I Am Morgan le Fay (10 page)

Three brief misty summers, three freezing winters, and every single day of those three years I brushed Annie and combed her mane and tail and cleaned her pretty face with a soft cloth and talked to her as if she were my best friend as I plaited her forelock between her sweet eyes. Year by year Annie's mane grew more silver, like Ongwynn's hair, her dapplings a lighter, brighter, more shining gray, her dark eyes more patient and wise. When I rode her to the distant village to barter fish or salt for the few things we needed—bolts of ticking for pallets, skeins of thread, spice for pickling, bodkins, fishhooks—when I rode her where folk might see her, I braided locks of her mane and tail as well, and bound them with red thread. This was folly, to draw attention so, and even the more folly that I rode alone and astride, but I could not seem to help it; I felt as if I must adorn Annie for Thomas's sake and ride her proudly as he would have done. Even though I wore a plain brown woolen frock like any peasant girl and hid my hair under a muslin cap, folk stared at me whenever I passed.

But in truth, any stranger would have been noticed in those lonely parts. “Who be ye, lass?” asked the goodwife from whom I bartered a setting of chicks.

I told her a name not my own. Meg or Peg, a commoner name; it doesn't matter what.

“Where be ye from?” These folk spoke an outlandish dialect; I could barely understand them.

“Ongwynn's hill.”

She startled like a deer and flinched away from me. “Are ye a witch?” she gasped.

“No.”

“Has—has the healer returned?”

“No.” This was what Ongwynn had told me to say.

After word got around, I sometimes saw folk furtively cross themselves to ward off evil eye in my presence. Few spoke with me a word more than they had to. None of them came near Caer Ongwynn. This was as Ongwynn wished it.

Other than a few times a year when I rode Annie on such errands, I saw no one, spoke to no one except my sister and Ongwynn. I lived as if in a holy cell. And I say this not with regret, but with gratitude. In those years I learned knowledges forbidden to other women. Even my queen mother Igraine could not have learned such mysteries as I did.

The knowledges lived in the wooden chests stacked in the innermost chamber, the trunks Morgause and I had tried to open and could not. The day after Thomas left, Ongwynn led us into that chamber and opened the domed top of the uppermost chest with a touch.

“How did you do that?” I demanded.

Ongwynn gave her slow smile but did not answer.

“There's a spell on them,” Morgause said. “There must be. See how they didn't rot like the wooden buckets and such.”

Astonishment fraught me; Morgause had a brain? Morgause had thought of something that had not occurred to me? The realization shocked and mortified me silent as Ongwynn lifted from the chest its treasure.

Books.

Volumes great and small bound in tooled leather red or brown or black, sometimes inlaid with gold. I had seen books a few times before, in my father's chamber when he was alive and in Lord Steward Redburke's possession since, but never such elegant books, so many books—and in the possession of a woman? A common Cornishwoman? Books were not for commoners or women; everyone knew that. Yet there they were, in Ongwynn's hands, and she passed them to us as if they were meat pasties she was taking out of the oven. “Put them on the table.”

We did, and ran back to find her bringing forth inks and vellums and quills such as scribes used. And when we had placed those on the table and returned, we found her lifting from the next chest rolled parchments limned with charts. And each trunk after that contained more wonders, wonders upon wonders that I could not yet begin to understand: circles within circles of gold orbs on gold wires, and vessels made of crystal, and a square block of polished wood inlaid with black tiles and white, and many figures carved from black walnut and pale ash wood. I gasped over these and took them one by one in my hands and saw nothing else for a while except a miniature carved white knight on a rearing charger, a black knight brandishing his sword, a grave bearded king under a heavy crown, a queen—oh, but the white queen was beautiful and sad and so much like my mother Igraine.

Always I tried not to think of my mother or wonder where she might be.

“What are the beads for?” Morgause asked behind me.

“To do sums upon.”

My head snapped up, for an excitement I could not yet name jarred my spine. With the sad white queen still in my hand I spun to face Ongwynn. “For who to do sums?”

Some lord's steward, some king's seneschal, might do sums; why was I asking such a simpleminded question? Ongwynn would think I was stupid. She would say—

She said, “Me. You.”

My jaw dropped so far I felt it click. I think Morgause could not speak either, for she did not.

“Come,” said Ongwynn, and she led us to the table, where the books and inks and quill pens and vellums lay. She gestured for us to sit on the bench, and before each of us she placed a scrap of parchment and a pen. “We'll start with letters,” she said.

Morgause gasped, “You're
lettered?”

“Yes.”

We gawked at her like simpletons.

“And so shall you be,” she said.

The excitement bubbled and seethed within me like broth in the pot. To be lettered, like a scribe or a druid or a nobleman—it was an enormity, yet there was no denying that I desired—no, I yearned, I lusted for this learning as I had never lusted for the learning of loom or spinning wheel or embroidery. Thread and cloth were ordinary—worse than ordinary; they were women's affairs. But letters! Letters were for lords and kings. And something in me blazed fiery jealous and joyous at the thought: Why ever should they have what I did not?

