Stonehenge

—«»—«»—«»—

In Ratharryn the priests had also determined that this day was midsummer and so, as dusk approached, the tribe lit the fires and prepared themselves for the bull-dancing and the flame-jumping. Derrewyn ignored the excitement. She was hunched in a corner of Lengar's hut, hidden from the men by a leather curtain. She was naked. Lengar insisted on it, for he enjoyed humiliating her, calling her the whore of Cathallo. She was Lengar's wife, forced to marry him in Slaol's temple, but in the last moons any of Lengar's friends could summon Derrewyn and she must go to them or else risk a beating, and there were scars on her face, shoulders and arms where they had all drunkenly thrashed her. Jegar had beat her the worst because she mocked him most. She mocked them all, for that had been her best defence. Now she crouched by the curtain, listened to the three men talk and felt the baby stir in her belly. She knew it was Lengar's baby, and she was certain it would be a son. It would be born in two or maybe three moons. The men took less interest in her now that she was pregnant, but still they insulted her. None, however, detected the seething anger that burned within her. They believed they had defeated her.

The three men in the hut, Lengar, Jegar and Vakkal, were talking of Cathallo. Vakkal was the war leader from Sarmennyn who had helped Lengar gain the chieftainship; he now boasted blue scars like the warriors of Ratharryn and spoke in Ratharryn's tongue. He was another of the men who had been given permission to summon Derrewyn whenever he wished, the privilege of Lengar's friends. Now he listened as Lengar declared Cathallo was ripe for defeat. The tribe had never recovered from Sannas's death and with her had gone the sorcery that Lengar believed had kept Cathallo safe. So in the late summer, Lengar said, Ratharryn should attack Cathallo again, only this time they would leave their enemy's settlement burned. They would pull down its great temple, level the Sacred Mound and piss on the grave mounds of Cathallo's ancestors.

'Are you listening, whore?' Jegar called. Derrewyn did not answer. 'Sullen bitch,' Jegar said, and Derrewyn heard the slurring in his voice and knew he was drinking the Outfolk liquor.

Tonight, Vakkal was saying, they would be burning the sun bride in Sarmennyn.

'Maybe we should burn Derrewyn,' Jegar suggested.

'Slaol wouldn't want her,' Lengar said. 'Give Slaol a whore and he'll turn his back on us.'

'He will not thank us,' Vakkal said, 'if we do not watch his setting tonight.' The fires were already burning in Ratharryn's fields and the bull men were waiting to dance among the wooden poles of Slaol's temple.

'We must go,' Lengar said. 'Stay here, whore!' he called to Derrewyn beyond the curtain and he left one of his young warriors in the hut to guard the treasures that were hidden beneath the floor and under the great piles of precious hides. 'If the whore gives you trouble,' Lengar told the young spearman, 'hit her.'

The spearman settled beside the fire. He was very young, though he already possessed two blue scars to represent the two warriors of Cathallo whom he had slaughtered at a battle on the heights above Maden. Like many of the young men in the tribe he revered Lengar because the new chief had made Ratharryn's spearmen feared and his followers wealthy. The youth dreamed of owning many cattle and wives. He dreamed of a great hut all of his own and of heroic songs sung about his exploits.

A sound made him turn his head and he saw that Derrewyn had appeared at the edge of the curtain. She was kneeling and when the warrior looked at her she dropped her head submissively. She had combed her long hair and hung an amber pendant round her neck, but otherwise she was naked. She kept her eyes lowered and made a whimpering sound as she shuffled forward on her knees. The spearman instinctively looked at the door to see if anyone was watching, but no one was there. Only the very old and the sick were left in Ratharryn; the rest of the folk were at Slaol's temple where the bull men were covering the girls in Slaol's honour.

The spearman watched Derrewyn approach. The fire made the shadows of her small breasts livid and lit her swollen belly. Then she looked up at him and there was an immense sadness in her big eyes. She mewed pitifully, then crept forward into the heat of the fire. The warrior frowned. 'You must go back,' he said nervously.

'Hold me,' she begged him. 'I'm lonely. Hold me.'

'You must go back!' he insisted. He was frightened that her glistening pregnant belly might burst if he used force to push her back behind the curtain.

'Hold me,' she said again, and she edged his spear aside and put her left arm round his neck. 'Please hold me.'

'No,' he said, 'no,' but he was too scared of her to push her away and so he let her pull his head towards hers. He smelt her hair. 'You must go back,' he said, and Derrewyn put her right hand between her thighs where the short bronze-bladed knife was clamped and she ripped the weapon upwards, straight into his belly, and the spearman's eyes widened, then he gasped as she twisted the blade in his guts and jerked it on upwards, through the band of muscle under his lungs and into the tangle of blood tubes about his heart so that she felt the warm gush of his life surge over her wrist and thighs. He tried to push her away, but his strength was gone; she heard the rattle in his throat and saw his eyes turn cloudy and Derrewyn felt the first real joy she had known since Lengar's return. It was as though Sannas's restless spirit had come to fill her and that thought made her go very still, but then the dead man's weight fell onto her and she wrenched the bloody knife free and tilted him sideways so that his head fell in the fire. His hair, greasy because he had wiped his fingers in its strands after eating, crackled and flared bright in the gloom.

Derrewyn was already across the hut. She went to the pile of furs that was Lengar's bed, hauled the pelts aside and began scraping at the soil with the bloody blade. She tore the earth open, delving down until the knife struck leather and then she scrabbled the soil clear and hauled the bag into the firelight.

Inside the bag was one of Sarmennyn's great lozenges and two of their small ones. She had hoped all the gold might be there, but Lengar must have divided the treasure and hidden the other pieces elsewhere in the hut. For a moment she considered tearing the hut apart, upsetting the pelts and scratching at the earth, but these three pieces, surely, would be enough.

She dressed in one of Lengar's tunics, tied leather shoes onto her feet and seized Lengar's precious bronze sword which hung from one of the hut's poles. She took the bag with the three gold pieces and went to the hut's door where she paused. It was still not quite dark, but she could see no one and so she gathered the folds of the tunic and ducked under the lintel.

There were spearmen guarding both the causeways that led through Ratharryn's great embankment, so Derrewyn ran to the ditch halfway between the entrances. There had been rain that summer and the bottom of the ditch was marshy, but she splashed through and then climbed the vast bank. She went slowly so she would meld with the shadows and either the gate guards did not see her or else Lahanna was looking after Derrewyn this night for she reached the embankment's crest undetected. She stopped there for a moment and turned to see that the sun was glinting brilliant through a slit in the dark clouds that otherwise obscured the south-western horizon. The tribe was dancing around the temple poles, while far off, up on the higher land, the new Sky Temple stood deserted again.

She hissed at the sun like a cat. Lengar worshipped Slaol, so Slaol was Derrewyn's enemy, and she crouched above the skulls that topped the embankment and spat at the sun that had turned all the bruised clouds red and gold. Then, quite suddenly, his brightness vanished.

And Derrewyn vanished with him. She slid down the outer bank and through the dark trees until she reached the river where she turned northwards, and as she passed the island where she had first lain with Saban she remembered him, but there was no trace of fondness in the memory. Fondness had been banished from her, along with kindness and laughter and pity, all washed from her by tears. She had become Cathallo's whore and now she would work Cathallo's revenge.

The short midsummer night fell and still she went north.

Later, much later, she heard the hounds baying behind her, but she had taken to the river and hounds cannot follow a spirit across water so Derrewyn knew she was free. She still had to slip past the spearmen who garrisoned Maden and cross the swamps, but she felt confident and strong because Lahanna was shining above her and in her hand she held some of the precious power of the sun god that she would give to Lahanna.

She had escaped, she carried Lengar's child, and now she would make war.

—«»—«»—«»—

In Sarmennyn it began to rain in the afternoon. The wind was rising, the rain fell heavier and beyond the trellis of branches Saban could see that the sky had become a turbulent grey shot through with black. The wind was flicking the thatch from the huts and the rain began to flood the pit.

When the first thunder sounded Saban put his head back and cried to the god of thunder and then he scrabbled at the dripping wet sides of the pit until he had prised out a sharp-edged stone that he used to make a step in the soil. He hacked a second step, a third, and then tried to climb the steps, but his bare feet slipped on the wet soil and he constantly fell back into the rising water.

He sobbed with frustration, found the stone again and tried to enlarge the steps. The water had risen to his ankles. Rain was thrashing on the trellis and dripping onto his face, the wind was a constant howl and the noise was so loud that he did not hear the splintering as the trellis was lifted clean away from the pit. He only knew he was rescued when a wet cloak was lowered to him and Haragg's voice shouted at him to take hold.

Saban saw Haragg and Cagan in the gloom above him. He gripped the cloak and Cagan lifted him like a child, swinging him up and out of the pit so that he sprawled on the grass. He lay there, wet and shaking, staring into the eye of the storm that had come from the sea to batter and thrash the coast. The trees tossed in the screeching gale while whole armloads of thatch were being torn from the huts and blown beyond the river. There was no sign of the men left to guard Saban.

'We must go,' Haragg said, lifting Saban from the grass, but Saban shook off the trader's hand. Instead he went to Kereval's hut and pushed past the curtain, half expecting to find his guards inside, but the hut was empty and he dried himself by rolling on a great pelt, then pulled on a deerskin tunic.

Haragg had followed him into the hut. 'We must go,' he said again.

'Go where?'

'Far off. There is madness here. We must get you away from Scathel.'

'This is Erek's madness,' Saban said as he helped himself to boots and a cloak and one of Kereval's bronze-bladed spears. 'We must go to the Sea Temple,' he told Haragg.

'To see her die?' Haragg asked.

'To see what sign Erek is sending,' Saban said, and he pushed past the leather curtain into the howling rain. One of the spearmen was now out in the settlement's centre where he was peering into the empty pit. As he turned to shout to his fellow guard he saw Saban and ran at him with his spear levelled. 'You must go into the hole!' he shouted, though his words were snatched away in the wind's fury.

Saban hefted his spear. The guard shook his head, as though to indicate that he had no intention of stabbing Saban, but merely wanted him to go voluntarily to Scathel's pit. Instead Saban began walking to the gate and the guard lunged to head him off and Saban knocked the spear aside. Suddenly he was overcome by all the frustrations of the last few weeks, by the helplessness of watching Aurenna go so placidly to her death, and he drove his own spear back at the guard like a swinging axe so that the blade sliced across the guard's face. Blood started into the wind and was whipped away in a red spray, and Saban, screaming hate, plunged the spear into the man's belly and went on thrusting so that the guard fell back into the mud and Saban had to put his booted foot onto the dying man's belly to tug the blade free.

Then he ran, and Haragg and Cagan followed him.

Saban was not running for fear of the dying man's spirit, but because the long day was already close to dark, though he guessed that darkness was brought by the storm clouds rather than by Slaol's setting. And this, he reckoned, was a storm like that which had brought the gold to Ratharryn, a storm caused by a war among the gods. Saban staggered in the wind's hard blast. The cloak was almost torn from him, flapping at his shoulders like a monstrous bat's wing and he untied the lace at his throat and watched the leather whip away across a land running with water. He struggled on into the rain, near blinded and deafened by the wind.

He came to the hills above the sea and he watched in awe as the ocean tried to break the land to pieces. The waves were ragged, white-crested and large as hills, and their spray burst on rocks then leapt to the black clouds before flying inland on the gale. On Saban went with his head down, stung by salt, buffeting into the wind, and the sky seemed darker than ever. Haragg and Cagan walked with him. There would surely be no last sight of Slaol this day, and perhaps, Saban thought, there would be no sight of Slaol ever again. Perhaps this was the world's ending, and he cried aloud for that thought.

A stab of lightning hissed to the far sea, making all the world white and black, and then a crash of thunder sounded overhead and Saban whimpered in fear of the gods. He was climbing a low hill and another jagged bolt tore from the sky as he reached the crest and in its wicked light he saw the Sea Temple beneath him. At first he thought it was deserted, but then he saw that the crowd of folk had scattered into the fields where they huddled for shelter in tumbled rocks. Only a few men were still in the temple circle and their presence drove Saban on. Haragg and Cagan stayed on the hill crest, sheltering among its boulders.

A great sea tore itself into oblivion at the foot of the cliff and the spray whipped over the cliff's summit to drench the temple stones. On the ledge just below the cliff top, where there should have been a raging fire, there was nothing but wisps of steam or smoke. Priests and spearmen crouched in the stone ring and, as Saban ran closer, he saw Aurenna's white robe among them.

She still lived.

Spearmen carried wood to the cliff's edge and dropped the damp timber on to the failing fire. Scathel was standing and shouting, his robe stripped of its feathers by the wind's rage, and if he saw Saban's arrival he took no notice. Kereval looked aghast, fearing what this omen meant.

Camaban saw Saban, and it was then that Camaban performed the rites. He dragged Aurenna to the beginning of the avenue that led to the fire and he drew a knife from his belt and cut off the pieces of gold that Kereval had bought to replace the lost treasures of Erek. Aurenna seemed in a trance. Scathel pushed against the wind to bellow a protest at Camaban, but Camaban shouted back and it was Scathel who stepped away, and then Saban was beside his brother. 'She must go to the fire!' Camaban shouted.

'There is no fire!'

'She must go to the fire, fool!' Camaban shouted, and he seized the neck of Aurenna's drenched white robe and slashed at it with his knife.

Saban grabbed his brother's hand to stop him, but Camaban shook him off. 'This is how it is done!' Camaban called above the seething fury of the gale. 'And it must be done properly! Don't you understand? It must be done properly!'

And suddenly Saban did understand. Aurenna must do her duty and walk to the fire, and if there was no fire then that was not of her doing. So Saban stepped away and watched as his brother slit down Aurenna's long robe. The heavy wool flapped wildly as it was cut away and then Camaban tugged at the soaking cloth and tugged again so that it fell to Aurenna's feet and she was naked.

She was naked because that was how a bride went to her husband and now was the time for Aurenna to go to Slaol. Camaban shrieked at her, 'Walk! Walk!' And Aurenna did walk, though it was hard because the elements were fighting against her slender body, but still, and still as if in a trance, she forced herself forward, and Camaban followed a pace behind, urging her on as the horrified priests watched from the temple's stone ring.

Some smoke or steam still came over the cliff top to be snatched into instant nothingness. Saban walked alongside Aurenna, but keeping outside the stones marking the sacred avenue, and the wind seemed fiercer still as she neared the edge. Her feet slipped on the wet turf, her soaked hair streamed behind her, but she obediently bent forward and thrust into the storm. 'Go on!' Camaban screamed at her. 'Go on!'

At the cliff's edge Saban saw that there was still a remnant of fire lurking in the timber. The pile of wood had been huge, and it would have been lit at midday and fed with fuel so that the heat grew ever more intense, but the wind and spray and rain had cowed the fire, had beaten it down and reduced it to wet, black and charred logs, but at its heart, deep down, some embers still fought against the tempest.

'There!' Camaban shouted exultantly. 'There!' And Saban and Aurenna both lifted their heads to see that the south-western horizon was not all black, but was slit with one small wound of red. The sun god was there. He was watching and his blood was showing against the clouds. 'Now jump!' Camaban screamed at Aurenna.

A hammer of thunder deafened the world. Lightning flickered along the cliffs. 'Jump!' Camaban shouted again, and Aurenna screamed with fear or perhaps with triumph as she stepped off the cliff's edge to fall among the rain-and sea-soaked remnants of the fire. She staggered as she landed, her balance upset by the gale and the black timbers that shattered under her feet, and then she fell against the cliff face and Saban saw a last eddy of smoke and suddenly there was no fire. Aurenna had done as she was supposed to do, and the god had rejected her.

Saban jumped down to the ledge. He pulled off his tunic and forced it over Aurenna's head. She seemed incapable of raising her arms and so he dragged the tunic down her body to cover her from the rain. It was then she looked up into his face and he put his bare arms around her and held her tight, and she, exhausted, sobbed on his shoulder above the storm-flayed sea.

But she lived. She had done what she was supposed to do, and disaster had come to Sarmennyn.

—«»—«»—«»—

The tempest began to lose its force. The sea still pounded on the cliffs and shattered white into the darkening air, but the storm settled into mere gusts, and the rain fell instead of flew.

Saban helped Aurenna to the cliff top. She had pushed her arms into the tunic's sleeves and now clung to him as if in a dream. 'She walked!' Camaban was shouting at the priests.

Haragg had come down from the hill and he added his voice to Camaban's. 'She walked!'

Kereval looked heartbroken. The fate of the sun bride was reckoned to foretell the tribe's fortune in the coming year and no one had ever seen a bride walk to the fire, then walk away.

Scathel shrieked in agony and in his fury he seized a spear from one of the warriors and advanced on Camaban. 'It was you!' he shouted. 'It was your doing! You brought the storm! You were seen in Malkin's shrine last night! You brought the storm!' With that a dozen of the warriors joined the high priest and advanced on Camaban with murder in their faces.

Saban had dropped his spear to help Aurenna and now she clung to him so he could do nothing to save his brother — but Camaban needed no help.

He simply lifted one hand.

In the hand was a golden lozenge. The large lozenge that had come from Sannas's hut.

Scathel stopped. He stared at the scrap of gold, then held up a hand to stop the spearmen.

'You want me to throw the treasure into the sea?' Camaban asked. He opened his other hand to show eleven of the small lozenges. 'I don't mind!' He laughed suddenly, a mad laughter. 'What is Erek's gold to me? What is it to you?' he asked in a shriek. 'You let it go, Scathel! You could not even guard your treasures! So let it go again! Give it back to the sea.' And he turned and made as if to hurl the treasures into the lessening wind.

'No!' Scathel pleaded.

Camaban turned back. 'Why not? You lost it, Scathel! You miserable piece of dried-up lizard dung, you lost Erek's gold! And I have brought some back.' He held the scraps of gold high in the air. 'I am a sorcerer, Scathel of Sarmennyn,' he said in a strong voice, 'I am a sorcerer and you are dirt beneath my feet. I made the spirits of the air and the spirits of the wind travel to Cathallo to rescue this gold, gold which has come to Sarmennyn even though you would break the agreement your chief made with my brother. You, Scathel of Sarmennyn, you have defied Erek! He wants his temple moved and his glory restored, and what does Scathel of Sarmennyn do? He stands in the god's way like a drooling hog before a stag. You oppose Erek! So why should I give you this gold that Erek took from you? It will go to the sea.' He stood on the cliff above the broken fire and once again threatened to hurl the gold into the seething waves.

'No!' Scathel shouted. He was gazing at the gold as though it were Erek himself. Tears were running down his gaunt face and a look of pure wonder was in his eyes. He dropped to his knees. 'Please, no!' he begged Camaban.

'You will move a temple to Ratharryn?' Camaban asked.

'I will move a temple to Ratharryn,' Scathel said humbly, still kneeling.

Camaban pointed northwards. 'In your madness, Scathel,' he said, 'in the mountains, you built a double ring of stone. That is the temple I want.'

'Then you shall have it,' Scathel said.

'It is agreed?' Camaban asked Kereval.

'It is agreed,' Kereval said.

Camaban still held the large lozenge high. 'Erek rejected the bride because you rejected his ambition! Erek wants his temple at Ratharryn!' Folk had crept out of shelter and were listening to Camaban who stood tall and terrible on the dark cliff's edge where the wind lifted his long black hair and rattled the bones tied to its ends. 'Nothing is done for nothing,' he shouted. 'Losing your gold was a tragedy, but a tragedy with meaning, and what does it mean? It means Erek would increase his power! He would spread his light to the world's centre! He will reclaim his proper bride, the earth itself! He will bring us life and happiness, but only if you do what he wishes. And if you move his temple to Ratharryn then you will all be like gods.' He slumped, exhausted. 'You will all be like gods…' he said again.

'Thank you for saving her,' Saban said, an arm about Aurenna.

'Don't be absurd,' Camaban said wearily. Then he walked forward and knelt in front of Scathel. He laid the gold, all twelve pieces of it, on the grass between them, and the two men embraced as though they were long-lost brothers. Both wept and both swore to do the sun god's bidding.

So Aurenna lived, Camaban had won and Ratharryn would have its temple.

Scathel did not know what to do with Aurenna: she had walked the path to the fire and lived, and no bride had ever done that. Scathel's first instinct was to kill her, while Kereval wanted to take her as his own bride, but Camaban, whose authority now stood almost unchallenged in Sarmennyn, decided she must go free. 'Erek permitted her to live,' he told the tribe, 'and that means he must have a use for her. If we kill her or if we force her to a marriage, then we defy Erek.'

And so Aurenna walked north to where her own folk lived and she stayed there through the winter, but in the spring she came south again and brought two of her brothers with her.

