Fic: Oh, Was I Born Too Late?
Title: Oh, Was I Born Too Late?
Author: Soujin
Characters/Pairings: Mordred/Elaine, Gawain, Lancelot
Rating: PG-13
Archive: Yes.
Disclaimer: Copyright has presumably expired.
Summary: Modred meets a lady in a castle, for what it's worth.
Notes/Warnings: For mhari's birthday, because I love her. ♥ Thanks to kaliscoo for beta-ing.
Oh, Was I Born Too Late?
The castle on the river is tall and white, shiningly unlike the one in Orkney, the castle where he lived out his childhood with a tumble of brothers and his witch mother. There are white banners on the turrets and white hangings from the windows, and a white gate with no device on it, and it matches his white shield (having been knighted but not yet performed any great deeds to earn him more than the Virgescue).
He's been more than a week on the horse. He's tired, hungry, the way of things but no less unpleasant for being familiar, so he rides to the white gate and gets off the horse there--a sleek, practised movement, having been taught horses by Gwalchmei, and no horseman better.
Immediately a girl comes to the gate. She's also dressed in white, her hair dressed in coiled braids with a few flowers and ribbons tucked in, all of it white. It's too much for her. Pale already, it steals what colour she has, and the only thing about her striking is her blue, blue eyes. Otherwise she's unremarkable, no great beauty, no obvious princess.
"Morrow, sir," she says, unfastening the gate skillfully. "Hast come for rest?"
"That's right."
He watches her without speaking, then. There's a sadness on her, in the ease of her hands on the tall gate's latch, her feet on the worn dirt and broken grass of the path into the castle courtyard; once the way is open, she steps back to let him come in, a hand on the horse's bridle, and leads him to the stable. She does this alone, with no help from a stableboy or groom, leads him to a stall--they're all empty--and helps him find grain and hay for the horse, water that isn't cold or hot. He takes the saddle off without hesitation, despite not knowing how soon he'll ride out. Untacked, the horse settles to eating, and the girl stands back.
"Come in. My father hath a table set for thee."
Something wry in his heart hears her, and he thinks how it should be that there's provision made for him, that he's so well-received (and tells himself it's because they don't know his name or his parentage, true enough).
"Aye? You're always ready for travellers here, or do I warrant a table?"
Her blue eyes settle on him. "The castle is prepared for any knight with no device, sir."
"Why's that?"
"There's a prophecy--"
"God, prophecies. Who thinks them up? With all the prophecies there are in Britain to-day, it's a wonder they're not all at cross-purposes and everyone's dead or banging on each other's doors." He pushes past her to the small, open door leading into the castle's kitchen, but she follows.
"Wilt thou bathe before thou comest to supper?" she asks softly, at his elbow, halfway down the hall, and he turns too quickly, being surprised, and looks at her.
"Bathe?"
"If it please thee."
"You have time for that? Or is that part of the prophecy? 'There shall be a bath prepared for the wandering knight at this castle'? Is it inscribed on stone above a doorway somewhere?"
"The prophecy is that a knight with no device shall get a son on me," she says, meeting his eyes--hers are bluer than ocean and bluer than sky, deeper than the rest of her, realer than the rest of her and with more expression than anything else in this white castle. "My father will turn none away, though he cannot rise from his bed."
In the quietness of her voice he thinks she would shame him with her words, and his temper rises. "If he can't leave the bed, why's no one getting a son on him? That's why I'm let in? So you can wash me and feed me and then if you like me you'll climb into my bed? God, and what's that supposed to accomplish?"
"My son shall be the best knight in Britain."
"I've heard that before. Wasn't that the King? Was it Sir Lancelot? Sir Peredur? Who haven't they said it of? Gwalchmei, Bedwyr, I swear, there's no one isn't the best."
"And he shall be the purest."
"At least that leaves Peredur."
"Sir, the child is already got and born."
"Then why in hell are you still inviting me in?"
