Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [196]
“Did I interrupt anything, sir?” the young man said, trying to peer around Lancelet, almost sniggering. Morgaine wondered disconsolate, What will this do to his reputation? Or is it to a man’s credit to be caught in the hay? Lancelet did not even answer; he shoved the youngster along before him, so that he almost fell. “Go and find Cai, and the farrier, get along with you.” He came swiftly back, a whirlwind, kissed Morgaine who had staggered somehow to her feet. “Gods! Of all the damnable—” He pressed her hard against him, with hungry fingers, kissed her so hard that she felt the brand of it was scalding red on her face. “Gods! Tonight—swear it! Swear!”
She couldn’t speak. She could only nod, dazed, numb, her whole body screaming for the interrupted fulfillment, as she saw him rush away. A minute or two later a young man came up to her deferentially and bowed, while soldiers began rushing back and forth and somewhere there was the terrible, almost human scream of a dying animal.
“Lady Morgaine? I am Griflet. The lord Lancelet sent me to escort you to the pavilions. He told me he had brought you down here to see the horse he is training for my lord the king, but that you had slipped and fallen in the hay, and that he was trying to see if you had hurt yourself when they began shrieking for him—when this fight broke out with King Pellinore’s horse. And he begs you to excuse him and return to the castle—”
Well, she thought, at least it explained her kirtle crushed and stained with hay and her hair and headcloth filled with hayseed. She need not go before Gwenhwyfar and her mother looking like the woman in Scriptures, the one taken in adultery; young Griflet held out his arm and she leaned on it heavily, saying, “I think my ankle is twisted,” and limped all the way up to the castle. It would explain the hay, if she had had a hurt and fallen hard. One part of her was glad of Lancelet’s quick thinking; the other, desolate, cried out for him to acknowledge and shelter her.
Arthur had gone off with Cai to the stables, distressed at the accident to the horses. She let Gwenhwyfar fuss over her and Igraine send for cold water and linen strips to bandage her ankle, and she accepted a place at Igraine’s side, in the shade, when horses and men rode out to display their exercises. Arthur made a little speech about the new legion of Caerleon which would revive the glories of the days of Rome, and save the countryside. His foster-father, Ectorius, was beaming. Then a dozen riders rode out, displaying the new skills with which the horses could stop in mid gallop, pull up, wheel, move together.
“After this,” Arthur declared grandly, “no one will ever again say that horses are fit for nothing but to move wagons!” He smiled at Gwenhwyfar. “How do you like my knights, my lady? I have called them after the old Roman equites—noblemen who could own and fit out their own horse.”
“Cai rides as well as a centaur,” Igraine said to Ectorius, and the old man smiled with pleasure. “Arthur, you never did a kinder thing than when you gave Cai one of the best of the horses.”
“Cai is too good a soldier, and too good a friend, to wither in the house,” said Arthur decisively.
Gwenhwyfar said, “Is he not your foster-brother?”
“True. He was wounded in his first battle, and feared he would skulk at home with the women forever after that,” said Arthur. “A frightful fate for a soldier. But on horseback he fights as well as any.”
“Look,” exclaimed Igraine, “the legion has smashed down that whole series of targets—I have never seen such riding!”
“I don’t think anything could stand against that attack,” said King Pellinore. “What a pity Uther Pendragon could not live to see this, my boy—excuse me—my lord and king—”
Arthur said warmly, “My father’s friend may call me whatever he wishes, dear Pellinore! But the credit must go to my friend and captain, Lancelet.”
Morgause