5

It seemed that nothing else was talked of in the city for several days—that Lot of Orkney had withdrawn and gone away to the North. It was feared that this would delay the final choice; but only three days later, Gorlois returned to the lodging, where Igraine was putting the final stitches into a new gown from the woven cloth she had found in the market, to say that the Council of Ambrosius’ advisers had done as they had known, all along, that Ambrosius would have wished, and chosen Uther Pendragon to rule over all Britain as High King among the kings of the land.

“But what of the North?” she asked.

“Somehow he will bring Lot to terms, or else he will fight him,” Gorlois said. “I do not like Uther, but he is the best fighter we have. I am not afraid of Lot, and I am sure Uther does not fear him either.”

Igraine felt the old stirring of the Sight, knowing that Lot had much to do in the years to come  ...  but she kept her peace; Gorlois had made it obvious that he did not like to hear her speak of men’s affairs, and she would rather not quarrel with a doomed man in the little time remaining to him.

“I see your new gown is finished. You shall wear it, if you will, when Uther is made High King in the church and crowned, and afterward he will hold court for all his men and all their ladies, before he goes to the West country for their kingmaking,” he said. “He bears the name Pendragon, Greatest Dragon, from the banner he bears, and they have some superstitious ritual about dragons and kingship—“

“The dragon is the same as the serpent,” Igraine volunteered. “A symbol of wisdom; a Druidical symbol.”

Gorlois frowned, displeased, and said that he had no patience with such symbols in a Christian country. “The anointing by a bishop should be enough for them.”

“But all people are not fitted for the higher Mysteries,” Igraine said. She had learned this as a child on the Holy Isle, and since her dream of Atlantis it seemed to her that all the early teaching about the Mysteries, which she thought she had forgotten, had assumed a new meaning and depth in her mind. “Wise men know that symbols are not needed, but the common folk of the countryside, they need their dragons flying for the kingship, just as they need the Beltane fires, and the Great Marriage when a king is wedded to the land—“

“Those things are forbidden to a Christian,” Gorlois said austerely. “The Apostle has said it, there is only one name under Heaven by which we may be saved, and all those signs and symbols are wicked. I would not be surprised to hear it of Other, that unchaste man, that he entangles himself in these lewd rites of pagandom, pandering to the folly of ignorant men. One day I hope to see a High King in Britain who will keep to Christian rites alone!”

Igraine smiled and said, “I do not think either of us will live to see that day, my husband. Even the Apostle in your holy books wrote that there was milk for babes and meat for strong men, and the common folk, the once-born, have need for their Holy Wells and their spring garlands and dancing rites. It would be a sad day for Britain if no Yule fires burned and no garlands fell into the Holy Wells.”

“Even the devils can quote the holy words amiss,” Gorlois said, but not angrily. “Perhaps this is what the Apostle meant, when he said that women should keep silence in the churches, for they are prone to fall into those errors. When you are older and wiser, Igraine, you will know better. Meanwhile, you can make yourself as fine as you please for the services in the church and for the merrymaking afterward.”

Igraine put on her new gown and brushed her hair until it shone like fine copper; and when she looked at herself in the silver mirror—Gorlois had sent to the market for it, after all, and had it brought to her—she wondered with a sudden fit of despondency whether Uther would even notice her. She was beautiful, yes, but there were other women, beautiful as she was, and younger, not married women who had borne children—why should he want her, old and used as she was?

All through the long ceremonies in the church, she watched intently as Uther was sworn and anointed by their bishop. For once the psalms were not doleful hymns of God’s wrath and punishment, but joyful songs, praising and offering thanks, and the bells sounded joyous instead of wrathful. Afterward in the house which had been Ambrosius’ headquarters, there were delicacies and wine and much ceremony, as one by one, Ambrosius’ war chiefs swore allegiance to Uther.

Long before it was over, Igraine grew weary. But at last it was done, and while the chiefs and their ladies congregated around the wine and the food, she moved a little away, watching the bright gathering. And there, at last, as she had been half aware that he would, Uther found her.

“My lady of Cornwall.”

She made a deep curtsey. “My lord Pendragon, my king.”

He said roughly, “There is no need for such formalities between us now, lady,” and caught her shoulders, so much as he had done in her dream that she stared, half expecting that she would see on his arms the golden serpent torques.

But he only said, “You are not now wearing the moonstone. It was so strange, that stone. When first I saw you wearing it, it was like to a dream I had. ... I had fever, last spring, and the Merlin attended me, and I had a strange dream, and I know now it was in that dream I first beheld you, long before ever I laid eyes on your face. I must have stared like a country lout, Lady Igraine, for I found myself struggling again and again to remember my dream, and what part you played in that dream, and the moonstone at your throat.”

She said, “I have been told that one of the virtues of the jewel, moonstone, is to awaken the true memories of the soul. I too have dreamed ...  .”

He laid a light hand on her arm. “I cannot remember. Why is it that I seem to see you wearing something gold about your wrists, Igraine? Have you a golden bracelet in the form of—of a dragon, perhaps?”

She shook her head. “Not now,” she said, paralyzed at the awareness that he had, somehow and without her full knowledge, shared that strange memory and dream.

“You will be thinking me a boor and beyond all courtesy, my lady of Cornwall. May I offer you some wine?”

Silently she shook her head. She knew that if she tried to take a cup in her hand she would shake and spill it all over herself.

“I do not know what is happening to me,” Uther said violently. “All that has happened in these days—the death of my father and king, the strife of all these kings, their choosing me for High King—it seems unreal, and you, Igraine, are the most unreal of all! Have you been to the West, where the great ring of stones stands on the plain? They say that in olden time it was a Druid temple, but the Merlin says not, it was built long before the Druids came to these lands. Have you been there?”

“Not in this life, my lord.”

“I wish I could show it to you, for I dreamed once I was there with you—oh, don’t think me a madman, Igraine, chattering always of dreams and prophecy,” he said with that sudden, boyish smile. “Let us talk very sedately of ordinary things. I am a poor Northern chief who has suddenly Wakened to find himself High King of Britain, and perhaps I am a little mad with the strain!”

“I shall be sedate and ordinary.” Igraine agreed with a smile. “And if you were a wedded man I would ask you how your wife did and if your oldest son had trouble with—oh, what is the most ordinary thing I could ask you—whether he was done teething before the hot weather, or if he had a skin rash from his swaddling clothes!”

He chuckled. “You will be thinking I am old not to be a married man,” he said. “I’ve had women enough, God knows. I should not say that, perhaps, to the wife of my most Christian of chiefs; Father Jerome would say I had had all too many women for the health of my soul! But I never saw one I cared for, when we rose from bedding, and I always feared that if I wedded some woman before we bedded, I would tire of her in such manner. It seemed to me always that there should be some tie stronger than that between man and women, though the Christians seem to think that is enough—what is it they say, it is better to marry than to burn? Well, I did not burn, for I slaked the fire, and when I had spent it, the fire went out, and yet I feel that there could be a burning which would not spend itself so quickly, and it should be such a one I could marry.” Abruptly he asked her, “Do you love Gorlois?”

Viviane had asked her this, and she had said that it did not matter. She had not known what she was saying. Now she said quietly, “No. I was given to him when I was too young to care what man I married.”

Uther turned away and paced angrily, saying at last, “And I can see you are no wench to tumble, and why in the name of all the Gods I must be bewitched by a woman who is wedded to one of my most loyal partisans—“

So the Merlin had worked his meddlesome magic on Uther too. But now Igraine did not resent it. It was their destiny, and what would come, must come. But she could not believe it was her destiny to betray Gorlois crudely, here like this. It was like a part of her dream of the great plain, so that she could almost see the shadow of the great ring of stones, when he laid his hand on her shoulder. But she was confused, No, that was another world, and another life. It seemed that her whole soul and body cried out within her for the reality of that kiss in their dream. She put her hands over her face and wept. He stared at her, dismayed and helpless, backing away a little.

“Igraine,” he whispered. “What can we do?”

“I don’t know,” she said, sobbing, “I don’t know.” Her certainty had become a miserable confusion. Had the dream been sent only to bewitch her, by magic, into a betrayal of Gorlois and her own honor and sworn word?

A hand fell on her shoulder, heavy and disapproving. Gorlois looked angry and suspicious.

“What is this unseemly matter, my lady? What have you been saying, my king, that my wife looks so wretched? I know you a man of lewd manners and little piety, but even so, sire, common decency should restrain you from approaching a vassal’s wife at your crowning!”

Igraine raised her face to him in anger. “Gorlois, I have not deserved this of you! What have I ever done that you should cast such an accusation at me in a public place?” For indeed heads were turning now, hearing angry words spoken.

“Then why, lady, do you weep, if he has said nothing unseemly to you?” His hand, gripping her wrist, felt as if he would crush it.

“As for that,” Uther said, “you must ask the lady why she weeps, for I do not know. But loose her arm, or I will make you. Husband or no, no one shall handle any woman roughly in my house.”

Gorlois let go of Igraine’s arm. She could see the marks of his fingers already reddening into dark bruises; she rubbed the marks, tears streaming down her face. Before the many faces surrounding them she was appalled, as if she had been taken and shamed; she covered her face with her veil and wept harder than ever. Gorlois pushed her before him. She did not hear what he said to Uther; only when they were outside in the street did she stare at him, amazed.

He said in a rage, “I will not accuse you before all men, Igraine, but God is my witness I should be justified in doing so. Uther looked at you just now as a man looks at a woman he has known as no Christian man has a right to know any other man’s wife!”

Igraine, feeling her heart pounding in her breast, knew it was true, and felt confusion and despair. In spite of the fact that she had seen Uther only four times, and dreamed twice of him, she knew that they had looked at each other and spoken to each other as if they had been lovers for many years, knowing all and more than all about each other, body and mind and heart. She recalled her dream, where it seemed that they had been bound for many years by a tie which, if it was not marriage, might as well have been so. Lovers, partners, priest to priestess—whatever it was called. How could she tell Gorlois that she had known Uther only in a dream, but that she had begun to think of him as the man she had loved so long ago that Igraine herself was not yet born, was a shadow; that the essence within her was one and the same with that woman who had loved that strange man who bore the serpents on his arms in gold ...  . How could she say this to Gorlois, who knew, and wished to know, nothing of the Mysteries?

He pushed her ahead of him into their lodging. He was ready, she knew, to strike her if she had spoken; but her silence frustrated him even more. He shouted, “Have you nothing to say to me, my wife?” and gripped her already bruised arm so strongly that she cried out anew with the pain of his hand. “Did you think I did not see how you looked at your paramour?”

She wrenched her arm away from him, feeling as if he would actually tear it out of the socket. “If you saw that, then you saw me turn away from him when he would have had no more than a kiss! And did you not hear him say to me that you were his loyal supporter and he would not take the wife of his friend—“

“If I was ever his friend, I am so no more!” Gorlois said, his face dark with fury. “Do you truly think I shall support a man who would take my wife from me, in a public place, shaming me before all his assembled chiefs?”

“He did not!” Igraine cried out, weeping. “I have never so much as touched his lips!” It seemed all the more vicious since she had indeed desired Uther but had kept herself scrupulously away from him. Why, if I am to be accused of guilt when I am innocent of any wrongdoing even as he would call it so, why should I not have done what Uther wished?

“I saw how you looked at him! And you have kept apart from my bed since first you set eyes on Uther, you faithless whore!”

“How do you dare!” she gasped, raging, and caught up the silver mirror he had given her, flinging it at his head. “Take back that word, or I swear I will throw myself into the river before ever you touch me again! You lie, and you know you lie!”

Gorlois ducked his head and the mirror crashed against the wall. Igraine snatched off her amber necklace—another new gift from her husband—and flung it after the mirror; with hasty fingers tore off the fine new gown and hurled it at his head. “How dare you call me such names, who have loaded me with gifts as if I were one of your camp followers and fancy women? If you think me a whore, where are the gifts I have received from my lovers? All the gifts I have are given me by my husband, the whoreson foul-mouthed cullion who tries to buy my goodwill for his own lusts because the priests have made him half a eunuch! From now on I will wear the weaving of my own fingers, not your disgusting gifts, you knave whose mouth and mind are as foul as your filthy kisses!”

“Be silent, you evil-minded scold!” Gorlois shouted, striking her so hard that she fell to the ground. “Now get up and cover yourself decently as a Christian woman should, not tearing off your clothes so that I will go mad with looking at you like that! Is that how you seduced my king into your arms?”

She scrambled to her feet, kicking the ruins of the gown as far as she could, and rushed at him, striking his face again and again. He grabbed her, trying to hold her motionless; crushed her into his arms. Igraine was strong, but Gorlois was a big man and a warrior, and after a moment her struggles subsided, knowing they were useless.

He whispered, pushing her toward the bed, “I will teach you better than to look at any man that way except your rightful husband!”

She flung her head back in contempt and said, “Do you think I would ever look at you again except with the loathing I would feel for a snake? Oh, yes, you can take me to bed and force me to do your will, your Christian piety permits you to ravish your own wife! I do not care what you say to me, Gorlois, because I know in my own heart that I am innocent! Until this very moment I felt guilty that some witchcraft or spell had made me love Uther. Now I wish I had done what he begged of me, if only because you were as ready to believe lies of my guilt as the truth about my innocence, and while I was anxious for my own honor and yours, you were prepared to believe I would fling mine to the winds!”

The contempt in her voice made Gorlois drop his arms and stare at her. He said, his voice husky, “Do you mean that, Igraine? Are you truly innocent of wrongdoing?”

“Do you think I would stoop to lie about it? To you?”

“Igraine, Igraine,” he said humbly, “I know well I am too old for you, that you were given to me without love and without your will, but I thought, perhaps, in these days, you have come to think a little better of me, and when I saw you weeping before Uther—“ His voice choked. “I could not bear it, that you should look like that at that lustful and vicious man, and look on me only with duty and resignation—forgive me, forgive me, I do beg it of you—if indeed I wronged you—“

“You wronged me,” she said, her voice stinging with ice, “and you do well to beg my pardon, which you shall not have until the hells rise and the Earth sinks beneath the western ocean! Better you should go and make your peace with Uther—do you truly think you can stand against the wrath of the High King of Britain? Or will you end by buying his favor as you sought to buy mine?”

“Be still!” Gorlois said angrily, his face flushing; he had humbled himself before her, and she knew he would never forgive her for that either. “Cover yourself!”

Igraine realized that she was still bare to the waist. She went to the bed where her old gown was lying and pulled it leisurely over her head, doing up the laces. He gathered up her amber necklace from the floor, and the silver mirror, and held them out to her, but she turned her eyes away and ignored them and after a while he laid them on the bed, where she let them lie without looking at them.

He stared at her for a moment, then pushed the door and went out.

Left alone, Igraine began to put her things into her saddlebags. She did not know what she meant to do; perhaps she would go and find the Merlin, take him into her confidence. It was he who had begun this train of events that had put her and Gorlois at such odds. At least she knew she would no longer dwell with complacency under Gorlois’s roof. A pain struck at her heart: they had been wedded under Roman law and by that law Gorlois had absolute power over their daughter, Morgaine. Somehow she must contrive to dissemble until she could get Morgaine away to a place of safety! She could perhaps send her to Viviane, at the Holy Isle, for fostering.

She left the jewels Gorlois had given her lying on the bed, packing with her only the gowns she had woven with her own hands at Tintagel, and for jewels, only the moonstone Viviane had given her. Later she realized it was this moment or two of delay which had cost her escape, for while she was laying out the gifts he had given her on the bed, separating her own things from them, Gorlois came back into the room. He cast one swift glance at her packed saddlebags, and nodded curtly. “Good,” he said, “you are making ready to ride. We will leave before sunset.”

“What do you mean, Gorlois?”

