Guinevere

by Sharan Newman

  Guinevere sat listening, wondering. She couldn’t understand why anyone would want to give up someone they loved, or that anyone could love something so much as to fear it was idolatrous. Gaia’s sobbing still echoed in Guinevere’s heart and she felt a strange thrill of pity for her. Suddenly, Gaia was human.

  Timon saw her, sitting there so innocently, her forehead wrinkled with the effort of understanding. He worried about her.

  “Guinevere,” he said earnestly. “If you ever decide to devote your life to God alone, be sure you do it because you love Him more than anything else, not to deny your love for something of this earth. The earth isn’t so awful. After all, God made it, too.”

  He shook himself, having said his piece. Again, Guinevere was reminded of a great, shaggy bear. He smiled at her. “I should finish the story. When Gaia turned eighteen, Nennius wanted to be married at once. He said that they had already waited longer than was necessary, but then she decided that since living with Nennius was what she wanted most, she had to get away from him at once. So she came up here. We all fought her. Father even tried to bring her back by force, but nothing worked. In the end they sent me up here to watch out for her. She thinks still that I only remain because of my promise, and that is another of the burdens she carries,” he chuckled. “She can’t believe that I am happier here with the animals and the bees than I ever was with all those educated Romans. Well, that’s all. We’ve been up here nearly twenty years. Nennius declared that if she wouldn’t marry him, he would become a monk, too. But he wouldn’t give up books for anyone. So he travels about the world, hunting for manuscripts that can be loaned for copy, and brings them back to Britain. Gaia won’t even look at one. But every time he returns, he comes here first, hoping to break her down.”

  Guinevere listened with growing wonder. It was a very romantic story, but silly, somehow. What good was Gaia to God up here, miserable? She felt vaguely that there must be an answer somewhere, that something in Gaia’s beliefs had gotten turned around and a word would set it right. But it was beyond her. She shook her head and smiled at Timon, who was kneeling, breaking up a clod he had kicked loose, crumbling it until the soft dirt ran between his fingers.

  “You won’t mention this to Gaia, now,” he cautioned again. “She thinks she’s fooled everyone into thinking she’s abandoned her early desires years ago. It would shame her terribly to think that others knew her weakness.”

  “She is the strongest person I have ever met,” Guinevere answered. “I know I wouldn’t have the courage to say a word to her.”

  “You mustn’t be afraid of her, either, you know. She has a good heart; it just never occurs to her to use it.”

  They went back to their work, hoeing the beans they had planted when Guinevere arrived. Already the first tiny leaves were unfolding, close-huddled to the soil. Guinevere had never noticed this precarious beginning before, this first fragile advance from the dark ground into the sun and wind. It amazed her that they throve so, that anything so tiny could have a chance. When Timon reminded her that even the great trees around them had started as seedlings, she flatly refused to believe it.

  He laughed at her. “Do you think that they sprang full grown from the earth one morning, complete with bark and branches?”

  “Well . . .”

  “I suppose you think that I arrived in the world six feet tall and wearing a beard?”

  She considered. “Do you know, I think you must have!”

  She walked around him, staring up at his great mane of hair, tumbling over his broad chest and shoulders. He could never have been a fat, limp, pink baby. Her imagination, never great, could not conceive of this at all.

  He roared in delight at this limit of her thought. “So be it then. I can’t argue with you any more than I can with Gaia. Let us simply tend our garden and leave speculation to the scholars.”

  They continued their work in companionable silence. In the hut Gaia cried until she fell asleep.

  Chapter Six

  The days slid by, summer waning as the garden flourished. Guinevere had long since meshed with the rhythm of Timon’s work cycle. She trotted after him, tending bees, cultivating the soil, exploring the forest in search of its treasures. He often gave her some small job to do quite alone. Before she would have felt put-upon, but now she accepted the responsibility as an honor. She hunted for early berries and gathered the angelica to steep with honey and water for mead. Her times of solitude grew more precious to her than she ever could have imagined. In her special meditation spot she felt most at peace. There she would sit motionless for hours, waiting. Sometimes she sang to herself or chanted poems. At first these were by the Latin poets or the church fathers, but they seemed jarring and too civilized for such a place. So, without noticing it, she began to chant the old British songs, the ones the people who worked in the fields knew. She had heard them repeated every year, each in its own time. The farmers and fieldmen, the potters and weavers, the dairymaid and the stablehand all knew the proper songs. One to call the wind upon a hot afternoon, one to make the name of one’s true love appear in the water; another to protect the new calves from sickness; more to bring the deer to the arrow. Flora had hummed them all to her when she was a child, and more. Perhaps the old woman thought she was too young to remember, but they were her first music and they were forever printed in her memory.

