The Mists of Avalon

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “I knew that,” Viviane said, sighing. “I think the Mother has laid her hand on you too, child. But you have come from a life of ease into a hard life and a bitter one, Morgaine, and it may be that I will have tasks for you as cruel as those the Great Mother has laid on me. Now you think only of learning to use the Sight, and of living in the beautiful land of Avalon, but it is no easy thing to serve the will of Ceridwen, my daughter; she is not only the Great Mother of Love and Birth, she is also the Lady of Darkness and Death.” Sighing, she stroked the girl’s soft hair. “She is also the Morrigán, the messenger of strife, the Great Raven . . . oh, Morgaine, Morgaine, I would you had been my own child, but even so I could not spare you, I must use you for her purposes as I was myself used.” She bowed her head, laid it for a moment on the young girl’s shoulder. “Believe that I love you, Morgaine, for a time will come when you will hate me as much as you love me now—”

  Morgaine fell impulsively to her knees. “Never,” she whispered. “I am in the hands of the Goddess . . . and in yours . . .”

  “May she grant that you never regret those words,” Viviane said. She stretched out her hands to the fire. They were small, and strong, and a little swollen with age. “With these hands I have brought children to birth; and I have seen a man’s lifeblood flow from them. Once I betrayed a man to his death, a man who had lain in my arms and I had sworn to love. I destroyed your mother’s peace, and now I have taken her children from her. Do you not hate me and fear me, Morgaine?”

  “I fear you,” said the girl, still kneeling at her feet, her dark, intense, small face glowing with firelight, “but I could never hate you.”

  Viviane sighed deeply, thrusting away foresight and dread. “And it is not me you fear,” she said, “but her. We are both in her hands, child. Your virginity is sacred to the Goddess. See you keep it so till the Mother makes her will known.”

  Morgaine laid her small hands over Viviane’s. “Be it so,” she whispered. “I swear it.”

  The next day she went to the House of the Maidens, and there she remained for many years.

  Morgaine speaks . . .

  How do you write of the making of a priestess? What is not obvious is secret. Those who have walked that road will know, and those who have not will never know though I should write down all the forbidden things. Seven times Beltane-eve came and went; seven times the winters shrivelled us all with cold. The Sight came easily; Viviane had said I was priestess-born. It was not so easy to bid it come when I willed and only when I willed, and to close the gates of the Sight when it was not fitting I should see.

  It was the small magics which came hardest, forcing the mind first to walk in unaccustomed paths. To call the fire and raise it at command, to call the mists, to bring rain—all these were simple, but to know when to bring rain or mist and when to leave it in the hands of the Gods, that was not so simple. Other lessons there were, at which my knowledge of the Sight helped me not at all: the herb lore, and the lore of healing, the long songs of which not a single word might ever be committed to writing, for how can the knowledge of the Great Ones be committed to anything made by human hands? Some of the lessons were pure joy, for I was allowed to learn to play upon the harp and to fashion my own, using sacred woods and the gut of an animal killed in ritual; and some lessons were of terror.

  Hardest of all, perhaps, to look within myself, under the spell of the drugs which loosed the mind from the body, sick and retching, while the mind soared free past the limits of time and space, and to read in the pages of the past and the future. But of that I may say nothing. At last, the day when I was cast out of Avalon, clad only in my shift, and unarmed save for the little dagger of a priestess, to return—if I could. I knew that if I did not, they would mourn me as one dead, but the gates would never again be opened to me unless I could bid them open at my own will and command. And when the mists closed around me, I wandered long on the shores of the alien Lake, hearing only the bells and the doleful chanting of the monks. And at last I broke through the mists, and called upon her, my feet upon the earth and my head among the stars, stretching from horizon to horizon, and cried aloud the great word of Power. . . .

  And the mists parted and I saw before me the same sunlit shore where the Lady had brought me seven years before, and I set my feet on the solid earth of my own home, and I wept as I had done when first I came there as a frightened child. And then the mark of the crescent moon was set between my brows by the hand of the Goddess herself . . . but this is a Mystery of which it is forbidden to write. Those who have felt their brow burned with the kiss of Ceridwen will know whereof I speak.

  It was in the second spring after that, when I had been released from the silence, that Galahad, who was already skilled at fighting the Saxons under his own father, King Ban of Less Britain, returned to Avalon.

  12

  The priestesses above a certain grade took it in turns to serve the Lady of the Lake, and at this season when the Lady was very busy with preparations for the approaching Midsummer festival, one of them always slept in the little wattled house, so that the Lady might have someone at her call night and day. It was so early that the sun still hid in the mist at the edge of the horizon when Viviane stepped into the room beyond her own, where her attendant slept, and beckoned quietly to awaken her.

  The woman sat up in bed, flinging her deerskin tunic over her undergown.

  “Tell the bargemen to be ready. And go and ask my kinswoman Morgaine to attend upon me.”

  A few minutes later, Morgaine paused respectfully before the entrance where Viviane was kneeling to build up her fire. She made no sound; after nine years of training in the priestess arts, she moved so silently that no footfall or even a breath of air marked her passing. But after those years, too, the ways of the priestesses were so well known to her that she was not surprised when Viviane turned as she reached the door, and said, “Come in, Morgaine.”

