I Am Morgan le Fay (8 page)

I wanted to stay by the spring, even though my bare feet shivered in the dewy heather, but I needed to take care of Ongwynn. Lugging the water back inside, I spilled some on myself and grew truly cold. As I hung the kettle on the hook over the fire, Ongwynn stirred and groaned.

I knelt beside her and soothed her hot forehead with my cold, wet hand. She opened her eyes and gazed at me.

“I'm trying to make you some soup,” I told her.

Her lips moved. “I need ...” But her voice was like the sighing of a sea wind. I could not make out the words.

“What, Nurse? What do you need?”

Her gaze clouded. She closed her eyes.

“It sounded like scone. Rude scone, or something like that,” said my sister's voice. I looked up to see Morgause standing over me, sleepy-eyed, her hair tangled and riddled with straw, as I am sure mine was also. “Morgan, you're soaking wet. Your feet are blue with cold.”

I did not bark and snarl at her as I would once have done. While I still scorned her as the mouse she was, during the long days of riding I had realized that I needed her.

“Go put on stockings and shoes,” she said.

“In a minute.” I turned to check on the fire. It burned strongly enough. “What goes in soup?”

“Meat and barley and leeks and such.”

Oh, certainly. And a roast suckling pig and a fresh roe-filled salmon or two. “Where shall we get”—I mimicked her voice—“meat and barley and leeks and such?”

Morgause shrugged. “I'll look around. You go find dry clothes.”

There were few enough clothes to share amid the pair of us, all of them in sore need of washing. Shivering in the chill of our straw-piled bedchamber, rummaging in our bags, it took me a while to find something dry and only moderately filthy to put on. When I got back to the warmth of the hearth, there at the rude table to one side of the fireplace sat Morgause placidly chopping carrots and parsnips and something brown—dried meat.

Dried meat! “Where did you get that?” I exclaimed.

“In the pantry.” Morgause slipped a bit of carrot into her mouth. “Mmm. Sweet. Nice and fresh.”

I grabbed an orange circle. “Why would there be fresh carrots in the pantry?” I mumbled around my own chewing. Ongwynn's home had the feel of having been empty for years. It was a cave, for the love of mercy. A hollow tor echoing with the roar of the sea. That sound of grumbling salt water, and the salt air I breathed, made me feel at home here, but in truth this place was not much like Tintagel. No busy comings and goings. No folk. Not a cottage in sight. “Does someone know we are here?” I reached for a whole carrot, but Morgause snatched it away from me.

“Don't. We need it for the soup. That's all there is.”

Behind me I heard a surprised breath. I turned. Thomas stood staring, a few wild onions dangling in his hand.

“Where—” he whispered.

“In the pantry,” Morgause said at the same time I did.

Thomas took a long breath and lifted his head, turning toward the morning light. He scanned the domed and groined hall of stone. I looked to see what he was looking for and saw nothing but rock, dust, cobwebs and shadows. Yet Thomas spoke. “Thank you, dwellers in Caer Ongwynn,” he said softly to the shadows.

Caer Ongwynn? This was no castle.

Yet no one laughed.

Except, perhaps, the denizens. From somewhere there sounded a kind of squeak or chuckle—it might have been a hedgehog or some sort of bird. I wanted to think it was just a bird or a mouse that had come in from outside.

Morgause and I looked at each other. Neither of us spoke. She turned back to slicing parsnips.

On her makeshift bed Ongwynn stirred and murmured.

“Has she come to herself at all?” Thomas asked.

I nodded. “Just for a moment. She said something I couldn't quite catch.”

“Something about bread,” Morgause said.

“Scone,” I corrected, for a scone was not quite the same thing as bread.

“Bread would be better for her,” Morgause said.

“What does it matter? Scone or bread, we do not have it to give to her.”

The water in the kettle had finally started to steam, although it was not yet boiling. Morgause scooped up handfuls of chopped dried meat and plunked them in, then the vegetables. Wobbling with weariness, Thomas nudged peat into the fire.

“Thomas,” I told him, “go sleep.”

