Lancelet spread his cloak in the grass. Around them was the indefinable scent of green apples and grass, and Morgaine thought, Almost, we might be in Avalon. With that trick he had of catching up her thoughts, he murmured, “We have found ourselves a corner of Avalon this night—” and drew her down beside him. He took off her veil, stroking her hair, but he seemed in no haste for more, holding her gently, now and again leaning down to kiss her on cheek or forehead.
“The grass is dry—no dew has fallen. Like enough there will be rain before morning,” he murmured, caressing her shoulder and her small hands. She felt his hand, sword-callused and hard, so hard that it startled her to remember he was full four years younger than she was herself. She had heard the story—he had been born when Viviane thought herself well beyond childbearing. His long fingers could encircle her whole hand and conceal it there; he toyed with her fingers, playing with her rings, moving his hand to the breast of her gown, and unlacing it there. She felt dizzied, shaken, passion sweeping through her like the tide surging in and covering a beach, so that she went under and drowned in his kisses. He murmured something that she could not hear, but she did not ask what he had said, she was beyond listening to words.
He had to help her out of her gown. The dresses worn at court were more elaborate than the simple robes she had worn as a priestess, and she felt clumsy, awkward. Would he like her? Her breasts seemed so soft and limp, they had been so since Gwydion’s birth; she remembered how they had been when he first touched her, tiny and hard.
But he seemed to notice nothing, fondling her breasts, taking the nipples between his fingers and then, gently, between his lips and his teeth. Then she lost thought altogether, nothing existing in the world for her except his hands touching her, the pulse of awareness in her own fingers running down the smoothness of his shoulders, his back, the fine dark softness of the hair there . . . somehow she had thought the hair on a man’s chest would be wiry and coarse, but it was not so with him, it was soft and silky as her own hair, curling so fine and close. In a daze she remembered that the first time for her had been with a youth no more than seventeen who scarce knew what he was about, so that she had had to guide him, to show him what to do . . . and for her that had been the only time, so that she came almost virgin to Lancelet. . . . In a rush of grief she wished that for her it was the first time, so that it might have been so blissful for her to remember; it should have been like this, this was how it should have been. . . . She moved her body against his, clinging in entreaty, moaning, she could not bear, now, to wait any longer. . . .
It seemed he was not yet ready, though she was all alive to him, her body flowing with the pulse of life and desire in her. She moved against him, hungry, her mouth avid, entreating. She whispered his name, begging now, almost afraid. He went on kissing her gently, his hands moving to stroke and soothe her, but she did not want to be soothed now, her body was crying out for completion, it was starvation, agony. She tried to speak, to beg him, but it came out a sobbing whimper.
He held her gently against him, still stroking her. “Hush, no, hush, Morgaine, wait, no more now—I do not want to hurt or dishonor you, never think that—here, lie here by me, let me hold you, I will content you . . .” and in despair and confusion she let him do what he would, but even while her body cried out for the pleasure he gave her, a curious anger was growing. What of the flow of life between their two bodies, male and female, the tides of the Goddess rising and compelling them? Somehow it seemed to her that he was stemming that tide, that he was making her love for him a mockery and a game, a pretense. And he did not seem to mind, it seemed to him that this was the way it should be, so that they were both pleasured . . . as if nothing mattered but their bodies, that there was no greater joining with all of life. To the priestess, reared in Avalon and attuned to the greater tides of life and eternity, this careful, sensuous, deliberate lovemaking seemed almost blasphemy, a refusal to give themselves up to the will of the Goddess.
And then, in the depths of mingled pleasure and humiliation she began to excuse him. He had not been reared as she was in Avalon, but thrown about from fosterage to court to military camp; he had been a soldier almost as long as he had been old enough to lift a sword, his life had been spent in the field, perhaps he did not know, or perhaps he was accustomed only to such women as would give him no more than a moment’s ease for his body, or such women as wanted to toy with lovemaking and give nothing . . . he had said, I do not want to hurt or dishonor you, as if he truly believed there could be something wrong or dishonorable in this coming together. Spent, now, he was turned a little away from her, but he was still touching her, toying with her, drawing his fingers through the fine hair at her thighs, kissing her neck and breasts. She closed her eyes, holding herself to him, angry and desolate—well, well, perhaps it was no more than she deserved, she had played the harlot in coming to him like this, perhaps it was no more than her due that he should treat her as one . . . and she was so besotted that she had let him take her like this, she would have let him do whatever he would, knowing that if she asked for more she would lose even this, and she longed for him, she still hungered for him with an intolerable ache that would never be wholly slaked. And he wanted her not at all . . . still in his heart he hungered for Gwenhwyfar, or for some woman he could have without giving more of himself than this empty touching of skins . . . a woman who could be content to give herself and ask nothing more of him than pleasure. Through the ache and hunger of her love, a faint strain of contempt was threading, and it was the greatest agony of all—that she loved him no less, that she knew she would love him always, no less than at this moment of hunger and despair.
