She sighed and leaned her chin in her hands. “I spoke well when I said that this night I was in need of a father. So it has come upon us already, the thing we feared and have wrought for all these years. What of Uther’s son, my father? Is he ready?”
“He must be ready,” said the Merlin. “Uther will not live till Midsummer-day. And already the carrion crows gather, as they did when Ambrosius lay dying. As for the boy—have you not seen him?”
“Now and again, I see a glimpse of him in the magic mirror,” she said. “He looks healthy and strong, but that tells me nothing except that he can look the part of a king when it comes to that. You have visited him, have you not?”
“At Uther’s will, I went now and again to see how he grew. I saw that he had those same books in Latin and Greek which taught your son so much of strategy and warfare; Ectorius is Roman to the core, and the conquests of Caesar and the exploits of Alexander are part of his very being. He is an educated man, and has trained both his sons for warfare. Young Caius was blooded in battle last year; Arthur fretted that he could not go, but he is an obedient son to Ectorius and did as he was told.”
“If he is so much Roman,” Viviane asked, “will Arthur be willing to be subject to Avalon? For he must rule the Tribes, as well, and the Pictish folk, remember.”
“I saw to that,” said the Merlin, “for I induced him to meet some of the little people, saying that they were the allies of Uther’s soldiers in this war to defend our island. With them he has learned to shoot their elf bolts, and to move silently in the heather and over the moors, and—” He hesitated and said significantly, “He can stalk the deer and does not fear to go among them.”
Viviane closed her eyes for a moment. “He is so young . . .”
“The Goddess chooses always the youngest and strongest of men to lead her warriors,” said Taliesin.
Viviane bowed her head. “Be it so,” she said. “He shall be tested. Bring him here if you can before Uther dies.”
“Here?” The Merlin shook his head. “Not till the testing is done. Only then can we show him the road to Avalon and the two realms over which he must rule.”
Again Viviane bowed her head. “To Dragon Island, then.”
“It will be the ancient challenge? Uther was not tested so at his king-making—”
“Uther was a warrior; it was enough to make him lord over the dragon,” Viviane said. “This boy is young and unblooded. He must be tested and proven.”
“And if he fails . . .”
Viviane gritted her teeth. “He must not fail!”
Taliesin waited until she met his eyes again and repeated, “And if he fails . . .”
She sighed. “No doubt Lot is ready, if that should come.”
“You should have taken one of Morgause’s sons and fostered him here at Avalon,” the Merlin said. “Gawaine is a likely boy. Hotheaded, quarrelsome—a bull, where Uther’s boy is a stag. But there is the stuff of a king in Gawaine, I think, and he also is Goddess-born—Morgause too was your mother’s daughter, and her sons have the royal blood.”
“I do not trust Lot,” said the Lady vehemently, “and I trust Morgause less than that!”
“Yet Lot holds the clansmen to the north, and I think the Tribes would accept him—”
“But those who hold to Rome—never,” said the Lady, “and then there would be two kingdoms in Britain, ever warring, and neither strong enough to hold off the Saxons and the wild Northmen. No. Uther’s son it must be, he must not fail!”
“That must be as the Goddess wills,” said the Merlin sternly. “See you mistake not your own will for hers.”
Viviane covered her face with her hands. “If he fails—if he fails it will all have been for nothing,” she said wildly, “—all that I have done to Igraine, all I have done to all those I love. Father, have you foreseen that it will fail?”
The old man shook his white head and his voice was compassionate.
“The Goddess does not make her will known to me,” he said, “and it was you who foresaw that this boy would have the powers to lead all of Britain. I caution you against pride, Viviane—thinking you know the best for every man and woman living. You have ruled well in Avalon—”
“But I am old,” she said, raising her face, and she could see the pity in his eyes, “and one day soon . . .”
The Merlin bowed his head; he too lived under that law. “When that time comes, you will know; it is not yet, Viviane.”
“No,” she said, struggling against the sudden despair which had come, as it sometimes did now, a heat in her body, a torment in her mind, “when it comes, when I can no longer see what lies ahead, then I will know it is time to give over the rulership of Avalon to another. Morgaine is still young, and Raven, whom I love well, has given herself to silence and the voice of the Goddess. It has not yet come; but if it comes too soon—”
“Whenever it comes, Viviane, that will be the right time,” the Merlin said. He stood up, tall and unsteady, and Viviane saw that he leaned heavily on his stick. “I will bring the boy to Dragon Island then, at the spring thaw, and we will see whether he is ready to be made king. And then you will give him the sword and the cup, in token that there is an eternal link between Avalon and the world outside—”
“The sword, at least,” Viviane said. “The cup—I do not know.”
The Merlin bowed his head. “That I leave to your wisdom. You, not I, are the voice of the Goddess. Yet you will not be the Goddess for him—”
Viviane shook her head. “He will meet the Mother when he is triumphant,” she said, “and from her hand he will take the sword of victory. But first he must prove his own, and must meet first with the Maiden Huntress. . . .” A flicker of a smile crossed her face. “And no matter what happens after that,” she said, “we will take no such chance as we did with Uther and Igraine. We shall make certain of the royal blood, whatever comes of it later.”
