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Because folklore has a right to a certain poetical flair, it is stated, many times over, by many various people, that the Once and Future King shall rise again: and there is a certain implication of glamour, as if he were going to come in as he had gone out, wielding a very large sword, under a very heroic banner. People in folklore are rather more grandiose than real ones, because no one really likes to read, in a nice little book of fairies, about how a great king might actually go about getting himself out of his tomb, which was what the lake was. They would not like to know that he did not just appear one day, jauntily from nowhere, a bit shiny round the edges, to show that he was a legendary rather than ordinary man; but that his first act upon the new earth was to crawl out onto its shores and vomit up some lake water with weed in it. 

And his second, because really he was a person who had happened to do extraordinary things, rather than extraordinary things which happened to be done by a person, and because bits of this story are realistic, rather than nice, was to have a panic attack. He did not have to be told he was all alone. There were things in the grass beside him, all the curious bits of the world which come out, eventually, to touch what has impinged upon their kingdom, so that he had things like crickets and flies on him, inquisitively one after another, coming round to see what had fallen, why it had fallen, and whether they could possibly profit by it; and there were strange noises, and scents, and sights, all round him, in the grass and outside of it. He knew as you always know that he was not home. He did not have to see any farther than the feeling in him. But of course he did. He was compelled to look, by that human impulse to confront what is terrible. In the old days of Britannia, the world was uncultured; not the barbaric humanoids which we see in media, cutting off one another’s heads (though they did exist, in no greater quantity than the barbarians of today, who are doing it with legislation), but in the wild places where the roof of the world is like a vault for the voice of the sea, and there is no human between it and the top of its register. Where we have shaved the native fields to their flat, coddled stubble, and trimmed the trees for our liking, Arthur’s world had gone about starkers, and raving. No one had coaxed that wild, naked profusion out of its natural state for the sake of the aesthete. Even in the fields which the villeins had furrowed for sowing, there were oxen lumbering in trace, and reapers killing by hand, the slow, imprecise efforts of humanity, rather than industry; and a brief walk would carry you from this savage cultivation, into the implacable bracken and moss. You cannot go into these places anymore: or rather, you can, because we have cut neat lines all through them, for the sake of the hiker; but it is a different forest he is going into. It is a different world, where he can feel himself quite alone with his Philosophy, and still nip down to the loo.

What Arthur came back to was something altogether unrecognisable. He had crawled out of one of the better lakes, in terms of acclimatisation, because this one was sat on the flank of Snowdon, the highest mountain of Wales; so that instead of coming out of a little man-made reservoir and onto the side of the motorway, he had come out instead into the natural world, onto some lichen and liverwort. But man has got to this too. For the city dweller, the National Park is the epitome of rough living, and he gets a little thrill from leaving the car park, and striking out on a well-marked footpath through the hillsides; but for Arthur what he saw, what he smelt, what he heard were the muddled sensations of modernity, yelling at him from all sides, so that he felt rather as if a madman had taken hold of his shoulders, and was whipping him about in the confusion. He was lying in lichen; but beyond the lichen were the gravelled footpaths and the long, serpentine lines down which strange metal boxes roared in the morning, and the clear, clamorous Babel of walkers and cyclists. 

This was when the panic attack struck, though he would not have called it that; he would not have known to call it that. He knew only that he was frightened. He knew only that he had come to live where he did not know how to exist.

He had gone away in the arms of the one person he trusted to let him safely do it; and possibly a part of him had expected to come back in them. Unconsciously, in his dreaming centuries, he had retained the bit of himself that had died, and remembered how he had done it, not alone, not frightened as he ought to have been; but with a sort of sorry contentment, because he was doing the easy bit of love, and Merlin the hard bit. In his bewilderment, in his fright, the old hope came pouring out of him; the same expectations of constant companionship which he had always had in the days of his reign; when he did want him, when he didn’t, there was the old friend at his side, ready to sneer at or console him. And so he assumed, because how could he bear to assume otherwise, that the footsteps which he heard in the grass were the footsteps of Merlin come to collect him. He was shaking. He was as close to tears as it was appropriate to get; and then he was asked, by a woman whose voice was lowered in horror for him, and for her, “Oh my God, are you all right?”

And what he answered was, “Merlin?” in a hoarse voice, not because he had mistaken the voice for Merlin’s, but because he was crying out like a child cries out in the night, instinctively, for what will bring him comfort in the dark.

These were some tourists, come to see what was the lump on the shore; and having seen it was a man, they wanted to do the decent thing, and take him to hospital. He was brought out of the shallows by a firm grasp on his elbows, and set on his feet, and questioned with good but terrifying intentions. What had brought him back had helped him with the barrier of language, so that he caught the idea of their words, and spoke, haltingly, in the same strange tongue; but each word struck at him where there was a gap between his technical skill, and his intrinsic comprehension. He was like a new learner turning over a greeting in his head, wiping off the rust from the sounds, and seeing what use could be got out of them. Was he hurt; was he alone; was there anyone to call, they asked him, and his brain sampled these questions with care, and finally brought out of him the same dumbstruck appeal: “Merlin.”

“Oh, honey, you’re shivering; come back to the car with us, will you? We’ve an emergency kit with a blanket in it. Come and get warmed up, and you can call your friend. We had signal back at the car, didn’t we, Jim?”

“Yeah, couple a’ bars.”

And he followed them, stumbling, back to those tidy footpaths in this oddly ordered world, because it seemed that they were taking him to Merlin; because they had given him false hope in supposing that Merlin existed, thinking he would be easy to reach; thinking this was some strange fellow who had got a bit rat-arsed for a laugh, and had some exasperated mate to collect him. He was young, and wearing a costume, and had vomited on the lake shore: and all these things indicated some stupid piss-up. No one engages alone in such eejit endeavours; so they took him back, helping him along with a hand on his elbow, and speaking to him as one speaks to an animal which is hurt, or lost, or frightened, and they brought him to one of the strange metal boxes, and sat him in the back of it. And the woman chafed his hands in hers, and asked him for the number of this Merlin.

And he had to say, “I don’t know.” He had to say that he did not know how Merlin could be got. He had to think perhaps he couldn’t be got. He was looking at the road from the car park, and flinching every time one of the boxes whizzed by, and realising the world was alien, and alienating. He had to realise that he had been gone a long, long time; that he had been transported not in place but in time; that he had died, and the world had travelled a long, long way without him. 

“I don’t know where he is,” he said thickly. “I don’t know if he is.”

So there was a little consultation, whilst he sat miserably in the box, with the blanket round him, and a blast of heat coming from some infernal opening in the front of the car, putting out its invisible flames. 

“I think we should call emergency services. It’s 999 here, isn’t it?” the woman said, and the man brought out a little flat object from his pocket, and tapped at it, and spoke into it.

“You sit tight, ok? We’re calling an ambulance.”

Arthur sat. He was stunned by the idea that the world had let him come back without Merlin. He was stunned by the indifferent cruelty of it. He tried to process, in the strange box, spoken at by strange people, in strange words, with the strange world going on all round him, that he had been saying really, permanently, good-bye, to someone he loved. Not the good-bye which he had thought he was saying; not the good-bye which was for them, instead of him: but a proper leave-taking of two souls who would have to learn, each of them, how to get on without the other. 

And he stood up, whilst they were at the front of the box, and he at the back, and walked off the path, and into what was left that was wild. 

He was not acting on an instinct of self-destruction; this is a sometimes realistic story, but not a nasty one. He simply had to walk out the idea, like someone turning round and round in an A&E waiting room, desperate to see whether the doctor will come out stone-faced, or promising. If he had sat it would swamp him. He had to try and get out from under the shock of it, where he could go, and grieve, and go on. 

But really there was something else to it; really there was something pulling at him, where he was not aware of it, where he was simply acting on the primal feeling of flight. He went on following it without noticing there was anything to follow. He went on as the sun was falling into the lake, past the lake, labouring on legs which had fallen out of the habit, to the quiet habitats of the native life, where they were dreaming in their burrows.

That was where the house was. Someone had built it a little beyond the lake, on a green slope in the meadowland, where only the intrepid foot would find it. A dreary shut-in of a house, which had not been loved in years, the squalid sort to which local children come to knock up, and flee. Arthur realised on seeing it that he had been going toward it all the while; he had been calling to it or the house calling to him, and they had found one another, two lonely beings in the world, looking for what was missing from them. He would go to the house, and be comforted; it was only a silly house; it was only a silly thought. But it got him over the hillside to it. It got him, gasping, to the door; and he touched it, and where he thought to feel the resistance of time, and deadlocks, the little door sprang open as if a friend had opened it to hold him.

The house was Merlin. That was what he knew crossing its threshold; there was the feeling of him in the wood of it, in the thatching, in every corner and cranny. This was what he had felt in the caves of Balor, in the friendly presence of that light sent by some amiable guardian, to bring him out of the dark. This was what he had hated, and hunted; and what he had learnt at the end of his life was love. Merlin’s magic was all round him; and he had to hold onto the door frame to bear the relief of it.

“Merlin, you pillock,” he called, in a breaking voice, and the house returned the insult to him unanswered: and that was how he knew it was empty; that was how he knew that he would have to wait in the little drear house, for its owner to find him. 

Arthur tended his hope as if he were tending a fire, stoking up the flame of it in the long, insidious dark. What had happened was Merlin had not come. What had happened was that even in the blankness of time when there were no church bells to tell him when to rise and when to sup, when the hours had gone by uncountably, the sun had told him that time had passed, and time had passed. He was growing a magnificent beard, and itching at it, because he had to go to the lake for his bath, which was quite the psychological clusterfuck; and it was better to act against his hygienic instincts by making only a rare dash at it, and splashing up some of the cloudy shallows onto his neck and his underarms. 

He had discovered some clothes in a cupboard, and at least got out of the mail and gambeson, and sorted out what was to go over his head, and what was to go over his legs. These were queer, flimsy garments, and their underwear was distressingly sexy, so that he had to pass, some nights, over the slow, hot idea that Merlin had flaunted himself in them, that bits of him had touched what was touching bits of Arthur: and then came the crisis in the night, of wondering how he was to explain what he was doing with his penis where Merlin’s penis had been.

He had to think these rubbish things, and to be a bit ridiculous in what was concerning him. He had to think there was a man coming back to be scandalised, or mocking. He had to think that the house had not called him to it simply to test what he could endure.

So he pottered about whilst the days went on; whilst weeks went by in the slow, still valley on which the house brooded, and into which hikers occasionally wandered, feeling that they had discovered one of those shaggy mountain men who are either absurdly decent fellows, or cannibals. Arthur at first was intimidated by this new world, and shrank from it, keeping himself in the house, or round the back of it, where there was some evidence of a garden started by man, and kept up by nature. There were herbs mixed in with the broom, and where the dog violets put out their stamen like tongues for the rain, there was the garlic, a little less pornographically thriving. He went all round the house, finding out what did what, by poking it; and discovering in this way that he would not have to go to the lake for a bath; that the cool white structure beside the squatter one poured out some water from a silver pipe, and that he could boil or freeze himself by twisting at some of the devices surrounding it. 

There were jars in one of the cupboards, which he opened by throwing them against the wall, and eating what had not exploded onto the floor. He found a little tin with some long, thin biscuits in it, and shouted out an unrepeatable review of their texture. They had to be soaked in water, and then gummed at till they were like paste in his mouth, and could go down without breaking his teeth. He had some vegetables and little jellies, all remarkably preserved, though the meat which he found was gelatinous, and shaped like a can. 

He rigged up some traps from what could be got round the house, and went into the valley, hoping to get a nice little rabbit, and getting nothing other than a cramp in his arse from crouching in the empty grassland. He was tired of the canned meat, and had a little fit, to which he felt he was entitled; then he took out a knife from the kitchen, and strapped it to his hip with the strips he had torn from his tunic, good now for nothing but repurposing: and he set out into the plains, to see were there any deer he could wrestle, and stab. He did find a small child playing in a stream, and a woman who snatched them back hastily. 

This was not, of course, what a legendary king ought to have been doing. He ought to have been shaven, and gallant. He ought to have been going about with some grand purpose among men, showing them how to get on in a crisis. But no one had told him that he had come back for humanity; and so he assumed he had come back for Merlin. 

This is the hard bit of the story: this is the bit where he was wrong. This is the bit where he realised, one morning in the silly act of smacking a can on the tub edge, so that he could have some beans with his bath, that he had come back to all that the world had kept of Merlin. There was the feeling of Merlin in the sad old house, because what could it do, but hold onto what it had got of him, the same as Arthur was holding on.

He threw the can, and put his face in his hands.

Because this is not much of a fairytale, because it is merely the story of humans who have done extraordinary things, because after they have done the extraordinary things, they have to live in the aftermath of their glory, when there is nothing but a few dead, dear friends, Arthur broke out in some ugly weeping. He laid down on the tile of the bathroom and bawled. There were centuries of it coming up in him; all the weeping which he had not got out in childhood or manhood, all the grief which had ever been in him; all the love which had ever been in him. He had been storing it all that while in the lake. He had come out of the lake full of these useless, human things, and now they had metamorphosised into some coughing, and snot. When it was over, he had to go straight away to bed; it was that kind of cry. It had taken everything he had in him. 

But he woke up next morning, in that impossible state of existence which always comes after a long cry. It always seems that you cannot get up afterward. It always seems that you cannot be, afterward. A part of him had thought to have died of the grief in the night; and here he was, alone in the bed, staring up at the ceiling, and realising that he was going to go on. There were the same birds outside his window, and the same sun coming through it; the same valley green in the slow light of the new morning. All the colours which the night had put away, the sun brought back to the living. And all this was coming in through his window. All these astounding, miraculous things which go on in the face of the heartsick. A good morning is like a good treacle: and this one poured in across the flat lands and fired the weeds like pots in their kilns and brought that good silver grain out of the leaves in their nestlings, like the flatware which is taken out for in-laws. In the garden, the dew was bringing out those smells which gardens always keep to themselves, till the rain has coaxed out the best of them. And in shaded slopes and ranges, where the clouds lay like sheep couchant in heather, what was alive, and singing, showed him what there was to be grateful for. 

So what he did was what you should always do after a good cry, which was to wash his face, and put it back together again. He had found a little shaving kit, and brought out the dodgy but only razor he had; there was a poor edge on it, but the alternative was the kitchen knife, which he had used, once, to nearly cut off his head, so that now he knew to go on cautiously with the rubbish edge, rather than the decent, holding up the looking glass which he had found in the bathroom cupboard, and thinking, helplessly, that it had been Merlin who had done this bit for him, turning the mirror as he asked for it to be turned, and chattering about his day, whilst Arthur pretended to mind it. This bit of intimacy hurt him. This banal routine which he had never done alone, never done without the cheerful voice goading him to mild injury, because he had tried to argue with it whilst scraping round his Adam’s apple, was like running straight at the hurt, as if onto a knife. 

But he had got out of the bed: the first step of a great journey.

And he dressed slowly in the kitchen where the light fell over the table and onto his biscuits and tinned meat, putting on his shirt with the speed and indifference of someone who has no one to offend; and nothing with which to offend them, because his chest had come out of the lake as it had gone into it, which is to say that it was a model of rugged athleticism. 

And he went out, at last, into the morning, into the garden, which he checked over as if it were an old friend he wanted to memorise. Possibly he felt that he was going away, though he did not then intend it. What he had to do, as he had done in leaving the couple with their strange metal box, was walk out what had happened to him. He had to walk till the numbness had come off him. He had to go, for a little while, ahead of the idea that the bones of his friends were in the bones of his lands, far under this hurried and sophisticated time which unfeelingly had gone over them with some tar. He had to feel, in the movements of the grass and the movements of the wind, that these were the old, ancestral cycles at work; that what had been done had to be done; that what had been taken from him had been taken impersonally; and then he had to stop, because that is all very sound reasoning, and grief will not stand for it. 

But eventually he went on again, because that is what you have to do. This is not right now a very nice story; but it is going to be one. So he went on in the strengthening day along path official and natural, for some hours, stopping more than his conditioning demanded of him, till at last he came out along the eerie black ribbon which led the boxes round and round the hills, and to the town of Caernarfon, where he saw that humanity was getting on without him. It was getting on colourfully; roaring from the boxes and in the street and pouring out the whole collective stuff of it into this new and boundless world. 

And there was a little nudging at him, like he had felt going away into the hills, where the house was pulling at him; a pressure, a feeling, a yearning, for a place which was in his heart but not his memory. The feeling it exerted on him was tremendous. 

And he turned round and walked those rambling hours all over again, quickly this time, jogging to get back to the house, to the biscuits in their tins and the meat in its cans and the tatty rucksack which he had found with the biscuits, a great collection of pockets and buckles. All of this he put together in a corner of the kitchen. Then he went to the steel box in the bedroom, and carried it out into the sun with him, and threw it down the hillside, compelled by some better impulse than his intellect. He had no inkling what would happen. It bounced a few times on the grass, and rolled tip over tit: and then on the rocks of a stream it broke its poor back on the shoreline. Then he had to pull out the guts of it, which he found were several handfuls of coins, and bits of colourful paper.

All this too went into the rucksack; and then he put on one of the hats which he had noticed made him look dashing, and set out in the evening.

He was going (though he did not then know it), to Ireland, which he would have called Eire; to the rocky coastline of its western shores, where America had sent John Wayne to film for The Quiet Man , and never forgot it; to that region which is called Connemara, where the wrack and storm are blown straight from the sea, with nothing much to impede them; and where there is a good little sheep farm of some two hundred ewes and their offspring, overseeing the Killary Fjord.

These were those great, blackhead sheep bred for mountaineering, with the horns coming off them like cornucopia; and they had one shepherd to guide them, a tall, dark-haired man of similar coif, who sheared himself sometimes in the season of lambing, possibly in commiseration; and possibly because he had forgot to keep up with his fringe, which went off like a bramble if he let it. He was in that rugged state now, practically their ilk, rather than their master; and he went up and down the mountainside after them, wonderfully spry in the doing of it, running along lightly after the dogs, and whistling at them their commands. He was young--or he looked young--and if not bred for the exertion, he had been conditioned to it by several campaigns in his youth--or what had appeared to be his youth, because he had gone to France, rather than Afghanistan; and he had stood against Hitler, rather than Saddam. 

Ireland is very brash in calling any of its mountains anything other than deeply ambitious hills, so that he could go round and over them at any pace he liked, gallop or amble, to check on or tag or bring down the sheep, who viewed him as a sort of benevolent deity. He descended upon them with no warning, but kindness; so that probably ‘deity’ is rather a poor comparison, for a being who looked after rather than smote them. Other shepherds may have resigned themselves to the nature of sheep, which are herd-beasts like humans, prone to the occasional non-conformist, who always found where there was a stone wall to get over, or a fence to go through, and left them for the tourists to admire on their ascents. But this one did not have to put up with that sort of nonsense. He could feel the moment he went out to his pastureland where there were 180 souls, rather than 201; and he struck out cheerfully in the sunrise, feeling how the grass was getting on under his feet, how it felt in the transformative light of day: for it does have a different soul in the cold light of the moon where the world is a sort of ur-world. He went up the mountainside with the dogs, and called out in the thin air things like, “Come by” or “Away” and blew the corresponding notes on his whistle, or on his lips, going about with the ease of an old man in a young man’s body: for that was what he was. He had been walking the mountains for decades. He had gone by the sheep paths and people paths and the storm paths to find out the mischievous deserters, and bring them back to their homeland, for three generations. He had kept the farm as his own grandfather, and his own father, and finally his own self, going down the dynasty carefully for the locals, so that no one had to be very much bothered by the fact that their Micheál had looked a very spry 85 for 30 years; so that the joke in the village of Leenane was that their Micheál had given birth to their Malachy and their Malachy to their Myrddin without the intervention of a single unnecessary woman. The Emrys men came out of the ground with the scurvygrass, very possibly in one of its flowers; and went to work soon thereafter, so the sheep did not suffer the passing of their predecessor. There was a native joke, where none of the Emryses could hear it, out of respect for the Emryses, and the jokers’ crops, that they were all, the lot of them, fairies; but as they were all of them good talkers, and had pulled Tom Hernon’s ewe out of a bog, no one felt it imperative to shun or shy from them. And in fact the neighbours were always going round to the farm, for help with their own, or to ask Myrddin round for a cuppa; and the women particularly seemed to need more than their usual share of assistance.

Of course he was the same man who had left the cottage in Wales. He was Merlin. 

What he was doing in Ireland was having a piece of time to himself. What he was doing was getting by in the slow, ordered way of traditionalism. 

What had happened was he had given up, and come to this outland to find peace with it.

It could be said that he oughtn’t to have done that; that he ought to have kept faith; that he ought to have gone on, year after year, watching the lake with his heart in it: but he had done, for one thousand years. He had thought, all the way up to the War, that he was keeping a maddening but not hopeless watch; that the land would give Arthur back to him; that the world would yield up in its time of hurt what was required to heal it. 

And then some children had been put into ovens as if they were pies, and what had happened for men to go along with it was nothing. They had simply stood it, or gone along with it, because the children were not very like them. One can get into the psychology of propaganda, into the fearful instincts of the hivish human creature who does not like to feel that he has stood where everyone else is sitting, but really the matter of it is that some ordinary people felt that it was too difficult to say anything. They felt it was better for the children to die if they were really such a bother as all that. They felt really that it was all right because the children had been given an unpleasant label; because the children were the targets of jingoism, and no one but a traitor is that.

