Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Avalon 1 - The Mists of Avalon

VIP免费

2024-12-06 0 0 1.5MB 609 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Also by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Published by Ballantine Books:

THE CATCH TRAP

THE HOUSE BETWEEN THE WORLDS

The Mists of Avalon

Marion Zimmer Bradley

DEL REY

A Del Rey Book Ballantine Books • new york

A Del Rey Book

Published by Ballantine Books

Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of

Random House, Inc., New \fork, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of

Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 83-91171

ISBN 0-345-35049-9

Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Cover art by Braldt Braids

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Ballantine Books Trade Edition: May 1984

30292827

"... Morgan le Fay was not married, but put to school in a nunnery, where she

became a great mistress of magic."

-Malory, Morte d'Arthur

acknowledgments

ANY BOOK of this complexity drives its author to sources far too many to be

listed in entirety. I should probably cite, first, my late grandfather, John

Roscoe Conklin, who first gave me a battered old copy of the Sidney Lanier

edition of the Tales of King Arthur, which I read so often that I virtually

memorized the whole thing before I was ten years old. My imagination was also

stirred by varied sources such as the illustrated weekly Tales of Prince

Valiant; and in my fifteenth year I played hooky from school far oftener than

anyone realized to hide in the library of the Department of Education in

Albany, New York, reading my way through a ten-volume edition of James

Frazer's The Golden Bough and a fifteen-volume set of books on comparative

religions, including an enormous volume on the Druids and Celtic religions.

In direct research for the present volume, I should give thanks to Geoffrey

Ashe, whose works suggested several directions for further research, and to

Jamie George of the Gothic Image bookstore in Glastonbury, who, in addition to

showing me the geography of Somerset and the sites of Camelot and Guinevere's

kingdom (for the purposes of this book, I accept the current theory that

Camelot was the Cadbury Castle site in Somerset), guided me through the

Glastonbury pilgrimage. He also drew my attention to the persistent traditions

surrounding Chalice Well in Glastonbury, and the long-standing belief that

Joseph of Arimathea had planted the Holy Thorn on Wearyall Hill; I also saw

there many materials exploring the Celtic tradition that Jesus Christ had been

educated in the wisdom religion at the temple that once stood on Glastonbury

Tor.

For material on pre-Augustinian Christianity, I have used, by permission, a

privately circulated manuscript entitled "The Pre-Constantine Mass: A

Conjecture," by Father Randall Garrett; I have also drawn upon materials from

the Syro-Chaldean liturgies, including the Holy Orbana of St. Sera-pion, as

well as liturgical materials from local groups of St. Thomas Christians and

Pre-Nicene Catholic groups. The excerpts from Scripture, especially the

Pentecost story and the Magnificat, were translated for me from the Greek

Testaments by Walter Breen; I should also cite Christine Hartley's The Western

Mystery Tradition and Dion Fortune's Avalon of the Heart.

Any attempt at recapturing the pre-Christian religion of the British Isles has

been made conjectural by the determined efforts of their successors to

extinguish all such traces; scholars differ so much that I make no apology for

selecting, among varying sources, those that best fit the needs of fiction. I

have read, though not slavishly followed, the works of Margaret Murray and

several books on Gardnerian Wicca. For the feel of the ceremonies, I would

like to express my grateful thanks to local neopagan groups; to Alison Harlow

and the Covenant of the Goddess, to Otter and Morning-Glory Zell, to Isaac

Bonewits and the New Reformed Druids, to Robin Goodfel-low and Gaia Wildwoode,

to Philip Wayne and Crystal Well, to Starhawk, whose book The Spiral Dance

proved invaluable to me in helping deduce much about the training of a

priestess; and, for much personal and emotional support (including comforting

and backrubs) during the actual writing of this book, to Diana Paxson, Tracy

Blackstone, Elisabeth Waters, and Ano-dea Judith, of the Darkmoon Circle.

Finally I must express loving gratitude to my husband, Walter Breen, who said,

at a crucial moment in my career, that it was time to stop playing it safe by

writing potboilers, and provided financial support so that I could do so: also

to Don Wollheim, who always believed in me, and his wife, Elsie. Above all,

and always, to Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey, who helped me to outgrow

categories in writing, always a scary business, my grateful love and thanks.

