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Merlin seized the foot of the bedclothes and whipped them off the bed. The sheet swam into the air and followed it onto the floor. Then he got down to business: Arthur’s mattress.
He had flattered himself that he knew everything about this bed. After all, he made it up every morning. He changed the sheets. He puffed up the pillows and bolsters every morning. He’d even broken it down onto its owner’s head, on one fondly-remembered occasion. He thought he knew this bed about as well as anyone could without ever actually sleeping in it.
Oh, how little he knew! Arthur had begun to complain that his bed smelled – odd. Musty. Dead bird-y. Like an unused chicken-coop. He’d complained about it at length, in increasing volume, and eventually Merlin had had to take note of his master’s complaints.
In the end, it had been Gwen who told him what the problem was.
Merlin hadn’t known that feather mattresses were supposed to be opened up and aired every few months! Nobody in Camelot had thought to tell him, and nobody in Ealdor had even owned a feather bed. How could he have known? Magic? Visions? Cryptic comments from the dragon? “Upholstery is your destiny, Merlin…” he intoned solemnly to himself, as he took a moment to tighten the lattice of ropes that supported the mattress, which was beginning to sag.
He didn’t really understand the fuss about feather mattresses. His own mattress was stuffed with straw. What was wrong with straw? There was nothing at all wrong with straw. It was nice and firm, it smelled sweet, and he could restuff it every day of the year if he wanted.
He’d suggested straw to Arthur, but he’d only had a pillow thrown at his head for his advice. Arthur wanted a new feather mattress. And what Arthur wanted, it was Merlin’s job, his destiny, his everlasting pride and pleasure, to make sure Arthur got.
So Merlin had spent two days running around Camelot looking for discarded down. It was made harder by the fact that the goose-girls chased him away from their live charges with sharp sticks. But at last he had acquired enough feathers. Forty pounds of feathers to be exact, all magically rid of its load of bugs, dander and goose excrement, and it lay behind him in sacks on Arthur’s floor.
It shouldn’t take him long to stuff them into the mattress. He would whip the old stuff out, put it in those empty sacks, put the new stuff in, and stitch it up again. Problem solved. Arthur would have his nice soft feather mattress by tonight. It shouldn't take long at all.
Merlin heaved up the foot of the mattress, and slit the lightly stitched seam open with an unpicker he’d borrowed from Gwen.
She’d offered to help him, as well, but he’d said he didn’t need help. This really shouldn’t take long.
The empty sack was ready at his feet, and he reached in and pulled out a fistful of crushed down.
Or at least, he attempted to pull out a fistful.
The mattress had had a great big Pendragon prince sleeping on it for years. His weight had meshed the down together into a nearly solid mass, and now the down didn’t want to leave the snug safety of the mattress. Merlin’s first fistful of down brought out about five times as much of it as he intended.
The second snag occurred to him once he had the first fistful in the air. Old down is fragile stuff. The delicate little branching strands that make up the soft fluffy body of the feather break off. And then … they float away.
Tiny floating scraps of fuzz took off from his hands to explore Arthur’s bedroom, pirouetting happily in the air as it went. Some of it introduced itself to Merlin’s clothes.
He tried shaking off the next fistful of down from its matrix inside the mattress instead. That didn’t work either.
He tried lining the lip of the mattress up with the empty sack’s mouth, and scooping it out.
He tried that again, keeping a closer seal between the sack and the mattress.
He tried putting the whole sack inside the mattress.
He tried swearing at the infuriating stuff and giving the mattress an angry kick.
Nothing worked. The down escaped in all directions, no matter what he did. He had only been at it a few minutes, and already he was surrounded by a snowfall of slowly floating down.
He couldn’t even round the down up with magic. Arthur was going to arrive here at any moment, and although Arthur was a world champion at not seeing things that were right under his nose, even he couldn’t miss seeing that.
He groaned and sat down on the stone floor, staring irritably at the mattress. It was an impossible job! How did anyone do this? With only one hand, he couldn’t pull apart the meshed down, but he needed the other hand to hold the receiving sack open. It was as if the down had a mind of its own!
Maybe it did have a mind of its own, and it had made up that mind to take over Camelot, one room at a time. What idiot came up with the idea of stuffing a mattress with feathers in the first place?
Ah, yes, of course. Nobles, that was who.
He glared at the mattress, took in a deep breath, and inhaled a feather.
For a few minutes, he forgot about the mattress. Forgot about a lot of things, actually. Nothing else mattered, for a few minutes.
When he was quite certain he wasn’t going to die, he wiped his eyes on a corner of his neckerchief, stood up, and turned around, slowly.