Of course Merlin had seen, all his very long life, that humans were unpleasant to one another. He had seen they were unpleasant to children. And he had seen in the inexorable progress of the race that it never got any less pleasant, but only more efficient; that what it did was to invent more neutral words, and weapons, for the killing, so that it did not have to see on the end of its sword where there was another human, getting out the unpleasant viscera. What it did was to create paperwork. What it did was to use cattle trucks, and livestock trains, so that it was as easy as saying ‘this man is Not Us; and therefore an animal’. It sought to de-recognise what it did not like, so that humanity could enter a sort of dissociative state; so that it could separate itself from the part of it that did the nasty things, and go home to its daughter: and so that in the dark hours of night and psyche it could go over what it had done and find those justifications of animalisation, that grim opposite of anthropomorphisation, in which we can find the joy of kinship in a wee little leaf.  

And so what happened is that he began to believe not that humanity did not need Arthur: but that it did not want him. He began to believe that the idealism of those brute but more innocent times was now a sort of outmoded fashion. If it had not needed him for Hitler, and it had not needed him for Stalin, and it had not needed him for Mao, it was because, fundamentally, it saw these as a kind of natural development in human culture; the collective soul could have called to him at any time. It could have shouted out into the void what it thought was an unanswerable plea: and the Old Religion could have thrilled to it. It could have dredged him up from the lake. It could have brought back the figurative sword in the hand of its figurehead, to lead the race out of the darkness of itself.

And the War had come and the War had gone, and Merlin had gone back to the cottage after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and sat for a long time at the table he had carpentered for himself, watching how the sun changed the patterns in the grain at dawn, at zenith, at dusk.

And he had gone to the silent shores in the yellow morning to say good-bye to the very old friend who was still a very young love in him. It was not any less difficult than when he had let the body down gently onto the bier, and set it adrift, and set it ablaze. Arthur had never lessened in him. He had grieved a great many people as you were supposed to grieve them: by getting out a good cry, and going round for some time in what was a grey and lacking world, and then forgetting, bit by bit, all those details which kept the dear faces alive in him. But he could see the face of Arthur as if it were still lying under his hand, smiling at him. He heard the voice as if it had come to him over a flat, still meadow, with nothing between it and Merlin’s memory.

So he had come to the Fjord, to the farm, to see what the countryside would do for him. He had come out of the shadow of the lake into the shadow of the mountain, to put the sea between them. He had come to feel where time passed differently; where the roots of the world had no ties to him, or what haunted him.

He had a pleasant routine now, of gathering up the sheep, instead of sitting by the lake; of going up into the mountains after the stragglers and breathing in the wind and breathing in the sea; and going in out of all of it to a pleasant little farm house with a pleasant little kitchen which diffused the sunrise like honey through a colander. After a cold day he put into himself an inordinate amount of tea; not the plain breakfast variety which you tart up with milk, but a whole medley of flavours, because he had a cupboard like a tea shop. He was an admirer of Taylors of Harrogate and Harney & Sons and even the old classic Twinings, and categorised them by tea type and stoutness, so that he knew instantly where to lay his hand if he wanted green leaves or black, and whether he was moved to lounge and relax, or put hair on his chest. Sundays he went into the village, to The Rock Bar for traditional music, carrying his own instrument, or relishing the villagers’, whilst Siobhan from up the lane reminded him her Maureen was single, and home from uni, and he was very welcome to stop round for tea.

So he was doing nothing much whatsoever, except treating himself for bereavement. He spent a little time training or running his dogs, and shearing the ewes, and pulling out the lambs when they had stuck fast, and giving the little bodies a tender rub with some straw, and cutting peat when it was dry enough for it, which he did the old way, using a sleán instead of the machine, and attracting, though he was rather oblivious to it, an audience of women who were ostensibly there to help, rather than gawk. 

All this he did according to season; and it was the lambing one on the day which Arthur came to the cottage for what was in Ireland, trying to get rid of him. It is incredible to think that the event had come and gone, and Merlin had never remarked it; but of course he had. He was in the barn with a birthing ewe, encouraging her to gallantry, when he felt there was a shift in the world. 

He looked away from the ewe for a moment. 

But of course he felt in the world what no one else felt; he felt what was in the heart of it, how it moved, how it lived, and how it would die, one day, if nobody did anything about the bloody carbon emissions. The earth is not a static base for human embellishment. So what he was always feeling was the surge and pulse of it, where it was a little rigid, where it was a little yielding; where it felt sometimes like the human a little sombre, or gay. He felt that something had altered in the spirit of it; that there was a little gladness in it; that there was a little gladness in him. And he attributed it to the new life which now was inching bit by groaning inch into his hands, and smiled at it. 

So Merlin was immovable where he was, on the green slopes overlooking the Fjord; but Arthur was coming doggedly to him, not understanding where he was going, only that he was going, to something which was vital to him.

Arthur deduced by the lack of visible weaponry, and by asking round Caernarfon for the armoury, that nobody was any more in the habit of going about armed.

There were various other discoveries: that one could get fresh vegetables from a shop; that one could not eat fresh vegetables from a shop, straight out of their bin; and that following round women doing their shopping, to see what they put into their trolleys, and what he ought to put into his, resulted in a rather unpleasant chat with the management. He was banned from three grocers’, on account of scaring the patrons, and one other shop, a sort of tailor’s place where clothes were hung from some racks, and you went about picking them like fruit. He had noted on entering the town that his clothes were not like the others’ clothes; that currently the fashion was some sort of blue and grainy material on the bottom, and a few layers of inadequate cotton on top; and it was quite like Merlin to make him an outsider in his tastes, by putting him in some frumpy antiques. He was using one of the racks for a dressing screen, and putting on a number of trousers and tops to find what was most fitting, when one of the women at the counter approached him nervously to say, “Em, sir, I’ve rung the police”, so that he had had to whisk in front of his privates the rucksack from Merlin’s, and yelp,” For God’s sake, do you mind ?” It was worse than Gwen having walked in on him: for this woman goggled very obscenely at it, as if she had never seen a man getting on with his ablutions. 

There was another discovery; quite a famous and useful discovery: that this casual bit of jargon ‘rung the police’ meant that some very large blokes in bright vests would be showing up; and that Arthur would have to escape them conspicuously half-naked, scrambling out into the street at speed, whilst people shouted or held up the thin, flattish objects on which the tourists who had helped him out of the lake thought he could contact Merlin. 

As someone of remarkable resource, he did get the clothes finally, for which he paid with some of the coins from the rucksack, at which the trader stared a long moment before putting them away into a drawer. 

“Thanks, slut,” he said, having heard it from a woman addressing her friend, and feeling rather proud of himself for remembering the lingo. 

He was going the way of Lôn Las Menai to Y Felinheli, which is to say that he was going the way which the feeling pulled at him, and that invisible force which was exerting itself on him had the integrity, and the intuition, to take him along the back way from Caernarfon to Holyhead, where he was ultimately bound for the harbour, instead of inflicting on him a profusion of the colourful steel boxes; and instead of inflicting Arthur on a society which was not yet ready to see his testicles in a Marks & Spencer. 

It was 6.5km to Y Felinheli, a short walk for a conditioned man, along a wooden railing which kept out the flat blue water of the Menai Strait, a narrow but civilised path on which a bit of shrubbery or cyclist occasionally imposed. He had started off late on account of the police, and having to look round for a grocer which had not yet ejected him from the premises, so that he would have had to stop over in Y Felinheli anyway, or push on in the dark, without a sword, and wearing only the measly trousers, shirt, and jumper which was the colour of his eyes; but additionally he was an attraction for the old men walking or pedalling along the path, who stopped to fulfil their natural functions of chattiness: and who were astonished to find that he was going by foot to Holyhead, which destination had suddenly crystallised in his head on questioning.

“That’s quite a stretch, young man; you won’t get there tonight,” one of them said, and the other asked, “To Holyhead, eh? What’s there for you?”

“I’m not really sure,” Arthur said, and then, realising that his accent marked him for a clear outsider, and thinking that he would be regarded possibly as a spy, or outlaw, or murderer, tried to improvise a little respectability for himself: “The hunting, actually.”

“You’re going to Holyhead to hunt ?” There were some incredulous eyebrows aimed at him. “It’s a port town, lad.”

“Yes,” Arthur said, nodding very sagely. “To hunt…fish.”

So that was that conversation, over and awkwardly done with.

He was at Y Felinheli by sunset, and sought out a noisy drinkling establishment to ask after a room: at which point he discovered that taverns no longer did those dual duties of bed and board, and he would have to find a separate establishment. There was a woman offered to take him home for herself, a relieving offer which settled where he was to sleep outside those safe confines of the cottage, till he realised that this was a sort of sexual come-on, and he would have to pay in something rather more saucy than coin. Finally he was directed down the road to a hostel by some pitying bloke, where he had a room to himself, in which he discovered no bath, but a white stall with a metal block which spat out, on pushing a button, a hot stream of water into his face; so he had something less than a bath, but went to his bed clean of the road.

In the narrow bed, he had only the ceiling to look at, and the sounds of life in the corridor to keep him from the thoughts which the walk had kept him from; he had had those metrical movements of strolling to keep him occupied, and the clear clean air of the world, coming to him round the great silhouettes of human efficiency. Now there was nothing between Arthur and his thoughts. There was some shouting leaking through, and what he assumed was some music, for it had a great, blundering sort of rhythm, and there was a singer riding its pitch: but the door had shut out the sights and the threats, so that under the thin blanket he felt that marginal relaxation of the fighting man, who never really sleeps with his whole being, but drops off that short cliff into an abyss the height of his calves. Now he was far away in himself, where there was no somnolent mist, fine or dense, to muddle and lure him; his body was trying to get at him, by feeling very heavy in the bed, but his thoughts floated up over it, out of it, on a little wavelet of hope, that lifted him like a gull on its peak. 

The feeling which had driven him to Y Felinheli and which was driving him to Holyhead was the same which had driven him to the cottage; it had brought him out of the lake, and out of the hills, to the place that was Merlin: and now it was sending him forth, to some other destination to which he was impelled. 

He had to think--he could not help but think--that he was going to Merlin; that he was going to the source of the feeling; that it had called him by some mysterious means which he did not understand but knew only to trust, as he had trusted the little blue light in the caves, leading him out of the dark and the peril. He had to think that he had been wrong, in the cottage, in his grief, that he had come back to a world which had othered and ousted him, for no other reason than to test his mettle. He had to think that he was going home; not to the tangible place, which he knew in his heart was waste in the blind tracts of history, but to what is the feeling of home: what is the weft and the weave of the lives in a passion, making the place a habitat for souls rather than things. Camelot was home to him; and Merlin was home. All those ancestral lands which he had thought of as a lovesick parent thinks of a child were some bones in a fell; but there was a second home dear to his heart; a place to which he had been brought in the silent hours of that unspeaking and unspeakable comprehension which exists between two beings who know one another. He had sat with Merlin, sometimes in bright chambers or darkling woods, and felt that he was loved, though they could never speak of it, except in jibe or in metaphor. He had rested in it. That was where he could be quiet in himself; that was where he had never felt that it was futile to give out and give out the love. 

So next morning he was up at sunrise, and heading out for the Menai Strait again, in a grey mizzle which gave him the unhappy sensation of the cold having got under his skin as if it were a neckline. It was that sensation of going through cobweb; that sticky unease of following, when the ghost of the thing is with you longer than the thing. He had some thirty kilometres and more to go in it, and was making remarkable time, but sullenly. He was seeing that marvellous landscape as the locals see it, rather than the tourists: why it is so green, rather than that it is green. The rain ironed out the landscape, so that where before varying greens had shaded and sounded it, showing where there was dimension even in those far slopes which convert themselves to panorama rather than diorama, there was only a sodden grey; not a bitter but a disheartening palette, which muted the trees where they pleached overhead and stopped the daisies dead in their nonsense. All those silly aspirations of spring it rebuffed. And those few obligated or compelled to continue on in the face of it cycled or strided along briskly, armoured far better than Arthur, in hood and in Wellington. 

He passed down the gravelled way and into the mucky, over ground leaf-brindled and bare, through trees noosed and nosed onto fences; where there was the good, simple air of the country lane, dedicated to clarity and to chastity. He went on past hills dappled in rock and in moss, where the trees fixed the scree fast in their footing: and where those old monuments turreted and gutted defied the world straight from their ruin.

And finally he came to the edge of North Wales, to Holyhead, to sea; and moved by his instinct, boarded and battened himself on the last ferry to Dublin.

The 21st century had divided its inns into two parts: the drinking establishment (the pub) and the sleeping establishment (the hostel). The latter was a sometimes proper and gendered affair, and sometimes a den of iniquity in which men and women mixed freely, and even shared in their toilet. Twice he had discovered in coming out straight from the shower that there were women waiting for him, piling some sheets on their beds; and looking at him with a sort of round-eyed wonder, or fear.

But aside from the indecorous living arrangements, he was getting on rather splendidly, learning to sprinkle in A Google liberally throughout his conversations, so that the people, especially the young people, would know that he was their ‘baller’ contemporary.

He did get a bit muddled over which were his pants, the over bit or the under, and found that to some Americans he had been speaking of his trousers, and to some Irishman his underwear, or his ‘cacks’. He learnt not to eat the yellow condiment which was hawked by the sandwich shops: and he learnt that a gay sauna was not an especially jolly bathhouse for the hygienically minded traveller. Otherwise, all in all, he was coming swiftly to terms with the modern time, and blending into it without any seams to show the gap between his century, and this century. In Dublin he acquired one of the thin, flattish objects of communication, a sort of messenger unbeholden to time, or place, or equine stamina; and on which he learnt he could talk to most anyone he liked.

“You ok, so?” he was asked in a shop which was called Vodafone, and he turned round to give the asker the stare which was deserved by the miserable doubter of a man clearly in the prime of his life and athleticism. “Uh, yeah, I’m fine, thanks.”

“No, I mean do you need help?”

“Oh, yes,” Arthur said, putting on the voice in which he had bartered for horses. “One of your mobile things, please.”

“Erm, ok--which one?”

“I don’t know--aren’t you supposed to tell me that? You’re the merchant. I don’t have an inventory of your wares.”

“Right. I meant do you have any preferences in brand, style? Specs? Got a price range?”

Arthur spent a moment processing what was clearly some gibberish; and repeated, in the slow, careful way of the native speaker to the foreign: “I want a mobile.” And he shaped it in the air with his hands.

There was some more of the wasteful haggling, by which Arthur, slowly and strenuously, brought the fellow round to his duties, till at last he was standing with the device in his hand, and winnowing out those secrets of construction and function.

“No, don’t take that off--sir, you’ll break it.”

“I think I know what I’m doing,” Arthur said, with that supreme confidence of which only the ignorant are capable.

“Right, see, you’re taking a picture of your nostrils again--never mind,” said the man, helplessly; arriving finally at the inevitable conclusion that he was in the presence of an expert, perfectly equipped to handle a little technology, where before he had managed an army.

“How do I call my friend?”

“Do you have his number?”

“What number?” Arthur asked. “His birthday? On this calendar--27th of May, I think. Not entirely sure what year he was born; I don’t think he knows either. Unless you were a noble, it wasn’t uncommon not to know when exactly--” He cut himself off, realising that he had nearly slipped, very nearly, into one of those historical faux pas which he had committed as a fresh innocent straight from the mountains of Wales, showing off his bollocks to some cashiers. “He’s from a very small village. No running water. Or birthdays.”

“No,” the man replied, in a strange and off-putting tone; there was a little gurgling noise in his throat, as if he were struggling to get up the words: “His phone number?”

“If I had his phone number, why would I be asking you how to contact him?”

So it was that Arthur had to leave the shop with the phone, and without having spoken to Merlin; he tried at various points along his journey putting in the numbers himself, seeing as it would be no less fruitless or useless than the shop clerk, and found that modern people were rather a testy and uncooperative lot of ill-humoured whiners: and that if the response from the other end was, “Hello, police, what is your emergency?” the answer had better not be: “Hello, I’m looking for my friend Merlin.”

He struck out from Dublin on foot once more, heading into the fathomless west, having the feeling to needle and propel him; he was in those old lanes of the world by which the goat and child go, seeking sustenance for belly or play; and occasionally he surfaced (or was chased) from the fields to the hostels, in which he further familiarised himself with this strange new language, improvising where he was ignorant, and coming out altogether astonishingly fluent.

“The Dementors? You know Harry Potter, right?” one bloke asked him over coffee in a common room, and Arthur said with swift recovery from his ignorance: “Right. Of course I know Harry Potter. We’re good mates.”

He was going to the coast, which he could tell, as a tracker, to county Galway, which he could not tell, as an outlander; and sleeping in grass or hay, under outcropping or overhang, having sometimes for company the wind in the grass, so that all round him the world was like a river in flux.

He was afraid, at first (though not really afraid , but rather manfully wary) that in the fields or lanes of the unpeopled country, he would be set upon by brigands, murdered or robbed; but the cities overwhelmed him. They were too full, too furious, too fleet: and he had to seek out where there were the crickets leaping like salmon in stream and the grasses stopped at the brink of the cosmos; where there was pathless infinity, and the cow-like lowing of foghorns. Gradually he began to feel where all these things were working on his heart. Gradually he began to feel that he had come back to a changed friend, rather than a perfect stranger; the old earth, his earth, was underneath the sediment of this one, like a struggling heart.

Walking is sometimes the only cure for what is poison in you. He could not have borne it standing still. He could not have gone by coach after the feeling, and kept his faith in its guidance. He had to go by the old paths of the shepherds and the wanderers and the refugees to the shores of the sounding waters. 

He was picking up speed as he crossed into Galway. On toes like blown toadstools he crossed into Roscommon, Castlerea, Claremorris; he was going on desperation now, to bring his hope to ruin or fruition. 

And on a mizzling Tuesday he reached the village of Leenane, having walked through the night to see it in sunrise. 

Merlin had risen that morning, and splashed his face, and stared at it in the mirror over his washstand, feeling there was something very slightly off in him. He was a little askew; the world was a little askew. Some facetious god had moved it off-centre like a prankster muddling the furniture. He reached out to the fields and the fallows for a ewe gone astray; and felt the blank, still presence of the innocent prey-mind in a home with no predators. They were as stupid and contented as ever; and there was naught but a wrinkle in the mirror of the Fjord.

He had his tea. 

If he had known, he would have dropped his mug. But he had to get on. He had to be strict with himself. He had imagined, in dreamland and daylight, the blonde head coming up the long drive in the sunlight, or the rainlight; he had seen the shoulders in mail and in shirt: and he had heard the old dear voice call out in the swindling wind, which brought to him the far echoes of men dressed up for his fancy. 

And he had let go of these things. He had forced himself to reason, to resignation. He had let go, not of his love, but his expectations. He had done what all grieving people do, and locked up the death in his heart, and brought it out only in those low, hard minutes of loneliness, when it is too much to go on in the indifference of the world without them.

So what he saw through his window was a stray tourist coming up the lane to the farm, too early for the daily demonstration of shearing and herding by which he kept himself company in the spring, when there were lambs for the children and bog cutting for the parents. He had had them before, misplaced but eager, and brought them in from the wind for some biscuits. 

He put on his jacket, and went out to intercept them. 

Arthur saw a man coming down the lane toward him with a dog at his heels. He was still a black blemish on the grey Fjord; shaped by the drizzle, but loosely.

But the feeling which had brought him from Snowdon to Leenane knew him; Arthur’s heart knew him. And as he came on in the mizzling the silhouette resolved into portrait, so that he could see the black hair, longer now, and the pale face, bearded now. 

What is there to say but that they both stopped, one in confusion, and the other in elation. Arthur had walked over 400 kilometres; Merlin had mourned over 1000 years. He was not done mourning yet. He had had the same experience of the far shape gradually coming into being, of a friend rather than a stranger materialising out of the world. 

And he thought the grief had done what it does, and tricked him; and wrecked him. He thought it had got loose from him, that he had been an inadequate keeper; that some random morning long after he had surrendered to that bitter matter of human loss, it had suddenly broken and deranged him. There was a hallucination coming on in the rain. There was a perfect modelling, spun from his yearning and hurt, staring back with reciprocal longing.

What is there to say but that he was wrong; that the apparition was laughing, and putting down the rucksack which Merlin had carried to war: that it was coming to Merlin over the rutted lane; that he was coming to Merlin over the rutted lane; that the hug was too smelly and wet to have been inflicted by anything other than a living man, living rough.

Merlin sought blindly for the fence, and missed it, and crumpled. He was holding Arthur round the neck as he went. 

He had to say his first words to what he had been addressing in dream and in longing, for one thousand infinite years. He said, “You prick .” He got it up in two sections: the you, and the prick, separately, brokenly. 

Arthur was holding him so that it hurt. Arthur had gone down into the mud clutching at him; he was in the same doting arms where he had died, and where he could live. It was like coming out of darkness. It was like coming out of fear.

Because it is customary at moments like these to kiss, Arthur had to do something else. He had the scratchy face in his hands as if he were going to follow through with the custom; he was smiling at it as if he were going to follow through with the custom. He had to get out somehow the feeling of love, without embarrassing himself; and he panicked, and blurted out instead of profundity inanity: “Have you got any breakfast?”

Merlin was laughing. He pressed his forehead to Arthur’s forehead.

And they knelt there in the lane, in the rain, with the dog going round them in bemusement.

Merlin got down to business. He brought out the tea cupboard as if it were an arsenal, firing off Arthur’s options like salvos: “Will that be white tea, green tea, black tea, herbal?”

“What?” Arthur wrinkled up his face. “Just tea tea. And don’t make it too hot. I had some at that star place in Dublin, and nearly burnt off my tongue.”

“Starbucks?”

“That’s what I said, Mer lin.”

“Could have asked for a drop of cold water in it.”

