Twilight of Avalon

by Anna Elliott

  The harpers’ tales spoke of Morgan’s fairness. Of raven-black hair and milk-white skin and a beauty to entrap and ruin a man’s soul. But it was not for beauty’s sake that Isolde was thankful, at times like this, if she was like Morgan, the daughter of Avalon. The grandmother who, for seven years now, had been to her nothing but a name in those same tales.

  The guards had dropped their heads in greeting, but now the man who had stood by the coffin straightened and spoke.

  “You are alone, lady?”

  He was the elder of the two, forty or forty-five, his face hard, scarred with the marks of battle, his hands large and powerful. “You should not have come out without a guard.”

  A thin prickle rose on the back of Isolde’s neck, but she said only, “I wish to keep vigil a time. I require no guard here.”

  She saw the two men exchange a quick sidelong glance, and then the first man said flatly, “You have a moment to say what prayers you will—and then we will see you return safely to the women’s hall. There is danger everywhere in such times as these.”

  Isolde stiffened, her brows lifting, and said, before she could stop herself, “Do you tell me so, indeed?” Then her gaze fell once more on the motionless figure beneath the dragon shield, and she drew a slow breath, willing herself to keep the flare of anger from her tone.

  “May I know the names of those who keep such careful guard on my life?”

  Again she saw the eyes of the two men slide sideways, the candlelight gleaming in the whites of their eyes. Then the elder said, “I am Hunno, lady, and this”—his head jerked toward his companion—“is Erbin.”

  “Very well, then, Hunno…Erbin.” She looked from one man to the other. “I thank you—both of you—for your concern. But my lord husband and king has been dead but three days. And I would be alone with my sorrow. You are released from your duties here for the evening. You may go.”

  “Thank you, lady.” Hunno’s jaw was set, his voice still harsh. “But we have our orders from my lord Marche. We stay.”

  A chill ran through Isolde at the memory of what it had cost her to get away on her own, even for this brief time. And all for nothing, she thought, if I cannot force them to go.

  “Orders?” she repeated. “My lord Marche may be king of Cornwall, but Tintagel is still the domain of the High King, as it has been since the Pendragon took the throne. It is not Marche who gives orders here.”

  “Is that so, lady?” A sly, ugly light appeared in Hunno’s eyes. “Who is it who gives orders, then? As you say”—he jerked his head backwards toward the coffin and the gleaming weapons of war—“your husband King Constantine lies dead. Even a king’s widow has small power on her own.”

  The second guard, a slight, dark youth with a thin, nervous face, stirred uneasily at Hunno’s words and made to lay a restraining hand on his companion’s arm, but Hunno shook him off with an impatient twist and took a step toward Isolde.

  “Well, my lady?”

  Isolde forced herself to stand without moving. “Have you forgotten, Hunno,” she asked softly, “who I am?”

  Hunno had started to take another step forward, but now he checked, and she saw a flicker of something that might have been fear stir at the back of his gaze.

  Isolde’s own eyes moved again to the still figure in the coffin, the hands lying limp against the folds of the crimson lining. Then she drew in her breath, looked up, and said, “Leave me. But before you go, return the ring you took from my husband’s right hand.”

  She heard the younger man, Erbin, catch his breath in a sharp gasp, but Hunno didn’t move. Fear pulled tight inside her, and she thought, as she always thought at such times, If, after all, I have guessed wrong…

  There was time for her to count seven beats of her own heart while she forced herself to wait, hand extended, keeping her eyes on Hunno’s.

  And at last, with an angry mutter and a half-sullen, half-fearful look from under his brows, Hunno drew something out of his belt and dropped it into Isolde’s outstretched hand.

  For a moment, his gaze locked with Isolde’s, and then he turned to Erbin. “Come on, then.” His voice was angry, his tone gruff. “There’ll be ale yet a while in the fire hall.”

  Hunno swung round on his heel, but before following, Erbin took a step toward Isolde and said, in a stammering rush, “Forgive us, lady. We did not mean—”

  Isolde cut him off curtly, her hand tightening about the ring in her palm. “It’s not for me to forgive. Make your peace with the king and go.” She paused, looking again from one man to the other. Then she added, very quietly, “I will know if you disobey.”

