Lady of Avalon (5 page)

The sky was just beginning to flush over with the first rosy light of dawn. Behind him, the growing light showed him the buildings clustered below the slope of the Tor. There was the long peak of the meeting hall, built in a rectangle in the Roman way. The thatched roofs of the roundhouses behind it glistened faintly, the larger for the priestesses, the smaller for the maidens, and another small building a little apart for the High Priestess. Cooksheds and weaving sheds and a barn for the goats lay beyond them. He could just glimpse the more weathered rooftops of the Druids’ halls on the other side of the hill. Farther down the slope, he knew, was the sacred spring, and across the pastures were the beehive huts of the Christians, clustered around the thorn tree that had grown from Father Joseph’s staff.

But he had not yet been there. The priestesses, after some debate about what tasks were suitable for a boy-child, had assigned him to help herd the goats that gave them milk. If he had gone to his Roman grandfather, he thought, he would not have had to herd goats. But the goats were not bad company. Eyeing the brightening sky, he realized the priestesses would be stirring soon and expecting him to come to the hall for his morning bread and ale. And then the goats would begin to bleat, anxious to be out on the hillside pastures. The only time he had to himself was now.

Again he could hear in his mind the Lady’s words: “Son of a Hundred Kings.” What had she meant? Why him? His mind would not let these thoughts alone. Many days had passed since that strange greeting. When would she come for him?

He sat for a long time on the shore, looking out over the grey expanse of the water as it changed to a sheet of silver reflecting the pale autumn sky. The air was crisp, but he was accustomed to cold, and the sheepskin Brannos had given him for a cape kept off the chill. It was quiet, but not quite silent; as he himself grew more still, he found himself listening to the whisper of wind in the trees, the sigh of the wavelets as they kissed the shore.

He closed his eyes, and his breath caught as for a moment all those small sounds that came from the world around him became music. He became aware of a song-he could not tell if it came from outside or if something in his spirit was singing, but ever more sweetly he could hear the melody. Without opening his eyes, he pulled from his pocket the flute of willow that Brannos had given him, and began to play.

The first notes seemed such a squawk that he almost flung the flute into the water; then for a moment the note clarified. Gawen took a deep breath, centered himself, and tried again. Once more he heard that pure thread of sound. Carefully, he changed his fingering and slowly began to coax forth a melody. As he relaxed, his breathing became deep, controlled, and he sank into the emerging song.

Lost in the music, he did not at first realize when the Lady appeared. It was only gradually that the shimmer of light above the lake became edged in shadow, and the shadow became a form, moving as if by magic across the surface until at last it grew close enough for him to see the low prow of the boat on which she stood and the slender shaft of the pole.

The boat was something like the barge in which Waterwalker had brought them to the isle but narrower, and the Lady was poling it with long, efficient strokes. Gawen watched her carefully. He had been too confused to really look at her when they met before. Her slender muscular arms were bare to the shoulder despite the cold; her dark hair was knotted up off her forehead, which was high and unlined, crossed with dark, level brows. Her eyes were dark too, and brilliant. She was accompanied by a young girl, sturdily built, with deep dimples embedded in pink-and-white cheeks as smooth as thick cream and fine hair, burnished copper-gold, the same color as the Lady Eilan’s-his mother’s-had been. She wore her hair, like the priestesses, in a single long braid. The young girl grinned quickly at him, her pink cheeks crinkling.

“This is my daughter Sianna,” the Lady said, fixing him with eyes as bright and sharp as a bird’s. “What name did they give you then, my Lord?”

“My mother called me Gawen,” he said. “Why did you-”

The Lady’s words cut across his question. “Do you know how to pole a punt, Gawen?”

“I do not, Lady. I have never been taught anything about the water. But before we go-”

“Good. You have nothing to unlearn, and this at least I can teach you.” Once more her words overrode his. “But for now it will be enough to get into the boat without upsetting it. Step carefully. At this time of year the water is too cold for a bath.” She held out her small hand, rock-hard, and steadied him as he stepped into the boat. He sat down, gripping the sides as the punt lurched, but in truth it was his own response to her command rather than the motion that had unsettled him.

