The Mists of Avalon Read online

  The face was reproachful, and the words seemed to blow away in the sound of the wind beyond the walls.

  Have you given up the Sight, Igraine? Of your free will?

  Stung by the injustice of that, Igraine retorted, “It was you who decreed that I must marry Gorlois . . .” but the form of her sister had wavered into shadows, was not there, had never been there. Igraine blinked; the brief apparition was gone. She pulled the cloak around her body, for she was cold, ice cold; she knew the vision had drawn its force from the warmth and life of her own body. She thought, I didn’t know I could still see in that way, I was sure I could not . . . and then she shivered, knowing that Father Columba would consider this the work of the Devil, and she should confess it to him. True, here at the end of the world the priests were lax, but an unconfessed vision would surely be treated as a thing unholy.

  She frowned; why should she treat a visit from her own sister as the work of the Devil? Father Columba could say what he wished; perhaps his God was wiser than he was. Which, Igraine thought, suppressing a giggle, would not be very difficult. Perhaps Father Columba had become a priest of Christ because no college of Druids would have had a man so stupid among their ranks. The Christ God seemed not to care whether a priest was stupid or not, so long as he could mumble their mass, and read and write a little. She, Igraine herself, had more clerkly skills than Father Columba, and spoke better Latin when she wished. Igraine did not think of herself as well educated; she had not had the hardihood to study the deeper wisdom of the Old Religion, or to go into the Mysteries any further than was absolutely necessary for a daughter of the Holy Isle. Nevertheless, although she was ignorant in any Temple of the Mysteries, she could pass among the Romanized barbarians as a well-educated lady.

  In the small room off the court where there was sun on fine days, her younger sister, Morgause, thirteen years old and budding, wearing a loose house robe of undyed wool and her old frowsy cloak about her shoulders, was spinning listlessly with a drop spindle, taking up her uneven yarn on a wobbly reel. On the floor by the fire, Morgaine was rolling an old spindle around for a ball, watching the erratic patterns the uneven cylinder made, knocking it this way and that with chubby fingers.

  “Haven’t I done enough spinning?” Morgause complained. “My fingers ache! Why must I spin, spin, spin all the time, as if I were a waiting-woman?”

  “Every lady must learn to spin,” rebuked Igraine as she knew she ought to do, “and your thread is a disgrace, now thick, now thin. . . . Your fingers will lose their weariness as you accustom them to the work. Aching fingers are a sign that you have been lazy, since they are not hardened to their task.” She took the reel and spindle from Morgause and twirled it with careless ease; the uneven yarn, under her experienced fingers, smoothed out into a thread of perfectly even thickness. “Look, one could weave this yarn without snagging the shuttle . . .” and suddenly she tired of behaving as she ought. “But you may put the spindle away now; guests will be here before midafternoon.”

  Morgause stared at her. “I heard nothing,” she said, “nor any rider with a message!”

  “That does not surprise me,” Igraine said, “for there was no rider. It was a Sending. Viviane is upon her way here, and the Merlin is with her.” She had not known that last until she said it. “So you may take Morgaine to her nurse, and go and put on your holiday robe, the one dyed with saffron.”

  Morgause put away the spindle with alacrity, but paused to stare at Igraine. “My saffron gown? For my sister?”

  Igraine corrected her, sharply. “Not for our sister, Morgause, but for the Lady of the Holy Isle, and for the Messenger of the Gods.”

  Morgause looked down at the patterned floor. She was a tall, sturdy girl, just beginning to lengthen and ripen into womanhood; her thick hair was reddish like Igraine’s own, and there were splotches of freckles on her skin, no matter how carefully she soaked it in buttermilk and begged the herbwife for washes and simples for it. Already at thirteen she was as tall as Igraine, and someday would be taller. She picked up Morgaine with an ill grace and carried her away. Igraine called after her, “Tell Nurse to put a holiday gown on the child, and then you may bring her down; Viviane has not seen her.”

  Morgause said something ill-tempered to the effect that she didn’t see why a great priestess would want to see a brat, but she said it under her breath so that Igraine had an excuse to ignore it.