The three came down the river on a boat made from willow branches that had been bent into a bowl and covered with hides. Aurenna was dressed in deerskins and had her golden hair tied at the nape of her neck. She landed at Kereval's settlement in the evening, and the sinking sun glowed on her face as she walked through the huts where the folk shrank from her. Some believed she was still a goddess, others thought her rejection by Erek had turned her into a malign spirit; all feared her power.

She stooped at the entrance of Haragg's hut. Saban was alone inside, chipping flints into arrow-heads. He liked the task, for it was satisfying to see the sharp slivers emerge from the knobs of rough stone, but then the light by which he was working was blotted out and he looked up, irritated, and did not recognise Aurenna for she was merely a shape against the light outside. 'Haragg is not here,' he said.

'I came to see you,' Aurenna answered, and that was when Saban recognised her and his heart was suddenly too full for him to speak. He had dreamed of seeing her again but had feared he never would; now she had come. She bent to enter the hut and sat opposite him while her two brothers squatted beyond the door. 'I have prayed to Erek,' she said gravely, 'and he has told me to help you move the temple. It is my fate.'

'Your fate? To move stone?' Saban almost smiled.

'To be with you,' Aurenna said and gazed at him anxiously as though he might refuse her help.

Saban did not know what to say. 'To be with me?' he asked nervously, wondering exactly what she meant.

'If you will have me,' she said, and blushed, though it was too dim in the hut for Saban to see it. 'I prayed to Erek all last winter,' Aurenna went on in a small voice, 'and I asked him why he had not taken me. Why had he shamed my family? And I spoke with our priest and he gave me a cup of liquid to drink and I dreamed the wild dream and Erek told me that I am to be the mother of the guardian of his new temple at Ratharryn.'

'You are to be a mother?' Saban asked, hardly daring to believe what she so calmly proposed.

'If you will have me,' she said humbly.

'I have dreamed of little else,' Saban confessed.

Aurenna smiled. 'Good,' she said, 'then I will be with you and my brothers can move your stones.' She explained that the brothers, Caddan and Makin, were accustomed to bringing great lumps of rock from the splintered mountain tops to the lower land where the families broke the boulders and made the axe-heads. 'And I hear,' she went on earnestly, 'that you are finding the task of moving the stones difficult?'

It was not Saban who was finding the task difficult, but Haragg, for Kereval had placed the trader in charge of moving the temple and the big man seemed perplexed by the problems. He had spent all the previous summer and autumn travelling back and forth between Scathel's temple and the chief's settlement and he had still not decided how the stones were to be shifted or, indeed, whether they could be moved at all. He worried at the problem, listened to suggestions, then fell into indecision. Lewydd and Saban were sure they knew how it could be done, but Haragg was nervous of taking their advice. 'It can be done,' Saban now told Aurenna, 'but only when Haragg decides to trust Lewydd and me.'

'I shall tell him to trust you,' Aurenna said. 'I shall tell him of my dream, and he will obey the god.'

Aurenna's return unsettled the priests for they feared her power might rival theirs, so Saban made her a hut on the other river bank, closer to the sea, and there he and Aurenna lived and folk came from all across Sarmennyn, and even from the lands touching Sarmennyn's borders, for her touch. Fishermen brought their boats for her blessing and barren women came to be granted the gift of children. Aurenna disclaimed any power, yet still they came and some even built their own huts close to hers until the place became known as Aurenna's settlement. Lewydd, the spearman who was a fisherman's son, also came to live there, bringing a wife, and Aurenna's brothers made their homes next to his and took themselves wives. Haragg and Cagan came also and Haragg bowed to Aurenna and seemed relieved when she instructed him that Erek had decreed that Saban and Lewydd were to move the temple stones. She told Haragg, 'My brothers will move the stones down the mountains, Saban will make boats to carry the stones and Lewydd will take the boats to Ratharryn.'

Haragg accepted Aurenna's word and thereafter joined Camaban who was travelling all through Sarmennyn and preaching his vision, for the task of moving the stones would need the help of the tribe and so the folk must be convinced. At the beginning of time, Camaban said, the gods had danced together and the folk of Earth had lived in their happy shadow, but men and women had begun to love the moon goddess and the earth goddess more than Erek himself and so Erek had broken the dance. Yet if Erek could be brought back then the old happiness would be restored. There would be no more winter, no more sickness and no more orphans crying in the dark. Haragg preached the same theme and the promises were received with astonishment and hope. In just one year the tribe's sullen opposition to moving a temple was turned into enthusiastic support.

It was one thing to persuade Kereval's people to move the stones, but it was another to make sure Lengar accepted the temple and so Scathel, who was now Camaban's sworn ally, went to Ratharryn in the spring. 'Tell Lengar that the temple we are sending him is a war temple,' Camaban instructed the high priest.

'But it isn't!' Scathel protested.

'But if he believes it is a war temple,' Camaban explained patiently, 'then he will be eager to receive it. Tell him that if he exchanges the gold for the stones then it will grant his spearmen invincibility. Tell him it will make him the greatest warrior of all the world. Tell him that songs of his prowess will ring through the years for ever.'

So Scathel went and told Lengar the lies and Lengar was so awed by the tall, gaunt priest and by his promises of invincibility that he actually yielded a half-dozen more of the small lozenges, though he said nothing of the ones Derrewyn had stolen.

When Scathel returned from Ratharryn he brought Galeth's son, Mereth, to be Saban's helper. Mereth was a year younger than Saban, and he had inherited his father's strength and knowledge. He could shape wood, lift stone, raise a temple pole or chip flint, and do all those things with dexterity, speed and skill. Like his father he had huge hands and a generous heart, though when he came to Sarmennyn that heart was burdened with news for Saban's mother had died.

Saban wept for her, listening as Mereth described how they had carried her corpse to the Death Place. 'We broke pots for her in Lahanna's temple,' Mereth said. 'Lengar wants to pull that temple down.'

'He wants to destroy Lahanna's temple?' Saban was amazed.

'Cathallo worships Lahanna, so Ratharryn isn't allowed to any more,' Mereth explained, then added that Derrewyn had rallied the people of Cathallo.

And that too was news to Saban. Derrewyn had escaped to Cathallo and taken a child in her belly. Saban pressed Mereth for whatever detail he could reveal, though Mereth knew little more than he had already told. Saban felt a fierce pleasure at the news and that, in turn, made him feel guilty about Aurenna. 'Derrewyn must have had the baby by now?' he suggested.

'I heard nothing,' Mereth said.

Mereth and Saban made sledges and boats, while Caddan and Makin, Aurenna's brothers, went to the mountain to move the stones of Scathel's temple from their high valley. They used sledges, each one twice the length of a man's height and half as broad, made of two stout oak runners spanned by baulks of timber. Saban made a dozen sledges that first year, and Lewydd carried them up the river from Aurenna's settlement on a boat made of two hulls joined by timber beams. The river twisted through the woods past Kereval's settlement and into the bleaker country where the trees were sparse and windbent, then wound northwards until it became too shallow for Lewydd's boat, but by then it was under the shadow of the mountain where the temple stood.

Aurenna's brothers needed scores of men to move the stones, but the folk of Sarmennyn had been inspired by Camaban and Haragg and there was no shortage of helpers. The women sang as the men dragged the sledges up the mountain. The first of the temple's stones were rocked loose from their sockets, then lowered onto the sledges. Aurenna's brothers began with the smaller stones for they could be lifted by a mere dozen men and two such stones could be placed on one sledge. A dozen men dragged the first sledge to the high valley's lip and there the sledge tipped over the edge and it needed thirty men, not to pull it, but to stop it from running loose down the steep slope. It took a whole day to guide the first two stones down the slope, and another full day to drag the sledge from the mountain's foot to the river's bank, and it would take another two years to bring the whole temple down the hill, and in all that time only one sledge ran out of control to thunder down the slope, tip and shatter so that its pillar broke into a thousand pieces. The largest stones, which needed thirty or forty men to lift, were stored beside the river on their sledges while the smaller pillars, which could be manhandled by a dozen men, were left on the grass.

It was Lewydd who would carry the stones to Ratharryn, for the temple would float for most of its journey and he was a seaman. Lewydd devised the boats. In the first year, after the first few stones had been brought down the mountain, he loaded two of the smaller stones onto the same boat that had carried the sledges upstream. He manned the two hulls with a dozen paddlers, then set off downriver. The boat moved fast, carried by the current, and Lewydd was confident enough to take the stones to where the river widened into the sea. He wanted to discover how the boat rode the larger waves, but no sooner had the first green sea broken on the bows than the weight of the stones pushed the two hulls outward and the boat split into two and the pillars sank. Haragg cried aloud, claiming the work was being done all wrong, but Camaban assured the men watching from the cliffs that Dilan, the sea god, had exacted his price and that no more stones would be lost. A heifer was sacrificed on the beach and its blood allowed to run into the water and a moment later three porpoises were seen offshore and Scathel declared that Dilan had accepted the sacrifice.

'Three hulls, not two,' Lewydd told Saban. Lewydd and his crew had swum safely ashore and the young seaman had decided it was not Dilan who had taken the stones, but the inadequacy of the boat. 'I want three hulls for each boat,' he explained, 'side by side. And I want ten boats, more if you can find the trees.'

'Thirty hulls!' Saban exclaimed, wondering if there were enough trees in Sarmennyn's scanty forests to provide so many. He had thought of using some of the tribe's existing boats, but Camaban insisted that the boats must be new and dedicated solely to Erek's glory and that once they had carried the stones eastwards they must be burned.

That summer the new sun bride burned, going to her death in a blaze of glory. The folk of Sarmennyn had never seen Erek so red, so swollen and so majestic as he was that midsummer night, and the bride died without a cry. Aurenna did not go to the Sea Temple for the ceremony, but stayed in her hut. She was pregnant.

The child was born early the next year. It was a boy and Aurenna called him Leir, which means 'One Who Was Saved', and she named him that because she had been saved from the fire. 'I never really thought I would die,' Aurenna confessed to Saban one winter evening after Leir's birth. They were sitting on their stone, the pink-flecked greenish boulder that lay on the river bank close to their hut, and sharing a bear's pelt to keep warm.

'I thought you would die,' Saban admitted.

She smiled. 'I used to pray to Erek every day, and somehow I knew he would let me live.'

'Why?'

She shook her head, almost as if Saban's question were irrelevant. 'I just did,' she said, 'though I hardly dared believe the hope. Of course I wanted to be his bride,' she added hastily, frowning, 'but I also wanted to serve him. When I was a goddess I had dreams, and in the dreams Erek told me the time of change was coming. That the time of his loneliness was ending.'

Saban was always uncomfortable when she talked of having been a goddess. He was not certain he really believed her, but he admitted to himself that he had not grown up in Sarmennyn and so he was not accustomed to the notion of a girl being changed into a goddess, or, indeed, changing back again. 'I prayed you would live,' he said.

'I still get the dreams,' Aurenna said, ignoring his words. 'I think they tell me the future, only it's like looking into a mist. It's how you told me you first saw Scathel's temple, as a shape in the mist, and that's how my dreams are, but I think they'll become clearer.' She paused. 'I hope they'll become clearer,' she went on, 'but at least I still hear Erek in my head and I sometimes think I am really married to him, that perhaps I am the bride he left on earth to do his work.'

'To move a temple?' Saban asked, suddenly jealous of Erek.

'To end winter,' Aurenna said, 'and bring an end to grief. That is why your brother came to Sarmennyn and why he saved you from Lengar. You and I, Saban, are Erek's servants.'

That winter Saban and Mereth roamed the southern woods of Sarmennyn and found the tallest, straightest oaks and elms, taller even than the highest temple poles at Ratharryn, and they touched their foreheads to the trunks, begging forgiveness of the trees' spirits, and then they cut the trees, trimmed them of branches and used a team of oxen to drag the trunks to Aurenna's settlement. There they shaped the massive trees into double-prowed hulls. They fashioned the outside of the hulls first, then turned the trunks over and hollowed them with adzes made of flint, stone or bronze. A dozen men worked on the river bank, singing as they swung the blades and piled the ground with wood chips. Saban loved the work for he was used to shaping timber and he took pleasure in watching the clean white-golden wood take its shape. Aurenna and the other women worked close by, singing as they slit hides into the thongs that would be used to bind the cross-beams to the hulls and the stones to the beams. Saban was happy in those days. He had been accepted as the head man of Aurenna's settlement and everyone there shared a purpose and took pleasure in watching the work progress. They were good times, filled with laughter and honest work.

When the first three hulls were finished Lewydd carved an eye on each bow so that the god who protected boats would look out for storms and rocks, and then he laid the three boats side by side. Each craft was as long as three men, and the width of the three boats together was half the length of the hulls, which Saban now joined together with two huge beams of oak as thick about as a man's waist. The beams were squared with flint and bronze and their lower halves fitted into slots chipped from the three hulls' gunwales. Once the timbers were jointed to the hulls, they were lashed tight with the long strips of hide. It was a monstrous thing, that first boat, and the fishermen shook their heads and said it would never float, but it did. Twenty men heaved it off the bank onto the mud at low tide and the incoming tide lifted the triple hull easily. They called that boat Molot, which meant monster, and Lewydd was certain it would take the weight of the greatest stone and still survive the sea's malevolence.

Camaban travelled to Ratharryn at winter's end and returned to Sarmennyn just as the Molot was finished. He admired the great boat, glanced at the other hulls that were being shaped, then squatted outside Saban's hut to give him news from home. Lengar, he said, was more powerful than ever, but Melak of Drewenna had died and there had been a struggle for the chieftainship between Melak's son and a warrior named Stakis. Stakis had won. 'Which is not what we wanted,' Camaban said. He took a bowl of gruel from Aurenna and nodded his thanks.

'What's so bad about Stakis?' Saban asked.

'We have to float the stones through his territory, of course,' Camaban explained, 'and he might not prove a friend to us. Still, he's agreed to meet us.'

'Us?'

'All of us,' Camaban said vaguely, waving a hand that could have encompassed the whole world. 'A meeting of the tribes. Us, Ratharryn and Drewenna. One moon before midsummer. The problem is' — he paused to scoop up some of the gruel — 'the problem' — he went on with his mouth full — 'is that Stakis doesn't like Lengar. I can't blame him. Our brother has to keep his spearmen busy, so he's been raiding Drewenna's cattle.'

'He doesn't fight Cathallo?'

'All the time, only they hide behind their marshes and their new chief is a good warrior. He's one of Kital's sons, Rallin.'

'Derrewyn's cousin,' Saban said, remembering the name.

'Derrewyn's pup, more like,' Camaban said vengefully.

'She calls herself a sorceress now and lives in Sannas's old hut where she wails to Lahanna, and Rallin won't take a piss without her permission. It's strange, isn't it' — he paused to eat more gruel — 'how Cathallo likes being ruled by a woman? First Sannas, now Derrewyn! A sorceress indeed! She grubs about with herbs and makes threats. That isn't sorcery.'

'Did she have Lengar's baby?' Saban asked. He had a sudden image of a dark face framed by black hair, of Derrewyn laughing, then of the same face crying and screaming. He shuddered.

'The baby died,' Camaban said carelessly, then sneered. 'What kind of sorceress can't keep her own child alive?' He put the empty bowl down. 'Lengar wants you to bring Aurenna to the meeting of the tribes.'

'Why?'

'Because I told him she's beautiful.' Camaban said, 'which is good reason to leave her here.'

'Lengar wouldn't touch her,' Saban said.

'He touches every woman he wants,' Camaban said, 'and no one dares deny him for fear of his spearmen. Our brother, Saban, is a tyrant.'

Kereval, Scathel, Haragg, Camaban and a dozen other elders and priests travelled to the meeting of the tribes. Seven boats were needed to carry the delegation, and Saban went with Lewydd in a fishing boat that was driven by eight paddlers. The weather was blustery, and the seas promised to be big, but Lewydd was unworried. 'Dilan will preserve us,' he promised Saban, who faced his first proper sea voyage with trepidation.

The fleet left in a summer dawn, paddling down the river until they reached the sea where they waited in the shelter of a headland. 'The tides,' Lewydd said, explaining the pause.

'What of them?'

'The tides don't just rise and fall, but are like winds in the water. They flow up and down the coast, but unlike the winds they keep to a rhythm. We shall go east with the water-wind, and when it turns against us we rest until it helps us again.' Lewydd had sacrificed a piglet in Malkin's temple, then splashed the animal's blood on the boat's prow, and now he dropped the carcass over the side. The crews of the other six boats did the same.

When the tide turned Saban did not detect it, but Lewydd was satisfied and his eight paddlers gave a shout and drove the boat out to sea. They went well away from the coast before turning east and now the wind was behind them and so Lewydd ordered a sail raised. The sail was made of two ox hides that were hung on a short spar suspended at the top of a stubby mast, and once the wind caught the leather it seemed to Saban that the boat flew, though still the waves came faster. The great seas would heap up behind and Saban feared the boat must be overwhelmed, but then the stern would lift and the paddlers would redouble their efforts and for a heart-stopping moment the wave would carry the boat forward in a great seething surge before the crest passed under the hull and the boat would lurch back and the sail would crack like a whip. The other crews raced them, driving their paddles hard so that the spray flicked up in the sun. They chanted as they worked, rivalling each other in music as well as in speed, though sometimes the chanting paused as men used sea-shells to scoop water from their boats.

Late in the morning the seven boats turned into the land. The tide, Lewydd explained, was turning, and though it was possible for paddles and sail to drive them against that current, their progress would be small and the effort great, so the boats sought shelter in a small bay. They did not go ashore, but rather anchored with a great stone through which a hole had been chipped and to which a long line of twisted strips of hide was attached. The seven boats rested through the afternoon. Most of the crews slept, but Saban stayed awake and saw men with spears and bows appear on the cliffs of the small cove. The men stared down at the boats, but made no attempt to interfere.

The crews woke towards evening and made a meal of dried fish and water and then the stones were hauled up from the sea's bed, the sails were hoisted and the paddles were plunged into the sea again. Slaol set in a blaze of red that was broken by streaky clouds and all the heaving sea behind flickered with the taint of blood until the last colour drained away and the grey gave way to black and they were sailing in the night. There was no moon at first, and the land was dark, but the sky had never seemed to hold so many stars. Lewydd showed Saban how he was following a star in the group that the Outfolk called the Mooncalf and the people of Ratharryn knew as the Stag. The star moved across the sky, but Lewydd, like all fishermen, knew its motion, just as he recognised the dark outlines of the low hills on the northern bank which, to Saban, were mere blurs. Later, when Saban woke from a half-sleep, he saw that there was land on both sides because the great sea was narrowing. A near full moon had risen and Saban could see the other boats stretched on either side with Lahanna's light flashing rhythmically from their paddles.

He slept again, not waking until the dawn. The paddlers were driving their boats towards the blaze of the rising sun. Great sheets of gleaming mud lay on either side, and folk walked on the mud's ripples and stared at the boats. 'They're hunting shellfish,' Lewydd said, then lifted his spear because a dozen boats had come from the southern shore. 'Show them your bow,' Lewydd said, and Saban dutifully held up the weapon. All the men in Sarmennyn's boats now brandished spears or bows and the stranger's boats sheered away. 'Probably just fishermen,' Lewydd said.

The sea narrowed between the wide muddy flats on which intricate fish traps, woven from hundreds of small branches, made dark patterns. Saban, looking over the side, saw the sea-bed writhing. 'Eels,' Lewydd said, 'just eels. Good eating!' But there was no time to fish, for the tide was again turning and the paddlers were chanting hard as they drove the boat towards the mouth of a river which slid into the sea between glistening banks. Lewydd said it was the River Sul, the same name that was used in Ratharryn. Birds rose from the mudbanks, protesting at the boats' intrusion, and the sky was filled with white wings and raucous cries.

They waited for the tide to turn again, then let it carry them far up Sul's river. That night they slept ashore and next morning, freed now of the tide's influence, they paddled the boats upstream, gliding beneath vast trees that sometimes arched overhead to make a green tunnel. This is all Drewenna's land,' Lewydd said.

'You've been here before?'

'When I hunted your young men on their ordeals,' Lewydd answered with a grin.

'Maybe I saw you,' Saban said, 'but you didn't see me.'

'Or maybe we did see you,' Lewydd said, 'and decided a little runt like you wasn't worth keeping.' He laughed, then lowered his spear shaft over the side to test the river's depth. 'This is the way we shall bring the stones,' he said.

'Only three days' journey?' Saban asked, pleased that the voyage had been so swift.

'The stones will take much longer,' Lewydd warned him. 'Their weight will make the boats slow, and we shall have to wait for good weather. Six days, seven? And more to bring the stones upriver. We shall be fortunate to make one voyage a year.'

'Only one?'

