed forms pacing slowly along the colonnaded walk. From somewhere, very softly, she could hear the sound of a harp. The low, slanting light—could it be the same sun she knew?—flooded the land with gold and silence, and she felt her throat tighten with tears. She thought, without knowing why, I am coming home, even though all the years of her life had been spent at Tintagel and at Caerleon and she had never seen this fair country before.
Viviane finished giving directions about the horses, and turned to Morgaine again. She saw the look of wonder and awe on the girl’s face, and forbore to speak until Morgaine drew a shaking breath, as if waking from sleep. Women, robed in dark-dyed dresses with overtunics of deerskin, some of them with a crescent moon tattooed in blue between their brows, came down the path toward them; some were like Morgaine and Viviane herself, small and dark, of the Pictish people, but a few were tall and slender, with fair or reddish-brown hair, and there were two or three who bore the unmistakable stamp of Roman ancestry. They bent before Viviane in silent respect and she raised her hand in a gesture of benediction.
“This is my kinswoman,” Viviane said. “Her name is Morgaine. She will be one of you. Take her—” Then she looked at the young girl, who stood shivering as the sun sank and darkness dropped grey, draining the fantastic colors from the landscape. The child was weary and frightened. There were enough trials and ordeals before her; she need not begin them at this moment.
“Tomorrow,” she said to Morgaine, “you will go to the House of Maidens. It will make no difference there that you are my kinswoman and a princess, you will have no name and no favors except what you can earn for yourself. But for tonight only, come with me; we have had little time to talk together on this journey.”
Morgaine felt her knees wobbling with the sudden relief. The women facing her, all strange and with their alien dress and the blue markings on their brows, f
rightened her more than the whole court of Uther assembled. She saw Viviane make a little dismissing motion, and the priestesses—for so she supposed they were—turned and went away. Viviane held out her hand, and Morgaine took it, feeling the fingers reassuringly cool and solid.
Once again Viviane was the kinswoman she knew, yet at the same time she was the awesome figure who had brought down the mists. Once again Morgaine felt the impulse to make the sign of the cross, and wondered if all this country would vanish away as Father Columba said all demonwork and sorceries must vanish at that sign.
But she did not cross herself; she knew suddenly that she would never do so again. That world lay behind her forever.
At the edge of the apple grove, between two trees just coming into blossom, stood a little house of wattle and daub. Inside, a fire was burning, and a young woman—like the others she had seen, in dark dress and deerskin tunic—welcomed them with a silent bow.
“Do not speak to her,” said Viviane. “She is, at present, under a vow of silence. She is a priestess in her fourth year, and her name is Raven.”
In silence, Raven stripped off Viviane’s outer garments and her muddy and travel-worn shoes; at a sign from Viviane she did the same for Morgaine. She brought them water for washing, and later, food: barley bread and dried meat. For drink there was only cold water, but it was fresh and delicious, unlike any water Morgaine had ever tasted.
“It is the water of the Sacred Well,” Viviane said. “We drink nothing else here; it brings vision and clear sight. And the honey is from our own hives. Eat your meat and enjoy it, for you will taste no more for years; the priestesses eat no meat until they have finished their training.”
“Why is that, Lady?” Morgaine could not say “Aunt” or “kinswoman.” Standing between her and the familiar names was the memory of the Goddess-like figure summoning the mists. “Is it wrong to eat meat?”
“Surely not and a day will come when you may eat whatever food comes to you. But a diet free of animal flesh produces a high level of consciousness, and this you must have while you are learning to use the Sight and to control your magical powers rather than letting them control you. Like the Druids in the early years of their training, the priestesses eat only bread and fruit, and sometimes a little fish from the lake, and drink only water from the Well.”
Morgaine said shyly, “You drank wine at Caerleon, Lady.”
“Certainly, and so may you, when you know the proper times to eat and drink, and the proper times to abstain,” said Viviane curtly. That silenced Morgaine, and she sat nibbling at her bread and honey. But although she was hungry, it seemed to stick in her throat.
“Have you had enough to eat?” Viviane asked. “Good, then let Raven take the dishes—you should sleep, child. But sit here beside me before the fire and talk a little, for tomorrow Raven will take you to the House of Maidens, and you will see me no more, save at the rites, until you are trained to take your turn with the older priestesses, to sleep in my house and care for me as a serving-woman. And at that time you too may well be under a vow of silence, neither to speak nor answer. But for tonight, you are only my kinswoman, not yet vowed to the service of the Goddess, and you may ask me whatever you will.”
She held out her hand, and Morgaine came to join her on the bench before the fire. Viviane turned and said, “Will you take the pin from my hair, Morgaine? Raven has gone to her rest, and I do not want to disturb her again.”
