Stonehenge

The Temple of Shadows

The Outfolk quickly stopped their killing for Lengar had not returned to become the chief of a slaughtered tribe. When the screaming ended, he stood above his father's body and held up the bloodstained axe that had sent the child to the skies. He had shrugged off his cloak to reveal a jerkin sewn with bronze strips that glittered in the firelight and, at his waist, a long bronze sword. 'I am Lengar!' he shouted. 'Lengar! And if any of you dispute my right to be chief in Ratharryn, then come and dispute it now!'

None of the tribe looked at Saban for he was reckoned too young to confront Lengar, but a few did stare at Galeth. 'Do you challenge me, uncle?' Lengar asked.

'You have murdered your father,' Galeth said, gazing in horror at his brother's body, which had fallen across the grave of the sacrificed child.

'What better way to become chief?' Lengar asked, then walked a few paces towards his rival. His companions, those men who had fled Ratharryn with him on the day that the emissaries from Sarmennyn had been rebuffed, climbed up from the ditch at the temple's far side, but Lengar stayed their progress with a gesture. 'Do you challenge me?' he asked Galeth again, then waited in silence. When it was plain that neither Galeth nor any other man in the tribe would confront him he tossed the axe on to the grass behind him and walked to the temple's entrance of the sun where he stood, tall and terrible with the bloody axe in his hand, between the two high stones. 'Galeth and Saban!' he called. 'Come here!'

Galeth and Saban walked nervously forward, both half expecting arrows to come from Lengar's companions who waited at the temple's far side, but no bowstring sounded. Lengar drew his sword as they approached. 'There are men here who might expect one of you to challenge me,' Lengar said. 'Even you, little brother.' He bared his teeth at Saban, pretending to smile.

Saban said nothing. He saw that Lengar had tattooed a pair of horns on his face, one outside of each eye, and the horns made him look even more sinister. Lengar held the sword out so that its tip touched Saban's breast. 'It is good to see you, brother,' he said.

'Is it?' Saban asked as coldly as he could.

'You think I have not missed Ratharryn?' Lengar asked. 'Sarmennyn is a bare place. Raw and cold.'

'You came home to be warm?' Saban asked sarcastically.

'No, little one, I came home to make Ratharryn great again. There was a time when Cathallo paid us tribute, when they were proud that their women married a man from Ratharryn, when they came to dance in our temples and begged our priests to keep them from harm, but now they sell us rocks.' He slapped the closest stone. 'Rocks!' He spat the word again. 'Why did you not buy oak leaves from them? Or water? Or air? Or dung?'

Galeth glanced at his brother's body. 'What do you want of us?' he asked Lengar dully.

'You must kneel to me, uncle,' Lengar said, 'in front of all the tribe, to show that you accept me as chief. Otherwise I shall send you to our ancestors. Greet them for me, if I do.'

Galeth frowned. 'And if I kneel, what then?'

'Then you shall be my honoured adviser, my kinsman and my friend,' Lengar said effusively. 'You shall be what you have always been, the builder of our tribe and the counsellor of its chief. I did not come back to let the Outfolk rule here. I came to make Ratharryn great again.' He gestured at the red warriors. 'When their work is done, uncle, they will go home. But till then they are our servants.'

Galeth looked again at his brother's body. 'There will be no more killing in the tribe?' he asked.

'I will kill no one who accepts my authority,' Lengar promised, glancing at Saban.

Galeth nodded. He paused for a heartbeat then sank to his knees. There was a sigh from the watching tribe as he leaned forward and touched his hands to Lengar's feet.

'Thank you, uncle,' Lengar said. He touched Galeth's back with the sword, then turned to Saban. 'Now you, brother.'

Saban did not move.

'Kneel,' Galeth muttered.

Lengar's yellow-tinged eyes, oddly bright in the gathering dark, stared into Saban's face. 'I do not mind, little brother,' Lengar said softly, 'whether you live or die. There are those who say I should kill you, but does a wolf fear a cat?' He reached out with the sword and stroked the cold blade down Saban's cheek. 'But if you do not kneel to me, I shall take your head and use your skull as a drinking pot.'

Saban did not want to submit, but he knew Lengar's madness, and he knew he would be killed like a frothing dog if he did not yield. He bit back his pride and made himself kneel, and another sigh sounded from the tribe as he too leaned forward to touch Lengar's feet. Lengar, in turn, touched the nape of Saban's neck with the bronze blade. 'Do you love me, little brother?' Lengar asked.

'No,' Saban said.

Lengar laughed and took the sword away. 'Stand,' he said, then stepped back to look at the silent, watching crowd. 'Go home!' he called to them. 'Go home! You too,' he added to Saban and Galeth.

Most of the crowd obeyed, but Derrewyn and her mother ran to the temple's ditch where Morthor lay wounded. Saban joined them to see that an arrow had struck high on the priest's shoulder and its force had driven the head clean through his body. Saban pulled the flint free, but left the shaft in place. 'The arrow will come out cleanly,' he reassured Derrewyn. The chalk slurry on Morthor's chest was stained pink and he was breathing in short panicked gasps. 'The wound will mend,' Saban told the frightened priest, then twisted back because Derrewyn had suddenly screamed.

Lengar had taken hold of Derrewyn's arm and was hauling her round so that he could see her face in the light of the great fires. Saban stood, but immediately found himself staring at the point of Lengar's sword. 'You want something of me, little brother?' Lengar asked.

Saban looked at Derrewyn. She was in tears, flinching from Lengar's tight grip on her arm. 'We are to marry,' Saban said, 'she and I.'

'And who decided that?' Lengar asked.

'Father,' Saban said, 'and her great-grandmother, Sannas.'

Lengar grimaced. 'Father is dead, Saban, and I rule here now. And what that moonstruck hag of Cathallo wants does not matter in Ratharryn. What matters, little brother, is what I want.' He snapped an order in the harsh Outfolk language and a half-dozen of the red warriors ran to his side. One took the sword from Lengar, while two others faced Saban with their spears.

Lengar put both hands on the neck of Derrewyn's deerskin tunic. He looked into her eyes, smiled when he saw the fear there, then tore the tunic with sudden force. Derrewyn cried out; Saban instinctively leapt forward, but one of the Outfolk spears tangled his ankles, and the other clouted him across the skull then came to rest on his belly as he fell to the ground.

Lengar ripped off the remnants of the tunic, leaving Derrewyn naked. She tried to hide her body, but Lengar pulled her out of the crouch and spread her arms. 'A thing of Cathallo,' he said, looking her up and down, 'but a pretty thing. What does one do with such pretty things?' He asked the question of Saban, but expected no answer. 'Tonight,' he went on, 'we must show Cathallo what the power of Ratharryn means,' and with that he took Derrewyn's wrist and dragged her towards the settlement.

'No!' Saban shouted, still pinned to the ground by the Outfolk spear.

'Quiet, little brother,' Lengar called. Derrewyn tried to pull away from him and he struck her hard across the face, scattering meadowsweets from her hair, and, when he was sure she would be obedient, he tugged her onwards. She pulled away from him again, but he gave her a second blow, much harder than the first; she whimpered and this time followed him in a daze. Her mother, still kneeling beside her husband, shouted a strident protest, but a red-painted warrior kicked her in the mouth and silenced her.

And Saban, bereft at the Sky Temple, could do nothing except weep. Two Outfolk warriors guarded him. Neel and Morthor, the wounded priests, were carried away to leave the bodies of Hengall and Gilan in the moonlight where Saban sobbed like a child. Then the Outlanders prodded him to his feet and drove him like a beast towards the settlement.

The Sky Temple had been consecrated but disaster had come to Ratharryn. Saban's world had turned dark. The gods were screaming again.

—«»—«»—«»—

Most of the Outfolk warriors stationed themselves on the embankment's crest from where, with their short bows and sharp arrows, they could threaten the folk inside Ratharryn's settlement, but a handful of Outfolk spearmen stood guard outside Hengall's hut where Lengar took Derrewyn. Most of the tribe had gathered beside Arryn and Mai's temple; they heard a blow, heard Derrewyn scream, then heard no more.

'Should we fight them?' Galeth's son, Mereth, asked.

There are too many of them,' Galeth said softly, 'too many.' He looked broken, sitting in the temple's centre with his head low. 'Besides,' he went on, 'if we fight them, how many of us will die? How many will be left? Enough to resist Cathallo?' He sighed. 'I knelt to Lengar, and so he is my chief…' He paused. 'For now.' The last two words were said so low that not even Mereth could hear them. The women outside the temple cried for Hengall, because he had been a good chief, while the men inside watched the enemy on the high earth bank. Lahanna stared down, unmoved by the tragedy. After a while the frightened folk slept, though their sleep was broken by people crying aloud in their nightmares.

Lengar appeared just before the dawn. The tribe woke slowly, becoming aware that their new chief was stepping over sleeping bodies to reach the centre of Arryn and Mai's temple. He still wore the bronze-plated jerkin and had the long sword at his waist, but he carried no spear or bow.

I did not mean that Gilan should die,' he said without any greeting. Folk were sitting up and shuffling off the cloaks in which they had slept, while the women outside the temple's rings leant forward to catch Lengar's quiet words. 'My companions showed more zeal than I wanted,' he continued ruefully. 'One arrow would have been enough, but they were frightened and thought more were necessary.'

All the people were awake now. Men, women and children — the whole tribe — gathered in a protective cluster in and around the small temple and all listened to Lengar.

'My father,' Lengar went on, raising his voice just a little, 'was a good man. He kept us alive in hard winters and he cut down many trees to give us land. Hunger was rare and his justice was fair. For all that he should be honoured, so we will make him a mound.' People responded for the first time, muttering their agreement, and Lengar let the murmuring continue for a while before raising a hand. 'But my father was wrong about Cathallo!' He spoke louder now, his voice touched with hardness. 'He feared it, so he let Kital and Sannas rule you. It was to be a marriage of two tribes, but in marriage it is the man who should be master and in time Cathallo would have mastered you! Your harvest would have been carried to their storehouses, your daughters would have danced the bull dance in their temple and your spears would have fought their battles. But this is our land!' Lengar cried, and some folk shouted that he was right.

'Our land,' Mereth shouted angrily, 'and filled with Outfolk!'

Lengar paused, smiling. 'My cousin is right,' he said after a while. 'I have brought Outfolk here. But there are not many. They have fewer spears than you do! What is to stop you killing them now? Or killing me?' He waited for an answer, but none of the men moved. 'Do you remember,' Lengar asked, 'when the Outfolk came and begged for the return of their treasures? They offered us a high price. And what did we do? We turned them down and used some of the gold to buy stone from Cathallo. Stone! We used Slaol's gold to buy rocks!' He laughed, and many of his listeners looked ashamed for what the tribe had done.

'We shall buy nothing more from Cathallo,' Lengar said. 'They claim to want peace, but war is hidden in their hearts. They cannot bear to think that Ratharryn will be great again, and so they will try to crush us. In our ancestors' time this tribe was stronger than Cathallo! They paid us tribute and begged our approval. But now they despise us. They want us helpless, and we shall have to fight them. How do we defeat them?' He pointed at the embankment where the Outfolk warriors squatted. 'We will defeat Cathallo by buying the help of the Outfolk, for they will pay almost any price to have their gold returned. But to receive their gold they must do our bidding. We are masters here, not them! And we shall use the Outfolk warriors to become the mightiest tribe in all the land.' He watched his listeners, judging the effect of his words. 'And that is why I came back,' he finished softly, 'and why my father had to join his ancestors, so that Ratharryn will be known through all the land, feared through all the land, and honoured through land and sky.'

The tribe began to thump their hands on the earth, and then the men were standing and cheering. Lengar had persuaded them.

Lengar had won.

—«»—«»—«»—

Saban spent the night in his hut, guarded there by two of Lengar's red-painted spearmen. He wept for Derrewyn, and the knowledge of what she endured in the dark gave him such pain that he was tempted to take the knife that had been a gift from his father and slit his own throat, but the lure of revenge stayed his hand. He had knelt to Lengar in the Sky Temple's gate, but he knew the gesture had been hollow. He would kill his brother. He swore as much in the awful dark, then cursed himself for not showing more fight at the temple. But what could he have done? He had possessed no weapon, so how could he have fought warriors armed with swords, spears and bows? Fate had crushed him, and he was close to despair. Only as dawn neared did he fall into a dream-racked, shallow sleep.

Gundur, one of the men who had fled Ratharryn with Lengar, woke him. 'Your brother wants you,' Gundur said.

'What for?' Saban asked resentfully.

'Just get up,' Gundur said scornfully. Saban put the bronze knife into his belt and picked up one of his hunting spears before following Gundur from the hut. He would kill his brother now, he had decided. He would spear Lengar without warning, and if he died under the blades of Lengar's companions then at least he would have avenged his father. The ancestors would approve of that and welcome him to the afterlife. He gripped the spear shaft tight and stiffened his resolve to strike as soon as he entered the chief's big hut.

But an Outfolk warrior waiting just inside the hut seized Saban's spear before he had even stooped beneath the lintel. Saban tried to keep hold of the ash shaft, but the man was too strong and the brief struggle left Saban sprawling ignominiously on the floor. Galeth, he saw, waited for him, and three more Outfolk warriors sat behind Lengar who had watched the scuffle with amusement. 'Did you think to avenge our father?' Lengar asked Saban.

Saban rubbed his wrist that was sore from the Outlander's grip. 'The ancestors will avenge him,' he said.

'How will the ancestors even know who he is?' Lengar asked. 'I chopped off his jawbone this morning.' He grinned, and pointed to Hengall's bloody and bearded chin that had been spiked to one of the hut poles. If a dead man's jawbone was taken then he could not tell tales to the ancestors. 'I took Gilan's too,' Lengar said, 'so the pair of them can mumble away in the afterlife. Sit beside Galeth, and stop scowling.'

Lengar was draped in his father's bearskin cloak and was surrounded by treasures, all of them unearthed from the floor or dug out of the piles of hides where Hengall had concealed his fortune. 'We are rich, little brother!' Lengar said happily. 'Rich! You look tired. Did you not sleep well?' Gundur, who had sat beside Lengar, grinned, while the three Outfolk warriors, who did not understand what was being said, just stared fixedly at Saban.

Saban glanced towards the leather curtain that hid the women's portion of the hut, but he saw no sign of Derrewyn. He squatted in front of the tribe's heaped treasures. There were bars of bronze, beautifully polished knives of stone and flint, bags of amber, pieces of jet, great axes, loops of copper, carved bone, sea-shells and, most curious of all, a wooden box filled with strangely carved pebbles. The stones were small and smoothly rounded, none of them bigger than the ball of a man's thumb, but all had been deeply cut with patterns of whorls or lines. 'Do you know what they are?' Lengar asked Galeth.

'No,' Galeth said curtly.

'Magic, I suspect,' Lengar said, tossing one of the stones from hand to hand. 'Camaban would know. He seems to know everything these days. It's a pity he's not here.'

'Have you seen him?' Galeth asked.

'He came to Sarmennyn in the spring,' Lengar said carelessly, 'and so far as I know he's still there. He was walking properly, or almost properly. I wanted him to come with me, but he refused. I'd always thought him a fool, but he isn't at all. He's become very strange, but he isn't foolish. He's very clever. Perhaps it runs in our family. What is the matter, Saban? You're not going to cry, are you? Father's death, is it?'

Saban thought of seizing one of the precious bronze axes and hurling himself across the hut, but the Outfolk spearmen were watching him and their weapons were ready. He would stand no chance.

'You will notice, uncle,' Lengar said, 'that the gold pieces of Sarmennyn are not here?'

'I noticed,' Galeth said.

'I have them safe,' Lengar said, 'but I won't display them because I don't want to tempt our Outfolk friends. They've only come here to get the gold.' Lengar jerked his head at the Outfolk warriors who sat silent behind him, their tattooed faces like masks in the shadowed gloom. 'They don't speak our tongue, uncle,' Lengar went on, 'so insult them as much as you like, but smile while you do it. I need them to think we truly are their friends.'

'Aren't we?' Galeth asked.

'For the moment,' Lengar said. He smiled, pleased with himself. 'I had originally decided to give them back their gold if they defeated Cathallo for me, but Camaban had a much better idea. He really is clever. He went into a trance and cured one of their chief's wives of some loathsome disease. Have you ever seen him in a trance? His eyes go white, his tongue sticks out and he shakes like a wet dog, and when the whole thing is over he comes out with messages from Slaol!' Lengar waited for Galeth to share his amusement, but Galeth said nothing. Lengar sighed. 'Well, clever Camaban cured the chief's wife and now the chief thinks that Camaban can do no wrong. Imagine that! Crippled Camaban, a hero! So our hero told the Outfolk that not only would they have to defeat Cathallo to get their gold back, but also give us one of their temples. Which means they have to move a temple across the country, which they can't do, of course, because their temples are all made of stone.' He laughed. 'So we'll defeat Cathallo and keep the gold.'

'Maybe they will bring you a temple,' Galeth said drily.

'And maybe Saban will smile,' Lengar said. 'Saban! Smile when you look at me. Have you lost your tongue?'

Saban was gouging his fingernails into his ankles, hoping that the pain would keep him from crying or betraying his hatred. 'You wanted to see me, brother,' he said harshly.

'To say goodbye,' Lengar said ominously, hoping to see fear on his brother's face, but Saban's expression showed nothing. Death, Saban thought, would be better than this humiliation and the thought made him touch his groin, a gesture that made Lengar laugh. 'I'm not going to kill you, little brother,' Lengar said. 'I should, but I am merciful. Instead I shall take your place. Derrewyn will marry me as a symbol that Ratharryn is now superior to Cathallo and she will breed me many sons. And you, my brother, will be a slave.' He clapped his hands. 'Haragg!' he shouted.

