I Am Morgan le Fay

by Nancy Springer

  “Did it go as planned, Sire?”

  I froze in my steps, for I could not find courage to move another inch toward the man who had spoken. His eyes—were those eyes? I saw them as black pits amid his steel gray beard. He wore a black gown bordered in stars and moons and strange devices that shone with their own weird green glow in the half-light. Instead of riding a horse, he rode a long-eared white mule. Although I stood in the shadows, he looked straight at me and smiled—it was as if a skull had grinned at me. And a fey and fearsome shock of recognition burned through me, even though I had never seen such a person before.

  Sorcerer.

  “Just as planned,” said my father—but his voice was not my father’s voice. Daddy’s voice was slow and golden, like honey, but this strange daddy’s voice was like the scratch of dog claws on gravel. Swinging onto his horse, a fat, brass-colored charger I had never seen before, he said, “I owe you a purse of gold, Merlin.”

  “No, Sire. You owe me only what you have promised.”

  A look passed between them. I cowered; I could not have withstood looking into that wizard’s empty black gaze.

  “The baby she will bear,” said the Sire man in a low voice.

  “Do not forget, my king, or you will rue it.”

  “I keep my promises. But what do you want with my son?”

  Merlin only laughed. He laughed like a night bird as they rode away.

  I slipped back to my bed and lay trembling with my hands naughtily under the covers, curled between my legs for warmth. After a while I slept.

  Oddly, Nurse let us girls sleep late that morning. When we awoke, we saw that she had been crying. She gave us porridge to eat, then told us that our father was dead.

  I did not understand dead. I understood only that Daddy was gone. Somehow he had been turned into this Sire person, who turned out to be Uther Pendragon.

  I did not think to fear that I would lose my mother also.

  Nurse put us in our plainest frocks—brown wool—with brown hose and shoes. She brushed our hair smooth but let it hang loose down our backs. All the while Morgause cried, squeakily, like the mouse she was, until she hiccuped. But I did not weep. I turned to stone.

  When she had dressed us, Nurse took us to our mother and left us.

  Perhaps she thought that our mother would comfort us, or that we would comfort her. But no. Mother sat dressed only in a chemise—I had never seen her so, and she seemed to me even more beautiful that way, in that simple shift of white, than when she wore silks and velvets and jewels. Her dark hair flowed loose like mine, rippling down over her pale, naked shoulders. She sat at her chamber window and stared. Morgause ran to her and laid her head in her lap, weeping, but Mother did not move. She did not even lower her eyes from their staring. She sat like a lovely statue and let Morgause weep upon her.

  There were servants in the room, but they either wept upon one another or stood behind Mother, staring eastward as she did. I studied Mother for a while. Then, as she did not move—no one moved—I turned to the door, lugged it open with my heels digging deep into the scented rushes on the floor, and went out.

  No one seemed interested in keeping me from wandering. I looked over my shoulder for a moment at the door that had closed behind me, then pattered off to see what was happening elsewhere.

  In the kitchen they were cooking clothes. I had never seen such a thing. A huge pot boiling, and clothes going into it and coming out drippy black, like wet crows. I saw my favorite frock, red with blue larkspur trim, go in, and I cried out and ran forward to try to save it. I would have dived into the vat after it, and been boiled black in my turn, but one of the cooks seized me. Without scolding, without even speaking, she put me out the door.

  I wept for the frock as I had not wept for my father, and I ran out into the courtyard, its cobbles ever shadowed by high walls. Beyond those walls the sea crashed cold against the cliffs, and always the wind swept down raw off the moors, but although I wore no shawl, I did not feel the chill. I was a weeping stone; what did I care whether the wind blew?

  Where was everyone?

  The gates stood open. No guards. No one coming or going atop the walls or within them.

  I stopped weeping but kept running. I ran out through the yawning gates, past the village huts huddled against the outside of the wall, and up the rugged grazing lands toward the moor.

