She hadn’t always lived in a town. When she was a girl Gwenhwyfar lived in a villa on a green hill beside a steep green cleave. The cleave was tangled with trees, feathery with ferns, a secret stream slinking black and gold through the oak-shadows. Gwenhwyfar went riding there on her pony, or hunted along the wood-shores with a little bow one of the servants made her. She was as wild as a fawn.
At least, that’s how I see her, when I make pictures in my head of the life she led before.
But fate had laid a snare for Gwenhwyfar; set to trap her when she reached the age of marriage. Her father was a half-brother of Ambrosius Aurelianus. The old general’s blood ran well diluted in her, but still it ran. You could see it beneath the skin at her temples, and on the long, pale column of her throat. Those winding veins, bluish under her white flesh, with maybe a hint of imperial purple. She was a bridge between our time and the happier times of Ambrosius, and the man who married her would link himself and his sons with the great name of the Aureliani.
Valerius’s brother was the first. He’d been chosen for her by her family and by her father’s allies among the ordo of Aquae Sulis. Gwenhwyfar didn’t mind. Marcus was handsome, light-hearted, kind; everything a girl could want. He brought her gifts. The seed of his son was already growing in her when the word came of his death in a cattle-raid.
After that, it was Valerius’s turn. It’s not uncommon for a dead man’s brother to marry the girl he’d been promised to. Why spoil a neat arrangement just because the bridegroom had run himself upon some rustler’s pike? But Valerius was a poor substitute. He was cold and stern. He’d grown used to being overlooked in favour of his older brother, and it had soured him. Now Marcus was gone, Valerius took the things that had been his with a sort of bitter triumph. It didn’t please him to find that the baby in his new bride’s belly was one of them.
It was a hard birth. The child was sickly, and soon dead. But in the few short days he lived, Gwenhwyfar loved him. Holding him made her happy. His little blue hands clutched fistfuls of her hair. She sang to him. When he died, the happiness went out of her for good. The cold old town they made her live in felt like a tomb. She dreamed her son was crying out for her, down under the cold ground, and she could not go to him. Her husband hated her. There were no more babies.
And now a new husband had come for her. However hard she tried to slow the approach of her wedding to Arthur, the days kept slipping through her fingers. Her women made jokes about him. His strength. His manliness. All she could think of was the name his men gave him. The Bear. Sometimes it seemed to her that he really was a bear, poorly disguised as a man. His short, black bristling hair, his watchful eyes. The way he tore at his meat in the feast-hall. His snarls and roars when things displeased him. In the growing warmth of spring she shivered as she stitched her marriage-gown and imagined her wedding night.
I felt sorry for her. Poor old heron.