Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [276]
Morgaine listened to him, appalled at the agony of bitterness in his words, the wounds dealt to his manhood. She knew the awareness that lived in his hands, the quick emotion of the musician. Even before the Goddess, could women look only at a broken body? She remembered how she had flung herself into Lancelet’s arms, and the wound to her pride which, she knew, would never cease to bleed.
Quite deliberately she bent down and kissed him on the lips, pulled his hand to her and kissed the scars there. “Never doubt it, to me you are a man, and the Goddess has prompted me to do this.” She lay down again, turning toward him.
He looked sharply at her in the growing light. For a moment she flinched at what she saw in his face—did he think she pitied him? No: she shared the awareness of his suffering, which was another thing. She looked him directly in the eyes . . . yes, if his face had not been so drawn with bitterness, so twisted with suffering, he might have been handsome; his features were good, his eyes very dark and gentle. Fate had broken his body, but not his spirit—no coward could have endured the ordeals of the Druids.
Under the mantle of the Goddess, as every woman is my sister and my daughter and my mother, so must every man be to me as father and lover and son. . . . My father was dead before I could remember him, and I have not seen my son since he was weaned . . . but to this man I will give what the Goddess prompts me. . . . Morgaine kissed one of the scarred hands again and laid it inside her gown, against her breast.
He was inexperienced—which seemed to her strange for a man of his age. But how, Morgaine wondered, could he possibly have been anything else? And then she thought, This is the first time, really, that I have done this of my free will, and had the gift taken simply, as it was offered. It healed something in her. Strange, that it could have been so with a man she scarcely knew, and for whom she felt only kindness. Even in his inexperience he was generous and gentle with her, and she felt, welling up within her, a great and unspeakable tenderness.
“It is strange,” he said at last, in a quiet, musing voice. “I had known you were wise and a priestess, but somehow I had never thought you were beautiful.”
She laughed harshly. “Beautiful? Me?” But she was grateful that, to him, at that moment, she seemed so.
“Morgaine, tell me—where have you been? I would not ask, but that whatever it is, it lies heavy on your heart.”
“I do not know,” she blurted out. She had never thought she would tell him. “Out of the world, perhaps—I was trying to reach Avalon—and I could not come there, the way is barred to me, I think. Twice now, I have been—elsewhere. Another country, a country of dreams and enchantments—a country where time stands still and is not, and there is nothing but music—” And she fell silent; would the harper think her a madwoman?
He traced a finger along the corner of her eye. It was cold, and they had thrown the covers off them; he tucked the cloaks gently round her again. “Once I too was there, and heard their music . . .” he said, in a distant brooding voice, “and in that place I was not near so crippled, and their women did not mock me. . . . Some day, perhaps, when I have lost my fear of madness, I shall go to them once again . . . they showed me the hidden ways and said I might come because of my music . . .” and again, his soft voice dropped into a long silence.
She shivered and looked away from him. “We had better get up. If our poor horse has not quite frozen in the night, we will arrive at Camelot this day.”
“And if we arrive together,” Kevin said quietly, “they may believe that you have come with me from Avalon. It is none of their affair where you have dwelt—you are a priestess, and your conscience is not in the keeping of any man alive, not even of their bishops, or of Taliesin himself.”
Morgaine wished she had a decent