Gwenhwyfar

by Mercedes Lackey

  She tried not to show her surprise to see that Gwenhwyfach waited there too, just behind Medraut. Arthur, however, did not restrain a start at seeing her sister, and, in fact, he finally glanced over at Gwen before looking back at Medraut’s wife. Nor was he the only one. If it had not been that one was gowned and coiffed as a queen and the other had her hair bound up and was in armor, it would have been as if they were reflections of each other.

  So, all of you who didn’t believe me . . . there you are. My dear sister, in the flesh, and looking more the queen than I do.

  And that seemed . . . petty. Was there any reason for Gwenhwyfach to have dressed as if for a coronation?

  Medraut pulled off his helmet and tucked it under his arm. His face was utterly unreadable. “Well, Father,” he began, just a little too casually.

  But anything he was going to say was interrupted by his wife.

  Gwenhwyfach suddenly stormed across the grass between them, and before Gwen could even think to move or speak, slapped her so hard across the face that her lip split and she saw stars and tasted blood.

  “You witless loon!” Gwenhwyfach hissed. “Fool! Idiot! All my life you were first. All my life I was second to you. Finally I was first! Finally I was the one that someone loved! And you ruined that!”

  She seized Gwen’s hair and wrenched her head around with shocking strength. “All he asked was for you to love him and be a true woman for him! All! And what did you do? You sat for months in his court and cried for your toy armor and sword like a spoiled brat! So I gave him what he wanted, and he loved me! And you took that away from me!”

  With a wrench, she flung Gwen to her knees. “You are no woman,” she spat. “You’re a half man. He should have been mine!”

  Gwen stayed on her knees as her mind raced. Now she knew what it was that her visions in Medraut’s cell had shown her. Little Gwen had not fallen entranced with Arthur—she had seen a way to take Gwen’s place with a man who wanted what she was. She had probably been planning to betray Medraut—or at least, put this day off until Arthur died naturally, thus having her crown in both the present and future. But Gwen had escaped and spoiled her plan. Finally she rose, slowly, and looked into her sister’s furious eyes. “Well, little sister,” she said, weighing each word and casting them like weapons. “All my life you have coveted what I had, even when you didn’t truly want it or were ill-suited to it. You wanted Medraut because you thought I wanted him and would be jealous of your married state, but your husband married you because he could not have me.” She wiped away the blood from her lip with the back of her hand. “It must be causing laughter among the gods that my husband saw in you the reflection of what he wanted me to be and was enchanted. You rightly say that you were the one Arthur wanted, and not me, though he knew it not. Given that, I believe that the scales are even between us.”

  Gwenhwyfach went white with fury. But before she or anyone else could say another word—

  There was a cry and a flash of light on metal up on the slope, where the two armies had drawn near—dangerously near—one another.

  And another great chorus of shouts and the cry of “Treachery!” and the parley disintegrated into chaos as fighting erupted on that slope and, in a flash, spread over the entire field.

  Screaming warriors charged from both sides and overran where Arthur’s party stood. Gwen found herself separated from the rest and trying to beat her way back to her archers as the two armies surged forward and clashed. For a moment, before any real blows were struck, she felt hysterical laughter bubbling up inside her.

  And then, as always, her world narrowed to the fighting in front of her, everything blurring into stroke and counterstroke, spin and blow and evasion. The noise was deafening; she shut it out. Once, she caught a glimpse of Lancelin riding through a sea of fighters, striking out on either side with his sword. Once, of Medraut and Arthur, fighting furiously like a pair of stags, oblivious to everything around them. Arthur’s skill was greater than Medraut’s, but Medraut was younger . . .

  But mostly, it was just trying to stay alive, slipping in mud and blood, breathing the stink of spilled guts and voided bowels, with a stitch in her side and a burning gash across her forehead, with her arm growing heavier with every swing, and her heart in bits at her feet.

  It all blurred together, until she was fighting in a kind of animal stupor, going on nothing but training and instinct.

