Merlin's Blade (4 page)

“Mercy?” Tregeagle shouted. “The only one whom I would allow to take his place would be
him
.”

Merlin's father leaned over and whispered through his teeth, “He's pointing at you.”

The room spun. Merlin gripped his father's hand. The thick metal armband his father always wore reflected dizzily before Merlin's eyes.

Walking forward, Tregeagle mocked, “Have mercy, Merlin. Have mercy on the thief!”

“Sir, I —”

“Yes, have mercy. You who dare hurt
my
son!” Tregeagle slipped his knife from its sheath and waved it in front of Merlin's eyes. “Take his place so we can see mercy.”

Silence filled the room, except for the sound of Tregeagle's clacking heels as he returned to the front.

“I … I accept,” Merlin said.

Garth caught his breath and stopped crying.

Tregeagle turned. “You
what
?”

“I accept!” Merlin's voice echoed through the room.

Tregeagle rapped on his table. “So be it. You shall —”

A stifled sob went up from somewhere behind Merlin. A girl's voice.

Tregeagle hesitated.

Merlin turned his head but could only guess who it was.

His father hissed in his ear, “You cannot. Are you a fool? Garth's done nothing but make trouble for you.”

“I can't let him be whipped.”

“Yes, you can. Wash your hands of this rascal!”

Merlin tightened his shoulders. “I'm responsible too, and I won't abandon him.”

“You'll be scarred for life. Everyone who sees your back will think you're a criminal or a runaway slave. It will take weeks to heal.”

Turning to his father, Merlin tilted his head until the light from the open window fell upon his face. “I'm already scarred. It doesn't matter anymore.”

His father moaned.

“Lictor Erbin, we have a change.” Tregeagle's voice betrayed no emotion. “Merlin is to be flogged in the boy's place. Guards, take Merlin outside to the post.”

M
erlin stood, handed his staff and dirk to his father, and stepped forward. The guards grabbed him by the arms and thrust him across the great hall toward the light of the open front door. As he was pushed outside, a few raindrops fell on his cheeks. Dark clouds had thickened over the moor, and a shadow soon covered the mountainside.

Behind him, Prontwon's footsteps caught up to his father's. “This is not necessary —”

Merlin's father spat. “My son can make his own daft decisions.”

Years of working the bellows in the blacksmith shop had added strength to Merlin's frame, and he could break free from the grip of the guards if he wanted to. He could tell Tregeagle he'd changed his mind. But he forced himself to remember Garth's plight and his own stupidity, and so he submitted as they led him away from the house.

Garth hung on to Merlin until someone dragged him away. “You needn't do it. Run!”

The guards roped Merlin's hands to a six-foot post and tore off his tunic to expose his back. His muscles tensed as he waited in the coolness of the evening breeze.

Merlin set his jaw and tried to brace his body.

Behind him, Erbin test-snapped the whip as he chatted with Tregeagle.

Dear God, help me
, Merlin prayed.

Crack!

Merlin let out a painful cry, then shut his mouth. A great welt burned from his left shoulder blade down to the middle of his back.

Crack!

Merlin lurched but held his tongue as the gash crisscrossed the previous one.

Ca-chack!

Merlin let out a ragged breath. Another blazing welt, this time lower down. He imagined Erbin leering as he swished the whip around.

Crack!

The whip opened up a long cut straight down the middle of his back, and Merlin's body recoiled, his legs trembling. All of the other welts opened, and blood wept down his back.

“Lord Jesu … help,” he whispered.

Crack!

Ca-tchow!

Crack!

The strikes felt like hot knives slicing open his flesh, and his knees buckled. Blood flowed down his breeches, and he cried out in great gasps.

Through the haze of a light rain, he heard Prontwon call on God's mercy.

He could hear his father yelling for Tregeagle to stop.

Tregeagle's cold voice answered, “You think I am harsh? Count him lucky. The tally will be nine. Do not tempt me to raise it.”

His father said no more.

Merlin shook his head to clear it and pulled himself up. The rain slicked the rope, and he gripped it tighter for the final two strikes. “Father in heaven,” he called, but he kept imagining an adder behind him ready to strike.

Crack!

Ca-wrack!

He dropped to his knees, all his muscles in a spasm. Vaguely, he heard the sobbing of a girl.

Dybris rushed to untie him. “So sorry …”

Merlin fell to his side, and his father wiped the blood that leaked from his wounds. Merlin felt his head lifted from the ground, and Garth was there.

Tregeagle's voice echoed through the air. “Get your rabbling son out of here. My coach must be fixed and in perfect condition before it is returned to me. You have two weeks.”