“I mean that I have cast back my oath in Uther’s face and told him what I should have told him at once. Henceforth we are enemies. I go now to organize the defense of the West against the Saxons and the Irish, should they come there; I have told him that if he seeks to bring his armies into my country I will hang him like the felon he is from any handy tree.”

She stared at him; at last she said, “You are mad, my husband. The men of Cornwall cannot hold the West country alone if the Saxons should come there in force. Ambrosius knew that; the Merlin knows that; God help me, I know it, and I am no more than a home-keeping woman! Will you strike down in one moment of madness everything that Ambrosius lived for and spent his last years struggling for because of some insane quarrel with Uther over your own mad jealousy?”

“You are quick to care for Uther!”

“I should be quick to pity the Saxon chief himself, if he lost his hardiest supporters in a quarrel with no foundation! In God’s name, Gorlois, for our very lives and the lives of the people who look to you for help if the Saxons come, I beg of you to amend this quarrel with Uther, and not to break up the alliance this way! Lot has already gone; if you go, there will be none but treaty troops and a few minor kings to follow him in the defense of Britain!” She shook her head in despair. “Would that I had thrown myself from the cliffs at Tintagel before ever I came to Londinium! I will take any oath you like, that I have never so much as touched Uther Pendragon’s lips! Will you break the alliance for which Ambrosius died, because of a woman?”

Gorlois glowered at her and said, “Even had Uther never set eyes on you, my lady, I should not in conscience follow a man of lewdness, so bad a Christian; I trust Lot not at all, but I now know that I should trust Uther less. I should have listened from the first to the voice of my conscience, and I would never have agreed to support him at all. Put my clothing into the other saddlebag. I have sent for the horses and our men-at-arms.”

She looked at his implacable face and knew that if she protested he would beat her again. Silently, with seething anger, she obeyed. Now she was trapped, she could not flee, not even to the Holy Isle under her sister’s protection—not while Gorlois held her daughter at Tintagel.

She was still laying folded shirts and tunics into the saddlebags when she heard alarm bells begin to ring. Gorlois said curtly, “Stay here!” and hurried out of the house.

Angry, Igraine hurried after him, only to find herself faced by a burly man-at-arms, one of Gorlois’s men she had not seen before. He thrust his pike sideways across the house door, preventing her from stepping across the sill. His Cornish dialect was so thick that she could hardly understand his words, but she made out that the Duke had commanded his lady was to keep safely within the house; he was there to see that she stayed so.

It would be beneath her dignity to struggle with the man, and she had a shrewd suspicion that if she did he would simply bundle her like a sack of meal across the threshold. In the end, she sighed and went back inside the house, finishing her packing. From the street she heard cries and clamor, the sounds of men running, bells ringing in the nearby church, although it was not the hour for services. Once she heard a clashing of swords and wondered if the Saxons were in the city and among them—it would indeed be a good time for an attack, when Ambrosius’ chiefs were all at odds! Well, that would solve one of her problems, but what would become of Morgaine, alone at Tintagel?

The day wore on, and near nightfall Igraine began to be afraid. Were the Saxons at the gates of the city, had Uther and Gorlois quarreled again, was one or the other of them dead? When at last Gorlois thrust open the door of the room, she was almost glad to see him. His face was drawn and distant, his jaw clenched as if in great grief, but his words to Igraine were brief and uncompromising.

“We ride at nightfall. Can you keep your saddle, or shall I have one of my men carry you on a pillion? We shall have no time to delay for a lady’s pace.”

She wanted to batter at him with a thousand questions, but she would not give him the satisfaction of seeming to care. “While you can ride, my husband, I can keep to my saddle.”

“See that you do, then, for we shall not halt long enough for you to change your mind. Wear your warmest cloak; it will be cold riding at night, and the sea fog is coming in.”

Igraine tied up her hair into a knot and wrapped her thick cloak over the tunic and breeches she always put on for riding. Gorlois lifted her to the horse’s back. The street was thickly clustered with the dark forms of men-at-arms with their long spears. Gorlois spoke in low tones to one of the captains, then strode back and mounted; there were a dozen horsemen and soldiers riding behind Gorlois and Igraine at their head. He took the reins of Igraine’s horse himself and said with an angry jerk of his head, “Come.”

She was not sure of the way; she rode in silence where Gorlois led, through the falling dusk. Somewhere against the sky there was fire, but Igraine did not know whether it was a soldier’s watch fire, or a house somewhere in flames, or simply the cooking fires of the travelling peddlers encamped in the marketplace. She had never learned her way through the thickly clustered houses and streets to the river, but as the thick fog began to blow in wisps across their path, she supposed they were coming to the riverbank, and after a time she heard the creaking of the rope windlass which controlled the heavy planking rafts of the ferry.

One of Gorlois’s men, dismounting, led her horse aboard; Gorlois rode at her side. A few of the men swam their horses. She realized it must be very late—at this time of year the light lingered long, and it was almost unheard of to ride at night. Then she heard a cry from the shore.

“They are going! They are going! First Lot, and then my lord of Cornwall, and we are unprotected!”

“All the soldiers are leaving the town! What will we do when the Saxons land on the south coast?”

“Cowards,” someone yelled from the shore as the ferry, with a great creaking, began to move away. “Cowards, running away with the countryside aflame!”

A stone came whizzing out of the dark. It struck one of the men-at-arms on his leather breastplate. He swore, but Gorlois spoke to him in a sharp undertone and he grumbled into silence. There were a few other insults hurled from the shore and a few more stones, but they were quickly out of range. As her eyes grew accustomed to the dark Igraine could see Gorlois, his face pale and set like a marble statue. He did not speak to her all that night, although they rode till dawn, and even when the dawn came up red and dripping behind them, turning the world to crimson fog, they stopped only a little while for horses and men to rest. Gorlois laid a cloak for Igraine to lie down on for a little while, and brought her some hard bread and cheese and a cup of wine, soldier’s rations, but still he did not speak to her. She was weary and bruised from riding, and confused; she knew that Gorlois had quarreled with Uther and withdrawn his men, but nothing more. Would Uther have let him go without protest? Well, Lot had been let go.

After a short rest, Gorlois brought the horses again and would have lifted her into the saddle, but here Igraine rebelled.

“I will ride no further until you tell me where we ride, and why!” She kept her voice down, not wanting to shame Gorlois before his men, but she faced him fearlessly. “Why do we steal from Londinium like thieves in the night? Now you will tell me what is happening, unless you wish to have me tied to my horse’s back and carry me screaming aloud all the way to Cornwall!”

“Do you think I would not do that if I must?” Gorlois said. “Don’t seek to cross me, you for whom I have forsworn a lifetime of honor and oaths kept, and set the memory of my king at nothing!”

“How can you dare to blame me for that,” Igraine flung at him. “You did it not for me but for your own insane jealousy! I am innocent of whatever sins your evil mind believes I have committed—“

“Silence, woman! Uther, too, swore that you were innocent of wrong. But you are a woman and you put some enchantment on him, I suppose —I went to Uther, hoping to mend this quarrel, and do you know what proffer that evil and lustful man made to me? He demanded of me that I should divorce you and give you to him!”

Igraine stared at him with wide-open eyes. “If you think so evil of me, that I am adulteress, witch, all these ill things, why then did you not rejoice at the prospect of getting quit of me so simply?”

And inside her was a new rage, that even Uther should think of her as a woman to be given away without her own consent, that he went to Gorlois and besought him to give the unwanted woman, even as Gorlois himself had asked her of the Lady of Avalon! Was she a horse to be sold at the spring fair, then? One part of her quivered with a secret pleasure— Uther wanted her, he wanted her enough that he would quarrel with Gorlois and alienate his allies by this quarrel over a woman. And with another part of her being she was enraged. Why had he not besought her, of herself, that she should put away Gorlois and come to him of her free will?

But Gorlois was attending seriously to her question. “You swore to me that you were not an adulteress. And no Christian man may put his wife away save for the sole cause of adultery.”

Between impatience and sudden compunction, Igraine held her peace. She could not be grateful to him, but at least he had listened to what she said. Yet it occurred to her that it was mostly his pride; even if he believed she had betrayed him, he would not want his soldiers to think that his young wife preferred another man to himself. Perhaps he would even rather condone the sin of adultery than let them think he could not keep the loyalty of a young woman.

She said, “Gorlois—“ but he silenced her with a gesture. “Enough. I have no patience to change many words with you. Once in Tintagel, there you may forget this folly at leisure. As for the Pendragon, he will have quite enough to do at war on the Saxon Shores. If you were glamoured by him, well, you are young and a woman, with small knowledge of the world or of men. I will reproach you no more; within a year or two, you will have a son’to take your mind from this man who has struck your fancy.”

In silence, Igraine allowed Gorlois to lift her to her horse. He must believe whatever it was that he believed, there was nothing she could say to penetrate that iron surface. Yet her mind went back stubbornly to what Viviane and the Merlin had said: that her destiny and Uther’s were bound. After her dream she believed it, she knew why they had come back together. She had begun to accept that this was the will of the Gods. Yet here she was, riding away from Londinium with Gorlois, the alliance in ruins, and Gorlois evidently determined that Uther never set eyes on her again. Certainly with a war on the Saxon Shores Uther would have no leisure to journey to the world’s end at Tintagel, and even if he could, there was no way he could make his way into that castle, which could be defended by only a few men until the sky fell. Gorlois could leave her there, and there she would stay till she was an old woman, shut up bleakly behind walls and the great chasms and crags of rock. Igraine put her cloak over her face and wept.

She would never see Uther again. All the plans of the Merlin were in wreck and ruin; she was bound to an old man she hated—she knew, now, that she hated him, which she had never before allowed herself to know— and the man she loved could think of nothing better to do than to try and bully the proud Gorlois into giving her up of his own free will! Later, she thought she must have wept all through the long journey, all the days and nights which they travelled across the moors and down through the valleys of Cornwall.

On the second night they camped and pitched tents for a proper rest. She welcomed hot food and a chance to sleep within a tent, even though she knew she could no longer avoid Gorlois’s bed. She could not cry out and struggle with him, not when they slept in a tent ringed about by his soldiers. She had been his wife four years; no one alive would believe a tale of ravishment. She would not have the strength to fight him, nor would she want to lose her dignity in a sordid struggle. She set her teeth and resolved to let him do as he would—although she wished she had some of the charms which were said to protect the maidens of the Goddess. When they lay with men at the Beltane fires, they conceived only when they willed it so. It seemed too bitter, that he should beget the son he wanted when she was humbled this way, beaten down utterly.

The Merlin had said it: You will bear Gorlois no son. But she did not trust to the Merlin’s prophecy, not now when she saw the wreck of all his plans. Cruel, scheming old man! He used her as men had always used their daughters since the Romans came, pawns who should marry this man or that as their fathers desired, chattels like a horse or a milk goat! She had found some peace with Gorlois, and that peace had been broken, cruelly and for nothing! She wept silently as she made ready for bed, resigned, despairing, not even confident enough of her own power to drive him away with angry words—she could see from his manner that he was ready to prove himself in possession of her, to drive away memories of any other man by forcing her to take heed of him in the only way he could enforce himself upon her.

His familiar hands on her, his face over her in the dark, were like those of a stranger. And yet, when he drew her to him, he was unable; limp and powerless, and although he pulled and clasped her, trying desperately to rouse himself, it came to nothing, and at last he let her go with a furious whispered curse.

“Have you put some spell upon my manhood, you accursed bitch?”

“I have not,” she said, low, with contempt, “although indeed, if I knew such spells I would have been glad to do so, my strong and gallant husband. Do you expect me to weep because you cannot take me by force? Try it, and I shall lie here and laugh into your face!”

For a moment he raised himself, clenching his fist.

“Yes,” she said, “strike me. It will not be the first time. And perhaps it will make you feel enough like a man that your spear will rise into action!”

With a furious oath, he turned his back on her and lay down again, but Igraine lay awake, shaking, knowing that she had had her revenge. And indeed, all the way to Cornwall, no matter how he tried, Gorlois found himself powerless to touch her, until at last Igraine began to wonder if indeed, without being aware of it, her very righteous wrath had indeed cast some enchantment on his manhood. Even then she knew, with the sure intuition of the priestess-trained, that he would never be potent with her again.

6

Cornwall seemed more than ever at the very end of the world.

In those first days, after Gorlois had left her there under guard—coldly silent now, and without a word for her, good or bad—Igraine had found herself wondering whether Tintagel existed at all in the real world anymore, or whether, like Avalon, it existed only in the mist kingdom, the fairy kingdom, bearing no relationship to the world she had visited in her one brief venture outside.

Even during this brief absence it seemed that Morgaine had grown from babe to small girl, a serious, quiet, small girl who questioned incessantly everything she saw. Morgause too had grown, her body rounding, her childish face taking on definition with its high cheekbones and long-lashed eyes under dark brows; she was, Igraine thought, beautiful, not aware that Morgause was the twin of herself at fourteen. Morgause was ecstatic with the gifts and fairings Igraine had brought her; she frisked around Igraine like a playful puppy, and around Gorlois too. She chattered to him excitedly, practiced sidelong looks, and tried to sit in his lap as if she were a child Morgaine’s age. Igraine saw that Gorlois did not laugh and push her off like a puppy, but stroked the long red hair, smiling, and pinched her cheek.

“You are too big for such foolishness, Morgause,” she said sharply. “Say your thanks to my lord of Cornwall and take your fairings to your room. And put away the silks, for you will not wear such things till you are grown. Don’t think to play the lady here just yet!”

Morgause gathered up the pretty things and went weeping to her room. Igraine saw that Gorlois followed the girl with his eyes. She thought, appalled, Morgause is only fourteen, then remembered in dismay that she herself had been but a year older when she was given to Gorlois as his bride.

Later she saw them together in the hall, Morgause laying her head confidingly on Gorlois’s shoulder, and saw the look in her husband’s eyes. Hard anger struck her, not so much for the girl as for Gorlois. She saw that they moved uneasily apart as she came into the hall, and when Gorlois had gone away, she looked at Morgause, her eyes unsparing, until Morgause giggled uneasily and stared at the floor.

“Why are you looking at me like that, Igraine? Are you afraid that Gorlois likes me better than you?”

“Gorlois was too old for me; is he not that much older than you? With you, he thinks he would have me back as he first knew me, too young to say him nay or to look at another man. I am no longer a pliant girl but a woman with a mind of her own, and perhaps he thinks you would be easier to deal with.”

“Perhaps, then,” Morgause said, insolent now, “you should look to keeping your own husband content, instead of complaining that some other woman can do for him what you cannot.”

Igraine raised her hand to slap the girl, then by sheer force of will, kept herself still. She said, summoning all her self-discipline, “Do you think it matters to me whom Gorlois takes to his bed? I am certain he has had his share of trollops, but I would rather my sister was not among them. I have no wish for his embraces, and if I hated you, I would give you to him willingly. But you are too young. As I was too young. And Gorlois is a Christian man; if you let him lie with you and he gets you with child, he will have no choice but to marry you off in haste to whatever man-at-arms will have used goods—these Romans are not like our own people, Morgause. Gorlois may be smitten with you, but he will not put me away and take you to wife, believe me. Among our own people, maidenhood is of no great consequence—a woman of proven fertility, swelling with a healthy child, is a most desirable wife. But it is not so with these Christians, I tell you; they will treat you as one shamed, and the man he persuades to marry you will make you suffer all your life long that he did not have the planting of the child you bear. Is that what you want, Morgause, who could marry a king if you chose? Will you throw yourself away, sister, to spite me?” Morgause went pale. “I had no idea—“ she whispered. “Oh, no, I do not want to be shamed—Igraine, forgive me.”