'If we are not to starve,' Lewydd said, meaning that the paddlers could not abandon their fishing or farming for too long. 'Perhaps, in a good year, we might make two voyages.' He poled with his spear shaft, not to test the depth but to push the boat forward. The seven craft were driving against the river's strong current now and most of the crews had abandoned their paddles and were standing and using their spears as Lewydd was doing. Every now and then, through the trees, they could see fields of wheat and barley, or pastures with cows. Pigs rooted on the river bank where herons nested high in the trees. Kingfishers whipped bright from either bank. 'And from here to Ratharryn?' Lewydd asked. 'I don't know how long that will take.' He explained how they could follow the Sul until it was too shallow for the boats to float any more, and there the stones and the boats would have to be hauled onto the bank and dragged on sledges to another river, perhaps a day's journey away. That river flowed into the Mai and once on that river the boats could be turned upstream until they came to Ratharryn.

'More sledges?' Saban asked.

'Ratharryn's folk will build them. Or Drewenna's,' Lewydd said, which was why the new chieftain of Drewenna had called this meeting of the tribes. The stones must pass through his land and their passage would require his help and doubtless Stakis wanted a rich reward for letting the boulders go safely past his spearmen.

The river was narrowing beneath the green trees and each of the boats now carried a leafy branch in its bows to show that the men of Sarmennyn came in peace, yet even so the few folk who saw them hid or ran away. 'Have you been to Sul?' Saban asked Lewydd.

'Never,' Lewydd said, 'though we sometimes raided close to it.' He explained that Sul's settlement was too large and too well guarded and so Sarmennyn's raiders always skirted the place.

The settlement was famous, for it was the home of a goddess, Sul, who welled hot water up from the ground and so had given her name to the river which curled around the cleft in the rocks where her marvellous spring bubbled. Drewenna ruled the settlement and guarded it fiercely, for Sul attracted scores of people seeking healing and those supplicants had to bring gifts if they were to gain access to the waters. Saban had heard many stories of Sul; his mother had told him how a monster had once lived there, a massive beast, larger than an aurochs, with a skin hard as bone and a great horn reaching from its forehead and massive hoofs heavier than stones. Anyone trying to reach the hot water had to pass the monster, and no one ever could, not even the great hero Yassana, who was the son of Slaol and from whose loins all Ratharryn's people had sprung, but then Sul had sung a lullaby and the monster had laid its heavy head in her lap and she had poured a liquid in its ear and the monster had turned to stone, trapping her. The monster and the goddess were still there, and at night, Saban's mother had said, you could hear her sad lullaby coming from the rocks where the hot water flowed.

The famous settlement lay on the river's northern bank. Fields spread downstream, hacked out of the forests that had once grown in the fertile valley, and a score of boats were hauled up on the bank, beyond which Saban could see smoke rising from thatched roofs. The hills were close on either side, steep hills, but looking lush and green after Sarmennyn's wind-scoured slopes.

The folk at Sul had heard the boats were coming upriver and a group of dancers waited at the landing to welcome Kereval and his men. Scathel was first ashore. The priest was naked and carried a great curved bone, a sea-monster's rib, and he crouched in the mud and smelt the air for danger, then turned three times before declaring the place safe.

Stakis, a scarred young warrior who was Drewenna's new chief, welcomed the Outfolk and Saban found himself translating the flowery words. Stakis embraced Saban, saying he was pleased to meet the brother of the mighty Lengar, though Saban sensed that the pleasure was feigned. Indeed, it was rumoured that Stakis had only won the chieftainship of Drewenna because he was reckoned strong enough to resist Ratharryn's insistent demands, while Melak's son, who had expected to succeed his father, had been thought too feeble. Lengar had not yet arrived, though a plume of smoke showing in the clear sky above the eastern hills was a signal that his party had been sighted.

Dancers escorted the visitors from Sarmennyn to some new huts specially raised for the meeting of the tribes and beyond the huts, on the grassland to the north of the settlement, there was a throng of shelters for the folk who had come to witness the meeting. There were jugglers in the crowd and men who had tame wild beasts: wolves, pine martens and a young bear. A larger bear, a great old male with a scarred pelt and claws the colour of scorched wood, was imprisoned in a wooden pen and Stakis promised that when Lengar's men arrived he would arrange a fight between the bear and his best dogs. A score of female slaves waited in the huts. 'They are yours,' Stakis said, 'yours to enjoy.'

Lengar arrived that evening. Drums announced his coming and the whole crowd walked eastwards to greet his procession. Six women dancers came first, all naked to the waist and sweeping the ground with ash branches, while behind them came a dozen naked priests, their skin whitened by chalk and their heads crowned with antlers. Neel, whom Saban remembered as the youngest of Ratharryn's priests, now wore the large antlers denoting he was the high priest.

Behind the priests came a score of warriors and it was those men who caused the crowd to gasp for, despite the day's heat, they wore cloaks made from fox pelts and high-crowned fox fur hats plumed with swan's feathers. They had bronze-headed spears and bronze swords and all looked alike, which made them oddly formidable.

And in their midst were Ratharryn's warlords, their battle captains, led by their renowned chief. Lengar was heavier and full-bearded now, so that he looked like his father, but his horned eyes were as sharp and cunning as ever. He wore his leather tunic on which the bronze plates gleamed, while on his head was a bronze helm like none Saban had ever seen before. He smiled slyly when he saw Saban, then walked on to greet Stakis. Drewenna's dancers circled the newcomers, kicking up a fine dust with their feet. Behind the warriors came a score of slaves, some bearing heavy sacks that Saban guessed must contain gifts for Stakis.

Lengar crossed to Saban when the greetings were done. 'My little brother,' he said, 'no longer a slave.'

'No thanks to you,' Saban said. He had neither embraced nor kissed his brother; he had not even offered his hand, but Lengar did not seem to expect a fond greeting.

'It is thanks to me, Saban, that you live at all,' Lengar said. Then he shrugged: 'But we can be friends now. Your wife is here?'

'She could not travel.'

Lengar's yellow eyes narrowed. 'Why not?'

'She is pregnant,' Saban lied.

'So? She loses a pup and you have the pleasure of whelping another on her.' Lengar scowled. 'I hear she is beautiful.'

'So men say.'

'You should have brought her. I ordered you too, didn't I? Have you forgotten I am your chief?' His anger was rising, but he shook his head as though forcing it down. 'Your woman can wait for another time,' he said, then tapped the blue tattoo on Saban's bare chest. 'Only one killing scar, little brother? And only one son, I hear? I have seven that I acknowledge, but there are plenty of others.' He plucked Saban's tunic, guiding him towards the huts set aside for Ratharryn's people. 'This temple,' he asked in a low voice, 'is it really a war temple?'

'It is Sarmennyn's great war temple,' Saban said. 'Their secret temple.'

Lengar seemed impressed. 'And it will bring us victory?'

'It will make you the greatest warlord of all time,' Saban said.

Lengar looked pleased. 'And what will Sarmennyn's folk do if I take their temple and keep their gold?'

'They might do nothing,' Saban said, 'but Slaol will doubtless punish you.'

'Punish me!' Lengar bridled, stepping away. 'You sound like Camaban! Where is he?'

'Gone to look at the goddess's shrine.' Saban nodded towards the high wooden palisade that surrounded the settlement and the goddess's spring, and when he turned back he saw that Jegar was approaching.

Saban was astonished at the upwelling of hatred he felt at the sight of Jegar and for an instant all the ancient misery about Derrewyn swamped him. It must have shown on his face, for Lengar looked pleased at his reaction. 'You do remember Jegar, little brother?' he asked.

'I remember him,' Saban said, staring into the eyes of his enemy. Jegar was wealthy now, for he was swathed in a cloak of fine otter fur and had a gold chain about his neck and a dozen gold rings on his fingers, but the fingers of his right hand, Saban saw, were still curled uselessly. His hair was streaked with red ochre and his beard was plaited.

'Only one killing scar, Saban?' Jegar said scornfully.

'I could have another if I chose,' Saban said defiantly.

'One more!' Jegar pretended to be impressed, then shrugged off the otter cloak to reveal a chest smothered in tattoos. Each blue scar was a row of dots hammered into the skin with a bone comb. 'Every scar is a man's spirit,' Jegar boasted, 'and every dot of every scar is a woman on her back.' He placed a finger against one blue mark. 'And I remember that woman well. She fought! She screamed!' He looked slyly at Saban. 'Do you remember her?' Saban said nothing and Jegar smiled. 'And as she wept afterwards, she promised me that you would have your revenge.'

'I keep promises made on my behalf,' Saban said stiffly.

Jegar whooped with laughter and Lengar punched Saban softly in the chest. 'You will leave Jegar alone,' he said, 'for tomorrow he will speak for me.' He gestured towards the big cleared space, marked by a ring of slender wooden poles, where the negotiations between the three tribes would take place.

'You won't speak for yourself?' Saban asked, shocked.

'They tell me there is a bull aurochs in the forest north of here,' Lengar said carelessly, 'and I have a mind to hunt it. Jegar knows what to tell Stakis.'

'Stakis will be insulted,' Saban protested.

'Good. He is Drewenna, and I am Ratharryn. He deserves insult.' Lengar began to walk away, then turned back. 'I am sorry you did not bring your woman, Saban. I would have liked to discover if she is as beautiful as everyone says.'

'I am sure she is,' Jegar said, challenging Saban. 'Your last one was beautiful. Did you know she is now a sorceress in Cathallo? She makes spells against us, but you see that we both still live. And both live well.' He paused. 'I look forward to meeting your woman, Saban.' He smiled, then walked after Lengar, both men laughing.

The bear killed seven dogs, then died itself. Three men were murdered in fights caused by the fierce liquor that Stakis provided and the priests, fearing blood feuds, killed their killers, and then night fell and Lahanna looked down from a star-bright sky as, one by one, the drunken warriors slept and peace came to the valley.

—«»—«»—«»—

Camaban did not go to the tribal meeting. Instead he sequestered himself with Neel, the new high priest at Ratharryn, and instructed him how the temple was to be built. Camaban had brought slivers of wood, shaped by Saban to represent the stones, and he stuck them in the soil to build the double ring with its entrance corridor that would face towards the place where the midsummer sun rose. 'In Sarmennyn the doors of the sun faced the setting sun,' Camaban explained, 'but in Ratharryn they must face its rising.'

'Why?' Neel asked.

'Because we wish to greet the sun, not say farewell.'

Neel stared at the small timber chips. 'Why don't you come and build it for us?' he asked petulantly. He was uncomfortable with Camaban, for he remembered him as a crippled child, pathetic and filthy, and Neel could not reconcile that memory with the confident sorcerer who now gave him orders. 'I'm not a builder,' he complained.

'You are a toad,' Camaban said, 'who tells my brother what he wants to hear instead of what the gods really say, but if you do as I tell you then the gods will endure your stench. And why should I come to Ratharryn? You have builders enough without wasting my time.' Camaban wanted to visit the land across the western sea for he had heard that their priests and sorcerers knew things that were still hidden to folk on the mainland, and he was ever bored by the practical business of moving or raising stones. 'It won't be difficult to build,' he claimed, and he showed Neel how the stones were to be planted according to height: the tallest by the gates of the sun and the smallest on the opposite side. Then he produced a leather bag containing a long string of sinew. 'Look after that,' he said.

'What is it?'

'The temple's measurement. Secure the sinew at the centre of the Old Temple, then make a circle with the other end. That circle marks the outer edge of the outer ring of stone. The inner ring is one pace inside.'

Neel nodded. 'What do we do with the present temple?'

'Leave it,' Camaban said dismissively. 'It does no harm.' Then he made Neel repeat all his instructions, and then repeat them all again, for he wanted to know that the new temple would be built exactly as it had been made in the high hanging valley in Sarmennyn.

As Camaban and Neel talked the three tribes met. Lengar, as he had promised, went hunting, taking a dozen men, some slaves and a score of dogs, and so it was Jegar, swathed in his thick otter skin cloak despite the day's heat, who brought Ratharryn's men to the meeting place.

Gifts were exchanged. Stakis was generous with his guests, and no wonder, for he intended to exact a high price for the privilege of moving Sarmennyn's stones across his territory. He heaped Kereval with fleeces, pelts, flints, pots and a bag of precious amber. He gave him combs, pins and a fine axe with a polished head of greenish stone, and in return he received a turtle shell, two bronze axes, eight decorated pots of liquor and a necklace of pointed teeth that had come from a strange sea creature.

Stakis presented Jegar with exactly the same gifts he had given to Kereval, and if he was offended that it was Jegar who received them instead of Lengar, he hid his anger. When his gifts were given, and after Jegar had made a flowery speech of thanks, Stakis resumed his seat at the southern side of the circle and two of Ratharryn's warriors carried Lengar's gifts to Drewenna's new chief. They brought the offerings on a willow-plaited hurdle covered with a hide, and they placed the hurdle in front of Stakis then removed the leather cover to reveal a whole basket of bronze spearheads. Then they fetched a second hurdle and this, when it was uncovered, carried a bronze sword, a bundle of bows and more than a dozen stone axes. The watching men were impressed, for Lengar's gifts far outweighed anyone's expectations, but they were still not all given for the two warriors now carried a third hurdle which proved to hold six bronze axes, two aurochs horns and a pile of badger pelts and wolf furs. Stakis was delighted, especially by the largest of the aurochs horns that he took onto his lap, then watched, wide-eyed, as a fourth hurdle, even heavier than the others, was brought from Lengar's huts. This last hurdle, though, was put on the ground in front of Jegar and its hide cover remained in place, suggesting that the final gift would only be given when Stakis yielded what Ratharryn wanted.

Saban thought that for a man who had been reluctant to give gifts his brother had been remarkably generous. Scathel, for once, looked pleased — indeed he was beaming, for how could the new chief of Drewenna now obstruct the passage of the stones? And the sooner the stones were in Ratharryn the sooner Erek's gold would be returned to Sarmennyn. But Stakis, despite his gratitude for Lengar's gifts, wanted more. He wanted Ratharryn's help in hunting down the man who had been his rival for Drewenna's chieftainship. Melak's son was said to be an outcast in the woods, but he had taken three score of warriors with him, and those men constantly raided Stakis's holdings: 'Bring me Kellan's head in a basket,' Stakis said, 'and you may move every stone in Sarmennyn across my land.'

Haragg sidled across to Jegar and urged him to accept the offer, but Jegar seemed confused. He wanted to know where Kellan was, exactly how many men he had and what were their weapons? And why could Stakis not hunt his rival down?

Stakis explained that he had tried, but Kellan constantly retreated before him into southern Ratharryn. 'If your men come westwards,' he said, 'and mine go eastwards, we shall trap him.'

It seemed a simple enough proposition, yet still Jegar worried at it. How could Stakis be certain that Kellan had not gone south and west to the people of Duran? Had Stakis talked with Duran's chief?

'Of course,' Stakis said, 'and he has not seen Kellan.'

'We have not seen him either,' Jegar claimed. 'We could search for him, but if a man has no wish to be found, then the woods can hide him for ever. My friend, Saban' — here he offered Saban a mocking smile — 'wishes to move the stones soon. Maybe he can bring some this very summer! But if he must wait while we search every tree and beat every bush then the stones will never arrive. Besides, Kellan may be dead!'

'He lives,' Stakis said. 'But it is enough for me,' he conceded, 'that you will agree to hunt Kellan down. Give me that promise, Jegar, and I will allow the stones through my territory.'

'With no further payment?' Jegar asked, leaving the matter of Kellan undecided.

'A man deserves payment for the movement of goods across his land,' Stakis said, turning to Sarmennyn's emissaries. 'You must pay me a piece of bronze sufficient to make one spearhead for every stone you bring into Drewenna, and for every ten stones you will pay me one further spearhead.'

'We will give you a bronze spearhead for every ten stones,' Saban offered. He had no right to speak for Kereval, but he knew Stakis's price was exorbitant. He translated his words to Sarmennyn's chieftain, who nodded his approval.

'How many stones are there?' Stakis asked.

'Ten times seven,' Saban answered, 'and two.'

There were gasps from Drewenna's men. They had thought that perhaps Sarmennyn was giving two or three dozen stones, but not twice that many. 'I shall want a spearhead of bronze for every stone,' Stakis insisted.

'Let me talk to Kereval,' Saban said, then leaned over to the chief and changed to the Outfolk tongue. 'He wants too much.'

'I will give him ten spearheads,' Kereval said, 'no more.' He looked across the circle at the gifts. 'He already has a basket of spearheads! Will all his men be armed with metal spears?'

'For every ten stones,' Saban said to Stakis, 'we shall give you one spearhead. No more.'

Jegar was watching this altercation with amusement. Before Stakis could respond to Saban's offer a horn sounded in the wooded hills just to the north of the meeting place. Stakis frowned at the noise, but Jegar smiled soothingly. 'Lengar is hunting,' he explained.

'No aurochs will be this close to Sul,' Stakis said, staring at the trees.

'It has been driven, perhaps?' Jegar suggested. 'As you wish us to drive Kellan onto your bronze spears?'

'Which you will do?' Stakis asked eagerly. Just then the horn sounded a second time and Jegar leaned forward and plucked the hide cover from the fourth hurdle. This one did not have gifts, but weapons. Men always came to a meeting unarmed, but Ratharryn's warriors now ran forward and picked up spears and bows and suddenly a host of spearmen were running from the trees and the first arrows were whipping overhead to fall among Stakis's men.

'Back!' Jegar shouted at Saban. 'Back to your huts. We have no quarrel with Sarmennyn!' He had thrown off his cloak and Saban saw that a bronze sword was in his crippled right hand. It was lashed there with leather strips, explaining why he had sat so uncomfortably swathed in the otter skin cloak that had hidden the weapon. 'Go back!' Jegar shouted.

Lengar had not been hunting at all, but had met the rest of his spearmen in the forests north of Sul, and now he attacked the unarmed men of Drewenna, and with him was Kellan and his renegade warriors. Stakis had been betrayed, tricked and surprised, and now he would die.

Saban ran to the huts with the rest of Sarmennyn's unarmed warriors. He snatched up his bow and a quiver of arrows, but Kereval put a hand on Saban's arm. 'This is not our fight,' the chief said.

It was no fight at all, but a slaughter. Some of Stakis's men had fled to the river where they tried to launch boats, but a group of Lengar's archers assailed them from higher up the bank and those men only stopped loosing arrows when Ratharryn's spearmen reached the river and killed the few survivors. Dogs howled, women screamed and the dying moaned. Stakis himself, with most of his followers, had fled towards to the settlement of Sul with Jegar and Lengar hard on his heels. A few, very few, of Drewenna's men ran towards their assailants, slipping between the attacking parties to reach the trees and when Lengar saw those men escaping he shouted at Jegar to hunt them down. Lengar then jumped, caught the top of the palisade that ringed the settlement and lithely hauled himself over. A flood of his spearmen struggled to follow, then one thought to split the palisade with an axe and yet more men widened the gap and flooded through to the thatched huts surrounding the sacred spring. Kellan and his men joined the slaughter inside the broken wall.

The men from Sarmennyn watched uneasily from their huts where Camaban had joined them. 'It is Lengar's business,' he said, 'not ours. Lengar has no quarrel with Sarmennyn.'

'It's shameful,' Saban said angrily. He could hear dying men calling on their gods, he could see women weeping over the dead and the river swirling with streamers of blood. Some of the attackers were dancing in glee while others stood guard over the gifts that Jegar had so treacherously given to Stakis. 'It's shameful!' Saban said again.

'If your folk break a truce,' Scathel said scornfully, 'then it is not our concern, though it is to our benefit. Kellan will doubtless let us carry stones through his land without any payment at all.'

Jegar had vanished into the trees with a dozen spearmen, pursuing the last of Drewenna's fugitives. Saban remembered the promise Derrewyn had made on his behalf and he remembered his own oaths of vengeance and so he picked up a spear. 'What are you doing?' Lewydd challenged him and, when Saban tried to pull away, Lewydd gripped his arm. 'It is not your fight,' Lewydd insisted.

'It is my fight!' Saban said.

'It isn't wise to pick a fight with wolves,' Camaban said.

'I made a promise,' Saban said and he threw Lewydd's hand off his arm to run towards the woods. Lewydd picked up his own spear and followed.

Dead and dying men lay among the trees. Like all those who had attended the meeting of the tribes, Stakis's warriors had worn their finery and Jegar's men were now stripping them of necklaces, amulets and clothes. They looked up in alarm as Saban and Lewydd appeared, but most recognised Saban and none feared Lewydd for the grey-tattooed Outfolk were not their enemy this day.