And last but not least to my elder son, David, for his careful preparation of

the final manuscript.

prologue

MORGAINE SPEAKS ...

In my time I have been called many things: sister, lover, priestess, wise-

woman, queen. Now in truth I have come to be wise-woman, and a time may come

when these things may need to be known. But in sober truth, I think it is the

Christians who will tell the last tale. For ever the world of Fairy drifts

further from the world in which the Christ holds sway. I have no quarrel with

the Christ, only with his priests, who call the Great Goddess a demon and deny

that she ever held power in this world. At best, they say that her power was

of Satan. Or else they clothe her in the blue robe of the Lady of Nazareth-who

indeed had power in her way, too-and say that she was ever virgin. But what

can a virgin know of the sorrows and travail of mankind?

And now, when the world has changed, and Arthur-my brother, my lover, king who

was and king who shall be-lies dead (the common folk say sleeping) in the Holy

Isle of Avalon, the tale should be told as it was before the priests of the

White Christ came to cover it all with their saints and legends.

For, as I say, the world itself has changed. There was a time when a

traveller, if he had the will and knew only a few of the secrets, could send

his barge out into the Summer Sea and arrive not at Glastonbury of the monks,

but at the Holy Isle of Avalon for at that time the gates between the worlds

drifted within the mists, and were open, one to another, as the traveller

thought and willed. For this is the great secret, which was known to all

educated men in our day: that by what men think, we create the world around

us, daily new.

And now the priests, thinking that this infringes upon the power of their God,

who created the world once and for all to be unchanging, have closed those

doors (which were never doors, except in the minds of men), and the pathway

leads only to the priests' Isle, which they have safeguarded with the sound of

their church bells, driving away all thoughts of another world lying in the

darkness. Indeed, they say that world, if it indeed exists, is the property of

Satan, and the doorway to Hell, if not Hell itself.

I do not know what their God may or may not have created. In spite of the

tales that are told, I never knew much about their priests and never wore the

black of one of their slave-nuns. If those at Arthur's court at Camelot chose

to think me so when I came there (since I always wore the dark robes of the

Great Mother in her guise as wise-woman), I did not undeceive them. And

indeed, toward the end of Arthur's reign it would have been dangerous to do

so, and I bowed my head to expediency as my great mistress would never have

done: Viviane, Lady of the Lake, once Arthur's greatest friend, save for

myself, and then his darkest enemy -again, save for myself.

But the strife is over; I could greet Arthur at last, when he lay dying, not

as my enemy and the enemy of my Goddess, but only as my brother, and as a

dying man in need of the Mother's aid, where all men come at last. Even the

priests know this, with their ever-virgin Mary in her blue robe; for she too

becomes the World Mother in the hour of death.

And so Arthur lay at last with his head in my lap, seeing in me neither sister

nor lover nor foe, but only wise-woman, priestess, Lady of the Lake; and so

rested upon the breast of the Great Mother from whom he came to birth and to

whom at last, as all men, he must go. And perhaps, as I guided the barge which

bore him away, not this time to the Isle of the Priests, but to the true Holy

Isle in the dark world behind our own, that Island of Avalon where, now, few

but I could go, he repented the enmity that had come between us.

AS I TELL THIS TALE I will speak at times of things which befell when I was

too young to understand them, or of things which befell when I was not by; and

my hearer will draw away, perhaps, and say: This is her magic. But I have

always held the gift of the Sight, and of looking within the minds of men and

women; and in all this time I have been close to all of them. And so, at

times, all that they thought was known to me in one way or another. And so I

will tell this tale.

For one day the priests too will tell it, as it was known to them. Perhaps

between the two, some glimmering of the truth may be seen.

