Chapter 9: The Harvest Child
The witchfinder came a week after Lammas, in the rain, with two clerks and a locked chest, and the first thing Merlin noticed about him was the smell.
Aredian was a thin grey man with a soft, courteous voice, and he washed his hands in vinegar before and after everything he touched, so that wherever he had been the air was sharp with it, like a pickling shed. He bowed lower to the consort in the great hall than any lord had bowed since the wedding. "My lord. The king tells me you are the reason I have come."
Merlin smiled at him. He had had a year's practice at smiling at people who frightened him.
Aredian took the old guardroom off the lower court and had the servants brought to him there one at a time, and kept them as long as he liked. Within a week the citadel had gone quiet. Nobody sang on the back stairs. The laundresses stopped talking at the coppers when anyone came in, Gwen said, and went on not talking after they had gone. On the ninth day Aredian arrested Annis, who washed the linen for the king's wing and had once, when Merlin was a servant with chilblains, given him a heel of hot bread on a February morning for nothing. Her youngest had colic. She had hung a knot of red wool and a rowan twig over its cradle, as her mother had hung one over hers.
The king had asked Aredian to Thursday supper. He sat at the foot of the table and ate very little, and between the fish and the venison he mentioned, as though it were the weather, that the laundress would burn on Saturday.
Merlin put down his knife.
"Sire," he said, to Uther and not to Aredian. "May I ask you for something?"
The king looked up. "You may ask."
"Her life. Annis." Merlin made his hands lie still on the cloth. "It was red wool, sire. Every mother in Ealdor ties red wool on a cradle. Mine did. Her baby has colic." He tried to smile. "So will mine, very likely, and I'll tie anything to anything if it stops."
For a long time Uther said nothing. The candles burned straight and tall, and Merlin kept his eyes on the king's face and nowhere near them.
"For you, then," said the king. "Once."
Aredian bowed his head over his plate. "As my lord king wishes." When he raised it he was looking at Merlin, mildly and without any hurry, the way Gaius looked at a rash he had not seen before.
He took his leave after the venison. At the door he turned back and bent over Merlin's ringed hand, with great courtesy, and held it a moment longer than he needed to.
"How warm your hands are, my lord," he said. "The king told me you always feel the cold."
In the middle of September Arthur stood up in council and told his father that his witchfinder was a torturer.
He had not meant to stand. He had meant to say it reasonably, the way Merlin would have, with the lower town in it somewhere. But Aredian had kept a stable boy of fourteen on his feet for three days and nights in the old guardroom, walking him up and down whenever his eyes closed, until the boy named his own grandmother, who was sixty and deaf and kept bees. Aredian had found the bees suspicious. She was in the cells now, in the place Annis had been let out of, and in the lower town people had begun to bar their doors at dusk.
"He walks them," Arthur said. "Up and down all night, every time they fall asleep. Anyone would say anything."
"Then the innocent will be found innocent," said his father.
"Nobody he questions is found innocent. That isn't what he's for."
"He is for keeping my house safe," said Uther, without raising his voice, "which is more than my son managed at my wedding feast."
At the foot of the table Aredian sat with his clean hands folded and watched, not Arthur, not the king, but the consort.
Arthur looked at Merlin too. At every council since Whitsun this was where Merlin would have spoken: a question at the right moment, a word about the lower town, Arthur's temper turned into something his father could take. Merlin sat at the king's left hand with his hands out of sight under the table and his eyes on the cloth, and said nothing at all, and Arthur understood with a cold drop in his stomach exactly why.
He picked up his cup and threw it. It went high, as it always did, and struck the wall a yard above Aredian's head, and the wine ran down the plaster in a long red stripe. Aredian did not blink.
"Get out," said the king.
Morgana was waiting in the gallery outside, as though she had known he would come out of that door before the council did.
"You threw high," she said.
"I always throw high."
"I know." She fell into step beside him, and did not look at him. "I dreamed of the field again last night. The oak, and Merlin laughing under it. There was a baby in it this time, on someone's hip. I couldn't see whose." She stopped at the head of the stairs. "Whatever you mean to do, Arthur, tell me first."
He went up the servants' stair at midnight, and waited on the top step until a second pair of boots had gone by beyond the panel. Aredian's men walked the king's corridor now, as well as the guard. When he knocked, Merlin let him in without a word, and they lay down in the great bed with Merlin behind him, the child a great warm curve against Arthur's back, and spoke in breaths.
"If it comes to it," Arthur said, "we run."
"Not before she's born. I can't sit a horse. I can hardly sit a chair."
"Then after."
"Where?"
"West. Anywhere he isn't." Arthur's jaw was tight in the dark. "He bought me with my mother's life, Merlin. He can do without me."
Merlin did not answer that. His fingers found Arthur's hair and began, small slow circles at the crown, and went on until Arthur's jaw let go.
"If it comes to it," Merlin said at last, so low that Arthur felt it more than heard it, as though each word had to be paid for.
Against Arthur's back their daughter kicked, hard, twice, like someone hammering on a door to be let out.
