Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [135]
She knew she should say something hard and hurtful. Instead she made her words kind, but distant. “You must not think of me in that way. For you I am not a woman, but a representative of the Goddess who came to you, and it is blasphemy to remember me as if I were only a mortal woman. Forget me and remember the Goddess.”
“I have tried—” He broke off, clenching his fists, then said gravely, “You are right. That is the way to think of it—only one more of the strange things that have come to me since I was sent for from Ectorius’ house. Mysterious, magical things. Like the battle with the Saxons—” He held out his arm, rolling back the tunic to reveal a bandage thickly smeared with pine-pitch already blackened. “I was wounded there. Only it was like a dream, my first battle. King Uther—” He looked down and swallowed. “I came too late. I never knew him. He lay in state in the church, and I saw him dead, his weapons lying on the altar—they told me it was the custom, that when a brave knight lay dead, his arms should watch with him. And then, even while the priest was chanting the Nunc Dimittis, all the alarm bells rang, there was a Saxon attack—the watchmen came right into the church and snatched the bell ropes out of the hands of the monk who was tolling the passing bell to ring the alarm, and all the King’s men caught up their arms and ran out. I had no sword, only my dagger, but I snatched up a spear from one of the soldiers. My first battle, I thought, but then Cai—my foster-brother, Caius, Ectorius’ son—he told me he had left his sword behind at their lodging, and I should run and fetch it for him. And I knew this was just a way to get me out of the battle; Cai and my foster-father said I was not yet ready to be blooded. So instead of running back to the lodging house I went into the church and snatched the King’s sword off the stone bier. . . . Well,” he defended himself, “he fought Saxons with it for twenty years, he’d certainly be glad to have it fight them again, instead of lying useless on an old stone! So I ran off and was going to give it to Cai as we were all gathering against the attack, and then I saw the Merlin, and he said in the biggest voice I have ever heard, ‘Where got you that sword, boy?’
“And I was angry because he’d called me boy, after what I’d done on Dragon Island, and I told him it was a sword for fighting Saxons, not for lying around on old stones, and then Ectorius came up and saw me with the sword in my hand, and then he and Cai both knelt down in front of me, just like that! I felt so strange—I said to him, ‘Father, why are you kneeling, why do you make my brother kneel like that? Oh, get up, this is terrible,’ and the Merlin said in that awful voice, ‘He is the King, it is right he should have the sword.’ And then the Saxons came over the wall—we heard their horns—and there was no time to talk about swords or anything else; Cai grabbed up the spear and I hung on to the sword and off we went. I don’t remember much about the battle—I suppose you never do. Cai was hurt—badly hurt in the leg. Afterward, while the Merlin was bandaging up my arm, he told me who I really was. Who my father had been, that is. And Ectorius came and knelt and said he would be a good knight to me as he had to my father and to Ambrosius, and I was so embarrassed . . . and the only thing he asked me was that I’d make Cai my chamberlain when I had a court. And of course I said I’d be glad to—after all, he’s my brother. I mean, I’ll always think of him as my brother. There was a lot of fuss about the sword, but the Merlin told all the kings that it was fate that had made me take it from the stone, and I tell you, they listened to him.” He smiled, and Morgaine felt a surge of love and pity at his confusion.
The bells that had waked her . . . she had seen, but she had not known what she saw.
She dropped her eyes. There would always be a bond between them now. Would any blow which struck him always fall like this, a sword into her naked heart?
“And