“If God wills it—” she answered cautiously, but he was looking at her as if she were the Goddess, or perhaps only the Tigernissa. Only now was Guendivar beginning to understand that for some, that was almost the same thing.
The healer had finished her examination
“Will he recover?” she asked.
“I believe so, with time and careful nursing,” the woman answered her. “He can make back the blood he has lost, and his wounds are not too severe. But I don’t like that fever.”
No more did Guendivar, but she had promised Edrit that she would try to save his master. For three nights she took turns with the other women to sit by the wounded man, sponging his brow and listening to his mutterings, until the crisis came.
It was past midnight, and the queen herself was half asleep in her chair, when a groan woke her.
“Hold!” Aggarban spoke quite clearly but his eyes were closed. “Don’t trouble to deny it—I know ye for a northern man. Is my mother tangled in this business?” There was a silence, as if someone invisible were answering, and then, once more, that terrible groan. When he spoke again, his voice was softer, edged by pain.
“Ah, my mother, you were in the Light that came through the hall—and then you abandoned us. Do you not care for your sons? But you never did, save for that red-haired brat. Festival-bastard, king’s-get—oh, I have heard the tales. Can you name any of our fathers?” The accusations faded into anguished mutterings.
“Aggarban—” The queen wrung water from the cloth and laid it on his brow. “It’s all right now, it’s over . . . you must sleep and get well.”
His eyes opened suddenly, and it seemed that he knew her. “Queen Guendivar . . . you shine like the moon . . . and are you faithless too?”
She recoiled as if he had struck her, but his eyes had closed. He stopped speaking, and after a few moments she took a deep breath and laying her hand on his brow, found it cool. Guendivar rose then and called the healer to examine him; and after, she went to her own bed, and wept until sleep came.
It was sunset, and the moon, now in its first quarter, hovered halfway up the sky. To Morgause, sitting on a coil of rope beside the stern rail, it looked like a cauldron into which all the light was trickling as the sky dimmed from rose to mauve and then a soft violet blue. When her gaze returned to the sea, she saw the undulating landscape before her, opalescent with color, its billows refracting blue and purple as they caught the light and subsiding into dusk grey when they fell.
The ship flexed and dipped, angling across the waves towards her evening anchorage. She was called the Siren, and in a week of travel Morgause had come to know her routine. Unless the weather was exceptionally fine and the wind steady, they put in each night at some sheltered cove, trading for fresh food and water and exchanging news. In these remote places there had been no rumor of the search for the Cauldron, but even here folk had felt the storm and rejoiced in the peace that came after. Those who had not died of the great sickness were on the mend, and hope had returned to the land.
At first, such interrupted progress had frustrated Morgause to the edge of rage. If the first few villages had been able to sell them horses, she would have left the ship and gone overland—to struggle with the hazards of the mountains would have matched her mood. But as day succeeded day, ever changing and always the same, she found her anger dissolving away. Even the presence of the Cauldron did not disturb her, for at sea, she was in its element and there was no separation between them.
Moving across the surface of the waters, suspended between earth and heaven, she found herself suspended also between the time before she took the Cauldron and whatever the future might hold. Her desire for the Cauldron was unchanging, but she wondered now why she had fought so hard to rule the north? Beside its reality, even her ambitions for Medraut paled. She was beginning to understand that whatever happened now, the woman who returned to the north would not be the same as the one who had ridden away a moon ago.
Vortipor rode in to Camalot with ravens wheeling around him. When those who came out to welcome him realized that the round objects dangling from his saddlebow were severed heads, they understood why.
The man who had taken them was brown and healthy and grinning triumphantly. The heads were rather less so, and even Vortipor did not protest too much when Artor tactfully suggested that Father Kebi might be willing to give them Christian burial.
“Though I doubt very much that they deserve it. I was outnumbered, and could not afford them time to confess their sins.” He did not sound sorry.
“I trust that they deserved the death you gave them—” Artor observed, but the steel in his tone did little to dim the young man’s smile.
“Oh, yes. The cave where they held me was littered with the remains of their victims. We’ll have to send a party to give them a grave as least as good as that of their murderers.”
“They were robbers, then,” said Guendivar.
“Most certainly, but they bit off more than they could chew when they captured me! I am sorry, my lady, that I have no news of the Cauldron, but when the Light passed through the hall, what I saw was a Warrior Angel, and I can only serve the truth I see.. . .”
“None of us can say more than that,” answered the king, and led him into the hall.
Even on dry land the ground seemed to be heaving. Morgause stumbled and halted, laughing. The Siren had put them ashore on the north bank of the Belisama, for her master would sail no farther. A half-day’s journey would set them on the Bremetennacum road. It was far enough—no one would think to look for the fugitives here. Indeed, the fear of pursuit had ceased to trouble her, as had any ambivalence regarding her theft of the Cauldron.
It was hers, as the gods had always intended, and the time to claim her inheritance had arrived. When Doli began to ask her about the next stage of their journey, she waved him away.
“We can take thought for that tomorrow. Tonight is the full of the moon. Carry the chest up the beach—there, beyond the trees—and let no one disturb me.” He was a Pict, and she knew he would not question his queen.
