The Mists of Avalon

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “I cannot remember all the dream,” Uther said, staring over her shoulder. “Only that we stood together on a great plain, and there was something like to the ring stones. . . . What does it mean, Igraine, that we share one another’s dreams?”

  She said, feeling her voice catch in her throat as if she were about to weep, “Perhaps it means only that we are fated for one another, my king . . . and my lord . . . and my love.”

  “My queen, and my love . . .” He met her eyes suddenly, a long look and a long question. “Surely the time for dreaming is over, Igraine.” He thrust his hands into her hair, pulling out the pins, letting it tumble down over her embroidered collar and over his face; smoothed the long locks down with trembling hands. He rose to his feet, still holding her in his arms. She had never guessed at the strength in his hands. He crossed the room in two great strides, and laid her down on the bed. Kneeling at her side, he bent and kissed her again.

  “My queen,” he murmured. “I would you could have been crowned at my side at my kingmaking. . . . There were rites there such as no Christian man should know; but the Old People, who were here long before ever the Romans came to these isles, would not acknowledge me king without them. It was a long road I took to come there, and some of it, I am sure, was not anywhere in this world I know.”

  This reminded her of what Viviane had told her about the drifting of the worlds, apart in the mists. And thinking about Viviane brought to mind what Viviane had asked of her, and how reluctant she had been.

  I did not know. I was so young then, and untried, I knew nothing, I did not know how all of me could be dissolved, torn, swept away. . . .

  “Did they ask of you that you should make the Great Marriage with the land, as was done in the old days? I know that King Ban of Benwick in Less Britain was so required . . .” and a sudden, violent stab of jealousy went through her, that some woman or priestess might have symbolized for him the land he was sworn to defend.

  “No,” he said. “And I am not sure I would have done so, but it was not asked of me. The Merlin said, too, that it is he, as with every Merlin of Britain, who is sworn to die if need be, in sacrifice for his people—” Uther broke off. “But this can mean little to you.”

  “You have forgotten,” she said, “I was reared in Avalon; my mother was priestess there and my eldest sister is now the Lady of the Lake.”

  “Are you a priestess too, Igraine?”

  She shook her head, starting to say a simple no; then said, “Not in this life.”

  “I wonder . . .” Again he traced the line of the imaginary serpents, touching his own with his other hand. “I have always known, I think, that I lived before—it seems to me that life is too great a thing to live it only once and then be snuffed out like a lamp when the wind blows. And why, when first I looked upon your face, did I feel that I had known you before the world was made? These things are mysteries, and I think it may be that you know more of them than I. You say you are no priestess, yet you had sorcery enough to come to me, the night of the great storm, and warn me. . . . I think perhaps I should ask no more, lest I might hear from you what no Christian man should know. As for these"—again, with a fingertip, he touched the serpents—"if I wore them before this life, then perhaps that is why the old man, when he pricked them into my wrists the night of my kingmaking, told me that they were mine by right. I have heard that the Christian priests have driven all such serpents from our isles . . . but I do not fear the dragons, and I wear them in token that I will spread my protection over this land like the dragon’s wings.”

  “In that case,” she whispered, “surely you will be the greatest of kings, my lord.”

  “Call me not so!” he interrupted fiercely, bending over her where she lay and covering her mouth with his.

  “Uther,” she whispered, as if in a dream.

  His hands moved at her throat, and he bent to kiss her bare shoulder. But when he began to pull off her gown, she flinched and shrank away. Tears flooded her eyes and she couldn’t speak, but he laid his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes.

  He said softly, “Have you been so mishandled, my beloved? God strike me if you ever have anything to fear from me, now or ever. I wish with all my heart that you had never been Gorlois’s wife. Had I found you first . . . but what is done is done. But I swear to you, my queen: you will never have anything to fear from me.” In the flickering light of the lamp, his eyes seemed dark, although she knew they were blue. “Igraine, I have—I have taken this for granted, because somehow I believed you must know how I feel. I know very little about your kind of woman. You are my love, my wife, my queen. I swear to you by my crown and by my manhood, you shall be my queen and I will never take another woman before you, or put you aside. Did you think I was treating you as a wanton?” His voice was trembling, and Igraine knew that he was stricken with fear—the fear of losing her. Knowing that he could fear too, knowing that he too was vulnerable, her own fear was gone. She put her arms around his neck and said clearly, “You are my love and my lord and my king, and I will love you as long as I live, and as long thereafter as God wills.”

  And this time she let him pull away her gown, and, naked, came willingly into his arms. Never, never had she guessed that it could be like this. Until this moment, despite five years of marriage and the birth of a child, she had been an innocent, a virgin, an unknowing girl. Now body and mind and heart blended, making her one with Uther as she had never been with Gorlois. She thought, fleetingly, that not even a child in its mother’s womb could be so close. . . .

  He lay weary on her shoulder, his coarse fair hair tickling her breasts. He murmured, “I love you, Igraine. Whatever comes of this, I love you. And if Gorlois should come here, I will kill him before he can touch you again.”

