Chapter 5: Snow on the Ridge Road
The curse, or whatever it had been, took three days to settle, and Merlin spent them in a low fever in the little room behind Gaius's workshop, listening to the leeches turn over in their water. He slept, and dreamed of the sea, which he had never seen.
The king came every evening and sat very upright on the stool by the bed, asking Gaius exact questions as if for reports from the border, and then sitting on in silence. Merlin found that he didn't mind it.
On the second evening Arthur came at the same hour.
Merlin heard him stop dead on the workshop stair. Arthur came in with his hair wet from the yard and the circlet in his hand.
"I brought..." He held it out. "It was under a bench."
The king held out his own hand without rising. After a moment Arthur crossed the room and put the circlet into it, and Uther laid it on the shelf among the jars.
"Gaius. Leave us."
Gaius left. Merlin, who could not, lay still and watched the king look at his son.
"I am told," said Uther, "that the prince of Camelot drank four jugs of wine at my wedding feast. I am told that when a high priestess of the old religion stood in my hall, the prince pulled a carving knife out of a goose and charged her alone, against his king's plain order, as though she were a boar in a thicket." He did not raise his voice at all. "And my consort is lying here because my son can hold neither his wine nor his temper."
Arthur had gone red to the ears. "She was talking about my mother. Somebody had to do something, and you stood there and let her."
"You were not brave, Arthur," said his father. "You were jealous of a chair."
In the silence Merlin heard the leeches turn over.
Arthur's face was going white under the red, the way it did just before he said the one thing that could never be taken back. His mouth opened.
"I tripped on the coat," Merlin said.
They both turned.
"I did, sire. He told me I would. He said I'd go down like a felled tree in front of everyone, and the fox would go one way and I'd go the other." He pushed himself up on the pillows, which hurt, and was glad it hurt, because it made them both start towards him and then stop and glare at each other across the bed. "I went over a table. So really he was right. He was only wrong about the fox."
The king looked at him. "You did not trip."
"You can't prove it. Sire, is it Thursday tomorrow?"
"It is."
"Then I owe you a game. I'll want the white."
"You will be in bed."
"Then you'll have to bring the board," said Merlin, "and I'll cheat lying down."
Something moved at the corner of the king's mouth, frost close to water, and was put away. He rose and laid his hand on Merlin's hair, briefly, the way you'd smooth a bird's feathers, and went out past his son without a word.
Arthur went to the window and stood with his hands braced on the sill. Merlin let him be.
"It was a very good charge," he said at last. "Wrong witch. But a very good charge."
Arthur's shoulders jerked. The sound he made was mostly a laugh, and when he turned round his eyes were wet and furious and would not look at the bed.
"Shut up," he said. "You idiot. Shut up."
George was perfect.
He was up before Arthur, and laced the gambeson as straight as a ploughman's rows without once letting his knuckles touch Arthur's ribs. Arthur felt nothing whatever where the hands should have been. He threw a boot at the wall, high, and George fetched it without a word, and Arthur would have given a year of his life to hear Oh, very grown-up.
He had decided not to think about it. The long gallery had been a moment's madness, the light and the silk, and the armoury another. Men had moments. Merlin was married to the king, and if Arthur had stood in a cold armoury with his hand on Merlin's face, leaning in like a tree in a gale, that had been the night before, and this was after, and the thing about after was that it went on.
The trouble was that Merlin had come out of the fever wrong.
He looked well; that was the trouble. He was softer at the edges, the way a drawing is softer than a carving. He used to come into a room like a dropped tray, and now he was simply there, by a window, turning a page. He didn't drop things. His voice had gone softer, so that you had to lean in to hear it, and Arthur found that he did. And he had let his hair grow; it curled over his collar and round his ears, which still stuck out, at least. Something in the world was where Arthur had left it.
It was all extremely irritating. Arthur told himself so several times a day.
One Thursday in November he passed his father's door and heard through the oak his father laugh, short and rusty, like a door that had not been opened in years. Arthur stood on the stair with his hand on the wall until it stopped.
At council the week after, Merlin found a pair of gloves on his chair, grey kid lined with fur. He went pink and put them on without a word, and Arthur knew who had left them, because only one man in Camelot could have. The fur was vair. Vair was squirrel. Arthur felt that this was a personal remark.