The Outfolk trader, the grim giant who had come to interpret when the folk of Sarmennyn had pleaded with Hengall for the return of the treasures, stooped to enter the hut. He had to bend double to get through the low doorway and when he stood he seemed to fill the hut for he was so tall and broad-shouldered. He was balding, had a thick black beard, and a face that was an implacable mask. 'Your new slave, Haragg,' Lengar said courteously, indicating Saban.

'Lengar!' Galeth appealed.

'You would prefer me to kill the runt?' Lengar enquired silkily.

'You can't put your own brother into slavery!' Galeth protested.

'Half-brother,' Lengar said, 'and of course I can. Do you think Saban was honest when he knelt to me last night? I trust you, uncle, but him? He'd kill me in an eyeblink! He's been thinking of nothing else ever since he came into this hut, haven't you, Saban?' He smiled, but Saban just stared into his brother's horned eyes. Lengar spat. 'Take him, Haragg.'

Haragg leaned over and put a vast hand round Saban's arm and hauled him upright. Saban, humiliated and miserable, plucked the small knife from his belt and swung it wildly towards the giant, but Haragg, without any fuss, merely caught his wrist and pinched hard so that Saban's hand was suddenly nerveless and feeble. The knife dropped. Haragg picked up the blade then dragged Saban from the hut.

Haragg's son, the deaf-mute who was even larger than his gigantic father, waited outside. He took hold of Saban and threw him to the ground while his father went back into Lengar's hut, and Saban listened as Lengar sought assurances from the huge trader that the new slave would not be allowed to escape. Saban thought of trying to run now, but the deaf-mute loomed over him and then a wailing made him turn to see Morthor's wife leading her husband from Gilan's old hut. Outfolk warriors were prodding the couple towards Ratharryn's northern entrance.

'Morthor!' Saban called out, then gasped, for when the high priest of Cathallo turned Saban saw that Morthor's eyes had been gouged out. 'Lengar did that?' Saban asked.

'Lengar did this,' Morthor said bitterly. His arm hung limp and blood was thickly crusted on his wounded shoulder from which the arrow shaft had been pulled, but his face was nothing but a dreadful mask. He pointed to his ravaged eyes. 'This is Lengar's message to Cathallo,' he said, then the spearmen pushed him on.

Saban closed his eyes as though he could blot out the horror of Morthor's face, and then he was assailed by the image of Derrewyn stripped naked in the night and his shoulders heaved as he tried to suppress the tears.

'Cry, little one.' A mocking voice spoke above him and Saban opened his eyes to see Jegar standing over him. Two of Lengar's friends were with Jegar and they levelled spears at him and, for a moment, Saban thought they meant to kill him, but the spears were merely there to keep him still. 'Cry,' Jegar said again.

Saban stared at the ground, then shuddered because Jegar had begun to piss on him. The two spearmen laughed and, when Saban tried to jerk aside, they used their spear points to hold him steady so that the urine splashed on his hair. 'Lengar will marry Derrewyn,' Jegar said as he pissed, 'but when he is tired of her, and he will tire of her, he has promised her to me. Do you know why, Saban?'

Saban did not answer. The liquid dripped from his hair, ran down his face and puddled between his knees while the deaf-mute watched with a look of faint puzzlement on his broad face.

'Because,' Jegar went on, 'ever since Lengar went to Sarmennyn, I have been his eyes and his ears in Ratharryn. How did Lengar know to come last night? Because I told him. Did I not tell you?' He asked this last question of Lengar, who had just come from his hut to watch his brother's humiliation.

'You are the most loyal of friends, Jegar,' Lengar said.

'And a friend who has a maimed right hand.' Jegar stooped suddenly and seized Saban's hand. 'Give me a knife!' he demanded of Lengar.

'Let him go,' Haragg said.

'I have business with him,' Jegar spat.

'He is my slave,' Haragg said, 'and you will leave him alone.'

The big man had not spoken loudly, but there was such force in his deep voice that Jegar obeyed. Haragg stooped in front of Saban, holding Saban's own bronze knife in his right hand, and Saban thought the huge Outlander planned to do what Jegar had meant to do, but instead Haragg seized a hank of Saban's hair. He sawed at it, cutting it through and tossing it aside. He worked roughly, slashing off great handfuls of hair and scraping Saban's scalp to make it bleed. All slaves were shaved like this, and though the hair would grow again, it was meant to show that the newly shorn captives were now mere nothings. Saban was now a nothing, and he flinched as the hard blade grazed down his scalp and the blood trickled down his cheeks where it was diluted by Jegar's urine. Saban's mother came from her hut as Haragg cut his hair and she screamed at the big man to stop, then threw clods of earth at him until two of Lengar's spearmen, laughing at her anger, dragged her away.

Haragg finished cutting off the hair, then took Saban's left hand and placed it flat on the ground.

'I will do this,' Jegar offered eagerly.

'He is my slave,' Haragg answered, and again the power in his voice made Jegar step back. 'Look at me,' Haragg ordered Saban, then nodded to his son who clamped a huge hand across Saban's wrist.

Saban, his eyes blurred with tears, looked into Haragg's harsh face. His left hand was being held hard against the ground and he could not see the knife, but then there was a terrible pain in his hand, a pain that streaked up to his shoulder and made him cry aloud, and Haragg pulled the bleeding hand up and clapped a piece of fleece over the severed stump of Saban's small finger. 'Hold the fleece,' Haragg ordered him.

Saban clamped his right hand over the fleece. The pain was throbbing, making him feel faint, but he clamped his teeth together and rocked back and forth as Haragg scooped up the chopped hair and the severed bloody finger and carried them to a fire. Jegar interceded again, demanding that the trader give him the hair so he could use it to have a spell made against Saban, but the grim Haragg doggedly ignored the demand, instead throwing both hair and finger onto the fire and watching them burn.

The deaf-mute now dragged Saban north through the huts to where Morcar, Ratharryn's smith, had his forge. Morcar was a friend of Galeth's and his usual work was making spearheads from bronze bars, but today he was heating bronze that Haragg had given him. The smith avoided Saban's eyes as he worked. Haragg pushed Saban onto the ground where Saban closed his eyes and tried to will away the pain in his hand, but then he felt an even greater pain in his right ankle and he whimpered, opened his eyes and saw that a bronze manacle was being placed around his leg. The manacle had already been bent so that it was nearly a closed circle and Morcar now hammered the heated bronze quickly so that the two ends of the curved bar met. The manacle was joined by a bronze chain to its twin that was forced over Saban's left ankle and hammered shut. The metal was scorching hot, making Saban gasp.

Morcar poured water onto the metal. 'I'm sorry, Saban,' he whispered.

'Stand,' Haragg said.

Saban stood. A small crowd of Ratharryn's folk watched from a distance. His feet were chained so he could walk, but not run, his head was shaved, and now Haragg stood behind him and slit his tunic all the way down the back with his knife. He pulled it away so that Saban was naked. Last of all he cut the necklace of sea-shells around Saban's neck and crushed them into the ground with a massive foot and pocketed the amber amulet that had been a gift from Saban's mother. Jegar laughed and Lengar applauded.

'You are now my slave,' Haragg said tonelessly, 'to live or die at my whim. Follow me.'

Saban, his humiliation complete, obeyed.

—«»—«»—«»—

Lengar feared the gods. He did not understand them, but he understood himself and he knew that the treachery of the gods could far outdo anything man could contrive, so he feared them and took good care to placate them as best he knew how. He gave gifts to the priests; he buried symbolic chalk axes in all Ratharryn's temples; and he permitted Hengall's surviving wives to live and even promised to make certain they did not starve.

His father's spirit was about to go to the afterworld where it would live with the ancestors and gods, but it would go without a jawbone and without a right foot so that Hengall could neither tell of his own murder nor, if his spirit remained earthbound, pursue Lengar. The jaw and foot were fed to pigs, but the rest of the corpse was treated with respect. Hengall was burned on a great pyre in the manner of the Outfolk. The fire was lit three days after Hengall's death and it was allowed to burn for another three days, and only then was a mound of chalk and soil thrown up over the smouldering embers.

On the night that the mound was raised Lengar knelt on its summit and bent his head to the chalky rubble. He was alone for he wanted no one else to witness this conversation with his father. 'You had to die,' he told Hengall, 'because you were too cautious. You were a good chief, but Ratharryn now needs a great chief.' Lengar paused. 'I have not killed your wives,' he went on, 'and even Saban still lives. He was always your favourite, wasn't he? Well, he lives, father, he still lives.'

Lengar was not sure that letting Saban live had been a good idea, but Camaban had persuaded him that to kill his half-brother would be fatal. Camaban had gone to Lengar in Sarmennyn, no longer the stuttering fool Lengar had always despised. Instead he had become a sorcerer, and Lengar found himself strangely nervous in Camaban's presence. 'The gods might forgive you Hengall's death,' Camaban had told him, 'but not Saban's,' and when Lengar demanded to know why, Camaban claimed to have spoken with Slaol in a dream. Lengar had yielded to the dream's message. He still half regretted it, but he feared Camaban's sorcery. At least Camaban had suggested that Saban should become Haragg's slave and Lengar was certain that the big trader's slaves did not live long.

Lengar rested his forehead on the mound's summit. The soil and chalk had been roughly piled on the fire's remains and the fumes still seeped through the mound to sting Lengar's eyes, but he dutifully kept his head down. 'You will be proud of me, father,' he told Hengall, 'because I will raise Ratharryn and humble Cathallo. I will be a great chief—' He went very still for he heard footsteps.

The footsteps were close to him, very close, then they were on the mound itself and despite having cut off his father's foot Lengar was suddenly terrified that this was Hengall's spirit come to avenge itself. 'No,' he whispered, 'no.'

'Yes,' said a deep voice, and Lengar let out a great sigh of relief and straightened his back to look up at Camaban. 'I decided to follow you from Sarmennyn after all,' Camaban explained.

Lengar found he had nothing to say. He was sweating with fear.

Camaban was a man now. His face was thinner than before and much harder, with high cheekbones, deep eyes and a wide, sardonic mouth. His hair, that used to be a tangled mat of filth, was now neatly tied at the back of his scalp with a leather thong from which a rattling tassel of small bones hung. He wore a necklace of children's rib bones and carried a staff tipped with a human jawbone. He now rammed the butt of the staff into the grave mound. 'Did you feel that, father?'

'Don't,' Lengar croaked.

'Are you frightened of Hengall?' Camaban asked derisively. He rammed the staff into the mound again, then spat. 'Did you feel that? I spit on you!' He gouged the staff in the chalk rubble. 'Can you feel it, Hengall? Feel it burning? This is Camaban!'

Lengar scrambled off the grave. 'Why did you come here?' he asked.

'To make sure you did the right thing, of course,' Camaban said, then, with a farewell spit to his father, he clambered down the mound and walked towards the Sky Temple. He still had a limp, but it was much less noticeable than before. Although Sannas had straightened his foot by forcing the bones straight, they did not flex properly, so he still had a halting step, though it was nothing like the grotesque and twisting dip with which he used to walk.

Lengar, following Camaban, spoke. 'I don't need you to tell me what is the right thing to do.'

'Got your courage back, have you?' Camaban sneered. 'You were shaking when I found you! Thought I was Hen-gall's spirit, did you?' He laughed.

'Take care, brother,' Lengar said in warning.

Camaban turned and spat at him. 'Kill me, would you? But I am Slaol's servant, Lengar, Slaol's friend. Kill me, you fool, and the sky will burn you and the earth will refuse your bones and even the beasts will shrink from the stench of your death. Even the worms and maggots will refuse your putrid flesh, brother, and you will dry to a yellow husk and the winds will carry you to the poisoned marshes at the world's end.' He pointed his staff at Lengar as he spoke, and Lengar backed away from the threats. Lengar might be older, he might have an enviable reputation as a warrior, but Camaban commanded powers that Lengar did not understand. 'Did you kill Saban?' Camaban asked.

'I enslaved him to Haragg.'

'Good,' Camaban said carelessly.

'And I have taken his bride.'

'And why shouldn't you?' Camaban asked. 'Someone has to. Is she pretty?' He did not wait for an answer, but walked on to the Sky Temple where he crossed the low outer bank, limped through the ditch and climbed up to the high inner bank. He stopped there, staring at the four moon stones. 'They have been busy,' he said sarcastically. 'Gilan's work?'

Lengar shrugged, for he knew nothing about the new temple. 'Gilan is dead.'

'Good,' Camaban said, 'for this has to be his doing. Either him or some priestly scum from Cathallo. They didn't have the courage to make a temple to Slaol without bowing to Lahanna as well.'

'Lahanna?'

'Those are moon stones,' Camaban said, pointing his staff to the paired pillars and slabs inside the ring.

'You want them removed?' Lengar asked.

'What Slaol wants,' Camaban said, 'I will arrange, and you will do nothing unless I tell you.' He walked on into the temple's centre where the high moon cast a small shadow from the hummock that marked the body of the deaf child. Camaban thrust his staff deep into the soft earth and tried to lever the corpse upwards, but though he disturbed the soil he could not shift the body.

Lengar recoiled from the stench which wafted from the loosening soil. 'What are you doing?' he asked in protest.

'Ridding the place of her,' Camaban said.

'You can't do that!' Lengar said, but Camaban ignored him and dropped to his knees so he could scratch and claw the soil and chalk away from the body and, once it was almost free, he stood and used his staff again, this time heaving the decaying corpse into the moonlight.

'Now she'll have to be buried again,' Lengar said.

Camaban turned on him savagely. 'This is my temple, Lengar, not yours. It is mine!' He hissed the last word, scaring Lengar. 'I kept it clear when I was a child! I loved this place, I worshipped Slaol in this circle when the rest of you were sucking on Lahanna's tits. This place is mine!' He rammed the butt of his staff into the dead child, smashing through her ribcage. 'That thing was a messenger sent before her time, for this temple is not finished.' He spat on the corpse, then tugged his staff free. 'The birds and beasts can have her,' he said dismissively, then went to the entrance of the sun. He ignored the two pillars flanking the entrance, making instead for the paired sunstones. He frowned at the two stones. 'This one we shall keep,' he said, laying a hand on the larger of the pair, 'but that one you can throw down.' He pointed to the smaller stone. 'One stone is enough for the sun.' He waved a laconic farewell to his brother and, with as little ceremony as he had arrived, began to walk northwards.

'Where are you going?' Lengar called after him.

'I still have things to learn,' Camaban said, 'and when I know them I shall return.'

'To do what?'

'To build the temple, of course,' Camaban said, turning. 'You want Ratharryn to be great, don't you? But do you think you can achieve anything without the gods? I am going to give you a temple, Lengar, which will raise this miserable tribe to the sky.' He walked on.

'Camaban!' Lengar shouted.

'What is it?' Camaban asked irritably, turning again.

'You are on my side, aren't you?' Lengar asked anxiously.

Camaban smiled. 'I love you, Lengar,' he said, 'like a brother.' And he walked on into the dark.

—«»—«»—«»—

Saban learned that it had been Haragg who had guided Lengar and his men from Sarmennyn to Ratharryn, for only an experienced trader would know the roads, would know where the dangers lay and how to avoid them, and Haragg was one of the land's most experienced traders. For ten years he had been crossing the world with his train of three shaggy horses that were loaded with bronze, axes and anything else that he could exchange for the flint, jet, amber and herbs that Sarmennyn lacked. Sometimes, Haragg told Saban, he carried the teeth and bones of sea monsters cast onto Sarmennyn's shores that he could exchange for rich metals and precious stones.

Most of this he grunted to Saban as they walked north. Part of the time he spoke in Saban's own tongue, but most of the time he insisted on speaking the Outfolk tongue and he would lash Saban with a stick if he did not understand or if he failed to reply in the same language. 'You will learn my language,' he insisted, and Saban did because he feared the stick.

Saban's tasks were simple. At night he made the fire which cooked the food and deterred the forest beasts from attacking, while by day he led the three horses, fetched water, cut forage and blew Haragg's ox-horn as they approached a settlement to warn that strangers were coming. The deaf-mute, who was called Cagan, could do these things, but Saban realised the huge boy, who was a few years older than himself, had also been born simple. Cagan was enormously willing and watched his father constantly for a sign that would allow him to be useful, but then he would stumble over the task. If he lit a fire he burned himself, if he tried to lead the horses he used too much strength, yet Haragg, Saban noted, treated Cagan with an extraordinary gentleness as though the deaf-mute, who was half as tall again as Saban, was a much-loved hound, and Cagan responded to his father's kindness with a touching pleasure. If his father smiled he would shudder with joy, or else bob up and down and smile back and make small whimpering noises deep in his throat. Each morning Haragg dressed his son's hair, combing it, plaiting it and tying it with a thong, and then he would comb Cagan's beard and Cagan would wriggle with happiness, and Haragg, Saban noted, would sometimes have a tear in his eye.

The trader shed no tears for Saban. The bronze manacles rubbed weals into Saban's skin, and the weals erupted with blood and pus. Haragg treated them with herbs then tucked leaves under the manacles to stop them chafing, though the leaves always fell away. After a few days he grudgingly allowed Saban a mangy wolfskin to tie around his waist, but became annoyed when Saban scratched at the lice that crawled from the pelt. 'Stop itching,' he would growl, lashing out with his stick. 'I can't bear itching! You're not a dog.'

They travelled eastwards and then northwards, usually in the protective company of other traders but sometimes alone for, though the woods were full of outcasts and hunters, Haragg reckoned there was small risk of ambush. 'If one trader is attacked,' he told Saban, 'then all traders will be attacked, so the chiefs protect us. But there are still dangerous places and there I always travel in company.' Many traders, Haragg explained, went by sea, paddling their wooden boats around the coast and exchanging goods only with the tribes that lived on the shore, but those seafarers missed the far larger inland settlements where Haragg made his living.

