The rain had stopped three hours before the dying started, and now the field smelled of copper and wet earth and something beneath both — the particular sweetness of men opened by iron, a smell Arthur had catalogued across thirty years of war and never found a use for except this: to know when the accounting was nearly done.
He pulled his sword from the body of the man he had just killed and stood.
Around him, Camlann stretched in every direction he cared to look, and in every direction it was the same: his men and Mordred's men and the question of which was which growing less answerable with each passing hour, because by now they had bled into each other the way rain bleeds into a river, indistinguishable, ruinous, complete. The late autumn light lay flat and yellow across the carnage, the kind of light that illuminated without warming, that made everything it touched look like an artifact of itself rather than a living thing.
Arthur was not yet dead. He registered this with the detached precision of a man who had been cataloguing his own wounds since midmorning and knew the full inventory: a cut across his left forearm that had stopped mattering, a deeper wound beneath his ribs on the right side that had not, and the blow from Mordred's spear that had taken him just below his gorget an hour ago and which he had thus far declined to think about directly. He had learned long ago that a wound examined too honestly in the heat of battle became a wound surrendered to. He would look at it later. If there was a later.
There would not be a later. He knew this the same way he knew the battlefield's arithmetic — not through feeling but through the cold application of experience to evidence. A king who has governed a dying kingdom is the world's foremost expert on the texture of ending.
He began walking.
The direction was not strategically chosen. Somewhere ahead, through the press of fallen men and fallen banners, he had last seen Mordred's standard, and toward it was the only direction left that carried any meaning. Not victory — that possibility had exhaled its last breath somewhere around the third hour of fighting, when Arthur had watched Gawain's line collapse and understood that the day's work would not be conquest but testimony. He walked toward Mordred's standard because a king who has lost everything still owes his kingdom one final accounting.
He found Mordred beside the body of a man Arthur did not recognize, and for one strange moment they regarded each other across six feet of muddy ground with the specific exhaustion of two people who have spent everything they had trying to end each other and find themselves still standing. Mordred looked like Arthur's sin. He always had. That particular cruelty was something Arthur had never found words for — that the face wearing the expression of his own ruin was the face that carried his blood.
"Uncle," Mordred said, and smiled with half his face. The other half was doing something else.
"Mordred," Arthur said.
There was nothing else to say. They both knew it. The day had already spoken everything; this was only the punctuation.
They moved toward each other at the same moment.
Arthur took the spear in the side — his left side, below the breastplate's edge, in the place where a younger man's reflexes might have turned the blow. He was not a younger man. He heard himself make a sound that he did not recognize as his own voice, drove Excalibur through Mordred's throat in the same moment, and they went down together.
The ground was colder than he expected. He had been cold before, in many places, but this cold had a specific quality — the cold of iron in November, of earth that has absorbed too much blood to hold any warmth. He lay in it and felt the sky above him as an enormous grey indifference, the clouds pressing down with the patient disregard of things that will exist long after the last human being has decided they matter.
Mordred was not moving beside him. Arthur was.
Barely.
His hand had not released Excalibur's hilt. He was aware of this the way he was aware of his own heartbeat — as something that had been true for so long it had become less a fact than a condition of existence. The sword hummed faintly against his palm, the vibration he had felt since the day the water gave it to him, the sound that had no analogue in the natural world and that he had spent thirty years assuming was simply his own imagination made tactile. It had never occurred to him that the sound might be the sword's, that Excalibur might have been singing all this time in a language he lacked the capacity to hear properly.
He heard it now.
His vision was narrowing. This he noted without significant concern, having prepared for this particular narrowing across the span of an entire reign. What he was less prepared for was the color the world was taking on at its edges — not the grey-black of approaching unconsciousness but something else, something the color of deep water in a river that has no name, a blue so dark it was almost the absence of light rather than light itself.
"Arthur."
The voice came from behind him and it was wrong. Wrong in the way that Merlin's voice was always slightly wrong — too certain of itself, too aware of its own necessity, the voice of a man who had been present at too many important moments and had consequently lost the ability to be surprised by them.