  ISOLDE WAITED UNTIL THE SOUND OF their booted footsteps died away, then she pressed her eyes briefly closed, feeling a prickle of perspiration on her back, despite the cold. Then, slowly, she turned once more to the open casket. Seven years now, she thought. Seven years that I have fought this battle. But now I am left to fight it entirely alone.

  She let out a shaking breath. The stars will still shine tomorrow, whatever happens to me here.

  She’d repeated the words so often over the years that they held the same familiar echo as one of the old tales. And now, as always when she thought or spoke them, a vague memory stirred in the shadows of her mind, of someone speaking them to give her courage as she’d done countless times since.

  But that was part of a lifetime—and a world—that had died on the battlefield when Arthur fought her father, his traitor heir. Seven years ago. When she’d lost both Sight and memory of all that had gone before.

  Isolde hadn’t intended to move, but somehow she found herself at the edge of the coffin, looking down at the man who lay within and hearing the words she’d spoken seem to echo in the chapel’s stillness. Alone with my sorrow, she thought. Alone with my sorrow, when I haven’t even been able to cry for Con yet.

  She had prepared the body for burial herself. Washed the blood and muck of the battlefield from his skin, anointed it with sweet oils. And seen in his side the blue-lipped, knife-thin wound where the dark heart’s-blood had seeped out. But now, surrounded by the gleaming weapons, his head covered by the leather war helm, he seemed all at once frighteningly unreal. A figure from legend or song, remote as the great Arthur himself.

  And yet, even now, Con’s face looked scarcely older than that of the twelve-year-old boy he had been on the day of their crowning, his brow unlined beneath the wisps of straight, nut-brown hair, his skin smooth, with only a faint stubble of beard shadowing the rounded chin. Almost, she thought, he might be asleep.

  Save for the folds of loosening flesh about the gold coins that covered his eyes.

  A shudder twisted through her, and Isolde closed her own eyes, trying to summon up a memory of the living Constantine. The memory that came, though, was an older one. Not of the husband—or even of the man.

  They had met only once before they were wedded and crowned. Only once—in the yard behind the stables of the great fortress of Caerleon, where the ceremonies had been held. Isolde had slipped away from her attendants and ladies to the only place she could be sure of finding a moment’s solitude and peace. But instead, amid the muck and straw and broken-down wagons, she’d found Con, twelve years old to her thirteen, his leather tunic torn and streaked with horse dung, his chin blood-smeared, with a purpling bruise over his right eye.

  He’d been kicking furiously and aimlessly at the broken spokes of a loose wagon wheel, his face flushed and angry, his jaw set. But there’d been something in his face—or maybe in the childish, oddly vulnerable curve of the back of his neck as he bent over the wheel—that had made Isolde speak to him instead of slipping quietly away to be alone as she’d meant.

  “I can give you a salve for that, if you’d like.”

  He’d whirled, startled at the sound of her voice. His face, beneath strands of sweat-soaked brown hair, had still the full-cheeked, rounded look of childhood, though he’d been even then nearly full grown, taller than she herself by more than a foot, the b
road planes of muscle along shoulders and back holding a man’s strength—or the promise of it, at least. The look he gave her was guarded, his body tensed as though bracing to attack or to ward off a blow.

  “What did you say?”

  “Your eye.” Isolde gestured toward his right eye, puffy and swollen nearly closed, and with a cut on the brow that had dripped a trail of blood onto temple and lid. “And your mouth, as well.” His upper lip, too, was bruised and bloodied, shiny with spittle since it was too swollen to be comfortably closed, and crusted with drying fragments of what looked like mud.

  “I don’t—” he’d started to say, but Isolde had stopped him.

  “Come up to my rooms. You’ll feel better with something on those bruises.” She paused, and, half against her will, a note of bitterness crept into her tone. “And we’d best get acquainted if we’re to be married at the end of this week.”

  In the end he’d followed her without speaking, stood, rigid, in the center of Isolde’s chambers while she drew out her box of medicines and salves. When she motioned him to sit on a low wooden stool and started to swab his bruises with witch hazel, though, he stiffened, and cast a quick, nervous glance around the room.