When they reached a settlement it was Saban's task to unpack Haragg's goods from the horses and lay them on otter skins in front of the chief's hut. Cagan would lift the heavy bags from the horses, then he would sit and watch, while the folk stared at him for he truly was a giant. The women would giggle, and sometimes the men, realising that Cagan had the mind of a small child, would try to provoke him, but then Haragg would shout at them and the men would back off, terrified of his height and fierceness.

There were some goods that were never unpacked: mainly scraps of gold and a handful of elegant bronze brooches that were saved for the chieftains Haragg reckoned would pay best. The haggling would last all day, sometimes two, and when it ended Saban would place the goods for Sarmennyn into one great leather bag, and the remaining trade goods into another, and Cagan would hang them on the horses' backs. One smaller bag contained nothing but fine large sea-shells which were wrapped in a strange weed that Haragg said grew in the ocean, but as Saban had never seen the sea it meant little to him. The shells were exchanged for food.

Haragg was not unkind. It took Saban a long time to learn this, for he feared the trader's expressionless face and quick stick, but he discovered that Haragg did not smile at anyone except his own son, but nor did he frown; instead he faced each man, woman and circumstance with the same grim determination, and if he spoke little, he listened much. He would speak to Saban, if only to while away the long journeys, but he spoke tonelessly, as though the information he provided was of small interest.

They were far to the north when the first hints of winter came with cold winds and spitting rains. The folk here spoke a strange language which even Haragg found difficult to understand. By now he was exchanging his bronze bars and black stone axes for small bags of herbs which, he said, flavoured the liquor that the folk of Sarmennyn brewed, but he grudgingly exchanged one small bronze spearhead for a fleece tunic and a pair of properly sewn ox-hide boots that he gave to Saban.

The boots would not fit over the manacles so Haragg sat him down and took a stone axe-head from one of his bags, then levered and beat the manacles far enough apart to force them off Saban's ankles. 'If you run away now,' he said tonelessly, 'you will be killed, for this is dangerous country.' He stowed the manacles among his cargo and at the next settlement sold them for twenty bags of the precious herbs. That was one of the settlements where, when the horn sounded the trader's approach, all the women were hidden away in their huts so that the strangers would not see any of their faces. 'They behave oddly up here,' Haragg said.

By now Haragg and Saban conversed only in the Outfolk tongue. Ratharryn was a memory — a sharp one, to be sure, but fading. Even Derrewyn's face had blurred in Saban's head. He could still feel a terrible pang of remorse when he thought of her, but now, instead of self-pity, he was filled with a burning desire for revenge. Night after night he consoled himself with images of Lengar's death and of Jegar's humiliation, but those consolations were being diluted by the new wonders he saw and the strange things he learned.

He saw temples. Many were great temples: some of wood, more of stone. The stones made vast circles, while the wooden temples soared to the sky and were hung with holly and ivy. He saw priests who cut themselves with flint so that their chests were smothered in blood as they prayed. He saw a place where the tribe worshipped a stream and Haragg told him how the folk drowned a child in its pool every new moon. In another place the men worshipped an ox, a different ox each year, and killed the beast at midsummer and ate its flesh before selecting a new god. One tribe had a mad high priest who twitched and dribbled and spoke nonsense, while another would only allow cripples to be priests. They worshipped vipers in that place, and nearby was a settlement ruled by a woman. That seemed strangest of all to Saban, for she was not merely an influential sorceress like Sannas, but the chief of all the tribe. 'They've always had women chiefs,' Haragg said, 'ever since I've known them. It seems their goddess ordered it.' The woman chief insisted that Haragg sleep a night in her bed. 'She won't buy anything if I say no,' the big man explained. It was in that settlement that Haragg ordered Saban to cut a branch of yew and make himself a bow. Haragg bought arrows for him, content that Saban would not now use the weapon against his master. 'But don't let Cagan have the arrows,' Haragg warned him, 'for he will only injure himself.'

The scar from Saban's missing finger had become a hard callus, but Saban found he could use a bow as well as ever. The missing finger was a mark of his servitude, but it was no handicap. His hair had grown back thickly and there were days when he even found himself laughing and smiling; one morning he woke with the strange realisation that he was enjoying this life with the dour Haragg. That thought gave him a pang of guilt about Derrewyn, but Saban was still young and his misery was fast being diluted by novelty.

They waited in the woman-ruled settlement as more traders assembled. The next journey, Haragg said, was dangerous and sensible men did not travel the track alone. The woman chief was paid a piece of bronze to provide twenty warriors as an escort and on a cold morning the traders walked north, climbing onto wide bleak moors that were dark under the clouded sky. No trees grew here and Saban did not understand how any folk could live in such a place, but Haragg said there were deep rocky clefts in the moors, and caves hidden in the clefts, and outcasts made their homes in such dank places. 'They are desperate,' Haragg said.

Late that day a band of men did attack. They rose from the heather to loose arrows, but they were few and cautious, and they showed themselves too soon. The hired spearmen tried to frighten the outcasts away by shouting and waving their spears, but the enemy was stubborn and still blocked the path. 'You must attack them,' Haragg shouted at the warriors, but they were unwilling to die for a few traders. Cagan wanted to charge the ragged men, howling like a beast, but Haragg held him back and let Saban advance instead. Saban loosed an arrow and saw it fall short so he ran a few more paces and let another fly. It fluttered just wide of his target and he guessed that was because the arrow had been slightly out of true rather than because of the wind, and he released a third and watched it thump home into a man's belly. The enemy's arrows were being aimed at Saban now, but they had poor bows, and Saban ran another few steps and hauled the sinew back and let it go to drive another man back. He screamed at them, mocking their courage and their marksmanship, then slashed a third flint arrow-head into a wild-haired man in a dirty fleece tunic. He danced as they ran away. 'Your mothers were swine!' Saban called. 'Your sisters lie with goats!' None of the enemy would have understood the insults, even if they had been close enough to hear them.

Haragg actually grinned at Saban. He even clapped his shoulder and laughed. 'You should have been a warrior, not a slave,' he said, and Cagan, following his father's example, bobbed his head and grinned at Saban.

'I always wanted to be a warrior,' Saban confessed.

'All boys do. What good is a boy who wants to be anything else?' Haragg asked. 'But all men are warriors, except the priests.' He said the last three words with an intense bitterness, but refused to explain why.

Next day the traders spread out their goods at a settlement north of the moors. Tribes from other settlements had come, and hundreds of folk wandered in the pasture where the haggling went on from dawn until dusk. Haragg exchanged most of his goods that day, taking in return more herbs and the promise of a pile of white pelts to be delivered to him at winter's end. 'Till then,' he told Saban, 'we shall stay here.'

It seemed a bleak place to Saban for it was nothing but a deep valley between soaring hills. Pine trees clothed the lower slopes and a cold stream tumbled over grey rocks between the dark trees. There was a stone temple lower down the valley and a huddle of huts higher; Haragg and Saban took a dilapidated hut for themselves and Saban repaired its rafters, then cut turfs and laid them as a roof. 'Because I like it here,' Haragg said when Saban asked why he did not return to Sarmennyn for the winter. 'And it will be a long winter,' Haragg warned him, 'long and cold, but when it is over I shall take you back to your brother.'

'To Lengar?' Saban asked bitterly. 'You'd do better to kill me here.'

'Not to Lengar,' Haragg said, 'Camaban. It was not Lengar who wanted you to be my slave, but Camaban.'

'Camaban!' Saban exclaimed in astonishment.

'Camaban,' Haragg confirmed calmly. 'Lengar wanted to kill you when he returned to Ratharryn, but Camaban was determined you should live. It seems that you protested once when your father was going to kill him?'

'I did?' Saban asked, then remembered the failed sacrifice and his involuntary cry of horror. 'So I did,' he said.

'So Camaban persuaded Lengar that it would bring him bad luck if he killed you. He suggested slavery instead, and to a man of Lengar's mind slavery is worse than death. But you had to become my slave, not any man's slave, so Camaban claimed to have been told as much in a dream. Your brother and I planned all this. We sat for whole nights discussing how it could be done.' Haragg looked at Saban's hand where the scar of the missing finger was now a wrinkle of dried skin. 'And it had to be done properly,' he explained, 'or Lengar would never have agreed and you would be dead.' He opened his pouch and took from it the precious knife that had been Hengall's gift to Saban and with which Saban's finger had been cut off. He held the knife to Saban. 'Take it,' he said, then gave him back the amber amulet.

Saban hung his mother's amber about his neck and pushed the blade into his belt. 'I am free?' he asked, bemused.

'You are free,' Haragg said solemnly, 'and you may go if you wish, but your brother wished me to keep you safe until we can join him in Sarmennyn. He knew no other way of keeping you alive, except to doom you to my slavery, but he charged me to protect you because he has need of you.'

'Camaban needs me?' Saban asked, utterly bemused by all that Haragg was so tonelessly revealing. Saban still thought of his brother as a crippled stutterer, a thing of pity, yet it had been the despised Camaban who had arranged his survival and Camaban who had recruited the daunting Haragg to his own purposes. 'Why does Camaban need me?' he asked.

'Because your brother is doing a marvellous thing,' Haragg said, and for once his voice held emotion, 'a thing that only a great man could do. Your brother is making the world anew.' Haragg lifted the leather curtain at the hut door and peered out to see that a new snow was falling thick and slow to smother the world. 'For years,' Haragg said, still staring at the snow, 'I struggled with this world and its gods. I was trying to explain it all.' He dropped the curtain and gave Saban a look that was almost defiant. 'It did not give me pleasure, that struggle. But then I met your brother. He cannot know, I thought, he is too young! But he did know. He did. He has found the pattern.'

'The pattern?' Saban asked, puzzled.

'He has found the pattern,' Haragg repeated gravely, 'and all will be new, all will be well, and all will be changed.'

In a winter night when the earth lay hard as ice and the trees were rimed with a frost that glowed under a pale misted moon, a man limped from the trees north of Cathallo and crossed the fallow fields. It was the longest night, the darkness of the sun's death, and no one saw him come. The huts of the settlement seeped a small smoke as the night fires settled to embers, but the dogs of Cathallo slept and the wintering oxen, sheep, goats and pigs were safe in the huts where they could not be disturbed by the stranger.

Wolves had seen the man and in the previous dusk a dozen of the grey beasts had followed him, their tongues lolling as they looped around behind him, but the man had turned and howled at them and the wolves had first whimpered, then fled into the black, white-frosted trees. The man walked on. Now, in the starlit moments before the dawn, he came to the northern entrance of the great shrine.

The great stones within the high earth bank glimmered with frost. For a heartbeat, pausing in the entrance, it seemed to him that the great ring of boulders was shimmering like a circle of dancers shifting their weight from foot to foot. The dancing stones. He smiled at that idea, then hurried across the grass to Sannas's hut.

He gently pulled aside the leather curtain that hung over the entrance and let in a gust of cold air that gave the dying fire a sudden glow. He ducked into the hut, let the curtain fall and went very still.

He could see almost nothing. The fire was mere embers in ash and no moonlight came through the small smoke-hole in the roof, and so he just squatted and listened until he detected the sound of three people breathing. Three sleepers.

He crept across the hut on his knees, going slowly so that he made no noise, and when he found the first of the sleepers, a young slave, he put one hand over her mouth and sliced a knife down with his free hand. Her breath bubbled harsh in her cut gullet, she twitched for a while, but at last went still. The second girl died the same way, and then the man discarded caution and went to the fire to blow on the smouldering embers and feed them with tinder of dried puffball and small twigs so that the flames flickered bright to illuminate the hanging skulls and bat wings and herb bunches and bones. The fresh blood glistened on the furs and on the killer's hands.

The last sleeper shifted on the hut's far side. 'Is it morning?' her ancient voice asked.

'Not quite, my dear,' the man said. He was putting some larger pieces of wood on the fire now. 'It's almost dawn, though,' he added comfortingly, 'but it will be a cold one, a very cold one.'

'Camaban?' Sannas sat up in the pile of furs that was her bed. Her skull-like face, framed by a tangle of white hair, showed surprise and even pleasure. 'I knew you'd come back,' she said. She did not see the new blood, and the stench of smoke masked its smell. 'Where have you been?' she demanded querulously.

'I have walked the hills and worshipped in temples older than time,' Camaban said softly, feeding more wood onto the revived fire, 'and I have talked with priests, old women and sorcerers until I have sucked the knowledge of this world dry.'

'Dry!' Sannas laughed. 'You've hardly licked the tit, you young fool, let alone sucked on it.' In truth Sannas knew Camaban had been her best pupil, a man to rival her own skills, but she would never tell him as much. She leaned to one side, revealing a leathery flap of breast as she reached for her honeycomb. She put a piece in her mouth and sucked noisily. 'Your brother is making war on us,' she said sourly.

'Lengar loves to make war,' Camaban said.

'And loves to make babies,' Sannas said. 'Derrewyn is pregnant.'

'I heard as much.'

'May her milk poison the bastard,' Sannas said, 'and its father too.' She pulled the furs round her shoulders. 'Lengar takes our men prisoner, Camaban, and sacrifices them to his gods.'

Camaban rocked back on his heels. 'Lengar thinks the gods are like hounds that can be whipped into obedience,' he said, 'but he will learn soon enough that their whips are bigger than his. But for the moment he does Slaol's work so I imagine he will prosper.'

'Slaol!' Sannas hissed.

'The great god,' Camaban said reverently, 'the god above all gods. The only god who has the power to change our sad world.'

Sannas stared at him as a dribble of honey trickled from her lips. 'The only god?' she asked in disbelief.

'I told you that I wished to learn,' Camaban said, 'so I have learned, and I have discovered that Slaol is the god above all the gods. Our mistake has been to worship the others, but they are much too busy worshipping Slaol to take any notice of us.' He smiled at Sannas's appalled expression. 'I am a follower of Slaol, Sannas,' he said, 'and I always have been, ever since I was a child. Even when I listened to you talk of Lahanna, I was a worshipper of Slaol.'

She shuddered at his impiety. 'Then why come back here, fool?' she demanded. 'You think I love Slaol?'

'I came to see you, my dear, of course,' Camaban said calmly. He put a last piece of wood on the fire, then moved to her side where he sat and cradled her shoulders. 'I paid you to teach me, remember? Now I want my final lesson.'

The old woman saw the blood on his hands then and tried to claw his face. 'I will give you nothing,' she said.

Camaban turned his body to face her. 'You will teach me the last lesson, Sannas,' he said gently. 'I paid for it with Slaol's gold.'

'No!' she hissed.

'Yes,' Camaban said gently, then he leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. She struggled, but Camaban used his weight to push her down. He still kissed her, his mouth fixed on hers, and for a few heartbeats she tried to escape his kiss by twisting her head, but her strength was no match for his.

She glared up at his eyes, then he moved the furs from her breasts and put one arm around her body and began to squeeze. The old woman struggled again and a small whimper escaped her, but Camaban pushed his mouth hard down on hers, squeezed with his arm and pinched her nostrils with his left hand. All the time he kept his green eyes on her black eyes.

It took a long while. A surprisingly long while. The old woman kicked and twitched under the furs, but after a while the spasmodic movements ended, and still Camaban kissed her. The fire was almost dead again by the time Sannas's small, birdlike movements had ended, but her eyes were still open and Camaban stared into them until at last, though cautiously, as if expecting a trick, he slowly pulled his face from hers. He waited, his mouth just a finger's breadth from her mouth, but she did not move. And still he waited, scarce daring to breathe, but finally he smiled. 'What a honey-sweet kiss that was,' he said to the corpse, then touched his finger to her forehead. 'I took your last breath, lady. I have stolen your soul.'

He sat for a moment, savouring the triumph. With her last breath he had stolen her power and engulfed her spirit, but then he remembered the closeness of dawn and he hurriedly crossed the hut. He cleared away the stones that ringed the small hearth and then, using a piece of firewood, shifted the burning wood, embers and hot ashes aside. He found a broken antler and used it to dig into the hot soil beneath the hearth, scrabbling the earth away where he knew Sannas hid her most precious possessions.

He uncovered a leather pouch. He prised it gently from the earth's grip, then pulled aside the leather curtain at the hut entrance where the first seeping grey of the morning provided a sullen light. He untied the pouch and spilt its contents on to his palm. There were eleven of Sarmennyn's small lozenges and one large one. It was the gold Hengall had exchanged for Cathallo's stones and the two lozenges Camaban himself had paid to Sannas. He gazed at the treasure for an instant, then returned it to the pouch, tied the pouch to his belt and went out into the cold.

He went north, and a child saw him leave the shrine in the misty greyness but did not raise any alarm. He limped across the frost-whitened fields to the dark woods in which he vanished before the sun rose to blaze across Cathallo's shrine.

Where Sannas the sorceress lay dead.

—«»—«»—«»—

Haragg hired three slave women for the winter. They came from a tribe that lived yet farther north and spoke a language that even Haragg did not understand, but they knew their duties. The youngest slept with Haragg, and Saban and Cagan shared the other two. 'A man should sleep with a woman,' Haragg told Saban. 'It is a natural thing, the proper thing.'

