Gwenhwyfar_ The White Spirit - Mercedes Lackey [132]
“I think that you will never convince me to leave my path,” she told him, finally, “But I am becoming more certain after listening to you that our paths are so near one another as to be identical in many places.”
He had looked at her with a raised eyebrow. Opened his mouth. Closed it again.
“There are things that the Ladies cleave to that I find . . . wrong,” she admitted. “I will never believe that the gods and the land require blood be spilled so that both can prosper. Think of all the blood spilled in war—if it were merely blood that was required, the lands that were battlefields should forever be waist deep in lush grasses and yielding four times the corn of others for all eternity. Yet I have never seen that. The first year after a battle, yes, but that is just logic, since you could get as goodly a harvest spreading manure. But not after.”
“And neither have I!” he began, eagerly.
“Wait,” she had said, holding up a hand to forestall him from yet another attempt to persuade her to his way of belief. “Aside from that, now I must look to the followers of both our gods. Your own god has said that one knows the tree by the fruit it bears. Those people that heed the Druids and the Ladies, I see to be not much different from those that follow Christ. There are liars and thieves among both, kindly, honorable and wise among both, virtuous and vile in equal measure. Can you refute that?”
He had looked as if he would have liked to, but he admitted that he could not.
“So our peoples are not so very different. Their hearts are not so different. So—” she shrugged. “Since it is the gods that rule men’s hearts, it follows that your gods and mine are not so different. It seems to me that the faces we put on them have more to do with ourselves than with them.”
He had looked at her with such astonishment on his face that she’d had to laugh. Eventually so did he, and gracefully he had turned the talk to more questions about the Folk of Annwn, about whom he was as curious as an eager child.
But now he was gone, and there was nothing to make one day different from the next. She rose after sunrise. She ate. She heard what the cook would be making. She approved it. She came to the solar, to be surrounded by these fatuous women, and tried not to die of boredom. She ate. Then back to the solar. Or every other day, a bath.
And not the efficient sort of bath she was used to, no indeed. This was a bath that took up an entire afternoon. First, she was ushered into an even warmer room, a bath in the Roman style but reserved for her and her women. This was, she was told, almost atop the furnaces that put warmth beneath the floors, and it was full of steam. There she put up with being washed with soap and cloths—as if she could not even wash herself!—and rinsed with jugs of warm water, which ran away into a drain in the floor. Then her hair was pinned up on the top of her head, and she was led like a dotard into a second room, where there was a pool—a pool!—of steaming hot water. All the ladies soaked in it together, occasionally going to a tub of cooler water, only to return to the hot one. And there they would gossip, gossip, gossip and talk of nothing but trivialities. She heard nothing of what was going on in the greater world, only endless details of dresses and love affairs. The few times she actually heard anything that did sound worth listening to, it turned out to be so distorted as to be incredible. Then, when she was sure she was going to fall asleep from boredom or the heat, came the drying, the massaging with lotions and scented oils, and at last, dressing and going to dinner. Dinner was generally in the company of the King and his Companions, but they never discussed anything worth listening to either! Oh, no, it was all pretty compliments and talk of hunts and weather—not a word of the Saxons, or King March, or anything else actually worth hearing about.
The whole tedious business happened every other day. And she was certain that at least some of her ladies would do this every day