“But you must keep the secret,” Ongwynn added, “as I have.”

We nodded. We knew that what we were doing was unheard-of—although in Caer Ongwynn it seemed possible; anything seemed possible there. Every night we left a food offering in the golden goblet that stood alone in the western chamber, a goblet fit for a king, and every morning the offering had been accepted, and every day unseen servants took care of half our needs. This was a place of powerful protection, and therefore a place where marvels could be ventured.

Only gradually did I come to understand that letters were a power and a magic just as surely as my milpreve was a tool of fearsome power. No wonder kings and lords denied letters to commoners and women.

Ongwynn showed us how to use our pens and started us practicing
Morgan and Morgause,
then sat and chose a book—small, bound in red leather tooled and illuminated with gold—and she opened it and began to read aloud.

Because there was no need for her to find the words and pull them out of herself, because the book, or the unknown scribe who made the book, spoke through her, she spoke on steadily, strongly. She was no longer Nurse when she read aloud to us. She was no longer even Ongwynn. She became—something more. A druid, as she read to us the words of the druids:

O
NGWYNN,“ I DEMANDED, ”TEACH ME POWER.“

Sitting as stolid as a mountain across the table from me, she did not answer or even look at me, for she was contemplating her next move. Her stubby hand rested on the carved white queen whose sad, symmetrical face always made me think of my mother, which always made me try to think of other things.

In a clear, lilting voice Morgause read to Ongwynn and me as we played chess:
“But to the old queen, no mortal princess was beautiful enough for her son the prince, the king who would be. In every damsel with whom he danced she saw some flaw, whether hair less glorious than the sun or eyes less shining than the stars or bearing less graceful than that of a swallow on the wind. Dis ...
Ongwynn, what is this word?”

Ongwynn gave her a quiet look.

“I know, I know.” Morgause rolled her eyes and stared at the word, trying to puzzle it out. I jumped up and looked over her shoulder to see if I knew it. We were rivals at letters, Morgause and I, and therefore we learned quickly.

She got it first.
“Discontentment. Discontentment for her son's sake harrowed her
—
”

I stuck out my tongue at her as I sat down. She whacked at me with the book and missed. Ignoring us, Ongwynn sat studying the chessboard. She still had not made her move. There was no hurry—not that Ongwynn ever hurried. But in wintertime particularly there was no hurry. During the short summers we were outdoors dawn to dusk with the chickens, the garden, picking wild strawberries and currants, scraping salt from the seaside rocks, gathering mussels, netting fish and drying them—but now the sleet pattered against the sealskin hung over the portal, snow and ice blanketed Ongwynn's hollow hill, and none of us were going anywhere for a while except to check on Annie in her snug little stable under the cliff, feed her dried seaweed and carrots, and bring in more firewood.

Ongwynn moved the white queen and said, “Check.”

Blast. Such was the power of the queen, to strike from afar, while the king barely moved and had to be protected at all times. Yet my mother...

Morgause was reading,
“... at the end of the seven days the prince entered the queen's chamber to find his mother lying abed, smiling upon him as she died. And kneeling beside her, holding her frail hand, there gazed up at him a damsel more beautiful than any he had ever seen or could ever imagine, a damsel with skin like the most tender petals of the wild rose, eyes the color of violets shining with dew ...”

I castled my king to get him out of check. Stupid, timid king. Queen, knights, druids, men-at-arms all devoted to protecting him and fighting his battles—for what purpose?

The wind and icy rain seethed against the doorflap, the chickens huddled and drowsed in their mess of straw just inside the door, from somewhere behind my back I heard the whisperings and gigglings of the denizens, the piskies who might mend the hole in my stocking while I slept, or then again they might not, and I knew better than to turn and look; it would be wasted effort, and they would laugh aloud, for I would never see them.

This was my third winter at Caer Ongwynn and much the same as the first two. Morgause read in her tuneful voice, and later maybe we would sing a ballad or two just to defy the howling of the wind, and meanwhile I dreamed of warm, green, heather, larkspur, the earth a flower woman—yet I knew that spring would bring war again. Every time I rode Annie to the village I heard of battles, death, war and rumor of war. Winter was long, but at least it brought peace.

I wondered where Thomas was. How he fared. Whether he lived.

Morgause read,
“ ‘Her name is Blossom,' said the queen. ‘She is yours. She will do anything you desire, but she cannot speak. That you must never ask of her. I love you, my son.' Then the queen died, for she had given over her vital power to the damsel made of flowers.”

I said to Ongwynn again, “Teach me power.” I did not know how I would use it, but it would not be to make a damsel out of flowers.

Ongwynn glanced up from the board and gave me a flat look. “I am.”

“This? A game of chess?” I lifted the queen carved of black walnut, her face as lovely as the white queen's but more grim. “Am I to hide a king behind my skirts someday? Did my mother—” But I had not meant to speak of my mother. I faltered into silence.

Ongwynn regarded me steadily now, her silence meshing with mine. Morgause stopped reading to listen.

After she had thought of the words, Ongwynn said, “Your mother loved your father.”