The Mists of Avalon

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “He is mad indeed,” Accolon said, “singing ballads, and carrying about the lady’s garter and such nonsense—”

  “I should think that same garter would make a horse’s halter by now,” said Uriens, and Accolon shook his head.

  “No—I have seen Lot’s lady and she is a beautiful woman still. She is not a girl, but she seems all the more beautiful for that. What I wonder is, what can the woman want with a raw boy like that? Lamorak is not more than twenty.”

  “Or what can a boy like that want with the old lady?” Avalloch insisted.

  “Perhaps,” said Uriens, with a ribald laugh, “the lady is well learned at sport among the cushions. Though one would hardly think she could have learned it, married all those years to old Lot! But no doubt she had other teachers. . . .”

  Maline flushed and said, “Please! Is this talk seemly in a Christian household?”

  Uriens said, “If it were not, daughter-in-law, I doubt your girdle would be grown so wide.”

  “I am a married woman,” said Maline, crimson.

  Morgaine said sharply, “If to be a Christian household means not to speak of what one is not ashamed to do, then the Lady forbid I should ever call myself Christian!”

  “Still,” said Avalloch, “perhaps it is ill done to sit here at meat and tell ugly stories about lady Morgaine’s kinswoman.”

  Accolon said, “Queen Morgause has no husband to be offended, and the lady is of age, and her own mistress. No doubt her sons are well pleased that she contents herself with a paramour and does not marry the boy! Is she not also the Duchess of Cornwall?”

  “No,” said Morgaine, “Igraine was Duchess of Cornwall after Gorlois was set down for his treason to Pendragon. Gorlois had no son, and since Uther gave Tintagel to Igraine for bride-gift, I suppose now it belongs to me.” And Morgaine was suddenly overcome with homesickness for that half-remembered country, the bleak outline of castle and crags against the sky, the sudden dips into hidden valleys, the eternal noise of the sea below the castle . . . Tintagel! My home! I cannot return to Avalon, but I am not homeless . . . Cornwall is mine.

  “And under the Roman law,” said Uriens, “I suppose, as your husband, my dear, I am Duke of Cornwall.”

  Again Morgaine felt the surge of violent anger. Only when I am dead and buried, she thought. Uriens cares nothing for Cornwall, only that Tintagel, like myself, is his property, bearing the mark of his ownership! Would that I could go there, live there alone as Morgause at Lothian, my own mistress with none to command me. . . . A picture came in her mind, the queen’s chamber at Tintagel, and she seemed very small, she was playing with an old spindle on the floor. . . . If Uriens dares to lay claim to an acre of Cornwall, I will give him six feet of it, and dirt between his teeth!

  “Tell me now your news of this country,” said Accolon. “The spring was late—I see the plowmen are just getting into the fields.”

  “But they have nearly done with plowing,” said Maline, “and Sunday they will go to bless the fields—”

  “And they are choosing the Spring Maiden,” said Uwaine. “I was down in the village, and I saw them choosing among all the pretty girls . . . you were not here last year, Mother,” he said to Morgaine. “They choose the prettiest of all for the Spring Maiden, and she walks in the procession around the fields when the priest comes to bless it . . . and there are dancers who dance round the fields . . . and they carry an image made from the last harvest, made from the barley straw. Father Eian does not like that,” he said, “but I don’t know why not, it is so pretty. . . .”

  The priest coughed and said self-consciously, “The blessing of the church should be enough—why should we need more than the word of God to make the fields grow and blossom? The straw image they carry is a memory of the bad old days when men and animals were burned alive so that their lives should make the fields fertile, and the Spring Maiden a memory of—well, I will not speak before children of that evil and idolatrous custom!”

  “There was a day,” said Accolon, speaking directly to Morgaine, “when the queen of the land was the Spring Maiden, and the Harvest Lady as well, and she did that office in the fields, that the fields might have life and fertility.” Morgaine saw at his wrists the faint blue shadow of the serpents of Avalon.

