Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [278]
And she did; any Christian woman must think so, to go into the fields and dance naked and lie there with the first man sent to her . . . immodest and shameful and wicked. Taliesin shook his head, sighing.
“Still, my queen, none can be the master of another’s conscience. Even if you think it wicked and shameful, would you pretend to know what is right for another? Even the wise cannot know everything, and perhaps the Gods have more purposes than we, in our little knowledge, can see.”
“If I knew right from wrong—as I do and as the priests have taught us, and as God has taught us in Holy Writ—then should I fear God’s punishment if I did not make such laws as would keep my people from sin?” Gwenhwyfar demanded. “God would require it at my hands, I think, if I allowed evil to take place in my realm, and if I were king I should already have put it down.”
“Then, lady, I can say only that it is the good fortune of this land that you are not king. A king must protect his people from outsiders, from invaders, and lead his people to defend themselves—a king must be the first to thrust himself between the land and all danger, just as a farmer stands to defend his fields from any robber. But it is not his duty to dictate to them what their innermost hearts may do.”
But she had debated with him hotly. “A king is the protector of his people, and what good is it to protect their bodies if he lets their souls fall into evil ways? Look you, Lord Merlin, I am a queen, and mothers in this land send their daughters to wait upon me and be schooled in courtly ways—understand you? Well, what manner of queen should I be, if I let another woman’s daughter behave immodestly and get herself with child, or—as did Queen Morgause, I have heard—let her maidens go to the king’s bed, if he wished to have his way with them? Mothers entrust me with their daughters because they know I will protect them—”
“It is different, that you should be entrusted with maidens too young to know their own will, and be even as a mother to bring them up rightly,” Taliesin said. “But a king rules over grown men.”
“God has not said there is one law for the court and one other for the country folk! He wishes all men to keep his commandments—and suppose the laws were not there? What do you think would happen to this land if I and my ladies went out into the fields and behaved so immodestly? How can such things be allowed to go on within the very sound of the church bells?”
Taliesin smiled. He said, “I do not think, even if there was no law against it, that you would be very likely to go into the fields at Beltane, my lady. I have marked it—that you like not to go out of doors much at all.”
“I have had the good of Christian teaching and priestly counsel and I choose not to go,” she said sharply.
“But Gwenhwyfar,” he said very gently, his faded blue eyes looking at her out of the network of lines and patches on his face, “think of this. Suppose a law was made against it, and your conscience told you that it was the right thing to do, to give yourself to the Goddess, in acknowledgment that she is over us all, body and soul? If your Goddess wished for you to do so—then, dear lady, would you let the passing of a law forbidding the Beltane fires stop you from it? Think, dear lady: not more than two hundred years ago—has Bishop Patricius not told you of this?—it was strictly against the laws here in the Summer Country that any should worship the Christ, for so they should defraud the Gods of Rome of their just and righteous due. And there were Christians who died rather than do such a little thing, cast a pinch of incense before one of their idols—aye, I see you have heard the story. Would you have your God be as great a tyrant as any Roman emperor?”
“But God is real, and they are but idols fashioned by men,” Gwenhwyfar said.
“Not so, no more than the picture of Mary Virgin which Arthur bore into battle . . .” said Taliesin, “a picture to give comfort to the minds of the faithful. It is strictly forbidden to me, a Druid, that I may have