  One day, on a deep sunny morning, she found herself sitting in the warm grass pungent with the smell of rotting fruits, and she began to sing the prayer for bringing flowers from the earth. Flora would start humming and reciting it to herself every winter solstice and kept on until midsummer’s day. Sometimes, when she had thought herself unwatched, Flora’s hands had moved over and upon the brown, barren ground in certain patterns. Guinevere thought it was a kind of dancing for the fingers and had learned to imitate it in her room. But she had never tried it out-of-doors, near summer’s end, with life already blooming flamboyantly about her.

  The grass quivered as she touched it, and she smiled. A comfortable warmth ran through her hands, like that which came from spiced wine by a winter’s fire. She sang low and caressingly, in the same loving tone in which Flora had sung it to her. She could sense the movement of growth far under the green mat. Nearby, something watched her with joy in its sorrowful velvet eyes.

  “The time is coming,” it thought. “She will be ready to find me and, for a while, our lives will run together. I will no longer be alone. For a time.”

  A giant crystal tear sizzled in the grass.

  Guinevere finished her song with a laugh. She patted the grass she had just blessed as if it were a pet kitten, Then she realized that it was nearly time for breakfast and she had promised Timon that she would help make a new hive, as the bees were getting ready to swarm. She skipped from the glen without a backward glance. Behind her, an orchid broke from the earth and reached toward the sun.

  • • •

  Occasionally, when Gaia was thoughtlessly cruel or Timon very busy, Guinevere wondered when Geraldus would come back for her. She worried that they had forgotten her at home, learned to live without her. She didn’t panic. It was just something that settled at the back of her mind and caused her lower lip to stick out. She usually forgot it a moment later, so great was her contentment with her life. But still, she would sometimes stare through the tiny front window at the stars and wonder if anyone missed her.

  She needn’t have worried. In the midst of trying to feed and entertain what seemed a whole company of soldiers and petty lords, Guenlian missed her terribly. The minute the men had come galloping across the shallow stream, horses sweating and armor gleaming, she had known that they had been right to send her away. They weren’t quite barbarians (after all, one had to remember they were fighting for Rome). A few were even moderately well mannered. But they were soldiers, trained from childhood to kill in battle. And when life consists of taking up a lance and shield and charging into a dirty, bloody melee every few weeks, there is not much t
ime for gentility. These men certainly showed it. They wore their muddy riding boots to dinner and drank their wine in long gulps. Their voices were too loud and their language a bastard Latin. Merlin was right in saying that few could read their own names. And even though strict orders had been sent down, more than one serving maid hid deep purple bruises beneath her thin robes.

  Guenlian shuddered but bore all their boorishness with dignity and apparent unconcern. Such was the power of her name and station, not to mention her own regal appearance, that no one ever quite got out of hand.

  Matthew and John were more than slightly embarrassed by their comrades’ manners. It was strange how different these men appeared in their home. There were many hunting trips, and during the breaks in these, the brothers tried to make it clear to the men that even with the drought, baths could be provided for those who wished to follow the old customs. There was a lot of ribaldry connected with this suggestion, but most of the soldiers took the hint. They mocked but they admitted, too, that they were powerfully awed by this glimpse of Roman life. It gave them new insight into what they might have if the invaders were ever completely ousted from Britain.

  It had been planned that way by Merlin, of course. He and Arthur had discussed it after they came. A few weeks of civilized life would give them all something to imagine for themselves. Leodegrance had sighed when they explained it, but resigned himself to the inconvenience in the name of Rome.

  So the hordes of soldiers came to the villa. During the day they hunted in the forest. It was mostly for sport and to keep themselves occupied, but there was no denying that the game they brought back was vital to keep them all fed. Not all the sheep and cattle on the place could have satisfied those carnivores. At night they feasted in the great dining room, or tables were set up in the atrium under the stars. To make more room, Guenlian said. To save spending the next day mopping, she thought.

  Mark was the only one of the brothers who preferred to stay behind when the others rode off. At first he explained that it was to help oversee the land and free his father for pleasure, but later he confided to Arthur that he had simply had enough of seeing things die.

  “I’m home now,” he sighed. “And I want to think of nothing but food and a clean bed and how nicely little Rhianna has grown since I was last here. It seems a pity. She’s almost sixteen now. Soon her parents will decide she’s ready for marriage and send for her. Then she’ll have to go back up into the mountains and live in a leaky stone house with her fine strong herdsman husband. And all her beauty and grace will be wasted unless a wandering monk should stop by or a merchant come to bid for their horses and wool. I have no doubt that she will be supremely happy.”

  Arthur smiled at his friend. They sat alone on the ground, leaning against the old stable wall. The stone was still warm from the sun, although it was well past midnight. The roistering hunters had all long since staggered to their beds, or lay curled where they had passed out under the tables. But Arthur was restless and not as drunk as his men. He had gone wandering and found Mark in the stable. He was feeling talkative and Arthur was content to let him ramble on, hearing little of what he said. They were facing the court and the lamps were still lit in a few of the windows. Arthur gazed at the scene hungrily. The house alone was more than he had ever imagined. It was a piece of art unto itself; mosaics on all the floors and murals on the walls; statues carved into the lintels and columns—and windows! Real glass windows of a cool, rippling green that made the room inside seem mystical and soothing. And Mark called it home. He had never known any other.

