Exhausted from their day's travails, Merlin and Gaius trudged along the corridor towards Gaius' quarters. They nodded at the guards who had been posted outside the physician's door, by order of the king, who feared lest anyone should mean the Southron harm.
"Thank you for all that you do, Master Gaius," said the older guardsman, who was named Tom. "And not forgetting you, Master Merlin."
Gaius merely grunted in reply, but Merlin felt obligated to return the small talk.
"You must be bored standing guard out here, eh, Tom?" he said.
"We've had our fill of action for the time being," Tom said. "'Sides, I'd rather be up here than keeping watch in the dungeons again." He lowered his voice and whispered theatrically, "That place is haunted."
Gaius raised one eyebrow as Merlin asked, "Is it?"
Tom nodded emphatically. "Aye. Men have seen things. Barrels, knocking themselves about. Dice casting themselves. Doors opening and closing with no cause. Men falling unconscious, and waking up to find hours have gone by. There's unquiet spirits, the souls of unhappy prisoners, roaming that place."
"How curious," said Gaius, shooting Merlin a sharp look. "Let us pray there are fewer eldritch apparitions up here." He moved past the guards and pushed open the door to his chamber, with Merlin following in his wake. Tom, meanwhile, had pulled a bronze medallion of St Dunstan out of his tunic, and was kissing it as a precaution against any malignant spirits that might be listening.
The interior of the chambers was unchanged, although a maidservant had entered at some point and lit a fire against the cold. That same servant had placed blankets over the prone figure of the Southron, and drawn covers over the windows.
Merlin dumped their bags of medical paraphernalia on the table. He took Gaius' cloak and hung it up beside his own, brought out two stools, and laid them in front of the fire. Sitting down, he removed his boots, and began to massage his feet tenderly, while groaning and twisting his face into a sequence of ghastly expressions.
Gaius, instead of joining Merlin, went over to the bed and began examining the patient.
"Take a break, Gaius," Merlin said. "You can solve problems better when you're rested."
"You could solve my problem for me, Merlin," Gaius returned.
Merlin lowered his voice. "I'm not sure that I could. I did have a look in my book. There are… remedies for physical illness, but the mind is more subtle. Besides… I'm still not happy over what I did to Arthur, to get him out of the city."
"You had to do that to save his life. And his kingdom."
"It still felt wrong. Morgana took my mind away from me once. And yes, she did it more brutally, forcing something inside my body. But… I don't want to tamper with people's minds any more. You must find a remedy for the Southron."
"I only have two sunsets more, Merlin. Then I'm afraid he will be beyond the power of any remedy to heal."
Merlin opened his mouth to say, Then turn a blind eye. Like you did when all the sorcerers died, and the dragons, and the Druids. Like you did when my father Balinor was hunted like a dog and chased from his kingdom. Like you did when Morgana's magic quickened, and we did nothing to help her.
But he held his tongue. When he'd first arrived in Camelot, he'd had such a strong sense of right and wrong. As the years had passed, as he'd done more and more questionable deeds in service of his king, his sympathy for Gaius had grown. Gaius did feel guilty for the things he had done, Merlin knew. He had just gotten very good at ignoring his conscience in order to survive.
One day, thought Merlin, when I'm an old and grey man, who's seen princes and governments come and go, and all the people I've loved are dead or gone far away… one day, when I look back on a life full of choices I regret, will I want to be held to account by the rash tongue of some feckless, self-righteous boy I took in as an act of charity?
It had taken a while to sink in, but the most enduring lesson Merlin had learnt from Gaius was silence.
Wasn't the Archbishop always banging on about that in his sermons? "Pone Domine custodem ori meo," he'd bellow, apparently unaware of the irony. "Serva paupertatem labiorum meorum! Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth! Keep the door of my lips!"
And now perhaps Merlin had learnt the lesson too well. Silence was something that had become second nature to him. He longed to open his mouth, to unburden himself of his secret before Arthur. To reveal that he had magic, that he could save precious lives and restore the former glory of Camelot. But the seal on his lips was too binding.
