Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [107]
She saw that the girl had been holding Lancelet’s hand. It seemed to Morgaine that he let it go reluctantly. The girl said, “Thank you, oh, thank you!”
“It is Morgaine you should thank,” Lancelet reminded her. “It is she who knows the paths in and out of Avalon.” The girl gave her a shy sidelong look. She dropped a little polite curtsey. “I thank you, mistress Morgaine.”
Morgaine drew a deep breath, drawing the mantle of a priestess around her again, the glamour she could summon when she would; despite her filthy and torn clothing, her bare feet, the hair that straggled in wet locks around her shoulders, she knew that suddenly she looked tall and imposing. She made a remote gesture of blessing and turned, silent, summoning Lancelet with another gesture. She knew, even though she did not see, that the awe and fright had returned to the girl’s eyes, but she moved silently away, with the noiseless gliding of a priestess of Avalon, Lancelet’s steps, reluctant, following her own silent ones.
After a moment she looked back, but the mists had closed and the girl had vanished within them. Lancelet said, shaken, “How did you do that, Morgaine?”
“How did I do what?” she asked.
“Suddenly look so—so—like my mother. All tall and distant and remote and—and not quite real. Like a female demon. You frightened the poor girl, you shouldn’t have done it!”
Morgaine bit her tongue with her sudden wrath. She said in a remote and enigmatic voice, “Cousin, I am what I am,” and turned, hurrying up the path ahead of him. She was cold and weary and sick with an inner sickness; she longed for the solitude of the House of Maidens. Lancelet seemed a long way behind her, but she no longer cared. He could find his own way from here.
13
In the spring of the year after this, through a drenching late-winter storm, the Merlin came late one night to Avalon. When word was brought to the Lady, she stared in astonishment.
“A night such as this would drown the very frogs,” she said. “What brings him out in such weather?”
“I do not know, Lady,” said the young apprentice Druid who had brought the word. “He did not even send for the barge, but made his own way by the hidden paths, and said that he must see you this night before you slept. I sent him for dry clothing—his own was in such a state as you can imagine. I would have brought him food and wine as well, but he asked if he might sup with you.”
“Tell him he is welcome,” Viviane said, keeping her face carefully neutral—she had learned very well the art of concealing her thoughts—but when the young man had gone, she allowed herself to stare in amazement, and to frown.
She sent for her attendant women, and bade them bring not her usual spare supper, but food and wine for the Merlin, and to build up the fire anew.
After a time she heard his step outside, and when he came in, he went directly to the fire. Taliesin was stooped now, his hair and beard all white, and he looked somewhat incongruous in the green robe of a novice bard, far too short for him, so that his scrawny ankles protruded from the lower edge of the garment. She seated him near the fire—he was still, she noticed, shivering—and set a plate of food and a cup of wine, good apple wine from Avalon itself, in a chased silver cup, at his side.
Then she seated herself on a small stool nearby and tasted her bread and dried fruit as she watched him eat. When he had pushed the plate aside and sat sipping at the wine, she said, “Now tell me everything, Father.”
The old man smiled at her. “I never thought to hear you call me so, Viviane. Or do you think I have taken the holy orders of the