‘This is not easy, Far-nor.’ The reply formed in his mind. ‘Your ignorance is profound.’
‘Whoever spoke to me at the lodge said that igno-rance is a curable condition,’ Farnor replied. ‘But I can’t be cured if no one will speak to me.’
‘We are afraid of you, Far-nor. You are indeed an outsider.’ The word was loaded with many shades of meaning. ‘And you do indeed possess great power. Much more is hidden about you than is seen.’
Farnor winced away from the stark honesty in the voice, then he snatched at a chance. ‘You sound – feel – like the one who spoke to me at the lodge. How are you here? And why do you say, we, all the time?’
Bewilderment flowed into his mind.
‘We don’t understand,’ came the reply, eventually. ‘What is, we?’
Farnor put his hand to his forehead. ‘We… all of us…’ he managed, after some thought. ‘As opposed to, I… me, on my own.’
More bewilderment followed this revelation. He sensed ‘I’ and ‘we’ tossing back and forth, in a distant debate.
‘We can say I, if we causes offence,’ the voice said, with a hint of apology about it.
Farnor frowned. ‘There’s no offence,’ he said. ‘I’m just puzzled. You say “we” when there’s only you actually talking to me. Whoever you are.’ He thought about the trees surrounding his tent and corrected himself. ‘Whichever you are. Just you on your own. I presume you’re speaking on behalf of the others. A spokestree, I suppose. Why don’t you say, I?’
It occurred to him abruptly, that perhaps he was being rude. The trees were, after all, presumably speaking a foreign language. He reverted to his other question.
‘And why do you sound like the one who spoke to me at Derwyn’s lodge?’ he asked. ‘That’s a long way away now.’
‘We… I… don’t understand,’ the voice replied, patently confused.
Farnor grimaced. Foreign was foreign, but this was verging on stupidity.
He formed his words very slowly and, still with his eyes closed, made pointing gestures in the darkness of his tent. ‘You – were – there.’ Point. ‘Now – you – are – here.’ Point. ‘But – you – cannot – move. How – is – this?’
‘You don’t have to be patronizing,’ a rush of injured voices swept into Farnor’s mind. ‘I’m doing our best.’
‘We! We!’ corrected an anxious chorus of voices that made Farnor start.
‘We’re doing my best,’ the lone voice conceded.
Just as bewilderment had flowed into his mind, so now came a headache and his thoughts began to fill with images of dry, cracking, dead wood. Then he was drawn – or he drew himself – from one place to another, and the images became sap-filled and vibrant.
And as he moved, so his headache passed.
The bewilderment that followed this was quite defi-nitely his own now!
‘What’s happening?’ he demanded. ‘What was that?’
The voice seemed to have recovered its composure. ‘You are not as we are, Far-nor,’ it said. ‘But you move in our worlds. You touch us, and I touch you, without knowing. And there is much confusion and difficulty.’
‘What are your worlds? Where are they? And how are you here when you are there, several days to the south?’ Farnor persisted, pointing into the darkness again.
‘Our worlds are where you are now, Mover. I do not understand here and there. They are perhaps in the world of our…’ The word sounded to Farnor like roots, but it could have been trunks, branches, leaves, almost anything to do with a tree, and around it were intona-tions that filled his mind with a myriad interwoven images of joining and bonding, of infinite dividing and coming together, of yearning to the light, and feeding in the warm, damp darkness; and of home; yes, there was no debating that image. And too, there was a feeling of both wholeness and separateness, simultaneously known, and linked to a strange sense of direction that was neither up nor down nor sideways, but which made Farnor feel dizzily insecure, as though he were looking down from some great height or over some great panorama.
But, above all, there was throughout, a celebration in the word that had been formed; a celebration that was at once sensuous, ascetic, reasoning, and intuitive. Farnor turned away from it. It was too complex. And there was a joy in it that tore at him profoundly.
The images vanished as swiftly as they had ap-peared.
‘It isn’t there then, this here and there?’ the voice said, almost incongruous after the breathtaking grandeur of the vision that it had just shown Farnor.
‘Yes, I think it might be, actually,’ Farnor replied.
‘Aah!’ Many voices formed the sigh of realization. Somewhere he Heard ‘here’ and ‘there’ being bandied about, as ‘I’ and ‘we’ had. And was that laughter he could Hear?
Despite the darkness, Farnor put his hands over his eyes as he pondered what he had just experienced. He was conscious of a discussion still going on at the edge of his awareness.
‘We understand,’ the voice said, eventually. ‘I think. But it isn’t easy. Movers have always presented us with a problem. It is difficult to talk to most Hearers.’
Farnor waited. And, seemingly from nowhere, a question came to him.
He asked it. ‘Are you one or are you many?’
There was a long silence. Then came the answer. ‘Yes.’
Farnor sighed. ‘Yes, what?’ he demanded impa-tiently. ‘Are you one or are you many?’
‘Yes,’ came the reply, immediately this time. ‘Of course we are one, and I am many.’
Farnor grimaced in frustration, then turned over and pushed his face into the rolled blanket that was serving as a pillow.
There was some disappointment in the voice when it spoke again. ‘I see that you must be one, now, wander-ing the by-ways of your own world until the light returns. It is our way to respect such things, I shall withdraw.’
Rather than responding, Farnor found himself cling-ing to the last word as it began to fade away. It grew softer and softer but never seemed to disappear completely. Around it were wrapped the farewells of many friends. Farnor thought that he was still listening to its distant, restful waning as it gradually began to transform itself into the din of the dawn chorus.
The terrain was such that Farnor could not make the rapid progress that he would have wished. Nevertheless, he moved northwards steadily, using both the stars and his lodespur, sometimes riding, sometimes walking. He could not know it, but the step that carried him relentlessly towards his goal was that which had patiently carried his father, and generations of Yar-rances before him, up and down the land at the head of the valley, moving sheep and cattle, sowing and harvesting crops, mending, tending, painstakingly measuring out a lifetime’s endeavour; it was like a ringing, resonant echo through time.
He made no attempt to mark his trail for, despite the richness of the variety of the Forest, there were too many things that were too similar and too few places where he could scan a broad panorama and select some feature to serve as a beacon. Instead, he placed a dull faith in the knowledge that as he now moved north-wards to an unknown destination at the behest of others, so, in due course, he would return southwards, and his own will would carry him inexorably back home.
Such obstacles as he encountered, therefore, he greeted predominantly with anger; anything that stood in the way of his ultimate destiny could expect nothing else. At first he tried to enlist the help of the trees in finding a suitable route, but though they made obvious efforts to help him they still seemed to have little or no understanding of such matters as place and distance, and even less understanding of the problems he was experiencing.
In the end, those obstacles that could not be walked over or hacked through, had simply to be walked around. Even a wide, tumbling river that crossed his path received little more than a curled lip and a fatalistic scowl as he wandered its bank looking for a suitable place to cross. Yet the bridge that he eventually found evoked no prayer of thanks, not even to good fortune. This was, after all, hardly an uninhabited land, was it? He had crossed many well-beaten tracks confirming that, and had even been able to follow some of them for part of the way. That a river should be well bridged thus brought no surprise.