He had definitely heard a shrill giggle.
“Who’s there?” he asked.
The room didn’t answer, but he had the distinct impression that it was listening intently.
Merlin began to walk around the room. There weren’t many places to hide in here, at least. Bless him, Arthur didn’t go in for lots of furniture or tapestries. He liked things simple and soldierly.
He yanked the cupboard doors open, hoping that something would get a fright at the sudden movement and jump out. But nothing moved.
He peeped around the dressing screen. Nothing.
He thumped the neatly-bundled bed curtains between his palms. Nothing – but there was a shrill squeak above his head.
He looked up.
A tiny face – tiny – was looking over the top of the bed at him. There was a tiny person sitting up there, no bigger than his thumb, with translucent blue wings. As his eyes widened in surprise and recognition, it let out another shrill squeal of laughter and flew over his head.
“A sprite!” he said aloud.
They were a sort of fairy, he knew. Unlike most fairies, sprites were cheerful and amiable, and comparatively benign creatures to have in your house. Some people even kept them as pets. He’d heard they helped keep flowers fresh.
Then again, this was Camelot – not exactly a fey-friendly neighbourhood. “How did you get in here?” he wondered aloud.
The tiny figure had alighted on the top of the shield that hung over Arthur’s fireplace, its feet dangling over the edge. It squeaked unintelligibly at him and waved both toothpick arms around its head.
“You can’t stay here,” he said to it. “This is no place for a sprite.” He walked over to the shield and reached up his hand, talking softy to it. “You might not know this, but the big fellow who lives here isn’t terribly fond of magic. No, sir. He spends a lot of his time hunting down magic. This isn’t a safe place for you.”
It watched him come closer, and then flew away over his head again.
When he turned to see where it had gone, it had landed back on the top of the bed again.
“All right,” he said. “This can’t be much harder than catching a bird. It shouldn’t take that long.”
He fetched a towel to catch it in, and dragged a chair from the table over to the bed. The sprite watched him come. He climbed onto the chair, and reached up slowly with the towel outspread. “Come here, silly creature. There’s the pretty. Come here, pretty, pretty,” he crooned. He tried pursing his lips and making kissy-kissy sounds, as if calling a kitten.
It looked at him, with its miniature head cocked on one side, and then looked at the oncoming towel. Then it squeaked, and leapt into the air.
Back to the wretched shield again. He sighed.
He was halfway across the room when he heard the unmistakeable sound of tiny wings zipping through the air behind him. Another sprite?
He spun on his heel, too slow to catch the sprite in flight, but in time to see the mattress spasm as something tiny arrived in it.
“Oh, no, no, no. Not in there! Not in there…!” He lunged, but he was too late.
The mattress convulsed and leaped up off the floor, scattering down. It pirouetted in the air, laughing merrily.
He leapt for it and grabbed one edge, trying to drag it back down, but the sprite inside it was surprisingly strong. It was shrieking with glee in there, bouncing from side to side and tenting the fabric of the mattress. And the down! Down was being pumped out over Merlin’s boots in billowing clouds.
The other sprite came down from the shield, and joined in the game, orbiting his head. He didn’t dare bat it away for fear of crushing it, but it was buzzing around his head so close that it was stirring his hair.
He ignored the orbiting sprite, and concentrated on gathering up the mattress. It was almost empty by now, and he crumpled it between his hands so that the sprite in the closed end couldn’t get out. Very gently, he wrung the sack between his hands until he had the sprite cornered in – well, a corner.
The sprite inside the sack suddenly noticed that it was trapped. In a heartbeat the shrieks of delight turned into screams of outrage.
Great. Now he had an angry sprite caught in what was, basically, a large sack.
He was about to thrust one hand inside the mattress when the second sprite screamed as well. It flew directly into his face and began doggedly punching him in the eyelids, yammering with fury.
“Ow!” he yelled, ducking his head and trying to shield his face in his arms.
This sprite just had to be male. It didn’t seem to have noticed that he was several hundred times out of its weight class. This had to be the sprite version of a knight. No, it was a four-inch simulacrum of Arthur, that was what it was.
“Stop that!” he yelled. “I’m trying to help you!”
The sprite screamed back and went on hitting him, and then escalated to yanking out his hair. With both fists, by the feel of it – right, left, right, left…
“Ow, ow, ow!” He couldn’t take it any longer. “Enough!” He dropped the sack, and reached up with both hands. His clutching fingers managed to grab the sprite from the air.
Its tiny body was hot and hard and vibrating with outrage, but it weighed almost nothing. He made a cage of his fingers around it, careful not to squeeze it, and walked over to the window. “Now, this is for your own good. You just can’t stay here. I’m sorry, but out you go.”
