I Am Morgan le Fay (24 page)

Too near at hand, amid the dust of many knights, I glimpsed the face of one of them, a helmed rider charging upon us both, a surly turnip-nosed face, a dangerous face all too familiar yet utterly strange and wrong in what should have been Caer Morgana.

Redburke.

Grinning because he saw me, he knew me.

Raising his broadsword.

Thomas whirled to face Redburke, dropping the milpreve. Without any weapon he sprang to place himself between death and me.

Redburke struck as if swatting a fly. His first blow sliced off Thomas's hand, lifted as if to raise a shield—but there was no shield. Redburke's second blow took off Thomas's head.

In the moment it took me to snatch up the milpreve from the ground, Thomas fell dead.

I saw—I can barely speak of it, even now. Slantwise as I stood up I saw ... his severed head falling.

I felt my heart splinter like the pomegranate trees.

Redburke loomed over me. With no thought for self or caution I screamed, “Death! Death to all of you!” The milpreve blazed so furious it blinded me; I saw only white fire. Then I slammed into the ground, and everything went black for a merciful while.

I
REMEMBER HEARING THE CROAKING OF RAVENS, BUT not understanding. I blinked up at a swirl of black wings against a twilight sky. I remember feeling several kinds of racking pain, in my hand, my body, my heart, but not knowing why. Then I sat up and saw.

Ravens picking out my father's eyes.

Rather, at first in my muddled mind I thought it was my father. I saw a battlefield. Bodies and carrion birds everywhere. Feasting upon—no, it was not my father. It was Redburke.

And nearby—Thomas.

His dead, bloody, severed head, its empty eye sockets turned toward me.

Already my heart had splintered to bits. In that moment my mind did the same. I felt it shatter.

I went mad.

Like my mother, I went mad.

The difference being, she had run crazed because of what had been done to her. But I ran crazed because of what I had done.

She had loved my father, and her love for him had made her soft and weak, so Ongwynn had said.

I had loved Thomas. What had loving him done to me?

I ran mad.

My memories of that time are bits and pieces I must search for amid the madness, like shards of broken shell amid the black grit of the seashore.

I remember seeing piskies—the little brown brats climbed upon me as I curled amid heather on the moor, pouring water on my face, forcing bread into my mouth. At the time it seemed to me that they were tormenting me and I deserved it, but I think now that they were trying to help, and to this day I cannot encompass such mercy after what I had done to them.

I remember hearing voices in the wind—Daddy, Cernunnos, Rhiannon, Thomas, Morgause, Mother, Ongwynn. Mostly they reproached me; only Ongwynn tried to comfort me. I remember looking for Ongwynn—I thought I was a child, and with my hair tangled like a moor pony's mane, with dirt and tears crusted on my face, I ran into Caer Ongwynn. Unless the madness deludes me, it was a hollow hill again, a rude stone haven, all just as it used to be, but no one was there, Ongwynn was not there, and I wept and stamped my feet and stormed off to find her.

I must have strayed far, for I remember a village woman throwing something at me from a safe distance—stones, I thought. I snatched one up left-handed to hurl it back at her, and saw that it was bread, and gnawed at it while I glared at her from under the hair hanging in my eyes.

I remember my own crippled right hand, with an odd sort of blue stone embedded amid melted metal in the seared flesh of the palm. I did not even recognize my own milpreve. My crazed mind would not let me think what it was, what had happened, how my hand had gotten that way.

I remember cows gazing down at me as I awoke from sleeping in their hay. I remember how the steam rose from the warm bulk of their bodies in a frosty autumn dawn. I remember them because their white breath warmed me. But I did not want to be warm. I wanted to be cold, because cold numbed my pain.

I remember lying in snow, and wondering how it was that white snow could look black at night, and welcoming the bone-deep chill, not caring whether I died.

I think it might have been that night that Cernunnos found me, just as he had once found my mother crouching as wild as a hare amid the heather.

 

 

Avalon. Wellspring of womanhood, wellspring of Ladywater, place of peril, place of healing.

I do not remember being carried home to Avalon in Cernunnos's arms—that was told to me later. I remember first the scent of violets—it was spring already when I awakened to find myself lying pillowed amid gauzy white linen in a bower by the waterside. Years later, when they took him there, King Arthur might have awakened in much the same way, bowered in flower-scented fleecy softness with the lady of Avalon by his side.

Rhiannon smiled down at me, her green eyes merry and sad and not a day older than when I had seen her last.

“Do you know me, Morgan?” she asked.

“Of course I know you!” I struggled to sit up, surprised to find myself thin and weak under a gown of creamy lambswool. “Rhiannon—what has happened? What am I doing here?”

To my surprise, her bright eyes misted. I had never seen such emotion in her before. She had to look away from me. “Later,” she said. “Eat first.”

But as I hoisted myself, I felt an odd lump in my right hand, and I looked. “My milpreve,” I whispered, bewildered, and then in my partly healed heart I felt a shadow, a distant intimation, of the rage and pain with which I had felled Redburke's army, and I remembered.

Thomas.

Oh, my love.

I remembered everything, and I cried out to Avalon, “I cannot bear it!” and flung myself facedown on the white bed and wept.

