Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [156]
“It cannot be long now, Morgaine,” Morgause said gently. “By Candlemas, surely, you will be delivered.”
“It cannot be too soon for me.” Morgaine gave the dog a final pat and set him on the floor. “There, now you are decent to be among ladies, puppy . . . how fine you are, with your hair all smooth!”
“I will make up the fire,” said one of the women, whose name was Beth, putting aside her spindle and thrusting the distaff into a basket of loose wool. “The men will be home, surely—it is already dark.” She went over to the fire, tripped on a loose stick, and half fell on the hearth. “Gareth, you little wretch, will you clear away this rubbish?” She flung the stick into the fire, and five-year-old Gareth, who had been pushing the sticks about and prattling to them in an undertone, set up a howl of outrage—the sticks were his armies!
“Well, Gareth, it is night, and your armies must go to their tents,” said Morgause briskly. Pouting, the little boy pushed the array of small sticks into a corner, but one or two he put carefully into a fold of his tunic—they were thicker ones, which Morgaine, earlier that year, had carved into the crude likeness of men in helmets and armor, dyed with berry juice for their crimson tunics.
“Will you make me another Roman knight, Morgaine?”
“Not now, Gareth,” she said. “My hands ache with the cold. Tomorrow, perhaps.”
He came and scowled, standing at her knee, demanding, “When will I be old enough to go hunting with Father and Agravaine?”
“It will be a few years still, I suppose,” said Morgaine, smiling. “Not until you are tall enough not to be lost in a snowdrift!”
“I’m big!” he said, drawing himself up to his full height, “Look, when you’re sitting down I’m taller than you are, Morgaine!” He kicked restlessly at the chair. “There’s nothing to do in here!”
“Well,” said Morgaine, “I could always teach you to spin, and then you need not be idle.” She picked up Beth’s abandoned distaff and held it out to him, but he made a face and started back.
“I’m going to be a knight! Knights don’t have to spin!”
“That’s a pity,” Beth said sourly. “Perhaps they would not wear out so many cloaks and tunics if they knew what toil it is to spin them!”
“Yet there was a knight who did spin, so the tale says,” Morgaine said, holding out her arms to the little boy. “Come here. No, sit on the bench, Gareth, you are all too heavy now for me to hold you on my lap like a sucking babe. There was in the old days, before the Romans came, a knight named Achilles, and he was under a curse; an old sorceress told his mother that he would die in battle, and so she put him into skirts and hid him among the women, where he learned to spin and to weave and do all that was fitting for a maiden.”
“And did he die in battle?”
“He did indeed, for when the city of Troy was besieged, they called on all the knights and warriors to come and take it, and Achilles went with the rest, and he was the best of all the knights. It was told of him that he was offered a choice, he could live long in safety, then die an old man in his bed and be forgotten, or he could live a short life and die young with great glory, and he chose the glory; so men still tell of his story in the sagas. He fought with a knight in Troy called Hector—Ectorius, that is, in our tongue—”
“Was it that same sir Ectorius who fostered our king Arthur?” asked the little boy, wide-eyed.
“To be sure it was not, for it was many hundred years ago, but it might have been one of his forefathers.”
“When I am at court, and one of Arthur’s Companions,” said Gareth, his eyes round as saucers, “I will be the best fighter in war, and I will win all the prizes when there are games. What happened to Achilles?”
“I remember it not—it was long ago, at Uther’s court, I heard the tale,” Morgaine said, pressing her hands against