The Mists of Avalon

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  She felt numbed; it had truly not seemed to her that she might be pregnant. If she had thought anything at all about it, it was that the stress of travel had delayed her courses . . . for the first three years of her marriage, every time it had been late, she had thought herself with child. Then, in the year in which Arthur had been, first, away for the battle of Celidon Wood and the long campaign before it, then wounded and too weak to touch her, the same pattern had persisted. And finally she had realized that her monthly rhythms were inconstant—there was no way to keep track of them by the moon, for sometimes two or three months might pass with no sign.

  But now that Igraine had spoken, she wondered why she had not thought of this before; it never occurred to her to doubt the Queen. Something inside Gwenhwyfar said, Sorcery, and there was a small voice that persisted in reminding her, All these things are of the Devil, and have no place in this house of holy women. But something else said, How could it be wicked to tell me this? It was more, she thought, as when the angel was sent to Mary the Virgin to tell her of the birth of her son . . . and then for a moment Gwenhwyfar was struck with awe at her own presumption; and then she began softly to giggle, at the incongruity of Igraine, old and dying, as an angel of God.

  At that moment the bell rang in the cloister for prayers, and Gwenhwyfar, though here as a guest, and without obligation, turned and went into the sisters’ chapel, kneeling in her accustomed place among the visitors. But she heard little of the service, for her whole heart and mind were caught up in the most fervent prayer of her entire life.

  It has come, the answer to all my prayers. Oh, thank you, God and Christ and our Blessed Lady!

  Arthur was wrong. It was not he who failed. There was no need . . . and once again she was filled with the paralyzing shame she had felt when he had said that thing to her, all but giving her leave to betray him . . . and what a wicked woman I was then, that I could even have considered it. . . . But now in the very midst of her wickedness God had rewarded her when she deserved it least. Gwenhwyfar raised her head and began to sing the Magnificat with the rest, so fervently that the abbess raised her head and looked sharply at her.

  They do not know why I am thankful . . . they do not know how much I have to be thankful for. . . .

  But they do not know how wicked I was either, for I was thinking here in this holy place of the one I love. . . .

  And then, even through her joy, suddenly it was like pain again: Now he will look upon me big with Arthur’s child, and he will think me ugly and gross and never look on me again with love and longing. And even through the joy in her heart, she felt small and cramped and joyless.

  Arthur gave me leave, and we could have had each other, at least once, and now never . . . never . . . never. . . .

  She put her face into her hands and wept behind them, silently, and no longer cared that the abbess was watching her.

  That night Igraine’s breathing was so labored that she could not even lower her head to rest; she had to sit bolt upright, propped up on many cushions, to breathe at all, and she wheezed and coughed without end. The abbess gave her a draught of something which would clear the lungs, but it only made her queasy, she said, and she could take no more of it.

  Gwenhwyfar sat beside her, drowsing a little now and then, but alert whenever the sick woman stirred, to give her a sip of water, to shift her pillows so that she could find a little ease. There was only a small lamp in the room, but there was brilliant moonlight, and the night was so warm that the door stood open into the garden. And through it all there was the ever-present muffled sound of the sea beyond the garden, beating at the rocks.

  “Strange,” Igraine murmured at last in a faraway voice, “never would I have thought I would come here to die. . . . I remember how dreary I felt, how alone, when first I came to Tintagel, as if I had come to the very end of the world. Avalon was so fair, so beautiful, so filled with flowers . . .”

  “There are flowers here,” Gwenhwyfar said.

  “But not like the flowers of my home. It is so barren here, so rocky,” she said. “Have you been in the Island, child?”

  “I was schooled in the convent on Ynis Witrin, madam.”

  “It is beautiful on the Island. And when I travelled here over the moors, it was so high and barren and deserted, I was afraid—”

  Igraine made a weak movement toward her, and Gwenhwyfar took her hand and was alarmed by its coldness. “You are a good child,” Igraine said, “to come so far, when my own children could not. I remember how you dread travelling—and now to come so far, when you are pregnant.”