“Well, no one told me that.”

“Ok, well, there’s no such thing as tea tea, I need a genre. Or you’re getting Scottish breakfast with nothing in it.”

“What would I be putting in it?”

“Milk. Sugar.”

And Arthur pursed up his lips, which Merlin knew--which Merlin still knew, after all this time--was the expression preceding a feeling of hot violence in his heart. He was about to have a Stupidity inflicted on him. 

“Sounds girly,” Arthur said. “I’ll take it neat.”

“Kay,” Merlin said, and left it to brew for fifteen minutes, so that Arthur would get nothing but the lukewarm tannins, and choke on them, to maintain the self-perception which he still had, of being unflappably and incomparably masculine.

“Oh, give me your phone number,” Arthur said suddenly over the noise of Merlin’s heart, and the rashers popping in their pan. He had been trying to concentrate on the rashers; trying to concentrate on the ordinary movements of the fork in his hand, turning or plucking them out, whilst his kitchen filled with the incredible presence of the dead man. He had thought he would have to set down the fork, and rest his forehead on his hand: and then the voice called him out of what was a burgeoning fit of weeping or panic, a little imperious, a little annoying, and he came back to the reality of Arthur, the tangible Arthur, no longer the dead and deified Arthur, but something of a little rank tosser.

“You got yourself a phone?” he asked, turning round, and sliding the rashers onto a plate, and some toast after them. He cracked open the eggs half-turned between the pan and Arthur, raising an eyebrow to show that he was incredulous, but listening.

“If you recall, I did run an entire kingdom. It was no trouble. Actually, I’ve had really a pretty easy time of it. It’s part of being a warrior: adapting to one’s terrain and whatnot.”

“Uh huh,” Merlin said, seeing that his old instincts for knowing when Arthur was a lying liar who lied were functioning as they ever were. He rattled off his number.

Arthur tapped at his phone with somewhat alarming vigour. “It didn’t take.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I typed it in, and it’s not doing anything.”

“Give it here,” Merlin said, and held out his hand. He stared at the phone a moment. He stared at Arthur. “You have to put it in your contacts.”

“That’s what I did!”

“No, you just typed it out on your keypad. Look, I’ll do it.” But there were more questions to be asked: “You have 500 calls in your log? Who the hell were you calling?”

“I was trying to get hold of you.”

“By calling random numbers? And 999? Three times?”

“Well, I didn’t know it was emergency services. But I called them the other two times for legitimate emergencies. That paper that’s in garderobes now was out. They said that wasn’t an emergency, and whilst I beg to differ, I was respectful of them being wrong.”

“So what was the third call?”

And Arthur said stiffly, “I don’t think that’s any of your business” and looked down at his hands, which he had knotted primly on the table, for something to do with them. 

Merlin handed back the phone, and there was a long moment of a silence neatly divided, between contemplative, on his end, and embarrassed, on Arthur’s. “Did you get your dick stuck in something?” he asked, partially because he could not help himself; and partially because he did not want to help himself.

“No!” Arthur hollered.

So in that atmosphere of faint hostility Merlin sat down to table with the breakfast plates, and three different jams he had cooked and canned himself; and they had to look at one another over those scant and separating inches, with the sun coming down between them. It had gone up neatly over the Fjord, and let itself in through the window over the stove, and picked out the detail in the grain of the wood and the grain of Arthur’s skin. There were little cuts from his razor, and a spot which probably had tormented his ego; all the details which brought him at last out of the shadow of Merlin’s terror, and let his heart believe in what was real, and living. He had forgiven Merlin the penis comment, and now was smiling at him with the old, crooked smile, which he had always brought out when he felt that it was safe for him to be tender. Merlin nearly dropped the plates. It was like being stuck with it. He had gone on without it, and gone on without it; and now it was like a blow to the long years in which he had starved on the memory of it. 

“It’s good to see you again, Merlin,” Arthur said, in the quiet way he had when he was bringing out something which Uther had taught him to be embarrassed of. “I wasn’t sure I would.” And he clutched Merlin’s forearm for a moment over the table, in the hand which had pressed Merlin’s hand to his chest, so that he could die with it on his heart.

“Yeah, me too,” Merlin said thickly, trying merely to bear the feeling that was in him.

Afterward he sent Arthur upstairs, to where there was a bath and a guest room, and went round to check on the sheep. He had to get out of the house, and crouch down in the grass, with his hands hanging between his knees, and his head down. He had to get out of him a few hot, harsh minutes of crying. It was that agony of relief which is very like the agony of grief: all his body knew was that it was in pain, and to purge it. 

Then he had to get up, and go on with his chores. Sheep are a bit like children, and do not care if you need some time for your breakdown rather than their breakfast. So they were bumping all about him, asking for silage, whilst he wiped at his face, trying to bring it back to a presentable state of gentle derision. He would have to go back into the house, and face Arthur as they had always faced one another, with some ribbing or slander. Arthur had initiated the hug, and thus exhausted his capacity for emotional expression; he would have to get on now with his usual methods of communication, by punching Merlin in the arm whenever he was in that deadly grip of human feeling.

So he went back into the house quite composed, after the morning rounds, to see how Arthur was getting on; and found that he had never made it to the bath. He had laid down on the bed for the temporary bliss of being off his feet: and fallen into that sleep which is very like death. Merlin saw where the body was still and silent on rather than under the covers, as if it had collapsed there--which probably it had--under the impetus of exhaustion. There was a feeling in him which the young mother feels at the crib side of her baby between the first breath, and the second; the small pink lump is in its deep rhythms of rapture, the trance-like pinnacle of Nap: and she is in agony. Merlin was like that now. He was watching the chest under its jumper, and expecting that it would not go up again. He clutched the door frame. And he saw the same as the mother the slow, deep movements which indicated life was resuming: and so too could his.

Arthur was lying slantwise across the bed, with his hands folded on his chest, and his booted feet over the side of the bed. He had kept them off the clean duvet, as if he were a sort of thoughtful person. 

Merlin smiled, and went to the bed, to the dangling feet, thinking to return the favour of consideration, by taking off the boots; and kneeling he unlaced them with mostly steady fingers, and slid off the first, and retched terribly. “Oh God, that is vile .” 

They had to settle into a rhythm of daily life, and to Arthur’s astonishment, the rhythm was not Merlin working, whilst Arthur watched him work. He had expected to follow Merlin round, mocking him; and instead he was expected to follow Merlin round, mimicking him.

In this season that meant mostly he was to help with the lambing; in pouring rain the distraught mother had to be brought into the barn under a heat lamp, and the whole business watched to see whether it would go smoothly, or poorly; and in mizzling rain they had to do it in the field, since none of them had anything to complain of, in such fine, fair weather as this. Arthur had never been subjected to the minutiae of birth; other men, poorer men, who were in the employ of greater men, were the breeders and bearers of this gruesome miracle; and it was not like it is today, where men are taken right into the room with the mother, and made to hold her hand whilst she forces out his heir. In Arthur’s time, the much more civilised practice of shutting up the human mother in a dark room with the women who would assist her and comfort her was the model by which society propagated itself; so that he knew babies came out of the female component of a species, and nothing else. He was shaken, so far as he could be shaken, as a man of not inconsiderable gumption, by the revelation that what happened was blood came out of them, and bleating, followed, eventually, by the perpetrator of violence: not at all representative of what was cute, and fuzzy, and wobbling about the fields on its precarious new legs, but a slimy imitate the colour of an apricot.

“Why is it orange ?” he cried.

“It’s just the meconium,” Merlin said, casually, still up to his elbow in the yelling mother. “Just means the poor fellow got a bit stressed and shit himself. You see it sometimes in more difficult births, or if it’s a really big lamb; they’ll come out a sort of yellow or orangish colour. His leg was stuck, which was why she couldn’t get him out herself. You’d probably shit yourself too, if you thought you were going to be trapped in there.”

“I would not!” Arthur protested.

“You don’t have to prove you’re manlier than the baby sheep, Arthur,” Merlin said, pulling out the next.

But there were pleasanter aspects of the process, when Arthur had to sit with the orphaned or rejected or hypothermic little bodies in his arms, encouraging them to feed from the bottle rather than the teat, and feeling rather startingly as if he would kill for them. Merlin had his own recipe for milk replacer, which Arthur had learnt to mix up in a loud instrument with little knives in the bottom of it, and on which was a sort of cap, to keep the concoction inside, rather than outside; which specialist knowledge he had discovered by not putting on the cap, so that Merlin had come in one afternoon to find the milk all over Arthur, and all over the kitchen.

“You have to put the lid on the blender before you use it,” he said, helpfully.

“Thank you, Mer lin.”

They were developing a habit, in the evenings, of lounging round the fire in the sitting room, with tea and biscuits, sometimes to read, and sometimes to watch something on a rectangular object which Merlin referred to as a ‘telly’, and which Arthur had seen in the occasional pub on his journey, always a window onto the startling modern conception that men were worth maiming for a little white ball. It was a bit like a hunt, with a lot of grand racing about, except that the prey always got away from them, into one net or another, and this was either a cause for jeering, or jubilation; though he could not tell what had prompted former or latter. In addition to this, Merlin showed him that by appealing to something called a Netflix, he could see most anything he wished; and many he didn’t. 

He had to go on like that for weeks. He had to fall into the old dynamic, to find where he was at last at peace in this tremendous new time. 

And finally he asked, in the comfortable warmth of the fireplace, with the glow of tea and company at work in him, where the questions he had were bearable to speak, “What happened to everyone? I mean--I know they died.” He swallowed. “How did they live?”

Merlin looked round at him. There was a little flame in each of his eyes, so that Arthur was recalled to the hot yellow glare of them, showing where Merlin had trusted Arthur no better than Uther. 

“Erm. Well. Lancelot and Gwen--married. Lots of babies. All but two made it to adulthood. They were really old when they passed. Lancelot went six months after her. I think he just didn’t know what else to do. Percival and Leon both married, too--Percival to a lady almost as big as he. Giant children. Think that’s where some of the myths have come from, honestly. They lived a long time. They had good lives; pretty quiet lives, actually. Mithian--she was a really good queen. You chose well. Camelot was at peace for a very long time. She ruled alone her whole life; your councillors weren’t very pleased about a woman doing that, but can’t argue with the results.”

“Gwaine?” he asked, taking a sip of his Victorian London Fog, trying to find in the casual act some brief refuge. Merlin had lost them centuries ago, and they were like those old, fond memories which are taken out on birthdays or holidays. But Arthur had come to as if from a sleep, and found that all his loved ones were dead. Not just his friends but his lands, leaving him the survivor of stunning calamity. He felt as if some accident had taken them all in a rush, and left him the lone caretaker of their memories. He was going about like a survivor of natural disaster, feeling the weight and the guilt of his flourishing.

“Gwaine died round the same time as you, actually. Morgana,” Merlin said, and looked away, as if he had known how it would land. 

“Oh,” Arthur said, and looked for a long while into his tea. He was trying to see if there was anything there to help him to bear it. He said finally, “I think I’ll go up to bed now.”

And he paused on the stairs to look back over his shoulder at the figure in the firelight and say to it not exactly what he had meant to say to it, but a pale impersonation: “Was magic ever legalised?”

“Yeah. Mithian did. After your death.”

“Good.”

What he meant of course was that he was sorry. What he meant was that he had been the perpetrator of bias, for no other reason than the shabby excuse which mankind has always given, of not knowing any better. He had kept the best man he knew and the best friend he knew in fear of himself, because he was in fear. That is the whole and the way of it; that no powerful man is responsible for his own fright; that someone else must be the source and the bearer of it. 

He went up the stairs to the cold sheets in the cold loft, and undressed very mechanically: and got into the bed feeling rather as if the whole world had died. It was like that terrible moment in children’s literature when the horse dies. He had rather thought Gwaine was invincible. He was one of those hardy sorts which pops up after a beating like a jack-in-the-box, without mussing his drink or his hair. He had come in out of rain or wind, out of the hard ways of the hard world, to cook his socks on the campfire. He had never gone out into certain death certain of it at all: but merrily ready to see that he would have a good time of it, and scarper off afterward as he would have scarpered off from a tavern bill. And nothing so inevitable as time had gotten him, but hatred. 

There were other things to contemplate in those long evenings when he went off to bed, or Merlin went off to bed, and the house was beholden to the wind, rather than the inhabitants, for companionship. He had thought on seeing Merlin in the lane, and thought harder, on hugging Merlin in the lane, of kissing him. He had had, occasionally, the same instinct in Camelot, during brief breaks from reality. Because Merlin was not a combatant, because he had no instinct for the hunt or the joust, and because he had, in Arthur’s negligible observation, which he had made in indifferent passing, a mouth in shape like a heart, he was more woman than man; and Arthur’s impartial penis was bound to confuse them. But he had grown out of the thin unthreatening frame into a worrying one, so that it was difficult for Arthur to tell whether his chest was wider, or Merlin’s; and more difficult still to justify the very rare but substantial yearning to kiss a creature bearded and broad, as alike to a woman as a horse is alike to a woman. 

Moreover, Merlin compounded the issue by wandering round the house starkers. He had come to the breakfast table wearing nothing but his shower one morning, so that Arthur, in the middle of his toast, had to see that really he was not a woman; and quite fortunately endowed to prove it.

He choked on the toast. “Merlin!” he shouted.

“Sorry; I’m not used to living with anyone. But you used to prance round naked in front of me all the time. And it’s my house.” He helped himself to some toast.

“Well, that was--it was--it was your job to see me naked.”

“So, I had to be subjected to you naked all the time, but I can’t snag one bit of toast without putting on a towel first, in my own home?”

“No! And what do you mean ‘subjected’? Like it’s some--some bloody torture, to see an attractive man naked? Not that I’m saying I enjoy it, just that--aesthetically speaking, it isn’t terrible, so it’s not as if--as if things were so terribly hard for you.” Very carefully he did not look at Merlin’s penis. “Very difficult .”

“And it’s difficult for you to look at me naked?”

“ No , obviously, I barely noticed it. I just don’t think it’s good manners. What if one of the neighbours had walked past? That--that loose woman up the lane who’s always coming round for tea as if she hasn’t got any of her own might get the wrong idea, is all.”

“If I want to give her the wrong idea, she’ll know.” And he winked, which in combination with the dimples, and the nudity, gave him a sort of odd impression of attractiveness. Arthur felt rather hot. It was the same strange feeling which went through his belly when they were patching up the fences, and Merlin had rolled up his sleeves in the sunshine, to show where the limber forearm muscles had been working in secret, and now were doing their business right in front of Arthur’s disinterest.

He considered it very platonic to have walked hundreds of kilometres on the whim that he might see his friend again; he did not yet know the word for it, but what he thought he was being was heterosexual. Men in his time (though not Arthur in his time) had given one another all sorts of brotherly caresses, and the kiss of peace between two rulers meeting was nothing more than two mouths greeting. In those homosocial bounds of training and battle ground, they had done all sorts of romantic things like dying for one another, and nobody had accused anybody else of bringing their penis into it.

Arthur’s penis was not in it. Now that it was where it belonged (or rather Arthur was where he belonged), it was indulging once more its proper indulgences: which is to say that Arthur sated himself on the memory of breasts, quickly and furtively in the mornings before Merlin hollered up to him; and Merlin’s voice had never sped up the process. He always thought of full chests, rather than flat chests, and never had Merlin’s naked form crossed the threshold of his mind, to impinge on or improve his pleasure. In times of hardship, or boredom, or friendship, he had sometimes imagined putting his tongue in Merlin’s mouth, because he had confused Merlin with something that was attractive to him; but now that the world was settling round him, now that they had got out of the way the reunion, now that Merlin was nothing more than an old, good friend, no longer a sanctuary to which he was fleeing in hope and in loneliness, but merely a man who put his feet in Arthur’s face when they were lying head to toe on the sofa, the insanity was past: and Arthur’s thinking was like a good, clear day out at sea, when you can see where the world drops off. There was nothing muddling or mystifying it, and he was never bothered by the concession which Merlin had made to his propriety, by coming to the breakfast table in a towel rather than nothing. 

“Supposed to storm today,” Merlin said one morning, licking off the jam from his fingers, whilst Arthur noticed, incidentally, that the water from his shower was running down his chest and his abdomen, and dropping off into that abyss where Arthur had to bridge what was under the towel, with what was in his imagination. 

“It always storms,” he said.

“It always rains ,” Merlin corrected him. “Hurry up and finish and put on your wellies. I want to round up the pregnant ewes and get them in the barn, in case any of them lamb today. Don’t want to worry about having to trek round in this sorting out any difficult births.”

“Why am I getting scolded when you haven’t got any clothes on at all?” Arthur was in shirt, trousers, and socks, and feeling rather indignant.

“Because in the time it takes you to put on your boots, I’ll have finished my breakfast, dressed, combed my hair, and been out the door some twenty minutes.”

“Do you even comb your hair?” Arthur asked dubiously.

“Yeah! With my fingers,” Merlin said, demonstrating.

Arthur rolled his eyes, and reached over the table to ruffle his fringe. “Well, there, I’ve halved your routine for you,” he said, and with a piece of toast between his teeth, went to put on his wellies, to prove that Merlin was an exaggerating little dodgy perjurer; and found as he was clumping out to the door, in an air of immense satisfaction, that Merlin was coming down the stairs already, in boots and knit cap: and shaved, even.

“How on earth did you--you cheated!”

Merlin wiggled his eyebrows, and smiled at him: the smile which had never affected Arthur beyond the usual effects which people in possession of dimples sometimes (but rarely) inflicted on an impartial innocent, momentarily misled into thinking that possibly they felt something about it; and that possibly their genitalia felt something about it. He pulled the cap down over Merlin’s eyes, to be as difficult as Merlin was being.

They came in soaked, and separated to shower; and reunited to eat.

Merlin had brought a thin, lidded object with him, and set it in the centre of the table whilst Arthur passed round the sandwiches which were the only meal he was trusted to contribute, and the tea which he had learnt how to brew without leaving on the hob, and burning down the house.

“Have you seen one of these yet?” Merlin asked, sticking half the sandwich in his mouth at one go, as if Arthur had brought him in from the wilds, and was still in the process of civilising him.

“Yes. Some people had them at that coffee star place.”

“It’s Starbucks, Arthur, for God’s sake. They’re everywhere, so you’re going to have to learn the name sooner or later.” He opened the object. “It’s a laptop; it’s a type of computer. I don’t really know how to explain it other than it’s a machine you can use to play Tetris, or argue about whether or not the moon landing was real.”

“I don’t understand what any of that means.”

“I know; but don’t worry, you’ll get it. I think it’s time you learnt about the internet. Wikipedia will bring you up to speed with what you missed of history far faster than I can, plus you can finally learn how to properly use ‘yeet’, because I’m tired of hearing you say things like ‘What the yeet.’”

Arthur frowned at him. “You can use it like that.”

“No you can’t. And you also can’t say ‘I’ll yeet to that’ like it’s a toast.”

“Yes you can.”

“No you can’t.”

“Well, what would you know about it; you’re an old man. Slang is a young man’s game.”

“You’re a pillock,” Merlin said, turning round the laptop, so that it was facing him. “You’ve got the internet on your phone, too. Here.” And he motioned for Arthur to hand over his mobile, which he did. “See that little thing right there? Touch it.”

“ You touch it.”

“Arthur, it’s your phone. And it’s only an app to open your browser.”

“I don’t trust apps.”

Merlin sighed, and handed back the phone. “Anyway, let’s go over basics,” he said, crossing round to Arthur’s side of the table, and leaning in over his shoulder, so that Arthur had to feel how warm he was after the shower, and smell on him the aftershave which he used, and which Arthur had stolen, thinking there was something treacherous in it because he had a habit--a very infrequent habit--of thinking that it made Merlin almost noticeably appealing. “Mouse,” Merlin said, and dropped a strange black object onto the table beside the laptop, and placed Arthur’s hand over it. “There’s a little wheel right here that you can roll to scroll down or up a page. I’ll show you in a second.”

“I think I can manage,” Arthur said, yanking out his hand from under Merlin’s hand.

And Merlin unperturbed went on with the lesson, and violating Arthur’s personal space.

“I’ll bring up a few tabs for you. Here’s Wikipedia. Here’s YouTube. Here’s a blank home page. The bar under ‘Google’ is where you can type in things you want to look up. So if I want to search for ‘Irish music’ or ‘books about astronauts’ I can type that in here, using these keys, and then it’ll bring up a bunch of results for things I can look at in relation to what I’m searching. See?”

“What’s an astronaut?” 

“Google it,” Merlin said, tousling his hair. “You can ask it any question you want. And if you want to watch videos of something, you can use YouTube to search for those. You can find documentaries and even footage of some historical events. I thought that might be helpful alongside Wikipedia. And don’t believe everything you read on the internet; anyone anywhere can contribute to it. Which means you get loads of brilliant stuff, and loads of rubbish. Which reminds me--we have to get you vaccinated. I’ll never let you live it down if you come back to the 21st century and die of measles.”

“I’m pretty sure it would take a lot more than this Measle to kill me. It took an enchanted sword to do it the first time round.”

“Right,” Merlin said, in a slightly strained voice, which he cleared, so that he could go on in the same slightly infantilizing way; Arthur could have sorted out this internet for himself, and brilliantly. “Look, I’m just going to have the talk now, because you’re going to find it anyway, and I’d rather not have a bunch of viruses on my computer, so I’m going to show you a safe site.”

“What’s a virus?”

“It means my computer can get sick, and possibly die, if you look at the wrong thing.”

“Well, that’s a lot of pressure.”

“Just don’t randomly click on anything with lots of Xs in the website URL, which is here. Anyway, do you remember that poem I caught you with? The dirty one?”

