Chapter 12: Straight Furrows
The wool merchant had rings on four fingers, and when Merlin laid a fifth on the trestle between them, his eyes went to it and stayed.
It was market day in January, in Glasdale's one town, a wet huddle of slate roofs where the river widened. Arthur stood at Merlin's shoulder with Wren on his hip and tried to look like a man called Gwyn. Merlin had unwound the grey thread on the walk down, slowly, a turn at a time, the way you take off a bandage, and wound it round two fingers and put it in his pocket. Now the ring lay on the trestle between a bale of fleece and a pot of ink, heavy and gold, with the dragon cut into its face.
"Where did you come by this?" said Cadoc's nephew.
"It was given me," said Merlin. "And now I'm giving it you."
Arthur had seen Merlin bargain over a goose at the fair. He had never seen him do it for an hour, with a face like a closed shutter, against a man who bought and sold for a living. By the end of the hour Merlin had the farm and everything in it: the house with its leaking roof, and the barn, and the foul well, and a plough with a crack in the share you could have posted a letter through, and an ox with a white face and the temperament of a bishop, and the pick of the merchant's wether lambs, which the merchant had not meant to give and could not afterwards say how he had come to.
Merlin stood in the wet street with the deed in one hand and looked at the other. There was a pale band round his finger where the ring had been for more than a year, softer than the rest of him. He opened his hand and closed it.
"Better," he said.
The valley called the farm Oakhollow, for the oak and the hollow it stood in. By Candlemas the well was sweet, and nobody asked why. By the end of February the roof leaked in only three places, which Merlin said was an improvement and Arthur said was three places. And in the first week of March, with the ground soft and the rooks quarrelling in the oak, Arthur yoked the ox and went out to plough.
He had ridden at the head of armies. He had taken a wyvern on foot. He had never in his life been so humiliated by anything as he was by the ox, which walked where it liked and stopped when it liked and turned its white face round to look at him over its shoulder with an expression of patient Christian sorrow. Arthur called it the Bishop. The Bishop did not care what Arthur called it.
The first furrow, when he turned at the bottom of the field and looked back up it, wandered from the gate to the hedge and back again.
Old Tegid from the next farm was leaning on the wall. He was eighty if he was a day, with three teeth and opinions on everything, and he had come up the lane on purpose to watch. He looked at the furrow for a long time.
"Like the track of a drunk snail," he said, and began to laugh, and laughed until he lost his footing and went backwards off the wall into the ditch, and lay there in the dead bracken wheezing.
On the third day the plough went through the hedge into Tegid's turnips, ox and all.
Arthur sulked. He sulked magnificently, sitting on the plough beam in the ruins of the turnips with his arms folded and his jaw set, and would not come in to supper. Merlin brought supper out to him. He brought honey cakes too, warm from the griddle, and Arthur ate four of them without uncrossing his arms, and said they were burnt, and went out again the next morning, and the morning after that.
At the end of March, turning the Bishop at the bottom of the field for the hundredth time, he looked up the slope and stopped.
Merlin was standing at the top of the field in the soft afternoon light, where the great oak leaned out over the yard wall and its branches came down almost to the turned earth. He had Wren on his hip and the honey-cake basket on his arm, and his hair had blown across his face, and he was laughing. He was laughing at Arthur, at the furrow, which had gone wrong again near the top, laughing so hard he had to put the basket down.
He was standing in a ploughed field with a great oak leaning over him, and he was laughing at someone. I couldn't see who.
Arthur stood in the furrow with the reins slack in his hands while the Bishop cropped at the headland. Morgana had dreamed it on the night after the fair, a year and a half ago and a hundred miles away, before there was a wedding or a curse or a child; and again last September, with Aredian in the citadel. There was a baby in it this time, on someone's hip.
It was me, he thought. He was laughing at me.
He began to laugh too, standing in his own crooked furrow, until the Bishop turned round to look at him with deep concern.
Tegid's ewes lambed in a sleet storm in the first week of April.
