Farnor ft-1

by Roger Taylor

  Eventually the vigil ended and Gryss came in to them. He struck a sunstone to reveal them all blinking in its sudden light.

  ‘How is he?’ Yakob and Harlen asked together.

  Gryss motioned Harlen out of his favourite seat and sat down heavily, at the same time waving an apologetic hand for his discourtesy. He looked tired and grim.

  ‘How is he?’ Harlen asked again, softly, as if fearing the answer he might receive. ‘What did they do to him?’

  ‘He’ll be all right… I think,’ Gryss replied. There was a tremor in his voice, as if he wanted either to weep or to roar with anger. ‘There are bruises all over his body,’ he went on. ‘All shapes and sizes. His arm’s broken and two of his ribs. I won’t know what happened to his insides for a day or two, but there’s no sign of any damage there at the moment.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘They must have beaten him with fists and feet and sticks and… who knows what? Why, for pity’s sake? Why? All they had to do was send him back.’

  ‘They did it to frighten us. To show us they have the power to do whatever they want to us.’ It was Marna speaking. ‘And they did it because they like doing things like that,’ she added.

  The three men turned to her. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, girl,’ Yakob said, though his sternness was shot through with uncertainty.

  Marna glowered at him. ‘There’s nothing ridiculous about it,’ she burst out. ‘If they’d wanted to kill him, they’d have done it and left him out there, over the hill. No one here would ever have found him. They wanted…’

  ‘Can we speak to Jeorg?’ Harlen asked Gryss, loudly, at the same time raising his hand to end his daughter’s angry tirade before it took full flight. Yakob looked both indignant and relieved.

  ‘You can have a look at him,’ Gryss replied, ignoring the tension in the room. ‘But we mustn’t disturb him too much. He’s in a lot of pain and I’ve given him something to ease it and something that should be sending him to sleep soon. The more time he can put between now and being fully conscious again the better.’

  Jeorg was mumbling to himself as the four of them trooped cautiously into his room. Marna gasped in dismay. Jeorg’s eyes and mouth were puffed and swollen, while the rest of his face was scarred with bruises and deep, livid cuts.

  ‘Rings,’ Gryss said, proffering his clenched fist and answering the question before it was asked. ‘Heavy rings.’

  Yakob and Harlen shared Marna’s dismay and looked from Jeorg to Gryss and to each other. Already powerless to do anything to help their friend, they now suffered the further indignity of not even knowing what to say to one another.

  ‘He’s trying to speak,’ Yakob whispered, angling his head to catch meaning from the apparently incoherent noises that Jeorg was making. ‘Did he tell you anything before? What they did, or why they did it?’

  Gryss shook his head. ‘He’s been mumbling and muttering the whole time,’ he said. ‘Most of it’s been meaningless, although I did get the feeling he was trying to tell me something important. I doubt he’ll have anything to say now. A few more minutes and he’ll be fast asleep, and likely to remain that way until this time tomorrow.’

  Then, as if to give him the lie, Jeorg’s swollen eyes opened painfully and searched the room. For an instant they were full of fear then they fell on Gryss and the fear became relief. It was followed by a look of urgency. Jeorg’s hand slowly raised itself to reach out to the old man, and his cracked lips began to open.

  Gryss pushed Harlen to one side and moved to the bedside. He took the hand gently. ‘Lie quiet, Jeorg,’ he said softly. ‘It’s over. It’s all over. You’re back with your friends. You’re safe.’

  But the urgency did not leave Jeorg’s face and his hand clutched at Gryss’s sleeve, trying to pull him downwards. Gryss bent and brought his ear close to Jeorg’s mouth.

  Then Jeorg’s hand went limp, and Gryss straight-ened up.

  ‘What did he say?’ Yakob asked.

  Gryss shrugged his shoulders, and began fussily adjusting Jeorg’s pillows. ‘I couldn’t catch it,’ he said. ‘And he’s fast asleep now, so we’ll have to wait until he wakes tomorrow. See if he remembers what it was then.’ He turned to Yakob. ‘He can’t tell dream from reality at the moment, anyway,’ he said.