With no hands to spare, he blew the window open with magic, and flipped the sprite out of the window.
The sprite parabola’ed out toward the sky, tiny arms windmilling, and he banged the window shut on a fading “Ee-e-oo-oo-oh-h-h!” of outrage.
The empty mattress lay in the middle of the floor, surrounded by its stuffing. It looked like it had been pulled down by wolves, and then torn apart by crows, in the middle of a snowstorm. The down was all over the room. Forty pounds of down, all over the room. It floated in the air like a dry mist.
There was no sign of the first sprite.
Merlin ran his fingers through his hair, dislodging goose down over his face like dandruff.
“I’ll deal with you later,” he promised the hiding sprite.
He paused, halfway to the mattress, as a thought struck him. “Did I really just get beaten up by something that weighs as much as a couple of grapes?” he asked himself aloud. Perhaps it was a good thing nobody was here to see him.
There didn’t seem much point in worrying about the down falling out of the mattress any more. There was more down stuck to him than in the receiving sack, anyway. He simply picked up the mattress, and shook the last of the down out into the open air.
At least Dollop-head didn’t have tapestries or carpets in here for all this to stick to. He could simply let the down settle for a few minutes, and sweep the whole lot up with a broom. Simple. Even as he watched, the down in the air was slowly settling into drifts on the floor.
It shouldn’t even take that long.
…As long as the sprite stayed out of his hair.
He was crouched on hands and knees, scooping up handfuls of powdery down from the fresh sacks and stuffing it into the mattress, when he felt the temperature in the room drop. All the hair stood up on the back of his neck.
He froze, without looking up. Someone else had entered the room.
No, not someone – some thing.
There was one good thing about being an unsuspected powerful sorcerer in Camelot, and that was the fact that nothing else in Camelot actually scared him. Apart from the occasional undead knight or plotting sidhe, the most frightening supernatural force walking these halls from day to day was him. Imps and petty demons got out of his way. He closed his eyes, and examined this new presence with his magic.
He recognized this presence. He and Gaius had been trying to attract its attention for months.
It was the ghost of a young knight who had galloped out with Arthur, and not galloped back. This had been, in life, the youngest, bravest, noblest, and stupidest of the knights. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t yet cottoned on to his change in circumstances. He didn’t seem to have grasped the very important concept that he had gone off-duty once and for all, and that there was somewhere else he was supposed to go. He was dazed, and confused, and – since he was also a high-born aristocrat accustomed to getting his own way in all things – he was growing annoyed with being ignored.
The first furniture had been thrown last week, in the maids’ quarters…
The ghost was looking back at him, uncertainly, and Merlin reached out very gently with his mind. If he could get the silly clodpole to listen to him, perhaps he could point out to him where he was supposed to go. It would be easy, and much less bother than exorcising him. He didn’t even need Gaius’s help.
It shouldn’t even take that long…
“Hello,” Merlin said, aloud.
The ghost listened! He felt it come closer. Ah-ha! Perhaps they could avoid the whole business of throwing stones and pounding on the bottoms of cupboards all night, after all!
“You shouldn’t still be here,” he said. “There’s nothing for you here, now. I know you don’t want to be here, either. You should move. There’s another place for you.”
…Where… the ghost queried.
…Over there… Merlin pointed with his mind, in a direction he knew instinctively, although he had never actually been there, and hoped he wouldn’t soon go.
But knights were never very good at following instructions, and this one still thought that questions of temporal space and direction applied to him.
With all the panache and decisiveness and wrong-headedness he’d shown in life, the ghost dived.
“No!” Merlin yelled. “Not in there!”
The mattress of clean, fresh feathers convulsed as it inflated with newly-arrived ghost.
He sprang for it, but it was too late. The ghost ran up against the closed end of the mattress, lifted it up into the air, and tipped it upside down. It tried to fly through the mattress to where it was supposed to go, but the gate to the next world wasn’t in there. Merlin felt the ghost depart through the fabric of the mattress with an irritated hiss. …Idiot peasant!…
For the second time, the air was filled with gently drifting down. Now half a mattress of fresh feathers was inextricably mixed with the old musty down on the floor.
Merlin sat down in the middle of the down with a sigh and covered his eyes with his hands. “A warlock’s work is never done,” he muttered to himself.
There was a giggle.
He looked up and flung the spell out in the same movement. “Gotcha!”
The sprite had time only to lift from the top of the cupboard when the spell struck. It froze in place above the wood, wings buzzing and legs kicking, but unable to go either forward or backward. It was stuck fast. It banged its tiny fists together and squealed in frustration.