Saban climbed the hill, looking for Jegar, then heard a scream to his right and ran through the trees to see his enemy hacking with a sword at a dying man. The sword was strapped to Jegar's maimed hand, but he still wielded it with sickening force. 'Jegar!' Saban shouted, hefting his spear. It would have been easier to have loosed an arrow from the golden string of his bow, but that would have been the coward's way. 'Jegar!' he called again.

Jegar turned, his eyes bright with excitement, then he saw the hunting spear in Saban's hand and it dawned on him that Saban was not an ally here, but a foe. At first he looked astonished, then he laughed. He stooped, picked up his own heavy war spear and straightened to face Saban with both weapons. 'Sixty-three men have I slaughtered,' he said, 'and some had more killing scars than I did.'

'I have killed two that I know of,' Saban said, 'but now it will be three, and sixty-three spirits in the afterlife will be in my debt and Derrewyn will thank me.'

'Derrewyn!' Jegar said scornfully. 'A whore. You'd die for a whore?' He suddenly ran at Saban, lunging with the spear, and laughed as Saban stepped clumsily aside. 'Go home, Saban,' Jegar said, lowering his spear's blade. 'What pride could I take in killing a bullock like you?'

Saban thrust with his spear, but the blade was contemptuously knocked away. Then Jegar lunged again, almost casually; Saban hit the spear aside and saw the sword coming fast from his other side and had to leap back to escape the fast swing. Then the spear came again, then the sword, and he was scrambling desperately back through the leaf mould, mesmerised by the flashing blades that Jegar used with such confident skill. Fighting was Jegar's life and he practised with weapons every day so he had long learned to compensate for his crippled hand. Jegar stabbed the spear again, then abruptly checked his attack to shake his head. 'You're not worth killing,' he said scornfully. Some of his men had come up the hill to watch the fight, and Jegar waved them back. 'It's our argument,' he said, 'but it's over.'

'It isn't over,' Saban said, and he lunged with the spear, dragging it back as soon as Jegar began to parry and then ramming it forward again, aiming at Jegar's throat, but Jegar swayed to one side and struck the spear down with his sword.

'Do you really want to die, Saban?' Jegar asked. 'Because you won't. If you fight me, I won't kill you. Instead I shall make you kneel to me and I'll piss on your head as I did before.'

'I shall piss on your corpse,' Saban said.

'Fool,' Jegar said. He thrust the spear blade forward with a serpent's speed, driving Saban backwards, then he thrust again, and Saban leapt up onto a rock so he was higher than Jegar, but Jegar swung the sword at his legs, forcing Saban to retreat higher still. Jegar laughed when he saw the fear on Saban's face, stepped forward to stab with the spear, and Slaol struck him.

The beam of sunlight came down through a myriad shifting green leaves. It was a spear of light that slid through the branches to strike and dazzle Jegar's eyes. The brilliance lasted only for a heartbeat, but Jegar flinched and jerked his head away and in that heartbeat Saban jumped down from the rock and rammed his spear straight into Jegar's throat. He screamed as he did it, and the scream was for Derrewyn's torment and for his own victory and for the joy he felt as he saw his enemy's blood misting bright.

Jegar fell. He had dropped his spear and was clawing at his throat where his breath bubbled with dark blood. He twitched, and his knees came up to his belly and his eyes rolled as Saban twisted the bronze blade, then twisted it again, so that yet more blood ran into the leaves. He dragged the spear free and Jegar looked up at him with disbelief and Saban drove the blade down into his enemy's belly.

Jegar shivered, then was still. Saban, eyes wide and breath heaving, stared at his enemy, scarce daring to believe Jegar was dead. He had thought himself outmatched, and so he had been, but Slaol had intervened. He pulled the spear from Jegar's corpse, then turned to look at Ratharryn's shocked warriors. 'Go and tell Lengar that Derrewyn is avenged,' he told them. He spat on Jegar's corpse.

Jegar's men backed away and Saban stooped to untie the leather thongs that strapped the sword to Jegar's dead hand. 'How long will you stay at Sul?' he asked Lewydd, who had stayed close to Saban throughout the brief fight.

'Not long,' Lewydd said. 'We must be home by midsummer. Why?'

'I shall be back here in four days,' Saban said, 'and I would travel to Sarmennyn with you. Wait for me.'

'Four days,' Lewydd said, then flinched when he saw what Saban was doing. 'Where are you going?' he asked.

'I shall be back in four days,' Saban repeated, and would say no more. Then he picked up his burden and walked uphill.

The killing at Sul was over.

Saban was tired, hungry and sore. He had walked for the best part of a night and a day, first travelling eastwards from Sul, then following a well-worn traders' path that led northwards through unending woods. Now, on the second evening after leaving Sul, he was climbing a long gentle hill that had been cleared of trees, though any crops that had ever grown on the slope had long vanished to be replaced by bracken. There were no pigs, the only beast that ate the bracken, and no other living thing in sight. Even the air, on this warm and oppressive evening, was empty of birds, and when he stopped to listen he could hear nothing, not even a wind in the bracken, and he knew that this was how the world must have been before the gods made animals and man. The clouds about the low sun were bruised and swollen, shadowing all the land behind him.

Saban had left his bow, his quiver and his spear with Lewydd and he carried only Jegar's bloodstained tunic with its weighty burden. He was dirty, and his hair hung lank. Ever since he had left Sul he had been wondering why he was making this journey and he had found no good answers except for the dictates of instinct and duty. He had a debt, and life was full of debts that must be honoured if fate was to be kind. Everyone knew that. A fisherman was given a good catch so he must offer something back to the gods. A harvest was plump so part must be sacrificed. A favour engendered another favour and a curse was as dangerous to the person who pronounced it as to the person it was aimed against. Every good thing and bad thing in the world was balanced, which was why folk were so attentive to omens — though some men, like Lengar, ignored the imbalance. They simply piled evil on evil and so defied the gods, but Saban could not be so carefree. It worried him that a part of his life was out of balance and so he had walked this long path to the bracken-covered hill where nothing stirred and nothing sounded. More woods crested the hill and he feared to walk in their darkening shadows as night fell, and his fear increased when he reached the trees for there, at the edge of the forest and standing on either side of the path like guardians, were two thin poles that carried human heads.

They were mere skulls now for the birds had pecked the eyes and flesh away, though one of the skulls was still hung with remnants of hair attached to a yellowing scalp. The eyeholes stared a bleak warning down the hill. Turn now, the eyeholes said, just turn and go.

Saban walked on.

He sang as he walked. He had little breath for singing, but he did not want an arrow to hiss out of the leaves so it was better to announce his presence to the spearmen who guarded this territory. He sang the story of Dickel, the squirrel god. It was a child's song with a jaunty tune and told how Dickel had wanted to trick the fox into giving him his big jaw and sharp teeth, but the fox had turned around when Dickel made his spell and the squirrel got the fox's bushy red tail instead. 'Twitch-tail, twitch-tail,' Saban sang, remembering his mother singing the same words to him, and then there was a sound behind him, a footfall in the leaves, and he stopped.

'Who are you, twitch-tail?' a mocking voice asked.

'My name is Saban, son of Hengall,' Saban answered. He heard a sharp intake of breath and knew that the man behind him was considering his death. He had announced that he was Lengar's brother and in this land that was enough to condemn him and so he spoke again. 'I bring a gift,' he said, lifting the blood-crusted bundle in his hand.

'A gift for whom?' the man asked.

'Your sorceress.'

'If she does not like the gift,' the man said, 'she will kill you.'

'If she does not like this gift,' Saban said, 'then I deserve to die.' He turned to see there was not one man, but three, all with kill scars on their chests, all with bows and spears, and all with the bitter and suspicious faces of men who fight an unending battle, but fight it with passion. They guarded a frontier that was protected by the skulls and Saban wondered if the whole of Cathallo's territory was ringed by the heads of its enemies.

The men hesitated and Saban knew they were still tempted to kill him, but he was unarmed and he showed no fear, so they grudgingly let him live. Two escorted him eastwards while the third man ran ahead to tell the settlement that an intruder was coming. The two men hurried Saban for night was looming, but the summer twilight was long and there was still a thin light lingering in the sky when they reached Cathallo.

Rallin, the new chief, waited for Saban on the edge of the settlement. A dozen warriors stood with him while the tribe had gathered behind to see this brother of Lengar who had dared come to their home. Rallin was no older than Saban, but he looked formidable for he was a tall man with broad shoulders and an unsmiling face on which a wound scar streaked from his beard to skirt his left eye. 'Saban of Ratharryn,' he greeted Saban dourly.

'Saban of Sarmennyn now,' Saban said, bowing respectfully.

Rallin ignored Saban's words. 'We kill men of Ratharryn in this place,' he said. 'We kill them wherever we find them and we strike off their heads and put them on poles.' The crowd murmured, some calling that Saban's head should be added to the cull.

'Is it really Saban?' Another voice spoke, and Saban turned to see Morthor, the high priest with his empty eye-sockets, standing among the crowd. His beard was white now.

'It is good to see you, Morthor,' Saban said, then wished he had not used those words.

But Morthor smiled. 'It is good to hear you,' he answered, then he turned his sightless eyes towards Rallin. 'Saban is a good man.'

'He is from Ratharryn,' Rallin said flatly.

'Ratharryn did this to me,' Saban answered, holding up his left hand with its missing finger. 'Ratharryn enslaved me and cast me out. I do not come from Ratharryn.'

'But you were whelped in Ratharryn,' Rallin insisted obstinately.

'If a calf is born in your hut, Rallin,' Saban asked, 'does that make it your son?'

Rallin considered that for a heartbeat. 'Then why do you come here?' he demanded.

'To bring Morthor's daughter a gift,' Saban answered.

'What gift?' Rallin demanded.

'This,' Saban said. He lifted the bundle but refused to unwrap it, and then a scream like a vixen's shriek sounded and Rallin turned to stare towards the great embankment of the shrine.

A pale slim figure stood alone in the temple's dark. She beckoned, and Rallin, obedient to the summons, stood aside and Saban walked towards the woman who waited for him where the paired stones of the western avenue met the temple's embankment. It was Derrewyn and Lahanna was shining on her to make her beautiful. She wore a simple deerskin tunic that fell to her ankles and which appeared almost white in the moonlight, while round her neck was a chain of bones. But as Saban drew nearer he saw that her beauty was the moon's reflection, little more, for she was thinner now and her face was angrier and lined and bitter. Her black hair was scraped back into a tight knot, while her mouth, which had once been so quick to smile, was a thin-lipped slit. In her right hand was the thigh bone that Sannas had once carried and Derrewyn raised it as Saban reached the avenue's last pair of stones. 'You dared to come here?' she asked.

'To bring you a gift,' Saban answered.

She looked at the bundle, then gave an abrupt nod and Saban untied the tunic and shook its contents onto the bare moonlit ground between them.

'Jegar,' Derrewyn said, recognising the head despite the blood which matted its beard and smeared its skin.

'It is Jegar,' Saban said. 'I cut off his head with his own sword.'

Derrewyn stared at it, then grimaced. 'For me?'

'Why else would I bring you the head?'

She looked at him, and it seemed that a mask dropped away for she gave him a tired smile. 'Is it Saban of Sarmennyn now?'

'It is.'

'And you have a wife? A lover of Slaol?'

Saban ignored the sourness of the question. 'All the Out-folk love Slaol,' he said.

'Yet now you come to me,' Derrewyn said, the mask of anger back in its place, 'you crawl to me with a gift! Why? Because you need protection from Lengar?'

'No,' Saban protested.

'But you do,' Derrewyn said. 'You killed his friend, and you think he won't return that favour? Touch one of those maggots of Ratharryn, and the rest pursue you.' She frowned at him. 'You think Lengar won't kill you? You think he won't take your wife as he took me? You've hurt him!'

'I came to bring you this,' Saban said, gesturing at Jegar's head, 'and nothing more.' In truth he had thought little of Lengar's reaction to Jegar's death. His brother would be filled with rage, of that Saban was sure, and he would probably want revenge, but Saban believed he would be safe in Sarmennyn.

'So you brought me your gift, nothing more,' Derrewyn said. 'What were you hoping for, Saban? My gratitude?' She hoisted her deerskin skirts, lifting them almost to her waist. 'Is that what you want?'

Saban turned away to look across the dark fields. 'I wanted you to know that I had not forgotten.'

Derrewyn dropped the skirts. 'Forgotten what?' she asked sourly.

'That we were lovers,' Saban said, 'and that I knew happiness with you. And since that time to this there has not been one day in which I have not thought of you.'

Derrewyn gazed at him for a long time, then sighed. 'I knew you had not forgotten,' she said, 'and I always hoped you would come back.' She shrugged. 'And now you are here. So? Will you stay? Will you help us fight your brother?'

'I shall go back to Sarmennyn,' Saban said.

Derrewyn sneered. 'To move your famous temple? The temple that will draw great Slaol to Ratharryn! Scorching the sky as he comes to do your bidding? Do you really believe he will come?'

'Yes,' Saban said, 'I do.'

'But to do what?' This time Derrewyn spoke without scorn.

'What Camaban promises,' Saban said. 'There will be no more winter, no more disease, no more sadness.'

Derrewyn stared at him, then put her head back and laughed, and her mockery echoed from the farther side of the great chalk embankment, which shone white in the twilight. 'No more winter! No more sadness! You hear that, Sannas? You hear it? Ratharryn will banish winter!' She had been dancing as she mocked, but now she stopped and pointed the thigh bone at Saban. 'But I don't need to tell Sannas that, do I? She knows what Camaban wants because he stole her life.' She did not wait for an answer, but spat and strode forward to pick up Jegar's head by its bloody crown. 'Come with me, Saban of Sarmennyn,' she said, 'and we shall find out whether you will conquer winter with your rattling stones from the west. If only you could! We could all be happy again! We could be young and happy, with no pains in our bones.'

She led him into the shrine. There was no one else there, just the rising moon shining on the huge boulders in which tiny flecks of starlight seemed to be embedded. Derrewyn took Saban to Sannas's old hut, which was still the only building inside the embankment, and there she tossed Jegar's head beside the entrance before pulling up her tunic and tugging it over her head. She dropped the bone necklace on the tunic. 'You too,' she said, indicating that he should take off his own tunic. 'I'm not going to rape you, Saban, I merely want to talk with the goddess. She likes us naked, just as your priests go naked so that nothing lies between them and their gods.' She ducked under the door.

Saban took off his tunic and boots, then followed her into the hut. Someone, presumably Derrewyn, had placed a baby's skull above the door. It had been a very young baby when it died for the crevice in the skull's dome still gaped. The interior of the hut had not changed. There were the same bundles hanging in the shadowed roof and the same jumbled piles of furs and baskets of bones and pots of herbs and ointments.

Derrewyn sat cross-legged on one side of the fire and indicated that Saban should sit opposite. She fed the fire, making it burn bright to flicker ominous shadows among the bat wings and antlers suspended from the roof pole. The flames lit her body and Saban saw she had become cruelly thin. 'I'm not beautiful any more, am I?' she asked.

'Yes,' Saban said.

She smiled at that. 'You tell lies, just like your brothers.' She reached into a big pot and brought out some dried herbs, which she threw onto the fire. She threw more, handful after handful, so that the small pale leaves first flared brilliant, and then began to choke the flames. The light dimmed and the hut began to fill with a thick smoke. 'Breathe the smoke,' Derrewyn ordered him, and Saban leaned forward and took in a breath. He almost choked and his head span, but he forced himself to take another breath and found there was something sweet and sickly in the harsh smoke's touch.

Derrewyn closed her eyes and swayed from side to side. She was breathing through her nose, but every now and then she let a sigh escape, and then, quite suddenly, she began to weep. Her thin shoulders heaved, her face screwed up and the tears flowed. It was as though her heart was broken. She moaned and gasped and sobbed, and the tears trickled down her face, and then she doubled forward as though she would retch, and Saban feared she would put her head into the smouldering fire, but then, just as suddenly, she arched her body back and stared into the peaked roof as she gasped for breath. 'What do you see?' she asked him.

'I see nothing,' Saban said. He felt light-headed, as though he had drunk too much liquor, but he saw nothing. No dreams, no visions, no apparitions. He had feared he would see Sannas, back from the dead, but there was nothing but shadow and smoke and Derrewyn's white body with its protruding ribs.

'I see death,' Derrewyn whispered. The tears still ran down her cheeks. 'There will be so much death,' she whispered. 'You are making a temple of death.'

'No,' Saban protested.

'Camaban's temple,' Derrewyn said, her voice no more than the sigh of a small wind brushing a temple's poles, 'the winter shrine, the Temple of Shadows.' She rocked from side to side. 'The blood will steam from its stones like mist.'

'No!'

'And the sun bride will die there,' Derrewyn crooned.

'No.'

'Your sun bride.' Derrewyn was staring at Saban now, but not seeing him for her eyes had rolled up so that only the whites showed. 'She will die there, blood on stone.'

'No!' Saban shouted and his vehemence startled her from her trance.

Her eyes focused and she looked surprised. 'I only tell what I see,' she said calmly, 'and what Sannas gives me to see, and she sees Camaban clearly for he stole her life.'

'He stole her life?' Saban asked, puzzled.

'He was seen, Saban,' Derrewyn said tiredly. 'A child saw a limping man leave the shrine at dawn, and that same morning Sannas was found dead.' She shrugged. 'So Sannas cannot go to her ancestors, not till Camaban releases her, and I cannot kill Camaban, for I would kill Sannas with him and share her fate.' She looked heartbroken, then shook her head. 'I want to go to Lahanna, Saban. I want to be in the sky. There's no happiness here on earth.'

'There will be,' Saban said firmly. 'We shall bring Slaol back and there will be no more winter and no more sickness.'

Derrewyn smiled ruefully. 'No more winter,' she said wistfully, 'and all by restoring the pattern.' She enjoyed Saban's surprise. 'We hear all that happens in Sarmennyn,' she said. The traders come and talk to us. We know about your temple and about your hopes. But how do you know the pattern is broken?'

'It just is,' Saban said.

'You are like mice,' she said scornfully, 'who think the wheat is grown for their benefit and that by saying prayers they can prevent the harvest.' She stared at the dull glow of the fire and Saban gazed at her. He was trying to reconcile this bitter sorceress with the girl he had known, and perhaps she was thinking the same thing for she suddenly looked up at him. 'Don't you sometimes wish everything was as it used to be?' she asked.

'Yes,' Saban said, 'all the time.'

She smiled at the fervour in his voice. 'Me too,' she said softly. 'We were happy, weren't we, you and I? But we were also children. It really wasn't so long ago, but now you move temples and I tell Rallin what to do.'

'What do you tell him?'

'To kill anything from Ratharryn, of course. To kill and kill again. They attack us all the time, but the marshes protect us and if they try to go round the marshes we meet them in the forests and kill them one by one.' Her voice was full of vengeance. 'And who started the killing? Lengar! And who does Lengar worship? Slaol! He went to Sarmennyn and learned to worship Slaol above all the gods and ever since there has been no end to the killing. Slaol has been unleashed, Saban, and he brings blood.'

'He is our father,' Saban protested, 'and loves us.'

'Loves us!' Derrewyn snapped. 'He is cruel, Saban, and why should a cruel god take away our winter? Or spare us sadness?' She shuddered. 'When you worship Slaol as just one of many gods then he is held in check — all is in balance. But you have put him at the head of the gods and now he will use his whip on you.'

'No,' Saban said.

'And I will oppose him,' Derrewyn said, 'for that is my task. I am now Slaol's enemy, Saban, because his cruelty will have to be curbed.'

'He is not cruel,' Saban insisted.

'Tell that to the girls he burns each year in Sarmennyn,' Derrewyn said tartly, 'though he spared your Aurenna, didn't he?' She smiled. 'I do know her name, Saban. Is she a good woman?'

'Yes.'

'Kind?'

'Yes.'

'And beautiful?' Derrewyn asked pointedly.

'Yes.'

'But she was shown to Slaol, wasn't she? Given to him!' She hissed those three words. 'You think he will forget? She has been marked, Saban, marked by a god. Camaban was marked! He has a moon on his belly. Do not trust people marked by the gods.'

'Aurenna was not marked,' Saban protested.

Derrewyn smiled. 'Her beauty marks her, Saban. I know, for I was once beautiful.'

'You still are,' Saban said and he meant it, but she just laughed at him.

'You would do better to make a hundred temples to a hundred gods, or make one temple to a thousand gods, but to make that temple? It would be better to make no temples at all. Better to take the stones and drop them in the sea.' She shook her head, as though she knew her advice was in vain. 'Fetch me the necklace I dropped outside,' she ordered him.