He had forty of them and a lambing fold of hurdles and thatch in the lee of the hill, and two hands, only one of which had worked since a ram broke the other forty years back. So Merlin and Arthur went down to help, as neighbours did in Glasdale.
On the third night a ewe threw twins, and the second lay where it fell in the sleet and did not move. Tegid looked at it by the lantern and said, "That one's gone," as he said everything, as though it were the lamb's own fault, and reached to take it away.
"Wait," said Merlin.
He knelt in the muck and cleared its mouth with his finger. It was small and slick and grey and still, and the river was there under him as it always was now, easy, warm, a word away. He thought of Gaius bent over a grey baby on a night of thunder, breathing, and breathing, and the cold leaning over the bed.
He said the word. His eyes went gold in the lantern light, in front of Tegid and the sleet and God, and the lamb sneezed, and kicked, and bleated, outraged, in a voice much too big for it.
On Arthur's hip, Wren clapped. She had learned it that week and did it at everything, but she clapped now as though the lamb were the finest thing she had ever seen, and Arthur clapped with her.
Merlin stayed on his knees with the lamb steaming in his hands and waited for the cold to come in under the hurdles. It did not come. Nothing came. It was a lamb, and nobody wanted paying for a lamb.
Tegid looked at Merlin's eyes for some time. Then he took the lamb and put it to the ewe and said, "Well. That's handy."
By the end of the week the whole valley knew. Merlin waited for that too: for the looks in the market, and people crossing the road, and a stone through the window. What came instead, on the Sunday, was a woman he had never seen, walking up the hill in the rain with a child of three in her shawl, burning with fever, who stood in the yard under the oak and said nothing at all, only held the child out.
After that people came up the hill a good deal. Nobody lit any fires.
Arthur slipped only once.
It was the end of April, after a week of cold rain. The Bishop had gone lame in the near fore, and Arthur had spent the day ditching the bottom field alone with water to his shins, and Merlin had spent it at the far end of the valley with an old man who was dying slowly and wanted someone to sit with him. When Merlin came up the hill at dusk Arthur was already in, at the table in the dark with his wet boots still on and Wren grizzling in the crib he had built her, which rocked whether you wanted it to or not. The hearth was cold.
"You let the fire out," Arthur said.
"I was with old Ifor. He hasn't long."
"You can light a fire by looking at it." Arthur did not turn round. "You can light one from the other end of the valley. And I come in after a day in a ditch to a cold house and a crying child because you'd sooner sit with somebody else's—"
He stopped.
He had got up while he spoke and gone to the doorway, and he stood there with one hand on the frame, and Merlin watched him hear it. Watched it go back over him, the voice and whose voice it was: cold and careful and never satisfied, the voice of a long table. Arthur's face went white in the last of the light.
"No," he said. "That was..." He shut his eyes. "I'm sorry."
"It's—"
"Don't. Let me." Arthur opened his eyes. "I keep saying sorry for things one at a time, and there are too many of them. I'll be dead before I get to the end. So I'm saying it once, for all of it. For every year you knew me. For the ones I haven't thought of yet." His voice cracked. "For tonight."
The old words came up in Merlin the way they always had. It's fine. Three years of them, worn smooth as a step. He felt them in his mouth, and did not say them.
"Thank you," he said.
Arthur stared at him as though he had never heard the two words in that order.
Merlin crossed the kitchen and took his hands. They were cold to the bone from the ditch, and raw at the knuckles, and Merlin held them between his own, which were warm now, always, as they had never been in all his years in Camelot. He rubbed them slowly, the way you rub a child's hands in from the snow, until Arthur's shoulders came down.
"Will you light it?" Arthur said. He said it carefully, like a man picking up a blade he has been told is sharp. "The fire. Please."
Merlin looked at him for a moment.
"Light it yourself," he said. "You know how."
And Arthur knelt on the hearthstone and built a fire: straw first, then kindling, then the split logs leaned in over it like the roof of a small house, the way he had watched Merlin do it every morning for two years and never once seen. He struck the flint twice, and bent close, and blew on it gently, the way you blow on a spark and not on a candle.
