Chapter 11: Over the White Mountains
Leon had learned everything Arthur ever taught him, and by noon Arthur was sorry for every lesson.
They doubled back down a stream bed, and so did Leon. They split their trail at the charcoal-burners' clearing and joined it again a mile on over bare rock, and Leon split his twenty and joined them again a mile on. It was like being hunted through the Darkling Woods by his own reflection. Whenever the track climbed, Arthur could see them through the grey trunks, red cloaks a mile back, then less.
Merlin had said at dawn that it would rain, and it rained, a long cold soaking rain through the bare beeches that ran down inside Arthur's collar and into the shawl that held his daughter against his chest. She did not care for it. She said so all morning, in a voice that carried through the woods better than a hunting horn.
"She's telling them where we are."
"She's telling you she's wet." Merlin rode hunched over Hawthorn's neck with both hands in her mane, as grey as the bark. Twice Arthur had seen him sway and catch himself. "Arthur. The river."
Where the west road crossed the river there was a ford a child could paddle in August. Now it was a brown roaring width of water with whole branches going down it, and the far bank a long way off through the rain.
"We'll wait," said Merlin.
Behind them, not far enough behind, a horse whinnied and another answered it.
"We won't," said Arthur, and put his horse at the water.
It came up to his stirrups, then the girths, cold enough to stop a heart. The bay leaned into it and went on, step by blind step over the stones, while Arthur held his daughter up under his chin and talked to the horse the whole way, steady filthy nonsense from the training field, until the bottom shelved and the bay heaved out onto the gravel of the far bank.
He turned. Merlin was halfway across.
Hawthorn was steady in snow. Nobody had ever said she was steady in a flood. In the middle of the river she put a foot on something that rolled, and the water took her legs from under her as easily as a hand sweeps crumbs off a table. She went over sideways, and Merlin went under.
Arthur had laid his daughter under a holly bush, roaring, and was in the river to his waist before he had thought about it at all. Last winter on the ridge road it had been Merlin hauling him out of a beck by the collar and the belt. He got a fistful of Merlin's coat and hauled, and Merlin came up choking, and Arthur dragged him over the stones onto the gravel and fell down beside him.
Downriver, Hawthorn found her feet. She came up grey and streaming and swam, strongly, the current taking her down towards the bend. At the bend she lifted her head and looked back at them once, ears forward, as though she had heard something said and was reserving judgement. Then the river took her round it.
"Hawthorn," Merlin said, on his hands and knees. "Arthur, she—"
Something hissed past Arthur's ear and went into the bank.
The knights had come out of the trees on the far side, twenty of them, cloaks black with rain. One of the younger men had a bow up, and as Arthur came to his feet a hot line opened across his upper arm, and Leon's voice came over the water like a whip: "Hold! Hold, damn you, that's the prince!"
Arthur drew his sword. He put himself between the river and the two things behind him on the gravel, Merlin on his knees and his daughter roaring under the holly, and stood there with the rain in his eyes and the blood running down inside his sleeve.
Leon rode into the shallows as far as his horse would go. He had taken off his helm. His face was wet, and not only with the rain.
"Sire." He had to shout it over the water. "Come back. Please. He'll forgive you. You're his son."
"Go home, Leon," Arthur shouted. "Tell him the river was up."
"I can't."
"I know."
They looked at each other across the flood. Along the bank the knights were spreading out to look for a crossing, and the boy had his bow up again.
Then the river stood up.
It rose in a brown wall higher than the trees and came down on both banks at once, and in the middle of where it had been, with the flood breaking round his shoulders like surf round a rock, there was a dragon.
He was the colour of old bronze gone green in the rain, and bigger than the great hall, and the wind of his wings as he folded them flattened the reeds for a furlong. On the far bank twenty horses screamed and bolted. Knights went into the river and out of it again, knights went over backwards, knights went back into the trees at a pace Arthur would have had words for on any other day. Leon's horse reared and spun and Leon kept his seat, and for a moment longer than any of the others he stayed, looking past the dragon at Arthur.
He raised his hand. It might have been to shield his eyes from the spray. It might have been a salute.
Then he turned his horse and went after his men.
