Chapter 7: A Cradle
The council on the second Tuesday in February was the dullest Arthur could remember, and he had sat through the one about the drains.
Agravaine wanted forty horses for the spring campaign and the pick of the knights, every one of them trained by Arthur, and Arthur sat at his father's right hand and listened to his own men being given away and said nothing. He had said a great deal at the last council, and been told that a prince who could not lose a command gracefully had shown why he lost it.
Then the treasurer, whose face had not grown any less like a disappointed trout over the winter, reported on the granary. It had opened at Candlemas at last year's price, and there had been no riot. There had been, he said, as though it pained him, a certain amount of singing. The lower town had a name for the loaves. "The consort's bread, sire."
Arthur looked across the table, properly, for the first time in a month.
Merlin sat at the king's left hand in the grey gloves, and he was the colour of tallow. He had not eaten at supper for three nights; Arthur had watched him move a piece of mutton round his plate for a whole course and then hide it under his bread, a trick Arthur had last used at nine years old, with cabbage. Now he sat very straight, one gloved hand pressed flat to his chest under the edge of the table, looking at the treasurer without seeing him.
"The consort's bread," said the king, and something at the corner of his mouth moved. "Well, Merlin. It seems you have fed them."
Merlin opened his mouth to answer, and nothing came out of it. His eyes rolled up, and he slid sideways out of his chair as neatly as a cloak sliding off a peg.
Arthur did not decide anything. He went round the back of his father's chair, which nobody ever went round, and was on his knees on the cold boards with Merlin's head in his lap before the treasurer had finished turning round. Merlin's skin was clammy and his lips had gone the grey of old ash.
"Merlin." It came out low and close, in the voice from the hut, and Arthur heard it and could not stop it. "Come on. Look at me."
A shadow fell over them both.
"The consort," said his father, "is not your responsibility."
He said it coldly, for the whole table to hear, the way he would correct a squire who had saddled the wrong horse, and then he was calling for the guard and for Gaius and unclasping his own cloak to lay over Merlin, all in the voice he had used for the drains.
But his hands were shaking.
Arthur saw it from the floor, where nobody else could. His father's long pale hands, which never moved without a reason, were fumbling at the clasp of the cloak like an old man's. They could not get it open. They tried again.
"Arthur," said the king. "Let go of him."
Two guards lifted Merlin between them, and Arthur's hands let go because there was no way for them not to. His father went out after them, and the door shut.
Down the table, Agravaine was looking at Arthur with his head a little to one side, the way a man looks at a dog that has barked at nothing in an empty yard, and wonders why.
Arthur sat down in his own chair, because there was nowhere else to put himself, and folded his hands on the table where they would keep still; and after a while the treasurer cleared his throat and went on about oats.
"When were you first sick?" said Gaius.
Merlin lay on the cot behind the workshop with the king's cloak over him. It smelled of woodsmoke and, faintly, of the cloves the king's servants put in his chests against the moth.
"The first week of the month. Most mornings since."
"And you said nothing."
"Everyone keeps telling me things are the fever."
Gaius did not smile. He laid his hand flat under Merlin's breastbone, as he had on the wedding night, and shut his eyes. Merlin had lain under that hand a dozen times since October, and every time Gaius had frowned and taken it away. This time he left it there, and Merlin watched the frown go out of his face and something worse come into it, blank and very careful.
"It's beating," Merlin said. "Isn't it."
"Yes." Gaius took his hand back and went and sat on the stool by the window.
"She aimed it at Arthur," he said, in the dry voice he used for lecturing on the humours. "You'll father no child. A door shut and barred in him, so that the Pendragons would end in a drunk boy with a carving knife. No blood in it, no fire. And you got in front of it." He picked up a pestle and turned it over. "Whatever you are, Merlin, and I have never pretended to know, your magic will not have a door shut in its face. It caught her spell and turned it inside out, the way you'd turn a sleeve. It was meant to close something in him. It opened something in you instead." He set the pestle down with great care. "It made a cradle, Merlin. It doesn't fill one."
"I'm a man," Merlin said, which was stupid, and he knew it while he said it.