It caught first time. Merlin had not said a word.
Arthur sat back on his heels and looked at the fire, and then up at Merlin, and Merlin watched him decide not to say damp.
After that he said please. He said it stiffly for a week, and then more easily, and by haymaking he was saying it to the Bishop.
They were handfasted under the oak at the end of harvest, on a still gold evening, with the stubble shining in the bottom field and the swallows gathering on the barn roof.
The hedge-priest walked the western valleys twice a year with a bell and a dog, and married or buried whoever asked him, and asked nothing back but his supper. Tegid stood witness, in a coat that had been his father's, and Nest beside him with her four sons scrubbed pink. Half the valley had come up the hill, the people who had been coming up it all summer: the woman whose child had had the fever, and old Ifor's daughter, and the man from the mill with the bad chest. Wren sat on Nest's hip and ate a honey cake with great seriousness.
Nest had plaited the cord herself, from their own wool, and in the middle of it, wound through with the grey, were three strands of darning thread that had held a king's ring on Merlin's finger for more than a year.
"Hands," said the priest.
Arthur held out his. He had stood in a shield wall at nineteen. He had waded into a river after a hart of twelve with his father watching from the bank. His hand was sweating and shaking like a boy's at his first tourney, and he could not make it stop.
Merlin's was perfectly steady. It was the hand that had held up a portcullis. He laid it against Arthur's, palm to palm, and the priest wound the cord round both their wrists, once, and again, and a third time, and tied the knot, and the knot slid straight off Arthur's wet skin into the grass.
Tegid wheezed. Nest's sons fell about. The priest picked the cord up, looked at Arthur over it with the patience of a man who has married a great many nervous farmers, wound it on again, round, and round, and round, and tied it twice over and pulled it tight.
Arthur did not hear a word of what came after. He heard the priest draw breath to say that he might kiss his husband, and did not wait for it.
"I hadn't got to that," said the priest, when he could be heard.
"He never waits for anything, that one," said Tegid. "Ploughed my turnips."
It was Arthur who saw the cart first, because he had his chin on Merlin's shoulder and was looking down the valley. It came over the shoulder of the hill from the pass road with the low sun behind it, two people on the box and a third in the back with something on her knees, and he watched it all the way up the lane before he could believe it.
Then Merlin turned in his arms and saw it too, and was gone, running down the slope through the stubble with the cord still hanging off his wrist.
Gwen was climbing down off the box. Elyan was holding the horse. And in the back of the cart Hunith sat very upright with a basket on her knees, and in the basket, with its head out and an expression of deep offence, was a hen.
Merlin had his mother's face in his two hands before she was down, and she had his, and neither of them was saying anything sensible. Gwen came up the slope to Arthur with her eyes wet and her chin up, and reached into her coat.
"He sent for me in August," she said. "He gave me a purse and the road, and said Ealdor was on the way if one went by the ridge." She put two things into Arthur's hand: a small packet sewn up in linen, and a letter. "I was to give these to Merlin. But I think you'd better hold them a minute."
The seal was red wax, and pressed into it was the dragon.
The letter was addressed to Merlin in the king's exact, narrow hand, with no title at all, only his name.
He opened it at the kitchen table when the supper was done, after Nest had taken her sons home and Tegid had been helped down the hill singing. Hunith sat by the fire with Wren asleep across her lap, and Gwen and Elyan sat on the settle and talked about the road with great care. Arthur stood behind Merlin's chair. Merlin did not need to look round to know it.
Merlin,
I have known where you were since the spring, when a ring bearing my device was offered in the wool market at Abermor by a merchant out of Glasdale. My people bought it back. It was not cheap. You will find it enclosed. Do with it what you think right.
I have called off the hunt. The witchfinder came back to me in March with a broken arm and your direction, and a message, which he delivered. He will not trouble you again. He will not trouble anyone in Camelot again.
Gaius tells me that on the morning in question he mistook one jar for another. I have allowed him to tell me so.
I gave the order for the portcullis one breath later than I might have. I have not decided whether that was age or something else.
