Stonehenge

Map of the settlement and temples of Ratharryn, c.2000 BC

The gods talk by signs. It may be a leaf falling in summer, the cry of a dying beast or the ripple of wind on calm water. It might be smoke lying close to the ground, a rift in the clouds or the flight of a bird.

But on that day the gods sent a storm. It was a great storm, a storm that would be remembered, though folk did not name the year by that storm. Instead they called it the Year the Stranger Came.

For a stranger came to Ratharryn on the day of the storm. It was a summer's day, the same day that Saban was almost murdered by his half-brother.

The gods were not talking that day. They were screaming.

—«»—«»—«»—

Saban, like all children, went naked in summer. He was six years younger than his half-brother, Lengar, and, because he had not yet passed the trials of manhood, he bore no tribal scars or killing marks. But his time of trial was only a year away, and their father had instructed Lengar to take Saban into the forest and teach him where the stags could be found, where the wild boars lurked and where the wolves had their dens. Lengar had resented the duty and so, instead of teaching his brother, he dragged Saban through thickets of thorn so that the boy's sun-darkened skin was bleeding. 'You'll never become a man,' Lengar jeered.

Saban, sensibly, said nothing.

Lengar had been a man for five years and had the blue scars of the tribe on his chest and the marks of a hunter and a warrior on his arms. He carried a longbow made of yew, tipped with horn, strung with sinew and polished with pork fat. His tunic was of wolfskin and his long black hair was braided and tied with a strip of fox's fur. He was tall, had a narrow face and was reckoned one of the tribe's great hunters. His name meant Wolf Eyes, for his gaze had a yellowish tinge. He had been given another name at birth, but like many in the tribe he had taken a new name at manhood.

Saban was also tall and had long black hair. His name meant Favoured One, and many in the tribe thought it apt for, even at a mere twelve summers, Saban promised to be handsome. He was strong and lithe, he worked hard and he smiled often. Lengar rarely smiled. 'He has a cloud in his face,' the women said of him, but not within his hearing, for Lengar was likely to be the tribe's next chief. Lengar and Saban were sons of Hengall, and Hengall was chief of the people of Ratharryn.

All that long day Lengar led Saban through the forest. They met no deer, no boars, no wolves, no aurochs and no bears. They just walked and in the afternoon they came to the edge of the high ground and saw that all the land to the west was shadowed by a mass of black cloud. Lightning flickered the dark cloud pale, twisted to the far forest and left the sky burned. Lengar squatted, one hand on his polished bow, and watched the approaching storm. He should have started for home, but he wanted to worry Saban and so he pretended he did not care about the storm god's threat.

It was while they watched the storm that the stranger came.

He rode a small dun horse that was white with sweat. His saddle was a folded woollen blanket and his reins were lines of woven nettle fibre, though he hardly needed them for he was wounded and seemed tired, letting the small horse pick its own way up the track which climbed the steep escarpment. The stranger's head was bowed and his heels hung almost to the ground. He wore a woollen cloak dyed blue and in his right hand was a bow while on his left shoulder there hung a leather quiver filled with arrows fledged with the feathers of seagulls and crows. His short beard was black, while the tribal marks scarred into his cheeks were grey.

Lengar hissed at Saban to stay silent, then tracked the stranger eastwards. Lengar had an arrow on his bowstring, but the stranger never once turned to see if he was being followed and Lengar was content to let the arrow rest on its string. Saban wondered if the horseman even lived, for he seemed like a dead man slumped inert on his horse's back.

The stranger was an Outlander. Even Saban knew that, for only the Outfolk rode the small shaggy horses and had grey scars on their faces. The Outfolk were enemy, yet still Lengar did not release his arrow. He just followed the horseman and Saban followed Lengar until at last the Outlander came to the edge of the trees where bracken grew. There the stranger stopped his horse and raised his head to stare across the gently rising land while Lengar and Saban crouched unseen behind him.

The stranger saw bracken and, beyond it, where the soil was thin above the underlying chalk, grassland. There were grave mounds dotted on the grassland's low crest. Pigs rooted in the bracken while white cattle grazed the pastureland. The sun still shone here. The stranger stayed a long while at the wood's edge, looking for enemies, but seeing none. Off to his north, a long way off, there were wheatfields fenced with thorn over which the first clouds, outriders of the storm, were chasing their shadows, but all ahead of him was sunlit. There was life ahead, darkness behind, and the small horse, unbidden, suddenly jolted into the bracken. The rider let it carry him.

The horse climbed the gentle slope to the grave mounds. Lengar and Saban waited until the stranger had disappeared over the skyline, then followed and, once at the crest, they crouched in a grave's ditch and saw that the rider had stopped beside the Old Temple.

A grumble of thunder sounded and another gust of wind flattened the grass where the cattle grazed. The stranger slid from his horse's back, crossed the overgrown ditch of the Old Temple and disappeared into the hazel shrub that grew so thick within the sacred circle. Saban guessed the man was seeking sanctuary.

But Lengar was behind the Outlander, and Lengar was not given to mercy.

The abandoned horse, frightened by the thunder and by the big cattle, trotted west towards the forest. Lengar waited until the horse had gone back into the trees, then rose from the ditch and ran towards the hazels where the stranger had gone.

Saban followed, going to where he had never been in all his twelve years.

To the Old Temple.

—«»—«»—«»—

Once, many years before, so long before that no one alive could remember those times, the Old Temple had been the greatest shrine of the heartland. In those days, when men had come from far off to dance the temple's rings, the high bank of chalk that encircled the shrine had been so white that it seemed to shine in the moonlight. From one side of the shining ring to the other was a hundred paces, and in the old days that sacred space had been beaten bare by the feet of the dancers as they girdled the death house that had been made from three rings of trimmed oak trunks. The smooth bare trunks had been oiled with animal fat and hung with boughs of holly and ivy.

Now the bank was thick with grass and choked by weeds. Small hazels grew in the ditch and more hazels had invaded the wide space inside the circular bank so that, from a distance, the temple looked like a grove of small shrubs. Birds nested where men had once danced. One oak pole of the death house still showed above the tangled hazels, but the pole was leaning now and its once smooth wood was pitted, black and thick with fungi.

The temple had been abandoned, yet the gods do not forget their shrines. Sometimes, on still days when a mist laid on the pasture, or when the swollen moon hung motionless above the chalk ring, the hazel leaves shivered as though a wind passed through them. The dancers were gone, but the power remained.

And now the Outlander had gone to the temple.

The gods were screaming.

—«»—«»—«»—

Cloud shadow swallowed the pasture as Lengar and Saban ran towards the Old Temple. Saban was cold and he was scared. Lengar was also frightened, but the Outfolk were famous for their wealth, and Lengar's greed overcame his fear of entering the temple.

The stranger had clambered through the ditch and up the bank, but Lengar went to the old southern entrance where a narrow causeway led into the overgrown interior. Once across the causeway Lengar dropped onto all fours and crawled through the hazels. Saban followed reluctantly, not wanting to be left alone in the pasture when the storm god's anger broke.

To Lengar's surprise the Old Temple was not entirely overgrown for there was a cleared space where the death house had stood. Someone in the tribe must still visit the Old Temple, for the weeds had been cleared, the grass cut with a knife and a single ox-skull lay in the death house where the stranger now sat with his back against the one remaining temple post. The man's face was pale and his eyes were closed, but his chest rose and fell with his laboured breathing. He wore a strip of dark stone inside his left wrist, fastened there by leather laces. There was blood on his woollen trews. The man had dropped his short bow and his quiver of arrows beside the ox-skull, and now clutched a leather bag to his wounded belly. He had been ambushed in the forest three days before. He had not seen his attackers, just felt the sudden hot pain of the thrown spear, then kicked his horse and let it carry him out of danger.

'I'll fetch father,' Saban whispered.

'You won't,' Lengar hissed, and the wounded man must have heard them for he opened his eyes and grimaced as he leaned forward to pick up his bow. But the stranger was slowed by pain, and Lengar was much faster. He dropped his longbow, scrambled from his hiding place and ran across the death house, scooping up the stranger's bow with one hand and his quiver with the other. In his hurry he spilled the arrows so that there was only one left in the leather quiver.

A murmur of thunder sounded from the west. Saban shivered, fearing that the sound would swell to fill the air with the god's rage, but the thunder faded, leaving the sky deathly still.

'Sannas,' the stranger said, then added some words in a tongue that neither Lengar nor Saban spoke.

'Sannas?' Lengar asked.

'Sannas,' the man repeated eagerly. Sannas was the great sorceress of Cathallo, famous throughout the land, and Saban presumed the stranger wanted to be healed by her.

Lengar smiled. 'Sannas is not of our people,' he said. 'Sannas lives north of here.'

The stranger did not understand what Lengar said. 'Erek,' he said, and Saban, still watching from the undergrowth, wondered if that was the stranger's name, or perhaps the name of his god. 'Erek,' the wounded man said more firmly, but the word meant nothing to Lengar who had taken the one arrow from the stranger's quiver and fitted it onto the short bow. The bow was made of strips of wood and antler, glued together and bound with sinew, and Lengar's people had never used such a weapon. They favoured the longer bow carved from the yew tree, but Lengar was curious about the odd weapon. He stretched the string, testing its strength.