  In that high place there were no people, only furze and heather and stunted thorn trees, deer and foxes and wind and stones. But giants used to live on the moor, Nurse had told me. Great stones taller than two men stood on end where the giants had placed them, maybe to play at quoits, for huge hoop-shaped stones lay strewn here and there. They must have been playful giants, because they had balanced the logan stones atop the cliffs also, stones the size of six horses, yet they rocked in every breeze as gently as cradles. The giants were gone now, Nurse said. Heroes had thrown them into the sea. Once I had asked her if Daddy had ever thrown a giant into the sea and she had laughed, but then she had said yes, he might have done so.

  Maybe Daddy was in the sea now. Maybe a giant had come back and thrown him in. Maybe that was why everyone was acting so strange.

  The steep moor slowed me to a walk. I trudged up the rocky hillside with no idea where I was going or why. In the distance, dust rose. That meant horsemen coming. Usually it meant Daddy coming home, and the castle folk would shout and Mother would come out and stand on the steps of the keep.

  I did not know what it meant this time.

  Caer Tintagel looked small below me now. Silent. Gates open like a beached fish’s mouth.

  I came to a circle stone standing on edge, bigger than a millstone, with a hole through it larger than I was tall. I climbed into the hole, turned sideways to make myself part of the stone and sat, waiting.

  The dust had come closer, and in it I could see ghostlike shapes of men walking, silent, their heads down, their hands behind them. The ones on horses, the knights, herded the walking men like cattle, prodding them with their spears.

  After that came more knights riding double file with their lances raised and in the fore a flag flying. A giant flag shaped like flames. Then I saw that the flames had form. A red dragon.

  The wind made the dragon seem alive. I slipped through the quoit stone and lay on the ground behind it, hiding. I saw no more.

  Perhaps that is what made such a difference between me and Morgause, afterward: that she saw Uther Pendragon ride into Tintagel, driving his prisoners before him, and she saw Mother walk out, barefoot and proud and pale in only her chemise, to surrender our home to him. And that I did not.

  It was not until years afterward that I understood how Uther Pendragon had tricked Mother with Merlin’s magic illusion the night before and bedded her. She never spoke of it.

  I lay behind the quoit stone—some folk said such stones had a magical power to heal a person who passed through them, but it had done nothing for me. I lay there and after a while I realized I was shaking all over, maybe with cold, and digging my fingers deep into the slaty ground. I sat up and saw that my hands were dirty and bloody red from clawing at the shale.

  One hand clutched something, I noticed as if the hand did not belong to me. I willed it to open, and it did. In the palm lay a small something so round it could not have been just a pebble. I stood up and dropped it into the pocket of my brown frock.

  Over the sea the sun was setting as red as my blood. As red as the dragon flag. In the waves its reflection shifted like flames.

  I knew I had to go home.

  Yet I did not see how I could bear to.

  Something sniffed at my ankle. I looked down, so stony numb I was not even surprised. A black dog stood there, neither friendly nor fierce, gazing at me with weird white eyes.

  “Child,” said a voice behind me.

  I turned, and at first I thought it was a giant looming over me. But it was Merlin, hard and dark like a standing stone in the dusk. He wore a coarse cloak, like a shepherd’s ma
ntle, and he carried a thick, knotty walking stick, but I knew him. I could never mistake that voice like winter thistles or those black pits, like tin mines, that were his eyes. It was he.

  I had no strength left to scream. I just stared into the midnight of his eyes, and he stared into the green and purple twilight of mine.

  “Fay,” he whispered.

  I had not yet heard it then, for no one except my father considered me of much account, but my mismatched eyes marked me as one set apart. Morgan le Fay.

  “Fate upon fate,” Merlin murmured. “Cycles upon cycles of fate. Who are you, child?”

  I could not speak. I tried to back away, but my feet seemed not to work.

  “There is the ancient green power here,” he said. “I smell it. What is your name, child? Is it Morrigun?”

  At last my panic gave me strength. I ran. Headlong, falling down the slope, cutting my knees on the rocks, I ran back to Tintagel and reached it just as the gates were closing.