The dragon turned his head on its long neck, the way a heron does, and looked down at Merlin.
"Young warlock," he said, in a voice Arthur felt through the gravel. "You have chosen a hard road."
"I know," said Merlin, still on his knees. "Thank you for coming."
The dragon made a sound like a small landslide, which Arthur slowly understood to be amusement. Then the great head came down past Arthur, who had forgotten he was holding a sword, and stopped an arm's length from the holly bush, where his daughter lay in her soaked shawl and roared up into the face of a dragon as though it owed her money.
The dragon considered her for some time.
"She has a great deal," he said, "of her other father's opinion of herself already."
Merlin had dreamed of flying all his life, like everyone, and in none of the dreams had Arthur been behind him swearing.
Kilgharrah took them up off the gravel in the last of the light, with a lurch that left Merlin's stomach on the riverbank, and the Darkling Woods dropped away beneath them like a cloth pulled off a table. Arthur sat behind him between two of the great ridged plates of the dragon's neck, with both arms locked round Merlin's middle hard enough to bruise and his forehead jammed between Merlin's shoulder blades. His eyes were shut. Merlin did not need to look.
The baby was buttoned inside Merlin's coat. The dragon's neck was as warm as a hearthstone, and the warmth came up through their wet clothes, and after a while she stopped roaring and slept with her fist in her mouth.
"Are we there?" said Arthur into his back.
"We've only just left the ground."
"Tell me when we're there."
The rain was behind them. Ahead the sky was clearing, and the first stars were coming out over the White Mountains, a long white wall along the edge of the world with the moon rising over it. Merlin had never been so high. Nobody had. The wind took his hair and his breath, and he was empty to the bone, and the wound ached, and he owned nothing in the world but the clothes he was wet in and the two people holding on to him, and he began, helplessly, to laugh.
"Don't laugh," said Arthur. "How can you laugh. There's nothing under us."
"There's a dragon under us."
"That's what I mean."
Merlin laughed until the tears ran sideways into his ears, and Arthur held on and swore, and under them the dragon made the landslide sound again.
Somewhere over the first of the snowfields Arthur said, in a different voice, "The night the dragon got out of the caves. The bells rang till dawn. I was out with the knights all night in the rain looking for it."
"I know," said Merlin. "I made you a posset when you came in."
A long silence. "You let it out."
"Him. Yes."
A longer silence. Then Arthur's arms tightened, which Merlin would not have thought possible, and he said into Merlin's back, in a voice of deep and settled grievance, "Of course you did."
"A door was opened for me once, under that city," said the dragon, without turning his head. "I pay what I owe, young warlock. I will take you over the mountains, and no further. My wings are old, and your daughter is very loud."
They came down at dawn on a hillside on the far side of the world, bracken and grey stone and a few astonished sheep, with the sun coming up behind the mountains and laying their shadow out across the valleys. Arthur slid off the dragon's shoulder and lay flat on his back in the bracken with his arms out and his eyes shut, holding on to the ground with both hands.
"Never again," he said.
Merlin sat down beside him, because his legs had gone. Kilgharrah looked down at the three of them for a long moment with his great gold eyes, the way Gaius looked at a patient he was not sure about. Then he went up into the morning without another word, and they watched him dwindle over the snow and go out.
They walked west for seven weeks, and Arthur complained about all of it.
He complained about the rain, and the hills, which went up and down in a way he considered deliberate, and his boots, and the porridge, and Merlin's feet, which in a hayloft at night were exactly as cold as they had been in the king's wing and a good deal nearer. Most of all he complained about the goat.
He had traded his sword-belt buckle for her in the first village they came to, because the baby had to eat, and a nanny goat in milk was the only thing for twenty miles that could feed her. The buckle was gold, with the Pendragon dragon on it. The hill woman who took it bit it, looked at him very hard, and asked no questions. The goat was brown and white, with yellow eyes and an expression of quiet contempt, and Arthur named her Agravaine.
"You can't call a goat Agravaine."
"She's got his smile."
Merlin laughed so much he had to sit down on a wall.