Igraine kissed her and gave her the silver mirror and the amber necklace, and Morgause stared at her.

“But these are Gorlois’s gifts—“

“I have sworn I will never again wear his gifts,” she said. “They are yours, for that king the Merlin saw in your future, sister. But you must keep yourself chaste till he comes for you.”

“Have no fear,” Morgause said and smiled again. Igraine was glad that this reminder had caught Morgause’s ambition; Morgause was cool and calculating, she would never be swayed by emotion or impulse. Igraine wished, watching her, that she too had been born without the capacity to love.

I wish I could be content with Gorlois, or that I could seek coldly—as Morgause would surely do—to rid myself of Gorlois and be Uther’s queen.

Gorlois stayed at Tintagel only four days, and she was glad to see him go. He left a dozen men-at-arms at Tintagel, and when he left, he called her to him.

“You and the child will be safe here, and well guarded,” he said curtly. “I go to gather the men of Cornwall against Irish raiders or Northmen— or against Uther, should he seek to come and take what is not his own, woman or castle.”

“I think Uther will have too much to do in his own country for that,” Igraine said, tightening her mouth against despair.

“God grant it,” Gorlois said, “for we have enough enemies without him, too. But I could wish him to come, so that I might show him Cornwall is not his, as he thinks all else is his own for the taking!”

To that Igraine said nothing. Gorlois rode away with his men, and Igraine was left to set her house in order, to recover her old closeness with her child, to try to mend her broken friendship with her sister Morgause.

But the thought of Uther was always with her, busy herself as she might with domestic tasks. It was not even the real Uther who haunted her, the man she had seen in orchard and court and in the church, impulsive and a little boyish, even somewhat boorish and clumsy. That Uther, the Pen-dragon, the High King, frightened her a little—she thought she might even be a little afraid of him, as she had once been of Gorlois. When she thought of Uther the man, thought of kisses and embraces and what more he might desire of her, at times she felt that melting sweetness she had known in her dream, but at other times she was seized with a panic terror, like the ravished child who had risen the morning after her wedding, cold with fear and dread. The thought of the act of marriage seemed terrifying and even grotesque to her, as it had seemed then.

What came back to her, again and again, in the silence of the night when she lay with Morgaine sleeping at her side, or when she sat on the terrace by the sea and guided her daughter’s hands in her first clumsy attempts to spin, was the other Uther, the Uther she had known at the ring of stones outside time and ordinary place; the priest of Atlantis, with whom she had shared the Mysteries. That Uther she knew she would love as her own life, that she could never fear him or dread him, and whatever happened between them, it would be a sweetness, a joy greater than she had ever known. Quite simply, when she came near him, she knew that she had discovered some lost part of herself; with him she was whole. Whatever might happen between them as ordinary man and woman, something lay beyond it which would never die or lessen in its intensity. They shared a destiny, and somehow they must fulfill it together  ...  and often when she had come so far in her thoughts she would stop and stare at herself in disbelief. Was she mad, with her fancies of shared destiny and the other half of her soul? Surely the facts were simpler and less pretty. She, a married woman, a decent matron and the mother of a child, had simply grown besotted with a younger and handsomer man than her lawful husband, and had fallen into a daydream of him and thereby quarreled with the good and honorable man to whom she had been given. And she would sit and spin, gritting her teeth with frantic guilt, and wonder if her whole life was to be spent in atonement for a sin only half-consciously committed.

The spring wore away into summer, and the Beltane fires were long past. Heat spread its haze over the land, and the sea lay blue and so clear that it seemed, at times, that far away in the clouds Igraine could see the forgotten cities of Lyonnesse and Atlantis. The days had begun to shorten, and there was sometimes frost in the nights again, when Igraine heard the first far rumblings of war—the men-at-arms brought news from the market town that there had been Irish raiders on the coast, that they had burnt a village and a church and carried off one or two women, and there were armies, not those commanded by Gorlois, marching west into the Summer Country and north to Wales.

“What armies?” Igraine asked the man, and he said, “I don’t know, lady, for I didn’t see them; those who did said they bore eagles like the Roman legions of the old days, which is impossible. But he said, also, that they bore a red dragon on their banner.”

Uther! thought Igraine, with a pang, Uther is near, and he will not even know where I am! Only then did she ask for news of Gorlois, and the man told her that her husband, too, was in the Summer Country, and that the armies were making some sort of council there.

She gazed long into her old bronze mirror that night, wishing that it were the scrying glass of a priestess, that could see what was happening far away!

She longed to take counsel with Viviane, or with the Merlin. They had wrought all this trouble—had they abandoned her now? Why did they not come to see how their plans lay all in wreck? Had they found some other woman of the correct lineage, to throw her into Uther’s path, to bear this king who would one day heal all the land and all the warring peoples?

But no word or message came from Avalon, and Igraine was not allowed by the men-at-arms even to ride to the market town; Gorlois, so the men said respectfully, had forbidden it because of the state of the country. Once, looking from the high window, she saw a rider approaching, and on the inner causeway stop to parley with the head man of the guards. The rider looked angry, and seemed to Igraine to look up at the walls in frustration, but finally he turned his back and rode away, and Igraine wondered if this had been a messenger sent to her whom the guardsman would not allow access.

She was, then, a prisoner in her husband’s castle. He might say, or even believe, that he had placed her there for her own protection, against the turmoil in the land, but the truth was otherwise: his jealousy had led him to imprison her here. She tested her theory a few days later, calling the head of the guards to her.

“I wish to send a message to my sister, asking her to come and visit,” she said. “Will you send a man with a message to Avalon?”

It seemed to her that the man avoided her eyes. He said, “Well, now, lady, I can’t do that. My lord of Cornwall said very explicitly that all of us were to stay right here and protect Tintagel in case of a siege.”

“Can’t you hire a rider in the village then, to make the journey, if I paid the man well?”

“My lord wouldn’t like that, lady. I’m sorry.”

“I see,” she said, and sent him away. She had not yet come to the point of desperation at which she would try to bribe one of the men. But the more she pondered this, the angrier she grew. How dared Gorlois imprison her here, she who was sister to the Lady of Avalon? She was his wife, not his slave or servant! At last she resolved on a desperate step.

She had not been trained in the Sight; she had used it a little, spontaneously, as a girl, but except for her brief vision of Viviane, she had never used it at all as a grown woman, and since her vision of Gorlois as death-doomed she had closed herself firmly to further visions. That one, the Gods knew, had come to nothing, for Gorlois was still very much alive. Yet somehow, she supposed, she might now manage to see what was to happen. It was a dangerous step—she had been reared on tales of what befell those” who meddled in arts to which they were not trained, and at first she sought to compromise. As the first leaves began to turn yellow, she called the chief of the men-at-arms to her again.

“I cannot stay here forever, shut like a rat in a trap,” she said. “I must go to the market fair. We must buy dyes and there is need of a new milk goat, and of needles and pins, and many things for the winter which comes.”

“Lady, I have no orders to let you go abroad,” he said, and turned his eyes from her. “I take my orders from my lord, and I have heard nothing from him.”

“Then I will stay here and send one of my women,” she said. “Ettarr or Isotta shall go, and the lady Morgause with her—will that suffice?”

He looked relieved, as she had hit upon a solution to save him from disobeying his lord; for indeed it was necessary that someone from the household should visit a fair before the winter, and he knew it as well as she did. It was outrageous to keep the lady of the house from what was, after all, one of her proper duties.

Morgause was wildly happy when Igraine told her she was to go. Small wonder, Igraine thought. None of us has been abroad all this summer. The very shepherds are freer than we, for they at least take the sheep to graze on the mainland! She watched, frankly envious, as Morgause put on the crimson cloak Gorlois had given her, and, with the chaperonage of two men-at-arms as well as both Ettarr and Isotta and two of the kitchen women to carry packages and goods, set forth on her pony. She watched from the causeway, holding Morgaine by the hand, until they were out of sight, and felt that she could not endure to reenter the castle which had become a prison to her.

“Mother,” Morgaine asked at her side, “why can we not go to the market with Auntie?”

“Because your father does not wish us to go, my poppet.”

“Why does not he want us to go? Does he think we will be naughty?”

Igraine laughed and said, “Indeed, I think that is what he believes, daughter.”

Morgaine was silent—a small, quiet, self-possessed little creature, her dark hair now long enough to plait into a little braid halfway down her shoulder blades, but so fine and straight that it slipped out into loose elf locks around her shoulders. Her eyes were dark and serious, and her eyebrows straight and level, so heavy already that they were the most definite feature of her face. A little fairy woman, Igraine thought, not human at all; a pixie. She was no larger than the shepherd girl’s babe who was not yet quite two, though Morgaine was nearing four, and spoke as clearly and thoughtfully’ as a great girl of eight or nine. Igraine caught up the child in her arms and hugged her.

“My little changeling!”

Morgaine suffered the caress, and even kissed her mother in return, which surprised Igraine, for Morgaine was not a demonstrative child, but soon she began to stir fretfully—she was not the kind of child who wished to be held for long; she would do everything for herself. She had even begun to dress herself and buckle her own shoes on her feet. Igraine set her down and Morgaine walked sedately at her side back into the castle.

Igraine sat down at her loom, telling Morgaine to take her spindle and sit beside her. The little girl obeyed, and Igraine, setting her shuttle in motion, stopped for a moment to watch her. She was neat-handed and precise; her thread was clumsy, but she twirled the spindle deftly as if it were a toy, twisting it between her small fingers. If her hands were bigger, she would already spin as well as Morgause. After a time Morgaine said, “I do not remember my father, Mother. Where is he?”

“He is away with his soldiers in the Summer Country, daughter.’

“When will he come home?”

“I do not know, Morgaine. Do you want him to come home?”

She considered a moment. “No,” she said, “because when he was here—I remember it just a little—I had to go sleep in Auntie’s room and it was dark there and I was afraid at first. Of course I was very little then,” she added solemnly, and Igraine concealed a smile. After a minute’; she went on, “And I do not want him to come home because he made you cry.

Well, Viviane had said it; women did not give babes enough credit for understanding what was going on around them.

“Why do you not have another baby, Mother? Other women have a. baby as soon as the older one is weaned, and I am already four. I heard Isotta say you should have given me a baby brother. I think I would like to have a little brother to play with, or even a little sister.”

Igraine actually started to say, “Because your father Gorlois—“ and then stopped herself. No matter how adult Morgaine might sound, she only four years old, and Igraine could not confide such things to h “Because the Mother Goddess did not see fit to send me a son, child.’

Father Columba came out on the terrace. He said austerely, “You should not talk to the child of Goddesses and superstition. Gorlois wishes her to be reared as a good Christian maiden. Morgaine, your mother did not have a son because your father was angry with her, and God withheld a son to punish her for her sinful will.”

Not for the first time, Igraine felt that she would like to throw her shuttle at this black crow of ill omen. Had Gorlois confessed to this man, was he aware of all that had passed between them? She had often wondered that, in the moons that had passed, but she had never had any excuse to ask and knew he would not tell her if she did. Suddenly Morgaine stood up and made a face at the priest, “Go away, old man,” she said clearly. “I don’t like you. You have made my mother cry. My mother knows more than you do, and if she says that it is the Goddess who did not send her a child, I will believe what she says, and not what you say, because my mother does not tell lies!”

Father Columba said angrily to Igraine, “Now you see what comes of your willfulness, my lady? That child should be beaten. Give her to me and I will punish her for her disrespect!”

And at this all Igraine’s rage and rebelliousness exploded. Father Columba had advanced toward Morgaine, who stood without flinching. Igraine stepped between them. “If you lay a hand on my daughter, priest,” she said, “I will kill you where you stand. My husband brought you here, and I cannot send you away, but on the day you come into my presence again, I will spit on you. Get out of my sight!”

He stood his ground. “My lord Gorlois entrusted me with the spiritual well-being of this entire household, my lady, and I am not given to pride, so I will forgive what you have said.”

“I care as little for your forgiveness as for that of the billy goat! Get out of my sight or I will call my serving-women and have you put out. Unless you want to be carried out of here, old man, get from here and do not presume to come into my presence until I send for you—and that will be when the sun rises over western Ireland! Go!”

The priest stared at her blazing eyes, at her uplifted hand, and scuttled out of the room.

Now that she had committed an act of open rebellion, she was paralyzed at her own temerity. But at least it had freed her from the priest, and freed Morgaine, too. She would not have her daughter brought up to feel shame at her own womanhood.

Morgause came back late that night from the fair, having chosen all her purchases carefully—Igraine knew she could not have done better herself—with a lump of loaf sugar for Morgaine to suck, which she had bought with her own pocket money, and full of tales from the marketplace. The sisters sat until midnight in Igraine’s room, talking long after Morgaine had fallen asleep, sucking on her sugar candy, her small face sticky and her hands still clutching it. Igraine took it away and wrapped it for her, and came back to ask further news of Morgause.

This is ignoble, that I must hear news from the marketplace about the doings of my own husband!

“There is a great gathering in the Summer Country,” Morgause said. “They say that the Merlin has made peace between Lot and Uther. They say, too, that Ban of Less Britain has allied with them, and is sending them horses brought from Spain—“ She stumbled a little over the name. “Where is that, Igraine? Is it in Rome?”

“No, but it is far in the south, nearer than we to Rome by many, many leagues,” Igraine told her.

“There was a battle with the Saxons, and Uther was there with the dragon banner,” Morgause told her. “I heard a harper telling it like a ballad, how the Duke of Cornwall had imprisoned his lady in Tintagel—“ In the darkness Igraine could see that the girl’s eyes were wide, her lips parted. “Igraine, tell me true, was Uther your lover?”

“He was not,” Igraine said, “but Gorlois believed he was, and that is why he quarreled with Uther. He did not believe me when I told him the truth.” Her throat choked tight with tears. “I wish now that it had been the truth.”

“They say King Lot is handsomer than Uther,” Morgause said, “and that he is seeking a wife, and it is whispered in gossip that he would challenge Uther to be High King, if he thought he could do so safely. Is he handsomer than Uther? Is Uther as godlike as they say, Igraine?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, Morgause.”

“Why, they say he was your lover—“

“I do not care what they say,” Igraine interrupted her, “but as for that, I suppose as the world reckons such things, both of them are fine-looking men, Lot dark, and Uther blond like a Northman. But it was not for his fair face that I thought Uther the better man.”

“What was it then?” asked Morgause, bright and inquisitive, and Igraine sighed, knowing the young girl would not understand. But the hunger to share at least a little of what she felt, and could never say to anyone, drove her to say, “Why—I hardly know. Only—it was as if I had known him from the beginning of the world, as if he could never be strange to me, whatever he did or whatever befell between us.”

“But if he never so much as kissed you  ... ”

“It does not matter,” Igraine said wearily, and then at last, weeping, said what she had known for a long time now, and had been unwilling to admit. “Even should I never again look upon his face in this life, I am bound to him and I shall be so bound until I die. And I cannot believe the Goddess would have wrought this upheaval in my life, if I was meant never again to see him.”

By the dim light she could see that Morgause was looking at her with awe and a measure of envy, as if in the younger girl’s eyes Igraine had suddenly become the heroine of some old romantic tale. She wanted to say to her, no, it is not like that, it is not romantic at all, it is simply what has happened, but she knew there was no way to say that, for Morgause had not the experience to tell romance from this sort of ultimate reality, rock-hard at the bottom of imagination or fantasy. Let her think it romance, then, if it pleases her, Igraine thought, and realized that this kind of reality would never come to Morgause: it was a different world she lived in.