She sat up, drawing her gown toward her, fastening it over her shoulders with shaking fingers. He sat silent, watching her, stretching out his hands to help her adjust it. After a long time he said sorrowfully, “We have done wrong, my Morgaine, you and I. Are you angry with me?”
She could not speak; her throat was too tight with pain. At last she said, straining her voice to form the words, “No, not angry,” and she knew that she should raise her voice and scream at him, demand what he could not give her—nor any woman, perhaps.
“You are my cousin, my kinswoman—but there is no harm done—” he said, and his voice was shaking. “At least I have not that to blame myself—that I could bring you to dishonor before all the court—I would not do so for the world—believe me, cousin, I love you well—”
She could not keep back her sobs now. “Lancelet, I beg you, in the name of the Goddess, speak not so—what harm is done? It was in the way of the Goddess, what we both desired—”
He made a gesture of distress. “You speak so, of the Goddess and such heathen things. . . . Almost you frighten me, kinswoman, when I would keep myself from sin, and yet I have looked on you with lust and wickedness, knowing it was wrong.” He drew on his clothes with trembling hands. At last he said, almost choking, “The sin seems to me more deadly, I suppose, than it is—I would you were not so like to my mother, Morgaine—”
It was like a blow in the face, like a cruel and treacherous blow. For a moment she could not speak. Then, for an instant, it seemed that the full rage of the Goddess angered possessed her and she felt herself rising, towering, she knew it was the glamour of the Goddess coming upon her as it had done in the Avalon barge; she felt herself, small and insignificant as she was, looming over him, and saw the powerful knight, the captain of the King’s horse, shrink away small and frightened, as all men are small in the sight of the Goddess.
“You are—you are a contemptible fool, Lancelet,” she said. “You are not even worth cursing!” She turned and fled from him, leaving him sitting there with his breeches half-fastened, staring after her in astonishment and shame. She felt her heart pounding. Half of her had wanted to scream at him, shrewish as a skua gull; the other half wanted to break down and weep in agony, in despair, begging for the deeper love he had denied her and rejected, refusing the Goddess in her. .
. . Fragments of thought flickered in her mind, an old tale of the Goddess surprised and refused by a man and how the Goddess had had him torn to shreds by the hounds who ran hunting with her . . . and there was sorrow that she had what she had dreamed of all these long years and it was dust and ashes to her.
A priest would say this was the wages of sin. I heard such, often enough, from Igraine’s house priest before I went to be fostered in Avalon. At heart am I more of a Christian than I know? And again it seemed to her that her heart must break from the wreck and disaster of her love.
In Avalon this could never have come to pass—those who came to the Goddess in this way would never have so refused her power. . . . She paced up and down, a raging fire unslaked in her veins, knowing that no one could possibly understand how she felt except for another priestess of the Goddess. Viviane, she thought with longing, Viviane would understand, or Raven, or any of us reared in the House of Maidens . . . what have I been doing all these long years, away from my Goddess?
Morgaine speaks . . .
Three days later I got leave from Arthur to depart from his court and ride to Avalon; I said only that I was homesick for the Isle and for Viviane, my foster-mother. And in those days I had no speech with Lancelet save for the small courtesies of every day when we could not avoid meeting. Even in those I marked that he would not meet my eyes, and I felt angry and shamed, and went out of my way that I might not come face to face with him at all.
So I took horse, and rode eastward through the hills; nor did I return to Caerleon for many years, nor knew I anything of what befell in Arthur’s court . . . but that is a tale for another time.
8
In the summer of the next year, the Saxons were massing off the coast, and Arthur and his men spent all the year in gathering an army for the battle they knew must come. Arthur led his men into battle and drove the Saxons back, but it was not the decisive battle and victory for which he had hoped; they were damaged indeed, and it would take them more than a year to recover, but he had not enough horses and men to defeat them firmly and for all time, as he hoped to do. At this battle he took a wound, which seemed not serious; but it festered and inflamed and he had to spend much of the autumn bedfast—the first snow flurries were coming over the walls of Caerleon before he could walk a little about the courtyard, leaning on a stick, and he would bear the scars to his grave.
“It will be full spring before I can sit a horse again,” he observed gloomily to Gwenhwyfar, who stood close to the courtyard wall, her blue cloak wrapped tight around her.
“It may well be,” Lancelet said, “and longer, my dear lord, if you take cold in your wound before it is full healed. Come within doors, I beg you—look, there is snow on Gwenhwyfar’s cloak.”
“And in your beard, Lance—or is that only the first grey?” Arthur asked, teasing, and Lancelet laughed.
“Both, I suppose—there you have the advantage of me, my king, your beard is so fair the grey will not show when it comes. Here, lean on my arm.”
Arthur would have waved him away, but Gwenhwyfar said, “No, take his arm, Arthur, you will undo all our fine leechcraft if you fall—and the stones are slippery underfoot, with this snow melting as it comes down.”
Arthur sighed and leaned on his friend’s arm. “Now have I had a taste of what it must be like to be old.” Gwenhwyfar came and took his other arm, and he laughed. “Will you love me and uphold me like this when indeed there is grey in my beard and hair and when I go on a stick like the Merlin?”
