"Oh, God," Gwen whispered. She turned to run, but even then she knew that she could not make it back into the woods in time. As she tumbled outside she heard a third pop, this time behind her, and simultaneously a pressure thudding into the left side of her back, as if someone had pushed her so hard that she was propelled to the ground.
The pain was not instantaneous; it came a moment after the thud, the surprise, the sudden spray of blood, like an aerosol, from her burst lung through her mouth and out from between her lips. After all that, the pain shot through her like a burning pinprick of flame, causing even her feet to kick out wildly.
The door of the house creaked open. Then he was there beside her in what seemed to be no time at all. The horrible pain shooting through her chest one second, and then Titus's face above her the next. But then, she thought, more time must have elapsed. She was on her back, which meant he had turned her over, and he was kneeling beside her.
He was wearing a plastic parka. The hood was pulled over his head, but rain still ran down his face in rivulets. His expression was very concerned.
"Daddy?" she asked.
He looked down at something in his hand. Gwen by this time was seeing only dimly, but it appeared to be a little cup, or a bowl. She did not wonder at all why Titus would be holding such an object. She was at the stage of trauma where all realities were acceptable. An angel walking out of the park would have been every bit as possible to her as the appearance of an ambulance.
Unfortunately, she got neither. Only Titus contemplating his cup and occasionally looking at her face as if he were trying to memorize it.
"I'm… I'm cold," she managed to say. The blood in her mouth tasted metallic, too strong.
For a moment it seemed that Titus held the cup tentatively out to her. Again, this action seemed perfectly normal, as would any other. But he withdrew it again. "I'm sorry," he said. "I haven't anything to put over you."
Her teeth chattered.
"It won't be long," the man whom she now knew only as her father said. He put the cup in his pocket.
"You're going to the Tor," she said.
Titus was getting up off his knees. "What did you say?" he asked softly. He leaned over her, his hand cupped over his ear. Rain dripped from his fingers onto Gwen's face.
"The Tor," she whispered. "You'll go to the Tor to make things right." Her speech was so soft that someone whose whole body was touching her would not be able to hear it.
But Titus did. Through the rain, through the deep rumble of thunder, he heard the dying girl's incoherent words so clearly that he thought they had originated in his own mind. "To make things right," she repeated.
"Yes, of course," he said, sorry that it had had to come to this. With her face washed clean, he saw that the girl was clearly his daughter. He saw it in all her features. She was the only child he had ever produced, as far as he knew, and she was quite lovely. "I'm sure you would have had a nice life," he said. Then he shot her again, through the head, to put her out of her pain.
Chapter Forty-Two
GUENEVERE'S JOURNEY
Aah, she thought. Dying was easier than she had ever thought it could be. Almost pleasant, actually, once the fear was gone. And Guenevere had lost her fear long, long ago.
She was Sister Guenevere now, in the convent where Arthur had chosen to put her away nearly twenty years before, although she almost never thought of herself as a nun.
There were different categories of nuns at the abbey. The contemplative nuns, who took on biblical names, were quite devout, living only to meditate on Christ through prayer. Even though most of them had come from very good families, they lived lives of penitential simplicity, dwelling in wretched little boxes of rooms with only a straw mat for a bed and no other furniture except for a tallow candle, and ate communally.
Then there were the working nuns, from the laboring classes. These sturdy women performed the menial chores of the convent, from plowing the fields to cooking. Unlike the contemplatives, they brought little to the abbey in terms of material possessions, but without them the place would surely fall to ruin.
And then there were the women like Guenevere—well, naturally, none were quite like Guenevere, since she had been High Queen of Britain—but nevertheless women of great stature and wealth, who had found their way to the abbey after their political roles had been fulfilled. There were only a few of them, mostly widows of petty kings who had fled for their lives after their husbands' dynasties were overthrown.
By this time civil war was raging through Britain as a result of Arthur's dying without leaving an heir. Mordred, Arthur's principal adversary, had been killed in the same battle that had taken Arthur's life.
After that, a number of people including, strangely, Morgause, had briefly ruled Britain. But in the end, the Saxons took over the country, and proved to be competent if harsh administrators who finally bent the disparate clans to their will by killing all the petty kings.
It was during those harsh times that Guenevere lay dying in the Abbey of Glastonbury, where many great ladies from the era of Camelot found themselves grateful for the sanctuary of the New Religion.
The abbey was not very rule-bound then, at least not for highborn women. Guenevere ate in her room, and had two servants, including her former nanny, to look after her, although in fact it was Guenevere who looked after Nanny rather than the other way round until the old woman died. Guenevere herself lived only two years more.
Her last years were spent in virtual solitude, remembering the two men who had made up her life: Arthur, who had been the fabric of her being, as much a part of her as her skin or her breath, and Launcelot, who had blazed for one white-hot moment in her loins and her heart.
That moment had exacted a terrible price. Arthur had died, betrayed and brokenhearted, the last great native King of Britain. Guenevere had given up the rest of her life to languish in this single stone room. And Launcelot had wandered away, some said to the wild northern lands of the Picts, a broken man gone mad with shame.
