The Mists of Avalon

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “The Goddess knows, child, I love you as I have never loved any other human being on earth,” Viviane said steadily, through the knifing pain in her heart. “But when I brought you here, I told you: a time would come when you might hate me as much as you loved me then. I am Lady of Avalon; I do not give reasons for what I do. I do what I must, no more and no less, and so will you when the day comes.”

  “That day will never come!” Morgaine cried out, “for here and now, I tell you that you have worked upon me and played with me like a puppet for the last time! Never again—never!”

  Viviane kept her voice even, the voice of the trained priestess who would remain calm though the heavens should fall upon her. “Take care how you curse me, Morgaine; words flung in anger have an evil way of returning when you love them least.”

  “Curse you—I thought not of it,” Morgaine said quickly. “But I will no longer be your toy and plaything. As for this child which you moved Heaven and Earth to bring to the light, I will not bear him in Avalon for you to gloat at what you have done.”

  “Morgaine—” Viviane said, holding out her hand to the younger woman, but Morgaine stepped back. She said into the silence, “May the Goddess deal with you as you have done with me, Lady.”

  Without another word she turned and left the room, not waiting for dismissal. Viviane sat frozen, as if Morgaine’s parting words had been a curse indeed.

  When finally she could think clearly, she summoned one of the priestesses; already it was late in the day, and the moon, the thinnest paring of a crescent, was visible, slim and silver-edged, in the western sky. “Tell my kinswoman, the lady Morgaine, to attend upon me; I did not give her leave to go.”

  The priestess went away, but she did not return for a long time; it was already dark, and Viviane had summoned the other attendant to bring food to break her long fast, when the first returned.

  “Lady,” she said and bowed, and her face was white.

  Viviane’s throat tightened, and for some reason she remembered how a long time ago a priestess in deep despair, after the birth of a child she had not wanted, had hanged herself by her girdle from one of the trees in the oak grove. Morgaine! Was it of this the Death-crone came to warn me? Would she lay hands on her own life? She said through dry lips, “I bade you bring the lady Morgaine to me.”

  “Lady, I cannot.”

  Viviane rose from the seat and her face was terrible; the young priestess backed away so swiftly that she almost fell over her skirt. “What has happened to the lady Morgaine?”

  “Lady—” the young woman said stammering, “she—she was not in her room, and I asked everywhere. I found—I found this in her room,” she said, holding out the veil and deerskin tunic, the silver crescent and the little sickle knife which Morgaine had been given at her initiation. “And they told me on the shore that she had summoned the barge and gone away to the mainland. They thought she went by your orders.”

  Viviane drew a long breath, reached out and took the dagger and crescent from the priestess. She looked at the food on the table and a terrible sense of weakness assailed her; she sat down and quickly ate some bread and drank a cup of water from the Holy Well. Then she said, “It is not your fault, I am sorry I spoke harshly to you.” She stood with her hand on Morgaine’s little knife and for the first time in her life, as she looked down at her hand, she saw the pulsing of the vein there and thought how easily she could draw the knife across it and watch her life spurt forth. Then would the Death-crone have come for me, and not for Morgaine. If she must have blood, let her have mine. But Morgaine had left the knife; she would not hang herself or cut her wrists. She had, no doubt, gone to her mother for comfort and counsel. She would come back one day, and if not, it was in the hands of the Goddess.

  When she was alone again, she went out of her house and, by the pale shimmer of the newborn moon, climbed along the path to her mirror.

  Arthur is crowned and a king, she thought; all that I have wrought for in the last twenty years has come to pass. Yet I am here alone and bereft. Let it be as the Goddess wills with me, but let me see once again the face of my daughter, my only child, before I die; let me know that it will be well with her. Mother, in your name.

  But the face of the mirror showed only silence, and shadows, and behind and through it all, a sword in the hands of her own son, Balan.

  Morgaine speaks . . .

  The little dark oarsmen had not looked twice at me; they were used to Viviane’s comings and goings in such garb as she chose, and whatever a priestess chose to do was good in their eyes. None of them presumed to speak to me, and as for me, I kept my face resolutely turned to the outside world.

  I could have stolen from Avalon by the hidden path. This way, taking the boat, Viviane was sure to hear that I had gone forth . . . but even to myself I was afraid to admit the fear that kept me from the hidden path, that my steps would take me not to the mainland, but to that unknown country where strange flowers and trees grew untouched by mankind, and the sun shone never, and the mocking eyes of the fairy woman saw clearly into my very soul. I still bore the herbs, tied in a little pouch at my waist, but as the boat moved on silent oars into the mists of the Lake, I untied the bag and let it fall into the water. It seemed that something gleamed there under the surface of the Lake, like a shadow . . . a glimmer of gold, perhaps jewels; but I looked away, knowing that the oarsmen were waiting for me to raise the mists.

  Avalon lay behind me, renounced; the Island lay fair in the rising sun, but I did not turn to look my last on the Tor or the ring stones.

  I would not be a pawn for Viviane, giving a son to my brother for some secret purpose of the Lady of the Lake. Somehow I never doubted that it would be a son. Had I believed I would bear a daughter, I would have stayed in Avalon, giving the Goddess the daughter I owed to her shrine. Never, in all the years since, have I ceased to regret that the Goddess sent me a son, rather than a daughter to serve her in temple and grove.

