Guenevere, Queen of the Summer Country

by Rosalind Miles

  She thought of the time when Ina cast the runes and Morgan read how they fell. At the tournament too, she knew words of power that Guenevere had never heard and, like a fool, thought Morgan was only using to keep Arthur safe.

  Where had she learned the art of divination?

  Where had she gotten to know the words of power?

  When Arthur tormented her with “What can I do?,” she dismissed him with one command. “Send to the convent where Morgan grew up.” But if he had, he did not say a word.

  NOW ARTHUR LEANED forward toward Ursien, a strange look in his eye. “You’ll know everything; never fear!” he cried. “You won’t be asked to buy a pig in a poke.”

  Guenevere came to herself with a start. She saw a spasm of rage fleet across Morgan’s face. Goddess, Mother, what now?

  Arthur gestured toward Guenevere. “My wife—” he said.

  She heard him say it with a distant pain. Why did he use the word, when the thing itself was dead?

  “—the Queen,” Arthur went on, “asked me to look into the place where it all began.”

  He raised his hand. At the far end of the room, the attendants threw open the double doors. A detachment of guards came down the hall with a heavy burden wrapped in ragged cloth, and threw it at Arthur’s feet.

  Gawain strode in behind. “Wait outside!” he ordered the men. “Be at hand in case you’re needed.” He bowed to Arthur with an unpleasant laugh. “As you commanded, sire.” Then he dealt the heap of rags a hefty kick. “Get up,” he shouted, “and tell your tale!”

  The bundle on the floor stirred and began to move. Now Guenevere could see the outline of a body, an arm, and a woman’s face. Slowly the captive freed herself from the all-enveloping cloth, struggled to her knees, and then to her feet. As well as she could with her hands tied, she adjusted her headdress and smoothed down her black habit. Gawain’s prisoner was a nun.

  She was a nondescript woman of middle height, neither old nor young. But for the fact that her black habit and white headdress were dirty and crumpled from rough handling, no one would have given her a second glance. Only her eyes betrayed her, as Morgan’s had. Hooded, a festering green like gooseberries, they throbbed with noxious power. She did not look at Morgan, but Guenevere could feel the connection pulsing between them. And when the newcomer turned her gaze to the throne, her malice fell on Guenevere like scalding rain.

  “Speak, witch!” Gawain threatened. He pointed to Morgan. “Tell us about your sister over there!”

  “Sister Ann?” She gave an ugly laugh. “That’s the King’s sister, not mine. They took away her given name to make her sound like a Christian. She and I were only sisters of the cloth. But she was the best of us all. She could have been Queen of the Fair Ones if she’d had a mind. That’s why they called her Morgan Le Fay.”

  “As you see, Ursien,” Arthur said, in the same high, strained tone, “this woman is from the convent where Morgan grew up.” He hesitated, then plunged on. “My father King Uther sent her there, when he married Queen Igraine. On my orders, Sir Gawain went there to investigate the place.”

  A sour satisfaction filled Guenevere. She could not hold her tongue. “And it proved to be a house of darkness, as I thought?”

  Gawain hesitated. “Not exactly, Your Majesty, no.” He turned on the woman beside him, half raising his forearm to strike. “Answer the Queen!”

  Against his great bulk she was very small. But she was not afraid. Her gaze raked him with raw contempt, and then she began.

  “It was a Christian convent right enough, and the nuns in there worshiped the Christian God. But how could they call themselves Christians, when so many of us had been locked up against our will?” She snickered without humor. “And where the Mother Abbess rejoiced in cruel chastisement, and ruled with the rod? My father was the richest king in the west. He had seven daughters, and he gave us all to nunneries, to avoid the dowries if we had found love, and married.” Her dull eyes lit up. “Well, he paid for that, when I came into my power.”

  Arthur tensed. “What power?”

  She snuffled with delight. “The power to kill a man, or destroy him alive. The power to take false shapes that others think are true. To make things fly through the air, and attack those we hate. To lead men as men lead donkeys, by the tip of their tenderest part—”

  “Enough, you foul-mouthed witch!”