  Rather contrary to her usual custom, however, Viviane did not invite her kinswoman to sit, but kept her standing there, regarding her evenly for a moment.

  Morgaine was not tall; she would never be that, and in these years in Avalon she had grown as tall as she would ever be, a scant inch taller than the Lady. Her dark hair was plaited down the back of her neck and wrapped with a deerskin thong; she wore the dark-dyed blue dress and deerskin overtunic of any priestess, and the blue crescent shone darkly between her brows. Nevertheless, smooth and anonymous as she was among them, there was a glint in her eyes which answered to Viviane’s cool stare, and Viviane knew from experience that, small and delicately made as she was, when she wished she could throw a glamour over herself that made her appear not only tall but majestic. Already she appeared ageless, and she would, Viviane knew, look much the same even when white appeared in her dark hair.

  She thought, with a flicker of relief, No, she is not beautiful, then wondered why it should matter to her. No doubt Morgaine, like all young women, even a priestess vowed lifelong to the service of the Goddess, would prefer to be beautiful, and was intensely unhappy because she was not. She thought, with a slight curl of her lip, When you are my age, my girl, it will not matter whether or no you are beautiful, for everyone you know will believe that you are a great beauty whenever you wish them to believe it; and when you do not, you can sit back and pretend to be a simple old woman long past such thoughts. She had fought her own battle more than twenty years ago, when she saw Igraine growing to womanhood with the tawny and russet beauty for which Viviane, still young, would gladly have bartered her soul and all her power. Sometimes, in moments of self-doubt, she wondered if she had thrust Igraine into marriage with Gorlois so that she need not be endlessly taunted with the younger woman’s loveliness, mocking her own dark severity. But I brought her to the love of the man destined for her before the ring stones of Salisbury plain were piled one upon another, she thought.

  She realized that Morgaine was still standing quietly, awaiting her word, and smiled.

  “Truly
I grow old,” she said. “I was lost, for a moment, in memories. You are not the child who came here many years ago; but there are times when I forget it, my Morgaine.”

  Morgaine smiled and the smile transformed her face, which in repose was rather sullen. Like Morgause, Viviane thought, though otherwise they are nothing alike. It is Taliesin’s blood.

  Morgaine said, “I think you forget nothing, kinswoman.”

  “Perhaps not. Have you broken your fast, child?”

  “No. But I am not hungry.”

  “Very well. I want you to go in the barge.”

  Morgaine, who had grown used to silence, answered only with a gesture of respect and assent.

  It was not, of course, a request unusual in any way—the barge from Avalon must always be guided by a priestess who knew the secret way through the mists.

  “It is a family mission,” Viviane said, “for it is my son who is approaching the island, and I thought it well to send a kinswoman to welcome him here.”

  Morgaine smiled. “Balan?” she said. “Will his foster-brother Balin not fear for his soul if he goes beyond the sound of church bells?”

  A glint of humor lighted Viviane’s eyes, and she said, “Both of them are proud men and dedicated warriors, and they live blameless lives, even by the standards of the Druids, harming none and oppressing none, and ever seeking to right a wrong when they find it. I doubt not that the Saxons find them four times as fearsome when they fight side by side. In fact, they are afraid of nothing, except the evil magic of that wicked sorceress who is mother to one of them . . .” and she giggled like a young woman, and Morgaine giggled with her.

  Then, sobering, she said, “Well, I do not regret sending Balan to fosterage in the outer world. He had no call to become a Druid, and he would have made a very bad one, and if he is lost to the Goddess, no doubt she will watch over him in her own way, even if he prays to her with beads and calls upon her as Mary the Virgin. No, Balan is away on the coast, fighting against the Saxons at Uther’s side, and I am content to have it so. It is of my younger son I spoke.”

  “I thought Galahad still in Brittany.”

  “So did I, but last night with the Sight I saw him . . . he is here. When last I saw him, he was but twelve years old. He is grown considerably, I should say; he must now be sixteen or more, and ready for his arms, but I do not know for certain that he is to bear arms at all.”

  Morgaine smiled, and Viviane remembered that when Morgaine had first come here, a lonely child, she had sometimes been allowed to spend her free time with the only other child fostered here, Galahad.

  “Ban of Benwick must be old now,” Morgaine remarked.

  “Old, yes; and he has many sons, so that my son, among them, is just one more of the king’s unregarded bastards. But his half-brothers fear him and would rather he went elsewhere, and a child of the Great Marriage cannot be treated like any other bastard.” Viviane answered the unspoken question. “His father would give him land and estates in Brittany, but I saw to it before he was six years old that Galahad’s heart would always be here, at the Lake.” She saw the glint in Morgaine’s eyes and answered, again, the unspoken.

  “Cruel, to make him ever discontent? Perhaps. It was not I that was cruel, but the Goddess. His destiny lies in Avalon, and I have seen him with the Sight, kneeling before the Holy Chalice. . . .”

  Again, with an ironic inflection, Morgaine made the little gesture of assent with which a priestess under vows of silence would have acquiesced to a command.

