By Force Alone

by Lavie Tidhar

  ‘Are you fucking insane?’ Kay says. ‘We just robbed them! Bors the Elder is going to want to kill you, and by kill you I mean, kill you very, very slowly. And if he finds about his son and me he’s going to kill both of us twice over.’

  Arthur nods, but Kay knows he’s not really listening. Arthur has made up his mind.

  Arthur says, ‘Kay, things are going to change round here. I want whoever is willing to accept this change to come over to us. I won’t hold their past loyalties against them. As for those who can’t accept the change, we’ll deal with them. Do you understand?’

  ‘I do, but—’

  ‘They’re like a pack of dogs,’ Arthur says. ‘They’ll roll over and submit to whoever holds the power. Bors will come crawling to us, and he’ll ask for permission just to take a piss. Do you understand?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You’re a knight now, Kay. You’re one of them. They can’t touch you, and they’ll listen to you. I want you to be my go-between. You’re my consiliarius, man. I trust you.’

  Arthur leans over, grasps Kay’s arm. Pulls him to himself, until their foreheads touch.

  ‘I love you, Kay. You know that, right?’

  ‘I love you too, Arthur.’

  ‘We’re brothers, Kay!’

  ‘Yes,’ Kay says. ‘Brothers.’

  Arthur smiles. And Kay knows, at that moment, that he’s lost him. That the Arthur he’d known is gone forever now, had perhaps never existed in the first place. This new Arthur’s nobody’s friend, and nobody’s brother. He is alone.

  He pulls away. Stands up to go.

  ‘Sir, yes, sir,’ he says softly.

  22

  ‘Oww!’ Carados says. He rubs his skin. It’s cold and white as Greek marble. ‘That hurt.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Merlin says. The Guv’nor’s sitting naked in the examination chair. It doesn’t take a doctor to know that he is dying. ‘You’ve got cancer. I could try bloodletting or purgatives as recommended by Celsus in De Medicina, but—’

  ‘Yes, yes, don’t you think I’ve done all that?’ Carados says. ‘I have my own physicians, thank you very much.’

  ‘Then what…’

  ‘I need something for the pain.’

  Merlin looks him over. The man has a crab in his body, crawling, tearing up his insides. Cancer, from the Greek karkinos, meaning crayfish or crab. It’s no way for a warrior to die, and Carados knows it.

  ‘I have some poppy juice from Cyprus where they grow the plant,’ Merlin says. He’d scored it from his contacts on the docks, but it is rare. He dreams of having his very own botanical gardens, where he could experiment with Nature and its bounty, but life since Uther’s fall has been… erratic, and he’d been forced to move around a lot. Just at the moment he is renting a two-room abode near Cripplegate, from an irate landlady, but it won’t do to advertise this fact.

  Carados looks at him with awful hope in his eyes. ‘Is it magical?’ he says.

  ‘It will ease your pain.’

  Merlin fetches the bottle and lets out drops of the precious liquid, and mixes it into a glass. He gives it to the Guv’nor to drink.

  ‘How goes it with the sword?’ he asks.

  The Guv’nor grins. ‘It worked much as you said it would,’ he says. ‘It draws them to itself like flies to a corpse.’

  ‘The knights?’

  ‘All of them, sure. I have one of my boys take admissions on the door. To help with costs, you understand. Also the concession stands for drinks and snacks and the performers, well, you can see for yourself when you go. It’s a bit of a Saturnalia out there. See, you never specified it had to be a knight, did you? So everyone now wants to have a go. And why not? It’s democracy, I say, like they had in Greece. A democracy of the sword. And anyone can try their luck for a few shekels.’

  The poppy juice is doing its job. The Guv’nor looks more animated, his eyes brighter, the smile – the smile of a man who’d eaten and fucked his share in life, and then murdered some others so he could eat and fuck all their share in life – widens. He moistens his lips with his tongue. He reminds Merlin of a great big toad.

  ‘You may leave me now, Merlin…’ he says.

  Merlin nods. He turns to leave. There is power still around this Sir Carados, but the taste of it is sour, spoiled – it makes Merlin want to heave. He says, ‘Have you?’

  ‘Have I what, Merlin?’

  ‘Have you tried it?’

  The Guv’nor smiles.

  ‘Get the fuck out of here,’ he says.