  And then, it seemed, she woke to find herself alone and without an opponent. And there was nothing more to fight. Somehow she had gotten to the edge of the battlefield, and as she looked about and saw no more enemies, her sword dropped from fingers too tired to hold it. Then she dropped to her knees, legs too weary to keep her upright. Numbly, she looked over the field again and saw nothing standing, nothing moving, nothing but the dead and a mist rolling over the battlefield to hide it. It was a vision of horror and carnage out of the end of some epic tale, one that does not end well for anyone—a tale that ends with all the heroes dead.

  Despair overwhelmed her. She threw back her head and howled, sobbed, and keened a wordless lament, and she wasn’t even sure who she was weeping for. Arthur? Lancelin?

  Herself?

  The end of the world?

  For surely this was the end, the very end, of the world. After this, what could there be? Death, death, death; nothing left but darkness and death.

  She sagged back on her heels, and the tears poured from that void where her heart had been. She had thought she had wept before. It had been nothing to this; the only thought left to her, if thought it could be at all, was that she would sit her forever, and weep forever, until she turned into a weeping stone and poured her waters into the little river that must now run red with blood until the end of time.

  “Gwenhwyfar! Gwenhwyfar!” Someone was calling her name. Shaking her. Would not let her mourn in peace. Shook her again, harder. Finally, to make it stop, she looked up through eyes so swollen with weeping they were only slits.

  And the shock of what she saw, with mist weaving around them both, dried her tears in an instant.

  “You—queen—” she gasped.

  Arthur’s second wife, cloaked and robed like one of Gildas’ monks, put back her hood with an impatient hand. There was no doubt; it was the same woman who was supposed to be dead. “Yes, well, queen no longer, but yes, I was Arthur’s second wife. Now get up and come with me. We have need of you.”

  “We—” She shook her head. This was impossible. How had anyone survived? “Who—”

  “Come, warrior. I tell you, you are needed for the journey across Anwnn, and Gwyn ap Nudd cannot hold the door forever.”

  As if she had no will of her own, Gwen got to her feet and yielded to the phantom’s urgent tugs on her arm. Though if the second Gwenhwyfar was a phantom, she was an uncommonly strong and solid one. “Where—”

  “Gildas persuaded Arthur to put me aside. Melwas’s love didn’t last past being confronted with an army.” The queen’s voice dripped with contempt, then softened. “Gildas is a good man. I have been . . . doing penance for my sins under his instruction. But Arthur needs us now. Arthur needs all of us now.” Her voice cracked a little. “He is dying.”

  I thought he was already dead . . .

  The mist swirled and billowed around them, making it seem as if they moved through a landscape of dream—or nightmare. They picked their way through tangled, motionless bodies and seemed to be heading for the single patch of light in the thickening shadows.

  And then the mist parted before them. Lit by torches, Arthur lay on a crude stretcher, his head pillowed on someone’s wadded-up tunic, surrounded by a handful of his Companions, all of them with faces contorted with grief. It was obvious to Gwen that no one could survive the terrible wound in his gut; it had been bound up, but from the amount of blood that had soaked the bandages, he could not have much longer.

  Kneeling beside him, his hand clutched in both of hers, was Gwenhwyfach.

  “And . . . you
really are . . . the sister?” he was saying.

  Little Gwen bent over his hand, weeping, and nodded.

  He sighed. “Then . . . you are the one that I loved most truly, most dearly, and I could never be healed of that sickness of love,” he said tenderly. “You are my true queen and ruler of my heart, who knew the desires of mine without my ever needing to speak them.” His free hand moved feebly to the bandages, and his breath caught. “Medraut is dead; no one has ever survived a single blow of Caliburn, and I struck him nine times. But his return blow was as deep as mine, and full as fatal. I shall die soon—”

  “No!” Little Gwen cried out. “No, no, you can’t leave me! I need you! I’m meant to be your queen!”

  He could only shake his head a very little, as his Companions wept.

  A new figure loomed out of the mist. Gwyn ap Nudd, who nodded to the old queen and Gwen. “Arthur,” he said, his voice deep and sonorous. “It is time.”

