The Mists of Avalon

by Marion Marion Bradley

  "This is my kinswoman," Viviane said. "Her name is Morgaine. She will be one of you. Take her-" Then she looked at the young girl, who stood shivering as the sun sank and darkness dropped grey, draining the fantastic colors from the landscape. The child was weary and frightened. There were enough trials and ordeals before her; she need not begin them at this moment.

  "Tomorrow," she said to Morgaine, "you will go to the House of Maidens. It will make no difference there that you are my kinswoman and a princess, you will have no name and no favors except what you can earn for yourself. But for tonight only, come with me; we have had little time to talk together on this journey."

  Morgaine felt her knees wobbling with the sudden relief. The women facing her, all strange and with their alien dress and the blue markings on their brows, frightened her more than the whole court of Uther assembled. She saw Viviane make a little dismissing motion, and the priestesses-for so she supposed they were-turned and went away. Viviane held out her hand, and Morgaine took it, feeling the fingers reassuringly cool and solid. Once again Viviane was the kinswoman she knew, yet at the same time she was the awesome figure who had brought down the mists. Once again Morgaine felt the impulse to make the sign of the cross, and wondered if all this country would vanish away as Father Columba said all demonwork and sorceries must vanish at that sign.

  But she did not cross herself; she knew suddenly that she would never do so again. That world lay behind her forever.

  At the edge of the apple grove, between two trees just coming into blossom, stood a little house of wattle and daub. Inside, a fire was burning, and a young woman-like the others she had seen, in dark dress and deerskin tunic-welcomed them with a silent bow.

  "Do not speak to her," said Viviane. "She is, at present, under a vow of silence. She is a priestess in her fourth year, and her name is Raven."

  In silence, Raven stripped off Viviane's outer garments and her muddy and travel-worn shoes; at a sign from Viviane she did the same for Morgaine. She brought them water for washing, and later, food: barley bread and dried meat. For drink there was only cold water, but it was fresh and delicious, unlike any water Morgaine had ever tasted.

  "It is the water of the Sacred Well," Viviane said. "We drink nothing else here; it brings vision and clear sight. And the honey is from our own hives. Eat your meat and enjoy it, for you will taste no more for years; the priestesses eat no meat until they have finished their training."

  "Why is that, Lady?" Morgaine could not say "Aunt" or "kinswoman." Standing between her and the familiar names was the memory of the Goddess-like figure summoning the mists. "Is it wrong to eat meat?"

  "Surely not and a day will come when you may eat whatever food conies to you. But a diet free of animal flesh produces a high level of consciousness, and this you must have while you are learning to use the Sight and to control your magical powers rather than letting them control you. Like the Druids in the early years of their training, the priestesses eat only bread and fruit, and sometimes a little fish from the lake, and drink only water from the Well."

  Morgaine said shyly, "You drank wine at Caerleon, Lady."

  "Certainly, and so may you, when you know the proper times to eat and drink, and the proper times to abstain," said Viviane curtly. That silenced Morgaine, and she sat nibbling at her bread and honey. But although she was hungry, it seemed to stick in her throat.

  "Have you had enough to eat?" Viviane asked. "Good, then let Raven take the dishes-you should sleep, child. But sit here beside me before the fire and talk a little, for tomorrow Raven will take you to the House of Maidens, and you will see me no more, save at the rites, until you are trained to take your turn with the older priestesses, to sleep in my house and care for me as a serving-woman. And at that time you too may well be under a vow of silence, neither to speak nor answer. But for tonight, you are only my kinswoman, not yet vowed to the service of the Goddess, and you may ask me whatever you will."

  She held out her hand, and Morgaine came to join her on the bench before the fire. Viviane turned and said, "Will you take the pin from my hair, Morgaine? Raven has gone to her rest, and I do not want to disturb her again."

  Morgaine pulled the carven pin of bone from the older woman's hair, and it came down with a rush, long and dark with a streak of white at one temple. Viviane sighed, stretching her bare feet to the fire.

  "It is good to be home again-I have had to travel overmuch in late years," she said, "and I am no longer strong enough to find it a pleasure."

  "You said I might ask you questions," Morgaine said timidly. "Why do some of the women have blue signs on their brows, and others not?"

  "The blue crescent is a sign that they are vowed to the service of the Goddess, to live and die at her will," Viviane said. "Those who are here only for some schooling in the Sight do not take such vows."

  "Am I to take vows?"

  "That will be your own choice," Viviane said. "The Goddess will tell you whether she wishes to set her hand upon you. Only the Christians use the cloister as a kitchen midden for their unwanted daughters and widows."

  "But how will I know if the Goddess wants me?"

  Viviane smiled in the darkness. "She will call you in a voice you cannot fail to understand. If you have heard that call, there will be nowhere in the world to hide from her voice."

  Morgaine wondered, but was too timid to ask, if Viviane had been vowed so. Of course! She is the High Priestess, the Lady of Avalon ... .

  "I was so vowed," Viviane said quietly, with the trick she had of answering an unspoken question, "but the mark has worn away with time ... if you look closely, I think you can still see a little of it at the edge of my hair, there."

