Guinevere (11 page)

The horse halted. The man threw back his hood, revealing a fine Roman nose and eyes startlingly blue. Nothing more could be seen of his face for the brown mat of beard which covered it. His hair stuck to his forehead and glistened like his robe. He smiled; his teeth were stained and crooked.

“Now Gaia,” he whispered. “You have no call for such a lack of hospitality to a fellow Christian.”

Guinevere started. His voice was cultivated and proud, each word formed as if chiseled in stone.

Gaia grew stiff in her rage. “Christian! The word is desecrated by your tongue! Temptor! Purveyor of filth! Hypocrite! Go at once! Return to your decadent world. You shall never cross our threshold again!”

His smile faded. “You are as closeminded and foolish as ever, Gaia. I will go if you really wish it. But I do not come alone, my dear. I have brought many worthy friends with me.”

He patted the leather bag slung behind him.

“Look, my Gaia,” his voice caressed her. “Gospels, saints’ lives, even a copy of
Pastoral Care
and the new one by Boethius. Wouldn’t you like a discussion with Dame Philosophia?”

His leering eyes never left hers as his fingers fumbled with the strings of the bag. Gaia stood stiff with hatred and yet seemed almost mesmerized. Violently she pulled her face away from his gaze. She threw a last epithet at him over her shoulder and raced back to the hut. She stumbled over the lintel and yanked the door shut behind her.

Timon had arrived to see her exit. He strode up to the monk, his face more stern than Guinevere had ever seen it. He grasped the reins tightly and turned the unresisting horse back down the trail.

“See what you have done to my poor sister,” he chided. “Why do you return to torment her?”

“Do you see what your sister has done to me?” Nennius answered. “What other man would wait as I have for so many years?”

“Only a fool, Nennius,” Timon answered. “Only a fool. You know Gaia better than anyone left on earth and yet you come here every year bringing the two things which tempt her most. You are cruel beyond words.”

“Cruel? Foolish? I am not the one. Let her ask God what she has made of me through all these years. Would He not have planned better things for us both? It is she who is the fool to waste our lives; and you for supporting her in her insanity! Bah! I am sick with it.” He ended suddenly.

“I will be back next summer; and the next and every year until I am too feeble to climb the path. She will give way yet. Good-bye, Timon. Watch over her. God and eternity will show us who the fools are.”

Guinevere had stood astonished throughout the interchange, and she might have been a tree in the forest for all the attention anyone had paid her. She only started to come to life again after Nennius and his horse had disappeared once more into the trees. Timon turned around and only then seemed to realize that she was there and had witnessed the entire scene. He came and put his arm around her gently. From inside the hut could be heard the sound of wild, bitter sobbing, choked in vain.

“Let’s walk for a time, Guinevere,” Timon whispered. “She doesn’t want us now.”

The day was ripening and the woods about them were busy with the scurry of birds and animals. Summer would soon be over and the squirrels were busy filling hollow trees. They didn’t care about strange human grief. Everything was preparing for the winter. A hard one, Tim guessed; the birds were already migrating, weeks ahead of their time.

They wandered quietly for a while, both pondering what had happened. Finally they came to her space in the woods, the little stone seat beneath the tree. He motioned her to sit and then paced back and forth across the clearing several times before he decided to speak.

“You need some explanation for this and I will tell you only if you realize that it is a sacred secret, never to be spoken of again, even to me. Above all, you must never let Gaia know I told you. Do you understand?”

She nodded.

He stood for a while, trying to find words to explain. How could she understand? Finally, he began.

“Gaia has truly loved only two things in her life, books and that man, Nennius. She cares for me, of course, but not the way she loves him. Yes, still. She denies it but I know. She could live happily without me anytime. Perhaps that’s why she doesn’t send me away, too. You can’t imagine how she was when she was younger. I was always the stupid one; strong but not much for learning. In another time I might have been bought subcommand of a legion. I’m glad it was too late for that. But Gaia! She was brilliant and so beautiful!”

“She still is,” Guinevere interrupted.