"And men do not lift oak roots out of the clay by looking at them. Your body has been making room since October, and I put it all down to the fever." Gaius rubbed his eyes. "Which leaves one question, and God knows I'd rather not ask it. The king..."
"Uther's never touched me."
Gaius went very still. "Then..."
Merlin followed a crack in the plaster above the cot, shaped like the river below Ealdor where it bent round the mill, from one end to the other.
"Midwinter," he said.
Gaius shut his eyes.
When he opened them he said none of the things Merlin had braced for. He only leaned over and drew the cloak up to Merlin's chin and tucked it in, as you would for a child of nine.
"I have to go up to him."
"Gaius, not yet. Give me a week."
"You fainted in front of the whole council. If I lie to him, and in two months some laundress tells him your waist has thickened, they will burn us on the same afternoon." Gaius stood, and his knees cracked. "I shall tell him that his consort is with child."
"He'll know it can't be his."
Gaius stopped with his hand on the door, and for a moment he looked as old as Merlin had ever seen him.
"The king has his own reasons for believing that magic can give him a child," he said. "Do not ask me what they are."
The king came at dusk.
Merlin was sitting by his own fire, laid as it was every night, when he heard footsteps in the corridor, slow and soft. Three weeks ago he had lain in the dark and listened to them stop outside this door and go away.
They stopped. There was a knock, and then the door opened, and the king of Camelot stood on the threshold of his consort's rooms with one hand on the frame, as though there were a line drawn on the floor.
"May I?" he said.
Merlin was on his feet. "Sire. Yes."
Uther came in and shut the door. He looked once round the bare cold walls and the stabbed men, like a man taking the measure of a field, and sat down on the edge of the chair across the hearth, upright, his hands on his knees, as though it might break under him.
For a long time he said nothing.
"She said that you would carry the Pendragon blood." He said it to the fire, slowly and exactly. "She said it before three hundred witnesses, and meant it for a curse, and I have spent four months waiting to learn what I would lose by it." His hands moved on his knees and were still. "I am not a man for miracles, Merlin. I know what is paid for them. But I am told that a thing which cannot happen has happened, in my house, to you. And I find I do not know what to do with my face."
A light had come into the king's face that Merlin had never seen there, not over the chessboard, not even at the honey-cake song, held very still, as if he were afraid of spilling it. Merlin had not known the king's face could hold so much joy, and he could not look at it for long.
"Ygraine was afraid, at the end," said the king. "She never said so. She talked about the coast, and her mother's garden, and whether the child would have her hair. But she was afraid, and so was I. They would not let me in. I stood in the passage a night and a day and listened, and there was nothing I could order done. And when they opened the door..." He stopped. "I believed I had finished with being afraid." He looked up, and the light was still there, and under it the old fear, dug up from wherever he had buried it. "It seems I have not."
"Gaius will attend you twice a day," he said, in his council voice, and Merlin was almost grateful. "You will not ride. And you will eat. You did not eat last night."
"You noticed that."
"I notice everything at my table." He rose and opened the door, and two servants carried in something under a cloth and went out, and the king drew off the cloth himself.
It was a cradle, very old, of oak gone dark and smooth as a conker, on rockers worn flat at the ends. All round its hood somebody had carved small flowers on short stems, crowded in clumps the way they grow out of the cracks in a sea wall.
"It was hers," said the king. "It came up from the coast with her when she was married. I have kept it in the tower room these twenty-five years. I found I could not burn it." He laid his long hand on the hood. "They are sea-pinks. She told me so. I have never seen one."
The boats are drawn up where the sea-pinks grow. It went through Merlin's head in Gaius's cracked hum over the mortar, and he did not know why it should make his eyes sting.
He stood up. His hand was flat on his breastbone, over the warm beating place, and the words were in his mouth, all of them: it isn't yours, it's your son's, I'm sorry.
"Sire," he said. "I have to tell you something."
"Uther," said the king.
Merlin stopped.
"When we are alone." Uther's eyes went to the cradle and back. "I think it is time. Don't you?"
The truth sat on Merlin's tongue like a stone and would not come out. He thought of the pyre in the square, and Ewan's brother. He thought of the soldiers on the ridge road above his mother's door. And he looked at this man's face, with that careful light in it, and found that he could not be the one to put it out.