For this is the thing the priests do not know, with their One God and One

Truth: that there is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and

the truth is like to the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and

your own thoughts, whither the road will take you, and whether, at the end,

you arrive in the Holy Isle of Eternity or among the priests with their bells

and their death and their Satan and Hell and damnation ... but perhaps I am

unjust even to them. Even the Lady of the Lake, who hated a priest's robe as

she would have hated a poisonous viper, and with good cause too, chid me once

for speaking evil of their God.

"For all the Gods are one God," she said to me then, as she had said many

times before, and as I have said to my own novices many times, and as every

priestess who comes after me will say again, "and all the Goddesses are one

Goddess, and there is only one Initiator. And to every man his own truth, and

the God within."

And so, perhaps, the truth winds somewhere between the road to Glastonbury,

Isle of the Priests, and the road to Avalon, lost forever in the mists of the

Summer Sea.

But this is my truth; I who am Morgaine tell you these things, Morgaine who

was in later days called Morgan le Fay.

Book One

Mistress of Magic

Even in high summer, Tintagel was a haunted place; Igraine, Lady of Duke

Gorlois, looked out over the sea from the headland. As she stared into the

fogs and mists, she wondered how she would ever know when the night and day

were of equal length, so that she could keep the Feast of the New Year. This

year the spring storms had been unusually violent; night and day the crash of

the sea had resounded over the castle until no man or woman within could

sleep, and even the hounds whimpered mournfully. Tintagel ... there were

still those who believed the castle had been raised, on the crags at the far

end of the long causeway into the sea, by the magic of the ancient folk of Ys.

Duke Gorlois laughed at this and said that if he had any of their magic, he

would have used it to keep the sea from encroaching, year by year, upon the

shoreline. In the four years since she had come here as Gorlois's bride,

Igraine had seen land, good land, crumble into the Cornish sea. Long arms of

black rock, sharp and craggy, extended into the ocean from the coast. When the

sun shone, it could be fair and brilliant, the sky and water as brilliant as

the jewels Gorlois had heaped on her on the day when she told him she bore his

first child. But Igraine had never liked wearing them. The jewel which hung

now at her throat had been given her in Avalon: a moonstone which sometimes

reflected the blue brilliance of sky and sea; but in the fog, today, even the

jewel looked shadowed.

In the fog, sounds carried a long way. It seemed to Igraine, as she stood

looking from the causeway back toward the mainland, that she could hear

footfalls of horses and mules, and the sound of voices-human voices, here in

isolated Tintagel, where nothing lived but goats and sheep, and the herdsmen

and their dogs, and the ladies of the castle with a few serving women and a

few old men to guard them.

Slowly, Igraine turned and went back toward the castle. As always, standing in

its shadow, she felt dwarfed by the loom of these ancient stones at the end of

the long causeway which stretched into the sea. The herdsmen believed that the

castle had been built by the Ancient Ones from the lost lands of Lyonnesse and

Ys; on a clear day, so the fishermen said, their old castles could be seen far

out under the water. But to Igraine they looked like towers of rock, ancient

mountains and hills drowned by the ever encroaching sea that nibbled away,

even now, at the very crags below the castle. Here at the end of the world,

where the sea ate endlessly at the land, it was 'easy to believe in drowned

lands to the west; there were tales of a great fire mountain which had

exploded, far to the south, and engulfed a great land there. Igraine never

knew whether she believed those tales or not. Yes; surely she could hear

voices in the fog. It could not be savage raiders from over the sea, or from

the wild shores of Erin. The time was long past when she needed to startle at

a strange sound or a shadow. It was not her husband, the Duke; he was far away

to the North, fighting Saxons at the side of Ambrosius Aurelianus, High King

of Britain; he would have sent word if he intended to return.

And she need not fear. If the riders were hostile, the guards and soldiers in

the fort at the landward end of the causeway, stationed there by Duke Gorlois

to guard his wife and child, would have stopped them. It would take an army to

cut through them. And who would send an army against Tintagel?