“Yes, she is still both. And that is her great grief. It’s all the fault of that philosopher Pelagius! When his theories came to her she dove in, arguing them with every scholar who visited. I don’t understand them! Even if I did, I don’t see that it much matters whether Christ was man or god or a bit of both. Then more preachers came, each one gloomier than the last, all telling us how to live a Christian life and divest ourselves of the worldly goods we loved so sinfully. Gaia listened and debated and read the scriptures and all the commentaries she could find. In the end she got the idea that she was doomed to everlasting torment if she didn’t give up the ways of the flesh. But hot baths and cool wine never mattered to her, it was all Ovid and Lucretius and Plutarch and Virgil and, of course, Nennius. You mustn’t think he was always like that, all filthy and smelling. He does that . . . well, I don’t really understand that, either. Anyway, he was once a nice, clean-shaven Roman and a brilliant philosopher, too. They were betrothed by their own decision and our families were pleased. They seemed to be very happy in their own argumentative way. But then she decided that if she loved a thing, it must be sinful. She kept fretting because she couldn’t get close to God while so surrounded by the World. She gave up all her books, even the Scriptures. She says that if she reads even one holy word all the wicked voluptuous ones will all come back to her. She daren’t even be near a book. Every waking moment she prays that the longing will be taken from her. And, although she has never said a word, I think she fears that if she ever lets Nennius pass over our doorstep, her longing for him will be too strong to deny.”

Guinevere sat listening, wondering. She couldn’t understand why anyone would want to give up someone they loved, or that anyone could love something so much as to fear it was idolatrous. Gaia’s sobbing still echoed in Guinevere’s heart and she felt a strange thrill of pity for her. Suddenly, Gaia was human.

Timon saw her, sitting there so innocently, her forehead wrinkled with the effort of understanding. He worried about her.

“Guinevere,” he said earnestly. “If you ever decide to devote your life to God alone, be sure you do it because you love Him more than anything else, not to deny your love for something of this earth. The earth isn’t so awful. After all, God made it, too.”

He shook himself, having said his piece. Again, Guinevere was reminded of a great, shaggy bear. He smiled at her. “I should finish the story. When Gaia turned eighteen, Nennius wanted to be married at once. He said that they had already waited longer than was necessary, but then she decided that since living with Nennius was what she wanted most, she had to get away from him at once. So she came up here. We all fought her. Father even tried to bring her back by force, but nothing worked. In the end they sent me up here to watch out for her. She thinks still that I only remain because of my promise, and that is another of the burdens she carries,” he chuckled. “She can’t believe that I am happier here with the animals and the bees than I ever was with all those educated Romans. Well, that’s all. We’ve been up here nearly twenty years. Nennius declared that if she wouldn’t marry him, he would become a monk, too. But he wouldn’t give up books for anyone. So he travels about the world, hunting for manuscripts that can be loaned for copy, and brings them back to Britain. Gaia won’t even look at one. But every time he returns, he comes here first, hoping to break her down.”

Guinevere listened with growing wonder. It was a very romantic story, but silly, somehow. What good was Gaia to God up here, miserable? She felt vaguely that there must be an answer somewhere, that something in Gaia’s beliefs had gotten turned around and a word would set it right. But it was beyond her. She shook her head and smiled at Timon, who was kneeling, breaking up a clod he had kicked loose, crumbling it until the soft dirt ran between his fingers.

“You won’t mention this to Gaia, now,” he cautioned again. “She thinks she’s fooled everyone into thinking she’s abandoned her early desires years ago. It would shame her terribly to think that others knew her weakness.”

“She is the strongest person I have ever met,” Guinevere answered. “I know I wouldn’t have the courage to say a word to her.”

“You mustn’t be afraid of her, either, you know. She has a good heart; it just never occurs to her to use it.”

They went back to their work, hoeing the beans they had planted when Guinevere arrived. Already the first tiny leaves were unfolding, close-huddled to the soil. Guinevere had never noticed this precarious beginning before, this first fragile advance from the dark ground into the sun and wind. It amazed her that they throve so, that anything so tiny could have a chance. When Timon reminded her that even the great trees around them had started as seedlings, she flatly refused to believe it.

He laughed at her. “Do you think that they sprang full grown from the earth one morning, complete with bark and branches?”

“Well . . .”

“I suppose you think that I arrived in the world six feet tall and wearing a beard?”

She considered. “Do you know, I think you must have!”