  Gwenhwyfar rubbed the icy hands between her own. “Do not tire yourself with talking, Mother.”

  Igraine made a little sound like a laugh, but it got lost in a fit of wheezing. “Do you think it makes any difference now, Gwenhwyfar? I wronged you—even on the very day you were wedded, I went to Taliesin and asked him, was there any honorable way for Arthur to get out of this marriage.”

  “I—did not know. Why?”

  It seemed to her that Igraine hesitated before answering, but she could not tell, perhaps it was only that the other woman struggled for speech. “I know not . . . perhaps it was that I thought you would not be happy with my son.” She struggled again with a fit of coughing so heavy that it seemed she would never get her breath.

  When she had quieted a little, Gwenhwyfar said, “Now you must talk no more, Mother—will you have me bring you a priest?”

  “Damn all priests,” said Igraine clearly. “I will have none of them about me—oh, look not so shocked, child!” She lay still for a moment. “You thought me so pious, that I retired to a convent in my last years. But where else should I have gone? Viviane would have had me at Avalon, but I could not forget it was she who had married me to Gorlois. . . . Beyond that garden wall lies Tintagel, like a prison . . . a prison it was to me, indeed. Yet it was the only place I could call my own. And I felt I had won it by what I endured there. . . .”

  Another long, silent struggle for breath. At last she said, “I wish Morgaine had come to me . . . she has the Sight, she should have known I was dying. . . .”

  Gwenhwyfar saw that there were tears in her eyes. She said gently, rubbing the icy hands which now felt as taut as cold claws, “I am sure she would come if she knew, dear Mother.”

  “I am not so sure . . . I sent her from me into Viviane’s hands. Even though I knew well how ruthless Viviane could be, that she would use Morgaine as ruthlessly as she used me, for the well-being of this land and for her own love of power,” Igraine whispered. “I sent her from me because I felt it better, if it came to be a choice of evils, that she should be in Avalon and in the hands of the Goddess, than in the hands of the black priests who would teach her to think that she was evil because she was a woman.”

  Gwenhwyfar was deeply dismayed. She chafed the icy hands between her own and renewed the hot bricks at Igraine’s feet; but the feet too were cold as ice, and when she rubbed them Igraine said she could not feel them.

  She felt she must try again. “Now with your end near, do you not want to speak with one of Christ’s priests, dear Mother?”

  “I told you, no,” said Igraine, “or after all these years when I kept silent to have peace in my home, I might tell them at last what I truly felt about them. . . . I loved Morgaine enough to send her to Viviane, that she at least might escape them. . . .” She began wheezing again. “Arthur,” she said at last. “Never was he my son . . . he was Uther’s—only a hope of the succession, no more. I loved Uther well and I bore him sons because it meant so much to him that he should have a son to follow him. Our second son—he that died soon after his navel string was cut—him, I think, I might have loved for my own, as I loved Morgaine. . . . Tell me, Gwenhwyfar, has my son reproached you that you have not yet borne him an heir?”

  Gwenhwyfar bent her head, feeling her eyes stinging with tears. “No, he has been so good . . . never once has he reproached me. He told me once that he had never fathered a
son by any woman, though he had known many, so that perhaps the fault was not mine.”

  “If he loves you for yourself, then he is a priceless jewel among men,” said Igraine, “and it is all the better if you can make him happy. . . . Morgaine I loved because she was all I had to love. I was young and wretched; you can never know how unhappy I was that winter when I bore her, alone and far from home and not yet full-grown. I feared she would have become a monster because of all the hate I felt when I was bearing her, but she was the prettiest little thing, solemn, wise, like a fairy child. She and Uther only have I loved . . . where is she, Gwenhwyfar? Where is she that she would not come to her mother when she is dying?”

