Lady of Avalon

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  She asked, “Can you build a fire?”

  “I am sorry, Lady. I have never been taught that either.” He felt himself blushing. “I know how to keep a good blaze going, but the Druids held fire to be sacred. It was only allowed to go out at special times, and then it was the priests who rekindled it.”

  “It is like men to make a mystery of something that any farmwife can do,” said Sianna scornfully. But the Lady shook her head.

  “Fire is a mystery. Like any power, it can be a danger, or a servant, or a god. What matters is how it is used.”

  “And what kind of flame is it that we kindle here?” he asked steadily.

  “A wayfarer’s fire only, which will serve to cook our day-meal. Sianna, take him with you and show him how to find tinder.”

  Sianna stretched out her hand to Gawen, closing her small warm fingers over his. “Here, we must find dry grasses and dead leaves; anything which will burn quickly and catch fire easily; little twigs and fallen deadwood—like this.” She let go his hand and picked up a handful of twigs. Together they sought out dry stuff and piled leaves and twigs into a little heap in a charred hollow in the damp soil. Larger sticks lay in a heap nearby. This was clearly a place they had used before.

  When she judged the pile big enough, the Lady showed him how to strike fire with a flint and steel that she had in a leather bag tied at her side, and it blazed up. It seemed odd to Gawen that she should make him do a servant’s work after hailing him as a king. But, looking at the fire, he remembered what she had said about it, and for a moment he understood. Even a cookfire was a sacred thing, and perhaps, in these days when the Romans ruled in the outer world, even a sacred king might have to serve in small and secret ways.

  After a few moments a cheerful little fire was sending up narrow tendrils of flame, which the Lady fed with successively larger sticks. When it was burning well, she reached into the punt and pulled from a bag the limp headless carcass of a hare. With a little stone knife she skinned and gutted it, and strung it on green sticks over the fire, which was settling to a steady glow as some of the sticks turned to coals. After a few moments sizzling juices from the hare began to drop into the fire. Gawen’s stomach growled in anticipation at the savory smell, and he became acutely aware that he had missed his breakfast.

  When the meat was done, the Lady divided it with her knife and gave a portion to each of the children, without, however, taking any herself. Gawen ate eagerly. When they had finished, the Lady showed them where to bury the bones and fur.

  “Lady,” said Gawen, wiping his hands on his tunic, “thank you for the meal. But I still don’t know what you want with me. Now that we have eaten, will you answer me?”

  For a long moment she considered him. “You think you know who you are, but you do not know at all. I told you, I am a guide. I will help you find what it is that you are meant to do.” She stepped back to the punt, motioning them to get in.

  What about the hundred kings? he wanted to ask. But he did not quite dare.

  This time the fairy woman drove the punt across open water where the inflowing waters of the river cut a channel through the marsh; she bent deeply to catch the bottom with the pole. The island toward which she was heading was large, separated only by a narrow channel from the higher ground to the west.

  “Walk quietly,” she said as they eased up onto the shore. She led them among the trees.

  Even at the beginning of winter, when leaves were beginning to fall, slipping between the trunks and underneath low branches was no easy task, and the dry leaves crackled beneath any unwary step. For a time Gawen was too caught up in the act of moving to question where they were going. The fairy woman passed without a sound, and Sianna moved almost as quietly. They made him feel like some great lumbering ox.

  Her lifted hand brought him to a grateful halt. Slowly she drew aside a branch of hazel. Beyond it lay a small meadow where red deer were cropping the fading grass.

  “Study the deer, Gawen, you must learn their ways,” she said softly. “In the summer you would not find them here. Then they lie up through the heat of the day and come out only at dusk to feed. But now they know they must eat as much as they can before winter comes. It is one of a hunter’s first duties to learn the ways of every animal he follows.”

  Gawen ventured to ask in an undertone, “Am I, then, to be a hunter, Lady?”

  She paused before answering.

  “It does not matter what you are to do,” she said, just as softly. “What you are is something different. That is what you have to learn.”

  Sianna put out her small hand and pulled him down into a little hollow in the grass.

  “We will watch the deer from here,” she whispered. “Here we can see everything.”

  Gawen was quiet at her side, and so close to her it suddenly rushed over him intensely that Sianna was a girl, and his own age. He had hardly seen, far less touched, a young girl before this; Eilan, and Caillean, whom he had known all the years of his life, did not seem like women at all to him. Suddenly things he had heard all his life without understanding rushed over him. Almost overwhelmed by this new knowledge, he felt his cheeks flooding scarlet. He was very much aware of this and hid his face in the cool grass. He could smell the damp sweaty fragrance of Sianna’s hair, and the strong smell of the crudely tanned hide of her skirt.

  After a while Sianna poked him in the side and whispered, “Look!”

  Stepping high and daintily over the grass came a doe, balanced lightly on hooves which seemed almost too small to bear her weight. A few steps behind her tiptoed a half-grown fawn, its baby spots disappearing into shaggy winter hide. The creature was following in his mother’s footsteps, but in comparison with her assured elegance his gait was alternately awkward and all grace. Like me…, he thought, grinning.

