For only I can keep him alive, can give him his life again.
And if that means death for me and for my love, then it has to be.
There was a soft knock at the door, and she raised her head. Darkness had fallen, but the moon was high.
“… Sir Lancelot?” she heard the attendant say. She drew herself up. “Show him into the next apartment, I will see him there.”
SHE SEEMED TALLER and straighter to Lancelot than he had ever seen her before, pale, lofty, and composed. The glowing red silk of her dress flowed over her body like wine, and her bright hair caught every glint of gold in the dying light. Her mouth, her folded pose, made her a rose to him again, waiting to be kissed. But she was looking at him with her deer’s eyes. She had the look of the woodland, wild, free, and strange.
She stood in the center of the chamber, and Lancelot knew what she would say. He felt himself falling through time and space. As he moved stiffly forward his body was not his, and his voice was not his own.
He reached for her hand and brought it to his lips. “So, lady,” he said huskily, “I must go, it seems? The time has come upon us. We must part.”
She saw the cliff ahead, and her soul fell spinning into the chasm beyond, the void of darkness without him, without his love. “You know I do not choose this for myself?” Her senses spun.
“Ah, lady!” he sighed. “We have no choice.” He straightened up and seemed to grow and tower in the room. “The Gods command our lives—we must obey.”
“The King—” She was choking now, and had to fight for breath. Her resolution faltered under a wave of pain. He talks of leaving me; it can’t be true—
Then, like a broken thing, her mind came limping along behind.
You have made a vow, your love for Arthur’s life. It must come true, and you must make it true.
He looked into her eyes and read her mind. With infinite sadness he took both her hands in his, raised them to his lips, and kissed her fingertips one by one.
Guenevere’s heart swelled till she could hardly breathe. “It is for Arthur—you know that—not for myself?”
Lancelot moved away. “So?” he said almost to himself, shaking his head in disbelief. “We must part?” He covered his eyes with his hand. “Well, perhaps the Mother knows better than we do. Perhaps—” He broke off.
“What do you mean?”
He turned to her again with the ghost of a smile. “We have been lucky, lady, to escape discovery. We have been in danger since the time at Joyous Garde. There will be nothing to fear if we are apart.” Except being apart, he thought with a sick lurch, but he did not say the words. He nodded to himself, turning away. “I never thought to leave you. But now I see I must.”
“Oh—”
He tossed back his hair, and his eyes were very bright. He reached for her hands again. “My Queen, let us make a good farewell. We shall have a long time to remember it.”
“Oh, my love!” Her breasts, her lips were aching for his touch. Never had she wanted him more than now. You must forget me, find another woman, one you can marry, who can live with you as I could never do, she wanted to say, but she knew she never would. “You will forget me,” she said sorrowfully. “You will find another love.”
He took her in his arms. “There is no other love for me but you.”
The force of all she was losing struck her again, and she wept at last. “With you, I lived and loved for the first time.”
He gasped. “Is that true?”
“You gave me back the life I lost when Amir died.” She checked herself—Enough. “Where will you go? What will you do?”
“Oh—” He raised his head and let out a baffled sigh. “Something—anything.”
“What shall I do?”
He took her in his arms and rested his chin tenderly on the top of her head. “Wait—wait and hope. Hope on, and keep the faith. Wherever I go, you will be always there. And wherever you go, my prayers will be there before. What we have between us is stronger than life, older than fate or time.”
“Lancelot—”
He put her away gently, drew a ring from his little finger, and slipped it onto her finger. “Wear this for me.”
It was a moonstone of the purest water, a mysterious silver-blue, in a thick band of antique gold. He held her hand and gazed into its depths. “I chose it for the color of your eyes. I was keeping it for the right time.” He brought her hand to his lips, his lashes glinting with unshed tears. “I did not know it would be this.”
Guenevere looked down. Her mother’s wedding ring gleamed on the finger next to the moonstone, a thick twist of old red gold. She tugged it off and threaded it onto his hand. She saw the love light in his eyes again, and tried to fix the image in her mind.
