Gawain and Lady Green (4 page)

“Another matter with Morgause,” Merry pursued. “Is she not a sister of your king?”

“Aye. That she is.”

“King Arthur is your uncle.” Aye.

“Heh! By the Grove Gods!” Merry leaned back against the beech and closed his eyes. His words brought a short silence upon the company.

Then Doon raised his voice again. “May King. You must know many tales, old and new. Can you tell us tales in the evenings?”

“Give us news of the world!”

“Sing the new songs.”

Gawain muttered, “Sing, I cannot. Tell, aye. I can do that.” Why not?

Merry’s eyes popped open. “You forget,” he told the men, “the May King works in the evenings.”

“Ei. Ech. Aye!” Nods, winks, and digs.

“And we work many days.”

Mock groans.

“But not all days. Next rain, come to our Men’s House, May King, and give us a story.”

“I will, if you call me by my name.”

“Call you—what is it, Gawain?”

“Aye. This May King title grates on my ears.”

The fellows murmured, “Gawain,” trying it out.

One said loudly, “Look at the sun, Brothers!”

Men and boys looked up through beech leaves, sighed, grunted, and found their feet. They stretched, peed, bent to pick up dropped scythes and hats.

“What!” Unpleasant surprise widened Gawain’s eyes. “Is there more hay?” He had thought the field cut.

Merry swept an arm to point behind the beech shade.

There stretched another sun-drenched, wind-waved field.

God’s eyes! Gawain had been ready to drift into sleep. His back, arms, and calves groaned. Satan’s balls! Another endless field?

Merry touched his shoulder. “May King—”

Gawain growled.

“Gawain. You need not scythe.”

Merry tilted his head and half smiled like…why, like Lady Green’s troublesome little girl! “No need to work. After all, you are the—”

“God’s blood, I’m coming! Coming. Now. I only didn’t…”

Merry picked his straw hat off the ground and crowned Gawain with it. The yokels cheered.

“Me myself,” Granny says. “In truth. One time I fell in love.”

The softened wet reed cuts my finger. I lick blood and wave the finger in air to dry. At my feet, old Brindle Dog whines sympathy. Ynis lets her reed-braid drop to her knee as though she can’t braid and listen at the same time. In truth, she can’t.

Cross-legged, we sit around the tub of soaking reeds outside our hut. Nearby, our low fire hisses, waiting to fry Ynis’s favorite honey cakes. We braid reeds, stitch the braids together, and toss small new mats on our growing pile. Ynis’s mats show bumps, ridges, knots, and blood spots. Her small hands are bloodied as though she braided brambles.

“Aye, me myself!” Granny asserts again. “I fell in love. You’d never guess with who.”

I joke. “I hope with Grandpa, Granny.”

“Him? Nah! A good husband he was, dear, never a word against him. I truly loved that good man. But I weren’t in love with him, you know how I mean.”

“I dunno how you mean, Granny.” Ynis cocks her head. Her little ears fairly twitch with curiosity.

“Pick up your reeds, Ynis.”

“How do you mean?”

“That one’s too big for the others. Get one the same size. Like that.

“I mean, dear, like when you can’t live without him. He’s all you think of. All day you wait for night, and him.”

“Ech,” says Ynis. “Yech. Ick.”

“Wait a while, you’ll change that tune! Anyhow, guess who I fell for flat on my face?”

Eyes on my work: “You’ll have to tell, Granny.”

Granny lowers her voice so the near neighbors at their reed tub won’t hear. “I fell for the May King!”

My fingers freeze on the braid. I look up.

Our little fire wavers and sinks into ash. A giant bat-shadow
swoops and hovers over us. I know the neighbors cannot see it. We four see it clearly. Ynis drops her work again. Trembling, Brindle tries to creep under my stool and twists himself into my dress. Granny braids on, squinting up uneasily at the hovering cloud. Maybe she should say no more.

But she goes on. “I were May Queen that year. He came from over Holly Wood way. He was the most love-some…” Granny sighs.

My mother died when I was born. This May King was a memory when she was born. But he lives today in Granny’s heart. “He laughed a lot. I always did like a laughin’ fellow.”

“So.” Does she guess? Does she see into my heart? Maybe she’s just woolgathering, wandering in memory. “What did you do, Granny?”

“Do? What did I do…Ah, yes.” With an effort she pulls herself out of dream. “First thing I did, I conceived his son. My first child.”

So that son was my handsome uncle—the one who wed, fathered four handsome children, then died, with two of them, of a pox.

“Nextly, I prayed.”

“And the Gods answered?”

“A Demon answered.”

Ynis’s small, soft mouth drops open. Her eyes follow Granny’s words into air. She seems to see the words up there in the dark cloud, fluttering like moths.

“This Demon, he promised me gifts if I’d forget my May King. Wunnerful gifts. Powers. Till then I didn’t have none. He gave me powers like so.” Granny turns and points at the fire. The ashes spring to life. Flame licks up from air.

Ynis breathes, “What else, Granny?”

“Ech…he gave me the healing touch. I’ve lived well on that ever since. Many’s the wart I’ve cured.” But not the pox. “An’ the seein’ eye. That sees fairies an’ auras an’ hearts.”

All that! “But I see too, Granny. Fairies and clouds.”

“Aye. You two was born gifted. Not me.”

All those gifts for turning from love! Keeping my eyes low so as not to see our dark cloud, I try to braid reeds again.

“I see that black cloud up there.” Ynis points up at it. “I don’t like that. Gives me the creepies.”

“It’ll go. If we talk somethin’ else. Like about braidin’ mats—”

Hastily—“Granny, I seed a thing last night. A big thing.”

“Aye?”