Merlin fought to sit up, the world shifting and swirling around him.

His father's voice faded until just a sigh remained, flitting away on the wind. His blurred sight exploded with light and colors, all hurtling toward him and pouring into his head. There was green and darker green and blue above that. His vision sharpened until he could see everything perfectly.

Strangely, his back didn't hurt, and the whipping post had disappeared.

He gaped in shock at the clear sight of tall weeds growing among grayish-red cabbages, whose pungence filled his senses. Sharply defined bees floated on thrumming wings, and a delicately feathered robin chirruped as she paraded through … garden paths? Merlin's trousers were rolled up, and his knees were pressed into the coolness of the soil.

This was his family's garden. He had sat here for hours on end throughout the last many years, weeding by touch. The smithy stood to his left, and oaken roof timbers jutted out from its conical
thatched roof. The granite rock wall was lichened green. Beyond the smithy squatted his family's house, smaller, with its low door closed and silent.

Where had everyone gone? How had he come to be here?

The sun rolled across the sky and fled away. Stars appeared, so bright that Merlin gazed upward in wonder. And he could focus on them.

But how can I see?

Then clouds rolled in, hiding the stars. Searing light flashed before his startled eyes. Deafening thunder struck at his ears.

Wolves howled in the distance, and Merlin jerked his head to look at the dark woods across the road — but no creature could be seen through the trees. He put a hand on his dirk and prepared to get up and run.

Then he smelled smoke. Hearing a crackling roar, he turned to see flames leaping from the roof of the smithy. Heat rolled over him and stung his face and arms. He started to rise, pushing off the ground with his hands, but his knees and fingers pressed into a sticky, dark liquid, which clung to him along with clods of dirt. He tried rubbing it off, but he could see now that it was blood.

The twisted body of a man lay facedown before Merlin. He wore a green robe, and a deep wound had been sliced between his neck and shoulder. The man's blood still seeped from the gash and into the soil around the now-crushed cabbages.

Merlin stiffened. He tried to shout but barely managed to rasp.

The sky lit up. Between him and the corpse, another man appeared, this one dressed in cloth that shimmered like pearl. His hair lay bright as silvered frost, and his eyes smoldered like melted bronze.

The man opened his mouth, and his voice rang in Merlin's head. “Servant who has suffered, the Lord greets you!”

Merlin tried to stand but fell back, dazed.

The man raised his hand, and a fountain of sweet-scented water flowed from his palm. “The Glorified One has ordained that a
prophecy concerning your homeland would be fulfilled over ten weeks of years. For eight sevens, the power of dark fire has slept, clad in deathless cold, and for two sevens, it has grown under the mortal sky. This day it has awakened and is revealed in woe to the inhabitants of the earth.”

“W-who are you?” Merlin stammered.

“I am a servant of the Most High. Fear not, for His mighty hand has chosen you.”

Merlin felt his teeth begin to chatter. “I-I don't understand.”

#x201C;F
EAR NOT
, M
ERLIN!
The Lord has sent me to warn you. This day a man has come who has found and awakened Death and Hell. Beware him. B
EWARE WHAT HE REVEALS.
But fear not. Trust in God!”

The angel disappeared in a folding, collapsing cloud. And with him faded the vision.

Merlin's eyesight blurred even as the flesh on his back screamed in pain again. He cried out. The pale form of the whipping post appeared once more, and he leaned upon it.

An hour later, after a painful journey back to his straw bed in the smithy, Merlin shifted onto his other side and tried to keep his food down. His face felt hot, and his back throbbed as if thousands of wasps continuously stung him. A few embers in the forge cast their light to the roof thatch, but everything else lay in shadow as the last light of the setting sun blinked and died through the shuttered window.

He remembered again the vision he had seen and wondered what it meant. He rubbed his hands to make sure the bloody soil was gone. Then his hands shot to his cheeks and eyelids, confirming the old scars still marred his features. Opening his eyes again, he saw the familiar smears marring his sight.

How had he been able to see clearly — even for that brief moment? The smell of fresh straw filled his senses. The smithy certainly
wasn't
on fire, and therefore a dead man wearing a green robe
wasn't
lying in their garden. He wondered if it had just been a strange dream.

His father banged open the double doors at the front of the smithy and brought a sloshing bucket in. He filled a ceramic jar and set it on a small table next to Merlin's bed. “I'm glad we got you home.”

Merlin drank, but his throat still felt dry.

Sitting in a nearby chair, his father folded his arms and said nothing for a while. When he spoke, anger tinted his voice. “You're going to take a long time to heal. How am I supposed to get my work done without you pumping the bellows? I'll have to run back and forth.”