The sun was already sinking into the western sea, and as they reached the spot Morgause had chosen, a rim of silver edged the distant hill.
Swiftly she stripped off her clothes and stood, arms lifted in adoration, as the silver wheel of the moon rolled up the eastern sky. It had been long since she had saluted the moon with the priestesses, but she still remembered the beginning of their hymn.
“Lady of the Silver Wheel, Lady of the Three-fold Way. . .” For a moment she hummed, trying to recall how the next lines ran, then words came to her—“Thy deepest mysteries reveal, hear me, Goddess, as I pray!” She repeated the phrase, sinking deeper into the chant, finding new verses to continue the song.
Words of power she sang, to confirm her mastery, but gradually it seemed to her that she was hearing other voices and singing the old words after all, and she did not know if they came from memory, or whether the familiar melody had somehow linked her in spirit to the priestesses who even now would be drawing down the moon on the Holy Isle.
“Holiness is your abode . . . Help and healing there abound.. . .” But Morgause had not wanted healing, only power.
“Ever-changing, you abide.. . Grant us motion, give us rest.. . .” As she sang the words, her strength left her and she sank down onto her scattered clothing, her breath coming in stifled sobs. It took a long time before she could find a stillness to match that of the night around her.
And all that while, the moon had continued to rise. Morgause sat watching it, and draped her mantle over her naked shoulders against the night chill. She realized gradually that the quiet was a breathing stillness, compounded of the chirring of frogs, the gentle lap of the waves against the sand, and the whisper of wind in the grass. And now, as she watched, she saw the first spark of light on the water, and the moon, lifting ever higher, began to lay down a path of light across the sea.
Ripple by ripple the moonpath
lengthened. Moving with dreamlike slowness, Morgause rose, undid the hasps that had secured the chest, and raised the lid. White silk swathed the Cauldron. Gently she folded it back, and drew in her breath at the glimmer of silver inside. It was as bright as if newly polished. The priestesses on the Isle of Maidens used to whisper that it never grew tarnished or needed to be cleaned.
For a moment longer awe kept her from moving, then she lifted the Cauldron and carried it to the water’s edge. The tide was fully in, and she had not far to go. The moon was high, serene in a sky of indigo, so bright that the sea showed deep blue as well, but moving across the river came a dancing glitter of light. Still holding the Cauldron, Morgause waded into the water, and when it lapped the tops of her thighs, she lowered the vessel and let it fill.
Here, where the outflow of the river met the tide, the water was both sweet and salt. It is all the waters of the world, thought Morgause, bearing the Cauldron back to the shore.
She set it down at the water’s edge and knelt behind it. A last wave ran up the sand and splashed her, and then the tide began to turn, but the moonpath continued to lengthen, glistening on the wet sand, until the light struck first the rim of the Cauldron and then the water within, and began to glow.
It was the power she had glimpsed in her mother’s ritual, increased a thousandfold. It was all she had ever hoped for, or desired. Heart pounding, Morgause gripped the rim of the Cauldron and looked in.
In the first moment, she saw only the moon reflected in the surface of the water. In the next, light flared around her. She did not know if the water had fountained or she were falling in. Glowing shapes moved around her; she blinked, and recognized the goddesses whose outer images had been embossed upon the Cauldron’s skin. The Lady of the Silver Wheel and the Lady of Ravens, the Flower Bride and the Great Mother, the Lady of Healing and the Death Crone, all of them passed before her—but now she perceived them without the veils of form that human minds had imposed to shield eyes unready to gaze on glory.
Morgause floated in the center of their circle, trembling as one by one they turned to look at her. She tried to hide her face, but she had no hands, and no feet with which to run even if there had been anywhere to go. A naked soul, she cowered beneath that pitiless contemplation that beheld and judged every angry thought and selfish deed and bitter word. In that brilliance all her justifications and excuses dissolved and disappeared.
And with them, the separate images dislimned and flowed together until there was only one Goddess, who wore her mother’s face, and gazed at her with all the love that Morgause had ever longed for in Her eyes, and then that image also gave way to a radiance beyond all forms and gender, and she knew no more.
Half a hundred of Artor’s Companions had ridden out to search for the Cauldron. As the infant moon grew to maturity and then began to dwindle, more and more of them returned. Some, like Aggarban, came back wounded. Sullen and taciturn once his fever left him, Aggarban was recovering well, but there were others who reached Camalot only to die, or who never returned at all, and Guendivar could not help but wonder whether Morgause had managed to curse the Cauldron.
And yet there were others who came back with a new light in their eyes, having found, if not the Cauldron, the thing that gave it meaning. It had taken her some days to realize that Manus, who had accompanied Igierne back down from the north, had gone out to search with the other men. He had not returned either, but she could not explain why she was worried about a kitchen lad.
The days passed, and Cai came in. He seemed more peaceful than he had been, though he refused to say much of his journey.
“I never even found a trace of the theives,” he told them. “But I do feel better—perhaps I just needed to get away.. . .”