  But Marna caught his eye and he flashed her a swift and mute appeal. Say nothing. For she had seen his face when he was affecting to adjust Jeorg’s pillows; he had been struggling to compose his features.

  She had not heard Jeorg’s message, though.

  ‘It’s Rannick, Gryss. It’s Rannick. He’s leading them. He’s leading Nilsson’s men.’

  Chapter 28

  Later that night, Gryss sat drowsing in a chair by the side of Jeorg’s bed. He stirred and muttered something as a subdued knocking drifted into his vague dreams. It was followed by a low, dutiful bark from his dog.

  The knocking came again, followed this time by a more querulous bark. Gryss’s dreams wavered and began to slip back into the echoing inner darkness from whence they had come. His eyes opened uncertainly.

  The knocking was turning into a persistent tattoo, though it was still subdued and discreet. For a timeless moment, the sound mingling confusingly with the fading remnant of his dream, Gryss decided that Jeorg was trying to rise from his bed. The prospect brought him sharply to wakefulness. As both his vision and his mind cleared, however, he saw that Jeorg was still asleep and motionless.

  The knocking intruded again. It was coming from the front door and, though soft, it was quite relentless. Frowning, Gryss levered himself up out of the chair and stiffly made his way along the hallway.

  Well, he thought, whoever it was, at least they had wit enough not to go clanging the bell with a sick man in the house. His frown deepened at the thought even as he opened the door. Who knew there was a sick man in the house? Apart from…

  ‘Marna! What are you doing here at this time of night?’

  Marna ignored the welcome and stepped in, easing Gryss to one side. ‘What did he say? What did Jeorg say?’ she demanded, bluntly, at the same time reaching down to stroke the dog.

  Gryss’s frown turned to unhappy confusion as it invariably did whenever he had to deal with Marna in one of her ‘forthright’ moods.

  ‘Come in,’ he said, unnecessarily, as he closed the door.

  She looked at him impatiently. He motioned her towards the back room. ‘Answering your question about how he is, he’s still asleep,’ he said caustically. ‘As was I,’ he added darkly, endeavouring to regain a little authority. ‘And he’s no different now than he was when you left, whereas I am markedly more weary.’

  Marna coloured at the rebuke, but her demeanour remained unchanged. ‘What did he say?’ she insisted, though less stridently. ‘It upset you, I could tell that. And you lied to my father and Yakob about it.’

  A memory returned to Gryss of Farnor once com-plaining that Marna could ‘talk a hole in a stone’ the unrelenting way she would pester and badger to gain information when she was so inclined.

  ‘Sit down, Marna,’ he said, with increased firmness. ‘And tell me the reason for this urgency.’

  Marna did as she was told, folding her hands in her lap demurely. The action was entirely unconscious and the incongruity of it made Gryss smile.

  Marna scowled at him in response, and he raised a defensive hand before she spoke. ‘You reminded me of your mother for a moment,’ he said, then he waved the matter aside. ‘Tell me why you’ve come back to torment me with your curiosity tonight instead of waiting until tomorrow?’

  Marna looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just had to. I’ve got the feeling that all the time we do nothing, they…’ She hesitated, and flicked her hand roughly northwards. ‘… up there, will get stronger and stronger. They’ll be able to do anything they want to us. Turn us out of our houses, destroy our fields, turn us into slaves… anything. And we’ll be powerless.’

&nbs
p; Gryss could not keep the distress from his face. ‘That’s a stark vision, Marna,’ he said. ‘And nothing they’ve done so far indicates they’d want to do that. Don’t forget, for all our suspicions, they may still be King’s men.’

  Marna almost snarled a denunciation of this notion. ‘King’s men, my behind!’ she said, angrily. ‘Are all you men completely blind?’ She raised her clawed hands in front of her, her arms quivering with tension. It was an oddly male gesture. ‘Can’t you… feel… what they’re like? Can’t you sense what they’re up to? Do you have to wait for them to kick in your door and take your goods before you realize something’s wrong?’

