by Roger Taylor
Edrien looked at the two men. ‘Shall I see if it’s safe to move him?’ she asked.
‘I suppose so,’ Derwyn replied, though he still kept his knife discreetly ready. He’d seen more than one ‘unconscious’ animal, suddenly spring to life, all teeth and slashing claws. And he’d never come across any animal remotely as devious and savage as a man bent on treachery.
Gently, Edrien lifted up the eyelids of the uncon-scious figure, then, carefully, she tested his limbs. ‘I can’t feel anything serious. I think he’s probably just fallen off his horse and cracked his head.’
Derwyn stood up. His lined face creased further as he frowned. ‘Well, that’s as may be, but if he’s a faller we can’t risk throwing him over a saddle while he’s unconscious, there’s no saying what hurt we’d do him. And wherever he’s come from, or for whatever reason, we can’t leave him here. We’ll have to tie him to a stretcher and take him back to the lodge. See what Bildar makes of him.’ He turned to Marken. ‘Find some suitable branches and ask if we may take them,’ he said.
Marken nodded and disappeared into the trees. Derwyn turned to his daughter. ‘Go and help him, Edrien,’ he said, adding as she stood up, ‘And be pleasant, please. Like me, he’s older than you, and unfortunately no longer has the advantage of knowing everything.’
His slight smile silenced Edrien’s reply before it formed.
Within a short while the three were walking their horses slowly through the forest. Derwyn’s was hauling a crude but well-rigged stretcher to which the body of the still-unconscious new arrival was tightly and skilfully lashed. The soft springiness of the two main supporting branches absorbed much of the impact of the small jolts that occurred as the trailing ends were dragged over the forest floor. Derwyn kept a careful watch for anything that might seriously jar the passen-ger. Behind him came Edrien and Marken, leading the other horses. There was little conversation as they walked along, and the tread of the horses was so soft that the sounds of their passing were lost in the gentle rustling of the trees and the bird song that filled the sunlit air.
As Derwyn halted and he and Edrien moved to ease the trailing ends of the stretcher over a large root protruding above the grassy forest floor, the figure on the stretcher muttered something. Edrien looked up. ‘I think he’s waking,’ she said.
Derwyn looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Well, we’ve not far to go now, we’ll get him back to the lodge and let Bildar look at him anyway. Keep an eye on him. See if you can make sense of anything he says.’
The small procession set off again.
* * * *
Darkness swirled around Farnor. At his heels, the fearful menace came ever closer.
‘Run, horse, run!’ The phrase wove incessantly in and out of his head through the pounding progress of the exhausted and panic-stricken horse. Then there was no horse and no sound and he was moving alone through the darkness. All around were menace and fear. Voices called to him: his mother and father, Gryss, Marna, and poor, beaten Jeorg. But he could not understand what they said. And there were other voices too, alien and strange.
Yet these were but flitting dreams. In truth, he knew that there was nothing but the flight and the fear and the terrible rasping of his breath and the pounding of his heart. There had never been anything but the flight and fear, in all its gasping horror, nor would there ever be.
Then the darkness began to cling about him, tangi-ble and awful. A myriad cloying fingers catching at his legs, his arms, his whole body. But he must not stop. Even to falter would be to bring the creature down upon him, with its fearsome, rending jaws, and its terrible will, lusting to feast upon the fear that so filled him.
Yet the darkness would not be gainsaid. It tugged and snatched at him, relentlessly draining the strength from him, wrapping itself about him tighter and tighter like some great spider’s web.
Until finally he was powerless to move.
Utterly spent, he was held fast, swaying helplessly in the black emptiness.
Faint sounds drifted to him.
It was still there! Pursuing him!
He began to struggle. He would not die to this crea-ture – Rannick’s creature – like some bleating sheep.
No!
‘No!’
‘Father!’
The voice burst upon him, urgent and nearby. With it came shifting shadows within shadows. Something touched his face. He shied away from it violently and struggled to free himself.
‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’ An anxious female voice, speaking with a strange accent, washed over him and the darkness broke silently into countless shimmering lights. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right,’ the voice said again.