Peretur had a strange tale of a girl he met by a sacred spring that made Guendivar wonder if he too had encountered the folk of faerie. Gwyhir returned triumphant, having surpassed Vortipor’s tally of slain outlaws. Young Amminius did not come back, but sent word that he was leaving the world to join a hermit he had found in the forest.
By the dark of the moon, of the most notable warriors all had been accounted for save Gualchmai. At first, Artor refused to worry. His nephew was widely recognized as the best fighter in an army that was the best in Britannia. Surely he could deal with any foe who might challenge him. But as time went on with no word, men began to remember that even the greatest fighter could be taken down from ambush or overwhelmed by numbers. And yet, even outnumbered, Gualchmai must have given an account of himself that would make the heavens ring.
And then, as the first sliver of new moon glimmered in the afternoon sky, the gate guard sent word that a single rider was coming up the road, a big man with a shock of wheat-colored hair. That hair, and the red-and-white shield, were famous all over Britannia. By the time Gualchmai rode through the gate, the entire population of Camalot was turned out to meet him.
“What is it?” he asked, looking around him. “Is there a festival?”
Whatever he had been doing, it was not fighting, for there was not a mark upon him. In fact he looked younger. The tunic he was wearing was new, made from green linen with embroidery around the neck and hems.
“To look at you, there must be!” exclaimed Gwyhir. “Where have you been, man? We’ve been worried about you!”
“Oh . . .” A becoming flush reddened Gualchmai’s skin. “I didn’t realize.” There was another pause. “I got married . . .” he said then.
He could hardly have caused a greater uproar, thought Guendivar, if he had announced a new invasion of Saxons. In time of war, Gualchmai was a great fighter. In peace he had gained an equal reputation as a lover of women. One could believe almost any feat in the bedchamber or the battlefield. But not marriage.
He told them about it later, when they were all gathered in the hall. He had taken the northern road, and after a day found the tracks of a large party of men. Gualchmai followed them onto a path that led through a patch of woodland, catching up just in time to break up an attack on an ancient Roman two-wheeled carriage with two women and an old man inside.
“Her name is Gracilia, and she was a widow, living in an old villa and struggling to keep the farm going with three slaves.”
“She must be very beautiful . . .” said Vortipor, but Guendivar wondered. It had always seemed to her that Gualchmai was so successful with women just because he found all of them beautiful.
“She . . .” Gualchmai gestured helplessly, seeking for words. “She is what I need.”
She is his Vessel of Light—thought Guendivar as the conversation continued.
“I thought I had made Britannia safe because there were no more enemies attacking from outside her borders,” said Artor at last, “but you are not the only one to have encountered worse evil within. My own injuries kept me confined to Camalot for too long. In the future it will be different, I swear.”
For three days, after the full of the moon, Morgause lay half conscious and drained of energy. When Doli, concerned because she had not called him in the morning, had gone to her, he had found the Cauldron back in its chest and his mistress lying unconscious beside it. Morgause had no memory of having put it there, but for some time, her memories of the entire night remained fragmented, like something remembered from a dream.
But certain facts remained with her, and as the days passed, they became clearer.
The Cauldron’s power was far greater than she had imagined, and far less amenable to human control, and the Isle of Maidens was the only place where it might be safely kept in this world.
The Goddess for whom it was the physical gateway was also greater than Morgause had allowed herself to believe, and the aspects that she had for the past ten years worshipped were no more adequate to represent the whole than the pallid version she had scorned the priestesses of the Isle of Maidens for honoring.
Her mother loved her, and the hostility between them was as much her own fault as it was Igierne’s.
When a
week had passed and Morgause could stand up without her legs turning to water, she ordered her men to break camp and took the road north towards Luguvalium. They traveled slowly while her strength was returning, and so the moon had grown dark and was beginning to wax once more when they came to the fortress of Voreda.
That night they sheltered in the barracks, abandoned for nearly a century. In the morning, Morgause led the way to the track that wound westward through the hills.
Once, she had known this way well. Now, she took in the prospect revealed by each turn of the road with new eyes. Never before had she been so conscious that this was a place outside ordinary reality, a realm of mountains sculptured by giants, rising like guardians behind the familiar hills. They hid a secret country that she, always so preoccupied by her own concerns, had never really known.
In body Morgause grew steadily stronger. Her past was forgotten, the future unknown. She greeted each dawn with increasing eagerness, wondering what the new day would bring, until they crested the last rise and saw through the black fringe of pine trees a glint of blue.
Where the trail curved round towards the trees stood an ancient boulder. When she had lived here as a child, the maidens used to call it the throne.
Someone was sitting there.
Even before Morgause could see the figure clearly, she sensed who it must be. Just as my mother knew that I would be coming, she thought then. I always believed that we fought because we were too different, but perhaps it was because we are too much the same.. . .
With a few words she halted Uinuist and Doli. She dismounted, then and took the rein of the pony to whose back the chest had been bound, and started towards the stone.
As she drew closer, Morgause realized that she was not the only one who had changed. She had never believed that her mother could look so fragile. The sunlight that dappled the ground beneath the pine needles seemed to shine through her.
The Hallowed Isle Book Three Page 18