She puts a hand on his arm, a softer touch than his mother's. "Because I am lonely and have no love. His father left me the night after he lay with me and I have lived here alone with no companion and no knight to call me lady, none but my father--my nurse hath been dead a sixmonth--and my son hath gone to a convent to be kept, and it is grown cold here. I did not mean to come to thee or plead with thee to come to me, but I would not eat alone again, and if I can do thee service, I will."
"Damn, you--"
"And," in her quiet voice, unremarkable as all of her, "I will not ask thee to bathe if thou wouldst not, but I thought thou wert weary and had the sweat of thy horse on thy hands, and would be clean."
"And you'd heat the water yourself," he says bitterly.
"I would."
"I've no need."
"I'll show thee a room. There are fresh clothes, and the supper shall be no more than an hour in the making."
He sets his mouth and follows her. At the door of the white room she tells him is his, she pauses, and says,--
"I am Elaine. What is thy name?"
"Modred."
"Thou art welcome."
"Then I think you don't know me." He closes the door against her plain face.
~~~
At suppertime he sits beside her; the table is long enough for a banquet, but there's no one there save themselves. She wears her white gown and white flowers, the same as before, and he the white tunic and hose laid out for him. The supper is plain and simple, goose and bread, fresh by the warmth and smell, and sweet wine. Elaine tells him that a hunter in the woods brings them meat, and she bakes herself, gathers her own wild wheat and grinds her own flour. The wine has been in the cellars since her birth.
"There were more folk then," she tells him. "My father and mother, and servants aplenty, and a court, a small court of our own. But they went, the young, one by one to serve the King in Camelot, and the old died. The women married what men were not to be knighted, and they travelled away. My mother took a pox--my father a fever and rheumatism, and now he cannot stand. It hath never left him. The prophecy hath led us to stay here and await the knight."
"But he came."
"Aye, a year and a half past, in the cold spring."
"You're still here."
Elaine breaks off a piece of bread and holds it in her hands. "He hath a lady in Camelot. I have no reason to travel after him."
"Not after him, then. Anywhere."
"I cannot leave my father. Perhaps when he hath died also I will go."
"And you still bring the knights in. Your father just used to having men come in and take you?"
"He doesn't know." She eats a little. "They did not take me. Only the one whose son I bore."
"And how'd you know he was the one?"
"I did not. I loved him."
"He had no qualms despite his lady."
"He thought I was she. I practised a deception on him. My nurse made a drink to make me look like the lady, and then he came to me willingly. He was unknowing of the truth before it was done."
"Ah, well, that's a way to make a man love you. I'm surprised he left the next morning."
The wine makes him light-headed, stronger than it is elsewhere, in the court at Camelot, where they water it. It's like the mead they drink in Orkney, with too much taste, and he remembers his brothers rowdy and laughing on a midwinter, faces flushed, firelight flickering, and how it was all camaraderie until Agravain and Gaheris began a fight Gaheris lost--Gaheris always losing--and their mother watched without saying a word, disdain in her eyes and her beautiful face, when Gaheris finally lay on the floor of the castle bleeding while Agravain laughed triumphantly, breath heavy.
He drinks it, but he looks at Elaine's face and thinks of his mother's beauty, how his mother is beautiful, and Elaine is as plain as the supper, as ordinary as bread kneaded by hand--by the hand of a girl living alone in a white castle, and the picture of her standing in the kitchen working it under the few hanging bunches of herbs, silent and steady in her work, seems more overwhelming than he can understand, and he puts his cup down.
She drinks without answering him, but finally says,--
"He was deceived, but I do not know how it should have been else. There was the prophecy."
"Means nothing," he says roughly. "It could as easily have been me, couldn't it? If I'd been a year and a half earlier, or you'd had the good sense not to trick him. I've got no lady. Why shouldn't I get the purest knight in Britain?"
"If thou hadst, wouldst thou have left?"
"God, no, not if you hadn't lied to me. I can do better by women than that."
"Canst thou?"