  Suddenly Viviane was angry with herself. I sit here justifying what I have done with my life, and the lives of my sons, to a chit of a girl! I owe her no explanations! She said, and her voice was chilled with sudden distance, “Go with the barge, Morgaine, and bring him to me.”

  A third time the silent gesture of assent and Morgaine turned to go.

  “One moment,” Viviane said. “You will break your fast here with us when you bring him back to me; he is your cousin and kinsman too.”

  When Morgaine smiled again, Viviane realized that she had been trying to make the girl smile, and was surprised at herself.

  Morgaine went down along the path toward the edge of the Lake. Her heart was still beating faster than usual; often, these days, when she spoke with the Lady, anger was mixed with affection, to neither of which she was allowed to give voice, and this did strange things to her mind. She wondered at herself, because she had been taught to control her emotions as she controlled her words and even her thoughts.

  Galahad she remembered from her first years in Avalon—a scrawny, dark, intense boy. She had not liked him much, but because her heart hungered for her own small brother, she had let the lonely boy run about after her. Then he had been sent away to fosterage and she had seen him only once since, when he was twelve years old, all eyes and teeth and bones thrusting through outgrown clothes. He had grown into an intense disdain of anything female, and she had been occupied with the most difficult part of her training, so she had paid him little heed.

  The small, dark men who poled the barge bent before her in silent respect to the Goddess whose form the higher priestesses were supposed to wear, and she signed to them without speaking and took her place in the prow.

  Swiftly and silently the draped barge glided out into the mist. Morgaine felt the dampness coalescing on her brow and clinging to her hair; she was hungry, and chilled to the bone, but she had been taught to ignore that too. When they came out of the mist, the sun had risen on the far shore, and she could see a horse and rider waiting there. The barge continued its slow strokes forward, but Morgaine, in a rare moment of self-forgetfulness, stood unguarded, looking at the horseman there.

  He was slightly built, his face aquiline and darkly handsome, set off by the crimson cap with an eagle feather in its band and the wide crimson cloak that fell gracefully around him. When he dismounted, the natural grace with which he moved, a dancer’s grace, took her breath away. Had she ever wished to be fair and rounded, when dark and slender could show this beauty? His eyes were dark too, glinting with a touch of mischief—mischief which alone gave Morgaine awareness of who this must be, although, otherwise, not a single feature remained of the scrawny boy with the bony legs and enormous feet.

  “Galahad,” she said, pitching her voice low to keep it from trembling—a priestess-trick. “I would not have recognized you.”

  He bowed smoothly, the cape swirling as he moved—had she ever despised that as an acrobat’s trick? Here it seemed to grow from his body.

  “Lady,” he said.

  He has not recognized me either. Keep it so.

  Why at this moment did she remember Viviane’s words? Your virginity is sacred to the Goddess. See you keep it so till the Mother makes her will known. Startled, Morgaine recognized that for the first time in her life, she had looked on a man with desire. Knowing that such things were not for her, but that she was to use her life as the Goddess should decree, she had looked on men with scorn as the natural prey of the Goddess in the form of her priestesses, to be taken or denied as seemed right at the moment. Viviane had commanded that this year she need not take part in the Beltane fire rituals, from which some of her fellow priestesses emerged with child by the will of the Goddess, children who were either born, or cast forth by the knowledge of herb lore and drugs she had been taught—an unpleasant process, which if not followed inevitably brought on the even more unpleasant and dangerous process of birth, and tiresome children who were reared or sent to fosterage as the Lady decreed. Morgaine had been glad enough to escape this time, knowing that Viviane had other plans for her.

  She gestured him to step on board. Never lay hands upon an outsider—the words of the old priestess who had schooled her; a priestess of Avalon must be even as a visitor from the otherworld. She wondered why she had to stop her hand from reaching out to touch his wrist. She knew, with a sureness that made the blood beat hard in her temples, that under the smooth skin would lie hard muscle, pulsing with life, and she
hungered to meet his eyes again. She turned away, trying to master herself.

  His voice was deep and musical as he said, “Why, now you move your hands, I know you—everything else about you has changed. Priestess, were you not once my kinswoman, called Morgaine?” The dark eyes glinted. “Nothing else is the same as when I used to call you Morgaine of the Fairies. . . .”

  “I was, and I am. But years have passed,” she said, turning away, gesturing to the silent servants of the barge to pole it away from the shore.

  “But the magic of Avalon never changes,” he murmured, and she knew he was not speaking to her. “The mist and the reeds and the cry of water birds . . . and then the barge, like magic, gliding from the silent shore . . . I know there is nothing for me here, and yet, somehow, I always return. . . .”

  The barge moved silently across the Lake. Even now, after years of knowing that it was no magic, but intensive training in silencing the oars, Morgaine was still impressed by the mystical silence through which they moved. She turned to call the mists, and was conscious of the young man behind her. He stood, easily balanced beside his horse, one arm flung across the saddle blanket, shifting his weight easily without motion, so that he did not visibly sway or lose balance as the boat moved and turned. Morgaine did this herself from long training, but he managed it, it seemed, by his own natural grace.