There was a time-Igraine remembered without bitterness, moving slowly into the

castle yard-when she would have known who rode toward her castle. The thought

held little sadness, now. Since Morgaine's birth she no longer even wept for

her home. And Gorlois was kind to her. He had soothed her through her early

fear and hatred, had given her jewels and beautiful things, trophies of war,

had surrounded her with ladies to wait upon her, and treated her always as his

equal, except in councils of war. She could have asked no more, unless she had

married a man of the Tribes. And in this she had been given no choice. A

daughter of the Holy Isle must do as was best for her people, whether it meant

going to death in sacrifice, or laying down her maidenhood in the Sacred

Marriage, or marrying where it was thought meet to cement alliances; this

Igraine had done, marrying a Romanized Duke of Cornwall, a citizen who lived,

even though Rome was gone from all of Britain, in Roman fashion.

She shrugged the cloak from her shoulders; inside the court it was warmer, out

of the biting wind. And there, as the fog swirled and cleared, for a moment a

figure stood before her, materialized out of the fog and mist: her half-

sister, Viviane, the Lady of the Lake, the Lady of the Holy Isle.

"Sister!" The words wavered, and Igraine knew she had not cried them aloud,

but only whispered, her hands flying to her breast. "Do I truly see you here?"

The face was reproachful, and the words seemed to blow away in the sound of

the wind beyond the walls.

Have you given up the Sight, Igraine? Of your free will?

Stung by the injustice of that, Igraine retorted, "It was you who decreed that

I must marry Gorlois ... " but the form of her sister had wavered into

shadows, was not there, had never been there. Igraine blinked; the brief

apparition was gone. She pulled the cloak around her body, for she was cold,

ice cold; she knew the vision had drawn its force from the warmth and life of

her own body. She thought, I didn't know I could still see in that way, I was

sure I could not ... and then she shivered, knowing that Father Columba

would consider this the work of the Devil, and she should confess it to him.

True, here at the end of the world the priests were lax, but an unconfessed

vision would surely be treated as a thing unholy.

She frowned; why should she treat a visit from her own sister as the work of

the Devil? Father Columba could say what he wished; perhaps his God was wiser

than he was. Which, Igraine thought, suppressing a giggle, would not be very

difficult. Perhaps Father Columba had become a priest of Christ because no

college of Druids would have had a man so stupid among their ranks. The Christ

God seemed not to care whether a priest was stupid or not, so long as he could

mumble their mass, and read and write a little. She, Igraine herself, had more

clerkly skills than Father Columba, and spoke better Latin when she wished.

Igraine did not think of herself as well educated; she had not had the

hardihood to study the deeper wisdom of the Old Religion, or to go into the

Mysteries any further than was absolutely necessary for a daughter of the Holy

Isle. Nevertheless, although she was ignorant in any Temple of the Mysteries,

she could pass among the Romanized barbarians as a well-educated lady.

In the small room off the court where there was sun on fine days, her younger

sister, Morgause, thirteen years old and budding, wearing a loose house robe

of undyed wool and her old frowsy cloak about her shoulders, was spinning

listlessly with a drop spindle, taking up her uneven yarn on a wobbly reel. On

the floor by the fire, Morgaine was rolling an old spindle around for a ball,

watching the erratic patterns the uneven cylinder made, knocking it this way

and that with chubby fingers.

"Haven't I done enough spinning?" Morgause complained. "My fingers ache! Why

must I spin, spin, spin all the time, as if I were a waiting-woman?"

"Every lady must learn to spin," rebuked Igraine as she knew she ought to do,

"and your thread is a disgrace, now thick, now thin.... Your fingers will lose

their weariness as you accustom them to the work. Aching fingers are a sign

that you have been lazy, since they are not hardened to their task." She took

the reel and spindle from Morgause and twirled it with careless ease; the

uneven yarn, under her experienced fingers, smoothed out into a thread of

perfectly even thickness. "Look, one could weave this yarn without snagging

the shuttle ... " and suddenly she tired of behaving as she ought. "But you

may put the spindle away now; guests will be here before midafternoon."

Morgause stared at her. "I heard nothing," she said, "nor any rider with a

message!"

"That does not surprise me," Igraine said, "for there was no rider. It was a

Sending. Viviane is upon her way here, and the Merlin is with her." She had

not known that last until she said it. "So you may take Morgaine to her nurse,

and go and put on your holiday robe, the one dyed with saffron."

