Yesterday, 06:40 AM
I took a small break from this but have decided to continue the story. If you need a refresher, the first 8 chapters are all here
Merlin and the Dragon Queen - Chapter 9
Yggdrasil regarded him from her great height with the patient, unhurried attention of something that had watched mountains form. Her scales were a deep arterial red, almost black in the volcanic light, and each one was the size of a shield. Her eyes were gold — not the warm gold of jewelry or harvest wheat but the cold, hard gold of old coins that had passed through too many hands to remember any of them. She did not move after she spoke. She simply watched him with those coins eyes and waited.
Merlin brushed volcanic dust from his robes and got to his feet. "You've been waiting," he started, "then you know why I've come."
"I know many things," Yggdrasil replied. Her voice was not loud but it filled the chamber the way heat fills a room — gradually and from every direction at once. She spoke the common tongue with an accent that suggested she had learned it from someone who had learned it from someone else entirely, flattening certain sounds and elongating others in ways that were not unpleasant but were certainly not human. "I know Aelphaba sent you. I know what you want. I know considerably more about Rome than you do and I have been asleep since before your grandfather's grandfather drew his first breath." She lowered her great head until one gold eye was level with Merlin, close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating from it. "What I do not know," she said, "is why I should find you interesting."
Merlin's horse, which had been standing near the entrance to the chamber with the philosophical resignation of an animal that had long since given up trying to understand its life, chose this moment to let out a long and deeply felt snort and begin backing slowly out of the cave. Merlin couldn't blame him.
"I don't need to be interesting," Merlin answered, "I need to get to Rome."
Yggdrasil pulled her head back and regarded him from full height again. "And Aelphaba has agreed to this. Very well. I will take you to Rome, little man. I will do what you need done in Rome. When it is finished, I will return here and sleep again and you will not bother me further." She turned her great body in the chamber with a grinding of stone that sent cracks racing up the walls. "Come then. I will not wait."
Merlin looked behind him. His horse had completed its retreat and was no longer visible. He looked back at Yggdrasil, then at the expanse of her back, then up at the ridged spine that ran from her neck to the base of her tail, each ridge standing as tall as his waist. She had not offered to lower herself to make mounting easier. She was not going to. Merlin planted his staff, got a running start and scrambled up her flank using the edges of her scales as handholds, hauling himself hand over hand until he arrived, breathless and considerably less dignified than he would have preferred, astride her neck just forward of her great shoulders. He settled himself between two ridges of her spine, tucked his staff under his arm and gripped the ridge in front of him with both hands.
"Ready?" Yggdrasil asked, with what Merlin strongly suspected was the draconic equivalent of a smile.
"Quite," said Merlin.
She launched.
The first thing Merlin discovered was that dragon flight and falcon flight were entirely different propositions. As a falcon, flight was his. He felt every current, every shift, every drop and rise of the air as an extension of himself. Riding a dragon was something altogether different. The first downstroke of Yggdrasil's wings hit him like a fist and very nearly took him clean off her back. He flattened himself against her neck, locking both arms around the spine ridge in front of him with a grip that would have impressed a blacksmith. She burst through the mouth of the volcano at speed and banked hard left immediately and the world became a vertical rush of black basalt and volcanic cloud and the cold spray of the sea. Merlin's beard, braided lilies long since gone, whipped directly into his face. He pressed it flat with one hand while keeping the other clamped to the ridge.
"You might warn a person!" he shouted into the wind. The wind took his words before they reached her ears or she simply didn't feel compelled to respond. He suspected the latter.
She levelled out and found her rhythm over the open sea and Merlin cautiously raised himself back upright. The sea below was a churning dark green. Avalon had already faded behind them. Ahead was open water. Merlin adjusted his grip and attempted to find a position that did not feel like it was slowly removing his inner thighs. There was no comfortable position. He experimented with bracing his legs outward against the curve of her shoulders, which helped somewhat and only required him to maintain the kind of grip on the spine ridge that would leave marks.
"How long to Rome?" he asked.
A pause. "Two days," she replied. "Perhaps less. The air is good."