  Gwenhwyfar said compassionately, “No doubt she knows not that you are ill—”

  “But the Sight!” Igraine cried, moving restlessly on her pillow. “Where can she be, that she does not see that I am dying? Ah, I saw she was in deep trouble, even at Arthur’s crowning, and yet I said nothing, I did not want to know, I felt I had had enough grief and said nothing when she needed me. . . . Gwenhwyfar, tell me the truth! Did Morgaine have a child somewhere, alone and far from anyone who loved her? Has she spoken of this to you? Does she hate me then, that she will not come to me even when I am dying, only because I did not speak out all my fears for her at Arthur’s crowning? Ah, Goddess . . . I put aside the Sight to have peace in my home, since Uther was a follower of the Christ. . . . Show me where dwells my child, my daughter. . . .”

  Gwenhwyfar held her motionless and said, “Now you must be still, Mother . . . it must be as God wills. You cannot call upon the Goddess of the fiends here—”

  Igraine sat bolt upright; despite her sick swollen face, her blue lips, she looked on the younger woman in such a way that Gwenhwyfar suddenly remembered, She too is High Queen of this land.

  “You know not what you speak,” Igraine said, with pride and pity and contempt. “The Goddess is beyond all your other Gods. Religions may come and go, as the Romans found and no doubt the Christians will find after them, but she is beyond them all.” She let Gwenhwyfar lower her to her pillows and groaned. “I would my feet could be warmed . . . yes, I know you have hot bricks there, I cannot feel them. Once I read in an ancient book which Taliesin gave me of some scholar who was forced to drink hemlock. Taliesin says that the people have always killed the wise. Even as the people of the far southlands put Christ to the cross, so this wise and holy man was forced to drink hemlock because the rabble and the kings said he taught false doctrine. And when he was dying, he said that the cold crept upward from his feet, and so he died. . . . I have not drunk of hemlock, but it is as if I had . . . and now the cold is reaching my heart. . . .” She shivered and was still, and for a moment Gwenhwyfar thought she had ceased to breathe. No, the heart was still sluggishly beating. But Igraine did not speak again, lying wheezing on her pillows, and a little before dawn the rasping breaths finally ceased.

  11

  Igraine was buried at midday, after a solemn service of mourning; Gwenhwyfar stood beside the grave, tears sliding down her face as the shrouded body was lowered into the open earth. Yet she could not properly mourn her mother-in-law. Her living here was all a lie, she was no true Christian. If it was true what they believed, then Igraine was even now burning in hell. And she could not bear that, not when she thought of all Igraine’s kindness to her.

  Her eyes burned with sleeplessness and tears. The lowering sky echoed her vague dread; heavy, as if at any moment rain would fall on them. Here within convent walls she was safe, but soon she must leave the safety of this place and ride for days over the high moors with the brooding menace of that open sky everywhere, hanging over her and over her child. . . . Gwenhwyfar, shivering, clasped her hands across her belly, as if in a futile wish to protect the dweller there from the menace of that sky.

  Why am I always so frightened? Igraine was a pagan and lost to the tricks of the Devil, but I am safe, I call upon Christ to save me. What is there under God’s Heaven to be afraid of? Yet she was afraid, with the same reasonless fear that seized on her so often. I must not fear. I am High Queen of all Britain; the only other to bear that title sleeps here beneath the earth . . . High Queen, and bearing the son of Arthur. Why should I be afraid of anything in God’s world?

  The nuns finished their hymn, turning from the grave. Gwenhwyfar shivered again, clutching her cloak. Now she must take very good care of herself, eat well, rest much, make certain that nothing went amiss as it had done before. Secretly she counted on her fingers. If it had been that last time before she left . . . but no, her courses had not come upon her for more than ten Sundays, she simply was not certain. Still, it was sure that her son would be born sometime about Eastertide. Yes, that was a good time; she remembered when her lady Meleas had born her son, it had been the darkest of winter, and the wind had howled outside like all the fiends waiting to snatch the soul of the newborn child, so nothing would suit Meleas but that the priest must come down to the women’s hall and baptize her babe almost before it cried. No, Gwenhwyfar was just as well pleased that she would not lie in at the darkest days of winter. Yet to have the longed-for child, she would be content to bear it even at Midwinter-night itself!