  *

  On his way out he passes the sword in the stone. The courtyard’s full. Musicians play. Jugglers juggle flames. Whores leer at passers-by, flashing pale thighs. Vendors sell mutton, bread, honey and apples. Merlin thinks he sees a Pan – a fucking Pan? – dancing on cloven hooves with a gaggle of young maidens. There’s beer and mead on sale in all four corners, and a jakes set up for the crowd to go and do their bit for a handful of coppers. Rooms, too, for hire for as much time as it takes a small sandglass to empty. It’s like the Guv’nor said – it’s fucking Saturnalia.

  The cross Sir Carados erected stands forlorn. There’s no one to pray kneeling beside it, but a couple too poor or too in a hurry to pay for a room begin to fuck against it as the crowd cheers them on, until the Guv’nor’s men pull them roughly away with a beating.

  But Merlin’s attention’s not on the cross, nor on the festivities, but on the sword in the stone.

  It stands apart from the festivities, and the sunlight falls down on it in just the right way to make it seem special somehow, it dapples around the hilt and the exposed metal of the blade, over the weathered old stone and the dark green moss that grows in the cracks. It’s a lovely effect, and only took a little bit of magic.

  The townsfolk queue. The queue snakes around the courtyard and all the way to the entrance and continues beyond. One of the Guv’nor’s burly men stands guard to collect the fee, but even he seems subdued, as though the bloody thing is genuine.

  And Merlin thinks, Christ, is that how he felt, back in Judea, how you put a little charm on and mouth a few homilies and suddenly people just… buy it? For all he knows, in centuries to come, people will whisper of this miracle and tell the tale over and over again, of the sword, and the stone, and the king who came to claim his birth right.

  While Merlin knows, just as the Guv’nor does, just as these men should know, if they only stopped to think about it, that there is no magic to being a king. There’s no birth right but the one that is bought with blood. And still they come, and queue in patience, and take their turn at the hilt of the sword. Some heave, some pull gently, some struggle with their feet against the stone. Some curse and some sob and some shrug and move on – and many merely return to the back of the queue, ready to part with their coppers again, to try once more, just one more time, maybe this time they’ll get lucky.

  And Merlin thinks, old Sir Carados, bless his black soul, must be making a killing in profit here.

  While he, Merlin, still has to live in that shitty two-room hellhole by Cripplegate.

  But patience, Merlin, he thinks. Patience. And he watches the good citizens of Londinium queue for their chance at becoming magical kings, and there’s a power here, real power of a kind he’d not seen before. And he finds it nourishing.

  He walks out of the gates. This was not in his plan. But it’s something, and he makes a note of it, in his mind.

  Then he turns into a cat and scuttles away.

  *

  He follows the smell of her piss all through the town. It’s marked on corners, on a fallen arch, on a clump of weeds by a butcher’s shop, in an alleyway next to a place where a rat was killed, near the entry way to an underground mithraeum, past a gladiatorial steam baths with the smell of semen and blood lingering not unpleasantly, down the market and past a money changers’, and alongside Tamesis with the smell of frying fish from the nearby stalls in the air. He steals a fish and gnaws its flesh and bones under a statue t
o Magnus Maximus, the Pretender. A feral cat hisses at him and Merlin shows his claws, and the cat slinks away.

  The stink of her piss is everywhere, she has marked this town for her own. And he resents her that. For all that he has temporarily made his home here, in the big city, Merlin is a country boy at heart. He knows the village green and the rolling hills and the clear clean brooks and the call of birds, while she is of the city and the city is of her. She knows its dark dank alleyways and endless commerce and the coming and going of traders and ships. She was there when the Romans came (or so she claims), when Boudicca rose, when the city was razed to the ground, when it was built up again. She will be there (so she claims) when the city shall fall again, and when it shall rise, and for as long as the occult stone of Londinium still stands in the street of the candle-makers.

  He follows the scent of her piss until he finds her at last in a maze of tenements a stone’s throw away from the White Hill, and he joins her under the arches of a shop. She licks a paw and bares her teeth at him.

  ‘Took you long enough,’ she says.

  ‘Morgan.’

  ‘Been enjoying your handiwork?’ she says.

  ‘It hasn’t gone exactly as I thought it would,’ he says.

