The Mists of Avalon

Even in high summer, Tintagel was a haunted place. Ygraine, Lady of Duke Gaulois, looked out over the sea from the headland. As she stared into the fogs and mists, she wondered how she would ever know when the night and day were of equal length, so that she could keep the feast of the new year. This year, the spring storms had been unusually violent. Night and day, the crash of the sea had resounded over the castle, until no man or woman within could sleep, and even the hounds whimpered mournfully. Tintagel There were still those who believed the castle had been raised on the crags at the far end of the long causeway into the sea by the magic of the ancient folk of Ys. Duke Gaulois laughed at this, and said if he had any of their magic, he would have used it to keep the sea from encroaching year by year upon the shoreline. In the four years since she had come here as Gaulois' bride, Ygraine had seen land, good land, crumble into the Cornish Sea. Long arms of black rock, sharp and craggy, extended into the ocean from the coast. When the sun shone, it could be fair and brilliant, the sky and water as brilliant as the jewels Gaulois had heaped on her on the day when she told him she bore his first child. But Ygraine had never liked wearing them. The jewel which hung now at her throat had been given her in Avalon, a moonstone which sometimes reflected the blue brilliance of sky and sea. But in the fog today, even the jewel looked shadowed. In the fog, sounds carried a long way. It seemed to Ygraine, as she stood looking from the causeway back toward the mainland, that she could hear footfalls of horses and mules, and the sound of voices. Human voices, here in isolated Tintagel, where nothing lived but goats and sheep, and the herdsmen and their dogs and the ladies of the castle with a few serving women and a few old men to guard them. Slowly Ygraine turned and went back towards the castle. As always, standing in its shadow, she felt dwarfed by the loom of these ancient stones at the end of the long causeway which stretched into the sea. The herdsmen believed that the castle had been built by the ancient ones from the lost lands of Lyonnais and Ys. On a clear day, so the fishermen said, their old castles could be seen far out under the water. But to Ygraine, they looked like towers of rock, ancient mountains and hills drowned by the ever-encroaching sea that nibbled away, even now, at the very crags below the castle. Here, at the end of the world, where the sea ate endlessly at the land, it was easy to believe in drowned lands to the west. There were tales of a great fire mountain which had exploded far to the south and engulfed a great land there. Ygraine never knew whether she believed those tales or not. Yes, surely she could hear voices in the fog. It couldn't be savage raiders from over the sea or from the wild shores of Erin. The time was long past when she needed to startle at a strange sound or a shadow. It wasn't her husband, the Duke. He was far away to the north, fighting Saxons at the side of Ambrosius Aureolanus, High King of Britain. He would have sent word if he intended to return. And she need not fear. If the riders were hostile, the guards and soldiers in the fort at the landward end of the causeway, stationed there by Duke Gaulois to guard his wife and child, would have stopped them. It would take an army to cut through them. And who would send an army against Tintagel? There was a time, Ygraine remembered without bitterness, moving slowly into the castle yard, when she would have known who rode toward her castle. The thought held little sadness now. Since Morgaine's birth, she no longer even wept for her home. And Gaulois was kind to her. He had soothed her through her early fear and hatred, had given her jewels and beautiful things, trophies of war, had surrounded her with ladies to wait upon her, and treated her always as his equal, except in councils of war. She could have asked no more, unless she had married a man of the tribes. And in this she had been given no choice.