“I came out here to pee.”

“Use the pot, child. Nights, stay inside. Unless we’re out here with you.”

“This tree came walkin’ by.”

“Eh?”

Again my fingers freeze on the braid.

“Ech! It was like a beech tree, Granny. Branches swayin’ ’round.” Ynis waves arms, bobs head. “Feet stompin’—”

“You mean, roots.”

“Nay, this tree it had feets. An’ they shook the ground.”

Granny mumbles, “Holy Gods! You were dreamin’.”

“Nay, I were peein’.”

“I guess it didn’t notice you.” Or you might not sit here now.

“It stomped right on by there.” Ynis points to the neighbor’s
hut. Carefully, we do not look there. That would invite neighborly conversation.

“Whuff!” Granny exhales relief. “You were right lucky, Ynis. You were downright blessed. Like I say—nights, use the pot!”

I whisper to Ynis, “You saw the Green Man.”

“Ma, I saw a tree!”

“Hush! Whisper. The Green Man looks like a tree. Or like a man. Or like grass. He is the life of trees, grass, men.”

Granny whispers, “He walks now in summer. Winters, he lies in his grave. Spring, he up and rises again.”

“He stomps and dances through the world. He blesses all crops. All weeds and woods.”

“And us?”

“He blesses us through the crops,” I explain. “We eat the crops and turn them into us. All that lives is really grass, Ynis. Grass magicked into flesh.”

Ynis whispers, “He didn’t look like blessin’ to me. He gave me the creepies.”

“So he should,” Granny tells her earnestly. “He’s mighty moody. He like to shred folk, be he in a mood.”

I take this good chance to warn my child. “Spirits you see, Gods, Fairies, they are like folk. Not all good. Some downright bad. Some friendly. Some dangerous.”

“Like I said,” Granny puts in, “nights, use the pot! Ho, look how we’ve fallen behind here!” She turns and calls to the neighbors, “Hi! How many mats you made?”

I glance upward. Like smoke, our black cloud drifts away.

An owl called from beyond the barley. Another answered from the far grove.

Gawain stretched, rolled over, and turned back to Lady Green. He drew her in toward him, edging his shoulder under her head. Her thick red hair spilled down his bare side and chest. Idly he lifted strands of it and wound them through his fingers, around his arms. He murmured, “You remind me of someone.”

They lay under an awning between banks of pea plants. Reeds, branches, and whole saplings had been piled in rows and the peas planted to climb over the debris. Already the knee-high vines halfway covered the piles. Lady Green had pointed out the obvious virtue of their lovemaking. “The peas will be ready soon after Midsummer. They love your power, May King!”

He had reminded her. “Gawain, Love. Call me Gawain.”

Quickly she promised, “I’ll try to remember.” He had only to ask and she, like all the rest, complied—except in the matter of a horse.

Now he said, “You remind me of someone…loved. I wish you did not.”

She caressed his chest. “Why…Gawain? Does that not help you to love me?”

“It does. Therefore I wish not.”

“You don’t like…loving me?”

This love-talk irked Gawain. In truth, he did find himself almost loving Lady Green. Love came easily, as naturally as anger, to his eager, hungry heart. How could he help loving a woman who gave
him so much pleasure every night? But honesty was more natural to him than love—and knightly as well.

So he said now, “Lady Green, I am going to leave you. We both know that.”

“Aye, dear…”

“This loving of ours is only till Summerend. So I would like to love you less. Care less.”

“Ungallant…”

“Aye, but truthful. Something in you calls out truth in me.” That was not gallantry. Lady Green’s direct gaze and uncompromising carriage did call from him the same honorable sincerity he practiced with men.

Chuckle. Snuggle. “Maybe I remind you of a former lover.”

“No.”

“Have you had so few you can be sure?”

“I have not been a great lover, Lady Green. Not like some of my brother knights.” Maybe if he had been more practiced he would not now feel so tempted toward love.

“But you are talented. For instance—”

“No.” He caught and held her hand. “Not now. If I could only remember, know, who it is you bring to mind…”

“Maybe we were lovers earlier.”

“What earlier?”

“In another life.”

“What?”

“You must remember living before.”

“What!”

“Don’t you dream sometimes of another life?”

“Oh, dreams. Haw! In dreams I can be anyone, any time, any age! In dreams I have been a tree…a young child…a stag. Once I even was”—he whispered this one—“a woman!”

“Because in the past, in other lives, you were such.”

“Never! Lady Green, do you not know that we go to God in heaven when we die?”

“Maybe for a while. But then we long to see the warm green earth again, and we come back. You and I may have loved many times since the Goddess birthed the world.”

“This I never heard or dreamed!”

“Or we may have been brother and sister. Or brother and brother. I dream I’m a man sometimes.”

Owls called back and forth from field to grove to river. Gawain drew Green’s hair across him like a blanket. “Let’s dream now together that this fantasy of yours is solemn truth.” A harmless game. “Do you think we could ever have been enemies, Lady Green?”

“Ech, aye! Maybe once we faced each other in battle; and now again, in love. We meet over and over again. Those we value in this life we have known before.”

“Where did you hear this?”

“We know in our hearts. Everyone knows.”

“Not where I come from!”

“That does not surprise me. Where you come from folk walk on their heads!”

“Seriously, Lady Green; not gaming, now. Our Faith teaches that we live but once in this world.”

“Once? Once only?” She raised on her elbow to look down on him. “But who could leave this green world forever? Do you not love the world, May King? Gawain?”

“I am talking here of Truth, not love!”

“Are they different?”

He sat up beside her. “Lady Green! Gwyneth! The Truth is what God makes. Love is…love is only what we feel about what God makes.”