Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword of Avalon (43 page)

Tirilan felt herself flush and then go pale as her mother’s words hit home.

“You may be right—” she said in a low voice. She had always believed that her mother knew everything. Anderle had ruled Avalon for twenty years, after all. “You usually are. But I don’t believe you know anything about love.”

Anderle shook her head in exasperation. “I arranged this for Mikantor, but also for you, knowing that you were lusting for him like a doe in season. I gave you this opportunity to get it out of your system and be done.”

“Is that all the act of love means to you?” Tirilan exclaimed. “You scratch the itch, and then you both go your ways until next year? Was my father no more than a means to get you with child?”

“Of course not—” said Anderle, but her rejoinder lacked conviction.

“I don’t believe you,” Tirilan said flatly. “I am not going back to Avalon.”
And if I am making a mistake, at least it will be my own . . .

“And your vows?”

“I will not tell him any temple secrets,” she said sweetly. “As for my other vows, I gave myself to the king as the Goddess required. If he desires me, I will lie with him again. If he does not, still I will serve him, and unless you have been lying about Mikantor’s destiny for all these years, thus I will serve the gods.”

“You will serve as a drudge, in camp with all those men—” Anderle began, but Tirilan interrupted her.

“If you try to stop me you will put the validity of the rite in question, and I think you want to secure Mikantor’s future even more than you want to impose your will on me. There have been many who were called Lady of Avalon, after all, but there is only one Son of a Hundred Kings.”

Others were gathering now. Tirilan faced her mother defiantly and saw the other woman shut her mouth with a snap, eyes glittering.

“Do not ask my blessing. You are my child no longer.”

“My Lady, I have not been a child since you sent me out from the chamber of initiation to climb the holy Tor,” Tirilan said softly. As her mother turned away, she bent in the full obeisance due to the Lady of Avalon, wondering whether she would ever do so again.

 

 

 

“MIKANTOR, YOU NEED TO go back into the hut. Someone is waiting for you.”

Hearing an odd tone in Ganath’s voice, Mikantor turned. His friend’s expression was strange as well, a mingling of consternation and amusement. But at least it was not the superstitious awe with which everyone, even his Companions, had looked at him yesterday.

All around them, the folk of the old blood who had gathered for the ritual were packing to return to their homes. The space beside the firepit was heaped with gifts they had left for him. Mikantor was still trying to understand what their allegiance would mean. Three clansmen were packing the gifts onto the sturdy ponies that roamed the moors. They had promised guides and supplies and a dry place to shelter over the winter for him and his band.

He started to say that he had no time, but the look in his friend’s eyes deterred him. Yesterday he had been limp with exhaustion from the hunt and the night that followed. But he could afford no more self-indulgence, and especially no more time trying to remember exactly what had happened in the cave. Few men received such a blessing even once, much less remembered or repeated it. The cure was to keep busy until the longing went away.

“All right, but you will have to keep at the men to get ready. Our guides must not be kept waiting.”

Limping a little from the wound in his thigh, he crossed the clearing and ducked through the door of the hut they had built for him. A woman was sitting beside the fire, wrapped in a cloak with a woolen scarf over her hair. He stopped short, eyes widening, as she rose to her feet and the scarf fell away to reveal a pale face and curling golden hair.

“Tirilan? What are you doing here? Did you come to see the ceremony? I did not see you there. . . .” His babble failed as she unwrapped the thing she had been holding and held it out to him.

“I came to return something to you. . . .”

A leather sheath.
The
sheath for the flint knife that they had not been able to find when the elders came to take him from the cave. He took a step toward her and staggered as his stiffened leg lagged.

“Does the wound trouble you?” she said swiftly. “Have they tended it properly? Let me see—”

“No, no. It’s fine, just stiff—
Tirilan
!” He caught her hands and held them, trying to sense truth through the contact of skin to skin as he was trying to hear in her voice the sweetness that he half remembered. “Does Anderle know you are here?”

“She knows. . . .”