Two days. Merlin looked down at his hands. His knuckles had already gone pale. He tried to imagine two days of this and arrived quickly at the conclusion that he would simply have to stop imagining things for a while. He pulled his cloak tight and watched the water pass beneath them.
---
On the first night they stopped on a rocky outcropping in the middle of the channel, barely large enough for Yggdrasil to land on. She folded her wings with an air of someone who finds the available accommodation beneath them but accepts it without comment. Merlin slid down her flank without waiting for help this time, dropped the last few feet and sat heavily on a flat rock at the water's edge. His legs ached in ways that suggested muscles he had not previously known he possessed. He pulled his robe up and inspected his inner thighs which were chafed raw and spectacular in their redness.
"You ride like a sack of grain," Yggdrasil observed.
"Thank you," said Merlin, "that is rather how I feel." He pulled some dried meat and a hard biscuit from within his robe and ate without enthusiasm, staring out at the black channel water. The moon was just past half, which meant Arthur had been fighting for over two weeks. He thought of Arthur in the swamplands, pushing into the Romans with that furious controlled precision that was all his own. He thought of Tristram at Cascura, drawing the enemy back and laughing at them. He thought of Lot, whose loyalty was a question that could only be answered in the doing. He thought of Nimue, which he hadn't meant to do, and quickly stopped thinking of Nimue.
"Tell me of Rome," he said to Yggdrasil.
She settled her chin on the rock at the water's edge. The sea around the outcropping was displaced by her presence. "Rome is old," she said, "but not so old as me. When I last saw it, it was still burning its dead. The aqueducts you speak of were not yet built. But I have felt them described."
"Agrippa's aqueducts feed fresh water throughout the city," Merlin said, leaning forward. "They run in channels beneath the roads and vent upward through grates and openings into the streets and into the buildings they serve. The Aqua Claudia enters the city on the eastern edge. It has a main passage, large enough at the inlet for you to enter. From there — "
"I will be in stone tunnels," Yggdrasil interrupted. "Not pleasant."
"No," Merlin agreed. "You won't be in there long. The inlet chamber before the city proper is large enough that you won't be pressed."
"What is large enough for a man is not large enough for me," she said.
"The inlet chamber is not sized for a man. It is sized for the volume of water Rome requires. It is the size of this rock." Merlin slapped the flat stone beneath him for emphasis.
Yggdrasil was quiet for a moment. "And the sleep breath," she said finally, and there was something different in her voice — not reluctance exactly, more the tone of a craftsman being asked about a difficult technique. "You understand what you are asking."
"Tell me," Merlin said.
"Fire wants to be fire. That is its nature. When I breathe I am giving it permission to be what it is. Sleep breath is the opposite. It is the fire before the fire. The spark held back. The smoke without the flame." She turned one gold eye toward him. "I must hold the heat in my chest and release only the vapor. Too much and Rome burns. Too little and your city sleeps for an hour and wakes irritable. The entire city. The aqueducts branch throughout. The effort to breathe continuously through all of them —" she paused "— it will take everything I have."
Merlin nodded. "How long can you sustain it?"
"Long enough," she said, which did not answer his question but which he understood was all the answer he was going to receive.
"I need four hours," Merlin said. "That's all. Four hours in a sleeping Rome and I can do what needs to be done."
Yggdrasil was quiet again. The sea moved around them. "You are going to face Mab," she said. It was not a question.
Merlin looked at her. "You know about Mab."
"I told you. I know many things." She settled her great head more fully onto the rock. "Mab is old and not to be treated carelessly. Even by wizards." The last word carried nothing contemptuous in it, which Merlin found, oddly, more unsettling than contempt would have been.
"No," he agreed. "Not carelessly."
She closed her gold eyes and the outcropping was suddenly very dark. "Sleep, little man," she said. "You will need it tomorrow more than tonight."
Merlin lay back on the flat rock and looked up at the sky. The stars over the open channel were extraordinary — unwashed by the light of any city, simply present in their full cold abundance. He thought about Mab in her bishop's robes winking at him from inside his vision. He thought about Rome, asleep in its streets. He thought about Arthur.
He slept.