  Gawen watched as they slowly moved in tandem, pausing to sniff the wind. Then, perhaps taking fright at some tiny sound Gawen did not hear, the doe flung up her head and bolted away. Left alone in the little clearing, the fawn first froze; it stood for a few seconds motionless, then abruptly bounded after her.

  Gawen let his breath go. He did not realize till then that he had been holding it.

  Eilan, my mother, he thought, trying over the thought, not for the first time, was like that doe. She was so busy being High Priestess, she did not even really know I was there, far less who or what I was.

  But by now he was almost accustomed to that pain. More real than the memory was the knowledge of Sianna stretched out at his side. He could still feel the imprint of her small damp fingers clutched in his. He started to stir, but she was pointing to the edge of the forest. He froze, trying not to breathe, and then, at the edge of the clearing, he saw a shadow. He barely heard Sianna’s involuntary gasp as, slowly, a magnificent stag, his head broadly crowned with antlers, paraded across the open space. His head was erect; he moved with a great and subtle dignity.

  Gawen watched without moving as the stag swung his head, pausing for a moment almost as if he could see Gawen through the leaves.

  At his side Gawen heard Sianna whisper half aloud, “The King Stag! He must have come to welcome you! I have sometimes watched the deer for more than a month without seeing him!”

  Without having willed it, Gawen stood up. For a long moment his eyes met those of the stag. Then the beast’s ears flicked and he gathered himself to leap away. Gawen bit his lip, sure it was he who had startled the beast, but in the next moment a black feathered arrow arched through the air and buried itself in the earth where the stag had been. Another followed it. But by that time all the deer were in among the trees once more, and there was nothing to be seen but shivering branches.

  Gawen stared from the place where the stag had disappeared to the point from which the arrows had come. Two men emerged from the trees, peering under their hands against the afternoon sun.

  “Halt!” It was the Lady’s lips that moved, but the voice seemed to come from everywhere. The hunters stopped short, staring
around them. “This prey is not for you!”

  “Who forbids—” began the taller of the two, though his companion was making the sign against evil and whispering to him to be still.

  “The forest itself forbids it, and the Goddess who gives life to all. Other deer you may hunt, for this is the season, but not this one. It is the King Stag you have dared to threaten. Go, and seek another trail.”

  Now both men were trembling. Without daring even to reclaim their arrows, they turned and crashed away into the undergrowth through which they had come.

  The Lady stepped out of the shadow of a great oak and signaled to both children to rise.

  “We must return,” she said. “Most of the day has gone. I am glad we saw the King Stag. That is what I wanted you to see, Gawen—the reason I brought you here.”

  Gawen started to speak, then thought better of it. But the Queen asked, “What is it? You may always speak your mind to me. I may not always be able to do or tell you everything, but you may always ask, and if it is something I cannot do or allow, I will always explain why.”

  “You stopped those men from hunting the stag. Why? And why did they obey?”

  “They are men of this country, and know better than to disobey me. But as for the stag, no hunter of the elder races would touch him knowingly. The King Stag can only be killed by the King….”

  “But we have no king,” he whispered, knowing he was getting close to an answer now, and not sure he wanted to know.

  “Not now,” she agreed. “Come.” She started back the way they had come.

  Gawen said heavily, “I wish I did not have to go back at all. I am nothing but an unwanted burden to the folk on the Tor.”

  Rather to Gawen’s surprise, the Lady did not at once reassure him about the good intentions of his guardians. He was accustomed to the way in which adults always reinforced what other adults said.

  Instead the Lady hesitated. Then she said slowly, “I also wish you did not have to return; I do not want you to be unhappy. But every adult must do, sooner or later in his life, some things for which he has no liking or talent. And though I would consider it a privilege to foster one of your lineage, and I have always wished for a son to bring up with my daughter, it is necessary for you to remain in the temple, as long as is needed for the making of a Druid. This learning is necessary for my daughter as well.”

  Gawen thought about that for a moment; then he said, “But I do not really wish to become a Druid.”

  “I did not say that—only that you must receive that training in order to fulfill your destiny.”

  “What is my destiny?” he burst out suddenly.

  “I cannot tell you.”

  “Cannot, or will not?” he cried, and saw Sianna go white. He did not want to fight with her mother before her, but he had to know.

  For a long moment the fairy woman only looked at him. “When you see the clouds red and angry, you know that the day is likely to be stormy, do you not? But you cannot say just when the rain will come or how much will fall. It is like that with the weather of the inner worlds. I know its tides and cycles. I know its signs and can see its powers. I see power in you, child; the astral tides ripple around you as the water parts above a hidden tree. Although it is no comfort to you now, I know that you are here for some purpose.

  “But I do not know what that purpose is, exactly, and if I did, I would not be allowed to speak of it; for it is often in working for or in avoiding a prophecy that people do those very things they should not.”

  Gawen heard this without much hope, but when she came to the end he asked, “Will I, then, see you again, Lady?”

  “To be sure you will. Is not my own daughter to live among the maidens of Avalon? When I come to see her I will visit you too. Will you watch over her among the Druids as she has watched over you in the forest?”

