Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [234]
It was the fairest part of the summer, and this morning Gwenhwyfar brought a white rose from the convent garden and laid it on Igraine’s pillow. Igraine had struggled to her feet last night to go to evensong, but this morning she had been so weary and without strength she could not rise. Yet she smiled up at Gwenhwyfar and said in her wheezing voice, “Thank you, dear daughter.” She put the flower to her face, sniffing delicately at the petals. “Always I wanted roses at Tintagel, but the soil there was so poor, little would grow. . . . I dwelt there five years and never did I cease from trying to make some sort of garden.”
“When you came to take me to be wedded, you saw the garden at my home,” Gwenhwyfar said, with a sudden twinge of homesickness for that faraway walled garden.
“I remember how beautiful it was—it put me in mind of Avalon. The flowers are so beautiful there, in the courts of the House of Maidens.” She was silent for a moment. “A message was sent to Morgaine at Avalon?”
“A message was sent, Mother. But Taliesin told us Morgaine had not been seen in Avalon,” said Gwenhwyfar. “No doubt she is with Queen Morgause in Lothian, and in these times it takes forever for a messenger to come and go.”
Igraine drew a heavy sigh and began to struggle with a cough again, and Gwenhwyfar helped her to sit upright. After a time Igraine murmured, “Yet the Sight should have bidden Morgaine to come to me—you would come if you knew your mother was dying, would you not? Yes, for you came, and I am not even your own mother. Why has Morgaine not come?”
It is nothing to her that I have come, Gwenhwyfar thought, it is not me she wants here. There is no one who cares whether I am here or elsewhere. And it seemed as if her very heart was bruised. But Igraine was looking at her expectantly, and she said, “Perhaps Morgaine has received no message. Perhaps she has gone into a convent somewhere and become a Christian and renounced the Sight.”
“It may be so. . . . I did so when I married Uther,” Igraine murmured. “Yet now and again it thrust itself on me undesired, and I think if Morgaine was ill or dying I would know it.” Her voice was fretful. “The Sight came upon me before you were married . . . tell me, Gwenhwyfar, do you love my son?”
Gwenhwyfar shrank from the sick woman’s clear grey eyes; could Igraine see into her very soul? “I love him well and I am his faithful queen, lady.”
“Aye, I believe you are . . . and you are happy together?” Igraine held Gwenhwyfar’s slender hands in her own for a moment and suddenly smiled. “Why, so you must be. And will be happier yet, since you are bearing his son at last.”
Gwenhwyfar’s mouth dropped open and she stared at Igraine. “I—I—I did not know.”
Igraine smiled again, a tender and radiant smile, so that Gwenhwyfar thought, Yes, I can believe it, that when she was young, she was beautiful enough for Uther to cast aside all caution and seek her with spells and charms.
Igraine said, “It is often so, though you are not really so young—I am surprised you have not already had a child.”
“It was not for lack of wanting, no, nor praying for it either, lady,” Gwenhwyfar said, so shaken that she hardly knew what she was saying. Was the old Queen falling into delirium? This was too cruel for jesting. “How—what makes you think I am—am with child?”
Igraine said, “I forgot, you have not the Sight—it has deserted me for long and long I renounced it, but as I say, it steals upon me unawares, and never has it played me false.” Gwenhwyfar began to weep, and Igraine, troubled, reached out her thin hand and laid it over the younger woman’s. “Why, how is this, that I give you good news and you weep, child?”
Now she will think I do not want a child, and I cannot bear to have her think ill of me. . . . Gwenhwyfar said