  Up the narrow stairs, her own chamber was cold; no fires were lighted there except in the dead of winter. While Gorlois was away, she shared the bed with her waiting-woman Gwennis, and his prolonged absence gave her an excuse to have Morgaine in her bed at night. Sometimes Morgause slept there too, sharing the fur coverlets against the bitter cold. The big marriage bed, canopied, curtained against draughts, was more than big enough for three women and a child.

  Gwen, who was old, was drowsing in a corner, and Igraine forbore to wake her, stripping off her workaday dress of undyed wool and hurrying on her fine gown, laced at the neck with a silk ribbon Gorlois had brought her as a fairing from Londinium. She put on her fingers some little silver rings she had had since she was a little girl . . . they would go only on her two smallest fingers, now . . . and hung a necklace of amber which Gorlois had given her about her neck. The gown was dyed rust color, and had an overtunic of green. She found her carven horn comb, and began to pull it through her hair, sitting on a bench and working her comb patiently through the tangles. From another room she heard a loud yelling and decided that Morgaine was having her hair combed by her nurse and didn’t like it. The yelling stopped suddenly, and she supposed that Morgaine had been slapped into silence; or perhaps, as sometimes happened when Morgause was in a good temper, Morgause had taken over the combing herself, with her clever, patient fingers. This was how Igraine knew that her young sister could spin well enough when she chose, her hands were so clever at everything else—at combing, at carding, at making Yule pies.

  Igraine braided her hair, clasped it on top of her head with a gold clasp, and put her good gold brooch into the fold of her cloak. She looked at herself in the old bronze mirror her sister Viviane had given her at her wedding, brought, they said, all the way from Rome. She knew, lacing her gown, that her breasts were once again as they had been before: Morgaine had been weaned a year now, and they were only a little softer and heavier. She knew she had her old slimness back, for she had been married in this gown, and now the laces were not strained even a little.

  Gorlois, when he returned, would expect to take her to his bed again. Last time he had seen her, Morgaine had still been at the breast, and he had yielded to her plea that she might continue to suckle the child through the summer season when so many little children died. She knew he was discontented because the baby had not been the son he craved—these Romans counted their lineage through the male line, rather than sensibly through the mother; it was silly, for how could any man ever know precisely who had fathered any woman’s child? Of course, these Romans made a great matter of worrying over who lay with their women, and locked them up and spied on them. Not that Igraine needed watching; one man was bad enough, who would want others who might be worse?

  But even though he was eager for a son, Gorlois had been indulgent, letting her have Morgaine in her bed and continue to suckle her, even keeping away from her and lying nights with her dressing-woman Ettarr so that she would not get with child again and lose her milk. He too knew how many children died if they were weaned before they could chew meat and hard bread. Children fed on gruel were sickly, and often there was no goat’s milk in the summer, even if they would drink it. Children fed on cow’s or mare’s milk often got the vomit and died, or suffered with the flux in their bowels and died. So he had left Morgaine at her breast, thus postponing the son he wanted for at least another year and a half. For that at least she would always be grateful to him, and not murmur, however quickly he got her with child now.

  Ettarr had gotten herself a belly from that visit, and gone abou
t preening herself; would she be the one to have a son by the Duke of Cornwall? Igraine had ignored the girl; Gorlois had other bastard sons, one of whom was with him now, in the camp of the war duke, Uther. But Ettarr had fallen sick and miscarried, and Igraine had enough intuition not to ask Gwen why she looked so pleased at the event. Old Gwen knew too much of herbs for Igraine’s perfect peace of mind. Some day, she resolved, I will make her tell me exactly what she put into Ettarr’s beer.