  A bell tolled, and then the abbess came to Gwenhwyfar. She did not bow—temporal power, she had once said, was nothing here—but Gwenhwyfar was, after all, the High Queen, so she inclined her head with great courtesy and said, “Will you be staying on with us here, my lady? We would be deeply honored to keep you as long as you wish.”

  Oh, if only I could stay! It is so peaceful here. . . . Gwenhwyfar said, with visible regret, “I cannot. I must return to Caerleon.”

  She could not delay telling Arthur her good news, the news of his son. . . .

  “The High King must hear of—of his mother’s death,” she said. Then, knowing what the woman wanted to hear, she added quickly, “Be sure I will tell him how kindly you treated her. She had everything she could wish for in the last days of her life.”

  “It was our pleasure; we all loved the lady Igraine,” said the old nun. “Your escort shall be told, and be ready to ride with you early in the morning, God willing and send good weather.”

  “Tomorrow? Why not today?” Gwenhwyfar asked, then stopped—no, that would be insulting haste indeed. She had not realized she was so eager to tell her news to Arthur, to end for all time the silent reproach that she was barren. She laid her hand on the abbess’ arm. “You must pray for me much now, and for the safe birth of the High King’s son.”

  “Is it so, lady?” The abbess’ lined face wrinkled up in pleasure at being the confidante of the Queen. “Indeed we shall pray for you. It will give all the sisters pleasure to think we are the first to say prayers for our new prince.”

  “I shall make gifts to your convent—”

  “God’s gifts and prayers may not be bought for gold,” the abbess said primly, but she looked pleased nevertheless.

  In the room near Igraine’s chamber, where she had slept these last nights, her serving-woman was moving about, putting garments and gear into saddlebags. As Gwenhwyfar entered, she looked up and grumbled, “It suits not well with the dignity of the High Queen, madam, to travel with only one servant! Why, any knight’s wife would have as much! You should get you another from one of the houses here, and a lady to travel with you as well!”

  “Get one of the lay sisters to help you, then,” said Gwenhwyfar. “But we shall travel all the more quickly if we are but few.”

  “I heard in the courtyard that there were Saxons landing on the Southern Shores,” the woman grumbled. “It soon will not be safe to ride anywhere in this country!”

  “Don’t be foolish,” Gwenhwyfar said. “The Saxons on the Southern Shores are bound fast by treaty to keep peace with the High King’s lands. They know what Arthur’s legion can do, they found it out at Celidon Wood. Do you think they want more work for ravens? In any case we will soon be back at Caerleon, and at the end of summer, we shall move the court to Came
lot in the Summer Country—the Romans defended that fort against all the barbarians. It has never been taken. Even now Sir Cai is there, building a great hall fit for Arthur’s Round Table, so that all the Companions and kings may sit at meat together.”

  As she had hoped, the woman was diverted. “That is near your own old home, is it not, lady?”

  “Yes. From the heights of Camelot, one may look a bowshot across the water and see my father’s island kingdom. Indeed, I went there in childhood once,” she said, remembering how, when she was a little girl, even before she went to school with the nuns on Ynis Witrin, she had been taken up to the ruins of the old Roman fort. There had been little there then, except for the old wall, and the priest had not stinted to make this a lesson on how human glories faded away. . . .

  She dreamed that night that she stood high on Camelot; but the mists drew in around the shore, so that the island seemed to swim in a sea of cloud. Across from them, she could see the high Tor of Ynis Witrin, crowned with ring stones; although she knew well that the ring stones had been thrown down by the priests a hundred years ago. And by some trick of the Sight it seemed that Morgaine stood on the Tor and laughed at her and mocked her, and she was crowned with a wreath of bare wicker-withes. And then Morgaine was standing beside her on Camelot and they looked out over all the Summer Country as far as the Isle of the Priests, looking down over her own old home where her father Leodegranz was king, and over Dragon Island shrouded in mist. But Morgaine was wearing strange robes and a high double crown, and she stood so that Gwenhwyfar could not quite see her, but only knew she was there. She said, I am Morgaine of the Fairies, and all these kingdoms will I give to you as their High Queen if you will fall down and worship me.