I Am Morgan le Fay

by Nancy Springer

  He nodded and struggled to sit up.

  “Wait,” I told him, “let me bring your horse first.” I ran to where I had tethered the stolid bay nag and led it to him. He could not quite stand until I reached to help him; then he pulled himself to his feet, swaying. His blue gaze focused on my hand, still clutched in his. “You’re hurt,” he declared in round-eyed bewilderment, as if this could not be so. Holding my hand palm up, he stared at a raw hole seared into the flesh, a burn about the size of a walnut.

  “It’s nothing.” I had barely noticed the mark, not even to wonder what had done it to me; my hurts were not worth bothering about compared to his.

  He kept hold of my hand. “You have a sweetheart?”

  “No. Why?”

  “The—the ring.”

  The ring woven of soft sable brown hair. “My mother.”

  “Queen Igraine! I—I have been trying to find her....” He let go of me and grabbed for the nearest tree to stay upright, closing his eyes against his own weakness.

  “Thomas, no more talking.” I snatched up my mantle from the ground. “We have to get you on this horse. Can you put your foot in the stirrup?”

  He did, and grasped the mane with his free hand and tried to swing himself up, but could not make it. He slumped with his belly across the saddle.

  “Stay there,” I told him.

  He mumbled something. “. . . try again.”

  “Thomas, stay the way you are.” I chirruped at the horse and tugged the reins to get it moving.

  I led it at a gentle walk—but there is no such thing as gentle when the way leads up a wilderness mountain. Thomas was moaning by the time we had gone half a furlong. But only a little farther, I found a rocky scarp to give us shelter of sorts and, for a wonder, a trickle of water. I stopped the horse and eased Thomas off it.

  He folded to the ground and gasped. “Morgan, what are you doing here?”

  “Plaguing you,” I snapped, and I threw my mantle over him, then left him for a moment while I ran back for Annie’s packs and the knight’s black charger. I threw the bags over the black horse, trotted it back to Thomas, and pulled the gear off both horses, dumping their saddles and bridles and packs in a mess on the ground. Then like a badger I started rooting through the baggage. That accursed knight was well provisioned; at least we would not lack food while Thomas healed. Soup, I thought vaguely. Might there be a kettle in this muddle? Make fire, make soup. Find a soft place for Thomas, moss, leaves, bracken, find blankets, make a proper bed for him—

  “Morgan,” he murmured.

  I left the packs and knelt beside him. It hurt me to look at him lying so pale, so beautiful, so perilously hurt. Blue shadows lay on his tender eyelids. He did not open his eyes.

  “I’m right here,” I told him.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “No! I’m fine.” Every part of me ached as if I had been thrashed, but my heart hurt worst. Annie. Thomas.

  “Gypsy—pony,” Thomas whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “Mane like—lady’s hair.”

  “Yes.” Yes, I had kept Annie shining, even on the journey. My gentle Annie. I had never known it was in her to fight like that. To save me.

  “Morgan, you—you grew.”

  He was lying there with his eyes closed, talking almost in his sleep, but I became suddenly, blushingly conscious of the way the velvet gown bared my neck and clung to my breasts.

  “Hush,” I told him, my voice not quite under control. “Go to sleep before I take a rock to you.” I went off to tend camp-fire, make soup and all the rest of it. When I felt sure Thomas was deeply sleeping, I pulled off the ragged, filthy gown, washed myself at the icy trickle of springwater, and put on one of my old brown frocks.

  “No,” said Thomas.

  “But I am sure I can do it.”

  “No. It’ll hurt you.”

  We sat whispering like the trees in the night, leaning against the rocks and listening to the darkness, the forest breathing, the silences and screams and hootings and wild laughter of neither of us knew what. It was our third night in that wilderness, and Thomas felt strong enough now to sit up and keep watch with me for a while. But his face showed moon pale in the light of my milpreve. I held it on my lap, and it shone there like a blue star. I had put out the cooking fire for fear of attracting unwelcome company; the milpreve was our only light.

