I Am Morgan le Fay

by Nancy Springer

  And already in my heart of hearts I knew well enough what he meant. I had not yet experienced the monthly courses of a woman, and my breasts were just beginning to bud, but I felt the ache in me and I hoped he felt it too. I knew.

  “No,” I bleated like a child. “Thomas, no, stay, you must stay here with us!”

  “Hush, Morgan.” Lumbering to her feet, Nurse laid her palm upon my dewy, half-plaited head. “Thomas is right.” To him she said, “Where will you go?”

  He shrugged, and gave no other answer.

  “Have you no home?”

  He shook his head. “Like the youngest son of the poor nobleman in the old tale,” he said, trying to joke, “I must venture forth to seek my fate.”

  “Fortune,” Ongwynn corrected him, and leaving my hair half-dried and half-dressed as it was, she set about packing him a bag of provisions as if the word fate meant nothing to her. But it froze me into such a misery of fear for him that I could barely move, for I remembered: The midwife who had birthed Thomas, who might have been such a wise woman as Ongwynn herself, had said he was fated to die ... I could not bear to think in battle, to remember the blind head on a pike like a scarecrow over death’s ghastly garden, so I went numb. I sat on the hearth, hugging myself and watching the others as if watching reflections in water, hearing them as if they were very far away, without much comprehension.

  “Give me no more than I can carry,” Thomas was telling Ongwynn. “I’ll leave Annie with you.”

  He was giving away his most precious companion. He saw death before him. I knew it. And—what could I do? Could I change his fate with the milpreve? To heal Ongwynn, I had somewhat promised to submit to my fate; was Thomas’s fate part of mine? I did not know, I did not understand enough, I was not strong enough; I could do nothing. I could not move even to cry.

  “Thomas, no,” Morgause protested. “You don’t have to leave Annie, you need her! How will you—”

  “I’ll walk.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not trying to be noble,” he said with a hint of exasperation. “I’ve outgrown her, that’s all.”

  “But you’ll miss her!”

  I wished she had not said that. It made him wince.

  I do not remember whether he replied, or how. Time became a sharp stone that skipped, rippling the watery images before my eyes. Thomas was saying his good-byes. Ongwynn reached up—Thomas was that tall now—and took his head in both her hands, blessing him.

  “Protector, thank you for everything,” he told her.

  “You will meet with dangers,” she said as levelly as if speaking of the weather.

  “I know. I will be wary.” He turned and hugged Morgause, then walked over to where I was sitting and—

  I don’t know what I was expecting or hoping for. A kiss? A pledge, a token?

  He reached down and tugged one of my braids as if I were a child.

  My chill misery heated in a flash. Fit to breathe fire, I leaped to my feet, yelling at him, “Stop it! Let me alone! Go on, get yourself killed, see if I care!”

  His taut face flowered into a grin, and his eyes shone happy, like blue violets in the spring. “I’ll be back,” he said as if it were a taunt to provoke me. But then his voice gentled. “I’ll be back, Morgan.”

  He whistled a lilting melody as he headed out the portal.

  Three years passed without a word of him.

  Three brief misty summers, three freezing winters, and every single day of those three years I brushed Annie and combed her mane and tail and cleaned her pretty face with a soft cloth and talked to her as if she were my best friend as I plaited her forelock between her sweet eyes. Year by year Annie’s mane grew more silver, like Ongwynn’s hair, her dapplings a lighter, brighter, more shining gray, her dark eyes more patient and wise. When I rode her to the distant village to barter fish or salt for the few things we needed—bolts of ticking for pallets, skeins of thread, spice for pickling, bodkins, fishhooks—when I rode her where folk might see her, I braided locks of her mane and tail as well, and bound them with red thread. This was folly, to draw attention so, and even the more folly that I rode alone and astride, but I could not seem to help it; I felt as if I must adorn Annie for Thomas’s sake and ride her proudly as he would have done. Even though I wore a plain brown woolen frock like any peasant girl and hid my hair under a muslin cap, folk stared at me whenever I passed.

