The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [95]
"What's the use of asking Merlin? He may know everything in the world, but ask him to describe a bridal, and I'll wager he doesn't even know the colour of the girl's hair or her gown!"
Then talk around us became general, with a lot of laughter, and speeches were made, and pledges given, and I must have drunk far more than I was accustomed to, because I well remember how the torchlight beat and swelled, bright and dark alternately, while talk and laughter surged and broke in gusts, and with it the woman's scent, a thick sweetness like honeysuckle, catching and trapping the sense as a limed twig holds a bee. The fumes of wine rose through it. A gold jug tilted, and my goblet brimmed again. Someone said, smiling, "Drink, my lord." There was a taste of apricots in my mouth, sweet and sharp; the skin had a texture like the fur of a bee, or a wasp dying in sunlight on a garden wall...And all the while eyes watching me, in excitement and wary hope, then in contempt, and in triumph...The servants were beside me, helping me from my chair, and I saw that the bride had gone already, and King Urbgen, impatience barely held on a tight rein, was watching the door for the sign that it was time to follow her to bed.
The chair beside me was empty. Round my own the servants crowded, smiling, to help me back to my rooms.
6
Next morning I had a headache as bad as anything that the aftermath of magic used to inflict on me. I kept to my rooms all day. On the day following I took leave of Urbgen and his queen. We had sat through a series of formal discussions before Morgause's arrival, and now I could leave the city -- how thankfully, it may be guessed -- and make my way southwest through the Wild Forest, at the heart of which stood Count Ector's castle of Galava. I took no leave of Morgause.
It was good to be out again, and this time with two companions only. Morgan's escort had been formed mainly of her own people from Cornwall, who had remained with her in Luguvallium. The two men who rode with me were deputed into my service by Urbgen; they would go with me as far as Galava, then return. It was vain for me to protest that I would rather go alone, and would be safe; King Urbgen merely repeated, smiling, that not even my magic would avail against wolves, or autumn fogs, or the sudden onslaught of early snow, which in that mountainous country can trap the traveller very quickly among the steep valley-passes, and bring him to his death. His words were a reminder to me that, armed as I was now with only the reputation of past power, and not the thing itself, I was as subject to outrage from thieves and desperate men as any solitary traveller in that wild country; so I accepted the escort with thanks, and in so doing I suppose I saved my life.
We rode out over the bridge, and along the pleasant green valley where the river winds, bordered with alder and willow. Though my headache had gone, and I felt well enough, a certain lassitude still hung about me, and I breathed the sweet, familiar air, full of pine scents and bracken scents, with gratitude.
One small incident I remember. As we left the city gates, and crossed the river bridge, I heard a shrill cry, which at first I took to be a bird's, one of the gulls that wheeled about the refuse on the river's banks. Then a movement caught my eye, and I glanced down to see a woman, carrying a child, walking on the shingle near the water's edge below the bridge. The child was crying, and she hushed it. She saw me, and stood quite still, staring upward. I recognized Morgause's nurse. Then my horse clattered off the bridge, and