  Bursting with rage, Gawain broke in to silence the gloating whine. “Sire,” he began again, avoiding Arthur’s stricken gaze, “she’s just admitting what she and some of the others did. It wasn’t true of them all. There was a sisterhood within the sisterhood, unknown to the good nuns. They formed a coven in the nunnery, and watched out for those who were resentful, or unhappy with the life. Then they seduced them into practicing the black arts, while all the others were learning the ways of God.”

  The nun smiled, gloating. “There was nothing we couldn’t do. Sister Ann saw to it that she had the care of the Christian Father John when he came. She made him pay for speaking against the Mother-right. My father died inch by inch, as maggots ate up his flesh. We all had our revenges in the end.”

  Her slug’s eyes crawled over Arthur, and then slithered on to Guenevere. She smiled, and now her smile was worse than before. “We could raise storms and fogs to blind the earth. We could ride through the skies on the winds, or escape through a keyhole without being seen. We could hold back a woman in labor, and keep the child rooted in the womb till both child and mother died.”

  Guenevere sat up with a start as a new horror dawned.

  Keep a child rooted in the womb?

  Of course.

  Her mind snapped back seven years.

  When I was in labor, Morgan held my hand, and the pains I had nearly killed me and Amir. I thought she was praying when she muttered over me, yet however hard I labored, I could not bring him forth till Arthur took her away.

  She wanted to kill Amir. She wanted to kill me too. If I had died then, she would have had Arthur for herself.

  “And more. We could do more than any of you dream.”

  The nun was still speaking, her green eyes fixed on Guenevere. She had the same look as Morgan when she sat up naked and shameless in Arthur’s bed. And you are next, my lady, her eyes said. Yesss, Guenevere, you are next—

  “Sir!” Guenevere was choking with fear. She could not look at Arthur. “Have you finished with this woman? Has she said all you need?”

  Arthur nodded. “Gawain?”

  Gawain grabbed the nun by the arms and bundled her to the door. “Guard, ho!” he shouted. “Get her to the guard tower, and make sure she’s secure.”

  A clear voice broke the silence. “Is that a witch?” It was King Ursien’s youngest son. “What will happen to her, Father?”

  Ursien’s eyes followed the nun as she was led away. “Oh, she’ll burn,” he said. “Like all her evil kind.” And he looked at Morgan with a darker gaze.

  Morgan stared straight ahead, pulling her cloak even closer around her, her face as tight as a fist. Arthur leaned forward, gripping the arms of his throne. “Well, what do you say, man?” he growled. “Take her or leave her, there she stands!”

  “Sire.” Ursien’s hand played on his sword hilt as he deliberated his move.

  “It’s a royal match for you, Ursien,” Arthur said angrily, “and she’ll come with a royal dowry too.”

  Ursien bowed politely. “I never doubted that.”

  “What do you doubt, then? Surely it’s simple enough?”

  “Sire, marriage is never simple—for man or wife.” He glanced thoughtfully at Morgan again. Then his brow cleared as he made up his mind. “But the honor of an alliance with King Arthur is not to be refused.”

  “It’s a match, then!” Arthur cried.

  Morgan smiled a smile from the pit of hell. “Amen,” she croaked. “Amen.”

  STANDING AT THE altar with Arthur and Ursien, head down, still clutching her cloak, Morgan looked like a child between the tall m
en. The priest muttered, Ursien answered, and in minutes, it seemed, the wedlock knot was tied.

  Afterward there was no wedding feast, because there was no cause to celebrate either for bride or for groom. Night was coming, and it was a long way back to Gore. On the steps of the church, Ursien called his men to horse. Morgan he placed in the center of a ring of spears with Sir Geras and Sir Accolon on either side, and the whole train clattered out of Caerleon with Morgan in their midst.

  “Farewell!” King Ursien called over his shoulder as he spurred away.

  Farewell?

  Guenevere stared at the thin, black-cloaked figure of Morgan till it faded to nothingness.

  We shall see, was her only thought. We shall see.

  CHAPTER 45

  Farewell …

  Night after night she lay awake and wondered how love had fled. The same lament ran endlessly through her head.