The knot Gaius had promised pulled tight that month.
Milk soured in the jug when Merlin was frightened, which was often. Candles flared when the child kicked, which was always. Once the wardrobe door swung open on its own and shut again, as if someone had looked inside for a cloak and changed their mind. Gaius brewed him a draught to damp it, mugwort and something he would not name, and it damped it a little and made Merlin sick as a dog for an hour afterwards. He drank it every evening anyway, before the king came.
The king came every evening now.
He brought a book that had been Ygraine's, about a saint who sailed west for seven years and said Mass on the back of a whale, and he read it aloud from the chair across the hearth, in which he no longer sat on the edge. He read the way he would read out a treaty, exactly and with no expression whatever, and nobody had ever read to Merlin in his life, and he loved it.
Between chapters, Uther talked.
"She sang when she sewed," he said one night, with the book shut on his finger. "Some song from the coast. After she died I had the women stop singing it. I could not bear it in the house." He looked at the fire. "I have not heard it in twenty-five years."
Merlin lay very still and did not hum.
And he talked about his son. Never to his son; Merlin had never once heard him do that. "He went in after that hart like his mother into an argument," Uther said. Or: "He thinks I do not watch him in the yard. I have watched him in the yard since he could hold a stick." And once, turning a page, as though it were nothing: "He will make a better king than I have, if he lives long enough to stop being a fool. You will not tell him I said so."
"Why not tell him yourself?"
"Because then he would stop trying to prove me wrong, and he is never so good as when he is trying to prove me wrong." The king found his place.
On the last Thursday but one before harvest he did not open the book at all.
"I have had Geoffrey draw up a paper," he said. "If I die before the child is grown, you will have her wardship. You will hold her lands and sit at my son's council in her name until she comes of age." He held up a hand before Merlin could speak. "Agravaine has already asked me who would have the keeping of a royal child, should the worst happen. He asked very kindly. Arthur will have a kingdom to hold. I would not have her be one more thing he must keep out of Agravaine's hands."
Merlin could not speak at all.
He lay in the great bed with the king's child that was not the king's turning under his hands, and the king's paper giving her to her own father's keeping, and the king's face turned to him in the firelight, pleased, the way it was pleased over the chessboard when a move had gone well. He thought of the bolt on the panel, drawn back every night since March. He thought he might be sick, and that this time it would not be the draught.
Under his hands the child kicked. On the table by the bed the candle flared up a hand's breadth, bright and gold, and stood there burning tall.
Uther looked at it.
He looked at it for a long moment, the book open on his knee. Then he said, "There is a draught," and rose and went to the window, which was shut, and stood with his hand on the latch, his back to the room, for a long time before he came back and sat down and found his place.
The pains began at noon on the last day of September, a year to the day since Merlin had lain on a bed of apples in the market with a honey cake stuck to his ear, and by dusk the thunder had come down off the hills and was walking round the citadel like something looking for a way in.
Gaius had told him in August that it would have to be the knife, and that he had done it twice before, and that he would do it a great deal better with poppy in Merlin than without. So there was poppy. It made the room very far away and the pain very near, and the thunder seemed to come and go inside his own chest. Gwen held his hands. When he cried out she held them harder, and said "There. There," as though he were a horse, and he laughed once and frightened her.
In the next room, beyond the door, the king was waiting. Gaius had met him on the threshold at noon and said, "Not in here, sire. Not this time either," and the king had looked at him and gone back and sat down. Arthur was there too, because the king had sent for him: a brother should be at the door. And Aredian, because the king would not have that door left unguarded on this night of all nights, while the witch who had killed his queen was still loose in the world.
Merlin felt them out there through the wall, the way he felt rain in his knees.
Then the cold came.
It came in under the door like the frost at the wedding feast, white feathers across the boards, and the candles shrank to small blue beads. Gwen's breath smoked. And there was something in the room that was not Gaius or Gwen or the thunder: old and patient, without malice, the way the tide is without malice when it comes in over the sand. Merlin knew it as he knew the river under him. A door had been made in him out of a witch's curse, the old religion's own coin, and the door had been used, and now it had come for what doors cost.
"Merlin," said Gaius, in a voice Merlin had never heard him use.
Then the baby was out. Gaius had her in his hands, small and grey and slick, and she was not moving, and she made no sound. There was a cord round her neck. Gaius's fingers were quick and old and sure; he had it off, and her mouth cleared, and he was rubbing her back with his thumb, and bending his white head to breathe into her, and breathing, and breathing. Nothing came. Gwen made a small sound and put her hand over her mouth.
The cold leaned over the bed like a patient creditor.
A life for a life. Merlin understood it with perfect clearness, through the poppy and the pain and the thunder. It had taken a queen in this house once, and given a son for her. It did not care which. It would take her, or it would take him, and either way it would be paid. He had only to choose.
He thought of Uther standing a night and a day in a passage, and the door opening.
"No," Merlin said.