'Erek!' the stranger cried loudly.

'You're Outfolk,' Lengar said. 'You have no business here.' He stretched the bow again, surprised by the tension in the short weapon.

'Bring me a healer. Bring me Sannas,' the stranger said in his own tongue.

'If Sannas were here,' Lengar said, recognizing only that name, 'I would kill her first.' He spat. 'That is what I think of Sannas. She is a shrivelled old bitch-cow, a husk of evil, toad-dung made flesh.' He spat again.

The stranger leaned forward and laboriously scooped up the arrows that had spilled from his quiver and formed them into a small sheaf that he held like a knife as though to defend himself. 'Bring me a healer,' he pleaded in his own language. Thunder growled to the west, and the hazel leaves shuddered as a breath of cold wind gusted ahead of the approaching storm. The stranger looked again into Lengar's eyes and saw no pity there. There was only the delight that Lengar took from death. 'No,' he said, 'no, please, no.'

Lengar loosed the arrow. He was only five paces from the stranger and the small arrow struck its target with a sickening force, lurching the man onto his side. The arrow sank deep, leaving only a hand's-breadth of its black-and-white feathered shaft showing at the left side of the stranger's chest. Saban thought the Outlander must be dead because he did not move for a long time, but then the carefully made sheaf of arrows spilled from his hand as, slowly, very slowly, he pushed himself back upright. 'Please,' he said quietly.

'Lengar!' Saban scrambled from the hazels. 'Let me fetch father!'

'Quiet!' Lengar had taken one of his own black-feathered arrows from its quiver and placed it on the short bowstring. He walked towards Saban, aiming the bow at him and grinning when he saw the terror on his half-brother's face.

The stranger also stared at Saban, seeing a tall good-looking boy with tangled black hair and bright anxious eyes. 'Sannas,' the stranger begged Saban, 'take me to Sannas.'

'Sannas doesn't live here,' Saban said, understanding only the sorceress's name.

'We live here,' Lengar announced, now pointing his arrow at the stranger, 'and you're an Outlander and you steal our cattle, enslave our women and cheat our traders.' He let the second arrow loose and, like the first, it thumped into the stranger's chest, though this time into the ribs on his right side. Again the man was jerked aside, but once again he forced himself upright as though his spirit refused to leave his wounded body.

'I can give you power,' he said, as a trickle of bubbly pink blood spilled from his mouth and into his short beard. 'Power,' he whispered.

But Lengar did not understand the man's tongue. He had shot two arrows and still the man refused to die, so Lengar picked up his own longbow, laid an arrow on its string, and faced the stranger. He drew the huge bow back.

The stranger shook his head, but he knew his fate now and he stared Lengar in the eyes to show he was not afraid to die. He cursed his killer, though he doubted the gods would listen to him for he was a thief and a fugitive.

Lengar loosed the string and the black-feathered arrow struck deep into the stranger's heart. He must have died in an instant, yet he still thrust his body up as though to fend off the flint arrow-head and then he fell back, shuddered for a few heartbeats, and was still.

Lengar spat on his right hand and rubbed the spittle against the inside of his left wrist where the stranger's bowstring had lashed and stung the skin; Saban, watching his half-brother, understood then why the stranger wore the strip of stone against his forearm. Lengar danced a few steps, celebrating his kill, but he was nervous. Indeed, he was not certain that the man really was dead for he approached the body very cautiously and prodded it with one horn-tipped end of his bow before leaping back in case the corpse came to life and sprang at him, but the stranger did not move.

Lengar edged forward again, snatched the bag from the stranger's dead hand and scuttled away from the body. For a moment or two he stared into the corpse's ashen face, then, confident the man's spirit was truly gone, he tore the lace that secured the bag's neck. He peered inside, was motionless for a heartbeat, then screamed for joy. He had been given power.

Saban, terrified by his brother's scream, shrank back, then edged forward again as Lengar emptied the bag's contents onto the grass beside the whitened ox-skull. To Saban it looked as though a stream of sunlight tumbled from the leather bag.

There were dozens of small lozenge-shaped gold ornaments, each about the size of a man's thumbnail, and four great lozenge plaques that were as big as a man's hand. The lozenges, both big and small, had tiny holes drilled through their narrower points so they could be strung on a sinew or sewn to a garment, and all were made of very thin gold sheets incised with straight lines, though their pattern meant nothing to Lengar who snatched back one of the small lozenges that Saban had dared pick up from the grass. Lengar gathered the lozenges, great and small, into a pile. 'You know what this is?' he asked his younger brother, gesturing at the heap.

'Gold,' Saban said.

'Power,' Lengar said. He glanced at the dead man. 'Do you know what you can do with gold?'

'Wear it?' Saban suggested.

'Fool! You buy men with it.' Lengar rocked back on his heels. The cloud shadows were dark now, and the hazels were tossing in the freshening wind. 'You buy spearmen,' he said, 'you buy archers and warriors! You buy power!'

Saban grabbed one of the small lozenges, then dodged out of the way when Lengar tried to take it back. The boy retreated across the small cleared space and, when it appeared that Lengar would not chase him, he squatted and peered at the scrap of gold. It seemed an odd thing with which to buy power. Saban could imagine men working for food or for pots, for flints or for slaves, or for bronze that could be hammered into knives, axes, swords and spearheads, but for this bright metal? It could not cut, it just was, yet even on that clouded day Saban could see how the metal shone. It shone as though a piece of the sun was trapped within the metal and he suddenly shivered, not because he was naked, but because he had never touched gold before; he had never held a scrap of the almighty sun in his hand. 'We must take it to father,' he said reverently.

'So the old fool can add it to his hoard?' Lengar asked scornfully. He went back to the body and folded the cloak back over the stumps of the arrows to reveal that the dead man's trews were held up by a belt buckled with a great lump of heavy gold while more of the small lozenges hung on a sinew about his neck.

Lengar glanced at his younger brother, licked his lips, then picked up one of the arrows that had fallen from the stranger's hand. He was still carrying his longbow and now he placed the black-and-white fledged arrow onto the string. He was gazing into the hazel undergrowth, deliberately avoiding his half-brother's gaze, but Saban suddenly understood what was in Lengar's mind. If Saban lived to tell their father of this Outfolk treasure then Lengar would lose it, or would at least have to fight for it, but if Saban were discovered dead, with an Outfolk's black-and-white feathered arrow in his ribs, then no one would ever suspect that Lengar had done the killing, nor that Lengar had taken a great treasure for his own use. Thunder swelled in the west and the cold wind flattened the tops of the hazel trees. Lengar was drawing back the bow, though still he did not look at Saban. 'Look at this!' Saban suddenly cried, holding up the small lozenge. 'Look!'

Lengar relaxed the bowstring's pressure as he peered, and at that instant the boy took off like a hare sprung from grass. He burst through the hazels and sprinted across the wide causeway of the Old Temple's entrance of the sun. There were more rotted posts there, just like the ones around the death house. He had to swerve to negotiate their stumps and, just as he twisted through them, Lengar's arrow whirred past his ear.

Thunder tore the sky to shreds as the first rain fell. The drops were huge. A stab of lightning flashed down to the opposite hillside. Saban ran, twisting and turning, not daring to look back and see if Lengar pursued him. The rain fell harder and harder, filling the air with its malevolent roar, but making a screen to hide the boy as he ran north and east towards the settlement. He screamed as he ran, hoping that some herdsman might still be on the pastureland, but he saw no one until he had passed the grave mounds at the brow of the hill and was running down the muddy path between the small fields of wheat that were being battered by the drenching rain.

Galeth, Saban's uncle, and five other men had been returning to the settlement when they heard the boy's shouts. They turned back up the hill, and Saban ran through the rain to clutch at his uncle's deerskin jerkin. 'What is it, boy?' Galeth asked.

Saban clung to his uncle. 'He tried to kill me!' he gasped. 'He tried to kill me!'

'Who?' Galeth asked. He was the youngest brother of Saban's father, tall, thick-bearded and famous for his feats of strength. Galeth, it was said, had once raised a whole temple pole, and not one of the small ones either, but a big trimmed trunk that jutted high above the other poles. Like his companions, Galeth was carrying a heavy bronze-bladed axe for he had been felling trees when the storm came. 'Who tried to kill you?' Galeth asked.

'He did!' Saban shrieked, pointing up the hill to where Lengar had appeared with the longbow in his hands and a new arrow slotted on its string.

Lengar stopped. He said nothing, but just looked at the group of men who now sheltered his half-brother. He took the arrow off the string.

Galeth gazed at his older nephew. 'You tried to kill your own brother?'

Lengar laughed. 'It was an Outlander, not me.' He walked slowly downhill. His long black hair was wet with rain and lay sleek and close to his head, giving him a frightening appearance.