Your mother's barley came up. The company on the ridge road will stay where it is. It is the best foothold I have ever had in Essetir, and I have never yet given up a foothold.
Aredian tells me you call the child by the name of a bird. Her name is Ygraine. You may call her what you like.
The paper enclosed was my wife's. I found it in her sewing box in the week she died and could neither burn it nor read it. She sang it to him before he was born. I could never bear to hear it, until a night last autumn when I was given no choice. Sing it to the child.
Last summer I told you that he would make a better king than I have been, and that you were not to tell him I said so. You may tell him now. I find I no longer have a reason not to.
Uther
Merlin read it twice. Then he held it up over his shoulder without turning round, and felt Arthur take it.
In the packet was the ring. Merlin cut a length of wool cord and threaded the ring on it, and went and knelt by his mother's chair and put it very gently round Wren's neck as she slept. She frowned, and found it with one hand, and put it in her mouth.
Under the ring was a square of old paper, folded small, soft as cloth with keeping. The ink had gone brown. The hand was round and careful and nothing like the king's. Merlin folded it again, very small, and put it inside his shirt, against his skin.
When Merlin stood up, Arthur had gone.
He found him in the barn, in the dark, sitting in the straw against the Bishop's stall with the letter in one hand. The Bishop was breathing slowly and warmly over the partition. Arthur did not look up.
Merlin sat down in the straw behind him, with his knees on either side of Arthur's hips, and put his arms round Arthur's chest and drew him back against him, the way he had in a woodcutter's hut on the ridge road with the storm going over, and put his chin on Arthur's shoulder.
"There," he said. "I've got you."
Arthur wept.
He wept as Merlin had never seen him weep, with his whole body, hard and silent, his hand crushing the letter against his knee. Merlin did not know all of what he was weeping for, and did not need to. He held on. He put his hand in Arthur's hair, small slow circles at the crown and out to the temples, and Arthur did not say don't, and after a long time the shaking eased.
"He said I'd make a better king," Arthur said thickly.
"He did. He said it to me last summer, reading by my fire. And then he told me not to tell you."
"Why?"
"Because you're never so good," said Merlin, "as when you're trying to prove him wrong."
Arthur made a sound that was half a laugh and half something worse. Merlin took the old paper out of his shirt and unfolded it on Arthur's knee, and made a small gold light in his palm to see it by.
"Sing it," he said. "The new part. I don't know it."
Merlin had never seen the words before. Perhaps nobody had sung them since before Arthur was born. He read them over Arthur's shoulder, in a dead queen's careful hand, and sang them into his hair, low, the way you sing to a child half asleep:
Hush now, my heart, though the wind's at the door,
the gulls are asleep on the rocks by the shore;
whatever is lost on the dark of the sea,
the morning will bring you safe home to me.
Arthur turned his face into Merlin's neck. After a while the little light went out of its own accord, and they sat on in the dark straw with the Bishop breathing over them, and the end of the cord from the oak still round Arthur's wrist.
At dawn the roof was leaking again in the corner by the window, into the pan they kept there for it, a slow tock, tock, like a clock in an empty room.
Arthur lay and listened to it. Merlin was awake beside him, on his back, with one hand spread flat over his breastbone. Arthur knew that hand. He had seen it pressed there under a council table in February, and flat on the curve under Merlin's robe on the day his father sent for the witchfinder, and he had never known it to mean nothing.
"What is it?"
"It woke," Merlin said. He was looking at the rafters, and his mouth was curling. "Last night. The warm place. It turned over, the way it did before her." He turned his head on the pillow. "Gaius said it made a cradle, Arthur. I don't think it ever closed."
Arthur lay still while it went into him. Then he sat bolt upright in the bed, and looked down at Merlin, and at the hand, and at Merlin's face, which was trying very hard to be sensible and failing.
He whooped. It was a whoop they must have heard at Tegid's. Across the room Wren woke with a roar of fury, and down in the kitchen Hunith's hen, who had come a hundred miles over the mountains in a basket for this, went off like a trumpet.