The Mists of Avalon

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Morgaine drew a long, sobbing breath, raising her head from Morgause’s shoulder. “I am sorry—I have wept all over your fine gown.”

  Morgause shrugged. “If nothing worse should happen to it, it is well. See? The sickness passes and for the rest of the day you will feel well. Do you think Viviane would spare you for a visit to me? You can return to Lothian with us, if you will—you have not seen the Orkneys, and a change will do you good.”

  Morgaine thanked her, but said that she must return to Avalon, and that before she went, she must go and pay her respects to Igraine.

  “I would not counsel you to confide in her,” Morgause said. “She has grown so holy she would be shocked, or think it her duty to be so.”

  Morgaine smiled weakly—she had no intention of confiding in Igraine, nor for that matter in anyone else. Before Viviane could know, there would no longer be anything for her to know. She was grateful for Morgause’s advice, and for her goodwill and good advice, but she did not intend to heed it. She told herself fiercely that it was her own privilege to choose: she was a priestess, and whatsoever she did should be tempered with her own judgment.

  All through the leavetaking with Igraine, which was strained—and interrupted, more than once, by that damnable bell calling the nuns to their duties—she was thinking that Morgause was more like the mother she remembered than Igraine herself. Igraine had grown old and hard and pious, it seemed to Morgaine, and she bade her farewell with relief. Returning to Avalon, she knew, she was returning home; now she had no other home anywhere in the world.

  But if Avalon was no longer home to her, what then?

  20

  It was early in the day when Morgaine slipped quietly out of the House of Maidens and into the wild marsh behind the Lake. She skirted the Tor and came out into the patch of forest; with luck she could find what she wanted here without wandering into the mists.

  She knew the things she needed—a single root and then the bark of a bush, and two herbs. They were all to be found in Avalon. She could have taken them from the storerooms in the House of the Maidens, but she would have had to explain why she wanted them, and she shrank from that. She wanted neither the teasing nor the sympathy of the other women; better to find them herself. She knew something of herb lore, and of the midwife’s skill. She need not place herself, for this, at the mercy of any other person.

  One herb she wanted grew in the garden in Avalon; she had picked it unnoticed. For the others she must go afield, and she went a considerable distance before she noticed that she had not yet gone into the mists. Looking about, she realized that she had wandered into a part of Avalon she did not know—and that was utter madness. She had lived in Avalon for ten years or more, she knew every rise and knoll, every path and almost every tree. It was impossible that she could be lost in Avalon, and yet it was true; she had wandered into a thicker patch of forest, where the trees were older and closer than any she had seen, and there were bushes and herbs and trees on which she had never laid eyes.

  Could it be that she had somehow strayed through the mists without knowing it, and was now on the mainland surrounding the Lake and the Island? No; she mentally retraced every step of her journey. There had been no mist. In any case, Avalon was almost an island, and if she had trespassed its borders, she would have come only to the water of the Lake. There was the hidden, almost dry, horse path, but she was nowhere near to that.

  Even on that day when she and Lancelet had found Gwenhwyfar in the mists, they had been surrounded by marsh, not forest. No, she was not on the Isle of the Priests, and unless she had somehow developed the magical ability to walk over the Lake without swimming, she was not on the mainland either. Nor was she in any part of Avalon. She glanced up, looking to take her bearings by the sun, but she could not see the sun anywhere; it was full day now, but the light was like a soft radiance in the sky, seeming to come from everywhere at once.

  Morgaine began to feel the coldness of fear. She was nowhere, then, in the world she knew. Was it possible that within the Druid magic which had removed Avalon from the very world, there was a further unknown country, a world around or past Avalon? Glancing at the thick trees, the ancient oaks and hazel, fern and willow, she knew she was not in any world she had ever seen. There was a single gnarled oak, old past guessing, that she could not possibly have failed to see and know. Certainly, so old and venerable a tree would have been marked as holy by the Druids. “By the Goddess! Where am I?”

  Wherever she might be, she could not simply stay. Either she would wander into a part of the world that was familiar to her again, find some landmark back to where she intended to go, or she would come to a place where the mists began and she could return to her own place that way.

  She moved slowly in the thickening forest. There seemed to be a clearing ahead which she moved toward. It was surrounded by hazel trees, none of which, she knew instinctively, had ever been touched, even by the metal of a Druid knife, to cut the divining wands which could find water, hidden treasure, or poisonous things. There was a hazel grove on the island of Avalon, but she knew the trees there; had cut her own divining stick there, years ago when she was first learning such things. This was not the place. At the very edge of the grove she saw a small patch of one of the herbs she wanted. Well, she might as well take it now, she might as well get some good for coming here. She went and knelt, folding her skirts to make a pad under her knees for working, and began digging for the root.

  Twice, as she grubbed in the earth, she had the sense that she was being watched, that little prickle in her back which comes to all who have lived among wild things. But when she raised her eyes, although there was a shadow of movement in the trees, she could see no one watching.

