Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [566]
The abbess nodded gravely. “In these days, our good King Arthur cannot spare a single one of his knights, and surely not the good sir Lancelet.”
Gwenhwyfar went out into the anteroom of the convent. Lancelet was there, wandering restlessly. He took her hands. “I cannot bear to say farewell to you here, Gwenhwyfar—ah, my lady, my love, must it be this way?”
“It must be so,” she said pitilessly, but knowing that for the first time she acted without thought of herself. “Your heart was always with Arthur, my dearest. I often think the only sin we did was not that we loved, but that I came between the love you had for each other.” If it could always have been among us three as it was on that Beltane night with Morgaine’s love charm, she thought, there would have been less of sin. The sin was not that we lay together, but that there was strife, and less of love therefore. “I send you back to Arthur with all my heart, dearest. Tell him for me that I loved him never the less.”
His face was almost transfigured. “I know that now,” he said. “And I know, too, that I loved him never the less, and I felt always that I wronged you by loving him. . . .” He would have kissed her, but it was not suitable here. Instead he bent over her hand. “While you are in God’s house, pray for me, lady.”
My love for you is a prayer, she thought. Love is the only prayer I know. She thought she had never loved him so much as at this moment, when she heard the convent door close, hard and final, and felt the walls shutting her in.
So safe, so protected, those walls had made her feel, in that day long past. Now she knew that she would walk between them all the rest of her life. When I had freedom, she thought, I desired it not, and feared it. And now, when I have learned to love it and long for it, I am renouncing it in the name of my love. Dimly she felt that this was right—the acceptable gift and sacrifice to bring before God. But as she walked through the nuns’ cloister, she looked at the walls closing her in, trapping her.
For my love. And for the love of God, she thought, and felt a small seed of comfort stealing through her. Lancelet would go to the church where Galahad had died, and there he would pray. Perhaps he would remember a day when the mists of Avalon had opened, and she and he and Morgaine had stood together, lost, knee-deep in the waters of the Lake. She thought of Morgaine too, with a sudden passion of love and tenderness. Mary, Holy Mother of God, be with her too, and bring her to you one day. . . .
The walls, the walls, they would drive her mad, closing her in, she would never be free again. . . . No. For her love, and for the love of God, she would even learn to love them again one day. Folding her hands in prayer, Gwenhwyfar walked down the cloister to the sisters’ enclosure, and went inside forever.
Morgaine speaks . . .
I thought I was beyond the Sight; Viviane, still younger than I, had renounced it, chosen another to be Lady in her place. But there was none to sit in the shrine of the Lady after me, and none to approach the Goddess. I saw it, helpless, when Niniane died, and I could not stretch forth my hand.
I had loosed this monster upon the world, and I had acquiesced in that move which should send him to throw down the King Stag. And I saw it from afar when, on Dragon Island, the shrine was thrown down and the deer hunted in the forest, without love, without challenge, without appeal to her who was giver of the deer; only arrows from afar and the edge of the spear, and her people hunted down like her deer. The tides of the world were changing. There were times when I saw Camelot too, drifting in the mist, and the wars raging up and down the land again, the Northmen who were the new foe plundering and burning . . . a new world, and new Gods.
Truly the Goddess had departed, even from Avalon, and I, mortal as I was,