On her love-finger she still wore the ring he had given her, a pure-water moonstone of mystical silver-blue. But the comfort it gave her had departed now. On her left hand she bore the burden of her wedding ring. The heavy hoop of gold was a torment too.
He’s going to marry her, Gawain said. Well, she’ll want that, any girl would.
But Goddess, Mother, married? She was gasping now, tears sprouting with every breath. Yes, he’ll marry her, he’ll be with her, and I’ll be all alone...
In the end, her nature could not continue in such pain. She passed from numbness to indifference, then felt nothing at all. So when a glowing Ina slipped up to her in her chamber, moon-eyed and pink-cheeked, she did not care.
“My lady, he’s coming!” Ina breathed. Her wide-set eyes were gleaming with their Otherworldly light. “Now we’ll know the truth.”
Will we?
Guenevere turned away. The candles had burned down. It was hours since she had left Arthur and his knights reveling in the hall, and climbed the steps to seek refuge in her tower. There she had bathed her temples with patchouli, her mother’s long-beloved sweet musky scent, and lit fresh candles in bowls of rosewater and lime. Then she had moved in a cloud of soothing fragrance into the window to read the faraway stars. She was at peace in her own domain. Why should she bother now?
“Ina, say it’s too late—”
But Ina was already at the door.
“A traveler from Little Britain,” she announced loudly as she showed him in.
Standing in the window, Guenevere heard the words with a shrug of disregard. Once they had needed to be careful when he came to her chamber alone. But now it no longer mattered what the guards thought.
“This way, sir.” Her heart in her eyes, Ina disappeared behind the closing door.
Lancelot came in, and a chill of fear brushed his heart. Guenevere stood with her back to him across the chamber, looking out into the night. Before, she would have run to meet him and thrown herself into his arms. Now all he could see was a column of blood-red silk, and a veil of pale gauze covering her hair. Her familiar fragrance reached him like a new dimension of pain, and a ring of frozen stars danced around her head. She has heard it all, came to him like a curse. And she believes the worst.
He shrugged off his traveling cloak and threw it on a chair. “My lady,” he said.
“Your lady?” She whirled around, pouncing like a snake. Her eyes were glittering. “Not anymore, Lancelot, from what I hear.”
He stiffened. “Madame, allow me, I can explain—”
She had always loved his lightly accented voice. The girl from Astolat must have loved it too. “Oh, I’m sure you can, Lancelot,” she said with savage emphasis. “You’ve always been able to speak up for yourself.”
He stared, confused by her hostility. “Is that wrong? Surely a knight should be able to speak to a lady, even a queen?”
Goddess, Mother, how dare he! Her frail control collapsed. “Oh, I hear you gave a very good account of yourself while you were away! Sir Gawain says you have a new love. Her brothers call you brother, and you wore her favor at the tournament.”
His heart, his stomach clenched. “How did you know this?” he managed.
“Gawain saw you! He saw it all.”
“Gawain—” He shook his head. “I did not know he was there.”
“Evidently!” She took a gulping breath. “So! Is she as young and lovely as they say? Is she an heiress, Lancelot? Will she be rich?”
Lancelot shook his head. He had never before seen Guenevere like this. But still it never occurred to him to lie. “She is the heiress of all Astolat.”
“Ha!” Guenevere drew in her breath with a hiss. “And a beauty too, they say?” She gave a brittle laugh. “She must be, or they would not call her fair.”
She paced away and covered her eyes with her hands. Only moments before he came, you thought you did not care. And now?
Now I hate him! Now I can’t bear him, his brown eyes burning in his long, pale face, that body of his that she must have enjoyed too—
She clutched a hand to her head. Her eyes grew dim. She saw Lancelot lying in bed in a quiet white room. She saw his body stripped and then covered, tended, and stripped again by unknown hands. Night fell, and she saw a slender shape steal into the room. Then it was dawn, and she watched the girl slip out. But a fragrance, an aura lingered with pervasive force. Guenevere came to herself choking on pink and white.
“Madame?”