  She went down to the kitchen, her long skirts trailing on the stone steps. Morgause was there, in her finest gown, and she had put Morgaine into a holiday dress, dyed saffron, so that the child looked dark as a Pict. Igraine picked her up, holding her with pleasure. Small, dark, delicately made, so small-boned it was like handling a little soft bird. How had that child come by her looks? She herself and Morgause were tall and red-haired, earth-colored like all of the Tribeswomen, and Gorlois, though dark, was Roman, tall and lean and aquiline; hardened from years of battle against the Saxons, too filled with his Roman dignity to show much tenderness to a young wife, and with nothing but indifference for the daughter who came in the place of the son she should have borne him.

  But, Igraine reminded herself, these Roman men considered it their divine right to have power of life and death over their children. There were many, Christians or no, who would have demanded that a daughter not be reared, so that their wives might be free at once to give them a son. Gorlois had been good to her, he had let her keep her daughter. Perhaps, though she did not give him credit for much imagination, he knew how she, a woman of the Tribes, felt about a daughter.

  While she was giving orders for the entertainment of guests, for wine to be brought up from the cellars and for the roasting of meat—not rabbit, but good mutton from the last slaughtering—she heard the squawk and flutter of frightened hens in the court and knew that the riders had come across the causeway. The servants looked frightened, but most of them had become resigned to the knowledge that the mistress had the Sight. She had pretended it, using clever guesses and a few tricks; it was just as well that they should remain in awe of her. Now she thought, Maybe Viviane is right, maybe I still have it. Maybe I only believed it was gone—because in those months before Morgaine was born, I felt so weak and powerless. Now I have come back to myself. My mother was a great priestess till the day of her death, though she bore several children.

  But, her mind answered her, her mother had borne those children in freedom, as a Tribeswoman should, to such fathers as she chose, not as a slave to some Roman whose customs gave him power over women and children. Impatiently, she dismissed such thoughts; did it matter whether she had the Sight or only seemed to have it, if it kept her servants properly in order?

  She went slowly out to the courtyard, which Gorlois still liked to call the atrium, though it was nothing like the villa where he had lived until Ambrosius made him Duke of Cornwall. She found the riders dismounting, and her eyes went at once to the only woman among them, a woman smaller than herself and no longer young, wearing a man’s tunic and woolen breeches, and muffled in cloaks and shawls. Across the courtyard their eyes met in welcome, but Igraine went dutifully and bent before the tall, slender old man who was dismounting from a raw-boned mule. He wore the blue robes of a bard, and a harp was slung across his shoulder.

  “I bid you welcome to Tintagel, Lord Messenger; you bestow a blessing upon our roof and honor it with your presence.”

  “I thank you, Igraine,” said the resonant voice, and Taliesin, Merlin of Britain, Druid, Bard, clasped his hands before his face, then extended them to Igraine in blessing.

  Her duty done for the instant, Igraine flew to her half-sister and would have bent for her blessing too; but Viviane bent and prevented her.

  “No, no, child, this is a family visit, time enough later to do me honors if you must. . . .” She clasped Igraine close and kissed her on the mouth. “And this is the babe? It is easy to see she has the blood of the Old People; she looks like our mother, Igraine.”

  Viviane, Lady of the Lake and of the Holy Isle, was at this time in her thirties; eldest daughter of the ancient priestess of the Lake, she had succeeded to her mother’s holy office. She picked up Morgaine in her arms, dandling her with the experienced hands of a woman well accustomed to babies.

  “She looks like you,” Igraine said, surprised, and then realizing that she should have realized this before. But it had been four years since she had seen Viviane, and then at her wedding. So much had happened, she had changed so much, since, a frightened girl of fifteen, she had been given into the hands of a man more than twice her age. “But come into the hall, Lord Merlin, sister. Come into the warm.”

  Freed of her enwrapping cloaks and shawls, Viviane, Lady of Avalon, was a surprisingly little woman, no taller than a well-grown girl of eight or ten. In her loose tunic with its wrapped belt, a knife sheathed at her waist, and bulky woolen breeches, legs wrapped with thick leggings, she looked tiny, a child put into adult clothes. Her face was small, swarthy and triangular, the forehead low beneath hair dark as the shadows beneath the crags. Her eyes were dark, too, and large in her small face; Igraine had never realized how small she was.