  Little Gwen looked up at him as if to protest, but at a single stern look from him, she shut her mouth, muffled her weeping, got up and stood aside. Four shadowy figures came from behind the King of Annwn; they approached the stretcher and took it up. Gwyn ap Nudd gestured to all three women to follow.

  “You bear witness,” said Gwyn, as the Companions watched, seemingly unable to move. “You see that these three queens, all beloved of Arthur, come to bear him through Annwn to the Isle of Glass.”

  The Companions stared; Gwen wanted to say something to them, but a power greater than she could deny pulled her after the others.

  The mist closed behind them as they approached the riverbank. The shadow warriors put the stretcher gently on a boat that was tied to the bank; Gwyn gestured to the three of them to enter it as well. “I can go no further,” Gwyn said. “But the gate is open for you, cousin, and by your bargain with my people, none will harm you in passage.” Gwen went to the prow and stood there, facing the river and the mist; Little Gwen again took her place at Arthur’s side and held his hand.

  “And you, Queen-that-was, you know the way. Yours will be the guiding hand.” The old queen took the tiller, and the shadow warriors, which all seemed to have the heads of beasts, stag, wolf, bear and otter, pushed it off.

  For a long time, there was only mist and water, the splashing of waves interrupted only by Little Gwen’s sobs. Gwen thought she saw vague shadows in the water and in the mist, but they never approached the boat, so she was never entirely sure what she saw. She felt empty and exhausted, as if she had left all of her emotions back there on the riverbank. And then, out of the mist, loomed a small wooden dock with more shadow figures on it, silhouetted by torches.

  But these were not Gwyn ap Nudd’s beast-men. Somehow, Gwen was unsurprised to see that they were robed in the garb of monks and that Abbot Gildas led them.

  A good dozen hands reached for the boat and helped guide it to the dock and make it fast. More of them reached for the stretcher on which Arthur lay. As they lifted him out of the boat, to Gwen’s shock, he opened his eyes and raised his hand.

  “Wait,” he whispered, and he beckoned to her.

  She found tears pouring down her cheeks, again. “I—forgive me—” she choked out. “I never meant to harm you. I wanted to protect you from Medraut, and then—I thought you didn’t care for me, I thought you would be pleased to see the back of me.”

  “It is you who should forgive me. I tried to make you—what you were not. I took a warhorse, and tried to fit it to a plow.” Pain contorted his face for a moment. “Go, and be yourself again. I release you from—every promise, every duty, everything.”

  He waved his hand. The monks carried him away with Gwenhwyfach in close attendance, leaving Gwen and the old queen standing on the dock. And in that moment, a blankness came over Gwen, mercifully taking all thoughts with it.

  Gwen came back to herself sitting in the Abbey church, with no recollection of how she had gotten there, nor how she had come to be clean of the mud and blood of combat and reclothed in another set of trews and tunic. The old queen was on her knees at the altar in the front of the church, but Gwen could not muster the strength or the will to move. It was dark in here, with only the candles on the altar and a small red lamp for light, but it was also dark beyond the windows. Somehow full night had fallen, not the strange twilight of the mist, while she had sat unaware.

  Another blank came over her; this one was probably not as long as the last, for when it passed, Gildas was sitting beside her; he peered at her when she moved her head a little. “Ah,” he said. “You are back among us.”

  She nodded and looked at the altar for the old queen. But she wasn’t there.

  “Arthur?” she asked, her throat sore and dry, her voice coming out as a hoarse whisper.

  “He is gone,” the Abbot said, simply. “And . . . so is your sister.” He shook his head. “When Arthur died, she went mad. She was like a wild thing. She railed at us, that we had not tried hard enough to save him, that we had stolen her crown and her king.” He blinked. “I can truly say that I have never seen such . . . such a strange and fearful sight. She was like one possessed.”

  Numbly, she shook her head. “Only by her own selfishness.” He sighed. “She attacked my monks, clawing at them like a cat, in a frenzy. If she was not possessed, then surely she was mad.”