  But in truth, any stranger would have been noticed in those lonely parts. “Who be ye, lass?” asked the goodwife from whom I bartered a setting of chicks.

  I told her a name not my own. Meg or Peg, a commoner name; it doesn’t matter what.

  “Where be ye from?” These folk spoke an outlandish dialect; I could barely understand them.

  “Ongwynn’s hill.”

  She startled like a deer and flinched away from me. “Are ye a witch?” she gasped.

  “No.”

  “Has—has the healer returned?”

  “No.” This was what Ongwynn had told me to say.

  After word got around, I sometimes saw folk furtively cross themselves to ward off evil eye in my presence. Few spoke with me a word more than they had to. None of them came near Caer Ongwynn. This was as Ongwynn wished it.

  Other than a few times a year when I rode Annie on such errands, I saw no one, spoke to no one except my sister and Ongwynn. I lived as if in a holy cell. And I say this not with regret, but with gratitude. In those years I learned knowledges forbidden to other women. Even my queen mother Igraine could not have learned such mysteries as I did.

  The knowledges lived in the wooden chests stacked in the innermost chamber, the trunks Morgause and I had tried to open and could not. The day after Thomas left, Ongwynn led us into that chamber and opened the domed top of the uppermost chest with a touch.

  “How did you do that?” I demanded.

  Ongwynn gave her slow smile but did not answer.

  “There’s a spell on them,” Morgause said. “There must be. See how they didn’t rot like the wooden buckets and such.”

  Astonishment fraught me; Morgause had a brain? Morgause had thought of something that had not occurred to me? The realization shocked and mortified me silent as Ongwynn lifted from the chest its treasure.

  Books.

  Volumes great and small bound in tooled leather red or brown or black, sometimes inlaid with gold. I had seen books a few times before, in my father’s chamber when he was alive and in Lord Steward Redburke’s possession since, but never such elegant books, so many books—and in the possession of a woman? A common Cornishwoman? Books were not for commoners or women; everyone knew that. Yet there they were, in Ongwynn’s hands, and she passed them to us as if they were meat pasties she was taking out of the oven. “Put them on the table.”

  We did, and ran back to find her bringing forth inks and vellums and quills such as scribes used. And when we had placed those on the table and returned, we found her lifting from the next chest rolled parchments limned with charts. And each trunk after that contained more wonders, wonders upon wonders that I could not yet begin to understand: circles within circles of gold orbs on gold wires, and vessels made of crystal, and a square block of polished wood inlaid with black tiles and white, and many figures carved from black walnut and pale ash wood. I gasped over these and took them one by one in my hands and saw nothing else for a while except a miniature carved white knight on a rearing charger, a black knight brandishing his sword, a grave bearded king under a heavy crown, a queen—oh, but the white queen was beautiful and sad and so much like my mother Igraine.

  Always I tried not to think of my mother or wonder where she might be.

  “What are the beads for?” Morgause asked behind me.

  “To do sums upon.”

  My head snapped up, for an excitement I could not yet name jarred my spine. With the sad white queen still in my hand I spun to face Ongwynn. “For who to do sums?”

  Some lord’s steward, some king’s seneschal, might do
sums; why was I asking such a simpleminded question? Ongwynn would think I was stupid. She would say—

  She said, “Me. You.”

  My jaw dropped so far I felt it click. I think Morgause could not speak either, for she did not.

  “Come,” said Ongwynn, and she led us to the table, where the books and inks and quill pens and vellums lay. She gestured for us to sit on the bench, and before each of us she placed a scrap of parchment and a pen. “We’ll start with letters,” she said.

  Morgause gasped, “You’re lettered?”

  “Yes.”

  We gawked at her like simpletons.

  “And so shall you be,” she said.

  The excitement bubbled and seethed within me like broth in the pot. To be lettered, like a scribe or a druid or a nobleman—it was an enormity, yet there was no denying that I desired—no, I yearned, I lusted for this learning as I had never lusted for the learning of loom or spinning wheel or embroidery. Thread and cloth were ordinary—worse than ordinary; they were women’s affairs. But letters! Letters were for lords and kings. And something in me blazed fiery jealous and joyous at the thought: Why ever should they have what I did not?

