Maline flushed and said, "Please! Is this talk seemly in a Christian household?"
Uriens said, "If it were not, daughter-in-law, I doubt your girdle would be grown so wide."
"I am a married woman," said Maline, crimson.
Morgaine said sharply, "If to be a Christian household means not to speak of what one is not ashamed to do, then the Lady forbid I should ever call myself Christian!"
"Still," said Avalloch, "perhaps it is ill done to sit here at meat and tell ugly stories about lady Morgaine's kinswoman."
Accolon said, "Queen Morgause has no husband to be offended, and the lady is of age, and her own mistress. No doubt her sons are well pleased that she contents herself with a paramour and does not marry the boy! Is she not also the Duchess of Cornwall?"
"No," said Morgaine, "Igraine was Duchess of Cornwall after Gorlois was set down for his treason to Pendragon. Gorlois had no son, and since Uther gave Tintagel to Igraine for bride-gift, I suppose now it belongs to me." And Morgaine was suddenly overcome with homesickness for that half-remembered country, the bleak outline of castle and crags against the sky, the sudden dips into hidden valleys, the eternal noise of the sea below the castle ... Tintagel! My home! I cannot return to Avalon, but I am not homeless ... Cornwall is mine.
"And under the Roman law," said Uriens, "I suppose, as your husband, my dear, I am Duke of Cornwall."
Again Morgaine felt the surge of violent anger. Only when I am dead and buried, she thought. Uriens cares nothing for Cornwall, only that Tintagel, like myself, is his property, bearing the mark of his ownership! Would that I could go there, live there alone as Morgause at Lothian, my own mistress with none to command me. ... A picture came in her mind, the queen's chamber at Tintagel, and she seemed very small, she was playing with an old spindle on the floor ... . If Uriens dares to lay claim to an acre of Cornwall, I will give him six feet of it, and dirt between his teeth!
"Tell me now your news of this country," said Accolon. "The spring was late-I see the plowmen are just getting into the fields."
"But they have nearly done with plowing," said Maline, "and Sunday they will go to bless the fields-"
"And they are choosing the Spring Maiden," said Uwaine. "I was down in the village, and I saw them choosing among all the pretty girls ... you were not here last year, Mother," he said to Morgaine. "They choose the prettiest of all for the Spring Maiden, and she walks in the procession around the fields when the priest comes to bless it... and there are dancers who dance round the fields ... and they carry an image made from the last harvest, made from the barley straw. Father Eian does not like that," he said, "but I don't know why not, it is so pretty ... ."
The priest coughed and said self-consciously, "The blessing of the church should be enough-why should we need more than the word of God to make the fields grow and blossom? The straw image they carry is a memory of the bad old days when men and animals were burned alive so that their lives should make the fields fertile, and the Spring Maiden a memory of-well, I will not speak before children of that evil and idolatrous custom!"
"There was a day," said Accolon, speaking directly to Morgaine, "when the queen of the land was the Spring Maiden, and the Harvest Lady as well, and she did that office in the fields, that the fields might have life and fertility." Morgaine saw at his wrists the faint blue shadow of the serpents of Avalon.
Maline made the sign of the cross and said primly, "God be thanked that we live among civilized men."
Accolon said, "I doubt you would be asked to do that office, sister-in-law."
"No," said Uwaine, tactless as any boy, "she is not pretty enough. But our mother is, isn't she, Accolon?"
"I am glad you think my queen is handsome," said Uriens hastily, "but the past is past-we do not burn cats and sheep alive in the fields, nor kill the king's scapegoat to scatter his blood there, and it is no longer needful that the queen should bless the fields in that way."
No, thought Morgaine. Now all is sterile, now we have priests with their crosses, forbidding the lighting of the fires of fertility-it is a miracle the Lady does not blight the fields of grain, since she is angry at being denied her due ... .
Soon after, the household went to rest; Morgaine, the last to rise from her seat, went to supervise the locks and bars, and then went, with a small lamp in her hand, to make sure Accolon had been given a good bed- Uwaine and his foster-brothers were now occupying the room that had been his when he lived here as a boy.
"Is all well with you here?"
"Everything I could desire," said Accolon, "except a lady to grace my chamber. My father is a fortunate man, lady. And you well deserve to be the wife of a king, not of, a king's younger son."
"Must you always taunt me?" she burst out. "I have told you; I was given no choice!"
"You were pledged to me!"
Morgaine knew that the color was leaving her face. She set her lips like stone. "Done is done, Accolon."
She lifted her lamp and turned away. He said behind her, almost a threat, "This is not done between us, lady."
Morgaine did not speak; she hurried along the corridor to the chamber she shared with Uriens. Her lady-in-waiting was ready to unlace her gown, but she sent the woman away. Uriens sat on the edge of the bed, groaning.
"Even those slippers are too hard on my feet! Aaah, it is good to go to rest!"
"Rest well, then, my lord."
"No," he said, and pulled her down at his side. "So tomorrow the fields are to be blessed ... and perhaps we should be grateful we live in a civilized land, and the king and the queen need no longer bless the fields by lying together in public. But on the eve of the blessing, dear lady, perhaps we should have our own blessing, private in our chamber-what would you say to that?"
Morgaine sighed. She had been scrupulously careful of her aging husband's pride; never did she make him feel less than a man for his occasional and clumsy use of her body. But Accolon had roused in her an anguished memory of her years in Avalon-the torches borne to the top of the Tor, the Beltane fires lighted and the maidens waiting in the plowed fields ... and tonight she had had to hear a shabby priest mocking what was, to her, holy beyond holiness. Now even Uriens, it seemed, made a mockery of it.
"I would say that such blessing as you and I might give the fields would be better left undone. I am old and barren, and you are not such a king as can give much life to the fields, either!"
Uriens stared at her. In all the year of their marriage she had never spoken a harsh word to him. He was too startled even to reproach her.
"I doubt it not, you are right," he said quietly. "Well, then, we will leave that to the young people. Come to bed, Morgaine." But when she lay down beside him, he lay quiet, and after a moment, he put a shy arm across her shoulders. Now Morgaine was regretting her harsh words ... she felt cold and alone, she lay biting her lip so that she would not cry, but when Uriens spoke to her, she pretended she was asleep.
MIDSUMMER DAWNED brilliant and beautiful; Morgaine, waking early, realized that, however much she might say to herself that the sun tides ran no longer in her blood, there was something within her that ran heavy with the summer. As she dressed, she looked dispassionately at the sleeping form of her husband.
She had been a fool. Why should she have accepted compliantly Arthur's word, fearing to embarrass him before his fellow kings? If he could not keep his throne without a woman's help it might be he did not deserve to hold it. He was a traitor to Avalon, an apostate; he had given her into the hands of another apostate. Yet she had meekly agreed to what they had planned for her.
Igraine let her life be used for their politics. And something in Morgaine, dead or sleeping since the day she fled forth from Avalon, bearing Gwydion within her womb, suddenly woke and stirred, moving sluggishly and slow like a sleeping dragon, a movement as secret and unseen as the first movements of a child in the womb; something that said, clear and quiet within her, If I would not let Viviane, whom I loved, use me this way, why should I bow my head meekly and let myself be used for Arthur's purposes? I am queen in North Wales, and I am duchess in Cornwall, where Gorlois's name still means something, and I am of the royal line of Avalon.