Now she had taken the step of alienating the priest who was Gorlois’s man, and another step in confessing to Morgause that she loved Uther. Viviane had said something of worlds drawing apart one from the other, and it seemed to Igraine as if she had begun to dwell on some world apart from the ordinary one in which Gorlois perhaps had a right to expect that she be his faithful chattel, servant, slave—his wife. Only Morgaine now bound her to that world. She looked at the sticky-handed, sleeping child, her dark hair scattered wildly around her, and at her wide-eyed younger sister, and wondered if, at the call of this thing that had happened to her, she would abandon even these last hostages which held her to the real world.

The thought gave great pain, but inside herself she whispered, “Yes. Even that.”

AND SO THE NEXT STEP, which she had feared so greatly, became simple to her.

She lay awake that night between Morgause and her child, trying to decide what she must do. Should she run away and trust to Uther’s part in the vision to find her? Almost at once she rejected that thought. Should she send Morgause, with secret instructions to flee to Avalon and bear a message that she was imprisoned? No; if it was common talk—a ballad in the marketplace—that she was imprisoned, her sister would have come to her if she thought that it would help. And ever at her heart gnawed the silent voice of doubt and despair. Her vision had been a false one ... or perhaps, when she had not flung all aside for Uther, they had abandoned the plan, found another woman for Uther, and the saving of Britain, as, should the high priestess be ill for the great Celebration, they would choose another for her part.

Toward morning, as the sky was already paling, she fell into a dazed sleep. And there, when she had ceased to hope for it, she found guidance. Just as she woke, it was as if a voice said inside her mind, Rid yourself for this one day of the child, and the maiden, and you will know what to do.

The day dawned clear and shining, and as they broke their fast on goat’s cheese and new-baked bread, Morgause looked at the shining sea and said, “I am so weary of staying withindoors—I did not know till yesterday at the market how weary I am grown of this house!”

“Take Morgaine, then, and go out for the day with the shepherd women,” Igraine suggested. “She too would like to go abroad, I imagine.”

She wrapped up slices of meat and bread for them; to Morgaine it was like a festival. Igraine saw them go, hoping now for some way to evade the watchful eyes of Father Columba, for, although he followed her will and had not spoken to her, his eyes followed her everywhere. But at midmoming, as she sat weaving, he came into her presence and said, “Lady—“

She did not look up at him. “I bade you stay away from me, priest. Complain of me to Gorlois when he comes home if you will, but do not speak to me.”

“One of Gorlois’s men has been hurt in a fall from the cliffs. His comrades think he is dying, and have bidden me to come to him. You need not be afraid; you will be properly guarded.”

She had known that—it had never occurred to her that, if she could get rid of the priest, she might somehow make her escape. In any case, where could she go? This was Gorlois’s country and none of his people would shelter an escaped wife from his wrath. Simple flight had never been her intention. “Go and the Devil take you, so that you come not into my presence,” and turned her back.

“If you presume to curse me, woman—“

“Why should I waste my breath with a curse? I would as willingly bid you Godspeed to your own heaven, and may your God find more pleasure in your company than I do.”

Once he had gone, hurrying on his little donkey across the causeway, she knew why she had felt she must rid herself of the priest. In his own way he was an initiate of the Mysteries, though they were not her Mysteries, and he would be quick to know and to disapprove of what she meant to do. She went to Morgause’s room and found the silver mirror. Then she went down to the kitchens to ask the serving-women to make a fire in her room. They stared, for the day was not cold, but she repeated it as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and fetched herself a few other things from the kitchen: salt and a little oil, a bit of bread and a small flask of wine— these, no doubt, the women thought she wanted for her noon meal—and she took a bit of cheese too to conceal her intent, and later flung it to the sea gulls.

Outside in the garden she found lavender flowers and managed to find a few wild-rose hips. Boughs of juniper, too, she cut with her own small knife, only a few symbolic branches, and a small piece of hazel. Once in her room again she drew the bolt and stripped off her garments, standing naked and shivering before the fire. She had never done this, and knew Viviane would not approve, for those who were unskilled in the arts of sorcery could cause trouble for themselves by meddling with it. But with these things, she knew, she could conjure the Sight even if she had it not.

She cast the juniper on the fire, and as the smoke rose, bound the branch of hazel to her forehead. She laid fruit and flowers before the fire, then touched salt and oil to her breast, took a bite of the bread and a sip of the wine, then, trembling, laid the silver mirror where the firelight shone on it and, from the barrel which was kept for washing the women’s hair, poured clear rainwater across the silver surface of the mirror.

She whispered, “By common things and by uncommon, by water and fire, salt and oil and wine, by fruit and flowers together, I beg you, Goddess, let me see my sister Viviane.”

Slowly, the surface of the water stirred. Igraine, in a sudden icy wind, shivered, wondering for a moment if the spell would fail, if her sorcery were blasphemy as well. The blurred face forming in the mirror was first her own, then slowly it shifted, changed, was the awesome face of the Goddess, with the rowanberries bound about her brow. And then, as it cleared and steadied, Igraine saw; but not, as she had hoped and foreseen, into a living, speaking face. She looked into a room which she knew. It had once been the chamber of her mother at Avalon, and there were women there, in the dark robes of priestesses, and at first she looked in vain for her sister, for the women were coming and going, and moving back and forth, and there was confusion in the chamber. And then she saw her sister, Viviane; she looked weary and ill and drawn, and she was walking, walking back and forth, leaning on the arm of one of the other priestesses, and Igraine knew, in horror, what she saw. For Viviane, in her pale robe of undyed wool, was heavy with child, her belly swollen, her face dragged down with suffering, and ever she walked and walked, as, Igraine remembered, the midwives had made her do when she was in labor with Morgaine ...  .

No, no! Oh, Mother Ceridwen, blessed Goddess, no ... our mother so died, but Viviane was so sure she was past childbearing  ...  and now she will die, she cannot bear a child at her age and live  ...  why, when she knew she had conceived, did she not take some potion to rid her of the child? This is the wreck of all their plans, then, it is the end ...  .

I too have thrown my life into ruin with a dream  ...  and then Igraine was ashamed of herself that she could think of her own misery when Viviane was to lie down in childbed from which it could hardly be hoped that she would ever rise again. In horror, weeping in dread, she could not even turn from the mirror, and then Viviane raised her head, looking past the head of the priestess on whose arm she leaned, and into her dulled eyes, drawn with anguish, came recognition and tenderness. Igraine could not hear her, but it was as if Viviane spoke directly to her mind.

Little girl  ...  little sister  ...  Grainne  ...

Igraine wanted to cry out to her, in sorrow and grief and fear, but she could not lay her own weight of sorrows upon Viviane now. She poured all her heart into a single outcry.

I hear you, my mother, my sister, my priestess, and my goddess ...  .

Igraine, I tell you, even in this hour do not lose hope, do not despair! There is a pattern to all our sufferings, I have seen it  ...  do not despair  ...  and for a moment, her hair rising on her forearms, Igraine actually felt on her cheek a light touch, like the lightest of kisses, and Viviane whispered, “Little sister  ... ” and then Igraine saw her sister’s face contorted with pain and she fell as if swooning into the arms of the priestess, and a wind ruffled the water of the mirror, and Igraine saw her own face, blurred with weeping, looking out through the water. She shivered, clutching some garment, anything to warm her, and flung the sorcerous mirror into the fire; then she threw herself down on her bed and wept.

Viviane told me not to despair. But how can I do other than despair, when she is dying?

She lay there, weeping herself into a stupor. At last, when she could not cry another tear, she rose wearily and washed her face in cold water. Viviane was dying, perhaps even dead. But her last words had been to bid Igraine not lose hope. She dressed herself and hung about her throat the moonstone Viviane had given her. And then, with a little stirring of the air before her, she saw Uther.

This time she knew it was a Sending, and not the man himself. Nothing human, certainly not Uther Pendragon, could have come into her guarded chamber without some man seeing and stopping him. He wore a heavy plaid about him, but on his arms—and this is why she knew it no dream—he wore the serpents she had seen when she dreamed of his life in Atlantis. Only they were not now golden torques, but live serpents, which raised their heads, hissing; only she did not fear them.

“My beloved,” he said, and although it was the very tone of his voice, the room was silent in the light of the flickering fire, and through the whispered voice she heard the small crackling of the juniper twigs. “I will come to you at Midwinter. I swear it, I will come to you, whatever may bar the way. Make ready for me at Midwinter—“

And then she was alone, with only the sun in the room, and the reflection of the sea outside, and in the courtyard below, the laughing voices of Morgause and her little daughter.

Igraine drew a long breath, calmly drank the rest of the wine. On an empty stomach, fasting, she felt it rise to her head with a sort of dizzy elation. Then she went quietly down the stairs to await the news she knew would come.

7

What happened first was that Gorlois came home. Still flustered with the elation of that moment of vision—and frightened, for she had never really thought that Viviane could die, and in spite of the words of hope, she could not imagine, now that Viviane could live—Igraine had expected something else; some magical news of Uther, or word that Gorlois was dead and that she was free. Gorlois himself, dust-covered and hungry and scowling, was half calculated to make Igraine think her vision no more than self-deception or a delusion of the Evil One.

Well, if it is so, there is good in that too, for it would mean that my sister lives and my vision of her was a delusion born of my own fears. And so she welcomed Gorlois calmly, with food and a bath and clean dry clothes, and only pleasant words. Let him think, if he would, that she was repenting her harshness and trying to curry his favor again. It no longer mattered to her what Gorlois thought or what he did. She no longer hated him or resented the early years of misery and despair. Her sufferings had made her ready for what would come after. She served Gorlois his food and drink, saw to the housing of his men as was suitable, and forbore to question him. She brought Morgaine for a moment, washed and combed and pretty, for her curtsey to her father, then had Isotta take her away to bed.

Gorlois sighed, pushing away his plate. “She grows good-looking; but she is like a fairy child, one of the folk of the hollow hills. Where came she by such blood? There is none of it among my people.”

“But my mother was of the old blood,” Igraine said, “and Viviane, too. I think her father must have been one of the fairy folk.”

Gorlois shivered and said, “And you don’t even know who fathered her—one thing that the Romans did well was to make an end of those folk. I fear no armed man that I can slay, but I fear those underground folk of the hollow hills, with their enchanted circles and their food that can lead you to wander a hundred years in enchantment, and their elf bolts which come out of the dark and strike a man down, unshriven, to send him to the hells ...  . The Devil made them for the death of Christians, and it is the work of God to kill them, I think!”

Igraine thought of the herbs and simples which the women of the fairy folk brought even to their conquerors for healing; of the poison arrows that could bring down game which could be taken no other way; of her own mother, born of the fairy people, and of Viviane’s unknown father. And Gorlois, like the Romans, would make an end of these simple people in the name of his God? “Well,” she said, “that must be as God wills, I suppose.”

“Morgaine perhaps should be brought up in a convent of holy women, so that the great evil she has inherited from your old blood will never taint her,” Gorlois mused. “When she is old enough, we will see to it. A holy man told me once that women bear the blood of their mothers, and so it has been since the days of Eve, that what is within women, who are filled with sin, cannot be overcome by a woman-child; but that a son will bear his father’s blood even as Christ was made in the image of God his father. So if we have a son, Igraine, we need not fear that he will show the blood of the old evil folk of the hills.”

A surge of anger rippled through Igraine, but she had pledged herself not to anger him. “That too must be as your God wills.” For she knew, if he had forgotten, that he would never touch her again as a man touches a woman. It did not matter now what he said or did. “Tell me what has brought you home so unexpectedly, my husband.”

“Uther, of course,” Gorlois said. “There has been a great kingmaking on Dragon Island, which is near to Glastonbury of the priests—I know not why the priests allow it to stand there, for it is a heathen place, and there they have paid homage to their Horned One of the woods, and raised serpents, and such foolishness as it is not fitting should be done in a Christian land. King Leodegranz, who is king of the Summer Country, stands with me and has refused to make compact with Uther. Leodegranz likes Uther no more than I, but he will not make war on the Pendragon now; it is not fitting that we should war among ourselves with the Saxons gathering on the eastern shores. If the Scots come this summer, we will be caught between hammer and anvil. And now Uther has sent an ultimatum—that I must put my Cornishmen under his command, or he will come and force me to. And so I am here—we can hold Tintagel forever, if we must. But I have warned Uther that if he sets foot in Cornwall I will fight him. Leodegranz has made truce with Uther, until the Saxons are gone from this country, but I would not.”

“In God’s name, that is folly,” Igraine said, “for Leodegranz is right —the Saxons could not stand, if all men of Britain stood together. If you quarrel among yourselves, the Saxons can attack you one kingdom at a time, and before long all Britain will serve the Horse Gods!”

Gorlois pushed his dishes aside. “I do not expect a woman to know anything of honor, Igraine. Come to bed.”

SHE HAD THOUGHT it would not matter now what he did to her, that she was past caring; but she had not been prepared for the despairing struggle of Gorlois’s pride. At the last he had beaten her again, cursing. “You have put an enchantment on my manhood, you damned witch!”

When he had fallen into exhausted sleep, Igraine, her bruised face throbbing, lay awake, weeping quietly at his side. So this was the reward of her meekness, just as it had been the reward of her hard words? Now indeed she was justified in hating him, and in a way she was relieved to feel no guilt for her loathing. Suddenly, and with violence, she hoped Uther would kill him.

He rode away the next morning at daylight, taking all but a scant half-dozen men who were left to defend Tintagel. From the talk she heard in the hall before they went, she knew he was hoping to ambush Uther’s invading army as it came down from the moors into the valley. And all this for what he called honor; he would deprive all Britain of her High King, leave the land naked like a woman to be ravished by the Saxon hordes— all because he was not man enough for his wife and feared that Uther would be.

When he had gone, the days dragged along, rainy and silent. Then the first frosts came, with snow sweeping across the moors, and even the moors themselves were out of sight except on the clearest of days. She longed for news; she felt like a badger trapped in a winter burrow.

Midwinter. Uther had said he would come to her at Midwinter—but now she began to wonder if it had been only a dream. As the autumn days lagged by, dark and cold, she began to doubt the vision, yet she knew that any attempt to repeat it, to bring herself reassurance, would not help. She had been taught in her childhood that such dependence on magical art was wrong. It was allowed to search for a glimpse of light in the darkness, and that she had done; but magic must not become a child’s leading strings for walking, lest she become unable to take a single step without the need for supernatural guidance.

I have never been able to rely on myself, she thought bitterly. When she had been a child, she had looked for guidance to Viviane; but no sooner than she was grown to womanhood, she had been married to Gorlois, and he felt that she should look to him in all things, or in his absence turn to Father Columba for constant counsel.

So now, knowing she had the chance to begin to do her own thinking, she turned inward upon herself. She schooled her daughter in spinning, and began to teach her sister Morgause how to weave in colors; hoarded her supply of food, for it began to look as if the winter might be colder and longer than usual; and listened ravenously to such small scraps of news as came to her from the shepherds when they went to market, or from any travellers—but there were few of these, as the winter closed down over Tintagel.

It was past Samhain when a peddler woman came to the castle, wrapped in rags and torn shawls, weary and footsore. Her feet were bound in rags and she herself was none too clean, but Igraine brought her in and gave her a place by the fire and a ladle of rich goat’s-meat stew with the stale bread which would have been her ordinary portion. When she saw that the woman was limping from a stone bruise, she asked the cook to heat some water, and found a cleaner rag to bind it. She bought two needles from the woman’s pack—they were coarse enough, she had better ones, but they would do to teach Morgaine her first stitches. Then, feeling she had earned it, she asked the woman if there was any news from the North.

“Soldiers, lady,” said the old woman, sighing, “and Saxons gathering on the northern roads, too, and a battle  ...  and Uther with his dragon banner, Saxons to the north of him, and, they say, the Duke of Cornwall against him to the south. Battle everywhere, even to the Holy Isle—“ Igraine demanded, “You have come from the Holy Isle?”

