THE WITCHES OF AVALON: a thrilling Arthurian fantasy (THE MORGAN TRILOGY Book 1)
Page 4
“You’ll get used to it, Morgan,” she told me, softly.
Avalon looked much larger as we approached it than it ever had done from the shores of its great lake. It towered over us, a craggy tor of bare granite rock, and carved into the side of it were a few buildings like the abbey; grand stone made with arches and little windows. When we arrived and stepped off the barge, I could not see back to Logrys when I turned around. I felt all over me, through my blood and my bones, the feel of the Otherworld.
The Lady led me inside one of the big stone buildings, to a little room that was not so different from my cell in the abbey, with a plain narrow bed, and a desk for reading and a couple of candles. She left me to myself, and I was glad of it. Glad to sit on my new bed and unpack my books and gather myself. I wondered when I would see Kay again. I wondered if he was thinking of me, too.
The first few days on Avalon were hard, and I felt miserable and lonely, my shyness holding me back from speaking to the women all around me I did not know. The cold stone, and bare halls and quietness of the place was miserable, too, after Ector’s bustling house and the boisterous playfighting of Arthur and Kay. But, slowly, I grew used to the quiet, and realised that I liked it, as I had liked the quiet to sit alone and read in the abbey. I liked, too, to sit on the shore on the big, grey rocks and look out through the mists across the lake. The Lady had been right, too, that I would get used to their smell. By the time winter came and the frost settled on the dark, scrubby grass on the tor of Avalon, it already felt like home, and often a small girl, white-blonde haired and serious-faced, called Nimue would come and sit with me, or read with me at night, and though she was quiet and we barely spoke I felt that I was slowly gaining a friend.
I still did not know exactly what I was in Avalon to learn, and none of the other women or girls seemed to speak about it, though I knew that I would get the lovely patterns of woad that the Lady and some of the other women on the island had once I did know. The library was full of wonderful books, and I spent a long time in there, by the fire, leafing through them. A lot of them were full of healing magic, some powerful, that could bring a man back to life, but I was disappointed with how much seemed trivial and silly, things like spells for a sunny day, or charms for a broken heart. I tried to make the potion described in the book I had read in the abbey, but the instructions were vague, and though I found all the ingredients in Avalon, I must have mixed them incorrectly, because what I mixed myself made me sick when I drank it. I did not manage to find a book that matched or explained the one I had found in the abbey about changing one’s shape, and when I asked the woman who watched the library she gave me a blank, aggressive stare as though she did not know and I ought not to ask.
I got a letter in the winter, from Kay. The Lady brought it to my room and left it there. She must have still been visiting Ector.
My dearest Lady Princess Morgan, I hope this letter finds you in good health, and not too blue in the face already. I am now an excellent knight, but Arthur is not a very good squire. He always loses my equipment and never pays proper attention. He is too busy pretending he too is a knight, or pulling strange faces at the girls he thinks are pretty. Last week I went to a tournament and Arthur forgot my helm. This big knight from Lothian almost had my head off. Perhaps he was one of your nephews. Father was quite angry. To teach Arthur a lesson I have started hiding the important bits of equipment. Yesterday it took him two hours to find my saddle. He is not very good at hiding games, either. Plus, he is not nearly so good at climbing trees as you or I, and since up a tree was where I had put it, it took him a while to retrieve it once he had found it. Everyone says Uther will die soon and I am afraid war is coming, which will go very ill for me if Arthur keeps losing my equipment. I have been thinking of you. I hope Avalon is not too boring without me. Ever your own good knight, Sir Kay.
So, at least, Kay had not changed even a little though months had passed since I had seen him. I had not seen Lancelot all the time I was in Avalon, and I wondered if he had, after all, been taken back to France. I did not want to ask about him because I did not really want him back. If Kay was still thinking of me, and writing to me, I did not want Lancelot to come back and remind him of whom he had been kissing before he was kissing me.
