Chapter 10: Hold Your Breath and Go Left
Arthur did not stand aside.
There were two guards at the bedside and Leon behind them, and Leon had taught half the squires in Camelot to fight, and Arthur had taught Leon. None of it mattered. A foot of steel was out of the scabbard, and the rest of it wanted to follow.
"Arthur," said his father again.
And from the bed behind him, so faint it might have been the linen moving: "Arthur."
Only that. It was the way Merlin had said it all summer, whenever Arthur said a thing he should not have. He never argued and he never sulked. He said Arthur's name, and Arthur heard it, and stopped.
His hand stopped. The sword went back the way it had come out, without consulting him, with a long dry whisper of steel on leather, and Arthur found that he was shaking.
Leon took the iron from the guard, knelt by the bed and put it on Merlin himself, as gently as a man could close iron round anyone. He did not look up at Arthur once. As the second cuff shut, the last of the gold went out of the room as if a door had closed on it, and the candles sank to ordinary flames, and when Arthur turned his head Merlin's eyes were blue again, and terribly tired, and fixed on him.
"Nobody goes in but Gaius," said the king, and looked at Aredian. "Nobody." Then, as though it were a council and he had grown tired of it: "Arthur. With me."
His father did not speak in the corridor, or on the stair, or in the long room where he ate his Thursday suppers. Ygraine's board stood by the fire with last week's game still set out, white for Merlin, as always. The king stood with his back to the room, his hands flat on the table an inch from the board.
Arthur had never begged his father for anything. He did not know how it was done, and he did it badly.
"He saved your life in the market. You married him for it." His voice was too big for the room. "He's never hurt anyone. He carries spiders out of the armoury in his hands, Father. He fed the lower town all winter, you said so yourself. What has he ever done with it but keep us—"
"I know what he has done. I watched him do it tonight. Every candle in my house, at once." His father did not turn round. "I have burned men for a great deal less."
"Then you burned them for nothing." And then, because it was there in his mouth: "You bought me with magic."
His father turned. His face had gone the colour of ash in a cold grate.
"Who told you that?"
"She did. At your wedding. You always did hate paying for what you'd bought. I went over a table at her for it, because I thought she was talking about my mother as though she'd been a debt." His throat closed, and he made it open. "She was talking about you. Tell me she was lying."
His father did not tell him that. When at last he spoke, his voice was perfectly steady.
"Your mother wanted you more than she wanted to live. I did not know that was what I was buying. By the time I knew, it was paid. I have spent twenty-five years making certain that nobody in this kingdom will ever buy anything of them again." He lifted one hand and let it fall. "That is what the law is, Arthur. It is not a thing I keep in a book."
"She's mine," Arthur said.
His father frowned, as at a sum that would not come out.
"Ygraine. She isn't yours, or God's, or the witch's. She's mine." He made himself say the rest with his hands open at his sides. "Midwinter. You left the feast early, and nobody had laid his fire, so I went up the servants' stair with an armful of wood."
He watched it go into his father, slowly, the way a blade goes into something that does not yet know it has been cut.
"He didn't bewitch me. Don't tell yourself that. I loved him before he had your ring on his hand. I just hadn't a word for it." His voice broke, and he let it. "I love him."
The king came across the room. Arthur thought for one clear moment that he was going to be struck, and found he did not much care. But his father put up both hands and took Arthur's face between them, and held it.
Arthur could not remember his father's hands on his face. He could not remember them anywhere. They were cold and dry and not steady, and the king searched his eyes from very close, the way Gaius looked into a man's eyes for fever.
"He has his hooks in you," his father said, very low. "To the bone. They give you what you want most, and then you are theirs." His thumbs moved once over Arthur's cheekbones. "When he dies, it breaks. You will wake, and you will not remember what you saw in him."
"It won't break."
"It will. The week is out at dawn on Thursday. You will light it yourself, so that the city sees my son is still my son."
Arthur thought of a small hot weight against his chest that had stopped roaring the moment it knew him, and of a woman in a shawl carrying her away down a corridor.
"Yes, Father," he said.