“I'm not tired,” he said, and he sat down on the stone floor near Ongwynn. Glancing at him a moment later, I saw that his head drooped, eyes closed.

“You're going to fall over and conk yourself,” I told him.

He did not answer, but began to sag to one side. I could have bowled him over with a touch. The thought tempted me and made me smile, but I took him by the shoulders and eased him to the stone, where he sprawled and slumbered. I stood gazing at him. Many folk look more beautiful, more innocent, more holy when they are sleeping, but Thomas did not. It was not possible. He had about him the innocent courage of a holy hero always.

“Morgan,” Morgause said to me.

I turned to her. She had left the soup to tend itself and knelt dabbing Ongwynn's forehead with the wet corner of her shawl.

I knelt beside her. “Is she any better?”

“No.”

She sat on the floor by Nurse—Ongwynn—and I sat beside her, staring at the sick woman as she did.

Just a common, blocky, sandy-haired Cornishwoman.

“There is so much I do not understand,” Morgause murmured. “This is her home? A hollow hill, a spirit grange? How did such a one come to us?”

I said nothing, but I shared her wondering. Why had Ongwynn, pedlar to whom all commoners prayed, become our nurse?

Wondering was no use. I stood up. “Come on,” I told Morgause.

“Where?”

“Just—looking.”

I hauled her to her feet. Hand in hand we tiptoed through Ongwynn's home, peering into the shadows of the half-moon arches, the vines, the groins, the niches in the stone walls. Our wanderings took us to our bedchamber, where we let go of each other long enough to grab our mantles and trot back to Thomas and bundle them around him as he slept. We checked on Ongwynn, then set off snooping again. We found a chamber stacked with heavy wooden chests, and we tried to look into one, leaving our finger marks in its dust; although we saw no padlock, we could not pry open the lid. In another chamber we saw, standing all alone in the middle of the stone floor, a golden goblet fit for a king, so glowing even through its dust that we did not dare to go near it. Other than those things, we found nothing out of the way—a root cellar, empty; the hollow of a baking oven behind the fireplace; a few rotting wooden water buckets. A pink-footed mouse or two scampered away from us. A dove cooed then flew over our heads. We saw no signs of any other life but these and ourselves.

Yet when we reached the pantry—a cubbyhole carved into the stone—there laid out on dock leaves sat bread, a dozen little loaves the size of our fists, freshly baked.

 

Morgause took the first watch over Ongwynn that night, and I the second. We had lifted Ongwynn and tried to feed her soup and bread, but we had not succeeded in getting much of it into her. Sometimes she shook with cold even by the hearth fire, and other times she sweated and burned with fever, and she had not come to herself all day.

My belly was full of good food, the best I had tasted in weeks, yet I felt empty. Alone in the mid of night, I sat by Ongwynn, kept the hearth fire going, and tried not to think or feel much.

Father, gone. Then, Mother. Now—Nurse?

And here I sat in a benighted cave instead of Tintagel. I began to understand that I could depend on nothing in my life. Nothing.

Except myself.

I had loved my father, and he was dead.

Mother... where was Mother now?

Nurse ...

Soft footsteps, and here came Thomas to join me—early, it seemed to me. He sat beside me at the hearth, but I did not move from my place.

“I'll watch,” he told me. “Go sleep.”

I shook my head. I could not possibly have slept. A voice, my own, said like a ghost in the night, “She's going to die.”

Thomas did not dispute it. He sat silent.

From around the corner of the fireplace, where we had left a food offering upon a dock leaf as Thomas had advised, there came small sounds such as squirrels might have made: rustle, squeak, chuckle. I startled, and would have jumped up to look, but Thomas put his hand on my shoulder to restrain me.

“Blessed earth folk,” he said softly to the night, “can you help Ongwynn?”

The sounds ceased. Only silence answered him.

He let go of my shoulder. “I should not have asked,” he murmured. “Now I've distressed them.”

I whispered, “How do you know?”

“They have only small powers. Make a flower bloom, mend a shoe, cozen a butterfly. And you should not overtax them, or they can be mischievous.”

