Gawain and Lady Green Read Free Page A

for all she’s so young. She’s taught you much already.
    So, what are you grumbling about? Accept this summer as an adventure! An enterprise old Merlin can sing about. “Gawain, May King!” That’s the song he’ll sing one day. The whole kingdom will sing it. For now, enjoy!
    Gawain looked up into Lady Green’s shining, smiling eyes. He took the mug she offered and gulped its contents to the dregs.

    Night rain-music is my favorite sound.
    Night rain sings softly of summer, of growing crops, of sleep— and so, of love.
    I lie here against my May King, head on his arm. Deeply he breathes beside me, catching back well-spent breath. His heart flutters under my hand like a caught bird.
    My bower bends low above us. I look up into its archedbranches by dim lamplight. Up there, thick thatch I gathered and bound, dried, and laid catches rain and sends it sliding away all richly wet.
    Above in the rain-sweet dark, ancient oaks guard the bower. Heavy in my happy body, I listen to night rain whisper joy in their leaves.
    An owl calls, sudden and near. From the eastern edge of the grove, another answers.
    My May King starts. He turns to me, draws me closer. The lamp sputtering beside our pallet shows me his smile, his slowly opening eyes.
    He is one strange fellow, this Sir Gawain from the south!
    I have known men. But never a man so rigid-proud in body and mind.
    Despite his pride, he knows nothing. When he first came, he could not even understand speech easily.
    Like a young child—like my daughter, Ynis—he most often speaks to ask a question. Ynis asks, “Why do we have to card wool?” Gawain asks, “Why do folk stay away from the oak grove?” No one past toddling should need to ask such questions!
    Angry once, in his quick, easy anger, he told me I would need to ask questions in his world! “You think me child-ignorant?” He spluttered. “You go south to Arthur’s Dun, lady, we’ll see who’s the child there!”
    A good thing it is I will never have to try that out.
    But I myself do not know quite everything. There are things I have been wondering about him.
    Now as his eyes open wide gray in lamplight, his lips open to question. I lay a finger across them, and he stills.
    “My turn to question, May King. I want to know a thing, and it is this: How came you here to this place, to Holy Oak village, out of the south?” I lift my finger away to let him answer.
    “I came a-horse, Lady Green.”
    I love that name! Lady Green can only be the mirror of the Green Goddess! I will be Lady Green only and always for him. And because he gave me this sweet, so-dignified name a loving bard might have invented, I like his name too. I speak it now with teasing tenderness. “Gawain, I know full well that you came a-horse!”
    “And I have asked the headman, and Merry the druid—”
    “The student druid. It takes years to turn druid.”
    “I have asked them both to replace my butchered charger; for they two seem more the leaders here than any others. I know you have horses at pasture.”
    “Not chargers, Gawain. Ponies.”
    “Aye, little northern ponies no winter lack can kill. I’ve seen your herds out there. Better a pony than afoot!”
    “But I asked you, how did you come here. You said you were spying the land.”
    “Mapping. Learning. Not spying.”
    “But the north country is huge, Gawain. How did you come out right there, on that edge of the grove by the Fair-Field? When you had the wide north and west to roam.”
    “Ech. As to that, I followed a doe here.”
    “Ah?”
    “A white fallow doe. I saw her from afar, white against dark trees. The first trees I had seen all day.”
    “White. You’re sure she was white.”
    “Milk-white. Snow-white. And I was a-hungered, Lady Green!”
    I chuckle. “Well I remember you hungry!”
    “So I clapped spur after her. And she ran into this grove and disappeared. And there was the Fair-Field.”
    “I see…” I see more and farther than Gawain will ever