  "Yes, a little ... what does it mean to be vowed to the Goddess, Lady? Who is this Goddess? I asked Father Columba once if God had any other name, and he said, no, there was only one Name by which we could be saved and that was Jesus the Christ, but-" She broke off, abashed. "I am very ignorant about such things."

  "To know you are ignorant is the beginning of wisdom," Viviane said. "Then, when you begin to learn, you will not have to forget all the things you think you know. God is called by many names, but is everywhere One; and so, when you pray to Mary, mother of Jesus, you pray, without knowing it, to the World Mother in one of her many forms. The God of the priests and the Great One of the Druids is the same One, and that is why the Merlin sometimes takes his place among the Christian councillors of the High King; he knows, if they do not, that God is One."

  "Your mother was priestess here before you, my mother said-"

  "That is true, but it was not a matter of blood alone. Rather that I had inherited her gift of the Sight, and vowed myself to the Goddess of my free will. The Goddess did not call your mother, nor Morgause. So I sent Igraine to be married to your father and then to Uther, and Morgause to be married as the King should decree. Igraine's marriage served the Goddess; over Morgause, she had no power and no call."

  "Are the priestesses called by the Goddess never married then?"

  "Usually not. They do not vow themselves to any man, except for the Great Marriage, where priest and priestess join in symbol of God and Goddess, and children so born are children to no mortal man, but to the Goddess. This is a Mystery, and you will learn it at the proper time. I was so born, and have no earthly father ... ."

  Morgaine stared at her and whispered, "Do you mean that-that your mother lay with a God?"

  "No, of course not. Only a priest, overshadowed by the power of the God; probably a priest whose name she never knew, because at that moment or in that time, the God came into him and possessed him so that the man was forgotten and unknown." Her face was distant, remembering strange things; Morgaine could see them moving across her brow. It seemed that the fire made pictures in the room, a great figure of a Horned One .....he shivered suddenly and pulled her cloak about her.

  "Are you weary, child? You should sleep-"

  But Morgaine was curious again. "Were you born in Avalo
n?"

  "Yes, though I was fostered on the Druid Isle, far to the north, in the Islands. And when I was grown to womanhood, the Goddess set her hand upon me-the blood of the priestess-born ran true in me, as I think it does in you, my child." Her voice was distant; she rose and stood looking into the fire.

  "I am trying to remember how many years ago it was that I came here with the old woman ... the moon was farther south then, for it was harvesttime, and the dark days of Samhain coming on, in the dying of the year. It was a bitter winter, even at Avalon; we heard wolves in the night, and snow lay deep, and we hungered here, for no one could make the passage through the storms, and some of the little children at the breast died when milk failed ... . Then the Lake froze, and they brought us food on sledges. I was a maiden then, my breasts had not grown, and now I am old, an old woman, a crone ... so many years, child."

  Morgaine could feel the older woman's hand trembling; she held it hard in her own. After a moment Viviane drew the girl to her side and stood, her arm around her waist.

  "So many moons, so many Midsummers ... and now it seems that Samhain follows hard upon Beltane-eve more swiftly than the moon waxed from maiden to full when I was young. And you too will stand here before the fire, and grow old as I have grown old, unless the Mother has other tasks for you ... ah, Morgaine, Morgaine, little one, I should have left you in Your mother's house ... ."

  Morgaine flung her arms fiercely around the priestess. "I could not stay there! I would rather have died. ..."

  "I knew that," Viviane said, sighing. "I think the Mother has laid her hand on you too, child. But you have come from a life of ease into a hard life and a bitter one, Morgaine, and it may be that I will have tasks for you as cruel as those the Great Mother has laid on me. Now you think only of learning to use the Sight, and of living in the beautiful land of Avalon, but it is no easy thing to serve the will of Ceridwen, my daughter; she is not only the Great Mother of Love and Birth, she is also the Lady of Darkness and Death." Sighing, she stroked the girl's soft hair. "She is also the Morrigan, the messenger of strife, the Great Raven ... oh, Morgaine, Morgaine, I would you had been my own child, but even so I could not spare you, I must use you for her purposes as I was myself used." She bowed her head, laid it for a moment on the young girl's shoulder. "Believe that I love you, Morgaine, for a time will come when you will hate me as much as you love me now-"

  Morgaine fell impulsively to her knees. "Never," she whispered. "I am in the hands of the Goddess ... and in yours ... "

  "May she grant that you never regret those words," Viviane said. She stretched out her hands to the fire. They were small, and strong, and a little swollen with age. "With these hands I have brought children to birth; and I have seen a man's lifeblood flow from them. Once I betrayed a man to his death, a man who had lain in my arms and I had sworn to love. I destroyed your mother's peace, and now I have taken her children from her. Do you not hate me and fear me, Morgaine?"

  "I fear you," said the girl, still kneeling at her feet, her dark, intense, small face glowing with firelight, "but I could never hate you."

  Viviane sighed deeply, thrusting away foresight and dread. "And it is not me you fear," she said, "but her. We are both in her hands, child. Your virginity is sacred to the Goddess. See you keep it so till the Mother makes her will known."

  Morgaine laid her small hands over Viviane's. "Be it so," she whispered. "I swear it."

