Guinevere Evermore (37 page)

“I forgot to tell you, Lancelot, my own. Loving you is what I can do best.”

• • •

They lay awake in the early morning dusk, Lancelot’s head cradled in the hollow of her shoulder and her breast. Guinevere sighed and felt all her muscles relax for the first time since Gawain’s death. Lancelot chuckled.

“My dear, you are purring like a kitten.”

“I feel like one, warm and lazy. Do you think we could just spend the rest of our lives in this bed?”

“Mmmm, what would your household think of us?”

“Probably that we were too old and feeble to get up. They are all so young! Even Risa is gone now. I hope she finally knows what happened to her son. We never heard a word of him.”

He absently let his hand drift across her body.

“Are we really the only ones left, Guinevere?”

“Nearly, I think. Agravaine died two winters ago and Lydia last summer. Gaheris, they say, is a bishop now, in iberia. We have outlived our time, my darling. To most men today we are nothing more than legends.”

“Then hold me tightly, Guinevere, before even our memory fades.”

He stayed a month. They both knew from the first that he couldn’t remain forever. Too much had changed, and too much of the past was still with them. Lancelot told stories of his travels to wide-eyed listeners, and they begged for tales of Camelot and Arthur.

“Please,” the children begged. “Lady Guinevere will tell us nothing, not even if the songs the poets sing are true. Did you really walk a flaming sword over an abyss to rescue her? Did Arthur really kill a hundred men in one battle? Did the wizard Merlin build Camelot overnight? Lady Guinevere laughed and laughed when we asked her that.”

“I can’t tell you about that,” he insisted. “Camelot was finished before I came there. Be content with what the poets tell you. What I remember does not belong with their songs.”

The night before he left, they didn’t sleep at all.

“They built the monastery on the tor of the sun god. It overlooks Camlann and what remains of Camelot, so it will be good that I can no longer see. The monks will take me in as a lay brother,” Lancelot explained. “I know better now than to make impossible vows.”

“Do you think you’ll find peace there?” Guinevere asked, smoothing his hair.

“No. I found it here. But there’s a stubborn part of me yet that longs for redemption. I don’t want to be left behind in purgatory when you ascend to heaven.”

“My darling fool! You still believe that happiness must be sinful!”

“Only my own, Guinevere.”

“Someday, I’ll teach you how wrong you are.” She kissed him again and they said nothing coherent the rest of the night.

• • •

Although she appeared much younger than she was, after Lancelot left, Guinevere felt older. Being with him again had showed her the gap between her old half-Roman world and this vibrant one of eager newcomers. She had accomplished what she wanted. Arthur would not be forgotten, nor, she believed, his dream. Her home was safe. It had even become a refuge. After Allard finished building his villa across the valley, she deeded hers to the church as a house for women who needed protection. Many were relieved to know there was a monastery just for them, where they could be free to study and work without male supervision. The management of the house and lands fell to Letitia.

Her hair never lost its gold and she took to covering it. Her pale eyes and translucent skin made the contrast too startling. Occasionally, Lancelot would send word. Only that, a word. But it was enough. She was simply biding time, and the world around her grew less and less important.

Late one winter night she was in her childhood room, reading the poems of Ausonius. She heard the singing very clearly and smiled. Geraldus was at her side.

“Have you come again to ask me to come to your country?”

“This is the last time I can ask, Guinevere.”

“Really? Oh, Geraldus, how wonderful! I’ve waited so long! I only hope Lancelot will follow me soon!”

“Guinevere, please. You don’t know what waits for you out there! Our land is beautiful and filled with magic and music. It’s where you’ve always belonged. We even have a unicorn.”

“A unicorn!” Memory filled her eyes. “Of course, how could I have forgotten all these years. My other self, it was, when I was a girl. But no, not even for my unicorn. I’ve grown up, as far as I can in this life. It’s time for me to see what else there is. And I promised Lancelot. He can’t reach the gates and not find me there.”

Geraldus sighed and reached across the narrow gap between them, kissing her good-bye.

“I didn’t think you’d change your mind. I hope it’s all you want it to be.”

“If Lancelot is with me, it will be.”

