Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [383]
It was like an answer from her own mind when a voice spoke softly behind her. “I wonder, lady, if any here save ourselves truly know what they are watching?”
Accolon took her arm for a moment to help her over a rough clump of the plowed land, and she saw again the serpents, fresh and blue along his wrists.
“King Uriens knows and has tried to forget. That seems to me a worse blasphemy than not to know at all.”
She had expected that would make him angry; had, in a way, been inviting it. With Accolon’s strong hands on her arm, she felt the strong hunger, the inner leap . . . he was young, he was a virile man, and she—she was the aging wife of his old father . . . and the eyes of Uriens’ subjects were on them, and the eyes of his family and his house priest! She could not even speak freely, she must treat him with cold detachment: her stepson! If Accolon said anything kind or pitying, she would scream aloud, would tear at her hair, at her face and flesh with her nails. . . .
But Accolon only said, in a voice that could not have been overheard three feet away, “Perhaps it is enough for the Lady that we know, Morgaine. The Goddess will not fail us while a single worshipper gives her what is due.”
For a moment she looked round at him. His eyes were dwelling on her, and although his hands on hers were careful, courteous, detached, it seemed that heat ran upward from them into her whole body. She was suddenly frightened and wanted to pull away.
I am his father’s wife and of all women I am the one most forbidden to him. I am more forbidden to him, in this Christian land, than I was to Arthur.
And then a memory from Avalon surfaced in her mind, something she had not thought of for a decade; one of the Druids, giving instruction in the secret wisdom to the young priestesses, had said, If you would have the message of the Gods to direct your life, look for that which repeats, again and again; for this is the message given you by the Gods, the karmic lesson you must learn for this incarnation. It comes again and again until you have made it part of your soul and your enduring spirit.
What has come to me again and again . . . ?
Every man she had desired had been too close kin to her—Lancelet, who was the son of her foster-mother; Arthur, her own mother’s son; now the son of her husband . . .
But they are too close kin to me only by the laws made by the Christians who seek to rule this land . . . to rule it in a new tyranny; not alone to make the laws but to rule the mind and heart and soul. Am I living out in my own life all the tyranny of that law, so I as priestess may know why it must be overthrown?
She discovered that her hands, still tightly held in Accolon’s, were trembling. She said, trying to collect her scattered thoughts, “Do you truly believe that the Goddess would withdraw her life from this earth if the folk who dwell here should no longer give her her due?”
It was the sort of remark that might have been made, priestess to priest, in Avalon. Morgaine knew, as well as anyone, that the true answer to that question was that the Gods were what they were, and did their will upon the earth regardless of whether man regarded their doing one way or the other. But Accolon said, with a curious animal flash of white teeth in a grin, “Then must we make it sure, lady, that she should always be given her due, lest the life of the world fail.” And then he addressed her by a name never spoken except by priest to priestess in ritual, and Morgaine felt her heart beating so hard she was dizzy.
Lest the life of the world fail. Lest my life fail within me . . . he has called on me in the name of the Goddess. . . .
“Be still,” she said, distracted. “This is neither the time nor the place for such talk.”
“No?” They had come to the edge of the rough ground. He let go of her hand and somehow her own felt cold without it. Ahead of them the masked dancers shook their phallic wands and capered, and the Spring Maiden, her long hair buffeted and tangled by the breeze, was going around the circle