Roger Taylor - Farnor

It was not a happy thought. Such occurrences could bode ill in any negotiations that might ensue even though the gatherers could soon be assured that they would find neither ill-will nor resistance here.

Gryss passed a hand through his hair in an apparent and highly uncharacteristic attempt to smooth it down. It returned to its normal condition as he stepped forward to greet the lead rider.

The man, however, gave no sign of even having seen him, and his horse continued walking steadily forward. Gryss stepped aside when he saw that the horse was not going to stop, then took a pace back. The rest of the villagers did the same.

Slowly the line of riders walked past. Gryss kept his face locked into a welcoming smile, but it was not easy. The soldiers were not merely an unprepossessing sight; they had a hard, even brutal quality about them that was almost palpable. And it was difficult to say which was the more chilling: the stony indifference to the watching crowd that most of them exhibited, or the cold-eyed curiosity of the remaining few.

The villagers watched this parade with a bewilder-ment that gradually turned into a foot-shuffling unease, and there was silence for some time after the last rider had passed by.

It was Jeorg who broke it. ‘They treated us like so much cowshit!’ he declaimed angrily, but his voice faded as Gryss raised a hand for silence. He was at a loss. Of the many things he had envisaged happening since Farnor had told him of the approaching riders, being ignored was not among them. Surely if there was some special greeting ceremony for the gatherers they would have at least stopped and waited for it?

‘I don’t understand,’ he admitted. ‘I think we’d probably all better…’ He hesitated and shrugged, ‘… go back to our normal business and… await events.’

The silence of the passing troop seemed to have infected the watchers, and such conversations as were struck up were held almost in whispers as the villagers took Gryss’s advice and gradually dispersed. At Gryss’s signal, Farnor and a few others remained.

‘Not much heart for finishing the sunset watch, Farnor?’ Gryss asked, largely for want of something to say.

Farnor shook his head. ‘Not much need now, is there?’ he said, attempting to smile. But he could not keep his true feelings hidden. ‘I don’t know why I feel so upset…’ He paused, and Gryss saw his mood suddenly change. ‘No, not upset,’ he decided. ‘Angry. Ignoring us like that. They treated us as if we were less than cowshit. At least there’s a use for that. We were like… nothing… smoke in the wind… bubbles in a stream.’

‘Would you rather they’d rode in at the charge, sa-bres drawn?’ Gryss asked, with gentle mockery, glad to find himself recovering from the stultifying effect of the riders’ silent passage.

‘No, of course not,’ Farnor replied needlessly, though with some heat. ‘But they could have… stopped, or something. Acknowledged us in some way. Told us what they wanted, what we were supposed to do.’

‘I’ll confess it wasn’t what I expected, to be sure,’ Gryss said. ‘But in my experience being ignored by strangers, especially strangers who look like they did, is probably better than being noticed.’

Farnor pulled an unhappy face. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘They were…’ He hesitated, loath to form the words he was thinking for fear of scorn from the others. ‘Frightening,’ he conceded eventually. He wrapped his arms about himself and hunched his shoulders as if he were suddenly cold.

No scorn greeted the remark, however, for it chimed with the unspoken thoughts of too many of the others. ‘They’re only men,’ Gryss said flatly, after a long pause.

He turned to the others. ‘Still, we can’t leave it like this,’ he went on in a tone that implied he would very much prefer to. ‘We’ll have to find out what’s happen-ing.’ An idea came to him. ‘Perhaps they’ve gone straight to the tithe barn,’ he said, snapping his fingers. ‘Come on.’

It took the group only a short time to reach the foot of the slope that led to the barn. The sunstone was shining like a guiding star, but even without its light they could see that no riders were waiting for them outside the sealed doors.

Gryss scratched his head violently with both hands, making his grey thatch even more disorderly than normal. ‘We’d better go after them,’ he said in exaspera-tion. ‘They’re outsiders, after all. It could be they don’t even know where they are. They might think there’s another village further up the valley.’

‘Let’s wait for them to come back, then. It’ll be eas-ier on our legs,’ Jeorg said.

Gryss seemed half inclined to agree but he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That lot were hardly in the sweetest of moods, for whatever reason. They’ll be even sourer if they trail up to the castle and find they have to turn back. Besides, we shouldn’t respond to their bad manners with bad manners of our own.’

Progress through the village was slowed by large numbers of people coming the other way, people who had not been disturbed by the initial alarm but who had peered out of their windows simply to see, ‘Who that could be, riding at this time of the evening?’

By the time he had explained the tale some four times to different inquirers, Gryss’s temper was beginning to fray, and he delegated the task to Yakob, one of the other village elders.

It soon became apparent, however, that though the riders might have only been walking their horses, they were already beyond catching.

‘Well, I’m damned if I’m riding after them,’ Gryss said, stopping abruptly in the middle of the street and wiping his shining forehead. ‘They can go all the way to the Great Forest for all I care. We’ll take your advice and wait for them to come back, Jeorg.’

‘In the inn?’ Jeorg inquired, inclining his round head significantly towards the nearby establishment.

Gryss nodded solemnly, as one about to prescribe a special medicine. ‘Indeed,’ he said, lifting the morale of the crowd with a single word as befitted a leader.

Farnor took his arm as he began to lead the assault on the inn. ‘I think I’ll go home,’ he said. He was worried about that line of ill-favoured horsemen going past the farm with his father and mother alone there and unaware.

Gryss caught the uncertainty in his voice. ‘Probably the best thing,’ he said. ‘Tell your father what’s hap-pened. I’ll borrow a horse from the inn and come along myself later.’

Unhindered by the others, Farnor let his feet take up the pace of his concerns and as he reached the outskirts of the village he broke into a leisurely, long legged trot that he knew he could maintain for mile after mile.

Stars were beginning to appear in the darkening sky, though a moon was rising that would soon wash many of them aside.

Farnor had no eyes for the heavens, though. Away from the apparent security of the village his mind began to wander unrestrained through many dark avenues, fed by his vivid imagination and remnants of tales he had heard from Yonas.

All that was truly clear to him was the increasing certainty that, whatever the gatherers were doing, they boded no good and the sooner they were gone the better. He echoed Gryss’s relieved proclamation that he was glad the village had always collected the tithe. The prospect of greeting King’s men of such an ilk having failed to do so verged on the terrifying.

‘They’re only men,’ Gryss had said. The rational view, stated to dispel the primitive and ancient fear of strangers that is in all people.

But reason is the newcomer and less rooted in its ways, and the juxtaposition in his mind of the grim outsiders and the warm security of his home and parents made Farnor grimace despite himself.