He raised his hand and brushed the ring against his lips. “So.” He took her gently in his arms again. “Remember this!” he commanded huskily. “As far as I go away from you, that is the measure of my love. It is a sign of the power you have, and the power to draw me back to you one day. If the quest leads to the ends of the earth and beyond, I shall return. If I die, I will come back to you after death. And then we will never be parted, for my soul will be with you always, till you join me in the Otherworld.”
“Oh, my love—my love—”
He folded her in his arms and gave her the sweetest kiss of their lives. “I swear by the Maiden, Mother, and Crone, by the Three in One and One in Three, that I will keep faith with you. Till the sky falls, till the seas drown the shore, till the earth swallows me, I am yours. You are my holy thing. You are my three in one and one in three. You are my love, you are my life, and there is nothing else.”
She was beside herself now. “Lancelot—oh—don’t say that, don’t—”
“My lady!”
There was a tapping at the door, and Ina’s low voice. “Madam, the doctors are here again to see the King.”
Lancelot met her eyes. There was no need for words. Outside the window the evening had come down, and the last faint fingers of light were stealing through the glass. In the thick greenish light he looked very ill.
He tried to smile, and she lost the last trace of self-control. “Come, my Queen.” He kissed her again, but on the forehead, distantly, as if they were already strangers now. “The Gods weave sorrows into the loom of life only to increase our joy. We must believe that this endless winter will give way to spring. One kiss, and then we part.”
CHAPTER 64
Dressed like a king, not like an invalid, Arthur lay motionless on the great bed. His body was sleeping, but his mind was never more alive. He had heard Guenevere order his attendants not to swathe him in the garb of the sickroom like a dying man. Marveling, his soul flowered with the sweetness of it, for he knew it spelled her longing to bring him back to life and restore him to what he had been. And he knew now that she was back in his chamber again, sitting at his bedside where she had been all along.
He should stir himself, he knew, and tell her that all was well, that there was nothing wrong with him but this sleepfulness. Yet while he was dreaming so blessedly, he thought, he would sleep a little longer yet. The dreams that had come to him in this time of waking sleep had made him sing to himself with joy, and cry to dream again.
He had dreamed of his boyhood, when he roamed with Kay through long summer days that never seemed to end. He saw himself on his first day as a squire, a tall boy of fourteen leaving off the short cloak of a page for a full-length red mantle with a royal trim. He had served King Ursien of Gore then, and the King’s banner floated through all these dreams. One by one his thoughts retraced all the steps that had brought him from squire to knight, and then at last to King.
And at his side through it all moved the thin flickering form of the one who had been more than a father to him, more than tutor, more than life. He saw Merlin again as the old man used to be, the rare visitor to the court of Sir Ector where he spent his childhood in happy ignorance of what he truly was. Merlin would arrive on a beast
as strange as himself, a tall white mule with one brown eye and one blue. He would be closeted with Sir Ector for a long day or a night while the two men exchanged news, Merlin’s of the outer world and the country at large, Sir Ector’s, as Arthur learned later, a loving report on the details of his foster son’s life.
Then the dream changed again. With Merlin at his side, he rode for London and relived the glory of when he was proclaimed. Once more he fought under Caerleon’s battlements, took his kingdom, and came into his own. With his enemies on their knees at his feet, he saw again the purest of all human sights, the joy on the faces of the vanquished when they know their lives will be spared. “Go in peace,” he heard his own voice echoing through the dream, “and make war no more!”
Now he dreamed of a high green hill under a smiling moon, and a queenly young woman standing bathed in white and gold. He could hear her soul calling to him as he plunged toward her, breasting a sea of fire. She held out her arms and he came to her, and they were one. They grew together like trees in a forest, separate yet intertwined.
But deep in the roots of his tree he could feel something stir. With the blind eyes of sleep he looked down through the earth and saw a great scaly thing uncoiling its loathsome body beneath his feet and slowly thrashing its hideous forked tail. In the branches above his head he could hear a raven cry. With a mournful clattering of its wings, it took to the air and circled around into his view.