Saban obeyed, scooping up the rattling bones on their string of sinew. They were, he realised with a shock, the bones of a small baby, all tiny ribs and fragile fingers. He handed it across the smouldering remnants of the fire and Derrewyn bit through the sinew and took a single small vertebra out of the string. She reached behind her for a red-coloured pot with a wide mouth that was sealed with beeswax. She used a knife to lever off the wax stopper and immediately a terrible stench pervaded the hut, overpowering even the remnants of the pungent smoke, but Derrewyn, whose head was directly above the evil smell, did not seem to mind. She pushed the small bone into the pot, then brought it out and Saban saw it was smeared with a sticky pale gum.

She put the pot aside and dragged a flat basket towards her and rooted amongst its contents, finally bringing out two halves of a hazelnut's shell. She placed the bone inside the shell and, frowning with concentration, closed the shell and wrapped it in a length of sinew. She wound the thread repeatedly about the nut, then took a leather lace and made the sinew-wrapped nut into an amulet that Saban could wear about his neck. She held it to him. 'Put it on.'

'What is it?' Saban asked, taking the amulet nervously.

'A charm,' she said dismissively, covering the stinking pot with a scrap of leather.

'What sort of charm?'

'Lengar gave me a son,' she said calmly, 'and the bone inside the shell is a bone of that child, and the ointment is what is left of its flesh.'

Saban shuddered. 'A bone of your own child?'

'Lengar's child,' Derrewyn said, 'and I killed it as you'd kill a louse. It was born, Saban, it cried for milk and I cut its throat.' She stared at Saban, her gaze unblinking. He shuddered again and tried to imagine the hate that had been put into her soul. 'But I shall have another child one day,' she went on. 'I shall have a daughter and I shall raise her to be a sorceress like me. I will wait till Lahanna tells me the time is right and then I shall lie with Rallin and breed a girl to guide this tribe when I am dead.' She sighed, then nodded at the nutshell amulet. 'Tell Lengar that his life is trapped inside that shell and that if he threatens you, if he attacks you or if he even offends you, just destroy the amulet. Beat it flat with a stone or burn it and he will die. Tell him that.'

Saban hung the hazel shell about his neck next to the amber pendant that had been his mother's gift. 'You hate him,' he said, 'so why don't you crush the charm?'

Derrewyn smiled. 'It was my child too, Saban.'

'So…' Saban began, but could not go on.

'Crush the amulet,' she said, 'and you will hurt me too. Maybe not kill me, for it is my magic and I can make charms to counter it, but it will hurt. It will hurt. No!' She had seen that he was about to take the amulet off. 'You will need it, Saban. You brought me a gift and now you must take mine. You gave me Jegar's life so I give you your brother's life for, believe me, he wants yours.' She rubbed her eyes, then crawled past him into the open air. Saban followed.

Derrewyn pulled the deerskin tunic over her head then stooped to look at Jegar's head. She turned it over and spat into its eyes. 'I shall plant this on a stake outside this hut,' she said, 'and one day, perhaps, put Lengar's head beside it.'

Saban dressed. 'I will go at dawn,' he said, 'with your permission.'

'With my help,' Derrewyn said. 'I'll send spearmen to take you safely away.' She kicked Jegar's head inside the hut. 'We shall meet again, Saban,' she said, and then, abruptly, she turned and hugged him, burying her face in his tunic and holding him with an astonishing strength. He felt her shudder and he put his arms about her.

She immediately pulled away. 'I will give you food,' she said coldly, 'and a place to sleep. And in the morning you can go.'

In the morning, he went.

—«»—«»—«»—

Lengar had already gone back to Ratharryn when Saban returned to Sul. 'He thought you'd run away,' Lewydd told Saban.

'You didn't tell him I was coming back?'

'I told him nothing. Why should I? But the sooner you're home in Sarmennyn, the better. He wants you dead.'

Saban touched the shape of the nutshell beneath his tunic, but said nothing of it. Would it work? Would he even need it? If he stayed in distant Sarmennyn he would never need face Lengar again and so he was glad when, on the day after his return from Cathallo, Kereval at last tore himself away from the hot spring in which he had been soaking himself, claiming that it cured the aches in his bones. The westwards sea journey home was much harder for the wind was against the boats and though the tides still carried them for half of the time, the voyage took much paddling and a whole day longer than the outward journey. At last, though, the boats turned about the headland and the crews sang as the tide carried them upriver to Kereval's settlement.

Next day Saban picked woad from a hillside and Aurenna infused it in water and, when the dye was ready, she placed a second killing tattoo on Saban's chest. She hammered the marks in with a comb, driving the dye deep, and while she worked Saban told her all that had happened in Sul and how he had taken Jegar's head to Derrewyn. Afterwards, while the blood dried on his chest, he and Aurenna sat by the river and she fingered the nutshell. 'Tell me about Derrewyn,' she said.

'She is thin now,' Saban said, 'and bitter.'

'Who can blame her?' Aurenna asked. She frowned at the nutshell. 'I don't like it. Loosing a curse can hurt the person who releases it.'

'It might keep me alive,' Saban said, taking it from her. 'I shall keep it till Lengar dies, then bury it.' He hung it about his neck. He dared not show it to Camaban for he feared his brother might use the charm to hurt Derrewyn, and so he kept it hidden. He also feared that Camaban would question him about his journey to Cathallo and call him a fool for having made it, but Camaban was preoccupied with finding a trader who could carry him to the island across the western sea. He eventually found some men who were making the voyage with a cargo of flints and so Camaban left Sarmennyn.

'I shall learn their priests' secrets,' he told Saban, 'and come back when it is time.'

'When is that?'

'Whenever I come back, of course,' Camaban said, stepping into the boat. One of the traders handed him a paddle, but Camaban contemptuously swatted it aside. 'I don't paddle,' he said, 'I sit and you paddle. Now take me.' He gripped the boat's gunwales and was carried downstream to the sea.

Ten boats for carrying the temple's pillars were now ready, all of them triple-hulled and tight-lashed, and they were towed upstream to where long grass grew around the growing piles of temple stones. The smaller stones, those about the height of a man, could be loaded two to a boat, but the largest needed a boat to themselves and Saban began by loading one of those huge boulders. At high tide one of the boats was hauled in to the river's edge and its stern was tied firmly to the bank. Saban levered up one end of the boulder, which still rested on its sledge, and slid a beam beneath it. He levered up the other end so three more beams could be placed under the stone, then forty men grasped the beams, heaved up and staggered towards the boat. The men had only a few paces to carry the vast weight, yet they became nervous when they stepped into the water and a dozen more men were needed to steady the stone. The men sweated, but inched onwards until the great stone was poised above the square timbers that spanned the three hulls. They lowered the stone and the boat settled so deep in the water that one hull grounded on the river-bed. Lewydd and a dozen men tugged the boat free and Saban saw how little freeboard the hull had, but Lewydd reckoned they would survive the journey to Ratharryn if Malkin, the weather god, was kind. He and a dozen men boarded the boat and paddled it downriver, followed on the bank by a horde of excited men.

It took three days to load the ten boats. Five of the craft carried large stones while the other five had a pair of smaller stones apiece, and once the stones were lashed to their beams the boats were all floated downstream. There were two places where the river ran shallow and men had to haul the boats across those places as though they were sledges, but in two days all the boats were safe at Aurenna's settlement where they were tethered to trees. At low tide the great hulls rested in the mud while at high they floated free to tug restlessly at their moorings.

They were waiting for the weather. It was already late in the summer, but Lewydd prayed at Malkin's shrine each morning then climbed the hills behind the settlement to peer westwards. He was waiting for the wind to die and the sea to settle, but the wind seemed relentless in those late summer days and the grey waves roared endlessly from the west to shatter white on the rocky coast.

The harvest was cut and then the rains started, blasting from the ocean in teeming downpours so that Saban had to empty the moored boats of rainwater every day. The skies stayed dark and he began to despair of ever moving the stones, but Lewydd never abandoned hope and his optimism was justified for one morning Saban woke to a strange calm. The day was warm, the winds had settled and the fishermen reckoned the fine weather would last. It often happened like this, they said, that, late in the year, just before the autumn brought howling gales, Malkin would send long days of blissful calm and so the ten boats were loaded with skins of fresh water and sacks of dried fish and baskets of the flat bread that was made on hot stones, and then Scathel splashed each boat with the blood of a freshly killed bullock and, at midday, with a dozen paddlers manning each craft, the first of the temple's stones went to sea.

There were plenty of men in the tribe who said the crews would never be seen again. In the heft of the sea, they claimed, the boats would swamp and the weight of the stones would drag them down to where the grey monsters of the deep waited. Saban and Aurenna walked to the coast and watched the ten boats, escorted by two slim fishing craft, turn around the headland and paddle out to sea. The pessimists were wrong. The ten boats rode the small waves easily and then the leather sails were hoisted above the stones, the paddles dug deep, and the small fleet rode the gentle wind and long tide eastwards.

Now all Saban could do was wait for Lewydd's return. He waited as the days shortened and as the wind rose and the air turned chill. Some days Saban and Aurenna would walk to the southern headland from where they would stare from the cliff's top to search for Lewydd's boats, but though they could see fishing boats with men standing and throwing their small nets, and though they saw plenty of traders' boats loaded with goods, they saw none of the triple-hulled boats that had carried the stones. Day by day the wind drove the sea harder, smashing water white on rock and lashing the wave crests to foam, and still Lewydd did not return. There were days when the fishermen would not go out because the water and the wind were too angry and on those days Saban feared for Lewydd.

The first frost came and after that the first snow. Aurenna was pregnant again and some mornings she woke weeping, though she always denied that her tears were for Lewydd. 'He lives,' she insisted, 'he lives.'

'Then why are you crying?'

'Because it is winter,' she said, 'and Erek dies in the winter and I am so close to him that I feel his pain.' She flinched when Saban touched her cheek. There were times when he felt she was distancing herself from him, moving closer to Erek. She would sit on her stone beside the river, her hands outstretched on either side, and claim to be listening to her god, and Saban, who heard no voices in his head, was jealous.

'Spring will come,' he said.

'As always,' Aurenna said and turned away.

Saban and Mereth made more boats. They found the last big oaks in the nearer forests and from those trunks they could make just five more craft. If Lewydd returned and brought his boats with him they would have fifteen boats, and fifteen boats could carry all the stones eastward in four voyages. But if Lewydd did not return then the temple could not be moved and, as day followed day, and as winter's grip locked the land hard, there was neither news nor sight of Lewydd.

Lewydd's long absence began to unsettle the folk of Sarmennyn. Rumours spread. One story claimed that the ten boats had foundered and their crews had been drowned, dragged down by the stones because Erek did not want them moved. Other folk claimed that Lewydd and his men had been slaughtered by the folk of Drewenna who, instead of providing the sledges as their new chief had promised after the massacre at Sul, had decided to take the stones for themselves. The rumours fed on themselves and, for the first time since Aurenna had walked from the fire, there were murmurs that Camaban and Kereval were wrong. Haragg tried to keep the tribe's faith, but more and more folk muttered that the temple should never have been given away. Over a hundred of the tribe's young men were gone with the boats and the tribe feared they would never see those men again. They had left widows and orphans, they had left Sarmennyn dangerously weak in spearmen, and because so many of the missing were fishermen, it meant there would be hunger in Sarmennyn that winter, and it was all the fault of those who had said the temple should be moved. Scathel, Haragg and Kereval tried to stanch the anger, advising the people to wait for news, but still the rumours flourished and turned to a sudden rage one winter evening when a crowd of resentful folk left Kereval's settlement and crossed the river with burning torches to walk south to Aurenna's settlement.

Scathel took a boat down the river to warn Saban that men were coming to burn the settlement and destroy the new boats. Kereval had tried to stop them, the high priest said, but Kereval was ailing and his authority was weakening.

Haragg spat angrily. 'Who leads them?' he asked his brother. Scathel named some of the men who were coming and Haragg shook with anger. 'They are worms,' he said derisively, and seized a spear.

'Let me talk to them,' Saban said.

'Talking won't stop them,' Haragg retorted as he stalked down the path, spear in hand. Cagan went with him. Saban ordered Mereth to take the women of the settlement into the trees then he ran after Haragg, catching the huge man just as he confronted the firelit crowd on the narrow forest path. Haragg lifted his spear. 'You are fighting against Erek,' he shouted, but before he could say another word an arrow whipped from the crowd to strike his chest and Haragg staggered back to fall against an oak. Cagan bellowed in distress, plucked up his father's spear and charged at the crowd. He was met by more arrows and a shower of stones, but the arrows might as well have been loosed at an aurochs. The giant deaf-mute flailed the spear clumsily, driving men back, and Saban ran to help him, but then Cagan was tripped; he fell, and the crowd surged over the huge man and their spears were rising and falling as he writhed beneath the blades. Saban seized Haragg's arm, hauled the trader to his feet and dragged him away so he would not see his son's death. 'Cagan!' Haragg called.

'Run!' Saban shouted. An arrow hissed past his ear and another thumped into a tree.

The crowd was following, their blood roused by Cagan's death. A spear was thrown and it skidded along the path, nearly striking Saban's ankle, then he saw Aurenna standing in the path's centre. 'Go back!' Saban shouted at her, but she waved him aside. Her golden hair hung free and her deerskin tunic swelled over her pregnant belly. 'Go!' Saban said. 'They've killed Cagan. Go!' He tried to pull her away, but Aurenna shook off his hand, refusing to be moved. She waited calmly, as placid as she had been when she had waited to endure the sun-bride's fire, and then, when the rampaging crowd came into sight, she walked slowly forward to meet them.

She did not raise her hands, she did not speak, but just stood there and the attackers checked. They had killed a man, but now they were faced by a bride of Erek, a woman who was either a goddess or a sorceress, a woman of power, and none had the courage to attack her, though one man did step out of the crowd to confront her. His name was Kargan and he was a nephew of Kereval and a famous warrior in Sarmennyn. He wore ravens' wings in his hair and had ravens' feathers tied to the shaft of his spear which was longer and heavier than any other in Sarmennyn. He had a long jaw and brooding eyes and thick grey scars that boasted of the souls he had slaughtered in battle, but he reverently bowed his head to Aurenna. 'We have no quarrel with you, lady,' he said.

Then with whom, Kargan?' Aurenna asked gently.

'With the folk who stole our young men,' Kargan said. 'With the fools who would move a temple across a world!'

'Who stole your young men, Kargan?' Aurenna asked.

'You know who, lady.'

Aurenna smiled. 'Our young men will return tomorrow,' she said. 'They will come in their boats and their song will be heard in the river. There will be joy tomorrow, so why cause more sadness tonight?' She paused, waiting, but no one spoke. 'Go back,' she instructed the crowd, 'for our men will come home tomorrow. Erek has promised it.' Then, with a last calm smile, she turned and walked away.

Kargan hesitated, but Aurenna's certainty had taken the anger from the crowd and they obeyed her. Saban watched them go, then followed Aurenna. 'And when the boats do not come tomorrow,' he asked her, 'how will we stop them killing us?'

'But the boats will come,' Aurenna said. 'Erek told me in a dream.' She was quite confident, even astonished that Saban might doubt her dream. 'The dream mists have cleared,' she told him happily, 'and I see Erek's future.' She smiled at him, then led Haragg to her hut where she soothed the trader's grief. He was breathing hard for the arrow had struck deep and pink blood was dribbling from his mouth, but Aurenna assured him he would live and gave him a potion to drink and then pulled the arrow's shaft free.

Next morning, after Cagan's body had been burned on a pyre, almost all the tribe walked south to the headland where the river met the sea, and there they waited above the grey waters. The white birds wheeled and their cries were like the wailing of drowned spirits. Saban was on the cliff top with Scathel and Mereth, and Kargan had come with the folk who had followed him the previous night, but Aurenna did not go. 'The boats will come,' she had told Saban that morning, 'and I do not need to see them.' She stayed with Haragg.

The morning passed and all that came was a squall. The rain hissed on the sea and the cold wind whipped it into the faces of the watching crowd. Scathel was praying, Saban was hunched in the lee of a rock and Kargan was pacing up and down the cliff top thumping the pale grass with his heavy spear. The sun was hidden by cloud.

Kargan finally faced Saban. 'You and your brother have brought a madness to Sarmennyn,' he said flatly.

'I brought you nothing,' Saban retorted. 'Your madness came when you lost the gold.'

'The gold was stolen!' Kargan shouted.

'Not by us.'

'And a temple cannot be moved!'

'The temple must be moved,' Saban said wearily, 'or you and I will never have happiness again.'

'Happiness?' Kargan spat. 'You think the gods want our happiness?'

'If you want to know what the gods want,' Saban said, 'then ask Scathel. He's a priest,' and he gestured towards the gaunt man who had been praying at the cliff's edge, but Scathel was no longer holding his arms to the sky. Instead he was staring eastwards, staring into the grey, shifting veils of rain and suddenly he shouted. He shouted again, pointed his staff and all the watching people turned to see where the high priest looked.

And they saw boats.

They saw a fleet of boats: a fleet racing home against rain and wind as it was carried on the last of the tide's surging ebb. Lewydd had split the great hulls apart so that each triple boat was now three, and the beams that had supported the stones were stored inside the hulls driven by cold men eager to be home. The crowd, which the night before had murdered Cagan and had been ready to slaughter everyone in Aurenna's settlement, now cheered. Lewydd, standing in the leading boat, waved his paddle. Saban was counting the boats and saw they were all there, every one. They came from the sullen waves into the lee of the headland in the river's mouth where the exhausted paddlers waited for the tide to turn.

The evening tide brought the fleet upriver and, just as Aurenna had promised, the crews sang as they guided their big boats into her settlement. They sang the song of Dilan, the sea god, and they drove their paddles in time to the song's rhythm and the crowd, which had followed them upstream, sang with them.

Lewydd jumped ashore and was greeted with embraces, but he fought through the crowd to put his arms about Saban. 'We did it,' he exulted, 'we did it!'

Saban had made a great fire in the open space beside the half-finished boats. The women had pounded roots and grain, and Saban had ordered venison roasted on the fire. The boats' crews were given dry pelts and Kargan returned from Kereval's settlement with pots of liquor and still more people so that it seemed to Saban that all of Sarmennyn was crowded around his home to hear Lewydd's tale. He told it well and the listeners groaned or gasped or cheered as he described how the boats had carried the stones to the River Sul at summer's end. There had been no difficulty in the voyage, he said. The boats rode the seas well, the stones stayed secure and the river was safely reached, but then their troubles began.

The supporters of Stakis, who had been defeated by Lengar, still roamed Drewenna and some of those men demanded tribute that Lewydd did not have. So he stayed at the Sul's mouth where he made himself a palisade and waited for men to come from Kellan, the new chief of Drewenna, and drive the vagabonds away.

Kellan's spearmen escorted the boats up the Sul, but when they reached the shallow headwaters where the boats could no longer float there were no sledges waiting. Kellan had promised to make the sledges, but he had broken the promise and so Lewydd walked to Ratharryn and there argued and pleaded with Lengar, who, finally, agreed to persuade Kellan. By then, however, the autumn winds were cold and the rain was falling and it took long days of tiresome work to fell the trees and trim the trunks and make the great sledges onto which the stones, and then the boats, were laid.

Oxen hauled the boats and the sledges over the hills to the east-flowing river where the boats were relaunched and the stones reloaded, and Lewydd then took the fleet east until they came to Mai's river up which he poled the stones to Ratharryn.

And there he had left the stones. He had split his big boats into their three hulls and had retraced his steps, dragging the boats across the watershed and relaunching them in the Sul, but when he reached that river's mouth the winter had struck cold and hard and he had not dared come home across the bitterly turbulent sea and so he had waited at the Sul's mouth until the weather relented.

Now he and all his men were home. The first stones were in Ratharryn. And Saban wept because Cagan was dead and burned, but also because there would be joy on earth. The temple was being moved.

Aurenna's second child was a girl, and Aurenna called her Lallic, which meant 'the Chosen One' in the Outfolk tongue. Saban was not happy with the name at first, for it seemed to impose a destiny on the child before fate had had a chance to decide her life, but Aurenna insisted and Saban became used to it. Aurenna never again conceived, but her son and her daughter grew healthy and strong. They lived by the river and Leir could swim almost before he could walk. He learned to paddle a boat, draw a bow and spear fish in the river shallows. And as the brother and sister grew they watched the stones go past their hut towards the sea.

It took five years to move them all. Lewydd had hoped to do it in less, but he would take his cumbersome fleet to sea in nothing less than perfect weather, and one year no stones were moved at all and the year after it was only possible to make one voyage, but when the boats did set out the gods were kind and no more stones were lost and not one man was drowned.

Lewydd brought news back from Ratharryn, telling how the temple was being remade and how the war between Lengar and Cathallo went on. 'Neither side can win,' Lewydd said, 'and neither side will give in, but your brother believes that the temple will bring him good fortune. He still thinks it's a war temple.'

