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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.
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.
No woman knows, when she lies down to childbirth, whether her life will not be demanded of her at the hands of the Goddess.
What wise God would consign a man to Hell for ignorance, instead of teaching him better in the afterlife?”
But a diet free of animal flesh produces a high level of consciousness, and this you must have while you are learning to use the Sight and to control your magical powers rather than letting them control you.
But a Lady of Avalon bends the knee to no human power. The Merlin would kneel, and so would Kevin if he were asked; Viviane, never, for she was not only the priestess of the Goddess, but incorporated the Goddess within herself in a way the man-priests of male Gods could never know or understand. And so Morgaine also would never kneel again.
“What must I swear, Lady?” “Only this: to deal fairly with all men, whether or no they follow the God of the Christians, and always to reverence the Gods of Avalon. For whatever the Christians say, Arthur Pendragon, and whatever they may call their God, all the Gods are as one God, and all the Goddesses but one Goddess. Swear only to be true to that truth, and not to cling to one and despise another.”
“Beware what you speak,” said the Merlin very softly, “for indeed the words we speak make shadows of what is to come, and by speaking them we bring them to pass, my king.”
Morgaine, as all mothers when a child cries, opened her eyes at the sound. She was almost too weak to move, but she whispered, “My baby—is that my baby? Morgause, I want to hold my baby.”
all the tears women shed, they leave no mark on the world, she thought in bitterness.
Arthur had returned physically after his long absence, but as all men do, he had grown so far from her that there was no longer any way to reach across that distance.
We will do the best we can. We are none of us embarked on this course for our own happiness, my child.
All women, indeed, are sisters under the Goddess.
Morgaine chuckled. “You Christians are overfond of that word unseemly, especially when it relates to women,” she said. “If music is evil, then it is evil for men as well; and if it is a good thing, should not women do all the good things they can do, to make up for their supposed sin at the beginning of the world?”
“I would say that any man without an ear for music is an ignorant ass indeed, since without it he does not speak but brays,”
Through the ache and hunger of her love, a faint strain of contempt was threading, and it was the greatest agony of all—that she loved him no less, that she knew she would love him always, no less than at this moment of hunger and despair.
there were neither Gods nor Goddess, but these were the shapes mankind gives, in terror, to what they cannot make into reason.
But for myself—no doubt you know that at a certain level of the Mysteries, what is eaten has so much effect on the mind—I dare not eat meat now, it makes me drunker than too much wine!”
Kevin shrugged. “You are my vowed sister in Avalon—what I have is yours, so runs the law. There is no talk of payment between us.” Morgaine felt herself coloring in shame, that Kevin should so remind her of what she had sworn. I have been out of the world, in truth.
Only there were times when it blurred before her eyes, so that she saw the Tor crowned with ring stones.
From time out of mind, a queen had ruled over the people, as a Goddess had ruled over the Gods, and they were content to have it so.
And when all was said and done, when the lamp was out, one man was not so different from any other, and all of them were ridiculously easy to manage, foolishly dependent on that thing a woman could offer to them.
Many of the royal lines of these islands, among the Druids, have been preserved in you, and if you are worthy, a great destiny awaits you. But you must be worthy—royal blood alone makes not a king, but courage, and wisdom, and farsightedness. I tell you, Gwydion, that he who wears the dragon may be more of a king than he who sits on a throne, for the throne may be won by force of arms, or by craft, or as Lot won it, by being born in the right bed and begot by the right king. But the Great Dragon can be won only by one’s own efforts, not in this life alone, but those which have gone before. I
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“I am saying, Lady,” said Kevin, deferentially, but firmly, “that it may even now be too late to prevent it—Avalon will always be there for all men to find if they can seek the way thither, throughout all the ages past the ages. If they cannot find the way to Avalon, it is a sign, perhaps, that they are not ready.”
Desire must go two ways or it is worthless.