Haragg seemed to take small pleasure from his own woman. Instead his joy came from the spare, cold life of that long winter. Each morning he would go to the temple to pray and afterwards he would bring water or ice to the fire while Cagan fed hay or leaves to the three horses that shared the hut. The chief of the settlement regarded Haragg as an honoured guest and provided food for all of them, though Saban supplemented those gifts by hunting. He preferred hunting by himself, stalking the scarce prey through an ice-bound land, though he did once join the men of the settlement when a bear was found sleeping in a cave. They woke the beast with fire and killed it with flint and bronze and afterwards Saban carried a bleeding haunch of meat back to the hut. There was never quite enough food, at least for the giant Cagan, but none of them starved. They ate berries and nuts that were stored in jars, eked out their bags of grain and herbs, and occasionally gorged on venison, hare or fish.

And day after day the snow glittered on the hills and the air seemed filled with a sparkling frost and the sun came for a short time and the nights were endless. They burned peat, which Saban had never seen before, but sometimes, to make the light in the hut brighter, they would add logs of resinous pine that burned smoky and pungent. The long evenings were usually silent, but sometimes Haragg talked. 'I was a priest,' the big man said one night, startling Saban. 'I was a priest of Sarmennyn, and I had a wife and a son and a daughter.'

Saban said nothing. The peat glowed red. The three horses stamped their feet and Cagan, who loved the horses, felt the vibration and turned and gurgled soothingly to them. The three women watched the men, sheltering under a shared pelt. They had tangled masses of black hair that half hid the scars on their foreheads, which showed they were slaves. Saban was learning their language, but now he and Haragg spoke in the Outfolk tongue.

'My daughter was called Miyac,' Haragg said, staring into the fire's steady glow. It was almost as though he were talking to himself, for he spoke softly and did not look at Saban. 'Miyac' — his voice caressed the name — 'and she was a creature of great loveliness. Great loveliness. I thought she would grow to marry a chief or a war leader, and I was glad, for her husband's wealth would keep my wife and me in our old age and would preserve Cagan when we were dead.'

Saban said nothing. There was a slithering noise from the roof as a mass of snow slid down the roof turfs. 'But, in Sarmennyn,' Haragg went on, 'we choose a sun bride each year. She is chosen in the spring and for three moons' — he rocked his hand back and forth to show that the three moons were an approximation — 'she is a goddess herself. And then, at midsummer, at the sun's glory, we kill her.'

'Kill her?' Saban asked, shocked.

'We send her to Erek.' Erek was the Outfolk's name for Slaol. 'And one year,' Haragg went on, 'we chose Miyac'

Saban flinched. 'You chose her?'

'The priests chose her,' Haragg said, 'and I was a priest. My wife screamed at me, she hit me, but I thought it was an honour to our family. What greater husband could Miyac have than Erek? And so my daughter went to her death and my wife died within a moon, and I fell into a black sadness, and when I came from that sadness I no longer wanted to be a priest and my ideas were unwelcome and so I began to wander the land. I traded.' The sadness showed on his face and Cagan whimpered so that Haragg leaned over and patted his son's hand to show that everything was well.

Saban shifted closer to the fire, dragged the pelt around his shoulders and wondered if the world would ever be warm again.

'My twin brother was the high priest in Sarmennyn,' Haragg said, 'and when I told him I no longer believed in sacrifice he allowed me to become a trader instead of a priest. His name is Scathel. You will meet him, if he still lives.'

Something about the way Haragg said his brother's name suggested that Saban did not want to meet Scathel. 'Is your brother still the high priest?' he asked.

Haragg shrugged. 'He lost his wits when the treasures were stolen and fled into the mountains, so now I do not know if he is alive or dead.'

'Who stole the treasures?' Saban asked.

'His name is never spoken,' Haragg answered, 'but he was a son of our chief and he wanted to be chief himself, except he had three older brothers and all were greater men than he and so he stole the tribe's treasures to bring ill luck on Sarmennyn. He had heard of Sannas, and he believed she could use the treasures to make a magic that would kill his father and brothers and give him the chieftainship. We know that, for he said as much to his woman, and she told us before we killed her, and then Scathel averted the ill luck by killing the chief and all his family. So the gold never did reach Sannas, but Scathel still went mad.' He paused. 'And perhaps the ill luck was not averted, I don't know. What I do know is that my people will do anything, give anything, to have the treasures returned.'

'They must give a temple,' Saban said, remembering what Lengar had told him on the morning of his enslavement.

'They must listen to Camaban,' Haragg said softly, and once again Saban was filled with wonderment that his awkward, crippled brother had suddenly gained such an awesome reputation.

A few days later, when a thaw had melted some of the snow on the passes through the hills and Haragg's precious white pelts had been delivered, and as the days lengthened again as Slaol recovered his strength, Haragg took Saban and Cagan westwards. Ostensibly they went to buy some axes made from black stone that were much prized in the south country, but Saban suspected there was another purpose in the journey. It took half a day until, quite unexpectedly, they reached a high hill that ended abruptly at a sea cliff. This was the first time Saban had ever seen the sea and he whimpered at the sight. He had never imagined anything so dark, grey, cold and venomous. It heaved constantly, as though muscles worked beneath its white-flecked surface, and where it met the land it broke into a myriad wind-whipped fragments, then sucked and drained and surged to shatter again. Shrieking white birds filled the air. He could have gazed at it for ever, but Haragg stirred him northwards along the shore. Monsters' bones littered the small beaches in the cliff bends and, when they came to the settlement that sold the axes, Saban found himself sleeping in a hut whose rafters were made of those vast curved bones that arched above him to support a low roof of wood and turf.

Next morning Haragg took Cagan and Saban to a narrow fragment of high land that jutted into the vast ocean and, at the land's end, atop a cliff that seemed to shake with the endless thunder of the sea, there was a temple. It was a simple enough shrine, a mere ring of eight tall stones, but one stone stood proud of the circle. 'Erek again,' Haragg said, 'for wherever you travel, you will find Erek is worshipped. Always Erek.' The outlying stone, Saban guessed, stood towards the place where the sun rose in midsummer and its shadow would pierce the circle as the sun gave life to the earth. Small sprigs of dead heather lay at the foot of the stones, evidence of prayers made, and not even the skirling sea wind could wholly snatch away the blood stink of a beast that had been sacrificed at the temple not long before. 'We have a shrine like this in Sarmennyn,' Haragg said softly, 'and we call it the Sea Temple, though it has nothing to do with Dilan.' Dilan, Saban now knew, was Sarmennyn's sea god. 'Our Sea Temple doesn't face the rising sun,' Haragg went on, 'but looks to where it sets in midsummer, and if I had my way I would pull it down. I would take its stones and cast them into the sea. I would obliterate it.' He spoke with an uncommon bitterness.

'The sun bride?' Saban guessed diffidently.

Haragg nodded. 'She dies at the Sea Temple.' He closed his eyes for a few heartbeats. 'She goes to the temple arrayed in Erek's gold and there she is stripped naked, just as a bride should go to her husband, and sent to her death.' Haragg hugged his knees, and Saban could see tears on his face, or perhaps that was just the effect of the wind that flecked the sea ragged and whirled the shrieking birds about the sky. Saban understood now why Haragg had come to this high place, because from here he could gaze into the vastness above the sea where his daughter's spirit flew with the soaring white birds. 'The gold was a gift from Dilan,' Haragg went on. 'The treasures were washed ashore in a swamped boat, close to where the Sea Temple stands, and so our ancestors decided the gold was a gift from one god to the other, and perhaps they were right.'

'Perhaps?'

'Boats do get swamped,' Haragg said, 'and traders from the land across the sea do bring us gold.'

Saban frowned at the scepticism in the big man's voice. 'Are you saying…' he began to ask.

Haragg turned on him fiercely. 'I am saying nothing. The gods do talk to us, and maybe the gods did send us the gold. Perhaps Dilan swamped the boat and steered it to that beach under the cliff, but why?' Haragg frowned into the wind. 'We never did ask why, we just wrapped a girl in gold and killed her, and we went on doing it year after year after year!' He was angry now, spitting at the temple stone where the sacrificial blood, stuck with brown hairs, still showed. 'And it is always the priests who demand sacrifice,' Haragg went on. 'From every beast that is killed they get the liver and kidney and brain and the meat of one leg. When the sun bride is a goddess she is given treasure, but who keeps it when she is dead? The priests! Sacrifice, the priests say, or else the harvest will be bad, and when the harvest is bad anyway they simply say you did not sacrifice enough and so demand more!' He spat again.

'Are you saying there should be no more priests?' Saban asked.

Haragg shook his head. 'We need priests. We need people who can translate the gods to us, but why do we choose our priests from the weakest?' He gave Saban a wry look. 'Just like your tribe, we choose our priests from those who fail the ordeals. I failed! I cannot swim and I almost drowned, but my brother saved me, and in so doing he failed his own ordeal too, but Scathel always wanted to be a priest.' He shrugged, dismissing the story. 'So most priests are weak men, but like all men, given some small authority, they become tyrants. And because so many priests are fools they will not think, but simply repeat the things they learned. Things change, but priests do not change. And now things are changing fast.'

'Are they?' Saban asked.

Haragg gave him a pitying look. 'Our gold is stolen! Your father is killed! These are signs from the gods, Saban. The difficulty is knowing what they mean.'

'And you do?'

Haragg shook his head. 'No, but your brother Camaban does.'

For a moment Saban's soul rebelled against this fate, which had brought him to a strange temple above an unforgiving sea. Camaban and Haragg, he thought, had entangled him in madness, and he felt a huge resentment against the destiny that had snatched him from Ratharryn and from Derrewyn's arms. 'I just want to be a warrior!' he protested.

'What you want counts for nothing,' Haragg said curtly, but what your brother wants is everything, and he saved your life. You would be dead now, cut down by Lengar's spear, if Camaban had not arranged otherwise. He has given you life, Saban, and the rest of that life must be in his service. You have been chosen.'

To make the world anew, Saban thought, and was tempted to laugh. Except that he was trapped in Camaban's dream and, whether he wanted to or not, he was expected to fulfil that vision.

—«»—«»—«»—

Camaban returned to Sarmennyn at the beginning of spring. He had wintered in the forest at an ancient timber temple. It was overgrown and decaying, but he had cleared the undergrowth and watched the sun retreat about the ring of poles and then start back again towards its summer fullness, and all the time he had talked with Slaol — even argued with the god, for at times Camaban resented the burden laid on him. He alone understood the gods and the world, and he knew he alone could turn the world back to its beginnings, but sometimes, as he tested his ideas, he would groan in agony and rock backwards and forwards. Once a hunting party of Outfolk, seeking slaves, had heard him, seen him and fled from him because they understood he was a holy man. He was also a hungry man by the time he reached Sarmennyn: hungry, sour and gaunt, and he came to the tribe's chief settlement on a day of festival like a mangy crow alighting amid a flock of swans. The settlement's main gate was hung with white garlands of cow parsley and pear blossom, for this was the day on which the new sun bride would be greeted by her people.

Kereval, the chief of Sarmennyn, greeted Camaban warmly. At first glance Kereval was an unlikely chief for such a warlike nation, for he was neither the tallest nor the strongest man in the tribe. However, he was reckoned to have wisdom and, in the wake of their treasures' loss, that was what the people of Sarmennyn had sought in their new leader. He was a small and wiry man with dark eyes that peered from the tangle of grey tattoos that covered his cheeks; his black hair was pinned with fishbones; his woollen cloak was dyed blue. His people asked only one thing of him: that he retrieve the treasures, and that Kereval was seeking to do by his alliance with Lengar. A bargain had been struck by which a small war band of Sarmennyn's feared warriors would help Lengar defeat Cathallo and a temple of Sarmennyn would be given to Ratharryn, and in return the golden lozenges would be sent home.

'There are those who think your brother cannot be trusted,' Kereval told Camaban. The two men squatted outside Kereval's hut where Camaban greedily ate a bowl of fish broth and a piece of hard flat bread.

'Of course they think that,' Camaban retorted, though in truth he did not care what people thought for his head was dizzy with the glory of Slaol.

'They believe we should go to war,' Kereval said, peering towards the gate to see if the sun bride had yet appeared.

'Then go to war,' Camaban said carelessly, his mouth full. 'You think it matters to me whether your miserable treasures are returned?'

Kereval said nothing. He knew he could never hope to lead an army to Ratharryn for it was too far away and his spearmen would meet too many enemies on the way, despite the fact that those spearmen were famous for their bravery, and were feared by all their neighbours for they were as hard and pitiless as the land they came from. Sarmennyn was a rocky land, a bitter place trapped between the sea and the mountains where even the trees grew bent as old folk, though few in the tribe ever did grow old. The hardships of life bent the people as the wind bent the trees, a wind that rarely ceased from wailing about the rocky tops of the mountains beneath which the folk of Sarmennyn lived in low huts made of stone and thatched with driftwood, seaweed, straw and turf. The smoke from their crouched huts mixed with mist, rain and sleet. It was a land, the people said, that no man wanted, and so the Outfolk tribe had occupied it and made a living from the sea, by carving axes from the dark stones of the mountains and by stealing from their neighbours. They had thrived in their barren country, but since their treasures had been stolen nothing had gone well in the land. There had been more disease than usual, and the disease had afflicted the tribe's cattle and sheep. A score of boats had been lost at sea, their crew's bodies washed ashore all white and swollen and sea-nibbled. Storms had flattened the land's few crops so there was hunger. Wolves had come down from the hills and their howling was like a lament for the lost treasures.

'If your brother does not keep our bargain—' Kereval began.

'If my brother breaks his word,' Camaban interrupted the chief, 'then I will undertake to return the gold. I, Camaban, will send you the gold. You trust me, do you not?'

'Of course,' Kereval said, and he did, for Camaban had cured the chief's favourite wife who had been dying of the wasting disease when Camaban had first visited Sarmennyn. Kereval's priests and healers had achieved nothing, but Camaban had given the woman a potion he had learned from Sannas and she had recovered swiftly and wholly.

Camaban wiped the broth from the clay bowl with the last of the bread then turned towards the crowd at the garlanded gate who had suddenly sunk to their knees. 'Your newest bride is here?' he asked Kereval sarcastically. 'Another child with twisted teeth and tangled hair to throw at the god?'

'No,' Kereval said, standing to join the crowd at the gate. 'Her name is Aurenna, and the priests tell me we have never sent a girl so lovely to the sun. Never. This one is beautiful.'

'They say that every year,' Camaban said, and that was true, for the sun brides were always reckoned beautiful. The tribe gave their best to the god, but sometimes, in years past, when parents had a beautiful daughter, they would hide the girl when the priests came to search for the bride. But the parents of this year's sun bride had not hidden her, nor married her to some young man who, by taking her virginity, would have made her ineligible for the sun god's bed. Instead they had kept her for Erek, although Aurenna was a girl so lovely that men had offered her father whole herds of cattle for her hand, while a chieftain from across the sea, a man whose traders brought gold and bronze into Sarmennyn, had said he would yield Aurenna's own weight in metal if she would just take ship to his far island.

Her father had rejected all the suitors, even though he desperately needed wealth for he had no cattle, no sheep, no fields and no boat. He chipped stone every day. He and his wife and their children all chipped the dark, greenish stone that came from the mountains to make axe-heads, which his children polished with sand, and then a trader would come and take away the heads and leave a little food for Aurenna's family. Aurenna alone had not chipped or polished stone. Her parents would not permit it for she was beautiful and a local priest had prophesied that she would become the sun bride, and so her family had protected her until the priests came to take her away. Her father had wept and her mother had embraced her when that moment arrived. 'When you are a goddess,' her mother pleaded, 'look after us.'

Now the new sun bride came to Kereval's settlement and the waiting crowd touched their foreheads to the ground as the priests escorted her through the blossom-hung gate. Kereval lay flat just inside the settlement's gateway and did not move until Aurenna gave him permission to stand, though one of the priests had to prompt her for she still did not fully understand that she was about to become a goddess. Kereval stood and felt a great relief that Aurenna was all that she had been reported to be. Her name meant 'golden one' in the Outfolk tongue, and it was a good name for her hair shone like pale gold. She had the whitest, cleanest skin Kereval had ever seen, a long face, calm eyes and a strange air of authority. She was, indeed, beautiful — Kereval would have liked to have taken her into his own household, but that was impossible. Instead he escorted her to the hut where the priests' wives would wash her, comb her long golden hair and dress her in the white woollen robe.

'She is beautiful,' Camaban grudgingly said to Kereval.

'Very,' Kereval said, and dared to hope that the sun god would reward the tribe for giving him a bride of such ethereal beauty.

'Beautiful,' Camaban said softly, and he knew suddenly that Aurenna must be part of his great scheme. In a world where folk were bent and scarred, toothless and dirty even when they were not wall-eyed, crippled and wart-covered, Aurenna was a pale, serene and dazzling presence, and Camaban understood that her sacrifice made this year a special one for Slaol. 'But what if the god rejects her?' Camaban asked.

Kereval touched his groin in the same gesture that Camaban's people used to avert ill fortune. 'He won't,' Kereval said fiercely, but in truth he did fear just such a rejection. In the past the sun brides had gone calmly to their deaths to be snatched in a blaze of light, but since the loss of the treasures the brides had all died hard. The last one had been the worst for she had screamed like a clumsily killed pig. She had writhed and shrieked and her moans of pain were worse than the howling of the wolves or the sigh of the ever-cold sea as it sucked at the dark rocks which edged Sarmennyn's bleak land. Kereval believed that the manner of Aurenna's death would be a touchstone for his wisdom. If the god approved of the bargain with Lengar then Aurenna would die cleanly, but if he disapproved then Aurenna would die in agony and Kereval's enemies within the tribe would reject his leadership.

At the southern edge of the settlement, beside the river where a score of boats had been pulled above the high tide, there stood a circle of rough stone pillars: the temple of the sun bride. The tribe danced about the circle, singing as they waited for the bride to appear from the hut where she was being washed and dressed. Leckan, the lame sorcerer who had gone to Ratharryn when the folk of Sarmennyn had attempted to trade for the gold, and who was now the senior priest in Kereval's settlement, glanced up at the sky and saw that the clouds were thinning so that there was a chance that the sun might see the girl. That was a good omen. Then the singing and the dancing stopped as the tribe dropped to the ground.