Farnor took in the gentleness of the voice even as the lights about him became bright, welcoming beams of warm sunlight, scattered by a wind-shaken canopy of branches and leaves.
The menace had gone!
Relief flooded through him.
But still he was bound!
With a panic-stricken cry, he began struggling again.
‘No, no!’ the woman’s voice protested. ‘You’re safe. No one’s going to hurt you.’ Then, apparently to someone else, ‘I don’t think he can understand me.’
Hands touched Farnor’s face, and the silhouette of a head intruded itself against the leafy background. ‘I said, you are safe,’ the head said loudly and with painstaking slowness. ‘Do not struggle. You have had a fall. You might be badly hurt.’
‘I doubt that, Edrien,’ came a man’s amused voice. ‘Not the way he’s wriggling. And I don’t think he’s deaf either, judging from the look on his face when you shouted at him.’
Though the nightmare horror of the creature and the chase had slipped away from him, much of Farnor’s fear returned. He was a captive, held by some strange-speaking people. Had he fallen into the hands of Nilsson’s men? Was he being carried back to the castle? He redoubled his struggling.
The head disappeared and another one replaced it. Farnor stopped briefly and screwed up his eyes to examine his captor, but the sunlight flickering through the leaves was too bright for him to distinguish any features.
‘Do you understand me, boy?’ the new head said quietly, but also with a strange accent.
‘I’m not a boy, sir,’ Farnor said, viciously polite, as an unexpected surge of anger ran through him, at this form of address.
Somewhere there was a soft chuckle. ‘I gather you do understand me, young man,’ the head said again.
‘Who are you?’ Farnor demanded. ‘Are you Nilsson’s men? Where are we? Where are you taking me…?’
The head shook and a waving hand appeared, seek-ing silence. ‘Calm yourself. No one means you any harm and we’ve all got a great many questions to ask. But for now, my name’s Derwyn, I’m Koyden-dae. I’m afraid I know of no peoples called Nilssons – a very peculiar name, I must say – but if the Nilssons are your kin then I’m sure we’ll help you to get back to them in due course, if we can.’
Farnor gaped.
‘Although I must admit, I wouldn’t know where to start looking,’ Derwyn continued. ‘Indeed, I’ve no idea how you came to be here. It’s all very strange.’ He became explanatory. ‘We were drawn out to look for something when our Hearer felt a great disturbance. And we found you. And your horse. That’s safe too, but you’ve been riding hard by the look of it. We…’
‘I can’t understand half of what you’re saying,’ Far-nor interrupted heatedly. He struggled against his bonds again. ‘But if you mean me no harm, then why am I trussed up like a Dalmas Day fowl?’
Derwyn’s brow furrowed. ‘I can’t say that I under-stand you particularly well, young man,’ he replied. ‘Your speech is a little strange. But we thought you were a faller, albeit only off your horse, and you might have been badly hurt. We bound you to this stretcher so that we could take you back to our Mender at the lodge without injuring you further.’
Despite his anxiety, Farnor felt the reassurance in Derwyn’s voice and, almost in sp
ite of himself, he relaxed a little. ‘I’m not hurt,’ he said more quietly. But as if they had been waiting for the opportunity, the pains from his beating by Nilsson and his subsequent headlong flight through the forest returned to give him the lie. He stiffened and grimaced.
Derwyn nodded knowingly. ‘So I see,’ he said, with some irony. ‘Just lie still. We’ve not far to go to our lodge, now. Then our Mender can look at you properly and we’ll find out just how badly you’re not hurt.’
Farnor was inclined to dispute the matter further, but all the spirit seemed to leave him. His entire body was beginning to throb and his mind whirled with innumerable, half-formed questions.
‘Relax. Lie still,’ Derwyn said again, and his head disappeared from Farnor’s view. The soft command coincided exactly with the demands of Farnor’s body and it did as it was bidden. Almost immediately sleep began to creep over him, helped in no small degree by the gentle swaying of the stretcher and the sunlight above him, broken into countless dancing shards by the shaking leaves.
