Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [380]
“You were pledged to me!”
Morgaine knew that the color was leaving her face. She set her lips like stone. “Done is done, Accolon.”
She lifted her lamp and turned away. He said behind her, almost a threat, “This is not done between us, lady.”
Morgaine did not speak; she hurried along the corridor to the chamber she shared with Uriens. Her lady-in-waiting was ready to unlace her gown, but she sent the woman away. Uriens sat on the edge of the bed, groaning.
“Even those slippers are too hard on my feet! Aaah, it is good to go to rest!”
“Rest well, then, my lord.”
“No,” he said, and pulled her down at his side. “So tomorrow the fields are to be blessed . . . and perhaps we should be grateful we live in a civilized land, and the king and the queen need no longer bless the fields by lying together in public. But on the eve of the blessing, dear lady, perhaps we should have our own blessing, private in our chamber—what would you say to that?”
Morgaine sighed. She had been scrupulously careful of her aging husband’s pride; never did she make him feel less than a man for his occasional and clumsy use of her body. But Accolon had roused in her an anguished memory of her years in Avalon—the torches borne to the top of the Tor, the Beltane fires lighted and the maidens waiting in the plowed fields . . . and tonight she had had to hear a shabby priest mocking what was, to her, holy beyond holiness. Now even Uriens, it seemed, made a mockery of it.
“I would say that such blessing as you and I might give the fields would be better left undone. I am old and barren, and you are not such a king as can give much life to the fields, either!”
Uriens stared at her. In all the year of their marriage she had never spoken a harsh word to him. He was too startled even to reproach her.
“I doubt it not, you are right,” he said quietly. “Well, then, we will leave that to the young people. Come to bed, Morgaine.” But when she lay down beside him, he lay quiet, and after a moment, he put a shy arm across her shoulders. Now Morgaine was regretting her harsh words . . . she felt cold and alone, she lay biting her lip so that she would not cry, but when Uriens spoke to her, she pretended she was asleep.
Midsummer dawned brilliant and beautiful; Morgaine, waking early, realized that, however much she might say to herself that the sun tides ran no longer in her blood, there was something within her that ran heavy with the summer. As she dressed, she looked dispassionately at the sleeping form of her husband.
She had been a fool. Why should she have accepted compliantly Arthur’s word, fearing to embarrass him before his fellow kings? If he could not keep his throne without a woman’s help it might be he did not deserve to hold it. He was a traitor to Avalon, an apostate; he had given her into the hands of another apostate. Yet she had meekly agreed to what they had planned for her.
Igraine let her life be used for their politics. And something in Morgaine, dead or sleeping since the day she fled forth from Avalon, bearing Gwydion within her womb, suddenly woke and stirred, moving sluggishly and slow like a sleeping dragon, a movement as secret and unseen as the first movements of a child in the womb; something that said, clear and quiet within her, If I would not let Viviane, whom I loved, use me this way, why should I bow my head meekly and let myself be used for Arthur’s purposes? I am queen in North Wales, and I am duchess in Cornwall, where Gorlois’s name still means something, and I am of the royal line of Avalon.
Uriens groaned, heaving himself stiffly over. “Ah, God, I ache in every muscle and there is a toothache in every toe of my foot—I rode too far yesterday. Morgaine, will you rub my back?”
She started to fling back furiously, You have a dozen body servants, and I am your wife, not your slave, then stopped herself; instead she smiled and said, “Yes, of course,” and sent a pageboy for her vials of herbal oil. Let him think her still compliant to everything; healing was a part of a priestess’s work. If it was the smallest