Pandora's Aquarium
Pandora's aquarium
She dives for shells
With her nautical nuns
And thoughts you thought
You'd never tell
--Tori Amos
Morgana dreams.
In her dreams a woman comes. A familiar stranger; this is not her first appearance.
The woman's name is Nimueh.
Nimueh speaks to Morgana in her dreams: conversations as unhurried and as guarded as those between two ladies of a newly struck Court acquaintance. This is how Morgana has come to know that behind her haughty pride, Nimueh is lonely and frustrated and a little mad. She is a priestess of unimaginable power and she scorns the company of weak, foolish men. But despite her great power, she is alone. Her sisters are dead, slain by an upstart man; a tyrant king.
Here, Morgana always looks away. The guilt is not hers. It is not.
"Walk with me," says Nimueh. Her coral-red lips curve around teeth like white pearls. Her invitations sound like orders, but Morgana is well used to dealing with this particular flaw.
Morgana leaves her bed and follows Nimueh into the moonlight shining in muted swathes through the patterned panes of her window. They slip fluidly through her dreams, floating mermaid-like above the cool floor of the sea. Their slow, bare feet don't touch the soft sand. The light reaches them from far, far above, strange and twisted. The water envelops and caresses them with its blue-green glow; now catching a glint of pale gold from some unfathomable sky, now shading bruise-violet into shadow.
They might well be sisters, walking in step underneath the water; hair writhing in long, dark serpents around alabaster throats and smooth arms. Loose white gowns tug against their slender forms until the water pushes the sheer cloth back to flutter around them. Heads are held to the same proud height. Their faces are pale and sharp, delicate and strong. Morgana's eyes are a luminous blue-grey that shade, like the sky, from sweet daydream to storm. Nimueh's are the polished blue-green of worn glass.
"Sister," says Nimueh with the confidential air of an older sibling advising a younger one, "you must choose."
This, too, is a familiar part of the dream. The same words are repeated each time.
They walk, through water wide-open but weirdly empty of living things, and Morgana listens as Nimueh tells her much that is of interest. Nimueh speaks of a time, not long ago, when women had power and choice. They were queens and priestesses and bowed their heads to no man, nor needed to ask for his indulgence to be granted things that were, in any case, already theirs. This, too, could be Morgana's, says Nimueh, were Morgana but to choose it. Not many women in this new, feeble time could aspire to such a life, but Morgana is one of the few who can. It is her birthright.
Morgana listens well. It is a skill honed by years of practice, of hoarding information and letting it nourish the seeds of her growing thoughts.
But if Morgana does not take up her birthright, (and here Nimueh's eyes darken seaweed-green and her coral lips harden with scorn), if she does not take it up of her own accord, then the King (she sneers) will marry her off to a man who ignores her, or beats her, or lies with other women. She will bear his many children and learn hard silence. Her beauty will be used up and forgotten. She will die in childbirth. She will have no voice of her own. Nimueh's cold certainty is transmuted by the gentle water, dissipated and dispersed to strange shores.
"Speak your thoughts freely, sister," says Nimueh, the elder confidant again. "Tell me what it is that you want."
What Morgana wants is what every living soul wants: to be loved and heard and understood and valued. What Morgana wants is a family.
What Morgana has is a maidservant who she wishes were a sister, and who she is unable to protect any better than herself. She has a man who thinks that being King is more important than being her guardian. And she has a young man who is not-a-brother, not-a-lover and not-a-friend, but is instead a reluctant and poorly-defined mixture of all three. With Uther and Arthur, she might as well be shouting into the bellows of the wind for all that her words reach their ears.
"They are unworthy," spits Nimueh, white teeth sharp. "To want the love of these people makes you weak and small." She lapses into a brooding silence, her profile lost in fierce memory.
She speaks, finally. "My sisters are dead," says Nimueh. "It was unforgivable; cruel beyond imagining; and for what?" She glances sideways at Morgana, eyes burning. "He would kill you, too, if he knew."
Morgana cannot think about this, not now. It is her dream. Should dreams not be pleasant things?
"I wish to see something different," she says, abrupt.
Nimueh raises her perfect brows in inquiry.
"Something. Anything," commands Morgana. "Show me how a different life would be."
"Very well," says Nimueh; and her lips curve around her many secrets, to contain them and to show their worth. "Take my hand."
She holds out slender fingers that Morgana clasps with her own. They visit a thousand choices made in a thousand separate lifetimes. In some of them, Morgana's father lives, and Morgana wants to weep when they move on; wants to scream and rail against fate; to beg to stay with him, or for him to come with her.
It is never to be.
She sees a thousand different Morganas living a thousand different lives. She marries a man who gives her his heart in a smile, and she loves and protects the children they raise. She chants old words of power in a sacred grove while a hushed crowd rocks back and forth. She rules a fertile kingdom well and wisely from a rosewood throne through a long time of peace. She scratches elusive words on sheet after sheet of parchment with a quill, late into the night, chasing lasting beauty. She tends to men bloody and dying in a muddy field, with dwindling supplies and dwindling hope. She dreams a city out of her head and her heart, and then works with stone and wood and men and women to build it solid and strong. She paints her pain and rage with deliberate, furious intent; tiny, regular strokes of colour on a broad canvas. She guides a vibrating, living, noisy metal bird high up above the biggest sea known to man; her route untraveled by any other. She stares through clever mechanical eyes at things too small to see or know. She maps the stars.
"Choose," insists Nimueh. "Soon you must choose, or the choice will be taken from you."
Morgana wakes on a gasp to the deep dark and to a drowsy Gwen.
"Were you dreaming again, my Lady?"
"Yes."
A/N: Thank you to Rachael for beta-ing this story, and to Sally for coffee and company while I wrote.
Morgana and Nimueh are the creative property of the BBC's 'Merlin.' The lyrics quoted at the beginning are from the weird and wonderful title song off Tori Amos' album 'Pandora's Aquarium.'