"Uther," he said. "Thank you."
The king touched the hood of the cradle once more, the way he had touched Merlin's cheek on the wedding night. "Eat something," he said, and went, and far off a door closed, and a bolt went home.
Merlin went to the panel by the wardrobe and put his hand on the bolt, the iron cold under his palm. On the other side the servants' stair went down into the dark, turn after turn, all the way to where Arthur was.
He did not draw it.
For two weeks nobody would tell him anything.
Gaius said the consort was recovering, and shut the workshop door. George said he couldn't presume to say, sire. Arthur went up the servants' stair three nights running and did not knock, because he did not know what he would do if the bolt stayed shut. By day he saw Merlin twice: once crossing the upper court in a carrying chair, which was so unlike him that Arthur stopped dead in the yard and was nearly run down by a cart of turnips; and once through his father's door on a Thursday, left a hand's breadth open, with a fur rug round him and his father leaning across Ygraine's board.
He thought it was the curse, come back for what was owed. He thought Merlin was dying and nobody would tell him, because he was not anyone; he was only the son.
On the first Sunday in March, his father called the court to the great hall at noon.
He stood on the dais in black, with the gold chain he wore to sign treaties, and Merlin stood at his left hand in the blue feast robes and the circlet, very pale.
"At my wedding feast," said the king, and the hall went quiet as snow, "a witch walked into this hall and cursed my house. Many of you heard her say that my consort would carry the Pendragon blood." He let it lie. "She meant it as a curse. God has made it a gift. My consort is with child, and the child will come at harvest."
A man did not carry a child; every child in Camelot knew it, and it was half the reason kings took men for consorts. Then the bishop crossed himself, and someone near the doors said miracle in a high cracked voice, and the word went through the hall like fire through stubble, out to the crowd in the courtyard and on down into the lower town, where by nightfall, Arthur did not doubt, they would have a verse for it.
Agravaine was smiling at his hands.
"Arthur," murmured Morgana at his elbow, without turning her head. "You've gone the colour of a man doing sums."
He could not stop doing them. Harvest. Count back from harvest, the way the grooms counted back from a foaling. December. And his father kept to his own rooms: always, sire, George had said, smoothing a pillow. A door at the king's end of the corridor with a bolt on it. A panel by a wardrobe with a bolt on it. Snow on a tall window, and a fire that would not light, and then did.
Midwinter.
His father had raised a hand for quiet, and in his face, for anyone who had watched it for twenty-five years, was a look Arthur had never once seen there on his own account. Beside him Merlin stood very still. Then, across the whole roaring length of the hall, his eyes found Arthur's, and he gave the smallest nod in the world.
He went up the servants' stair at midnight with nothing in his hands, and knocked twice, and before his knuckles had left the wood the second time the bolt drew back. Merlin stood there in his shirt with a blanket round his shoulders and a candle, as though he had been standing there for hours.
"Is it mine?" said Arthur.
"Yes."
Arthur sat down on the floor.
His legs simply stopped holding him, the way they had once when a lance took him in the chest at a tourney. Merlin shut the panel and stood over him with the candle.
"Mine," Arthur said.
He said it to the floor. It was the oldest word he had. He had said it to Hadric in the rain and shouted it under the eaves with a shirt in his fist, and he had never once meant it like this, with the whole of his chest. A child. His.
And then he heard it in his father's voice, my child, at noon, with the court on its feet: the same word, and the same hunger in it.
"No," he said. "Not mine." He looked up. "Ours."
Merlin's face did something in the candlelight. He sat down too, not quite touching, his back against the end of the bed.
"She," he said. "I think. She feels like a she."
"A girl." Arthur found his mouth had gone strange. "But how?"
"Gaius says it made a cradle. Out of the curse." Merlin was looking at the fire, not at him. "I don't understand it either."
Arthur had never wanted to know how a witch did anything, and he did not start now. Something better was coming up through him, hot and bright and certain, the way the ground comes up to meet you off a horse.