  “It won’t hurt me much,” I said doubtfully. I wanted to use the milpreve to heal him. All day every day the summons of Avalon tugged like a fishhook in me, and all night every night; I paced in the dark and could not sleep. I had to travel. But I could not leave him.

  “Not much?” he mocked gently. “Just burn a hole in you, blacken your eyes, knock you down—”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Morgan—” He sat forward to face me, his tone stark serious. “That stone terrifies me. Put it away. Please.”

  I could not refuse him anything he asked of me in that way. I lifted the milpreve and let it drop inside my gown—some whim had made me wear the sea green gown, and I had plaited my hair in a crown and wound it with ivy just for something to do. I had put a garland of ivy on Thomas too, to amuse him. But neither of us could see the other in the dark. His voice came to me out of shadows.

  “The milpreve,” he said. “Is that the reason you must go to Avalon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know who wants you there or why?”

  I shook my head.

  “Morgan?” He could not see me.

  “I think it’s the moon,” I mumbled.

  “That fits,” he said. “Lunacy.”

  We had been through this. The first time I had mentioned the name of Avalon, it had shocked his breath away. It was a place where no one ventured, he had told me, not even warring lords, not even renegade knights. Or if knights ventured there, they came back mad and gibbering and unable to say what terror lay there, or they did not return at all.

  “The moon,” I said, “or the youngest fay, the primrose one.”

  I did not have to explain to him. He knew of these things, as Ongwynn had said the night he had guessed her name. The Gypsies had spoken of these things around their campfires. Some folk said that the language of the Gypsies was the language of fays and magic, the language that spoke to flowers and animals, a language that could tell a placid little dapple-gray pony to rear up and strike an armored knight.

  “You’re never likely to face a greater peril,” whispered Thomas.

  “I know,” I said. Actually, I did not know. I did not understand then, or for years to come, how I carried my greatest peril to Avalon within my heart.

  “Morgan, do you really have to go there?”

  “Yes. The calling in me . . .” I could not begin to explain to him the yearning so strong it took away my fear and made me feel as if I should have been at Avalon yesterday. I murmured, “If only there were someplace safe for you to stay . . .” I let the thought trail away, for I knew of no safe place in the world except Caer Ongwynn, much too far away.

  “No,” said Thomas, “I will go with you.”

  10

  I RODE THE DEAD KNIGHT’S BLACK HORSE, FOR I HAD the use of both arms and hands, and I needed them and the fierce curb bit and all my strength to control that steed; the big brute wanted to charge, not walk. My hands were blistered by the reins after the first day of struggling with him. Thomas rode the more placid bay, mounting from a tree stump and holding the reins with his one good hand. He sat erect, his injured arm in a sling, his face quiet and proud and much too pale. I knew that for his sake we should have stayed where we were another few days if not a fortnight. But he said he was ready to ride, and I could not help but take him at his word; Avalon would not let me do otherwise.

  “If we meet with brigands,” Thomas said as we left our camp, “I won’t be of much help. It will be up to you. Stone them or something.”

  His wryness made me smile. “Don’t worry. I will.�
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  That day we topped the mountain pass. At the crown I managed to tug the black to a prancing halt, and Thomas pulled up the bay, and the two of us looked back into the misty distance behind us.

  “I can’t see the sea,” I murmured. What I really meant was that I could not see Caer Ongwynn.

  “It’s still there,” Thomas said.

  Ahead of us, when we looked that way, lay the blue-veined plain I remembered from a long, boring ride in a canopied wagon when I was a child.

  Odd. Scanning that waterscape, I could not find the castle I remembered. I could not see anything that looked like stonework or fortifications or even a village. Or a road. I could not trace where the path we were on might lead us. I saw no boats on the sky blue maze of streams. Except for a shadow in the distance like a green moon, a circle that might have been a mound or a ring of standing stones, I saw no sign that anyone mortal had ever ventured to Avalon.