---
They made landfall on the Italian peninsula as the sun was declining on the second day, coming in low over the coast from the west to avoid the shipping lanes. Yggdrasil was a dark shape against a darkening sky and Merlin had grown, if not comfortable, then at least functional in his position on her back. He had worked out that if he leaned slightly forward and kept his weight on his knees rather than sitting flat, the worst of the chafing was manageable. His hands were so thoroughly locked to the spine ridge that he had stopped noticing them.
Rome grew in the distance as they flew inland. Even from the air in the failing light it was unmistakable — the sprawl of it, the density, the smoke from a thousand cooking fires rising in the evening air, the great dome of the Pantheon catching the last of the sun and throwing it back. Merlin had been to Rome once before, in a different life, in circumstances he didn't often think about. It was still the most extraordinary thing man had built. He felt a complicated admiration for it.
"There," he said, leaning forward and pointing. "You can see the aqueduct coming in from the east. The Aqua Claudia. Do you see the inlet?"
"I see it," said Yggdrasil.
"We need to land east of the city. Outside the walls. I'll go in on foot and you wait until dark before you approach the inlet. The water level in the channel will be low enough at night that you can enter without displacing it into the city. Once you are in the antechamber — "
"I know what to do from there," Yggdrasil said.
"Of course," Merlin said.
"And you?" she asked. "What will you do while I am in the tunnels?"
Merlin was quiet for a moment. He looked out at Rome growing larger beneath them, the lights of it beginning to glow as the evening came on. Somewhere in that city Mab was wearing a bishop's face and pulling the strings of an empire like a puppeteer who had got bored with the usual plays.
"I am going to have a conversation," Merlin said.
Yggdrasil made a sound deep in her chest that Merlin had not heard from her before. After a moment he realized it was a laugh. Not a warm laugh. Not an unkind one either. The laugh of something very old watching something much younger walk toward something very dangerous with tremendous confidence and very little idea of what was coming.
"A conversation," she repeated, and said nothing more.
They descended toward the dark fields east of the city walls and the fires of Rome burned below them and all around the great city the aqueducts ran their ancient patient courses through the stone, waiting.
Merlin and the Dragon Queen - Chapter 9
Yggdrasil regarded him from her great height with the patient, unhurried attention of something that had watched mountains form. Her scales were a deep arterial red, almost black in the volcanic light, and each one was the size of a shield. Her eyes were gold — not the warm gold of jewelry or harvest wheat but the cold, hard gold of old coins that had passed through too many hands to remember any of them. She did not move after she spoke. She simply watched him with those coins eyes and waited.
Merlin brushed volcanic dust from his robes and got to his feet. "You've been waiting," he started, "then you know why I've come."
"I know many things," Yggdrasil replied. Her voice was not loud but it filled the chamber the way heat fills a room — gradually and from every direction at once. She spoke the common tongue with an accent that suggested she had learned it from someone who had learned it from someone else entirely, flattening certain sounds and elongating others in ways that were not unpleasant but were certainly not human. "I know Aelphaba sent you. I know what you want. I know considerably more about Rome than you do and I have been asleep since before your grandfather's grandfather drew his first breath." She lowered her great head until one gold eye was level with Merlin, close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating from it. "What I do not know," she said, "is why I should find you interesting."
Merlin's horse, which had been standing near the entrance to the chamber with the philosophical resignation of an animal that had long since given up trying to understand its life, chose this moment to let out a long and deeply felt snort and begin backing slowly out of the cave. Merlin couldn't blame him.
"I don't need to be interesting," Merlin answered, "I need to get to Rome."
Yggdrasil pulled her head back and regarded him from full height again. "And Aelphaba has agreed to this. Very well. I will take you to Rome, little man. I will do what you need done in Rome. When it is finished, I will return here and sleep again and you will not bother me further." She turned her great body in the chamber with a grinding of stone that sent cracks racing up the walls. "Come then. I will not wait."