Lancelot was gripping her by the forearms, staring into her eyes. She gasped, and recoiled from him. “You have, haven’t you?” she spat.
“What, madame?”
“Made love to her! You have, I know, I’ve seen it!”
His eyes flared. “You see nothing but your own jealousy!”
“My jealousy? Not your treachery?” she cried.
Lancelot stepped back from her, and took a breath. “This is madness, lady.”
“Tell me the truth! I know you’ve married her!” A red rage was sweeping her like a storm. “Wedded her, bedded her, call it what you like. Don’t you understand what I’m saying?”
“Madame.”
At last he felt his anger rising to answer hers. The French rhythms of his speech had never been more pronounced. “I speak your language well enough to speak the truth. I am not married, and not likely to be.”
“Oh, so?” She gave a scornful laugh.
He gritted his teeth and pressed on. “And I bedded no one. The maid of Astolat is a pure virgin for me.”
“You say that? When you wore her favor in the tournament? When all the world knew you were pledged to her?”
“She begged a favor before I could refuse. I never gave her my pledge.”
“Why should you owe her a favor?”
“She saved my life. I came to her house with a wound that would not heal. For months she took care of me as I lay in bed, day and night.”
The image of Lancelot in bed with the girl at his side came back to her again with all the force of a blow. “It must have been good to be ill,” she burst out, “to be nursed like that!”
“Gods above, enough!” He bounded forward, and gripped her by the wrists. “Why do you say these things and make us both suffer so? It was you who sent me away, and I left my heart with you. Yet the first gossip you hear, I am a liar, I am untrue!”
She turned her head toward him as if caught in a bad dream. “Words, words.”
“You are my lady! I am your knight. That means I am pledged to you.” He gave a scornful laugh. “To you! And you taunt me with being pledged to her, when—?” When you are married to the King, and sleep in his bed, he might have said, but could not. He shook his head, and turned toward the door. “I will leave you, lady. I have no stomach for your jealousy.”
“This girl—” She changed course with brutal suddenness. “This Elaine—she loved you, yes? Did you know?”
Lancelot gritted his teeth. “Madame—”
She assumed a lighter tone. “I want to know.”
He drew a breath. He should tell her the truth; he had nothing to fear. “When we met, she was very kind to me. I was sick in bed, and she was with me a lot.”
She tensed imperceptibly. So it was true. A throbbing pulse picked up on the side of her head.
Lancelot paused, his senses suddenly alert. “There was nothing in it. There’s really nothing to say.”
“No no, go on, it’s fine, I want to know.”
He wanted to believe her. “Then after that, she was always quiet when she saw me, and would sit by my bed and never say a word.”
“She was a quiet girl, then?” Her voice was calm, but the beating of her mind was growing faster as she spoke.
“Quiet and gentle,” he said unwarily.
“And pretty too?”
“Oh, yes. She’s a beautiful girl.”
“And kind and loving toward you?”
He did not see the pit his words had dug. “Always.”
“You did go to her bed!” She trembled in a panic of distress.
He felt an answering impulse of pure terror. “No, madame!”
“Or she came to yours!” she howled. “Did she seduce you? Who made the first move?”
He turned to face her. “No one! Listen to me!”
But the madness was running unchecked through her body now, drowning out her brain. She saw again the lean frame she had so much loved, and her smiling rival drifting up to his bed.
“No more, Lancelot!” she screamed. All her life’s loss and grief were in her cry. “You have betrayed me. You’re a faithless man. You’ve killed our love, Lancelot. You have to go!”
Fear flooded him. “Lady, let me speak—”
She was panting so hard that she could hardly breathe. “Get out.” She pointed a quivering finger toward the door. “Go!”
She is mad, he thought. He tried to take her hands. “My Queen, we should—”
She broke away and struck him in the face. “Go!” she screeched. “Don’t you see I hate you for what you’ve done?”
He drew into himself, hurt beyond thought, beyond speech. “So, madame,” he forced out at last, “if this is your will, I go. Till tomorrow, then, I kiss your hand.”