  The next day she went to the House of the Maidens, and there she remained for many years.

  MORGAINE SPEAKS ...

  How do you write of the making of a priestess? What is not obvious is secret. Those who have walked that road will know, and those who have not will never know though I should write down all the forbidden things. Seven times Beltane-eve came and went; seven times the winters shrivelled us all with cold. The Sight came easily; Viviane had said I was priestess-born. It was not so easy to bid it come when I willed and only when I willed, and to close the gates of the Sight when it was not fitting I should see.

  It was the small magics which came hardest, forcing the mind first to walk in unaccustomed paths. To call the fire and raise it at command, to call the mists, to bring rain-all these were simple, but to know when to bring rain or mist and when to leave it in the hands of the Gods, that was not so simple. Other lessons there were, at which my knowledge of the Sight helped me not at all: the herb lore, and the lore of healing, the long songs of which not a single word might ever be committed to writing, for how can the knowledge of the Great Ones be committed to anything made by human hands? Some of the lessons were pure joy, for I was allowed to learn to play upon the harp and to fashion my own, using sacred woods and the gut of an animal killed in ritual; and some lessons were of terror.

  Hardest of all, perhaps, to look within myself, under the spell of the drugs which loosed the mind from the body, sick and retching, while the mind soared free past the limits of time and space, and to read in the pages of the past and the future. But of that I may say nothing. At last, the day when I was cast out of Avalon, clad only in my shift, and unarmed save for the little dagger of a priestess, to return-if I could. I knew that if I did not, they would mourn me as one dead, but the gates would never again be opened to me unless I could bid them open at my own will and command. And when the mists closed around me, I wandered long on the shores of the alien Lake, hearing only the bells and the doleful chanting of the monks. And at last I broke through the mists, and called upon her, my feet upon the earth and my head among the stars, stretching from horizon to horizon, and cried aloud the great word of Power ... .

  And the mists parted and I saw before me the same sunlit shore where the Lady had brought me seven years before, and I set my feet on the solid earth of my own home, and I wept as I had done when first I came there as a frightened child. And then the mark of the crescent moon was set between my brows by the hand of the Goddess herself ... but this is a Mystery of which it is forbidden to write. Those who have felt their brow burned with the kiss ofCeridwen will know whereof I speak.

  It was in the second spring after that, when I had been released from the silence, that Galahad, who was already skilled at fighting the Saxons under his own father, King Ban of Less Britain, returned to Avalon.

  12

  The priestesses above a certain grade took it in turns to serve the Lady of the Lake, and at this season when the Lady was very busy with preparations for the approaching Midsummer festival, one of them always slept in the little wattled house, so that the Lady might have someone at her call night and day. It was so early that the sun still hid in the mist at the edge of the horizon when Viviane stepped into the room beyond her own, where her attendant slept, and beckoned quietly to awaken her.

  The woman sat up in bed, flinging her deerskin tunic over her under-gown.

  "Tell the bargemen to be ready. And go and ask my kinswoman Morgaine to attend upon me."

  A few minutes later, Morgaine paused respectfully before the entrance where Viviane was kneeling to build up her fire. She made no sound; after nine years of training in the priestess arts, she moved so silently that no footfall or even a breath of air marked her passing. But after those years, too, the ways of the priestesses were so well known to her that she was not surprised when Viviane turned as she reached the door, and said, "Come in, Morgaine."

  Rather contrary to her usual custom, however, Viviane did not invite her kinswoman to sit, but kept her standing there, regarding her evenly for a moment.

  Morgaine was not tall; she would never be that, and in these years in Avalon she had grown as tall as she would ever be, a scant inch taller than the Lady. Her dark hair was plaited down the back of her neck and wrapped with a deerskin thong; she wore the dark-dyed blue dress and deerskin overtunic of any priestess, and the blue crescent shone darkly between her brows. Nevertheless, smooth and anonymous as she was among them, there was a glint in her eyes which answered to Viviane's cool stare, and Viviane knew from experience that, small and del
icately made as she was, when she wished she could throw & glamour over herself that made her appear not only tall but majestic. Already she appeared ageless, and she would, Viviane knew, look much the same even when white appeared in her dark hair.

  She thought, with a flicker of relief, No, she is not beautiful, then wondered why it should matter to her. No doubt Morgaine, like all young women, even a priestess vowed lifelong to the service of the Goddess, would prefer to be beautiful, and was intensely unhappy because she was not. She thought, with a slight curl of her lip, When you are my age, my girl, it will not matter whether or no you are beautiful, for everyone you know will believe that you are a great beauty whenever you wish them to believe it; and when you do not, you can sit back and pretend to be a simple old woman long past such thoughts. She had fought her own battle more than twenty years ago, when she saw Igraine growing to womanhood with the tawny and russet beauty for which Viviane, still young, would gladly have bartered her soul and all her power. Sometimes, in moments of self-doubt, she wondered if she had thrust Igraine into marriage with Gorlois so that she need not be endlessly taunted with the younger woman's loveliness, mocking her own dark severity. But I brought her to the love of the man destined for her before the ring stones of Salisbury plain were piled one upon another, she thought.