And then, of course, there was Britain itself, which would never be the same. The Saxons would change the very look of the population. They would bring their own gods, and name the days of the week for them. As for the Old Religion of the Britons, its magic and power would become lost in the storms of war. There would only be a few druids left by then, anyway. After Britain became a Saxon holding, no one would pay any attention to the ancient ways. Only the old women in the countryside would remember the Sabbats and Esbats, or chant the spells for love and fertility and protection, or mix the potions from the earth and the sea that cured sickness and eased pain. Only the old women would keep what was left of Britain alive.
All because I did not give birth to the child within me, Guenevere thought. Because ultimately, her country had not been lost because Arthur was a bad King. On the contrary, he had been the greatest King their island had ever known. He had been doomed only because he had begotten no heir.
The terrible irony of it all was that Arthur had been raised in the old ways. Had Guenevere simply told him of her indiscretion, he might not have been ruined by it, as he was by the circumstances as they happened. He might have accepted the child she bore as his heir, even if he knew it was made from Launcelot's seed. Practitioners of the Old Religion were not so sticky about whose child was whose. They believed all life belonged to the Goddess, anyway, the Great Mother, and that human beings were merely custodians, not owners, of one another. One child was as good as another under the old rules.
Not a bad way for people to be, she thought, knowing how blasphemous the thought was, but no longer really caring. She was fifty-five years old, the oldest woman in the abbey. Considering that the average life span was under twenty-five, even Arthur had been thought of as an old man at the time of his death at the age of thirty-eight. Cheneus, universally acknowledged as ancient, had been perhaps sixty when he succumbed to his wife's lethal potion. Only the Merlin had lived longer, but he could hardly be counted
as human.
Guenevere had no doubt that she would not remain long on earth. Her lungs were filled with the congestion that came of damp and cold. The Merlin had known of a hundred ways to cure it, but he was long gone. He had become a hermit shortly after Arthur's death, Guenevere was told. He had died inside a cave, with a wolf watching over his body, so that no one could claim it for burial.
The sisters at the abbey, meanwhile, knew of no cures besides prayer. And so Guenevere prayed, when she remembered the words, although she knew she would die of this foul thing in her lungs. This, this coughing, the black phlegm, the honking pain in her chest, was just penance for her sin with Launcelot.
And yet she never could quite bring herself to truly regret that morning in the field when she lay naked with him, their limbs entwined, feeling his breath on her, his lips, his sweet tongue; the electrifying moment when she opened her legs to him and gave over to him her passion while she took his, took his love, the deepest love of his heart, into herself.
Was that so horrible? Her eyes welled with tears. If it was, it was only because Arthur, too, had held her love in his heart. They had loved one another, it seemed, since the beginning of time. Yes, she thought as she grew drowsy, she had known him lifetimes before, and loved him then, too.
The sin lay in the knowledge that she had not chosen between them. She had taken what was offered by both Arthur and Launcelot, and treasured it all. That, she supposed, was what made it all a horror.
"But can love ever be a horror?" she said aloud, although the sound was little more than a croak.
She was glad she was here, in the nunnery, rather than back at the castle with a hundred attendants to record her last breath. People were meant to die alone. It was more intimate. When God—or the Goddess, in case her old nanny had been right, after all—came to take her, she did not wish to walk away reluctantly, as if she were leaving the party.
But then, perhaps no one would come for her at all. After what she had done, perhaps her sinful little soul would just dry up and turn to dust. And in the morning, when her body was taken away, one of the sturdy working nuns would sweep up the ashes of her soul in a dustpan and throw it out among the chickens.
She smiled. The picture the thought generated was amusing. Suffering had brought Guenevere the gift of humor, even though it was of the black sort.
Yes, it would be fitting to be tossed out among the chickens, she thought. All of us, with our mighty plans and clever ways. In the end, it seems, fate always has its way. All of the compromises Arthur made to appease the petty kings were for nothing. He had forsaken his wife, whom he had loved, for them. He had abandoned his plans for a peaceful assimilation of the Saxons, thereby making them enemies, in order to feed the chiefs' lust for battle. And although he had geared his whole life toward achieving peace, Arthur had died by the sword.
As for herself... Well, here she was, an old sinner dying alone, filled with phlegm and regret. She coughed, and her thin body doubled over in pain. Blood trickled from between her lips.
Are you coming? she asked silently. Goddess, have you come to take me?
She did, in fact, see someone. It was the beautiful fair-haired woman she had seen so many years before, in a demented vision as she hovered near death beneath a makeshift tent along the road to Orkney. The woman, a priestess, was holding an obsidian dagger, just as she had in that long-ago vision.
"Brigid," Guenevere said, delighted. "Have you come for me?"
"I am you," the priestess said.
"Ah, I understand." She looked down, and there she was, standing, dressed again like a queen, in a gown of fine red wool. "I am Guenevere. I am you."
"And me, too." The two of them turned to see a third female, this one a young girl with eyes rimmed in black, wearing blue jeans and a wet jacket.
"My, that's an odd one," Guenevere said.
"Gwen." Brigid held out her arms. "She is from the future," she explained to Guenevere. "Have you ever dreamed of her?"