'An Outlander?' Galeth asked, spitting to avert ill fortune. There were many in Ratharryn who said Galeth should be the next chief instead of Lengar, but the rivalry between uncle and nephew paled against the threat of an Outfolk raid. 'There are Outfolk up on the pasture?' Galeth asked.

'Only the one,' Lengar said carelessly. He pushed the Outfolk arrow into his quiver. 'Only the one,' he said again, 'and he's dead now.'

'So you're safe, boy,' Galeth told Saban, 'you're safe.'

'He tried to kill me,' Saban insisted, 'because of the gold!' He held up the lozenge as proof.

'Gold, eh?' Galeth asked, taking the tiny scrap from Saban's hand. 'Is that what you've got? Gold? We'd better take it to your father.'

Lengar gave Saban a look of utter hatred, but it was too late now. Saban had seen the treasure and Saban had lived and so their father would learn of the gold. Lengar spat, then turned and strode back up the hill. He vanished in the rain, risking the storm's anger so that he could rescue the rest of the gold.

That was the day the stranger came to the Old Temple in the storm, and the day Lengar tried to kill Saban, and the day everything in Ratharryn's world changed.

—«»—«»—«»—

The storm god raged across the earth that night. Rain flattened the crops and made the hill paths into streamlets. It flooded the marshes north of Ratharryn and the River Mai overflowed her banks to scour fallen trees from the steep valley that twisted through the high ground until it reached the great loop where Ratharryn was built. Ratharryn's ditch was flooded, and the wind tore at the thatch of the huts and moaned among the timber posts of its temples' rings.

No one knew when the first people had come to the land beside the river, nor how they had discovered that Arryn was the god of the valley. Yet Arryn must have revealed himself to those people for they named their new home for him and they edged the hills around his valley with temples. They were simple temples, nothing but clearings in the forest where a ring of tree trunks would be left standing, and for years, no one knew for how many, the folk would follow the wooded paths to those timber rings where they begged the gods to keep them safe. In time Arryn's people cleared away most of the woods, cutting down oak and elm and ash and hazel, and planting barley or wheat in the small fields. They trapped fish in the river that was sacred to Arryn's wife, Mai, they herded cattle on the grasslands and pigs in the patches of woodland that stood between the fields, and the young men of the tribe hunted boar and deer and aurochs and bear and wolf in the wild woods that had now been pressed back beyond the temples.

The first temples decayed and new ones were made, and in time the new ones became old, yet still they were rings of timber, though now the rings were trimmed posts that were raised within a bank and ditch that made a wider circle around the timber rings. Always a circle, for life was a circle, and the sky was a circle, and the edge of the world was a circle, and the sun was a circle, and the moon grew to a circle, and that was why the temples at Cathallo and Drewenna, at Maden and Ratharryn, indeed in nearly all the settlements that were scattered across the land, were made as circles.

Cathallo and Ratharryn were the twin tribes of the heartland. They were linked by blood and as jealous as two wives. An advantage to one was an affront to the other, and that night Hengall, chief of the people at Ratharryn, brooded on the gold of the Outfolk. He had waited for Lengar to bring him the treasure, but though Lengar did return to Ratharryn with a leather bag, he did not come to his father's hut and when Hengall sent a slave demanding that his son bring him the treasures, Lengar had answered that he was too tired to obey. So now Hengall was consulting the tribe's high priest.

'He will challenge you,' Hirac said.

'Sons should challenge their fathers,' Hengall answered. The chief was a tall, heavy man with a scarred face and a great ragged beard that was matted with grease. His skin, like the skin of most folk, was dark with ingrained soot and dirt and soil and sweat and smoke. Beneath the dirt his thick arms bore innumerable blue marks to show how many enemies he had slain in battle. His name simply meant the Warrior, though Hengall the Warrior loved peace far more than war.

Hirac was older than Hengall. He was thin, his joints ached and his white beard was scanty. Hengall might lead the tribe, but Hirac spoke with the gods and so his advice was crucial. 'Lengar will fight you,' Hirac warned Hensall.

'He will not.'

'He might. He is young and strong,' Hirac said. The priest was naked though his skin was covered with a dried slurry of chalk and water in which one of his wives had traced swirling patterns with her spread fingers. A squirrel's skull hung from a thong about his neck, while at his waist was a circlet of nutshells and bear's teeth. His hair and beard were caked with red mud that was drying and cracking in the fierce heat of Hengall's fire.

'And I am old and strong,' Hengall said, 'and if he fights, I shall kill him.'

'If you kill him,' Hirac hissed, 'then you will have only two sons left.'

'One son left,' Hengall snarled, and he glowered at the high priest for he disliked being reminded of how few sons he had fathered. Kital, chief of the folk at Cathallo, had eight sons, Ossaya, who had been chief of Madan before Kital conquered it, had fathered six, while Melak, chief of the people at Drewenna, had eleven, so Hengall felt shamed that he had only fathered three sons, and even more shame that one of those sons was a cripple. He had daughters too, of course, and some of them lived, but daughters were not sons. And his second son, the crippled boy, the stuttering fool called Camaban, he would not count as his own. Lengar he acknowledged, and Saban likewise, but not the middle son.

'And Lengar won't challenge me,' Hengal declared, 'he won't dare.'

'He's no coward,' warned the priest.

Hengall smiled. 'No, he's no coward, but he only fights when he knows he can win. That is why he will be a good chief if he lives.'

The priest was squatting by the hut's central pole. Between his knees was a pile of slender bones: the ribs of a baby that had died the previous winter. He poked them with a long chalky finger, pushing them into random patterns that he studied with a cocked head. 'Sannas will want the gold,' he said after a while, then paused to let that ominous statement do its work. Hengall, like every other living being, held the sorceress of Cathallo in awe, but he appeared to shrug the thought away. 'And Kital has many spearmen,' Hirac added a further warning.

Hengall prodded the priest, rocking him off balance. 'You let me worry about spears, Hirac. You tell me what the gold means. Why did it come here? Who sent it? What do I do with it?'

The priest glanced about the big hut. A leather screen hung to one side, sheltering the slave girls who attended Hengall's new wife. Hirac knew that a vast treasure was already concealed within the hut, buried under its floor or hidden under heaped pelts. Hengall had ever been a hoarder, never a spender. 'If you keep the gold,' Hirac said, 'then men will try to take it from you. This is no ordinary gold.'

'We don't even know that it is the gold of Sarmennyn,' Hengall said, though without much conviction.

'It is,' Hirac said, gesturing at the single small lozenge, brought by Saban, that glittered on the earth floor between them. Sarmennyn was an Outfolk country many miles to the west, and for the last two moons there had been rumours how the people of Sarmennyn had lost a great treasure. 'Saban saw the treasure,' Hirac said, 'and it is the Outfolk gold, and the Outfolk worship Slaol, though they give him another name…' He paused, trying to remember the name, but it would not come. Slaol was the god of the sun, a mighty god, but his power was rivalled by Lahanna, the goddess of the moon, and the two, who had once been lovers, were now estranged. That was the rivalry that dominated Ratharryn and made every decision agonizing, for a gesture to the one god was resented by the other, and Hirac's task was to keep all the rival gods, not just the sun and the moon, but the wind and the soil and the stream and the trees and the beasts and the grass and the bracken and the rain, all of the innumerable gods and spirits and unseen powers, content. Hirac picked up the single small lozenge. 'Slaol sent us the gold,' he said, 'and gold is Slaol's metal, but the lozenge is Lahanna's symbol.'

Hengall hissed, 'Are you saying the gold is Lahanna's?'

Hirac said nothing for a while. The chief waited. It was the high priest's job to determine the meaning of strange events, though Hengall would do his best to influence those meanings to the tribe's advantage. 'Slaol could have kept the gold in Sarmennyn,' Hirac said eventually, 'but he did not. So it is those folk who will suffer its loss. Its coming here is not a bad omen.'

'Good,' Hengall grunted.

'But the shape of the gold,' Hirac went on carefully, 'tells us it once belonged to Lahanna, and I think she tried to retrieve it. Did not Saban say the stranger was asking for Sannas?'

'He did.'

'And Sannas reveres Lahanna above all the gods,' the priest said, 'so Slaol must have sent it to us to keep it from reaching her. But Lahanna will be jealous, and she will want something from us.'

'A sacrifice?' Hengall asked suspiciously.

The priest nodded, and Hengall scowled, wondering how many cattle the priest would want to slaughter in Lahanna's temple, but Hirac did not propose any such depredation on the tribe's wealth. The gold was important, its coming was extraordinary and the response must be proportionately generous. 'The goddess will want a spirit,' the high priest said.

Hengall brightened when he realized his cattle were safe. 'You can take that fool Camaban,' the chief said, talking of his disowned second son. 'Make him useful, crush his skull.'

Hirac rocked back on his haunches, his eyes half closed. 'He is marked by Lahanna,' he said quietly. Camaban had come from his mother with a crescent birthmark on his belly and the crescent, like the lozenge, was a shape sacred to the moon. 'Lahanna might be angry if we kill him.'