“Yes, lady, I was benighted by the lakes there, and lost in the mist. ... The priests gave me dry bread and bade me come to mass and be shriven, but what sins has an old woman like me? My sins are all done and over, all forgotten and forgiven and not even regretted anymore,” she said with her thin laughter; it seemed to Igraine that she had not much wit, and what little she had, had been scattered by hardship and solitude and long wandering. “And indeed there is little opportunity for the old and poor to sin, except to doubt God’s goodness, and if God cannot understand why we doubt that, then he is not as wise as his priests think, heh heh heh  ...  but I had no taste to listen to mass and it was colder inside their church than without, so I wandered in the mist and the fog, and then I saw a boat, and somehow I came to the Holy Isle, and there the women of the Lady gave me food and fire, like you  ...  heh heh heh ...  .”

“You saw the.Lady?” Igraine demanded, leaning forward and looking into the woman’s face. “Oh, give me news of her, she is my sister ...  .”

“Aye, she said as much to me, that her sister was wife to the Duke of Cornwall, if the Duke of Cornwall still lived, which she did not know about, heh heh heh ...  . Oh, aye, she gave me a message for you, that is why I came here through moors and rocks where my poor feet were mangled by all the stones, heh heh heh  ...  now what did she say to me, poor me, I can’t remember, I think I lost the message in the mists around the Holy Isle, the priests, you know, they told me there was no Holy Isle, not never no more, they said, God had sunk it in the sea and if I thought I had been entertained there it was only witchcraft and the delusions of the devil ...  .” She paused, bent and cackling; Igraine waited.

Finally she asked, “Tell me of the Lady of Avalon. Did you see her?”

“Oh, aye, I saw her, not like you she is, but like a fairy woman, little and dark....” The woman’s eyes brightened and then cleared. “Now I mind the message. She said, tell my sister Igraine that she should remember her dreams and not lose hope, and I laughed at that, heh heh heh, what good are dreams, except perhaps to you ladies in your great houses, not much good to those of us who wander the roads in the fog ...  . Ah, yes, this too: she was delivered of a fine son at harvesttime, and she bade me say that she was well beyond all hopes and expectations, and that she had named the boy Galahad.”

Igraine let out a long sigh of relief. So Viviane had indeed, against all hope, survived childbed.

The peddler woman went on, “She also said, heh heh heh, that he was a king’s son and that it was fitting that one king’s son should serve another ...  . Does this mean anything to you, my lady? It sounds like more dreams and moon shadows, heh heh heh. ...” And she collapsed into giggling, hunched in her rags, spreading her thin hands to the warmth of the fire.

But Igraine knew the meaning of the message. One king’s son should serve another. So Viviane had indeed borne a son to King Ban of Less Britain, after the rite of the Great Marriage. And if, in the prophecy she and the Merlin had made, Igraine should bear a son to Uther, High King of Britain, one should serve the other. For a moment she felt herself trembling on the edge of the same hysterical laughter as the demented old woman’s. The bride is not yet brought to bed and here we make arrangement for the fostering of the sons!

In her heightened state, Igraine saw these children, the born and the unborn, crowding round her like shadows; was Viviane’s son Galahad to be the dark twin, the bane of her unborn son by Uther? It seemed to Igraine that she could see them in the flickering of the fire: a dark, slender lad with Viviane’s eyes; a stripling with shining hair like a Northman’s.. . and then, flashing in the firelight, she saw the Holy Regalia of the Druids, kept now at Avalon since the Romans burned the sacred groves—dish and cup and sword and spear, gleaming and flashing to the four elements: dish of earth, cup of water, sword of fire, and the spear or wand of air ... she thought, drowsily, stirring as the fire flashed and flickered, that there was a piece of the regalia for each of them. How fortunate.

Fiercely she blinked, drawing herself upright. The fire had died to coals; the old peddler woman slept, her feet tucked under the shawls and rags, as close as she could roll herself to the fire. The hall was all but empty. Her waiting-woman drowsed on a bench, wrapped tightly in shawl and cloak; the other serving folk had gone to bed. Had she slept here half the night by the fire and dreamed it all? She roused the sleeping waiting-woman, who grumbled off to her own bed. Leaving the old peddler woman to sleep by the fire, Igraine crept shivering to her own room, crawling in beside Morgaine and clutching the child tight, as if to ward off fantasies and fear. “

WINTER SET IN, then, in earnest. There was not much wood for fuel at Tintagel, only a kind of rock which would burn, but it smoked evilly and blackened doors and ceilings. Sometimes they had to burn dried seaweed, which made the whole castle stink of dead fish like the sea at low tide. And at last rumor began to speak of Uther’s armies, drawing near to Tintagel, ready to cross the great moors.

Under ordinary conditions, Uther’s army could beat Gorlois’s men into submission. But if they are ambushed? Uther does not know the country! He would feel himself threatened enough by the rocky and unfamiliar terrain, knowing Gorlois’s armies would be massed near Tintagel. Uther would not be expecting a nearer ambush!

She could do nothing but wait. It was a woman’s fate to sit at home, in castle or cot—it had been so since the Romans came. Before that, the Celtic Tribes had followed the counsel of their women, and far to the north there had been an island of women warriors who made weapons and tutored the war chiefs in the use of arms ...  .

Igraine lay awake night after night, thinking of her husband and of her lover. If, she thought, you can call a man your lover when you have never exchanged a single kiss. Uther had sworn he would come to her at Midwinter, but how could he cross the moors and break through the trap of Gorlois, lying in wait for him  ...  ?

If only she were a trained sorceress or a priestess like Viviane. She had been reared on tales of the evil involved in using sorcery to enforce one’s own will on the Gods. Was it, then, a good thing to allow Uther to be waylaid and his men murdered? She told herself Uther would have spies and scouts and needed no woman’s help. Still she felt, disconsolate, that there must be something better for her to do than to sit and wait.

A few days before Midwinter-night, a storm blew up and raged for two days, so fiercely that Igraine knew that northward, on the moors, nothing which was not burrowed like a rabbit in its hole could possibly live. Even safely within the castle, people crouched near the few fires and listened, trembling, to the raging of the wind. During the day it was so dark, with snow and sleet, that Igraine could not even see to spin. The supply of rushlights was so limited that she did not dare exhaust it further, for there was still a long weight of winter to bear, so most of the time they sat in the dark, and Igraine tried to remember old stories from Avalon, to keep Morgaine amused and quiet and Morgause from fretting with boredom and weariness.

But when at last the child and the young girl had fallen asleep, Igraine sat wrapped in her cloak before the remnants of the small fire, too tense to lie down, knowing that if she did, she would lie wakeful, staring with aching eyes into the darkness, trying to send her thoughts over the leagues that lay between  ...  where? To Gorlois, to find where his treachery had led? For it was treachery: he had sworn alliance with Uther as his High King, and then, because of his own jealousy and mistrust, broken his word.

Or to Uther, trying to make camp on these unfamiliar moors, battered by the storm, lost, blinded?

How could she reach Uther? She gathered to herself all the memories of what small training she had had in magic when she was a girl in Avalon. Body and soul, she had been taught, were not firmly bonded; in sleep the soul left the body and went to the country of dreams, where all was illusion and folly, and sometimes, in the Druid-trained, to the country of truth, where Merlin’s leading had taken her in dream that one time.

  ...  Once, when Morgaine was being born, and the pains seemed to have gone on forever, she had briefly left her body, seen herself lying down below, a racked thing fussed over by the midwives and encouraged by her women, while she floated, free of pain and elated, somewhere above; then someone had bent over her, urgently telling her that now she must work harder, for they could see the crown of the baby’s head, and she had come back to renewed pain and fierce effort, and she had forgotten. But if she could do it then, she could do it now. Shivering in her cloak, Igraine stared at the fire, and willed herself, abruptly, to be elsewhere ...  .

She had done it. She seemed to stand before herself, her whole awareness sharply focused. The main change was that she could no longer hear the wild wailing of the storm outside the walls of the castle. She did not look back—she had been told that when you left your body, you must never look back, for the body will draw back the soul—but somehow she could see without eyes, all round her, and knew that her body was still sitting motionless before the dying fire. Now that she had done it she felt frightened, thinking, I should mend the fire first—but she knew if she went back into her body she would never have the courage to try this again.

She thought of Morgaine, the living bond between herself and Gorlois —even though he now rejected it, spoke scathingly of the child, still the bond was there, and she could find Gorlois if she sought him. Even as the thought formed in her mind, she was  ...  elsewhere.

  ...  Where was she? There was the flare of a small lamp, and by its fitful light she saw her husband, surrounded by a cluster of heads: men huddled together in one of the small stone huts on the moors.

Gorlois was saying, “I have fought beside Uther for many years, under Ambrosius, and if I know him at all, he will count on courage and surprise.

His people do not know our Cornish weather, and it will not occur to them that if the sun sets in raging storm, it will clear soon after midnight; so they will not move till the sun rises, but he will be out and about the moment the sun is above the horizon, hoping to fall on us while it is still early. But if we can surround his camp in those hours between the clearing of the sky and the sunrise, then as they break camp we can surprise them. They will be prepared for a march, not a battle. With just a little luck we can take them before they have their weapons well out of the sheath! Once Uther's army is cut to pieces, if he himself is not killed, he will at least turn tail and get out of Cornwall, never to return." By the dim lamp, Igraine saw Gorlois bare his teeth like an animal. "And if he is killed, his armies will scatter like a beehive when someone kills their queen!"

Igraine felt herself shrink back; even bodiless, a wraith, it seemed that Gorlois must see her hovering there. And indeed, he raised his head and frowned, brushing at his cheek. "I felt a draught—it's cold in here," he muttered.

"And how could it be otherwise? It's cold here as the pit, with the snow raging like this," one of his men growled—but even before he got the words out, Igraine was away from there, hovering in bodiless limbo, shivering, resisting the strong pull to return to Tintagel. She longed for the feel of flesh, of fire, not to go wandering between worlds, like some flittering wraith of the dead ...  .

How could she come to Uther, to warn him? There was no bond between them; she had never exchanged with him so much as a kiss of passion, which would bind their bodies of flesh and so bind the bodiless spirit she was now. Gorlois had accused her of adultery; frantic, Igraine wished again that it were so. She was blind in the dark, bodiless, nowhere; she knew that the flicker of a thought would take her back to the room at Tintagel where her body, cramped and icy cold, slumped before the dead fire. She fought to remain in this deathly blind darkness, struggling, praying wordlessly, Let me come to Uther, while knowing that the curious laws of the world she was in now made it impossible; in this body she had no bond with Uther.

But my bond with Uther is stronger than the bond of flesh because it has endured for more lives than one, Igraine felt herself arguing with something impalpable, as if appealing to a higher judge than whatever it was that made the laws for this life. The darkness seemed to press on her now, and she felt that she could not breathe, that somewhere below her the body she had abandoned was chilled, iced over, breath failing. Something in her cried out, Return, return, Uther is a grown man, he does not need you to care for him, and she answered herself, struggling, fighting to stay out where she was, He is only a man, he is not proof against treachery!

Now in the pressing darkness there was a deeper darkness, and Igraine knew she looked not on her own invisible self, but on some Other. Chilling, trembling, racked, she did not hear with her bodily ears, but felt in every nerve of her whole being the command: “Go back. You must go back. You have no right to be here. The laws are made and fixed; you cannot remain here without penalty.”

She heard herself say to the strange darkness, “If I, must, I will pay the penalty that is exacted.”

“Why do you seek to go where it is forbidden to go?”

“I must warn him,” she said frantically, and then, suddenly, like a moth spreading its wings over the cocoon, something in Igraine that was greater than herself opened and spread its wings and the darkness around her was gone, and the fearsome shape warning her was no more than a veiled shape, a woman like herself, a priestess, certainly not a Goddess nor the Old Death-crone. Igraine said steadily, “We are bound and sworn, life to life and beyond; you have no right to forbid.” Suddenly Igraine saw that about her arms were twining the golden serpents which she had worn in her strange dream of the ring stones. She raised her arms and cried out a word in a strange language. She could never, afterward, remember more than half a syllable, only that it began with a great “Aaahhh  ... ” and that it was a word of power; nor did she know how the word had come to her in this extremity, to her who was not even a priestess in this life. The forbidding shape before her was gone, and Igraine saw light, light like the rising sun ...  .

No, it was the dimmest of lantern lights, a rushlight shielded crudely with a thin slice of horn in a wooden box, no more than a glimmer in the icy shadows of a small, stone-walled hut, tumbledown and roughly repaired with bundles of reeds. But by some curious, nonexistent light—or did she, bodiless, see in the dark without eyes?—she could make out a few faces in the shadows, faces she had seen around Uther in Londinium: kings and chiefs and soldiers. Exhausted and icy cold, they crouched around the tiny lantern as if its flickering fire could somehow warm them. And Uther was among them, gaunt and exhausted, his hands bleeding with chilblains, his woolen plaid drawn up closely over his head and around his chin. This was not the proud and kingly priest-lover she had seen in her first vision, not even the clumsy and boorish young man who had come into church disturbing them all; but this weary, haggard man, damp hair straggling around his nose, reddened with the cold, somehow seemed to her more real, more handsome than ever before. Igraine, aching with pity, longing to take him in her arms and warm him, felt as if she had cried out Uther!

She knew he heard, for she saw him raise his head and look all about the cold shelter, shivering as if some colder wind stirred there; and then she saw, through the cloaks and plaids huddled around his body, the serpents twining about his arms. They were not real; they writhed like living snakes where no snake ever known to humanity would leave its burrow in such weather. But she saw them, and somehow Uther saw her, and opened his mouth to speak. Imperatively, she gestured him to silence.

You must arouse, and make ready to march, or you are doomed! The message did not form itself in her mind as words, but she knew that it moved directly from her thoughts to his. The snow will cease soon after midnight. Gorlois and his soldiers think you are pinned down where you are now, and they will fall upon you and cut you to pieces! You must be ready to meet their attack.

The words pressed upon him, soundless, with her last remnant of strength. And even as they formed, she knew that the strength of will which had brought her here across the gulf, against the laws of this world, was fading. She was not accustomed to this work, and she struggled, not wanting to leave with her warning unspoken. Would they believe him, would they be ready to meet Gorlois? Or would they stay there, motionless in the darkness after the storm, and Gorlois find them like hens huddled on their roost for the fox? But she could do no more. A deathly cold, the faintness of utter exhaustion, came over her; she felt herself fading into icy cold and darkness, as if the storm were raging through her entire body  ...

  ...  she was lying on the stone floor, before the cold ashes of the fire. Over her an icy wind was blowing, as if the storm which had followed her all through her vision was raging here too, inside her body ...  . No, it was not that. The wooden shutters of the room had blown open in the dying frenzy of the storm; they were slamming back and forth, and slashes of icy rain were blowing into the room.

She was cold. She was so cold she felt she would never move again, that she would lie there and freeze and that the cold of her body would gradually change to the sleep of death. At the moment she did not care.

There must be punishment for breaking a taboo; that is the law. I have done the forbidden thing, and I cannot emerge scatheless from it. If Uther is safe, I accept it, even if my punishment be death ... and indeed, Igraine, huddling and trying to cover herself with the inadequate warmth of her cloak, felt that death would be merciful. At least she would not feel the cold ...  .

But Morgaine, Morgaine who slept in the bed near to that window, if the window were not closed she would take a chill and perhaps have the lung fever ...  . Igraine would not, for her own sake, have moved. But for her child and her innocent sister she forced herself painfully to stir, to make her numbed hands and feet move. Clumsy, moving as if drunken, she stumbled to the window and fumbled with her frozen hands to draw it closed. The wind twice tore it from her fingers, and she heard herself sobbing as she wrestled with it. She could not feel, but she knew she had torn away a fingernail in the struggle with the shutter, which fought her like a living thing. At last, capturing the clasp between her hands, she drew it shut by main force, pinching a finger, cold and blue, in the frame, as she managed to fasten the wooden hasp.