One year he brought news that Derrewyn had given birth to a child.

'A daughter,' Saban said.

'You heard?' Lewydd asked.

Saban shook his head. 'I guessed. And she's well?'

Lewydd shrugged. 'I don't know. I just heard that your brother's priests put a curse on mother and child.'

That night Saban went to the sun-bride's temple in Kereval's settlement and buried his mother's amber pendant beside one of the stones. He bowed to Slaol and asked the god to lift Ratharryn's curses from Derrewyn and her daughter. His mother, he knew, would forgive him, though whether Aurenna would be as understanding he did not know: when she asked him what had happened to the amulet he pretended its sinew had broken and that the amber had fallen in the river.

It was in springtime of the fifth year that the very last stones of the Temple of Shadows were brought down the river. There were only eleven of the dark pillars left and all were hoisted on to their triple-hulled boats and floated downstream to a mooring off Aurenna's settlement. Lewydd was eager to carry the final cargo eastwards, but both Scathel and Kereval wanted to accompany the stones because, with the safe delivery of the last boulders, Sarmennyn's side of the bargain would be fulfilled and Lengar must yield the rest of Erek's treasure. Scathel and Kereval wanted to be present when the treasures were restored to their tribe and they insisted that a small army of thirty spearmen travel with them and it took time to collect the food that those men would need.

No sooner had the extra boats been provisioned than the wind turned sharply into the east to bring cold squalls and short, steep seas. Lewydd refused to risk the boats and so they waited in the river, bucking on their moorings under the impact of the gusting wind and changing tides. Day after day the wind stayed cold and when at last it turned into the west it blew too hard and still Lewydd would not take the fleet to sea.

So they waited, and one day towards the end of spring, on a day in which the wind howled at the tree tops and broke white in shattering spume against the cliffs, a boat appeared in the west, coming from the land across the sea. The boat was manned by a dozen paddlers who fought the storm. They shrieked at it, bailed their boat, paddled again, cursed the wind god and prayed to the sea god and somehow brought their fragile boat safe past the foam-shredded headland and into the river. They drove their hull upriver against the tide's ebb, too angry to wait for the flood, and they chanted as they paddled, boasting of their victory over the storm.

The boat brought Camaban back to Sarmennyn.

He alone had showed no fear at sea. He alone had not bailed, paddled, cursed, nor chanted, but had sat silent and serene, and now, as the boat grounded at Aurenna's settlement, he stepped ashore with apparent unconcern. He staggered slightly, still expecting the world to pitch and rock, then walked to Aurenna's hut.

At first Saban did not recognise his brother. Camaban was still as thin as a sapling and gaunt as a flint blade, but his face was now terrifying for he had scarred his cheeks and forehead with deep vertical cuts into which he had rubbed soot so that his face was barred black. He had plaited his long hair into a hundred narrow braids that writhed like vipers and were hung with a child's knuckle bones. Leir and Lallic shrank from the stranger who sat by Saban's fire and said nothing and who did not even respond when Aurenna offered him food.

He sat there all night, saying nothing, eating nothing, awake.

In the morning Aurenna revived the fire and heated stones to put in the broth and still Camaban did not speak. The wind fidgeted the thatch, plucked at the moored boats and drove rain across the settlement where the crew of Camaban's boat had found shelter.

Saban offered his brother food, but Camaban just stared into the fire. A single tear once ran down a black scar, but that could have been the wind-whirled smoke irritating an eye.

It was not till mid-morning that he stirred. He frowned first, pushed hair from his face, then blinked as if he had just been woken from a dream. 'They have a great temple in the land across the sea,' he said abruptly.

Aurenna stared at Camaban in a trance, but Saban frowned, fearing that his brother would demand that this new temple be fetched by boat.

'A great temple,' Camaban said with awe in his voice, 'a temple of the dead.'

'A temple to Lahanna?' Saban asked, for Lahanna had ever been reckoned the guardian of the dead.

Camaban shook his head. A louse crawled from his hair down into his beard, which was braided like his hair and decorated with more small knuckle bones. He smelt of brine. 'It is a temple to Slaol,' he whispered, 'to the dead who are united with Slaol!' He smiled suddenly, and to Saban's children the smile looked so wolfish that they shrank from their strange uncle. Camaban made the shape of a low mound with his hands. 'The temple is a hill, Saban,' he said enthusiastically, 'circled by stone and hollowed out, with a stone house of the dead in its heart. And on the day of Slaol's death the sun pours down a rock-lined shaft into the very centre of the house. I sat there. I sat among the spiders and the bones and Slaol talked to me.' He frowned, still gazing into the fire. 'Of course it's not built to Lahanna!' he said irritably. 'She has stolen our dead, and we must reclaim them.'

'Lahanna has stolen the dead?' Saban asked, puzzled by the concept.

'Of course!' Camaban shouted, turning his eerily striped face to Saban. 'Why did I never see it before? What happens when we die? We go the sky, of course, to live with the gods, but we go to Lahanna! She has stolen our dead. We are like children without parents.' He shuddered. 'I met a man once who believed the dead go to nothing, that they are lost in the chasm between the stars, and I laughed at him. But maybe he is right! When I sat in that house of the dead with the bones all about me I heard the corpses of Ratharryn calling to me. They want to be rescued, Saban, they want to be reunited with Slaol! We have to save them! We have to bring them back to the light!'

'You have to eat,' Aurenna said.

'I must go,' Camaban said. He looked again at Saban. 'Have they started building the temple at Ratharryn?'

'So Lewydd says,' Saban confirmed.

'We have to change it,' Camaban said. 'It needs a death house. You and I will rebuild it. No mound, of course. The people across the sea are wrong about that. But it must be a place to pull the dead back from Lahanna.'

'You can rebuild it,' Saban said, 'but I shall stay here.'

'You will go!' Camaban shouted, and Aurenna scurried to comfort Lallic who had begun to weep. Camaban pointed a bony finger at Saban. 'How many stones must still be delivered?'

'Eleven,' Saban said. 'Just those you see on the river.'

'And you shall go with them,' Camaban said, 'because it is your duty to Slaol. Carry the stones to Ratharryn, and I shall meet you there.' He frowned. 'Is Haragg here?'

Saban jerked his head to show that the big man was in his hut. 'His son died,' he told Camaban.

'Best thing for him,' Camaban said harshly.

'And Haragg himself was wounded,' Saban went on, 'but he recovered, though he still mourns Cagan.'

'Then he must be given work,' Camaban said, then stood and ducked out into the wind and rain. 'It is your duty to go to Ratharryn, Saban! I spared Aurenna's life for you! I spared your life! I didn't do it so you could rot on this river bank, I did it for Slaol and you will repay him by building his temple.' He went to Haragg's hut and pounded a fist on the mossy thatch. 'Haragg!' he shouted. 'I need you.'

Haragg came from the door with a startled expression. He was completely bald now and unnaturally thin, so that he looked old before his time. The arrow's strike had left him sick for a long time and there had been days when Saban was sure the breath would die in the big man's throat, but Haragg had survived. Yet it seemed to Saban that he was wounded in his spirit far more grievously than in his body. Haragg now stared at Camaban and, for a heartbeat, did not recognise the man with a striped face, then he smiled. 'You've come back!' he said.

'Of course I've come back!' Camaban snapped. 'I always said I would, didn't I? Don't just gaze at me, Haragg, come! You and I have much to discuss and far to travel.'

Haragg hesitated an instant, then abruptly nodded and, without even looking back at his hut, let alone fetching anything he might need, followed Camaban towards the trees.

'Where are you going?' Saban called after them.

'To Ratharryn, of course!' Camaban said.

'You're walking?' Saban asked.

'I never wish to see another boat,' Camaban said fervently, 'so long as I live,' and with that he walked on. To make his new temple even greater. To tie Slaol to the living and the dead to Slaol. To make a dream.

—«»—«»—«»—

'Camaban is right,' Aurenna said that evening.

'He is?'

'Erek saved us,' she said, 'so we must travel where he wishes. It is our duty.'

Saban rocked back and forth on his heels. It was night, the children were sleeping and the fire was burning low to fill the hut with smoke. The wind had dropped and the rain had ended, though the eaves of the thatch still dripped. 'Camaban said nothing of you going to Ratharryn,' Saban said.

'Erek wants me there,' Aurenna retorted.

Saban groaned inwardly for he knew he must now argue with the god. 'My brother Lengar would want nothing more than for me to take you to Ratharryn. He will see you, lust after you and then take you. I shall fight for you, of course, but his warriors will cut me down and you will be forced onto his pelts and raped.'

'Erek will not permit it,' Aurenna said placidly.

'Besides,' Saban said petulantly, 'I don't want to go to Ratharryn. I'm happy here!'

'But your work here is done,' Aurenna pointed out. 'There are no more boats to be made and no more stones to be fetched down the mountain. Erek's work moves to Ratharryn and he saved our lives, so that is where we shall go.' She smiled. 'We shall go to Ratharryn and we shall wind the world back to its beginning.'

It was an argument Saban could not win for Erek was against him, and so Aurenna readied herself and the children for the voyage. Yet the sea winds would not abate and still the great waves broke white and ragged on the headland and day after day passed until the summer brought bramble blossom and bryony, bindweed and speedwell, and still Lewydd would not risk the journey. 'The gods,' Lewydd said one night, 'they are holding us back.'

'It's the missing stones,' Aurenna said. 'The two that we lost in the river and the one that broke on the mountain. If we don't replace those stones the temple will never be complete.'

Saban said nothing, though he did glance at Lewydd to see how he would respond to the thought of fetching more stones from the mountains.

Aurenna closed her eyes and swayed back and forth. 'It is a temple to Erek,' she said softly, 'but it is being built to draw him back to Modron' — Modron was the Outfolk name for Garlanna — 'so we should send one stone for her. One great stone to replace the three that were lost.'

'We could fetch one more stone from the mountain,' Lewydd said grudgingly.

'Not from the mountain,' Aurenna said, 'but from here.' In the morning she showed Lewydd the greenish boulder beside the river where she and Saban liked to sit, the great stone with shining flecks and pink sparkles embedded in its heart. The mother stone, Aurenna called it, for it lay in mother earth's dark grip while the rest of the boulders had been plucked from the hanging valley in Erek's sky.

It was vast, that mother stone, twice the weight of the heaviest of the temple's pillars, and it lay deeply embedded in the grassy bank. Saban stared at the stone for two days, trying to work out how to shift it, then he and Mereth went into the woods and found six tall trees that they chopped down. They trimmed the trunks into smooth poles, then cut them into eighteen shorter lengths.

Next day they lifted the mother stone from the earth with levers of oak. Saban dug deep on either side of the stone, scraping holes like badgers' setts far under the rock, and the levers were thrust down into the earth and then, with six men on either side, the front end of the rock was heaved up. It came reluctantly, and men had to scrabble the earth away from beneath the boulder to free it from the soil's grip, but at last it lifted and Mereth could thrust one of the short rollers under the stone.

For three days they levered and lifted until the stone was resting on the eighteen rollers, and now Lewydd could bring one of the empty triple-hulled boats in to the bank. He tethered the craft with its bows facing the stone, then waited for the tide to drop so that the boat was stranded on the mud. Once the boat was in place, Saban's men levered the rock forward while others stood in the riverbank's mud and tugged on ropes to drag the mother stone along the rollers. The boulder was almost three times the height of a man, but slender, and it rolled willingly enough. Men dragged the rollers as they emerged behind the rock and placed them in front of it, and so, hand's breadth by hand's breadth, the great slab was dragged and pushed until one end of it jutted out from the bank to overhang the stranded boat.

'Careful now!' Saban called. One of the rollers had been placed on the boat and two men held it in place as a dozen others manned levers at the back of the stone. 'Heave again!' Saban called, and the great slab edged forward and then began to tip down. 'Let it tip! Let it tip!' Saban shouted, and watched as the stone's forward edge swung down to rest on the boat. The three hulls creaked alarmingly under the stone's weight. More rollers were placed on the boat and the men levered again and, as the rain speckled the river and the women watched and the tide rose, the vast tongue of stone was pushed onto the boat. The mother stone was so long that it almost filled the boat's whole length.

'Now to see if it floats,' Lewydd said, and he, Saban and Aurenna waited on the river bank as night fell and the tide went on rising. They lit a fire and by its light they saw the dark incoming water swirl about the boat's three hulls. Higher and higher the water came until Saban was sure that it must rise above the boat's gunwales and so flood the hulls, but then the mud under the boat yielded a sucking sound and the three hulls were shifting in the current. 'I never thought we'd move that stone,' Lewydd said wonderingly.

'We've still got to shift it to Ratharryn,' Saban said.

'Erek will help,' Aurenna claimed confidently.

'The boat floats low,' Lewydd said, worried, and explained that at sea the waves inevitably slopped over the hull's gunwales to flood the boats. The outer hulls, where the paddlers knelt, could be bailed easily enough, but the mother stone was so long there was scarce room for a man to crouch in the central hull.

'Put a small boy there,' Saban suggested, and in the morning they discovered there was just room for a boy to crouch in front of the stone, and another behind it, and Lewydd reckoned that if the two boys kept scooping out the seawater then the heavily laden boat might survive the voyage. 'So long,' he added, 'as the weather is kind.'

But the weather stayed hard. The boats waited, the warriors were ready to travel, but the winds heaped up the seas and brought yet more stinging rain. Another moon passed, the summer was slipping away and Saban began to fear he could never leave. Or hope he could never leave, for he did not really want to go back to Ratharryn. Home was Sarmennyn, beside this river, where he had thought he would live out his life, watch his children grow and become a member of Kereval's tribe. He would put Sarmennyn's scars on his face and rub ash into them so that they showed grey. Only now Camaban and Aurenna insisted he go back to the heartland and Saban did not want to go, so he welcomed the bad weather that kept him beside Sarmennyn's river where he and Mereth whiled away the wasting time by shaping and hollowing a trunk that had been rejected as too short to be turned into one of the hulls for carrying the stones, but which would make a fine fishing craft. They planned to give the boat to Lewydd as a reward for moving the temple.

Mereth had taken a wife from the women of Sarmennyn and he too was wondering whether to go or stay. 'I'd like to see my father again,' he said, 'and Rai wants to see Ratharryn.' Rai was his wife.

Saban tipped a bag of beach sand into the new boat, then rubbed it up and down with a stone, smoothing the wood. 'It will be good to see Galeth again,' Saban said, and he thought it would also be good to visit his father's grave, but he could think of no other reason to take him back to his childhood home. He touched the nutshell under his jerkin, then rocked back on his heels and wondered why he was so reluctant to return. Of course there was fear of Lengar, but Saban possessed the nutshell charm and he believed it would work, so why was he frightened of going home? If the temple was built then Slaol would return and all would be well, and he glanced out into the river where the stones floated on their boats. When those stones reached the Sky Temple the dream would be completed, and then what? Would everything change? Would Slaol scorch through the sky to obliterate winter and sickness? Or would the world change slowly? Would anything happen at all?

'You look worried,' Mereth said.

'No,' Saban said, though he was. He was worried by his unbelief. Camaban believed, Scathel believed and Aurenna believed, indeed most of Kereval's people were sure that they were changing the world, but Saban was not certain he shared their faith. Perhaps, he decided, it was because he alone had known Camaban as the crooked child, as the outcast stutterer, the despised son. Or perhaps it was because he had fallen in love with this river and its banks. 'I was thinking,' he said, 'maybe I could share this boat with Lewydd? Become a fisherman?'

'All you'll ever catch is a cold,' Mereth said. He shaved a trace of wood so that the rising curve of the prow looked perfect. 'No,' he said, 'I reckon you and I are going home, Saban, and we might as well get used to it. It's what our wives want and what wives want they seem to get.'

The summer passed and the winds did not abate and Saban doubted the stones would leave the river that year, but then, just as it had in the very first year, the approaching autumn brought a spell of calm seas and gentle winds. Lewydd waited two days, spoke to the fishermen, prayed at Malkin's shrine and then declared the small fleet could leave. Food and water were put back into the boats, the warriors took their places, and Mereth and Saban settled their families in two of the long, single-hulled craft that would escort the stones eastwards. Scathel sacrificed a heifer and splashed its blood on the tightly lashed stones, Kereval kissed his many wives and it was time to go.

The heavily laden boats went downstream to the lee of the headland in the river's mouth with the paddlers chanting a song to Erek. The folk left behind stood on the river bank and listened to the strong voices fade. They listened until there was no sound but the running of the river and the sigh of the wind. Sarmennyn had kept faith. It had sent its temple to Ratharryn and all the folk could do now was wait for the return of their chief, their high priest and their treasures.

The weather was placid, and it needed to be, for the boat holding the mother stone was clumsy and slow. When Saban had first made this voyage it had seemed swift, but then he had been in a single-hulled boat that had cut through the water like a knife slicing flesh, but the big, triple-hulled boats seemed to batter their way through the waves. The tide carried them and the paddlers worked themselves to weariness, but it was still an agonisingly slow voyage. Saban and his family shared one of the boats carrying Kereval's warriors and that was frustrating for the boat could have leapt ahead of the fleet, but instead had to stay with the lumbering stone-carriers. The mother stone was the slowest, and the two small boys in the centre hull had to bail water constantly. If the boat sinks, Scathel had warned the boys, they would be blamed and would be allowed to drown, and the warning kept them hard at work scooping with their sea-shells. Aurenna clutched Lallic, while Leir had a leash about his waist so that when he fell overboard he could be hauled back like a fish. The sun shone, proof that Erek approved their voyage.

They anchored at each tide's turning and set off when the water flowed east again. It did not matter whether that turning came by day or night; that they slept between the tides and, as often as not, travelled beneath the stars. The moon was a sickle, low in the sky, so there seemed little danger of Lahanna's jealousy thwarting the journey. Day after day, night after night, the stones crept eastwards until at last, after nine days and nights, the sun rose to show the green hills close on either bank, with the great shining mud flats slowly drying as the river shrank. They paddled hard, racing to keep with the dying tide and competing with each other as the banks came closer and at last Sul's mouth came into view. The paddlers drove the boats up into the narrower stream, between the high mud flats, past fish and eel traps, to where a small settlement of fishermen had their huts near the palisade Lewydd had made on the very first journey of the stones, and there at last they could rest. Scathel gave a stone axe-head to the chief of the settlement in return for a scrawny goat that he sacrificed to Erek as thanks that the most dangerous part of the journey was done. The fisherfolk watched bemused as the Outfolk warriors danced to the setting sun. In times past there would have been nothing but enmity between the two groups, but the settlement gave their allegiance to Drewenna and the river folk had become used to the voyaging stones.

Lewydd sent one of the fishermen with a message to Kellan, Drewenna's chief, asking of him to send men to haul the sledges which waited at the end of the first river journey, and next morning they started up the Sul with the incoming tide. That first day was easy enough, but after then the tide was of small help and they had to pole the boats upstream. It took three days to reach Sul where Kereval decreed they would rest for two days. Aurenna and Saban took the children to splash in the hot spring that bubbled over the rocks to make a pool amidst ferns and moss. The rocks above the pool were strewn with scraps of wool where petitioners had left their prayers for the goddess and all that day a succession of the lame, the crippled and the sick came to the shrine to beg Sul's help. Aurenna washed her hair in the spring and Saban combed it out for her and the folk of Sul watched in amazement for she was so tall, so clean and so calm. One man asked Saban whether she was a goddess, while another offered him seven oxen, two axe-heads, a bronze spear and three of his daughters if Aurenna would be his wife.

They spent that night in one of the huts Stakis had made for the meeting of the tribes. Saban lit a fire on which they cooked trout and then he watched Aurenna until she became tired of his gaze. 'What is it?' she asked.

'Are you a goddess?' Saban asked.

'Saban!' she said reproachfully.

'I think you are a goddess.'

'No,' she replied with a smile, 'but Erek does want me for something special. That is why we travel.' She knew he was worried for her and so she reached over and touched his hand. 'And Erek will preserve us. You'll see.'

Saban woke in the dawn to discover that a party of Ratharryn's warriors had come to the shrine during the night. The leader of the warrior band was Gundur, one of Lengar's closest companions and the man who had dragged Saban from his hut on the morning that he had been enslaved to Haragg. Gundur had come from south of the river, from Drewenna, and Saban saw how Gundur and his men strutted through Sul's huts. This was Kellan's territory, but the spearmen of Ratharryn were lords here. Saban ate with Gundur's men and listened as they told of Lengar's wars: how he had seized a herd of Cathallo's oxen; how he had raided deep into the land of the people to the east of Ratharryn; and how he had forced a heavy tribute from the people who lived by the sea at the mouth of the River Mai. Now, Gundur said, even as they spoke, Lengar was at Drewenna. He had gone there, Gundur explained, to fetch Kellan's spearmen. 'The harvest is in,' Gundur said, 'so what better time to attack Cathallo? We'll finish them for ever. You can join us, Saban. Share the plunder, eh?' Gundur smiled as he offered the invitation. He seemed friendly, hinting that the old enmity between Saban and Lengar was long past.