Sianna giggled and the Lady fixed her with her dark eyes. “If you had never been taught, you would not know anything either. Is it well done to mock at ignorance?”

What about
my
ignorance?
he wondered. But he did not try to repeat his question. Maybe she would listen later, when they had gotten wherever she was taking him.

Sianna murmured, “It was only the picture of an unexpected bath on such a day…” She was trying to look sober, but she giggled again and the Lady smiled indulgently, digging in with the pole and sending the punt gliding across the surface of the lake.

Gawen looked back at the girl. He did not know if Sianna had been making fun of him, but he liked the way her eyes slanted when she smiled and decided that he did not mind her teasing him. She was the brightest thing in all that expanse of silver water and pale sky; he could have warmed his hands at her red hair. Tentatively, he smiled. The radiance of the grin that answered him struck through the shell with which he had tried to armor his feelings. Only much later did he realize that in this moment his heart was opened to her forever.

But now he knew only that he felt warmer, and loosened the thong that held his sheepskin closed. The punt moved smoothly over the water as the sun climbed higher. Gawen sat quietly in the boat, watching Sianna from beneath his lashes. The Lady seemed to have no need for speech and the girl followed her example. Gawen dared not break the silence, and presently he found himself listening for the occasional call of a bird and the faint lapping of water.

The water was calm, ruffled only by small ripples as the breeze touched it or the sliding wrinkles that the Lady told him signaled hidden snags or bars. The autumn had been rainy and the water was high; Gawen looked at the waving water grass and imagined sunken meadows. Hills and hummocks poked through the surface, linked in some places by thick reeds. It was past noon when at last the Lady sent the boat sliding up the pebbled shore of one island which-at least to Gawen-seemed no different from any other. Then she stepped out on the dry ground and motioned to the two children to follow her onto the land.

She asked, “Can you build a fire?”

“I am sorry, Lady. I have never been taught that either.” He felt himself blushing. “I know how to keep a good blaze going, but the Druids held fire to be sacred. It was only allowed to go out at special times, and then it was the priests who rekindled it.”

“It is like men to make a mystery of something that any farmwife can do,” said Sianna scornfully. But the Lady shook her head.

“Fire is a mystery. Like any power, it can be a danger, or a servant, or a god. What matters is how it is used.”

“And what kind of flame is it that we kindle here?” he asked steadily.

“A wayfarer’s fire only, which will serve to cook our day-meal. Sianna, take him with you and show him how to find tinder.”

Sianna stretched out her hand to Gawen, closing her small warm fingers over his. “Here, we must find dry grasses and dead leaves; anything which will burn quickly and catch fire easily; little twigs and fallen deadwood-like this.” She let go his hand and picked up a handful of twigs. Together they sought out dry stuff and piled leaves and twigs into a little heap in a charred hollow in the damp soil. Larger sticks lay in a heap nearby. This was clearly a place they had used before.

When she judged the pile big enough, the Lady showed him how to strike fire with a flint and steel that she had in a leather bag tied at her side, and it blazed up. It seemed odd to Gawen that she should make him do a servant’s work after hailing him as a king. But, looking at the fire, he remembered what she had said about it, and for a moment he understood. Even a cookfire was a sacred thing, and perhaps, in these days when the Romans ruled in the outer world, even a sacred king might have to serve in small and secret ways.

After a few moments a cheerful little fire was sending up narrow tendrils of flame, which the Lady fed with successively larger sticks. When it was burning well, she reached into the punt and pulled from a bag the limp headless carcass of a hare. With a little stone knife she skinned and gutted it, and strung it on green sticks over the fire, which was settling to a steady glow as some of the sticks turned to coals. After a few moments sizzling juices from the hare began to drop into the fire. Gawen’s stomach growled in anticipation at the savory smell, and he became acutely aware that he had missed his breakfast.