  Despite himself, Gryss found his own temper begin-ning to flare in response to Marna’s rebukes. ‘I can feel lots of things I’m not happy about, Marna,’ he said heatedly. ‘And there’s plenty of things been happening of late that I can’t begin to understand. But unhappiness and not understanding don’t tell me what’s wrong, or what I should do.’

  Caught between Gryss’s logic and her own passions, Marna clenched her teeth and banged her heels on the floor. Almost as soon as it appeared, however, this childish outburst faded and Gryss found himself looking into the concerned and determined eyes of an adult.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I feel so helpless. It’s as if I’m the only one who can see what’s happening, and it’s all so… dangerous, so frightening. Couldn’t you see it, feel it, when they were at the green, walking slowly past you, with Jeorg hanging between Yakob and my father?’

  Just as her previous angry tone had stirred Gryss’s anger, so now her quieter and more compelling manner calmed him.

  ‘Perhaps I was too close to it,’ he said.

  There was a silence between them for a long mo-ment, then Gryss said, ‘They’d have killed me, Marna. Killed me with no more thought than treading on an ant. I looked into their eyes and I could tell that.’ He paused. ‘And I fear you’re right about both them and their intentions, though I don’t know how someone so young could have arrived at such a grim conclusion so quickly. They’re never King’s men, and the longer we do nothing about them the more they’ll gain power over us.’

  Marna looked at him, unblinking. Questions were bubbling through her head, but central to them was the one she knew she must have answered.

  ‘What did he say to you, Gryss?’ she asked again, very quietly.

  Gryss answered without hesitation. ‘He said that Rannick was in charge of Nilsson’s men.’

  Marna’s eyes widened in disbelief. ‘Rannick?’ she exclaimed. But she did not cry out, ‘Impossible!’ as he had half expected. Instead she said, ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s all he said. “Rannick’s leading Nilsson’s men.” His voice was weak, but he was quite clear. I didn’t mishear him.’

  Marna stared at him. ‘You’ve been afraid of this all the time, haven’t you?’ she said.

  It seemed to Gryss that with this simple statement Marna had picked him up and shaken him violently. He felt his breathing become shallow and frequent, and his heart begin to thump.

  ‘Yes,’ he heard himself saying breathlessly. He stood up. ‘Yes. But how in Murral’s name did you know when I didn’t even know myself?’

  Marna, alarmed at this almost explosive change in her involuntary host, shrugged helplessly. ‘Patterns, shapes, bits and pieces…’ she said, wriggling awk-wardly in her chair.

  But Gryss was not listening. He found himself teeter-ing between waking nightmare and reality. He sat down again, abruptly, and put his head in his hands as he struggled to bring his rioting thoughts into some semblance of order.

  ‘Rannick’s tainted line is at the heart of this,’ he said, mainly to himself. ‘It wasn’t someone that Nilsson brought with him. It was someone here. It makes sense.’ Images came and went – Rannick and Farnor meeting by the slaughtered sheep – Rannick disappearing and then reappearing. Still the memory of his meeting with him refused to become clear. And the creature. What part did it play in all this? And the terrible fate of the men who had tried to go through the northern part of the valley, the fate that Farnor had indirectly witnessed?

  Questions teemed through his efforts to clarify his thoughts. What was the creature? Where had it come from? Were the stories about the caves true? Who and what were Nilsson and his men, and from what distant land did they come? And why? And what was the true nature of the power that ran through Rannick’s ancestry like a diseased tap root? And had some part of it branched off to infect Farnor? If infection was the right word for the lad’s strange, seemingly harmless ability.

  For an instant he had a vision of uncountable tiny causes and effects stretching back through time, each linked and interlinked, each affecting the other. He shook his head in rejection; it was too complex and, more to the point, it was of no value. Then, like a low rumbling deep beneath the earth, the thought occurred to him that he, and all the others in the valley, were but minor pieces in a game played by some greater, unknowable power. This, too, he rejected because it was of no value, but rejection proved much harder than he would have thought. There were many unknown powers in the world, why not one such? He remembered reproaching Farnor for his ignorance of the simple yellow flowers that grew outside his cottage, but then how much did he know about them? Or, by implication, about the power that lay within all living things?