Arthur milked her badly. He had never milked anything in his life, and the goat knew it. She stood on his foot, put her own in the pail, and twice knocked him off the stool into the muck, while Merlin, who had milked goats since he could walk, sat in the straw with the baby and offered no help at all. "Gently. You're not wringing a neck." "She kicked me." "So would anyone, if you went at them like that."
They needed names in the first week. A carter asked for theirs at a ford, and Arthur opened his mouth with Pendragon already in it, and Merlin trod on his foot and said pleasantly, "Emrys. And this is Gwyn."
"Gwyn?" said Arthur, when the carter had gone.
"It means fair." Merlin did not look round. "And you are. And you'll hate it."
He did hate it. He answered to it within a fortnight. The baby he named himself, by accident, on a hillside in the rain, when she had roared for an hour without drawing breath and he said, "God's teeth, you're like a wren in a hedge, you're the size of my thumb and they can hear you in the next valley," and Merlin laughed, and after that she was Wren and would answer to nothing else, insofar as she answered to anything.
In the fourth week the cut on his arm went bad.
He had thought nothing of it. But it went red, and then hot, and one night in a shepherd's bothy above a lake he could not stop shaking, and could not tell the shaking from the cold, and he heard himself talking to his father in a voice he did not recognise.
He came back to himself in the small hours. The bothy was full of gold.
Merlin was kneeling over him with both hands flat on his arm, and his eyes were open and blazing, not hidden, not shut, not turned away into anybody's chest. The light came off him like heat off a forge. Arthur felt it go into the arm, warm, then hot, then cool, as though someone had poured clean water through the wound, and the ache went out of his bones with it.
He lay and watched. He had once seen candles float in a dark room and backed away until a wardrobe stopped him. He looked now for the place in him where that fear had been, and could not find it.
"There you are," he said. His voice was a croak.
Merlin's eyes went slowly back to blue. "Here I am."
After that Merlin did not hide it from him at all. He lit their fires with a word in the rain and warmed the goat's milk in his hands for Wren, and once, on a high road, he held off a sleet storm over the three of them like a roof for the best part of an hour, and afterwards sat down in the road and could not get up. Arthur carried him to the next farm on his back with Wren tied to his chest and the goat on a string, and complained the whole way.
And every night, in every hayloft west of the mountains, Merlin lay down behind him and put an arm over him and Wren both, and sang the tide song into the back of Arthur's neck until one of them slept. Arthur said it was for the baby. Merlin said, "Mm," and sang it anyway.
The snow caught them at an inn in the last of the hills, and kept them there four days.
It was a long low house of grey stone full of drovers waiting out the weather, with a fire you could have roasted an ox in and a landlady who had taken one look at Wren and put them in the warm corner by the chimney without being asked. Merlin had warmed her chilblained hands for her on the second night, quietly, under the table. She had looked at him over them and said nothing, and brought them double portions after.
On the fourth evening he smelled vinegar.
He was by the fire with Wren asleep on his shoulder, and Arthur was across the room losing at knucklebones to a drover, and the door opened on a gust of snow, and before Merlin had turned his head he knew. Sharp and sour, like a pickling shed.
Aredian stood in the doorway knocking the snow off his boots. He had two big men behind him in sheepskins, with cudgels, and a small crossbow cocked in the crook of his arm. He looked thinner and greyer than in Camelot, and very tired, and entirely pleased.
"My lord," he said across the room. "A careless thing, to trade a Pendragon buckle for a goat. I have followed that buckle through eleven villages." He smiled at Arthur. "Your Highness. Your father would like you home."
Every drover in the room was looking from the grey man to the young one by the fire with the baby on his shoulder.
"This man," Aredian told them pleasantly, "is a sorcerer. The king of Camelot pays two hundred crowns for him, alive." He lifted the crossbow, not at Merlin but at Arthur, who had come to his feet with his hand on his sword. "Sit down, Your Highness. The king wants his son back. He did not say whole."
Merlin stood up.
He gave Wren to the landlady, who took her without a word. Then he walked out into the middle of the floor, between the fire and the door, where the whole room could see him.
He had been hiding since he was born: in Ealdor from the neighbours, in Camelot from everyone, in the king's wing from the very walls. He had hidden his eyes in Arthur's chest at a wedding feast. He found, standing in the firelight of a drovers' inn with snow against the windows, that he had finished with it.