His choir sang to her one more time, a song very much like the prothalamium they had made for her wedding day. Dear Geraldus!

Guinevere looked with longing into the growing dawn. She thought she saw Gawain’s face framed in the clouds. “Galahad is gone to some holy place where I may not be allowed to follow. Arthur, they say, will never die, poor dear. But I have made a promise to Lancelot and with all my heart, I want to keep it. If Lancelot is not in paradise, then I might as well be damned. Thank you, Geraldus,” she called to the fading singing. "But death seems very wonderful to me. Give my love to everyone left behind.”

Letitia found her later that morning, her face turned to the window and her eyes wide open as if in delighted surprise.

They put her in a sarcophagus made for one of her ancestors, wrapped in her brilliant hair and with Galahad’s curl tucked into her hand.

Letitia took the message to Lancelot herself. His tears slipped quietly through his gnarled hands as she told him.

“I should have felt it,” he muttered. “But she still lives in my heart. I don’t understand.”

“Poor old man,” Letitia said to herself.

The monks thought the news would kill him, but Lancelot could not will himself dead. Later the Lady of the Lake tried to make him come home to her, threatening him with eternal youth, but he laughed in her face.

“That was my third offer, Lancelot. Take your humanity and rot in it!” she screamed at him.

“There is nothing I want more,” Lancelot answered. She vanished in a puff of fuchsia smoke, which quite unnerved the monks working outside.

He took her words as a gift. That afternoon he complained of a fever and chills, and a week later he finally died.

When they heard of Lancelot’s passing, the women of Cameliard took Guinevere’s coffin to Glastonbury.

“We promised her, Lord Abbot,” the abbess, Elfgifu, insisted, with a melting glance. “She was to be buried again with Sir Lancelot. Please allow us to fulfill her last desire.”

“
Brother
Lancelot renounced all earthly desires when he came to us in his last years. We cannot permit such blasphemy as to have his paramour laid with him in the grave.”

“What harm could they do there?” Elfgifu’s face was innocent, but the abbot sensed her mocking.

“It grieves us terribly,” she continued, “that you won’t let us lay our poor lady to rest. We have labored in the time since her death to create fine offerings to give the monastery at Glastonbury, for the peace of her soul, of course. Fine altar cloths, exquisitely wrought candlesticks of silver, gold patens, and a relic which was brought to our lady while she was Queen and which she always kept in this carved ivory box.”

“What is it?” The abbot sniffed greedily at the hoard.

Elfgifu opened the box, but only for a moment. “Baby teeth from John the Baptist and Saints Peter and James, saved by their mothers and lovingly preserved. We felt they should rest in the chapel over our lady’s grave.”

The abbot relented. “Very well. Perhaps she was not so wicked as the tales say. Some of them do tell that she was kind to the poor and needy. But we will not let them lie side by side; her bones must rest at his feet in an attitude of submission.”

Elfgifu looked at Letitia, who shrugged. “All right, we agree.”

So they put her bones, still wrapped in her golden hair, at Lancelot’s feet and buried them both in a sealed lead coffin.

Legends grew up about the place, as about Arthur and Merlin and all the knights of the Round Table, until they obscured the truth like ivy on a wall. A generation later, a monk of Glastonbury reasoned that if the woman buried by the chapel were Guinevere, then the man with her must be King Arthur. He had a lead cross carved to that effect and placed it above the grave. In time, it came to be believed. Then for many years the grave was forgotten and new buildings and new monks came and only the poets remembered the tale.

In 1184 a fire raced through the monastery. In the extensive clearing out and rebuilding, the association of the monastery with Camelot was recalled. In 1191, while digging a foundation for a new chapel, the cross was discovered to great excitement.

It read: HIC JACET INCLITUS REX ARTURIS IN INSULA AVALLONIS SEPULTUS CUM WENNEVERIA UXORE SUA SECUNDA.

“Here lies the famous King Arthur, in the isle of Avalon buried, with Guinevere, his second wife.”

Why the cross said second wife, no one knew, unless the monk knew Modred was Arthur’s son and that Guinevere was not his mother.