Arthur did not turn his head. He lacked the mechanics for it, and besides, he had been listening to that voice since he was a boy and he could hear everything in it from this position.
"Old man," Arthur said. His voice was wetter than he would have preferred.
A silence. Then the sound of someone lowering himself, carefully, to the ground — the creak of old joints, the specific gentleness of a man settling himself beside a body he does not want to disturb. Merlin. Sitting beside him on the field of Camlann the way he used to sit beside Arthur's bed when Arthur was ten years old and could not sleep for the weight of who he was being asked to become.
"You should look at me," Merlin said.
"I am dying," Arthur said. "I have earned the right to look at whatever I choose."
Another silence. Shorter this time.
"Yes," Merlin said. "You have." And then, with a quality in his voice that Arthur had heard perhaps four times in thirty years, a quality that sat badly in the old man's mouth like a word he had never learned to pronounce properly: "I am sorry."
Arthur turned his head.
Merlin looked as he always looked, which was to say he looked like every age simultaneously — the young man's eyes in the ancient face, the hands that had held a staff and a kingdom's invisible architecture with equal authority, the white beard moving slightly in the cold wind that was dragging itself across the field with the halfhearted persistence of a thing that no longer cares to perform its function. But the expression. The expression was different. Arthur had seen Merlin afraid, had seen him exhausted, had seen him furious and grieving and occasionally, brilliantly wrong. He had not, in thirty years of depending on the man's certainty the way a building depends on its cornerstone, seen him look like this.
Like a man who is about to do something he cannot undo and has no better options.
"Where is Avalon?" Arthur asked. His voice had settled into a curious calm. The dying had taken the urgency with it, the way a fire takes the heat when it goes out, leaving only the shape of what burned. "You always said—"
"I know what I said." Merlin looked away briefly, toward the horizon, where the sun was settling into the distant hills with the unhurried impertinence of things that do not participate in human catastrophe. "Avalon is — Avalon is a possibility. A place between places, a sleep between lives. I had intended — when I planned—"
"You had a plan," Arthur said, "and it failed. Like mine."
Merlin's mouth closed.
"Say what you need to say, old man." Arthur shifted slightly against the ground and felt the specific wrongness of it in a way that confirmed the inventory he had been declining to complete. His breathing had taken on a quality he recognized from the bedside of dying men — the measured, deliberate rhythm of a body negotiating with itself about how much longer to continue. "I am listening."
Merlin reached out and placed his hand over Arthur's on Excalibur's hilt. The sword's hum changed immediately — deepened, shifted, took on a resonance that Arthur felt not in his ears but in the bones of his chest, behind his ribs, in the place beside the wound where some essential mechanism of himself was trying to keep moving. The blue at the edges of his vision intensified.
"I cannot send you to Avalon," Merlin said. The words came out with the clipped precision of a man reciting something he has rehearsed against his own resistance. "The path is closed. The magic that built that passage has — the world has changed, Arthur, the world has changed faster than I calculated, and the old roads are shut, and I cannot—" He stopped. Started again. "I can send you forward."
Arthur said nothing. He was listening to the sword, which had moved from hum to something approaching song — not melody exactly, but the memory of melody, the shape that a sound leaves in the air after it has stopped.
"Forward," he said.
"Across time. Across — more than time. I do not have a word for the distance. I do not know what you will find." Merlin's hand tightened on his. The old knuckles, white. "I know only that there is a place — I have seen it in the moments between other sights, glimpsed it at the edges of everything I know — where the darkness that is destroying us here has not yet finished its work. Where there is still something to be saved. Where the kind of man you are might—" His voice stopped entirely for a moment. "Might matter. In the way that you mattered here, before the end."
Arthur looked at the sky. The grey had deepened. The cold had deepened. His breath made small clouds and then they were gone.
"You are sending me away," he said, "because you could not save Britain, and you want me to—"
"Because the alternative is that everything you were ends here in this field," Merlin said, with a fierceness that cracked the surface of his composure like a stone through ice, "and I have spent thirty years watching you build something worth preserving, and I will not — I refuse—" He breathed. "I am asking your forgiveness and your trust simultaneously and I know I have earned neither today, and I am asking anyway."
