The Mists of Avalon

  “Mordred,” he said, in contempt. “Such a trick is worthy of you!”

  Gawaine said formally, “In the King’s name, Lancelet, I accuse you of high treason. Get me your sword.”

  “Never mind that,” said Gwydion, “go and take it.”

  “Gareth! In God’s name, why did you lend yourself to this?”

  Gareth’s eyes were glistening as if with tears in the lamplight. “I never believed it of you, Lancelet. I would to God I had fallen in battle before ever I saw this day.”

  Lancelet bent his head and Gwenhwyfar saw his eyes, panicky, move around the room. He muttered, “Oh, God, Pellinore looked at me so when they came with the torches to take me in Elaine’s bed—must I betray everyone, everyone?” She wanted to reach out to him, to cry out with pity and pain, to shelter him in her arms. But he would not look at her.

  “Your sword,” said Gawaine quietly. “And dress yourself, Lancelet. I will not take you naked and disgraced into Arthur’s presence. Enough men have witnessed your shame.”

  “Don’t let him get at his sword—” some faceless voice in the darkness protested, but Gawaine gestured the speaker contemptuously into silence. Lancelet turned slowly away from them, into the tiny antechamber where he had left clothing, armor, weapons. She heard him drawing on his garments. Gareth stood, his hand on his sword, as Lancelet came into the room, dressed but weaponless, his hands in full view.

  “I am glad for your sake that you will come with us quietly,” said Gwydion. “Mother"—he turned into the shadows, and Gwenhwyfar saw, with consternation, Queen Morgause standing there—"see to the Queen. She shall be in your charge until Arthur may deal with her.”

  Morgause advanced on the bedside. Gwenhwyfar had never noticed before how large a woman Morgause was, and how ruthless her jaw line.

  “Come along, my lady, get into your gown,” she said. “And I will help you peg your hair—you do not want to go naked and shameless before the King. And be glad there was a woman here. These men—” she looked contemptuously at them—"meant to wait until they could catch him actually inside you.” Gwenhwyfar shrank from the brutality of the words; slowly, with lagging fingers, she began to draw on her gown. “Must I dress before all these men?”

  Gwydion did not wait for Morgause to answer. He said, “Don’t try to cozen us, shameless woman! Dare you pretend you have anything left of decency or modesty? Put on that gown, madam, or my mother shall bundle you into it like a sack!”

  He calls her mother. No wonder Gwydion is cruel and ruthless, with the Queen of Lothian to foster him! Yet Gwenhwyfar had seen Morgause so often as merely a lazy, jolly, greedy woman—what had brought her to this? She sat still, fastening the laces of her shoes.

  Lancelet said quietly, “It is my sword you want, then?”

  “You know it,” Gawaine said.

  “Why, then"—moving almost more swiftly than the eye could follow, Lancelet leaped for Gawaine, and in another catlike movement, had Gawaine’s own sword in his hand—"come and take it, damn you!” He lunged with Gawaine’s sword at Gwydion, who fell across the bed, howling, bleeding from a great slash in his backside; then, as Cai stepped forward, sword in hand, Lancelet caught up a cushion from the bed and pushed Cai backward with it so that he fell into the advancing men, who tripped over him. He leaped up on the bed and said, low and short to Gwenhwyfar, “Keep perfectly still and be ready!”

  She gasped, shrinking back and making herself small in a corner. They were coming at him again; he ran one of them through, briefly engaged another, and over that one’s body, lunged and slashed at a shadowy attacker. The giant form of Gareth crumpled slowly to the floor. Lancelet was already fighting someone else, but Gwydion, bleeding, cried out, “Gareth!” and flung himself across the body of his foster-brother. In that moment of horrified lull, while Gwydion knelt, sobbing, over Gareth’s body, Gwenhwyfar felt Lancelet catch her up on his arm, whirl, kill someone at the door—she never knew who it was—and then she was on her feet in the corridor, and Lancelet was pushing her, with frantic haste, ahead of him. Someone came at him out of the dark and Lancelet killed him, and they ran on.