"Of course I can, I have some sense of what--damn it," he says, and he pushes her cup aside, more gently than he thought he would, and kisses her, more bitterly than the wine, but stronger. When he draws back her eyelashes are wet with tears. "Damn it, what the hell's that?"
"I have never been loved," she whispers. "I bore a son to a man who would never have touched me if he knew who I was. I feel my body dying around me every day, and I have never been loved, and soon this castle shall be empty of me, and none shall work in the kitchens, none shall keep the horses in the stable when knights come here, none shall give the hunter cause to come here. I wish it had not been so."
"It won't be. For God's sake--" He kisses her again. "Your prophecy can go to hell. Come on."
He draws her up the stairs to his room, and she comes as if in a dance, her feet slow and graceful on the stone, her hands in his. They stop, constantly they stop, to kiss, to touch, to take her hair down and lose along the way the ribbons and the flowers that add nothing, mean nothing, until they come to his room and against the door he unfastens the hooks of her white gown and lets it fall to the floor--it gives her nothing. Her body is scarred with pockmarks, like hundreds of stones that have struck her and left their imprints.
He forgets everything that means something, and is left only with thoughts like her flowers, as he holds her in the bed and kisses her scarred shoulders, her fingers, her breasts, brushes his fingers across her stomach, and although he never says her name, and she is silent, the sound of autumn outside the window is loud enough to mask the rustle of sheets.
She seems old and young, as strange and simple as the white castle--she weeps, sometimes, without a sound, but she lies beside him after and sleeps, and her face is as lined and worn as any woman who has lived long and hard and borne many children. He strokes her face and her long, long, pale hair (the night being moonless, he feels for her in the darkness), and then he sleeps also, her body beside his, their bare skin warm and his chest, scarred fresh by fighting, against her back and her old, old scars.
~~~
In the morning, when he wakes, she has gone. He dresses and goes down, finds her outside the castle gate, finds her by the river, putting flowers into a boat lined with a white silk banner from her window.
"What are you doing?"
"I don't want to be here when I die," she says.
He nods, and helps her gather the rest of her flowers and arrange them in the crevices of the boat.
"It's going to be damned uncomfortable," he says, after a while. "You're going to have the seats sticking up at your head and feet, and your back will hang down in the middle."
Elaine nods, takes the banner and flowers out--in a few brief moments she undoes all of it--and looks at the seats. Then she goes into the courtyard and comes back with an axe, and, with her small hands, cuts out the seats. He puts the banner back into the boat and smooths it, his hands unknowing, while she puts the flowers around like bright bunches of coloured marzipan at a banquet, lays them out as delicate as though she were nestling eggs instead of sturdy cornflower and late wild roses.
They eat breakfast together at the same long table, and she asks him to help dress her hair, coiling the long braids with ribbons and new white flowers.
She gives him loaves of bread to take with him, more grain for his horse, wine in a skin and what's left of the goose, and he slings it all over his saddle. At the gate, she tears the hem off her gown and hands it up to him.
"Colours," she says.
"I don't carry colours. That's my brother's business," he says, thinking of Gwalchmei and all the girls who love him.
"Please. I will thee."
He takes the strip of cloth and ties it around his arm, and then rides on.
~~~
At Michaelmas, a boat comes down the river to Camelot. The flowers have died, but the banner is white silk, and the girl with white flowers and ribbon in her hair, the girl with a white gown that steals the little colour she has, the girl is called Elaine of Astolat.
She has a paper in her hands, and the King takes it and reads it; silently gives it to Sir Lancelot. A circle of knights are with them.
He stands by, looking at her face. Her eyes are closed. There is nothing to compare with the sea or the sky, nothing but whiteness, a lily-whiteness that covers her and hides her--meaningless.
"God forgive me," Sir Lancelot says.
He looks up sharply.
"I must do penance," Sir Lancelot tells the King. "She loved me."
"I think it is well to do so," the King says.
Gwalchmei finds him in the stables later, brushing his horse, his mouth set in a cold, hard line, and he will answer nothing except to say that he is glad Lancelot is going, and Gwalchmei agrees, because he hates to see his brother angry with himself.