  She purrs a laugh. ‘And the boy?’ Morgan says.

  ‘You keep your paws off him.’

  ‘Fat chance of that, little Merlin,’ she says. He does his best to ignore her.

  ‘Is he here?’ he says instead.

  ‘He is,’ she says. ‘Arrived two nights ago, at the witching hour. He wasn’t easy to find.’

  ‘He has his own spell makers.’

  ‘So it would seem. But no one comes and goes in my town without me finding out about it,’ Morgan says.

  ‘So… here?’ Merlin says. He peers across the road. It’s a hovel worse than where he himself is staying. A maze of old Roman-built streets, low-ceiling rooms in crumbling masonry, no sunlight, trash everywhere… ‘This is no place for a king.’

  It’s Leir, of course. The clever old man of the ridings, lord of the Brigantes, the man whose claim to power goes all the way to Imperial Rome. A real king, and they say despite his age he’s ageless. Has he really been lured all the way to Londinium because of a sword in a stone?

  ‘He’s not stupid, Merlin,’ Morgan says. Reading his thoughts. ‘If he’s here it’s because he smells something. He smells a rat.’ She swipes at him with her claws. ‘No offence.’

  ‘None taken. And well done on finding him. Are the others here, too?’

  ‘Word is Outham the Old’s on his estates outside the city,’ Morgan says. ‘And Conan Meriadoc’s on the southside with the Frankish mob. But don’t be fooled, Merlin. They won’t go down easy. They know the score. They have their men and their protections.’

  ‘Whatever, Morgan. Any gossip?’

  ‘They say Outham’s got a pet bishop with him, from that new Christian church. It’s all the rage over on the continent. I fear they’re here to stay.’

  ‘Christianity’s just a fad, surely,’ Merlin says.

  ‘I’m not so certain.’

  Something whistles through the air. Merlin reacts lightning-quick. He pounces on Morgan, throwing her out of harm’s way, landing on her. The missile whistles past and hits the wall behind them with a nasty bang.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  Their cat bodies are intertwined. She pushes him away. They peer around the corner. A brutish Briganti stands there with a catapult and another rock at the ready. He leers at them as he cocks another missile.

  ‘Motherfucker!’ Morgan screams.

  The man fires. The cats draw back in time. Morgan le Fay takes a deep breath and begins cursing.

  ‘May your eyes boil in your head and may your tongue shrivel and die in your mouth, may your penis fall off and your testicles explode, may your gut rot and your teeth fall out and your hair wither and you get boils on your ass, may you—’

  ‘Morgan, stop!’

  When Merlin peers around the corner again he sees the Brigantes man on his knees, holding his head in his hands. The man retches a black foul liquid onto the squalid stone floor.

  ‘There are covenants in place,’ Merlin says, ‘there are understandings.’

  ‘Then let him understand this,’ Morgan says, ‘no one fires on me in my town.’

  ‘Now Leir knows we’re watching him.’

  ‘You think he didn’t know before?’

  ‘I love you, Morgan,’ Merlin says, ‘but you’re a fucking liability.’

  ‘I love you too, pet wizard,’ Morgan says. ‘Now, have you seen enough?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Then fuck off back to your wank pad, darling,’ Morgan says; with affection.

  23

  The Goblin Fruit heist made them. The word’s out. Merlin watches the boys’ new compound from across the road. A month later, they have men and boys positively queuing to sign up.

  Kay and Arthur, sitting behind that same shitty old round table they’d lugged over from the safe house:

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Agravain. Of the Hard Hand, sir!’

  ‘Let’s see them, then.’

  Agravain shows his fists. Kay whistles. Arthur nods.

  ‘Good at bashing heads, then?’

  ‘Very good, sir!’

  ‘Can you handle a sword?’

  ‘I can handle any blade, sir!’

  ‘Pay’s two coppers a day, plus bread allowance, meat on Tuesdays and fish on Thursdays, plus a one-tenth of whatever spoils you catch. And a roof over your head.’

  ‘Sign me up, sir!’

  ‘Can you read or write?’

  ‘No, sir!’

  ‘Good enough. Go see Elyan over there, he’ll sort you out.’

  Agravain goes off. Arthur says, ‘Make sure they know bedding and gear will be deducted from pay.’

  ‘Elyan will sort it out,’ Kay says. ‘Stop fussing.’