  “But you must keep the secret,” Ongwynn added, “as I have.”

  We nodded. We knew that what we were doing was unheard-of—although in Caer Ongwynn it seemed possible; anything seemed possible there. Every night we left a food offering in the golden goblet that stood alone in the western chamber, a goblet fit for a king, and every morning the offering had been accepted, and every day unseen servants took care of half our needs. This was a place of powerful protection, and therefore a place where marvels could be ventured.

  Only gradually did I come to understand that letters were a power and a magic just as surely as my milpreve was a tool of fearsome power. No wonder kings and lords denied letters to commoners and women.

  Ongwynn showed us how to use our pens and started us practicing Morgan and Morgause, then sat and chose a book—small, bound in red leather tooled and illuminated with gold—and she opened it and began to read aloud.

  Three women ride the white mare of the moon:

  Rhiannon with her silver bow hunting,

  Epona milkbreast suckling the king,

  Menwy the ancient hunchbacked crone,

  And these three be one.

  Because there was no need for her to find the words and pull them out of herself, because the book, or the unknown scribe who made the book, spoke through her, she spoke on steadily, strongly. She was no longer Nurse when she read aloud to us. She was no longer even Ongwynn. She became—something more. A druid, as she read to us the words of the druids:Three mysteries are grasped by no man:

  The mistletoe green between earth and sky,

  The sadness in a maiden’s smile,

  The runes shaped by the changing moon.

  7

  ONGWYNN,“ I DEMANDED, ”TEACH ME POWER.“

  Sitting as stolid as a mountain across the table from me, she did not answer or even look at me, for she was contemplating her next move. Her stubby hand rested on the carved white queen whose sad, symmetrical face always made me think of my mother, which always made me try to think of other things.

  In a clear, lilting voice Morgause read to Ongwynn and me as we played chess: “But to the old queen, no mortal princess was beautiful enough for her son the prince, the king who would be. In every damsel with whom he danced she saw some flaw, whether hair less glorious than the sun or eyes less shining than the stars or bearing less graceful than that of a swallow on the wind. Dis ... Ongwynn, what is this word?”

  Ongwynn gave her a quiet look.

  “I know, I know.” Morgause rolled her eyes and stared at the word, trying to puzzle it out. I jumped up and looked over her shoulder to see if I knew it. We were rivals at letters, Morgause and I, and therefore we learned quickly.

  She got it first. “Discontentment. Discontentment for her son’s sake harrowed her—”

  I stuck out my tongue at her as I sat down. She whacked at me with the book and missed. Ignoring us, Ongwynn sat studying the chessboard. She still had not made her move. There was no hurry—not that Ongwynn ever hurried. But in wintertime particularly there was no hurry. During the short summers we were outdoors dawn to dusk with the chickens, the garden, picking wild strawberries and currants, scraping salt from the seaside rocks, gathering mussels, netting fish and drying them—but now the sleet pattered against the sealskin hung over the portal, snow and ice blanketed Ongwynn’s hollow hill, and none of us were going anywhere for a while except to check on Annie in her snug little stable under the cliff, feed her dried seaweed and carrots, and bring in more firewood.

  “... she determined to give to her son a bride be fitting him. She called her servants and ex ... ex ... exhorted them and sent them forth to bring to her every sweet blossom they could find, columbine and woodbine and wild rose and gillyflower, every blooming flower within twenty leagues. Messengers ran their horses to death to bring the queen the daintiest of woodland violets before the dew had dried from their petals. Then, surrounded by masses of flowers, the old queen shut herself in her tower chamber for seven days. And for every hour of those days thunder roared and lightning crackled around the tower—”

  Ongwynn moved the white queen and said, “Check.”

  Blast. Such was the power of the queen, to strike from afar, while the king barely moved and had to be protected at all times. Yet my mother...