  He swore inwardly. These notions were but distrac-tions. Whatever the ultimate cause, if any, of these events, the effect was with him and the rest of the valley now, and that was the problem that had to be dealt with.

  ‘It’s a coincidence,’ he said to the now-bewildered Marna.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said as this single, detached statement appeared in front of her like part of a monologue. ‘What’s a coincidence? What’re you talking about?’

  Gryss stared at her. ‘Nilsson’s being here,’ he said, his voice matter of fact. And, as if he had been explain-ing all the time, he went on, his tone becoming increasingly revelatory, ‘Rannick touched the creature, perhaps like Farnor did, but differently.’ He curled his lip almost into a sneer. ‘Probably because of his naturally curdled instincts. And now he’s controlling it in some way. Or it him. Then along comes Nilsson and his men, just by chance, by coincidence, and Rannick sees an opportunity.’ His face became thoughtful. ‘His powers… whatever they are… must have grown tremendously if he’s now apparently controlling not only the creature but also Nilsson’s men.’

  Only fleetingly did it occur to Marna that the old man was rambling. What dominated her response was the fact that, whatever the truth of Gryss’s conjectures, the sense of evil that pervaded them chimed with her own feelings.

  Thus, instead of debating or disputing, when he had finished, she merely asked, ‘What would Rannick want? And what can we do about it?’

  Gryss had arrived at the same questions, though he too had no answers. ‘What did Rannick ever want?’ he asked. ‘Always something he didn’t have. And he compounded his folly by despising whatever he did have. If the family’s trait has been writ large in a personality like that I shudder to think where it’ll end.’

  Marna did not seem inclined to disagree. ‘What shall we do?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Gryss said.

  He pulled a wry face. ‘Perhaps I’ve got it all wrong,’ he said, with an airy wave of his arms. ‘It’s been a bad few days: the business at the castle, Farnor, Jeorg. I’m tired. Perhaps I did mishear him, or misunderstood him. It’s all very… wild.’

  Marna shook her head. ‘You heard clearly enough,’ she said, starkly. ‘And he repeated himself. I saw that much myself. And however wild your ideas, they’re no wilder than what’s been happening to Farnor, and what happened to you and him at the castle, are they?’

  Gryss’s attempted escape into elderly folly collapsed.

  ‘We must do something,’ Marna insisted.

  Gryss remembered again the ring of swords that had suddenly appeared as he tried to release
Jeorg, and once again Katrin’s words returned to him, though this time they were like a taunt. ‘Fighting men… stabbing and killing… none could stand against them and hope to live.’

  ‘We can’t do anything,’ he said. ‘Not against those swords… those men. And not against Rannick if he truly has the power he seems to have.’

  ‘We must do something,’ Marna repeated, angrily. ‘We know what’s happening. We can’t sit idly by and let them slowly take command of the whole valley.’

  Gryss felt old again. He wanted to lash out and drive this damned girl away. He wasn’t stupid. Whatever happened, he had wit enough to survive. All he needed to do was avoid offending anyone, keep himself inconspicuous, do as he was told. That would be easy enough. And who would want anything from an old man with nothing other than a crooked cottage and a small plot of land? No matter what comings and goings there were through the village, he could live out his life safely and quietly. After all, what more could he ask for? Besides, how much longer did he have?

  Then he felt a hand laid softly on his arm. He raised his head.

  ‘Please,’ Marna said simply.

  Once again, Marna destroyed his escape as, with this light and delicate touch, she shattered the taut and brittle structure of his thinking. The old may send the young to war, he recalled, but this one was girding herself to go on her own. This one not only had a longer life ahead of her, she had a keen measure of the value of what she already had and, seeing the threat to it, she would fight to protect it. This young one was dragging an old one to war. No, that was unfair. This one was asking for the only thing he could give her: his advice and experience. In return she would give him her strength and courage.