'Maybe she would like his company?' Hengall suggested slyly. 'Maybe that is why she marked him? So he would be sent to her?'

'True,' Hirac allowed, and the notion emboldened him to a decision. 'We shall keep the gold,' he said, 'and placate Lahanna with the spirit of Camaban.'

'Good,' Hengall said. He turned to the leather screen and shouted a name. A slave girl crept nervously into the firelight. 'If I'm to fight Lengar in the morning,' the chief said to the high priest, 'then I'd better make another son now.' He gestured the girl to the pile of furs that was his bed.

The high priest gathered the baby's bones, then hurried to his own hut through the growing rain that washed the chalk from his skin.

The wind blew on. Lightning slithered to earth, turning the world soot-black and chalk-white. The gods were screaming and men could only cower.

Saban feared going to sleep, not because the storm god was hammering the earth, but because he thought Lengar might come in the night to punish him for taking the lozenge. But his elder brother left him undisturbed and in the dawn Saban crept from his mother's hut into a damp and chill wind. The remnants of the storm gusted patches of mist within the vast earthen bank which surrounded the settlement while the sun hid its face behind cloud, appearing only as an occasional dull disc in the vaporous grey. A thatched roof, sodden with rainwater, had collapsed in the night, and folk marvelled that the family had not been crushed. A succession of women and slaves went through the embankment's southern causeway to fetch water from the swollen river, while children carried the night's pots of urine to the tanners' pits which had been flooded, but they all hurried back, eager not to miss the confrontation between Lengar and his father. Even folk who lived beyond the great wall, in the huts up on the higher land, had heard the news and suddenly found reason to come to Ratharryn that morning. Lengar had found the Outfolk gold, Hengall wanted it, and one of the two had to prevail.

Hengall appeared first. He emerged from his hut wearing a great cape of bear fur and strolled with apparent unconcern about the settlement. He greeted Saban by ruffling his hair, then talked with the priests about the problems of replacing one of the great posts of the Temple of Lahanna, and afterwards he sat on a stool outside his hut and listened to anxious accounts of the damage done by the night's rain to the wheatfields. 'We can always buy grain,' Hengall announced in a loud voice so that as many people as possible could hear him. 'There are those who say that the wealth hidden in my hut should be used to hire weapons, but it might serve us better if we buy grain. And we have pigs to eat, and rain doesn't kill the fish in the river. We won't starve.' He opened his cloak and slapped his big bare belly. 'It won't shrink this year!' Folk laughed.

Galeth arrived with a half-dozen men and squatted near his brother's hut. All of them carried spears and Hengall understood that they had come to support him, but he made no mention of the expected confrontation. Instead he asked Galeth whether he had found an oak large enough to replace the decayed temple pole in Lahanna's shrine.

'We found it,' Galeth said, 'but we didn't cut it.'

'You didn't cut it?'

'The day was late, the axes blunt.'

Hengall grinned. 'Yet I hear your woman's pregnant?'

Galeth looked coyly pleased. His first wife had died a year before, leaving him with a son a year younger than Saban, and he had just taken a new woman. 'She is,' he admitted.

'Then at least one of your blades is sharp,' Hengall said, provoking more laughter.

The laughter died abruptly, for Lengar chose that moment to appear from his own hut, and in that grey morning he shone like the sun itself. Ralla, his mother and Hengall's oldest wife, must have sat through the stormy darkness threading the small lozenges on sinews so that her son could wear them all as necklaces, and she had sewn the four large gold pieces directly onto his deerskin jerkin over which he wore the stranger's gold-buckled belt. A dozen young warriors, all of them Lengar's close hunting companions, followed him while behind that spear-carrying band was a muddy group of excited children who waved sticks in imitation of the hunting spear in Lengar's hand.

Lengar ignored his father at first. Instead he paraded through the huts, past the two temples built within the great embankment, then up to the potters' huts and tanners' pits at the north of the enclosure. His followers clashed their spears together, and more and more folk gathered behind him so that eventually he led his excited procession in an intricate path that twisted between the rain-soaked thatch of the low round huts. Only after he had threaded the settlement twice did he turn towards his father.

Hengall stood as his son approached. He had let Lengar have his time of glory, and now he stood and shrugged the bear cloak from his shoulders and threw it, fur down, into the mud at his feet. He wiped the mist's moisture from his face with the ends of his big beard, then waited bare-chested so that all the folk in Ratharryn could see how thick the blue marks of dead enemies and slaughtered beasts clustered on his skin. He stood silent, the wind stirring his ragged black hair.

Lengar stopped opposite his father. He was as tall as Hengall, but not so heavily muscled. In a fight he would probably prove the quicker man while Hengall would be the stronger, yet Hengall showed no fear of such a fight. Instead he yawned, then nodded at his eldest son. 'You have brought me the stranger's gold. That is good.' He gestured at the bear cloak that lay on the ground between them. 'Put everything there, son,' he growled.

Lengar stiffened. Most of the watching tribe thought he would fight, for his eyes bespoke a love of violence that verged on madness, but his father's gaze was steady and Lengar chose to argue instead of striking with his spear. 'If a man finds an antler in the woods,' he demanded, 'must he give it to his father?' He spoke loudly enough for all the crowd to hear. The people of Ratharryn had clustered between the nearer huts, leaving a space for the confrontation, and some of them now called out their agreement with Lengar. 'Or if I find the honey of the wild bees,' Lengar asked, emboldened by their support, 'must I endure the stings, then yield the honey to my father?'

'Yes,' Hengall said, then yawned again. 'In the cloak, boy.'

'A warrior comes to our land,' Lengar cried, 'a stranger of the Outfolk, and he brings gold. I kill the stranger and take his gold. Is it not mine?' A few in the crowd shouted that the gold was indeed his, but not quite so many as had shouted before. Hengall's bulk and air of unconcern was unsettling.

The chief fished in a pouch that hung from his belt and took out the small lozenge that Saban had brought from the Old Temple. He dropped the scrap of gold onto the cloak. 'Now put the rest there,' he said to Lengar.

'The gold is mine!' Lengar insisted, and this time only Ralla, his mother, and Jegar, one of his closest friends, shouted their support. Jegar was a small and wiry man, the same age as Lengar, but already one of the tribe's greatest warriors. He killed in battle with an abandon that was equal to Lengar's own and he was avid for a fight now, but none of Lengar's other hunting companions had the belly to confront Hengall. They were relying on Lengar to win the confrontation and it seemed he would do that by violence for he suddenly raised his spear, but instead of stabbing with the blade he held it high in the air to draw attention to his words. 'I found the gold! I killed for the gold! The gold came to me! And is it now to be hidden in my father's hut? Is it to gather dust there?' Those words provoked sympathetic murmurs for many in Ratharryn resented the way Hengall hoarded treasures. In Drewenna or Cathallo the chief displayed his wealth, he rewarded his warriors with bronze, he hung his women with shining metal and he made great temples, but Hengall stored Ratharryn's wealth in his hut.

'What would you do with the gold?' Galeth intervened. He was standing now, and he had untied his tail of hair which hung black and ragged about his face so that he looked like a warrior on the edge of battle. His spear blade was levelled. 'Tell us, nephew,' he challenged Lengar, 'what will you do with the gold?'

Jegar hefted his spear to meet Galeth's challenge, but Lengar pushed his friend's blade down. 'With this gold,' he shouted, patting the lozenges on his chest, 'we should raise warriors, spearmen, archers, and end Cathallo for ever!' Now the voices that had first supported him shouted again, for there were many in Ratharryn who feared Cathallo's growth. Only the previous summer the warriors of Cathallo had taken the settlement of Maden that lay between Ratharryn and Cathallo, and hardly a week passed without Cathallo's warriors scouring Hengall's land for cattle or pigs, and many in the tribe resented that Hengall appeared to be doing nothing to stop the taunting raids. 'There was a time when Cathallo paid us tribute!' Lengar shouted, encouraged by the crowd's support. 'When their women came to dance at our temples! Now we cower whenever a warrior of Cathallo comes near! We grovel to that foul bitch, Sannas! And the gold and the bronze and the amber that could free us, where is it? And where will this gold go if I give it up? There!' With that last word he turned and pointed the spear at his father. 'And what will Hengall do with the gold?' Lengar asked. 'He will bury it! Gold for the moles! Metal for the worms! Treasure for the grubs! We scratch for flint and all the while we have gold!'

Hengall shook his head sadly. The crowd that had cheered Lengar's last words fell silent and waited for the fight to start. Lengar's men must have thought the moment was close for they summoned their courage and closed up behind their leader with levelled weapons. Jegar was dancing to and fro, his teeth bared and spear blade pointing at Hengall's belly. Galeth edged closer to Hengall, ready to defend his brother, but Hengall waved Galeth away, then turned, stooped and fetched his war mace from where it had been hidden under the low thatch of his hut's eave. The mace was a shaft of oak as thick as a warrior's wrist topped with a misshapen lump of grey stone that could crush a grown man's skull as if it were a wren's egg. Hengall hefted the mace, then nodded at the cloak of bear fur. 'All the treasure, boy,' he said, deliberately insulting his son, 'all of it, in the cloak.'