  “You won’t—” he began. “I mean…they say your grandmother…”

  “I know what they say.”

  A hot flush swept up under the clear, bright skin of his face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…” He stammered to a halt again.

  Isolde studied him, smearing all-heal salve over the cuts on brow and eye. His hands were clenched tight at his sides, but he’d made no sound, though Isolde knew she must be hurting him a good deal, gentle as she tried to be.

  She thought of Morgan—the grandmother Con had been about to call sorceress or witch, if not something worse—and an ache of grief rose in her throat. But she’d promised herself, on the road to this place, that she’d not look back anymore. And here, now, was this boy. Frightened and in pain and trying desperately to hide both.

  “Do you know any stories?” Isolde asked.

  Con looked up, startled, then swallowed heavily, gulping and blinking away the tears that had risen to his eyes. “Stories? How do you mean?”

  Isolde turned to her medicine box and drew out needle and thread. “The cut over your eye is deep—it should be stitched if it’s to heal properly. But I can tell you the story of Bran the Blessed and his magical cauldron while I’m stitching it.”

  A press of tears burned behind her own eyes. No, she thought. No more remembering. The past is a tale. Words. Nothing more.

  And already the memory of Morgan’s face was fading.

  Isolde frowned, deftly clipping off a length of thread and passing it through the needle’s eye. “It won’t hurt as much if you’ve something to think about besides the pain.”

  When at last she was done, Isolde returned the needle and thread to their case, then turned away to dispose of the dirtied linens and swabs.

  “How did all this happen?” she asked.

  Con had been gingerly touching mouth and eye, running a finger over the row of stitches now set over his brow, and at the question he hesitated. Then, “A horse kicked me,” he muttered. “It was my fault. I—” He stopped. “I startled it. Made it buck and lash out.”

  Isolde’s brows rose. “A bucking horse?” She shook her head. “If I couldn’t tell lies better than that, I’d give up trying.”

  A flush—of anger, this time—spread up Con’s neck to his face, his head snapping up. “Are you saying I’m a liar?”

  Isolde eyes moved to the marks on Con’s arm, visible beneath the sleeve of his tunic. The marks of fingers, clear and reddening angrily against the fair skin. “I’m saying, at any rate, that it’s a rare horse with a hand to twist an arm behind your back and hold you down on the ground.”

  Abruptly, the flush faded from Con’s cheeks. His shoulders sagged, and his head dropped again. He was silent so long Isolde thought for a moment he wasn’t going to respond at all, but then at last he said, in a low, sullen tone, “It was Caw—he’s one of Lord Marche’s men.”

  Isolde nodded. She knew the man—or boy, rather, however much he might seem a man to Con. A heavyset, ugly boy of fifteen or sixteen, with a pasty, small-eyed face and powerful arms.

  Con’s eyes were still trained on the floor, and he said, in the same low tone, “We were practicing swordplay in the stable yard, and I got the better of him in the last match. And some of the others laughed and said hadn’t he got any better skill than to be beat by”—his cheeks flushed again—“by a snot-nosed brat. And Caw got angry at that and said my—”

  Con stopped abruptly, as though he’d recollected where he was and to whom he spoke, and he glanced at Isolde, the flush on his cheeks darkening. “That is…I mean…he said I wouldn’t…” He rubbed the back of his neck, seeming to grope for words, then gave up, his eyes falling again as he went on, his voice quick and almost toneless. “He said I’d have no better idea what to do with a wife in bed than a gelded horse would. And I said that I knew well enough—that I’d seen dogs hump a bitch in heat dozens of times, and breeding stallions serving mares. And he—”

  Con stopped again, hands tight at his sides. “He laughed.”

  He almost spat the words, his eyes dark with remembered fury. Isolde herself had bitten her lip to hide a brief, unwilling smile of her own, but the smile faded almost at once. She could see the ugly little scene. Con shamed and humiliated in front of his fellows—the men and boys he would soon lead into battle as their crowned and anointed king.

  And whether what Caw said was true or no, she thought, I’ll belong to this boy soon enough. Body and spirit and mind, I’ll be his, by the law of the land.