Author: Soujin
Characters/Pairings: Mordred/Elaine, Gawain, Lancelot
Rating: PG-13
Archive: Yes.
Disclaimer: Copyright has presumably expired.
Summary: Modred meets a lady in a castle, for what it's worth.
Notes/Warnings: For mhari's birthday, because I love her. ♥ Thanks to kaliscoo for beta-ing.
Oh, Was I Born Too Late?
The castle on the river is tall and white, shiningly unlike the one in Orkney, the castle where he lived out his childhood with a tumble of brothers and his witch mother. There are white banners on the turrets and white hangings from the windows, and a white gate with no device on it, and it matches his white shield (having been knighted but not yet performed any great deeds to earn him more than the Virgescue).
He's been more than a week on the horse. He's tired, hungry, the way of things but no less unpleasant for being familiar, so he rides to the white gate and gets off the horse there--a sleek, practised movement, having been taught horses by Gwalchmei, and no horseman better.
Immediately a girl comes to the gate. She's also dressed in white, her hair dressed in coiled braids with a few flowers and ribbons tucked in, all of it white. It's too much for her. Pale already, it steals what colour she has, and the only thing about her striking is her blue, blue eyes. Otherwise she's unremarkable, no great beauty, no obvious princess.
"Morrow, sir," she says, unfastening the gate skillfully. "Hast come for rest?"
"That's right."
He watches her without speaking, then. There's a sadness on her, in the ease of her hands on the tall gate's latch, her feet on the worn dirt and broken grass of the path into the castle courtyard; once the way is open, she steps back to let him come in, a hand on the horse's bridle, and leads him to the stable. She does this alone, with no help from a stableboy or groom, leads him to a stall--they're all empty--and helps him find grain and hay for the horse, water that isn't cold or hot. He takes the saddle off without hesitation, despite not knowing how soon he'll ride out. Untacked, the horse settles to eating, and the girl stands back.
"Come in. My father hath a table set for thee."
Something wry in his heart hears her, and he thinks how it should be that there's provision made for him, that he's so well-received (and tells himself it's because they don't know his name or his parentage, true enough).
"Aye? You're always ready for travellers here, or do I warrant a table?"
Her blue eyes settle on him. "The castle is prepared for any knight with no device, sir."
"Why's that?"
"There's a prophecy--"
"God, prophecies. Who thinks them up? With all the prophecies there are in Britain to-day, it's a wonder they're not all at cross-purposes and everyone's dead or banging on each other's doors." He pushes past her to the small, open door leading into the castle's kitchen, but she follows.
"Wilt thou bathe before thou comest to supper?" she asks softly, at his elbow, halfway down the hall, and he turns too quickly, being surprised, and looks at her.
"Bathe?"
"If it please thee."
"You have time for that? Or is that part of the prophecy? 'There shall be a bath prepared for the wandering knight at this castle'? Is it inscribed on stone above a doorway somewhere?"
"The prophecy is that a knight with no device shall get a son on me," she says, meeting his eyes--hers are bluer than ocean and bluer than sky, deeper than the rest of her, realer than the rest of her and with more expression than anything else in this white castle. "My father will turn none away, though he cannot rise from his bed."
In the quietness of her voice he thinks she would shame him with her words, and his temper rises. "If he can't leave the bed, why's no one getting a son on him? That's why I'm let in? So you can wash me and feed me and then if you like me you'll climb into my bed? God, and what's that supposed to accomplish?"
"My son shall be the best knight in Britain."
"I've heard that before. Wasn't that the King? Was it Sir Lancelot? Sir Peredur? Who haven't they said it of? Gwalchmei, Bedwyr, I swear, there's no one isn't the best."
"And he shall be the purest."
"At least that leaves Peredur."
"Sir, the child is already got and born."
"Then why in hell are you still inviting me in?"