When the Merlin had gone away, she sat for a long time, watching pictures in the fire, seeing into the past alone, not seeking to look through the mist of time toward the future.
She too, years ago, so many years that she could not now remember how many, had laid down her maidenhood to the Horned God, the Great Hunter, the Lord of the living spiral dance. She hardly spared a thought for the virgin who would take this part in the kingmaking which was to come, but she let her mind stray into the past, and the other times she had played the part of the Goddess in the Great Marriage . . .
. . . never had it been more to her than duty; sometimes pleasant, sometimes distasteful, but always bidden, possessed by the Great Mother who had ruled her life since first she had come here. Suddenly she envied Igraine, and a detached part of her mind wondered why she envied a woman who had lost all her children to death or fosterage, and now was to suffer widowhood and end her life behind convent walls.
What I envy her is the love she has known. . . . I have no daughters, my sons are strangers and alien to me. . . . I have never loved, she thought. Nor have I known what it is to be loved. Fear, awe, reverence . . . these have been given me. Never love. And there are times when I think I would give it all for one look from any human being such as Uther gave Igraine at their wedding.
She sighed bleakly, repeating half aloud what the Merlin had said. “Well, there is no use fretting after last year’s snowfall.” She raised her head, and her attendant came on noiseless feet.
“Lady—?”
“Bring me—no,” she said, changing her mind abruptly; let the girl sleep. It is not true that I have never loved or been loved. I love Morgaine beyond all measuring, and she loves me.
Now that, too, might come to an end. But that too must be as the Goddess willed it.
14
The palest splinter of new moon stood to the west of Avalon. Morgaine paced slowly upward, her bare feet treading out the spiral pathway, noiseless and pale as the virgin moon. Her hair was unbound, her single garment uncinctured. She knew that guards and priestesses watched he
r, silent, lest some unauthorized person disturb her silence with an unconsecrated word. Behind the dark curtain of her hair, her eyelids were lowered. She moved unerringly on the path, without need for sight. Raven moved silently behind her, like Morgaine barefoot, ungirdled, her unbound hair curtaining her face.
Upward and upward in the darkening twilight, with a few stars pale in the indigo dome above them. The ring stones were grey and shadowy, a single pallid flicker within them—not fire; some will-o’-the-wisp, witch fire, sorcery, gleaming out from within the magical circle.
By the last flicker of the setting moon, reflected for a moment in the shining Lake below, a silent maiden priestess moved toward them, only a little girl, robed in undyed wool, her shorn hair no more than a wisp of darkness. She offered Morgaine a cup and Morgaine accepted it and drank in silence, then handed the cup to Raven, who drained its last drops. Silver and gold gleamed in the dying light. Morgaine took, from unseen hands, the great cross-handled sword, gasping a little at the unexpected weight. Barefoot, cold but not aware of it, she traced out the circle under the ring stones. Behind her, Raven took the long spear, thrust it into the heart of the witch fire. Light sprang up on the bit of tow there and she carried it, after Morgaine, all around the circle, a dim line of pale witch fire springing up around the dimness. Returning to the center by the dimmest of pale lights, they saw the face of Viviane; ageless, timeless, floating in midair disembodied—the face of the Goddess, shining. Although Morgaine knew that the effect was produced by a luminous substance smeared on cheeks and brow against the darkness of the circle and the dark garments, it never failed to make her catch her breath.
Bodiless, shining hands laid something in Morgaine’s hands, then in Raven’s. Morgaine bit into the sharp wooden bitterness, forced herself, past sickness, to swallow. Silence descended. Eyes gleamed in the dark, but no faces could be seen. She felt as if she were standing among multitudes beyond multitudes thronging the top of the Tor, but she could see no single face among them. Even Viviane’s bodiless face had vanished into the dark. She could feel the warmth of Raven’s body near hers, though they nowhere touched one another. She tried to keep her mind still, in meditation, moving into the schooled silence, not sure why she had been brought here.
Time passed; stars brightened against the ever-darkening sky. Time, Morgaine thought, time runs differently in Avalon, or perhaps it does not exist. Many nights during the long years she had traced out the spiral paths up the Tor, probing the mysteries of time and space within the circle of the ring stones. Yet tonight seemed stranger, darker, somehow more weighted with mystery; never before had she been called out from the other priestesses to play the major part in ritual. She knew that what she had been given, the magical feast, was an herb used to strengthen the sight; that did not diminish its power or its magic.
After a time, in the darkness, she began to see pictures in her mind, small colored pictures as if at a very great distance. She saw a herd of deer running. She saw again the great darkness that had descended upon the land when the sun went out and a cold wind blew, and she had been afraid that the world was ending; but the older priestesses had explained to her, as they gathered in the courtyard, that the Moon God was effacing the brightness of the Goddess, and she ran out with them joyously to join in the shrieks of the women to frighten him away. Later it had been explained to her how the sun and moon moved, and why, now and again, one of them crossed the face of the other; that it was in the way of nature, and the common people’s beliefs about the face of the Gods were symbols which these people, at the current state of their evolution, needed to visualize the great truths. Some day all men and women would know the inner truths, but now they needed them not.