Then one night George, smoothing a pillow, let slip that His Majesty kept to his own rooms. "Always, sire. The night servants say he's never once gone along the corridor. Not that I'd presume to repeat what the night servants say."
Arthur felt something so like relief that he was ashamed of it at once, and lay awake being ashamed until the candle guttered, which was worse.
So it was in a thoroughly bad temper that he asked the king's consort to present the squires' prize.
The consort came down to the yard at the end of November in the grey gloves and gave young Rhodri his dagger with a little speech that had the squires grinning. Then the squires were sent in to supper, and Merlin, out of two years' habit, began picking up the practice swords.
"Leave those. You'll get your gloves dirty."
Merlin straightened up with an armful of wooden swords. "Is this about the gloves?"
"Why would it be about the gloves?"
"You've glared at my hands for a fortnight. I thought you wanted to borrow them."
Arthur shoved him.
He had shoved Merlin a thousand times, in corridors and stables and once into a horse trough, and Merlin had always shoved back, and he did now: dropped the swords and pushed, grinning, with colour in his face for the first time in a month. Arthur laughed out loud. He caught Merlin's wrist and hooked a foot behind his knee, the way he'd shown the squires that morning, "for practice," and took him down in the straw and pinned both his wrists above his head.
"Yield."
"Never. Get off, you great gilded turnip, you weigh more than the horse."
Merlin was laughing underneath him, struggling, his hair all over the straw, his face flushed and his mouth open and his wrists warm and thin in Arthur's hands. His whole body moved under Arthur's when he laughed.
And Arthur's body, without consulting him in the least, took an interest he could not possibly mistake.
He went still. Half a moment after, so did Merlin, his eyes going wide; and then Arthur was off him and three yards away, his face on fire and his heart going like a drum at a hanging.
"For God's sake," he said, too loud. "Look at the state of you. Your hair wants cutting, you look like a sheepdog. And you walk about now as if you're in a procession. You're not a bishop. Stop it."
"Stop what?"
Arthur waved a hand at all of it, the gloves and the hair and the straw. "That."
Merlin got up, slowly, the way he did everything now, with straw in his hair, and looked at Arthur, and then away. His ears had gone red.
"Go on, then," he said. "Call me an idiot. Nobody's called me an idiot in a month."
Arthur opened his mouth to do it.
It wouldn't come. The word was there, the oldest word between them, worn smooth as a step, and he knew that if he said it now it would come out in a voice he did not want Merlin to hear. So he made him a bow instead, short and stiff, the kind he gave envoys from countries he didn't much like.
"My lord," he said, and went in.
At the last council of November the treasurer, who had a face like a disappointed trout, proposed that the royal granary stay shut until Lady Day and then sell at whatever the market would bear.
Merlin sat at the king's left hand in his gloves and said nothing, as he had at every council since the wedding, while the lords looked at him the way Cook looked at a mouse in the flour. Then they began to nod, and Merlin thought of Agnes at the bread stall counting her pennies with her lips moving, and heard himself say, "They'll riot."
Every head at the table turned.
"Sorry. Sire." His face was hot; he went on anyway. "They rioted in the summer over a farthing on the loaf. Keep the granary shut till Lady Day and they'll be eating their boots by Candlemas. Open it at Candlemas and sell at last year's price. They'll remember who fed them in February a good while longer than what it cost in March."
Uther was looking at Merlin as he did over the chessboard when a piece had gone somewhere unexpected.
"Candlemas," said the king. "At last year's price. See to it."
Arthur, at his right, had not looked at Merlin since the training yard. When the grain was done with he leaned forward. "The raiders have a winter camp in the old quarry above the Essetir fords. Give me thirty men and I'll burn them out before the snow."
"And give Cenred a war in his own country," said Uther, without turning his head, "that he cannot afford and I do not want, so that my son may have a song of his own."
Arthur's ears went the colour Merlin had learned to dread across two years of suppers, and the lords sat back to enjoy it.
"Sire," said Merlin, "the rest of Ealdor's grain is still in the storehouse."
Uther turned.
"It was to go in the spring, but the ridge road shuts with the snow, and it wants a strong escort, with raiders above the fords." Merlin kept his eyes on the king and away from Arthur. "If the prince himself took it, with thirty men, food for his father's consort's mother, nobody could call it a war. It's a reason you could put before Cenred, sire. But the raiders would see thirty Camelot swords on their side of the ridge all the same. And so would Cenred."
