The iron ring outside Gryss’s house came back to him, with its vivid representation of the lines of sombre, waiting soldiers; these seemed to be different again from either Yonas’s or Gryss’s view – ordinary men made extraordinary by evil circumstances. A lucky charm, Gryss had called it. Lucky? Farnor smiled to himself in the darkness and wondered for a moment if the old man had ever really looked at it properly.
Probably he had, he decided after a moment’s reflec-tion on this silent act of disrespect for the village elder.
But there must have been soldiers in the village once. Or was the village even there when the castle had been first built and manned? Perhaps in fact it grew into being afterwards because of the need to grow food for the garrison.
Farnor had never had such thoughts in his entire life before.
And then there was still the why of it.
Had there once been enemies to the north? Had the lush green valley once rung to the cries of battle?
Round and round his mind went. Then, as he drifted towards sleep, the real concern of the day emerged like nemesis. What had happened to him when he had picked up that piece of animal fur? The sensation had been so intense. He had touched something. Something desperately wicked. And it had been as if he had touched it in another world; a world that had been real and solid, while the valley and his father and the others had become but distant dreams at the edge of his awareness.
He turned over and plunged his face into a cool part of his pillow. Could it have been the sun, and the general strangeness of the day?
Please let it be that.
But it could not be. He had laboured long and hard in the fields many times under hotter suns than today’s. He might sweat and stink and have a mouth like a cowshed floor, but he didn’t become light-headed, nor did he drift into vivid waking dreams. And still less did he faint.
So it had happened. Somehow he had gone into another place and touched the creature that was killing the sheep.
The conclusion came slowly and fearfully and not without much anxious denial and backsliding. But come it did, despite his resistance. And it stayed, showing the same immovable solidity as the castle itself.
Farnor suddenly felt very alone. And he had lied to Gryss and to his father; a further act of isolation. He had told them he remembered nothing.
But how could he have done otherwise? How could he have said, ‘I’ve been into the heart of the creature and known its evil,’ when he had been all the time lying unconscious at their feet?
His father would have supported him gently, his manner a mixture of concern and impatience at such unmanly nonsense. Gryss would have recommended this, that or the other physic, and the rest would have pulled knowing faces at one another.
Then cold, black panic surged up inside him. What did it really mean? Was he some kind of oddity, a freak? He recalled Rannick standing over the slaughtered sheep. He saw again the black cloud of flies swarming up around him to be dispatched to hover at a watchful distance like a waiting army by a snap of the fingers. And he knew that Rannick had touched them in some way. He remembered, too, his own momentary disorien-tation.
Was he like Rannick? Did he have in him those traits – evil traits – that would bring Gryss’s condemnation down on him? Some power beyond most people’s understanding? ‘Going from bad to worse… faster and faster.’
He found himself trembling and, for the first time in many years, he felt his throat tighten with the need to weep. He swallowed hard and forced the urge down though the effort involved left him drained and unhappy. The haven of his familiar room could not protect him from the desolation he began to feel.
For a long time he lay motionless, painfully wide awake and his heart and mind blacker than the surrounding darkness.
Then the memory of the creature’s evil came back to him. He would have to tell someone about it, somehow. Men would be sent out on night watches soon and they would be slaughtered as easily as the sheep if they came across it unprepared.
But how could he do that?
No answer came, but the comforting practicality of the problem took his mind away from his darker, less tangible anxieties and, as he pondered it, his young body, wiser than he, eased him gently into sleep.
He had no solution to his problem when he woke the following day, and it remained at the forefront of his mind as he pursued his early morning routine of jobs about the farm.
‘You look tired,’ his mother said when he eventually came into the kitchen.
‘I am,’ Farnor yawned ungraciously as he hung up his leather cape dripping from the fine drizzle that was misting the landscape outside.
‘Yesterday was a long one by all telling,’ his mother said. ‘Sit down. Eat your breakfast. Your father’s gone to Gryss’s to get something sorted out about the night watches.’
Untypically, food had not been dominating Farnor’s mind since he had awakened, and such appetite as he had shrank further at this news.
He was careful to keep his reluctance from his mother, however, and he watched her surreptitiously as she moved busily about the kitchen. Her greying hair was pulled back into a loose bun, setting off a round face that even he could see was still attractive. And small agile hands pursued long-familiar tasks with practised ease, pausing only now and then to smooth down her white apron.
It came to him that he had never really looked at her. Never seen her for what she was. He had looked at his father, particularly of late, and seen him slowly, almost imperceptibly, change. Change from being just a father to being also a friend; a respected, older and sometimes stern friend admittedly, but a friend nonetheless. Vaguely he could understand how such a thing could come about. His mother, though, was his mother. It was beyond him to imagine her as anything else. She couldn’t ever be just a friend. It wasn’t possible.
Perhaps it was a father and son thing. Perhaps mothers and daughters too became friends while fathers and daughters stayed always fathers and daughters.
The thought brought Marna, unbidden, to his mind, and as he watched his mother he felt guilty about the richness of his own good fortune. Marna had only her gentle, easy-going father, perhaps neither friend nor support to her. Was that why she was so strong, so belligerently independent? And one day he would have this farm, but what would she have? As far as he knew she had little, if any, of her father’s skill at the weaving, and it would be a rare one indeed that would take her on as a wife.
And yet she was a very whole, solid person, and she loved her father, and he her. You only had to see them together to realize that.
‘You’re not eating.’ His mother’s voice ended the voyage he had set forth on before he wandered into territories beyond charting. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Sorry. I was daydreaming.’
Better a confession to a lesser crime than to try to explain that he did not want to eat, could hardly eat, while his secret knowledge of the creature lay so heavy inside him.
Better, too, to force the food down with affected enthusiasm than to risk further inquiry.
‘I’m going down to Gryss’s,’ he said, rising to his feet the instant he had finished his first plate. ‘They might want some help with the arrangements.’
His mother looked at him enigmatically, but said nothing.
As he fastened his cape about him he returned her gaze. Suddenly he wanted to reach out and embrace her and say, ‘Thank you, mother. Thank you for everything. Thank you for my whole life and for being what you are.’ But instead he shrugged awkwardly and gave her his usual clumsy kiss on the forehead as he left.
Unusually she came to the kitchen door and watched him as he strode across the farmyard and clambered over the gate in preference to opening it. She watched him until he had disappeared from view.
Once out of sight of the farm, Farnor slowed. He was glad that his father had inadvertently given him this opportunity to be alone and to think. He was glad also to escape his mother’s perceptive eye; he would not have been able to keep his preoccupation from her for very long.