Epilogue: Lambing
It had rained since noon, as Merlin's knees had said it would, and by dark the yard was a pond and the children had gone feral.
Lambing did that to a house. For a fortnight nobody slept more than three hours together, everybody ate standing up, the kitchen smelled of wet wool and ewe's milk and the honey cakes Merlin had burnt at noon, and the children ran up and down to the barn in the dark with lanterns and grew wilder by the day, like hounds before a hunt. Merlin could do nothing about the children. He could at least do something about Arthur, who had been in the lambing pens since before light and came in at dusk so filthy that Gaius, dozing in the good chair by the fire, opened one eye and asked whether they had bought another ox.
So the tin bath came down off its hook in the scullery and went in front of the fire, and Arthur got into it.
He did not fit. He had never fitted. He sat with his knees up round his ears and his arms along the rim and his head tipped back, the firelight on his shoulders, and the children came at him like gulls at a fishing boat. Will, who was five and mostly mud, with a gap in his front teeth from the day he fell out of the oak, poured a jug over his head and shrieked. Bal, who was seven and solemn, sat on the hearth with a cup and tipped water onto his father's knee a little at a time, very carefully, to see where it would go. Nia, who was two, was in the bath as well, between Arthur's knees, because she had climbed in fully dressed when nobody was looking and would not be got out. And Wren, who was nine, sat on the settle with her feet tucked under her and told everybody what they were doing wrong.
"You'll flood the kitchen," said Wren.
"The kitchen's already flooded," said Arthur, with his eyes shut. "Merlin. Back."
Merlin took up the cloth and the soap.
It was a big back, broader than it had been in Camelot and browner, with the old axe-mark along the ribs and a long white seam on the upper arm where an arrow had gone by at a ford. Merlin scrubbed it in slow firm circles, shoulders first and then down either side of the spine, the way he had once in a prince's chamber with a cut across his hand, and Arthur leaned forward into it and made a noise like a cat on a warm wall.
"More hot," said Arthur.
Merlin said a word under his breath, an old warm one, and the water steamed. Nia patted it, astonished, as she was every time.
The fire was Arthur's. He had built every fire in this house for nine years, small things underneath and the logs leaned in over them, and it burned the way his fires always burned now, steady and clean, throwing its heat right across the kitchen to the dresser. He was very proud of his fires. He would tell anybody.
On the far side of the bath, Will had begun to sing.
It was the honey-cake song. It was, Merlin realised a line too late, the rude verse, and Will was giving it everything he had, every word in its place and the rhyme on bonny landed like a hammer.
Arthur opened his eyes. "Who taught him that?"
Every child in the room looked at the good chair. Gaius had his eyes shut and his hands folded on his stomach, and gave every appearance of an old man asleep.
"It scans," said Gaius, without opening them, "a great deal better than the one about the miracle."
Arthur laughed so hard he slid down in the bath, and Nia went under, briefly, and came up spluttering and delighted. After that there was a good deal of water on the floor, and Wren said, "I said," and Merlin fished the youngest out by the back of her dress and handed her, streaming, to Bal, who bore her off to the fire with the gravity of a man carrying a lamb.
When Arthur climbed out at last, red as a boiled ham, Merlin threw him a shirt and laced it up the front for him while he stood dripping on the hearthstone with his arms out like a scarecrow in a bean field. He crossed the second and third.
Arthur looked down at them. Then he looked at Merlin, and said nothing at all.
At ten o'clock the last ewe of the night went into difficulty, and Merlin went out to the barn with a lantern, and Wren went with him, because there was no stopping her.
The barn was warm and loud with sheep, and the rain drummed on its roof the way it had once drummed on a woodcutter's hut on the ridge road. The ewe was down in the end pen, straining, with one small hoof showing and nothing else.
"Leg back," said Wren at once, on her knees in the straw. "The other one's back. Papa, let me."
She was fair as wheat, with Arthur's jaw and Arthur's way of setting it, and round her neck on a cord of their own wool hung a heavy gold ring with a dragon on its face, swinging as she leaned. She had been bossing ewes since she could walk.
"Gently," said Merlin. "You're not wringing a neck." He had said it once to her father, about a goat.
Wren slid her small hand in. The ewe heaved and kicked, and Wren went over backwards into the straw, and the lantern on its hook flared up white and tall to the rafters, the way every lamp in the house did when Wren was cross, and settled again.
"Temper," said Merlin.
"She kicked me."
"So would you."
Somewhere above them in the hay, somebody giggled.
Merlin did not look up. "I can hear you."
There was a pause in the loft, full of breathing.
"No you can't," said Will.
There was a scuffle, and a hiss, and Bal's solemn face appeared over the edge of the loft, stuck all over with hay. He looked at the ewe. Then he climbed down the ladder without a word, in his nightshirt, and knelt at her head and put his hand flat on her neck and began to talk to her, low, nonsense, the way Arthur had once talked a horse across a river in flood. The ewe's eye rolled, and steadied, and she laid her head down in the straw and let him.
Merlin had watched for magic in it, the first year, the way Gaius had once watched him, and found none; it was only Bal. Every animal in the valley went quiet for him, and he had never in his life thought it remarkable.
Wren went in again, scowling, with her tongue caught between her teeth. Then her face changed.