The next time I saw Nimue I was sitting out on the rocks wrapped in a cloak of furs that had once belonged to my mother, and I was surprised to see that she had earned her woad and was covered in lovely delicate little patterns of blue-green over her face, and hands, and in fact all of the skin that I could see. I felt a stab of jealousy. I was sixteen years old that winter, and Nimue looked to me to be only eleven or twelve. I did not think it was fair that someone younger than me should be able to earn it before me, but I kept my silence. I thought maybe, since she and I had spent a long time side by side, that she might tell me Avalon’s secret ritual, but she did not.
When I asked her about it, she said vaguely,
“I was born in Avalon.”
I wished I had found that helpful, even in a small way, but I did not. But then, after a pause staring off across her lake, her little pointy nose newly traced with blue leading off towards Logrys, she said.
“I found my gift quickly, because I have been here all along.”
So that was it. That was how you earned your woad. I knew already what I wanted mine to be, but I was not sure it could be so, because I had only the one book and I had not yet managed to do it. I knew the Lady of Avalon had her gifts in the healing arts, and I had even heard it said that she could bring a dead man back to life with only the touch of her hands, but I knew they were not for me. It has to come from within you, and I did not think I had a gift within me for nurturing or healing. But I did know, and had always known, how to change my shape, to hide and disappear where I knew I was not wanted, to play a silent role. I had hidden from my stepfather Uther right beside my mother, and half the time when I imagined that I was as invisible as a stick of wood to him, his eyes had glossed over me and passed me by, but that gift had had no magic and often he had seen me, and shouted and raised his hand against me until I scurried away. It was not a bold woman’s gift, it was a shy woman’s and it was the one that I wanted. The ability to become someone else.
I gathered the fur more tightly around myself as the breeze came harder across the lake, and Nimue’s long plait of white-blonde hair stirred its free wisps all the way down. It was a cold wind and, I felt, one of ill omen. I would have to find the rest of the secret of shape-changing soon. I wanted to be strong with secrets when Uther died. I would need them all to escape being married away. But Nimue had her secret now, and suddenly the idea sparked within me that she might help me.
“What was it, Nimue?”
She turned to me, her pale blue eyes fixing me vaguely, as though I had stirred her from a dream. She was like a creature from a dream, really. So pale, so delicate. Her eyes never seemed to focus on the world around her. It worried some of the other women, I knew, but I liked it. It did not make me feel, as some others did, that I was being scrutinized under a critical gaze, or being measured or judged. Nimue was just looking at me with hazy interest, as though I were nothing more than part of the landscape of her dreams.
She reached out and offered me her hand.
“Come with me.”
I took it, standing awkwardly, my limbs stiff from the cold of sitting on the rock, and let Nimue lead me up over the scrubby grass at the foot of the tor, past the low dark stone buildings of the houses of Avalon, and round the other side. Though it was cold, by the time we arrived at the forge where it stood under the head of the tor on the other side of the small island, I was red in the face and puffing out steam.
It was not something I had ever paid that much attention to before, since I had no interest in armour or weapons, and I had never seen any of the women in Avalon wear them or bear them so I was not even sure why it was there, but then I remembered Kay’s Otherworld armour that had felt light in my hand. Perhaps his o
wn mother had been from Avalon, and it had been forged here. I remembered I had not yet written back to him. I was not sure what I wanted to say. I did not have Kay’s easy, casual way with words, and I was afraid that anything I wrote him would betray too much of what I felt, of what had happened between us. I didn’t want Arthur reading it, and I was sure he would. He was nosy and brash and I could not imagine him letting Kay have any secrets to himself. I didn’t have Kay’s skill in saying all the right things, but making it seem so effortless. I was afraid that anything I wrote back would be painfully honest, or painfully inadequate.
