Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [40]
And silence; and Igraine found herself, naked, wrapped only in her cloak, huddled before the last cold ashes of the fire in her room in their lodging; and Gorlois snoring softly in the bed.
Shaking, she wrapped herself tightly in the shawl and crept, chilled to the bone, back to the bed, burrowing for some remnants of warmth. Morgan. Morgaine. Had she given her child that name because it was truly one she had borne? Was it only a bizarre dream sent by the Merlin, to convince her that once she had known Uther Pendragon in some former life?
But that had been no dream—dreams were confused, bizarre, a world where all is foolishness and illusion. She knew that somehow she had wandered into the Land of Truth, where the soul goes when the body is elsewhere, and somehow she had brought back not a dream but a memory.
One thing at least was made clear. If she and Uther had known each other, loved each other, in the past, it explained why she had this tremendous sense of familiarity with him, why he did not seem a stranger, why even his boorish—or boyish—manners seemed not offensive, but simply part of the person which he was and had always been. She remembered the tenderness with which she had dried his tears with her veil, knowing now that she had thought: yes, he was always so. Impulsive, boyish, rushing toward what he wanted, never weighing costs.
Had they truly brought the secrets of a vanished wisdom to this land, generations ago when the lost lands were newly vanished under the western ocean, and together incurred the penalties for that oathbreaking? Penalties? And then, not knowing why, she remembered that rebirth itself—human life—was supposed to be the penalty, life in a human body rather than endless peace. She curved her lips in a smile, thinking, Is it penalty, or reward, to live in this body? For thinking of the sudden wakening of her body in the arms of the man who was, or would be, or once had been, Uther Pendragon, she knew as she had never known before that, whatever the priests said, life, whether birth or rebirth, in this body, was reward enough.
She burrowed her body down in the bed, and lay, not sleepy now, looking into the darkness, smiling. So Viviane and the Merlin had known, perhaps, what it was fated for her to know: that she was bound to Uther by a bond which made her tie to Gorlois merely superficial and momentary. She would do as they willed; it was part of her destiny. She and the man who now was Uther had bound themselves, many lives ago, to the fate of this land, where they had come when the Old Temple was buried. Now, when once again the Mysteries were imperilled, this time by hordes of barbarians and wild men from the North, they returned together. It was given to her to bring to birth one of the great heroes who, so it was said, came back to life when they were needed, the king who was, and is, and will come again to save his people . . . even the Christians had a version of the story, saying that when their Jesus was born, his mother had had warnings and prophecies that she would bear a king. She smiled in the darkness, thinking of the fate that was reuniting her with the man she had loved so many centuries before. Gorlois? What had Gorlois to do with her fate, except to make her ready? Otherwise, she might have been too young to understand what was to happen to her.
In this life I am not a priestess. Yet I know that I am still the obedient child of my fate; as all men and women must be.
And for the priests and the priestesses there is no tie of marriage. They give themselves as they must, in the will of the Gods, to bring forth those who are pivotal to the fates of mankind.
She thought of the great constellation called the Wheel, in the north. The peasants called it the Wain, or the Great Bear, shambling ever round and round the northernmost of the stars; but Igraine knew it symbolized, in its coming and going, the endless Wheel of Birth and Death and Rebirth. And the Giant who strode across the sky, the sword hanging from his belt . . . for a moment it seemed to Igraine