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By Root 601 0

of his horse half whilst at the same time the cold turned his skin a pale blue colour. A matted mane hung down his back, mingling with the mud of the stream bed. One of his legs was very obviously broken.

After the initial shock had worn off, they were nonplussed as to what they should do. Jack felt around for some signs of life.

‘Where do you look for a pulse in a centaur? I’ve tried in the wrist and there's maybe something but I can't be sure.'

‘Try the jugular,' suggested David.

‘I have - doesn't seem to be one.'

‘Wait a minute. Here we are.' David was feeling around the leg and had finally detected a fluttering pulse. 'He's alive.!'

‘I think we ought to get him out of the water and cover him up, or he won't be alive for long.'

‘Are you sure we should move him? I mean, with that leg broken and everything?'

‘It’ll kill him if we don't. Come on, you take the front end and I'll push at the back.'

They struggled to little effect for a couple of minutes until, finally the centaur began to slide over the mud. Once he was moving, they managed to slide him a few inches away from the stream. His flank was still partially immersed, but his human part, which they assumed was the most important segment, was out of the water. Jack took a towel from his rucksack and shoved it under the torso, then he pulled a sweater over the centaur's head.

‘We’ll have to get some help. There's nothing we can do by ourselves.’

‘But, Jack, what are we going to say to someone? "Hi there, we’ve found a centaur, will you help us?" They'll help us all right - into a little white van.'

‘Well, if we find a doctor and just tell him that there's a rider who’s had an accident.'

‘Yeah, okay. One of us will have to stay up here. You go back down to Llanfer Ceiriog and try to phone from the pub. I’ll make some soup up and try to keep him warm.'

‘Right, I'll try and be as quick as I can.'

'I couldn't believe it! I mean, bam! He just shot his gun like that. Bam!'

'All right, Ace, ' the Doctor said soothingly. 'Calm down and start at the beginning.'

Ace took a deep breath and told the Doctor about her trip into the next valley. As she approached the point where the man had fired his gun, she became more and more excited.

'So anyway, I could see that he was about to shoot so I dropped, right, but at the last moment he turned the gun upwards and fired into the air. Then he just poked me with the gun told me to get off his land.'

'That sounds like Emrys, all right,' commented Hugh.

The Doctor turned to him questioningly. 'Emrys?' he asked.

'Emrys Hughes,' Hugh said. 'Him and his family have lived in that valley for the last hundred and fifty years. They won’t have anyone trespassing. His old da was up before the magistrate for giving a walker a backside full of shot not long before ‘e died. Nothing ever came of it, of course. They've got a lot of influence, that bunch. They're an odd lot, an' no mistake.

'What was that about a village?' the Doctor suddenly asked irrelevantly.

'Oh, yeah, right. There was sort of like a load of old ruins. Maybe it was just a farm or something.

There was an old well there too.'

'That'll be Dinorben,' Janet said.

'Dinorben?' Ace asked. The Doctor raised an eyebrow in surprise.

'Dinorben,' Janet repeated. 'I've got something about it in one of my books. Though, of course, the real person to ask is Leah down in the village. She's the expert on all things local, past and present.' She scanned the bookshelves and finally traced the slim pamphlet she was looking for.

'Why're you interested in the village, Doctor?' Hugh asked

'Oh, I'm interested in everything. Follow every clue, climb every mountain, ford every stream ... '

Ace recognized the telltale signs of the Doctor attempting to conceal something, but as yet there didn't seem to be anything worth concealing.

'Here it is,' Janet said and she began to quote from the pamphlet. ' "In the mid-nineteenth century ten families from Lancashire founded the village of Dinorben three miles to the southwest of Llanfer Ceiriog. Dinorben was set up as a farming cooperative,