“I do not ,” Arthur said primly, “remember anything other than you never keeping your nosy, meddling hands out of my personal effects.”

“Well, we both know what I’m talking about. I don’t care and I don’t want to know what you were doing with it. But that sort of thing is all over the internet, except it’s videos now, and you can see way more than what was being described in that poem.”

“Are you suggesting that I’m interested in--in--erotic…erotic??” He did not know how to finish the sentence to the satisfaction of his embarrassment. 

“You’re a man and breathing and I’ve already caught you with it once, so yeah.” Merlin leant into his shoulder, and brought up another page, his long fingers zipping over the keys so that Arthur could hardly follow them. “I’m going to show this to you once, so you know where to go without killing my computer, and then we’re never going to speak of it again. This is Pornhub, it’s free, and you can find just about anything you want, by category, or top rated, or most viewed, or anything like that. So if you’re looking for, for instance, ‘big tits’, here you go.”

Arthur was speechless. There was a woman with her nipples pointed as if they were weapons at the man on which she was seated, and her genitalia was bald as an egg. 

“Do they know I’m watching them?” he cried in horror, whilst Merlin closed out the page, and returned to the safer Wikipedia.

“No; they’re just recordings. It means they filmed themselves, and then put it up for people to watch whenever they want. They aren’t currently doing it. Unless you want to watch the livecam footage.”

“I am not watching any of this,” Arthur said coldly, a bit mildly incensed that Merlin had taken him for some sort of pervert.

“Ok, fine. We can both pretend you won’t look at it.”

“I’m not going to!”

“You don’t have to get all shouty about it. Anyway, poke round a bit. I’m going into the village.”

“And why am I not coming?”

“Because you’re a bit weird and I’m not sure I want the rest of my friends meeting you yet. You told Alice “Ok, Boomer” when she wanted sugar in her tea, and that you had gone to uni for bae.” 

“Well, what was I supposed to say? I didn’t go to university because I was in a lake?”

“You could just say you went straightaway to working, or say you studied literature or something.”

“And then she’d want to know what kind of literature I studied, and possibly ask me questions about it. What if she studied literature? How am I meant to get one over on her then?”

“She didn’t, and you’re right, Arthur, it was much better to say ‘I studied bae at Cambridge’ rather than literally any other answer you could have given her. Much more normal. She didn’t ask me if you were all right at all.”

“Weren’t you going into town?” Arthur demanded testily.

And Merlin sailed out the door on a laugh.

So in the quiet, where there was only the house to witness his sins, he thought briefly, very briefly, of the woman abusing the man with her strange shaven privates; and turned to Wikipedia like the gentleman that he was. Merlin had brought up an article entitled ‘History of the United Kingdom’ and he scrolled through this for some time, finding that if he smacked his hand on the mouse whilst hovering over the blue bits, he could bring up a whole other article; and in the process learning that he was in the Republic of Ireland, whilst there were six counties in the North still under the domain of the Queen, because a place called England was a marauding dick.

Then he moved over to the YouTube, and found and was lost in some cat videos; so that when Merlin returned some hours later, having been delayed by the usual processes of Irishmen gossiping, and asked, “So, what did you learn?” Arthur answered immediately and without looking up: “I want a cat.”

They did not get a cat, though Arthur pressed the point like a child wheedling his mum; it was too much now to consider, whilst Merlin was still socialising Arthur as if he were a puppy, and had no time or capacity for another living being: especially one which would knock over the wildflowers he kept in a vase in the kitchen, for the simple thrill of being a hooligan. 

The farm was busy all that spring, with new lives, and tourists wanting to fondle them; and to Arthur slowly were entrusted the duties of turf cutting, both operation and demonstration, whilst the tourists (the female tourists) watched him sweating over his sleán. He had come out of the lake, Merlin noticed, as fit as he had gone into it; where he might have been expected, and excused, those flabby bits which crept in on the idler, he had kept the muscles trim as a sportsman, and fine-tuned them now by doing whatever lousy, heavy work there was, to show he was Merlin’s marked superior. What at first had been some gleeful revenge now was some backfired revenge. He had thought to pay back all those long hours of boot polishing and shit shovelling by assigning to Arthur all the worst bits of farming; by having him lug round all the heaviest bits of it: and by parading him out in the rain, when it was actively pissing, rather than simply pervasive: so that the end result was Arthur wet, and lifting things onto his shoulders with the freakish ease of a strongman. Merlin was too old to be dazzled by some remarkable musculature; but he did walk into the side of the barn once, due to unfortunate but unrelated circumstances. 

He knew, because he had had centuries to come to terms with it, and because Gwen had told him so, that he loved Arthur; knew that Arthur had for him an asexual and brotherly devotion; and that one day he would have to give up Arthur again to a woman he could love on his own terms, rather than his realm’s. He minded this a little; but only a little. Because he had come through the centuries with the same kind heart in him, because he had come through Bergen-Belsen with the same kind heart in him, because time had not made of him what it makes of many young humans in their bitter twilight, he felt a little sadness for an old, old man who had been alone, and would be alone; but he did not feel any resentment for the woman. He did not feel any resentment for Arthur. He made up Arthur’s toast in the mornings and drank down the tea which had been offered in rubbish but well-meaning reciprocation, and he went out to work the farm which had been his in the long years of Arthur’s death and would be his in the long years of Arthur’s leave-taking. He kept the evenings by the fireside in his heart so that he could take them out in the cold, lean times which an old man endures at the end of his times. Of course Merlin had no end of his times; but he had the same feeling of tiredness, and loneliness, which is in very old people who have outlived their loves and their use. He was like one of those veterans who sees time coming to pick off one after another the friends which war has spared.

He kept Arthur to himself for a good couple of months, sharing him only occasionally with Maureen and Siobhan up the lane; and Joe down the lane; introducing him bit by bit to the world, so that neither Arthur nor it were frightened. But finally he had to take him out of the house and into the village, and into the world. He straightened Arthur’s collar whilst Arthur stood nervously letting him; and pretending that he was not nervously letting him, but valiantly. 

“Ok. What do you say if someone asks where you’re from?”

“London. Do I have to be from London? I’m not sure I like England.”

“Sorry; you have the plummiest accent imaginable, so unless you can credibly imitate a Dublin accent or something and we can pass you off as an outsider, but an Irish outsider, an Englishman it is. And you can’t; so don’t ever try it again, please.” He tweaked the collar again. “Don’t worry; just be yourself. They’ll expect you to be a bit of an arsehole, since you’re English. What about uni?”

Arthur rolled his eyes. “I studied mediaeval history at Cambridge, not bae.”

“Good. You might do. And remember--we don’t say, ‘It was only a bit of pony play’ instead of ‘It was only a bit of horseplay.’ Glad we got that one sorted out before unleashing you on the unsuspecting locals.”

“I thought that’s what it was called now,” Arthur said, frowning.

“Well, I showed you the video to prove it’s not, so there you go.” He finished his unnecessary fussing, and looked down, very slightly, into the anxious blue eyes which were doing what they had always done, and failing to hide the heart in them. He was looking at Merlin very fondly, though he had meant to do it derisively. There was a little lump in Merlin’s throat. Sometimes love is a warmth; and sometimes it is a fury. There were things knocking about in him. And he had to stand as if he were serene; he had to stand in the path of the love, and bear its terrible impact.

He clapped Arthur on the shoulder, and smiled at him. The little crooked smile came out in turn; helplessly out of the instincts to smother it; helplessly into the space that was Merlin’s breath, and Arthur’s breath, and the world was some distant imposition. 

This perhaps is another of the realistic bits of the story; this is the bit where if it were a nicer story, a more saccharine story, a less human story, featuring far smarter protagonists, they would have ended the long drought, and fallen on one another. Merlin wanted to; Arthur wanted to. 

But they were both rather dim. And so Merlin stood in the path of the love, and was crippled by it; and Arthur’s stomach turned over with the sickening longing which he had not yet identified, feeling that he had to kiss him; feeling that it was wrong to kiss him.

And they went into town for the evening, to a pub called Gaynors, and stuffed themselves on beef stew, and stout, talking over one another, and laughing; and fielding that steady stream of natives which always comes by to view the foreigner like an ape in a zoo. Arthur got on very well, though he still proposed to ‘yeet’ to their health, possibly out of thickness, or malice.

Then they had the long walk back in the dark, to lean on and trip over one another, in that vast and murky world out of which Merlin’s torch chiselled a little thin pavement where the moon would not do it for them. It was nearly eight kilometres going on like that, along the road, and through fields which did not exist till the torchlight discovered them. They had the feeling of adventurers piercing the veil; coming out of their world, into an otherworld. Arthur ruined the mystique a bit by drunkenly peeing in one of the fields, but all together it was a grand undertaking; like men going off to sea who have never been to sea, and do not realise that it is only a lot of composed or angry water. They felt young, going into the darkness where the world was new.

“I dare you to jump in the Fjord,” Merlin said when they had reached it.

“I am not doing that,” said Arthur, who was already taking off his jacket. He threw one of his boots, and both of his socks at Merlin. Then the shirt came off, at a good, heterosexual clip, to show that he was not especially aware of having taken it off in front of Merlin; that in fact he had not considered it at all, but whipped off what was keeping his nipples from wind and scrutiny in the casual spirit of blokeiness. “Come on, then. It’ll be cold. I’m not going in alone,” he said, and shoved Merlin in; and jumped in after him.

“Bollocks!” Merlin shouted, surfacing. “ Bollocks , it’s cold, you prat !”   

Arthur, in the meantime, was not in love with Merlin, not especially bothered by the fact that he came to breakfast in a towel, not especially bothered that he would not trim his hair, though the curls made him bewilderingly attractive, and not at all bothered by That Woman who came round for her ‘tea’.

“You do know she’s here to ogle you,” Arthur said, very casually, whilst she was in the loo, and Merlin was fiddling round the hob.

Merlin laughed. “Alice? She’s old enough to be my mum. Or at least that’s how it looks to her.”

“So? She’s probably one of those, those--” He groped round for the word, plucked it up proudly, and presented it: “She’s a MILF.”

“You mean a cougar, and I’m taking the internet away from you.”

Arthur flicked a crumb from his plate across the kitchen; Merlin flicked one back from the counter.

The internet in fact was the only source of strife in Arthur’s life, aside from the hair which curled over the nape of Merlin’s neck. He had been getting along marvellously with it when the Pornhub website began to visit him in his dreams, and then his daydreams, at all inconvenient hours of the day. Arthur did not hold with that sort of thing. He did not deny the human tendency to fapping; but he did not think there was any need to bring in some specialists. It was one of those morning chores which was to be completed out of necessity, like washing his face; and he could bring it off quite all right without some woman yelling at him to do it.

But because Merlin had put the little seed in his head, and Arthur’s libido had watered it, there grew up in him a little longing; not really sexual, but merely enquiring. Modern people did things to themselves, and then decided that other people had better know about it; and Arthur felt, after a sort of Catholic struggle of the self against the self, where both of the selves are horny, and flagellating one another about it, that it was almost impolite of him not to look at what the modern people were doing to themselves. It felt to him a kind of denigration of local custom; and he did not want to be thought of as one of those blundering Yanks which he had heard came to a new country to see why it was unlike their country; and to suggest why it ought to be like their country. He did not suppose it was very civil of him, to react very much in the spirit of the Christian observing the Moslem. 

He had learnt by now to access the internet on his mobile, having also learnt in the usual way, which is to say, the hard way, that the internet kept a record of his searches, so that he had had to explain to Merlin why he had been looking at ABO fanfiction (because tumblr had told him to), why he had Googled ‘fish mittens’ (because Reddit had told him to), and why the YouTube was cluttered with suggestions for Turkish oil wrestling (because his penis had told him to). The last bit was what had driven him to his mobile’s browser, rather than the laptop’s; because brewing in him like the seed which Merlin had planted was a suspicion of himself which he had held, fleetingly and dangerously, in his own time. There are things which one knows, and things which one acknowledges, and for Arthur they were very rarely the same things. Now he had a word for the phenomenon which sometimes seized him (or rather, bits of him) when one of the knights undressed himself; or when he thought of Merlin undressing himself. In his time men had had to take wives; matrimonially, and biblically; and men of his rank had had to proliferate heirs with the genitalia which could produce them. So he had gone through the little charade with Mithian, never getting on her an heir, but at least fulfilling the expectations of attempting to get on her an heir. He had said things like ‘Top job’ afterward, and patted her on the shoulder, so it must have come off; though he had never personally felt anything beyond that rote stimulation of flesh on flesh. And now he had learnt that there were men who did not like women at all; who were not opposed to them as humans but as sexual partners. He had stumbled very briefly into the bathhouse in Dublin, and seen a man stroking himself, and taken him for some kind of pervert, and the establishment for some kind of dodgy one. And it was not an aberration, but merely an expression of modern male sexuality.

So now when he gave in to Pornhub, he gave in also to the curiosity in himself, which supposedly he would no longer be killed for; and, trying briefly to interest himself in some breasts, in fact in two pairs of them at once, finally he clicked into the category which really he had meant all along to click into, and passing the frightening thumbnails which showed men bound in rope, or squatting over purple spears, he found the ones which featured penises in their unthreatening singular, being subjected to nothing more obscene than a stroking. In the interests of science, he watched ten of these videos, and one of the breasts, hoping to pass off what he had felt for the former as a consequence of the latter. 

Then he threw down his phone and put his head in his hands. He felt very alone, and like wanking; which possibly is the saddest combination there is.

He had to come bit by bit to the realisation that it was all right to wank to the videos; or, at least, that it might not be all right: but that he was going to do it anyway. He tested it out after Merlin had gone to town, waiting till the house was deep in that secretive hush of single residency; and then pulling up the video he had bookmarked, and watching till it was nearly unbearable not to touch himself; a disconcertingly short acceleration from curiosity to necessity. He rubbed at himself through his trousers first, as if that were marginally more acceptable, watching as the man on screen held no such reservations, and jerked himself till he was groaning, easing off as his stomach muscles tightened, his harsh breathing terrible and thunderous in the house which was for now Arthur’s domain and Arthur’s alone. He turned down the volume, till he could barely hear anything, and finding that it was not quite as satisfactory to watch the man taking pleasure, without listening to the results of it, he groped round for the headphones Merlin had got him, found them, finally, at the bottom of his bed, in the nest of his sheets, and popped them in. He was in his own little space then, feeling that as the headphones had shut out the world so too had the world shut out him, so that he could get on with what was his own business, and no one else’s. And, hesitating, he unbuttoned his trousers.

It was a solidly good wank. In fact, his toes curled at the denouement, and he sank back in the bed, breathing harshly in the aftermath. He had brought himself off shortly after the man went, spurred on by the sight of him coming all over the heaving stomach muscles. The journey had been pleasant, but now he had arrived, merely sticky, at the revelation; it is not a very nice revelation, which uses spunk to communicate truth. 

He turned over the phone on the bed, and pretended, for a while longer, that he had been thinking of women.

“Why do you never use your magic around me?” Arthur asked one evening whilst they were sitting round the fire. Merlin had one of the dogs under his foot, and was going over and over the soft head with a toe, reading his book in this pleasant state of contentment; Arthur had a lamb on his lap. He had been scolded and scolded against bringing them in for their feedings, and went on doing it anyway, so that Merlin had had to refine his rule from ‘No livestock in the house’ to ‘No adult livestock in the house’ to maintain at least the illusion of authority. Now Arthur was sat on the sofa like a new dad, his hair rucked up in the back, with the little white bundle looking up in awe at him, whilst Merlin attempted not to be desperately fond of him. He was failing dismally at it when the question startled him out of his book, and out of his love.

“What?”

“Your magic. Why do you never do it in front of me?” This was said very carefully, whilst Arthur was looking down at the lamb, so that Merlin knew he had better answer it carefully. Arthur had the habit of being terrifically hurt by things, and that was why he was looking at the lamb, instead of looking at Merlin, so that he could hide if there was anything done to him by Merlin’s response. It is not very convincing to make as if you have no human feeling, whilst bottle feeding an infant lamb as if it were your own infant child; but it was important to him. Merlin said, truthfully enough, “I dunno. I’ve had to hide it longer than not, I suppose.”

“It’s not specifically because you don’t want to practise it in front of me? I could understand that.”

And Merlin looking at him remembered that he had said simply, “Merlin, you are not a sorcerer, I would know.” He had had a blind faith in the reciprocity of trust; a sort of childlike expectation of confidence from the one soul to whom he had confided his scared and secret self; and it must have felt as if he were being told he was not very much loved. He must have felt after that lifetime practice of disappointing Uther a kind of resignation; a sort of weary pity of himself, for having considered himself finally the recipient of mutual love.

“No,” he said, closing the book, and leaning forward, and looking till Arthur had to look back at him; looking till he had crossed the gulf of the sitting room, and their eye contact was its own sort of touching. “I’m not keeping it from you. I’ve just got used to doing it when I’m alone.”

“Well, you’re not alone anymore,” Arthur said; saying it, really, for the both of them.

There were less fraught questions.

“Are you not going to cut your hair?” Arthur blurted out one day.

“Why?”

“Because it’s longer than it used to be.”

“So?”

“It’s curly.”

“So? It’s my hair, and I can do what I like with it. Unless it’s yours or you’re the one pulling on it, you don’t get a say.”

Arthur choked on his toast. “Who’s pulling it?” he demanded, and very swiftly picked up and drained his tea.

“No one, currently. Which means I’m taking my own input, and no one else’s. You want an opinion on my hairstyle, you better make it worth my while,” he said, in the low voice which he knew riled Arthur’s prudishness; and laughed to see that it had stopped him dead in the act of demolishing his eggs. “You’re such an old maid.”

“I am not,” Arthur replied automatically, peevishly, and flicked some of his eggs into Merlin’s hair.

“Yeah, sorry, my mistake, you’re a child.”

And then long after it was appropriate to contribute any more to the topic, whilst Merlin was explaining how the lambs would have to be wormed, Arthur suddenly said, “Why would I have sex with you just so you’ll cut your bloody hair?”

Merlin blinked. “I didn’t say you would? It was a joke.”

“Well, it’s not funny. Maybe you should try telling funny jokes.”

“Sorry; I’ll consult you in future to make sure my humour is up to your standards. Anyway, we’ll need to round up the lambs. I’ll show you how to do it properly when we get out there, but really just make sure it’s going over their tongue, and that they swallow it.”

“Right,” Arthur said, as if he were normal; and then whilst they were going along with the dosing guns in their hands, opening the resisting little mouths and slipping in the tubes, “I’m not that bothered by your hair, I wouldn’t sleep with you just to make you--presentable.”

“You’re a freak,” Merlin replied cheerfully.

They went on like that for months, through the lambing season and into summer, going on in the old ways to show themselves that the fundamentals were unchanged; that time had changed, and the world had changed, and they two were still how the other one oriented himself. Slowly Arthur was learning to cook; and slowly Merlin was learning not to fear his cooking. They drove up sometimes to the Burren and walked in the footsteps of glaciers, Merlin carrying his shoes in his hand, because he had learnt in all his years that the best way to see the land is through the sole; and Arthur went along derisively after him, till finally he thought he had better see what this mad little hippy was on about, and took off his own shoes, and felt what Merlin thought of as a sort of conduit between man and earth, and Arthur thought of as some knobbly pebbles which were poking him. 

“Because you can’t see what I can,” Merlin said, shoving him a little.

And Arthur, shoving him back, said, “Oh, really? And what is it you can see?”

Merlin had to pause for a moment. He had to gather up that terrible strength which is needed for vulnerability. It was not enough to be safe in the presence of Arthur; it was like showing off a hobby with which you are desperately in love, and finding that people tolerate it as if it is the sick bit which they have vowed to take with the well. He could lead Arthur stiffly through it, and listen to some silence, or platitudes; and then they would go away a little reduced in their friendship; there would be between them something which Merlin loved, and Arthur didn’t love.

“Hold out your hand,” he said, clearing his throat.

“Why?”

“Just do it, you numpty,” he prompted, and Arthur scowled at him, and looked to be on the verge of habitual resistance; and then he held out his hand, palm up, aiming at him a raised eyebrow.

Merlin grabbed the hand in his own.

“What on earth--” Arthur blurted.

“Just shut up,” Merlin barked, and he reached out to the land, to where it was reaching back, and sent what he felt to Arthur. His joy, the earth’s joy, all those hidden byways on which stone and sea meet, where they were intrinsically linked, where the wind carried salt air and fresh air and the grasses nurtured by both; and the beings which went by wind and wave to lay their children in grotto or meadow. All these things Arthur had a superficial grasp of: and now Merlin had made him see that what he knew was the superficial knowing of all humans, who suppose that the land ends and the sea ends where the eye loses track of them. 

He looked over nervously at Arthur, to find there was a soft smile waiting for him; the feeling of it, the knowing of it, was in Arthur’s eyes, and they did not have to speak of it. 

And Merlin felt the love rise in him as if it were a sickness; exactly as if it were a sickness, as if he would have to get rid of it, or be slain by it. He lost for one moment the feeling of gentle resignation; that amiable happiness, mellow, complacent, habituated, which lives in us when we are afraid for ourselves, for what is shocking, or blazing. Sometimes it comes up a little into your throat, when you have looked at an ordinary being you have loved for years in the same comforting way, and realised you will be leaving, or left by them; that the feeling or the body is fleeting; and one day you will have to go a very long way in strangeness and sadness. Merlin felt now looking at Arthur where he had been broken, where he was mending, where he would break again. He had told himself, as a very old man, surrendered to his place, that he would hold Arthur’s children in his arms, and feel for them what a fond uncle felt, and for his wife what a good friend felt; that he would hide what would make him wretched, and Arthur wretched, in himself, from himself. And now it had gotten loose in the sunset, with mischief in its heart.