Merlin got up. “Right!” he said. “Time to put you out, and you can join your mate. You wait there, my friend, this won’t take long.”
He dragged a chair over the cupboard through the snowdrift, climbed up onto the seat, and reached over the top of the cupboard.
He stopped.
Just in front of his nose was a saucer, hidden by the ornamental frontage of the cupboard. There was a little bit of milk in the saucer, and a few breadcrumbs carefully arranged around the rim.
Pet food...
He had a sudden image in his mind’s eye, blindingly-clear, of the great Prince Arthur Pendragon, in his shining armour and glorious surcoat, jumping on a chair every night to put up a saucer of milk.
Oh, hell. Had he just pitched Arthur’s pet sprite out of the window?
The sprite kicked wildly, and squealed at him.
And all of a sudden, as if his ears had just found their focus, he could make out what it was saying. It was the Old Tongue, thickly accented, and extremely rapid, but recognizable now that he knew what it was.
“You are a nasty man! I don’t like you! You’re nasty! I’m going to tell the Nice Man on you! Nasty man! Nasty, nasty, nasty, nasty!”
“I’m sorry!” he said, in the Old Tongue, and released the spell.
The sprite lost no time in darting across the top of the cupboard toward him, and slapping his face. Actually, it slapped the side of his nose, but the intent was clear. Possibly, this one was a girl.
He flinched away reflexively from the blow, and remembered too late that he was still standing on the chair.
Out of reflex, he grabbed at the top of the cupboard to catch himself, and remembered just a split-second too late that the bottom half of the cupboard was empty.
He toppled backward, yelping.
The spell flicked out without even needing words. He was just fast enough to arrest the cupboard’s fall at a sharp angle above him, but he wasn’t fast enough to catch what was inside it.
Arthur’s washbowl and Arthur’s porcelain water jug, lavishly painted and lovingly transported all the way from Amsterdam, jumped out of the open door and crashed to the floor.
Merlin landed on his back on top of something soft, with potsherds bouncing around him and water slopping onto him. He opened his eyes to find feathers flying in a cloud around him.
He had fallen onto the last full sacks, and they had coughed out the last of the down under his weight.
For the third time, he found himself scrambling inside a snowstorm of floating down. This time, however, he was also in a puddle of cold water. The wet feathers stuck to him like spots of glue. The shards of broken pottery had bounced into the feathers and disappeared, but he could see the rapidly expanding puddle as it spread like oil in a hot pan over Arthur’s flagstones.
The sprite, meanwhile, had shot to the cold hearth. She paused for a moment to yell her opinion of him, standing on the grate with her hands on her hips. Then with a last rude gesture, she vanished up the flue.
Merlin rolled up onto his hands and knees, and scrambled across the floor to the hearth. He pressed his face into the fireplace, and yelled up the flue in the Old Tongue, “Come back! I’m sorry! I didn’t know! Arthur didn’t tell me you were here! Come back!”
….
It was time to see what Merlin was up to.
Arthur could hear muffled shouting from the corridor, and recognized Merlin’s voice. Who on earth was Merlin shouting at in there?
Knowing Merlin, he could very well be shouting at himself in the mirror. It was the considered consensus of the Knights of Camelot that Prince Arthur’s servant was completely mad. He wandered around the Citadel at all hours of the night, he turned up in the damnedest places, and, in spite of dozens of stop-overs in the stocks, he seemed incapable of keeping his mouth shut.
It was almost a perk of his rank, Arthur thought, employing the worst servant in Camelot. It certainly made for good bragging-rights.
Arthur reached the doors to his chambers, pushed them open, and sauntered in.
His first, half-formed, impression was that it was snowing.
His chambers had gone all … fluffy. His floor was covered in white, and more flecks of white were drifting in the air, pirouetting in the draught of the open door.
In the deep white drifts by the fireplace, something moved; something tall and haggard and spotted with clumps of white like a reversed Dalmatian. The horrifying spectre hauled itself to its feet and turned to face him, its eyes wild.
The Yeti thrust its index finger out at Arthur like a spear, shaking with agitation, and screamed, “Sprites?”
Oh, hell, he found 'em, Arthur thought to himself. He pursed his lips, and thought better of laughing. It would probably be a really bad idea to laugh right now, he realized.
"Sprites, Arthur?" the Yeti screamed. “When were you going to tell me?”
“Um,” he hesitated. “Let’s talk about this later, shall we? But not now. I have a joust to go to. Um. Right now. Somewhere else.”
He ducked hurriedly out of the room, and popped the door shut quickly between himself and the madman.