Redburke.
Grinning because he saw me, he knew me.
Raising his broadsword.
Thomas whirled to face Redburke, dropping the milpreve. Without any weapon he sprang to place himself between death and me.
Redburke struck as if swatting a fly. His first blow sliced off Thomas’s hand, lifted as if to raise a shield—but there was no shield. Redburke’s second blow took off Thomas’s head.
In the moment it took me to snatch up the milpreve from the ground, Thomas fell dead.
I saw—I can barely speak of it, even now. Slantwise as I stood up I saw ... his severed head falling.
I felt my heart splinter like the pomegranate trees.
Redburke loomed over me. With no thought for self or caution I screamed, “Death! Death to all of you!” The milpreve blazed so furious it blinded me; I saw only white fire. Then I slammed into the ground, and everything went black for a merciful while.
18
I REMEMBER HEARING THE CROAKING OF RAVENS, BUT not understanding. I blinked up at a swirl of black wings against a twilight sky. I remember feeling several kinds of racking pain, in my hand, my body, my heart, but not knowing why. Then I sat up and saw.
Ravens picking out my father’s eyes.
Rather, at first in my muddled mind I thought it was my father. I saw a battlefield. Bodies and carrion birds everywhere. Feasting upon—no, it was not my father. It was Redburke.
And nearby—Thomas.
His dead, bloody, severed head, its empty eye sockets turned toward me.
Already my heart had splintered to bits. In that moment my mind did the same. I felt it shatter.
I went mad.
Like my mother, I went mad.
The difference being, she had run crazed because of what had been done to her. But I ran crazed because of what I had done.
She had loved my father, and her love for him had made her soft and weak, so Ongwynn had said.
I had loved Thomas. What had loving him done to me?
I ran mad.
My memories of that time are bits and pieces I must search for amid the madness, like shards of broken shell amid the black grit of the seashore.
I remember seeing piskies—the little brown brats climbed upon me as I curled amid heather on the moor, pouring water on my face, forcing bread into my mouth. At the time it seemed to me that they were tormenting me and I deserved it, but I think now that they were trying to help, and to this day I cannot encompass such mercy after what I had done to them.
I remember hearing voices in the wind—Daddy, Cernunnos, Rhiannon, Thomas, Morgause, Mother, Ongwynn. Mostly they reproached me; only Ongwynn tried to comfort me. I remember looking for Ongwynn—I thought I was a child, and with my hair tangled like a moor pony’s mane, with dirt and tears crusted on my face, I ran into Caer Ongwynn. Unless the madness deludes me, it was a hollow hill again, a rude stone haven, all just as it used to be, but no one was there, Ongwynn was not there, and I wept and stamped my feet and stormed off to find her.
I must have strayed far, for I remember a village woman throwing something at me from a safe distance—stones, I thought. I snatched one up left-handed to hurl it back at her, and saw that it was bread, and gnawed at it while I glared at her from under the hair hanging in my eyes.
I remember my own crippled right hand, with an odd sort of blue stone embedded amid melted metal in the seared flesh of the palm. I did not even recognize my own milpreve. My crazed mind would not let me think what it was, what had happened, how my hand had gotten that way.
I remember cows gazing down at me as I awoke from sleeping in their hay. I remember how the steam rose from the warm bulk of their bodies in a frosty autumn dawn. I remember them because their white breath warmed me. But I did not want to be warm. I wanted to be cold, because cold numbed my pain.
I remember lying in snow, and wondering how it was that white snow could look black at night, and welcoming the bone-deep chill, not caring whether I died.
I think it might have been that night that Cernunnos found me, just as he had once found my mother crouching as wild as a hare amid the heather.
Avalon. Wellspring of womanhood, wellspring of Ladywater, place of peril, place of healing.
I do not remember being carried home to Avalon in Cernunnos’s arms—that was told to me later. I remember first the scent of violets—it was spring already when I awakened to find myself lying pillowed amid gauzy white linen in a bower by the waterside. Years later, when they took him there, King Arthur might have awakened in much the same way, bowered in flower-scented fleecy softness with the lady of Avalon by his side.