  And so I spoke the magical words for the last time, as I believed then, and the mists drew back, and we came to the shores of the Lake. I felt as if I were waking from a long dream. I had asked, looking for the first time upon Avalon, “Is it real?” and I remembered what Viviane had answered me: “It is more real than any other place.” But it was real no more. I looked on the dismal reeds and thought, this only is real, and the years in Avalon no more than a dream which will fade and be gone as I wake.

  Rain was falling; the drops splashed coldly into the Lake. I put my heavy cloak over my head and stepped onto the real shore, watching for a moment as the boat faded again into the mists, then resolutely turning away.

  I never doubted where I should go. Not to Cornwall, though my whole soul longed for the country of my childhood, the long arms of rock stretching into the dark sea, the deep and shadowed valleys lying between slate cliffs, the beloved and half-forgotten shoreline of Tintagel. Igraine would have welcomed me there. But she was content within convent walls, and it seemed good to me that she should stay there untroubled. Nor did I ever think of going to Arthur, although I have no doubt he would have pitied and sheltered me.

  The Goddess had had her way with us. I felt some of the shared regret for what had happened that morning—what we had done as Goddess and God had been ordained by ritual, but what had happened at sunrise, that had been for ourselves. But that, too, was as the Goddess would have it. It is only humankind who make these distinctions of blood times and kindred; the beast-kind know nothing of such things, and after all, man and woman are of the beast-kind. But in kindness to Arthur, who had been reared as a Christian, he should never know that he had fathered a son in what he would call grievous sin.

  As for me, I was not priest-bred or priest-ridden. The child now in my womb—I resolved this firmly—had not been gotten by any mortal man. He had been sent to me by the King Stag, the Horned One, as was lawful for the first child of a sworn priestess.

  So I turned my steps toward the North, without fear of the lo
ng journey over moorland and fell which would bring me at last to the kingdom of Orkney, and to my kinswoman Morgause.

  Book Two

  The High Queen

  1

  Far to the north, where Lot was king, the snow lay deep on the fells, and even at midday there was often no more than a twilit fog. On the rare days when the sun shone, the men could get out for some hunting, but the women were imprisoned in the castle. Morgause, idly twirling her spindle—she hated spinning as much as ever, but the room was too dark for any finer work—felt an icy draft from the opened door and looked up. She said in mild reproof, “It is too cold for that, Morgaine, and you have been complaining of the cold all day; now would you turn us all into icicles?”

  “I was not complaining,” said Morgaine. “Did I say a word? The room is as stuffy as a privy, and the smoke stinks. I want to breathe—no more!” She pushed the door shut and went back to the fire, rubbing her hands and shivering. “I have not once been warm since Midsummer.”

  “I doubt that not at all,” said Morgause. “Your little passenger in there steals all the heat from your bones—he is warm and snug, and his mother shivers. It is always so.”

  “At least Midwinter is now past, the light comes earlier and stays later,” said one of Morgause’s women. “And perhaps in another fortnight, you will have your babe with you. . . .”

  Morgaine did not answer but stood shivering near the fire, chafing her hands as if they ached. Morgause thought that the girl looked like her own ghost, her face sharpened and fined to deathly thinness, her hands bony as skeleton sticks contrasted with the huge bulging of her pregnant belly. There were great dark circles under her eyes, and the lids were red as if sore with long weeping; but in all the moons Morgaine had been in this house, Morgause had not seen the younger woman shed a single tear.

  I would comfort her, but how can I, if she does not weep?

  Morgaine was wearing an old gown of Morgause’s own, a faded and threadbare kirtle of dark blue, grotesquely too long. She looked clumsy, almost slatternly, and it exasperated Morgause that her kinswoman had not even troubled to take needle and thread and shorten the dress somewhat. Her ankles, too, were swollen so that they bulged over her shoe tops; that was from having only salt fish and coarse vegetables to eat at this time of year. They all needed fresh food, which was not easy to come by in this weather. Well, perhaps the men would have some luck at hunting and she could induce Morgaine to eat some of the fresh meat; after four pregnancies of her own, Morgause knew the near-starvation of late pregnancy. Once, she remembered, when she was pregnant with Gawaine, she had gone into the dairy and eaten some of the clay they kept for whitening it. An old midwife had told her that when a pregnant woman cannot keep herself from eating such strange things, it is the child that hungers and she should feed him whatever he wishes for. Maybe tomorrow there would be fresh herbs by the mountain stream—that was something every pregnant woman craved, especially in late winter like this.

  Morgaine’s beautiful dark hair was tangled, too, in a loose braid—it looked as if she hadn’t combed or rebraided it for weeks. She turned from the fire now, took down a comb that was kept on the shelf, picked up one of Morgause’s little lapdogs and began combing it. Morgause thought, You would be better occupied at combing your own hair, but she held her peace; Morgaine had been so edgy lately that there was no speaking to her at all. It was natural enough, so near her time, she thought, watching the younger woman’s bony hands pulling the comb through the matted hair; the little dog yelped and whined, and Morgaine hushed him in a softer voice than she ever used to anything human these days.