  A serving-woman brought the guest cup: hot wine, mixed with the last of the spices Gorlois had had sent to her from the markets in Londinium. Viviane took it between her hands, and Igraine blinked at her; with the gesture with which she took the cup, she was suddenly tall and imposing; it might have been the sacred chalice of the Holy Regalia. She set it between her hands and brought it slowly to her lips, murmuring a blessing. She tasted it, turned, and laid it in the hands of the Merlin. He took it with a grave bow and put it to his lips. Igraine, who had barely entered the Mysteries, somehow felt that she too was part of this beautiful ritual solemnity as in turn she took the cup from her guests, tasted it, and spoke formal words of welcome.

  Then she put the cup aside and her sense of the moment dropped away; Viviane was only a small, tired-looking woman, the Merlin no more than a stooped old man. Igraine led them both quickly to the fire.

  “It is a long journey from the shores of the Summer Sea in these days,” she said, remembering when she had travelled it, a new-made bride, frightened and silently hating, in the train of the strange husband who, as yet, was only a voice and a terror in the night. “What brings you here in the spring storms, my sister and my lady?”

  And why could you not have come before, why did you leave me all alone, to learn to be a wife, to bear a child alone and in fear and homesickness? And since you could not have come before, why do you come at all, when it is too late and I am at last resigned into submission?

  “The distance is indeed long,” Viviane said softly, and Igraine knew that the priestess had heard, as she always heard, the unspoken words as well as what Igraine had said. “And these are dangerous times, child. But you have grown into womanhood in these years, even if they have been lonely, as lonely as the years of isolation for the making of a bard—or,” she added, with the flicker of a reminiscent smile, “the making of a priestess. Had you chosen that path, you would have found it equally lonely, my Igraine. Yes, of course,” she said, reaching down, her face softening, “you may come up on my lap, little one.” She picked up Morgaine, and Igraine watched with wonder; Morgaine was, ordinarily, as shy as a wild rabbit. Half resentful, half falling again under the old spell, she watched the child settle into Viviane’s lap. Viviane looked almost too small to hold her securely. A fairy woman, indeed; a woman of the Old People. And indeed Morgaine would perhaps be very like her.

  “And Morgause, how has she prospered since I sent her to you a year ago?” Viviane said, looking up at Morgause in her saffron gown, where she hung back resentfully in the shadows of the fire. “Come and kiss me, little sister. Ah, you will be tall like Igraine,” she said, raising her arms to embrace the girl, who came, sullen as a half-trained puppy, from the shadows. “Yes, sit there at my knee if you want to, child.” Morgause sat on the floor, leaning her head
against Viviane’s lap, and Igraine saw that the sulky eyes were filled with tears.

  She has us all in her hand. How can she have such power over us all? Or is it that she is the only mother Morgause has ever known? She was a grown woman when Morgause was born, she has always been mother, as well as sister, to both of us. Their mother, who had been really too old for childbearing, had died giving birth to Morgause. Viviane had borne a child of her own, earlier in the year; her child had died, and Viviane had taken Morgause to nurse.

  Morgaine had snuggled tightly into Viviane’s lap; Morgause leaned her silky red head on Viviane’s knee. The priestess held the little one with one arm while her free hand stroked the half-grown girl’s long, silky hair.

  “I would have come to you when Morgaine was born,” Viviane said, “but I was pregnant, too. I bore a son that year. I have put him out to nurse, and I think his foster-mother may send him to the monks. She is a Christian.”

  “Don’t you mind his being reared as a Christian?” Morgause asked. “Is he pretty? What is his name?”

  Viviane laughed. “I called him Balan,” she said, “and his foster-mother named her son Balin. They are only ten days apart in age, so they will be reared as twins, no doubt. And no, I do not mind that he is reared a Christian, his father was so, and Priscilla is a good woman. You said the journey here was long; believe me, child, it is longer now than it was when you were wedded to Gorlois. Not longer, perhaps, from the Isle of the Priests, where their Holy Thorn grows, but longer, far longer, from Avalon . . .”