Aurenna had appeared and, led by two priests, walked to her temple. Her hair had been combed, then gathered into a plait that was bound with a leather thong and laced with cowslips and sloe-blossom. The robe, so clean and white, hung straight from her shoulders. She would normally have been arrayed in gold, with a cascade of lozenges around her neck and the larger pieces sewn to the robe, but the gold was gone, yet even so she was dazzling. She was a tall girl, and slender, and straight-backed, so that it seemed to Camaban, who alone watched as she walked through the prostrate tribe, that she moved with an unworldly grace.

Aurenna was unsure of what she should do. She was hesitant to enter the circle until one of the priests whispered that this was the moment when she became a goddess and this was her temple and she could do as she wished, but that it was customary for the bride to go to the circle's centre and there instruct the tribe to stand and dance. Aurenna did as she was told, though there was a catch in her voice as she spoke. And just at that moment the sun broke through the clouds and the people sighed with delight for that good omen.

Kereval, the chief, carried a leather bag which he handed to Leckan, and Leckan opened it to discover new treasures inside. These were treasures that Kereval had ordered made in the land across the western sea, and they had cost him dearly in bronze and amber and jet, and though they could not replace the lost treasures, they could still do honour to Erek and his bride. The priest drew out one large golden lozenge and three chains of smaller lozenges that had been strung on strings of sinews and he hung them about Aurenna's neck. Then he produced a bronze-bladed knife that had pins of gold pierced into its wooden handle. He kept the knife himself as a symbol that the thread of Aurenna's life would be cut when her time was done.

Gifts were brought to the goddess. There were bags of grain, oysters, mussels and many dried fish. There were axe-heads and slivers of bronze, and those gifts the priests tucked away for their own use, but the food was piled before Aurenna, fetched into the temple by men who dared take a glance at the goddess before they prostrated themselves. She thanked each one with a diffidence that was alluring. She even laughed when one man brought some dried fish, all threaded by their gills onto a stick, and one fish fell off. As the man turned to retrieve it another fell from the opposite end of the stick, and as he turned to retrieve that so a third fell off. Aurenna's laughter was as bright as her betrothed who still shone down from the gap in the clouds.

'It is customary to give the food to the widows,' Leckan the priest told her in a low voice.

'The food must go to the widows,' Aurenna said in a clear voice.

Leckan gave her more instructions. She was a goddess now, so she must not be seen eating or drinking, though wherever she went in Sarmennyn a hut would be provided for her privacy. Two women would be her constant attendants and four young spearmen her guards. 'You are free to go wherever you wish, great one,' he murmured to Aurenna, 'but it is customary to travel throughout the land to bring blessings on it.'

'And…' Aurenna began a question, but the words dried in her throat. 'When…' she began again, but still could not finish.

'And, at the end,' Leckan said calmly, 'you will be here and we shall escort you to your husband. It does not hurt.' He pointed to the sun, which now blazed between the clouds. 'Your husband will not wish to wait one heartbeat longer than is necessary. There will be no pain.'

'No pain?' a voice suddenly shouted behind them. 'No pain? There must be pain! What bride does not feel pain? Pain and blood! Blood and pain!' The man who had shouted these words now came into the temple where he dropped to the ground and stretched his hands towards Aurenna's feet. 'Of course there is pain!' he shouted into the grass. 'Unimaginable pain! Your blood will boil, your bones crack and your skin shrivel. It is agony. You could never imagine such pain, not if you were to live in torment till the end of time!' He scrambled to his feet again. 'You should scream in pain,' he spat at Aurenna, 'for you are a bride!'

The man had come with a dozen followers, all naked like their leader and all priests, but only the man who shouted had come close to Aurenna. He was a tall, gaunt creature with a starved face and blazing eyes, long yellow teeth and tangled black hair and a scar-flecked skin. His voice was like a raven's jeer, his heavy bones were as knobbled as flint and his blackened fingers were hooked like claws. 'Pain is the price you pay!' he shouted at the terrified girl. He carried a heavy flint-headed spear which he flourished wildly as he capered among the stones. 'Your eyes will burst, your sinews will shrink and your screams will echo from the cliffs!' he shouted.

Camaban had watched this display and grinned at it, but Kereval had run into the temple. 'Scathel?' he shouted angrily. 'Scathel!'

Scathel was the high priest of Sarmennyn, and had been the high priest when the treasures were stolen, but he had blamed himself for the gold's loss and so he had gone away into the hills where he had howled at the rocks and scarred his body with flints. Others of the priests had followed him and, when Scathel's madness had passed, they had built themselves a new temple in the high rocks and there they had prayed, starved and abased themselves, making amends for the loss of the treasures. Many in the tribe believed that Scathel had vanished for ever, but now he had returned.

He ignored Kereval and prodded Leckan out of the way with his spear so that he could advance on the frightened Aurenna. If Scathel was impressed by her beauty he did not show it, but instead thrust his raw-skinned face at her. 'You are a goddess?' he demanded.

Aurenna could not speak, but did give one small nod in nervous acknowledgement of the question.

'Then I have a petition for you,' Scathel shouted so that every soul in the settlement could hear him. 'Our treasures must be returned! They must be returned!' His spittle flecked her face as he shouted and she stepped back to avoid it. 'I have built a temple!' Scathel bellowed over Aurenna's shoulder, addressing the whole crowd, who stared at him aghast. 'I have made a temple with my own hands and I have bled for the god, and he has spoken to me! We must fetch the treasures back!'

'The treasures will be returned,' Kereval intervened.

'You!' Scathel turned on the chief, and even levelled his spear so that a dozen warriors ran to Kereval's side. 'What have you done to retrieve the treasures?' Scathel demanded.

'We have lent men to Ratharryn,' Kereval replied courteously, 'and will send them a temple.'

'Ratharryn!' Scathel sneered. 'A small place, a miserable place, a bog of stunted people, goitred pigs and twisted serpents. You are a chief, not a trader! You do not bargain for our gold, you take it! Take our spears, take our arrows, and take back the treasures!' He stepped aside and raised his arms to attract the tribe's attention. 'We must go to war!' he shouted. 'To war!' He began to beat his spear against one of the stones. 'We must take our spears, our swords, our bows and we must kill and maim until the things at Ratharryn scream for our mercy!' The spear shaft broke and the crude stone head flew harmlessly away. 'We must burn their huts and raze their temples and slaughter their livestock and throw their infants into Erek's fires!' He turned back on Kereval and thrust out the splintered spear staff. 'Lengar has our men to fight his wars, and he has our gold, and when his wars are won he will turn on our men and kill them. You call yourself a chief? A chief would even now be leading the young men to war!'

Kereval drew his sword. It was a bronze blade, beautifully balanced, part of the tribute that each trader who came from the island across the western sea had to pay to the folk of Sarmennyn before he was allowed to carry his goods further eastwards. Kereval suddenly slashed at the spear staff and the ferocity of the attack drove Scathel backwards. 'War?' Kereval asked. 'What do you know of war, Scathel?' He slashed again, knocking the staff violently aside. 'To go to war, Scathel, I must lead my men across the black hills, then through the land of Salar's people. You would fight them?' The sword cut a third time, slicing a thick splinter from the rough ash staff. 'And when we have buried our dead, priest, and crossed the further hills, we shall come to the tribes of the great river. They have no love for us. But perhaps we can fight them too?' He slapped the staff aside again with his sword. 'And when we have fought our way across the river, and up into the farther hills, then Ratharryn's allies will wait for us with spears. With hundreds of spears!'

'Then how did Vakkal reach Ratharryn?' Scathel demanded. Vakkal was the man who had led the forces to help Lengar take the chieftainship.

'They went by hidden paths, led by your brother,' Kereval said, 'but they were only fifty men. You think I can take all our spearmen secretly? And to conquer Ratharryn, Scathel, will take all our men, and who will stay here to protect our womenfolk?'

'The god will protect them!' Scathel insisted.

Kereval slashed the sword again. This time Scathel dropped the staff and spread his hands as though inviting Kereval to drive the heavy sword into his belly, but the chief just shook his head. 'I have given my word,' Kereval said, 'and we shall give Lengar of Ratharryn time to keep his word.' He raised the sword so that its tip disappeared into the filthy tangle of Scathel's wild beard. 'Be careful of what you stir in this tribe, priest, for I still rule here.'

'And I am still high priest,' Scathel spat back.

'The treasures will be returned!' Kereval shouted. He turned to look at his tribe. 'We have chosen a bride who is more lovely than any girl we have ever sent to Erek's bed,' Kereval announced. 'She will carry our prayers.'

'And what will you do' — Scathel repeated Camaban's grim question — 'if the god rejects his bride?' He suddenly turned and snatched the bronze knife from Leckan's hand. For a heartbeat men thought he was about to attack Aurenna, but instead he held his own beard with his left hand and slashed at it with the knife, slicing off great tangled hanks of matted hair. Then he threw the hair into the temple's centre. 'With my beard I put a curse on Kereval if the god refuses this bride! And if he does, then it will be war, nothing but war! War and death and blood and slaughter until the treasures are back!' He stalked towards his old hut and the tribe parted, letting him through, while behind him, at her temple, Aurenna shuddered in horror.

Camaban watched, and afterwards, when no one watched him, he retrieved the hanks of Scathel's hair and wove them into a ring through which he stared at a cloud-shrouded Slaol. 'He will fight me,' he told the god, 'even though he loves you as I do. So you must turn his thoughts as I have turned his hair,' and with that he cast the circlet of hair into the river that flowed past Kereval's settlement. He doubted the small charm would effect the change by itself, but it might help, and Camaban knew he needed help for the god had given him a gigantic task. That was why he had returned to Sarmennyn in the time of their sun bride's rule for it was then that the Outfolk tribe was most vulnerable to suggestion, to magic and to change.

And Camaban had a whole world to change.

Haragg, Saban and Cagan reached Kereval's settlement on the same day as Aurenna, but it was evening when they came and the good weather had turned into a heavy downpour that beat on the dark land and soaked Saban's hair and tunic. Haragg unloaded his horses, then led the weary beasts into a decrepit hut, evidently his home, before taking Saban and Cagan to a great hut that stood on the highest ground within the settlement's timber palisade. Water streamed from the thatched roof of the hut that was larger than any Saban had ever seen, so large that, when he ducked inside, he saw that its ridge pole needed the support of five great timbers. The hall stank of fish, smoke, fur and sweat, and was crowded with men who feasted in the light of two great fires. A drummer beat skins while a flautist played a heron-bone flute in the hut's corner.

A silence fell as Haragg entered and Saban sensed that the men were wary of the big trader, but Haragg ignored them, pointing instead at a small man sitting at one end of the hall close to a smoky fire. The man's wiry hair was crammed into a bronze circlet, while his face was thick with ash-grey scars. 'The chief,' Haragg whispered to Saban. 'Called Kereval. A decent man.'

Camaban was sitting next to Kereval, though at first Saban did not recognise his brother, seeing instead a hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed sorcerer with a frightening face framed by bones woven into his hair. Then the sorcerer pointed a long finger at Saban, crooked it and gestured that he should come and sit between himself and the chief, and Saban realised it was his brother.

'It took you long enough to get here,' Camaban grumbled, without any other greeting, then he grudgingly named his brother to Kereval who smiled a welcome then clapped his hands for silence so he could tell the feasters who the newcomer was. Men stared at Saban when they heard he was Lengar's brother, then Kereval demanded that a slave bring Saban some food.

'I doubt he wants to eat,' Camaban said.

'I do,' Saban said. He was hungry.

'You want to eat this filth?' Camaban demanded, showing Saban a bowl of stewed fish, seaweed and stringy mutton. He lifted a strand of seaweed. 'Am I supposed to eat this?' he asked Kereval.

Kereval ignored Camaban's disgust and spoke to Saban. 'Your brother cured my best wife of a disease that no one else could mend!' The chief beamed at Saban. 'She is well again! He works miracles, your brother.'

'I simply treated her properly,' Camaban said, 'unlike the fools you call healers and priests. They couldn't cure a wart!'

Kereval took the seaweed out of Camaban's hand and ate it. 'You have been travelling with Haragg?' he asked Saban.

'A long way,' Saban said.

'Haragg likes to travel,' Kereval said. He had small beady eyes in a face that was good-humoured and quick to smile. 'Haragg believes,' he went on, leaning close to Saban, 'if he journeys far enough, he will find a magician to give his son tongue and ears.'

'What Cagan needs is a good blow on the head,' Camaban snarled. 'That would cure him.'

'Truly?' Kereval asked eagerly.

'Is that liquor?' Camaban asked, and helped himself to a decorated pot that stood beside Kereval. He tipped it to his mouth and drank greedily. 'You will stay now? Through the summer, perhaps?' Kereval asked Saban with a smile.

'I don't know why I'm here,' Saban confessed, glancing at Camaban. He was taken aback by the change in his brother. Camaban, the stuttering cripple, was now seated in the place of honour.

'You are here, little brother,' Camaban said, 'to help me move a temple.'

Kereval's smile vanished. 'Not everyone believes we should give you a temple.'

'Of course they don't!' Camaban said, not bothering to lower his voice. 'You have as many fools here as in any other tribe, but it doesn't matter what they think.' He waved a dismissive hand at the feasters. 'Do the gods seek the opinion of these fools before they send rain? Of course they don't, so why should you or I? It only matters that they obey.'

Kereval quickly diverted the conversation, talking instead about the change in the weather, and Saban looked about the firelit hall. Most of the men had drunk enough of the Outfolk's famously fierce liquor to be loud and boisterous. Some were arguing about hunting exploits while others bellowed for silence so they could listen to the flautist whose thin notes were being overwhelmed by the uproar. Women slaves brought in food and drink, and then Saban saw who sat beyond the hall's farther fire and his world changed.

It was a moment when his heart seemed to cease its beating, when the world and all its noises — the rain on the thatch, the harsh voices, the splintering of burning wood, the airy notes of the flute and the pulse of the drums — vanished. All was suspended in that moment as if there were nothing left but himself and the white-robed girl who sat on a wooden platform at the hall's far end.

At first, when he glimpsed her though the swirling smoke, Saban thought she could not be human for she was so clean. Her robe was white and hung with shining lozenges, while her hair fell in a cascade of shining gold to frame a face that was the palest and most beautiful he had ever seen. He felt a surge of guilt for Derrewyn, a surge that was swept away as he looked at the girl. He stared and stared, motionless, as though he had been struck by an arrow like the one that had flickered through the twilight to kill his father. He did not eat, he refused the liquor that Camaban offered, he just gazed through the smoke at the ethereal girl who seemed to hover above the brawling feast. She did not eat, she did not drink, she did not speak, she just sat enthroned like a goddess.

Camaban's harsh voice sounded in Saban's ear. 'Her name is Aurenna, and she is a goddess. She is Erek's bride, and this feast is to welcome her to the settlement. Is she not beautiful? When you speak to her, you must kneel to her. But if you touch her, brother, you will die. If you even dare to dream of touching her, you will die.'

'She's the sun bride?' Saban asked.

'And she will burn in less than three moons,' Camaban said. 'That's how the sun brides get married. They jump into a fire at the sea's edge. Hiss of fat and splinter of bone. Flame and screaming. She dies. That's her purpose. That's why she lives, to die. So don't stare at her like a dumb calf, because you can't have her. Find yourself a slave girl to rut with because if you touch Aurenna you'll die.'

But Saban could not take his eyes from the sun bride. It would be worth dying, he thought recklessly, just to touch that golden girl. He guessed she was fourteen or fifteen summers old, the same age as himself, a bride in her perfection, and Saban was suddenly assailed by a gaping sense of loss. First Derrewyn, and now this girl. Had Miyac, Haragg's daughter, presided over a feast like this? Had she been as beautiful? And had some young man gazed at her with longing before she went to the flames at the sea's edge?

And then his thoughts were broken as the leather curtain in the wide doorway was snatched aside so violently that it tore from the wooden pegs holding it to the lintel. A gust of chill damp wind flickered the two fires as a tall, gaunt and wild-haired man strode into the hut. 'Where is he?' he shouted, his wolf pelt cloak dripping rainwater.

Haragg, thinking the wild-haired man sought him, stood, but the newcomer just spat at Haragg and turned on Kereval instead. 'Where is he?' he shouted. Three other men had followed him into the hut — all priests, for they had bones woven into their beards.

'Where is who?' Kereval asked.

'Lengar's brother!'

'Both Lengar's brothers are here,' Kereval said, gesturing at Camaban and Saban, 'and both are my guests.'

'Guests!' the wild man sneered, then he threw his arms wide and turned to stare at the feasters who had fallen silent. 'There should be no guests in Sarmennyn,' he cried, 'and no feasts, no music, no dances, no joy until the treasures are returned to us! And those things' — he whipped round to point a bony finger at Saban and Camaban — 'those two bits of dirt can bring Erek's gold back.'

'Scathel!' Kereval shouted. 'They are guests!'

Scathel pushed past the seated men and stared down at Saban and Camaban, frowning when he saw the bones tied into Camaban's hair. 'Are you a priest?' he demanded.

Camaban ignored the question. He yawned instead, and Scathel suddenly bent and seized Saban's tunic and, with an astonishing strength in a man so thin and bony, pulled him upright. 'We shall use the brother magic,' he told Kereval.

'He is a guest!' Kereval protested again.