No spell he knew was as old as that word. It came up out of the bottom of him where the river ran, and the river came with it, and for the first time in his life he did not try to hold it back. He let it go. He felt it break through him like a dam giving way in spring, everything he had kept down in the king's wing for a year, everything he had kept down since he was born, all of it at once. The cold burned off like mist in a May sun. Every candle in the room leapt to the height of a man, and he felt the candles beyond the room go up with them, along the corridor and down the stairs and out across the courtyards, every candle and torch and rushlight in the citadel, all at once, as if the whole of Camelot had drawn one breath.
The room filled with gold.
And in Gaius's hands the baby gasped, and choked, and drew in air, and roared.
She roared as though she had been insulted. She roared as though she had a great deal to say and had been kept waiting for it. Gwen was crying and laughing, and Gaius was saying "There you are, there you are" over and over, and then she was on Merlin's chest, hot and furious and wet, faintly glowing at the edges like a coal, her fists going. He could hardly lift his arms. He got them round her.
He knew his eyes were still gold. He could not make them stop. Under the door, out into the antechamber, the light was pouring like water from a broken sluice, and there was nothing left in him to stop that either.
Arthur had been in the antechamber since noon.
He had walked a groove in the rushes from the window to the door and back. His father sat in the one good chair, very upright, and did not move. Aredian stood by the window with his clean hands folded and watched the lightning. Through the door, every so often, came Gaius's voice, or Gwen's, or Merlin's, and every time Merlin's came Arthur stopped walking and stood with his nails in his palms and was the king's son, and the child's brother, and nothing else.
"I stood in a passage like this," his father said, somewhere past midnight, "for a night and a day."
"I know."
"You do not know. You were the one inside." The king's hands were on his knees, and they were not steady. "She held you. Once, before the end. Did anyone ever tell you that?"
Arthur stopped walking. "No."
"She did," said his father, and said nothing more.
Then the candles shrank. All of them at once, to beads of blue, and frost came out from under the door in white feathers over the rushes, and Aredian straightened at the window and said softly, "My lord."
Even the thunder had stopped. Inside the room there was no sound at all.
His father stood up.
Then the light came. It poured out under the door, gold, so bright it threw the shadows of their feet up the walls behind them, and every candle in the antechamber leapt to the ceiling, and through the window Arthur saw every window in the citadel flare at once. And through the door, small and enraged and alive, a baby roared.
His father went in first. Arthur went after him, and Aredian after Arthur.
Merlin was in the great bed, white as the linen, with the child on his chest, and his eyes were gold, blazing the way coals blaze when you blow on them, and the baby in his arms glowed faintly round her edges, and gold light was still fading slowly out of the corners of the room like water draining from a field. Gwen stood with her back against the wall. Gaius had not moved from the bedside.
The king stopped at the foot of the bed.
Arthur saw his face. He would see it for the rest of his life: his father's face coming apart, slowly, from the inside, like river ice in March.
"Not you," said his father. It was hardly a voice. "Not you too."
"Uther," Merlin said.
The king flinched as though he had been struck across the face.
"Sorcery, my lord," said Aredian, from the doorway.
For a long time nobody moved. The baby had stopped roaring and was making small offended noises against Merlin's neck. Then the king came round the side of the bed and bent and took her out of Merlin's arms, and Merlin, who could not have held on if he had tried, let him.
His father held her as though he had been told she was breakable and did not quite believe it. He looked down at her for a long time, at the crumpled red face and the fuzz of hair the colour of wheat, and it was the only tenderness left in that room.
"Her name is Ygraine," he said.
Then he turned and held her out to Arthur. "Your sister."
Arthur took her. He did not know how, but his arms did. She weighed nothing at all. She was hot, and damp, and she opened her eyes, which were dark and cross and unfocused, and looked at him, and stopped making any noise. He held his daughter against his chest in front of his father and the witchfinder, and he could not say one word of what she was.
"Sir Leon," said the king, without turning. His voice broke on it. "Take him."
Leon was in the doorway with two of the guard. He looked at Arthur. Then he came in.
"Sire, he cannot be moved." Gaius had risen from the bedside. "He'll die on the stair."
"Cold iron, my lord," said Aredian, "and the cells. Tonight. A sorcerer of this strength—"
"The law does not burn a man in childbed." The king had not raised his voice. "It never has. He will stay in these rooms, under guard, until seven days are out." He held out his hands. "Give her to me, Arthur."
Arthur gave her. There was no way not to. His father carried her to the door, where a woman Arthur had never seen stood waiting with her shawl over her head, a wet nurse brought up from the lower town days ago against this very night, and laid her in the woman's arms, and the woman took her away down the corridor, and the small offended noises went with her and grew faint and were gone.
The guards moved towards the bed. One of them had the iron in his hands.
Arthur was between them and the bed before he had thought about it, his back to Merlin, and his sword was half out of its scabbard, a foot of bare steel shining in the light of the candles that were still burning far too high.
His father looked at him across the room, at the sword and at his face, and Arthur saw him understand a great deal more than the sword.
"Arthur," said the king. "Stand aside."