Rhiannon smiled down at me, her green eyes merry and sad and not a day older than when I had seen her last.
“Do you know me, Morgan?” she asked.
“Of course I know you!” I struggled to sit up, surprised to find myself thin and weak under a gown of creamy lambswool. “Rhiannon—what has happened? What am I doing here?”
To my surprise, her bright eyes misted. I had never seen such emotion in her before. She had to look away from me. “Later,” she said. “Eat first.”
But as I hoisted myself, I felt an odd lump in my right hand, and I looked. “My milpreve,” I whispered, bewildered, and then in my partly healed heart I felt a shadow, a distant intimation, of the rage and pain with which I had felled Redburke’s army, and I remembered.
Thomas.
Oh, my love.
I remembered everything, and I cried out to Avalon, “I cannot bear it!” and flung myself facedown on the white bed and wept.
I felt as if I would die. In a sense it was true that I could not bear what had happened. It had driven me mad, and it had taken all the healers of Avalon to bring me back. If it had not been for the ring on Rhiannon’s finger and the gentling touch of her hands on my shoulders, I might have gone mad again.
Many days passed, I do not know how many, before I could bear to speak to Rhiannon, or to any of the friends who attended me. And seasons passed before I could bear to tell them of Thomas’s death.
Seasons passed on tiptoe in Avalon, as I have said. I remember a violet-scented day when I sat in the arbor and watched the wee ducks swimming and I talked with Cernunnos—it seems like the same year, but I think it was a year later. It must have been, for I had scried by then that Morgause was safe; she had married King Lothe of Lothian. And I knew that my mother still spent her days sitting in darkness under the dome of Avalon, her haunted eyes gazing into a shadowed mirror, begging, “Arthur. Show me Arthur. I want my son.”
Arthur! How I detested the name. Why should he have a mother who loved him when I, Morgan, daughter of the same mother, had no one?
Still, I somewhat understood now how she had come to be the way she was. My heart still ached with longing for Thomas.
Cernunnos and I sat under the shade of the same arbor where Thomas had rested in soft greensward, where I had knighted him and had given him a useless quest to send him out of danger into what had seemed like lesser danger at the time. The memory seemed to come to me from a lifetime ago.
The tiny jewel-bright ducks swam in a pool like a sky blue mirror, and in the water their reflections showed as the wings of butterflies, sapphire, topaz, ruby, amethyst.
That urging from Ladywater helped me speak. “Thomas once gathered for me a bouquet of butterflies,” I told Cernunnos.
With his gleaming antler tips almost touching the arbor leaves, he lounged in the grass, turning his fey golden eyes my way. “No one could have loved him better than you did,” he said.
“I killed him.” The three words might as well have been three daggers stabbing my heart.
Cernunnos eyed me, his golden gaze unreadable. “As I recall,” he said mildly, “you told me Redburke killed him.”
“Yes,” I said, my throat tightening against grief, “but if it had not been for my folly—”
“Your only folly was to try to cheat fate.”
“I tried to impris
on him. Now he’s dead.”
Cernunnos shook his head, his antlers rattling against the arbor posts. “Morgan, use your good, strong mind. Think. You were only trying to save Thomas. And what would have happened to him if you had not tried?”
“I—I don’t know. He might be alive now.”
“No. I think not. His span of life was determined when he was born. You know he was fated to die in battle.”
“But—”
“When you tried to defy fate, you took fate’s third strand in your hands.”
As Ongwynn had tried to warn me not to. As was written in the book of threes; was I the thorny-hearted maid, or the blackwing Morrigun after all? I could hardly bear to think of what fate had done to make me be fate, of what I had done. “Please,” I whispered.
Cernunnos stirred his brown-furred shoulders impatiently. “Morgan, he knew. The first night he sheltered here, he saw the Morrigun washing his bloody corpse. He saw me and my hounds hunting his soul across the sky.”
