Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [112]
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