Derwyn pursed his lips. That thought had not oc-curred to him.
‘But when the boy’s safe, Marken suddenly senses confusion all around him. Their confusion, as much as his own. Confusion that he thinks might have been rumbling on perhaps even for years. And he’s got an inquiring mind, Derwyn. His every fibre would have wanted to stay here and learn about that boy. I don’t think he simply walked away. I think he was drawn away.’
‘They want to tell him something,’ Derwyn said, on an impulse.
Angwen nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, simply. ‘I think so. Marken, the boy, us, we’re all at the centre of this. They wouldn’t have let the boy in on some whim, would they? Nor chosen Marken to search him out, nor had him brought here. And, from what both Marken and the boy said, I think they may well have turned away his pursuers.’
She paused and continued looking at her hands. When she spoke again she was almost whispering. ‘Think, Derwyn. We live in harmony with them, but it’s they who are the stronger and the older, and we who are really the outsiders. They’ve little or no need of us. They respect us, perhaps, or they fulfil some ancient obliga-tion, who can say? But they aren’t as we are, and generally they leave us to our own destinies.’
Derwyn’s brow furrowed a little.
‘You know it’s so,’ Angwen replied. ‘Many’s a child wandered off to perish, and many’s an injured hunter bled to death, where a whisper from them would have found them.’
Derwyn grimaced. Angwen’s clarity of vision was sometimes difficult to deal with. ‘A cold respect,’ he could not help saying.
Angwen looked at him sadly. ‘But it is so,’ she said. ‘And how could it be otherwise? Either they interfere with our lives or they don’t. And if they did, what would we be then? Clinging parasites, useless and draining? Noisy pets? Either way, as captive as if we were bound in cages. Yet this time they did interfere. More than we’ve ever known.’ She nodded her head conclusively. ‘They have some need of this boy. This boy who isn’t even Valderen. And he in his turn needs us if he’s to survive here.’
‘And you think Marken will be told what’s to be done with him?’ Derwyn asked.
‘It’s logical, if nothing else,’ Angwen declared.
‘But if that were the case, they could’ve told him what he needed to know in the first place,’ Derwyn said, although he was reluctant to challenge the optimism in his wife’s words.
Angwen nodded again. ‘I doubt it’s that simple,’ she said, reflectively. ‘They aren’t as we are. Marken spoke of great confusion. Perhaps they don’t know what they want. Perhaps what they want is beyond our under-standing.’ She shrugged. ‘Perhaps it’s difficult for them to make themselves Heard, or perhaps Marken, or any Hearer for that matter, simply can’t understand fully what he’s Hearing…’ She stopped abruptly. ‘But that’s all conjecture and vagueness,’ she concluded, smiling and holding her hands out, palms upwards, with a small shrug of defeat. She raised an eyebrow. ‘What does the bold hunter’s intuition tell him?’
Derwyn smiled and raised his head in mock imita-tion of an animal testing the air. ‘My hunter’s instinct tells me that I’ve been dithering where I should’ve been thinking, and that, as usual, you’re probably right,’ he said. ‘There’s obviously something special about the boy. And, without a doubt, he’ll need us while he’s here. And who else but Marken could be the link to tell us what’s happening? I’ll be patient and await events.’ Then his smile faded abruptly and his expression became almost fearful. It was as if a black cloud had suddenly appeared in a bright summer sky, to obscure the sun and throw the land below into cold shadow.
‘What’s the matter?’ Angwen asked, her eyes abruptly anxious.
Derwyn forced a smile, but it merely served to ac-centuate his look of distress. ‘There’s a bad feeling in the air, Angwen. All around. Change coming. Change for us. Change for them. Darkness…’
Slowly, like Farnor before him, he wrapped his arms about himself protectively.
Chapter 4
Farnor slept restlessly, though it seemed to him that he scarcely slept at all, so many times did he start awake violently. Yet sleep he did, he knew, for when he slept, he dreamed, or, more correctly, he slipped from the torment of his waking thoughts into the torment of nightmare.
Awake, he played fitfully with all that had happened, seeking to arrange the events of the past weeks into some form of order, seeking some kind of pattern within which he could find his place, and thence decide what he must do next. But no such pattern emerged. Everything that had happened had seemingly been wild and arbitrary: the silent arrival of the creature, heralded only by a few slaughtered sheep; the unexpected arrival of Nilsson and his men, and the confusion with the tithe gathering that had enabled them to become established at the castle and to take control of the valley before their true character was known; and the mysterious trans-formation of Rannick from village misfit to…
To what?
To some kind of manic… chieftain?… possessed of powers that previously Farnor had heard of only as wild fancies in Yonas’s fireside tales where they were invariably possessed only by those beings who had walked out of the great burning from which all things had come, and who had moved about the world, shaping it through the ages until it had become as it now was. Beings who were now all long vanished.
For all the fever of his anguish, however, Farnor was too close to the soil, to the reality of the mysterious cycle of the growth and death of things, to squander his energies wildly denying what he knew to be true. The how and the why of Rannick’s transformation were questions which capered for the most part at the edge of his thoughts, dancing to the centre only rarely and being almost immediately dismissed from the whirling circle there, where lodged his overpowering desire to destroy Rannick. His dominant concerns were profoundly practical. What was the extent of Rannick’s power? How readily could it be used? How often? And at what cost? For surely nothing was ever truly without cost? There was a balance in all things.
And, most intriguing of all, for what, and how much, did Rannick rely on the creature? For it was the creature he had sent in pursuit when he had felt Farnor’s angry presence, not some battering wind or scorching fire.
And yet, mysteriously, the creature had failed.
Memories of the times when he had found himself at one with the creature returned, welling up inside him like vomit. They were not memories that he relished but he sensed that they were important. He had seen the terror in men’s faces, indeed he had felt – and lusted for – the terror in their hearts as they looked on it… him. And they had been fighting men at that; men used to wielding swords and axes to defend themselves against savage enemies. Yet they had fallen without resistance, like corn before the scythe.
But still, he, Farnor, fleeing in panic, had escaped the creature, though he was sure it had been only a few paces behind him at the end. When he solved that mystery he would have the makings of a weapon which he could wield against both Rannick and the creature, he was sure. For even though he had no measure of his own strange abilities, nor any conscious control over them, he knew that Rannick understood – and feared – them.
Not that this conclusion was reached so straightfor-wardly. It emerged and retreated repeatedly, like a wild animal preparing to cross open ground. Looking, listening, testing the air, waiting for those silent inner voices that would urge it forward, then vanishing again into the tangled undergrowth of childish terror and frenzied blood-red hatred, of despair and grim determi-nation, that seemed to have possession of Farnor’s soul.