Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [124]
Viviane smiled at the harper. “Few men can boast of so loyal a mistress.”
His smile was a cynical twist. “Oh, like all women, she will respond to whatever hand caresses her, but I think she knows that I can best make her thrill to my touch, and being like all women lecherous, I am sure she loves me best.”
Viviane said, “It sounds to me as if you had no good opinion of women who are flesh and blood.”
“Why, so I have not, Lady. Save for the Goddess—” He spoke the words with a faint lilt, not quite mockery. “I am content to have no mistress but My Lady here, who never chides me if I neglect her, but is always the same sweet paramour.”
“Perhaps,” said Morgaine, raising her eyes, “you treat her rather better than you treat a woman of flesh and blood, and she rewards you as is your due.”
Viviane frowned, and Morgaine knew she had trespassed by this bold speech. Kevin raised his head suddenly from the harp and met Morgaine’s eyes. For a moment he held her gaze, and she was astonished at his bitter hostility and with it, the sense that he understood something of her rage, had known his own and fought through it.
He might have spoken, but Taliesin nodded to him, and he bent his face again over the harp. Now she noticed that he played it differently from most harpers, who held their small instruments across their body, playing with the left hand. He set his harp between his knees, and leaned forward to it. It startled her, but as the music began to fill the room, like moonlight rippling from the strings, she forgot the strangeness of it, saw his face change and grow quiet and distant, without the mockery of his words. She decided that she liked him better when he played than when he spoke.
There was no other sound in the room, only the harping that filled it to the rafters, as if the listeners had stilled even their breathing. The sound swept away all else, and Morgaine dropped her veil over her face and let the tears come. It seemed that in the music she could hear the flooding of the spring tides, the sweet awareness that had filled her body as she lay that night in the moonlight, awaiting the coming of the dawn. Viviane reached out to her and, as she had done when Morgaine was only a child, took her hand, gently stroking her fingers one after another. Morgaine could not stop her tears. She raised Viviane’s hand to her lips and kissed it. She thought, with a crushing sense of loss, Why, she is old, she has grown old since I came here . . . always before this, Viviane had seemed to her ageless, unchanging, like the very Goddess herself. Ah, but I too have changed, I am no longer a child . . . once she told me, when I came here, that a day would come when I would hate her as much as I loved her, and I could not believe it then. . . . She struggled against her weeping, afraid she would make some sound which would betray her and, even more, interrupt the flood of music. She thought, No, I cannot hate Viviane, and all her rage melted into sorrow so great that for a moment she thought she would break into the fiercest weeping. For herself, for the changes in herself, for Viviane who had been so beautiful, the very face of the Goddess, and who was now nearer to the Death-crone, and for the knowledge that she too, like Viviane, with the relentless years would one day herself come to stand as the crone; for the day she had climbed the Tor with Lancelet and lain there in the sun, hungering for his touch without clearly knowing what it was she