She puts a hand on his arm, a softer touch than his mother's. "Because I am lonely and have no love. His father left me the night after he lay with me and I have lived here alone with no companion and no knight to call me lady, none but my father--my nurse hath been dead a sixmonth--and my son hath gone to a convent to be kept, and it is grown cold here. I did not mean to come to thee or plead with thee to come to me, but I would not eat alone again, and if I can do thee service, I will."
"Damn, you--"
"And," in her quiet voice, unremarkable as all of her, "I will not ask thee to bathe if thou wouldst not, but I thought thou wert weary and had the sweat of thy horse on thy hands, and would be clean."
"And you'd heat the water yourself," he says bitterly.
"I would."
"I've no need."
"I'll show thee a room. There are fresh clothes, and the supper shall be no more than an hour in the making."
He sets his mouth and follows her. At the door of the white room she tells him is his, she pauses, and says,--
"I am Elaine. What is thy name?"
"Modred."
"Thou art welcome."
"Then I think you don't know me." He closes the door against her plain face.
~~~
At suppertime he sits beside her; the table is long enough for a banquet, but there's no one there save themselves. She wears her white gown and white flowers, the same as before, and he the white tunic and hose laid out for him. The supper is plain and simple, goose and bread, fresh by the warmth and smell, and sweet wine. Elaine tells him that a hunter in the woods brings them meat, and she bakes herself, gathers her own wild wheat and grinds her own flour. The wine has been in the cellars since her birth.
"There were more folk then," she tells him. "My father and mother, and servants aplenty, and a court, a small court of our own. But they went, the young, one by one to serve the King in Camelot, and the old died. The women married what men were not to be knighted, and they travelled away. My mother took a pox--my father a fever and rheumatism, and now he cannot stand. It hath never left him. The prophecy hath led us to stay here and await the knight."
"But he came."
"Aye, a year and a half past, in the cold spring."
"You're still here."
Elaine breaks off a piece of bread and holds it in her hands. "He hath a lady in Camelot. I have no reason to travel after him."
"Not after him, then. Anywhere."
"I cannot leave my father. Perhaps when he hath died also I will go."
"And you still bring the knights in. Your father just used to having men come in and take you?"
"He doesn't know." She eats a little. "They did not take me. Only the one whose son I bore."
"And how'd you know he was the one?"
"I did not. I loved him."
"He had no qualms despite his lady."
"He thought I was she. I practised a deception on him. My nurse made a drink to make me look like the lady, and then he came to me willingly. He was unknowing of the truth before it was done."
"Ah, well, that's a way to make a man love you. I'm surprised he left the next morning."
The wine makes him light-headed, stronger than it is elsewhere, in the court at Camelot, where they water it. It's like the mead they drink in Orkney, with too much taste, and he remembers his brothers rowdy and laughing on a midwinter, faces flushed, firelight flickering, and how it was all camaraderie until Agravain and Gaheris began a fight Gaheris lost--Gaheris always losing--and their mother watched without saying a word, disdain in her eyes and her beautiful face, when Gaheris finally lay on the floor of the castle bleeding while Agravain laughed triumphantly, breath heavy.
He drinks it, but he looks at Elaine's face and thinks of his mother's beauty, how his mother is beautiful, and Elaine is as plain as the supper, as ordinary as bread kneaded by hand--by the hand of a girl living alone in a white castle, and the picture of her standing in the kitchen working it under the few hanging bunches of herbs, silent and steady in her work, seems more overwhelming than he can understand, and he puts his cup down.
She drinks without answering him, but finally says,--
"He was deceived, but I do not know how it should have been else. There was the prophecy."
"Means nothing," he says roughly. "It could as easily have been me, couldn't it? If I'd been a year and a half earlier, or you'd had the good sense not to trick him. I've got no lady. Why shouldn't I get the purest knight in Britain?"
"If thou hadst, wouldst thou have left?"
"God, no, not if you hadn't lied to me. I can do better by women than that."
"Canst thou?"
"Of course I can, I have some sense of what--damn it," he says, and he pushes her cup aside, more gently than he thought he would, and kisses her, more bitterly than the wine, but stronger. When he draws back her eyelashes are wet with tears. "Damn it, what the hell's that?"