  The third time she delayed raising her eyes as long as she could, telling herself that no one would be there. She wrested the herb free from the earth and began stripping the root, murmuring the charm appointed for this use—a prayer to the Goddess to restore life to the bush uprooted, that while she took this one bush, others might grow in its place always. But the sense of being watched grew stronger, and at last Morgaine raised her eyes. Almost invisible at the edge of the trees, standing in shadow, a woman was watching her.

  She was not one of the priestesses; she was not anyone Morgaine had ever seen before. She wore a gown of shadowy grey-green, the color of willow leaves when they grow old and dusty in late summer, and some kind of dark cloak. There was a tiny glimmer of gold at her throat. At first glance Morgaine thought she was one of the little dark people with whom she had awaited the killing of the King Stag. But the woman’s bearing made her look quite unlike those small hunted people; she carried herself like a priestess or a queen. Morgaine had no idea of her age, but the deep-set eyes and the lines around them told her that the woman was not young.

  “What are you doing, Morgaine of the Fairies?”

  Ice prickled all along her spine. How did the woman know her name? But, concealing her fear with the skill of a priestess, she said, “If you know my name, lady, surely you can see what I am doing.” Firmly she wrenched her eyes away from the dark gaze bent on her own, and returned to peeling the bark. Then she looked up again, half expecting that the strange woman would have disappeared as quickly as she had come, but she was still there, regarding Morgaine’s work dispassionately. She said, her eyes now resting on Morgaine’s grubby hands, the nail she had broken in her rooting, “Yes, I can see what you are doing, and what you intend to do. Why?”

  “What is that to you?”

  “Life is precious to my people,” the woman said, “though we neither bear nor die as easily as your kind. But it is a marvel to me that you, Morgaine, who bear the royal line of the Old People, and thus are my far kinswoman, would seek to cast away the only child you will ever bear.”

  Morgaine swallowed hard. She scrambled to her feet, conscious of her grubby earth-covered hands, the half-stripped roots in her hand, her skirt wrinkled with kneeling on the damp muddy earth—like a goose
girl before a High Priestess. She said defiantly, “What makes you say that? I am still young. Why do you think that if I cast this child forth I should not bear a dozen others?”

  “I had forgotten that where the fairy blood is dilute, the Sight comes down to you maimed and incomplete,” the stranger said. “Let it be enough to say: I have seen. Think twice, Morgaine, before you refuse what the Goddess sent you from the King Stag.”

  Suddenly Morgaine began to weep again. She said, stammering, “I don’t want it! I didn’t want it! Why did the Goddess do this to me? If you come from her, can you answer that, then?”

  The strange woman looked at her sadly. “I am not the Goddess, Morgaine, nor even her emissary. My kind know neither Gods nor Goddesses, but only the breast of our mother who is beneath our feet and above our heads, from whom we come and to whom we go when our time is ended. Therefore we cherish life and weep to see it cast aside.” She stepped forward and took the root from Morgaine’s hand. She said, “You do not want this,” and cast it aside on the ground.

  “What is your name?” Morgaine cried. “What is this place?”

  “You could not say my name in your language,” said the lady, and suddenly Morgaine wondered what language they were speaking. “As for this place, it is the hazel grove, and it is what it is. It leads to my place, and the path yonder—” she pointed—"will lead you to your own place, in Avalon.”

  Morgaine followed her pointing finger with her eyes. Yes, there was a path there; she would have taken oath it had not been there when she came first into the grove.

  The lady was still standing near her. There was a strange smell to her, not the strong smell of an unwashed body as it had been with the old tribal priestess, but a curious indefinable fragrance, as of some unfamiliar herb or leaf, a strange, fresh, almost bitter scent. Like the ritual herbs for the Sight, it made Morgaine feel as if there was some spell on her eyes so that she saw more than she saw at any other time, as if everything was new and clean, not the ordinary things of every day.

  The lady said in a low, mesmerizing voice, “You can stay here with me if you will; I will make you sleep so that you will bear your child without pain, and I will take him for the strong life that is in him, and he will live longer than he would with your kind. For I see a destiny for him, in your world—he will try to do good, and like most of your kind, he will do only harm. But if he stays here among my people, he will live long and long—almost, you would say, forever—perhaps a magician or enchanter among us, living with trees and wild things that were never tamed by man. Stay here, little one; give me the babe you do not want to bear, then return to your people, knowing he is happy and will come to no harm.”

  Morgaine felt a sudden deathly chill. She knew that this woman confronting her was not wholly human; she herself bore some such taint of this ancient elf-blood—Morgaine of the Fairies, the old name with which Lancelet had taunted her. She pulled away from the fairy woman’s hand and ran, ran toward the path she had pointed out, ran wildly as if pursued by a demon. Behind her the woman called, “Cast out your child, then, or strangle him at birth, Morgaine of the Fairies, for your people have their own fate, and what befalls the son of the King Stag? The king must die and be cast down in his turn . . .” But her voice died away as Morgaine plunged into the mists, racing, stumbling, briars catching at her and pulling her down as she fled in panic flight, until she broke through the mists into glaring sun and silence and knew that she stood again on the familiar shores of Avalon.