  Oh, Arthur, Arthur …

  Every wife has to learn sometime that her husband is not the perfect man she dreamed. But not every woman has to go as far as I did down the hard road of truth. When you came, I thought you were a God. But now I know you are only a man like other men, unable to resist the sweet evil of hurting where you love most.

  Were you and I foredoomed from the start? Love lifts us all into the garden of the Goddess, and not every paradise fades as ours has done into a wasteland of despair. You were the golden lord of all my dreams, and I reveled in the glory our love brought. Now it is gone, and the world is a colder place.

  When you came, I thought you and I were destined for each other from the time before time. I thought our union was blessed by the Old Ones who made the world, and by the Shining Ones before them. You shone in my eyes from the moment you dazzled me on the Hill of Stones. But you came with a darkness inside you that I did not see.

  For you were not the child of light and love at all. You were born of deception, murder, and adultery. You came to life through the vicious trickery of a mad and cruel old man. Your life was fated to be deformed by that deceit. And now mine is too.

  “I SHOULD HAVE seen it,” Guenevere muttered half to Ina, half to herself. “He came to me under the banner of the dragon, the red ravager, and when dragon power is unleashed, it lays the land waste.”

  “Madam, these are old wives’ tales!” Ina protested with tears in her eyes.

  Guenevere laughed, an ugly sound even to her own ears. “Well, we are old wives now, can’t you see that?”

  For her twenties had slipped by unnoticed as Amir grew up. Now she was thirty, and she looked in the mirror to see a filigree of fine lines around her eyes and mouth. She was not to know that they deepened her beauty with their undying testament of love and loss. Like any woman, she fretted painfully at the loss of her girlhood bloom.

  It seemed to Guenevere that the cloud-capped towers and gleaming palaces they once inhabited had fallen around their ears, and how cold winds blew through the ruins every day. And still the inner battle went to and fro.

  I am his wife. I must love him again.

  There is no “must” in love. Love once destroyed is hard to build anew.

  Yet surely it can be done?

  When the house is down, where can love hide its head?

  It is my duty.

  Ah, duty. A cold comforter. Still, it is all you have.

  NOW IN THE woodlands beyond Caerleon, the last leaves of summer hung on the branches before the gales of winter came to strip them bare. One by one the flowers of autumn withered as nature drew all life back to its roots. Night after night Guenevere lay and watched the stars’ cold fires as they flared up toward midnight, then slowly faded to dawn. All the grief had dried up in her now, and she did not weep.

  It was strange how soon her body forgot love and its fierce desires, forgot the feel of a man sleeping beside her with all the comfort that brings. She had always pitied women without love, nuns locked up in their convents, especially those like Morgan, confined against their will. Now for the first time she envied the peace of a house of women, and understood the desire for what she knew she could not have—life without men, or even the thought of them.

  But she was aching too, and often hot and restless in her cold bed. Her arms, her heart, her center, her empty womb were raging for all they had lost that would not come again. She knew she was still mourning for Amir, her whole being dry-weeping for him day and night. But another ache was also gripping her now. A strange longing haunted her pale nights and came to her in fragments of wistful dreams. Who? What? her spirit cried out. She did not know.

  THEN THE GREAT cold came. The hills and valleys drowsed under banks of snow, and the rivers froze in their reedy beds. Ice locked up roads and waterways, till neither man nor beast could safely stir. The poor folk drew their cattle in for shelter, and every dwelling became like a place under an enchantment as men and beasts slept out the winter’s sleep.

  In Camelot there was nothing to do but wait the winter out. For like a disease, Morgan was with them still. Arthur’s bleak face and sickly air told the world every day that something was amiss. Now he turned more and more to the black-hooded monks who padded around the chapel. He spent long hours among them on his knees, and sent often to London for the counsel of the Father Abbot, which was speedily returned. But nothing could drive the pallor from his face, or take away the anguish in his eyes.

  “Has His Majesty been ill?” the King of the Black Lands drew Guenevere aside to ask when he passed through Caerleon to pay his respects.