Merlin could almost watch the king set it out behind his eyes: the swords, the camp in the quarry watching them pass, Cenred's reeves writing it down. Three moves. Four.
"The prince will take thirty men and see the grain to Ealdor," Uther said at last, "and be seen doing it. He leaves on Monday. And he will go nowhere near the quarry."
"Yes, Father," said Arthur, through his teeth.
Neither of them looked at Merlin. Arthur sat back and scowled at the table like a man who had asked for a war and been given a delivery round, and Merlin folded his gloved hands and found that they were shaking.
On the Monday before dawn the king came down to the stable yard with a groom leading a grey mare, dappled like a winter sky, who turned her ears as though listening to everything you said and reserving judgement.
"Her name is Hawthorn," said the king. "She is steady in snow. There is another cart with the column: seed barley, for Ealdor's spring sowing. Gaius tells me theirs burned with the barn."
"I didn't ask for that."
"No," said Uther. "You did not." He watched Merlin hold out a hand to the mare, and Hawthorn breathed on the glove and leaned her great grey head against his chest. "You have grown graceful," the king said, as if it had only now occurred to him. "Since the feast."
Merlin's hand stopped on her neck. "Gaius says it's the fever."
"Perhaps." The king turned away. "Come back before the snow."
Ealdor was mud, as it always was from Michaelmas to May, and the carts had to be dug out twice between the ford and the green.
His mother was waiting by the new barn. She did not run, because she never ran, but she came down the slope very fast and took his face in her two hands and turned it to the light.
"You've grown thin," she said. "No, you haven't. You've grown..." She frowned. "What have they done to you?"
"Nothing, Mum. I had a fever."
"Hm," said Hunith, exactly as Gaius said it, and kissed him.
Elsa and Mair hit him at the knees, pink and loud and solid, and wanted to know whether he was a king now, and when he said not exactly were very disappointed in him.
The thirty men unloaded the grain, and Arthur unloaded it with them. He threw off his cloak, and his gambeson, and then, as he warmed, his shirt, and carried sacks with the soldiers stripped to the waist in the December cold, steam coming off his shoulders. He was showing off. Merlin could have told it at a hundred yards: three sacks where everyone else took two, swung up one-handed, a pause in the barn door to push his hair back and see who was watching. Half of Ealdor was watching.
Merlin looked at the sky.
It was a very interesting sky, the colour of wet slate, with clouds piling up yellow-grey over the ridge, and his knees said snow. He studied it closely.
"He asked for them, you know," said Leon, at his elbow.
"Asked for what?"
"These thirty. In council, the Tuesday after the fair, for the villages over the ridge. The king told him to come back when he'd had a thought that didn't come off the training field, and half the table laughed. That was a week before anyone had heard a word about a marriage."
Merlin stood still in the mud. Then you should have told me, Arthur had shouted at him under the eaves. I'd have sent grain. And Merlin had said, Would you?
"He never told me."
"No," said Leon. "He wouldn't. I thought somebody ought to." He went to see about the horses.
His mother put a cup of something hot into his hands, and together they watched the prince of Camelot carry the last sack into Ealdor's barn and come out and stand in the doorway, steaming and filthy, looking round. Looking for something. Finding it. Merlin felt it land on him like sun on the back of his neck, and kept his eyes on the cup.
"He looks at you," said Hunith, "the way your father looked at me."
Merlin's hands tightened on the cup. He had known his father for less than a week and lost him at the end of it, and he still did not know what to do when his mother said your father in that easy voice, as though Balinor had only gone out to see to the sheep.
"I'm married, Mum."
"I know," said Hunith. She took the cup back, since he wasn't drinking it, and drank from it herself. "I know what you're married to."
The snow came down on the ridge road three hours out of Ealdor, as if somebody had slit a sack. One moment Arthur could see the column strung out up the slope with Leon's red cloak at its head, and the next he could see his horse's ears and nothing else, and the wind came round off the ridge with a noise like hounds in full cry.
Then Hawthorn threw a shoe. Arthur turned back and found Merlin down in the snow with her forefoot in his hands. "She'll go lame if I ride her on this," Merlin shouted. He was right, and the column was already a quarter of a mile up the road and gone.