When the meat was done, the Lady divided it with her knife and gave a portion to each of the children, without, however, taking any herself. Gawen ate eagerly. When they had finished, the Lady showed them where to bury the bones and fur.

“Lady,” said Gawen, wiping his hands on his tunic, “thank you for the meal. But I still don’t know what you want with me. Now that we have eaten, will you answer me?”

For a long moment she considered him. “You think you know who you are, but you do not know at all. I told you, I am a guide. I will help you find what it is that you are meant to do.” She stepped back to the punt, motioning them to get in.

What about the hundred kings?
he wanted to ask. But he did not quite dare.

This time the fairy woman drove the punt across open water where the inflowing waters of the river cut a channel through the marsh; she bent deeply to catch the bottom with the pole. The island toward which she was heading was large, separated only by a narrow channel from the higher ground to the west.

“Walk quietly,” she said as they eased up onto the shore. She led them among the trees.

Even at the beginning of winter, when leaves were beginning to fall, slipping between the trunks and underneath low branches was no easy task, and the dry leaves crackled beneath any unwary step. For a time Gawen was too caught up in the act of moving to question where they were going. The fairy woman passed without a sound, and Sianna moved almost as quietly. They made him feel like some great lumbering ox.

Her lifted hand brought him to a grateful halt. Slowly she drew aside a branch of hazel. Beyond it lay a small meadow where red deer were cropping the fading grass.

“Study the deer, Gawen, you must learn their ways,” she said softly. “In the summer you would not find them here. Then they lie up through the heat of the day and come out only at dusk to feed. But now they know they must eat as much as they can before winter comes. It is one of a hunter’s first duties to learn the ways of every animal he follows.”

Gawen ventured to ask in an undertone, “Am I, then, to be a hunter, Lady?”

She paused before answering.

“It does not matter what you are to
do,
” she said, just as softly. “What you
are
is something different. That is what you have to learn.”

Sianna put out her small hand and pulled him down into a little hollow in the grass.

“We will watch the deer from here,” she whispered. “Here we can see everything.”

Gawen was quiet at her side, and so close to her it suddenly rushed over him intensely that Sianna was a girl, and his own age. He had hardly seen, far less touched, a young girl before this; Eilan, and Caillean, whom he had known all the years of his life, did not seem like women at all to him. Suddenly things he had heard all his life without understanding rushed over him. Almost overwhelmed by this new knowledge, he felt his cheeks flooding scarlet. He was very much aware of this and hid his face in the cool grass. He could smell the damp sweaty fragrance of Sianna’s hair, and the strong smell of the crudely tanned hide of her skirt.

After a while Sianna poked him in the side and whispered, “Look!”

Stepping high and daintily over the grass came a doe, balanced lightly on hooves which seemed almost too small to bear her weight. A few steps behind her tiptoed a half-grown fawn, its baby spots disappearing into shaggy winter hide. The creature was following in his mother’s footsteps, but in comparison with her assured elegance his gait was alternately awkward and all grace.
Like me
…, he thought, grinning.

Gawen watched as they slowly moved in tandem, pausing to sniff the wind. Then, perhaps taking fright at some tiny sound Gawen did not hear, the doe flung up her head and bolted away. Left alone in the little clearing, the fawn first froze; it stood for a few seconds motionless, then abruptly bounded after her.

Gawen let his breath go. He did not realize till then that he had been holding it.

Eilan, my mother,
he thought, trying over the thought, not for the first time,
was like that doe. She was so busy being High Priestess, she did not even really know I was there, far less who or what I was.

But by now he was almost accustomed to that pain. More real than the memory was the knowledge of Sianna stretched out at his side. He could still feel the imprint of her small damp fingers clutched in his. He started to stir, but she was pointing to the edge of the forest. He froze, trying not to breathe, and then, at the edge of the clearing, he saw a shadow. He barely heard Sianna’s involuntary gasp as, slowly, a magnificent stag, his head broadly crowned with antlers, paraded across the open space. His head was erect; he moved with a great and subtle dignity.