The Mists of Avalon

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Lie still, my lady,” said Isotta, “in a little while I will bring you your medicine.”

  Igraine said, and was surprised to find herself whispering, “If I have lived through your herb drinks, I will probably live through this, too. What day is this?”

  “Only ten days till Midwinter-night, my lady, and as for what happened, well, all we know is that the fire in your room must have gone out during the night, and your window blown open. The lady Morgause said she woke to see you closing it, and that you went out afterward, and came back with a fire pan. But you did not speak, and mended the fire, so she did not know you were ill till morning, when you were burning with fever and did not know her, or the child.”

  That was the simple explanation. Only Igraine knew that her illness was more, was punishment for attempting sorcery far beyond her strength, so that body and spirit were drained almost past returning.

  “What of—” Igraine stopped herself; she could not inquire of Uther, what was she thinking of? “Is there news of my lord Duke?”

  “None, my lady. We know there was a battle, but no news will come until the roads are cleared after the great storm,” the serving-woman said. “But now you must not talk anymore, lady, you must have some hot gruel and lie down to sleep.”

  Patiently Igraine drank the hot broth they brought her, and slept. News would come when the time was ripe.

  8

  On Midwinter-eve, the weather broke again and turned fine. All day snow was melting and dripping, the roads ran mud, and fog came in and lay softly over the sea and courtyard, so that voices and whispers seemed to echo endlessly when anyone spoke. For a little while in the early afternoon, the sun came out, and Igraine went into the courtyard for the first time since her illness. She felt quite recovered now, but she fretted, as they all did, for news.

  Uther had sworn he would come at Midwinter-night. How would he manage it, with Gorlois’s army lying between? All day she was silent and abstracted; she even spoke sharply to Morgaine, running about like a wild thing with the joy of being free after the confinement and cold of the winter weather.

  I should not be harsh with my child because my mind is with my lover! Igraine thought, and, angry with herself, called Morgaine to her and kissed her. A chill went through her as she laid her lips to the soft cheek; by her forbidden sorcery, warning her lover of Gorlois’s ambush, she might have condemned the father of her child to death . . .

  . . . but no. Gorlois had betrayed his High King; whatever she, Igraine, had done or left undone, Gorlois was marked for death, and by his treason he had deserved it. Unless, indeed, he should compound his betrayal by killing that man whom his sworn king, Ambrosius, had marked for the defense of all Britain.

  Father Columba came to her, insisting that she forbid her women and serving-men to light Midwinter fires. “And you yourself should set them a good example by coming tonight to mass,” he insisted. “It has been long, my lady, since you received the sacraments.”

  “I have been ill,” she said indifferently, “and as for the sacraments, I seem to remember that you gave me the last rites when I lay sick. Although I may have dreamed it—I dreamed many things.”

  “Many of them,” said the priest, “such things as no Christian woman should dream. It was for my lord’s sake, lady, that I gave you the sacraments when you had had no opportunity to confess yourself and receive them worthily.”

  “Aye—I know well it was not for my own sake,” said Igraine, with a faint curl of her lip.

  “I do not presume to set limits on God’s mercy,” the priest said, and Igraine knew the unspoken part of his thought: he would err if needed on the side of mercy, because Gorlois, for some reason, cared about this woman, and leave it to God to be harsh with her, as no doubt God would be. . . .

  But at last she said that she would come to mass. Little as she liked this new religion, Ambrosius had been a Christian, Christianity was the religion of the civilized people of Britain and would inevitably become more so; Uther would bow to the public observance, whatever his private views on religion. She did not really know—she had had no opportunity to know how he really felt about matters of conscience. Would she ever know? He swore he would come to me at Midwinter. But Igraine lowered her eyes and tried to pay strict attention to the mass.

  Dusk had fallen, and Igraine was speaking in the kitchen house to her women, when she heard a commotion at the end of the causeway and the sound of riders, then a cry in the courtyard. She flung her hood over her shoulders and ran out, Morgause behind her. At the gateway were men in Roman cloaks such as Gorlois wore, but the guards were barring their way with the long spears they carried.

  “My lord Gorlois left orders; no one but the Duke himself to go inside in his absence.”

  One of the men at the center of the group of newcomers drew himself up, immensely tall.

  “I am the Merlin of Britain,” he said, his resounding voice ringing through the dusk and fog. “Stand back, man, will you deny passage to me?”

  The guardsman drew back in instinctive deference, but Father Columba stepped forward, with an imperative gesture of refusal.

  “I will deny you. My lord the Duke of Cornwall has said particularly that you, old sorcerer, are to have no entrance here at any time.” The soldiers gaped, and Igraine, despite her anger—stupid, meddlesome priest!—had to admire his courage. It was not an easy thing to defy the Merlin of all Britain.

  Father Columba held up the big wooden cross at his belt. “In the name of the Christ, I bid you begone! In God’s name, return to the realms of darkness whence you came!”