Morgause put away the spindle with alacrity, but paused to stare at Igraine.

"My saffron gown? For my sister?"

Igraine corrected her, sharply. "Not for our sister, Morgause, but for the

Lady of the Holy Isle, and for the Messenger of the Gods."

Morgause looked down at the patterned floor. She was a tall, sturdy girl, just

beginning to lengthen and ripen into womanhood; her thick hair was reddish

like Igraine's own, and there were splotches of freckles on her skin, no

matter how carefully she soaked it in buttermilk and begged the herbwife for

washes and simples for it. Already at thirteen she was as tall as Igraine, and

someday would be taller. She picked up Morgaine with an ill grace and carried

her away. Igraine called after her, "Tell Nurse to put a holiday gown on the

child, and then you may bring her down; Viviane has not seen her."

Morgause said something ill-tempered to the effect that she didn't see why a

great priestess would want to see a brat, but she said it under her breath so

that Igraine had an excuse to ignore it.

Up the narrow stairs, her own chamber was cold; no fires were lighted there

except in the dead of winter. While Gorlois was away, she shared the bed with

her waiting-woman Gwennis, and his prolonged absence gave her an excuse to

have Morgaine in her bed at night. Sometimes Morgause slept there too, sharing

the fur coverlets against the bitter cold. The big marriage bed, canopied,

curtained against draughts, was more than big enough for three women and a

child.

Gwen, who was old, was drowsing in a corner, and Igraine forbore to wake her,

stripping off her workaday dress of undyed wool and hurrying on her fine gown,

laced at the neck with a silk ribbon Gorlois had brought her as a fairing from

Londinium. She put on her fingers some little silver rings she had had since

she was a little girl ... they would go only on her two smallest fingers,

now ... and hung a necklace of amber which Gorlois had given her about her

neck. The gown was dyed rust color, and had an overtunic of green. She found

her carven horn comb, and began to pull it through her hair, sitting on a

bench and working her comb patiently through the tangles. From another room

she heard a loud yelling and decided that Morgaine was having her hair combed

by her nurse and didn't like it. The yelling stopped suddenly, and she

supposed that Morgaine had been slapped into silence; or perhaps, as sometimes

happened when Morgause was in a good temper, Morgause had taken over the

combing herself, with her clever, patient fingers. This was how Igraine knew

that her young sister could spin well enough when she chose, her hands were so

clever at everything else-at combing, at carding, at making Yule pies.

Igraine braided her hair, clasped it on top of her head with a gold clasp, and

put her good gold brooch into the fold of her cloak. She looked at herself in

the old bronze mirror her sister Viviane had given her at her wedding,

brought, they said, all the way from Rome. She knew, lacing her gown, that her

breasts were once again as they had been before: Morgaine had been weaned a

year now, and they were only a little softer and heavier. She knew she had her

old slimness back, for she had been married in this gown, and now the laces

were not strained even a little.

Gorlois, when he returned, would expect to take her to his bed again. Last

time he had seen her, Morgaine had still been at the breast, and he had

yielded to her plea that she might continue to suckle the child through the

summer season when so many little children died. She knew he was discontented

because the baby had not been the son he craved-these Romans counted their

lineage through the male line, rather than sensibly through the mother; it was

silly, for how could any man ever know precisely who had fathered any woman's

child? Of course, these Romans made a great matter of worrying over who lay

with their women, and locked them up and spied on them. Not that Igraine

needed watching; one man was bad enough, who would want others who might be

worse?

But even though he was eager for a son, Gorlois had been indulgent, letting

her have Morgaine in her bed and continue to suckle her, even keeping away

from her and lying nights with her dressing-woman Ettarr so that she would not

get with child again and lose her milk. He too knew how many children died if

they were weaned before they could chew meat and hard bread. Children fed on

gruel were sickly, and often there was no goat's milk in the summer, even if

they would drink it. Children fed on cow's or mare's milk often got the vomit

and died, or suffered with the flux in their bowels and died. So he had left

Morgaine at her breast, thus postponing the son he wanted for at least another

year and a half. For that at least she would always be grateful to him, and

not murmur, however quickly he got her with child now.

