And so gentle was his tone that many were deceived and gazed at him as children do at a kindly old man who gives them honey-cakes when they expected blows from his white stick. But others, who knew more, nudged each other and set themselves to wait for what would happen.
‘I do not fear you,’ said Garroch, his pulses pounding and his inner heart thrusting at him to be away, to run, and run, and run, into the sunset, anywhere, as long as it was not this awful place with these strangers about him, closing him in, making him a little man, not the Old Man any more . . .
‘Come here,’ said the blind man, reaching out his thin hands from his horse. ‘Come here, my son. Let there be no fear between us.’
Garroch found himself walking towards the black horse, as though a great wind were pushing at