Morgaine, kneeling quietly in her place, thought, Why, it was the Sight that came upon them and they did not understand it. Nor had they cared to understand; to them it only proved that their God was greater than other Gods. Now the priest was talking of the last days of the world, how God would pour out his gifts of vision and prophecy, but she wondered if any of these Christians knew how commonplace all these gifts were, after all? Anyone could master these powers when he had demonstrated that he could use them suitably. But that did not include trying to astonish the common people with
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Pride, she thought drearily, was a cold bedfellow.
She had spoken the unforgivable. But if it is true that this morning he has given me his child to bear . . . and a strange pain struck inward through her body even into her womb. Could anything take root and grow in such bitterness?
Arthur, troubled, looked from Morgaine to Gwenhwyfar. Morgaine said, “Penance? Sin? Do you truly believe that your God is an evil-minded old man, who snoops around to see who lies in bed with another’s wife?”
The year was swinging toward the summer solstice; Morgaine reckoned it up, realizing ruefully that at last the effects of half a lifetime in Avalon were wearing away—the tides no longer ran in her blood.
And then a memory from Avalon surfaced in her mind, something she had not thought of for a decade; one of the Druids, giving instruction in the secret wisdom to the young priestesses, had said, If you would have the message of the Gods to direct your life, look for that which repeats, again and again; for this is the message given you by the Gods, the karmic lesson you must learn for this incarnation. It comes again and again until you have made it part of your soul and your enduring spirit.
“We repeat what we do not repair.”
Can that which was never made nor created by Man, be worshipped under a roof made by human hands?
The hubris of using human architecture as an enclosure for worshiping the ineffable.
“The people of Avalon fast, sometimes, to teach their bodies to do what they are told without making demands it is inconvenient to satisfy—there are times when one must do without food, or water, or sleep, and the body must be the servant of the mind, not the master. The mind cannot be set on holy things, or wisdom, or stilled for the long meditation which opens the mind to other realms, when the body cries out ‘Feed me!’ or ‘I thirst!’ So we teach ourselves to still its clamoring.
Who was yonder old Roman who said, ‘Call no man happy until he is dead’?
I never knew, she thought, I have never known what it was to be only a woman. I have borne a child and I have been married for fourteen years and I have had lovers . . . but I knew nothing, nothing. . .
The world had shifted subtly round them—she had believed this strange ancient land lay at the borders of Avalon, not here in the remote fastnesses of North Wales. Yet a voice said silently in her mind, I am everywhere, and where the hazel reflects in the sacred pool, there am I. She heard Accolon draw in a breath of wonder and awe, and turned to see that the lady of the fairy kingdom was with them, standing straight and silent in her shimmering garment, the crown of bare wicker-withes above her brow. Was it she who spoke, or the lady? There is other testing than the running of the deer . . .
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Or is it only that there are so few of us, now, who were young together?
On fondness for old foes…
The voice was harsh with asperity. “Men never think of what they do, and all the bloody mess women have for men’s pleasure! No, it was all too soon to tell whether it would have been a boy or not, but she had had one fine son, I doubt not she would have borne you another, had she been strong enough and young enough to carry it!”
There is no sorrow like the memory of love and the knowledge that it is gone forever;
Patricius had set up new forms of worship, a view of the world wherein there was no room for the real beauty and mystery of the things of nature. From these Christians who came to us to escape the bigotry of their own kind I learned something, at last, of the Nazarene, the carpenter’s son who had attained Godhead in his own life and preached a rule of tolerance; and so I came to see that my quarrel was never with the Christ, but with his foolish and narrow priests who mistook their own narrowness for his.
There is a magic that comes with yielding to life.
Yielding to life.
So passes the last of the great Merlins, into the storm that breaks now over Avalon.
Death of Kevin and the Merlins.
It was not possible to lose the whole city of Camelot; yet it had vanished into nowhere. Or was it she herself, with all her men and ladies and horses, who had vanished into the world of sorcery? And every time she came to that point in her thoughts she would wish that she had not allowed her anger with Cormac to set him to watching over the camp; if he were lying here beside her, she would not have that terrifying sense of the world somehow insanely out of joint . . . again and again she tried to sleep and found herself restlessly staring, wide awake, into the dark.
Camelot, lost to the mists, lolling in memory.