Ettarr had gotten herself a belly from that visit, and gone about preening

herself; would she be the one to have a son by the Duke of Cornwall? Igraine

had ignored the girl; Gorlois had other bastard sons, one of whom was with him

now, in the camp of the war duke, Uther. But Etarr had fallen sick and

miscarried, and Igraine had enough intuition not to ask Gwen why she looked so

pleased at the event. Old Gwen knew too much of herbs for Igraine's perfect

peace of mind. Some day, she resolved, I will make her tell me exactly what

she put into Ettarr's beer.

She went down to the kitchen, her long skirts trailing on the stone steps.

Morgause was there, in her finest gown, and she had put Morgaine into a

holiday dress, dyed saffron, so that the child looked dark as a Pict. Igraine

picked her up, holding her with pleasure. Small, dark, delicately made, so

small-boned it was like handling a little soft bird. How had that child come

by her looks? She herself and Morgause were tall and red-haired, earth-colored

like all of the Tribeswomen, and Gorlois, though dark, was Roman, tall and

lean and aquiline; hardened from years of battle against the Saxons, too

filled with his Roman dignity to show much tenderness to a young wife, and

with nothing but indifference for the daughter who came in the place of the

son she should have borne him.

But, Igraine reminded herself, these Roman men considered it their divine

right to have power of life and death over their children. There were many,

Christians or no, who would have demanded that a daughter not be reared, so

that their wives might be free at once to give them a son. Gorlois had been

good to her, he had let her keep her daughter. Perhaps, though she did not

give him credit for much imagination, he knew how she, a woman of the Tribes,

felt about a daughter.

While she was giving orders for the entertainment of guests, for wine to be

brought up from the cellars and for the roasting of meat-not rabbit, but good

mutton from the last slaughtering-she heard the squawk and flutter of

frightened hens in the court and knew that the riders had come across the

causeway. The servants looked frightened, but most of them had become resigned

to the knowledge that the mistress had the Sight. She had pretended it, using

clever guesses and a few tricks; it was just as well that they should remain

in awe of her. Now she thought, Maybe Viviane is right, maybe I still have it.

Maybe I only believed it was gone-because in those months before Morgaine was

born, I felt so weak and powerless. Now I have come back to myself. My mother

was a great priestess till the day of her death, though she bore several

children.

But, her mind answered her, her mother had borne those children in freedom, as

a Tribeswoman should, to such fathers as she chose, not as a slave to some

Roman whose customs gave him power over women and children. Impatiently, she

dismissed such thoughts; did it matter whether she had the Sight or only

seemed to have it, if it kept her servants properly in order?

She went slowly out to the courtyard, which Gorlois still liked to call the

atrium, though it was nothing like the villa where he had lived until

Ambrosius made him Duke of Cornwall. She found the riders dismounting, and her

eyes went at once to the only woman among them, a woman smaller than herself

and no longer young, wearing a man's tunic and woolen breeches, and muffled in

cloaks and shawls. Across the courtyard their eyes met in welcome, but Igraine

went dutifully and bent before the tall, slender old man who was dismounting

from a raw-boned mule. He wore the blue robes of a bard, and a harp was slung

across his shoulder.

"I bid you welcome to Tintagel, Lord Messenger; you bestow a blessing upon our

roof and honor it with your presence."

"I thank you, Igraine," said the resonant voice, and Taliesin, Merlin of

Britain, Druid, Bard, clasped his hands before his face, then extended them to

Igraine in blessing.

Her duty done for the instant, Igraine flew to her half-sister and would have

bent for her blessing too; but Viviane bent and prevented her.

"No, no, child, this is a family visit, time enough later to do me honors if

you must ... ." She clasped Igraine close and kissed her on the mouth. "And

this is the babe? It is easy to see she has the blood of the Old People; she

looks like our mother, Igraine."