"I've got the legs," she said. "Papa, I've got the legs!"
"Then pull. With her, not against her. Now."
She pulled. The lamb came out all at once in a slither and a rush, grey and slick, and lay in the straw and did not move.
Merlin knelt and cleared its mouth with his finger. He did not have to think about it any more; it was there, as it was always there, warm and easy, a word away. He said the word. For a moment his eyes went gold in the lantern light, and Wren and Bal watched them the way they would have watched him light a candle, and the lamb sneezed, and shook its ears, and bleated at all of them with enormous indignation.
"Mine," said Wren, sitting back on her heels with her arms round it, slimy to the elbows and shining. "I pulled it. It's mine."
"It's the ewe's," said Merlin.
The barn door scraped. Arthur stood in it with the rain behind him and a lantern in one hand, and on his shoulder, wrapped in his coat with only her fair curls showing, Nia, fast asleep.
"She wouldn't settle," he said. "She wanted to see the lamb."
"She's seeing it with great attention."
Arthur came and sat down in the straw beside him, carefully, so as not to wake her, and leaned his back against the post with his long legs out, and looked at the lamb, and at Wren, and at Bal at the ewe's head, and at the loft, where a pair of eyes was shining between the bales.
"Bed," said Arthur to the eyes.
"In a minute," said the eyes.
Merlin leaned against him. Arthur's shoulder was warm and smelled of soap and woodsmoke, and Nia's breath went in and out against his neck.
"Tegid came up the lane this afternoon," Merlin said. "He stood at the bottom field for the best part of an hour."
"Oh, God. What did he say?"
"He says your furrows are straight this year."
Arthur went very still. He was trying not to look pleased. He failed, slowly, all over his face, like a boy who has been told at last that he can sit a horse.
"He said that? To you?"
"He says it to me so I'll tell you," said Merlin, "so you won't get above yourself."
"Too late," said Arthur, and shut his eyes, smiling.
Merlin looked at him for a while in the lantern light: at the lines beside his eyes that had not been there in Camelot, and the grey coming in at his temples, and his big ploughman's hand spread over his daughter's back.
It was seven years now since Gaius's letter had come over the mountains to say that the king had died in his sleep in February, quite peacefully, with Ygraine's board set out on the table by his bed. The pieces had been set out for a game, Gaius wrote, as though someone were expected. White for his guest. And the white king two squares to the left of where it ought to have stood. Arthur had read that in the kitchen, standing up, and then gone out to the barn without a word, and Merlin had gone after him, and they had sat in the straw against the Bishop's stall until it was light.
Morgana had been crowned at Pentecost. The year after, she had burned the law against magic in the square where the pyre had stood, and the lower town, Gwen wrote, had sung the whole honey-cake song while it went up, all six verses. Morgana had written to them herself after that, in her sharp quick hand, to say that the chair at her right hand was empty and she had had it re-covered, and would they for pity's sake come home. They had read it in bed by candlelight and laughed, and talked about it half the night, and stayed. Her letter was on the shelf behind the salt.
Leon had come once, the summer after, and stood in the yard turning his helmet round and round in his hands until Arthur came out of the barn and walked straight across the mud and put his arms round him. Hunith lived in the cottage at the bottom of the lane, with a long line of hens descended from the one who had come over the mountains in a basket. Gaius came over the pass every spring for the lambing, complaining of every mile of it, and sat by the fire and taught the children things they should not know.
Up in the loft, someone had begun to sing.
It was Will, half asleep, with the wrong words, and then Bal, with the right ones, correcting him. Then Wren took it up from the straw, with the lamb in her lap, in her clear bossy voice that carried to the far end of the barn: Hush now, my heart, for the tide's running low. They sang it the way they sang it every night, both verses, the first that Merlin had taught them and the second from the old brown paper in the box on the shelf, which Wren could read now, and did, to anyone who would sit still. Bal sang it to the ewe. Will sang it to the hay. Arthur, eyes shut, joined in at the end of each verse with half the words wrong, as he always had; and Merlin, with his head on Arthur's shoulder, sang it all.
the morning will bring you safe home to me.
In the quiet after, the ewe nosed her lamb. The rain went on drumming on the roof.
There was a rustle and a thump, and Will came down the loft ladder in his nightshirt, crossed the barn with great purpose, climbed into Merlin's lap, and turned round three times like a dog and settled there.
"Mine," said Will.
"That's my lamb, though," said Wren, holding it tighter.
"That's my Papa."
"In this family," said Arthur, without opening his eyes, "we share."
Merlin looked at him, sitting in the straw of his own barn with a sleeping child on his shoulder and hay in his hair, saying it as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world. And he thought of a wet training field a long time ago, and a big red-bearded knight with a loose greave, and a golden boy in a sulk crossing the mud to say this one's mine, and he began to laugh.
He laughed until he had to hold on to Will to keep him from sliding off, until Arthur opened one eye and said, "What?", until the ewe looked round at him with deep disapproval, and he could not stop, and he laughed so hard that he woke the baby.
Nia lifted her head from Arthur's shoulder and looked round at all of them, the lamb and the ewe and her brothers and her sister and her two fathers in the straw. She considered them for some time. Then she decided that none of it was worth staying awake for, and put her thumb back in her mouth.