Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [572]
Morgaine smiled at her, troubled. “I am sorry—I do not—”
“No, you would not remember me,” said the abbess, “though I saw you, now and again, at Camelot; I was so much younger. My name is Lionors. I was married to Gareth, and when all my children were grown, I came here—here to end my days. Did you come to Lancelet’s funeral, then?” She smiled and said, “I should indeed have said Father Galahad, but it is hard to remember, and now he is in Heaven it will not matter.” She smiled again. “I know not now even who is King, or whether Camelot still stands—there is war in the land again, it is not as it was in Arthur’s time. That all seems so very long ago,” she added with detachment.
“I came here to visit Viviane’s grave. She is buried here—do you remember?”
“I have seen the tomb,” said the abbess, “but it was before ever I came to Camelot.”
“I have a favor to beg of you,” Morgaine said, and touched the basket on her arm. “This is the Holy Thorn that grows on the hills of Avalon, where it is said that the foster-father of Christ struck his staff into the ground and it blossomed there. I would plant a cutting of this thorn tree on her grave.”
“Plant it if you will,” said Lionors. “I cannot see how anyone could object to that. It seems right to me that it should be here in the world, and not hidden away in Avalon.”
She looked at Morgaine, dismayed.
“Avalon! Have you come here from that unholy land?”
Morgaine thought, Once I would have been angry with her. “Unholy it is not, whatever the priests say, Lionors,” she said gently. “Think—would the foster-father of Christ have struck his staff there if the land had seemed to him evil? Is not the Holy Spirit everywhere?”
The woman bowed her head. “You are right. I will send novices to help you with the planting.”
Morgaine would sooner have been alone, but she knew it was a kindly thought. The novices seemed no more than children to Morgaine, girls of nineteen or twenty, so young that she wondered—forgetting that she herself had been made priestess when she was eighteen—how they could possibly know enough of spiritual things to choose lives like this. She had thought nuns in Christian convents would be sad and doleful, ever conscious of what the priests said about the sinfulness of being born women, but these were innocent and merry as robins, talking gaily to Morgaine of their new chapel and bidding her rest her knees while they dug the hole for the cutting.
“And it is your kinswoman who is buried here?” asked one of the girls. “Can you read what it says? I never thought I would learn to read, for my mother said it was not suitable, but when I came here, they told me I must be able to read in the mass book, and so now I can read in Latin! Look,” she said proudly, and read: ” ‘King Arthur made this tomb for his kinswoman and benefactress, the Lady of the Lake, slain by treachery at his court in Camelot’—I cannot read the date, but it was a long time ago.”
“She must have been a very holy woman,” said another of the girls, “for Arthur, they say, was the best and the most Christian of all kings. He would never have had any woman buried here unless she was a saint!”
Morgaine smiled; they reminded her of the girls in the House of Maidens. “I would not call her a saint, though I loved her. In her day, there were those who called her a wicked sorceress.”
“King Arthur would never have a wicked sorceress buried here among holy people,” said the girl. “And as for sorcery—well, there are ignorant priests and ignorant people, who are all too ready to cry sorcery if a woman is only a little wiser than they are! Are you going to stay and take the veil here, Mother?” she asked, and Morgaine, for a moment startled at the word, realized that they were speaking to her with the same deference and respect as any of her own maidens in the House of Maidens, as if she were an elder among them.
“I am vowed elsewhere, my daughter.”
“Is your convent as nice as this one? Mother Lionors is a kind woman,” the girl said, “and we are all very happy here