Viviane, Lady of the Lake and of the Holy Isle, was at this time in her

thirties; eldest daughter of the ancient priestess of the Lake, she had

succeeded to her mother's holy office. She picked up Morgaine in her arms,

dandling her with the experienced hands of a woman well accustomed to babies.

"She looks like you," Igraine said, surprised, and then realizing that she

should have realized this before. But it had been four years since she had

seen Viviane, and then at her wedding. So much had happened, she had changed

so much, since, a frightened girl of fifteen, she had been given into the

hands of a man more than twice her age. "But come into the hall, Lord Merlin,

sister. Come into the warm."

Freed of her enwrapping cloaks and shawls, Viviane, Lady of Avalon, was a

surprisingly little woman, no taller than a well-grown girl of eight or ten.

In her loose tunic with its wrapped belt, a knife sheathed at her waist, and

bulky woolen breeches, legs wrapped with thick leggings, she looked tiny, a

child put into adult clothes. Her face was small, swarthy and triangular, the

forehead low beneath hair dark as the shadows beneath the crags. Her eyes were

dark, too, and large in her small face; Igraine had never realized how small

she was.

A serving-woman brought the guest cup: hot wine, mixed with the last of the

spices Gorlois had had sent to her from the markets in Londinium. Viviane took

it between her hands, and Igraine blinked at her; with the gesture with which

she took the cup, she was suddenly tall and imposing; it might have been the

sacred chalice of the Holy Regalia. She set it between her hands and brought

it slowly to her lips, murmuring a blessing. She tasted it, turned, and laid

it in the hands of the Merlin. He took it with a grave bow and put it to his

lips. Igraine, who had barely entered the Mysteries, somehow felt that she too

was part of this beautiful ritual solemnity as in turn she took the cup from

her guests, tasted it, and spoke formal words of welcome.

Then she put the cup aside and her sense of the moment dropped away; Viviane

was only a small, tired-looking woman, the Merlin no more than a stooped old

man. Igraine led them both quickly to the fire.

"It is a long journey from the shores of the Summer Sea in these days," she

said, remembering when she had travelled it, a new-made bride, frightened and

silently hating, in the train of the strange husband who, as yet, was only a

voice and a terror in the night. "What brings you here in the spring storms,

my sister and my lady?"

And why could you not have come before, why did you leave me all alone, to

learn to be a wife, to bear a child alone and in fear and homesickness? And

since you could not have come before, why do you come at all, when it is too

late and I am at last resigned into submission?

"The distance is indeed long," Viviane said softly, and Igraine knew that the

priestess had heard, as she always heard, the unspoken words as well as what

Igraine had said. "And these are dangerous times, child. But you have grown

into womanhood in these years, even if they have been lonely, as lonely as the

years of isolation for the making of a bard-or," she added, with the flicker

of a reminiscent smile, "the making of a priestess. Had you chosen that path,

you would have found it equally lonely, my Igraine. Yes, of course," she said,

reaching down, her face softening, "you may come up on my lap, little one."

She picked up Morgaine, and Igraine watched with wonder; Morgaine was,

ordinarily, as shy as a wild rabbit. Half resentful, half falling again under

the old spell, she watched the child settle into Viviane's lap. Viviane looked

almost too small to hold her securely. A fairy woman, indeed; a woman of the

Old People. And indeed Morgaine would perhaps be very like her.

"And Morgause, how has she prospered since I sent her to you a year ago?"

Viviane said, looking up at Morgause in her saffron gown, where she hung back

resentfully in the shadows of the fire. "Come and kiss me, little sister. Ah,

you will be tall like Igraine," she said, raising her arms to embrace the

girl, who came, sullen as a half-trained puppy, from the shadows. "Yes, sit

there at my knee if you want to, child." Morgause sat on the floor, leaning

her head against Viviane's lap, and Igraine saw that the sulky eyes were

filled with tears.

She has us all in her hand. How can she have such power over us all? Or is it

that she is the only mother Morgause has ever known? She was a grown woman

when Morgause was born, she has always been mother, as well as sister, to both

of us. Their mother, who had been really too old for childbearing, had died

giving birth to Morgause. Viviane had borne a child of her own, earlier in the

year; her child had died, and Viviane had taken Morgause to nurse.