Arthur lay on the field of Camlann for a long moment.
Beneath his hand, Excalibur sang.
The sound was nothing he had heard before and nothing he had heard before meant nothing beside it — it was older than the sword itself seemed to be, older than the word old, a sound that the silence had been shaped around rather than the other way, as if the universe had always been waiting for exactly this frequency and only now, in this cold and broken place, had the conditions aligned for it to be heard. Arthur felt it move through the wound in his side and through the wound that would not close and through the older wound that had nothing to do with iron — the wound of a king who loved too much and too badly and too late, who built a table of equals and watched them shatter the equality for want of being merely men.
He felt it move through all of it and not stop.
"Do it," he said.
Merlin shut his eyes. His lips began to move without sound, which was how Arthur knew the enchantment was serious — the spells Merlin spoke aloud were ceremony; the ones he spoke in silence were the real architecture, the grammar beneath the grammar, the working that cost him something of himself rather than simply something of his craft.
The blue rose from the edges of Arthur's vision and became the whole of his vision.
The field of Camlann ceased.
Not gradually. Not with the soft attenuation of sleep. It simply stopped existing in the way that matters, the way a room stops existing when you leave it — it was still there, would always be there in the way that past moments persist in the permanent record of what happened, but Arthur was no longer in it, was no longer of it, was moving through a darkness that smelled of iron and of something beneath iron, something that had no name in his language or any language he had been taught but that he would have called, if forced to find a word, distance.
He was cold. He was — he checked himself with the instinct of a man who has been keeping inventory too long to stop — still breathing. The wound was still there. Excalibur was still in his hand. The sword was singing in earnest now, a sound that filled the darkness around him and was the only warm thing in it, and he held onto it the way a drowning man holds onto whatever the current has not yet taken, not because holding on changes the outcome but because some covenants are kept in the body before the mind has finished deciding to keep them.
The darkness moved around him or he moved through the darkness — the direction had no meaning here, the coordinates of up and down and forward and back dissolving into something that required a different vocabulary entirely, a vocabulary he had not been given. He thought of Guinevere. He thought of Lancelot. He thought of Kay, who had been his first knight and his first friend and had died in the third year of the war with a sword in his hand and Arthur's name in his mouth. He thought of the Round Table sitting empty in a hall that no longer stood.
He thought of Merlin's face and the thing it wore that was not an expression he had seen before.
He held Excalibur and the sword held him back, which was the covenant, which had always been the covenant — not king to blade but blade to king, not ownership but compact, a promise made before either party could articulate what was being promised.
The darkness began to change.
Light appeared in it, not the yellow light of Camlann's dying afternoon but a cold white light, sharp and multiple, light that came from many sources and had traveled immense distances to arrive, light that was older than it appeared. Stars. He understood this with the slow certainty of a man putting a name to something he has never seen but has always, in some archival chamber of himself, known exists.
Stars.
Not as Merlin had described them — distant fires, the camp of heaven's army, the souls of great kings blazing in the vault above. As themselves. As what they actually were, which was immensity beyond the reach of his comprehension, which was heat and gravity and the slow enormous labor of light finding its way across distances that had no name in his language either.
He fell through them.
The sword sang. The stars watched. The dark between them smelled of iron still, and something beyond iron, and Arthur Pendragon, last High King of Britain, fell forward into a galaxy that had no word for him yet and that he had no word for yet, two grammars approaching each other across the void between all things, and above both of them, beneath both of them, threaded through the darkness like a sound heard before you are awake enough to name it, the song of the oldest thing in his hand.
He did not know how long it lasted. Time was not operating on recognizable principles.
He knew when it ended, because the darkness became something specific — not the open darkness of between but the closed darkness of interior, ceiling and floor and the smell of metal and oil and something electrical that prickled at the back of his throat, a smell with no analogue in anything he had ever breathed. The cold was different here, not the wet cold of the battlefield but a dry, sealed cold, the cold of air that had been cycling through the same channels long enough to forget what outdoor air felt like.
He was lying on a floor.