My aching heart stopped beating for a moment, and I felt an awesome silence in which there was nothing, no pain, no power, no struggle, no comprehension. I gawked at Cernunnos.
“But he was wiser than you,” Cernunnos added more quietly, “and he accepted, and lived out his allotted span.”
I barely managed to speak. “You did not really—set the hounds on his soul, when he died—”
“No. No, I took him in my arms.”
I breathed again.
Cernunnos said, “Truly, Morgan, it is no wonder that you grieve so for him. He was such a one as this wretched world has seldom known.”
I would not have believed it a moment before, but yes, I heard sorrow in his voice, saw sorrow in his eyes. My heart came alive again, warmed by his words.
“I will tell you a tale of fate,” Cernunnos said, but I shook my head, stood up, thanked him with the best smile I could muster, and left him, walking barefoot in the spring grass down to the pool where the white swans floated, their reflections shining like ebony.
After that day, though, I carried a sense of fate in the closed fist of my mind, and remembered one by one, in time, the tales of fate I had heard, and in time I opened my mind a little and allowed Cernunnos to tell me more. But it was Rhiannon who told me the tale that I remember most often to this day, and it is this: There was once a knight whose liege king had gifted him with a golden goblet, a great heavy vessel fit for a prince. But when his lady saw the goblet, she turned white as a swan. Throw it in the sea, she said. It is your death. But the knight would not give up his kingly gift. So as he slept, his lady stole the goblet and hid it until she could think how to destroy it. When the knight awoke and found his goblet gone, he was enraged. What have you done with it? he roared at his lady. And when she would not answer, he struck her so hard that she stumbled and fell against a doorway. And the goblet, which she had placed in a high niche above the doorway, fell down upon the knight’s head, killing him.
Like me, the lady had tried to save her beloved.
It still hurt like fire to think of Thomas’s death, but in a slantwise way all that had happened started to make sense to me.
There came a summer day—it might have been a month or more than a year after I had talked with Cernunnos—a floating water-lily day when I swam naked with Rhiannon and many others in a pool of Ladywater as warm as a womb, and the minnows nibbled at my belly and my toes, and all was peace for a while.
Then everything changed, not only for me but for all who dwelt in Avalon, never to be the same.
There was no warning. All in a moment the earth quaked, sending the minnows darting for the shallows. With a clamor the mound of Avalon blossomed open—it should never have done so under the sun, never until twilight. Then, as we scrambled to the shore and stood bare and staring, out from under a gilded archway, out of a grassy portal, a scrawny figure staggered, then stood blinking in the bright summer light.
I did not at first recognize her, for in many, many years I had not seen her in the sunshine.
She shaded her eyes from the day’s glory with both brittle hands. She peered straight at me but past me. “My son!” she cried to all of us. “Arthur has drawn the sword from the stone.” Sword? Stone? The words made no sense to any of us, but Mother seemed to know what they meant. “My son!” she cried to the blue sky. “My son, they will crown him King!”
19
BUT HOW WILL YOU GO?“ I ASKED MY MOTHER. MANY others had asked her the same question.
Busy sorting through a shimmering pile of gowns mounded on her bed, trying to decide what to wear to the coronation, she answered me just as she had answered them. “You will see.” Distracted, cheerful, smiling. “I am sent for. Arthur knows who his mother is now, and he wants to meet me.” And truly he would meet his mother, Igraine the Beautiful, for despite the lines of age she was beautiful again, color in her cheeks now, her hair sleek, and even a little flesh beginning to soften her thin body. Somehow Arthur had cured her when I could not.
Arthur. My half brother, a fifteen-year-old stripling who would be King while Thomas lay dead. Why should this untried youth, this Arthur, my half brother, have a throne when I, who knew much and had suffered much, had nothing? I had not met Arthur since his name-day, when he had lain a fat baby in my mother’s arms, but sitting on a hard chair in my mother’s chamber I still despised him every bit as much as I had then, with the fire dragon burning in my heart and vengeful thoughts blazing in my mind. Thinking of him, wishing him ill, I felt the milpreve go hot in its metal nest in the palm of my hand.