The queen thought. "Hmm. I do believe I have."
"And I know you both," Gwen said. "I've drawn you."
"An artist," Guenevere said. "I always wanted to draw."
"And I would have liked to be a queen," Brigid said.
"And I would have liked to call down the Goddess," Gwen said.
Brigid cocked her head. "But you did, child," she said. "At the end, when you were suffering so. You told your killer to come to the Tor."
"The Tor?" Gwen asked.
Brigid smiled. "It's where I lived."
"And where I found the sword in the stone," Guenevere said.
"And where you will…" Brigid covered her mouth. "Well, things will be made right, as you said."
"Did I say that?" Gwen asked.
"In a way. It was the Goddess who spoke. But her words came from your mouth."
"I didn't know that could happen."
"Oh, yes," Brigid said. "It is the way of our kind."
"Our? But I'm not—"
"You are everything I am." She gestured toward Guenevere. "Everything the queen is. Whenever you need us, you will find us all within yourself."
"Unfortunately," Guenevere said dryly. "I'm afraid you won't be needing much of anything. Nor will any of us."
Gwen looked around. "Am I dead, then?"
The two other women smiled gently.
"Oh, but I can't be," she said, looking about her. "I have to go back."
"Oh, dear," said the queen, who had lived such a long time that the prospect of returning to her sickness-wracked body did not seem tremendously appealing. "But how do you propose to do that, child?"
"I don't know," Gwen said. "Maybe Arthur…"
"Arthur," Guenevere said.
"Arthur," Brigid echoed.
"I beg your pardon, ma'am?" It was her servant. Guenevere had forgotten all about her. She was new. Both her former nanny and her handmaid were dead. This girl—oh, what was her name again? It didn't matter. The girl had been sleeping. She could tell by the way the little simpleton was blinking.
"You could at least stay awake for my death," Guenevere said archly.
"Yes, ma'am."
Well, there were some good things about death, she supposed. She wouldn't have to be waited on by fools. "Go away," she said.
What had she been thinking? Oh, yes, Brigid. The priestess whom she had been in another life. Fascinating. And the other, the strange girl with the covered legs. Very odd, that one. But she, too, had been Guenevere. How many other lives have there been, she wondered. Hundreds, perhaps thousands.
Oh, my, she thought suddenly. That's blasphemous. Or something. She blinked slowly, sleepily. Or nothing. "Just the wanderings of my confused mind," she rasped. "I'm sick. I'm dying. These imaginings..."
They are not imaginings, came a voice. It was very close, right inside her ear.
"Brigid?"
"Yes, my child."
"Child, indeed! I'm twice your age."
"And I was born sixteen hundred years before you."
"Oh, dear. I see. Where's the other? The maiden who wraps her legs?"
"She wants to wait. For Arthur."
"Arthur, yes," the queen said faintly. "Will he come?"
"I think so."
"I'm glad," Guenevere said. "We were always meant to be together, but we couldn't... that is, I didn't..."
"I understand," Brigid said softly. "It was the same with me. That is why we're being given another chance."
"Through the maiden."
"Yes. We'll try again. Sooner or later, we're bound to connect."
"So much always seems to get in the way, though."
"That is why we're given other chances."
"Ah," Guenevere said. "Fate does have a habit of getting its way, doesn't it?"
"Indeed." The women laughed.
"But about these imaginings of mine..." Guenevere began.
"They are not imaginings," Brigid repeated. "They are the journey home."
Guenevere blinked
. "Oh," she said softly. "Are you God, then?"
Brigid thought. "Why, I suppose I am. And you, too."
"What?" The old woman laughed out loud. "Hardly."
"Well, why not? Who else is going to look after us?"
"But that's ... that's ..." Her eyes met Brigid's. "That's marvelous," she finished.
Then, putting her arm around the ancient priestess, they walked together into the great white light that grew around them like a halo. And in that radiant, loving light, Queen Guenevere laughed about what she now knew, too late to tell anyone, of gods and humans.
Chapter Forty-Three
A NEW DAY DAWNS
"I think someone's at the door," Hal said.
It was hard to tell. The rain was pouring seemingly straight down, and thunder boomed so loud that it was difficult to hear anything.
Emily pulled aside the curtain to look outside. "Who in the world… It's Arthur!" she said, running to let him in.
He was soaked and shivering, his red hair plastered to his face, and his eyes looking lost, with the vague, wide aspect of someone in shock. "Emily, is Hal here? I... I need..."
"What is it?" Hal demanded, knowing that Arthur would not hunt him down idly on a night like this.
"It's a girl," Arthur said, embarrassed. "Her name is Gwen.”
"Who?"
"Gwen Ranier?" Emily asked.
"Yes. I have to find her, but I don't know where she lives."
Hal made an effort not to laugh out loud. "Are you telling me you've been out in this rain looking for a girl?"
"I called all the Raniers in the phone book, but I couldn't reach her." Arthur wiped his face with his bare hands. "I think she's in trouble, Hal."
"How do you..." Hal was going to say "know," but the one thing he had learned from his experience with Arthur was that it made no difference how the boy knew the things he did. He simply knew them.
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