  The courtyard teemed with strangers. Nobody seemed to notice a bloody child running through. I reached my chamber and found Morgause there, and she looked at me as if I were a stranger, her face as pallid and flat as the moon. Nurse came in after a while, took me to the washstand and scrubbed me and bandaged my hands and knees, all in silence. She did not scold me or ask me where I had been. I concluded that no one had missed me. Since Daddy was gone, no one cared.

  2

  THREE DAYS LATER, UTHER PENDRAGON TOOK MY mother away.

  Nurse led me and Morgause to the steps of the keep and stood there holding us by the hands, just as if we were watching Daddy ride off to war. I stared at the huge warhorse. It was the same fat, brass-colored horse Daddy had mounted in the dawn, but on that horse now sat Uther Pendragon, and he was not like Daddy at all. He did not look at us. In the three days he had spent in Tintagel, taking charge and appointing his own steward to run the castle, he had not once looked at us or spoken to us. His charger pawed at the cobbles a few feet from us, but Uther Pendragon stared eastward, where his stronghold, Caer Argent, awaited him. His eyes glinted sharp and dark, like flints.

  “Stand!” he ordered his horse, curbing it sharply. His voice was the scratchy, dog-claws-on-gravel voice of the daddy I had seen in the night.

  Small wonder I barely understood anything that was happening.

  Mother came out with her maids-in-waiting clustered in a half circle around her as if to protect her. But the maids drew back as Mother crouched before my sister and me and hugged us one by one. She did not speak. Nor did she weep. She kissed us—her face felt cold, like a smooth white stone, against mine. Morgause and I wore our black-dyed frocks, but Mother wore a green silk gown with an overgown of gold; later I learned that her new lord and master would not allow her the black mourning dress of a widow.

  There was much that I did not learn until years later. I did not think to wonder at the time where my father’s body was, or why there had been no funeral. I did not know that his head had been paraded on a pike and the crows had picked out his kind gray eyes. I did not know that his body had been looted, then left on the battlefield, food for the carrion birds as well. And because I had not seen his dead body, I did not understand. Dead? I had seen dead leaves, but leaves sprang green again in the spring. I had seen dead trees send up shoots that grew into saplings. I had seen a cook make a chicken dead for the pot, but surely no one had wrung my father’s strong neck.

  If Mother was going away with this strange, flinty king, it had to be because he was Daddy now. No other explanation made sense.

  Except—maybe it was all my fault. Because I was bad, because I had so much trouble in me, Daddy was gone and Mother was leaving.

  She hugged Morgause one more time, then without a word she stepped into the canopied horse litter and settled herself on the cushions. Someone was crying, but it was not me. It was one of Mother’s women weeping as she wrapped a fur mantle around Mother’s narrow shoulders.

  Then they drew the curtains around Mother, and I saw her no more. Uther Pendragon barked out something, and many horses started to walk at once, horses of knights and men-at-arms and the litter horses carrying Mother away. I remember the sound of many hooves clopping hollow on the cobbles, making me think of raindrops, although for once in that wet land no rain was falling; only a morning mist hung in the air. After the gates closed behind them there was nothing to hear but the roar of the sea pounding, beating, raging against the rocks below Tintagel.

  “Come,” Nurse said, leading us by the hands into the keep again.

  “Is Mother going to war now?” I asked, trotting to keep up. For a six-year-old I was small.

  “No.”

  Morgause started crying. The goose, why was she crying? Mother had hugged her last. Mother had hugged her more than me.

  I demanded of Nurse, “Is Mother going to be with Daddy?”

  “No.”

  “Where is she going, then?”

  “To be married.”

  But Mother was married to Daddy. “Will she come back soon?”

  “No.”

  Nothing made sense.

  It might have been that day, or the next, or the next week, that Nurse picked up my brown frock to go cook it black like the others and something fell out of the pocket and rolled into the rushes on the chamber floor.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  I said, “Nothing.”

  “How so, nothing?”

  “Nothing but a pebble I found.”

