Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [115]
“My body and my soul belong to her, to do with as she will,” she whispered. “And your will is her will, Mother. Let it be so.”
15
Since she had come there, Morgaine had left Avalon only two or three times, and then only for short journeys into the countryside at the edges of the Summer Sea, so that she could become aware of the nearby sites which retained, despite disuse, their old power.
Time and place were now none of her concern. She had been taken from the Island at dawn in silence, cloaked and veiled so that no unpriestly eye might see the consecrated one, and carried in a closed litter so that not even the sun might shine on her face. In less than a day’s journeying from the enclosure of the sacred island she had lost all awareness of time and space and direction, lost in meditation, dimly aware of the beginning of the magical trance. There had been times when she had fought against the onset of the ecstatic state. Now she welcomed it, opening her mind full to the Goddess, inwardly imploring the Goddess to come into herself, the instrument, and possess her, body and soul, so that she might act in all things as the Goddess herself.
Nightfall; a moon nearly at full came dimly between the curtains of the litter. When the runners stopped, she felt it bathing her in cold light, like the kiss of the Goddess, and felt faint with the beginnings of ecstasy. She did not know where she was, nor did she care. She went where they led her, passive, blinded, tranced, knowing only that she went to meet her destiny.
She was inside a house, then she was put into the hands of a strange woman, who brought her bread and honey, which Morgaine did not touch—she would not break her fast again until she did so with the ritual meal—and water, which she drank thirstily. There was a bed, so placed that the moon fell upon her; the strange woman moved to draw the wooden shutters closed and Morgaine stopped her with an imperious gesture. She lay much of the night tranced, feeling the moonlight like a visible touch. At last she slept, but fitfully, wandering in and out of sleep like an uneasy traveller, strange images flickering in her mind—her mother, bending over the fair hair of the intruder Gwydion, her white breasts and coppery hair somehow forbidding instead of welcoming; Viviane, only somehow she was a sacrificial beast and the Lady of Avalon was leading her somewhere on the end of a rope, and she heard herself say fretfully, You needn’t pull, I am coming; Raven, soundlessly screaming. A great horned figure, half man, half animal, suddenly thrusting aside a curtain and striding into her room—she woke and half sat up, but there was no one there, only the moonlight, and the stranger woman sleeping quietly at her side. Quickly she lay down again and slept, this time dreamlessly and deep.
About an hour before dawn they awakened her. Now, in contrast to the tranced unawareness of the previous day, she was wide awake and sharply aware of everything—the cold fresh air, the mists stained with pink where soon the sun would rise, the strong smell of the little dark women in their garments of badly tanned skins. Everything was clean-edged and brilliantly colored, as if fresh this moment from the hand of the Goddess. The dark women whispered among themselves, not presuming to disturb the strange priestess; she heard them, but she knew only a few words of their language.
After a time the eldest of them—the one who had welcomed her and led her inside on the previous night, and whose bed she had shared—came to Morgaine and brought her fresh water. Morgaine bowed to thank her, the salute, priestess to priestess, and then wondered why. The woman was old; her hair, long and tangled and fastened with a clasp of bone, was almost all white, and her dark skin bore faded blue stains. Her garment was of the same imperfectly dyed skin of the others, but over it she wore a cloak of deerskin, the hair still clinging to it, painted with magical symbols;