‘He’s asleep, Father,’ he heard the female voice say softly in the distance, but he could not muster the strength to deny it.
A dreamlike, twilight interval followed, as he drifted in and out of the sleep that he so desperately needed. He was aware of shimmering lights, then a dark coolness. Then warmth and sunlight again, with an open sky overhead. And many voices, speaking with that same strange accent. And hands, lifting him gently and laying him down, and searching about him, expertly, purpose-fully, for injury. He woke briefly to a deep silence and a momentary vision of an odd, cave-like room. Then there was darkness again, folding over him to take him away from his aching body.
And into this darkness came the other voices that he had heard before. The voices that were inside his head. The great family of voices. But whereas, in the past, they had been distant and faint, now they were clear and distinct, and he knew that they were speaking softly, as if for fear of disturbing him.
Some part of him told him that he should be fright-ened; that he was hearing voices where there were no people; that he had indeed fallen and injured his head – or worse, that he might even be going mad. But he had heard them before, and he could feel no real alarm, for the voices brought with them subtler meanings than those contained in the words alone. Many questions were being asked, and there was bewilderment, doubt, and even fear, but there was nothing that offered him any threat. Indeed, when he became the focus of debate, a sense of surprise and wonder dominated all responses.
‘He can Hear us even now.’
Again, wonder. And a realization that this was the truth.
‘It is strange. There’s never been such a one before.’
Denial.
Farnor felt a sudden, almost giddying, sensation, of great spans of ages arching back into times long past, when many things were very different. It was as if, in a single instant, he heard every one of Yonas’s tales being told, plus ten score more, and each more enthralling than the last. A fleeting glimpse of innumerable great histories, of peoples growing and moving across the world. Of the coming of great darkness and terror, of terrible conflicts, and courage and heroism, cowardice and treachery, sacrifice and victory. Of the return of light and wonder and knowledge. And finally, trailing into the here and now, of guilt, of lapsing vigilance, of a recent, frightening… return?
And, within the blink of an eye, it was all gone. ‘He will Hear our every word.’
‘No. He’s but a solitary Mover. And a sapling.’
‘And what have we to hide?’
Silence.
‘He may be our salvation.’
Doubt. Fear.
‘He may presage our downfall.’
Denial again.
‘He may presage strange and troubled times, but our true downfall cannot lie in the power of the Movers any more than it did before. We are First Comers after the Great Heat and our hold on the world goes even beyond that – into the times unknowable.’
This opinion was given unequivocally, though strands of doubt ran through it.
‘Who are you?’ Farnor found himself asking into the silence that ensued, though no sound came to his lips.
The silence deepened.
‘There. He Hears us almost as we Hear ourselves. Say what you will, there’s not been one such in genera-tions beyond counting.’
‘Who are you?’ Farnor asked again.
‘Rest, Mover,’ came the reply. ‘You know us well enough. We have turned away the abomination for the nonce, though it cost us great pain and fear runs through us as it has not done in many ages. Rest your limbs, we feel their pain. And make your peace with your own kind. You have frightened them also.’
‘I don’t understand anything you say,’ Farnor re-plied.
Amusement filled him. ‘Rest,’ came the gentle in-struction. ‘We’ll disturb you no more with our chatter.’
And in the word, rest, came so many images of peace and stillness that it was beyond Farnor to resist them, and he drifted back into sleep again.
* * * *
Bildar, the Mender to Derwyn’s lodge, scratched his chin unhappily. ‘He’s not seriously hurt,’ he said. ‘But he’s got severe bruising and muscle damage, and, like his horse, he’s absolutely exhausted.’
Derwyn shrugged a little. ‘Well, I suppose only he can tell us why he was riding so hard,’ he said. ‘And I presume it’s the riding that’s caused the bruising.’
‘Not all of it, I’m afraid,’ Bildar said, shaking his head. ‘At least, as far as I can tell. Some of it’s a little older than the rest and it looks as if he’s had a nasty accident to his arm. But, for the most part…’ he looked unhappily at Derwyn, ‘… it looks to me as if he’s been beaten – badly beaten.’
‘Beaten?’ Derwyn queried.