  “Downhill from here,” Thomas said, then settled his feet deeper in the stirrups, swinging them forward to brace himself as we began the descent.

  “I am not proud of the company you found me in,” he said out of the blue. “That knight. I’m ashamed that you found me squiring for him.”

  “Why? Because he seized upon maidens?” I called over my shoulder to him, for the path was too narrow for us to ride abreast, and the black steed insisted on taking the lead. “Don’t they all do that?”

  “Not quite all. He had not done it before.”

  “Who was he? Sir Griffin?”

  “No. I won’t tell you his name. That way no one can surprise it out of you.”

  “I don’t want to know it anyway,” I grumbled, turning my attention to the path, now a ledge winding down the mountainside.

  “Of course you don‘t,” said Thomas placidly.

  “I don‘t! I’m glad he’s dead.”

  Silence while I thought how true that was. Killing the knight had taken less toll on me than healing Ongwynn had done. Murderous fury harrowed me less than love, it seemed.

  This was not a comforting thing to think of myself.

  Thomas said, “Anyway, I—when I entered his service, I didn’t know....”

  I began to understand what he was trying to say. “Thomas, it’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Even True Thomas has to eat,” I said. “Hush. Save your strength.” I knew why he was talking about this now, and the knowledge chilled me: He thought he might not have another chance. He thought we might be riding to our doom.

  He did not hush. “I had set myself a quest to find your mother,” he said.

  “And then you had to stop. It’s all right.”

  “I did find out she was alive a few months ago.”

  I reined in the black and turned to look at Thomas, wondering why he had not told me this before. It should have been good news, but something in his voice told me otherwise. I nodded at him to go on.

  “Redburke captured her first,” he said, his voice and his look as level as the plain below us. “She must have made her way back to Tintagel.”

  Probably trying to find Morgause and me. “And?”

  “He used her hard, I hear.”

  At first I did not understand. I thought with a pang of Annie, of using her too hard, the sweat foaming on her flanks those first days of the journey. Then I caught the other meanings, and it was all the worse because I knew Redburke, his thick hairy neck and his turnip nose, and the idea, the image in my mind of his approaching my mother not as a queen but as a prisoner and a concubine—

  I turned so that Thomas would not see my face and rode forward again. He said no more. He was waiting until I was ready to hear the rest of it.

  “And then?” I asked presently.

  “Penzance won her from Redburke, playing at dice—”

  I clenched my teeth, and my legs must have clenched against the black charger also. He surged forward, almost pitching me off the mountainside.

  “Morgan!”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Stop that accursed horse.”

  I managed to wrestle the brute to a halt, turned to Thomas and said, “Just tell me where she is now.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not at Penzance?”

  “No. The story has it that he was sending her under guard to Caer Arienhrodd and she escaped somehow. The men-at-arms paid with their lives for losing her. Since then, nothing. She could be anywhere.”

  “Did she have food?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A mount?”

  “I don’t know, Morgan. I’m sorry.”

  “Was this last winter?”

  “Yes.”

  I nodded, nudged my horse with my heels and rode on in silence, thinking of Igraine the Beautiful alone and fleeing like a deer on the moor in the freezing storms that lashed up like a fist from the sea. My mother, facing mortal peril rather than facing one more day as a lord‘s—as a slave.

  I said softly, “She might be dead.”

  We traveled late, under the light of a waning moon, for the tors dropped steeply and there was nowhere to stop until we had reached the foothills.

  In the morning I awoke when the sunlight shone in my eyes, and I got up to see Thomas lying on the far side of a sheltering tree from me, still sleeping. I stood gazing at his face, fairer than that of any prince in any tale I had ever imagined, and I saw some color in his cheeks today, in his brow—

  He stirred and gave a sigh almost like a moan, and I saw how his skin glistened with sweat. I stepped swiftly to him, crouched and laid my hand on his forehead.

  Fever.

  At my touch he opened his blue eyes and looked blankly up at me.

  “Thomas, your arm, your shoulder,” I said, “are they worse? Do they hurt?”