As the great black bird flew down he could see that it clutched a small child in its claws. Black-haired and white-faced, it was the child from the tournament who came as herald for the black knight. Passing Arthur, the boy turned his head and looked full at him, and Arthur shook with the force of his stare. Once already he had seen the odd, lustrous, hyacinthine eyes. But now for the first time he saw in the child’s face the mirror of his own.
The raven set the child down on the jousting field, and circled away with a hideous cawing behind the viewing gallery at the knights’ end of the field. Moments later, the black knight rode out onto the field. And now Arthur was forced to relive his charge down the lists. Again he was thundering toward a black lance that would not feint away. Now he could feel the agony in his chest as the point brought him down; now he crashed to the ground with the heavy armor mangling his every joint; now his lifeblood oozed from him as he lay in the dirt.
And he saw what he knew no one else could see: the helmet of the black knight parting from its iron collar and gaping open to the air. Through the crack came a black beak, a black head, and a dead blue-black eye, and then the raven was free and away and circling up through the air. She winged her leisurely way to the end of the field where the child stood, now watching the sky. Unnoticed by all as they ran madly down the field to the fallen King, the raven wheeled down, picked up the child, and soared away to the clouds.
A loud mocking cry filled Arthur’s ears as she went. He shook like a willow, and a pale sweat bathed every limb. Now he knew why the child had begged the boon for the black knight. Now he knew why the black knight had come to challenge him; now he knew who it was.
He had to wake now; he had to; the fear was too intense. But he could not stir. Instead he watched in agony as the spirit shadow of Morgan hovered above him and took shape. In a sick parody of their love, she began to strip him of his clothing, piece by piece. She stripped him as she had done when she seduced him, and he lay naked in a welter of scalding shame.
And as always, she took him further than he meant to go. Now she led him on further still, in spite of his resistance and his pain. Taunting and abusing, she still set herself to arouse him and he watched in helpless horror as his flesh answered her call. Now he was lying naked and erect, but unable to cover himself, his hands and feet pinioned in the torpor of the dream.
Now he was drowning in shame like boiling oil.
And still she had not finished with him.
“See, Arthur. See!”
The deadly hissing was all around him now. A sickness gripped his stomach, and he felt a stirring at the root of his being, deep in his loins. Then, to his terror, his whole sex shook and a blue-black eye emerged at the very tip. First one eye, then another, then a blunt, questing head, and as he watched, a grown snake emerged to the light of day, crawling inch by inch out of his shuddering member.
Arthur looked on, trying to force himself awake, trying in vain to scream. The snake sat coiled on his chest now, hissing lightly, surveying him curiously. Its scaly body was black with red markings blotched like blood, and black wattles swung from its neck as the head swayed ominously to and fro. But the eyes assessing him so coldly were not black or red but a deep hyacinthine blue. The snake that had issued from him was the boy on the jousting field. And the boy on the jousting field was—
“Aaaaghh—”
As Arthur’s mind closed around the terror, the snake reared, spat, and struck. He felt the stinging venom in his eyes, then sharp fangs sinking into his throat. Thrashing like a sea serpent, the snake was tearing his windpipe out. The thing that had sprung from his own loins was going to take his life.
“Aaaaghh!”
“Arthur, Arthur! What’s the matter? Oh, my love!”
Arthur burst into consciousness, weeping with terror and clutching at his throat. Guenevere’s face was above him, her warm arms around him, her whole being alight with love and anguished concern.
He tried to speak, but no words came from his mouth.
“What is it?” she implored. Then her face cleared and a light of joy shone in her eyes. “Oh, Arthur,” she whispered, wide-eyed, “you’ve come back to me. You’re awake again; you’re alive.”
Arthur shook his head, too weak to speak again. A cup of strong liquor was at his lips now. “Drink this,” urged Guenevere.