“Even when you are ninety, my lord,” said Lancelet, laughing with him. “I can see it well, Gwenhwyfar holding you by one arm and I by the other as our ancient steps totter toward your throne—we will all be ninety or thereabout!” Abruptly he sobered. “I am troubled about Taliesin, my lord, he grows feeble and his eyes are failing. Should he not go back to Avalon and rest his last years in peace?”
“No doubt he should,” said Arthur. “But he says he will not leave me alone, with only the priests for councillors—”
“What better councillors than the priests could you have, my lord?” Gwenhwyfar flared. She resented the unearthly word Avalon; it frightened her to think that Arthur was sworn to protect their heathenish ways.
They came into the hall where a fire was burning, and Arthur made a gesture of annoyance as Lancelet eased him into his chair. “Aye, set the old man by the fire and give him his posset—I marvel that you let me wear shoes and hose instead of a bedgown!”
“My dear lord—” Gwenhwyfar began, but Lancelet laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t fret yourself, kinswoman, all men are so, peevish when they are ill—he knows not when he is well off, being nursed by fair women and tended with dainty foods and clean linen and those possets he scorns. . . . I have lain with a wound in a field camp, nursed by a sour old man too lame to fight, and lying in my own shit because I could not shift myself and no one came near to help me, with nothing brought but some sour beer and hard bread to soak in it. Stop grumbling, Arthur, or I shall try to see to it that you nurse your wound in manly fashion as befits a true soldier!”
“Aye, and he would do it, too,” said Arthur, with an affectionate smile at his friend. “You go not in much fear of your king, Prince Galahad—” He took the horn spoon from his wife’s hand and began to eat the concoction of warmed wine with bread and honey soaked in it. “Aye, this is good and warming—it has spices in it, has it not, those same spices you bade me send for from Londinium. . . .”
Cai came to them, when Arthur had finished, and said, “So, how goes the wound after an hour of walking on it, my lord? Is there still much pain?”
“Not as much as the last time, and that is all I can say,” Arthur said. “It is the first time I have known what real fear was, fear I might die with my work still undone.”
“God would not have it so,” Gwenhwyfar said.
Arthur patted her hand. “I told myself that, but a voice within kept saying to me that this was the great sin of pride, fearing that I or any man could not be spared from what God wishes to be done—I have thought long about such things while I lay unable to set foot to the ground.”
“I cannot see that you have so much undone, save for the final victory over the Saxons, my lord,” said Cai, “but now you must go to your bed, you are weary with the out of doors.”
When Arthur was stretched out on the bed, Cai took his clothes away and examined the great wound which still, faintly, oozed matter through the cloths. Cai said, “I will send for the women, and you must have hot cloths on this again—you have strained it. It is well you did not break it open while you were walking.” When the women had brought steaming kettles and mixed the compresses of herbs and hot water, laying folded cloths upon the wound so hot that Arthur winced and roared, Cai said, “Aye, but you were lucky even so, Arthur. Had that sword struck you a hand span to one side, Gwenhwyfar would have even more cause to grieve, and you would be known far and wide as the gelded king . . . as in that old legend! Know you not the tale—the king wounded in the thigh and as his powers fade, so fades the land and withers, till some youth comes who can make it spring fertile anew. . . .”
Gwenhwyfar shuddered, and Arthur said testily, shifting in pain under the heat of the compress, “This is no tale to tell a wounded man!”
“I should think it would make you more aware of your good fortune, that your land will not wither and be sterile,” Cai said. “By Easter, I dare say, the Queen’s womb could be quick again, if you are fortunate—”
“God grant it,” Arthur said, but the woman winced and turned away. Once again she had conceived, and once again all had gone awry, so quickly that she had scarce known she had been with child—would it be so always with her? Was she barren, was it the punishment of God on her that she did not strive early and late to bring her husband to be a better Christian?
One of the women took away the cloth and would have replaced it; Arthur reached for Gwenhwyfar. “No, let my lady do it, her hands are
gentler—” he said, and Gwenhwyfar took the steaming hot cloth—so hot it was she burned her fingers, but she welcomed the pain as penance. It was her fault, all her fault; he should put her away as barren, and take a wife who could give him a child. It was wrong that he should ever have married her—she had been eighteen, and already past her most fruitful years. Perhaps . . .
If only Morgaine were here, I would indeed beseech her for that charm which could make me fruitful. . . .
“It seems to me now that we have need of Morgaine’s leechcraft,” she said. “Arthur’s wound goes not as it should, and she is a notable mistress of healing arts, as is the Lady of Avalon herself. Why do we not send to Avalon and beseech one of them to come?”
Cai frowned at her and said, “I do not see that there is need of that. Arthur’s wound goes on well enough—I have seen much worse come to full healing.”
“Still, I would be glad to see my good sister,” said Arthur, “or my friend and benefactor, the Lady of the Lake. But from what Morgaine has told me, I do not think I will see them together. . . .”