He said it at once. He had never in his life said it to his father at once, and he watched the king hear that and go still, his hands on Arthur's face, looking at him a moment longer, as though he had noticed something about a horse he had owned for years and could not yet say what it was.
Then he took his hands away. Arthur felt the cold places where they had been all the way down the stair.
They kept him five days in the king's wing, and he slept through most of the first two.
The iron did not hurt, exactly. It was cold, and stayed cold however long it lay against him, and it sat on the river in him like a stone on a lid. When he reached for the river nothing came but a trickle, enough to warm his own fingers and no more. Gaius came morning and evening to dress the wound, and told him things in a low voice while the guard watched from the door. She was feeding. She was roaring. The nurse, a big soft woman from Tanner's Row, called her the little madam. The king went up to the nursery every day at noon and stood by her cradle for the space of a hundred breaths, because the nurse had counted them, and went away without touching her.
"Which cradle?" Merlin said.
Gaius looked at the hearth, where Ygraine's stood as it had since March, dark oak with the sea-pinks round its hood. Nobody had come for it.
"A new one," said Gaius.
Merlin turned his face to the wall.
On the fifth day Aredian asked whether the prisoner could walk, and Gaius looked at Merlin a long time before he said that he could, just. So Merlin walked, past the king's shut door and down stair after stair with Aredian's vinegar going ahead of him like a herald, to the cells under the citadel. They put him in the end cell, with straw and a bucket and a grating that let in a square of grey and no warmth at all, and Aredian had the blanket taken out. "Cold iron and cold stone, my lord. It is the only way to be sure."
The gaoler was a big slow man called Wat, who looked once at the prisoner's face and after that at the floor. On the second day his boy brought the water instead: seven or eight, with a cowlick and no front teeth, singing the honey-cake song all the way down the stair. He had got well into the rude verse, and had rhymed honey with bonny with enormous satisfaction, when his father's voice came down after him like a dropped sack.
He put the cup through the bars. "Are you the honey-cake boy?"
"I was."
"My mam says you're the bread." He considered this. "She cried."
Merlin laughed, and it pulled at the wound so that he had to fold over it with his chained hands. The boy watched with great respect, and went, and Merlin heard him start the rude verse again on the stair, quieter.
The king came on the last night.
He came alone, in soft shoes, hung his torch in the bracket, set the gaoler's stool outside the bars and sat. He was in black. He had not shaved, and in the torchlight the lines beside his mouth ran down like cuts.
For a long time neither of them spoke.
"I saw the candle," the king said at last. "In September, when the child kicked. I told you there was a draught, and I went and closed a window that was shut. I believe I had been closing it since Whitsun."
"I know," said Merlin. "I watched you."
"How long?"
"Always. I was born with it." He had said it once before, to Arthur, and it came easier the second time. "The rush-seller's knife was red-hot when it hit the puddle. You looked right at it. That was me. And at the feast I didn't trip. She meant to end your line in him, and I couldn't let it touch him, so I caught it." He swallowed. "She's here because of that. Because of what you mean to burn."
"Be quiet."
Merlin was quiet. Somewhere in the dark, water dripped.
"You asked me for grain," said the king, slowly. "For the granary, and for Gaius, and for a laundress's life. You sat at my table every Thursday for a year and asked me for whatever you pleased. Why did you never ask me for this?"
"Ask you what? Uther, I was born a sorcerer, may I keep my head? You'd have burned me for asking."
"Yes. That is the law." He looked down at his hands. "I know how many I have burned. I had Geoffrey keep the count. A rush-seller's brother with a book under his floor. A midwife in Tanner's Row who sang over the women. A boy of sixteen who could find water with a hazel stick." His voice did not change. "If I spare you, I have burned every one of them for nothing."
"Then stop," said Merlin.
The king was silent so long that Merlin thought he would not answer.
"I would have given you anything," he said. "Anything I had. I gave you her cradle."
"Uther," Merlin said.
The king flinched, as he had at the birth, but he did not tell him to stop.
"I'm sorry. Not for what I am. For Midwinter, and for letting you think she was yours. You were kind to me, and I—"
There was no end to that sentence that would be any use to either of them.