  Maline made the sign of the cross and said primly, “God be thanked that we live among civilized men.”

  Accolon said, “I doubt you would be asked to do that office, sister-in-law.”

  “No,” said Uwaine, tactless as any boy, “she is not pretty enough. But our mother is, isn’t she, Accolon?”

  “I am glad you think my queen is handsome,” said Uriens hastily, “but the past is past—we do not burn cats and sheep alive in the fields, nor kill the king’s scapegoat to scatter his blood there, and it is no longer needful that the queen should bless the fields in that way.”

  No, thought Morgaine. Now all is sterile, now we have priests with their crosses, forbidding the lighting of the fires of fertility—it is a miracle the Lady does not blight the fields of grain, since she is angry at being denied her due. . . .

  Soon after, the household went to rest; Morgaine, the last to rise from her seat, went to supervise the locks and bars, and then went, with a small lamp in her hand, to make sure Accolon had been given a good bed—Uwaine and his foster-brothers were now occupying the room that had been his when he lived here as a boy.

  “Is all well with you here?”

  “Everything I could desire,” said Accolon, “except a lady to grace my chamber. My father is a fortunate man, lady. And you well deserve to be the wife of a king, not of a king’s younger son.”

  “Must you always taunt me?” she burst out. “I have told you; I was given no choice!”

  “You were pledged to me!”

  Morgaine knew that the color was leaving her face. She set her lips like stone. “Done is done, Accolon.”

  She lifted her lamp and turned away. He said behind her, almost a threat, “This is not done between us, lady.”

  Morgaine did not speak; she hurried along the corridor to the chamber she shared with Uriens. Her lady-in-waiting was ready to unlace her gown, but she sent the woman away. Uriens sat on the edge of the bed, groaning.

  “Even those slippers are too hard on my feet! Aaah, it is good to go to rest!”

  “Rest well, then, my lord.”

  “No,” he said, and pulled her down at his side. “So tomorrow the fields are to be blessed . . . and perhaps we should be grateful we live in a civilized land, and the king and the queen need no longer bless the fields by lying together in public. But on the eve of the blessing, dear lady, perhaps we should have our own blessing, private in our chamber—what would you say to that?”

  Morgaine sighed. She had been scrupulously careful of her aging husband’s pride; never did she make him feel less than a man for his occasional and clumsy use of her body. But Accolon had roused in her an anguished memory of her years in Avalon—the torches borne to the top of the Tor, the Beltane fires lighted and the maidens waiting in the plowed fields . . . and tonight she had had to hear a shabby priest mocking what was, to her, holy beyond holiness. Now even Uriens, it seemed, made a mockery of it.

  “I would say that such blessing as you and I might give the fields would be better left undone. I am old and barren, and you are not such a king as can give much life to the fields, either!”

  Uriens stared at her. In all the year of their marriage she had never spoken a harsh word to him. He was too startled even to reproach her.

  “I doubt it not, you are right,” he said quietly. “Well, then, we will leave that to the young people. Come to bed, Morgaine.” But when she lay down beside him, he lay quiet, and after a moment, he put a shy arm across her shoulders. Now Morgaine was regretting her harsh words . . . she felt cold and alone, she lay biting her lip so that she would not cry, but when Uriens spoke to her, she pretended she was asleep.

  Midsummer dawned brilliant and beautiful; Morgaine,
waking early, realized that, however much she might say to herself that the sun tides ran no longer in her blood, there was something within her that ran heavy with the summer. As she dressed, she looked dispassionately at the sleeping form of her husband.

  She had been a fool. Why should she have accepted compliantly Arthur’s word, fearing to embarrass him before his fellow kings? If he could not keep his throne without a woman’s help it might be he did not deserve to hold it. He was a traitor to Avalon, an apostate; he had given her into the hands of another apostate. Yet she had meekly agreed to what they had planned for her.

