Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [116]
With her own hands, the woman began to prepare Morgaine for the ritual. She stripped her naked, and painted the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands with blue dye, and renewed the crescent moon on her brow; on her breast and belly she outlined the full moon, and just above the dark patch of Morgaine’s body hair she painted the dark moon. Briefly, almost perfunctorily, she parted the girl’s legs and probed a little: Morgaine, beyond embarrassment, knew why she was searching. For this rite, the priestess must be a virgin. But the tribal priestess would find nothing wrong; Morgaine was untouched, but she felt a sudden half-pleasurable moment of fear, and at the same moment she was conscious that she was almost fiercely hungry. Well, she was trained to ignore hunger, and after a time the hunger left her.
The sun was rising as they led her outdoors, robed in a cloak like the old woman’s, with the magical signs painted on it—the moon, the antlers of the deer. She was aware of the stiff astringency of her painted body, and some part of her mind, very far away, stared with amazement and a moment’s contempt at these symbols of a mystery far older than the Druidic wisdom in which she had been so carefully schooled. That was momentary and vanished at once; the belief of generations ancient past knowing invested this rite with its own power and holiness. She saw the round stone house behind her; across from her was another, and they were leading forth a young man. She could not see him clearly; the rising sun was in her eyes, and she could see only that he was tall, with a shock of fair hair, and strongly built. He is not one of their own people, then? But it was not for her to question. The men of the tribe—and especially an old man, with the gnarled swollen muscles of a smith, blackened like his own forge—were painting the youth’s body from head to foot with the blue woad, covering him with a cloak of untanned raw skins, smearing his body with the deer fat. On his head they fixed antlers; at a low word of command, he swung his head to make certain they could not be dislodged, no matter how he moved. Morgaine looked up to see the proud swing of that young head, and suddenly she felt a ripple of awareness run down her body, cramping her calves, running into the secret parts of her body.
This is the Horned One, this the God, this the consort of the Virgin Huntress. . . .
They wound her hair in a garland of crimson berries and crowned her with the first of the spring flowers. The precious necklace of gold and bone was reverently taken from the neck of the Mother of the tribe and placed around her own; she felt its weight like the very weight of magic. Her eyes were dazzled with the rising sun. They placed something in her hand—a drum, taut skin stretched over a hooped frame. As if it came from somewhere else, she heard her own hand strike it.
They stood on a hillside, overlooking a valley filled to the brim with thick forest, empty and silent, but within it she could sense the life in the forest—the deer moving on silent, slender feet, the animals climbing in the trees, and the birds nesting, darting, moving, asurge with the life of the first running tide of the full moon of spring. She turned for a moment and looked behind, on the hillside. Above them, carved white in the chalk, was a monstrous figure, human or animal she could not tell, her eyes were blurred; was it a running deer, was it a striding man, phallus erect and filled with the spring tide, too?
She could not see the young man at her side, only the surge of the life in him. There was a solemn, waiting hush all over the hillside. Time ceased, was again transparent, something in which she moved, bathed, stepped freely. The drum was in the old crone’s