  Gawen looked at her in astonishment; Sianna did not at all fit the pattern of Druid priestesses, for whom his model was Eilan, or perhaps Caillean.

  So Sianna was also to be one? Did she have a destiny too?

  Chapter Three

  With the approach of Midwinter, the weather drew in dark and wet and cold. Even the goats lost interest in roaming. More and more often, Gawen found himself close to the beehive huts where the pastureland stretched away from the foot of the Tor. At first, when he heard the sound of chanting coming from the large round structure the Christians called their sanctuary, he stayed in the field, but what he could hear of the music fascinated him. Day by day he came closer.

  He told himself that it was only because it was raining, or the wind was cold, and he wanted to watch the goats from shelter. It might have been different if he had had a companion of his own age, but the Faerie Queen had not yet fulfilled her promise to bring Sianna to live at Avalon, and he was lonely. He hid when any of the monks were about, but the long, slow surge of their music stirred him, though in a different way, as much as the music of the Druid bards.

  One day a little before the solstice, the shelter of the wall seemed especially attractive, for his sleep had been troubled by nightmares in which his mother, surrounded by flames, was calling to her son to save her. Gawen felt his heart wrenched as he watched, but in his dream he did not know that he was the one she was calling to, and so he did nothing. When he woke, he remembered that he was her son. He wept then, because it was too late to save her, or even to tell her that he would have loved her if he had only been given the chance.

  He eased down against the plastered wickerwork of the wall, tucking his sheepskin around him. The music today was particularly beautiful, full of joy, he thought, though he did not understand the words. It dissipated the anguish of the night as the early sunlight was melting the frost. His gaze fixed on the rainbow play of light on ice crystals, and gradually his lids grew heavy, and without warning he slept.

  It was not sound, but the lack of it, that brought him to himself again. The singing had stopped and the door was opening. Twelve men came out, old, or at least they seemed so to him, clad in grey robes. Heart pounding, Gawen shrank into his furs, still as a mouse when the owl is flying. At the very end of the line came a little old man, stooped with age, with hair wholly white. He paused, his sharp gaze flickering around him, and far too swiftly fixed on Gawen’s trembling form. He took a few steps toward him and nodded.

  “I do not know you. Are you, then, a young Druid?”

  The last monk before the old man in the line, a tall man with thinning hair and blotchy skin, had turned to watch them, glaring. But the ancient lifted a hand, in reproval or blessing, and the other, still frowning, turned away, like his brothers, to his own little beehive hut.

  Gawen got to his feet, reassured by the old man’s courtesy. “I am not, sir. I am an orphan, brought here by my foster-mother because I had no other kin. But my mother was one of them, so I suppose that is what I will be too.”

  The old man surveyed him in mild surprise. “Is it truly so? I had believed the priestesses of the Druids were under a vow of virginity, like our own maidens, and did not marry, neither did they bear children.”

  “They don’t,” said Gawen, remembering some remarks Eiluned had made when she thought he did not hear. “There are those who say that I should not have been born at all. Or that my mother and I both should have died.”

  The old priest surveyed him kindly. “The Master, when He dwelt among us, had compassion even for the woman taken in adultery. And He said of little children that of such was the kingdom of heaven. But I cannot remember that He ever inquired into the birth, lawful or otherwise, of the children.”

  Gawen frowned. Was even his own soul of value in this old priest’s sight? After a moment, hesitantly, he dared to ask.

  “All men have souls of equal worth in the sight of the true God, little brother. You as well as any other.”

  “The true god?” echoed Gawen. “Does your god, whoever he may be, regard my soul as his own, even though I am not one of his worshippers?”

 
The priest said gently, “The first truth of your faith, as well as of mine, is that the gods, by whatever names they may be called, are but one. There is really only one Source; and He rules alike over Nazarene and Druid.”

  He smiled, and moved stiffly to a bench that had been set beside the little thorn tree. “We have dealt with immortal souls, and still do not know each other’s names! My brothers who lead the singing are Bron, who was married to my sister, and Alanus. Brother Paulus is the lastcomer to our company. I am Joseph, and those of our congregation call me ‘Father.’ If your earthly father would not object, it would please me if you would call me so.”

  Gawen stared at him. “I never set eyes on my earthly father, and now he is dead, so there is no knowing what he might say! And as for my mother, I knew her, but not”—he swallowed, remembering his dream—“that she was any relation to me.”

  For a few moments the old priest watched him. Then he sighed. “You called yourself an orphan, but it is not so. You have a Father and a Mother too—”

  “In the Otherworld—” Gawen began, but Father Joseph interrupted him.

  “All around you. God is your Father and Mother. But you have a mother in this world also, for are you not the fosterling of the young priestess Caillean?”

  “Caillean? Young?” Gawen repressed a snort of laughter.

  “To me, who am truly old, Caillean is no more than a child,” Father Joseph answered with composure.

  The boy asked suspiciously, “Has she, then, spoken about me?” He already knew that Eiluned and the others gossiped about him. The idea that they might have been talking even to the Christians was infuriating.