“Did she
send
you?”

“She did not send me
here.”
said Tirilan.

“It was you, in the cave?” he breathed, beginning to understand, though he was not yet quite ready to believe.

“In the cave it was the Goddess and Her Chosen,” Tirilan said softly. “I believe that it is Her will that I stay with you. You said I might pray for your protection. I will do that better where I can see you.”

Mikantor shook his head, exasperation, pity, and an odd excitement struggling for mastery.

“You don’t understand. I am only a man.”

She shrugged. “I know that—I remember when you were a snot-nosed brat. But I also remember how you called the thunder. When you do not believe in yourself, I will believe for you. When I look at you, I still see the god.”

An unwelcome thought came to him. “Has your mother cast you out?”

Tiri grimaced. “She was not pleased. You do not have to take me—” she went on, “but I promise I can walk as far and sleep as rough as any of your men. And I am trained as a healer.”

He looked down at her and did not know what he felt, except that despite her brave words, just now she needed his protection.

“So . . . so . . .” He put an arm around her and drew her against him, simultaneously disappointed and relieved that at this moment his chief response was a rueful affection. “You shall come with me, then, and may the gods help any who would stand against us!”

TWENTY

T
irilan had turned her back on Avalon, but the lee of another tor had become her new home. She still found that strange. The moors northeast of Belerion were studded with rounded granite outcrops that thrust up from the soil. Best of all, they were solid ground, unlike so much of the moorland, which was a mix of peat bog and mire that could suck down a sheep, or a man. Today the land was covered with the white of last night’s snowfall. Tirilan squinted against the blaze of sunlight on that glistening white blanket, and pulled her faithful gray cloak tightly around her to keep out the wind.

Mikantor was out there somewhere, on his way back from the next village, where he had taken some of their extra food. Winter had bit deeply on the moors, and while some of the men muttered that the supplies they had brought with them were for their own survival, Mikantor stood firm. The moor clans had welcomed them and helped them to rebuild their dwellings. The only way for all of them to prosper was to share.

Tirilan did not begrudge the food, but the moors were doubly treacherous when covered with snow. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, taking the shape of a swan to send her spirit out in protection. This, at least, was something she could do for him. Their blankets were laid on the raised platform to the right of the hearth, but they did not share them. She had not expected to do so when they were traveling, but by the time they reached the moors the habit of separation had become a barrier that he apparently did not wish to break. He never touched her. Did he know how she longed for some small sign of affection? She would never have believed that two people could live side by side in such silence. If nothing had changed by spring, she might just as well admit that her mother was right and go home to Avalon.

The wind had come up, swirling the light snow as if to give form to the spirits she sensed dancing across the land. Once, these highlands had been a patchwork of field and pasture, with many villages built from the abundant native stone. But the place where the moor folk had settled Mikantor and his Companions had been long abandoned. They had rebuilt some of the house circles and called it Gorsefield, from the amount of prickly brush they had to clear. From the tor she could see the shimmer of smoke that filtered through their thatched roofs. When the climate worsened, most of the people had been driven down to the coasts. Now, only a few clans of the elder folk stayed here, herding their sheep across the hills.

“Goddess,” she whispered. “Enjoy your lovely white garment, but send our men home safely, and soon.”

It was a bitter truth that from their danger came their safety, for if travel on the moors was hazardous even with the clansman Curlew for their guide, it was certain that no enemy could attack them. And this corner of the country was rich in ancestral spirits, who haunted the standing stones they had left behind them, each capped now with its own helmet of snow. A league to the north stood the barrow of the Three Queens—the ancient Mothers who still watched over the land. It was a place where the power of the Goddess was strong. And it lay beside the current of power that ran from the tip of Belerion all the way through Avalon and across the land.

Another gust of wind sent a cold draft up her back. It was time to go home.