  She did not want to think of Gorlois. She smoothed the light hair across his brow and murmured, “Sleep, my love. Sleep.”

  She did not want to sleep. Even after his breathing became heavy and slow, she lay wakeful, caressing him softly so as not to wake him. His chest was almost as smooth as her own, with only a little light, fair hair; she had somehow thought all men were heavy and hairy. The scent of his body was sweet, though heavy with sweat and the juices of love. She felt she could never have enough of touching him. At one and the same time she longed for him to waken and take her again in his arms, and jealously guarded his exhausted sleep. She felt no fear now, and no shame; what had been with Gorlois duty and acceptance had become delight almost unendurable, as if she had been reunited with some hidden part of her own body and soul.

  At last she did sleep a little, fitfully, curled into the curve of his body. She had slept perhaps an hour when she was roused abruptly by commotion in the courtyard. She sat up, flinging her long hair back. Uther pulled her sleepily down.

  “Lie still, dear love, dawn is still far away.”

  “No,” she said, with sure instinct, “we dare not linger now.” She flung on a gown and kirtle, twisting her hair up with shaking hands. The lamp had gone out and she could not find the pin in the darkness. At last she caught up a veil to throw over it, slid her feet into her shoes, and ran down the stairs. It was still far too dark to see clearly. In the great hall there was only a little glimmer of light from the banked fire. And then she came up sharp before a little stirring of the air, and stopped dead.

  Gorlois stood there, a great sword cut on his face, looking upon her with unutterable grief and reproach and dismay. It was the Sending she had seen before, the fetch, the death-doom; he raised his hand, and she could see that the ring and three fingers had been cut away. His face bore a ghastly pallor, but he looked at her with grief and love, and his lips moved in what she knew was her name, although she could not hear in the frozen silence around them. And in that moment she knew that he, too, had loved her, in his own harsh way, and whatever he had done to hurt her had been done for love. Indeed, for her love he had quarreled with Uther, flung away honor and dukedom both. And she had returned his love
with nothing but hatred and impatience; only now could she understand that even as she felt for Uther, so Gorlois had felt for her. Her throat cramped with anguish and she would have cried out his name, but the dead air moved and he was gone; had never been there at all. And at that moment the frozen silence around her was lifted and she heard men shouting in the courtyard.

  “Make way!” they were crying. “Make way! Lights, here, lights!”

  Father Columba came into the hall, thrust a torch into the banked fire and set it ablaze. He hastened to fling the door wide.

  “What is this outcry—”

  “Your duke is slain, men of Cornwall,” someone shouted. “We bring the Duke’s body! Make way! Gorlois of Cornwall lies dead and we bring his body for burying!”

  Igraine felt Uther’s arms holding her up from behind, else she would have fallen. Father Columba protested loudly, “No! This cannot be! Why, the Duke came home last night with a few of his men, he’s asleep upstairs now in his lady’s chamber—”

  “No.” It was the voice of the Merlin, quiet, but ringing to the farthest corners of the court. He took one of the torches and thrust it against Father Columba’s torch, then gave it to one of the soldiers to hold. “The oathbreaker Duke came never to Tintagel as a living man. Your lady stands here with your overlord and your High King, Uther Pendragon. You shall marry them today, Father.”

  There were cries and mutterings among the men, and the servants who had come running stood numbly watching as the rough bier, animal skins sewn into a litter, was borne into the hall. Igraine shrank away from the covered face and body. Father Columba bent over, briefly uncovered the face, made the sign of the cross, then turned away again. His face was grieved and angry.

  “This is sorcery, this is witchcraft.” He spat, brandishing the cross between them. “This foul illusion was your doing, old wizard!”

  Igraine said, “You will not speak so to my father, priest!”

  Merlin lifted his hand. “I need no woman’s protection—nor no man’s, my lord Uther,” he said. “And it was no sorcery. You saw what you willed to see—your lord come home. Only your lord was not the oathbreaker Gorlois, who had forfeited Tintagel, but the true High King and lord who came here to take what was his own. Keep you to your priestcraft, Father, there is need of a burying, and when that is done, of a nuptial mass for your king and for my lady whom he has chosen queen.”

  Igraine stood within the curve of Uther’s arm. She met the resentful, contemptuous look in Father Columba’s eyes; she knew that he would have turned on her, called her harlot and witch, but his fear of Uther kept him silent. The priest turned away from her and knelt beside Gorlois’s body; he was praying. After a moment Uther knelt too, his fair hair gleaming in the torchlight. Igraine went to kneel at his side. Poor Gorlois. He was dead, he had met a traitor’s death; he had richly deserved it, but he had loved her, and he had died.

  A hand on her shoulder prevented her. The Merlin looked into her eyes for a moment, and said gently, “So it has come, Grainné. Your fate, as it was foretold. See that you meet it with such courage as you may.”