'The brother magic?' Camaban asked in a tone of genuine enquiry. 'Tell me of this magic'

'What I do to him,' Scathel said, digging a finger into Saban's ribs, 'will be done to his brother also. I take his eye; Lengar loses an eye.' He slapped Saban. 'There,' he crowed, 'Lengar's cheek is stinging.'

'Mine isn't,' Camaban said.

'You are a priest,' Scathel said, explaining why Camaban had failed to feel Saban's pain.

'No,' Camaban said, 'I am no priest, but a sorcerer.'

'A sorcerer who does not know the brother magic?' Scathel jeered. 'What kind of sorcerer is that?' He laughed, then turned Saban around so that all the hall could see him. Lengar of Ratharryn will never yield the treasures!' he shouted. 'Not if we give him every temple in Sarmennyn! Not if we take every stone from every field and lay them at his feet! But if I take his eyes, his hands, his feet and his manhood, then he will yield.'

The listening men beat their hands on the floor in approval and Camaban, watching silently, saw how much opposition there was in Kereval's tribe to the agreement with Lengar. They did not believe Ratharryn would ever yield the gold. They had agreed to the bargain for, at the time, there had seemed no alternative, but now Scathel had come roaring from the hills and proposed using magic, torture and sorcery. 'We shall dig a pit,' Scathel said, 'and drop this louse inside, and there he shall stay shut up until his brother yields us the treasures!' The feasters shouted their approval.

'Put my brother in a pit,' Camaban said when there was silence, 'and I shall fill your bladder with coals, so that when you piss you will writhe from the agony of liquid fire.' He leaned over and took a morsel of fish from Kereval's bowl and calmly ate it.

'You? A crippled sorcerer? Threaten me?' Scathel gestured at Camaban's left foot, which was still misshapen, though no longer grotesquely clubbed. 'You think the gods listen to things like you?'

Camaban took a fishbone from his mouth, then delicately bent it between a thumb and forefinger. 'I will make the gods dance on your entrails,' he said quietly, 'while dead souls suck your brains out of your eye-sockets. I shall feed your liver to the ravens and give your bowels to the dogs.' He snapped the bone in two. 'Let my brother go.'

Scathel leaned down to Camaban, and Saban, watching, thought how alike the two men were. The Outfolk sorcerer, Haragg's twin brother, was the older man, but like Camaban he was lean, gaunt and powerful. 'He will go in the pit tonight, cripple,' Scathel hissed at Camaban, 'and I will piss on him.'

'You will let him go!' a woman's voice commanded, and there was a gasp in the hall as the men turned to look at Aurenna. She was standing, pointing a finger at the angry priest. 'You will release him,' she insisted, 'now!'

Scathel quivered for a heartbeat, but then he swallowed and reluctantly released his grip on Saban. 'You risk losing everything!' he said to Kereval.

'Kereval does Erek's will,' Camaban said, still quietly, answering for the chief, and then he leaned forward and dropped the two scraps of fishbone into the fire. 'I have long wanted to meet you, Scathel of Sarmennyn,' he went on, smiling, 'for I had heard much of you and thought, fool that I am, that I might learn from you. I see, instead, that I will have to teach you.'

Scathel looked into the fire where the two slivers of bone lay on a burning log. For a heartbeat he stared at them, then he reached down and carefully picked them up, one after the other; the hairs on his arm shrivelled in the flames and there was a rank smell of burning flesh that made men wince, but Scathel did not flinch. He spat on the bones, then pointed one at Camaban. 'You will never take one of our temples, cripple, never!' He flicked the bone scraps at Camaban, plucked the damp wolf pelts close about his thin body and walked away leaving the feast hall in silence.

'Welcome to Sarmennyn,' Camaban said to Saban.

'What am I doing here?' Saban demanded.

'I will tell you tomorrow. Tomorrow I give you a new life. But tonight, my brother, if you can, eat.' And he would say no more.

—«»—«»—«»—

Next day, in the fresh swirling wind that followed the night's rain, Camaban led Haragg, Saban and Cagan to the Sea Temple. It lay a fair walk west of the settlement on a low rocky headland where the sea broke white. Cagan would not go near the temple where his sister had died, but cowered in some nearby rocks, whimpering, and Haragg soothed his huge son, patting him like a small child and crooning to him even though Cagan could hear nothing. Then Haragg left Cagan in his cleft of stone and followed the brothers to the deserted temple, which was loud with the plaintive calls of the white birds.

The temple was a simple ring of twelve stones, each about a man's height, while from the ring a short corridor flanked by a dozen smaller stones led to the cliff's edge. The cliff was neither high nor sheer and just beyond its upper edge, and not far beneath it, was a wide ledge heaped with timber. 'They've already begun stacking the fire,' Haragg said in disgust.

'Kereval tells me they're making the fire bigger this year,' Camaban said. 'They want to make sure this girl dies quick.' The wind lifted his hair and rattled the small bones tied to the fringes of his tunic. He looked at Saban. 'The girl is stripped inside the circle, then waits till the sun touches the sea when she must walk the stone avenue and leap into the flames. I watched it last year,' he went on, 'and the girl took fright. Tried to jump straight through the fire.' He laughed at the memory. 'What a death she had!'

'So they don't go willingly?' Saban asked.

'Some do,' Haragg said. 'My daughter did.' The big man was weeping now. 'She walked to her husband as a bride should and she smiled every step of the way.'

Saban shuddered. He looked at the cliff's edge and tried to imagine Haragg's daughter stepping into the blazing fire. He heard her scream, saw her long hair flare brighter than the sun she would marry, and suddenly he wanted to cry for Aurenna. He could not shake her face from his thoughts.

'And Miyac's burned bones were pounded to powder and scattered on the fields,' Haragg went on. 'And for what? For what?' He shouted the last two words.

'For the good of the tribe,' Camaban replied sourly, 'and you were a priest then, and you'd burned other men's daughters without scruple.'

Haragg flinched as if he had been struck. He was much older than Camaban, but he bowed his head as if accepting the younger man's authority. 'I was wrong,' he said simply.

'Most people are wrong,' Camaban said. 'The world is stuffed with fools, which is why we must change it.' He motioned for Haragg and Saban to squat, though he stayed standing like a master addressing his pupils. 'Lengar has agreed to return Erek's gold if Sarmennyn gives him a temple. He made that agreement because he believes no temple can be moved to Ratharryn, but we are going to prove him wrong.'

'Take this temple,' Haragg said, nodding at the Sea Temple's stark pillars.

'No,' Camaban said. 'We shall find Sarmennyn's best temple and take that one.'

'Why?' Saban asked.

'Why?' Camaban snapped at him. 'Why? Slaol sent Ratharryn his gold. That is a sign, fool, that he wants something of us. What does he want? He wants a temple, of course, because temples are where the gods touch the earth. Slaol wants a temple, and he wants it in Ratharryn, and he sent us gold from Sarmennyn to show us where the temple must come from. Is that so very hard to understand?' He gave Saban a pitying look, then began pacing up and down the short turf. 'He wants a temple from Sarmennyn because here Slaol is worshipped above all the other gods. Here the people have glimpsed part of the truth, and that truth we must carry to the heartland. But there is a greater truth.' He stopped his pacing and stared at his two listeners with a fierce expression. 'I have seen to the heart of all things,' he said softly, then waited for either man to challenge him, but Haragg was just watching him with a worshipful face and Saban had nothing to say.

'The priests believe the world is fixed,' Camaban went on scornfully. 'They believe that nothing changes and that if we obey their rules and make our sacrifices, then nothing will ever change. But the world is changing. It has changed. The pattern is broken.'

'The pattern?' Saban said. Haragg had mentioned the pattern in the north country, but would not explain it. Now Camaban would tell him.

To do so Camaban stooped and plucked an arrow from Saban's quiver, for Saban went nowhere without his yew bow, which was a symbol that he was no longer a slave. Camaban used the arrow's flint point to scratch a wide circle in the turf, gouging it so that the soil showed brown through the sallow grass. He said, 'The circle is the sun's year. We know that circle. We mark it. Here in Sarmennyn they kill a girl each midsummer to show when one circle ends and the same circle begins again. Do you understand that?' He was looking at Saban for Haragg already knew of the broken pattern.

'I understand,' Saban said. At Ratharryn they also marked the circle's end and beginning at midsummer, though they did it by killing a heifer at sunrise rather than a girl at sunset.

'Now for the mystery,' Camaban said, and he gouged a much smaller circle, placing it on the larger scratched ring like a bead on a bronze wire circlet. 'That is Lahanna,' he said, tapping the small circle. 'She is born, she grows' — he was tracing his finger about the bead — 'and dies again. Then she is born again' — he made a new circle, the same size as the first and next to it — 'she grows and dies, and then is born again.' He scratched a third circle. What Camaban had drawn now looked like three beads that almost, but not quite, filled one quadrant of the big circle of the sun. 'She is born, she dies,' he said again and again, drawing more circles until he had made twelve beads, and then he stopped. 'You see?' he said, pointing the arrow's head to the gap between the last and the first bead.

The circle now had twelve beads. 'Twelve moons in each year,' Camaban said, 'but the mystery is here.' He tapped the small space that was left between the first and the last of the moon circles.

Haragg turned to Saban, eager that he should understand. 'The moon's year is shorter than the sun's year.'

Saban understood that. The priests at Ratharryn, indeed priests everywhere, had long noted that the moon's year of twelve swellings and shrinkings was shorter than the sun's great circuit about the sky, but Saban had never thought much about the disparity. It was one of life's constant mysteries, like why stags only wore antlers for part of the year, or where the swallows went in winter. He watched now as Camaban brought a human thigh bone from his bag.

'When I was a child,' Camaban said, 'I sat in our Old Temple and watched the sky. I would go to the Death Place and steal bones, and I would mark the bones like this one.' He gave the bone to Saban. 'Look,' he instructed him, pointing to a series of small marks that had been cut into one long side of the bone. 'Those marks are the days of the sun's year.'

Saban had to hold the bone close, for the marks were tiny, but he could see hundreds of nicks, far too many to count, and each tiny scratch marked a day and a night, adding to a year. 'And these marks' — Camaban showed Saban a second set of scratches that lay parallel to the first — 'are the days of the moon's growing and dying. They show twelve births and twelve deaths.' The second set of marks was fractionally shorter than the first.

Saban again held the bone close to his eyes and used his fingernail to count the extra days on the sun's line. 'Eleven days?' he asked.

'So far as I can tell,' Camaban said. His scornful tone was gone, replaced by an earnest humility. 'But the days are hard to count. I used many bones over many years, and sometimes there was too much cloud and I had to guess the days of the moon, and some years the gap came to more than eleven, and sometimes it was less.' He took the bone back from Camaban. 'But this bone came from the best year, and it tells the same message as all the bones. It tells me that the pattern is broken.'

'The pattern?'

'The circles should meet!' Camaban said fiercely, tapping the diagram he had scratched into the turf. 'That gap' —

he put his finger on the space between the beads — 'is eleven days long. But it should not be there.' He stood again and began to pace. 'To everything in the world there is a purpose,' he said, 'for without purpose there is no meaning. And the meaning is in the pattern. Night and day, man and woman, hunter and prey, the seasons, the tides! They all have a pattern! The stars have a pattern. The sun follows a pattern, the moon follows a pattern, but the two patterns are different, and the world is being split into two.' He pointed towards the sea. 'Some patterns follow the sun, others the moon. The crops come and are cut with the sun, but the tides follow the moon — why? And why did Dilan send the gold to Erek?' He used the Outfolk names for the gods of the sea and the sun, then answered his own question fiercely. 'He sent it so that the sun would take the sea tides back into his pattern!'

'Women follow the moon pattern,' Haragg said gloomily.

'They do?' Camaban sounded surprised.

'In their bleeding,' Haragg said, then shrugged, 'or so I'm told.'

'But everything,' Camaban declared, 'everything should follow the sun! All should be regular, but it isn't.' He pointed again at the pattern in the turf. 'The mystery is how to make the pattern right.'

'How?' Saban asked.

'You tell me,' Camaban said, and Saban understood that the question was not lightly asked.

He stared at the pattern. Think of it, he told himself, as beads on a bronze wire and then the answer was obvious. A man could make more beads, smaller ones, and try to thread them until they filled the wire perfectly, but that would be a laborious task. The simple way to make the beads fit was to shorten the wire, a task that would be easy for any smith. And if the wire were shortened, the big circle would be smaller and the beads would all touch. 'Slaol must be brought closer to the earth?' Saban suggested diffidently.

'Well done,' Camaban said warmly. 'So what does that tell you?'

Saban thought long and hard, then shrugged. 'I don't know.'

'We tell stories about how Slaol and Lahanna loved each other and then became enemies, but those are just stories. They leave something out. Us. Why are we here? We know that the gods made us, but why? Why do we make things? You make a bow — to kill. You make a pot — to hold things. You make a brooch — to fasten a cloak. So we were made for a purpose, but what was that purpose?' He waited for an answer, but neither Haragg nor Saban spoke. 'And why are we flawed?' Camaban asked. 'Would you make a bow that was weak? Or a pot that was cracked? We were not made flawed! The gods would not have made us flawed any more than a potter would make a bowl that was cracked or a smith would make a knife that was blunt, yet we are sick, we are maimed and we are twisted. The gods made us perfect, and we are flawed. Why?' He paused before offering the answer: 'Because we offended Slaol.'

'We did?' Saban asked. He was accustomed to the story that Lahanna had offended Slaol by trying to dim his brightness, but Camaban was now blaming mankind.

'We offended him by worshipping the lesser gods as fervently as we worshipped him,' Camaban said. 'We insulted him, and so he moved away, and now we must draw him back by worshipping him as he is supposed to be worshipped, by giving him his proper place above all the other gods, and by building him a temple that will show him we have understood his pattern. Then he will come back, and when he returns there will be no more winter.'

'No more winter?' Saban asked in astonishment.

'Winter is Slaol's punishment,' Camaban explained. 'We offended him and so he punishes us each and every year. How? By moving away from us. How do we know that? Because the farther you stand from a fire, the less heat you feel. In summer, when Slaol is near us, we feel his heat, but in winter, when things die, his heat goes. It goes because he is far from us, so if we can bring him back then there will be no more winter.' He turned and faced the sun. 'There will be no more winter,' he said again, 'and no more sickness, and no more grief, and no more children crying in the night.' There were tears in his eyes, and Saban remembered the night when Camaban's mother had died and the crooked child had howled like a wolf cub.

'And no more girls will leap into the flames,' Haragg said quietly.

'And you' — Camaban ignored Haragg's words as he turned to Saban — 'will not be a warrior.' He took the yew bow from Saban's shoulder and, with an effort that made him grimace, snapped the stave across his knee. He flung the broken bow across the cliff top so that it fell into the sea. 'You will be a builder, Saban, and you will help Haragg move the temple from Sarmennyn to Ratharryn and so bring the god back to us.'

'If my brother permits it,' Haragg said, speaking of Scathel.

'In time,' Camaban said confidently, 'Scathel will join us. because he will understand that we have seen the truth.' He dropped to his knees and bowed to the sun. 'We have seen the truth,' he said humbly, 'and we shall change the world.'

Saban felt the excitement. They would change the world. At that moment, poised above the sea, he knew that they could.

—«»—«»—«»—

Aurenna, in the time between her elevation to a goddess and her death in the sun's fire, was expected to tour the country and hear the people's prayers that she would carry to her husband. She left Kereval's settlement escorted by four spearmen to guard her, two women to attend her, three priests to guide her and a dozen slaves to serve her, as well as by a crowd of other folk who just wanted to follow the footsteps of the sun bride.

Kereval ruled a land greater in size than Ratharryn's holdings, though it was more thinly settled for Sarmennyn's soil was hard; it was Aurenna's duty to show herself to all the tribe and to the dead in their communal mounds. Each night a hut was cleared of its folk and animals so that the sun bride could sleep in privacy and each morning there was a huddle of petitioners waiting outside the hut. Women begged her to grant them sons, parents pleaded with her to heal their children, warriors asked her to bless their spears and fishermen bowed as she touched their boats and nets. The priests led her from temple to temple and from grave mound to grave mound. They opened the graves, shoving their vast entrance stones aside so that Aurenna could stoop into their cave-like interiors and talk to the dead whose bones lay jumbled in the damp shadows.

Camaban and Saban also accompanied her, following the golden girl to the sheltered valleys on Sarmennyn's south coast where the people farmed and took their long wooden fishing boats out to sea, and then up into the high, bare land of the north where cattle, sheep and the making of stone axes gave a poor living to scattered homesteads. And wherever they went Camaban inspected the temples, looking for the one he wanted moved to Ratharryn. The people, recognising him as a sorcerer, bowed. 'Can you make magic?' Saban asked him one day.

'I turned you into a slave, didn't I?' Camaban retorted.

Saban looked at the scar on his hand. 'That was cruel,' he said.

'Don't be absurd,' Camaban said wearily. 'How else was I to keep you alive? Lengar wanted to kill you, which was entirely the sensible thing to do, but I hoped you might prove useful to me. So I fed him a nonsensical tale about the gods taking revenge on those who killed their half-brothers, then gave him the idea of enslaving you. He liked that. And I wanted you to meet Haragg.'

'I like him,' Saban said warmly.

'You like most people,' Camaban said scornfully. 'Haragg is quite clever,' he went on, 'but you can't trust all his ideas. He's absurdly influenced by his daughter's death! He distrusts ritual, but there's nothing wrong with ritual. It shows the gods that we recognise their power. If we took notice of Haragg's ideas we wouldn't burn Aurenna to death and what is the point of the girl's existence if it isn't to burn?'

Saban looked ahead to where Aurenna walked between her attendant priests. He hated Camaban at that moment, but he said nothing, and Camaban, who knew exactly what his brother was thinking, laughed.

