Roger Taylor - Valderen

Yet these were but flitting dreams. In truth, he knew that there was nothing but the flight and the fear and the terrible rasping of his breath and the pounding of his heart. There had never been anything but the flight and fear, in all its gasping horror, nor would there ever be.

Then the darkness began to cling about him, tangi-ble and awful. A myriad cloying fingers catching at his legs, his arms, his whole body. But he must not stop. Even to falter would be to bring the creature down upon him, with its fearsome, rending jaws, and its terrible will, lusting to feast upon the fear that so filled him.

Yet the darkness would not be gainsaid. It tugged and snatched at him, relentlessly draining the strength from him, wrapping itself about him tighter and tighter like some great spider’s web.

Until finally he was powerless to move.

Utterly spent, he was held fast, swaying helplessly in the black emptiness.

Faint sounds drifted to him.

It was still there! Pursuing him!

He began to struggle. He would not die to this crea-ture – Rannick’s creature – like some bleating sheep.

No!

‘No!’

‘Father!’

The voice burst upon him, urgent and nearby. With it came shifting shadows within shadows. Something touched his face. He shied away from it violently and struggled to free himself.

‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’ An anxious female voice, speaking with a strange accent, washed over him and the darkness broke silently into countless shimmering lights. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right,’ the voice said again.

Farnor took in the gentleness of the voice even as the lights about him became bright, welcoming beams of warm sunlight, scattered by a wind-shaken canopy of branches and leaves.

The menace had gone!

Relief flooded through him.

But still he was bound!

With a panic-stricken cry, he began struggling again.

‘No, no!’ the woman’s voice protested. ‘You’re safe. No one’s going to hurt you.’ Then, apparently to someone else, ‘I don’t think he can understand me.’

Hands touched Farnor’s face, and the silhouette of a head intruded itself against the leafy background. ‘I said, you are safe,’ the head said loudly and with painstaking slowness. ‘Do not struggle. You have had a fall. You might be badly hurt.’

‘I doubt that, Edrien,’ came a man’s amused voice. ‘Not the way he’s wriggling. And I don’t think he’s deaf either, judging from the look on his face when you shouted at him.’

Though the nightmare horror of the creature and the chase had slipped away from him, much of Farnor’s fear returned. He was a captive, held by some strange-speaking people. Had he fallen into the hands of Nilsson’s men? Was he being carried back to the castle? He redoubled his struggling.

The head disappeared and another one replaced it. Farnor stopped briefly and screwed up his eyes to examine his captor, but the sunlight flickering through the leaves was too bright for him to distinguish any features.

‘Do you understand me, boy?’ the new head said quietly, but also with a strange accent.

‘I’m not a boy, sir,’ Farnor said, viciously polite, as an unexpected surge of anger ran through him, at this form of address.

Somewhere there was a soft chuckle. ‘I gather you do understand me, young man,’ the head said again.

‘Who are you?’ Farnor demanded. ‘Are you Nilsson’s men? Where are we? Where are you taking me…?’

The head shook and a waving hand appeared, seek-ing silence. ‘Calm yourself. No one means you any harm and we’ve all got a great many questions to ask. But for now, my name’s Derwyn, I’m Koyden-dae. I’m afraid I know of no peoples called Nilssons – a very peculiar name, I must say – but if the Nilssons are your kin then I’m sure we’ll help you to get back to them in due course, if we can.’

Farnor gaped.

‘Although I must admit, I wouldn’t know where to start looking,’ Derwyn continued. ‘Indeed, I’ve no idea how you came to be here. It’s all very strange.’ He became explanatory. ‘We were drawn out to look for something when our Hearer felt a great disturbance. And we found you. And your horse. That’s safe too, but you’ve been riding hard by the look of it. We…’

‘I can’t understand half of what you’re saying,’ Far-nor interrupted heatedly. He struggled against his bonds again. ‘But if you mean me no harm, then why am I trussed up like a Dalmas Day fowl?’

Derwyn’s brow furrowed. ‘I can’t say that I under-stand you particularly well, young man,’ he replied. ‘Your speech is a little strange. But we thought you were a faller, albeit only off your horse, and you might have been badly hurt. We bound you to this stretcher so that we could take you back to our Mender at the lodge without injuring you further.’

Despite his anxiety, Farnor felt the reassurance in Derwyn’s voice and, almost in spite of himself, he relaxed a little. ‘I’m not hurt,’ he said more quietly. But as if they had been waiting for the opportunity, the pains from his beating by Nilsson and his subsequent headlong flight through the forest returned to give him the lie. He stiffened and grimaced.

Derwyn nodded knowingly. ‘So I see,’ he said, with some irony. ‘Just lie still. We’ve not far to go to our lodge, now. Then our Mender can look at you properly and we’ll find out just how badly you’re not hurt.’

Farnor was inclined to dispute the matter further, but all the spirit seemed to leave him. His entire body was beginning to throb and his mind whirled with innumerable, half-formed questions.

‘Relax. Lie still,’ Derwyn said again, and his head disappeared from Farnor’s view. The soft command coincided exactly with the demands of Farnor’s body and it did as it was bidden. Almost immediately sleep began to creep over him, helped in no small degree by the gentle swaying of the stretcher and the sunlight above him, broken into countless dancing shards by the shaking leaves.

‘He’s asleep, Father,’ he heard the female voice say softly in the distance, but he could not muster the strength to deny it.

A dreamlike, twilight interval followed, as he drifted in and out of the sleep that he so desperately needed. He was aware of shimmering lights, then a dark coolness. Then warmth and sunlight again, with an open sky overhead. And many voices, speaking with that same strange accent. And hands, lifting him gently and laying him down, and searching about him, expertly, purpose-fully, for injury. He woke briefly to a deep silence and a momentary vision of an odd, cave-like room. Then there was darkness again, folding over him to take him away from his aching body.

And into this darkness came the other voices that he had heard before. The voices that were inside his head. The great family of voices. But whereas, in the past, they had been distant and faint, now they were clear and distinct, and he knew that they were speaking softly, as if for fear of disturbing him.

Some part of him told him that he should be fright-ened; that he was hearing voices where there were no people; that he had indeed fallen and injured his head – or worse, that he might even be going mad. But he had heard them before, and he could feel no real alarm, for the voices brought with them subtler meanings than those contained in the words alone. Many questions were being asked, and there was bewilderment, doubt, and even fear, but there was nothing that offered him any threat. Indeed, when he became the focus of debate, a sense of surprise and wonder dominated all responses.

‘He can Hear us even now.’

Again, wonder. And a realization that this was the truth.

‘It is strange. There’s never been such a one before.’