Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [492]
The last of the leaves had gone and the fearful storms of winter had begun to beat over Tintagel when one day one of my women came to me and said that a man had come to seek me.
“At this season?” I looked out beyond the window, where unceasing rain beat down from skies as grey and bleak as the inside of my own mind. What traveller would come through this bitter weather, struggling through storms and darkness? No; whoever he might be, I cared not. “Say to him that the Duchess of Cornwall sees no man, and send him away.”
“Into the rain on a night such as this will be, lady?” I was startled that the woman should protest; most of them feared me for a sorceress, and I was content to have it so. But the woman was right; Tintagel had never failed in hospitality when it was in the hands of my long-dead father, or of Igraine . . . so be it. I said, “Give the traveller hospitality fitting his rank, and food, and bed; but tell him that I am ill, and cannot receive him.”
She went away and I lay watching the fierce rain and darkness, feeling its cold breath through the slit of the window and trying to find my way back into the peaceful blankness where now I felt most like myself. But after a very little, the door opened again and the woman returned, and I started upright, shaking with anger, the first emotion I had let myself feel in many weeks.
“I have not summoned you, and I did not bid you return! How dare you?”
“I am charged with a message for you, lady,” she said, “a message I didn’t dare say no to, not when one of the high ones speaks. . . . He said, ‘I speak not to the Duchess of Cornwall but to the Lady of Avalon, and she cannot refuse the Messenger of the Gods when the Merlin seeks audience and counsel.’ ” The woman paused and said, “I hope I’ve got it right . . . he made me say it over twice to be sure I had it all.”
Now, against my will, I felt the stirrings of curiosity. The Merlin? But Kevin was Arthur’s man, surely he would not have come like this to me. Had he not aligned himself firmly with Arthur and with the Christians, traitor to Avalon? But perhaps some other man now held that office, Messenger of the Gods, Merlin of Britain . . . and now I thought of my son Gwydion, or Mordred as I supposed I must now think of him; perhaps this was his office, for he alone would now think of me as Lady of Avalon. . . . After a long silence, I said, “Tell him I will see him, then.” After a moment I added, “But not like this. Send someone to dress me.” For I knew that I was too weak to put on my own clothes. But I would not receive any man this way, weak and ill and in my bedchamber; I, who was priestess of Avalon, would manage to stand on my feet before the Merlin, even if what he brought was sentence of death for all my failure . . . I am still Morgaine!
I managed to rise, to have my dress put on and my shoes, and my hair braided down my back and covered with the veil of a priestess; I even painted, after the woman’s clumsy hands had twice botched it, the symbol of the moon on my forehead. My hands—I noted it incuriously, as if they belonged to someone else—were shaking, and I was weak enough that I let the woman give me her arm as I crawled down the steep stairs. But the Merlin should not see my weakness.
A fire had been built in the hall; the fire was smoking a little, as always here when it rained, and through the smoke I could see only a man’s figure seated by the fire, turned away from me, draped in a grey cloak—but at his side stood a tall harp I could not mistake; from My Lady I knew the man. Kevin’s hair was all grey now, but he dragged his stooped body upright as I came in.
“So,” I said, “you call yourself still Merlin of Britain, when you serve only Arthur’s will and defy that of Avalon?”
“I know not what to call myself now,” said Kevin quietly,