"Is it Thursday tomorrow?" he said instead.
The king's head came up. "It is."
"I'd have wanted the white."
Something went over the king's face that Merlin had never seen there and never wanted to see again, a pike turning under ice. When it had gone, Uther stood up carefully, like a man who has broken something inside and not yet found where. He unclasped his cloak, folded it once, and put it through the bars onto the straw by Merlin's knee. Then he took down his torch and went up the stair, and the dark came down behind him.
The cloak smelled of woodsmoke and cloves. Merlin pulled it round himself, chain and all. Somewhere above him a woman from Tanner's Row was walking his daughter up and down in the dark, and he could not hold her, and very likely never would again; and he found that he was humming.
He had not chosen the song. It was simply there, the way it always was when somebody could not sleep. He hummed it into the king's cloak for a child who could not hear him, and then, because nobody could hear him, he sang the words.
On the stair, the footsteps stopped.
They had not reached the top. After they stopped there was no sound at all, only the stillness of a man standing in the dark with his hand on the wall. Merlin could have stopped. He sang it to the end, and I'll hold you till morning, as slowly as Gaius had ever hummed it over the mortar, and then he lay and listened.
For a long while nothing moved. Then the footsteps went on up, as they had once gone away from his door, and far above him a door closed.
He had told Morgana first, because she had asked him to. She heard him out in the gallery at dawn the morning after the birth without once interrupting, and at the end she said only, "Good. Now we can begin."
They met for the last time on the Wednesday night in Gaius's workshop, with the shutters closed and one candle. On his way past the cell stair Arthur had seen two of the guard at the top of it with their faces turned to the wall, and known who was below.
A pyre in the middle of a city was a matter of public health, Gaius had told Aredian, and so the king's physician had stood over the stacking all afternoon. The right-hand side, as you faced the stake from the citadel steps, was packed through with the yellow powder he burned in sickrooms against the plague.
"It will smoke like the pit, and the wind's in the west, so it will go left across the square towards the chandler's. The other side is ash wood, dry as a sermon." He looked at Arthur over the candle. "Which side?"
"The right, from the steps."
"Again."
"The right, Gaius."
He would examine the child at dawn, as he had twice a day all week. The nurse liked her ale, and the guards on the nursery door liked whatever the nurse liked. "Poppy, and a little valerian. They will wake with sore heads and no memory of my face, and I shall be extremely sorry for them."
Gwen had a laundry basket. "Annis's. She says she owes him a heel of bread and her life, and she'd as soon start with the bread." Linen on top and the baby beneath, and Gwen out by the scullery gate with it on her hip like any maid going down to the coppers.
Elyan would be in the alley behind the chandler's with two horses from the forge, one of them Hawthorn, and a hammer and a cold chisel. "Three blows," said Elyan, who had made the links for Merlin's silver belt and did not waste words. "Four, if he can't keep his wrists still."
Arthur had thought of asking Leon, and had not. Leon would have said yes, and they would have hanged him for it.
"Tell Merlin only this," said Gaius. "When the smoke comes, hold your breath and go left. He will have no breath for anything longer." He folded his hands. "You understand that you will not come back. You will not be king."
Arthur thought of the chair at his father's right hand, and his mother's chair at the left, and the cradle standing empty by Merlin's hearth. He found that he did not care at all who sat in any of them after him.
"Somebody else can be jealous of the chair," he said, and saw Morgana's mouth twitch. "And my father? He'll see everything from the balcony."
"Leave your father to me." Morgana was turning one of the leech jars in the candlelight, watching the black ribbons move. "I told you I dreamed of a field."
They came for him before it was light.
Wat would not look at him. He took the king's cloak off Merlin's shoulders and folded it with surprising care, and then they walked him up out of the dark in his shirt and out into the square.
It was full, people on the troughs and the stall roofs and the chandler's steps, frost on their shoulders, their breath going up into the grey. And it was silent. Merlin had never known the lower town silent. He walked through it barefoot, the wound pulling at every step, and heard nothing but the guards' boots, until somewhere near the well somebody began to hum.