She watched in the inner Sight, as she had done in life, while again and again the cycles of the year swung around the great ring stones; she watched the birth and fecundity and at last the dying of the God; she saw the great processions winding up the spiral toward the oak grove before the ring stones had been set here . . . time was transparent, it ceased to have meaning as the little painted people came and ripened and were cut down, and then the Tribes, and after them the Romans in their turn, and tall strangers from the coast of Gaul, and after them . . . time ceased, and she only saw the movement of peoples and the overgrowth of the world, ice came and receded and came again, she saw the great temples of Atlantis now drowned forever between the covering oceans, saw new worlds rising and setting . . . and silence and beyond the night the great stars wheeled and swung. . . .
Behind her she heard an eerie wailing cry and her skin iced. Raven cried out, Raven whose voice she had never heard; Raven, who once, when they were serving together in the Temple, had caught a lamp about to overflow, and, scalded with the burning oil, had sat smothering her screams with her two hands while her burns were bandaged, that she might not break the vow which had given her voice to the Goddess. She would always bear the scars; once, looking at her, Morgaine had thought, The vow I made was a little thing next to that, and yet I came so near to breaking it for a dark and sweet-voiced man.
And now Raven, in the moonless night, screamed aloud, a high, eldritch crying, like a woman in childbed. Three times the shrill cry trembled over the Tor, and Morgaine shivered again, knowing that even the priests on the other island that lay corresponding to their own must waken in their solitary cells and cross themselves, hearing that haunted cry that rang between the worlds.
After the cry, silence, a silence which seemed to Morgaine filled with breathing, with held breath even, from the unseen initiates who now surrounded the dreadful solitude inhabited only by the three motionless priestesses. Then, gasping and choking, as if her voice were long disabled from the silence, Raven cried out:
“Ah—seven times the Wheel, the Wheel with thirteen spokes, has turned about in the sky . . . seven times the Mother has given birth to her dark son. . . .”
Again the silence, deepening in contrast, except for the choking gasps of the entranced prophetess. She cried out, “Ah—ah—I burn—I burn—it is time, it is time . . .” and lapsed again into the clotted silence, pregnant with terror.
“They run! They run in the spring rutting, they run—they fight, they choose their king—ah, the blood, the blood—and the greatest of them all, he runs, and there is blood on the antlers of his pride. . . .”
Again the silence lengthened, and Morgaine, seeing in the darkness behind her eyelids the spring running of the deer, saw again what she had seen in a half-forgotten glimpse in the silver bowl—a man among the deer, struggling, fighting. . . .
“It is the child of the Goddess, he runs, he runs . . . the Horned One must die . . . and the Horned One must be crowned . . . the Virgin Huntress must call the king to her, she must lay down her maidenhood to the God . . . ah, the old sacrifice, the old sacrifice . . . I burn, I burn . . .” and the words began to choke over one another and die in a long, sobbing scream. Behind her, through her closed eyes, Morgaine saw Raven fall senseless to the ground and lie there, gasping, her gasps the only sound in the deepening silence.
Somewhere an owl called; once, twice, three times.
Out of the darkness, priestesses came, silent and dark, blue gleams on their brow. They lifted Raven tenderly and bore her away. They lifted Morgaine too, and she felt her throbbing head tenderly held to a woman’s breast as they carried her away. Then she knew no more.
Three days later, when she had recovered her strength somewhat, Viviane sent for her.
Morgaine rose and tried to dress herself, but she was still weak, and accepted the help of one of the young priestesses, grateful that the girl was under silence and did not speak to her. The long fasting, the terrible sickness brought on by the ritual herbs, the strung tension of the ritual, still gripped at her body; she had eaten a little soup the night before, and some bread soaked in milk this morning, but she still felt sick and empty after the long strain, and her head throbbed, and her moon-dark bleeding had seized her with a violence never felt befor
e; this too, she knew, might be the aftereffect of the sacred herbs. Sick and incurious, she wished that Viviane had left her to recover in peace, but she did Viviane’s will as she would have done that of the Goddess, had the Goddess leaned down from Heaven and spoken a wish aloud. When she was dressed, and had braided her hair and wound it with a deerskin thong, and painted the blue crescent on her forehead with fresh blue dye, she went along the trail to the house where the High Priestess lived.
As was now her privilege, she entered without knocking or announcing her presence. Somehow in this house she always visualized Viviane waiting for her, seated in the thronelike chair as if she were the Goddess on her dark throne, but today Viviane was moving about at the back of the room, and the fire was not lighted, but dark and cold. Viviane wore her simple robe of undyed wool with a hood tied over her hair, and for the first time it came sharply on Morgaine that Viviane was priestess, not now of the Maiden or of the Mother, but of the ancient wise-woman—who was also the Old Death-crone. Her face looked lined and haggard, and Morgaine thought, Of course, if the rites made Raven ill, and myself, and we are both young and strong, what must it have done to Viviane, who has grown old in the service of her whom we serve?