  Con had gone on, the words coming in an angry rush. “I said at least I’d have a woman instead of fu—…of bedding goats and cows because I couldn’t get anything else. And he said he’d make me eat horseshi—…dirt for that. We fought—but he got me in a wrestler’s hold. One I didn’t know. So—”

  Con stopped, the flush on his cheekbones deepening again, his shoulders sagging once more. Isolde, watching him, understood, now, the streaks of filth about his mouth.

  Con glanced sideways at her. “I suppose you’ll not want to be wedded to me, now you know I lost a fight to a…a swine like him.”

  And small difference it would make, Isolde thought, if I did not. The flash of angry bitterness ebbed, though, as her eyes met Con’s, dark and suddenly anxious, with a childish look of appeal overlaid only slightly by the struggle for indifferent calm. She thought briefly of giving him a soothing lie, then stopped herself. She owed him honesty, at least. And so she said, “I’d sooner wed you than anyone else, I suppose—if I’ve got to be wedded at all.”

  Con’s brow furrowed, but then he let out his breath in a sigh and nodded, giving a slight, indifferent shrug. “I suppose that’s the way I feel about it, as well.” He stopped, then, the flash of anxiety visible once more at the back of his eyes, “You won’t—you won’t tell Marche, will you? About what happened today with Caw?” He stopped, then went on, awkwardly, “He…he doesn’t know me much, yet. Only from the ride here with the rest of his men. But he’s to be my regent. And if he found out, he’d be angry and say I wasn’t fit to be king.”

  So, Isolde thought. You’ve already learned that much, at least, of Lord Marche. Marche, whose betrayal had cost her father the field of Camlann, and his life, as well. And her grandmother—

  If not for Marche, Isolde thought, Morgan of Avalon would be alive still. And I’d not be here now, forced into marriage with this overgrown boy. But Con was watching her, his face still anxious and taut, and she said, “No. I won’t tell. But Caw may, you know.”

  Con shook his head. “No, he won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Con’s jaw hardened, making his face appear strangely adult, childish no more. “Because after he’d made me eat the horseshit I gave him a couple of good fistings in the balls. It will be a while be
fore he can say anything and not sound like a squeaking girl.”

  NOW, IN THE SILENT CHAPEL, ISOLDE opened her eyes and stared unseeingly straight ahead, the twelve-year-old Con’s face vivid in her mind’s eye, the rounded, childish planes of his face contrasting so oddly with the slow, grim smile that had stretched his mouth that long-ago day. Only a year younger than she’d been herself, and yet, for all his strength and height, the difference in their ages had seemed greater than that by far. As it always had, even later on. And maybe, she thought, maybe that is why after seven years of marriage, that boy Con seems, tonight, more real to me than the man.

  The soft footfall from behind made her whirl, heart jerking hard against her side. Then, as the spare, shadowed figure stepped forward into the circle of candlelight, Isolde let out her breath once more.

  Myrddin. He had kept his promise, then, to come.

  Myrddin Emrys, sometimes called the Enchanter or the Prophet of Kings, was an ugly man. His face was narrow, with a high, prominent forehead, a crooked nose, and a flowing white beard that nearly covered a wide mouth and jaw. He wore the white robe and bull’s-hide cloak of the druid-born, and beneath it his body was bent, gnarled with age, one leg lame and twisted, the right shoulder a little higher than the left.

  Only his eyes were beautiful—his eyes, and his hands, as well. His eyes were a deep, clear gray-blue, the color of the sea where the lost land of Lyonesse was said to lie beneath the waves. And his hands were slender, long-fingered and all but untouched by age, save for the harper’s calluses, worn with years of plucking the instrument’s strings.

  He came toward her now, leaning heavily on the carved oaken staff he carried, the lame leg dragging a little behind. The hair that fell nearly to his shoulders was plaited with dozens of tiny braids, and a raven feather had been bound on a leather thong at the end of one braid, a streak of black against the snowy white.

  “Isa.”

  Isolde knew he’d not meant to hurt her, but all the same the old childhood name brought a sudden, fierce stab of longing, and for a moment Isolde wished, with all her heart, that she could go back. Back to the time before Camlann, before she had been wedded and crowned Britain’s High Queen. Back to the time that, for seven years now, she’d not let herself remember at all.