When the coffin was opened, the bones of a large man were found, with those of a woman curled at his feet. In the sunlight, something gleamed from her and the monks saw a single strand of hair, the color of gold. One monk leaped into the coffin, grasped it and held it up. It was caught by the breeze and crumbled to dust in his hands.

King Henry the Second and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had the coffin taken in state and buried in a great tomb in front of the high altar of Glastonbury. It remained there until the Reformation, when it was destroyed and the bones were scattered.

• • •

Arthur, still dreaming under the lake, neither knew nor cared about the matter. Guinevere heard of it and laughed. What difference did it make? For at last, she and Lancelot were together and free to spend eternity wandering joyfully among the stars.

The End

The Palace by Moonlight

Miniffer coughed noisily, scratched his nose, coughed again, took a long gulp of milky-white ale and cursed the universe. He started with the splintery bench he was sitting on and worked outward to include the whole of creation. It took most of the night, but it was satisfying work and he had nothing better to do. As his imprecations grew in range, his voice grew in volume until he attracted the notice of the bleary few in the dilapidated inn who still remained awake.

“Stuff it, Miniffer,” Old Tamas said genially. “We all know what you think of life. You’ve bellowed your damnations so often they ha’n’t no more power than a whore’s blush.”

“Too true,” one-eared Urbgan sighed. “It’s not like anyone here disagrees. Things ha’ gone mightily hard since Arthur’s time. So give us a night’s rest. We got our own swearing to do.”

Various grunts and belches indicated that the majority agreed, and so Miniffer reluctantly desisted, still muttering into his glass about the degeneration of government, society, and life in general in the thirty years since Arthur had left the earth. It had gotten so that a well-trained bard, capable of reciting the genealogies of all the great houses of Dumnonia and Powys, not to mention Cornwall; of chanting the most stirring sagas of military splendor; of giving the slyest turns to the old favorites of love and betrayal . . . a man like that, Miniffer grieved, was reduced to sleeping under the table in a disgusting inn which hadn’t had a cleaning since Vortigern the traitor had married his Saxon bitch and started all the troubles a hundred years ago.

Even while descending into his nightly stupor, Miniffer couldn’t stop himself from thinking like a showman.

The next morning he was awakened, as usual, by the tavern dogs licking the grease from his face and hands. This was accompanied by a sharp kick in his midsection. The innkeeper, while not a tidy man, had grown tired of having a sodden poet cluttering up his establishment.

“Out, you!” He emphasized his suggestion with another kick. “We know all your stories. We’re sick of hearing how great it was in Arthur’s day. Arthur! Wha’ do you know of Arthur? You wasn’t even born when he died.”

Miniffer roused himself, carrying his head with him gently.

“Arthur isn’t dead!” he insisted. “He's just gone away awhile. He’ll be back; you’ll see. Leading all his knights, charging down through this valley . . . in all their shining, wondrous, holy splendor. And he’ll—”

“
Will
you leave it for once, Miniffer,” the innkeeper sighed. “Those days is dead, like all them knights and whatall. And I never heard they was so great, anyways. My own grandmother used to tell how one of those knights came riding by one day and had his way with her without not so much as taking off his boots. Don’t sound so holy wondrous to me.”

Miniffer started to make a comment on the probable veracity and virtue of said grandmother, but reflected in time how close his host’s foot still was.

Sitting in the glaring sunshine by the side of the road an hour later, Miniffer wished he had spoken. The innkeeper’s words were being echoed far too much lately. It wasn’t right, after all King Arthur had done, for him to be forgotten so soon. Or remembered like that! As if a knight would ever rape someone’s grandmother! It was all due to the lack of respect for learning these days. They weren’t turning out proper bards anymore. Not like in the old times.

Miniffer forced down the bile in his throat, then, upon consideration, let it do as it wished. After some unpleasantness, he felt better. Well enough, in fact, to lift his head from the ditch in time to see the messenger ride by and to be spattered with dust raised by the racing horse.

There, Miniffer thought, as he pulled himself indignantly back onto the road. That’s what we’ve come to! No thought at all for a poor bard who might have been blinded by the flying pebbles. He shook his fist at the retreating rider.