But he had had to live a very long time, loving a dead man; and he could love a live one with the same dearth of reciprocity. 

So they went home to the kitchen, to argue over a mystery series to which they had been listening whilst they were cooking or worming the sheep or weeding the garden, one earbud in Arthur’s ear, and the other in Merlin’s whenever they were outside, and now the phone sat on the table inside, which Arthur repeatedly touched to pause the narration. “Well, I don’t think they’re lying. They’ve already confessed to the murders and are going to be hanged. But who on earth would sneak in and break a dead prostitute’s fingers and toes? Were they broken before they were killed? Wouldn’t one of the witnesses have known? They’d have complained about a client getting too rough with them.”

Merlin threw the tea towel over his shoulder, and tossed the pan he was holding, partially to mix his stir fry, and partially to show off. He dimpled at Arthur’s raised eyebrow. “Maybe we’d know if you actually let us listen to it.”

“I want to make sure I’ve hit on the solution before the end of the book. And before you sort it.”

Merlin tossed the stir fry again. “Ok, well, that’s going to be difficult when you’re blundering off totally in the wrong direction.”

“I am not!”

“Well, you think they actually killed those women.”

“And you don’t?”

Merlin shrugged a shoulder. “I’m not saying anything. Just that you’re wrong.”

“I am not wrong! They confessed!”

“Did they? Did the first man really confess, though? He didn’t, really. He just didn’t deny it. Which isn’t the same thing at all. He’s a pimp. He knows the coppers aren’t going to believe him or sympathise with him. And the second one, she did, but she also denies having done anything else. Not the buttoned boots, or the water, or the broken fingers and toes; none of it. She doesn’t know Finlay, and doesn’t know how that handkerchief got there. You don’t think it’s possible she roughed her up a bit and left her for dead, but didn’t actually kill her? That’s some fetish sort of thing, believe me.”

“I don’t want to know how you know about any fetishes.”

“Hasn’t the internet taught you not to kink shame?”

“No, it’s taught me to pay lip service to not kink shaming, and to dribble a lot of rubbish about tolerance, and then to be a gate-keeping prude.” Arthur cleared his throat, and shifted a bit uncomfortably in his chair. “Anyway, I don’t need to know what you got up to over the centuries, or whether you--invented any of it, or whatever.”

“Yeah, you probably couldn’t handle it. Anyway, if you’re so sure they’re guilty, how about a little wager?”

He turned round to find that Arthur was squinting suspiciously at him. “What do you know? Have you already read this book?”

“No,” Merlin said, with the perfectly innocent air of a conniving bastard.

Arthur squinted harder at him. “Fine. But I change my answer--they aren’t guilty, and if I’m right, you have to--to do something appropriately humiliating.”

“Sorry, I only know the inappropriate kind. Also, how’s that fair? You can’t just change your answer last minute and then set some nebulous terms that I’m just expected to agree to.”

“Fine, if I’m right, then you have to kneel at my feet, very humbly; maybe even kiss them.”

“Yeah, I only kneel if it’s really worth my time.”

Arthur had been trying to drink his tea. He choked. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It was a blowjob joke.”

“I know that , I mean why--why would you say that? I wasn’t insinuating something, I would never in a million years--”

“Calm down, you little touchy ridiculous tit. Nobody’s impugning your heterosexuality. I just said it to see you turn purple.” He flashed one of the dimples over his shoulder again. “I’m not agreeing to those terms, though.”

“Why?” Arthur demanded. “Afraid that I’m right?  Afraid to lose?”

Merlin turned round again, wiping his hands on the tea towel, and saying, “Yeah, you being right is never a concern I’ve had in all my very long life.”

“Then make the bet.” Arthur lounged back in his chair, crossing his arms, and raising both eyebrows in challenge. 

“Fine,” Merlin said. “But if you’re wrong, you have to do all the laundry for the next two weeks.”

Arthur scoffed. “That’s the best you can come up with? It’s a good job I’m going to win, then; be a waste to have it go to something so mundane.”
“I could set the same terms as you,” Merlin said, and wiggled his eyebrows pornographically. 

Arthur hunched over his tea with a scowl. “Fine. If the statistically impossible happens, and I’m wrong and you’re right, I’ll do the bloody laundry.”

And they sat and listened to it through the stir fry, through several cups of tea, whilst the sitting room clock gently cried out through the deepening hours; and it was just gone midnight when the conclusion startled Arthur’s chin out of his hand. He stared at Merlin in horror.

Merlin burst out laughing. “I read ahead. You are so easy to manipulate.” He got up, and went round behind Arthur’s chair, to land the finishing blow, saying in the low, provoking voice, straight into Arthur’s ear, and getting a little shiver out of him, “Washing machine’s broken, by the way. I ordered a new one, but it won’t be in for another two weeks. You’ll have to do it by hand. Night.” And he patted Arthur jauntily on the shoulder, and went away whistling to his bed.

Arthur had graduated, with honours, from the solo videos to the partnered, and liked to watch the mesmeric rhythms of cocks disappearing into mouth or arse, stroking himself, still a little guiltily, till he had come, gasping into his hand. The period of abstemious disgrace which he had afterward endured was gone; he took out the videos now whenever he liked, feeling that after all it was not the watching which was truly the sin, but rather the doing; and he was only doing himself. And anyway, he was only keeping to those proper videos of ordinary copulation, and skimming past those alarming titles in which twinks were being bred, or bears milked. He did not know what these things meant; and sensed with those old, ancestral impulses that he did not want to know.

The videos forced a redefining of himself. Now he had a direct point of comparison, having watched the ones featuring cocks, and the ones featuring breasts, and he had to admit, after much scientific analysis, that the latter were not terribly interesting; that they neither repulsed nor engrossed him; that he had in fact no particular investment in their aestheticism or eroticism. He looked on them as something that happened to other people; whereas the videos with men impressed on him a sort of impulse of participation which made him feel (which made parts of him feel) that he was their intimate contributor. Where a woman was involved he felt that it was all very good for her; but it would have been better for him.

And the problem with this was that he had to redefine other aspects of himself. He had to examine what love that he had, that he knew that he had, for Merlin; he had to look into the face of it. He had to confront what it actually was, rather than what he wished it was. He had to realise that in the quiet hours of the day, when they were working over sick lamb or ewe, or walking the length of the Fjord with nothing between them but sunlight or rainlight, the feeling that was in his stomach was love; the feeling that was in his throat was love. What had risen to check him or choke him when the tall figure came through the kitchen door damp, dishevelled, congenial, was love; and he had been a sad, dissembling little fool. He had made of the love what he could bear of it. He had disguised it as what was acceptable and survivable. 

Naturally he handled it stoically. Merlin had come into the home one evening with a little package in his hand, and opened it, and said, “Oh; this is the one I ordered for you” and handed over the contents, a little silver ring with a revolving middle section that spun when Arthur thumbed at it. He had said, “I remembered you had one like that. It was your mother’s, wasn’t it?” and gone to the hob, and switched it on for the kettle. He had said: “I remember that you used to play with it whenever you were nervous. You can do the same with these. They’re for anxiety. I thought you might like to have something that reminded you of her.” And Arthur in a remarkable show of restraint had not gone over the table between them; had not kissed him; had not even touched him, but only stood very still looking down at the ring, feeling a little as if loving and dying were two very dear relatives to one another. All this he bore, and the tourists besides, which liked to flutter at Merlin their little jezebel lashes, whilst he was doing nothing more impressive than commanding the dogs. 

In fact Arthur had to put up with a remarkable number of the tourists. The astounding thing, the annoying thing, was that Merlin was attracted to women; and women were attracted to Merlin. Whilst Merlin had at home a perfectly fit (actually an extraordinarily fit) companion from whom he could have simply asked a sexual favour, or three, or ten, he settled instead for going round to the pub with some intruding harpy; and occasionally for bringing her back to his bed. There was a Yank from Michigan (she had mentioned it twice, as if she wanted some accolades) taking a workaway holiday with a family in Leenane who needed a minder for their children; and when she was not minding the children, she was minding Merlin’s penis. She had monopolised it for nearly an hour one night, and then come down to the kitchen as if there were nothing out of the ordinary. “Have you got anything to eat? I’m starving,” she asked, poking round in the fridge, as if her funds or labour had contributed to it.

“There are plenty of restaurants in the village,” Arthur pointed out, hunching into the couch with his book and his scowl.

“Yeah, maybe we could all go out? Merlin’s just getting dressed.”

“I’m extraordinarily busy, actually,” Arthur said.

“Sorry if it was too loud,” Merlin said later, after she had pissed off into the night, rummaging round in the pantry for crisps. 

“It was,” Arthur snapped.

“Yeah, I tried to tell her to keep it down.”

“Maybe you could put a pillow over her head next time,” Arthur suggested, merely with practical rather than murderous intent. “What on earth is there to yell about anyway? It’s only you.”

“I’ve been round for hundreds of years. You don’t think I’ve learnt a few tricks to warrant the yelling?” Merlin said, popping his head out of the pantry, and dimpling. 

So Arthur had to continuously endure Merlin practising what his apparently fruitful centuries had taught him, sticking in his ear buds as soon as the cacophony started, and accidentally hearing one afternoon on passing his room Merlin saying, “Yeah, yeah, like that” in the muddled brogue which he had developed after decades in the countryside, and which had the extraordinary effect of making Arthur feel immediately sweaty. He had been on his way to the loo, and detoured now to the stairs, to his room, so that he could spend some time alone with himself, contemplating how he could get Merlin to say, “Yeah, yeah, like that” in the same breathless inflection.

It went on like that a couple of weeks, till From Michigan (he had not learnt her name) came in one afternoon whilst Merlin was out, and elected to wait, and Arthur felt that if she had stolen his friend, there was every chance she would make off with the cutlery; and sat himself on the sofa with his mobile to watch for the symptoms of larceny.

“Hey, um, look, Merlin said he wasn’t going to bring this up because you’re mates and you live together and it would be weird, but you’re really hot, and I was wondering if you’d be up for a threesome?”

Arthur looked up from his game of Candy Crush. “A threesome?”

“Yeah. You don’t have to touch each other or anything. It wouldn’t have to be weird between you two. You could just, you know, take turns having a go.”

“So you’d be there?” Arthur asked.

She raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? Obviously?”

“Then no,” Arthur said, and went back to his game.

“I told her not to ask,” Merlin said that evening over supper, ladling out the stew into his bowl, and carrying the garlic bread in his teeth back to the table. He sat, and spat it into his hand. “She’s wanted to screw you for weeks, so I guess she thought she’d just go for it.” He paused for a moment in the chilly silence, stirring round his stew a little uncertainly. “We’re not serious or anything. So if you like her, you could--not at the same time, obviously, but…I wouldn’t be upset or anything.”

“You wouldn’t be upset if I slept with her?” Arthur replied sourly. 

“No. It’s not serious, like I said. We’re just having a bit of fun. Look, not to get too personal, but I get that it’s been a while for you, and I assume you’re a normal red-blooded twenty-nine-year-old man who’s been sleeping in a lake instead of getting laid. I know you’re a bit of a prude, and that you had a succession line to worry about in Camelot, and you didn’t want, you know, loads of bastards muddying it, but it’s different now. There’s protection and whatnot. And you’re not ‘ruining’ a girl anymore by sleeping with her. No one will expect you to marry her.”

“I don’t want to sleep with her. You idiot.”

“Ok. That’s fine.” Merlin paused for a spoonful of soup, and then: “Is something bothering you?”

“No.”

“Ok, let me rephrase: what’s bothering you, because I know something is.”

“I’m fine,” Arthur snapped, and to prove it, left the table, and left the soup, untouched where it sat, putting off some aromatic steam, and went up to his room to watch Love, Actually , as if he had had a bad break-up, and needed to be miserable in the face of others’ happiness. He had a knock at his door twenty minutes in, and did not get up to open it, but peevishly made Merlin poke in his head uninvited, so that he had to feel himself awkwardly relegated to the threshold, unable to cross that demarcation between his space, and Arthur’s space. “Look, you don’t have to tell me what’s wrong. Just thought I’d see if you wanted to drink about it?” And he held up a bottle of Arthur’s favourite Scotch, and shook it becomingly.

Arthur pursed his lips. “Fine. Leave the Scotch.”

“Oh, no,” Merlin replied. “Budge up. If you drink it alone, it’s just sad,” he said, and heaved himself down onto the bed beside Arthur before Arthur had made any indication that he was welcome; and in fact he had made several that he was not. “What are we watching?”

“ Die Hard ,” Arthur lied.

Merlin laughed. “Starring Colin Firth?”

“Shut up.” Arthur punched him in the shoulder. “Tumblr said I should watch it.”

“Is it any good?”

“Rubbish so far. We’ll need the Scotch just to bear it.”

So they did, and were thoroughly pissed thanks to the two hour and fifteen-minute runtime; and fell asleep drooling on one another’s shoulders.

“What would you have done if I had said yes to the threesome?” Arthur blurted out some days later.

Merlin looked up from his phone. “I dunno. Probably gone through with it.”

Arthur was suddenly absorbed in his own phone. “Didn’t you say it would be weird?”

“Yeah. It would be weird. We’re friends. But our friendship recovered from you being dead, and I’ve done a lot weirder things. I think we could move past seeing one another’s erections.”

“Oh,” Arthur said, sounding a little faint, a little as if he had got something in his throat. He was still looking at his phone. He tapped very rapidly at the screen, opened his mouth, shut it, and then ruffled up his fringe in clear agitation. “She said we wouldn’t have to--touch one another or anything like that. That we’d just--take turns.”

“Yeah. It’s not very fun that way, though.”

Arthur scowled at him. “How would you know?”

“Because I’ve been having sex for centuries. You start doing away with all the taboos round about two hundred or so.”

“So you would have touched me?”

“No! Not you. Obviously.”

“ Obviously .”

“I just meant, generally speaking, with two blokes and a woman, why waste the other bloke? Everyone might as well have fun with everyone.”

Arthur swallowed. “So you’ve--had sex with men.”

“Yeah.”

“Right.”

Merlin asked, very carefully, “Is that a problem?”

“No,” Arthur said, scratching at the back of his neck. “I just didn’t realise you--went that way.”

“Arthur, after centuries, you go all the ways, trust me.” He paused, looking down at his own mobile now, feeling that the air had thickened between them, feeling that nettling sensation of a danger present but latent. “I was like that even in Camelot, though.”

“You liked women, though.”

“I liked both. I just had to be more discreet about the men, obviously.”

“Oh,” Arthur said, sounding deflated now.

Merlin cocked his head. “Are you actually thinking about the threesome?”

“No,” Arthur said, clearly and firmly.

He was thinking about the threesome. He was thinking that possibly it was the only chance he had of physical intimacy. He had the damaged notions of intimacy which all hurt people have. Because he was lonely, because he felt that he deserved to be lonely, he had the idea that he had to gain affection by subterfuge. He felt that he had to trick out of people what he needed. 

But already Merlin had told him what to expect; already he knew that he would be touched by and have to touch some strange woman and then watch the small body moving over or under Merlin’s body. He would be a third party to what he wanted; he would be an interloper. He had always felt a sort of interloper, interrupting that human experience of love freely given or taken; but he could not be like a guest in Merlin’s relations. He saw the woman one other time, and thought for a moment of the proposition which she had made, and was still making with her eyes; and went up to his room and put in his earbuds. He was like a Victorian hero, and had decided to perish of his love, rather than to declare it.

And then miraculously she was gone. There was no mention of her again; no indication that she had ever existed. He never heard the shouting again, and never had to endure the distasteful sight of her sated face, and Merlin’s sated face, coming down to a civilised supper, as if they were all proper adults, all capable of maturity in the presence of copulation. Arthur ventured one day, casually, to ask whether she had returned, finally, to where she belonged, and Merlin said, “No, she’s still here. I just stopped seeing her.”

“Why?” Arthur asked, with no particular interest whatsoever.

“I dunno.” Merlin looked up from his breakfast plate. “I guess I just wasn’t…I wasn’t really into her.”

Arthur thought of making a snippy comment about exactly how into her Merlin had been; and felt it was better to have a polite breakfast, on a pleasant day, with the sun falling down between them, and Merlin’s stubbled face looking over the table at him. He felt a little lightness in him. He felt what men feel at the start of spring, after the long winter.

She had stopped coming round because the sex was grand, but Merlin did not like what he felt was an intrusion into their home. He felt an increasing discomfort at the sensation which he had when she sat at table with them, or wandered round on the hills, or played with the dogs; he felt that she was touching bits of their lives. He felt that she was sullying them. He had Arthur to himself almost as if he were a husband; a silly little delusion; a dangerous delusion: but he had gone without it, ten long centuries. Returned to him were those casual intimacies of Arthur’s chambers, where Arthur shared his literal nakedness, and his metaphorical nakedness: and Merlin found that it was like a betrayal of them, bringing her into the space in which they thrived. He would have to go offsite with his dalliances. 

But he had stopped doing that too. He had had some very gratifying sex; and afterward felt as if he needed to shower. It was all right doing it in the absence of Arthur; but in the presence of Arthur, it felt like a treason against himself; it felt as if he were deceiving the love which was not sated as easily as his penis was sated. He felt whenever the crooked smile came out for him, that he would have to live on the scraps of it; that he could live on the scraps of it. That the affection which Arthur had, and reluctantly showed, for him was its own satisfaction, as rewarding as having his name yelled or his hair pulled.

And then he locked himself in his room and had a terrifically wrong wank to the image of Arthur pulling his hair, and coming all over his face. Afterward he put his arm over his face, and sighed, and hated himself, and hated Arthur, and hated destiny, which could have as easily paired him with an ugly king as a fit one.

In the dark of the sitting room, when the fire had burnt low in its grate, in the silence and blackness in which these conversations are bearable, they got out what was impossible in daylight.

“When I came out of the lake and you weren’t there, I thought you must be dead,” Arthur said one night, quietly, where he was stretched out on the sofa, his hands folded on his stomach, where there was another presence stretched out on the other sofa, breathing rhythmically in the night.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there; I just--I couldn’t anymore. I waited for so long, and you just never came. I thought I must have been lied to. I thought you weren’t coming. I thought that damn dragon had strung me along, and I’d just gone along with it, like a fool. It was centuries, Arthur.” There was a little shifting in the dark, the sound of fabric on furniture. “When you died, I thought, but we never really did what we said we’d do. It did come about--but I thought you’d be there to see it. I thought Albion was something you were going to envision, and build, and preside over. I thought we were going to do that. I was told we were going to do that. And then you died at twenty-nine, and I waited all that time for the world to need you again. I believed it would need you again. I saw it need you again. I had all these grand things in my head, all that prophecy, fate and bollocks. And now you’re here at last, and I don’t want any of that anymore.”

“What do you want?”

“I just want to grow old.”

“You want to die?” Arthur asked thickly.

“No, I don’t think I do, even after I’ve lived so much more than anyone else. But I want to actually live. Humans, normal humans, live. Sometimes miserably, sometimes fleetingly, but they grow, and they age, and one day they die, and that makes everything mean something. I don’t want to be like a person standing still whilst things rush past me. I want to feel sometimes like I’m rushing at them. I don’t want to be standing on the shore of a damn lake for another thousand years, waiting to see if I get one time, or if you’ll come back to me again. I don’t want to be…stuck.”

Arthur looked up at the ceiling. He was trying to think how he could say what he wanted to say, in a way that Merlin wanted to hear it. He was trying to think how to make palatable the feeling that was in him; how to strain out the hard, desperate bits of it, to make the love something publicly correct. “I don’t think I came back for any grand purpose,” he said at last, not looking over at the dark lump on the other sofa, which he could feel was looking at him.

“How would you know?”

“I don’t. I just.” He shifted round a little, and scratched at his head. He had to give his hands something mundane to do. “I came out of the lake, and I went to the house, because I felt that I ought to. And then I came to Ireland, because I felt that I ought to. Do you see what I mean?”

“No?”

“I mean,” Arthur said, through his teeth, back now in the comfortable territory of explaining to the incomprehensibly thick head what he was feeling for it, “that I haven’t felt that since I got here. I think I did what I was supposed to do.”

“You haven’t done anything except piss about on a farm.”

“I’ve pissed about on a farm with you , you--daft pillock.”

“So destiny brought you back to be a sheep farmer?”

Arthur gave out the long-suffering sigh of a wife, and pinched the bridge of his nose. And then he shouted, which he had not known he was going to do, “I think I came back for you, you idiot. It was your magic led me to the house in Wales, it was your magic led me here.”

“Why would you have come back for me?” Merlin asked, very carefully in the dark.

“God only knows,” Arthur said as petulantly as he was able. 

“Right.”

“Right.”

“Em,” Merlin said, sitting up on the sofa, and looking at him as if he were doing it with his hands, as if he were touching Arthur, not altogether appropriately, in that anonymous dark. Arthur had sat up too. He had felt as if he had to. He had felt as if he needed to hold the eye contact, as if possibly something would come from it; as if possibly the look which was like touching might segue into actual touching, if he yearned hard enough at it.

“Yeah, uh, good night,” Merlin said instead, and went off to his room. 