Morgaine pulled the carven pin of bone from the older woman’s hair, and it came down with a rush, long and dark with a streak of white at one temple. Viviane sighed, stretching her bare feet to the fire.
“It is good to be home again—I have had to travel overmuch in late years,” she said, “and I am no longer strong enough to find it a pleasure.”
“You said I might ask you questions,” Morgaine said timidly. “Why do some of the women have blue signs on their brows, and others not?”
“The blue crescent is a sign that they are vowed to the service of the Goddess, to live and die at her will,” Viviane said. “Those who are here only for some schooling in the Sight do not take such vows.”
“Am I to take vows?”
“That will be your own choice,” Viviane said. “The Goddess will tell you whether she wishes to set her hand upon you. Only the Christians use the cloister as a kitchen midden for their unwanted daughters and widows.”
“But how will I know if the Goddess wants me?”
Viviane smiled in the darkness. “She will call you in a voice you cannot fail to understand. If you have heard that call, there will be nowhere in the world to hide from her voice.”
Morgaine wondered, but was too timid to ask, if Viviane had been vowed so. Of course! She is the High Priestess, the Lady of Avalon. . . .
“I was so vowed,” Viviane said quietly, with the trick she had of answering an unspoken question, “but the mark has worn away with time . . . if you look closely, I think you can still see a little of it at the edge of my hair, there.”
“Yes, a little . . . what does it mean to be vowed to the Goddess, Lady? Who is this Goddess? I asked Father Columba once if God had any other name, and he said, no, there was only one Name by which we could be saved and that was Jesus the Christ, but—” She broke off, abashed. “I am very ignorant about such things.”
“To know you are ignorant is the beginning of wisdom,” Viviane said. “Then, when you begin to learn, you will not have to forget all the things you think you know. God is called by many names, but is everywhere One; and so, when you pray to Mary, mother of Jesus, you pray, without knowing it, to the World Mother in one of her many forms. The God of the priests and the Great One of the Druids is the same One, and that is why the Merlin sometimes takes his place among the Christian councillors of the High King; he knows, if they do not, that God is One.”
“Your mother was priestess here before you, my mother said—”
“That is true, but it was not a matter of blood alone. Rather that I had inherited her gift of the Sight, and vowed myself to the Goddess of my free will. The Goddess did not call your mother, nor Morgause. So I sent Igraine to be married to your father and then to Uther, and Morgause to be married as the King should decree. Igraine’s marriage served the Goddess; over Morgause, she had no power and no call.”
“Are the priestesses called by the Goddess never married then?”
“Usually not. They do not vow themselves to any man, except for the Great Marriage, where priest and priestess join in symbol of God and Goddess, and children so born are children to no mortal man, but to the Goddess. This is a Mystery, and you will learn it at the proper time. I was so born, and have no earthly father. . . .”
Morgaine stared at her and whispered, “Do you mean that—that your mother lay with a God?”
“No, of course not. Only a priest, overshadowed by the power of the God; probably a priest whose name she never knew, because at that moment or in that time, the God came into him and possessed him so that the man was forgotten and unknown.” Her face was distant, remembering strange things; Morgaine could see them moving across her brow. It seemed that the fire made pictures in the room, a great figure of a Horned One. . . . She shivered suddenly and pulled her cloak about her.
“Are you weary, child? You should sleep—”
But Morgaine was curious again. “Were you born in Avalon?”
“Yes, though I was fostered on the Druid Isle, far to the north, in the Islands. And when I was grown to womanhood, the Goddess set her hand upon me—the blood of the priestess-born ran true in me, as I think it does in you, my child.” Her voice was distant; she rose and stood looking into the fire.
“I am trying to remember how many years ago it was that I came here with the old woman . . . the moon was farther south then, for it was harvesttime, and the dark days of Samhain coming on, in the dying of the year. It was a bitter winter, even at Avalon; we heard wolves in the night, and snow lay deep, and we hungered here, for no one coul
d make the passage through the storms, and some of the little children at the breast died when milk failed. . . . Then the Lake froze, and they brought us food on sledges. I was a maiden then, my breasts had not grown, and now I am old, an old woman, a crone . . . so many years, child.”
Morgaine could feel the older woman’s hand trembling; she held it hard in her own. After a moment Viviane drew the girl to her side and stood, her arm around her waist.
“So many moons, so many Midsummers . . . and now it seems that Samhain follows hard upon Beltane-eve more swiftly than the moon waxed from maiden to full when I was young. And you too will stand here before the fire, and grow old as I have grown old, unless the Mother has other tasks for you . . . ah, Morgaine, Morgaine, little one, I should have left you in your mother’s house. . . .”
Morgaine flung her arms fiercely around the priestess. “I could not stay there! I would rather have died. . . .”
The Mists of Avalon Page 21