Morgaine had snuggled tightly into Viviane's lap; Morgause leaned her silky

red head on Viviane's knee. The priestess held the little one with one arm

while her free hand stroked the half-grown girl's long, silky hair.

"I would have come to you when Morgaine was born," Viviane said, "but I was

pregnant, too. I bore a son that year. I have put him out to nurse, and I

think his foster-mother may send him to the monks. She is a Christian."

"Don't you mind his being reared as a Christian?" Morgause asked. "Is he

pretty? What is his name?"

Viviane laughed. "I called him Balan," she said, "and his foster-mother named

her son Balin. They are only ten days apart in age, so they will be reared as

twins, no doubt. And no, I do not mind that he is reared a Christian, his

father was so, and Priscilla is a good woman. You said the journey here was

long; believe me, child, it is longer now than it was when you were wedded to

Gorlois. Not longer, perhaps, from the Isle of the Priests, where their Holy

Thorn grows, but longer, far longer, from Avalon ..."

"And that is why we came here," said the Merlin suddenly, and his voice was

like the tolling of a great bell, so that Morgaine sat up suddenly and began

to whimper in fright.

"I do not understand," said Igraine, suddenly uneasy. "Surely the two lie

close together ... ."

"The two are one," said the Merlin, sitting very erect, "but the followers of

Christ have chosen to say, not that they shall have no other Gods before their

God, but that there is no other God save for their God; that he alone made the

world, that he rules it alone, that he alone made the stars and the whole of

creation."

Igraine quickly made the holy sign against blasphemy.

"But that cannot be," she insisted. "No single God can rule all things ...

and what of the Goddess? What of the Mother ... ?"

"They believe," said Viviane, in her smooth low voice, "that there is no

Goddess; for the principle of woman, so they say, is the principle of all

evil; through woman, so they say, Evil entered this world; there is some

fantastic Jewish tale about an apple and a snake."

"The Goddess will punish them," Igraine said, shaken. "And yet you married me

to one of them?"

"We did not know that their blasphemy was so all-encompassing,"

Merlin said, "for there have been followers of other Gods in our time. But

they respected the Gods of others."

"But what has this to do with the length of the road from Avalon?" asked

Igraine.

"We come, then, to the reason for our visit," said the Merlin, "for, as the

Druids know, it is the belief of mankind which shapes the world, and all of

reality. Long ago, when the followers of Christ first came to our isle, I knew

that this was a powerful pivot in time, a moment to change the world."

Morgause looked up at the old man, her eyes wide in awe.

"Are you so old, Venerable One?"

The Merlin smiled down at the girl and said, "Not in my own body. But I have

read much in the great hall which is not in this world, there the Record of

All Things is written. And also, I was living then. Those who are the Lords of

this world permitted me to come back, but in another body of flesh."

"These matters are too abstruse for the little one, Venerable Father," Viviane

said, gently rebuking him. "She is not a priestess. What the Merlin means,

little sister, is that he was living when the Christians first came here, and

that he chose, and was allowed, to reincarnate at once, to follow his work

through. These are Mysteries, which you need not try to understand. Father, go

on."

"I knew that this was one of those moments where the history of all mankind

would be changed," the Merlin said. "The Christians seek to blot out all

wisdom save their own; and in that strife they are banishing from this world

all forms of mystery save that which will fit into their religious faith. They

have pronounced it a heresy that men live more than one life -which every

peasant knows to be true-"

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

AlsobyMarionZimmerBradleyPublishedbyBallantineBooks:THECATCHTRAPTHEHOUSEBETWEENTHEWORLDSTheMistsofAvalonMarionZimmerBradleyDELREYADelReyBookBallantineBooks•newyorkADelReyBookPublishedbyBallantineBooksCopyright(c)1982byMarionZimmerBradleyAllrightsreservedunderInternationalandPan-AmericanCopyrightConv...

展开>> 收起<<

Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Avalon 1 - The Mists of Avalon.pdf

共609页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Avalon 1 - The Mists of Avalon

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: