Roger Taylor: Valderen

He held out a hand towards him. ‘Rannick, no,’ he shouted into the eerie stillness. ‘Come back. Nothing there belongs here. There’s only loneliness, pain and madness for you if you go on. Come back.’

He hesitated for a moment, then he cried out, ‘ I forgive you the death of my parents. ’

Rannick started violently and his hand clutched at the creature feverishly. ‘No!’ he cried, his face alive with horror. He began to sway unsteadily. The vision of the worlds beyond shifted and changed, and Farnor felt Rannick reaching out, moving further and further into those places beyond, gathering as never before that which might give him the power to protect himself from the fearful revelation he heard in Farnor’s words.

Farnor reached after him. Rannick’s doubts and pain filled him, as did his desires. ‘No, Rannick. I forgive you, truly. Come back.’ But even as he spoke, he knew that in reaching for him he was reaching out once more to make whole the rent that Rannick had torn in the fabric of this reality. For therein lay Rannick’s pain. And he knew too that Rannick had bound himself dreadfully to those places beyond.

Yet still there was hope.

‘No, Rannick!’ he cried out again, in desperation. ‘Come back! Let go! Let go! LET GO!’

Then there was silence.

Save for the lingering echo of Farnor’s final, plain-tive cry…

And the howl of the creature.

And when that was no more, Farnor, pain-racked, was alone in a damp, empty cave, dimly lit by Angwen’s tumbled lantern. Both Rannick and the creature were gone, and no sense of either lingered anywhere.

‘No,’ Farnor whispered faintly, over and over. ‘Let go. Let go.’

Then he wept.

Farnor was found the following day by a search party of villagers and Valderen. He was leaning against a rock at the entrance to the cave, exhausted and covered in blood. Apart from some bad bruising, however, he was unhurt.

There was all manner of speculation about what had happened to Rannick and the creature, but despite every entreaty Farnor would say nothing except, ‘They’re gone.’

Besides Farnor’s mysterious reappearance and the apparent destruction at his hand of Rannick and the creature, many other tales from that night went down into village and Valderen legend. Marna’s desperate leap through the burning gate to rescue the four strangers. Rannick’s screaming flight into the night. The death of Nilsson. And the strange and terrible fire that had consumed even the stonework of the castle until it had suddenly flickered out, as if it had never truly been there.

And too there was the appearance out of the woods of the Valderen and the four strangers escorting the remainder of Nilsson’s men to join those held by the villagers at the castle. Following the death of their leader at the hands of their new Lord, most of Nilsson’s men had thrown down their weapons, though a few had fled into the Forest. It proved to be a costly mistake for them however, as Angwen, quiet and graceful, had listened to Farnor and trusted him, and she and the other women were waiting, bows and vicious hunting arrows ready, for the sudden arrival of armed strangers. They killed all of them without mercy, as is the way with women when they choose to kill.

And they killed Rannick’s awful steed also, as, both masterless and riderless it careened, howling, through the Forest.

In due course, the survivors were given to the charge of a contingent of the king’s army which had eventually been drawn to the area by news of Rannick’s depredations in the surrounding countryside.

‘Others will be sent to take them, in time,’ Engir told the king’s commander. ‘We must return home as soon as possible.’

‘What did they do that you travelled so far and for so long to find them?’ Marna asked Aaren.

Aaren looked down at her hands. ‘Wearing a false livery, they rode into a quiet village one misty autumn morning and killed everyone they could find,’ she said without emotion. ‘Men – women – children. None were spared. Then they burned the houses.’

The stark flatness of the telling shook Marna more than any amount of passion could have.

‘Why?’ she asked, rather hoarsely, after a moment.

‘To start a war,’ Aaren replied, as flatly as before. ‘A civil war.’

‘Which you won, I presume,’ Marna retorted sav-agely, suddenly desperately angry at this coldness.

Aaren looked up sharply, but though she saw the torment in Marna’s face, she did not spare her. ‘You stood with us all amid the Valderen’s grief when the butchered remains of their dead were buried. You saw the terrible wounds that came out of the Forest. And you heard the screams of people maimed for ever. And there are injuries you can’t see.’ She fidgeted with her damaged finger, then tapped her head. ‘In here. Like the memory of the one you killed. He’ll never leave you, Marna.’ She seemed to relent a little. ‘And all this was barely a skirmish.’ She paused. ‘No one wins a war, Marna. Least of all a civil war. The more fortunate survive and grow a little wiser. But no one ever forgets. Not a day passes for as long as they live but some memory doesn’t come back to them.’

‘Why do you stay a soldier, then?’ Marna asked. She had not intended it, but again there was a hint of anger and reproach in her voice.

There was an equal note of annoyance in Aaren’s reply. ‘Because circumstances made me such. And just as it was right for me then, so it’s still right for me now.’ Marna could not tear her eyes away from Aaren’s bleak gaze. ‘There are evils in this world, Marna, and there are always people who choose to forget or ignore that, and then they need people like me and the others – with our particular skills – because of the inevitable conse-quences of that forgetting.’

Marna suddenly felt very ashamed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I won’t forget.’

Unexpectedly Aaren embraced her. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know. Circumstances have made you one of us, haven’t they?’

They talked a lot after that. And Marna thought a lot.

The Valderen and the villagers became cautious friends. As did the villagers and those people from other villages who had been brought there as captives. Indeed, after the kind tending of these unfortunates, the villagers did much to help the communities over the hill that had suffered from Rannick’s ambitions. It became much less… eccentric… for villagers to travel abroad.

While they remained in the village, Engir and his companions found themselves engaged in long discussions with Gryss and elders from the other villages, all anxious to make preparations to ensure that no such tragedy could befall them again. Derwyn, too, listened thoughtfully and sorrowfully, and made his own resolutions for the future.

Farnor, with the help of his neighbours, began to rebuild his farmhouse, and very soon part of it was fit to live in. Gryss and his other friends watched approvingly, but grieved a little at the sadness that now seemed to lie just below the surface of the young man.

One evening Aaren, Yehna, Levrik and Engir rode into the Yarrance farmyard, together with Marna. Farnor welcomed them warmly and, in his still rough-and-ready home, he entertained them as well as he could, recounting yet again his journey through the Great Forest and his encounter with the most ancient of the trees. The four exchanged significant glances when he talked of Uldaneth, but said nothing. Then they, in their turn, talked of their own land and their long journeyings.

A silence fell over the group. Farnor grinned sheep-ishly and was about to remark on it when Engir spoke. ‘We’re leaving tomorrow,’ he said. ‘The Valderen are going to allow us through the Forest. It’ll save us a great deal of time, and there’s much we both need to learn from one another.’ Then, ‘Marna’s coming with us.’