Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [517]
When life runs full at the rounding of the moon, then shall the Goddess receive the body of her lover. . . .
It was not altogether beyond belief. She was the daughter of the Queen’s champion and the King’s closest friend. Kevin, the Merlin, unlike a Christian priest, was not forbidden to marry. The court would be pleased at a marriage so high-placed, even though some of the ladies would be shocked that she could yield up her delicate body to a man they considered a monster. Arthur surely knew that Kevin could not, after what he had done, return to Avalon, but he had a place at court as the King’s councillor. Also, he was a musician of surpassing skill. There would be a place for us, and happiness . . . when the moon is full, brimming with life, he will plant a child in my womb . . . and I will bear it joyfully . . . he is not monster-born, his deformity is from childhood injuries . . . his sons would be handsome . . . and then she stopped herself, disturbed by the power of her own fantasies. No, she must not become so deeply entangled in this spell. She must deny herself, even though the waxing moon made the surging blood in her veins a very agony of frustration. She must wait, wait . . .
As she had waited all those years. . . . There is a magic that comes with yielding to life. The priestesses of Avalon knew it when they lay in the fields at Beltane, invoking the life of the Goddess in their own bodies and hearts . . . but there is a deeper magic which comes from guarding the power, damming up the stream. The Christians knew something of this, when they insisted that their holy virgins live in chastity and seclusion, that they might burn with the darker flame of that harnessed force; that their chaste priests might pour all their contained power into their Mysteries, such as they were. Nimue had felt that power in the lightest word or gesture from Raven, who had never wasted words on anything trivial, so that her force, when she spent it, was tremendous. She had wondered often, alone in the temple at Avalon, when she was forbidden to mingle with the other maidens or to go to the rites, when she felt that life force in her veins with such power that she sometimes burst into hysterical crying or tore at her hair and her face . . . why had they set her aside for this, why must she bear the terrible weight of all this without relief? But she had trusted the Goddess and obeyed her mentors, and now they had entrusted this great work to her, and she must not fail them through her own weakness.
She was a charged vessel of power, like the Holy Regalia which it was death to touch unprepared, and all this power of her long preparation would be hers to bind the Merlin to her . . . but she must wait for the tide to slacken and fill again; at the dark moon she must take the other tide which came of the other side of the moon . . . not fertile but barren, not of life at all but of dark magic older than human life. . . .
And the Merlin knew these things; he knew of the old curse of the dark moon and the barren womb . . . he must be so wholly enspelled by her that he would not even wonder why she had refused him at the spring tide and sought him out at the slack. She had one advantage: he did not know that she knew these things, he had never seen her in Avalon. Yet the bond went between them both ways, and if she could read his thoughts, he might read hers; she must guard herself every moment lest he see within and guess her purposes.
I must so wholly blind him with desire that he will forget . . . forget all he has been taught in Avalon. And at the same time, she must not be overcome by his desire, she must contain her own. It would not be easy.
She began to frame in her mind the next wile she would use on him. Tell me of your childhood, she would say, tell me how you were so hurt. Sympathy would be a powerful bond; she knew just how she would touch him with the very tips of her fingers . . . and she knew, in despair, that she was seeking out ways to be near him and touch him, not for her work but for her own hunger.