 

 

 

MIKANTOR SAID FAREWELL TO Pelicar and ducked into the angled entry of the house he shared with Tirilan, silently praising the ingenuity of the original builders, who had put all their entrances facing downhill to help with drainage, away from the prevailing wind. Behind him he heard the shouts as those who had stayed welcomed the others. He paused, gathering his resolution to face her. Living with her over these past months had made him acutely aware of her as a physical being, and his body responded accordingly, and yet he could never forget that she was a priestess, bound by her vows. He stamped the snow from his feet and hung his cape of tightly woven natural wool on a hook beneath the overhang before pushing past the hide that curtained the door.

“Did the meeting go well?” Tirilan looked up as he came in. She was mending one of his tunics. His breath caught as he saw how the flicker of the fire burnished the smooth planes of her face and her shining hair.

He shrugged off his sheepskin coat and hung it up. Fingers and feet were beginning to throb in the warmth of the room.

“Lycoren seems to be reliable, and he hates Galid. When we come down from the moors in the spring he has promised to join us with his band.”

The Ai-Akhsi leader was the third chieftain who had made his way to this wilderness to pledge his support. The queens and their war leaders were still preserving an official neutrality, but word of the Running of the Deer had spread among the people. By spring, Mikantor might find himself leading a small army.

“I expect you could use something hot right now. I have a bag of yarrow tea steeping in the cooking hole—I’ll just put in another rock to bring it to a boil.” She set the tunic aside and with a deft flick slid the tines of an antler under the round piece of granite that had been heating among the coals. Another practiced twist dropped it hissing into the water that filled the stone-lined depression by the hearth, one of the amenities the long-dead builders of this place had left behind.

“I went up to the tor this morning,” she observed, dipping up tea and filling one of the clay beakers they had brought with them. “The view was wonderful. This land is hard, but there is beauty here.”

“Beauty, and fear,” he agreed. “On the way back, Curlew was telling us about the spirits of the moors. I’m not sure whether he meant to warn or frighten us. He says there’s a monstrous black dog that can run a man down.”

“That sounds like the demon Guayota about whom they have such tales among the tribes,” she replied. “Old Kiri used to tell us some truly scary stories—”

As Tirilan continued to talk, he took the beaker and sat down on the sleeping ledge, casting a surreptitious glance behind him. The sheepskins and blankets in which they slept were arranged, as always, in two neat piles. He sighed and stretched out his feet toward the fire. The men all assumed that he was sleeping with her, and the best way to protect her seemed to be to let them think so. But she took such pains to avoid any show of flesh that might arouse him, he had no reason to believe she would welcome his advances. Living with her day by day, he had finally come to understand that he loved her as much as he did Velantos. But he understood the smith. Tirilan was still a mystery. They had left Anderle behind, he thought bitterly, but her daughter was still bound by Avalon’s rules.

 

 

 

TIRILAN SHIVERED AS THE roof beams flexed to another gust of wind. The houses were sturdy, with a rubble filling between two shells of stone slabs and a lining of wooden planks or sheepskins to insulate them within. The walls had been easy to repair. It was only the roofs that were a problem, for poles long enough to attain the proper pitch were hard to come by on the moors. There were spirits in that wind, she thought grimly, whose icy fingers plucked at the bindings to spin the thatch away.

The moon that followed Midwinter had brought one storm after another, swirling drifts man-high in one place, while others were swept bare, hiding the shape of the land even from those who knew it well. Stocks of food and fuel were getting low. Some of the men muttered that they should have stayed in the marshes, where they might be wet, but at least they would not freeze. She broke off a corner from the slab of peat and eased it into the fire, then picked up her spindle once more. Her fingers were almost too cold to grasp the wool, though she was already wearing every garment she owned, but she would not use more fuel while she sat here alone.

Mikantor and most of the other men were out there somewhere, searching for Pelicar and Romen, who had gone out to hunt that morning and had not returned. One could hope that the freezing weather had also hardened the surface of the bogs, but there were a hundred other ways a man could die in this land. They had been gone for so long! She yanked more wool from her basket and loosely joined it to the end of the fiber that dangled from her spindle.