  Igraine let her life be used for their politics. And something in Morgaine, dead or sleeping since the day she fled forth from Avalon, bearing Gwydion within her womb, suddenly woke and stirred, moving sluggishly and slow like a sleeping dragon, a movement as secret and unseen as the first movements of a child in the womb; something that said, clear and quiet within her, If I would not let Viviane, whom I loved, use me this way, why should I bow my head meekly and let myself be used for Arthur’s purposes? I am queen in North Wales, and I am duchess in Cornwall, where Gorlois’s name still means something, and I am of the royal line of Avalon.

  Uriens groaned, heaving himself stiffly over. “Ah, God, I ache in every muscle and there is a toothache in every toe of my foot—I rode too far yesterday. Morgaine, will you rub my back?”

  She started to fling back furiously, You have a dozen body servants, and I am your wife, not your slave, then stopped herself; instead she smiled and said, “Yes, of course,” and sent a pageboy for her vials of herbal oil. Let him think her still compliant to everything; healing was a part of a priestess’s work. If it was the smallest part, still, it gave her access to his plans and his thoughts. She rubbed his back and kneaded salve into his sore feet, listening to the small details of the land dispute he had ridden out yesterday to settle.

  For Uriens, any woman could be queen, he wants only a smiling face and kind hands to cosset him. Well, he shall have them while it suits my purpose.

  “And now it looks as if we would have a fine day for the blessing of the crops. We never have rain at Midsummer-day,” Uriens said. “The Lady shines on her fields when they are consecrated to her—that is what they used to say when I was young and a pagan, that the Great Marriage could not be consummated in the rain.” He chuckled. “Still, I remember once when I was very young, when the fields had been rained on for ten days, and the priestess and I might have been pigs wallowing in the mud!”

  Against her will, Morgaine smiled; the picture he made in her mind was ludicrous. “Even in ritual, the Goddess will have her joke,” she said, “and one of her names is the Great Sow, and we are all her piglets.”

  “Ah, Morgaine, those were good times,” he said, then his face tightened. “Of course, that was long ago—now what the folk want in their kings is dignity. Those days are gone, and forever.”

  Are they? I wonder. But Morgaine said nothing. It occurred to her that Uriens, when he was younger, might have been a king strong enough to resist the tide of Christianity washing over the land. If Viviane had tried harder to put a king on the throne who was not bound hard and fast to the rule of the priests . . . but of course, who could have foreseen that Gwenhwyfar would be pious beyond all reason? And why had the Merlin done nothing?

  If the Merlin of Britain and the wise folk at Avalon had done nothing to stem this tide that was drowning the land and washing away all the old ways and the old Gods, why should she blame Uriens, who was after all only an old man, and wanted peace? There was no reason to make him an enemy. If he was content, it would not matter to him what she did . . . she did not know yet what she meant to do. But she knew that her days of silent compliance were over.

  She said, “I wish I had known you then,” and let him kiss her on the forehead.

  If I had been married to him when first I became marriageable, North Wales might never have become a Christian land. But it is not too late. There are those who have not forgotten that the king still wears, however faded, the serpents of Avalon about his arms. And he has married one who was a High Priestess of the Lady.

  I could have done her work better here than all those years at Arthur’s court, in Gwenhwyfar’s shadow. It occurred to Morgaine that Gwenhwyfar would have been content with a husband like Uriens, whom she could keep within her own sphere, rather than one like Arthur, living an entire life in which she had no part.

  And there had been a time, too, when Morgaine had had influence with Arthur—the influence of the woman he had first taken in coming to manhood, who wore, for him, the face of the Goddess. Yet, in her folly and pride, she had let him fall into the hands of Gwenhwyfar and the priests. Now, when it was too late, she began to understand what Viviane had intended.

  Between us, we could have ruled this land; they would have called Gwenhwyfar the High Queen, but she would have had Arthur only in body; he would have been mine in heart and soul and mind. Ah, what a fool I was. . . . He and I could have ruled—for Avalon! Now Arthur is the priests’ creature. And he bears, still, the great sword of the Druid Regalia, and the Merlin of Britain does nothing to hinder him.