On Fridays, The Lads came round for poker, a very loud, very amicable contingency of ex-fishermen who felt themselves, as men who belonged to that seasoned era of 70+, visiting some adopted grandsons. They came in shouting, and left the same way, speaking in the thick country way which Arthur had to frantically translate in his head, or sometimes by giving Merlin a confused look, which Merlin would answer by mouthing at him the English approximate. Patrick was always first in, and hollered, ‘Where’s the wee Limey fella?’ into the kitchen, as if Arthur were not standing in it, because he was 6’7”, and because Arthur was touchy about not being 6’7”; he expected everywhere he went to be the most physically imposing man, and here was only the third most physically imposing man, even behind Merlin, who had an infinitesimal half an inch on him. He had learnt early on how to communicate with these men, and replied with the expected, “Hello, you daft Mick cunt”, the end of which he got out in a grunt, because he had been hoisted off his feet for a dangerous hug. He heard his ribs creak.

“All right, Paddy, put him down,” Merlin said. “You know how delicate these English are.”

There was a mad convergence on the crisps, and then the flurry of anecdotes which Arthur had to follow as if he were working out a maths problem. 

“Sure we had a bit of gas that day, didn’t we lads.”

“Did you not hear Sam’s lad got the sack?”

“Sure he’s a cute hoor like.”

And sometimes there were the exchanges which caused a disturbance in his very anatomies:

“Your man up in Dublin, what’shisface, the actor, do you know?”

“What’s he been in?” Merlin asked.

“That show where they’ve the razorblades in their caps? Do you know the one? ‘Peaky Fellas’; that’s it.”

“Peaky Blinders. Do you mean Cillian Murphy?”

“That’s the lad.”

“You have a man in Dublin?” Arthur asked, very indifferently, after they had left the men in the warm kitchen, and went out into the blustering night for their final check on the sheep. “What kind of a man? A platonic man?” He was asking, of course, in the interests of common decency; he had been to Dublin himself, and found it a questionable place, prone to wanking in spas, and dressing like leprechauns.  

“I don’t have a man in Dublin.”

“Sean said you did.”

“That’s just a saying, Arthur. He’s not my man; I don’t even know him.”

“So you’re not--involved?”

“Yeah, actually; I pop round to Dublin every Tuesday for my big gay city adventure. Didn’t you notice?”

“Very funny.”

“I would, though, if he asked.” Merlin brought out his phone, fiddled with it a moment, and held it out to Arthur. “That’s him,” he said, showing a dark-haired man who possibly was marginally attractive, if one had unfortunate or lacking taste. 

“ That’s your type? He looks like a murderer.”

“No he doesn’t.”

“Yes he does. He’s got--creeper eyes.”

“I think I’ve been around long enough to know when somebody has creeper eyes. But anyway, even if he were a murderer, it’s not like he can kill me. I’d show him a good time.”

And they went back in, Arthur leading, and scowling, to find the men engrossed in a debate of ethics:

“ There’s a queer fella if I ever met one.”

“Christ, you can’t say that anymore, Oisin! You have to call them LGBT. And there’s a plus at the end like. I dunno what it’s for.”

“Sure it’s not a slur anymore; the gays have taken it back like. But I meant the weird sort.”

“Who are we talking about?” Merlin asked.

“Our lad Arthur,” Oisin said cheerfully.

Merlin burst out laughing. “Why did you think he meant the gay sort?” he asked Patrick. 

“I didn’t,” he said, looking down at his cards. “I only thought Oisin thought it.”

“No, I never thought it,” Oisin said, also looking at his cards, with more than the required consideration. 

“Heh?” shouted Liam, who was deaf as a stone.

“We were saying Arthur’s the strange sort of queer, not the gay,” Oisin shouted into his face. 

“That’s the English for you!” Liam shouted back. “Privileged pricks. No offence to you, lad. Anyway, I don’t as consider you English. You’re too useful.”

“Thanks,” Arthur screamed.

After they had left, of course he had to get out the question which was bursting in him, bringing it up almost against his own will whilst they were cleaning the kitchen, and catching Merlin, and startling him, mid-elbow in washing-up liquid. “Why do they think I’m gay?”

“They don’t think you’re gay? They said so.”

“But why was it even a question? Why would they have brought it up at all in connection with me? I don’t give off--vibes or anything like that.”

“I dunno? Maybe because they know I’m gay and they assume if I’m living with a man, he’s gay too?”

“But you’re not gay. You like women.”

“Bisexual, pansexual, whatever you want to call it. Not straight, at least. Anyway, what does it matter?”

“It doesn’t. Obviously. I was just wondering why they would even consider for a moment that I might not be straight.”

“Probably because you get all flustered about it. No one’s accusing you of anything, so relax.” He looked sideways at Arthur, and Arthur saw that his face had shuttered a little. “Are you being weird because you’re uncomfortable with the fact that I’m not straight? Look, I didn’t--I didn’t look or anything like that, when you were bathing. I wouldn’t have done that.”

“No! I’m not uncomfortable. And what do you mean, you didn’t look?” Arthur snapped.

Merlin stopped with his mouth open. “I don’t, uh--did you want me to look?”

“No! Of course not. But I am obviously an extremely attractive man, and you are attracted to men. So it’s only natural if you wanted to--to look.”

“Well, you have to remember, you were a massive prick when I first met you. I’d have preferred drowning you in your bathwater to fucking you in it.”

“Well, of course you wouldn’t have fucked me in it!” Arthur shouted.

“That’s what I said.”

“Right,” Arthur said, and flitted round the kitchen, picking up after their game, and afterward disappearing into the sitting room with their next audio book queued, as if nothing had happened; as if Merlin had not insulted him to his face; as if he had not just had the unfortunate and unpleasant revelation thrust upon him that Merlin was possessed of barbaric and incorrect preferences. 

And Merlin came in as if nothing had happened, and sat down next to him, and tapped at his phone to start the next chapter.

“What is your type, then?” Arthur blurted out after an interminable period of patience.

“What?”

“In men. What sort of men do you like?”

“I dunno? Fit ones?”

“So I’m not fit.”

“That’s…not what I said.”

“But you said you didn’t look, and you were never tempted to look, and you would rather have drowned me than--than slept with me.”

Merlin rubbed at his forehead. “You’re upset because I was respectful and didn’t ogle you in your chambers, where you felt comfortable and safe stripping off in front of your ostensibly heterosexual manservant?”

“I am not upset,” Arthur said through gritted teeth.

“Right. Well, you sound perfectly not upset. What do you want me to say, Arthur? That you’re attractive? I don’t think your ego needs me to confirm that. We can barely fit your big head through the door as it is.”

“I just find it suspicious that you find men attractive but don’t find me attractive.”

“I’m not having this discussion, actually,” Merlin said, and got up. “Don’t be one of those straight men who has to be wanted by gay guys. They’re twats.” He looked down at Arthur with a little derision in his eyes now, and Arthur felt the sudden wild urge to show Merlin his phone; to show him all the sordid history of it; to show him that he was struggling to come to terms with himself, where it was finally safe to do so. 

But Merlin had gone; and he was alone with the dying fire.

Merlin stopped coming to breakfast half-naked. He moved round the hard, impassable silence between them as if he felt it natural to accommodate it, whilst on the far side of it, Arthur felt the separation as if it were a slow killing. He said, desperately, “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to upset you.” He said it as if it had been ripped out of him. He felt, in the chair two feet from Merlin’s chair, the rift which he had accidentally created; which he might have expected to create, by pressing clumsily for reciprocation. He stared down miserably at his eggs.

Merlin sighed. “Look, it’s fine. Just don’t--don’t be a prat about this, Arthur. You’re going to say something that maybe our friendship can’t come back from, not fully. Ok? Just leave it.”

“Ok,” Arthur said, poking at the egg, feeling that Merlin had found out about the love; that he was speaking directly to it; that he was telling it what it had always heard, and was always expecting to hear. 

Then he had to sit in the quiet evenings listening to the clock bonging, or the log popping, sometimes with Merlin pressed up right against him on the sofa; sometimes with Merlin pressed up right against him in the bed, where they sometimes convened to watch Netflix on Arthur’s phone. There was nothing meant by it; they had lain together in the long nightfall of the woods, back to back or hip to hip, and were no closer now. Arthur thought that Merlin had come to him in the dark of the night when he was not sleeping, and sensed that Arthur was not sleeping, because he was lonely; because he had kept a house for himself for ten unbelievable lifetimes, leading out of his bed a procession of casual acquaintances, and never leaving any of them in it. Probably he wanted, like Arthur often had wanted, just to feel there was some other presence in the world that felt kindly toward him. In the depths of midnight, he wanted to know there was another being which longed after his being. He wanted to rove beyond the vast crypt which is an unshared bed, and come back to the brightness of living. And so sometimes under the guise of bingeing a series, he crawled into Arthur’s bed; and sometimes under the same guise Arthur let him.

This presented a difficulty for him. Sometimes he fell asleep, or Merlin fell asleep, before the episode was through, and went straight through to the morning, not touching, but certainly close to touching; and then when he woke with the usual male difficulty, he would have to turn over hastily, and point it safely at the wall. He woke up sometimes to find that Merlin was suffering the same anatomical adversity; and then had to crawl over him unhelpfully, to get to the shower and relieve himself. He stroked himself till he was shaking, and cried out into the forearm he had braced against the shower wall.

They had always timed it politely, so that Merlin was still sleeping whilst Arthur was in agony, or relieving the agony; but this was convenient, and therefore impermanent. He woke up one morning to find that Merlin was already awake; that he was breathing into Arthur’s ear that slow, fluttering breath of emerging consciousness. He was hard, and not fully aware of it; not fully aware that currently he was pressed against Arthur’s arse; and that currently Arthur was suffering for it. He froze; and Merlin in concert froze with him.

“Uh,” a sleepy voice said in his ear at last. “Sorry.” Then he felt the hard presence taken away: the chest, and the--not-chest.

And for some time Merlin did not come back to his bed.

Arthur was very drunk: that is how it always begins. This is not to excuse force, but merely stupidity. They had gone to bed with the Scotch, having already consumed enough of it to get Merlin back into the bed in the first place; and now they were deep into endangering their livers, by taking a shot every time See-Threepio whinged. They were on the first movie of Arthur’s first watch through, so that Merlin kept scolding him for laughing, as if he were going to miss some vital development of plot or character. “It’s just people shooting lasers at one another,” he said loftily, drinking straight from the bottle.

“You don’t know how many people would literally rip you to shreds for that.” Merlin elbowed him. “Give the bottle here.”

Arthur hugged it to him, like a child. He felt comforted by it. It had treated him well thus far; he was immune to, or nearly immune to, or anyway somewhat not entirely distracted by Merlin’s warm thigh against his. Merlin wrestled it away from him, laughing.

They were perfectly at peace. Arthur had an itchy sort of awareness of the big warm body beside him in the bed, intimately under the sheets, with his knee touching the back of Arthur’s knee; but he was being an adult about it. He was not thinking how little space separated the backside of him, from the frontside of Merlin, but only lying innocently with his arm under his head, watching Han Solo’s trousers. Then Merlin shifted round behind him, to ease out some crick or cramp, and brushed himself against Arthur; and Arthur felt that he was hard. He stiffened, waiting for Merlin to pull away; and Merlin stayed where he was, too drunk to realise that he was pressing his erection against Arthur’s hip. Arthur decided that he was too drunk to be awkward about it. He relaxed into the body, into the firm, blunt nudging which he felt now against his arse; and which he could tell by Merlin’s breathing Merlin felt also. There was no getting round that he had noticed, and Merlin had noticed. Ostensibly they were still watching the film; but really Arthur was feeling himself harden in his own jeans; really he was feeling where Merlin’s rough breathing touched his ear, and touched the reactive hairs at the nape of his neck. He felt the hair on his arms rise. He felt where the chest pressed against his back hitched when he moved, or Merlin moved. 

He was breathing as hard as Merlin, and Merlin had to feel it. He had to feel the tension which Arthur had not resolved by laughing, or moving away; he had to feel that Arthur had pressed back against his cock, not by accident, but design.

But he did nothing. He laid in the bed behind Arthur, breathing those short, shallow breaths of arousal, and doing nothing to assuage them. 

Arthur was going slowly mad. Actually, he was going rapidly mad. For the first time since he had noticed he was gay, there was a cock pressed against him; and he was doing nothing about it, and the cock was doing nothing about it. He breathed through his nose, slowly, counting in his head, as if he were trying to ward off some nausea. He tried to get rid of his horniness by simply telling it there was nothing that could be done with it; and his horniness begged to differ. It did not see why they were wasting two perfectly good erections, perfectly willing. 

He was holding onto the last of his sanity as desperately as if it were a cliff edge on which he had only one hand: and, of course, at last, he slipped off. He shut his eyes, and ground back into Merlin. And Merlin startled, badly enough that Arthur felt he had miscalculated; that he wondered if he hadn’t misinterpreted, taking credit for the erection when really credit belonged to Han Solo. Then Merlin pressed his hot, wet mouth to the nape of Arthur’s neck, and breathed out against him, and moved against him. 

Arthur yanked at his zipper with a shaking hand, reaching back for the hand which had braced on his hip, and pulling it down in his own, into his trousers, where he was frantic for the same friction which Merlin was getting against his arse. He arched when the warm fingers closed round him, shuddering a little. 

Then Merlin thrust his tongue into Arthur’s ear, and Arthur cried out, and pushed back against him, setting off in Merlin several hurried, jerky movements, which ended in his naked cock against Arthur’s naked arse. He had yanked down both their trousers, whilst Arthur fuzzily tried to reconcile this sudden change in fortune. He felt the hot wet head dragging against him, the contrast of smooth cock, and rough hand which he felt against his arse cheeks, between his arse cheeks, when Merlin suddenly thrust against him, sticking his tongue in Arthur’s ear again, and rapidly endangering the reputation which Arthur liked to think he held, of being something of an inexhaustible lover. He was already on the verge of coming. He squeezed the base of his cock, his chest heaving, and moaned as Merlin, sucking messily on his ear now, breathing harshly into it, licking it, plunging in his tongue in a motion reminiscent of his cock plunging in between Arthur’s thighs, thrust against him, holding his hip in a tight, desperate hand. Then he rolled Arthur over onto his stomach, and shoved his face into the bed.

Arthur felt for one wild moment that he was about to be fucked. He imagined the hot slide of Merlin’s cock in him, the strong, rough hands on his hips, yanking him back helplessly, whilst he could only cry out, and come endlessly. He jerked himself frantically, no longer concerned that he would come too soon; thinking only to relieve the desperate tension which was in his stomach. He bit down on his free hand.

But Merlin did not press the head excruciatingly into him, letting out little noises as he entered Arthur, shuddering, and stopping, and saying his name when it seemed that it would be too much for him to go on. He grabbed Arthur’s hips and braced himself as if he were about to give Arthur a rather desperate pounding: and slid his cock once more in between Arthur’s thighs, over his bollocks now, whilst Arthur stroked himself. He had not taken off his jumper, and Arthur felt the contrast of hot skin where it had ridden up, and scratchy wool where it had not. He felt Merlin’s hand brushing his arse as he pulled it up, to keep between them only naked skin on naked skin: and then he drove against Arthur with fast, frantic lunges. He pushed Arthur’s hand away from himself, and jerked him, a little awkwardly, trying to coordinate the motions of his hand with the motions of his hips; and Arthur twisted the sheets in his hands and cried out into them: and came, so hard that he accidentally bit his tongue, spurting into the big warm hand which was not his own, feeling that he could hardly bear the gratification of it. Merlin made a little desperate noise in the back of his throat, and Arthur felt something hot hitting him; he pushed back on his forearm, onto the hot, slippery cock, so that it came all over him, rather than the sheets, rubbing himself against it whilst Merlin shuddered and ground against him, wishing that it was in him; and thinking possibly to sink down on it whilst Merlin was still coming, and make him scream.

But it was over. There was a long moment of harsh breathing, whilst Merlin brought himself back under control; and then he blurted out inanely: “Oh my God , you’re gay, and I never noticed!”

Arthur was astonished. He was witnessing the sort of stupidity that belonged in a museum. He rolled over onto his back, and pulled up his trousers, whilst Merlin, still obscenely half-nude, still obscenely half-hard, waxed foolish on his burgeoning theory. “Every time you showed any attraction to a woman, you were always enchanted. And Mithian said--” He paused, and looked down at Arthur, and stopped. “Mithian said you were really enthusiastic. 

“I was there, Merlin, I know exactly how--animated I was.”  

“Right. She said you rarely came to her chambers and she didn’t go into great detail, because she was too nice for that, but I got the distinct impression you were bad at it.”

“I’m not bad at it!” Arthur cried. 

“Well, not at the gay version. Which sort of supports what I’m saying. I just--I thought you were straight. All that time in Camelot, I was like, ‘Yeah, that Arthur, pinnacle of heterosexuality, don’t look at his penis. Or his shoulder muscles.’”

“So you did want to look at me.”

Merlin, pulling up his own trousers now, gave Arthur a look of withering contempt; the same look which he had given to Merlin. “No, I’m one of those gay men who doesn’t like to look at fit blonde men. Really, they disgust me.” He paused now, and a little change came over his face, a sudden ripple which altered its composition and clarity, so that he no longer stared down at Arthur with a sort of fond derision, but gave him the pitying look which is given by the feeling offender, to his collateral damage. 

“Uh, I think I have to vomit,” he said, and lurched off the bed.

Arthur contemplated his circumstances. He was covered in his jizz, and Merlin’s jizz; and there were the sounds of vomiting clear in the hush of sexual aftermath. 

He got up and went into the loo and knelt down by the spasming back, and rubbed at it fumblingly; not a romantic gesture, because he had rolled his eyes whilst doing it, and he had said, derisively to the miserable head in its throes, “Really. Your first act after having sex with me is to vomit.”

Merlin wiped his mouth, and rolled over like a beached whale onto the floor. “Yeah. One thing I haven’t really learnt after all these years is how to hold my liquor. And that was a lot of liquor, and a lot of jostling. So, yeah. Sorry. Nothing personal. Actually, you were surprisingly good at it.”

Arthur touched his sweaty fringe. “Thanks,” he said drily. “You look ridiculous.”

“Get me downstairs; my magic is good for a few things aside from minding little posh precious gits.”

Arthur eyed him warily. “Are you going to vomit on me if I pick you up?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“‘I don’t think so’ isn’t a good enough answer, where sick is concerned,” Arthur said, but snagged him under the armpits, and lifted him with a certain resigned affection, and helped him down those muddling stairs, as though he were escorting a toddler on the triumphal inaugural walk. He bundled him into the kitchen, where Merlin made a fantastic racket putting into the blender what he needed, muttering to himself as he threw in bits of this, and that, and those, and altogether making a mess of himself and the kitchen, so that Arthur had a feeling as if he were back in Camelot; as if he were back in the workroom, with Merlin bent over some foul concoction, and Gaius urging him on to scientific enquiry. The contents of the blender were like the contents of those alarming mixtures, into which went a number of plants, and out of which came a number of smells; and there was the same inevitable conclusion to look forward to, in which Merlin had to dab out a sample onto palm or finger, and test whether it could be got down at all, or whether the medicinal effects were excelled by the purgative. Now he had to drink off the whole thing. He spoke a word in the language of Gibberish, and gave the contents a brief yellow look; then he had to take up the blender in both hands, and look at it, and steel himself, and make peace with himself. He tossed it back, and choked. There were some subsequent dramatics, which started in his face, and ran through his whole body; he looked for a moment as if he were seizing, or dancing: these two events were never distinguishable in him, the medical emergency, or the musical. He made a little absurd gesture with his tongue, like a dog who has snuffled up off the floor something which even he cannot eat.

“That is absolutely disgusting.”

“Does it work?” Arthur asked.

“Yeah, immediately. Unfortunately. Do you want some?”

“ No . Some of us aren’t great girls and can drink without making fools of ourselves.”

“Yeah, sure. Want to talk about the first time you had wine and realised it’s not watered down anymore?”

“No,” Arthur said primly. “Anyway, I don’t remember anything about that night.”

He was sitting at table, with his hands folded in the centre of it, casually as if they were supping, or visiting; and then Merlin looked at him from across the room, and changed the scene entirely with the one electric stare. Arthur thought he was going to be jumped. He thought it would be like his fantasies; that they would be going on as usual, and turn on one another, and fall on one another, with no more transition than the one between propriety, and nudity. 

And Merlin said, instead of “Take off your trousers”, “I’m going to clean my teeth”; and Arthur blinked, and came back, alarmed, to himself; came back to the realisation that he would have let a man who had vomited do whatever he liked with his tongue, to Arthur’s tongue.  “Right. Good idea,” he said, and nodded, stupidly.

Merlin left the kitchen, came back into the kitchen, left the kitchen; he had gone into the hall, and returned from the hall, and gone back, farther into the hall; and finally he came wholly though barely into the kitchen, giving Arthur a look which brought him out of the cyclic despair of having given it up to a man who made such cerebral musings as, “Wow, you’re gay!” in the presence of homosexual enterprise.

“Em,” he said, articulately. “Actually, I was going to clean my teeth so I can kiss you. If that’s all right.”

Arthur wrinkled up his face. “Why wouldn’t it be all right, after what we just did?”

“Some men are really weird about kissing. They can have full, penetrative sex with you, and that’s perfectly all right, but kissing is too gay.”

“I really don’t want to know that. I don’t need to know anything, actually, about anything you’ve done, at all, sexually speaking, prior to twenty minutes ago.”

Merlin beamed at him. 

“Go and clean your teeth, you muppet,” Arthur said.