  “Make for the stables,” he gasped. “Horses, and out of here, fast.”

  “Wait!” She caught at his arm. “If we throw ourselves on Arthur’s mercy—or you escape and I will stay and face Arthur—”

  “Gareth might have seen justice done. But with Gwydion’s hand in it, do you think either of us would ever reach the King alive? I named him well Mordred!” He hurried her into the stables, swiftly flung a saddle on his horse. “No time to find yours. Ride behind me, and hold on well—I’m going to have to ride down the guards at the gate.” And Gwenhwyfar realized she was seeing a new Lancelet—not her lover, but the hardened warrior. How many men had he killed this night? She had no time for fear as he lifted her on his horse and sprang up before her.

  “Hang on to me,” he said. “I’ll have no time to look after you.” He turned then, and gave her one hard, long kiss. “This is my fault, I should have known that infernal bastard would be spying—well, whatever happens now, at least it’s over. No more lies and no more hiding. You’re mine forever—” and he broke off. She could feel him trembling, but he turned savagely to grip the reins. “And now we go!”

  Morgause looked on in horror as Gwydion, weeping, bent over her youngest son.

  Words spoken in half earnest, years ago—Gwydion had refused to take the lists on the opposite side from Gareth, even in a mock battle. It seemed to me that you lay dying, he had said . . . and I knew it was my doing you lay without the spark of life. . . . I will not tempt that fate.

  Lancelet had done this, Lancelet whom Gareth had always loved more than any other man.

  One of the men in the room stepped forward and said, “They’re getting away—”

  “Do you think I care about that?” Gwydion winced, and Morgause realized that he was bleeding, that his blood was flowing and mingling with Gareth’s on the floor of the chamber. She caught up the linen sheet from the bed, tore it, and wadded it against Gwydion’s wound.

  Gawaine said somberly, “No man in all of Britain will hide them now. Lancelet is everywhere outcast. He has been taken in treason to his king, and his very life is forfeit. God! How I wish it had not come to this!” He came and looked at Gwydion’s wound, then shrugged. “No more than a flesh cut—see, the bleeding is slowed already, it will heal, but you will not sit in comfort for some days. Gareth—” His voice broke; the great, rough, greying man began to weep like a child. “Gareth had worse fortune, and I will have Lancelet’s life for it, if I die myself at his hands. Ah God, Gareth, my little one, my little brother—” and Gawaine bent and cradled the big body against him. He said thickly, through sobs, “Was it worth it, Gwydion, was it worth Gareth’s life?”

  “Come away, my boy,” said Morgause, through a tightness in her own throat—Gareth, her baby, her last child; she had lost him long ago to Arthur, but still she remembered a fair-haired little boy, clutching a wooden painted knight in his hand. And one day you and I shall go on quest together, sir Lancelet . . . always Lancelet. But now Lancelet had overreached himself, and everywhere in the land every man’s hand would be against him. And still she had Gwydion, her beloved, the one who would one day be King, and she at his side.

  “Come, my lad, come away, you can do nothing for Gareth now. Let me bind up your wound, then we shall go to Arthur and tell him what has befallen, so that he may send out his men to seek for the traitors—”

  Gwydion shook her grip from his arm. “Get away from me, curse you,” he said in a terrible voice. “Gareth was the best of us, and I would not have sacrificed him for a dozen kings! It was you and your spite against Arthur always urging me on, as if I cared what bed the Queen slept in—as if Gwenhwyfar were any worse than you, when from the time I was ten years old you had this one or that one in your bed—”

  “Oh, my son—” she whispered, aghast. “How can you speak so to me? Gareth was my son to
o—”

  “What did you ever care for Gareth, or for any of us, or for anything but your own pleasure and your own ambition? You would urge me to a throne, not for my sake but for your own power!” He thrust away her clinging hands. “Get you back to Lothian, or to hell if the devil will have you, but if ever I set eyes on you again, I swear I will forget all except that you were the murderer of the one brother I loved, the one kinsman—” and as Gawaine urgently pushed his mother from the chamber, she could hear Gwydion weeping again. “Oh, Gareth, Gareth, I should have died first—”

  Gawaine said shortly, “Cormac, take the Queen of Lothian to her chamber.”