That afternoon they came to another temple, this one a simple circle of five stones that was typical of the shrines in the northern part of Sarmennyn. A few, very few, had as many as a dozen stones, but none of the boulders was as large as those that stood within Cathallo's walls. Sarmennyn's stones were rarely taller than a man nor any thicker than a man's waist, but nearly all of them were squared into trim pillars.

Camaban liked none of the shrines they saw. 'We want a temple that will astonish,' he told Saban. 'We have to find a temple that will tell Slaol we have made a great effort on his behalf. What's the achievement in moving four or five little rocks to Ratharryn?'

Saban reckoned that moving just one stone would be an achievement, and he had begun to doubt that Camaban would ever find the temple he wanted. 'Why don't you just pick any temple?' he asked one night. 'Slaol will know how much effort we made to move it.'

'If I wanted the job done quickly and carelessly,' Camaban said, 'I would have let you find a temple rather than waste my own time searching. Don't be absurd, Saban.' They were eating in a crowded hut where Aurenna's attendants had been greeted with gifts of fish, meat, pelts and pots of liquor. One pot of the liquor could steal a man's brains and legs, though Camaban always seemed unaffected. He drank it like water, belched, drank more, and never slurred his words nor staggered; in the morning, when Saban's head was throbbing and sour, Camaban would be full of energy.

That night they were in the hut of a clan chief, the lord of all his kin whose huts were huddled in the lee of a mountain. The chief was a toothless old man who, in honour of Aurenna's coming, wore a circle of gold about his scrawny neck. His wives had stirred a foul mess of seaweed and shellfish over a smoky fire and when the meal was eaten one of his sons, who looked as old and toothless as his father, took down the polished shell of a sea-turtle that hung from a rafter and used it to beat out a rhythm while he chanted an apparently endless song about his father's exploit in crossing to the land across the western sea where he had slaughtered many enemies, taken many slaves and brought home much gold. 'What it probably means,' Camaban said to Saban, 'is that the old fool wandered up the beach for three days and came back with a couple of striped pebbles and a gull's feather.'

Folk came from the other huts while the chant continued. More and more packed themselves in until Camaban and Saban were crammed against the hut's low stone wall. The people must have heard the tale many times, for they often joined in the chant and the old man nodded happily whenever such a chorus sounded, but then, quite suddenly, the drumbeat and the chanting ended. The old man opened his eyes and looked indignant at the silence until he saw that Aurenna, who had eaten in the privacy of her own hut, had just entered. The clan chief smiled and indicated that the sun bride could sit beside him, but Aurenna shook her head, peered about the hut, then stepped delicately through the press of bodies to sit beside Saban. She nodded to the chanter, indicating he could begin again, and the man tapped his turtle-shell, closed his eyes and picked up his story's thread.

Saban was acutely conscious of Aurenna's proximity. He had spoken to her a few times while they walked Sarmennyn's rough paths, but she had never sought his company and her arrival at his side made him clumsy, shy and tongue-tied. It hurt him even to look at Aurenna for the thought of what must happen to her in a brief time. Her fate and Derrewyn's had become tangled in his mind so that it seemed to him that Derrewyn's soul had entered Aurenna's body and now must be snatched from him again. He closed his eyes and bent his head, trying to will away the thoughts of Derrewyn's rape and Aurenna's impending death.

Then Aurenna leaned close to him so that he would hear her voice above the chanter's song. 'Have you found your temple?' she asked.

'No,' he said, shaking with nervousness.

'Why not?' Aurenna asked. 'You must have seen a new temple every day?'

'They're too small,' Saban answered, blushing. He did not look at her for fear that he would stammer.

'And how will you move your temple?' Aurenna asked. 'Will you have the god make it fly to Ratharryn?'

Saban shrugged. 'I don't know.'

'You should talk to Lewydd,' she said, indicating one of her guardian spearmen who was squatting beside the hut's central post. 'He says he knows how it can be done.'

'If Scathel ever lets us take a temple,' Saban said gloomily.

'I shall defeat Scathel,' Aurenna said confidently.

Saban dared to look into her eyes then. They were dark, though the flicker of firelight was reflected in them, and he suddenly wanted to weep because she was going to die. 'You'll defeat Scathel?' he asked.

'I hate him,' she said softly. 'He spat at me when I was first taken to my temple. That's why I wouldn't let him put you in the pit. So when I go to the fire I shall tell my husband that he is to let you take a temple to Ratharryn.' She looked away from Saban as another man took the turtle-shell drum and started another song, this one in praise of the sun bride herself. Aurenna listened intently as a compliment to the singer as he began by describing the sun god's loneliness and his yearning for a human bride, but when he moved on to describe the sun bride's beauty Aurenna seemed to lose interest for she leaned close to Saban again. 'Is it true that in Ratharryn you do not send the god a bride?'

'No.'

'Nor in Cathallo?'

'No.'

Aurenna sighed, then gazed at the fire. Saban stared at her, while her guards watched him. 'Tomorrow' — Aurenna swayed close to Saban again — 'I must start back towards Kereval's settlement, but you should climb the hill behind this place.'

'Why?'

'Because there is a temple there,' she said. 'The folk here told me of it. It is Scathel's new temple, the one he built when he was recovering from his madness. He says he will dedicate it when the treasures are returned.'

Saban smiled, thinking how angry Scathel would be if he knew that his own new temple might go to Ratharryn. 'We shall look at it,' Saban promised her, though he would rather have stayed with Aurenna — to what purpose, he could not tell. She would be dead soon, dead and gone to her glory in the blazing sky.

Next morning, as a thick fog rolled in from the sea, Aurenna began her southward journey, but Camaban and Saban went north, climbing the hill through the fog's thick whiteness. 'It will be a waste of time,' Camaban grumbled, 'just another tawdry ring of stones,' but he still led Saban up the steep grass and across scree-covered slopes until at last they emerged from the cloud into glorious sunlight. They were now above the fog that lay all about them like a white and silent sea in which the mountain's peak was an island of splintered rock, as tangled and jagged as if a god had hammered the summit in a rage. Saban saw now why all the pillars of Sarmennyn's temples were alike for the rock, shattering from the peak, fell in naturally square shafts and all a man needed to make a temple was to carry the split rock down the mountainside.

There was no temple in sight, but Camaban guessed it lay somewhere in the thick fog beneath and so he sat on a stone ledge to wait. Saban paced up and down, then asked Camaban, 'Why would we want Scathel's temple if Scathel is an enemy?'

'He's no enemy of mine.'

Saban sneered at that. 'Then what is he?'

'He's a man like you, brother,' Camaban said, 'a man who hates things to change. But he is a good servant of Slaol and in time he will be our friend.' He turned and looked eastwards where the peaks of other mountains stood like a line of islands above the whiteness. 'Scathel wants Slaol's glory, and that is good. But what do you want, brother? And don't say Aurenna,' he added, 'for she'll be dead soon.'

Saban blushed. 'Who says I do want her?'

'Your face says so. You stare at her like a thirsty calf gazing at an udder.'

'She's beautiful,' Saban said.

'So was Derrewyn, but what does beauty matter? In a dark hut at night, how can you tell? Never mind, tell me what you want.'

'A wife,' Saban said, 'children. Good crops. Plentiful deer.'

Camaban laughed. 'You sound just like our father.'

'And what's wrong with that?' Saban asked defiantly.

'Nothing is wrong with that,' Camaban said wearily, 'but what a little ambition it is! You want a wife? Then find one! Children? They come whether you want them or not, and half will break your heart and the other half will die. Crops and deer? They're there now.'

'So what do you want?' Saban asked, stung by his brother's scorn.

'I told you,' Camaban said calmly. 'I want everything to change, and then nothing will change, for we shall reach the point of balance. The sun won't wander and there will be no more winter and no more sickness and no more tears. But to do that we must make Slaol a proper temple, and that is what I want. A temple that does Slaol honour.' With those words he suddenly fell silent and stared, wide-eyed, into the fog beneath, and Saban turned to see what had attracted his brother's attention.

At first he could only see fog, but then, slowly, as the land appears when the night drains, a shape emerged in the whiteness.

And what a shape. It was a temple, but unlike any Saban had ever seen. Instead of one circle of stones it had two, one set inside the other, and at first Saban could only see the dark tips of those stones in the vapour. He tried to count the pillars, but there were too many, and at the double circle's farther side, looking towards the place on the skyline where the winter sun would set, there was an entrance made from five pairs of stone pillars that had other stones laid crosswise on their tops to make a row of five doorways for the dying sun. Saban stared, and for a magical time the whole temple seemed to float in the vapour and then the fog drained from the high valley to leave the stones rooted in the dark earth.

Camaban was standing now, his mouth open. 'Scathel was not mad,' he said quietly, then he gave a cry and leaped off the rocks and hurried down the hill, scattering dark-fleeced sheep as he went. Saban followed more slowly, then edged between the twin rings of stone to find Camaban crouched at the temple's north-eastern side where he was peering into the tunnel made by the lintelled stones. 'Slaol's gates,' Camaban said in wonder.

The temple was built in a high hanging valley that overlooked the low country to the south and, at midwinter, when the sun was on that far horizon, it would shine across the sea and land to pierce the gates of stone. 'All else would be dark,' Camaban said softly, 'all would be shadowed by the stones, but in the shadow's centre would be a shaft of light! It's a temple of shadows!' He hurried to the stone opposite the entrance and there, facing the sun's gateway, he spread his arms and flattened himself against the rock as though the light of the dying sun was pinning him to the boulder. 'Scathel is magnificent!' he cried. 'Magnificent!'

The pillars, naturally square, were not large. Those in the sun's gate were a little taller than Camaban, but the rest were shorter than a man and some were no higher than a toddling child. All the rocks had been prised or lifted from the shattered mountain top and slid down the steep slope to this flat patch of high hanging land where they had been shallowly rooted in the thin soil. Saban pushed against one stone and it rocked dangerously. The stone against which Camaban stood was actually two pillars, both too thin, but they had been joined together by carving a groove in one long side and sculpting a tongue in the other so that the two stones fitted like a man fits to a woman. 'Two halves of the circle,' Camaban said reverently, noticing the jointed stones. 'The sun side' — he gestured to the south, indicating the stones over which the sun would travel in its daily path — 'and the night side, and they're joined here, and the joint must be sealed with blood at the sun's dying.'

'How do you know?' Saban asked. He had been counting the stones, and had already numbered more than seventy.

'How else?' Camaban asked curtly. 'It's obvious.' He whirled around in his excitement. 'The Sea Temple for midsummer and the Temple of Shadows for the winter! Scathel is marvellous! But this one will be ours. It will be ours!' He began walking around the circle, cracking his staff against the stones until he reached the lintelled gate where he stooped to gaze through the tunnel of five stone arches. 'A doorway for Slaol,' he said in wonder, then straightened and wiped the nearest stone. The fog's moisture had left the rocks with a strange blue-green sheen that began to fade to black as the spring sun and the sea wind dried them. Camaban, to Saban's horror, tried to push one of the lintels as if hoping to topple it, but it would not move. 'How do they fix it?' he asked.

'How would I know?'

'I don't suppose you would,' Camaban said carelessly, then frowned. 'Did I tell you Sannas is dead?'

'No.' Saban was oddly shocked, not because he had any fondness for the old woman, but because as long as he had lived she had been a part of his world, and not just any part, but a forbidding presence. 'How?' he asked.

'How would I know?' Camaban retorted. 'She just is. A trader brought the news, and she was an enemy of Slaol so it's good news.' He turned to gaze again at the temple. Now, freed of the fog's moisture, it was a black double ring in a black valley crouched in the mountain's black-rocked grip. It was wide and splendid, a mad priest's tribute to his god, and Camaban had tears in his eyes. 'It is our temple,' he said reverently, 'and it will banish winter.'

Somehow they had to persuade Scathel to let them take it, then carry it halfway across the world to Ratharryn.

The thick fog that had shrouded the Temple of Shadows gave way to days of warm sun and calm winds. Old folk marvelled at that early summer, saying they could not remember its like, while Kereval claimed that the weather's kindness was a sign of the sun god's approval of his new bride. Some of the fishermen, who kept a small salt-reeking hut beside the river where they made offerings to a weather god called Malkin, made dire prophecies of storms, but day after day their pessimism was confounded. Kereval's favourite sorceress, a blind woman who uttered her wisdom while in the throes of violent fits, also predicted storms, but the skies stayed stubbornly clear and the winds light.

Kereval's feared warriors made their summer raids into the neighbouring territories to bring back slaves and livestock; traders came from the land across the western sea bringing gold; and the growing crops greened the land. All was well in Sarmennyn, or should have been, except that when Camaban and Saban returned to Kereval's settlement they found the folk sullen.

It was Scathel's return that had soured Sarmennyn. The high priest raged and preached against Kereval's agreement with Ratharryn, claiming that Lengar would never return the treasures unless he was forced and so, while Camaban and Saban were travelling with Aurenna, the high priest had dug a monstrous hole in front of Kereval's hut and placed above it a lattice of stout branches so that the pit could serve as a prison-cage for Saban. There Scathel could torture Saban, confident that every mutilation would be magically visited on Lengar, but Scathel's hopes were frustrated by Kereval who refused to give his permission. Kereval stubbornly insisted that Lengar would return the treasures and the chief liked to point to the bright sky and ask what better omen the tribe could wish. 'The god loves his bride already,' Kereval claimed, 'and when she goes to him, he will reward us. There is no need for the brother magic to be used.'

Yet Scathel constantly preached the need for Saban's eyes to be gouged out and for his hands to be lopped off. He toured the huts inside the settlement and visited the homesteads that lay within a half-day's journey and he harangued Sarmennyn's people, and the folk listened to him. 'Ratharryn will never take a temple from us!' Scathel ranted, 'Never! The temples are ours, built by our ancestors, made from our stone! If Ratharryn wants a temple, let them pile their own dung and bow to it!'

'If your brother were to send us some of the gold, it would help,' Kereval told Camaban wistfully, but Camaban shook his head and said that that had never been part of the agreement. The gold would come, he said, when the temple was moved, though he took care not to say that it was Scathel's own shrine he wanted for the tribe's passions were already running too high. Kereval did his best to calm the growing anger. 'Folk will calm down when they see the sun bride go in her glory,' the worried chief assured Saban.

Day after day Saban would visit the sun-bride's temple and watch the shadow of the tall outlying stone. He feared that shadow, for it crept ever closer to the centre stone, and when the shadow touched the stone Aurenna must go to the flames. Aurenna herself avoided the temple, as if by ignoring the shadow she might lengthen her life; instead, in those days as she waited for her wedding, she was drawn to Haragg. 'When you go to your husband,' he would tell her, 'you must persuade him to stop the waste. He must reject the brides!' But Haragg could no more persuade the tribe to abandon their yearly sacrifice than Kereval could persuade them that Lengar would keep faith, so Aurenna would have to die. As the days grew longer she spent more time with Haragg and Saban, and Haragg left them together for he understood that Aurenna was attracted to the tall, dark-haired young man who had come out of the heartland with a missing finger and a single blue tattoo on his chest. Other young men boasted of their killing scars, but instead of boasting Saban told Aurenna stories. At first he told her the same stories his own mother had told him, like the tale of Dickel, the brother of Garlanna, who had tried to steal the earth's first harvest and how Garlanna had turned him into a squirrel as punishment. Aurenna liked the stories and was ever hungry for more.

The two were never alone for the sun bride was always guarded. She could go nowhere except into the privacy of her own hut without being dogged by the four spearmen and so Saban became used to her guardians and even befriended one of them. Lewydd was a fisherman's son and he had inherited his father's squat build. His chest was broad and his arms hugely strong. 'From the time I could walk,' he told Saban, 'my father made me pull nets. Pull nets and paddle! That makes a man strong.' It was Lewydd who had devised a way of transporting a temple's stones to Ratharryn. 'You must take them by boat,' he said. Lewydd was three years older than Saban and had already gone on two slave-raids deep into the eastern territories. 'Almost all of the journey to Ratharryn can be done on water,' he claimed.

'Ratharryn is far from the sea,' Saban pointed out.

'Not by sea, by river!' Lewydd said. 'You would ride the sea to the river that will carry us to the far edge of Drewenna, and there we would need to carry the boats and the stones to the rivers of Ratharryn. But it can be done.'

The boats at Sarmennyn, like the river craft at Ratharryn, were made from the trunks of old, big trees. There were few woods in Sarmennyn, so the priests would mark certain trees that must be preserved until they grew large enough for the boat-builders and when the trunk was tall enough the tree would be cut down and hollowed out. Lewydd took Saban to sea one day, but Saban hid his head in his hands when the great waves hissed towards him and Lewydd, laughing, turned the boat around and let it run back into the river's calm.

Aurenna liked to cross the river in one of the hollowed-out boats. She and her spearmen would walk in the woods on the eastern bank and inevitably she would seek out a great grey-green boulder that was flecked with sparkling chips and small pink marks, and Aurenna would sit on the rock and watch the river run by. When Saban accompanied her she would ask him to tell her more stories and once he told her how Arryn, god of their valley, had chased Mai, the river goddess, and how she had tried to hinder him by turning great stretches of the land into marsh, and how Arryn had felled trees to make paths across the bog and so cornered her at the spring where she rose from the earth. Mai had threatened to turn him to stone, but Arryn had whispered to Lakka, the god of the air, and Lakka had sent a fog so that Mai could not see Arryn, who sprang on her and made her his wife. Still, Saban told her, a mist would rise from Mai's river on cold mornings to remind Arryn that he had only found happiness through trickery.

'Men use trickery,' Aurenna commented.

'Gods too,' Saban said.

