Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [73]
A hand on her shoulder prevented her. The Merlin looked into her eyes for a moment, and said gently, “So it has come, Grainné. Your fate, as it was foretold. See that you meet it with such courage as you may.”
Kneeling at Gorlois’s side, she prayed—for Gorlois, and then, weeping, for herself; for the unknown fate that lay before them now. Had it indeed been ordained from the beginning of the world, or had it been brought about by the sorcery of the Merlin, and of Avalon, and by her own use of sorcery? Now Gorlois lay dead, and as she looked on Uther’s face, already beloved and dear, she knew that soon others would come and he would take up the burdens of his kingdom, and that never again would he be wholly hers as he had been on this one night. Kneeling there between her dead husband and the man she would love all her life, she fought the temptation to play upon his love for her, to turn him, as she knew she could do, from thoughts of kingdom and state to think only of her. But the Merlin had not brought them together for her own joy. She knew that if she sought to keep it, she would rebel against the very fate that had brought them together, and thus destroy it. As Father Columba rose from the dead man’s side and signalled to the soldiers to carry the body into the chapel, she touched his arm. He turned impatiently.
“My lady?”
“I have much to confess to you, Father, before my lord the Duke is laid to rest—and before I am married. Will you hear my confession?”
He looked at her, frowning, surprised. At last he said, “At daybreak, lady,” and went away. The Merlin followed Igraine with his eyes as she came back to him. She looked into his face and said, “Here and now, my father, from this moment, be witness that I have done forever with sorcery. What God wills be done.”
The Merlin looked tenderly into her ravaged face. His voice was gentler than she had ever heard it. “Do you think that all our sorcery could bring about anything other than God’s will, my child?”
Catching at some small self-possession—if she did not, she knew, she would weep like a child before all these men—she said, “I will go and robe myself, Father, and make myself seemly.”
“You must greet the day as befits a queen, my daughter.”
Queen. The word sent shudders through her body. But it was for this that she had done all that she had done, it was for this that she had been born. She went slowly up the stairs. She must waken Morgaine and tell her that her father was dead; fortunately the child was too young to remember him, or to grieve.
And as she called her women, and had them bring her finest robes and jewelry and dress her hair, she laid her hand wonderingly over her belly. Somehow, with the last fleeting touch of magic before she renounced it forever, she knew that from this one night, when they had been only lovers and not yet king and queen, she would bear Uther’s son. She wondered if the Merlin knew.
Morgaine speaks . . .
I think that my first real memory is of my mother’s wedding to Uther Pendragon. I remember my father only a little. When I was unhappy as a little girl, I seemed to remember him, a heavyset man with a dark beard and dark hair; I remember playing with a chain he wore about his neck. I remember that as a little maiden when I was unhappy, when I was chidden by my mother or my teachers, or when Uther—rarely—noticed me to disapprove of me, I used to comfort myself by thinking that if my own father were alive, he would have been fond of me and taken me on his knee and brought me pretty things. Now that I am older and know what manner of man he was, I think it more likely he would have put me into a nunnery as soon as I had a brother, and never thought more about me.
Not that Uther was ever unkind to me; it was simply that he had no particular interest in a girl child. My mother was always at the center of his heart, and he at hers, and so I resented that—that I had lost my mother