I followed Nimue slowly into the forge; perched as it was against the steep sloping side of the tor, I was afraid that I would slip, but I made it in. It was swelteringly hot and the fire at the centre of it filled the whole room with an orange light. Though it was frosty outside, Nimue stripped immediately to a sleeveless underdress in the heat of the forge, and I copied her, folding up my furs and then placing my dark wool dress on top. I also coiled the plait of my hair around and tucked it into a bun, afraid that its long ends would catch fire.
It was small and cramped and hot in the little forge and I did not see how it could have anything to do with Nimue’s gift, but she was busying around already, blackened leather gloves on her hands, pulling together blocks to cast a sword. I had not seen a sword the whole time I had been in Avalon.
Nimue picked up a lump of iron as though it was nothing, and threw it to me across the forge. I was surprised when I caught it to find that I caught it as lightly as she had thrown it.
“Iron mined in the Otherworld,” Nimue told me, a sudden focus in her pale eyes, and the slightness of a smile around her face.
I lifted it a little in my hands, feeling its strange weightlessness. To test it, I dropped it against the dirt floor, and when I picked it up again, I saw that it had left a deep and heavy dent. Nimue took it back from me and set it to melt in the forge.
I sat back against the little table in the corner to watch her work. She was slow and methodical, mixing the iron to make steel. It was as though she had forgotten I was there, she was so absorbed and careful. I got lost watching her, moving away from my body, already prickling with sweat in the intense heat of the forge, my skin already darkening with ash and dust. Nimue was mesmerising, her eyes growing wild, her tiny limbs, orange in the light of the fire, moving with a hypnotic grace, and I could not tear my gaze away as she seemed to half-dance through the forge, pouring the steel into the sword-mould, setting the hilt there, which she had made plated with gold and set with old jewels. She must have got them from some ancient sword, or some lost king’s crown. By the time the sword was set in the mould, I had not realised that it had got dark outside, and when she pulled it out, still glowing with heat, to run down to the icy cold lake and temper it in those enchanted waters. When she brought it back up to me, I could see the blade shining smooth, and so sharp its edges seemed to disappear into nothingness. She offered it to me, and I took it. It felt weightless and wonderfully graceful in my hand. I swung it a little, as I had seen Kay and Arthur do before, and it seemed to move with me, as though it were a part of my limbs itself. Nimue disappeared into the forge, and I was suddenly aware that it was a winter’s night and I was out in my underdress, my skin turned to goosebumps from the cold. I followed her inside, where she was holding in her hands a jewelled scabbard.
“I made this, too,” she told me, her voice soft as a whisper. “Whoever carries this scabbard will never spill a drop of blood.”
She handed that to me, as well, and I slid the sword inside. I made to hand it back to her, but she held up a hand in protest and shook her head.
“I made them for you. I think you will need them, Morgan. There are dangers coming for you.”
Tentatively, not knowing how to thank her enough, I pulled on my dress and furs, and buckled the scabbard around my waist. She gave a rare, gentle smile to see it on me. I had never received so fine a gift, but it made me uneasy. It seemed like a gift for a woman of the world, a warrior queen, rather than what I wanted to be, a wise woman in Avalon. It seemed like a gift for the beginning of a life at war after King Uther’s death, not the life of peaceful study that I coveted.
I thanked her quietly nonetheless, and as I turned to go, she said to me,
“Oh, Morgan. The sword has a name. It is called Excalibur. That means ‘cutter of steel’.”
A sword for war, then.
Chapter Five
I hid the sword and the scabbard under my bed, dimly aware that I ought not to have such things. I was not sure yet why Nimue had made me such a sword, or given me such a fine magical scabbard, though I always had the feeling that Nimue knew far more than she would ever say. So, her gift had been to forge Otherworld arms. Perhaps Kay and Arthur’s mother had been such a woman on Avalon. She had not been much like Nimue, though. She had been always laughing, always smiling and telling stories. Dark-eyed and bright witted. I had heard people say that she was a fairy-woman and had enchanted Ector into loving her, but even if she had been a fairy-woman, she would have had no need for magic. She had been wonderfully pretty and clever and kind and everyone who had met her had loved her. Worse even than her death had been seeing how weak and silent she had grown when she was ill, the life and the colour fading out of her slowly. At least her elder son had had all the qualities that she had possessed, and the world had not had to carry on without them after she was gone.