'No,' she insisted. 'The gods are pure.' Saban did not argue with her for she was a goddess and he was a mere man.

Sometimes, as Saban talked, he worked. He had found a yew tree in the woods and he had cut a limb and trimmed away the bark and most of the heartwood, and then shaped a great long bow to replace the one Camaban had hurled into the sea. He tipped the bow with notched horn, greased the wood with bull's fat, and Lewydd found him sinews with which to string it and Aurenna cut some strands of her golden hair that he wove into the sinews so that the bowstring glittered like the sunlight. 'There,' she said, laughing, 'you have a goddess's hair on the bow. It can't miss!'

On the day he first strung the bow he seared an arrow clean across the river and deep into the farther woods. Aurenna wanted to try the weapon, but did not have enough strength to pull the string even halfway. Lewydd could draw it fully, but he was used to the Outfolk's short bow and his arrow spun clumsily away to tumble into the stream.

'Tell me another story,' Aurenna commanded Saban and so he told her the tale of Keri, goddess of the woods, who had been loved by Fallag, the god of stone, but Keri had spurned him and so Fallag forever shaped himself into axes that could cut down Keri's trees. And a day or two later, bereft of stories about the gods, Saban told Aurenna about Derrewyn and how he had hoped to marry her, and how Lengar had come from the darkness and loosed an arrow that had changed his life. Aurenna listened to the tale, staring at the river swirling by, and then she looked at him. 'Lengar killed his own father?'

'Yes.'

She shuddered, then frowned for a long while. 'Will Lengar return the treasures?' she asked, breaking the silence.

'Kereval thinks so.'

'Do you?'

Saban did not answer for a long time. 'Only if he is made to,' he confessed at last.

Aurenna flinched at that answer, plainly distressed. 'Erek will force him,' she said.

'Or Scathel will.'

'Who wants to put you in the pit.'

Saban shrugged. 'He will do worse than that.' And then he thought of what must happen to Aurenna within a few days and his heart was suddenly too full and he could not speak. He looked at her, marvelling at the shine of her hair and the curve of her cheek and the sweetness of her pale face, and he was astonished by her serenity. Soon she must burn, but she faced that fate with a placidity that disturbed Saban as much as it impressed him. He ascribed her calmness to her divinity, for he could find no other explanation.

'I shall talk to Erek,' Aurenna said softly, 'and persuade him to make Lengar keep his agreement.'

'Lengar will say that Erek sent him the gold and that he is entitled to keep it.'

'But surely he wants a temple?' Aurenna asked.

Saban shook his head. 'It's Camaban who wants the temple moved. Lengar told me he doesn't believe it's possible. Lengar wants power. He wants to rule a great land and have hundreds of folk bring him tribute. It's Camaban who dreams of bringing the god to earth, not Lengar.'

'So Erek must kill Lengar?'

'I wish he would,' Saban said forcefully.

'I will ask him,' Aurenna said gently.

Saban stared at the river. It was much wider than Mai's river, and it swirled dark where the sea tides pulled and tugged at the current. 'Are you not terrified?' he asked. He had not meant to ask her, but just blurted out the question.

'Of course,' Aurenna said. It was the first time they had spoken of her marriage and now, also for the first time, Saban saw tears in her eyes. 'I don't want to burn for the god,' she said quietly so that the spearmen could not hear her. 'Everyone says it is quick! The fire is so big, so fierce, that there isn't time to feel anything except Erek's embrace, and after that I shall be in bliss. That's what the priests tell me, but I sometimes wish I could live to see the treasures returned.' She paused and gave Saban a wan smile. 'Live to see my own children.'

'Has any sun bride ever lived?' Saban asked.

'One did,' Aurenna answered. 'She leaped through the flames and fell into the sea, and somehow she did not die but came to a beach near the cliff. So they brought her up and pushed her into the fire. But it was a very slow death because the fire was low by then.' She shuddered. 'I have no choice, Saban. I must jump into Erek's fire.'

'You could—' Saban started.

'No!' she said sharply, stopping him before he could say more. 'How can I not do what Erek wants? What would I be if I ran away?' She frowned, thinking. 'From the moment when I can first remember thinking for myself I knew I was meant to be someone special. Not important, not wealthy, but special. The gods want me, Saban, and I must want the same thing that they want. I sometimes dare hope that Erek will spare me and that I can do his work here on earth, but if he wants me at his side then I should be the happiest person ever born.'

He stared down at the rock on which they sat. It glinted in the evening light as though shards of moonshine were trapped in the pale green stone, while the flecks of red made it seem as if blood were imprisoned within the rock. He thought of Derrewyn. He thought of her often, and that worried him, for he did not know how to reconcile those thoughts with his yearnings for Aurenna. Camaban had told him Derrewyn was pregnant and he wondered if she had given birth yet. He wondered if she was reconciled to Lengar. He wondered if she remembered their time before Hengall's death.

'What are you thinking?' Aurenna asked.

'Nothing,' Saban said, 'nothing.'

Next evening Saban joined the priests as they went to see how far the stone's shadow had crept in Aurenna's temple. Scathel spat at him, then stooped to see that the shadow was still two finger's breadths from the central stone. Saban wanted to take a stone maul and hammer away the pillar's edge, but instead he prayed and knew, even as he pleaded with Slaol, that his prayers were in vain. He watched for omens, but found nothing good. He saw a blackbird fledgling fly and thought it a good augury, but a sparrowhawk stooped and there was a flurry of feathers and a spray of blood.

Midsummer was a day or so away and still the sun shone bright, though the fishermen, laying their offerings of bladderwrack and oarweed before Malkin's shrine, swore that the storm god was stirring. Camaban climbed a hill that was brilliant with milkwort and crimson-spiked orchids and claimed he saw a brownish line on the western horizon, though that far threat did not cause nearly so much excitement as the return of five young men who had been among the war party that had accompanied Lengar to Ratharryn. The five spearmen had made a long journey, skirting hostile tribes by staying in the woods, and all were weak and tired when they reached the settlement.

That night Kereval ordered a feast of welcome, and when the five young warriors had eaten, the folk of the tribe gathered to hear their news. They assembled outside Kereval's great hut, alongside the pit that Scathel had dug for Saban; the tribe's men squatted nearest the storytellers while the women stood behind. They already knew of Lengar's success in taking Ratharryn from his father, but now the five young men spoke of a year of battles that had occurred in the high land between Ratharryn and Cathallo. They said that the forces of Ratharryn, stiffened by the warrior band from Sarmennyn, had inflicted a series of defeats on Cathallo. Eight men from Sarmennyn had died in the skirmishes and another score were injured, and a few men of Ratharryn had suffered, but Cathallo's casualties, the young men said, were innumerable. 'Their great sorceress had died in the winter,' one of the warriors explained, 'and that omen took their hearts away.'

'What of Kital,' Saban asked, 'their chief?'

'Kital of Cathallo died,' the spearman answered. 'He was slaughtered by Vakkal in one of the battles.' The listeners thumped their spear butts on the dry ground to show their pleasure at hearing that a hero of Sarmennyn had killed the enemy's chieftain. 'His successor sent us lavish gifts in hope of peace.'

'Were the gifts accepted?' Kereval wanted to know.

'In return for a settlement called Maden.'

'Where are the gifts?' Scathel asked.

'Half of them have been put aside,' the warrior answered, 'and will be brought to Sarmennyn.'

There was more pleasure at this, but Scathel silenced the approbation by standing to his full height. 'And what of our gold?' he demanded of the five warriors. 'Did Lengar of Ratharryn send any of our gold with you?'

'No,' the young man's leader confessed, 'but he showed it to us.'

'He showed it to you! How kind of him!' Scathel spoke derisively. The high priest had honoured the feast by dressing in a great woollen cloak that had been threaded with hundreds of gull feathers so that he seemed swathed in white and grey. His lank hair was bound with a leather band into which more feathers had been placed, while round his neck he had hung a chain of small bones. 'Erek's gold is being displayed in Ratharryn!' he said scornfully. 'All of it?'

This last question had been snapped in anger and the tone brought an expectant silence to the listening crowd. The five men looked abashed. 'Not all of it,' their leader confessed after a while. 'There were only three of the great pieces.'

'And some of the smaller pieces were gone too,' another of the warriors added.

'Gone where?' Scathel asked in a furious voice.

'Before we arrived,' the first man said, 'those pieces had been given away by Hengall.'

'Given to whom?' Kereval asked, shocked.

'To Cathallo.'

'And you defeated Cathallo?' Scathel roared. 'Did you not demand the return of the gold?'

'They claim the gold has vanished,' the young man said miserably.

'Vanished?' Scathel shouted. 'Vanished!' He turned on Kereval in a blind fury. The chief, Scathel said, had been stupidly trusting. He had believed Lengar's promises, but already part of the precious gold had been scattered like bird dung. And how much more of the gold would be given away? The crowd was all on Scathel's side now. 'Lengar will feel safe soon,' Scathel yelled. 'He has forced his enemy to plead for peace and soon he will not need our men! He'll slaughter them, then keep the gold. But we have him!' He pointed at Saban. 'I can make Lengar of Ratharryn scream for mercy. I can make him sweat at night, I can crease him with pain, I can make boils erupt on his skin, I can blind him! One eye first, and then the second eye, and then his hands, and after that his feet and, last before his life, his manhood. You think Lengar will not pray for eagles to fly our gold back to us as those wounds are torn into his rotting flesh?' The men cheered this speech, thumping their spear butts on the ground.

Kereval held up his hand for silence. 'Did Lengar promise to give us the treasure?' he asked the five warriors.

'He said he would exchange it for our temple,' their leader answered.

'You have chosen a temple?' Kereval asked Camaban.

Camaban looked surprised to be addressed, as though he had been paying no attention to the heated discussion. 'I'm sure we shall find one,' he said casually.

'But if you do find it,' Scathel jeered at Camaban, 'and if you move it, will your brother return our gold?'

Camaban nodded to the priest. 'He has agreed to do that.'

'He agreed,' Scathel said. 'He agreed! But he never told us that part of our gold was already given away! What else is he hiding from us? What else?' And with that question the gaunt priest suddenly crouched and put his head in his hands so that his long hair trailed in the dust. He mewed for a while, writhing in apparent pain, and the crowd held their breath, knowing that he was speaking with Erek. Saban glanced anxiously at Camaban, wondering why his brother did not put on a similar display, but Camaban just yawned again.

Scathel threw his head back and howled at the clear evening sky. The howl shrank into a mewing whimper and the priest's eyes rolled up so that only their whites showed. 'The god speaks,' he gasped in a hoarse voice, 'he speaks!' Saban fought off terror, suspecting only too well what message the god would bring. He looked at Camaban again, but Camaban had picked up a stray kitten and was unconcernedly plucking fleas from its fur. 'We must use blood!' Scathel shrieked, and with those words he flung a hand towards Saban. 'Seize him!'

A dozen warriors competed to hold Saban who had no time to defend himself. Haragg tried to pull some of the men off, but the trader was knocked down by a spear butt. Cagan roared and charged to his father's rescue and it took six men to tackle the mute giant and hold him face down beside the pit. Saban struggled, but the spearmen held him tight against the wall of Kereval's hut. They ignored the chief's protests for the news that part of Erek's gold had been given away had enraged them.

The high priest shrugged off the gull-feather cloak. He was naked now. 'Erek,' he shouted, 'what I do to this man, do to his brother!'

Saban could do nothing except watch Scathel walk towards him. There was triumph on the priest's face, triumph and excitement, and Saban realised that Scathel was enjoying this cruelty. Camaban was ignoring the confrontation, tickling the kitten's throat while Scathel took a flint blade from one of his priests. 'Take Lengar's eye!' Scathel shouted at the god, then reached out with his left hand and grabbed a handful of Saban's hair. The spearmen held him tighter, and all Saban could do was try to turn away as the flint blade came closer.

'No!' Aurenna's voice called.

The knife quivered like a great shadow at the edge of Saban's sight.

'No!' Aurenna said again. 'Not while I live!'

Scathel hissed and turned on her.

'Not while I live,' she repeated calmly. She had walked through the crowd and now faced Scathel boldly. 'Put the knife down.'

'What is he to you?' Scathel demanded.

'He tells me stories,' Aurenna said. She stared Scathel in the eye, and Saban, who thought the priest was tall, saw that the sun bride was very nearly the same height. She faced him in her white and gold splendour and her back was straight and her face as calm as ever. 'And when I go to my husband,' she told the priest, 'he will send a sign about the gold.'

Scathel's face twisted. He was being given orders by a girl, but the girl was a goddess and he could do nothing except obey and so he forced himself to bow his head and back away. 'Put him in the pit,' he ordered the two spearmen.

But again Aurenna intervened. 'No!' she said. 'He still has tales to tell me.'

'He must go into the pit!' Scathel insisted.

'Not till I leave,' Aurenna said and she stared into Scathel's eyes until the priest gave way. He signalled for the spearmen to let go of Saban's arms.

And next evening the pillar in the sun bride's temple had no shadow for there were thick clouds in the west. But the priests decided the time had come anyway.

In the dawn they would leave for the Sea Temple, and in the evening they would send Aurenna to the fire.

That night the wind rose, tugging at the thatch and thrashing at the trees. Saban lay in his pelt, swathed in misery, and he could have sworn he did not sleep at all, yet even so he did not see or hear Camaban stir in the night's heart and slip silently from the hut.

Camaban went to Malkin's shrine and there prayed to the weather god. He prayed for a long time as the wind fretted at the settlement's palisade and the small waves of the river were flecked with white. Camaban bowed to the god, kissing the idol's blackened feet, then he went back to Haragg's hut and wrapped himself in a cloak of bear's fur. He listened to Cagan snore, heard Saban whimper in his sleep and he closed his eyes and thought of the temple up in the hills, the Temple of Shadows: he saw it moved as if by magic to the green hill beside Ratharryn, and he saw the sun god poised above the hill, huge and bright and all-embracing, and Camaban began to weep for he knew he could make the world happy if only the fools did not thwart him. And there were so many fools. But then he, too, slept.

Saban was the first to stir in the dawn. He crawled to the hut entrance and saw that the good weather had ended. The wind was whipping the tree tops and grey-black clouds were hurrying low above the hills. 'Is it raining?' Camaban asked.

'No.'

'Did you sleep well?'

'No.'

'I did!' Camaban claimed. 'All night!'

Saban could not stand his brother's cheerfulness and so he went out into the settlement where the newly woken tribe readied themselves for the day and night that lay ahead. They would take bags of food and skins of water to the Sea Temple for the ceremony would last most of the day, and once the bride had gone to the flames they would dance about the temple until the fire had cooled enough for Aurenna's charred bones to be retrieved and pounded into dust.

Kereval, swathed in a cloak of beaver fur and carrying a massive spear with a polished bronze head, ordered his spearmen to open the settlement gate. The warriors had smeared their faces with red ochre and bound their long hair in strips of hide. Today no one would fish. Today nearly all the tribe would go to the Sea Temple. From all across Sarmennyn the folk would gather to send the sun bride on her journey. Haragg watched the preparations and then, unable to endure the sight, abruptly turned away. 'Come hunting with me,' he told Saban.

'Your brother won't let me.' Saban said, nodding to the spearmen who watched him on Scathel's orders. Today Saban would become the high priest's hostage. He wondered why he had not fled eastwards in the night, and he knew it was because of Aurenna. He loved her and he could not leave her, even if by staying he could do nothing to help her.

Haragg and Cagan crossed the river in a log boat and vanished among the trees. A moment later Scathel emerged from Kereval's large hut. The high priest wore his feather cloak that ruffled and shivered in the wind. His hair had been stiffened with red mud, while around his neck hung a chain of sea-monster teeth. At his waist was a belt at which two knives were scabbarded. Leckan, the next most senior priest, was wearing a cape made from tanned human skin and the faces of the two men whose hides had been flayed hung down his back with their long hair trailing. Another priest had antlers on his head. They danced from the hut, and the waiting tribe began to shuffle from side to side. A drummer began to beat a skin and the shuffle took rhythm as someone began to sing. Camaban joined the dance. He was wearing a cloak of deerskin and had smeared his face with strips of soot.

Scathel pointed at Saban. 'Take him!' he ordered, and a dozen of the red-painted warriors closed on Saban with their spears. They herded him to the pit's edge, but before they could throw him into its depths Aurenna appeared.

Her white face was drawn and shadowed, but her tall body was swathed in the fresh woollen robe and the replacement gold glinted at her breast and neck. Her hair had been combed straight, though the wind immediately lifted it as she walked slowly towards the dancing priests. She did not look at Saban, but kept her eyes on the ground, and then, when Scathel summoned her, she turned obediently towards the gate. The crowd sighed and the dancers moved to join the procession that would take her to the Sea Temple.

Scathel nodded to the spearmen guarding Saban and two of them pulled the cloak from his shoulders while a third drew a knife and slashed Saban's tunic from neck to hem, then tugged the garment away so that he was naked. 'Jump,' the spearman ordered.

Saban looked round a last time. Camaban was not looking at him and Aurenna had gone beyond the gate, then one of the impatient spearmen threatened him and so, resigned, he jumped into the prison pit. It was deep and the impact of the fall was painful, and when he stood he saw that he could not reach to the pit's top. The great trellis of branches was placed over his prison and was fixed in place with wooden pegs that were banged into the earth.

Then there was just the sigh of the wind and the sound of the drumming that faded as the tribe left the settlement. One of the two spearmen who had been left to guard Saban dropped a skin of water through the trellis, then went away, and Saban huddled in a corner with his arms about his knees and his head dropped on to a forearm.

Aurenna would die. And he would be tortured, blinded and maimed. Because the gold had gone to Ratharryn.