Lengar stared at him. The spear had a longer reach than the mace, but if his first lunge missed then he knew the stone head would break his skull. So Lengar hesitated, and Jegar pushed past him. Hengall pointed the mace at Jegar. 'I killed your father, boy,' he snarled, 'when he challenged me for the chiefdom, and I crushed his bones and fed his flesh to the pigs, but I kept his jawbone. Hirac!'

The high priest, his skin mottled with dirt and chalk, bobbed at the edge of the crowd.

'You know where the jawbone is hidden?' Hengall demanded.

'I do,' Hirac said.

'Then if this worm does not step back,' Hengall said, staring at Jegar, 'make a curse on his blood. Curdle his loins. Fill his belly with black worms.'

Jegar paused for a heartbeat. Although he did not fear Hengall's mace, he did fear Hirac's curse, so he stepped back. Hengall looked back at his son. 'In the cloak, son,' he said softly, 'and hurry! I want my breakfast!'

Lengar's defiance crumpled. For a second it seemed he would leap at his father, preferring death to dishonour, but then he just sagged and, with a despairing gesture, dropped the spear, unlooped the gold from his neck and cut the stitches holding the great lozenges to his jerkin. He placed all the lozenges in the bear cloak, then unclasped the belt and tossed it with its great gold buckle onto the lozenges. 'I found the gold,' he protested lamely when he had finished.

'You and Saban found it,' Hengall agreed, 'but you found it in the Old Temple, not in the woods, and that means the gold was sent to all of us! And why?' The chief had raised his voice so that all the folk could hear him. The gods have not revealed their purpose, so we must wait to know the answer. But it is Slaol's gold, and he sent it to us, and he must have had a reason.' He hooked the bear cloak with his foot, dragging it and the treasures towards his hut's doorway from where a pair of woman's hands reached out to haul the glittering pile inwards. A faint groan went through the crowd, for they knew it would be a long time before they ever saw that gold again. Hengall ignored the groan. There are those here,' he shouted, 'who would have me lead our warriors against the folk of Cathallo, and there are folk in Cathallo who would like their young men to attack us! Yet not all in Cathallo wish war on us. They know that many of their young men will die, and that even if they win the war they will be weakened by the fight. So there will be no war,' he finished abruptly. That had been a very long speech for Hengall, and a rare one in that he had revealed his thinking. Tell someone your thoughts, he had once said, and you give away your soul, but he was hardly giving away secrets when he declared his abhorrence of war. Hengall the Warrior hated war. The business of life, he liked to say, is to plant grain, not blades. He did not mind leading war bands against Outlanders, for they were strangers and thieves, but he detested fighting against the neighbouring tribes, for they were cousins and they shared Ratharryn's language and Ratharryn's gods. He looked at Lengar. 'Where's the dead Outlander?' he asked.

'In the Old Temple,' Lengar muttered. His tone was surly.

Take a priest,' Hengall instructed Galeth, 'and get rid of the body.' He ducked back into his hut, leaving Lengar defeated and humiliated.

The last of the mists vanished as the sun broke through the thin cloud. The moss-covered thatch steamed gently. The excitement in Ratharryn was over for the moment, though there were still the after-effects of the storm to marvel at. The river flowed above its banks, the great ditch which lay inside the encircling embankment was flooded and the fields of wheat and barley were beaten flat.

And Hengall was still the chief.

—«»—«»—«»—

The vast earthen embankment defined Ratharryn. Folk still marvelled that their ancestors had made such a wall for it stood five times the height of a man and ringed the huts where close to a hundred families lived. The bank had been scraped from soil and chalk with antlers and ox-blades, and was topped by the skulls of oxen, wolves and enemy spearmen to keep away the spirits of the dark forest. Every settlement, even the mean houses up on the higher land, had skulls to frighten the spirits, but Ratharryn mounted its skulls on the great earth bank that also served to deter and awe the tribe's enemies.

The families all lived in the southern part of the enclosure, while in the north were the huts of the potters and carpenters, the forge of the tribe's one smith and the pits of the leather workers. There was still space inside the bank where herds of cattle and pigs could be sheltered if an enemy threatened, and at those times the people would throng to the two temples built inside the earthen ring. Both shrines were rings of timber poles. The largest had five rings and was a temple to Lahanna, the goddess of the moon, while the smaller, with just three rings, was for Arryn, the god of the valley, and for Mai, his wife, who was goddess of the river. The highest poles of those temples stretched three times the height of Galeth, who was the tribe's tallest man, but they were dwarfed by the third temple which lay just to the south of the encircling embankment. That third temple had six rings of timber, and two of the rings had wooden lintels spanning their posts' tops, and that temple belonged to Slaol, the sun god. The Sun Temple had been deliberately built outside the settlement for Slaol and Lahanna were rivals and their temples had to be separated so that a sacrifice at one could not be seen from the other.

Slaol, Lahanna, Arryn and Mai were the chief deities of Ratharryn, but the people knew there were a thousand other gods in the valley, and as many again in the hills, and countless more beyond the hills, and a myriad in the winds. No tribe could build temples for each of the gods, nor even know who they all were, and besides that multitude of unknown gods there were the spirits of the dead, spirits of animals, spirits of streams, spirits of trees, spirits of fire, spirits of the air, spirits of everything that crept and breathed and killed or grew. And if a man was silent, standing on a hill in the evening quiet, he could sometimes hear the murmuring of the spirits, and that murmur could make a man mad unless he constantly prayed at the shrines.

Then there was a fourth shrine, the Old Temple, that lay on the southern hill where it was overgrown with hazel and choked with weeds. That temple had been dedicated to Slaol, but years before, no one could remember when, the tribe had built Slaol the new temple close to the settlement and the old shrine had been abandoned. It had just decayed, yet it must still possess power, for it was there that the gold of the Outfolk had come. Now, on the morning after the great storm, Galeth took three men to the ancient temple to find and bury the Outlander's body. The four men were accompanied by Neel, the youngest of Ratharryn's priests, who went to protect them from the dead stranger's spirit.

The group stopped at the brow of the hill and made a bow to the grave mounds that stood between the Old Temple and the settlement. Neel howled like a dog to attract the attention of the ancestors' spirits, then told those spirits what errand brought the men to the high ground. Galeth, while Neel chanted his news to the dead, stared at the sacred way that ran straight as an arrow's flight off to the west. The ancestors had built that path but, like the Old Temple, it was now overgrown and abandoned, and not even the priests could say why its long straight ditches and banks had been scratched from the earth. Hirac thought it had been made to placate Rannos, the god of thunder, but he did not really know nor did he care. Now, as Galeth leaned on his spear and waited for Neel to detect an omen, it seemed to him that the world was wrong. It was decaying, just as the ancient sacred path and the Old Temple were decaying. Just as Ratharryn was decaying under the siege of sad harvests and persistent sickness. There was a tiredness in the air, as though the gods had become weary of their endless circling of the green world, and that tiredness frightened Galeth.

'We can go,' Neel declared, though none of the men accompanying him had seen what sign the young priest had detected in the landscape. Perhaps it was the brush of a mist tendril against a tree bough, or the banking flight of a hawk, or the twitch of a hare in the long grass, but Neel was confident that the ancestral spirits had given their approval. So the small party walked on into a small valley and up the further slope to the Old Temple.

Neel led the way through the rotted posts on the causeway and into the hazels. The young priest, his deerskin tunic soaked from the wet leaves, stopped with surprise when he reached the old death house. He frowned and hissed, then touched his groin to avert evil. It was not the stranger's body that caused that precaution, but rather because the space in the shrine's centre had been deliberately cleared of weeds and hazel. It looked as though someone worshipped here in secret, though the presence of the ox-skull suggested that whoever came to this forgotten place prayed to Slaol for the ox was Slaol's beast, just as the badger and the bat and the owl belonged to Lahanna.

Galeth also touched his groin, but he was warding off the spirit of the dead stranger who lay on his back with the three arrows still protruding from his chest. Neel dropped onto all fours and barked like a dog to drive the dead man's spirit far from the cold flesh. He barked and howled for a long time, then suddenly stood, brushed his hands and said the corpse was now safe. 'Strip him,' Galeth told his men, 'and dig a grave for him in the ditch.' The stranger would be given no ceremony in his death, since he was not of Ratharryn. He was a mere Outlander. No one would dance for him and no one would sing for him, for his ancestors were not Ratharryn's ancestors.

Galeth, despite his huge strength, found it hard to free the arrows for the stranger's cold flesh had tightened on the wooden shafts, but the shafts did at last come loose, though their flint heads stayed inside the corpse as they were supposed to do. All the tribes tied their arrow-heads loosely so that an animal or an enemy could not pull out the barbed flint which, instead, would stay in the wound to fester. Galeth tossed the three shafts away, then stripped the body naked, leaving only the flat piece of stone that was tied to the dead man's wrist. Neel feared that the stone, which was beautifully polished, was a magical amulet that could infect Ratharryn with a dark spirit from the Outfolk's nightmares, and though Galeth insisted that it had merely protected the man's wrist from his bowstring's lash, the young priest would not be persuaded. He touched his groin to avert evil, then spat on the stone. 'Bury it!'