  Arthur remembered his fostering place. It was in the north, too near the sea. It was cold and damp all year ’round. It was only an old fort, adapted for family living. The rooms were tiny, originally intended for storage or as watchtowers. The walls were thick stone, with narrow slits in them, not to admit light but to fire through at attackers. When the wind was strong, they would be covered with oiled skins and then there would be no light at all. The walls were smeared with smoke and grease, and the entire household slept together for warmth. Cleanliness wasn’t a word in his vocabulary until he met Merlin.

  He stared angrily at his hands. Big, rough, clumsy. He wondered if the Lady Guenlian had cringed inside when she had touched them in greeting. He felt terribly uncomfortable and out of place in this ordered, cultured world, but his whole heart longed to be a part of it, to live like a gentleman, a Roman citizen, although he was rather vague on just what those terms entailed. To live in a place like that and feel as though one belonged there; he laughed bitterly at himself. He knew what he was, for all Merlin’s teaching. He was a soldier, a man who could make other men follow him into battle. When the battle ended he was no one again: a man with no family, no station, no place in the cosmos, certainly no place in a society where everyone was related and every man knew his cousins to the seventh degree. He pressed his lips together tightly and tried to pay attention to what Mark was saying.

  Actually, Arthur was being too hard on himself. He had made a very strong and favorable impression on Leodegrance and Guenlian. Even before he spoke they were pleased with his air of quiet control. But their prejudice showed in their failure to approve of him completely until they had heard his voice. Under Merlin’s careful training, his Latin was pure and clear. He knew the correct phrases and when to use them, although he still had a hard time recognizing words when they were written down. For all his rough, barbaric appearance, they decided that he was acceptable as a general for their sons. In their minds it was but a small transition from that to leading the country. Everything he said and did on his visit only confirmed this opinion.

  And, although she didn’t admit it, there was a lonely, lost look about him that touched Guenlian’s heart and made her want to mother him as she did her own children.

  “Who is he?” she asked Merlin one night as they sat alone on her private veranda. “You know who he is, you’ve said so.”

  Merlin nodded. “He is a boy with a great gift for making other men believe in him and a certain talent for military strategy. He hasn’t done much else, yet. He’s not far over twenty, you know.”

  “He looks younger,” she commented. “I suppose it’s because he’s so fair. That mop of red hair and all those freckles make him look like a boy. He can’t be shaving yet. His body still outraces itself, all arms and legs and nose. Mark still has that coltlike appearance, and he’s only seventeen. But I did not ask you his age or talents. I want to know where he comes from, who his family is. You have hinted mysteriously to many people that you know his parentage but won’t reveal it. Is there something shameful about it? Is Arthur likely to go mad in a full moon? I’ll not believe you if you say his father was a peasant or a slave. Crude as he is, there’s good blood there, I’m certain.”

  Merlin frowned and answered bitterly. “You’re wrong, Guenlian. His father was a slave; the worst kind, a slave to himself, to his own base desires. He was full of uncontrolled temper and lust. They were his master and they overcame him in the end.”

  He stopped suddenly. He had said too much. He cursed himself. Guenlian was not a simpleminded country wife. What might be obscure to most people would be clear as crystal to her, raised as she was in the eye of the storm, surrounded by politics and intrigue. Too late he remembered what good cause she had for knowing of a man who allowed his body to control his reason. He studied her carefully in the candlelight. Her face was closed. She remembered. In the cool night she could still smell the rancid wine on his breath and the hot, clumsy hands pawing at her robes. She shuddered.

  “By whom?” she asked sharply.

  Merlin saw there was no use prevaricating. Actually, he was relieved to be able to tell someone. He had feared he might die before it was time to reveal the secret, and that could not be permitted.

  “His own legal wife,” he said.

  “I can’t believe that. There was a six-month child, born soon after the marriage, but it died, of course. They never live when they co
me so early. She had no others. They said it was a judgment. She believed it, poor woman.”

  “It was a full-term infant. I received him still wet from his mother, the birth bloodstains on his fingernails, and rode out with him at once. I found a wet nurse and kept him with me three months. When I was sure he would live, I sent him to Ector for fostering.”

  “It was true then. There were rumors even at the time that Uther had gone to Tintagel the night that Gorlois died and forced himself upon Igraine. I never understood why she consented to marry him. I thought it was out of fear, but she was carrying his child even then.” Her voice intensified in anger. “He raped her with her husband’s murder on his soul, and you connived it for him!”

  He shrank from her. “It had to be, Guenlian. It was an evil piece of business and it sickened me even then, though I was as young then as Arthur is now and didn’t realize what she must have suffered. But that is the way it was ordained and I could only guide the events. Even as I must do now.”