"Then we tell him. Tomorrow. I'll stand in front of him and say it was me, and you're not to be blamed for—"
"For what?" said Merlin. "Think. If it isn't his, it isn't God's either. It's hers. A witch's curse in the king's consort, and the king's son in his bed." He said it flatly, the way you'd count out eggs. "He'd burn me, Arthur. And it would break him. You didn't see his face. He's kept that cradle in a tower for twenty-five years."
Arthur looked at the cradle by the hearth, dark oak, flowers round the hood. "Whose is it?"
"Your mother's."
Arthur was on his feet. "Then we go. Tonight. I'll saddle Hawthorn myself, we'll be over the border before he's—"
"And Ealdor?"
Arthur stopped.
"There's a company of his soldiers on the ridge road above my mother's door," Merlin said, "for as long as I wear his ring. Cenred's raiders are still in the hills, and the barn's new. What happens to the ridge road the morning after the king's consort runs off with the king's son?"
Arthur snatched up a cushion and threw it at the wall as hard as he could. It hit the tapestry square in the middle of the man in the blue hat, and dropped.
They both looked at it.
"Well," said Merlin. "That's a first."
Arthur put his hands over his face and laughed, a cracked sound with no breath behind it, and then he was sitting on the end of the bed with his elbows on his knees, and there were fingers in his hair, small slow circles at the crown and out towards the temples.
"Don't," Arthur said into his hands.
Merlin went on, and Arthur's shoulders came down an inch at a time, until his head tipped back against Merlin's middle and he felt the warmth there through two shirts. He could not think of one thing to say that would be any use. So he said what he would have said a year ago, with his boots on the table.
"You'll be fat as a Michaelmas goose by harvest."
The fingers stopped.
"Don't," said Merlin.
Arthur twisted round. Merlin's face was white and quite steady.
"Be kind to me," Merlin said, "or go back down the stairs."
Nobody had ever said that to Arthur, and he sat with his mouth open and felt the words go into him and stay.
"All right," he said. It came out small. "I don't know how. Tell me when I do it."
Merlin's mouth twitched. "You just did," he said. "Goose."
They lay down in the great cold bed in their clothes, and Merlin fitted himself along Arthur's back and put an arm over him, as though it had been settled long ago which way round it went.
"Only this," Merlin said into his hair. "Not here. Only this."
"I know," said Arthur.
He complained, for form's sake. Merlin's feet were like two fish off the slab, his knee was somewhere no knee belonged, and there was a draught from the panel that had been sent personally to torment him. Merlin said "Mm" to all of it, and did not move, and nor did Arthur.
Against the small of his back there was a warmth like a stone out of the fire wrapped in cloth, low and steady. After a while Arthur reached back without turning round and found Merlin's hand, the cold one with the heavy ring on it, and drew it forward over his own heart, and held it there.
Arthur came up most nights after that, when the guard had gone by, and went down before the kitchens woke with his boots in his hand. Merlin stopped shooting the bolt.
Nothing happened in the great cold bed but sleep, and Arthur's grumbling, and Merlin's arm over him. Merlin had not known it could be enough. Some nights it was very nearly more than he could bear.
"You look better," said Gaius, one morning in the middle of March, and handed him the cup of milk and ginger he had made him drink every day since the faint.
"I feel better." He had eaten a whole dish of eggs at the king's table the night before, and the king had watched him do it with grave satisfaction, as though Merlin had taken a city. He wrapped his hands round the cup and thought about Arthur asleep on his back with his mouth open and one fist under his chin.
The milk began to steam.
He did not notice until it boiled, frothing up over the rim and down his fingers, and he felt it only as warm, no hotter than bathwater. He looked at it stupidly.
Gaius took the cup out of his hands and set it on the bench, where it went on seething to itself for some time.
"I didn't do that," Merlin said.
"I know you didn't. That is rather the trouble." Gaius sat down on the stool by the leech jars, and the eyebrow lay perfectly flat, which was worse than any height it had ever reached. "The child has your magic, Merlin. I felt it that first day, under my hand. As she grows, yours and hers will knot together, and the further on you are, the tighter the knot. Things will happen around you that you can't stop, because it won't be you doing them." He looked at the cup. "You will not be able to hide it for ever."
On the bench between them, the candle by the leech jars bent its flame towards Merlin and stayed there, leaning, as if it had been called.