“No, I mean—how do you know such things?”

“It makes sense that Ongwynn would have such folk about her.”

What he took for sense I saw as far more. “No! I mean ...” I shook my head like Annie shaking off flies and asked of him the question he had once asked Ongwynn. “Who are you?”

Silence.

“Thomas?”

He said gently—almost always he spoke gently—“You'll be safer if I do not tell you.”

“But—”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, shoulders hunched, looking at the floor. “Uther Pendragon killed my father,” he said, “and my mother and my two little sisters, much as he would have killed you if it had suited him.”

His voice was so quiet and calm that it harrowed me more than tears would have. I whispered, “I'm sorry.”

He nodded but did not look at me. “It was all a muddle of darkness and blood and fire and—and screams,” he said. “Men-at-arms took hold of me and hit me until it was nothing but black. When I awoke I was in a dungeon.” He shuddered and stopped speaking.

“I'm sorry,” I whispered again.

“Death is kinder than prison,” Thomas said, low. “I watched my father die in his shackles before they killed him.”

“I—” I did not understand. “Did they starve him?”

“Of course.” He gave me a glance that almost pitied me, then looked to the stone floor again. “His manhood died, I mean. Prison slew his soul. When they took him out to kill him, he had no heart left, no good-bye for me.”

I thought I understood. “I miss my father too.”

He said nothing.

I asked, “Why did they let you go?”

“They didn't. They dragged me to the block in my turn, but I was little and skinny as an eel, they had no chains that would not fall off me, and somehow I wiggled out of their grasp. I ran into the forest.”

I had been thinking of him as always and forever a handsome youth. “You were just a little boy?”

He nodded. “In my seventh summer. Not quite old enough to make a proper outlaw.” He lifted his head with a wry smile, trying to joke, but neither of us laughed. “I wandered and wept and tried to find something to eat, but I was already so starved I had no strength to fend for myself. I lay down to die. When I awoke, Gypsies were feeding me.”

“Gypsies!”

He nodded. “Annie is a Gypsy pony.”

“They—they raised you?”

“Yes. They took me in and cherished me and beat me when I needed it and told me their stories and taught me to be a horseman.”

“Nobody should beat you! Not ever!”

He looked at me, smiling; he could smile now, being past the sorrowful part. “A beating is nothing compared to... He let the thought go.

Compared to being slaughtered by a conquering king? Compared to dying in battle? Compared to his fate?

“But I could not stay a Gypsy,” he said. “They steal. I can't steal. Something in me won't let me.”

True Thomas.

“When I was old enough I thanked them and left them and journeyed to Caer Argent to serve Uther Pendragon.”

The king who had killed his family?
“Why?”

Thomas said just as gently as ever, “I meant to learn all I could of him. I meant to be trusted by him. And then, when I was a man and strong enough, I meant to take my revenge.”

At our feet, Ongwynn stirred and groaned. I knelt by her side, dipped the kerchief in the pan of cool water we had placed nearby and bathed her face. Her breathing panted, shallow, and she did not open her eyes to look at me.

“Fate has seen fit to save me from being a murderer,” Thomas murmured.

I did not like what Thomas was saying. I did not like to think that he could kill. And he spoke of fate, and I did not understand or like the ways of fate. Blast fate, if it wanted to take Uther Pendragon, why couldn't it have done so before he had killed my father? And what did fate want Nurse for, when I needed her? That laughing fay had said I was fated to be fate? Nonsense. Idiocy. If fate wanted Nurse to die, I had to fight it any way I could.

I cupped Ongwynn's head in my hands, lifted it and demanded, “Nurse, tell me what will make you well.”

She did not answer. She did not see me. Her eyes opened but they were only shadows in her face, as blind as if they had been picked out by crows. I meant nothing to her anymore.

I shook her. “Answer me!”

I felt Thomas take hold of my shoulders, tugging me away from her. “Morgan, she can't.”

I twisted loose of his hold, staying where I was, kneeling beside Ongwynn. All fate be damned, what was it that she had said? I was not at all convinced that stupid Morgause had heard her correctly. Rude scone?