Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [200]
And far away, in the furthest wing of the castle, Gwenhwyfar lay awake, looking in guilty tenderness at Arthur’s hair shining in the moonlight, his chest that rose and fell with his quiet breathing. Tears trickled slowly down her cheeks.
I want so much to love him, she thought, and then she prayed. “Oh, God, holy Mary Virgin, help me to love him as I ought to do, he is my king and my lord and he is so good, he deserves someone who will love him more than I can love.” All around her, it seemed, the night breathed sadness and despair.
But why, she wondered. Arthur is happy. He has nothing with which to reproach me. Whence comes this sorrow in the very air?
7
On a day in late summer, Queen Gwenhwyfar, with several of her ladies, sat in the hall at Caerleon. It was afternoon and very hot; most of them were making a pretense of spinning, or of carding the last of that spring’s wool for spinning, but the spindles moved sluggishly, and even the Queen, who was the best needlewoman among them, had ceased to set stitches in the fine altar cloth she was making for the bishop.
Morgaine laid aside the carded wool for spinning and sighed. At this season of the year she was always homesick, longing for the mists that crept in from the sea over the cliffs at Tintagel . . . she had not seen them since she was a little child.
Arthur and his men, with the Caerleon legion, had ridden out to the southern coast, to examine the new fort that the Saxons of the treaty troops had built there. This summer had brought no raid, and it might well be that the Saxons, except for those who had made treaty with Arthur and were living peacefully in the Kentish country, would give up Britain for lost. Two years of Arthur’s horse legion had reduced the Saxon fighting to a sporadic summer exercise; but Arthur had taken this season of quiet to fortify all the defenses of the coasts.
“I am thirsty again,” said Pellinore’s daughter, Elaine. “May I go, my lady, and ask for more pitchers of water to be sent?”
“Call Cai—he will attend to it,” Gwenhwyfar said.
Morgaine thought: She has grown a great deal; from a scared and timid child she has become a queen.
“You should have married Cai when the King wished for it, lady Morgaine,” said Elaine, returning from her errand and sitting down on the bench beside Morgaine. “He is the only man under sixty in the castle, and his wife will never lie alone for half a year at a time.”
“You are welcome to him, if you want him,” Morgaine said amiably.
“I still wonder that you did not,” Gwenhwyfar said, as if it were an old grievance. “It would have been so suitable—Cai, the King’s foster-brother and high in his favor, and you, Arthur’s sister and Duchess of Cornwall in your own right, now that the lady Igraine never leaves her nunnery!”
Drusilla, daughter of one of the petty kings to the east, snickered. “Tell me, if the King’s sister and brother marry, how is it other than incest?”
“Half-sister and foster-brother, you goose,” said Elaine. “But tell me, lady Morgaine, was it only his scars and lameness that deterred you? Cai is no beauty, certainly, but he would be a good husband.”
“I am not deceived by you,” Morgaine retorted, pretending a good humor she did not feel—did these women think of nothing but marriages? “You care nothing for my wedded happiness with Cai, you merely wished for a wedding to break the monotony of the summer. But you should not be greedy. Sir Griflet was married to Meleas last spring, and that should be weddings enough for now.” She glanced at Meleas, whose dress had already begun to grow tight over her pregnant body. “You will even have a babe to fuss and coo over this time next year.”
“But you are long unmarried, lady Morgaine,” said Alienor of Galis. “And you could hardly have hoped for a better match than the King’s own foster-brother!”
“I am in no great haste to be wed, and Cai had