I Am Morgan le Fay by Nancy Springer Page B

to know about it. When I met with cowherds or tinkers or the like, I gave them greeting and asked them, “What news?” Or if there was a village, I would ride in and drink water at the common well and give water to Annie when she had cooled enough so that it would not harm her, and I would ask of folk who stopped to stare what was the name of the place, to guide my course by. Almost always folk stammered when they replied as if they were trying to decide whether they needed to tug their forelocks and bow to me. Some folk were wary, some curious, some friendly. A goodwife gave me scones to eat, a goatherd gave me cheese, and I bartered Annie’s ribbons for oats for her. Few folk were bold enough to ask whence I came or where I was going, and in answer to the bold few I only smiled and rode on. And three times in as many days I changed my course because of the cautions they gave me. In the distance sometimes I could see the dust of battle rising like the smoke, as if the earth herself were burning, and I shuddered.
    During the nights Annie either grazed or lay down, and I slept under the stars sometimes, in a sheepcote sometimes and once in a cowshed on the outskirts of a village when it was raining. I slept lightly, for I missed the murmur of the sea, and these soft inland hills felt strange to me, too tame with their maple groves, their villages huddled in hollows, their hedged garden plots. Also, the summons of Avalon tugged at me like a golden wire threaded into my heart, and I wanted only to ride on.
    I cantered across the cushiony hills, and my heart sang like a harp of Avalon, Avalon, and I felt blessed, exalted.
    I thought nothing could harm me.
    Then I reached the mountains.
    I saw them rising in the distance out of wilderness that coiled like an ivy green shadow around their feet, and I felt my mouth open like a hollow moon. Now I am ancient or ageless and I have flown over snowpeaks and I know what mountains are, but then I was a maiden like a green willow sprout, only fifteen, and those crags were the most daunting tors I had ever seen.
    Within a day’s journey the land changed from heathery moor to rocky foothills, and Annie went lame.
    At first when I felt the hitch in her gait I thought that she had a stone wedged in her hoof, and I jumped down from her back and lifted her feet one by one. No stone. But one of her little clay-colored hooves, the left fore, had begun to crack.
    â€œOh, Annie . . .” I stood there harrowed by the knowledge that I was selfish, thoughtless, stupid. I should have had metal plates put on her hooves the way the knights did before they set out on a long journey. It was not often done for farm ponies and such, but probably in some village I could have traded something, maybe one of those confounded gowns, to have a blacksmith do it. But now the villages lay behind me, and the dust of war rose on that horizon, and it was too late. A mystic force tugged at me the way the moon tugged at the tides, pulling me toward Avalon, Avalon, Avalon.
    Perhaps I could have pitted the force of my stubborn self-will against that sending, if only for a day, and turned back to see Annie safely pastured. But I did not. I wanted to go on.
    I straightened Annie’s forelock between her eyes, for all the good that did. “Sweetheart,” I whispered to her, “I’m so sorry.”
    I got on her again and rode at the walk, seeking the softest ground. The rocky uplands gave way to copses of willow and rowan, and I rode a twisting course over the loam and leaves beneath the trees, hoping Annie’s hoof would get no worse.
    But it did. By evening the hoof had begun to split.
    By evening also, copses of maple had given way to such wilderness as I had never seen. Huge trees—their ivy-shrouded trunks of greater girth than Annie and I put together, towering so high I could not see the sky—tree giants whose names I did not know shadowed me all around, and the darkness at