Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [236]
She put her face into her hands and wept behind them, silently, and no longer cared that the abbess was watching her.
That night Igraine’s breathing was so labored that she could not even lower her head to rest; she had to sit bolt upright, propped up on many cushions, to breathe at all, and she wheezed and coughed without end. The abbess gave her a draught of something which would clear the lungs, but it only made her queasy, she said, and she could take no more of it.
Gwenhwyfar sat beside her, drowsing a little now and then, but alert whenever the sick woman stirred, to give her a sip of water, to shift her pillows so that she could find a little ease. There was only a small lamp in the room, but there was brilliant moonlight, and the night was so warm that the door stood open into the garden. And through it all there was the ever-present muffled sound of the sea beyond the garden, beating at the rocks.
“Strange,” Igraine murmured at last in a faraway voice, “never would I have thought I would come here to die. . . . I remember how dreary I felt, how alone, when first I came to Tintagel, as if I had come to the very end of the world. Avalon was so fair, so beautiful, so filled with flowers . . .”
“There are flowers here,” Gwenhwyfar said.
“But not like the flowers of my home. It is so barren here, so rocky,” she said. “Have you been in the Island, child?”
“I was schooled in the convent on Ynis Witrin, madam.”
“It is beautiful on the Island. And when I travelled here over the moors, it was so high and barren and deserted, I was afraid—”
Igraine made a weak movement toward her, and Gwenhwyfar took her hand and was alarmed by its coldness. “You are a good child,” Igraine said, “to come so far, when my own children could not. I remember how you dread travelling—and now to come so far, when you are pregnant.”
Gwenhwyfar rubbed the icy hands between her own. “Do not tire yourself with talking, Mother.”
Igraine made a little sound like a laugh, but it got lost in a fit of wheezing. “Do you think it makes any difference now, Gwenhwyfar? I wronged you—even on the very day you were wedded, I went to Taliesin and asked him, was there any honorable way for Arthur to get out of this marriage.”
“I—did not know. Why?”
It seemed to her that Igraine hesitated before answering, but she could not tell, perhaps it was only that the other woman struggled for speech. “I know not . . . perhaps it was that I thought you would not be happy with my son.” She struggled again with a fit of coughing so heavy that it seemed she would never get her breath.
When she had quieted a little, Gwenhwyfar said, “Now you must talk no more, Mother—will you have me bring you a priest?”
“Damn all priests,” said Igraine clearly. “I will have none of them about me—oh, look not so shocked, child!” She lay still for a moment. “You thought me so pious, that I retired to a convent in my last years. But where else should I have gone? Viviane would have had me at Avalon, but I could not forget it was she who had married me to Gorlois. . . . Beyond that garden wall lies Tintagel, like a prison . . . a prison it was to me, indeed. Yet it was the only place I could call my own. And I felt I had won it by what I endured there. . . .”
Another long, silent struggle for breath. At last she said, “I wish Morgaine had come to me . . . she has the Sight, she should have known I was dying. . . .”
Gwenhwyfar saw that there were tears in her eyes. She said gently, rubbing the icy hands which now felt as taut as cold claws, “I am sure she would come if she knew, dear Mother.”
“I am not so sure . . . I sent her from me into Viviane’s hands. Even though I knew well how ruthless Viviane could be, that she would use Morgaine as ruthlessly as she used me, for the well-being of this land and for her own love of power,” Igraine whispered. “I sent her from me because I felt it better, if it came to be a choice of evils, that she should be in Avalon and in the hands of the Goddess, than in the hands of the black priests who