“Not till tomorrow!” she howled. “No more tomorrows, no more after today!”
He could not believe her. “I am not your tame falcon, lady,” he began angrily, “to be sent away, then whistled back as soon as you change your mind. I am—”
Her heart, her mind were breaking all at once. “I know who you are. And you’re nothing to me now. Get out!”
His face was set like stone. “Have a care, madame!”
Her voice dropped to a piercing hiss. “I mean it, Lancelot. Go, and don’t come back. You’re banished from the court, from the Summer Country, from my love. Get out, now! ”
He turned and left the room. Her last words were still ringing in his head as he slammed the door and started down the steps.
“Go! I never want to see you again!”
CHAPTER 39
The antechamber to the King’s apartments was dull and devoid of life. The gray light of a late winter afternoon played over the groups of people waiting for the King to return, and lost itself in the shadows of the aloof. A few of the bystanders talked quietly among themselves. But where Bors and Lionel waited by the door the silence was almost too deep to break.
Lionel stared at the walls, gazed out through the window, and finally studied his feet. “We should have gone with the King,” he said at last.
Bors glanced around the room and found no relief from Lionel’s reproach. He knew they should not be idling away here among the grim-faced monks and sad-eyed lords too old for the hunt. They should have joined the laughing, shouting band that had streamed out joyfully in the winter dawn.
He nodded a weary assent.
Lionel pressed on. “And we should have stopped Lancelot from going straight to the Queen.”
Bors gave a savage laugh. “Or at least warned him how angry she might be.”
“He thought she would understand if he told her the truth.”
“The truth?” Bors smiled bitterly to himself. “She’s not interested in the truth. She believes whatever she wants to believe. She’s out of her mind!”
“Brother, you don’t mean—”
“How else to explain her sending him away?” Bors’ face darkened at the thought, and he could not contain his rage. “Think of it! A prince of Benoic to be banished like some evildoing wretch? A king’s son to be discarded like a servant who gives offense?”
Lionel glanced uneasily around. Nearby was a group of earnest monks, farther off a cluster of knights and aged lords. Some of their ancient ladies were there too, and mischief-making kept them all alive. Any of them might overhear Bors’ complaint. In a royal antechamber, even the walls had ears.
He lowered his voice. “He loved her too well,” he said placatingly.
“D’you call it love?” Bors spat. His eyes narrowed. “Sometimes I think she must be a witch. How else—?”
Lionel straightened up, stretched his long legs, and looked over his brother’s head. His clear gray eyes were veiled with a secret thought. He knew why men loved the Queen. He could have told Bors why their cousin was moved to the depths of his soul by the sight of her hand lifting her veil, by the tragic shadows around her mobile mouth, by her ever-youthful ways and her age-old soul. And he knew, too, why Bors, dutiful and precise, could never admire Guenevere.
But Bors did not have to hate her, as he did now. Lionel flinched. Hate was not the word. Bors loathed Guenevere for her treatment of Lancelot.
Their silence now was filled with private pain. Bors cursed himself. He did not want to go out hunting with the King. Yet least of all did he want to be in a dull chamber on a winter afternoon, waiting for him.
He raised his head as a cry came at the door.
“The hunt is back. Make way for the King and his knights!”
There was a flurry of cries and commands, and Arthur strode through the doors, tossing his cloak and gauntlets to a servant as he came. “Thank you, good sir!” he said. “And come—wine for my knights and guests—give them good cheer!”
He was glowing from his day in the saddle, bright-eyed and welcoming. “Greetings to you all,” he cried. He smiled on all, and gestured expansively. “Fill your glasses, come!”
He always did this, brightening a room as soon as he came in, Bors noted with an upsurge of love. When Arthur entered, the flames leaped up on the hearth, and the torches danced in their sconces to keep them company.
“Sir Niamh, you should have been with us—you too, Sir Lovell—”
Arthur moved across to the aged knights, greeting the graybeards tenderly, one by one. A bevy of scribes and councilors entered with the day’s missives and papers for him to sign. Behind them the knights tumbled noisily through the door, jostling one another like bullocks in a pen, reliving the day’s hunt.
