Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [237]
Gwenhwyfar was deeply dismayed. She chafed the icy hands between her own and renewed the hot bricks at Igraine’s feet; but the feet too were cold as ice, and when she rubbed them Igraine said she could not feel them.
She felt she must try again. “Now with your end near, do you not want to speak with one of Christ’s priests, dear Mother?”
“I told you, no,” said Igraine, “or after all these years when I kept silent to have peace in my home, I might tell them at last what I truly felt about them. . . . I loved Morgaine enough to send her to Viviane, that she at least might escape them. . . .” She began wheezing again. “Arthur,” she said at last. “Never was he my son . . . he was Uther’s—only a hope of the succession, no more. I loved Uther well and I bore him sons because it meant so much to him that he should have a son to follow him. Our second son—he that died soon after his navel string was cut—him, I think, I might have loved for my own, as I loved Morgaine. . . . Tell me, Gwenhwyfar, has my son reproached you that you have not yet borne him an heir?”
Gwenhwyfar bent her head, feeling her eyes stinging with tears. “No, he has been so good . . . never once has he reproached me. He told me once that he had never fathered a son by any woman, though he had known many, so that perhaps the fault was not mine.”
“If he loves you for yourself, then he is a priceless jewel among men,” said Igraine, “and it is all the better if you can make him happy. . . . Morgaine I loved because she was all I had to love. I was young and wretched; you can never know how unhappy I was that winter when I bore her, alone and far from home and not yet full-grown. I feared she would have become a monster because of all the hate I felt when I was bearing her, but she was the prettiest little thing, solemn, wise, like a fairy child. She and Uther only have I loved . . . where is she, Gwenhwyfar? Where is she that she would not come to her mother when she is dying?”
Gwenhwyfar said compassionately, “No doubt she knows not that you are ill—”
“But the Sight!” Igraine cried, moving restlessly on her pillow. “Where can she be, that she does not see that I am dying? Ah, I saw she was in deep trouble, even at Arthur’s crowning, and yet I said nothing, I did not want to know, I felt I had had enough grief and said nothing when she needed me. . . . Gwenhwyfar, tell me the truth! Did Morgaine have a child somewhere, alone and far from anyone who loved her? Has she spoken of this to you? Does she hate me then, that she will not come to me even when I am dying, only because I did not speak out all my fears for her at Arthur’s crowning? Ah, Goddess . . . I put aside the Sight to have peace in my home, since Uther was a follower of the Christ. . . . Show me where dwells my child, my daughter. . . .”
Gwenhwyfar held her motionless and said, “Now you must be still, Mother . . . it must be as God wills. You cannot call upon the Goddess of the fiends here—”
Igraine sat bolt upright; despite her sick swollen face, her blue lips, she looked on the younger woman in such a way that Gwenhwyfar suddenly remembered, She too is High Queen of this land.
“You know not what you speak,” Igraine said, with pride and pity and contempt. “The Goddess is beyond all your other Gods. Religions may come and go, as the Romans found and no doubt the Christians will find after them, but she is beyond them all.” She let Gwenhwyfar lower her to her pillows and groaned. “I would my feet could be warmed . . . yes, I know you have hot bricks there, I cannot feel them. Once I read in an ancient book which Taliesin gave me of some scholar who was forced to drink hemlock. Taliesin says that the people have always killed the wise. Even as the people of the far southlands put Christ to the cross, so this wise and holy man was forced to drink hemlock because the rabble and the kings said he taught false doctrine. And when he was dying, he said that the cold crept upward from his feet, and so he died. . . . I have not drunk