It was Agnes, who sold him his thread, on the step of the bread stall with her chin up. The man beside her took it up, and the woman beside him, and it went through the crowd the way miracle had gone through the great hall in March, until the whole square was humming the honey-cake song under its breath, the rude verse too, and not one of them opening their mouth wide enough to be hanged for it.
Aredian, at the foot of the pyre with his clerks, looked round at it once and did not like it.
Merlin stumbled on the steps of the pyre, and the guards lifted him the rest of the way and bound him to the stake with rope over the iron. Aredian read the charges in his soft, courteous voice, and Merlin looked up.
The king stood on the balcony above the citadel steps, in black, with Morgana beside him in grey. He did not look down. He looked out over the roofs, the way Arthur had once looked at the doors of the great hall the whole time Merlin was marrying his father.
Then the crowd parted, and Arthur came across the square with the torch.
He was in red, and he walked the way he walked onto a tourney field, looking at nobody. The humming dropped away round him as he passed and closed again behind. He climbed the steps and stood in front of Merlin and said, loudly enough for the balcony, "You should have stayed a servant."
Then he leaned in, as though to look at the ropes.
"When the smoke comes, hold your breath and go left."
He straightened. The torch was shaking, the flame jerking in the still air the way it never did in Arthur's hand.
"You'll miss," Merlin said, so low that only Arthur could hear. "You always throw high."
Arthur's mouth moved. For one moment Merlin thought he would laugh out loud, there on the pyre in front of the whole lower town, and he very nearly did. Then the torch was still.
He turned and thrust it deep into the right-hand side.
For a heartbeat nothing happened. Then the faggots coughed, and the smoke came up out of them yellow as egg yolk and thick as fleece, stinking of the sickroom, and rolled left across the square on the wind. Merlin had time to see Morgana sway on the balcony and go down as gracefully as dropped silk, straight into the king's arms, and to see the king catch her. Then there was nothing anywhere but yellow.
He held his breath. A knife went through the rope at his chest and at his knees, and Arthur had him by the chain, and they were going down the back of the pyre, left, into the smoke. Hands came out of it and took his arms. One of them was large and red and smelled of thread-wax, and it pulled him on through people he could not see, who closed behind them like water.
From somewhere above the smoke he heard the king.
"Arthur!"
There was no order in it, only a name, cried out the way you cry a name after someone who has fallen, and nobody in the square moved for it, because nobody had been told to.
Then there was the alley behind the chandler's, and air, and Gwen with a laundry basket, and two horses, and Elyan with a hammer. "Wrists," said Elyan. Merlin laid them on the mounting block. Three blows, and the iron fell away, and the river came back up into his arms like blood into a hand that has been slept on, burning.
Under the linen his daughter was asleep, one fist up by her ear, frowning at something.
"Somebody," said Gwen, and her voice shook, "has to be very surprised about all this." She kissed Merlin hard on the cheek and bound the baby against Arthur's chest under his cloak, quick as a parcel, and Elyan threw Merlin up onto Hawthorn as though he weighed nothing.
They went down through the lower town at a gallop, through streets as empty as a plague year, and every stride went through the wound like a nail. Ahead, at the end of Tanner's Row, the gate stood open on the grey fields. A bell began on the walls, and with a long iron shriek the portcullis started to fall.
They were too far away. Arthur shouted and did not check.
Merlin let go of the saddle and put up his hand.
He had no word for it. He had the river, what was left of it after a week in iron, and he took all of it and threw it at the gate. The portcullis stopped a man's height above the road with a jolt that shook dust out of the arch, and hung there groaning, while Arthur went under it with the baby and Merlin went under it after him. Then the river ran out, and the iron came down behind them with a crash he felt in his teeth.
On the road beyond he pulled Hawthorn up. Arthur wheeled back, shouting his name.
Merlin did not answer. He tipped back his head and called.
It came from somewhere older than the river and older than any word, from a man he had known for less than a week and lost at the end of it, and it was a sound no human throat should have been able to make. It went out over the frosted fields to wherever the old dragon was, and Arthur stared at him as though he had grown wings himself.
Ahead of them the fields lay white to the dark line of the woods. Behind them, on the walls of Camelot, the horns had begun.