Marion Bradley - The Mists of Avalon

She had had her eye on this one for months; his name was Cormac, and he was tall and young, with a hawklike face and strong shoulders and thighs. But it seemed to Morgause now that all men were stupid, she would have done better to leave Cormac at home and lead this party herself. But there were things even the Queen of Lothian could not do.

"I do not recognize any of these roads. Yet I know from the distance we have ridden this day that we must be near to Camelot-unless you have somehow lost your way in the fog and we are riding northward again, Cormac?"

Under ordinary conditions she would have welcomed another night on the road, in her comfortable pavilion, with all the comforts she could provide, and perhaps, when all her women slept, this Cormac to warm her bed.

Since I found the way to sorcery, all men are at my feet. Yet now, it seems, I care for none ... strange, I have sought out no man since word came to me of Lamorak's death. Am I growing old? She recoiled from the thought, and resolved she would have Cormac with her tonight ... but first they must reach Camelot; she must act there to protect Gwydion's interest and to advise him. She said impatiently, "The road must be here, dolt. I have made this journey more times than I have fingers on my two hands! Do you think me a fool?"

"God forbid, madam. And I too have ridden this road often, yet somehow, it seems, we are lost," Cormac said, and Morgause felt she would choke with her exasperation. Mentally she retraced the road she had travelled so often from Lothian, leaving the Roman road and taking the well-travelled way along the edge of the marshes to Dragon Island, then along the ridge till they should strike the road to Camelot, which Arthur had had broadened and resurfaced until it was almost as good as the old Roman road.

"Yet somehow you have missed the Camelot road, dolt, for there is that old fragment of Roman wall ... somehow or other we are half an hour's ride past the turn to Camelot," Morgause scolded. There was no help for it now but to turn the whole caravan about, and already darkness was closing down. Morgause drew up her hood over her head and urged her plodding horse through the grey lowering twilight. At this time of year there should have been another hour of sunlight, but there was only the faintest glimmer of light in the west.

"Here it lies," said one of her women. "See, that clump of four apple trees-I came here one summer to take a graft of apples for the Queen's garden."

But there was no road, only a little track winding upward on a barren hill, where there should be a broad road, and above it, even through mist, there should have been the lights of Camelot.

"Nonsense," she said brusquely, "we have lost the way, somehow- are you trying to tell me that there is no more than one clump of four apple trees in Arthur's kingdom?"

"Yet that is where the road ought to be, I swear it," grumbled Cormac, but he got the whole line of riders, horses, and pack animals into motion again and they plodded on, rain coming down and down as if it had been coming down since the beginning of time and had forgotten how to stop. Morgause was cold and weary, longing for hot supper at Gwenhwyfar's table and hot mulled wine and a soft bed, and when Cormac rode up to her again she demanded crossly, "What now, dolt? Have you managed to lose us again, and miss a wide wagon road once more?"

"My queen, I am sorry, but somehow-look, we are back again where we paused to rest the horses after we turned off the Roman road-that bit of rag I dropped, I'd been using it to clean the muck off one of the packs."

Her wrath exploded. "Was ever a queen plagued with so many damnable fools about her?" she shouted. "Must we look for the biggest city north of Londinium all over the Summer Country? Or must we ride back and forth on this road all night? If we cannot see Camelot's lights in the dark, we could at least hear it, a castle with more than a hundred knights and serving-men, horses and cattle, Arthur's men patrolling all the roads about -everything that moves on this road is clearly in sight of his watchtowers!"

Yet in the end there was nothing to do but to have lanterns lighted and turn southward again; Morgause herself rode at the head of the line, next to Cormac. The fog and rain seemed to damp out all sound, even echoes, until, through the foggy rain, they found themselves again at the ruined patch of Roman wall where they had turned about before. Cormac swore, but he sounded frightened too.

"Lady, I am sorry, I cannot understand it-"

"Damnation seize you all!" Morgause shrieked at him. "Will you have us riding hither and thither on this road all night?" Yet she too recognized the ruined wall. She drew a long breath, exasperation and resignation in one. "Perhaps by morning the rain will have ended, and if we must we can retrace our steps to the Roman wall. At least we will know where we have come!"

"If indeed we have come anywhere and have not wandered somehow into the fairy country," murmured one of the women, surreptitiously crossing herself. Morgause saw the gesture, but she only said, "No more of that! It's bad enough to be lost in the rain and fog without such idiot nonsense! Well, why are you all standing about? We can ride no more tonight, make haste to camp here, and in the morning we will know what to do."

She had intended to call Cormac to her, if only that she might have no leisure for the fear that had begun to steal through her... had they indeed come out of the real world into the unknown? Yet she did not, lying alone and wakeful among her women, restless, mentally retracing all the steps of their journey. There was no sound in the night, not even the calling of frogs from the marshes. 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.

Sometime in the night, the rain stopped; when day broke, although damp mist was rising everywhere, the sky was free of cloud. Morgause woke from a fitful doze, a dream of Morgaine, greying and old, looking into a mirror like her own, and went out of her pavilion, hoping that she would look up the hill and find that Camelot was, indeed, where it should have been, the broad road leading up to the towers of Arthur's castle, or else that they were on some unknown road clearly miles and miles from where they should have been. But they were camped by the ruined Roman wall, which she knew to be about a mile south from Camelot, and as horses and men prepared to ride, she looked up at the hill which should have been Camelot; but the hill was green and grass-grown and featureless.

They rode slowly along the road, muddy with the many tracks where they had ridden back and forth half the night. A flock of sheep grazed in a field, but when Morgause's man went to speak with the shepherd, the man hid behind a rock wall and would not be coaxed out.

"And this is Arthur's peace?" Morgause wondered aloud. "I think, my lady," said Cormac with deference, "there must be some enchantment here-whatever it is, this is not Camelot."

"Then in God's name, what is it?" asked Morgause, but he only muttered, "In God's name, what indeed?" and had no further answer for her. She looked upward again, listening to the frightened whimpering of one of her women. For a moment it was as if Viviane spoke again in her mind, saying what Morgause had never more than half believed, that Avalon had gone into the mists, and that if one set out there, either Druid or priestess, and not knowing the way, one would come only to the priests' Isle of Glastonbury ... .