  The Merlin’s ringing laugh raised echoes from the looming walls. “Good brother in Christ,” he said, “your God and my God are one and the same. Do you really think I will vanish away at your exorcism? Or do you think I am some foul fiend from the darkness? No, not unless you call the falling of God’s night the coming of darkness! I come from a land no darker than the Summer Country, and look, these men with me bear the ring of his lordship the Duke of Cornwall himself. Look.” The torchlight flashed as one of the cloaked men thrust out a bare hand. On the first finger glinted Gorlois’s ring.

  “Now let us in, Father, for we are not fiends, but mortal men who are cold and weary, and we have ridden for a long way. Or must we cross ourselves and repeat a prayer to prove that to you?”

  Igraine came forward, wetting her lips with nervousness. What was happening here? How did they come to bear Gorlois’s ring, unless they were his messengers? Certainly one of them would have appealed to her. She saw no one she recognized, nor would Gorlois have chosen the Merlin for his messenger. Was Gorlois dead then, and was it news of his death being brought to her in this fashion? She said abruptly, her voice sounding harsh, “Let me see the ring. Is this truly his token or a forgery?”

  “It is truly his ring, Lady Igraine,” said a voice she knew, and Igraine, bending her eyes to see the ring in the torchlight, saw familiar hands, big, broad and callused; and above them, what she had seen only in vision. Around Uther’s hairy arms, tattooed there in blue woad, writhed two serpents, one on either wrist. She thought that her knees would give way and that she would sink down on the stones of the courtyard.

  He had sworn it: I will come to you at Midwinter. And he had come, wearing Gorlois’s ring!

  “My lord Duke!” said Father Columba impulsively, stepping forward, but the Merlin raised a hand to forbid the words.

  “Hush! The messenger is secret,” he said. “Speak no word.” And the priest fell back, thinking the cloaked man was Gorlois, puzzled but obedient.

  Igraine dropped a curtsey, still struggling against disbelief and dismay. She said, “My lord, come in,” and Uther, still concealing his face beneath the cloak, reached out with the ringed hand and gripped her fingers. Her own felt like ice beneath them, but his hand was warm and firm and steadied her as they stepped into the hall.

  She took refuge in banalities. “Shall I fetch some wine, my lord, or send for food?”r />
  He murmured close to her ear, “In God’s name, Igraine, find some way we can be alone. The priest has sharp eyes, even in the dark, and I want it thought it is Gorlois, indeed, who has come here.”

  She said to Isotta, “Bring food and some beer to the soldiers here in the hall, and to the Lord Merlin. Bring them water for washing, and all they desire. I will speak with my lord in our chambers. Have food and wine sent there at once.”

  The servants went scurrying in all directions to do her will. The Merlin let a man take his cloak, and set his harp carefully on one of the benches. Morgause came into the doorway, peering boldly at the soldiers. Her eyes fell on Uther’s tall form, and she dropped a curtsey.

  “My lord Gorlois! Welcome, dear brother!” she said, and started toward him. Uther made a slight forbidding movement and Igraine stepped quickly in front of him. She thought, frowning, This is ridiculous; even cloaked, Uther looks no more like Gorlois than do I!

  She said sharply, “My lord is weary, Morgause, and in no mood for the chatter of children. Take Morgaine to your chamber and keep her; she will sleep there with you this night.”

  Frowning, sullen, Morgause picked up Morgaine and carried her away up the stairs. Keeping well behind them, Igraine reached for Uther’s hand and held it as they climbed. What manner of trickery was this, and why? Her heart was pounding until she thought she would faint away as she led him into the chamber she had shared with Gorlois and shut the door.

  Inside, his arms were stretched to sweep her into his embrace; he shoved back the hood and stood there, his hair and beard wet with fog, holding out his arms, but she did not move toward him.

  “My lord King! What is this, why do they think you are Gorlois?”

  “A small magic of the Merlin,” Uther said, “mostly a matter of a cloak and a ring, but a small glamour too; nothing that would hold if they should see me in full light, or uncloaked. I see that you were not deceived; I had not expected it. It is a seeming, not a Sending. I swore I would come to you, Igraine, at Midwinter, and I have kept my vow. Do I not even get a kiss for all my travail?”

  She came and took the cloak from him, but she evaded his touch.

  “My lord King, how came you by Gorlois’s ring?”

  His face hardened. “That? I cut it from his hand in battle, but the oathbreaker turned tail and fled. Mistake me not, Igraine, I come here by right, not as a thief in the night; the glamour is to save your reputation in the eyes of the world, no more. I would not have my promised wife branded adulteress. But I come here by right; the life of Gorlois is forfeit to me. He held Tintagel as the sworn vassal of Ambrosius Aurelianus; that oath he renewed to me, and now that, too, is forfeit. Surely you understand this, Lady Igraine? No king can stand if his sworn men may break oath with impunity and stand under arms against their king.”

  She bowed her head in acknowledgment.

  “Already he has cost me the wreck of a year’s work against the Saxon. When he left Londinium with his men I could not stand against them, and I had to step aside, flee, and let them pillage the town. My people, whom I am sworn to defend.” His face was bitter. “Lot, I can forgive; he refused to take the oath. A score I have to settle with Lot, indeed—he will make peace with me or I will see him off his throne and hanged—but he is not oathbreaker or betrayer. Gorlois I trusted; he took oath and forswore it, and so I am left in the wreck of the work Ambrosius spent his life to accomplish, with all of it to do again. Gorlois cost me that, and I am come to have Tintagel at his hands. And I will have his life, too, and he knows it.”

