Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [7]
Viviane, Lady of the Lake and of the Holy Isle, was at this time in her thirties; eldest daughter of the ancient priestess of the Lake, she had succeeded to her mother’s holy office. She picked up Morgaine in her arms, dandling her with the experienced hands of a woman well accustomed to babies.
“She looks like you,” Igraine said, surprised, and then realizing that she should have realized this before. But it had been four years since she had seen Viviane, and then at her wedding. So much had happened, she had changed so much, since, a frightened girl of fifteen, she had been given into the hands of a man more than twice her age. “But come into the hall, Lord Merlin, sister. Come into the warm.”
Freed of her enwrapping cloaks and shawls, Viviane, Lady of Avalon, was a surprisingly little woman, no taller than a well-grown girl of eight or ten. In her loose tunic with its wrapped belt, a knife sheathed at her waist, and bulky woolen breeches, legs wrapped with thick leggings, she looked tiny, a child put into adult clothes. Her face was small, swarthy and triangular, the forehead low beneath hair dark as the shadows beneath the crags. Her eyes were dark, too, and large in her small face; Igraine had never realized how small she was.
A serving-woman brought the guest cup: hot wine, mixed with the last of the spices Gorlois had had sent to her from the markets in Londinium. Viviane took it between her hands, and Igraine blinked at her; with the gesture with which she took the cup, she was suddenly tall and imposing; it might have been the sacred chalice of the Holy Regalia. She set it between her hands and brought it slowly to her lips, murmuring a blessing. She tasted it, turned, and laid it in the hands of the Merlin. He took it with a grave bow and put it to his lips. Igraine, who had barely entered the Mysteries, somehow felt that she too was part of this beautiful ritual solemnity as in turn she took the cup from her guests, tasted it, and spoke formal words of welcome.
Then she put the cup aside and her sense of the moment dropped away; Viviane was only a small, tired-looking woman, the Merlin no more than a stooped old man. Igraine led them both quickly to the fire.
“It is a long journey from the shores of the Summer Sea in these days,” she said, remembering when she had travelled it, a new-made bride, frightened and silently hating, in the train of the strange husband who, as yet, was only a voice and a terror in the night. “What brings you here in the spring storms, my sister and my lady?”
And why could you not have come before, why did you leave me all alone, to learn to be a wife, to bear a child alone and in fear and homesickness? And since you could not have come before, why do you come at all, when it is too late and I am at last resigned into submission?
“The distance is indeed long,” Viviane said softly, and Igraine knew that the priestess had heard, as she always heard, the unspoken words as well as what Igraine had said. “And these are dangerous times, child. But you have grown into womanhood in these years, even if they have been lonely, as lonely as the years of isolation for the making of a bard—or,” she added, with the flicker of a reminiscent smile, “the making of a priestess. Had you chosen that path, you would have found it equally lonely, my Igraine. Yes, of course,” she said, reaching down, her face softening, “you may come up on my lap, little one.” She picked up Morgaine, and Igraine watched with wonder; Morgaine was, ordinarily, as shy as a wild rabbit. Half resentful, half falling again under the old spell, she watched the child settle into Viviane’s lap. Viviane looked almost too small to hold her securely. A fairy woman, indeed; a woman of the Old People. And indeed Morgaine would perhaps be very like her.
“And Morgause, how has she prospered since I sent her to you a year ago?” Viviane said, looking up at Morgause in her saffron gown, where she hung back resentfully in the shadows of the fire. “Come and kiss me, little sister.