  Kneeling at Gorlois’s side, she prayed—for Gorlois, and then, weeping, for herself; for the unknown fate that lay before them now. Had it indeed been ordained from the beginning of the world, or had it been brought about by the sorcery of the Merlin, and of Avalon, and by her own use of sorcery? Now Gorlois lay dead, and as she looked on Uther’s face, already beloved and dear, she knew that soon others would come and he would take up the burdens of his kingdom, and that never again would he be wholly hers as he had been on this one night. Kneeling there between her dead husband and the man she would love all her life, she fought the temptation to play upon his love for her, to turn him, as she knew she could do, from thoughts of kingdom and state to think only of her. But the Merlin had not brought them together for her own joy. She knew that if she sought to keep it, she would rebel against the very fate that had brought them together, and thus destroy it. As Father Columba rose from the dead man’s side and signalled to the soldiers to carry the body into the chapel, she touched his arm. He turned impatiently.

  “My lady?”

  “I have much to confess to you, Father, before my lord the Duke is laid to rest—and before I am married. Will you hear my confession?”

  He looked at her, frowning, surprised. At last he said, “At daybreak, lady,” and went away. The Merlin followed Igraine with his eyes as she came back to him. She looked into his face and said, “Here and now, my father, from this moment, be witness that I have done forever with sorcery. What God wills be done.”

  The Merlin looked tenderly into her ravaged face. His voice was gentler than she had ever heard it. “Do you think that all our sorcery could bring about anything other than God’s will, my child?”

  Catching at some small self-possession—if she did not, she knew, she would weep like a child before all these men—she said, “I will go and robe myself, Father, and make myself seemly.”

  “You must greet the day as befits a queen, my daughter.”

  Queen. The word sent shudders through her body. But it was for this that she had done all that she had done, it was for this that she had been born. She went slowly up the stairs. She must waken Morgaine and tell her that her father was dead; fortunately the child was too young to remember him, or to grieve.

  And as she called her women, and had them bring her finest robes and jewelry and dress her hair, she laid her hand wonderingly over her belly. Somehow, with the last fleeting touch of magic before she renounced it forever, she knew that from this one night, when they had been only lovers and not yet king and queen, she would bear Uther’s son. She wondered if the Merlin knew.

  Morgaine speaks . . .

  I think that my first real memory is of my mother’s wedding to Uther Pendragon. I remember my father only a little. When I was unhappy as a little girl, I seemed to remember him, a heavyset man with a dark beard and dark hair; I remember playing with a chain he wore about his neck. I remember that as a little maiden when I was unhappy, when I was chidden by my mother or my teachers, or when Uther—rarely—noticed me to disapprove of me, I used to comfort myself by thinking that if my own father were alive, he would have been fond of me and taken me on his knee and brought me pretty things. Now that I am older and know what manner of man he was, I think it more likely he would have put me into a nunnery as soon as I had a brother, and never thought more about me.

  Not that Uther was ever unkind to me; it was simply that he had no particular interest in a girl child. My mother was always at the center of his heart, and he at hers, and so I resented that—that I had lost my mother to this great fair-haired, boorish man. When Uther was away in battle—and there was battle a good deal of the time when I was a maiden—my mother Igraine cherished me and petted me, and taught me to spin with her own hands and to weave in colors. But when Uther’s men were sighted, then I went back into my rooms and was forgotten until he went away again. Is it any wonder I hated him and resented, with all my heart, the sight of the dragon banner on any horsemen approaching Tintagel?

  And when my brother was born it was worse. For there was this crying thing, all pink and white, at my mother’s breast; and it was worse that she expected me to care as much for him as she did. “This is your little brother,” she said, “take good care of him, Morgaine, and love him.” Love him? I hated him with all my heart, for now when I came near her she would pull away and tell me that I was a big girl, too big to be sitting in her lap, too big to bring my ribbons to her for tying, too big to come and lay my head on her knees for comfort. I would have pinched him, except that she would have hated me for it. I sometimes thought she hated me anyhow. And Uther made much of my brother. But I think he always hoped for another son. I was never told, but somehow I knew—maybe I heard the women talking, maybe I was gifted even then with more of the Sight than I realized—that he had first lain with my mother when she was still wedded to Gorlois, and there were still th
ose who believed that this son was not Uther’s but the son of the Duke of Cornwall.

  How they could believe that, I could not then understand, for Gorlois, they said, was dark and aquiline, and my brother was like Uther, fair-haired, with grey eyes.

  Even during the lifetime of my brother, who was crowned king as Arthur, I heard all kinds of tales about how he came by his name. Even the tale that it was from Arth-Uther, Uther’s bear; but it was not so. When he was a babe, he was called Gwydion—bright one—because of his shining hair; the same name his son bore later—but that is another story. The facts are simple: when Gwydion was six years old he was sent to be fostered by Ectorius, one of Uther’s vassals in the North country near Eboracum, and Uther would have it that my brother should be baptized as a Christian. And so he was given the name of Arthur.

  But from his birth until he was six years old, he was forever at my heels; as soon as he was weaned, my mother, Igraine, handed him over to me and said, “This is your little brother and you must love him and care for him.” And I would have killed the crying thing and thrown him over the cliffs, and run after my mother begging that she should be all mine again, except that my mother cared what happened to him.