‘Yesterday,’ he said. Then he scouted carefully around the area. Rather than destroy any faint traces of spoor, the other hunters squatted down to wait for Badraig’s report. Within minutes he returned.
‘Four lads,’ he said. ‘One is very large and can only be Lennox. You were right, Caswallon; they passed me.’
The group pushed on into the mountains and, as the sun sank, Caswallon found the hollow Layne had chosen for their camp. The men gathered round.
Tomorrow should be easier going,” said Cambil, stretching his long legs in front of him and resting his back against the granite boulder. ‘The tracks will be easy to find.’ His strong fingers kneaded the muscles of his thigh, and he grunted as the pain flowed.
Leofas sank to the ground, his face grey, his eyes sunken. With great effort he slipped his pack from his shoulders and unrolled his blanket. Wrapping himself against the night chill, he fell asleep instantly.
Badraig took two huntsmen and began to scour the area. The moon was bright and three quarters full and the tracks left by the boys could be clearly seen. Badraig followed them halfway up the north slope of the hollow. Here he stopped.
Overlapping Lennox’s large footprint was another print twice as long. Badraig swore, the sound hissing between clenched teeth. Swiftly he returned to the men in the hollow.
‘The beast is hunting them,” he told Cambil. ‘We must move on.”
‘That might not be wise,’ the Hunt Lord replied. ‘We could miss vital signs in the darkness. Worse, we could stumble on the beast itself.’
‘I agree,’ said Caswallon. ‘How close behind them is it, Badraig?’
‘Hard to say. Several hours, perhaps less.’
‘Damn all druids!’ said Cambil, his broad face flushed and angry. ‘Damn them and their Gates.’
Caswallon said nothing. Wrapping himself in his blanket, he leaned back, closed his eyes. He thought of Gaelen and wondered if Fate could be so cruel as to save the boy on one day, only to have him brutally slain thereafter. He knew that it could. All life was chance.
But the Gates were a mystery he had never been able to fathom.
The elders had a story of a time just before Caswallon was born, when a leather-winged flying creature had appeared in the mountains, killing sheep and even calves. That had been slain by the then Hunt Lord, a strong proud man who sought to be the first High King since Earis. But the people had voted against him. Embittered, he had taken thirty of his followers and somehow found a way to cross the churning waters of Attafoss to the Island of Vallon. There he had overpowered the druids and led his men through the Forbidden Gate.
Twenty years later he returned alone, gravely wounded. Taliesen had asked for his death, but the Druid Council denied him and the
man was returned to the Farlain. No longer Hunt Lord, he would tell no man of his adventures, saying only that a terrible vision had been revealed to him.
Many thought him mad. They mocked him and the once-proud lord took it all, making his home in a mountain cave where he lived like a hermit. Caswallon had befriended him, but even with Caswallon the man would not speak of the world beyond the Druid’s Gate. But of the Gates themselves he spoke, and Caswallon had listened.
The feeling as you pass through,’ Oracle had told him, ‘is unlike any other experience life can offer. For a moment only you lose all sense of self, and experience a great calm. Then there is another moment of sense-numbing speed, and the mind is full of colours, all different, moving past and through you. Then the cold strikes marrow-deep and you are human again on the other side.’
‘But where did you go?’ Caswallon asked.
‘I cannot tell you.’
The wonder of it, Caswallon knew, was that Oracle had returned at all. There were many stories of people disappearing in the mountains, and even rare occasions when strange animals or birds appeared.
But Oracle was the only man he had heard of – save for Taliesen -to pass through and return. There were so many questions Oracle could have answered. So many mysteries he could lay to rest.