My mother sighed over the gowns the fays were offering her. “I shall look so odd,” she murmured. “No jewels... but I suppose fashions have changed. Do you know?” She turned and smiled at me, cordial.
“No.”
“You have not been out either for a long time?”
“No. I haven’t.”
“Oh, well, perhaps my son Arthur will give me some jewels. Rubies would be nice. I used to have the most lovely rubies. I wonder what has become of them—”
“Mother?” I interrupted her prattling.
She looked at me blankly. Half the time I felt not at all sure she knew who I was.
“I used to have a ring made of your hair,” I told her, “but it wore out. Would you make me another one before you leave?”
“Oh? Oh, certainly, dear, when I have time. But I have so much to do. Arthur’s coronation—”
I got up and wandered out of her chamber, soothing the milpreve with a fingertip. Mother had probably forgotten my request already. And the ring Thomas had given me was gone, I did not know how, probably burned right off my hand on that awful day, so that I did not have even that small circle of shining black hair to remember him by. My hands bore no ornament except the milpreve in its nest of melted orichalcum, bedded to the bone in my palm. Never before, I thought, had a lady worn a stone so strangely.
The milpreve and I both wanted to do something spiteful, but I did not yet know what. I avoided my mother during the days that followed, but I heard that she was busy embroidering a headdress for herself.
“Am I to send her off as I did you, alone on a dead knight’s charger?” Cernunnos asked me, brows raised.
“I don’t know.”
No one knew. And Avalon stood open night and day, and no one knew the why or how of that either. There was worried talk, then a waiting silence. Nothing untoward had yet happened, but I could feel the waiting, a silence of waiting like the silence of a heron standing in the shallows. Even the little ducks had gone silent, and even the breezes held their breath, even the windflowers stood still, waiting, and the ripples stilled in the pools and streams.
My mother finished her embroidery, I surmise, for one morning as I walked past the arbor to bathe my face in the swan pool, she issued forth with her headdress in place, mantled and gowned for a journey. The friends who had sheltered her for these many years followed her like servants, carrying her bags. All of Avalon came out to watch—
something, who knew what? Igraine the Beautiful clearly and serenely expected to depart. She stood smiling before the sunny portal.
I saw this, then turned my back, sitting on the grassy verge of the swan pool and gazing at myself in the mirroring water.
The pudgy, powdered face of middle-aged Morgan smirked back at me, her hard eyes glinting with a mirth I did not like or understand.
She horrified me. But I sat silent just to see what might happen next. The fire dragon?
No. Not this time. Instead, the face turned to that of a sooty black bird, so large and near that I could see the membranes at the corners of its yellow eyes, the bony nostrils piercing its beak hard and sharp and heavy as a broadsword.
And the blue stone blazing, imbedded in its feathered forehead much as it now nestled in my palm.
The Morrigun, but—arrayed as never before.
My breath stopped, and I bit my lip to keep from crying out. I heard footsteps approaching, and I blinked; the pool showed me only my own taut, grieving face now. But the sight of my true self harrowed me only a little less than what I had seen before.
I splashed with my hands, driving the reflection away, then washed my face. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Cernunnos standing beside me. With my face dripping shards of Ladywater, I stood to see what he wanted.
He tilted his antlered head toward the mound of Avalon. “Your mother—now what?”
I looked at her standing at the portal of Caer Avalon as proudly as she had ever stood upon the steps of Tintagel. What, did she think my father was coming home to her? Crazy old woman.
“How should I know?” I grumbled. But clearly we couldn’t just send her off. “Wait and—”
But there was no waiting. In that moment, Merlin, no less, stood beside Igraine.
I Am Morgan le Fay Page 17