  “It cannot be long now, Morgaine,” Morgause said gently. “By Candlemas, surely, you will be delivered.”

  “It cannot be too soon for me.” Morgaine gave the dog a final pat and set him on the floor. “There, now you are decent to be among ladies, puppy . . . how fine you are, with your hair all smooth!”

  “I will make up the fire,” said one of the women, whose name was Beth, putting aside her spindle and thrusting the distaff into a basket of loose wool. “The men will be home, surely—it is already dark.” She went over to the fire, tripped on a loose stick, and half fell on the hearth. “Gareth, you little wretch, will you clear away this rubbish?” She flung the stick into the fire, and five-year-old Gareth, who had been pushing the sticks about and prattling to them in an undertone, set up a howl of outrage—the sticks were his armies!

  “Well, Gareth, it is night, and your armies must go to their tents,” said Morgause briskly. Pouting, the little boy pushed the array of small sticks into a corner, but one or two he put carefully into a fold of his tunic—they were thicker ones, which Morgaine, earlier that year, had carved into the crude likeness of men in helmets and armor, dyed with berry juice for their crimson tunics.

  “Will you make me another Roman knight, Morgaine?”

  “Not now, Gareth,” she said. “My hands ache with the cold. Tomorrow, perhaps.”

  He came and scowled, standing at her knee, demanding, “When will I be old enough to go hunting with Father and Agravaine?”

  “It will be a few years still, I suppose,” said Morgaine, smiling. “Not until you are tall enough not to be lost in a snowdrift!”

  “I’m big!” he said, drawing himself up to his full height, “Look, when you’re sitting down I’m taller than you are, Morgaine!” He kicked restlessly at the chair. “There’s nothing to do in here!”

  “Well,” said Morgaine, “I could always teach you to spin, and then you need not be idle.” She picked up Beth’s abandoned distaff and held it out to him, but he made a face and started back.

  “I’m going to be a knight! Knights don’t have to spin!”

  “That’s a pity,” Beth said sourly. “Perhaps they would not wear out so many cloaks and tunics if they knew what toil it is to spin them!”

  “Yet there was a knight who did spin, so the tale says,” Morgaine said, holding out her arms to the little boy. “Come here. No, sit on the bench, Gareth, you are all too heavy now for me to hold you on my lap like a sucking babe. There was in the old days, before the Romans came, a knight named Achilles, and he was under a curse; an old sorceress told his mother that he would die in battle, and so she put him into skirts and hid him among the women, where he learned to spin and to weave and do all that was fitting for a maiden.”

  “And did he die in battle?”

  “He did indeed, for when the city of Troy was besieged, they called on all the knights and warriors to come and take it, and Achilles went with the rest, and he was the best of all the knights. It was told of him that he was offered a choice, he could live long in safety, then die an old man in his bed and be forgotten, or he could live a short life and die young with great glory, and he chose the glory; so men still tell of his story in the sagas. He fought with a knight in Troy called Hector—Ectorius, that is, in our tongue—”

  “Was it that same sir Ectorius who fostered our king Arthur?” asked the little boy, wide-eyed.

  “To be sure it was not, for it was many hundred years ago, but it might have been one of his forefathers.”

  “When I am at court, and one of Arthur’s Companions,” said Gareth, his eyes round as saucers, “I will be the best fighter in war, and I will win all the prizes when there are games. What happened to Achilles?”

  “I remember it not—it was long ago, at Uther’s court, I heard the tale,” Morgaine said, pressing her hands against her back as if it hurt her.

  “Tell me about Arthur’s knights, Morgaine. You have really seen Lancelet, have you not? I saw him, that day at the King’s crowning—has he killed any dragons? Tell me, Morgaine—”

  “Don’t plague her, Gareth, she’s not well,” said Morgause. “Run out to the kitchens and see if they can find you some bannock.”

  The child looked sulky, but he took his carved knight out of his tunic and went off, talking to it in an undertone. “So, sir Lancelet, we will go out and we will kill all the
dragons in the Lake. . . .”

  “That one, he talks only of war and fighting,” said Morgause impatiently, “and his precious Lancelet, as if it were not enough to have Gawaine away with Arthur at the wars! I hope that when Gareth is old enough, there will be peace in the land!”

  “There will be peace,” Morgaine said absently, “but it will not matter, for he will die at the hands of his dearest friend—”

  “What?” cried Morgause staring, but the younger woman’s eyes were vacant and unfocused; Morgause shook her gently and demanded, “Morgaine! Morgaine, are you ill?”

  Morgaine blinked and shook her head. “I am sorry—what did you say to me?”

  “What did I say to you? What, rather, did you say to me?” Morgause demanded, but at the look of distress in Morgaine’s eyes, her skin prickled. She stroked the younger woman’s hand, dismissing the grim words as delirium. “I think you must have been dreaming with your eyes wide open.” She found that she did not want to think that Morgaine might have had a moment of the Sight. “You must care for yourself better, Morgaine, you hardly eat, you don’t sleep—”