It was still cold in the room, cold as ice, and she knew that without the fire, Morgaine, and Morgause too, would be ill... she wanted nothing more than to creep into bed between them, still wrapped in her cloak, warm herself between their young warm bodies, but it was hours till morning, and she had been the one who left the fire untended. Shivering, pulling her cloak close, she took a fire pan from the hearth and stole down the stairs, feeling her icy feet bruised as they stumbled on the stone. In the kitchen, three serving women curled close like dogs in front of the banked fire; it was warm there, and a steaming pot hung on a long hook over the fire—gruel for the morning meal, no doubt. Well, it was her own kitchen and her own gruel. Igraine dipped a cup into the pot and drank the hot, unsalted oatmeal broth, but even that could not warm her. Then she filled the fire pan with red-hot coals and covered the fire, covered the fire pan, and, holding it in a fold of her skirt, went up the stairs again. She was weak and shaking, and, despite the hot drink, shuddering so hard she feared she would fall. I must not fall, for if I fall I will never get up again, and the fire pan will set something afire ...  .

She knelt before the cold hearth in her room, feeling the great shudders take her body and rack her with pain in her chest; but she was not cold now, she felt hot throughout her body. She fed the coals patiently with bits of tinder from the bin, then with small sticks; at last the log caught and roared up toward the ceiling. Igraine was so hot now that she flung off her cloak, stumbling toward the bed; lifted Morgaine and lay down with the child in her arms; but she did not know whether she slept or died.

NO, SHE WAS NOT DEAD. Death would not bring this racking, shuddering heat and cold.... She knew that she lay a long time, wrapped in steaming cloths, which grew cold and were taken away and renewed; she knew that they forced hot drinks down her throat, sometimes nauseous herbal mixtures against fever and sometimes strong spirits mixed with hot water. Days, weeks, years, centuries, passed over her while she lay and burned and shivered and suffered the horrid stuff they poured down her throat when she was too weak even to vomit it up. Once Morgause came and asked her fretfully, “If you were ill, Igraine, why did you not wake me and send me to mend the fire?” The dark shape who had forbidden her the road was standing in one corner of the room, and now Igraine could see her face: it was the Death-crone who guards the doors of the forbidden, and now would punish her ...  . Morgaine came and looked down at her, her small, somber face frightened, and Igraine wanted to reassure her daughter, but she was too weak to speak aloud. And Uther was there too, but she knew that no one else could see him, and it was not seemly to call out any man’s name save that of her own wedded husband ... no one would think worse of her if she should call out Gorlois’s name. But even if she was dying, she did not want to call out the name of Gorlois, she wanted no more of him, in life or in death.

Had she betrayed Gorlois, with her forbidden sorcery? Or had that been only a dream, no more real than her attempt to warn Uther? Had she saved him? It seemed that she was wandering in the icy spaces again, trying blindly to force herself through the storm to give her warning, and once Father Columba came and mumbled Latin at her, and she was frantic. By what right did he come to worry her with the last rites when she could not defend herself? She had meddled in sorcery, by his standards she was an evil woman, and he would condemn her for betraying Gorlois, he would come to avenge his master. The storm was back again, raging through her, she was wandering endlessly in the storm, trying to find Morgaine who was lost in it, only Morgause was there, wearing a crown, the crown of the High Kings of all Britain. Then Morgaine was standing at the prow of the barge which passed over the Summer Sea to the shores of Avalon, Morgaine wearing the robes of a priestess, the robes Viviane wore  ...  and then all was darkness and silence.

And then there was sunlight in the room and Igraine stirred, only to discover that she could not sit up.

“Lie still, my lady,” said Isotta, “in a little while I will bring you your medicine.”

Igraine said, and was surprised to find herself whispering, “If I have lived through your herb drinks, I will probably live through this, too. What day is this?”

“Only ten days till Midwinter-night, my lady, and as for what happened, well, all we know is that the fire in your room must have gone out during the night, and your window blown open. The lady Morgause said she woke to see you closing it, and that you went out afterward, and came back with a fire pan. But you did not speak, and mended the fire, so she did not know you were ill till morning, when you were burning with fever and did not know her, or the child.”

That was the simple explanation. Only Igraine knew that her illness was more, was punishment for attempting sorcery far beyond her strength, so that body and spirit were drained almost past returning.

“What of—“ Igraine stopped herself; she could not inquire of Uther, what was she thinking of? “Is there news of my lord Duke?”

“None, my lady. We know there was a battle, but no news will come until the roads are cleared after the great storm,” the serving-woman said. “But now you must not talk anymore, lady, you must have some hot gruel and He down to sleep.”

Patiently Igraine drank the hot broth they brought her, and slept. News would come when the time was ripe.

8

On midwinter-eve, the weather broke again and turned fine. All day snow was melting and dripping, the roads ran mud, and fog came in and lay softly over the sea and courtyard, so that voices and whispers seemed to echo endlessly when anyone spoke. For a little while in the early afternoon, the sun came out, and Igraine went into the courtyard for the first time since her illness. She felt quite recovered now, but she fretted, as they all did, for news.

Uther had sworn he would come at Midwinter-night. How would he manage it, with Gorlois’s army lying between? All day she was silent and abstracted; she even spoke sharply to Morgaine, running about like a wild thing with the joy of being free after the confinement and cold of the winter weather.

I should not be harsh with my child because my mind is with my lover! Igraine thought, and, angry with herself, called Morgaine to her and kissed her. A chill went through her as she laid her lips to the soft cheek; by her forbidden sorcery, warning her lover of Gorlois’s ambush, she might have condemned the father of her child to death  ...

... but no. Gorlois had betrayed his High King; whatever she, Igraine, had done or left undone, Gorlois was marked for death, and by his treason he had deserved it. Unless, indeed, he should compound his betrayal by killing that man whom his sworn king, Ambrosius, had marked for the defense of all Britain.

Father Columba came to her, insisting that she forbid her women and serving-men to light Midwinter fires. “And you yourself should set them a good example by coming tonight to mass,” he insisted. “It has been long, my lady, since you received the sacraments.”

“I have been ill,” she said indifferently, “and as for the sacraments, I seem to remember that you gave me the last rites when I lay sick. Although I may have dreamed it—I dreamed many things.”

“Many of them,” said the priest, “such things as no Christian woman should dream. It was for my lord’s sake, lady, that I gave you the sacraments when you had had no opportunity to confess yourself and receive them worthily.”

“Aye—I know well it was not for my own sake,” said Igraine, with a faint curl of her lip.

“I do not presume to set limits on God’s mercy,” the priest said, and Igraine knew the unspoken part of his thought: he would err if needed on the side of mercy, because Gorlois, for some reason, cared about this woman, and leave it to God to be harsh with her, as no doubt God would be ...  .

But at last she said that she would come to mass. Little as she liked this new religion, Ambrosius had been a Christian, Christianity was the religion of the civilized people of Britain and would inevitably become more so; Uther would bow to the public observance, whatever his private views on religion. She did not really know—she had had no opportunity to know how he really felt about matters of conscience. Would she ever know? He swore he would come to me at Midwinter. But Igraine lowered her eyes and tried to pay strict attention to the mass.

Dusk had fallen, and Igraine was speaking in the kitchen house to her women, when she heard a commotion at the end of the causeway and the sound of riders, then a cry in the courtyard. She flung her hood over her shoulders and ran out, Morgause behind her. At the gateway were men in Roman cloaks such as Gorlois wore, but the guards were barring their way with the long spears they carried.

“My lord Gorlois left orders; no one but the Duke himself to go inside in his absence.”

One of the men at the center of the group of newcomers drew himself up, immensely tall.

“I am the Merlin of Britain,” he said, his resounding voice ringing through the dusk and fog. “Stand back, man, will you deny passage to me?”

The guardsman drew back in instinctive deference, but Father Columba stepped forward, with an imperative gesture of refusal.

“I will deny you. My lord the Duke of Cornwall has said particularly that you, old sorcerer, are to have no entrance here at any time.” The soldiers gaped, and Igraine, despite her anger—stupid, meddlesome priest!—had to admire his courage. It was not an easy thing to defy the Merlin of all Britain.

Father Columba held up the big wooden cross at his belt. “In the name of the Christ, I bid you begone! In God’s name, return to the realms of darkness whence you came!”

The Merlin’s ringing laugh raised echoes from the looming walls. “Good brother in Christ,” he said, “your God and my God are one and the same. Do you really think I will vanish away at your exorcism? Or do you think I am some foul fiend from the darkness? No, not unless you call the falling of God’s night the coming of darkness! I come from a land no darker than the Summer Country, and look, these men with me bear the ring of his lordship the Duke of Cornwall himself. Look.” The torchlight flashed as one of the cloaked men thrust out a bare hand. On the first finger glinted Gorlois’s ring.

“Now let us in, Father, for we are not fiends, but mortal men who are cold and weary, and we have ridden for a long way. Or must we cross ourselves and repeat a prayer to prove that to you?”

Igraine came forward, wetting her lips with nervousness. What was happening here? How did they come to bear Gorlois’s ring, unless they were his messengers? Certainly one of them would have appealed to her. She saw no one she recognized, nor would Gorlois have chosen the Merlin for his messenger. Was Gorlois dead then, and was it news of his death being brought to her in this fashion? She said abruptly, her voice sounding harsh, “Let me see the ring. Is this truly his token or a forgery?”

“It is truly his ring, lady Igraine,” said a voice she knew, and Igraine, bending her eyes to see the ring in the torchlight, saw familiar hands, big, broad and callused; and above them, what she had seen only in vision. Around Uther’s hairy arms, tattooed there in blue woad, writhed two serpents, one on either wrist. She thought that her knees would give way and that she would sink down on the stones of the courtyard.

He had sworn it: I will come to you at Midwinter. And he had come, wearing Gorlois’s ring!

“My lord Duke!” said Father Columba impulsively, stepping forward, but the Merlin raised a hand to forbid the words.

“Hush! The messenger is secret,” he said. “Speak no word.” And the priest fell back, thinking the cloaked man was Gorlois, puzzled but obedient.

Igraine dropped a curtsey, still struggling against disbelief and dismay. She said, “My lord, come in,” and Uther, still concealing his face beneath the cloak, reached out with the ringed hand and gripped her fingers. Her own felt like ice beneath them, but his hand was warm and firm and steadied her as they stepped into the hall.

She took refuge in banalities. “Shall I fetch some wine, my lord, or send for food?”

He murmured close to her ear, “In God’s name, Igraine, find some way we can be alone. The priest has sharp eyes, even in the dark, and I want it thought it is Gorlois, indeed, who has come here.”

She said to Isotta, “Bring food and some beer to the soldiers here in the hall, and to the Lord Merlin. Bring them water for washing, and all they desire. I will speak with my lord in our chambers. Have food and wine sent there at once.”

The servants went scurrying in all directions to do her will. The Merlin let a man take his cloak, and set his harp carefully on one of the benches. Morgause came into the doorway, peering boldly at the soldiers. Her eyes fell on Uther’s tall form, and she dropped a curtsey.

“My lord Gorlois! Welcome, dear brother!” she said, and started toward him. Uther made a slight forbidding movement and Igraine stepped quickly in front of him. She thought, frowning, This is ridiculous; even cloaked, Uther looks no more like Gorlois than do I!

She said sharply, “My lord is weary, Morgause, and in no mood for the chatter of children. Take Morgaine to your chamber and keep her; she will sleep there with you this night.”

Frowning, sullen, Morgause picked up Morgaine and carried her away up the stairs. Keeping well behind them, Igraine reached for Uther’s hand and held it as they climbed. What manner of trickery was this, and why? Her heart was pounding until she thought she would faint away as she led him into the chamber she had shared with Gorlois and shut the door.

Inside, his arms were stretched to sweep her into his embrace; he shoved back the hood and stood there, his hair and beard wet with fog, holding out his arms, but she did not move toward him.

“My lord King! What is this, why do they think you are Gorlois?”

“A small magic of the Merlin,” Uther said, “mostly a matter of a cloak and a ring, but a small glamour too; nothing that would hold if they should see me in full light, or uncloaked. I see that you were not deceived; I had not expected it. It is a seeming, not a Sending. I swore I would come to you, Igraine, at Midwinter, and I have kept my vow. Do I not even get a kiss for all my travail?”

She came and took the cloak from him, but she evaded his touch.

“My lord King, how came you by Gorlois’s ring?”

His face hardened. “That? I cut it from his hand in battle, but the oathbreaker turned tail and fled. Mistake me not, Igraine, I come here by right, not as a thief in the night; the glamour is to save your reputation in the eyes of the world, no more. I would not have my promised wife branded adulteress. But I come here by right; the life of Gorlois is forfeit to me. He held Tintagel as the sworn vassal of Ambrosius Aurelianus; that oath he renewed to me, and now that, too, is forfeit. Surely you understand this, Lady Igraine? No king can stand if his sworn men may break oath with impunity and stand under arms against their king.”

She bowed her head in acknowledgment.

“Already he has cost me the wreck of a year’s work against the Saxon. When he left London with his men I could not stand against them, and I had to step aside, flee, and let them pillage the town. My people, whom I am sworn to defend.” His face was bitter. “Lot, I can forgive; he refused to take the oath. A score I have to settle with Lot, indeed—he will make peace with me or I will see him off his throne and hanged— but he is not oathbreaker or betrayer. Gorlois I trusted; he took oath and forswore it, and so I am left in the wreck of the work Ambrosius spent his life to accomplish, with all of it to do again. Gorlois cost me that, and I am come to have Tintagel at his hands. And I will have his life, too, and he knows it.”

His face was like stone.

Igraine swallowed hard. “And you will have his lady, too—by conquest and by right, as you have Tintagel?”

“Ah, Igraine,” he said, drawing her to him with his two hands, “I know well what choice you made, when I saw you the night of the great storm. If you had not warned me, I would have lost my best men, and, no doubt, my life as well. Thanks to you, when Gorlois came against me, I was ready for him. It was then I took the ring from his finger, and would have taken the hand, and the head too, but he escaped me.”

“I know well you had no choice as to that, my lord King,” Igraine said, but at that moment there was a knock on the door. One of the serving-women brought in a tray with food and a jug of wine, and muttered “My lord,” dropping a curtsey. Mechanically Igraine freed herself from Uther’s hands, took the food and wine, shut the door behind the woman. She took Uther’s cloak, which was, after all, not so very different from the one Gorlois wore, and hung it on the bedpost to dry; bent and helped him off with his boots; took his sword belt from him, Like a dutiful lady and wife, a voice remarked in her mind, but she knew she had made her choice. It was even as Uther said: Tintagel belonged to the High King of Britain; so did its lady, and it was at her own will. She had given her allegiance to the King’s own self.

The women had brought dried meat seethed with lentils, a loaf of new-baked bread, some soft cheese, and wine. Uther ate like a man starving, saying, “I have been in the field these two moons past, thanks to that damnable traitor you call husband; this is the first meal I have eaten under a roof since Samhain—the good Father down there, no doubt, would remind me to say All Souls.”

“It is only what was cooking for the servants’ supper and mine, my lord King, not at all fitting—“

“It seems to me good enough for the keeping of Christmas, after what I have been eating in the cold,” he said, chewing noisily, tearing the bread asunder with strong fingers and cutting a chunk of cheese with his knife. “And am I to have no word from you save my lord King? I have dreamed so of this moment, Igraine,” he said, laying down the cheese and staring up at her. He took hold of her round the waist and drew her close to his chair.