'What brings you to Sul?' Saban asked.

'You,' Gundur said. 'Lengar heard the last of the stones had come and sent us to find out if it were true.'

'It is true,' Saban said, gesturing at the boats, 'and you should tell Lengar that Kereval of Sarmennyn has come with them to receive the treasures.'

'I shall tell him,' Gundur promised, then turned to watch as Aurenna walked from the huts to the river. She carried a water-skin that she stooped to fill, then carried back, and Gundur watched her every step. 'Who is that?' he asked in an awed voice.

'My wife,' Saban said coldly.

'I shall tell Lengar you're both here. He'll be pleased.' Gundur stood. He hesitated a heartbeat and Saban wondered if he was about to mention Jegar's death, which had taken place so close to where they had eaten, but Gundur merely asked if Saban intended to carry the stones up river that same day.

'We do,' Saban said.

'Then we shall see you in Ratharryn,' Gundur said, and he led his men south while Saban and his family went back to the stones and continued the weary journey of poling the heavy boats against the river's flow. So now Lengar knew that Aurenna had come to the heartland, and knew she was beautiful; Saban surreptitiously touched the nutshell that hung at his neck.

The journey became much easier when they were half a day out of Sul for now the river was shallow enough for men to wade and so haul the boats, and next day they came to a place where a smaller river joined the Sul from the south and Lewydd turned the boats into that narrower stream. The current was less strong, almost placid, and they made easy progress, coming that evening to the place where the water was at last too shallow to carry the boats and where the great sledges waited. Next day men arrived from Drewenna and they heaved the eleven small stones off the boats and on to the sledges, then hauled the boats themselves on to even larger sledges.

The mother stone alone remained and it took a whole day to align the boat with a sledge on the shore and to cut more rollers, and next day, using oxen to drag the boulder, they slid the mother stone from boat to sledge. They hauled the boat ashore the following day, by which time the first stones were already being dragged eastwards.

It took three days to cross the low watershed. They followed a grassy track that climbed gently and then fell, just as gently, to the bank of the river which flowed eastwards. Here the boats were lifted from the sledges and relaunched and the stones were carried back aboard. For five years Lewydd and his men had been doing this. Five years of lifting and levering, heaving and sweating, and now the great task was almost finished. It took three days to carry all the stones off their sledges and on to the boats, but at last the job was done and it would never need to be done again.

Next morning they floated the boats down the river and the men sang as they rode the current. They did not hurry and the only effort that was ever needed was an occasional shove of a pole to drive a boat around an obstruction. The sun shone, filtering through the last green leaves as the river slowly twisted between banks thick with feathery willow-herb. Corncrakes sounded harsh from the fields and woodpeckers stuttered in the trees. The sun shone. When they passed Cheol, Ratharryn's southernmost settlement, the folk lined the river bank to dance and sing a welcome to the stones. 'Tomorrow!' Saban called to them. 'We shall be at Ratharryn tomorrow! Tell them we're coming!'

Once past Cheol the river entered the trees again. The current was faster now, so fast that those men who had elected to walk along the bank had to half run to keep up with the fleet. There was an air of excitement now. The great work was so close to its finish and Saban wanted to shout his triumph at the sun. It had all been done for Slaol, and surely Lengar's enmity would fade in the glory of Slaol's approval. Saban was not sure how that approval would be shown, but his doubts about Camaban's dream were fading. It was the journey itself that had restored his faith for he had seen for himself just how much effort had been needed to move the boats and the stones and he could not believe that five such hard years were for no purpose. Slaol must respond! Just as a short lever of wood could move a great stone, so little men could shift a vast god. Camaban was surely right.

'Don't let the current take them!' Lewydd was shouting and Saban came out of his happy reverie to see that the river had almost reached its confluence with the bigger River Mai and that it was time to drag the boats into the bank and tether them there for the night. Next morning they would have to haul the stones upriver against the Mai's current to Ratharryn, so they would spend this last night of the journey amidst the trees which grew on the narrowing spit of land between the two rivers.

They tied the boats to the bank, then made fires. It was a warm, dry night, so there was no need for shelters, but they did make a cordon of fires from river bank to river bank to deter the malevolent spirits, and Kereval's warriors were set to watch beside the fires and feed the flames through the darkness. The rest of the travellers gathered and sang songs until tiredness overwhelmed them and then they wrapped themselves in cloaks and slept beneath the trees. Saban listened to the river noises until the dreams came. He dreamed of his mother, seeing her try to hammer a peg into their hut's pole, and when he asked her why she did it, she had no answer.

And suddenly the dream was full of new noises, of screaming and terror, and he woke, realising it was no dream at all, and he sat up to hear shouts from beyond the fire cordon and a strange ripping sound overhead. Then something thumped into a tree and he realised it was an arrow and the ripping sound was the noise of other arrows flickering through the leaves. He seized his bow and his quiver of arrows and ran to the fire cordon. Immediately two arrows whipped from the dark close to him and he understood the flames made him into a target, so he hid himself behind some bushes where Mereth and Kereval both sheltered. 'What's happening?' Saban asked.

Neither man knew. Two of Kereval's warriors were wounded, but no one had seen the enemy or even knew what enemy it was, but then Kargan, Kereval's nephew, came running and shouting for his uncle and his voice provoked another flight of arrows from the dark.

'They're stealing one of the stones,' Kargan said.

'They're stealing a stone?' Saban could not believe what he heard.

'They're towing one of the boats upstream!' Kargan said.

Scathel had overheard. 'We have to follow,' he said.

'What about the women and the children?' Kereval demanded. 'We can't leave them alone.'

'Why would they want to steal a stone?' Mereth asked.

'For its power?' Saban suggested.

The noises in the wood were fading and no more arrows flickered from the dark. 'We should follow them,' Scathel demanded again, but when Saban and Kargan crept into the darkness beyond the fire cordon, they found nothing. The enemy had gone, and in the morning, when a mist was drifting over the rivers, they discovered that one of the triple-hulled boats had been dragged away. It had carried one of the smaller stones, but now it was gone. One of the two wounded men died that morning.

And Saban saw that the moon stayed in the sky after the dawn and he recalled that he had dreamed of his mother and she had ever been a worshipper of Lahanna. The goddess, he feared, was striking back, but then he found some of the arrows and saw they were fledged with ravens' feathers. Black feathers, like those the men of Ratharryn used, but he said nothing of his suspicions for the great work was almost done.

—«»—«»—«»—

The last part of their journey was up the Mai. The sun shone warmly, but the mood was sombre and the memory of the arrows in the night chilling. The men watched the wooded banks warily as they towed the boats through the waist-deep water with the spearman's corpse laid on the long mother stone. Scathel had insisted that the corpse be carried to Ratharryn for he wanted to place the treasures against the dead man's skin so that the departed spirit would know that his journey and death had not been wasted.

Saban walked up the river bank holding Leir's hand. Aurenna carried Lallic and listened as Saban talked of the hills they passed. That one was where a great bear had been killed, and that one was where Rannos, the god of lightning, had struck a thief dead, and this one, he said, pointing to a wooded hill on the left, is where our Death Place lies. 'The Death Place?' Leir asked.

'We don't burn our dead in Ratharryn,' Saban explained, 'but lay them in a small temple so the birds and beasts can eat their flesh. Then we bury the bones, or perhaps put them in a mound.'

Leir made a face. 'I'd rather be burned than eaten.'

'So long as you go to the ancestors,' Saban said, 'what does it matter?'

They rounded the corner of the hill and on the river bank ahead was a great crowd of people who began to sing in welcome as the first of the boats came in view. 'Which one is Lengar?' Aurenna asked.

'I don't see him,' Saban said, and as he drew closer he saw that Lengar was not there. Mereth's younger half-brothers were there and so were Saban's sisters, and a host of others he remembered, and when he came near they ran to him and reached out to touch him as though he had a sorcerer's power. When they had last seen Saban he had been little more than a boy, but now he was a man, tall and bearded and straight-backed, with a hardened face and a son of his own. They stared at Aurenna in amazement, awed by her golden hair and gentle face that was so miraculously untouched by the scars of any disease. Lengar, folk told Saban, was still at Drewenna, and then the crowd parted to let Galeth through. He was old now, old and white-haired, and one eye was milky white and his back was bent and his beard thin. He first embraced Mereth, his eldest son, then clasped Saban. 'You have come back for good?' Galeth asked Saban.

'I don't know, uncle.'

'You should stay,' Galeth said softly, 'stay and be chief.'

'You already have a chief.'

'We have a tyrant,' Galeth said fiercely, his hands on Saban's shoulders. 'We have a man who loves war more than peace, a man who thinks every woman is his own.' He looked at Aurenna. 'Take her away, Saban,' he added, 'and don't bring her back until you have become chief here.'

'Has Lengar built the temple?'

'It is being built,' Galeth said, 'but Camaban came in the spring and he and Lengar argued. Camaban came with Haragg, and they both said the temple must be changed, but Lengar insisted it must be finished just as it is for it will give him power, and so Camaban and his companion went away.' Galeth looked at Aurenna again. 'Take her away, Saban! Take her away! He'll see her and he will take her for himself!'

'I want to see the temple first,' Saban said and he led Aurenna up the hill on a wide path that had been worn into the turf by the passage of the sledges carrying the stones from the river. Kereval and his men followed, wanting to see how their temple looked in its new home.

'Lengar assures us it is a great war temple,' Galeth said, hobbling beside Saban. 'He believes Slaol is not just the god of the sun, but the god of war too! We already have a god of war, I told him, but Lengar says Slaol is the great god of war and of slaughter. He believes he will finish his temple, Saban, then rule all the world.'

Saban smiled. 'The world may not agree.'

'What Lengar wants, Lengar takes,' Galeth said grimly, giving Aurenna another anxious glance.

Saban touched the nutshell. 'We shall be safe, uncle,' he said, 'we shall be safe.'

The path led north at first, climbing between harvested fields and skirting the high trees where the Death Place was hidden, then turned westwards and now Saban could see the great earthen wall of Ratharryn off to his right. He showed the embankment to Leir, telling him that that was the place where he had grown up. On either side now were the ancestors' grave mounds and Saban dropped to his knees and bent his head to the grass in thanks for their protection over the years.

Once past the mounds the path turned south to drop into a small valley, then joined the sacred path that Gilan had ordered made when the first stones came from Cathallo. The hill bulged, serving like the double bend in Cathallo's sacred path to hide the temple until the last moment of the approach, and Saban felt a growing excitement as he climbed between the ditch and chalk banks. He had last seen the Temple of Shadows in the high valley at Sarmennyn, but now he would see it again, though wondrously moved across a whole wide land and a cold green sea. He took hold of Aurenna's hand and she smiled at him, sharing his anticipation.

The first they saw of the temple was the sole remaining sun stone that stood high in the sacred path, and after it the twin pillars at the shrine's gateway of the sun came into view, and then at last they breasted the hill's slope and the temple was in front of them.

It was more than half built. The entrance corridor of lintelled stones was finished and the double circle of pillars was almost two-thirds complete, standing around the temple's centre and flanked by the four moon stones. Saban guessed that only thirty more stones needed to be placed and he saw that the holes for those pillars had already been dug, while off to one side of the temple, beyond the ditch and banks, a pile of Sarmennyn's stones waited to be placed. All that was needed now was for those pillars to be carried across the entrance causeway and for the last stones to be brought up from the river and the temple would be finished. But already it was near enough complete so that a man could see how the shrine would look when the last stone was planted. Saban stopped by the lichen-covered sun stone and gazed at what he and Lewydd and so many others had achieved over the last five years. 'Well?' Galeth asked.

Saban said nothing. He had been waiting for this moment, and he was remembering the awe he had felt when he had first seen the double ring emerging from Sarmennyn's fog, yet somehow, here at Ratharryn, there was no awe. He had thought he would be overwhelmed by the temple, that he might even fall to his knees in spontaneous worship, yet somehow the two rings looked smaller here and their stones appeared shrunken. In Sarmennyn, cradled by the dark valley and poised above the gulf of air, the stones had snatched an awesome power from the windy sky as they had stared across a whole land to where the sun died in a distant sea. In Sarmennyn the stones had formed a snare to capture a god, but here the dark pillars were dwarfed by the wide grassland. Dwarfed, too, by the seven taller and paler stones from Cathallo.

'Well?' Galeth asked again.

Saban did not want to answer the query. 'We were attacked last night,' he said instead.

Galeth touched his groin. 'By outcasts?'

'We don't know who attacked us,' Saban said, remembering the black-fledged arrows.

'The outcasts have become bold,' Galeth said. He laid a hand on Saban's arm and lowered his voice. 'People have fled.'

'From the outcasts?'

'From Lengar!' Galeth leaned closer. 'There are rumours, Saban, that the spirits of the dead have gathered to kill Lengar. Folk are frightened!'

'We saw no dead last night,' Saban said, then went to stand between the entrance pillars that had come from Cathallo. He had to look steeply up to the tops of those stones, while the tallest stones of the new rings were not much higher than Saban himself and most were much shorter. 'What did Camaban say of the temple?' he asked Galeth.

'He wanted it remade,' Galeth said, then shook his head. 'I do not know what else he wanted, but he did not seem pleased and Lengar shouted at him and they argued and Camaban and his companion walked away.'

'This is how it was in Sarmennyn,' Saban said, still gazing at the stones.

'You're disappointed?' Aurenna asked.

'It's not my disappointment that matters,' Saban said, but what Slaol thinks.' He was looking beyond the temple now, to the southern grave mounds that clustered so thick on the brow of the hill. There were new mounds there, their chalk flanks white in the sun, and he supposed one of those newer graves belonged to his father. 'Where is Camaban now?' he asked Galeth.

'We haven't seen him all summer,' the old man said.

'He wanted me here to finish the temple,' Saban said.

'No!' Galeth insisted hotly. 'You must go away, Saban. Take your woman, go!' He turned to Aurenna. 'Don't let him keep you here. I beg you.'

Aurenna smiled. 'We are supposed to be here. Erek' — she corrected herself — 'Slaol wants us to be here.'

'Camaban insisted we come,' Saban added.

'But Camaban is gone,' Galeth said. 'He has not been here in four moons. You should follow him.'

'Where to?' Saban asked. He led Aurenna around the temple's margin, following the low bank that lay outside the ditch until he came to the place where he had sat on the grass with Derrewyn on that far-off day after his ordeals. She had made a daisy chain, he remembered, and he was suddenly overcome with sadness for it seemed that five years of work had been for nothing. The temple had been moved, but Slaol would never be drawn to these little stones. Most were scarce as tall as a child! The temple was supposed to call the god to earth, but this little pattern of stones would pass under Slaol's gaze like an ant beneath a hawk's eye. No wonder, Saban thought, that Camaban had fled, for all their labour had been for nothing. 'Maybe we should just go home,' he said to Aurenna.

'But Camaban insisted—' she began.

'Camaban has gone!' Saban said harshly. 'He is gone, and we have no need to stay if he is gone. We shall go home to Sarmennyn.' The music of Sarmennyn had become his music, the tales of its tribe his tales, its language his tongue, and he felt no kinship with this frightened place with its shabby temple. He turned and walked to where Kereval was standing beside the sun stone. 'With your permission,' Saban said to the chief, 'I would return home with you.'

'I would be sad if you did not,' Kereval said, smiling. The chief was white-haired now, and stooped, but he had lived long enough to see his bargain fulfilled and so he was happy.

Scathel intervened, 'But we do not go back until the gold and the other treasures are returned.'

'My brother knows that,' Saban said and just then a warning shout made him turn round to see that six horsemen had appeared among the grave mounds to the south. All carried spears and had short Outfolk bows across their shoulders and all six were warriors who, long before, had marched to Ratharryn to help Lengar snatch the chieftainship. Their leader was Vakkal whose face had the grey ashen scars of Sarmennyn, but whose arms now boasted the blue scars of Ratharryn. He was a tall man with a harsh face and a short black beard that had a badger's streak of white. He wore a leather tunic that was armoured with bronze strips, had a bronze sword at his waist and fox tails woven into his long plaited hair. He dismounted when he came to Kereval, then dropped to his knees in submission. 'Lengar sends his greetings,' Vakkal told the chief.

'He follows you?' Kereval asked.

'He will come tomorrow,' Vakkal said, then stood aside as his five Outfolk warriors came to greet their chief. Saban saw how the folk of Ratharryn made way for the men, how they scuttled apart as if it was suddenly bad luck to be close to a spearman. Vakkal was gazing at Aurenna who, made uncomfortable by his stare, went to stand beside Saban. 'I don't know you,' Vakkal challenged Saban.

'We met once,' Saban said, 'when you first came to Ratharryn.'

Vakkal smiled, though no pleasure showed in his eyes. 'You are Saban,' he said, 'Jegar's killer.'

'And my friend!' Kereval said loudly.

'We are all friends,' Vakkal said, still looking at Saban.

'Does Lengar bring us the gold?' Scathel demanded.

'He does,' Vakkal said, at last looking away from Saban. 'He brings the gold, and until he comes he asks only that you and your men be his honoured guests.' He turned and gestured towards Ratharryn. 'He says you are welcome to his home and that a feast will be made for you.'

'And we are to receive the gold?' Kereval asked eagerly.

'All of it,' Vakkal promised with a sincere smile, 'all of it.'

Kereval fell to his knees in gratitude. He had sent a temple and kept faith with his god and the treasures would now be returned to his tribe. 'Tomorrow,' he said happily, 'tomorrow we shall take our gold and we can go home.'

Home, Saban thought, home. Tomorrow. It would all be over and he could go home.

Ratharryn had grown. There were more than twice as many huts as when Saban had left, indeed there were so many that they now filled more than half the space inside the encircling wall, while a whole new settlement had been built beyond the embankment on the higher ground close to the wooden temple of Slaol. Yet the most startling change was that Lahanna's temple had been replaced by a great round thatched building. 'It used to be the temple,' Galeth told Saban, 'only now it is Lengar's hall.'

'His hall?' Saban was shocked. It seemed a terrible thing to transform a temple into a hall.

'Derrewyn worships Lahanna in Cathallo,' Galeth explained, 'so Lengar decided to insult the goddess. He pulled down most of the poles, roofed it, and he now feasts here.' Galeth had led Saban through the soaring hut's doorway into a cavernous interior much higher and larger than Kereval's great building at Sarmennyn. A dozen of the Old Temple posts were left, only they now supported a high thatched roof that soared towards a hole at the peak where smoke could escape, though that vent was barely visible because the roof beams were hung with a multitude of spears and smoke-darkened skulls. 'The spears and heads of his enemies,' Galeth told Saban in a hushed voice. 'I do not like this place.'

Saban hated it and Lahanna, he thought, would surely want revenge for the desecration of her shrine. The hall was so large that all Kereval's men, well over a hundred of them, could sleep on its rush- and bracken-strewn floor, and all ate there that night, feasting on pork, trout, pike, bread, sorrel, mushrooms, pears and blackberries. Saban and Aurenna ate in Galeth's hut where they listened to tales of Lengar's chieftainship. They heard stories of endless raids, of the slaughter of strangers, the enrichment of the warriors and the enslavement of countless folk from neighbouring tribes, yet through it all, Galeth said, Cathallo had resisted. 'All who hate Ratharryn,' he said, 'befriend Cathallo.' So Cathallo and Ratharryn still fought, though it was Ratharryn who raided the deepest. No boy could now become a man in Ratharryn until he had brought back a head to add to the skulls in Lengar's great hut. 'It is not enough to survive the forest these days,' Galeth said, 'a boy must also show his bravery in battle, and if he is thought a coward then he must spend a whole year dressed as a woman. He must squat to piss and fetch water with the slaves. Even their own mothers despise them!' He shook his head and made a keening noise.

'Yet Lengar is building the temple?' Aurenna asked, puzzled that a man who so loved war should make a temple that was supposed to bring a time of peace and happiness.

'It is a war temple!' Galeth said. 'He claims Kenn and Slaol are one!'

'Kenn?' Aurenna asked.

'The god of war,' Saban explained.

'Slaol is Kenn, and Kenn is Slaol,' Galeth said, shaking his head. 'But Lengar also says a great leader must have a great temple and he likes to boast that he has stolen a temple clean across the world.'

'Stolen?' Aurenna asked with a frown. 'He is exchanging it for gold!'