Arthur went to the sitting room to wait. He had done it with the idea that he was merely being cosy; that it was better to be kissed on a sofa than a stool: but really it was so that he could walk off the nervousness. He tried to wear it out of him, by going back and forth, between the kitchen and the sitting room. He was in that cold state of soberness now, after you have done something not necessarily regrettable, but reflectable; he was reflecting, and not only with his penis, on the fact that he had realised at last the culmination of all those long years of anguish. He was a little frightened of Merlin coming into the sitting room. He was a little frightened, not that he had imagined it, but that he had exaggerated it: for that was what love was to him, a thing which he amplified by doing it himself, unbearably, at the person from whom he was seeking it. That was how he had nourished himself all his life: on those odd scraps which are given to the desperate child from the despotic parent, who means to keep them dependent on minimal kindness. He had had to inflate everything which was given to him; he had had to maximise the occasional compliment or the hand on his shoulder; all these things which are ordinary things, he had taken, and blown up in himself till they were the size of his own love. And now he was stood in the sitting room, listening to the shutting door far down the hall; realising what was small, and scared, and silly in himself. 

If Merlin had come out and kissed him perfunctorily, or even sexually, it would have killed him; it would have killed the little desperate dream in him. 

But he came into the sitting room, and smiled, looking quite as nervous as Arthur’s stomach. There was the gulf of centuries, and stations, between them; and then Merlin grabbed him. It is the gentlest description of what he did. His hands came up, frantically; and Arthur found that his face was abruptly in them. They had to hold onto whatever was in reach; Arthur had got his collar. They were touching at every point where two separate beings can intersect; they slid their arms round one another’s waists, shoulders, necks, trying to find what was most bearable; trying to find where the touching was enough. They had to see if the feeling could be fulfilled; if there was some positioning of hand or face which was satisfactory to it. They had to restlessly seek it, and keep seeking it: but sometimes there is nothing to mollify the love. Sometimes it is too furious a thing.

Arthur had not kissed anyone in a very long time, and he had, briefly, a flash of self-consciousness about his technique; but it was not that sort of kissing. Really it was a sort of confession. Really he just had to let out what was in him, whilst timing his lips to Merlin’s lips, so that they were both in the same place at the same time, except when Merlin kissed his nose, because it is awkward to do anything other than have your nose kissed: a very fraught exercise in which the recipient cannot move into the gesture, unless he wants the nostril kissed, instead of the bridge. 

They had to slow down finally, to breathe, which they did by resting their foreheads together, so that their mouths and noses were still in intimate but not inhibiting contact; and finding that it was better to smother, they went back to that wild confusion of limbs, grabbing at whatever was accessible, pulling at shirt collars and hems to bring the two bodies into contact wherever they were separate, and suffering. They went on like that for quite a while, sometimes resting their foreheads on one another’s shoulders; sometimes resting them on each other: resting, always, in the quiet, in each other.

Arthur was a new gay, and Merlin had to be respectful of what might be too overtly homosexual for him. This meant that he blew Arthur, but did not expect to be blown in return; and whilst he would have liked to put his whole penis in Arthur, he did not put so much as the tip of his finger in Arthur. And Arthur, meanwhile, had the imagination, and the internet search history, to fancy all these scenarios; but not the boldness to ask for them. He acknowledged that as an indisputably butch man, he would have to penetrate Merlin, rather than be penetrated by Merlin; these were the leftovers of the old ideals in him, which had always reiterated that the man did the breaching, and the woman the receiving; and he could hardly occupy the feminine role when Merlin was so in touch with his feelings.

But he had developed a mild fixation on the drunken fumbling with which they had commenced this new era of friendship. He thought, not terribly often, but only in those moments of monotonous action, when the hands know their business, and the mind is free to pursue its own, about the feeling of being thrust against; that hot, slippery sensation of smooth hard flesh which might have entered him, if he had only pushed a little harder, or Merlin had pushed a little harder. He imagined this no more than a dozen times a day; really it was not even a fixation. Really it was more accurate to say it was a curiosity. Merely because he was picturing Merlin naked when cooking, or whistling at the dogs, or watching telly, did not mean that he had an obsession; merely because he displaced Merlin by plucking him out of those ordinary acts of daily farming, and dropping him, unceremoniously, into Arthur’s arsehole, did not make him some sad fanatic. 

There was nothing much changed between them, except now if they were watching Netflix, they put their hands in one another’s laps, instead of their feet: and now Arthur had something of a disturbing association between Daleks, and coming. They upset one breakfast table by snogging against it, handling one another as if they were teenagers, but unfortunately not weighing as if they were teenagers, so that under the combination of two grown men leaning on it, the table flipped, bringing them down onto the toast and the preserves: almost as messy a culmination as the sexual one. 

The sheep did not care about any of this. It was no skin off their noses if their masters were humping. The sexual act for the animal is a means to self-promulgation, so that they did not see why anybody should be very much upset whatsoever, if they came by to plaintively ask after some silage when it was clear that the penetration had happened, and therefore the objective; though it was Arthur in Merlin’s mouth, an alarming sort of procreation, for the sheep, and for Arthur, who was trying to concentrate on what Merlin was doing to him, rather than the eyes which were parsing him. It is not as invasive as being watched by a cat, since sheep are too stupid to focus very long on anything other than the whistling in their heads; they do not have that nastiness which cats have, of judging and condemning the human act without blinking. But a few which had been hand-fed by Arthur, and viewed him as a sort of strange, naked father, ran up and butted him with great affection, and then he had to say, in a strained voice, “Maybe we should be doing this inside?” He was lying in the damp grass, feeling alternatively hot, and cool all over, whilst Merlin casually deep throated him. He had not intended to be sexually serviced under the eye of Fjord and God; but Merlin had asked, after sticking his tongue in Arthur’s ear, whether he wanted to be blown, right then; and it had seemed rather rude, and mad, to reply that actually he didn’t fancy it.

“What? Why?” Merlin asked, lifting his head. He had a hazy sort of look. He enjoyed the act nearly as much as the recipient, and left off almost in confusion, as if he had been shocked out of a pleasant dream. He was wild-haired, and breathing heavily. 

“They’re staring at me!” Arthur protested. 

“Oh,” Merlin said, and with a word dispersed them, and dipped back down to take in Arthur gradually at first, licking and sucking at the head: and then in one long swoop swallowing him again, and staying there, so that Arthur, digging his fingers into the grass, had to exist through the torture, had to bite at his hand, and breathe through his nose to keep from coming fantastically. “Are you close?” he gasped, lifting his head with difficulty to see where Merlin’s hand was in his own trousers, stroking frantically. 

Merlin pulled off. “Yeah.” His voice shook getting it out. “Are you?”

Arthur yanked him up by the collar of his jacket to kiss him. “Come on me,” he said, roughly, too muzzy to wonder whether he ought to be saying it; whether it was quite appropriate for a former manservant to relieve himself on a former king. He was thinking merely of the sensation of Merlin coming, very hotly, all over him in Arthur’s bed; of the strange gratification which he felt in having the cock jerking and pulsing against him. 

Merlin fumbled with his trousers, pushing them down his thighs. Arthur propped himself on his elbows to watch, touching himself, running his thumb over the head where he was slick with Merlin’s spit, fascinated by the smooth pumping of Merlin’s long white fingers, the twist which they added where he liked it, and the shockwaves which this sent through Merlin’s whole body, the shoulders which tensed at the feelings he was stoking in himself, and the open, shuddering mouth, trying simply to get in the air. He said, right as Arthur was backing off himself, squeezing rather than stroking, because he wanted to watch Merlin come, instead of being caught up in his own engulfing sensations, “Close your eyes.”

“Why?” Arthur asked breathlessly.

“Because I’m a bit worked up, and it’s going to go everywhere,” Merlin said, and shivered, and came, all over Arthur’s belly, his jacket, his face; pushing Arthur himself over the edge at the sight of Merlin’s cock in his big hand, pulsing so that it seemed it would go on forever, whilst Merlin helplessly trembled his way through it.

Sometimes in the depths of night, Merlin came to him in his bed, and slid in next to him, and kissed the nape of his neck, or his shoulder, and existed with him. They were two old soldiers, and they had an old soldier’s trouble with dreams. They met sometimes in the kitchen at 1.00 A.M. for tea and reminiscing, having come down to find that the other was already at table, or prepping the kettle; they never had to say they were thinking of Camlaan, or the Battle of Britain, but only asked which tea the other preferred, and whether he was taking any sugar with it. There was nothing to be done with the memories, other than to supplant them, momentarily, with a better feeling. Of course Merlin could describe what he had seen when liberating the camps, or sharing his trench with some rats; and Arthur could have revisited the terrible moment when he had been killed by a friend. But they did not like to bring the unpleasantness into their little house. They had come to it as a sanctuary, like you go to a spa, not denying the bad bits, but rather seeking holiday from them. And sometimes, though Arthur did not like to admit it, they leant over the table and softly kissed; that was how they spoke of it. Sometimes love is all that can be said on a matter. 

Upon Arthur’s discovery of it, The Great British Bake Off became a staple of their evenings, a rather fraught addition, because Arthur liked to yell at it as if it were a footie match. “She’s overworking that dough,” he said one evening, shaking his head.

“How the hell would you know?” Merlin asked, laughing.

He liked to explain, patronisingly, to Merlin what was the difference between crème anglaise and crème mousseline, as if he had not just learnt it from Prue, rather than experience, and to say things like, “The spiral isn’t even on that genoise” as if he had not put on his own shirt backwards on his way out the door that morning, and noticed only when Merlin was taking it off again. 

He was nitpicking some fairy cakes and disputing the handshake which Paul Hollywood had just given out when he said, apropos of nothing, “You know, I’d thanked you before.”

“What?” Merlin asked.

“When I was dying, you idiot. I said I was going to say something to you that I’d never said before. And then I said, ‘thank you’.”

“Yeah, I’m aware. I was there. I relived it for centuries, thanks. I don’t need you to refresh my memory. So? It was about time you said it sincerely, you ungrateful tit.”

“But I’d said it before .” He was speaking between his teeth, and staring with unearthly focus at the telly.

“So? You were dying. You weren’t exactly clear-headed.”

Arthur crossed his ankle over his knee. He bounced his foot rapidly, keeping his face perfectly neutral, so that the foot was the only indicator that he was suddenly anxious. Merlin stared at it. “What’s wrong with you?”

“You are stupid, that’s what wrong with me. Take out the buns!” he shouted abruptly, flailing one of his hands at the telly, where there was a contestant hurrying round their station, going madly between prep and oven. And then as if it were all part of the conversation, and Merlin was expected to keep pace with it: “When I said ‘thank you’, what I meant was--what I was going to say…was that…I loved you.”

Merlin squinted at him. “Why didn’t you just say that, then?”

Arthur whipped round in sudden astonishment, giving him a look which said plainly that Merlin was implausibly thick. “ What ? Why would I have just said it ?”

“Because you were dying? It’s not like you were going to be sticking around to bear out the consequences of having actual human emotions.”

“And what if I hadn’t died? What if you’d saved me at the last moment?”

There was a moment of flawless silence. “Arthur, are you telling me that in your final moments, you decided you’d say ‘thank you’ instead of ‘I love you’ and then die, just to be on the safe side?”

“Yes.”

“Wow,” Merlin said, and turned back to watch Prue sampling a choux bun. 

“Well?” Arthur snapped, and poked him hard under a rib with his toe.

“Ow! ‘Well’ what?”

“What’s your response to that?”

“You’re ridiculous. That’s my response.”

Arthur kicked him this time.

“Ow! You prick!”

Arthur kicked him again. “Aren’t you going to say something? In response? Something laudatory?”

“No! You’re kicking me! I’ve got nothing nice to say.”

Arthur put him in a headlock, which Merlin resolved by biting him, and then shoving him over onto the sofa, and straddling him. “I built a house in the Welsh mountains and waited in it for centuries, because I thought you were going to come back one day. What do you think my response is, you great git?” He kissed the stupid face, disgruntled by its own vulnerability, till it had relaxed out of petulance, into mollification. A hand stole up into his hair, and clutched at it; and then the arms followed, and brought Merlin down against him, and he was kissed, a little frenetically; a little as if he were going away. He stroked out the fringe from Arthur’s eyes, and said, “You silly arsehole” and nosed at him, and kissed him; slowly, feelingly, till the body under him shuddered a little, and felt that it was safe to be languid; till Merlin was getting out of him touches made desperate with lust, rather than loneliness. 

“I want you to tell that tart down the lane that we’re together now, and unless she can keep her eyes to herself, she isn’t welcome anymore,” Arthur said one morning whilst they were dressing, in Merlin’s room this time, where Arthur had moved in his meagre wardrobe, and dental supplies, and they could make use of the larger bed.

Merlin sat up in astonishment. He had been sliding on his boxers, too lazy to do it properly by standing and putting his legs through them, and instead doing a little apathetic wiggle on top of the covers, and jiggling them up inch by inch whilst he watched Arthur’s bum disappearing into his own. “Alice, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

“You want me to tell her, ‘Sorry, Arthur and I are having gay sex now, so piss off?’”

“Yes. Although you might word it a bit more politely.”

“I’m not banning her from the house because you’re a jealous git.”

“I didn’t say she was banned, I said there are conditions on her being allowed in.”

“Arthur, I’m not doing that. She’s just a nice lady who’s a bit lonely, and you’re being an ass.”

It was not surprising that Arthur had to do all the work around here; he had hoped, but not expected, that Merlin would make some cursory attempt at usefulness: but she had come round just the same, and ogled Merlin just the same, and Arthur respectfully but emphatically refused to stand for it.

“Just to let you know, Merl--Myrddin and I are not roommates, we are lovers,” he said one day whilst Merlin was in the loo, and Alice was at the kitchen table.

There were two eyes like an owl’s, staring at him over the tea. “Are you then?”

“Yes. I can appreciate that Merlin is a very attractive man, obviously, and that you’ve noticed, but he is not available, and he will not be available for the foreseeable future. Till I’m dead.” And even then was no guarantee; for after all, he had come back once, and intended that he should come back again, if it was to what Merlin had done to him that morning in the shower.

“Oh.” She set down her mug. “Sure I had no idea.”

“Right.”

“Well.” She flittered about with her hands, touching the sugar, touching the milk, and trying by these ordinary objects of afternoon tea to bring some semblance of equanimity back into her world. “I’m sorry. I really had no idea--I didn’t even know he was--I’ll just be leaving, then.”

“Where’s Alice?” Merlin asked, coming back into the kitchen, seeing two mugs, and one Arthur, and rubbing, very briskly, at the bridge of his nose. “You told her off, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t tell her off, I merely explained that she was a bit out of line coming round with her--intentions.”

“Right, well, is this a chocolate biscuits sort of apology, or am I going to have to buy out Wilde Irish Chocolates again?”

“You didn’t have to do it the first time; I was perfectly lovely to that old busybody.”

Merlin sighed. “I’ll pop round with the biscuits first, and see what sort of damage you’ve done.”

Arthur was still being treated as if he were new to homosexuality; as if he had not watched 312 videos under the subheading ‘gay’ on that old stalwart Pornhub; and as if he had not tried, in a fit of hormonal inquisitiveness, what tricks could be tried on the solo man, by his amenable hand, or finger. He had trialed putting himself up himself, and found that, like most masturbatory acts, he could bring himself off satisfactorily; sometimes even impressively: but there was no singular substitute for the plural act.

He had found out by the old-fashioned method of sticking a dick in his mouth that he liked having a dick in his mouth; that, in fact, he liked all the versions of it, the active, the passive, so that he felt he could nearly get off from going down earnestly on Merlin whilst Merlin was stretched out on the sofa or bed, or whilst he was stretched out on sofa or bed, and Merlin was knelt over him, thrusting away. He had seen face fucking and felt a little twinge in himself, a little hot frisson at the idea of being on his knees, or on his back, the receptacle of desperation, an open mouth, and a hot tongue, on which a partner could violently pleasure himself; and he had borne out the theory that he was rather madly into it by kneeling one day in front of Merlin, whilst Merlin was getting down from a cupboard the box of pasta which was to be their dinner, and unbuttoning his jeans, and saying, whilst Merlin was letting him set the pace, restraining himself to a little shallow thrusting against Arthur’s tongue, “Do you think I’m delicate ? Fuck me.”

Arthur was something of a slut. He wondered briefly whether he ought to have a little crisis about it; but he was too repressed to do anything other than be a filthy slag about it. They had sex both oral and intercrual, and once in the barn waiting out a gale engaged in some standing frottage which forced him to sit down very hard afterward, breathing like a blown horse.

But the closest he had come to penetration was that first drunken fumbling, when he had been a good thrust away from having Merlin inside him, shaking and coming whilst Han Solo obliviously shot up some stormtroopers. He was frankly tired of not being ploughed. He came into the kitchen one morning, where Merlin was scrolling through his phone, and eating some eggs, and said, “I want you to shag me.”

Merlin looked up at him. He had a fork halfway to his mouth, where it was now like a perfect statue of itself. “Uh, like right now?”

“No, not right now, obviously. We don’t have time for it. But--tonight.” He cleared his throat. He had not realised he was going to set such a close time frame for himself, and now he felt that dual anticipation of anxiety and excitement, those close cousins which do the same thing to the stomach. He looked at and bypassed breakfast, going instead to the tea which Merlin had made him, and drinking it whilst leaning against the counter. It is wonderfully casual to lean against a countertop; it suggests a certain nonchalance; a certain lack of virginity. He was like one experienced man to another, going about his usual business, feeling quite cool at the idea that today he would engage in those old rituals of agriculture, and tonight those even older rituals of fornication. A somewhat backwards interpretation of the practice, in which the obvious top took in the obvious bottom, possibly begging for it; but a venerable practice nevertheless, an old rite going back to the beginning of time, and humans, and that wonderful revelation that all holes are dual-purpose holes.

Merlin put down the fork, and rubbed his stubble. “Like you want me to--top you?”

“Unless you always have to be on the--receiving end.”

“No. I prefer, uh--the other way. I just didn’t think that was going to be your--deal. Yeah, I can--definitely. But I’ll have to go into town and get more condoms.”

“Are you diseased or something?” Arthur demanded.

“What? No, I’m clean.”

“Are you planning on doing it with someone else?” He took a sip of tea, to hide that he was waiting, not entirely calmly, for the answer; that he wanted one response, and was frightened, briefly, of getting another.

“No, of course not. I just--you want me to bareback you. King Arthur is a power bottom. Ok. Yeah. Checks out, I guess.”

“Look, I realise it isn’t--traditional. Obviously, realistically, you should be--on the receiving end, of course, since I’m a man.”

“I’m a man too? Sorry, did I need to explain that to you? I just assumed you had noticed, considering how many times my cock has been in your mouth.”

“Yes, but I’m the manlier man.”

Merlin folded his hands, and propped up his nose on them. “Ok, real quick: I get what it was like back in Camelot, that there were very strictly defined gender roles in that period of time, and that there was a very rigid idea of what was ok sexually, and what wasn’t, and who should be giving it, and who should be taking it, and all that rot, but now we do whatever we like. There’s no ‘girl’ role, Arthur. We’re both men.”

“I know that. Obviously .” 

“All right, then don’t be a weird gatekeeping prick about who should be bottoming, and who topping. I can be nice about it for like…two minutes, maybe, because you’re from a different time. If you want to try it, it’s fine; if you don’t like it, it’s fine too. If you want to try it on me, that’s also fine. And whichever you like better comes down purely to personal preference.”

Arthur squinted at him. “So are we having sex or not?”

“Yes, you prat,” Merlin said, standing, and throwing the rest of his tea down the drain, and on his way to the door pausing next to Arthur, so that Arthur could feel where Merlin pressed against him, his chest to Arthur’s shoulder, the whole front of him touching all down the side of Arthur, warm, broad, scented with the aftershave which had so confused him; a little hard already where he was flush against Arthur’s hip, and inspiring in Arthur a complementary response. Then the low voice at his ear, the hot breath in his ear; the hot tongue also, playing at his lobe: “I’ll pound you until you’re screaming for it.”

Arthur had frozen with the mug at his lips. He was stuck like that, with the blood rushing in his ears, as Merlin pulled away; as he brushed past: and as he opened the door like the little arse he was, and went out casually into the grey morning.

“Really!” he shouted after him. 

“The anticipation will be good for you,” Merlin said cheerfully when he had thrown his tea after Merlin’s down the sink, and put on his jacket and wellies, and gone out into the muck and mizzle after Merlin himself. “It’ll help you relax.”

He strung Arthur along all day, by standing too close to him, and breathing onto his neck and into his ear when he had something to say which could have been said at a respectable distance; by squeezing past him in the barn when there was a whole aisle to accommodate him; and, most heinously, by snogging him briefly in the parlour shed where the ewes were to be milked, a wet, messy affair, with so much tongue Arthur went rather instantaneously from that moderate state of alertness which Merlin had kept him in all that exasperating day, to full attention. He had to go back out into the cold rain, and breathe through his nose for rather a long time, so that he was hooking up the milking tubes half-hard, instead of torturously hard. They took the Land Rover and a dog up the mountain after a stray lamb, and were not very much perturbed by the consequences of the sheep’s coat, and the dog’s coat, having been out in the bucketing elements; and groped one another in the front seat after they had let out the dog and the sheep in form if not in smell, kissing so hard that Arthur acquired Merlin’s razor burn in addition to his own.

He had thought he would be laid right then, in a Land Rover smelling of sheep, and was already scrambling to take off his shirt, when Merlin pushed him off, popped open the door, and disappeared into the rain, which made all things solvent, and brought them back to the land. He was now only a grey mass bleeding away into the grey world; a confused suggestion of shape in the shapeless world, too indistinct to be pelted with rocks.

