Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [191]
After a time Kevin put by the harp, and Morgaine, as she would have done in Avalon, poured him wine and knelt to offer it to him. He smiled and took it, gesturing to her to rise and sit by him.
“Lady Morgaine, my thanks.”
“It is my duty and my pleasure to serve such a bard, Master Harper. Are you recently come from Avalon? Is my kinswoman Viviane well?”
“Well, but much aged,” he said quietly. “And, I think, pining for you—you should return.”
Morgaine felt again the surge of unforgotten despair; she looked away from him. “I cannot. But give me news of my home.”
“If you wish more news of Avalon you will have to go there. I have not returned myself for a year, since I am required to give news of all the kingdom to the Lady—Taliesin is too old now for a Messenger of the Gods.”
“Well,” Morgaine said, “you will have something to tell her of this marriage.”
“I will tell her that you are alive and well,” said Kevin, “since she has mourned you. She has not now the Sight to see for herself. And I shall tell her of her younger son who is Arthur’s chiefest Companion; indeed,” he said, his lips curving in a sarcastic smile, “watching him with Arthur, I think him like that youngest disciple who leaned at dinner upon the bosom of Christ. . . .”
Morgaine could not keep back a small chuckle. “Yonder bishop would have you whipped for blasphemy, no doubt, if he heard you say so.”
“Well, there sits Arthur like to Jesus with his Apostles, defending Christianity to all the land,” Kevin said. “As for yonder bishop, he is an ignorant man.”
“What, because he has no ear for music?” Morgaine had not realized how she had starved for the banter of casual equals like this; Morgause and the gossip of her ladies were so small, so bound by little things!
“I would say that any man without an ear for music is an ignorant ass indeed, since without it he does not speak but brays,” Kevin retorted, “but it is more than that. Is this any time for a wedding?”
Morgaine had been so long away from Avalon that for a moment she did not know what he meant; but he pointed to the sky.
“The moon is waning from the full. This augurs ill for a wedding, and the lord Taliesin told them so. But the bishop would have it a little after the full so that all these people would have light to travel to their homes, and because it is the feast of one of their saints—I know not which! The Merlin spoke to Arthur as well, to tell him this marriage would bring him no joy—I know not why. But there was no honorable way to stop it, it seemed, all had gone too far.”
Morgaine knew instinctively what the old Druid had meant; she too had seen the way in which Gwenhwyfar looked upon Lancelet. Was it a flash of the Sight which had caused her to shrink from Gwenhwyfar, that day upon Avalon?
She took Lancelet from me forever on that day, Morgaine thought, then, remembering that she had been under a vow to keep her maidenhood for the Goddess, looked within, in dull astonishment. Would she have been forsworn for his sake? She lowered her head in shame, almost fearing, for a moment, that Kevin could read her thoughts.
Viviane had said to her that a priestess must temper everything with her own judgment. It had been a right instinct, vows or no vows, which had led her to desire Lancelet . . . I would have done better, even by Avalon, to take Lancelet then; then would Arthur’s queen have come to him with her heart untouched, for Lancelet would have formed that mystical bond with me, and the child I bore would have been born of the ancient royal line of Avalon. . . .
But they had had other plans for her, and in the wreck of that she had left Avalon forever, borne a child who had destroyed any hope that she could ever give the Goddess a daughter to her shrine: after Gwydion, she could carry no other to life. If she had trusted her own instinct