Galeth's men used antler picks and ox shoulder-blade shovels to deepen the ditch beside the temple's entrance to the sun, then Galeth dragged the naked body through the hazels and dumped it in the shallow hole. The stranger's remaining arrows were broken and tossed in beside him, and then the spoil was kicked over the body and trampled flat. Neel urinated on the grave, mumbled a curse on the dead man's spirit, then turned back into the temple.

'Aren't we finished?' Galeth asked.

The young priest raised a hand to demand silence. He was creeping through the hazels, knees bent, stopping every other pace to listen, just as though he were stalking some large beast. Galeth let him go, presuming that Neel was making certain the stranger's spirit was not clinging to the temple, but then there was a rush of feet, a yelp and a piteous howl from deep within the hazels and Galeth ran into the shrine's centre to find Neel holding a struggling creature by the ear. The priest's captive was a dirty youth with wild black hair that hung matted over a filthy face, so filthy that he seemed as much beast as human. The youth, who was skeletally thin, was beating at Neel's legs and squealing like a pig while Neel flailed wildly in an attempt to silence him.

'Let him go,' Galeth ordered.

'Hirac wants him,' Neel said, at last succeeding in landing a stinging blow on the youth's face. 'And I want to know why he's been hiding here! I smelt him. Filthy beast,' he spat at the boy, then clouted him again. 'I knew someone had been interfering here,' Neel went on triumphantly, gesturing with his free hand at the carefully cleared space where the ox-skull sat, 'and it's this dirty little wretch!' The last word turned into an agonized scream as the priest suddenly let go of the boy's ear and doubled over in pain, and Galeth saw that the boy had reached under Neel's bone-fringed tunic to squeeze his groin, and then, like a fox cub unexpectedly released from a hound's jaws, dropped to all fours and scrambled into the hazels.

'Fetch him!' Neel shouted. His hands were clutched to his groin and he was rocking back and forward to contain the agony.

'Let him be,' Galeth said.

'Hirac wants him!' Neel insisted.

'Then let Hirac fetch him,' Galeth retorted angrily. 'And go. Go!' He drove the injured priest from the temple's cleared centre, then crouched beside the hazels where the strange creature had vanished. 'Camaban?' Galeth called into the leaves. 'Camaban?' There was no answer. 'I'm not going to hurt you.'

'Everyone hurts m-m-me,' Camaban said from deep in the bushes.

'I don't,' Galeth said, 'you know I don't.' There was a pause and then Camaban appeared nervously from deep inside the hazel thicket. His face was long and thin, with a prominent jaw and large green eyes that were wary. 'Come and talk to me,' said Galeth, retreating to the centre of the clearing. 'I won't hurt you. I've never hurt you.'

Camaban crept forward on hands and feet. He could stand, he could even walk, but his gait was grotesquely dipping since he had been born with a clubbed left foot, for which reason he had been named Camaban. The name meant Crooked Child, though most of the tribe's children called him Pig, or worse. He was Hengall's second son, but Hengall had disowned him and banished him from Ratharryn's walls, dooming the child to scavenge a living among the folk who lived beyond the great embankment. Camaban had been ten when he was cast out, and that had been four summers before, and many marvelled that Camaban had lived since his banishment. Most cripples died very young, or else were chosen to die for the gods, but Camaban had survived. By now, if he had not been a cripple and an outcast, he would have taken the ordeals of manhood, but the tribe would not take him as a man so he was still a child, the crooked child.

Hengall would have preferred to kill Camaban at birth because a crippled son was a disastrous omen, worse than a daughter, but the boy had been born with the red mark on his belly and the mark was shaped like a crescent moon and Hirac had declared that the baby was marked by Lahanna. The child might yet walk, the high priest had said, so give him time. Camaban's mother had also begged for his life. She had then been Hengall's oldest wife and had been barren for so long that it was thought she would never give birth. She had prayed to Lahanna, as all childless women do, and she had made a pilgrimage to Cathallo where Sannas, the sorceress, had given her herbs to eat and made her lie one full night wrapped in the bloody pelt of a newly killed wolf. Camaban came nine moons later, but was born crooked. His mother pleaded for him, but it was the moon mark on Camaban's belly that persuaded Hengall to spare the boy. Camaban's mother never had another child, but she had loved her wolf-son and when she died Camaban had wailed like an orphaned cub. Hen-gall had struck his son to silence and then, in disgust, had ordered that the cripple be cast outside Ratharryn's wall.

'Are you hungry?' Galeth now asked the boy. 'I know you can talk,' he said after waiting for an answer, 'you talked just now! Are you hungry?'

'I'm always hungry,' Camaban answered, peering suspiciously from under his tangle of matted hair.

'I'll have Lidda bring you food,' Galeth said. 'But where should she leave it?'

'B-b-by the river,' Camaban said, 'where Hirac's son died.' Everyone knew that benighted place downstream from the settlement. The high priest's child had drowned there, and now a sloe bush, which Hirac claimed was his son's spirit, grew among the alders and willow.

'Not here?' Galeth asked.

'This is secret!' Camaban said fiercely, then pointed up to the sky. 'Look!' he said excitedly. Galeth looked and saw nothing. 'The p-p-post!' Camaban stuttered. 'The p-post.'

Galeth looked again. 'The post?' he asked, then remembered that there had been one post of the death house left in the Old Temple. It had been a familiar enough landmark, jutting and leaning from the clump of hazels, but now it was broken. The lower half was still planted in the earth, but the upper part lay charred and shattered among the undergrowth. 'It was struck by lightning,' Galeth said.

'Slaol,' Camaban said.

'Not Slaol,' Galeth said, 'Rannos.' Rannos was the god of lightning.

'Slaol!' Camaban insisted angrily. 'Slaol!'

'All right! Slaol,' Galeth said good-naturedly. He looked down at the wild-haired boy, whose face was contorted with rage. 'And what do you know of Slaol?'

'He t-t-talks to me,' Camaban said.

Galeth touched his groin to deflect the god's displeasure. 'Talks to you?'

'All night sometimes,' Camaban said. 'And he was angry because L-L-Lengar came back and t-t-took the treasure away. It's Slaol's treasure, see?' He said this last very earnestly.

'How do you know Lengar took the treasure?' Galeth asked.

'B-b-because I watched him! I was here! He t-t-tried to kill Saban and didn't see me. I was in here.' Camaban twisted round to burrow back into the hazel bushes. Galeth followed, crawling down a passage that had been trampled through the weeds to where Camaban had woven supple branches together into a living hut. 'Here's where I live,' Camaban said, staring defiantly at his uncle. 'I'm the g-g-guardian of the temple.'

Galeth could have cried for pity at the boy's pathetic boast. Camaban's bed was a pile of soaking bracken, beside which lay his few belongings: a fox's skull, a broken pot and a raven's wing. His only clothing was a rotting sheep's pelt that stank like a tanner's pit. 'So no one knows that you live here?' Galeth asked.

'Only you,' the boy said trustingly. 'I haven't even t-t-told Saban. He brings me food sometimes, b-b-but I make him take it to the river.'

'Saban brings you food?' Galeth asked, surprised and pleased. 'And you say Slaol talks to you here?'

'Every d-d-day,' Camaban stuttered.

Galeth smiled at that nonsense, but Camaban did not see for he had turned and reached further into the leaves where, from a hiding place, he brought out a short bow. It was an Outfolk bow, the stranger's bow with its wrappings of sinew lashed about the strips of wood and antler. 'L-L-Lengar used it last night,' Camaban said. 'The m-m-man was d-d-dying anyway.' He paused, looking worried. 'Why does H-H-Hirac want me?' he asked.

Galeth hesitated. He did not want to say that Camaban was to be sacrificed, though there could be no other reason for Hirac's demand.

'He wants to k-k-kill me,' Camaban said calmly, 'doesn't he?'

Galeth nodded reluctantly. He wanted to tell his outcast nephew to run away, to go west or south into the woods, but what good would such advice do? The child would die anyway, caught by beasts or captured by slavers, and it would be better if he were given to Lahanna. 'You will go to the goddess, Camaban,' Galeth said, 'and you'll become a star and will look down on us.'

'When?' Camaban asked, seemingly unmoved by his uncle's promise.

'Tomorrow, I think.'

The boy gave Galeth a mischievous grin. 'You c-c-can tell Hirac that I'll b-b-be at Ratharryn in the morning.' He turned to push the precious bow back into its hiding place. Other things were concealed there: the stranger's empty quiver, a snake's skin, the bones of a murdered child, more bones that had small marks scratched on their flanks and, most precious of all, two of the small golden lozenges that Camaban had retrieved while Lengar had pursued Saban. Now he took those lozenges and held them tight in his fist, but did not show them to Galeth. 'You think I'm a fool,' he asked, 'don't you?'

