The Book of Avalon Eternal

After the fire died down, and Mordred's remains lay charred upon the bier, a line of squires marched from the well inside the fortress with water-filled troughs from the barnyard. Gawain did not watch them complete their task of dousing the ashes. He turned and, on his crutch, unsteadily began walking back up the hill toward Camlann's gates. He heard behind him Nimue turn and follow, and at this sound he hastened his step. He was nauseous at what he had just witnessed. For the first time in many years, he felt a sense of being both betrayed and powerless to answer the betrayal.

He lurched ahead faster and faster, crutch unsteady and slipping on the slick grass, trying to evade Nimue's attention. But his crutch slipped out from under him completely, and he fell sideways onto the grass in a heap. Thankfully, he landed on the leg that was not broken. He sat there staring at the ground.

Behind him he heard soft rustling footsteps in the grass: Nimue knelt behind him, her face over his shoulder and next to his. He felt hot tears welling up inside his eyes: the second time he had cried in two days. He hated it, and he hated himself for crying. He had not cried, before seeing Mordred's body yesterday, since Gaheris's death. And before that, besides childhood tears shed over scrapes, cuts, and bruises, he had only cried on the day that his mother had died. His tears were bitter and scalding on that day, and his heart had felt like it was pierced with a knife that wrought not physical pain, but spiritual.

Now he sits on the edge of his bed, still silent, the tears having subsided. The long walk back through the palace corridors exhausted him, and the night was now well advanced into the late evening. Nimue is across the room, preparing drinks on the table that sits under the windows on the opposite wall. She brings them across the deep red and green rug and hands him one of the cups: red wine, mixed with a potion to ease pain of all types, she says, without further explanation. For her, of course, water.

Gawain drains his cup and wipes his mouth and beard with the back of his hand. The wine is warm in his stomach, and he drank it so quickly that he can feel the warmth radiate back upward to untie the knotted ropes of thought that bind his mind. Nimue takes several sips of her water before finishing it one deep draught. He sees her lips moistened from the water, and several drops run down her chin. He reaches over and gently wipes them with his thumb.

Nimue rises from the bed and stands before him. He looks up at her with a tense expectation radiating from his stomach, but he is in no way certain of what she will do next. As it has always been, he is never certain of what Nimue will do next. In his mind, he sees the image of her standing next to him not even an hour ago, with the glimmer of flames reflected in the dark pools of her eyes. He did not ask her then, and he desires to ask her even less now, whether she knows who was responsible for the desecration, or even, gods forbid, if she herself was responsible. He simply does not want to know, and he may never want to. She reaches out to hold both sides of his head with her small hands, and he wonders if these small hands are the same that tore the hold into that horrible darkness and that held it open for minutes while blood streamed from her nose.

He looks up into her face and into her brown eyes, softer than usual, and thinks of how these same eyes helped her to navigate the battlefield, dealing death wherever she chose, and under full control and possession of herself and her magic. He looks deeper and sees behind the softness the hint of something that resembles shining rock, like a vein of some impossibly hard jewel found in the darkest cave in the world. The hint of this vision flickers and disappears, but then returns, and he sees her eyes in a different way now: the softness of them is formed around and supported by an unbreakable core that no enemy, human or otherwise, that she has ever faced has been able to stand against.

She moves to sit on his lap, legs apart to either side. He is frozen in uncertainty as to how to respond, and so he does nothing. She touches the sides of his face again and gently kisses his forehead. He has a cut under his right eye and down the cheek, sustained at some point in the battle or its aftermath: it was too chaotic of a day to determine when exactly such a minor wound occurred.

Nimue runs her finger over the cut and pulls a small sprig of herb from a thin necklace she is wearing. Placing the sprig in her mouth, she chews it gently and wets her finger with the mixture of whatever the herb released and her saliva. Then she rubs her finger on the cut, and he feels it tingle instantly, then dim in its intensity, and then he notices that there is no more pain. The wound had made his face feel tight and painful when he moved, spoke, or smiled, but now that feeling is gone entirely.

She moves closer to him, still with one leg on either side of his, and he responds by placing his hands in the small of her back before softly raising them to feel the sharp shoulder blades underneath her thin shoulders. His hands move to caress the back of her neck, and her eyes close while she bows her head towards his. He runs his fingers to the top of her spine where her thick black hair grows out behind her and massages with his fingers. He feels the tight muscles there relax under his touch, and Nimue bends her head further so that it rests on his shoulders.

Gawain turns to bury his face in her hair, but as he does so she sits up straight again and presses her mouth to his. He does not respond right away, and she gently kisses his lips, the inside of his lips, and with her tongue explores the space between his teeth. When her tongue touches his, he returns the kiss, not in a frantic or frenzied way, but deeply, thoroughly, tasting her mouth and lips. He feels her body stiffen under his hands, and he pulls her closer.

Nimue reaches between his thighs to untie the knot below his belt buckle. She reaches inside and grasps, and then he rises toward the space between her thighs. Pulling her shift up higher so that it is bunched around her lower stomach just about the navel, she positions herself over him and holds his shoulders firmly so that his sitting position is solid on the side of the bed. She lowers herself down onto him.

Now he does kiss her in earnest, passionately and hungrily, which she returns briefly before pushing him back from her. Her hips move rhythmically, and his hands move across the back of her body, holding her at and below her lower back so that she can move more securely and firmly in her position. He sees her bare feet grip the stone floor on either side of his legs, and she is careful to account for his broken leg as she beings to move more rapidly. His hands move up and under her shift, and around to the front so that he holds her breasts in his hands.

She rolls her head backwards and leans back holding tightly to his shoulders. He feels her body begin to shudder, and he pulls her to him again. She continues her movement but with more urgency, now heading towards the final release. Within himself, he feels the inexorable building of pressure which he resists for a time. Soon he is unable to withhold any longer, and as he feels her body contracting in and out, he also feels himself sliding under the surface of the warm, deep lake of her love. The last thing he experiences before disappearing completely under is her hair surrounding his face, and she smells of the mist in the morning, the rich loam that carpets the forest, and, most of all, of the flowers in a meadow when bitter winter has finally yielded to a gentle spring.