“I’m going to kill you,” Arthur told him breathlessly when they had gone in for lunch, shoving him through the door which he barely remembered to close, and backing him against the table, where they nearly repeated that accident of breakfast: this time at least endangering no preserves, but only the table itself. Arthur had a leg hooked round Merlin’s, and was pulling at his shirt, and then at his belt, trying to decide which he had to get off first; which was least bearable to leave put away behind the layers between his skin, and Merlin’s skin. He sucked at Merlin’s neck, and felt a hand briefly helping his hand with the belt; and then felt it pushing him away.

“Not yet,” Merlin gasped. But he was still touching Arthur through his trousers, still giving him the slow, gliding stroke from that awkward position, sometimes substituting his own body for his hand when the angle wasn’t right, and tonguing Arthur with the wild abandon of a man who did not appear overly concerned with holding out till after the evening chores.

Arthur pushed him down into one of the chairs, and straddled him.

“Ok, you’re going to have to stop,” Merlin said, grabbing him by the hips, and grinding them together. He threw back his head for Arthur to kiss at his neck. 

“You’ve spent all morning driving me bloody mad!”

“It’s for your own good,” Merlin said, and kissed him, a little more slowly now, locking his hands on Arthur’s hips and stopping, suddenly, with a strength that possibly and minorly heightened Arthur’s arousal, the frantic thrusting which had been driving Arthur steadily and shockingly towards the desperate finish. He nosed at Arthur’s sweaty neck, kissing the hollow of it, down onto the shoulder, and all the way up to his ear, which he bit, very briefly; and a shudder went through the whole of Arthur, from the ear to his toes.

He grabbed Merlin’s face in either hand, and kissed him, a little (a very little) more restrainedly, feeling how the arms went round his waist, and the mouth in response opened under his, astonishingly hot where the nose was cold against his nose, and the hands which found their way under his shirt pimpled the flesh in their wake. They calmed, a little, under Merlin’s more patient directive; and Merlin rubbed their noses together, to see Arthur crinkle up his. He laughed, and gave Arthur a slow, sucking kiss which started up in his belly the same fizzy nervousness he had had that morning. The lust was dying down a little, into a more resilient coal: keeping him continuously anticipatory but not continuously frantic. He shifted a little, feeling how hard Merlin was under him, feeling that they were already in the necessary position, with the unnecessary clothes. He thought of getting Merlin out of trousers and pants, of getting himself out, hastily, in the space between table and chair: and then sitting back down, sliding back down, and watching what it did to the stubbled face; watching the lips open voluntarily on a little breath which Arthur had got out of him; and getting out more of them merely by moving in the warm, warm lap, and kissing the arched throat.

“Do you want to wait till tonight?” Merlin asked. He was a bit strained. He’d had to swallow, and then say it.

“No,” Arthur said. “Not sure I can, actually.”

“Ok, well, the sheep should be good for a while. It’s pissing down; they’ll just be huddled up in the shed or the barn. So we could shower, and then--if you want.”

Arthur stood up, and pulled Merlin off the chair after him. 

They took the shower together; Merlin licked off some water from his throat, but kept the endeavour otherwise Safe For Work (depending upon the work). Actually Merlin was cruel about it, and did not let him come when he said that he needed to, but only bit at his ear, and said into it, “Your first time will be a lot better if you’re really, really gagging for it.”

“Well, that’s that accomplished then,” Arthur gasped, pushing into the hard body pressed against his back, to feel the slippery head against his arse, which hopefully, finally, would be in him before he lost his feeble grasp on his sanity. He felt the light kissing at the nape of his neck stop, the little distracted pause which absorbed Merlin for a moment instead of the kissing: and then Merlin pushing back against him, sliding between his thighs, the hand on Arthur’s hip digging in hard as Merlin slowly, excruciatingly rubbed the head of his cock over Arthur’s arse, between the cheeks, nudging at but never breaching him. Arthur clutched at the hand on his hip and tried to back onto him, a rubbish attempt which he knew would be thwarted by Merlin, or the pain; but his penis was in charge now, and it did not consider it very much relevant to the situation whether they had used lube or not used lube.

Merlin bit his neck, and shut off the water.

“Get on your stomach,” Merlin said when they had made it into the bedroom, going round to the little nightstand on his side of the bed, and taking out the lube, the sight of which dispelled Arthur’s annoyance at having been told what to do, when he could very well do what he liked. He turned over onto his stomach.

Merlin slid a pillow under his hips, and knelt behind him. Arthur swallowed. Already he was feeling the slick finger inside him, touching him, opening him; finding what would wring out of him the embarrassing noises, till Merlin’s cock wrung out of him the desperate ones. 

Then he felt instead of the finger a tongue, and arched up off the pillow. 

“Merlin,” he gasped.

“Just relax,” Merlin said, and he felt the hot wet sensation again, circling what it turned out was an extraordinarily sensitive bit of flesh, extraordinarily receptive to being licked. He felt little pulses going through him; if he had been standing he would have fallen. There was a strange and liquid sensation in his stomach, and lower. He was shaking, and had to grab at the sheets as if they were solid, as if they would solidify him. It was a sort of out-of-body moment; he felt that he would have to come out of himself; that it was too much to be in his own skin; that the slow, thorough tongue was methodically undoing him. “Oh my God .” He had muffled it in the bed, but Merlin heard it, and was spurred on by it; he was breathing as heavily as Arthur. He darted in his tongue, and Arthur jerked, feeling the shock through his whole body, and clutching at the sheets, and bringing up a little noise in his throat which was all that he could get out. He was almost too breathless to moan. He had got out a longer and louder pant, and that was it. Then Merlin pulled back, and slipped in a finger, touching first what his tongue had sensitised, rubbing at it a little, till Arthur felt altogether unhinged about it: and finally sinking in the first finger, and then a second, giving a slow pump, and then going back in with his tongue.

He brought Arthur to that tremulous edge of desperation, fucking him first with his mouth, sucking at him, and then sliding in his fingers, feeling round till he had got out of Arthur an involuntary bucking, and then knowing where to stimulate; coming back to it over and over again, and when Arthur was shaking thrusting in the hot, skilled tongue, moaning a little when he did it. His desperation was increasing in time with Arthur’s desperation. Arthur could feel the rhythm being lost, the dissolution of expertise; that tremulous line between skillful fucking and horny fucking beginning to overlap itself; and the concentrated efforts which were being lavished on him slowly turned merely to efforts. Merlin forgot to alternate between licking and fingering; forgot which combination had drawn out of Arthur the most encouraging noises: and simply tongued at him filthily. He put his tongue to the same use which his cock was going to be put to; and Arthur, forgetting that he would have to last till he could get in him the hard, slippery head which had nudged at him in the shower, pushed back on his forearms, groaning. 

Finally Merlin came back to himself, before anything was done that could not be undone, and pulled away: and there were the sounds now of him stroking himself, the indecent squelching of the lube on his hard flesh. “Get on your hands and knees,” he said roughly, grabbing Arthur by his hips, and pulling him up as Arthur was trying to do it himself. He thought of saying something snappish, but he hadn’t terrifically minded the manhandling: and if he had, there was the assuaging knowledge of what was about to be done to him. There was Merlin’s cock against him, this time not to be pulled away, but pushed into him. “I’ll go really slowly,” Merlin said. “Tell me right away if you need me to stop.” And there was pressure now, far more tremendous than the fingers; it was not so much painful as novel: and in the very first moment of it, he did not know how to feel about it. Slowly Merlin inched into him, pulling back a little when he was partially in, and pushing in once more, breathing in great hitches, as if he were sprinting. Arthur was galvanised by this. However he felt about it, it was turning on Merlin: and he pushed back to elevate the moment for him; to hear the breathing change from ragged, to broken. 

“Is that ok?” Merlin panted; he was seated now, and had stopped, pressed flush to Arthur, his belly rapidly brushing against him. He could feel the tension in the fingers which had dug into his hips. 

“Yes,” he said in a strangled voice. He pushed back, a little experimentally. Merlin, gripping his hips, thrust back. Arthur cried out.

“Right there?” Merlin asked, thrusting again, shallowly, slowly, getting out of Arthur another little cry. There was the hot building in him of his rising climax, but a more jittery sensation this time; a hotness through his whole body, rather than just his groin. The hairs on his arms stood up. “Right there,” he gasped in agreement, and Merlin began to thrust a little harder now, his belly slapping against Arthur, his hands manoeuvering Arthur onto him, off him, never pulling out completely, but sometimes pulling back a good distance, so that there was the warm fullness in him, but easing off what was most reactive in him, and then hitting it again, and making him jerk. He was absurdly hard. There was precome all over him; but when he reached up to thumb at it, a little awkwardly leaning into the hand still on the mattress for balance, Merlin let go of one hip, and pulled his hand away. “Don’t touch yourself yet; trust me on this.”

“Well, I’m going to have to,” Arthur gasped. 

“Are you going to come?” Merlin asked, low and ragged in his ear, sticking in his tongue as he was sticking in his cock, and blowing a hot breath afterward onto the wet patch he had licked over Arthur’s earlobe, making it almost unbearable for Arthur not to be coming.

“Yes,” Arthur panted. He dug into the sheets with his fingers, and pushed back. “Harder.”

But contrary to what he had said, Merlin slowed down, still pumping in and out of him, but no longer hitting him exactly where he needed; Arthur’s vision cleared a little, and he could see the wall behind the headboard now, instead of some red spots. Then there was a hot mouth at his ear again, biting and licking at it, working him up till he was driving himself back onto Merlin, whilst Merlin held himself almost still, letting Arthur fuck himself stupid. He was shivering; and each time he slid back onto that hot, hard cock, he had to arch a little into the sensation, to bear it. 

“Jesus Christ ,” Merlin said, and started to fuck him again, breathing rapidly through his nose, jerking Arthur back onto him by his hips with complete abandon, no longer interested in torturing him, but in finishing him. Arthur dropped his head, and rode it out; he was shaking so hard he did not know how he would stand it when he came. There were little waves cresting all through him, from his shaking legs all the way up his spine and through his belly, not quite turning into anything yet, but disturbing the hairs on the nape of his neck, and the little fine fuzz along his spine, everywhere the same hot white hypersensitivity as Merlin thrust against him, licking sloppily at his ear and throat. 

He had Arthur’s earlobe in his teeth again when he suddenly tensed, and let out a choked breath; he was trembling against Arthur: he had frozen for a brief moment, and then plunged in roughly twice more, and Arthur felt a sudden warmth in him. That was Merlin’s come in him, he realised, and moaned as it was filling him; he lost hold of anything other than the fact that Merlin was coming inside him. He rocked back hard, feeling that Merlin was still coming, that he was using Arthur’s back to hold himself up, and thinking to wrench out of him something closer to a scream, rather than the gasps which were ratcheting up a little in volume each time Arthur shoved back against him. Then the sensation that had been cresting in him hit, and crushed him. It was like an impact all throughout him. One wave after another, peaking and peaking again, whilst he spurted across the bed, across the headboard, too shocked to do anything other than kneel and try to bear it, no longer working himself onto Merlin, but now simply the passive recipient of the thrusting which Merlin had resumed, to get him through the last of it. Then Merlin began to jerk him, and that was another sensation, one which he was not sure he would survive. He clung to the bed, and cried out: and pulsed several more times in Merlin’s rough hand, with Merlin’s cock still in him; and finally collapsed on his stomach.

“Dear God, I’m never going to walk again,” he panted after Merlin had pulled out of him at last, and rolled over onto his back next to Arthur.

Merlin patted him on the hip. “Not bad,” he said, getting out the words in two separate sections. He had to pause again afterward, to catch his breath.

“Not bad ,” Arthur said. “When I can get up, I’m going to shove your face into the mess. I can’t believe you made sure to point me toward my side of the bed.”

“That’s why I’m the beauty and the brains, and you’re just the brawn.”

Arthur rolled over, and grabbed him up in his arms, more quickly and deftly than either of them could have anticipated: and ducked him, yelling, onto the wet side of the bed.

Arthur topped him once, and came with a little shudder, whilst Merlin was coming all over his chest; and returned with conviction to bottoming. 

“Oh, I think they’ve left it too long in the proving drawer,” he said one night, as conversationally as he was able, putting both Arthur’s legs against one of his shoulders, and holding him by the ankles as he fucked him.

“Shut up,” Arthur groaned. He had his head thrown back against the sofa, and did not even care that a souffle had just been plated perfectly raw. 

They did it against but not on the kitchen table, Arthur holding onto the edge of it whilst he was being thoroughly humped, to use the gentleman’s terminology; and gasping back, “Well, what do you expect me to do” when Merlin remembered, right at the nexus between almost too late, and entirely too late, to say, “Don’t come all over the table; we eat there.”

“Then get off me!” Arthur protested, shoving back into him, and calling somewhat into question his devotion to hygienic convention, by jerking himself.

Merlin pulled out, and turned him round: and sank to his knees before Arthur could get out a protest, and swallowed him down to the bollocks, slipping in a finger whilst Arthur choked, and came, long and shudderingly in him.

Then he turned him back round, and brought himself off hard inside Arthur, groaning into Arthur’s shoulder as his cock pulsed in the tight warmth of him, the backs of Arthur’s thighs trembling against the front of his. 

They did it in the Land Rover, in the field, in the parlour shed; and once, memorably, in a loo at the Visitor Centre in Connemara National Park, where they had gone to have a nice hike in the autumnal boglands.

“Faster,” Arthur gasped.

“Shut up,” Merlin gasped in return, crowding him against the stall door, slamming into him as Arthur, using the door for leverage, pushed back onto him with an enthusiasm appalling for the circumstances. “This is so gross. I can’t believe you talked me into this.”

“You’re the one who said you don’t have any boundaries left.”

“I meant I’ve tried loads of stuff just to try it, not that I think it’s perfectly fine to get off in a public loo.” He bit Arthur’s neck, thrusting messily into him: and slipped out at precisely the most inopportune moment, and came, helplessly, stroking himself through it, since he was already there, and desperate for it, all over Arthur’s back.

“Did you just come all over my jacket ?” Arthur barked. 

Merlin thrust back into him, and fucked him, not into politeness, since that was impossible, but at least into a state which very nearly mimicked politeness, by shutting him up entirely, till he was muffling his orgasm in his forearm. Afterwards he reverted to the same mincing twat, by saying to Merlin, “Give me your jacket, then” and seizing it off him, and wearing it through all Merlin’s protestations of chilliness, saying in a snobbish voice, “Well, it’s not like you’re going to die; chin up, Merlin.”

“I have no idea why I like you,” Merlin groused, sticking his hands under his armpits.

“Well, as long as you do,” Arthur said, and moved off down the stone path into those rollers of heather which the wind combed back and back onto themselves, getting himself swiftly away from the scene of the crime, where he had committed an Embarrassment. And Merlin, moving off after him, smiled at the thick little head, and grabbed up his hand, and held it through all the leisurely walk, whilst Arthur pretended they were not being affectionate, but merely practical, by replacing the necessity for gloves with human warmth.

At Christmas they set up a tree that Arthur argued was leaning too far to the left, and Merlin argued was leaning too far to the right: and additionally there was the fraught matter of the presents, which had to be protected with no less than three magical wards, because Arthur was a nosy bastard.

“You can’t hide them using magic; that’s cheating!” Arthur protested. 

“Well, it’s the magic, or I’ll set up patrol with a kitchen knife, you meddling arsehole.”

Arthur’s great triumph of the season was turning out a yule log which could be cut, rather than hammered; and Merlin’s was catching him in an act of sentimentality into which he was lured by the false impression of aloneness which Arthur had one evening in the sitting room, with Merlin snoring on his shoulder, where he had been put by some alcoholic egg nog. He was the sole wakeful and sober party: and felt himself quite safe enough to lift up the fringe off the forehead, and drop a hasty kiss underneath it.

“I’m actually awake, you maudlin little sod,” Merlin said gleefully.

“That wasn’t me,” Arthur said stiffly.

“About the cat,” Merlin said over breakfast.

“I know, we can’t have one, because we never do anything I want to do, only whatever Merlin wants.”

“ What ? You are such a twat. Anyway, no. Um. Look, I only said no because cats live a long time, and I assumed you’d move on eventually, you know, find a nice woman, marry her, start a family. I just didn’t want to get attached to it and have to decide who it was going to live with, like we were splitting up assets in our divorce.” He poked at his rashers. “But since I assume that’s not going to happen, if you still wanted one. We could.” He looked up from his plate. “I mean, if, you know.”

“Do you want to get married?” Arthur blurted out. He had waited six months and three days to ask; as long as he could be expected to wait.

Merlin blinked at him. “I’ve never been, before. Actually. I’ve never been married.”

“Do you not believe in it?” Arthur asked, feeling that was at least a less crippling justification; that he could, not comfortably, but passably, live with the idea that Merlin was not the marrying kind, rather than that Arthur was not the marrying kind.

“No, I just--you great lug. Why would I have ever married anyone? I only ever really loved one person in all my life.”

“So that’s--that’s a yes?”

“Oh, no, sorry; I didn’t mean you.”

Arthur kicked him under the table.

“Ow!” Merlin shouted, and kicked him back. “Yes it’s a yes, you prat. You know, some people actually get down on one knee and cry. Maybe you ought to try it.”

Arthur kicked him again. 

But he did get down, agreeably enough, on both knees.

There is still, many years gone now, a little farm on the shores of the Fjord, beloved brainchild of a man who had been called Micheál, and Malachy, and Myriddin; who had been his own grandfather and father, to make it easier for the villagers; who had been, all his life, something that was easier for others. Strictly for those first two generations it was known by the villagers as the Emrys farm, for the men of that clan had for their partners the sheep and the dogs and the wind; and in the third generation it was called the Emrys-Pendragon farm, because the third Emrys had taken in some little blonde English tart, and made of him as honest a man as could be made from an Englishman.

Now it is under the flagship of a new family, another of those self-regulating lots who pop out those unambitious successors which are needed to keep out the grubby foreign buyers. It was passed over as lovingly as a grandchild by the man who had got it from his father, and his father before him; and now was seeing that it went into the arms of a new lineage, with the blood still hot and red in it, because he had for an inheritor an ageing cat, and an ageing husband. 

And the village of Leenane in the county of Galway in the country of Eire lost its Saturday entertainment. Those two staples of Gaynors who had been coming in for decades for an evening pint and an evening squabble which they seemed to enjoy as much as the witnesses, vanished suddenly into the rain. They had been getting on in years--but getting on well, stumping about like men half their age, and remarking occasionally in their singularly odd way on the act of maturation:

“God, I hate being old; my bloody knees hurt.”

“Oh, stuff it, you whinger. It’s only till you get back to the house.”

So the village felt a sort of ownership of them; it felt, even toward the Englishman, a sort of parental love, and expected one day to give their old bones back to those old hills. They had given up their livelihood because the mountains were no place for an old man’s knees; and because the lambs were the lively opponents of a young man’s wrestling skills. But they had had any number of quiet little homes to choose from, in the hills or overlooking the Fjord: where the sun when it chanced to show could thaw out the arthritis from them, and nurse back cat and garden from their wretched winters. No one ever expected that they would go off into the green yonder, and find some other land on which to expire; that is what a city person does. There is some sense in leaving industrialisation to be with the land in your twilight: and none whatsoever in leaving the countryside. 

But one day quite as Micheál appeared, Myriddin disappeared, which is a thing rather expected of old men: but there was no grieving Englishman bumbling about in his absence, waiting for death to take what was left of him. Myriddin was gone, and the cat, and the Englishman.

In County Mayo, along what is called the Wild Atlantic Way, there is another farm; not so very remarkable a thing, because there are greater than 100,000 farms in Ireland, and rather more than 30,000 of these are concerned with those productions in which sheep are the principle actors. There is no Fjord in which the sunsets (or the rainsets) echo themselves; but there is a little stream going through the green land, and a white barn overlooking that, and a white house overlooking that. There is a garden in which improbable things grow, because the gardener is in posession of those uncanny green fingers which can coax out a sward from a desert land: and a pepper from the well-meaning malice which his husband has inflicted on it, by watering it half a dozen times a day, instead of one. 

The town of Westport is now the recipient of two odd little eccentrics whose habits if not faces the residents of Leenane might recognise; two men for whom a row is conducted with as much affection as a love confession, and the new lambs are infants to be brought round on errands. In many a place which is no place for a sheep can be heard the following exhortation:

“I told you to leave it in the barn.”

And the following objection:

“He’s got no mother , Merlin!”

And the exciting conclusion:

“Why don’t you get one of those wraps like a new mum and bring it round on our Tesco trip? You know, exactly where a farm animal belongs: touching our dinner.”

“I shall, actually; thanks for the idea.”

But these are two very young men; men who the oldest residents of Leenane might have seen in their natural state of fairness and darkness in the remote past of their own remote youth. These are two men in the prime of themselves, with the sex life to prove it. 

These are two young men who twelve pub quizzes running have walked away with the winnings, because the dark one is some kind of polymath; and the blonde one is some kind of arsehole. So there can be heard in any given pub which has challenged its patrons to drink and do trivia the one goading, and the other retorting:

“Come on, Merlin, you were there.”

“Yeah, a hundred and fifty years ago, you twat.”

“Come on. Come onnnn!”

“I’m thinking!”

“Well, don’t hurt yourself. You better stop, actually; you never can be too careful.”

“That’s rich, coming from you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means it’s a good job you’re pretty.”

“I am not pretty.”

These two men can still be found in the white house overlooking the white barn overlooking the little stream; most probably arguing over whether the stream is an intermittent stream, or an ephemeral one: and to which sexual act the argument’s victor is entitled. 

These two men have come, finally, across centuries to be with another; they have come out of the wild stuff of earth, and humans, to be two old bickering men, rather than heroes; they have come out of the wrack and the ruin of the race, to love one another in peace.

So we shall leave them to it.