'No,' Galeth said.

'B-b-but I am,' Camaban said. He was Slaol's fool, and he dreamed dreams.

But no one took any notice, for he was crippled. So they would kill him.

—«»—«»—«»—

Next morning Neel had two men dig a shallow grave in Lahanna's temple, just beside the outer ring of poles. It was, the men agreed, an auspicious day for the sacrifice for the clouds that had trailed the storm were thinning fast and Lahanna was showing her pale face in Slaol's sky. A few darker clouds appeared as the crowd gathered about the temple's five rings and some feared that Hirac would delay the sacrifice, but he must not have been concerned about the clouds for at last the dancers appeared from the high priest's hut. The dancers were women who carried leafy ash branches with which they swept the ground as they capered ahead of the seven priests whose naked bodies had been whitened with the slurry of chalk in which finger patterns swirled. Hirac wore a pair of antlers tied to his head with leather laces and the horns tossed dangerously as he danced behind the women. A ring of bones circled his waist, more bones hung from his mud-crusted hair, and a shining talisman of amber dangled at his neck. Neel, the youngest priest, played a flute made from the leg bone of a swan and its notes skittered wildly as he danced. Gilan, who was next oldest after Hirac, led Camaban by the hand. The boy had been allowed back into Ratharryn for this one day, and while he was inside the embankment the women had woven flowers into his black hair that had been untangled with bone combs so that it now fell straight to his thin waist. He too was naked, and his washed skin looked unnaturally clean. The red mark of Lahanna showed on his flat belly. Like Hengall's other two sons he was tall, though each time he stepped on his left foot his whole body made a grotesque twisting dip. Hengall and the tribe's elders followed the priests.

Four men began to beat wooden drums as the procession approached, and the tribe, ringing the temple, began to dance. At first they just swayed from side to side, but as the drummers increased the speed of their beating they stepped sunwise about the circle. They paused only to make way for the priests and the elders and, once the procession had passed through them, the dancing ring closed up.

Only the priests and the victim were allowed through the gap in the shallow bank that ringed the temple. Hirac was first, and he went to the newly dug grave where he howled up at the faded moon to draw the goddess's attention while Gilan led Camaban to the circle's far side as the other priests capered about the temple rings. One held the tribe's skull pole high so that the ancestors could see what important thing was being done in Ratharryn this day, while another carried the massive thigh bone of an aurochs. One end of the bone was a gnarled and knobbly mass that had been painted with red ochre. It was the tribe's Kill-Child, and the watching children, who danced with their parents to the beat of the drums, eyed it warily.

Hengall stood in the temple entrance. He alone did not dance. At his feet lay gifts for the goddess: a stone mace, an ingot of bronze and an Outfolk jar with its pattern of cords pressed into the clay. The priests, who did no work in the fields and raised no flocks or herds, would keep those gifts and trade them for food.

The tribe danced until their legs were tired, until they were almost in a trance induced by the drums and by their own chanting. They called Lahanna's name while the sweepers, who had driven away any spirits that might try to intrude on the ceremony, dropped their ash branches and began to sing a repetitive song that called on the moon goddess. Watch us, they sang, see what we bring to you, watch us, and there was happiness in their voices for they knew that the gift would bring pleasure to the goddess.

Hirac danced with closed eyes. The sweat was making runnels through the chalked pattern on his skin and it seemed, in his ecstasy, as though he might fall into the newly dug grave, but he suddenly became still, opened his eyes, and howled again at the moon that still glimmered between the white clouds.

A quiet dropped on the temple. The dancers slowed and stopped, the song faded, the drummers rested their fingers and Neel let the swan-bone flute fall silent.

Hirac howled again, then reached out with his right hand and took the Kill-Child. The priest with the skull pole moved close behind the high priest so that the ancestors could see all that happened.

Gilan urged Camaban forward. No one expected the boy to go willingly, but to their surprise the naked youth limped unhesitatingly towards the grave and a sigh of approval sounded from the tribe. It was better when the sacrifice was willing, even if the willingness did come from stupidity.

Camaban stopped beside his grave, exactly where he was supposed to stop, and Hirac forced a smile to soothe any fears the boy might have. Camaban blinked up at the priest, but said nothing. He had not spoken all day, not even when the women had hurt him by tugging at the knots in his hair with their long-toothed combs. He was smiling.

'Who speaks for the boy?' Hirac demanded.

'I do,' Hengall growled from the temple's entrance.

'What is his name?'

'Camaban,' Hengall said.

Hirac paused, angry that the ritual was not being observed. 'What is his name?' he called again, louder this time.

'Camaban,' Hengall said, and then, after a pause, 'son of Hengall, son of Lock.'

A cloud covered the sun, casting a shadow over the temple. Some in the tribe touched their groins to avert ill luck, but others noted that Lahanna still showed in the sky.

'Who has the life of Camaban, son of Hengall, son of Lock?' Hirac demanded.

'I do,' Hengall said, and opened a leather pouch that hung from his belt and took from it a small chalk ball. He gave it to Neel who carried it to Hirac.

The ball, no larger than an eye, was the token carved at the birth of a child which was destroyed when the child became an adult; until then it was the possessor of the child's spirit. If the child died the ball could be ground into dust, and the dust mixed with water or milk and then drunk so that the spirit would pass to another body. If the child vanished, snatched by the spirits or by an Outfolk hunting party seeking slaves, then the ball might be buried by a temple post so that the Gods would offer the missing child protection.

Hirac took the ball, rubbed it in his groin, and then held it high in the air towards the moon. 'Lahanna!' he cried. 'We bring you a gift! We give you Camaban, son of Hengall, son of Lock!' He threw the ball onto the grass beyond the grave. Camaban smiled again, and for a moment it looked as though he might lurch forward and pick it up, but Gilan whispered at him to be still and the boy obeyed.

Hirac stepped over the grave. 'Camaban,' he shouted, 'son of Hengall, son of Lock, I give you to Lahanna! Your flesh will be her flesh, your blood her blood and your spirit her spirit. Camaban, son of Hengall, son of Lock, I cast you from the tribe into the company of the goddess. I destroy you!' And with those words he raised the Kill-Child high over his head.

'No!' a frightened voice called, and the whole astonished tribe looked to see that it was Saban who had spoken. The boy seemed aghast himself, for he placed a hand over his mouth, but his distress was plain. Camaban was his half-brother. 'No,' he whispered behind his hand, 'please, no!'

Hengall scowled, but Galeth put a comforting arm on Saban's shoulder. 'It has to happen,' Galeth whispered to the boy.

'He's my brother,' Saban protested.

'It has to happen,' Galeth insisted.

'Quiet!' Hengall growled, and Lengar, who had been sullen ever since his loss of face the previous morning, smiled to see that his younger brother was also out of favour with their father.

'Camaban,' Hirac shouted, 'son of Hengall, son of Lock, I give you to Lahanna!' Annoyed by Saban's interruption, he brought the great bone club down so that its ochred end smashed the chalk ball into fragments. He pounded the fragments into dust, and the watching crowd moaned as Camaban's spirit was thus obliterated. Lengar grinned, while Hengall's face showed nothing. Galeth flinched and Saban was weeping, but there was nothing they could do. This was business for the gods and for the priests.

'What is the boy's name?' Hirac demanded.

'He has no name,' Gilan responded.

'Who is his father?' Hirac asked.

'He has no father,' Gilan said.

'What is his tribe?'

'He has no tribe,' Gilan intoned. 'He does not exist.'

Hirac stared into Camaban's green eyes. He did not see a boy, for the boy was already dead, his life-spirit shattered and crushed into white dust. 'Kneel,' he ordered.

The youth obediently knelt. To some of the tribe it seemed odd that such a tall youth was to be killed by the aurochs' bone, but, other than Saban, few in Ratharryn regretted Camaban's death. Cripples brought ill luck, so cripples were better dead, to which end Hirac raised the Kill-Child high above his head, looked once at Lahanna then down to Camaban. The high priest tensed to give the killing blow, but never gave it. He was motionless, and there was a sudden horror on Hirac's face, and the horror was compounded because at that moment a rift opened in the clouds covering Slaol and a beam of sunlight lanced into the temple. A raven settled on one of the tallest poles and called loudly.

The Kill-Child quivered in Hirac's hands, but he could not bring it down.

'Kill it,' Gilan whispered, 'kill it!' But Gilan was standing behind Camaban and he could not see what Hirac could see. Hirac was staring down at Camaban who had stuck out his tongue and on the tongue were two slivers of gold. Outfolk gold. Slaol's gold.

The raven called again and Hirac looked up at the bird, wondering what its presence portended.

Camaban tucked the gold pieces back into his cheek, wet a finger and dabbed it into the powdered chalk of his soul. 'Slaol will be angry if you kill me,' he said to Hirac without stuttering, then he licked the chalk off his finger. He collected more, assembling his shattered spirit and eating it.

'Kill it!' Neel screamed.

'Kill it!' Hengall echoed.

'Kill it!' Lengar called.