Sir Gawain and his brothers were at the head of the troop. Gawain fetched Agravain a boisterous clout across the back. “Don’t look so bad-tempered, Agravain!” he crowed. “You missed the boar, but Gaheris got him in the end.”
He gave the grinning Gaheris a push that sent him spinning into Gareth, who, for all his bulk, was giggling like a girl.
“Lords, lords! Is this good behavior to show before the King?”
It was one of the clerics waiting to see Arthur. Gods above! Gawain swore to himself in a fury. How dared he address them like this? He turned to face the source of the rebuke. Clad all in black, with a huddle of monks on his heels, the gowned figure loomed like a column of basalt in the shadowed hall. The stink of stale incense and candle grease wafted ahead of him like a bad prayer, and he exuded an air of great holiness. But behind the lofty gaze and domed forehead lay a brain like a hunting knife, Gawain knew. Not to me, you don’t, he seethed in silence. None of your pious Christian lectures to me!
“Away the Orkneys!” he announced abruptly, turning on his heel. Startled, his three brothers followed without a word.
Gawain crossed to Arthur to take his leave. “My lord, we shall see you at dinner in the hall.”
“Before you go, Gawain...”
Arthur was flourishing a letter, wreathed in smiles. “I have good news for you. Your mother has written to beg a visit from her sons. And I intend to give you leave to go.”
“Sire?” Gawain was stupefied. Behind him Agravain stood in tense silence, while Gareth and Gaheris exchanged glances of surprise and joy.
“Your mother, Queen Morgause,” Arthur repeated with a smile. “She wants to see you, and I know you must want to see her.”
“Of course,” Gawain agreed hastily. He had to admit that his mother had been far from his mind, but now a host of cheerful memories flooded in. Long days of hunting through the golden Orkney air. White nights of reveling with the Queen’s knight companions, mighty drinkers to a man. A world where his
mother was queen, and he was every man and woman’s future king.
Gawain felt himself expand and grow. Yes, a return to the Orkneys would do very well. He gave an elaborate bow. “The Orkneys, eh? You are gracious, sire. My brothers and I will gladly take leave to go. In the meantime, we shall attend you in the Hall.”
He bowed himself out, and his brothers followed suit.
There was a moment of silence after they had left. The Father Abbot pursed his lips in a cold smile. Gone, were they? So may all heathen shrivel in the fire of truth. And so may I separate the King from all his benighted kin, when they stand between him and the Lord as these Orkney louts do.
And so shall I part them all from the Great Whore. When I speak to the King—
“Father Abbot!”
He came to himself with a start. Arthur was standing before him, clasping his hand with delight. “I did not see you there! What, have you come all the way from London without sending word? The Queen and I would have sent out a troop of knights to welcome you, if we had known.”
The Queen? the Abbot mused dispassionately. No, he could never think of the concubine as a Queen. God alone knew why Arthur ever took a daughter of these pagans as his wife, when there were Christian princesses to be had. Surely he’d known that the women of the Summer Country gave their bodies like beasts, and offered their so-called thigh-friendship wherever they willed? But he had chosen her, and now he called her his Queen. Let him call her what he liked. To a man of God, she would never be more than a whore.
And this whore would never welcome him in Camelot. The Father Abbot stiffened along the length of his spine. Had he ever believed that he would find himself here in the stronghold of the Mother Goddess, almost in the arms of the Great Whore herself? No, in truth he had not—but such was the wonder of God’s plan. Already His soldiers were taking Avalon. Now Arthur would be apprised of their progress there. When they had succeeded in getting the Holy Grail, only time would be needed to bring Camelot down.
Time, Lord. Give me time.
“You are gracious, sire.” The Abbot forced his thin lips into a smile. “But I need no special welcome to do God’s work. A while ago, I begged you to spare the House of the Little Sisters of Mercy from the vengeance of Sir Yvain, when his grief at his father’s death made him want to put the whole nunnery to the sword. You spared their lives, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now you’ll rejoice to know that the convent is whole again.”
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