‘Are you all right?’ Farnor asked again, still shaking him.
Gryss yanked his arm free. ‘I will be when you stop pulling my arm off,’ he said testily. But his face was both pale and covered with perspiration, and belied the vigour of this rebuke. ‘Help me up,’ he demanded, trying to lever himself on to one elbow. He was breathing heavily.
‘In a moment,’ Farnor said, putting his left arm around Gryss’s shoulders. ‘Just rest a little. You look awful.’
Gryss’s lip curled. It was almost a sneer, and an expression that Farnor had never seen before on the old man’s face.
‘Thank you, Farnor,’ Gryss said, his tone matching his look. ‘You obviously have a natural healer’s flare for building confidence in a patient. Now get me up, and let’s get away from here before anything else happens.’
But for all his protestations, he lay back on the ground again and made no effort to help himself for some time. When, finally, he did so, it proved no easy task to get him to his feet. He was having difficulty in breathing and Farnor had no feeling in his right arm other than pain, which seemed now to be affecting every part of his body; and both of them were shaking with the shock of the terrifying encounter.
‘Where’s the horse?’ Gryss asked as they began to move hesitantly away from the castle.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Farnor replied. ‘It ran off when the gate slammed shut.’ He shook his head. ‘I was half inclined to join it. What happened in there?’
Gryss halted and patted his chest with a clenched fist. Farnor kept his left arm about the old man until, at last, he began to straighten up, and to breathe a little more easily.
‘I don’t know, Farnor,’ he said, without looking at him. ‘But I do know that I’m too old for this kind of activity.’ He patted his chest again, and coughed painfully.
Gently he shook Farnor’s arm from his shoulders and looked around vaguely. ‘The horse has probably gone back to the inn.’
‘That’ll cause a stir,’ Farnor said. ‘There’ll be all sorts of questions. What are we going to say happened?’
Gryss frowned. ‘We’ll have to lie, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘I can say I was coming to see your father and some-thing… a fox, maybe… startled the horse, and it bolted and threw me.’
Farnor looked at him unhappily. ‘I can’t lie to my parents any more,’ he said. ‘Keeping this business about the creature from them is bad enough. It makes me feel… uncomfortable… and my mother knows some-thing’s the matter apart from any worries about whether Nilsson’s men are gatherers or not.’ He grimaced violently and held his right arm tightly. It was growing increasingly painful and he thought he could feel bones moving about under his hand. With an effort he tried to continue talking. ‘And staggering in with you half dead…’
But the pain was too much and had Gryss not al-ready taken hold of him he would have stumbled.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ the old man said, the tone of his voice echoing the desperate apology in his words. Quickly he led Farnor to the edge of the road and, sitting him down on a grassy bank, began to take off his jacket.
Now it was the young man who was pale and per-spiring.
‘I was so busy with my own concerns,’ Gryss said as he gingerly worked Farnor’s jacket off his arm, ‘I forgot what you did in there.’ Self-reproach filled his face as he rolled up Farnor’s shirt sleeve to examine the injured arm, but he set his emotions aside and became purpose-ful. ‘Move your fingers,’ he said, gently.
After a few minutes of probing and manipulation, during which Farnor simply did as he was told, wincing freely as need arose, Gryss rolled down the sleeve again and draped Farnor’s jacket about his shoulders.
‘There’s nothing broken, fortunately,’ he said. ‘But it’s badly bruised and some of your muscles have been damaged. It’ll be very sore for a while. You’ll need to rest it. Then it’ll be just plain sore for a long time.’ His face lightened and he managed a smile. ‘And the colours will be something to behold.’ He took Farnor’s right hand and folded it across his body. ‘Just hold it there for now, as relaxed as you can. I’ll make a sling out of something when we get to your father’s.’
Farnor confined himself to nodding, some reflex from childhood always making him behave thus in the presence of Gryss the healer.
He found that his legs were rather uncertain as Gryss helped him to his feet, but the pain was easier if only for the assurance that no bones had been broken.
They set off down the road at an elderly man’s pace.
‘You saved my life in there,’ Gryss said when they had walked some way. ‘I don’t know what to say. Thank you seems woefully inadequate. I’ve never been so frightened in all my life.’
Farnor in his turn did not know what to say by way of reply. ‘What happened?’ he asked again.
‘I can’t remember properly,’ Gryss said. ‘I looked inside and saw no one about, then I went in and… something… hit me. Threw me into the gate.’ His brow furrowed. ‘I think I managed to turn round. I recall banging on the gate and shouting, but everything seemed to be sucked up into the noise and thrown back to mock me. It was as if half a dozen winter blizzards were clamouring at my back. And the force…’ he went on, as if he still could not believe what he had felt. ‘So powerful…’ He turned to Farnor. ‘Then it eased. It felt almost as if it had been driven back by something. Like a fierce animal retreating before something even fiercer. And then you came tumbling in through the wicket and dragged me out.’
He looked at Farnor intently. ‘What did you hear, on the outside?’
‘The same,’ Farnor replied. ‘A tremendous noise. But there was something else as well. I called out to you before you went in. I had this feeling that something in the courtyard was both… here and… somewhere else at the same time. I can’t explain. And it was as if something awful was coming from that somewhere else. Bringing all the harm.’ He shook his head, and nursed his arm once again.
Gryss blew out his cheeks. He felt useless, and it was not a feeling he cared for. Things were happening that were far beyond anything he had ever experienced. Not even in any of Yonas’s tales had he heard of anything so strange. He glanced covertly at Farnor. Something in the courtyard from somewhere else? What was the lad talking about? He would have liked to have laughed understandingly and dismissed him as being over-imaginative, or shocked, or deranged even, but the sound and the furious power of the wind that had seized him and pinned him helpless against the castle gate were still with him and all too real. He had no doubts about the threat that he had experienced.
And there was something else too, something he did not want to think about.
Then, as if by their very intensity his wishes could make themselves come to pass, he found his mind filling with an almost desperate longing for everything to be as it was before Nilsson and his troop had arrived. That was a world which he understood completely. Nothing could happen there which he could not turn his mind to and solve eventually. But now…
He began to feel utterly wretched, and it was only with a great effort that he kept any sign of this inner turmoil from his face. Sternly he reminded himself that, whatever was happening, the young man next to him had been injured in saving his life and that, despite his youth and through no fault of his own, he found himself near to the centre of this mystery. However impotent he, the village elder, felt, Farnor felt no less and needed all the support that could be given.
But what support could he offer? There wasn’t even anyone he could turn to for advice.
You’ve sat helpless by enough death beds in your time, just be here for him, came a grim reply from within as he felt the waves of despair about to break over him again. It mightn’t be much but it’s all you’ve got.
‘What are we going to tell my father?’
Farnor’s reversion to his original concerns brought Gryss sharply out of his inner debate.