Bildar nodded, and lifted his clenched fist to amplify his meaning. ‘Badly,’ he repeated. ‘I’d say he was lucky not to have suffered some internal injury. As it is, he’s going to be very sore for quite a time.’
Derwyn turned to Marken, who shrugged. He looked around at the trees surrounding the wide, circular green where they were sitting. ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said, in answer to the unspoken question. ‘I don’t even know what’s brought him here, let alone how he came to be injured. And I can Hear nothing. It’s almost as if they were deliberately keeping quiet. I’ve never felt anything quite like it.’
Derwyn leaned on the wooden table in front of him and rested his head on his hand. ‘But who’d want to beat a young lad like that? Who’d beat him so hard that he’d flee his homeland and ride both himself and his horse to a standstill?’
‘That’s not completely beyond understanding,’ Marken replied a little sourly, casting a glance at Edrien. ‘But more to the point, why did they let him through? Why wasn’t he gently turned about? We don’t suffer from outsiders and fringe dwellers here, but the Koyden-ushav and the Koyden-d’ryne do and that’s what normally happens there to anyone who wanders in without an invitation.’
‘Perhaps it’s because they’re not used to outsiders here,’ Edrien offered. ‘Perhaps he caught them by surprise.’
Marken shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied, gently but definitely. ‘They weren’t taken by surprise. I’ve been Hearing vague whispers about… someone beyond… someone unusual… for some time now. And there’s been an odd feeling of… expectancy… in the air.’ He looked at his listeners and shrugged. ‘I’m sorry I can’t be clearer.’
‘You mean, they knew he was coming?’ Derwyn asked, his eyes widening. ‘And you knew?’
‘No,’ Marken replied, a touch irritably. ‘I told you, it’s not that clear. But they certainly weren’t taken by surprise. When I Heard them, it was like nothing I’d ever Heard before. Vivid, intense. There was some great upheaval, a bewildering debate of some kind, then suddenly something was coming into the Forest and we were to find it.’ He shivered slightly. ‘And there were great washes of all sorts of emotions, not least outright fear.’
Derwyn straightened up and then leaned back in his chair. He looked around him. Warm sunlight filled the clearing, while a soft breeze, full of woodland sounds and scents, prevented it from becoming too hot and gently stirred the surrounding treetops. Quite near to the table, several birds were hopping to and fro in search of insects and worms. Occasionally a noisy squabble would break out and one or two of them would fly off into the trees, seemingly to sulk for a little while before returning.
‘Such a beautiful day,’ Derwyn said, putting his hands behind his head then letting them fall on to his knees. ‘I don’t know what to make of all this. It’s so strange. And it all feels so… bad. I almost regret not strapping that lad over his saddle, pointing him south and sending him back on his way.’
‘I think that might have been to his death,’ Marken said, after a long pause. ‘Whatever was causing the upheaval amongst them was no small thing.’
Derwyn turned and looked at him. ‘This has dis-turbed you far more than you’re admitting, hasn’t it?’ he said.
‘I’m afraid so,’ Marken replied. ‘I’ve no clear reason for it, but I don’t feel any happier about the arrival of this young man than you do. Valderen are Valderen, outsiders are outsiders…’
‘We’re all people, Marken,’ Edrien interrupted, with some petulance.
Marken assumed a look of scarcely controlled exas-peration and Derwyn shot his daughter an angry glance. ‘Valderen are Valderen, and outsiders are outsiders,’ Marken repeated deliberately. Then despite himself his irritation surfaced. ‘And no one’s talking about them not being people, you silly girl.’ Edrien bridled, but another look from her father made her keep silent. Marken continued. ‘We’re Forest dwellers and they’re not. They live in the plains and the mountains and presumably know the lore of such places, just as we know the lore of the Forest. But throughout our known history and our legends, contact between us has been infrequent and usually associated with evil happenings.’ He looked at Derwyn. ‘We must tend this boy, of course. See that he’s fed and rested. And listen to his tale, if he’s willing to tell it. But we must be’ – he searched for a word – ‘circumspect in any judgements we make about him. Or anything he says.’