  Looking too dazed to answer, he sat up, his face tightening—yes, he hurt. As gently as I could I slipped off his sling and removed his bandaging. The wounds had been healing well when last I had wrapped them, the morning we left our camp on the mountain—yesterday. It seemed long ago. Now Thomas’s arm and shoulder were swollen and streaked with red.

  “Contagion,” I whispered, misery squeezing at my chest. Curses on me and everything about my harebrained journey. Annie dead, Thomas hurt, and now this. “Lie down, go back to sleep.” I spun away and started rummaging in our baggage, my mind going like a squirrel, flask of cold water, cloth of some sort, cold compresses, poultices—

  Thomas stood beside me. “Bind me up again and let’s ride,” he said.

  “You can’t ride!”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “Thomas—”

  “Just patch me together and put me on a horse! We can’t stop now. We’re almost there.”

  He could be very stubborn, my Thomas. So could I, but not this time, for the summons of Avalon sang to me like a harp string rooted in my heart, its pull stronger than ever. I could even sense the direction whence it came. It was as Thomas said, we were close. How he knew I cannot say. Thomas knew of many mysteries.

  So we rode on, downhill and out of the forest and onto the plain, among a labyrinth of winding streams.

  At the first stream I halted my horse and got down. Where the bank curved and a thick willow tree crouched over a deep pool, I knelt and soaked my shawl in the cold water. I pushed the cloth under the dark willow-shaded surface, and then, as I lifted it, dripping, I saw a face looking up at me.

  A pale green face with hair that floated darker green, like waterweed. She looked at me with no expression, like an idiot, her mouth slack and lipless, her nose half eaten away by minnows. But she was not a corpse. Her pale, lashless eyes, one fishbelly white, one as brown as a tadpole, blinked and focused on me from under the water.

  An odd calm came over me. I said, “Hello,” stood up with my dripping shawl in my hands, and turned to Thomas—he sat on his horse in a near stupor; he had noticed none of this. I laid the sopping-wet shawl on his arm and shoulder, and with a corner
of it I reached up to comfort his fevered face.

  “I can do it myself,” he mumbled, taking the wet cloth from me.

  I, Lady Morgan, standing there in my sea green gown with my black charger’s reins in hand—I confess I stuck out my tongue at him.

  He smiled. “Let’s ride.”

  The sun shone hot on the green plains of Avalon that day. A green-gold day, perhaps a trick of fate. The summons pulled me straight toward the green-moon place, the mound I had seen from the mountaintop, but the streams curved, curved, curved in the way, and the sun rays struck off their blue crescents like swords.

  Within a few hours Thomas could no longer smile. He rode with his eyes half lidded against the glare and his own pain. I rode with mine wide open.

  As we rode along one stream searching for a place to ford it, I saw what looked at first like a log of wood rise out of the water. It was the head of a black horse, its white-rimmed eyes watching me. Glinting eyes peered out of its flaring water-flooded nostrils as well. When my charger saw it, he shied so hard he almost threw me. I curbed him, and we rode on.

  We rode through rocky shallows to cross. Nothing could harm us there, I thought. But when I glanced down, the water around the horses’ hooves ran red, like blood.

  There were the ordinary sights as well. Fish jumped, tall gray herons stood like druids in the shallows while in the deeper pools swans floated—

  Wait. A white swan drifted as fair as the pearly moon, yet I stared, for on the surface of the water its reflection shimmered starry black.

  I shivered with fear and wonder. But I said nothing to Thomas of anything I had seen, for nothing so far had offered to harm us, not the green woman who breathed water or the stream that ran red or any of it. Water, it all had to do with water, and I remembered a triad:The gifts of the Mother are three:

  Fire that warms yet also burns,

  Tides that feed yet also drown,

  The flood that waters the Tree.

  When the sun stood overhead and beamed down most hotly, I called a halt. Thomas wanted to ride on. I took him by the waist and pulled him off the horse. He was so weak I could do that.