I struggled to resist — drugged, enchanted, whatever I was, I strove to fight her; and I am not weak-willed. She must have felt the struggle in me. Her arms were around my neck, and she laughed, softly and crooningly. “Na na, there is no need that you should be afraid. I will tell you my name in exchange for yours; if I were one of Them, I could not do that, for it would give you power over me.”
“I do not think I want to know it.” I dragged the words out,
“But you must; it is too late now. . . . I am called Ygerna,” and she began to sing, very softly, almost under her breath. It might have been a spell — maybe it was, in its way — but it only sounded like a singing rhyme that I had known all my life; a small caressing song that the women sing to their children, playing with their toes at sleeping time. Her voice was sweet and soft as wild honey; a dark voice:
The song and the voice were calling to me, calling to the part of me that had its roots in my mother’s world, offering the perfect and complete homecoming that I had failed to find. The Dark Side, I had called it, the women’s side, the side nearest to the heart. It was calling to me now, arms wide and welcoming, through the woman lying across my knee, finally claiming me, so that the things I had cared about before the mist came down were forgotten; so that I rose when she did and stumbled after her to the piled sheepskins against the wall.
When I awoke, I was lying still fully clothed on the bed place, and the leather apron had been freed from its pegs and drawn back from the doorway; and in the gray light of dawn that watered the shadows, I saw the woman sitting beside me, once again with her stillness upon her, as though she had been waiting maybe a lifetime or so for me to waken.
I smiled at her, not desiring her any more, but satisfied, and remembering the fierce joy of her body answering mine in the darkness. She looked back at me with no answering smile, her eyes no longer blue but merely dark in the leaden light, the discolored lids more deeply stained than ever. I came to my elbow, aware, without full looking, of Cabal lying still asleep beside the hearth, the fire burned out to frilled white ash, and the cup with its silver rim lying where it had fallen among the fern. And in the woman, too, it seemed that the fires were burned out and cold, deadly and dreadfully cold. A chill fell on me as I looked at her, and the thought came back to me of waking on a bare mountainside. . . .
“I have waited a long time for you to wake,” she said without moving.
I glanced at the light that was still colorless as moonstone beyond the doorway. “It is still early.”
“Maybe I did not sleep as sound as you.” And then, “If I bear you a son, what would you have me call him?”
I stared at her, and she smiled now, a small bitter twisting of the lips. “Did you not think of that? You who were chance-begotten under a hawthorn bush?”
“No,” I said slowly. “No, I did not think. Tell me what you would have me do. Anything that I can give you —”
“I do not ask for payment; none save that I may show you this.” She had been holding something hidden between her two hands; and now she opened them and held out what they contained. And I saw that it was a massive arm ring of red gold, twisted and coiled into the likeness of the Red Dragon of Britain. I had seen the mate of it on Ambrosius’s arm every day of my life. “On a morning such as this one, Utha, your father and mine, gave this ring to my mother before he rode on his way.”
It was a long moment before I understood the full meaning of her words. And then I felt sick. I drew my legs under me and got up, pressing back from her, while she sat watching me under her dark cloak of hair. “I do not believe you,” I managed at last. But I knew that I did believe her; the look in her face told me that if she had never told the truth in her whole life, she was telling it now; and I knew at last, now that it was too late, that the likeness that had so puzzled me was to Ambrosius. And she had known; all the while she had known. I heard someone groan and scarcely knew that it was me. My mouth felt stiff and dry, so that I could scarcely form the words that were in my throat. “Why — what made you do it?”
She sat playing with the dragon arm ring between her hands, turning and turning it, just as Ambrosius had done, that night in Venta. “There could be two good reasons. One is love, and the other, hate.”
“I never harmed you.”
“No? For the wrong, then, that Utha, Prince of Britain, did to my mother before you were born. Your mother died at your coming — oh, I know — and because you were a son, bastard or no, your father took and reared you at his hearth, and so you see the thing with your father’s eyes. But I was only a daughter; I was not taken from my mother, and she lived long enough to teach me to hate, where once she had loved.”
I wanted to look away, not to stare into her face any more, but I could not turn my eyes from her. She had given me her body in a kind of flaming and devouring ecstasy, last night; and it was an ecstasy of hate, as potent as ever that of love could have been. I smelled hate all about me, tangible as the smell of fear in a confined space. And then, as though at last the veil were torn aside, I saw what was behind her eyes. I saw a woman and a child, a woman and a girl, beside the peat fire in this place, the one teaching and the other absorbing that caressing, soul-destroying lesson of hate. All at once I saw that what I had taken for the ruins of beauty in Ygerna’s face was the promise of beauty that had been cankered before ever it could come to flowering, and for one instant pity mingled with the horror that was rising like vomit in my throat. But the two figures in the peat smoke were changing, the girl becoming the mother, and in her place a boy, with his face, his whole soul, turned to hers, drinking in the same lesson. Dear God! What had I let loose? What had my father let loose before me, into the world?
“If it is a boy,” said Ygerna, and her gaze went beyond me, as though she too were seeing past and future, “I shall call him — Medraut. I had a little white rat with rose-red eyes called Medraut, when I was a child. And when he is a man, I will send him to you. May you have much joy of your son when that day comes, my lord.”
Without knowing it, my hand had been fumbling with the hilt of my sword which had lain beside me — strange that she had not disarmed me while I slept. My fingers tightened on it, and it was half out of the wolfskin sheath. A little hammer was beating in my head. “I should like — very much — to kill you!” I whispered.
She swept up from the floor, dragging back the torn breast of her gown. “Why do you not then? See, here is the place. I will not cry out. You can be well away from the steading before my servants find what is left.” All at once there was a wailing note in her voice. “It might be the best way for both of us. Now — kill me now!”