  Nurse went away. Morgause kept on playing with her doll. “Now put on your black dress,” she told it. The doll did not have a black dress; it was made of unbleached wool and its dress was the same color. I had torn the head off my doll and I wanted to tear the heads off Morgause’s doll and Morgause as well. Instead, I hunted in the rushes and found the round something I had clawed out of the dirt below the quoit stone and forgotten ever since. I stood on the stool before the washbasin and plunked my find into the water.

  Then I gawked and gasped.

  A pebble should sink. This did not. Nor did it float. Softly and quite unnaturally it swam like a tadpole or a minnow in the midst of the water, and the water eddied and roiled around it.

  A dirty stone should need to be scrubbed. This did not. Like skirts swirling out from a dancing maiden, layers of brown drifted up, opening like veils cast off, revealing the glimmering azure wonder beneath.

  I did not understand what it was, but I sensed that it had been under that quoit stone for a long, long time, maybe since the time of the giants, and that all that long time it had meant to find me.

  It was small, no larger than the nail on my littlest finger, but so clear and shining blue that it seemed larger. Rain-washed sky, robin’s egg, sunlit holy well—none were so blue as this. An angel’s eyes might be so blue—and like an eye, this round thing had fine veins and a dark circle at its core. But the wormwork of veins glinted richly gold, not red, and the dark circle was not a pupil, but a hole.

  I dared not stare too long—Nurse might come back. I glanced around to see whether Morgause had noticed my gasp—blessed be, she had not. “Now say bye-bye to Mommy,” she cooed at her doll, laying it in the chest and closing the lid on it as if she were placing it in a coffin. I snatched my—stone, all I could think to call it was stone—I snatched it out of the water, hopped down from the stool and heaved open the chamber door, running out.

  Even though it was wet, the stone felt warm in my hand.

  I ran to my mother’s chamber. If it could any longer be called my mother’s chamber.

  No one prevented me from pushing my way in, for there was no one there. The rushes had been swept out and the oak floor left bare. This was a high, sunny tower chamber, vaulted, with its great beams carved all over in forms of hounds and deer running and twisting together like puzzles and biting one another. It was a chamber fitting for the lady of the castle, too grand for any lesser person, and so it brooded on ghosts, empty.

  My mother’
s chair, all gilt curves and velvet padding, still crouched at the window. Her embroidery basket still squatted beside it on the cold floor.

  In that hollow, haunted place, under the carved wooden gaze of many wild beasts, I opened my hand and looked at the stone. Warm like a baby sun in my palm, it shone with its own blue-gold watery light.

  After looking at it for a while I somehow knew what to do.

  I pattered over to my mother’s chair, sat there, and rooted with my grubby little paws among the fine white linens in her basket. Among the cloth I found a thick silk thread, red as blood. It took my chubby fingers a while to string it through the hole in the stone, but I succeeded. It took even longer to knot the thread behind my neck, but I managed to do that also. Then I hid thread and stone under my frock. The stone lay as warm as a living thing upon my ribby, narrow chest, against my skin, over my heart.

  I sat in my mother’s chair, looked out her window to the east and wondered where she was.

  That might have been her wedding day. It was a ten-day journey to Caer Argent. The moment he had conveyed her there, thirteen days after he had widowed her, Uther Pendragon wedded her, then bedded her.

  A year passed. Morgause and I were allowed plain brown and white frocks now, and the black ones were put away. I turned seven years old, and Nurse tried to start me on sewing and embroidery. I hated it.

  Out on the moor one day, curled in my quoit stone to hide from Nurse and the everlasting needlework, I paid no particular heed when a messenger rode into the castle. Messengers were always coming and going between Uther Pendragon and Redburke, his steward at Tintagel, a man I found remarkable chiefly for his bearish bad humor and his turnip nose. Twice a messenger reporting to Redburke had also brought small tokens from Mother for Morgause and me—once rings made of her hair, which we were not allowed to wear lest we spoil them, and once tiny red satin pincushions shaped like hearts. I did not like to stick pins in mine; it felt as if I were stabbing Mother. Messengers came often and such gifts seldom, so I expected nothing as I saw this particular lad on a fleet pony gallop in.