  ‘I’m not.’ Arthur rubs his hands as though cold. ‘How did we get to this?’ he says.

  Kay says, ‘We won,’ and Arthur smiles. Then the smile fades.

  ‘Not yet we haven’t.’

  Kay sighs. Kay shouts, ‘Next!’

  A new wannabe shuffles forward.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Ulfius, sir.’

  ‘Can you handle a sword?’

  The boy grins. ‘Wasn’t born yesterday, Sir Kay, was I?’ he says.

  ‘Dunno, was you?’

  ‘No, sir!’

  ‘Pay’s two coppers a day, plus—’

  ‘Bread allowance, I know, sir, we all know, all the boys, we want to serve, don’t we? We know what you guys did and we want in.’

  He looks at Arthur, who looks back at him levelly.

  ‘You’re the Guv’nor now, ain’t you, Sir Arthur. Begging your pardon, but it’s true, innit? It’s true?’

  Arthur says, ‘We’ll make it true, Ulfius,’ and the boy near blushes, so delighted to be called by name. ‘Go see Elyan,’ Arthur says. ‘He’ll sort you out.’

  ‘Sir, yes, sir!’

  ‘Next!’

  And so it goes. The boys have arms now, swords, knives, shields, some fucking battering rams Owain, the Bastard, got half-price from some dealer. Half the city’s trying to get a place with their gang. And the others are keeping a wary distance – for now. Kay knows it’s not over, not by a long shot. They have to stay vigilant.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Merlin.’

  ‘You!’ Kay says. He stares at this interloper, who seems not much older than they are. Pale, almost silvery skin, long black hair and those unsettling eyes, like a fish’s or a lizard’s, not quite human at any rate.

  ‘You know him?’ Arthur says.

  ‘He talked to me,’ Kay says. Somehow the very memory of Merlin approaching him on the steps of the Temple of Apollo is unsettling. The very nature of the memory doesn’t feel quite right. It’s out of focus, the details smudged.

  ‘He talked to you?’ Ar
thur says, laughing.

  This Merlin licks his lips, as though the very sight of Arthur is a meal for him. There’s nothing sexual about it, Kay thinks. That he could understand, at least. Arthur’s a handsome lad, more than one girl or one boy would be glad for the chance to fuck him. But this is something different. It’s wrong, somehow. Like Arthur is a kind of food.

  ‘I did meet and briefly converse with him, yes,’ Merlin says. ‘It was a most illuminating chat.’

  ‘He’s a… he must be a spy or something!’

  ‘A spy? For whom?’

  ‘For, I don’t know…’

  Merlin kneels before Arthur. He raises his head and looks him in the eye.

  ‘I wish only to serve,’ he says.

  Arthur laughs, as though the very presence of the creature delights him. ‘And can you use a sword?’ he says.

  ‘Goodness, no,’ Merlin says. ‘I abhor naked steel.’

  Arthur looks at him, still amused. ‘No swords? Then what can you do, pray tell?’

  ‘I can do magic.’

  ‘Cups and balls? You’d make a denarius disappear?’

  ‘No, lord. I mean, I could, if it pleased you, lord. But no. I mean, like—’

  Merlin clicks his fingers, spouting a colourless flame. He sends it dancing above them.

  ‘A will-o’-the-wisp?’

  ‘An ignis fatuus, or foolish fire, lord. It’s but a trifle, of course, but…’

  ‘So you are what, a fae?’

  ‘A wizard, sir.’

  ‘We do not have a wizard, Kay,’ Arthur says.

  ‘With good reason, Arthur! We shouldn’t truck with such as these.’

  ‘Such as what, please?’ Merlin says.

  ‘The fae! Boggarts and that.’

  ‘I am no boggart or bogie,’ Merlin says reproachfully. ‘My mother was mortal, just like your own.’

  ‘I never met my mother,’ Arthur says.

  I have, Merlin thinks, but doesn’t say. Gods, but it’s hard standing so close to him now. What a fat little baby he was. There’s such an innocence to babies, before the world takes them and shapes them as it will. This Arthur, he is like a blade. He could be great, Merlin thinks. He’s so proud of him. It’s like watching Uther again, but Uther in youth, in bloom, an Uther with all of the world still before him, ready for the taking.