Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [269]
And then one night she woke with a start, hearing from somewhere a great cry, and for a moment, it seemed to her as if she stood on the Tor at the center of the ring stones, hearing the terrifying cry ringing through the worlds—the voice she had heard but once since she grew to womanhood, that harsh rusty voice, grown dull with unuse, the voice of Raven, who broke her silence only when the Gods had a message they dared not leave to any other. . . .
Ah, the Pendragon has betrayed Avalon, the dragon has flown . . . the banner of the dragon flies no more against the Saxon warriors . . . weep, weep, if the Lady should set foot from Avalon, for surely she will return no more . . . and a sound of weeping, of sobbing in the sudden darkness . . .
And silence. Morgaine sat upright in the greyish light, her mind suddenly clear for the first time since she had come into this country.
I have been here all too long, she thought, winter has come. Now I must depart, now, before this day is over . . . no, I cannot even say so, the sun does not rise or set here . . . I must go now, at once. She knew she should call for her horse, and then, remembering, she knew: her horse was long since dead in these woods. In a sudden fright, she thought, How long have I been here?
She searched for her dagger, and remembered that she had cast it away. She bound her dress about her—it seemed faded. She could not remember washing it, nor her underlinen, yet they seemed not dirtied much. She wondered suddenly if she were mad.
If I speak to the lady, she will beseech me again not to go. . . .
Morgaine tied her hair up in plaits . . . why had she let it hang free, she, a grown woman? And she set off down the path which, she knew, would bring her to Avalon.
Morgaine speaks . . .
To this very day I have never known how many nights and days I spent in the fairy country—even now my mind blurs when I try to reckon it up. Try as I may I can make it no fewer than five and no more than thirteen. Nor am I certain how much time passed in the world outside, nor in Avalon, while I was there, but because mankind keeps better records of time than the fairy folk, I know that some five years passed.
Perhaps, and I think this more as I grow older, what we speak of as time passing happens only because we have made it a habit, in our very blood and bones, to count things—the fingers of a newborn child, the rising and returning of the sun, we think so often of how many days must pass or how many seasons before our corn will ripen or our child grow in the womb and come to birth or some longed-for meeting take place; and we watch these by the turning of the year and the sun, as the first of the priestly secrets. Within the fairy country I knew nothing of the passing of time, and so for me it did not pass. For when I came out of the country I found that already there were more lines in Gwenhwyfar’s face, and Elaine’s exquisite youthfulness had begun to blur a little; but my own hands were no thinner, my face was untouched by line or wrinkle, and though in our family white comes early to the hair—in his nineteenth year Lancelet had had already a few grey strands—my hair was black and untouched by time as the wing of a crow.
I have come to think that once the Druids had taken Avalon away from the world of constant counting and reckoning it began to happen there, too. Time does not flow in Avalon unreckoned like the passing of a dream, as it does in the fairy country. Yet truly time has begun to drift a little. We see the moon and sun of the Goddess there, and reckon the rites within the ring stones, and so time never wholly leaves us. But it runs not even with time elsewhere, though one would think that if the motion of sun and moon were known at all, it would move like to that in the world outside . . . yet it is not so. Toward