As soon as I set eyes on ho-, without pause for thought or any kind of consideration, I spun on my heel and walked hurriedly away, afraid that she might turn and see me there. Even as I did so I was cursing myself for my cowardice, instantly angered at myself for thus cravenly fleeing the sight of a harmless young woman. It would not be accurate simply to say I was surprised and dismayed to find her there in my quarters, although I was—I was actually appalled, and I found the strength of my reaction startling enough to make me question it. When I did, I found conflicting things, strangely hidden deep inside myself, that did not please me greatly. There was no denying that some part of me had hoped to find her there; another part of me, however, a disconcertingly reproving part, had disdained the idea; and yet another large and unsuspecting part of me* the outward-facing part, appeared to me, upon examination, to have been completely unaware of any thought of her.
That latter "truth" was an outright lie, of course, and the fact that it was a lie to myself made it the more annoying. Tressa and her alluring charms, her dimpled smile, her high, proud breasts, lithe waist and swelling thighs, had seldom been out of my thoughts since the night of the storm, when I had watched her so studiously during dinner. Confronting and accepting that, at least, enabled me now to look more closely at the second part of how I felt: the disapproving censure of some other, more carefully concealed part of me. Whence had that sprung, and why so virulently?
Thinking these thoughts, I realized that I was striding along the main street of the fort like a man with a mission, and I forced myself to slow my pace until I was ambling, almost dawdling. Several people passed me, nodding silently in greeting, before I came to the rear gate and walked through to pause on the brink of the chasm where I had hovered a short time before, my arms spread like an eagle on the wind. I found a flat-topped stone outcrop, cushioned with moss, and seated myself where I could look down into the valley beneath and let my thoughts take me where they would.
This ability of mine to take myself to task and thus identify the motives that had prompted me towards a certain course of action was one that I had cultivated over long years of assiduous self-examination. I had begun questioning myself and all my motives in response to a withering criticism from my cousin Uther, who had accused me of being far too smug and all too often self-righteous, judgmental and priggish. Determined, with the arrogance of youth, to change my behaviour from that time forward, I had taught myself to question and examine myself mercilessly, coming eventually to know myself too well ever to gull myself for any length of time.
Now I brought this ability to bear upon the matter of this woman, Tressa, and upon my own very real reaction to her. I stripped myself ruthlessly of false denials and pretenses, and the last scales fell from my eyes so that I accepted what I saw, incontrovertibly, to be true: I found the woman unequivocally attractive, and was resolved to yield to the inevitable and act upon the attraction. I was left, however, with an inner conflict on the matter of celibacy, over which I had spent so many agonizing hours in die past few years. Something deep within me, some niggling voice of conscience, was displeased over that abandonment of what had seemed a glowing ideal. Now, treating the discomfort like some inedible remnant from an otherwise delicious stew, I sat there atop the cliff, beneath the high, stone walls of Mediobogdum, and chewed on it, biting and grinding at the gristly elements of my concern until nothing remained but indigestible fragments that I spat out, one by one.
My desire for celibacy—utterly genuine and heartfelt—had sprung from several sources, each of them entirely comprehensible, if not exactly laudable or logical. My lust for Shelagh was a burden I had carried for years, never satisfied and never justifiable, since it involved perfidy and betrayal to my closest friend. My commitment to chastity on that account had been flawless; celibacy, I hoped, would eventually extend that physical chastity to my unconscious thoughts. My guilt and conflict over my memories—and my two-year loss of memory—of my dead wife, while inexplicable, were nonetheless very real, and some deep- hidden part of me had sought a resolution there in celibacy, too, although I found myself incapable of defining or even delineating why I should be feeling any guilt. And then, apart from Shelagh, the only other woman to whom I had felt an attraction, the lovely Ludmilla, had loved and wed my brother Ambrose. I had no guilt there, and no lustful longings, for which I was intensely grateful. Ludmilla was my sister now, and I thought of her as such, with a fraternal love. And yet, I knew, she, too, had played a role in my attraction to the celibate state: I had dared to begin loving her and had lost her before my feelings had a chance to grow. Celibacy would have removed such a threat forever from my future;
Then had come my terrifying brush with the spectre of leprosy and the foulness of contagion. There was a binding and convincing reason for being celibate! But that had passed, with the arrival and relief of Luke's lost parchment and the shrinking size of what I had assumed to be a leper's lesion.
Amidst all these elements, there had been growing and ■ emerging the love and pride I took in young Arthur Pendragon, and the responsibility I felt for giving him all that lay within my mind and my abilities to give. I had believed that celibacy would empty my mind of all that was profane and leave me free to learn and to teach the boy. And then had come this lovely and attractive young woman Tressa.
My reactions to the merest sight of Tressa had confounded me for a time, but then I had begun to lose my fears of her, recognizing them for what they were: simple fears of rejection and of having grown too old, at forty, to be attractive to a young woman.
Beyond that, I had an illogical fear that the mere admission of being physically attracted to a woman could somehow endow that woman with power over me, and that fear persisted despite the fact that the logical part of me knew it to be untrue—Shelagh was proof of that. I also knew that being attracted by this Tressa woman was a far cry from allowing myself to be besotted by her; I knew my intellect would arm me with the means to keep myself protected from her wiles and knew, besides, that she could be no match for me in such matters. Her speech was slow and simple, her demeanour humble and submissive and her manner deferential and respectful. Her presence, therefore, might be pleasantly distracting, but it could be in no wise threatening, now that I had defined the terms within which I might deal with it.
Having settled my mind to a great degree, I turned again and walked slowly back to my quarters, where I found Tressa working still, setting the place in order against my return. I greeted her calmly, noting the pleasure with which she greeted me, and then attempted to ignore her for the time being, an effort doomed to fail because I was acutely aware of the brightness of the yellow smock she wore, and of her physical proximity.
Once I had assured her that her presence would not disturb me, I seated myself at a small table by one of the windows and busied myself with reading one of Uncle Varrus's large books, while she continued to bustle about, fulfilling the tasks set out for her by Shelagh. In so doing, however, she passed quite close to me on several occasions, and I became acutely aware of how the smell of her filled up the air between us and suffused my breathing. She had a pleasant smell, warm and clean and faintly musky with the suggestion of fresh sweat. I tried to shut it from my consciousness, but the mere awareness of it had awakened in me the realization that I sat there naked, having come from the bathhouse unclothed save for my tunic, and I found myself becoming uncomfortably engorged with lust and blank-minded with helplessness.