"I have never been loved," she whispers. "I bore a son to a man who would never have touched me if he knew who I was. I feel my body dying around me every day, and I have never been loved, and soon this castle shall be empty of me, and none shall work in the kitchens, none shall keep the horses in the stable when knights come here, none shall give the hunter cause to come here. I wish it had not been so."
"It won't be. For God's sake--" He kisses her again. "Your prophecy can go to hell. Come on."
He draws her up the stairs to his room, and she comes as if in a dance, her feet slow and graceful on the stone, her hands in his. They stop, constantly they stop, to kiss, to touch, to take her hair down and lose along the way the ribbons and the flowers that add nothing, mean nothing, until they come to his room and against the door he unfastens the hooks of her white gown and lets it fall to the floor--it gives her nothing. Her body is scarred with pockmarks, like hundreds of stones that have struck her and left their imprints.
He forgets everything that means something, and is left only with thoughts like her flowers, as he holds her in the bed and kisses her scarred shoulders, her fingers, her breasts, brushes his fingers across her stomach, and although he never says her name, and she is silent, the sound of autumn outside the window is loud enough to mask the rustle of sheets.
She seems old and young, as strange and simple as the white castle--she weeps, sometimes, without a sound, but she lies beside him after and sleeps, and her face is as lined and worn as any woman who has lived long and hard and borne many children. He strokes her face and her long, long, pale hair (the night being moonless, he feels for her in the darkness), and then he sleeps also, her body beside his, their bare skin warm and his chest, scarred fresh by fighting, against her back and her old, old scars.
~~~
In the morning, when he wakes, she has gone. He dresses and goes down, finds her outside the castle gate, finds her by the river, putting flowers into a boat lined with a white silk banner from her window.
"What are you doing?"
"I don't want to be here when I die," she says.
He nods, and helps her gather the rest of her flowers and arrange them in the crevices of the boat.
"It's going to be damned uncomfortable," he says, after a while. "You're going to have the seats sticking up at your head and feet, and your back will hang down in the middle."
Elaine nods, takes the banner and flowers out--in a few brief moments she undoes all of it--and looks at the seats. Then she goes into the courtyard and comes back with an axe, and, with her small hands, cuts out the seats. He puts the banner back into the boat and smooths it, his hands unknowing, while she puts the flowers around like bright bunches of coloured marzipan at a banquet, lays them out as delicate as though she were nestling eggs instead of sturdy cornflower and late wild roses.
They eat breakfast together at the same long table, and she asks him to help dress her hair, coiling the long braids with ribbons and new white flowers.
She gives him loaves of bread to take with him, more grain for his horse, wine in a skin and what's left of the goose, and he slings it all over his saddle. At the gate, she tears the hem off her gown and hands it up to him.
"Colours," she says.
"I don't carry colours. That's my brother's business," he says, thinking of Gwalchmei and all the girls who love him.
"Please. I will thee."
He takes the strip of cloth and ties it around his arm, and then rides on.
~~~
At Michaelmas, a boat comes down the river to Camelot. The flowers have died, but the banner is white silk, and the girl with white flowers and ribbon in her hair, the girl with a white gown that steals the little colour she has, the girl is called Elaine of Astolat.
She has a paper in her hands, and the King takes it and reads it; silently gives it to Sir Lancelot. A circle of knights are with them.
He stands by, looking at her face. Her eyes are closed. There is nothing to compare with the sea or the sky, nothing but whiteness, a lily-whiteness that covers her and hides her--meaningless.
"God forgive me," Sir Lancelot says.
He looks up sharply.
"I must do penance," Sir Lancelot tells the King. "She loved me."
"I think it is well to do so," the King says.
Gwalchmei finds him in the stables later, brushing his horse, his mouth set in a cold, hard line, and he will answer nothing except to say that he is glad Lancelot is going, and Gwalchmei agrees, because he hates to see his brother angry with himself.