I asked Nimue the next day why she had given me a sword, and rather enigmatically she told me,
“That is the finest sword ever made, and you will be a great queen one day, and you will need it.”
That did not sound like a happy prediction to me. I did not want to be a great queen or possess a great sword. I wanted to live in peace minding my own business. I would not have minded one bit living in Ector’s simple house with Kay eating whatever grew in the land until I was old and wrinkled. I supposed it was not to be, though. Kay was already a knight, and war was coming.
Winter deepened around Avalon, and Christmas drew near. I had not expected Avalon to observe its festivities, though, and it did not. Christmas at Camelot had been a thing of wonder, for sure, though I had only watched it from the edges, called back into the heart of nasty, brutish Uther’s kingdom to show my face as the obedient step-daughter. I had only gone to get a chance to see my sister, and half in the thought that my presence there would protect her a little from Uther. We never sat at the high table, nor did we join the Christmas games. My mother Queen Igraine had thought it best if Uther, drunk on Christmas wine, did not have sight of his stepdaughters if it could be helped, and would not be made angry by the memory of the husband my mother had had before. I hated that brute of a man, and I hoped that he would die soon.
When I was alone in my room, I would often draw my sword and look at the smoothness and sharpness of the blade. Sometimes I imagined driving it into Uther’s war-hardened flesh and imagining in the surprise on his face that the little girl he had mocked and struck had still retained enough strength in her to hate him.
I was sorry, then, when a few weeks before Christmas news came that Uther had died of his illness and I would have no chance for my own revenge. It came in a strange form, the news. I sat out on the rocks, staring through the mist, when I saw the barge come. I expected the Lady of Avalon, but instead I saw a young man, brown-skinned with thick glossy brown curls falling to his chin. He looked about my age, young and lithe, and he was dressed in simple woollen clothes under a rich and heavy cloak of dark furs. About his neck, too, he bore a strange chain of gold set at its centre with a huge sapphire that glinted like the eye of a dragon. I stood slowly to my feet, mesmerised, and I was shocked when, as the barge docked and the man tied it to Avalon’s tiny wooden pier, he came over to me, took me by the hand and gave a little bow.
“My Lady Morgan.” I was yet more shocked that he knew who I was. “I bring news from your lady mother, the Queen Igraine. King Uther is dead.”
The man reached out and brushed my cheek lightly with his hand. Were I not so stunned from the news I had both longed for and dreaded I might have been surprised at this, but it reached me as though through a dream.
Thoughtfully, he said, “You look so like your mother at that age, you know.”
It seemed impossible to me that he would have known my mother at sixteen. He looked no older than twenty to me, and more like my own age. I did not think, besides, that I could look like my mother. Everyone said that my mother was a great beauty, and that I was not. Too tall, too skinny, too serious about the eyes. This strange man was just being kind, or worse, just being polite.
As though waking from his own daydream, he shook his head, and the brown curls bounced lightly in time with it.
“Morgan, can you take me to the Lady?”
I nodded mutely, and led the way. I couldn’t make sense of anything other than the relief and panic of Uther’s death. He was gone, he could not hurt me now, but my mother and Arthur and Ector and – most of all – Kay, were out there alone in a realm that was soon going to be eaten up by war. Even if my sister’s husband, King Lot, made a play to seize the southern realm of Logrys, it would not be easy. Men would die. Men I cared about. Women, too, and children. And they would not die with swords in their hands riding to battle. They would be slaughtered. Avalon suddenly did not seem so safe or so far from Logrys. It would, of course, remain untouched by war, but I could not forget those who were beyond the lake.