Marna seemed to be considering pursuing her ques-tions, but Gryss’s manner forbade it.
For a while they followed the old castle road back to the village, but it was overgrown with brambles in places and uniformly hard and uneven underfoot. Further, being intended for carts and wagons, it wound too leisurely a way round the contours of the route for the pleasure of the quartet, and very soon they cut off it and began walking across the steep grassland directly towards the village. They spoke little, each pondering the events that had occurred to make the present so radically different from what they might have expected at the outset of the day.
Rannick moved cautiously forward. Following the lure of the creature, he had gradually dropped down from his high vantage and now found himself passing through increasingly dense woodland.
The eerie, tenuous contact he had made had been maintained constantly, a mutual anxiety keeping it whole. What part of it was guiding his feet he could not have said, but he knew that he was moving steadily towards his goal.
Occasionally, flutterings of doubt arose, urging caution. What was this creature he was so blithely breaking new ground to find? Judging from the sheep it had taken it was large and powerful, and hadn’t he himself lured many animals into his traps with suitably tempting bait? And, should some ill fate befall him, then even assuming that the villagers would notice he was missing and be concerned enough to send out search parties, they would not even think to look for him out here.
But he dismissed such thoughts out of hand. The need of the creature for him was beyond doubt, as was his certainty that he could master it when finally they met. And, too, he conceded that there was a desperate recklessness in his behaviour. This creature knew and used the power that he possessed; something he had never known before. True, he had sensed occasional, flickering sparks of contact at times, even when he had been in the village, but these were rare and fleetingly elusive, and could have been nothing more than imagination. But this was not. This was as real and solid as the mountains themselves. This, he knew, was the key to his future greatness and it was better to die contend-ing for that than to shrivel and die like an autumn leaf within the stultifying confines of the valley.
He glanced around. There was little to be seen; the trees obscured almost everything save the sky. But he knew that he was well beyond the castle, and he felt a brief frisson of alarm as childhood memories rose to the surface. He had long grown used to wandering in parts of the valley that were not commonly used by the villagers, such as the far downland where he had met travellers from over the hill, or upland, around the castle, where most of the villagers were almost too afraid to tread.
But here was beyond where even he had trodden before. Here was the region where the caves were said to lie, with their deep, winding tunnels and, so the tales had it, the chambers where lay ancient, evil creatures. Creatures from a time long dead. Creatures that were sleeping until… until when?
Now?
He ignored the question, but he paused for a mo-ment and looked around again. He was hot, tired and thirsty, but he could not rest. He had an inner momen-tum that was carrying him forward inexorably. Nothing would stop him now until he had reached… whatever it was that was calling him.
He shrugged off the discomfort and strode on. There would probably be a stream across his path where he could pause to cool himself and take a drink.
Soon, however, he found that he was moving up-wards again. The terrain became steeper and rockier and the trees less dense, then, quite suddenly, he was at the edge of the trees and clambering awkwardly along a scree slope, a sheer rock face looming above him to his right and a view over an unfamiliar tree canopy to his left. Looking back, he could make out the taller towers of the castle rising above a ridge on the far side of the valley. He had come much further than he thought.
The presence of the creature was almost palpable now, filling him completely with its desire; a desire to which his whole being resonated in response. He turned away from the castle and continued his journey.
There was little of it left, however. Scrambling over a tumbled mass of rocks that had fallen on top of the scree, he found himself on the edge of a great cwm. But it was not the majestic, arcing sweep of the weathered rock face that drew his gaze; it was the dark mouth of a cave only a short way above and beyond him.
He began running towards it, almost falling over in his haste as he leapt across the rocks. Small stones and boulders, dislodged by his passage, went clattering down towards the trees below.
Reaching the entrance to the cave, he stopped and gazed into the forbidding darkness. A damp coldness rolled out to greet him, carrying with it a scent of musty rottenness. Once again, childhood terrors rose up to test him, but he swept them aside. The cry of need that was now ringing through him was so all-pervading that he no longer knew whether it was his or the creature’s.
Here everything came into focus. Here lay his des-tiny: drawn mysteriously from an unknown, inaccessible future to the solid present.
Rannick stepped into the cave and disappeared from the light.
Chapter 6
In bed that night, Farnor lay awake. Normally such a day’s exertions would have sent him straight to sleep the instant his head touched the pillow, but the events of this particular day had unleashed a host of thoughts and imaginings which conspired noisily to keep sleep at bay.
Gryss and his father had taken him over the bound-ary that had marked the whole of his childhood existence. And he had seen and touched the castle and found it to be a wondrous place, though for reasons quite different from those he would have imagined even as recently as that morning.
The great, finely jointed stones piled relentlessly one upon the other high into the spring sky sat in his mind with the same feeling of massive solidity that the castle itself exuded. So also did the huge gate timbers with their echoes of the trees that had yielded them. The who and the how of its building tantalized him. As too did Marna’s questions; why was it so big? And why was it there?
And, it occurred to him, there were no large quarries nearby, nor trees of that size. What must the valley have been like when convoys of wagons were wending to and fro, bringing in all those stones and timbers and all the other paraphernalia that would have been used in the building of such an edifice? And what would the castle itself have looked like with its great walls and towers half completed and with masons and joiners and all manner of other artisans crawling about it like so many ants?
At the thought of joiners he found himself perched giddily high on one of the castle’s towers, struggling perhaps to secure some heavy roof rafter. The swaying perspective that he and Marna had viewed from the base of the walls he imagined downwards from those half-built eaves. Even in the dark safety of his bedroom, Farnor felt his hands start to shake at this vision and, toes curling, he had to clench his fists and close his eyes tightly to dismiss it.
Then, feet on the ground again, he pondered the valley when the castle was garrisoned.
Soldiers?
He had no conception of what they were, really. On the one hand were Yonas’s tales of mighty armies fighting great battles against hordes of cruel invaders, and valiant knights searching always for heroism and glory. On the other was Gryss’s revealing and sour response: ‘From what I’ve seen of soldiers and their ilk, consider yourself more than fortunate that the castle is empty and locked.’