'He is building it for his own glory,' Galeth said, 'though there are rumours that the temple will never be finished.'

'What rumours?' Saban asked.

The old man rocked back and forth. The fire lit his gaunt face and threw his shadow on the underside of the roof's thatch. 'There have been omens,' he said quietly. 'There are more outcasts than ever among the trees and they grow bold. Lengar led all his spearmen against them, but all they found were corpses hanging in trees. They say the outcasts are led by a dead chieftain and none of our spearmen dare confront them now, not unless a priest goes with them to make charms and spells.' Galeth's wife Lidda, who was toothless and bent now, cried aloud and groped under her pelt to touch her groin. 'Healthy children have died,' Galeth continued, 'and lightning struck Arryn and Mai's temple. One of its posts is all blackened and split!'

Lidda sighed. 'Corpses were seen walking beyond the Sky Temple,' she moaned, 'and they cast no shadows.'

'It isn't a Sky Temple now,' Saban said bitterly. The airy lightness of the first stones had been stolen by Sarmennyn's squat ring. It was not even a Temple of Shadows, but something belittled and inadequate.

'An ash was cut in the forests and it cried like a dying child!' Galeth said. 'Though I did not hear it myself,' he added. 'Axes are blunt before they are used.'

'The moon rose the colour of blood,' Lidda carried on the lament, 'and a badger killed a dog. A child was born with six fingers.'

'Some say' — Galeth lowered his voice and glanced warily at Aurenna — 'that the Outfolk temple has brought ill fortune. And when Camaban came here in the spring he said the temple should be remade, that it was all wrong.'

'And Lengar disagreed?' Saban asked.

'Lengar says Camaban has gone mad,' Galeth said, 'and that Slaol's enemies are trying to prevent the temple's completion. He called Camaban an enemy of Slaol! So Camaban went away.'

'And the priests?' Saban asked. 'What do they say?'

'They say nothing. They fear Lengar. He killed one!'

'He killed a priest?' Saban asked, shocked.

'The priest tried to stop him turning Lahanna's temple into a hut, so Lengar killed him.'

'And Neel?' Saban asked. 'What did he do?'

'Neel!' Galeth spat at the mention of the high priest's name. 'He's nothing but a dog at Lengar's heels.' Galeth turned to Aurenna. 'You must go, lady, before Lengar returns.'

'Lengar will not touch me,' Aurenna said, using the language of Ratharryn that she had learned from Saban.

'We are here with warriors of Sarmennyn,' Saban explained, 'and they will protect her.' He touched the nutshell beneath his tunic.

Galeth looked dubious at that assertion. 'When my brother was chief,' he told Aurenna, 'we were happy.'

'We were happy,' Lidda echoed.

'We lived in peace,' Galeth said, 'or tried to. There was hunger, of course, there is always hunger, but my brother knew how to share food. But it has all changed, all changed.'

Next morning, under a cloudless sky and a warm sun, a hundred men slid the mother stone ashore and levered it onto a sledge that was harnessed to sixteen oxen. The beasts dragged the stone away from the river while Galeth took Saban and Aurenna to the Sky Temple and asked where the stone should be placed. It was Aurenna who decreed that it should stand on its own within the double ring and opposite the lintelled gateway of the sun. That way, she said, the rising sun at midsummer would touch the mother stone as a symbol of the earth and sun united. There was no one else to make the decision so Galeth ordered a dozen men to make a hole where Aurenna had indicated.

Galeth watched as the turf was peeled back and the antler picks prised at the chalk beneath. 'I can't dig any more,' he told Saban. 'My joints ache. I can't even swing an axe now.'

'You've worked hard enough,' Saban said.

'If a man can't work, a man shouldn't eat, eh?' Galeth said, then turned to watch the oxen hauling the mother stone, which was so long that it overhung its sledge at both ends. Three of the smaller stones were following, their sledges being dragged by men. 'All slaves,' Galeth told Saban. 'Our spearmen raid constantly for slaves and food. We trade in slaves now and it makes Lengar rich.'

A horn sounded to the south. The noise was booming, but made tremulous by the warm autumn air. Saban looked enquiringly at Galeth, who nodded. 'Your brother,' he said wearily.

Saban crossed the banks and ditch, going to Aurenna. He put an arm about her and placed his other hand on his son's shoulder. The horn sounded again, and then there was a long silence. Saban watched the near crest that was broken by the humps of the graves. Farther off, blurred by the warm air, the distant horizon was dark with trees.

They waited, but still nothing showed on the crest. A wind lifted Aurenna's long hair and rippled the grass, turning it pale and then dark again. Lallic was wriggling in her mother's arms and Aurenna soothed the child. The men digging the hole for the mother stone had dropped their antler picks and were staring south. Even the oxen dragging the boulder were standing still, their heads low and their flanks bleeding from the goads. A hawk slid across the sacred path, its black shadow flicking sharp against the chalk banks.

'Is a bad man coming?' Leir asked his father.

Saban smiled. 'It is your uncle,' he said, ruffling his son's hair, 'and you must treat him with respect.'

The ox-horn sounded again, much louder and closer, and Leir, startled by the blast, jumped under Saban's hand, though still nothing showed at the hill's crest. Then the ox-horn sounded a fourth time and a single man ran to the top of one of the grave mounds. He carried a long pole from which hung a standard of fox brushes and wolf tails. The standard bearer wore a cloak of an untrimmed wolf pelt and the wolf's mask was perched on his head like a second face. He stood silhouetted against the sky and shook the standard and a heartbeat later the whole crest filled with men.

They had come in a long line, and if they meant to impress, they did. One moment the crest was empty, the next it was thronged with a battle-line of spearmen, so many spearmen that Saban knew that he must be staring at the combined armies of Ratharryn and Drewenna. Their spears made a ragged hedge and their sudden shout frightened Lallic. It was a display of awesome power, only this army was not arrayed before an enemy, but in front of Lengar's own home. Lengar must have known Cathallo would hear of this horde, and he wanted them to fear its power.

Lengar himself, tall and cloaked, spear in hand and with a sword at his belt, appeared at the centre of his army. A dozen men, his war chiefs, surrounded him, while next to him, looking short and plump, was Kellan, chief of Drewenrta and Lengar's lackey. Lengar stood for an instant then beckoned his escorts forward.

'How are they all fed?' Aurenna wondered aloud.

'In summer it's easy enough,' Saban said. 'There are deer and pigs. More pigs than you can imagine. It is a fat country. In winter,' he went on, 'you raid your neighbours.'

Lengar saw Saban and swerved towards him. The chief of Ratharryn was wearing his long leather tunic that was sewn with bronze strips, a woollen cloak hung from his shoulders and he carried a massive spear with a polished bronze blade. Strips of fox fur hung from the spear shaft and more were wound about his legs and arms. Eagle feathers had been woven into his hair that had been oiled so that it lay slicked back close to his skull, reminding Saban of that far-off day when the stranger had died and Lengar had pursued him down to the settlement. The kill scars now stretched to cover the backs of Lengar's hands and fingers, while the tattooed horns at his eyes gave his face a terrifying intensity. Saban felt Leir give an involuntary shudder and he patted the boy's head reassuringly.

Lengar halted a few paces away. For a heartbeat or two he stared at Saban, then spoke derisively. 'My little brother. I thought you would never dare come home.'

'Why should a man fear to come home?' Saban asked.

But Lengar was not listening to Saban. He was staring at Aurenna. She was still as tall and slender and straight-backed as on the day Saban had first met her, still a woman who could have drawn chieftains across the sea, and she met Lengar's gaze calmly, while Lengar looked truly astonished as if he did not really believe his eyes. He kept staring at Aurenna, he stared from her head down to her feet, then back up again. 'Is this Aurenna?' he asked.

'My wife, Aurenna,' Saban said, his arm still about her shoulders.

'Gundur told the truth,' Lengar said quietly.

'About what?' Saban asked.

Lengar still gazed at Aurenna. 'About your woman, of course,' he answered brusquely. His war chiefs stood behind him like leashed hounds, all of them tall men with long spears, long cloaks, long plaited hair and long beards, and they too stared hungrily at the tall, fair-haired woman from Sarmennyn. Lengar at last forced himself to look away from Aurenna. 'Your son?' he asked Saban, nodding towards Leir.

'He is called Leir, son of Saban, son of Hengall.'

'And that child is a daughter?' Lengar nodded at Lallic who was in Aurenna's arms.

'She is called Lallic,' Saban said.

Lengar smiled derisively. 'Only one son, Saban? I have seven!' He looked back at Aurenna. 'I could give you many sons.'

'I am content with your brother's son,' Aurenna said.

'My half-brother's son,' Lengar said scornfully, 'and if the boy dies your life would have been in vain. What use is a woman who whelps only one son? Would you keep a sow that littered only one piglet? And sons do die.' He still gazed at Aurenna, indeed he seemed incapable of looking anywhere else. He looked her up and down again, not bothering to hide his admiration. 'Do you remember, Saban,' he asked, keeping his eyes on Aurenna, 'how our father would always tell us to marry wide-rumped girls? Women are just like cattle, he used to say. The thin ones are not worth keeping. Yet you chose this woman. Perhaps you would have more sons if you followed Hengall's advice?'

'I will take no other wife,' Saban said.

'You will do what you are told, brother,' Lengar said, 'now that you are in Ratharryn.' He turned and pointed his spear to a new mound on the low crest. 'That is Jegar's mound. You think I have forgotten him?'

'A man should remember his friends,' Saban said.

The spear was now pointing at Saban. 'You owe Jegar's family a death price. It will be many oxen, many pigs. I have promised them.'

'And you keep your promises?' Saban asked.

'You will keep this promise,' Lengar said, 'or I will take something from you, brother, of great value.' He looked at Aurenna and forced a smile. 'But we must not quarrel. This is a happy day! You have returned, you have brought the last stones and the temple will be completed!'

'And you will return the treasures to our tribe,' Aurenna said.

Lengar's face twitched. He did not like being told what to do by a woman, but he nodded his assent. 'I shall return the treasures,' he said curtly. 'Is Kereval here?'

'He is in the settlement,' Saban said.

'Then we should not keep him waiting. Come!' Lengar held out his arm for Aurenna, but she refused to leave Saban's side and Lengar pretended not to notice.

The spearmen streamed past Saban and Aurenna. 'I think that we should go now,' Saban said. 'Just walk away.'

Aurenna shook her head. 'We are supposed to be here,' she said.

'Only because Camaban told us to come!' Saban protested. 'And he's gone! He's fled! We should follow him.'

'Erek, Slaol, told us to be here. With or without Camaban, this is where I am supposed to be.' She turned to gaze at the stunted stones of the unfinished temple. 'Slaol has been speaking to me ever more clearly in my dreams,' she said softly, 'and he wants me here. That is why he spared my life, to bring me here.' Saban wanted to argue, but it was hopeless fighting against a god. He did not speak to any god in his dreams. Aurenna turned and frowned at the mass of spearmen walking towards the settlement. Why does your brother need so many men?' she asked.

'Because he will attack Cathallo,' Saban said. 'We have arrived in time to see a war.'

They walked back to the settlement. Small boys were driving pigs out of the woods to a patch of land near Slaol's old temple where the beasts were being butchered. Women and children slashed the flesh from the bones while dogs crouched and prowled, hoping for offal, but it was being pounded in mortars, mixed with barley and stuffed into the pigs' intestines, which would be baked in hot ashes. The squeals of the dying animals were constant and the pungent blood sufficient to trickle down the slope in small bright rivulets that were lapped by the hungry dogs. Inside the settlement the stench was worse for there women were mixing pots of the glutinous poison that would coat the warriors' spears for their attack on Cathallo. Other women were readying for the night's feast. Swans were being plucked, pork roasted and grain pulverized on quern stones. The tannin pits, filled with dung and urine, added their smell. Men tied flint arrow-heads to shafts and beat the edge of spear blades to make them sharp.

Aurenna went to Galeth's hut to feed the children while Saban wandered about the settlement in search of old friends. At Arryn and Mai's temple, where he marvelled at the lightning-riven post that was split and blackened, he met Geil, his father's oldest widow, who was laying a little bunch of feathery willow-herbs at the temple's entrance, and she embraced Saban, and then began to cry. 'You should not have returned,' she sobbed, 'for he kills everything he does not like.'

'It was worth coming back,' Saban said, 'just to see you.'

'I won't last this next winter,' the old woman said, dabbing her tears with the ends of her white hair. 'Your father was a good man.' She stared at the flowers she had laid by the entrance markers. 'And all our sons die,' she added sadly, then sniffed and hobbled away towards her hut.

Saban walked into the temple and laid his forehead against a post that he and Galeth had raised many years before. He had not even been a man then. He closed his eyes and had a sudden vision of Derrewyn coming from the stream naked and with water dripping from her hair. Had Mai the river goddess sent that vision? And what did it mean? He prayed to Mai that she would keep his family safe, then rapped on the post to draw the goddess's attention to that prayer when a shout made him turn round. 'Saban!' It was Lengar's voice. 'Saban!'

Lengar was striding through the huts with two spearmen who were evidently his guards. 'Saban!' Lengar shouted again, then saw his brother in the temple and hurried towards him. The folk close to the shrine edged aside.

Lengar was in a rage, his right hand resting on the wooden hilt of the bronze-bladed sword that hung at his waist. 'Why did you not tell me that one of the stones was stolen in the night?' he demanded.

Saban shrugged. 'By men with black-fledged arrows,' he said. 'Why should I tell you what you already know?'

Lengar seemed taken aback. 'Are you saying—'

'You know what I'm saying,' Saban interrupted.

Lengar shouted him down. 'I have an agreement with Sarmennyn!' he bellowed. 'And the agreement was that they should bring me a temple. Not part of one!'

'It was your men who took the stone,' Saban said accusingly.

'My men!' Lengar sneered. 'My men did nothing! You lost the stone!' He punched Saban's chest. 'You lost it, Saban!'

The two spearmen watched Saban warily in case he responded to his brother's anger with a rage of his own, but Saban just shook his head wearily. 'You think you've been cheated because one stone is missing?' he asked. 'One stone from so many?'

'If I chop off your prick, brother, will you miss it? Yet it is such a little scrap of flesh,' Lengar spat. 'Tell me, when these men attacked you with black-fledged arrows, did you kill one? Did you take a prisoner?'

'No.'

'So how do you know who they were?'

'I don't,' Saban confessed, but only Ratharryn used black-fledged arrows. Cathallo mixed the blue feathers of jays with their raven black while Drewenna tipped their arrows with a mix of black and white.

'You don't know,' Lengar jeered, 'because you didn't fight them, did you?' He plucked aside the upper hem of Saban's tunic. 'Just two scars, Saban? Still a coward?'

'One scar is for Jegar,' Saban said defiantly, 'and he did not find me a coward.'

But Lengar did not rise to that bait. Instead he had found the nutshell on its leather thong and, before Saban could stop him, he had pulled it out from under the tunic. 'Cathallo puts its spells inside hazel shells,' he said in a dangerously soft voice. He lifted his gaze to look into Saban's eyes. 'What charm is this?'

'A life.'

'Whose?'

'It is the bone of someone's bone,' Saban said, 'and flesh of their flesh.'

Lengar paused, considering that answer, then gave the leather thong a sharp tug, jerking Saban forward, but succeeding in breaking the nut free. 'I asked whose life it is,' he said.

'Yours, brother,' Saban said.

Lengar smiled. 'Did you think, little brother, that this nutshell would keep your woman safe?'

'Slaol will keep Aurenna safe.'

'But this charm, little brother,' Lengar said, holding the shell in front of Saban's eyes, 'is not of Slaol. It is of Lahanna. Did you crawl back to Derrewyn?'

'I did not crawl to her,' Saban said. 'I went to her with a gift.'

'A gift to my enemy?'

'I gave her Jegar's head,' Saban said. He knew it was dangerous to provoke Lengar, especially as he had no weapon, but he could not help himself.

Lengar stepped back and shouted for Neel, the high priest. 'Neel! Come here! Neel!'

The priest ducked from his hut. He limped because of the arrow that had pierced his thigh on the night that Lengar had killed Hengall. His hair was spiked with dried mud, a ringlet of bones circled his neck and his belt was hung with pouches in which he kept his herbs and charms. He bobbed in front of Lengar, who gave him the nutshell. 'This is a charm on my life,' Lengar said, 'a thing of Derrewyn's. Tell me how it is done.'

Neel glanced nervously at Saban, then took a small flint blade from a pouch and cut the sinews which bound the nut. He split the two halves, then sniffed the contents. He made a face at the stench, then poked at the tiny bone with a finger. 'It must be from Derrewyn's child,' he decided.

'My child, too,' Lengar said.

'She killed it,' Neel said, 'and used its bones and flesh to curse you.'

'A curse of Lahanna's?'

'She would use no other god,' Neel confirmed.

Lengar took the shell back and carefully placed its two halves together. 'Will it work?' he asked the priest.

Neel hesitated. 'Lahanna has no power here,' he said nervously.

'So you constantly assure me,' Lengar said. 'Now we can test your belief.' He looked at Saban. 'To kill me, little brother, what did you have to do? Crush it?'

Saban said nothing. Lengar laughed. 'One day I shall feed your flesh to the pigs and use your skull as a pisspot.' His words were defiant, but there was nervousness on his face as he placed the nut between the heels of his hands and slowly applied pressure. He paused, evidently wondering whether his defiance of the goddess was sensible, but Lengar had not made Ratharryn feared by being cautious. A man must take risks if he was to achieve greatness and Lengar was willing to wager his life if the reward were large enough, and so he squeezed again. It took more strength than he expected, but at last the shell gave way and the charm was crushed. He held the sticky scraps between his hands and held his breath, waiting. Nothing happened.

He laughed softly, then carefully scooped the remnants of the charm onto one palm. He gave the scraps to Neel. 'Put them in the closest fire,' he ordered, then watched as the priest went obediently to the nearest cooking fire and tossed the charm into the flames. There was a small burst of brighter fire and a hiss of fat, and still Lengar lived.

'Why should I care for Lahanna's curse?' Lengar demanded loudly. 'I live in her temple, and she does nothing. We are Slaol's people! Kenn's people!' He shouted this, making folk stare at him nervously as he brushed his hands together. 'So much for Derrewyn's curse,' he said to Saban. 'Or am I dead?'

Neel laughed at this jest. 'You are not dead!' the high priest cried.

Lengar patted his body. 'I seem to be alive!'

'You are alive!' the priest cackled.

'But Derrewyn is hurting, yes?' Lengar asked the priest.

'Oh. yes,' Neel said, 'yes! She is hurting!' He writhed to show the pain that would be racking Derrewyn. 'She hurts!'

'And Saban is disappointed,' Lengar said pityingly, then gave his brother a stare so chilling that Saban expected the sword to be drawn and buried in his belly. Instead, surprisingly, Lengar smiled. 'I shall make you an offer, little brother. I have cause to kill you, but what merit is there in slaughtering a coward? So you can crawl back to Sarmennyn, but if I ever see your face again I shall cut it off.'

'I want nothing more than to go to Sarmennyn,' Saban said.

'But you shall go without your wife,' Lengar said. 'Lest you be disappointed, brother, I shall buy her from you. Her price is the cost of Jegar's life.'

'Aurenna is not for sale,' Saban said, 'and her people are Sarmennyn's people. You think they will let her go to slake your appetite?'

Lengar sneered at that question. 'I think, little brother, that by tonight your wife will be mine, and that you will bring her to me.' He prodded Saban with a finger. 'You hear that? You will bring her to me. You forget, Saban, that this is Ratharryn where I rule and where the gods love me.' He half turned away, then twisted back, smiling. 'Or you could rule? All you have to do is kill me.' He waited a heartbeat, as if expecting Saban to attack him, then reached out and patted Saban's cheek before leading his grinning spearmen away.

And Saban ran to find Aurenna and was relieved to find her safe. 'We must go,' he told her, but Aurenna scoffed at his terror.

'I am supposed to be here,' she said. 'Erek wants me here. We are here to do a great thing.'

The nutshell had failed, Aurenna was lost in her dream of the sun god and Saban was trapped.

—«»—«»—«»—

That night Lengar gave a great feast for the men of Sarmennyn. It was a lavish feast of oysters, swan, trout, pork and venison. His slaves served it in the feasting hall and Lengar supplied generous pots of intoxicating liquor.

Lengar's own men, like the warriors from Drewenna, feasted outside, for there was not room inside the feasting hall for so many and, besides, the men outside prepared themselves for battle and so had gathered first at Slaol's old temple where they sacrificed a heifer and dedicated themselves to slaughter, then they took their liquor pots and drank deep for they believed the fiery drink gave a man courage. The women gathered at Arryn and Mai's temple where they prayed for the men.