He warmed himself by the fire for a while, and then, feeling uncomfortable sitting on his haunches while Gaius worked, he got up, put a crust of bread in his mouth, and busied himself with the herbs he'd collected that morning. He took bundles of just-flowered white lilies and snapped off their stalks, leaving their thick, bulbous roots. He took fresh shepherd's purse, and pounded the stalks, leaves, and flowers together in a mortar, until he had a runny paste, which he carefully scooped into jars. Then the St James' wort he'd picked had to be thoroughly boiled to extract its juices, and he added some honey and fresh butter to the mixture, and reduced it all to an oily salve.
Meanwhile, Gaius had been hovering around the Southron youth in growing frustration. He had applied decoctions of comfrey to the scalp to promote blood flow. He had burnt various combinations of herbs and wafted the smoke over the patient's face. Consulting astrological charts, he had tried suspending certain crystals over the unconscious man, the efficacy of which were known to be greatest during the current lunar phase. It was all to no avail.
Merlin had just finished setting some marigolds to steep in water, when a knock sounded at the door. It was Gawaine.
"The king sent me," Gawaine began.
"Tell him there's been no change!" Gaius said testily. "I've had no time to work with all my extra duties! I need the three days he promised me!"
"I will tell him that," Gawaine said evenly. "He also sent ye this. A small token of his appreciation. For all your hard work." He held up a bottle. "Spiced wine, from Burgundia! This was sitting in the vaults. Must have cost a mint." Gawaine advanced into the room and placed the bottle on the table beside Merlin, to whom he nodded in acknowledgement. "I'll leave ye to your work."
"Wait," said Merlin. "Gawaine! Stay a while."
Gawaine didn't need to be asked twice. Merlin set another stool by the fire, and resumed hectoring Gaius, until the old physician accepted that his unresponsive charge could wait awhile, and joined the two younger men. Merlin had fetched three glasses along with the bottle, and he now poured generous helpings into each.
Merlin was no great connoisseur of wines. In Ealdor they drank only what they brewed themselves, which was watery ale, and stronger ciders and beers. The climate in Camelot was not conducive to growing grapes, except at great expense. Most wines were imported from across the sea, and therefore beyond the means of all but the wealthy. All Merlin knew was that the wine tasted deep and rich, the spices lending it a sweet and interesting flavour.
Their loquaciousness grew as the amount of wine remaining in the bottle shrank. They toasted fallen comrades and lost friends. Gaius ventured to mention that if Alice were here, she could do something about the Southron boy. Merlin had not heard him mention her name since she had left Camelot.
Gawaine's eyes fell on the lute sitting in the corner of the room.
"Which one of ye plays?" he asked.
Gaius waved a hand at the instrument dismissively. "Neither. That was payment from a patient of mine."
Gawaine eagerly took the lute up and began tuning it. "She's a fine piece," he said, tapping the back and listening with his ear almost pressed against it. "Ash, or I'm no judge. I can't believe ye left her sitting there gathering dust, Gaius. She needs to feel the touch of quick fingers on her."
Gaius mumbled unintelligibly into his glass, something along the lines of young people being full of horse manure.
"I didn't know you were musical," Merlin said.
"There's a lot ye don't know about me," said Gawaine.
"Go on, then. Let's hear you play something."
Gawaine went on twisting the pegs, plucking the strings, and murmuring to the instrument as though it were his lover, until he was satisfied. Then he said, "You're an Ealdorman, aren't ye? Maybe you'll know this one."
Gawaine patted a rhythm absent-mindedly on his knee, and stared into the fire as though looking for inspiration within the flames. All of a sudden he began strumming a rapid sequence on the strings, beating the ground with one foot to accentuate certain syllables.
At first Merlin heard only the strings. Then, as the notes cascaded around him, he felt a rush of homesickness. Gawaine's tune transported him a long way away, to the wide fields and mountains around Ealdor. Gawaine's voice was rough but musical, so unlike the ethereal choirs of maidens in the cathedral, and the tinkling, artificial melodies of the court minstrels. This was a voice hewn out of the earth, which had traversed many lands, and carried the echoes of many adventures in it.