Merlin looked behind him. His horse had completed its retreat and was no longer visible. He looked back at Yggdrasil, then at the expanse of her back, then up at the ridged spine that ran from her neck to the base of her tail, each ridge standing as tall as his waist. She had not offered to lower herself to make mounting easier. She was not going to. Merlin planted his staff, got a running start and scrambled up her flank using the edges of her scales as handholds, hauling himself hand over hand until he arrived, breathless and considerably less dignified than he would have preferred, astride her neck just forward of her great shoulders. He settled himself between two ridges of her spine, tucked his staff under his arm and gripped the ridge in front of him with both hands.
"Ready?" Yggdrasil asked, with what Merlin strongly suspected was the draconic equivalent of a smile.
"Quite," said Merlin.
She launched.
The first thing Merlin discovered was that dragon flight and falcon flight were entirely different propositions. As a falcon, flight was his. He felt every current, every shift, every drop and rise of the air as an extension of himself. Riding a dragon was something altogether different. The first downstroke of Yggdrasil's wings hit him like a fist and very nearly took him clean off her back. He flattened himself against her neck, locking both arms around the spine ridge in front of him with a grip that would have impressed a blacksmith. She burst through the mouth of the volcano at speed and banked hard left immediately and the world became a vertical rush of black basalt and volcanic cloud and the cold spray of the sea. Merlin's beard, braided lilies long since gone, whipped directly into his face. He pressed it flat with one hand while keeping the other clamped to the ridge.
"You might warn a person!" he shouted into the wind. The wind took his words before they reached her ears or she simply didn't feel compelled to respond. He suspected the latter.
She levelled out and found her rhythm over the open sea and Merlin cautiously raised himself back upright. The sea below was a churning dark green. Avalon had already faded behind them. Ahead was open water. Merlin adjusted his grip and attempted to find a position that did not feel like it was slowly removing his inner thighs. There was no comfortable position. He experimented with bracing his legs outward against the curve of her shoulders, which helped somewhat and only required him to maintain the kind of grip on the spine ridge that would leave marks.
"How long to Rome?" he asked.
A pause. "Two days," she replied. "Perhaps less. The air is good."
Two days. Merlin looked down at his hands. His knuckles had already gone pale. He tried to imagine two days of this and arrived quickly at the conclusion that he would simply have to stop imagining things for a while. He pulled his cloak tight and watched the water pass beneath them.
---
On the first night they stopped on a rocky outcropping in the middle of the channel, barely large enough for Yggdrasil to land on. She folded her wings with an air of someone who finds the available accommodation beneath them but accepts it without comment. Merlin slid down her flank without waiting for help this time, dropped the last few feet and sat heavily on a flat rock at the water's edge. His legs ached in ways that suggested muscles he had not previously known he possessed. He pulled his robe up and inspected his inner thighs which were chafed raw and spectacular in their redness.
"You ride like a sack of grain," Yggdrasil observed.
"Thank you," said Merlin, "that is rather how I feel." He pulled some dried meat and a hard biscuit from within his robe and ate without enthusiasm, staring out at the black channel water. The moon was just past half, which meant Arthur had been fighting for over two weeks. He thought of Arthur in the swamplands, pushing into the Romans with that furious controlled precision that was all his own. He thought of Tristram at Cascura, drawing the enemy back and laughing at them. He thought of Lot, whose loyalty was a question that could only be answered in the doing. He thought of Nimue, which he hadn't meant to do, and quickly stopped thinking of Nimue.
"Tell me of Rome," he said to Yggdrasil.
She settled her chin on the rock at the water's edge. The sea around the outcropping was displaced by her presence. "Rome is old," she said, "but not so old as me. When I last saw it, it was still burning its dead. The aqueducts you speak of were not yet built. But I have felt them described."
"Agrippa's aqueducts feed fresh water throughout the city," Merlin said, leaning forward. "They run in channels beneath the roads and vent upward through grates and openings into the streets and into the buildings they serve. The Aqua Claudia enters the city on the eastern edge. It has a main passage, large enough at the inlet for you to enter. From there — "
"I will be in stone tunnels," Yggdrasil interrupted. "Not pleasant."
"No," Merlin agreed. "You won't be in there long. The inlet chamber before the city proper is large enough that you won't be pressed."