"I'm not your lord," he said. "And I'm nobody's consort. My name is Merlin."
His eyes went gold. He let them, in front of all of them.
Aredian loosed.
The bolt stopped a hand's breadth from Arthur's chest and hung there in the air, quivering, while the whole room stared at it. Then it dropped on the boards with a small dry sound.
The two big men came on together. Arthur met the first with his sword still in its scabbard, across the side of the head, and the man went down like a sack. The second swung his cudgel, and Arthur ducked under it and came up inside it and put him into the drovers' table, and the knucklebones went everywhere. Aredian had dropped the crossbow and was reaching into his coat for something that glinted.
Merlin said one word. It was not even a hard one.
Aredian went backwards across the room as if a horse had kicked him, hit the doorpost, and Merlin heard his arm break. He slid down the post into the snow that had blown in under the door and sat there, white, holding it.
Nobody moved. The fire cracked. Arthur stood over the two men on the floor with his sheathed sword in his fist, breathing hard, and looked across the room at Merlin and grinned at him like a boy let off lessons.
Merlin crouched by the doorpost. Aredian's face was grey with pain, and he would not meet Merlin's eyes.
"Go home," Merlin said. "Tell him where we are, if you like." He thought of a man on a stool outside a cell, and a cloak folded once. "And tell him she's well."
They put Aredian on his horse in the morning, his arm bound to a board, his men behind him. Nobody at the inn said a word to Merlin about any of it. But that night the landlady set down in front of them a whole roast fowl they had not paid for, and gave Merlin a long look, and went back to her kitchen; and one of the drovers moved along the bench to make room for them nearer the fire.
They came down into Glasdale on Midwinter night.
Arthur did not know it was Midwinter until they were halfway down the valley road in the dusk, and heard singing from a farm below and saw a yule fire in the yard. Then he counted. A year to the night since he had gone up a dark stair with an armful of wood.
The snow had not reached the valley. It lay wet and green under a still sky, walled fields and woods and a river going down the middle, and smoke from a dozen farms rising straight up. Nobody had told them anything about it except that it lay west, beyond the reach of any king who burned people. It was as far as their feet would go.
The farm with the yule fire belonged to a widow called Nest, a small fierce woman with four sons and an apron, who looked at the three of them in her gateway, and at the goat, and said, "God's sake, come in out of that." She sat them by her fire and gave them broth with barley in it, and asked them nothing whatever except whether the baby took goat's milk, and gave them her hayloft for the night.
It was warm in the hayloft, and smelled of summer. Arthur lay on his back with Wren asleep on his chest, and Merlin lay alongside with his head on Arthur's shoulder and one hand on Wren's back, rising and falling with her. Down in the yard Nest's sons were still singing round the fire, badly.
"A year ago tonight," Arthur said, "I built you a fire upside down."
"You did." Merlin was nearly asleep. "It was the worst fire I've ever seen."
"It lit."
"It did," said Merlin, after a moment, in a particular voice. Arthur turned his head. Merlin's mouth was curling in the dark, and Arthur understood, a year late, exactly why a fire built like a garden wall had caught for him on Midwinter night, and laughed so hard that Wren woke up and objected.
When she had settled again he lay with his cheek against Merlin's hair.
"Happy Midwinter," he said.
"Happy Midwinter, Gwyn."
"I'll throw you out of this loft."
"You'll miss," said Merlin, and went to sleep.
In the morning Nest watched Arthur milk the goat, took the pail off him without a word, and did it herself. Then she stood in her doorway with her arms folded and looked up the valley at a farm on the hillside above, half hidden in trees, with no smoke rising from it.
"That's old Cadoc's place," she said. "Empty four years, since he went. Roof wants seeing to and the well's foul, and his nephew in the wool trade would sell it to the devil for a fleece." She squinted at it. "Good land, mind. And there's an oak in that yard you won't see the like of, leaning right over the house like an old man over a gate."
Arthur looked up at the dark shape of it above the trees, and for no reason he could have given, he thought of Morgana in the long gallery, telling him about a dream.