  His strong arm was holding her upright, and after they had moved down the hall, after that dreadful sobbing had died away behind her, Morgause began to draw breath freely again. How could he turn on her this way? When had she ever done anything except for his sake? She must show decent mourning for Gareth, certainly, but Gareth was Arthur’s man, and surely Gwydion would have realized it, sooner or later. She looked up at Cormac. “I cannot walk so fast—hold back a little.”

  “Certainly, my lady.” She was very much aware of his arm enfolding her, holding her. She let herself lean a little on him. She had bragged to Gwenhwyfar of her young lover, but she had never yet actually taken him to her bed—she had kept him delaying, dangling. She turned her head against his shoulder. “You have been faithful to your queen, Cormac.”

  “I am loyal to my royal house, as all my people have ever been,” the young man said in their own language, and she smiled.

  “Here is my chamber—help me inside, will you? I can scarce walk—”

  He supported her, eased her down on her bed. “Is it my lady’s will that I call her women?”

  “No,” she whispered, catching at his hands, aware that her tears were seductive. “You have been loyal to me, Cormac, and now is that loyalty to be rewarded—come here—”

  She held out her arms, half shutting her eyes, then opened them, in shock, as he pulled awkwardly away.

  “I—I think you are distraught, madam,” he stammered. “What do you think I am? What do you take me for? Why, lady, I have as much respect for you as for my own grandmother! Should I take advantage of an old woman like you when you are beside yourself with grief? Let me call your waiting-woman, and she will make you a nice posset and I will forget what you said in the madness of grief, madam.”

  Morgause could feel the blow in the very pit of her stomach, repeated blows on her heart—my own grandmother . . . old woman . . . the madness of grief. . . . The whole of the world had suddenly gone mad—Gwydion insane with ingratitude, this man who had looked on her so long with desire turning on her . . . she wanted to scream, to call for her servants and have him whipped till his back ran crimson with his blood and the walls rang with his shrieking for mercy. But even as she opened her mouth for that, the whole weight of her life seemed to descend on her in deadly weariness.

  “Yes,” she said dully, “I do not know what I was saying—call my women, Cormac, and tell them to bring me some wine. We will ride at daybreak for Lothian.”

  And when he had gone, she sat on the bed without the strength to lift her hands.

  I am an old woman. And I have lost my son Gareth, and I have lost Gwydion, and I will never now be Queen in Camelot. I have lived too long.

  17

  Clinging to Lancelet’s back, her gown pulled up above her knees and her bare legs hanging down, Gwenhwyfar closed her eyes as they rode hard through the night. She had no idea where they were going. Lancelet was a stranger, a hard-faced warrior, a man she had never known. There was a time, she thought, when I would have been terrified, out like this under the open sky, at night . . . but she felt excited, exhilarated. At the back of her mind was pain too, mourning for the gentle Gareth who had been like a son to Arthur and deserved better of life than to be struck down so—she wondered if Lancelet even knew whom he had killed! And there was grief for the end of her years with Arthur, and all they had shared for so long. But from what had happened this night there could be no going back. She had to lean forward to hear Lancelet over the rushing of wind. “We must stop somewhere soon, the horse must rest—and if we ride in daylight, my face and yours are known all through this countryside.”

  She nodded; she had not breath enough to speak. After a time they came within a little wood, and there he pulled to a stop and lifted her gently from the horse’s back. He led the horse to water, then spread his cloak on the ground for her to sit. He stared at the sword by his side. “I still have Gawaine’s sword. When I was a boy—I heard tales of the fighting madness, but I knew not that it was within our blood—” and sighed heavily. “There is blood on the sword. Whom did I kill, Gwen?”