  “I have an old fever” was Arthur’s brusque response to any who questioned him. “It returns to trouble me.” But all the world knew that he was sick, heartsick from Morgan’s poison. In the cold watches of the night, Guenevere feared that he was still heartsick for Morgan too.

  But they were still King and Queen, not people who could hide from the world to nurse their pain. So she sat with Arthur in the Audience Chamber to greet kings and queens and debate with lords on matters of state. They received the country folk who came with their endless grievances, laborers with cruel masters, brothers warring against brothers, and widows and orphans put out of their homes. There was no respite in their struggle to keep the kingdom free.

  But the time always came when every dignitary had departed and all the petitioners had gone on their way. Then Arthur would turn to her and say dully, “Do you dine alone? Or would you join me for an hour or so?” Every day he would make the same request, and she would turn away as if she had not heard.

  Then on a golden day of early spring, something stirred in her heart, and she answered him.

  “Tonight, my lord, I will.”

  A look of wounded hope leaped in his eyes. That night as she came in, tears stood in his eyes. They feasted on pears and guinea fowl and broth to warm the heart, and as they left the table she went to his bed.

  “Ohhhhh,” he wept, “you’re warm!” His body against hers was cold and filmed in sweat.

  She took him in her arms. “I will try to love you as your wife. Be a husband to me now. Love me again.”

  But he could not. The loving between them was dead, like Amir. Her body was closed to Arthur like her heart, and she could not force it open to him again.

  And he could not come to her. Now that the fire of his lust for Morgan had burned out, he could not feel the heat of their old love. When she held him in her arms, nothing she did could warm him to her now. She took his hand and guided it to her breast, she lay the length of him and stroked his body with loving hands, and still no love came.

  The groan he gave then racked his frame and left her trembling with fear. “She has finished me, Guenevere,” he said hoarsely, his eyes black with terror in the night. “Morgan has taken my manhood; this is her revenge!”

  And she soothed him. “Hush, never say that, this is nothing, you are a man still, and it will pass,” just as women have always said to men. But neither of them believed what she said.

  YET STILL THEY had to try to live again. Now he sle
pt in his quarters, and she in hers, but she would share his bed for company when his fears were riding him and the nights were long and cold. They kept up the pretense for the people, as their reconciliation had been the signal for so much joy. By coming together they healed the land again. What did it mean to the people that their union was hollow at its heart?

  But still it was not entirely without love.

  “I have failed you, Guenevere,” Arthur would say. “How can I give you back what you have lost?”

  Guenevere looked at him. “Better you give me what I truly need.”

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “It does not matter,” she said, and went away.

  But she could not forget the night when Morgan sat taunting her in Arthur’s bed. I am the Queen of the Summer Country, and Queen of the Middle Kingdom, too, her soul cried out. I am Queen of two kingdoms, yet no man on earth would raise his sword for me.

  A queen will always have her knights, her mother had said.

  She was a queen alone, and she knew what she needed now.

  ONE NIGHT SHE went to Arthur in the small hours, when misery is always most alive. She found him sitting by a dying fire, staring at the flames. The black-gowned, hooded creatures with him rose on silent feet, folded their hands in their monkish sleeves, and slipped away. Guenevere had to mouth down her distaste. Goddess, Mother, are the Christians everywhere now?

  “Hear me, Arthur,” she said, with all the force at her command. “Your knights serve you, and no man cares for me. I must have a troop of knights of my very own.”

  “Poor Guenevere.” His eyes showed he had been weeping, but he was calm enough. “To give up your home, your country, for a worthless wretch like me—and then to find no man beside you when you need a sword.”

  Guenevere brushed it aside. “I do not need your sympathy.”

  He gave a pained smile. “Would you accept my help?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “The three Orkney princes are ready to be made knights. Agravain has proved a fearsome fighter; he would die rather than yield. Gaheris is a gentler soul but fearless too, and young as he is, Gareth outdoes them all in feats of arms. They are all as doughty as Gawain, and I dare swear they’ll prove as loyal too. Let them be your knights, the Queen’s own champions.”