“Have you no word of love for me?- Can it be that you are still loyal to Gorlois?”

Igraine let him draw her against him. She said it aloud. “I have made my choice.”

“I have waited so long—“ he whispered, pulling her down so that she half-knelt against his knee, and tracing the lines of her face with his hand. “I had begun to fear it would never come, and now you have no word of love or look of kindness for me—Igraine, Igraine, did I dream it, after all, that you loved me, wanted me? Should I have left you in peace?”

She felt cold, she was shaking from head to foot. She whispered, “No, no—or if it was a dream, then I too dreamed.” She looked up at him, not knowing what else to say or do. She did not fear him, as she had feared Gorlois, but now that the moment was at hand she wondered, with a sudden wild panic, why she had come so far. He still held her within the curve of his arm. Now he pulled her down on his knee, and she let him draw her back, her head against his breast.

He said, encircling her narrow wrist in his big hand, “I had not realized how slight you were. You are tall; I thought you a big woman, queenly —and after all you are a little thing, I could break you with my two hands, little bones like a bird’s—“ He closed the fingers around her wrist. “And you are so young—“

“I am not so young as all that,” she said, laughing suddenly. “I have been married five years and I have a child.”

“You seem too young for that,” Uther said. “Was that the little one I saw downstairs?”

“My daughter. Morgaine,” Igraine said. And suddenly she realized that’ he, too, was ill at ease, delaying. Instinctively she realized that for all his thirty-odd years, his experience of women was only with such women as could be had for the asking, and that a chaste woman of his own station was something new to him. She wished, with a sudden ache, that she knew the right thing to do or say.

Still temporizing, she drew her free hand along the tattooed serpents twining around his wrists. “I had not seen these before ...  .”

“No,” he said, “they were given me at my kingmaking on Dragon Island. I would you could have been with me, my queen,” he whispered, and took her face between his hands, tilting it back to kiss her on the lips.

“I do not want to frighten you,” he whispered, “but I have dreamed so long of this moment, so long  ... ”

Shaking, she let him kiss her, feeling the strangeness of it stirring something deep in her body. It had never been like this with Gorlois  ...  and suddenly she was afraid again. With Gorlois it had always been something done to her in which she had no part, something from which she could stand aside, watching with detachment. She had always been herself, Igraine. Now, with the touch of Uther’s lips, she knew she could no longer remain apart, that she would never again be the self she had known. The thought terrified her. And yet the knowledge of how much he wanted her was racing through her veins. Her hand tightened about the blue serpents at his wrists. “I saw these in a dream .. . but I thought it was only a dream.”

He nodded soberly. “I dreamed of them before ever I wore them. And it was in my mind that you had something like to them, too, about your arms ... ” He picked up her slender wrist again and traced along it. “Only they were golden.”

She felt the hairs rise on her back. Indeed it had been no dream, but a vision from the Country of Truth.

“I cannot remember all the dream,” Uther said, staring over her shoulder. “Only that we stood together on a great plain, and there was something like to the ring stones ...  . What does it mean, Igraine, that we share one another’s dreams?”

She said, feeling her voice catch in her throat as if she were about to weep, “Perhaps it means only that we are fated for one another, my king  ...  and my lord  ...  and my love.”

“My queen, and my love  ... ” He met her eyes suddenly, a long look and a long question. “Surely the time for dreaming is over, Igraine.” He thrust his hands into her hair, pulling out the pins, letting it tumble down over her embroidered collar and over his face; smoothed the long locks down with trembling hands. He rose to his feet, still holding her in his arms. She had never guessed at the strength in his hands. He crossed the room in two great strides, and laid her down on the bed. Kneeling at her side, he bent and kissed her again.

“My queen,” he murmured. “I would you could have been crowned at my side at my kingmaking.... There were rites there such as no Christian man should know; but the Old People, who were here long before ever the Romans came to these isles, would not acknowledge me king without them. It was a long road I took to come there, and some of it, I am sure, was not anywhere in this world I know.”

This reminded her of what Viviane had told her about the drifting of the worlds, apart in the mists. And thinking about Viviane brought to mind what Viviane had asked of her, and how reluctant she had been.

I did not know. I was so young then, and untried, I knew nothing, I did not know how all of me could be dissolved, torn, swept away ...  .

“Did they ask of you that you should make the Great Marriage with the land, as was done in the old days? I know that King Ban of Benwick in Less Britain was so required  ... ” and a sudden, violent stab of jealousy went through her, that some woman or priestess might have symbolized for him the land he was sworn to defend.

“No,” he said. “And I am not sure I would have done so, but it was not asked of me. The Merlin said, too, that it is he, as with every Merlin of Britain, who is sworn to die if need be, in sacrifice for his people—“ Uther broke off. “But this can mean little to you.”

“You have forgotten,” she said, “I was reared in Avalon; my mother was priestess there and my eldest sister is now the Lady of the Lake.”

“Are you a priestess too, Igraine?”

She shook her head, starting to say a simple no; then said, “Not in this life.”

“I wonder  ... ” Again he traced the line of the imaginary serpents, touching his own with his other hand. “I have always known, I think, that I lived before—it seems to me that life is too great a thing to live it only once and then be snuffed out like a lamp when the wind blows. And why, when first I looked upon your face, did I feel that I had known you before the world was made? These things are mysteries, and I think it may be that you know more of them than I. You say you are no priestess, yet you had sorcery enough to come to me, the night of the great storm, and warn me. ... I think perhaps I should ask no more, lest I might hear from you what no Christian man should know. As for these”—again, with a fingertip, he touched the serpents—“if I wore them before this life, then perhaps that is why the old man, when he pricked them into my wrists the night of my kingmaking, told me that they were mine by right. I have heard that the Christian priests have driven all such serpents from our isles  ...  but I do not fear the dragons, and I wear them in token that I will spread my protection over this land like the dragon’s wings.”

“In that case,” she whispered, “surely you will be the greatest of kings, my lord.”

“Call me not so!” he interrupted fiercely, bending over her where she lay and covering her mouth with his.

“Uther,” she whispered, as if in a dream.

His hands moved at her throat, and he bent to kiss her bare shoulder. But when he began to pull off her gown, she flinched and shrank away. Tears flooded her eyes and she couldn’t speak, but he laid his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes.

He said softly, “Have you been so mishandled, my beloved? God strike me if you ever have anything to fear from me, now or ever. I wish with all my heart that you had never been Gorlois’s wife. Had I found you first ... but what is done is done. But I swear to you, my queen: you will never have anything to fear from me.” In the flickering light of the lamp, his eyes seemed dark, although she knew they were blue. “Igraine, I have—I have taken this for granted, because somehow I believed you must know how I feel. I know very little about your kind of woman. You are my love, my wife, my queen. I swear to you by my crown and by my manhood, you shall be my queen and I will never take another woman before you, or put you aside. Did you think I was treating you as a wanton?” His voice was trembling, and Igraine knew that he was stricken with fear—the fear of losing her. Knowing that he could fear too, knowing that he too was vulnerable, her own fear was gone. She put her arms around his neck and said clearly, “You are my love and my lord and my king, and I will love you as long as I live, and as long thereafter as God wills.”

And this time she let him pull away her gown, and, naked, came willingly into his arms. Never, never had she guessed that it could be like this. Until this moment, despite five years of marriage and the birth of a child, she had been an innocent, a virgin, an unknowing girl. Now body and mind and heart blended, making her one with Uther as she had never been with Gorlois. She thought, fleetingly, that not even a child in its mother’s womb could be so close ...  .

He lay weary on her shoulder, his coarse fair hair tickling her breasts. He murmured, “I love you, Igraine. Whatever comes of this, I love you. And if Gorlois should come here, I will kill him before he can touch you again.”

She did not want to think of Gorlois. She smoothed the light hair across his brow and murmured, “Sleep, my love. Sleep.”

She did not want to sleep. Even after his breathing became heavy and slow, she lay wakeful, caressing him softly so as not to wake him. His chest was almost as smooth as her own, with only a little light, fair hair; she had somehow thought all men were heavy and hairy. The scent of his body was sweet, though heavy with sweat and the juices of love. She felt she could never have enough of touching him. At one and the same time she longed for him to waken and take her again in his arms, and jealously guarded his exhausted sleep. She felt no fear now, and no shame; what had been with Gorlois duty and acceptance had become delight almost unendurable, as if she had been reunited with some hidden part of her own body and soul.

At last she did sleep a little, fitfully, curled into the curve of his body. She had slept perhaps an hour when she was roused abruptly by commotion in the courtyard. She sat up, flinging her long hair back. Uther pulled her sleepily down.

“Lie still, dear love, dawn is still far away.”

“No,” she said, with sure instinct, “we dare not linger now.” She flung on a gown and kirtle, twisting her hair up with shaking hands. The lamp had gone out and she could not find the pin in the darkness. At last she caught up a veil to throw over it, slid her feet into her shoes, and ran down the stairs. It was still far too dark to see clearly. In the great hall there was only a little glimmer of light from the banked fire. And then she came up sharp before a little stirring of the air, and stopped dead.

Gorlois stood there, a great sword cut on his face, looking upon her with unutterable grief and reproach and dismay. It was the Sending she had seen before, the fetch, the death-doom; he raised his hand, and she could see that the ring and three fingers had been cut away. His face bore a ghastly pallor, but he looked at her with grief and love, and his lips moved in what she knew was her name, although she could not hear in the frozen silence around them. And in that moment she knew that he, too, had loved her, in his own harsh way, and whatever he had done to hurt her had been done for love. Indeed, for her love he had quarreled with Uther, flung away honor and dukedom both. And she had returned his love with nothing but hatred and impatience; only now could she understand that even as she felt for Uther, so Gorlois had felt for her. Her throat cramped with anguish and she would have cried out his name, but the dead air moved and he was gone; had never been there at all. And at that moment the frozen silence around her was lifted and she heard men shouting in the courtyard.

“Make way!” they were crying. “Make way! Lights, here, lights!” Father Columba came into the hall, thrust a torch into the banked fire and set it ablaze. He hastened to fling the door wide. “What is this outcry—“

“Your duke is slain, men of Cornwall,” someone shouted. “We bring the Duke’s body! Make way! Gorlois of Cornwall lies dead and we bring his body for burying!”

Igraine felt Uther’s arms holding her up from behind, else she would have fallen. Father Columba protested loudly, “No! This cannot be! Why, the Duke came home last night with a few of his men, he’s asleep upstairs now in his lady’s chamber—“

“No.” It was the voice of the Merlin, quiet, but ringing to the farthest corners of the court. He took one of the torches and thrust it against Father Columba’s torch, then gave it to one of the soldiers to hold. “The oath-breaker Duke came never to Tintagel as a living man. Your lady stands here with your overlord and your High King, Uther Pendragon. You shall marry them today, Father.”

There were cries and mutterings among the men, and the servants who had come running stood numbly watching as the rough bier, animal skins sewn into a litter, was borne into the hall. Igraine shrank away from the covered face and body. Father Columba bent over, briefly uncovered the face, made the sign of the cross, then turned away again. His face was grieved and angry.

“This is sorcery, this is witchcraft.” He spat, brandishing the cross between them. “This foul illusion was your doing, old wizard!”

Igraine said, “You will not speak so to my father, priest!”

Merlin lifted his hand. “I need no woman’s protection—nor no man’s, my lord Uther,” he said. “And it was no sorcery. You saw what you willed to see—your lord come home. Only your lord was not the oathbreaker Gorlois, who had forfeited Tintagel, but the true High King and lord who came here to take what was his own. Keep you to your priestcraft, Father, there is need of a burying, and when that is done, of a nuptial mass for your king and for my lady whom he has chosen queen.”

Igraine stood within the curve of Uther’s arm. She met the resentful, contemptuous look in Father Columba’s eyes; she knew that he would have turned on her, called her harlot and witch, but his fear of Uther kept him silent. The priest turned away from her and knelt beside Gorlois’s body; he was praying. After a moment Uther knelt too, his fair hair gleaming in the torchlight. Igraine went to kneel at his side. Poor Gorlois. He was dead, he had met a traitor’s death; he had richly deserved it, but he had loved her, and he had died.

A hand on her shoulder prevented her. The Merlin looked into her eyes for a moment, and said gently, “So it has come, Grainne. Your fate, as it was foretold. See that you meet it with such courage as you may.”

Kneeling at Gorlois’s side, she prayed—for Gorlois, and then, weeping, for herself; for the unknown fate that lay before them now. Had it indeed been ordained from the beginning of the world, or had it been brought about by the sorcery of the Merlin, and of Avalon, and by her own use of sorcery? Now Gorlois lay dead, and as she looked on Uther’s face, already beloved and dear, she knew that soon others would come and he would take up the burdens of his kingdom, and that never again would he be wholly hers as he had been on this one night. Kneeling there between her dead husband and the man she would love all her life, she fought the temptation to play upon his love for her, to turn him, as she knew she could do, from thoughts of kingdom and state to think only of her. But the Merlin had not brought them together for her own joy. She knew that if she sought to keep it, she would rebel against the very fate that had brought them together, and thus destroy it. As Father Columba rose from the dead man’s side and signalled to the soldiers to carry the body into the chapel, she touched his arm. He turned impatiently.

“My lady?”

“I have much to confess to you, Father, before my lord the Duke is laid to rest—and before I am married. Will you hear my confession?”

He looked at her, frowning, surprised. At last he said, “At daybreak, lady,” and went away. The Merlin followed Igraine with his eyes as she came back to him. She looked into his face and said, “Here and now, my father, from this moment, be witness that I have done forever with sorcery. What God wills be done.”

The Merlin looked tenderly into her ravaged face. His voice was gentler than she had ever heard it. “Do you think that all our sorcery could bring about anything other than God’s will, my child?”

Catching at some small self-possession—if she did not, she knew, she would weep like a child before all these men—she said, “I will go and robe myself, Father, and make myself seemly.”

“You must greet the day as befits a queen, my daughter.”

Queen. The word sent shudders through her body. But it was for this | that she had done all that she had done, it was for this that she had been born. She went slowly up the stairs. She must waken Morgaine and tell her that her father was dead; fortunately the child was too young to remember him, or to grieve.

And as she called her women, and had them bring her finest robes and] jewelry and dress her hair, she laid her hand wonderingly over her belly. Somehow, with the last fleeting touch of magic before she renounced it forever, she knew that from this one night, when they had been only lovers and not yet king and queen, she would bear Uther’s son. She wondered the Merlin knew.

MORGAINE SPEAKS  ...

I think that my first real memory is of my mother’s wedding to Uther Pendragon. I remember my father only a little. When I was unhappy as a little girl, I seemed to remember him, a heavyset man with a dark beard and dark hair I remember playing with a chain he wore about his neck. I remember that as a little maiden when I was unhappy, when I was chidden by my mother or my teachers, or when Uther—rarely—noticed me to disapprove of me, I used to comfort myself by thinking that if my own father were alive, he would have been fond of me and taken me on his knee and brought me pretty things. Now that I am older and know what manner of man he was, I think it more likely he would have put me into a nunnery as soon as I had a brother, and never thought more about me.

Not that Uther was ever unkind to me; it was simply that he had no particular interest in a girl child. My mother was always at the center of his heart, and he at hers, and so I resented that—that I had lost my mother to this great fair-hair boorish man. When Uther was away in battle—and there was battle a good deal of the time when I was a maiden—my mother Igraine cherished me and petted me, and taught me to spin with her own hands and to weave in colors. But when Uther’s men were sighted, then I went back into my rooms and was forgotten until he went away again. Is it any wonder I hated him and resented, with all my heart, the sight of the dragon banner on any horsemen approaching Tintagel?