The fiery liquid seared its way through the gag of dust and cobwebs blocking his mouth. He grabbed at the cup and drained the cordial down. Then his hands plucked madly at Guenevere’s arm. “Morgan,” he groaned. “She was there, and—”
“And Mordred.” Guenevere drew away from him, he saw with a stab of agony, at the very mention of the name. “Yes, she has come back to plague us once again.”
Arthur fell back on the bed, seeing it all. Morgan, the black spirit who had come as knight and bird. Mordred, the terrible boy, the old-young offspring of a force that existed before time began.
Raw evil from ancient times, already abroad and looking for fresh meat when he stepped in its way. And in the folly of his own young manhood, wounded by love and dragged along by insatiable desire, he had made more evil out of the evil that was. He had let loose another Morgan in male form to darken the years to come.
He looked at Guenevere hovering over the bed. Her once-lovely eyes were purple with suffering, and her face was as wild and fierce as that of a haggard of the rock. She was paying too, he realized with blank dread. She would pay for Mordred in times to come, and so would Kay and Gawain, Lucan and Bedivere. So would they all. He closed his eyes. Tears as big as hailstones escaped from his lids and ran down his face. “I should have died,” he said.
Guenevere leaped to his side. “Arthur, no!” She took his hand. Her grip was cool, and as she leaned in to him she smelled as sweet and wholesome as the blossom on the trees.
“Yes,” he persisted stubbornly. “For all I have done—done to you—” He gave a rusty laugh. “And to Morgan too, and to him now, the little one—”
“Your son.”
Arthur shuddered.
“Your son,” Guenevere repeated as steadily as she could. “Mordred. He lives; we know that now. We have to say his name.”
Arthur turned his head aside.
“Say it, Arthur. He has to be recognized.”
He closed his eyes. “Mordred,” he heard himself say.
“Your son.”
He paused. “My son.” He opened his eyes. Could he say this? He had to. “My second son.”
Guenevere flinched. Arthur pressed on. “First Amir, then Mordred. Is this the
end, Guenevere? In your country queens may change their consorts when they need a better man. Even in mine, a king may live alone. I will do whatever you want that will make you happy now.”
“It will not make me happy to be alone.”
A dull spark of hope lit Arthur’s eye. “Could you ever think of being with me again? Could you ever forgive?”
Could she? She took his hand. “Hear me, Arthur. When a marriage fails, there is fault on both sides. Morgan could not have taken you from me if our love had been strong. No woman can steal a man who is truly loved. I failed you then.” She took a fragile breath. Do not speak of Lancelot, her heart urged, and she heard its voice. But something had to be said. “And I have failed you since. You talk of forgiving. But you, can you forgive?”
“Oh, Guenevere!” He drew her down to the bed and took her in his arms. He felt a surge of love for her so powerful that the blood burst through his body and rushed to his loins. Tenderly he kissed her eyes, her forehead, and the soft skin of her face. After so long, he dared not approach her mouth. But he wept softly with joy when he felt her kissing him.
MY LOVE.
Arthur, my love …
She took his face between her hands and kissed his lips as she had not done for a long time. With confident hands she unfastened his tunic and parted the shirt underneath.
Without haste she set about renewing the love she once felt for him. Gently circling, kissing, and caressing, she rediscovered his long length, and made much of his every limb. A languorous warmth suffused her as she played him like an instrument, wringing from him groans of pleasure and tiny stifled cries of disbelief and joy.
Waves of desire seized Arthur, racking him from head to foot. He felt himself grow strong and flourish as he had feared he never would again. He tossed Guenevere back on the bed and fumbled with the fastening of her gown. Laughing softly in her throat, she pushed his hand aside and slid herself out of the bright silken sheath.
Naked against the cloudy folds of silk, she was like the creamy pistil lying at a poppy’s heart. Arthur’s senses swam. He passed a trembling hand over her warm heavy breasts, feeling himself quicken again at the sight of her nipples urgent for his touch. Awe and wonder held him back, and a moment of blind panic almost had him weeping with fear—What if I lose this again?
Guenevere, Queen of the Summer Country Page 50