“Is that all you care about?”

“If I don't fix the wagon —”

“Let Tregeagle flog the anvil next.”

His father pushed his stool back. “I told you not to do it.”

Merlin sat up, and the pain made him regret it. “You think I deserved nothing?”

“Seizing Garth's bagpipe was unfair. Whipping you was worse.”

“So save the bagpipe but flog Garth?” His father was full of nonsense.

His father stood. “When I was young, my father gave me a bow and quiver. One day I practiced with a friend, and he shot one of my father's hounds.”

“On purpose?” Merlin touched one of the stinging welts, amazed at how much it had swollen.

“I don't know. But the dog died with the arrow lodged in its side.”

“Did your friend get in trouble?”

“Yes, but I did too,” his father said. “Both his bow
and
mine were taken from us, and I'll never forget the injustice of that day.”

Merlin said nothing, waiting for his father to continue.

“Garth's only token of his dead father is his bagpipe, and it's cruel to take it away.” Merlin's father raised his voice. “But you shouldn't have been whipped. You never would've taken Tregeagle's horses and —”

Merlin turned away and said in a soft voice, “You mean I'm not capable.”

“I did my best when the wolves came —”

“You saved me —”

“Not enough!” His father's words were muffled by his hands as his voice broke. “You were so young …”

Merlin lay down on his side again. “This has nothing to do with my blindness.”

“You don't know what it's like for a father. I lived it all over again … Watching you get whipped brought back the memory of how the wolves scratched your face. It was too much.”

“I didn't think about that. I —”

“There you stood, your flesh being torn, and again I couldn't help. Again.”

“I didn't want to be helped.” Merlin reached out painfully and clutched his father's shoulder. Sliding his hand down, he brushed against the cold metal of the marriage-covenant band on his father's arm.

Owain patted him on the head. “You're braver than is good for a blind lad.”

“Tas … Father … I know I've asked before, but when I'm better, would you please come to chapel?”

Even as Merlin asked the question, the armband grew warm. And then hot.

His father jerked away and stood. “Had enough of monks. The troubles they cause.”

The gem on the armband gleamed red in the smithy flames. It reminded Merlin of the glowing eyes of the wolves from his nightmares, and he turned away.

Why did his father never want to go to chapel? Ever since Merlin started visiting four years earlier, his father had never approved. Sure, he'd blacksmith tools for the monks, but always grudgingly. And Mônda, Merlin's stepmother, treated the monks with open derision. She would yell at Merlin in Eirish if he even mentioned them.

His father filled in the silence by changing the subject. “How's your back? Your tunic's bloody, and you're sweating.” He wiped Merlin's forehead with a dank-smelling cloth.

In truth, Merlin felt tired and weak. The darkness had crept into the smithy, and he yawned, hoping for sleep and the chance to forget his father's stubbornness, as well as his own painful welts.

“You get some sleep, and we'll talk more in the morning.” His father slipped out the back door, and the iron latch clicked shut.

Merlin lay awake long into the night, unable to sleep, hot and in pain. Wondering if he had a fever, he felt his own forehead with little result. He tried to doze but couldn't get comfortable.

Outside, a wolf howled.

Then another. And close to the smithy. Too close. Were they after the goats? He lay perfectly still, straining his ears for any additional hints of the wolves' location. One breath became twenty, then thirty. Nothing. As he began to relax, he heard it: low growling, just outside the smithy's walls. A wolf began tearing at the slats of the window near the bellows, claws and teeth raking through the old wood.

They weren't after the goats.

“It can't be,” he whispered. After seven years, they were hunting him again.

His trembling fingers traced the scars running from his eyelids as he forced himself to sit up on the bed. Finding the tin box of char, he slid off the lid, blew on the coals until they glowed, and finally held the tip of the rush lamp to it. The oil-soaked reed began to smoke but didn't light.

The wolf snarled now, and chunks of wood splintered and fell to the ground.

The wick flared, lighting the room with a pale shimmer. Barely enough for his feeble vision to guide him.

More wood cracked away as the wolf ripped at the shutter.

Why hadn't his father mounted an iron grate in the window?
Merlin fumbled next to his pallet and found his dirk. At least his father had made this for him.

Other wolves scratched at the double doors facing the road, and the hinges groaned.

Merlin's eyes searched for details, fear making his hands numb. Had he fastened the bar before bed? Leaping from his pallet, ignoring the pain, he ran barefoot across the blacksmith shop. The rush lamp gave enough light for Merlin to avoid the blur of workbenches between him and the doors.