  Gwen blinked. “But you said—she was dead—”

  “We managed to repel her and drive her out of the chapel. We found her in the morning at the edge of the lake, drowned. She died within moments of him, we think.” He shook his head. “She must have fallen in at some deep point. She must have truly loved him to have been so frenzied.”

  She decided not to disabuse him of his notion. “Yes,” she said slowly. “She did.” Or at least, she loved his crown.

  “Then we will bury them together.” He peered into her face. “Come. You should sleep.”

  “But—”

  “The old queen—we call her Sister Blessed now—will hold vigil over them. And we shall have them buried by your Ladies, here, though not in ground consecrated to Christian use. Come.” He took her hand and tugged at her. She stood.

  And then there was another blank moment, and when she came out of this one, she was lying on a pallet, covered by a wool blanket, in a small wooden hut. The door stood open, and sunlight poured through it.

  She was still numb, and her mind . . . wouldn’t work. It was almost as if she were under the influence of one of Medraut’s potions. Finally she just gave up trying to think at all. She let people lead her about, ate and drank what was put in her hands, did what she was told. She stood at the side of the grave as the monks laid Arthur and Little Gwen in it. That gave her a strange sense of dislocation—she felt a moment of utter terror as she looked at the dead face that was so like her own, could have been her own. For that moment, it seemed as if it were she, not Little Gwen, who was being covered over with earth . . .

  But the moment passed, giving way again to numbness.

  The numbness, the dullness, persisted. She spent days just sitting in the church or beside the lake, or at the Cauldron Well. If someone gave her something to eat, she ate it; if not, it didn’t seem to matter. Nothing seemed to matter; not only her heart was broken, so was her spirit, and she was nothing but a hollow shell where once there had been a warrior with her name.

  And so the days passed.

  And then, one day she woke, and woke fully, and her mind worked again. She sat up and dressed quickly, feeling almost as if she had been very sick, and now the fever had broken.

  Yet once she had dressed, she was at a loss for what to do. She had no idea what was going on beyond the boundaries of the Abbey. Had the Saxons overrun the country at last? Was there any resistance to them at all? Was there anything out there, beyond the deceptive peace of this place, or was it all a chaos of warfare and blood?

  At least she could find the old queen, maybe, or Abbot Gildas, or one of the Ladies, and ask some sensible questions.

 
She ventured out into the morning sunlight, and that was when she saw him riding in along the path that led to the Abbey, looking worn and weary and as broken as she.

  “Lancelin?” she faltered.

  And although he could not possibly have heard her, he looked up, straight at her.

  But his expression did not change. And although he dismounted, tethered a horse that looked as beaten and weary as he, and walked toward her, there was nothing of joy and nothing of love, in his face.

  “Gwen,” he said, stopping a little too far away from her to have taken her hand. “They told me you were here.”

  And there it was. That love, if love it really had been, had burned bright and guttered out. When she tried to find it in herself, all she could sense were cinders and ashes and regret. She nodded. “I have been ill,” she said, and she released that dead love to fall to pieces in the aching void inside her. “I have heard of nothing since—”

  “Ah.” The silence hung awkwardly between them. “They never sing of these things, in the tales. Never talk about what happens after everything is over.”

  She swallowed. “And what does happen?” she asked.

  His eyes held the wisdom of terrible sorrow. “Life goes on. Planting and harvest, birth and death, sun and rain. The world does not end for everyone. Just for a few.” He sighed. “But you don’t want to hear philosophy. The Saxons took a terrible beating, and no, they have not overrun the countryside. There is no High King, and things have broken down into squabbling among all the petty kings again. Most of the Companions are dead. Those that survived have retreated to their estates or taken places in the courts from which they came. Even Celliwig is mostly deserted, except for Kai and the few men that limped home from Camlann. Rumor says that you are dead, you are turned Christian and gone into retreat, or you have followed Arthur into Annwn, where you will both await a day that you are needed.” He shrugged. “I came to see if the fourth rumor was true, that you were here, and if you were, to say farewell.”