She walked around him, staring up at his great mane of hair, tumbling over his broad chest and shoulders. He could never have been a fat, limp, pink baby. Her imagination, never great, could not conceive of this at all.

He roared in delight at this limit of her thought. “So be it then. I can’t argue with you any more than I can with Gaia. Let us simply tend our garden and leave speculation to the scholars.”

They continued their work in companionable silence. In the hut Gaia cried until she fell asleep.

Chapter Six

The days slid by, summer waning as the garden flourished. Guinevere had long since meshed with the rhythm of Timon’s work cycle. She trotted after him, tending bees, cultivating the soil, exploring the forest in search of its treasures. He often gave her some small job to do quite alone. Before she would have felt put-upon, but now she accepted the responsibility as an honor. She hunted for early berries and gathered the angelica to steep with honey and water for mead. Her times of solitude grew more precious to her than she ever could have imagined. In her special meditation spot she felt most at peace. There she would sit motionless for hours, waiting. Sometimes she sang to herself or chanted poems. At first these were by the Latin poets or the church fathers, but they seemed jarring and too civilized for such a place. So, without noticing it, she began to chant the old British songs, the ones the people who worked in the fields knew. She had heard them repeated every year, each in its own time. The farmers and fieldmen, the potters and weavers, the dairymaid and the stablehand all knew the proper songs. One to call the wind upon a hot afternoon, one to make the name of one’s true love appear in the water; another to protect the new calves from sickness; more to bring the deer to the arrow. Flora had hummed them all to her when she was a child, and more. Perhaps the old woman thought she was too young to remember, but they were her first music and they were forever printed in her memory.

One day, on a deep sunny morning, she found herself sitting in the warm grass pungent with the smell of rotting fruits, and she began to sing the prayer for bringing flowers from the earth. Flora would start humming and reciting it to herself every winter solstice and kept on until midsummer’s day. Sometimes, when she had thought herself unwatched, Flora’s hands had moved over and upon the brown, barren ground in certain patterns. Guinevere thought it was a kind of dancing for the fingers and had learned to imitate it in her room. But she had never tried it out-of-doors, near summer’s end, with life already blooming flamboyantly about her.

The grass quivered as she touched it, and she smiled. A comfortable warmth ran through her hands, like that which came from spiced wine by a winter’s fire. She sang low and caressingly, in the same loving tone in which Flora had sung it to her. She could sense the movement of growth far under the green mat. Nearby, something watched her with joy in its sorrowful velvet eyes.

“The time is coming,” it thought. “She will be ready to find me and, for a while, our lives will run together. I will no longer be alone. For a time.”

A giant crystal tear sizzled in the grass.

Guinevere finished her song with a laugh. She patted the grass she had just blessed as if it were a pet kitten, Then she realized that it was nearly time for breakfast and she had promised Timon that she would help make a new hive, as the bees were getting ready to swarm. She skipped from the glen without a backward glance. Behind her, an orchid broke from the earth and reached toward the sun.

• • •

Occasionally, when Gaia was thoughtlessly cruel or Timon very busy, Guinevere wondered when Geraldus would come back for her. She worried that they had forgotten her at home, learned to live without her. She didn’t panic. It was just something that settled at the back of her mind and caused her lower lip to stick out. She usually forgot it a moment later, so great was her contentment with her life. But still, she would sometimes stare through the tiny front window at the stars and wonder if anyone missed her.

She needn’t have worried. In the midst of trying to feed and entertain what seemed a whole company of soldiers and petty lords, Guenlian missed her terribly. The minute the men had come galloping across the shallow stream, horses sweating and armor gleaming, she had known that they had been right to send her away. They weren’t quite barbarians (after all, one had to remember they were fighting for Rome). A few were even moderately well mannered. But they were soldiers, trained from childhood to kill in battle. And when life consists of taking up a lance and shield and charging into a dirty, bloody melee every few weeks, there is not much time for gentility. These men certainly showed it. They wore their muddy riding boots to dinner and drank their wine in long gulps. Their voices were too loud and their language a bastard Latin. Merlin was right in saying that few could read their own names. And even though strict orders had been sent down, more than one serving maid hid deep purple bruises beneath her thin robes.