Roger Taylor - Valderen

‘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.

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.

And in between this waking confusion, he slept, sometimes tossing and turning, muttering and crying out incoherently, at other times lying motionless while his mind soared off into eerie dreamworlds where the terrors and the furies of his waking thoughts ran hideous riot.

Yet, unvarying throughout, there ran the simple thought that he must return to the valley. He must finish what he had set out to do. He must find Rannick and somehow kill him. No sense of ordered law coloured this thought, neither the far distant king’s, nor even the village council’s. His parents had been cut down at Rannick’s foul whim, and he was tied to that event inexorably. That the bonds were of his own making, he could not know. All he knew was that his every endeav-our must be dedicated to the destruction of the murderer of his mother and father. What might lie beyond that end was one torment that never came to him.

He was thus little rested when finally he awoke to see leaf-greened sunlight percolating through a carved grille covering the window and dimly lighting the room that Edrien had found for him. He jerked upright, gazing about him, alarmed. ‘Who’s there?’ he demanded of the silence about him.

There was no reply. And the room was quite empty. Yet for some time he could not shake off the feeling that he was being watched, or perhaps listened to.

Eventually, however, his aching body made itself felt, and the impression faded. Then a lifetime of early rising forced him out of bed. He looked about him as he dressed. The room was simply furnished, containing only the bed, a couple of chairs, and an odd circular table set with tiers of drawers, the like of which he had never seen before. And everything, he realized gradu-ally, seemed to be made of wood – even a bowl on the table, which at home would have been earthenware, was wood. He picked it up gently and examined it closely. At first he thought that it had been elaborately painted, but as he looked at it he saw that it was made out of many different-coloured pieces of wood, tightly jointed together in some manner that he could not discern. For the first time since his parents’ death he felt a distant stirring of wonder; pleasure even.

It shrivelled however, as soon as it touched the bale-ful thoughts that blew through his mind like biting winter winds. Its last residue faded as he ran his fingers lingeringly along the smooth rim of the bowl when he laid it down. The bowl became merely functional and unnecessarily ingenious. As did the wooden handles to the drawers in the circular table, and the peculiar hinges to the door.

His inspection was ended by a sharp knock on the door. As he moved to open it he noticed for the first time that a sword was hanging behind it. He was about to examine this unexpected find when a second, more impatient knock made him snatch open the door irritably.

Edrien bustled in. ‘Hello,’ she said cheerfully. ‘You’re up at last, then? I gather the dawn horns didn’t wake you. Bildar said I should leave you until you woke up on your own.’

Without waiting for a response, she walked across the room to the window, where she fiddled with something that Farnor could not quite see. Silently, the grille covering the window divided and the two halves swung apart to form decorative panels on either side of the window. Bright sunlight flooded the room.

Blinking, Farnor moved to the window. He ran a hand over one of the panels. There was a quality about the delicate carving that, for some reason, reminded him of the ring that hung outside Gryss’s cottage, but he was in no mood to pursue the idea. Then, very tenta-tively, he tapped the glass. ‘Well, at least something around here’s not made of wood,’ he said.