And when my brother was born it was worse. For there was this crying thing, all pink and white, at my mother’s breast; and it was worse that she expected me to care as much for him as she did. “This is your little brother,” she said, “take good care of him, Morgaine, and love him.” Love him? I hated him with all my heart, for now when I came near her she would pull away and tell me that I was a big girl, too big to be sitting in her lap, too big to bring my ribbons to her for tying, too big to come and lay my head on her knees for comfort. I would have pinched him, except that she would have hated me for it. I sometimes thought she hated me anyhow. And Uther made much of my brother. But I think he always hoped for another son. I was never told, but somehow I knew—maybe I heard the women talking, maybe I was gifted even then with more of the Sight than I realized —that he had first lain with my mother when she was still wedded to Gorlois, and there were still those who believed that this son was not Uther’s but the son of the Duke of Cornwall.

How they could believe that, I could not then understand, for Gorlois, they said, was dark and aquiline, and my brother was like Uther, fair-haired, with grey eyes.

Even during the lifetime of my brother, who was crowned king as Arthur, I heard all kinds of tales about how he came by his name. Even the tale that it was from Arth-Uther, Uther’s bear; but it was not so. When he was a babe, he was called Gwydion—bright one—because of his shining hair; the same name his son bore later—but that is another story. The facts are simple: when Gwydion was six years old he was sent to be fostered by Ectorius, one of Uther’s vassals in the North country near Eboracum, and Uther would have it that my brother should be baptized as a Christian. And so he was given the name of Arthur.

But from his birth until he was six years old, he was forever at my heels; as soon as he was weaned, my mother, Igraine, handed him over to me and said, “This is your little brother and you must love him and care for him.” And I would have killed the crying thing and thrown him over the cliffs, and run after my mother begging that she should be all mine again, except that my mother cared what happened to him.

Once, when Uther came and she decked herself in her best gown, as she always did, with her amber and moonstone necklaces, and looked down on me with a careless kiss for me and one for my little brother, ready to run down to Uther, I looked at her glowing cheeks—heightened with color, her breathing quickened with delight that her man had come—and hated both Uther and my brother. And while I stood weeping at the top of the stairs, waiting for our nurse to come and take us away, he began to toddle down after her, crying out, “Mother, Mother” —he could hardly talk, then—and fell and cut his chin on the stair. I screamed for my mother, but she was on her way to the King, and she called back angrily, Morgaine, I told you, look after the baby,” and hurried on.

I picked him up, bawling, and wiped his chin with my veil. He had cut his lip on his tooth—I think he had only eight or ten, then—and he kept on wailing and calling out for my mother, but when she did not come, I sat down on the step with him in my lap, and he put up his little arms around my neck and buried his face in my tunic and after a time he sobbed himself to sleep there. He was heavy on my lap, and his hair felt soft and damp; he was damp elsewhere, too, but I found I did not mind much, and in the way he clung to me I realized that in his sleep he had forgotten he was not in his mother's arms. I thought, Igraine has forgotten both of us, abandoned him as she abandoned me. Now I must be his mother, I suppose.

And so I shook him a little, and when he woke, he put up his little arms around my neck to be carried, and I slung him across my hip as I had seen my nurse do.

"Don't cry," I said, "I'll take you to nurse."

"Mother," he whimpered.

"Mother's gone, she's with the King," I said, "but I'll take care of you, brother." And with his chubby hand in mine I knew what Igraine meant; I was too big a girl to cry or whimper for my mother, because I had a little one to look after now.

I think I was all of seven years old.

WHEN MY MOTHER'S SISTER Morgause was married to King Lot of Orkney, I knew only that I had my first grown-up gown, and an amber necklace with silver. I loved Morgause well, for she often had time for me when Mother did not, and she told me stories of my father—after his death, I think Igraine never spoke his name. But even though I loved Morgause, I feared her, for sometimes she would pinch me and tug my hair and call me tiresome brat, and it was she who first taunted me with the taunt which then made me weep, though now I take pride in it: "You are born of the fairy folk. Why not paint your face blue and wear deerskins, Morgaine of the Fairies!"

I knew only a little about the reasons for the wedding, or why Morgause was to be married so young. I knew my mother was glad to have her married and away, for she fancied Morgause looked on Uther lustfully; she was probably not aware that Morgause looked lustfully on all men she came by. She was a bitch dog in heat, though indeed I suppose it was because she had no one to care what she did. At the wedding, in my new holiday gown, I heard them speak of how fortunate it was that Uther had made haste to amend his quarrel with Lot of Orkney, even giving him his own sister-in-law in marriage. I found Lot charming; only Uther, I think, was ever immune to that charm. Certainly Morgause seemed to love him —or perhaps only found it expedient to act as if she did.

It was there, I think, that I first remember meeting with the Lady of Avalon. Like Morgause, she was my aunt, my mother's sister, and she was also of the ancient folk - small, and dark, and glowing, with crimson ribbons braided in her dark hair. She was not young, even then, but I thought her, as I always thought her, beautiful; and her voice was rich and low. What I liked best about her was that she spoke to me always as if I were a woman of her own age, not with the cooing falsity with which most grown-up people spoke to a child.

I came into the hall a little late, for my nurse had not been able to manage braiding my hair with ribbons, and in the end I did it myself; I have always been neat-handed, and could do well and swiftly things which grown-up people did only slowly. Already I could spin as well as my mother and better than Morgause ever did. I was very proud of myself, in my saffron gown with ribbons edged with gold, and an amber necklace instead of the baby corals I had outgrown. But there was no seat at the high table, and I circled it in disappointment, knowing that any moment now Mother would banish me to a lower table, or call my nurse to take me away, or call attention to me by sending a serving-woman to fetch a chair. And while I was a princess in Cornwall, at Uther’s court in Caerleon I was only the Queen’s daughter by a man who had been traitor to his High King.

And then I saw a small, dark woman—so small, in fact, that at first I thought she was a girl only a little older than I—sitting on an embroidered stool. She put out her arms and said, “Come here, Morgaine. Do you remember me?”

I did not, but I looked at the dark, glowing face, and felt as if I had known her from the beginning of time.

But I pouted a little, because I was afraid she would tell me to come and sit on her lap, as if I were a baby. Instead, she smiled and moved to one side of her stool. I could see now that she was not a girl, but a lady.

“We are neither of us very big,” she said. “I think this one stool will hold us both, since it was made for bigger people.”

From that moment I loved her, so much I sometimes felt guilty because Father Columba, my mother’s confessor, told me I should honor my mother and my father above all others.

So I sat beside Viviane through the wedding feast, and I learned that she was Morgause’s foster-mother—their mother had died at Morgause’s birth and Viviane suckled her as her own. Which fascinated me, because I had been angry when Igraine refused to give my new brother up to a wet nurse and fed him from her own breasts. Uther said it was unseemly for a queen, and I had agreed with him; I had hated seeing Gwydion at Igraine’s breasts. I suppose the truth is that l was jealous, though I would have been ashamed to say so.

“Was your mother, and Igraine’s, a queen, then? “ For she was robed as richly as Igraine, or any of the queens of the North.

“No, Morgaine, she was not a queen, but a great priestess, the Lady of the Lake; and I am Lady of Avalon in her place. One day, perhaps, you will be a priestess too. You have the old blood, and perhaps you have the Sight.”

“What is the Sight?”

She frowned. “Igraine has not told you? Tell me, Morgaine, do you ever see things that others cannot see?”

“All the time,” I said, realizing that this lady understood all about me. “Only Father Columba says it is the work of the Devil. And Mother says that I should be silent about it, and never speak of it to anyone, even to her, because these things are not suitable for a Christian court and if Uther knew of them he would send me into a nunnery. I do not think I want to go into a nunnery and wear black clothes and never laugh again.”

Viviane said a word for which nurse had washed my mouth out with the harsh lye soap the kitchen people used for scrubbing floors. “Listen to me, Morgaine. Your mother is right that you should never speak of these things to Father Columba—“

“But God will be angry with me if I lie to a priest.”

She said the bad word again. “Listen, dear child: a priest will be angry if you lie to him, and say it is his God who is angry. But the Great Creator has better things to do than to be angry with young people, and this is a matter for your own conscience. Trust me, Morgaine: never say any more to Father Columba than you must, but always believe what the Sight tells you, for it comes to you directly from the Goddess.”

“Is the Goddess the same as the Virgin Mary, Mother of God?”

She frowned. “All the Gods are one God and all the Goddesses are one Goddess. The Great Goddess will not be angry if you call her by the name of Mary, who was good and loved mankind. Listen, my dear, this is no talk for a festival. But I swear you shall never go into a nunnery while there is life and breath in my body, no matter what Uther may say. Now that I know you have the Sight, I will move Heaven and Earth if I must, to bring you to Avalon. Shall this be a secret between us, Morgaine? Will you promise me?”

“I promise,” I said, and she leaned down and kissed my cheek. “Listen, the harpers are beginning to play for the dancing. Is Morgause not beautiful in her blue gown?”

                                   9     

On a spring day in the seventh year of the reign of Uther Pendragon at Caerleon, Viviane, priestess of Avalon and Lady of the Lake, went out at twilight to look into her magic mirror.

Although the tradition in which the Lady was priestess was older than the Druids, she shared one of the great tenets of the Druid faith: that the great forces which created the Universe could not be fitly worshipped in a house made with human hands, nor the Infinite contained within any man-made thing. And therefore the Lady’s mirror was not of bronze or even silver.

Behind her rose the grey stone walls of the ancient Temple of the Sun, built by the Shining Ones who had come there from Atlantis, centuries before. Before her lay the great lake, surrounded by tall, waving reeds, and swathed in the mist which, even on fine days, lay now across the land of Avalon. But beyond the Lake lay islands and more lakes, all through the whole of what was called the Summer Country. It lay mostly underwater, bog and salt marsh, but in the height of summer, the pools and some of the brackish lakes would dry in the sun and the lands would lie there, fertile for grazing and rich with grass and weeds.

Here, in fact, the inland sea was receding, year by year giving way to dry land; one day this would all be rich farmland  ...  but not in Avalon. Avalon now lay eternally surrounded in the mists, hidden from all but the faithful, and when men came and went in pilgrimage to the monastery which the Christian monks called Glass Town, the Temple of the Sun was invisible to them, lying in some strange otherworld; Viviane could see, when she bent her Sight upon it, the church they had built there.

It had been there for a long time, she knew, though she had never set foot upon its grounds. Centuries ago—so the Merlin had told her, and she believed him—a little band of priests had come here from the south, and with them had been their Nazarene prophet for schooling; and the story went that Jesus himself had been schooled there, in the dwelling place of the Druids where once the Temple of the Sun had risen, and had learned all of their wisdom. And years later, when—so the story ran—their Christ had been brought to sacrifice, playing out in his life the old Mystery of the Sacrificed God which was older than Britain’s very self, one of his kinsmen returned here, and struck his staff into the ground on the Holy Hill, and it had blossomed forth into the thorn tree which blossoms, not only with the other thorn, in Midsummer, but in the depth of the winter snow. And the Druids, in memory of the gentle prophet whom they too had known and loved, consented that Joseph of Arimathea should build, in the very grounds of the Holy Isle, a chapel and a monastery to their God; for all the Gods are one.

But that had been long ago. For a time, Christian and Druid had dwelt side by side, worshipping the One, but then the Romans had come to the Isle, and, although they were widely known for tolerating local deities, against the Druids they had been ruthless, cutting and burning down their sacred groves, trumping up lies that the Druids committed human sacrifice. Their real crime, of course, had been that they heartened the people not to accept the Roman laws and the Roman peace. And then, in one great act of Druid magic, to protect the last precious refuge of their school, they had made the last great change hi the world; that change which removed the Island of Avalon from the world of mankind. Now it lay hidden in the mist which concealed it, except from those initiates who had been schooled there or those who were shown the secret ways through the Lake. The Tribesmen knew it was there, and there they worshipped. The Romans, Christian since the days of Constantine, who had converted his legions wholesale on the grounds of some vision he had seen in a battle, believed that the Druids had been vanquished by their Christ, not knowing that the few remaining Druids lived and passed on their ancient wisdom in the hidden land.

Viviane could see, if she chose, with doubled Sight, for she was High Priestess of Avalon. When she chose she could see the tower they had built atop the very Tor, on the Holy Mountain of Initiation; a tower dedicated to Michael, one of their Jewish angels whose ancient function was to keep down the inferior world of demons. This struck Viviane as a blasphemy, even now, but she comforted herself with the thought that it was not in her world at all; if the narrow-minded Christians wished to think of the great old Gods as demons, the Christians would be the poorer for it. The Goddess lived, whatever the Christians thought of her. She turned her thoughts to her own business, which was to look into her magic mirror while the new moon still stood in the sky.

Although it was still light enough to see perfectly well, the Lady had carried with her a little lamp with a tiny flickering flame. She turned her back on the reeds and salt marsh, and walked inland along the path, climbing slowly along the reedy shore, passing the ancient rotted pilings of the dwellers who had built their houses there at the edge of the Lake in time long past.

Her small lamp flickered, becoming more and more visible in the darkness, and above the trees the pure, slim crescent of the virgin moon, barely visible, shone like the silver torque about the Lady’s throat. She went along the ancient processional way, climbing slowly—for, although she was still strong and vigorous, she was not a young woman—until she came to the mirror pool, lying clear between standing stones of enormous antiquity.

The water was clear, reflecting the moonlight and, as she bent over it, springing into flame at the Lady’s tiny lamp. She bent, dipped her hand in the water, and drank—it was forbidden to dip any man-made object into the pool, though above them, where the water bubbled into a spring, pilgrims might come with bottles and jugs and take away what they would from the flow. She tasted the clear, metallic-tasting water, and as always felt the stir of awe: this spring had been flowing since the beginning of the world, and it would flow forever, generous and magical, and free to all people. Surely such a spring as this was the gift of the Great Goddess, and Viviane knelt as she drank, raising her face to the slender crescent in the sky.

But after that momentary renewal of awe, which she had observed since first she came here, a novice of the House of Maidens, she turned back to her business. She set the lamp on a flat rock near the lip of the mirror pool, so that its light would reflect, as would the crescent moon, into the water. Now there were present the four elements: fire, in her lamp; water, from which she had drunk; the earth where she stood; and as she invoked the powers of air, she saw, as always during this invocation, a vagrant breeze ripple across the surface.

She sat for a moment in meditation. Then at last she formulated to herself the question for which she would consult the magical mirror.

How is it with Britain? How is it with my sister, and her daughter who is priestess-born, and with the son who is the hope of Britain?

For a moment, as the wind stirred the surface of the mirror pool, she saw only confused images, flowing—were they within her mind, or on the restless surface of the pool? She caught glimpses of battles, blurred by the restless water; she saw Uther’s dragon banner and saw her Tribesmen fighting at his side. She saw Igraine robed and crowned, as she had seen her in the flesh. And then, in a flash that made her heart pound faster, she saw Morgaine weeping; and in a second and terrifying flash of Sight, she saw a fair-haired child lying senseless, motionless—dead or alive?

Then the moon sank out of sight beyond the mist, and the vision was gone, and try as she might, Viviane could summon nothing back except mocking glimpses: Morgause holding her second son, Lot and Uther pacing in a great hall and hurling angry words, and the confused memory of the bruised and dying child. But had these things been, or were they only a warning of things yet to come?

Biting her lip, Viviane bent and picked up her mirror. She cast the remaining drops of pure oil into the surface of the pool—oil burned for the Sight must never be used for mundane purpose—and went swiftly in the falling darkness along the processional way and to the dwelling of the priestesses.

Once there, she summoned her waiting-woman. “Make all ready to ride at first dawn,” she said, “and let my novice make ready to serve at full moon, for before it waxes another day, I must be in Caerleon. Send to tell the Merlin.”