I felt as if I would die. In a sense it was true that I could not bear what had happened. It had driven me mad, and it had taken all the healers of Avalon to bring me back. If it had not been for the ring on Rhiannon's finger and the gentling touch of her hands on my shoulders, I might have gone mad again.

Many days passed, I do not know how many, before I could bear to speak to Rhiannon, or to any of the friends who attended me. And seasons passed before I could bear to tell them of Thomas's death.

Seasons passed on tiptoe in Avalon, as I have said. I remember a violet-scented day when I sat in the arbor and watched the wee ducks swimming and I talked with Cernunnos—it seems like the same year, but I think it was a year later. It must have been, for I had scried by then that Morgause was safe; she had married King Lothe of Lothian. And I knew that my mother still spent her days sitting in darkness under the dome of Avalon, her haunted eyes gazing into a shadowed mirror, begging, “Arthur. Show me Arthur. I want my son.”

Arthur! How I detested the name. Why should he have a mother who loved him when I, Morgan, daughter of the same mother, had no one?

Still, I somewhat understood now how she had come to be the way she was. My heart still ached with longing for Thomas.

Cernunnos and I sat under the shade of the same arbor where Thomas had rested in soft greensward, where I had knighted him and had given him a useless quest to send him out of danger into what had seemed like lesser danger at the time. The memory seemed to come to me from a lifetime ago.

The tiny jewel-bright ducks swam in a pool like a sky blue mirror, and in the water their reflections showed as the wings of butterflies, sapphire, topaz, ruby, amethyst.

That urging from Ladywater helped me speak. “Thomas once gathered for me a bouquet of butterflies,” I told Cernunnos.

With his gleaming antler tips almost touching the arbor leaves, he lounged in the grass, turning his fey golden eyes my way. “No one could have loved him better than you did,” he said.

“I killed him.” The three words might as well have been three daggers stabbing my heart.

Cernunnos eyed me, his golden gaze unreadable. “As I recall,” he said mildly, “you told me Redburke killed him.”

“Yes,” I said, my throat tightening against grief, “but if it had not been for my folly—”

“Your only folly was to try to cheat fate.”

“I tried to imprison him. Now he's dead.”

Cernunnos shook his head, his antlers rattling against the arbor posts. “Morgan, use your good, strong mind. Think. You were only trying to save Thomas. And what would have happened to him if you had not tried?”

“I—I don't know. He might be alive now.”

“No. I think not. His span of life was determined when he was born. You know he was fated to die in battle.”

“But—”

“When you tried to defy fate, you took fate's third strand in your hands.”

As Ongwynn had tried to warn me not to. As was written in the book of threes; was I the thorny-hearted maid, or the blackwing Morrigun after all? I could hardly bear to think of what fate had done to make me be fate, of what I had done. “Please,” I whispered.

Cernunnos stirred his brown-furred shoulders impatiently. “Morgan, he knew. The first night he sheltered here, he saw the Morrigun washing his bloody corpse. He saw me and my hounds hunting his soul across the sky.”

My aching heart stopped beating for a moment, and I felt an awesome silence in which there was nothing, no pain, no power, no struggle, no comprehension. I gawked at Cernunnos.

“But he was wiser than you,” Cernunnos added more quietly, “and he accepted, and lived out his allotted span.”

I barely managed to speak. “You did not really—set the hounds on his soul, when he died—”

“No. No, I took him in my arms.”

I breathed again.

Cernunnos said, “Truly, Morgan, it is no wonder that you grieve so for him. He was such a one as this wretched world has seldom known.”

I would not have believed it a moment before, but yes, I heard sorrow in his voice, saw sorrow in his eyes. My heart came alive again, warmed by his words.

“I will tell you a tale of fate,” Cernunnos said, but I shook my head, stood up, thanked him with the best smile I could muster, and left him, walking barefoot in the spring grass down to the pool where the white swans floated, their reflections shining like ebony.

After that day, though, I carried a sense of fate in the closed fist of my mind, and remembered one by one, in time, the tales of fate I had heard, and in time I opened my mind a little and allowed Cernunnos to tell me more. But it was Rhiannon who told me the tale that I remember most often to this day, and it is this: There was once a knight whose liege king had gifted him with a golden goblet, a great heavy vessel fit for a prince. But when his lady saw the goblet, she turned white as a swan. Throw it in the sea, she said. It is your death. But the knight would not give up his kingly gift. So as he slept, his lady stole the goblet and hid it until she could think how to destroy it. When the knight awoke and found his goblet gone, he was enraged. What have you done with it? he roared at his lady. And when she would not answer, he struck her so hard that she stumbled and fell against a doorway. And the goblet, which she had placed in a high niche above the doorway, fell down upon the knight's head, killing him.

Like me, the lady had tried to save her beloved.

It still hurt like fire to think of Thomas's death, but in a slantwise way all that had happened started to make sense to me.

 

 

There came a summer day—it might have been a month or more than a year after I had talked with Cernunnos—a floating water-lily day when I swam naked with Rhiannon and many others in a pool of Ladywater as warm as a womb, and the minnows nibbled at my belly and my toes, and all was peace for a while.