  I must take up the work that Viviane let fall. . . .

  Ah, Goddess, I have forgotten so much. . . .

  And then she stopped, shaking at her own daring. Uriens had reached a pause in his tale; she had ceased rubbing his feet, and he looked down questioning at her, and she said hastily, “I am quite sure you did the right thing, my dear husband,” and spread some more of the sweet-smelling salve on her hands. She had not the slightest idea what she had agreed to, but Uriens smiled and went on with his tale, and Morgaine slid off into her own thoughts again.

  I am a priestess still. Strange how I am suddenly sure of that again, after all these years, when even the dreams of Avalon are gone.

  She pondered what Accolon had told them. Elaine had borne a daughter. She herself could not give Avalon a daughter, but as Viviane had done, she would bring her a fosterling. She helped Uriens to dress, went down with him, and with her own hands fetched him fresh new-baked bread from the kitchen and some of the foaming new beer. She served him, spreading honey on his bread. Let him think her the most doting of his subjects, let him think her only his sweet compliant wife. It meant nothing to her, but one day it might mean much to have his trust, so that she could do what she chose.

  “Even with the summer my old bones ache—I think, Morgaine, that I will ride south to Aquae Sulis and take the waters there. There is an ancient shrine to Sul—when the Romans were here they built a huge bathhouse, and some of it is still there, unfallen. The great pools are choked, and when the Saxons came they carried off much of the fine work, and threw down the statue of the Goddess, but the spring is still there, undamaged—boiling up in clouds of steam, day after day and year after year, from the forges at the center of the earth. It is awesome to behold! And there are hot pools where a man can soak all the weariness from his bones. I have not been there for two or three years, but I shall go again, now the countryside is quiet.”

  “I see no reason you should not,” she agreed, “now there is peace in the land.”

  “Would you care to go with me, my dear? We can leave my sons to care for everything here, and the old shrine would interest you.”

  “I would like to see the shrine,” she said, sincerely enough. She thought of the cold unfailing waters of the Holy Well on Avalon, bubbling up inexhaustible, forever, sourceless, cool, clear. . . . “Still, I do not know if it would be well to leave all things in your sons’ hands. Avalloch is a fool. Accolon is clever, but he is only a younger son—I do not know if your people would listen to him. Perhaps if I were here, Avalloch would take counsel of his younger brother.”

  “An excellent idea, my dear,” Uriens said sunnily, “and in any case it would be a long journey for you. If you are here I will not have the slightest hesitation in leaving all things to the young men—I will tell them they must come to you for good advice in
all things.”

  “And when will you set forth?” It would not be at all a bad thing, Morgaine thought, if it were known that Uriens did not hesitate to leave his kingdom in her hands.

  “Tomorrow, perhaps. Or even after the blessing of the crops this day. Will you have them pack my things?”

  “Are you sure you can travel that long a road? It is not an easy ride even for a young man—”

  “Come, come, my dear, I am not yet too old to ride,” he said, frowning a little, “and I am sure the waters will do me good.”

  “I am sure they will.” Morgaine rose, leaving her own breakfast almost untasted. “Let me call your body servant and have everything made ready for you to depart.”

  She stood at his side during the long procession around the fields, standing on a little hill above the village and watching the capering dancers, like young goats . . . she wondered if any of them so much as knew the significance of the phallic green wands wound about with red and white garlands, and the pretty girl with her hair streaming, who walked, serene and indifferent, among them. She was fresh and young, not fourteen, and her hair was coppery gold, streaming halfway between her waist and knees; and she had on a gown, dyed green, that looked very old. Did any of them know what they were watching, or see the incongruity of the priest’s procession, following them, two boys in black carrying candles and crosses, and the priest intoning the prayers in his bad Latin; Morgaine spoke better Latin than he!