"What is large enough for a man is not large enough for me," she said.
"The inlet chamber is not sized for a man. It is sized for the volume of water Rome requires. It is the size of this rock." Merlin slapped the flat stone beneath him for emphasis.
Yggdrasil was quiet for a moment. "And the sleep breath," she said finally, and there was something different in her voice — not reluctance exactly, more the tone of a craftsman being asked about a difficult technique. "You understand what you are asking."
"Tell me," Merlin said.
"Fire wants to be fire. That is its nature. When I breathe I am giving it permission to be what it is. Sleep breath is the opposite. It is the fire before the fire. The spark held back. The smoke without the flame." She turned one gold eye toward him. "I must hold the heat in my chest and release only the vapor. Too much and Rome burns. Too little and your city sleeps for an hour and wakes irritable. The entire city. The aqueducts branch throughout. The effort to breathe continuously through all of them —" she paused "— it will take everything I have."
Merlin nodded. "How long can you sustain it?"
"Long enough," she said, which did not answer his question but which he understood was all the answer he was going to receive.
"I need four hours," Merlin said. "That's all. Four hours in a sleeping Rome and I can do what needs to be done."
Yggdrasil was quiet again. The sea moved around them. "You are going to face Mab," she said. It was not a question.
Merlin looked at her. "You know about Mab."
"I told you. I know many things." She settled her great head more fully onto the rock. "Mab is old and not to be treated carelessly. Even by wizards." The last word carried nothing contemptuous in it, which Merlin found, oddly, more unsettling than contempt would have been.
"No," he agreed. "Not carelessly."
She closed her gold eyes and the outcropping was suddenly very dark. "Sleep, little man," she said. "You will need it tomorrow more than tonight."
Merlin lay back on the flat rock and looked up at the sky. The stars over the open channel were extraordinary — unwashed by the light of any city, simply present in their full cold abundance. He thought about Mab in her bishop's robes winking at him from inside his vision. He thought about Rome, asleep in its streets. He thought about Arthur.
He slept.
---
They made landfall on the Italian peninsula as the sun was declining on the second day, coming in low over the coast from the west to avoid the shipping lanes. Yggdrasil was a dark shape against a darkening sky and Merlin had grown, if not comfortable, then at least functional in his position on her back. He had worked out that if he leaned slightly forward and kept his weight on his knees rather than sitting flat, the worst of the chafing was manageable. His hands were so thoroughly locked to the spine ridge that he had stopped noticing them.
Rome grew in the distance as they flew inland. Even from the air in the failing light it was unmistakable — the sprawl of it, the density, the smoke from a thousand cooking fires rising in the evening air, the great dome of the Pantheon catching the last of the sun and throwing it back. Merlin had been to Rome once before, in a different life, in circumstances he didn't often think about. It was still the most extraordinary thing man had built. He felt a complicated admiration for it.
"There," he said, leaning forward and pointing. "You can see the aqueduct coming in from the east. The Aqua Claudia. Do you see the inlet?"
"I see it," said Yggdrasil.
"We need to land east of the city. Outside the walls. I'll go in on foot and you wait until dark before you approach the inlet. The water level in the channel will be low enough at night that you can enter without displacing it into the city. Once you are in the antechamber — "
"I know what to do from there," Yggdrasil said.
"Of course," Merlin said.
"And you?" she asked. "What will you do while I am in the tunnels?"
Merlin was quiet for a moment. He looked out at Rome growing larger beneath them, the lights of it beginning to glow as the evening came on. Somewhere in that city Mab was wearing a bishop's face and pulling the strings of an empire like a puppeteer who had got bored with the usual plays.
"I am going to have a conversation," Merlin said.
Yggdrasil made a sound deep in her chest that Merlin had not heard from her before. After a moment he realized it was a laugh. Not a warm laugh. Not an unkind one either. The laugh of something very old watching something much younger walk toward something very dangerous with tremendous confidence and very little idea of what was coming.
"A conversation," she repeated, and said nothing more.
They descended toward the dark fields east of the city walls and the fires of Rome burned below them and all around the great city the aqueducts ran their ancient patient courses through the stone, waiting.