In the lonely darkness, Rannick communed. ‘This one, above all, must be ours. This one, above all, will be ours.’
He laughed.
‘So easy, my friend. So easy.’
Gryss was standing at the door of his cottage when Farnor arrived the following morning. It was a fine sunny day, but clouds were beginning to move slowly overhead and there was a slight edge in the air that betokened rain later. Gryss was staring at the yellow spring flowers growing in profusion on an embankment nearby.
‘Have you ever looked at those?’ he asked as Farnor approached.
Farnor gave the flowers a cursory glance. ‘Sun’s eyes,’ he said, off-handedly.
‘Indeed,’ Gryss acknowledged. ‘But have you ever looked at them?’
‘Of course,’ Farnor replied, puzzled. ‘Many times. You can’t miss them at this time of year, can you?’
Gryss smiled. ‘How many petals do the flowers have, Farnor? What shape are the leaves? Is there one stem or many, divided? Why do they grow there and not there?’ He pointed to a bare area. ‘What kind of insects visit them? And why some and not others?’
Farnor waved his arms and spluttered vaguely in the face of this gentle barrage, but offered no coherent reply apart from reaffirming a few times that they were sun’s eyes, weren’t they?
‘Not looked at them as much as you’d thought, have you?’ Gryss said, grinning now. ‘Try it one day. You won’t regret it, I promise you.’
Farnor shuffled his feet. ‘You said you had some jobs for me,’ he said, in an attempt to forestall any further embarrassing interrogation.
Gryss’s face became serious. ‘I told you to come here because we need to talk about Rannick and this… Captain Nilsson and his slaughtered horse, don’t we?’
Farnor turned away from Gryss’s scrutiny. ‘I sup-pose so,’ he muttered, almost sulkily.
‘You know so,’ Gryss said, sternly. ‘From now on, let’s you and me see and say things the way they are, eh? Then we’ll know where we are.’
‘Where are we, then?’ Farnor asked abruptly, some-what to his own surprise.
‘I don’t know,’ Gryss replied, ignoring the sharpness of the question. ‘But wherever it is I’m involved because, for my sins, I’m the senior elder, and you’re involved because you’re involved. All I know for sure at the moment is that we both need someone to talk to freely, directly; someone to trust, to speak foolishness with and not be afraid.’
Farnor looked at him uncertainly. This was a Gryss he had never seen before. A man. An ordinary man. For an instant he felt the young man, no different from himself, bound and hedged about by the old man’s body.
‘I’ll trust your young judgement in this,’ Gryss con-tinued. ‘Will you trust mine?’
Part of Farnor wanted to turn and run. To fly across the fields and into the woods, and lie on the soft grass there, watching the sun flickering through the leaves overhead while he wove his familiar tales of heroism and glory.
But even as the thoughts formed, they palled. A different light had been shone upon them from somewhere. Their colours had faded, their ringing resonance had become thin and weak. He found himself regretting the passing of something, but he was uncertain what.
‘Yes,’ he said after a moment.
‘Good,’ Gryss said. ‘Let’s walk to Rannick’s cottage and talk as we go.’
‘Why?’ Farnor asked.
Gryss gave him a reproachful glance. ‘You’d break our agreement so soon?’ he said.
‘Sorry,’ Farnor replied. He tried to make amends. ‘Rannick’s at the heart of this, isn’t he?’
Gryss laid a hand on his shoulder, and they set off towards Rannick’s cottage. ‘At the heart, or near it,’ he said. ‘There’s been some kind of encounter between Rannick and Nilsson’s men, and it’s badly disconcerted our Captain Gatherer in some way, if I’m any judge.’
Gryss’s surmise seemed reasonable, but Farnor did not know what to say, except, ‘If we don’t know what’s happened, what can we do? And should we bother? He did say nothing had happened that would affect us down here.’
An unsettling thought formed. ‘You don’t think that…’ He hesitated. Gryss inclined his head but did not speak.
They turned off the wide road that went through the village and began walking down the narrower one that led to Rannick’s cottage.
‘You don’t think that the tales about the caves are true?’ Farnor managed to say at last, though he could feel his face burning. ‘That there are ancient… monsters… asleep up there… just waiting?’
Gryss’s brow furrowed and he did not reply for some time. He returned a friendly greeting from a passer-by. ‘Reject nothing,’ he said, eventually. ‘Examine everything.’
Farnor looked at him. It still felt very strange, talk-ing to the old man like this. Almost like an equal.
‘Then you think…’ he began.
‘I don’t think anything,’ Gryss said firmly, turning to him. ‘At the moment, I’m just looking. How many petals, what shape leaves, how many stems? You understand?’
‘I think so,’ Farnor answered, adding after a mo-ment, ‘If I’m allowed to think, that is.’
Gryss laughed loudly and aimed an affectionate blow at Farnor’s head.
Then they were once again walking along the nar-row, overgrown pathway to Rannick’s cottage. It seemed wider than it had the night before, constrained as it had been then by the light from Gryss’s lantern. But the overgrown hedgerows on either side were more alive, full of mysterious movements and rustlings, and the brambles appeared to have taken on a new life in the sunlight.
Stepping over the fallen gate, they halted.
Gryss shook his head. The darkness had hidden much of the condition of the cottage. He looked at the torn and ragged thatch, and at the stained walls. All seemed worse than the night before, as did the boarded window and the rotten windows and door. ‘Such neglect,’ he said. ‘I’d no idea he’d let it get into this state, or I’d have had a word with him.’
‘He wouldn’t have listened,’ Farnor said.
‘Maybe,’ Gryss said. ‘But I’d have felt better about it, and perhaps a little less guilty now.’
‘Guilty! You?’ Farnor exclaimed in surprise. ‘What for? Rannick does what he wants. Always has, as long as I’ve known him, anyway. How could you have done anything about this?’
Gryss stopped him. ‘I feel what I feel, Farnor,’ he said. ‘Perhaps a word here, a word there, who knows?’
Farnor made a disparaging noise.
‘That’s a young man’s privilege,’ Gryss said. ‘Unfor-tunately, as you get older you realize that a small change at the beginning can have a profound effect on the conclusion.’
‘The empire was lost for want of a nail?’ Farnor said, recalling one of Yonas’s tales and seeing it now in a new light.
‘Exactly,’ Gryss said. ‘Let’s go inside.’
The inside of the cottage, like its outside, looked very different than on the previous night. The daylight coming through the windows heightened the gloomy corners and exposed more vividly the stained walls and floor. Though Farnor felt a wave of disgust at the general squalor of the place, he also felt unexpectedly sad at the sight of the faded furniture and the dusty ornaments with their lingering hints of homeliness and caring. He righted a small vase that had fallen over. It left its fallen image, dust free, on the shelf like a reproachful shadow.
Gryss watched him and nodded.
‘What do you feel?’ he asked.
Farnor shrugged. ‘Nothing much,’ he replied. ‘It’s very different from last night. For one thing it doesn’t have that captain hulking around in it. Perhaps it was him made the place feel strange. Him and the darkness.’
Gryss chuckled. ‘Let’s have a look round,’ he said.
‘Suppose he comes back?’ Farnor said, suddenly conscious of what they were doing. Doors were invariably open in the valley, but deliberately nosing around someone’s house was another matter.
‘I’ll have plenty to ask him, don’t worry,’ Gryss re-plied tartly, as he headed for the kitchen.
Farnor followed him about, growing progressively more uneasy.