  She could not bear to see his sorrow and guilt. “There was more than one—”

  “I know I struck Gwydion—Mordred, damn him. I know I wounded him, I could still act with my own will then. I don’t suppose"—his voice hardened—"that I had the luck to kill him?”

  Silently she shook her head.

  “Then who?” She did not speak; he leaned over and took her shoulders so roughly that for a moment she was afraid of the warrior as she had never been of the lover. “Gwen, tell me! In God’s name—did I kill my cousin Gawaine?”

  This she could answer without hesitation, glad it was Gawaine he had named. “No. I swear it, not Gawaine.”

  “It could have been anyone,” he said, staring at the sword and suddenly shuddering. “I swear it to you, Gwen, I knew not even that I had a sword in my hand. I struck Gwydion as if he had been a dog, and then I remember no more until we were riding—” and he knelt before her, trembling. He whispered, “I am mad again, I think, as once I was mad—”

  She reached out, caught him against her in a passion of wild tenderness. “No, no,” she whispered, “ah, no, my love—I have brought all this on you, disgrace and exile—”

  “You say that,” he whispered, “when I have brought them on you, taken you away from everything that meant anything to you—”

  Reckless, she pressed herself to him and said, “Would to God that you had done it before!”

  “Ah, it is not too late—I am young again, with you beside me, and you—you have never been more beautiful, my own dear love—” He pushed her back on the cloak, suddenly laughing in abandon. “Ah, now there’s none to come between us, none to interrupt us, my own—ah, Gwen, Gwen—”

  As she came into his arms, she remembered the rising sun and a room in Meleagrant’s castle. It was like that now; and she clung to him, as if there were nothing else in the world, nothing more for either of them, not ever.

  They slept a little, curled together in the cloak, and wakened still in each other’s arms, the sun searching for them through the green branches overhead. He smiled, touching her face.

  “Do you know—never before have I wakened in your arms without fear. Yet now I am happy, in spite of all . . .” and he laughed at her, a note of wildness coming into the laughter. There were leaves in his white hair, and leaves caught in his beard, and his tunic was rumpled; she put up her hands and felt grass and leaves in her own hair, which was coming down. She had no way to comb it, but she caught it in handfuls and parted it to braid, then bound the end of the single braid with a scrap ripped from the edge of her torn skirt. She said, her voice catching with laughter, “What a pair of wild ragamuffins we are! Who would know the High Queen and the brave Lancelet?”

  “Does it matter to you?”

  “No, my love. Not in the least.”

  He brushed leaves and grass out of his hair and beard. “I must get up and catch the horse,” he said, “and perhaps there will be a farm nearby where we can find you some bread or a drink of ale—I have not a single coin with me, nor anything worth money, save my sword, and this—” He touched a little gold pin on his tunic. “For the moment, at least, we are beggars, though if we could reach Pellinore’s castle, I still have a house there, where I lived with Elaine, and serv
ants—and gold, too, to pay our passage overseas. Will you come with me to Less Britain, Gwenhwyfar?”

  “Anywhere,” she whispered, her voice breaking, and at that moment she meant it absolutely—to Less Britain, or to Rome, or to the country beyond the world’s end, only that she might be with him forever. She pulled him down to her again and forgot everything in his arms.

  But when, hours later, he lifted her on the horse and they went on at a soberer pace, she fell silent, troubled. Yes, no doubt they could make their way overseas. Yet when this night’s work was talked from one end of the world to the other, shame and scorn would come down on Arthur, so that for his own honor he must seek them out wherever they fled. And soon or late, Lancelet must know that he had slain the friend who was dearest to him in all the world save only Arthur’s self. He had done it in madness, but she knew how grief and guilt would consume him and in time he would remember, when he looked on her, not that she was his love, but that he had killed his friend, unknowing, for her sake; and that he had betrayed Arthur for her sake. If he must make war on Arthur for her sake, he would hate her. . . .