"My sweet Will has gone to sea,
He gave his word he'd marry me,
We kissed beneath the poplar tree,
Fol-de-rol dol, de dun dun!
I waited for him winters three,
He fought the Duke of Burgundy,
And fell beneath the poplar tree,
Fol-de-rol dol, de dun dun!
They brought my William back to me,
Our wedding bed, six foot by three,
Was dug beneath the poplar tree,
Fol-de-rol dol, de dun dun!
Merlin lost track of time, until Gawaine's song had stopped. The sudden absence of music pulled him back to the present. It was as though a thirst he didn't know existed had been slaked, and now the cup had been pulled away from him again. He realised there was moisture in his eyes, and he wiped it away with his sleeve.
After a while, Gaius said, "The Southron has moved his arm."
They all stared at the patient for a bit. He was as still as the grave.
Gawaine plucked a few more notes on the lute experimentally, and tried humming a few phrases, but there was no effect.
"Perhaps," said Gawaine, "he would like to hear something from closer to his own country. I do know a couple of tunes from the lands of Tunis and Araby."
"How did you learn those?" Merlin asked in astonishment.
"How did I learn those?" said Gawaine. "Ah, what a story! La Mariposa! There was a caravan of Aegyptians who passed through one of the towns I lived in up north. The townsfolk weren't too keen on them. They were said to be thieves and sorcerers, who stole unbaptised babies and sacrificed them at the Black Mass. But the women of the town would sneak out to consult their fortune-tellers. And the men - oh, the men loved their dancers and acrobats, especially-" An expression of remembered awe and delight spread across Gawaine's face. "La Mariposa!"
"Oh, she was a beauty! And all the men were after her. But if they'd caught her, they would have destroyed her. I only learnt what her name meant afterwards. A butterfly is beautiful, but if a man touches it just once, it loses some of the dust from its wings. It may still fly, but never as it did before. And if he touches her again, he may destroy her wings completely. La Mariposa went from the heart of man to man, never settling for long, but they all tried to snatch at her with greedy fingers. In the end, the women of the town said she was a witch - they were afraid of losing their husbands - and threw stones at her people til they packed up their caravans and left.
"But La Mariposa taught me many things. She taught me some of the wild tunes of her people. She said they had come out of Aegypt, many centuries ago. They had refused to shelter Our Lady when the Holy Family fled into Aegypt to seek asylum. And for that sin, they were cursed to be driven out of their homeland and to wander the world forever, without rest. I felt I could relate to her, because I didn't belong anywhere, either. I was something of a wanderer myself back then."
Having given this cryptic explanation, Gawaine stood up and began to play a wild and pagan-sounding melody. The fingers of his left hand slid up and down the lute's neck with alarming liquidity, and the fingers of his right plucked at the strings with the rapidity of lightning flashes. As he played, he paced back and forth, stamping out complicated rhythms with his feet. There were slower, stately passages, punctuated by astonishing chords and notes which scattered from his fingertips like raindrops.
To everyone's amazement, the Southron boy opened his eyes and stared upwards for a few moments. His mouth worked, then opened, and he seemed to be labouring to say something. Then, tears gathered at the corners of his eyes, and he turned slightly and lay still, the life draining out of his expression once again.
They could not induce him to stir again after that, no matter what Gawaine tried.
"This could be a breakthrough," said Gaius. "I hadn't considered the therapeutic properties of the lute before. Why do they have you wasting time waving a sword around, when you have all these other talents, Gawaine?"
"One day," said Gawaine, "the world will be safe for all men to learn music instead of war. Until then, I do what I can to keep the people I know safe."
"Indeed," said Gaius.
The wine bottle was empty. The fire had burned down to dull embers. Gaius pulled the blankets up to Southron's chin, and dragged his pallet next to the bed, so he could keep an eye on the patient overnight.
Merlin and Gawaine, leaning on each other for support, stumbled their way into Merlin's room. Pausing only to remove their boots, they fell atop the covers. Merlin's head was foggy from the wine, and his heart was full of memories of Ealdor, of Will and his mother, of Freya. He was comforted by the warmth and solidity of Gawaine next to him as he drifted into unconsciousness.