  Morgause was reading, “... at the end of the seven days the prince entered the queen’s chamber to find his mother lying abed, smiling upon him as she died. And kneeling beside her, holding her frail hand, there gazed up at him a damsel more beautiful than any he had ever seen or could ever imagine, a damsel with skin like the most tender petals of the wild rose, eyes the color of violets shining with dew ...”

  I castled my king to get him out of check. Stupid, timid king. Queen, knights, druids, men-at-arms all devoted to protecting him and fighting his battles—for what purpose?

  “The prince fell in love with her at first sight.”

  The wind and icy rain seethed against the doorflap, the chickens huddled and drowsed in their mess of straw just inside the door, from somewhere behind my back I heard the whisperings and gigglings of the denizens, the piskies who might mend the hole in my stocking while I slept, or then again they might not, and I knew better than to turn and look; it would be wasted effort, and they would laugh aloud, for I would never see them.

  This was my third winter at Caer Ongwynn and much the same as the first two. Morgause read in her tuneful voice, and later maybe we would sing a ballad or two just to defy the howling of the wind, and meanwhile I dreamed of warm, green, heather, larkspur, the earth a flower woman—yet I knew that spring would bring war again. Every time I rode Annie to the village I heard of battles, death, war and rumor of war. Winter was long, but at least it brought peace.

  I wondered where Thomas was. How he fared. Whether he lived.

  Morgause read, “ ‘Her name is Blossom,’ said the queen. ‘She is yours. She will do anything you desire, but she cannot speak. That you must never ask of her. I love you, my son.’ Then the queen died, for she had given over her vital power to the damsel made of flowers.”

  I said to Ongwynn again, “Teach me power.” I did not know how I would use it, but it would not be to make a damsel out of flowers.

  Ongwynn glanced up from the board and gave me a flat look. “I am.”

  “This? A game of chess?” I lifted the queen carved of black walnut, her face as lovely as the white queen’s but more grim. “Am I to hide a king behind my skirts someday? Did my mother—” But I had not meant to speak of my mother. I faltered into silence.

  Ongwynn regarded me steadily now, her silence meshing with mine. Morgause stopped reading to listen.

  After she had thought of the words, Ongwynn said, “Your mother loved your father.”

  Yes. Yes, my mother and father had loved with stead
fast love, true love, as I loved Thomas.... The thought caught me by surprise, flowering out of me before I could stop it. It both warmed and frightened me.

  “Such love softens a woman,” Ongwynn said.

  But—but I could not give up love...

  Morgause put in, “Mother had power enough to protect us. Not power enough to keep Arthur, but—we don’t know what happened after. Maybe things changed. We don’t know. Maybe she had more power than we knew.”

  Ongwynn nodded and lifted one blocky hand to move her knight. “Checkmate.”

  Confound her. I studied the board. It was checkmate truly enough, and I did not see how she had done it to me.

  “As usual,” I grumbled. I swept my black chess pieces aside, reached for the white queen and cradled her in my hands. It didn’t matter now what power the queen had. The game was over when the king went down.

  Morgause laid her book aside. “Ongwynn, what are we to do with these—these powers you are teaching us? What do you foresee for us?”

  Outside, not so far away, wind and sleet hissed like a serpent. Instead of answering, Ongwynn heaved herself up from the table and bent stiffly to feed more peat to the fire. Did her back hurt her? She had never said so. When had she started moving like an old woman?

  “You don’t have to do that,” I complained as if her stiffness reproached me. “I can do that.”

  “There’s little enough I can do.” She straightened and faced Morgause. “I do not foresee,” she said. “I am not a seeress.”

  “But you must have some idea.”

  “Thoughts, that is all.”

  “And?” Morgause prompted.

  Ongwynn sighed out one of her long pauses before she spoke. “You are fated by birth to lives full of trouble,” she said finally. “You are your mother’s daughters.”

  Yes. Two half-grown girls hiding in Caer Ongwynn while too many greedy men battled for an empty throne, and my mother the queen, wherever she was, had become no queen but only a pawn.

  In a low voice Ongwynn said, “I think both of you will need to live by your wits. Be secret and strong.”