  His face was like stone.

  Igraine swallowed hard. “And you will have his lady, too—by conquest and by right, as you have Tintagel?”

  “Ah, Igraine,” he said, drawing her to him with his two hands, “I know well what choice you made, when I saw you the night of the great storm. If you had not warned me, I would have lost my best men, and, no doubt, my life as well. Thanks to you, when Gorlois came against me, I was ready for him. It was then I took the ring from his finger, and would have taken the hand, and the head too, but he escaped me.”

  “I know well you had no choice as to that, my lord King,” Igraine said, but at that moment there was a knock on the door. One of the serving-women brought in a tray with food and a jug of wine, and muttered “My lord,” dropping a curtsey. Mechanically Igraine freed herself from Uther’s hands, took the food and wine, shut the door behind the woman. She took Uther’s cloak, which was, after all, not so very different from the one Gorlois wore, and hung it on the bedpost to dry; bent and helped him off with his boots; took his sword belt from him, Like a dutiful lady and wife, a voice remarked in her mind, but she knew she had made her choice. It was even as Uther said: Tintagel belonged to the High King of Britain; so did its lady, and it was at her own will. She had given her allegiance to the King’s own self.

  The women had brought dried meat seethed with lentils, a loaf of new-baked bread, some soft cheese, and wine. Uther ate like a man starving, saying, “I have been in the field these two moons past, thanks to that damnable traitor you call husband; this is the first meal I have eaten under a roof since Samhain—the good Father down there, no doubt, would remind me to say All Souls.”

  “It is only what was cooking for the servants’ supper and mine, my lord King, not at all fitting—”

  “It seems to me good enough for the keeping of Christmas, after what I have been eating in the cold,” he said, chewing noisily, tearing the bread asunder with strong fingers and cutting a chunk of cheese with his knife. “And am I to have no word from you save my lord King? I have dreamed so of this moment, Igraine,” he said, laying down the cheese and staring up at her. He took hold of her round the waist and drew her close to his chair. “Have you no word of love for me? Can it be that you are still loyal to Gorlois?”

  Igraine let him draw her against him. She said it aloud. “I have made my choice.”

  “I have waited so long—” he whispered, pulling her down so that she half-knelt against his knee, and tracing the lines of her face with his hand. “I had begun to fear it would never come, and now you have no word of love or look of kindness for me—Igraine, Igraine, did I dream it, after all, that you loved me, wanted me? Should I have left you in peace?”

  She felt cold, she was shaking from head to foot. She whispered, “No, no—or if it was a dream, then I too dreamed.” She looked up at him, not knowing what else to say or do. She did not fear him, as she had feared Gorlois, but now that the moment was at hand she wondered, with a sudden wild panic, why she had come so far. He still held her within the curve of his arm. Now he pulled her down on his knee, and she let him draw her back, her head against his breast.

  He said, encircling her narrow wrist in his big hand, “I had not realized how slight you were. You are tall; I thought you a big woman, queenly—and after all you are a little thing, I could break you with my two hands, little bones like a bird’s—” He closed the fingers around her wrist. “And you are so young—”

  “I am not so young as all that,” she said, laughing suddenly. “I have been married five years and I have a child.”

  “You seem too young for that,” Uther said. “Was that the little one I saw downstairs?”

  “My daughter. Morgaine,” Igraine said. And suddenly she realized that he, too, was ill at ease, delaying. Instinctively she realized that for all his thirty-odd years, his experience of women was only with such women as could be had for the asking, and that a chaste woman of his own station was something new to him. She wished, with a sudden ache, that she knew the right thing to do or say.

  Still temporizing, she drew her free hand along the tattooed serpents twining around his wrists. “I had not seen these before. . . .”

  “No,” he said, “they were given me at my kingmaking on Dragon Island. I would you could have been with me, my queen,” he whispered, and took her face between his hands, tilting it back to kiss her on the lips.

  “I do not want to fri
ghten you,” he whispered, “but I have dreamed so long of this moment, so long . . .”

  Shaking, she let him kiss her, feeling the strangeness of it stirring something deep in her body. It had never been like this with Gorlois . . . and suddenly she was afraid again. With Gorlois it had always been something done to her in which she had no part, something from which she could stand aside, watching with detachment. She had always been herself, Igraine. Now, with the touch of Uther’s lips, she knew she could no longer remain apart, that she would never again be the self she had known. The thought terrified her. And yet the knowledge of how much he wanted her was racing through her veins. Her hand tightened about the blue serpents at his wrists. “I saw these in a dream . . . but I thought it was only a dream.”

  He nodded soberly. “I dreamed of them before ever I wore them. And it was in my mind that you had something like to them, too, about your arms . . .” He picked up her slender wrist again and traced along it. “Only they were golden.”

  She felt the hairs rise on her back. Indeed it had been no dream, but a vision from the Country of Truth.