  The moon was dark in the sky again. Avalon was covered in mist and summer fog, but Viviane had been priestess for so many years that she knew the moon’s changes as if they ran in the tides of her own blood. She paced the floor of her house silently, and after a time told one of the priestesses, “Bring me my harp.” But when she sat with the pale willow-wood harp on her knee, she only touched the strings idly, without the will or the heart to make music.

  As the night began to pale toward morning, Viviane rose and took a tiny lamp. Her attendant priestess came swiftly from the inner room where she slept, but Viviane shook her head without speaking and gestured the woman to return to her bed. She went, silent as a wraith, down the pathway to the House of Maidens, and stole inside, treading more silently than any cat.

  In the room where Morgaine slept, she went to the bedside and looked down on the sleeping face so like her own. Morgaine, sleeping, had the face of the little girl who had come to Avalon so many years ago and who had entered into Viviane’s inmost heart. Under the dark lashes, there were patches of darkness like bruises, and the edges of the eyelids were red, as if Morgaine had wept before sleeping.

  Holding the lamp high, she looked long on her young kinswoman. She loved Morgaine as she had never loved Igraine, or Morgause whom she had nursed at her own breasts; as she had never loved any of the men who had shared her bed for a night or for a season. Not even Raven, whom she had schooled to the ways of a priestess since the age of seven, had she loved like this. Only once had she felt this fierce love, this inner pain as if every breath of the beloved were agony—for the daughter she had borne in her first year as sworn priestess, who had lived a scant six months and whom, weeping for the last time, Viviane had buried before she had completed her fifteenth year. From the moment they had laid that daughter in her arms, until the frail child’s last breath had ceased, Viviane had drawn her every breath in a kind of mingled delirium of love and pain, as if the beloved child were a part of her own body, whose every moment of contentment or suffering was her own. That had been a lifetime ago, and Viviane knew that the woman she had been born to be had been buried within the hazel grove in Avalon. The woman who walked tearlessly away from that tiny grave had been another person altogether, holding herself aloof from every human emotion. Kind, yes; content, even happy, at times; but not the same woman. She had loved her sons, but from the moment of their birth she had been resigned to the thought of giving them up to foster-mothers.

  Raven she had let herself love a little . . . but there were times when Viviane had felt in the innermost depths of her heart that her own dead daughter had been sent back to her by the Goddess in the form of Igraine’s child.

  Now she weeps, and it is as if every tear burns into my heart. Goddess, you gave me this child to love, and yet I must give her up to this torment. . . . All of mankind suffers, the Earth herself cries out under the torment of her sons. In our suffering, Mother Ceridwen, we grow nearer to thee. . . . Viviane raised her hand swiftly to her eyes, shaking her head so that the single tear vanished without trace. She too is vowed to what must be; her suffering has not yet begun.

  Morgaine stirred and turned on her side, and Viviane, suddenly fearful that Morgaine would wake and that she must confront again the accusation of those eyes, stole quickly out of the room and silently returned to her own dwelling.

  She lay down on her bed and tried to sleep, but she did not close her eyes. Once, toward morning, she saw a shadow move across the wall, and in the dimness she made out a face; it was the Death-crone, waiting for her, in the form of an old woman clothed in rags and tatters of shadow.

  Mother, have you come for me?

  Not yet, my daughter and my other self, I wait here that you may remember I await you, as I await every other mortal. . . .

  Viviane blinked, and when she opened her eyes again the corner was dark and empty. Surely I need no reminding that she awaits me now. . . .

  She lay silent, waiting as she had been trained to wait, until at last the dawn stole into the room. Even then she waited until she had dressed herself, though she would not break the moon-dark fast until the crescent could be seen tonight in the evening sky. Then she called her attendant priestess and said, “Bring the lady Morgaine to me.”

  When Morgaine came, she noted that the younger woman had dressed herself in the garb of a priestess of the highest rank, her hair high and braided, the small sickle-shaped knife hanging from its black cord. Viviane’s mouth moved in a dry smile, and when the
y had greeted each other and Morgaine sat beside her, she said, “Twice now the moon has darkened; tell me, Morgaine, has the Horned One of the grove quickened your womb?”

  Morgaine looked quickly at her, the glance of some small frightened thing in a snare. Then the younger woman said, angry and defiant, “You told me yourself that I should use my own judgment; I have cast it forth.”

  “You have not,” said Viviane, steadying her voice to complete detachment. “Why should you lie to me? I say you shall not.”

  “I will!”

  Viviane felt the power in the girl; for a moment, as Morgaine rose swiftly from the bench, it seemed to her that she had grown suddenly tall and imposing. But it was a priestess-trick and Viviane knew it too.

  She has outstripped me, I cannot overawe her any longer. Nevertheless she said, summoning all her old authority, “You shall not. The royal blood of Avalon is not to be cast aside.”

  Suddenly Morgaine fell to the ground, and for an instant Viviane feared the girl would break into wild sobbing. “Why did you do this to me, Viviane? Why did you use me this way? I thought you loved me!” Her face worked, though she did not weep.