He became aware of this gradually, then all at once. Floor. Hard. Metal, he thought, or something like metal but smoother than any metal he had ever felt. Beneath his left shoulder was the edge of something that had once been fixed in place and had since been violently unmoored — a panel of some kind, cracked, with a smell of burning still woven into it. Around him in the sealed dark, things were wrong in ways he could hear before he could see: a rhythmic stuttering from somewhere above, a low grieving moan that was structural rather than human, and beneath both — the vibration of a large and damaged machine trying to remember how to do its job.
He was inside something. Something enormous. Something that was failing.
He tried to rise and the wound in his side informed him, with considerable clarity, that they were still in negotiation on that point.
He rose anyway.
Slowly. Using Excalibur as a prop in the manner of an old man with a walking stick, which was the most undignified application of a legendary sword in the history of legendary swords, and he noted this and filed it and did not particularly care, because he was alive and somewhere and the somewhere had a floor, which was already better than where he had been. He got himself upright and stood breathing in the dark for a moment, cataloguing. The wound was bad. Not Camlann-bad — not the specific variety of bad that had a direction and a destination — but bad. He had bandaged worse in the field. He would bandage this.
Light came from one direction — faint, blue-white, stuttering, cast by something in the wall that was not a torch or a candle or a fire of any kind he knew, but that fulfilled the general function of all three by making the darkness approximately navigable. He moved toward it.
The corridor he found himself in was nothing he had a word for. The walls were curved and constructed of materials he could not identify on examination — smooth, cold to the touch, marked here and there by damage that told its own story: something had struck this vessel with considerable force. There were things on the walls — panels, mechanisms, instruments whose purposes were entirely opaque to him — and several of them were dark, which he understood to mean damaged, and several were blinking in ways that seemed distressed.
He walked.
The sword hummed in his hand, not the full song of the between-place but the familiar resting note, the sound that had lived in his palm for thirty years and that he had somehow never asked about directly, and he thought, not for the first time in the past hour, that there were questions he had been deferring for an inappropriately long time.
He found a viewport.
He did not know that word — he would learn it later. What he found was a section of the curving wall that was transparent, and beyond it the dark of space, and in the dark of space the stars.
He stood before them for a long time.
They were not the stars above Britain. He knew this without being told, the way you know a stranger's face is not any face you have met — not through specific difference but through the cumulative absence of recognition. The patterns were wrong. The distances were wrong. The quality of the darkness between them was wrong in ways he could feel but not calculate. He was not in Britain. He was not anywhere Britain knew about.
He had expected this, in the way that a man can expect something his mind has accepted and his body has not. The body's adjustment was taking longer.
He placed his free hand flat against the transparent wall and felt its cold through his gauntlet and looked at the stars and thought, carefully and deliberately, about what he knew. He was alive. He was armed. He was wounded. He was in an enclosed space that was large and mechanical and damaged and apparently traveling, and he was somewhere that was not Britain and not Avalon and not anywhere in the known world because the known world was behind him by two thousand years.
Merlin had sent him forward.
Arthur looked at the stars.
"Then I must go forward," he said, to no one, to himself, to the sword that hummed in his hand, to whatever version of the universe was listening.
The ship shuddered around him. Somewhere in its mechanical depths, something gave out with a sound like a very large thing sighing, and the stuttering vibration that had underlain everything since he woke changed quality — lower, slower, the rhythm of something winding down rather than simply struggling. The lights in the corridor dimmed.
Arthur turned from the stars and began, with the methodical unhurriedness of a man who has never in his life had the luxury of not continuing, to explore the ship.
He did not know what he was looking for. He had never needed to know what he was looking for to begin looking. You moved toward what required addressing; you assessed what you found; you made of your resources whatever the moment allowed. He had governed by this principle, fought by this principle, and it had served him poorly enough and well enough in roughly equal proportion, which was the most any principle could claim.
The sword sang its quiet note.
The stars wheeled slowly past the damaged viewports as the ship drifted on, through a darkness that had no name for Britain and no name for Camelot and no name for the grief and the covenant and the fierce impossible persistence that were, at this precise moment in the vast cold absence between all suns, the entire legacy of his civilization.
Alive. Armed. Forward.
He walked on.