"Go on," Merlin shouted. "Catch them up. I'll lead her."
"Don't be an idiot."
It came out by itself, the old word, and Arthur did not notice until he saw Merlin grin at him through the snow.
So they led the horses, heads down into the wind, until the road went and the light went after it. Arthur said, "Not far now," twice, and the second time Merlin laughed at him.
He didn't see the stream. Nobody could have, a little beck under a foot of new snow with a skin of ice across it. The road gave way under him with a crack and he went in to the waist.
The cold hit like a fist, through boots and breeches and mail at once, and then Merlin had him by the collar and the belt and was hauling, and he came out onto the bank on his knees with the water freezing as it ran off him.
"There's a hut," Merlin was saying close to his ear. "In the trees. Arthur, walk."
He did not remember most of it: a woodcutter's hut half buried in drift, a stone hearth, old logs as dry as bone; Merlin getting the horses under the lean-to and the mail off him, swearing at the laces, while Arthur stood shaking so hard his teeth knocked together.
"The rest too, it's soaked. Here." Merlin's fur-lined cloak came round his shoulders, and a blanket from Hawthorn's pack that smelled powerfully of horse. "Sit. I'll do the fire."
Arthur turned his back to get out of the rest of his wet things, because he found he could only do that facing the wall. When he turned round again, wrapped to the chin, the fire was burning high and clear, and Merlin was crouched before it with the flint still in his hand, looking at it as if it had surprised him. Arthur thought, distantly, that in two years of mornings he had never once known Merlin light a fire first time.
Then the warmth reached his face, and the shaking got worse, and did not stop. The cold was in the middle of him now, where no fire reached. He had seen men on the northern campaigns sit down in the snow and shake like this, and then stop shaking, and go to sleep.
"Arthur. You're not getting warmer."
"I'm f-fine."
"You're blue." Then, quietly, "Right," and Merlin came round behind him and sat down.
He sat close, his knees either side of Arthur's hips, and pulled the cloak and the blanket round them both, and put his arms round Arthur's chest from behind and drew him back against him.
Merlin was warm. Merlin, whose hands were always cold, was warm right through, as warm as a hearthstone, and he put his chin on Arthur's shoulder and his cheek against Arthur's colder one and said, "There. I've got you," and did not let go.
The wind roared over the roof. A long time later the shaking eased, and stopped, and Arthur lay back against Merlin's chest with his eyes shut and felt the warmth come into him an inch at a time. He could feel Merlin's heart against his back, and Merlin's thumb moving over his breastbone the way it had moved at his temples in the armoury. There was no court here, and no guard calling the watch, and no father. There was a hut on a mountain in the snow, and Merlin's arms.
Arthur stopped pretending.
He turned over. It was clumsy; the blanket tangled and his elbow found Merlin's ribs and Merlin said "Ow," and then they were face to face in the firelight, and Merlin's eyes were very wide and very dark, and Arthur put his hand on Merlin's face, on the bone under the eye, where he had put it once before.
"Arthur," Merlin said.
Arthur kissed him.
It was not a good kiss. His mouth was still cold and his nose was in the way, and he had never in his life kissed anyone whose answer he was afraid of. But he knew, the way he knew a sword in his hand, that he wanted it, and had wanted it since a window seat on a spring morning, and would go on wanting it whatever came after. And Merlin made a small sound against his mouth, and his hand came up into Arthur's hair, and he kissed him back.
For a while there was nothing else in the whole white world.
Then Merlin stopped. He didn't pull away; he lay with his forehead against Arthur's, eyes shut, his hand still in Arthur's hair.
"He's been kind to me, Arthur," he said. "Your father. He's been so kind."
Arthur lay still. He thought of a rusty laugh through an oak door, and a grey mare in the stable yard, and gloves lined with squirrel on a council chair, and his father's careful hand holding Merlin's as though it might break.
"I know," he said. "I've seen."
They did not kiss again. After a while Merlin turned over and lay with his back against Arthur's, close enough to keep them both warm, and Arthur lay with his eyes open and listened to Merlin not sleeping. Twice in the night Merlin got up and put a log on, though the fire had not needed it, and lay down again in the same place, spine to spine.
Towards dawn the storm blew itself out. In the grey light from the smoke-hole Arthur watched the fire burn on between them and the door, steady and bright, as if someone had told it not to die.