Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [562]
Morgause looked on in horror as Gwydion, weeping, bent over her youngest son.
Words spoken in half earnest, years ago—Gwydion had refused to take the lists on the opposite side from Gareth, even in a mock battle. It seemed to me that you lay dying, he had said . . . and I knew it was my doing you lay without the spark of life. . . . I will not tempt that fate.
Lancelet had done this, Lancelet whom Gareth had always loved more than any other man.
One of the men in the room stepped forward and said, “They’re getting away—”
“Do you think I care about that?” Gwydion winced, and Morgause realized that he was bleeding, that his blood was flowing and mingling with Gareth’s on the floor of the chamber. She caught up the linen sheet from the bed, tore it, and wadded it against Gwydion’s wound.
Gawaine said somberly, “No man in all of Britain will hide them now. Lancelet is everywhere outcast. He has been taken in treason to his king, and his very life is forfeit. God! How I wish it had not come to this!” He came and looked at Gwydion’s wound, then shrugged. “No more than a flesh cut—see, the bleeding is slowed already, it will heal, but you will not sit in comfort for some days. Gareth—” His voice broke; the great, rough, greying man began to weep like a child. “Gareth had worse fortune, and I will have Lancelet’s life for it, if I die myself at his hands. Ah God, Gareth, my little one, my little brother—” and Gawaine bent and cradled the big body against him. He said thickly, through sobs, “Was it worth it, Gwydion, was it worth Gareth’s life?”
“Come away, my boy,” said Morgause, through a tightness in her own throat—Gareth, her baby, her last child; she had lost him long ago to Arthur, but still she remembered a fair-haired little boy, clutching a wooden painted knight in his hand. And one day you and I shall go on quest together, sir Lancelet . . . always Lancelet. But now Lancelet had overreached himself, and everywhere in the land every man’s hand would be against him. And still she had Gwydion, her beloved, the one who would one day be King, and she at his side.
“Come, my lad, come away, you can do nothing for Gareth now. Let me bind up your wound, then we shall go to Arthur and tell him what has befallen, so that he may send out his men to seek for the traitors—”
Gwydion shook her grip from his arm. “Get away from me, curse you,” he said in a terrible voice. “Gareth was the best of us, and I would not have sacrificed him for a dozen kings! It was you and your spite against Arthur always urging me on, as if I cared what bed the Queen slept in—as if Gwenhwyfar were any worse than you, when from the time I was ten years old you had this one or that one in your bed—”
“Oh, my son—” she whispered, aghast. “How can you speak so to me? Gareth was my son too—”
“What did you ever care for Gareth, or for any of us, or for anything but your own pleasure and your own ambition? You would urge me to a throne, not for my sake but for your own power!” He thrust away her clinging hands. “Get you back to Lothian, or to hell if the devil will have you, but if ever I set eyes on you again, I swear I will forget all except that you were the murderer of the one brother I loved, the one kinsman—” and as Gawaine urgently pushed his mother from the chamber, she could hear Gwydion weeping again. “Oh, Gareth, Gareth, I should have died first—”
Gawaine said shortly, “Cormac, take the Queen of Lothian to her chamber.”
His strong arm was holding her upright, and after they had moved down the hall, after that dreadful sobbing had died away behind her, Morgause began to draw breath freely again. How could he turn on her this way? When had she ever done anything except for his sake? She must show decent mourning for Gareth, certainly, but Gareth was Arthur’s man, and surely Gwydion would have realized it, sooner or later. She looked up at Cormac.