'Kill it!' the crowd shouted.

But Hirac could not move. Camaban ate more chalk, then looked up at the priest. 'Slaol commands you to spare me,' he said very calmly, still without any stutter.

Hirac stepped back, almost into the grave, and let the Kill-Child fall. 'The goddess,' he announced hoarsely, 'has rejected the sacrifice.'

The crowd wailed. Saban, his eyes full of tears, was laughing.

And the crooked child went free.

There was fear in Ratharryn after the failed sacrifice for there were few omens worse than a god rejecting a gift. Hirac would not say why he had refused to kill the child, only that he had been given a sign, then he took himself to his hut where his wives claimed he was suffering from a fever, and two nights later those same wives wailed in the darkness because the high priest was dead. They blamed Camaban, saying the cripple had cursed Hirac, but Gilan, who was now Ratharryn's oldest priest, claimed that it had been a nonsense trying to kill a child marked with Lahanna's sign. Hirac had only himself to blame, Gilan said, for Hirac had woefully mistranslated the message of the gods. The gold had gone to the Old Temple and that was surely a sign that Slaol wanted the temple remade. Hengall listened to Gilan, who was a cheerful, efficient man, but distrusted because of his admiration for Cathallo. 'In Cathallo,' Gilan urged Hengall, 'they have one great temple for all the gods and it has served them well. We should do the same.'

'Temples cost treasure,' Hengall said gloomily.

'Ignore the gods,' Gilan retorted, 'and what will all the gold, bronze and amber in the world do for you?'

Gilan wanted to be high priest, but age alone would not give him that honour. A sign was needed from the gods and all the priests were seeking signs before, together, they would choose one of their number to succeed Hirac. Yet all the signs seemed bad for in the days following the failed sacrifice the warriors of Cathallo became ever bolder in their forays into Ratharryn's territory. Day after day Hen-gall heard of stolen cattle and pigs, and Lengar argued that the war drum should be sounded and a band of spearmen sent north to intercept the raiders, but Hengall still shied away from war. Instead of sending spears he sent Gilan to talk with Cathallo's rulers, though everyone knew that really meant talking to Sannas, the terrifying sorceress. Cathallo might have a chief, it might have great war-leaders, but Sannas ruled there, and many in Hengall's tribe feared that she had put some curse on Ratharryn. Why else had the sacrifice failed?

The omens became worse. A child drowned in the river, an otter tore apart a dozen fish-traps, a viper was seen in Arryn and Mai's temple, and Hengall's new wife miscarried. Grey bands of rain swept from the west. Gilan returned from Cathallo, spoke with Hengall, then walked north again; the tribe wondered what news the priest had brought and what answer Hengall had returned to Cathallo, but the chief said nothing and the folk of Ratharryn went on with their work. There were pots to be made, flints to be dug, hides to tan, pigs to herd, cattle to milk, water to fetch, buildings to repair, willow fish-traps to be woven and boats to be hacked out of the vast forest trees. A trading party arrived from the southern coast, their oxen laden with shellfish, salt and fine stone axes, and Hengall took his levy from the men before letting them travel north towards Cathallo. Hengall buried one of the axes in Slaol's temple and another in Lahanna's, but the gifts made no difference for the next day wolves came to the high pasture and took a heifer, three sheep and a dozen pigs.

Lengar alone seemed unaffected by the terrible omens. He had suffered the humiliation of yielding the gold to his father, but he retrieved his reputation by his prowess as a hunter. Day after day he and his companions brought back carcasses, tusks and hides. Lengar hung the tusks either side of his doorway as proofs that the gods smiled on him. Hengall, summoning the last shreds of his authority, had sternly ordered Lengar to stay out of the northern woods and thus avoid any confrontation with the spearmen of Cathallo, but one day Lengar came across some Outfolk in the south country and he brought back six enemy heads that he mounted on poles on the embankment's crest. Crows feasted on the grey-tattooed heads and, seeing the trophies on their skyline, more and more of the tribe was convinced that Lengar was favoured by the gods and that Hengall was doomed.

But then the Outfolk messengers came.

They arrived just as Hengall was dispensing justice, a thing that was done with each new moon when the chief, the high priest and the tribe's elders gathered in Arryn and Mai's temple and listened to wrangles about theft, threats, murder, infidelity and broken promises. They could condemn a man to death, though that was rare for they preferred to make a guilty man work for the wronged party. On that morning Hengall was frowning as he listened to a complaint that a field's boundary marker had been moved. The argument was passionate, but was broken off when Jegar, Lengar's friend, announced that Outfolk horsemen were coming from the west.

The Outlanders were blowing a ram's horn to proclaim that they travelled in peace and Hengall ordered Lengar to take a group of warriors to greet the strangers, but to allow them no nearer to Ratharryn than Slaol's temple. Hengall wanted time to consult with the priests and elders, and the priests wanted to don their finery. Food needed to be prepared, for though the Outfolk were regarded as enemies, these visitors came in peace and so would have to be fed.

The younger priests prepared a meeting place on the river bank just outside the settlement. They planted the skull pole in the turf, then splashed water to mark out a circle within which the visitors could sit, and outside that circle they placed ox-skulls, chalk axes and sprigs of holly to constrain whatever malevolence the Outfolk might have brought. The people of Ratharryn gathered excitedly outside the circle, for no one could remember any such thing ever happening before. Outfolk traders were common enough visitors, and there were plenty of Outfolk slaves in the settlement, but never before had Outfolk emissaries arrived and their coming promised to make a story to tell and retell in the long nights.

Hengall was at last ready. The tribe's best warriors were dispatched to escort the strangers to the meeting place while Gilan, who had just returned from his last mission to Cathallo, wove charms to prevent the strangers' magic doing harm. The Outfolk had their own sorcerer, a lame man whose hair was stiffened with red clay; he howled at Gilan and Gilan howled back, and then the lame man put a deer's rib between his naked legs, clamped it there for a heartbeat, then tossed it away to show that he was discarding his powers.

The lame sorcerer lay flat on the ground in the meeting place and thereafter did nothing except stare into the sky, while the other eight strangers squatted in a line to face Hengall and his tribal elders. The Outfolk had brought their own interpreter, a trader whom many of Ratharryn's folk knew and feared. He was called Haragg and he was a giant; a huge, brutal-faced man who travelled with his deaf-mute son who was even taller and more frightening. The son had not come with this embassy, and Haragg, who usually arrived at Ratharryn with fine stone axes and heavy bronze blades, had brought nothing but words, though his companions all carried heavy leather bags that Hengall's people looked at expectantly.

The sun was at its height when the talking began. The strangers first announced that they came from Sarmennyn, a place as far west as a man could walk before he met the wild sea and a country, they said, of hard rock, high hills and thin soil. Sarmennyn, they went on, was far away, very far, which meant they had come a long distance to talk with the great Hengall, chief of Ratharryn, though that flattery went past Hengall with as much effect as dawn mist drifting by a temple post. Despite the day's warmth the chief had draped his black bear pelt across his shoulders and was carrying his great stone mace.

The leader of the strangers, a tall, gaunt man with a scarred face and one blind eye, explained that one of their own people, a young and foolish man, had stolen some paltry treasures belonging to the tribe. The thief had fled. Now the strangers had heard that he had come to Hengall's land and there died, which was no more than he deserved. Small as the treasures were, the strangers still sought their return and were willing to pay well for them.

Hengall listened to Haragg's long translation, then objected that he had been sleeping and did not understand why the Outlanders had woken him if all they wanted was to exchange a few trifles. Still, he conceded, since the strangers had disturbed his sleep, and since they were being respectful, he was willing to waste a little time in seeing what offerings they had brought. Hengall did not trust Haragg to interpret for him, so instead his speech was translated by Valan, a slave who had been captured from the Out-folk many years before. Valan had served Hengall a long time and was now the chief's friend rather than his slave and was even allowed to keep his own hut, cattle and wife.

The one-eyed man apologized for waking the great Hengall and said he would have happily conducted the transaction with one of Hengall's servants, but since the chief had been gracious enough to listen to their plea, would he also be kind enough to confirm that the missing treasures were indeed in his keeping?

'We normally throw trifles away,' Hengall said, 'but perhaps we kept them.' He gestured to the embankment where a group of small children, bored with the talk, were tumbling among the woad plants growing just beneath the Outlanders' heads that Lengar had brought back from the forest. Those heads had not come from the Outfolk of Sarmennyn, but from other Outfolk tribes who lived closer to Ratharryn, but their presence was still unsettling to the visitors. 'Children like bright things,' Hengall said, nodding towards the impaled heads, 'so maybe we kept your treasures to amuse the young ones? But you say you have brought other things to exchange for them?'

The strangers laid their gifts on the turf. There were some fine otter hides and seal skins, a basket of sea-shells, three bronze bars, a rod of copper, some curious sharp teeth that they claimed came from ocean monsters, a portion of shiny turtle shell and, best of all, some lumps of amber that were scarce as gold. Hengall must have noted that the bags were still half full for he stretched his arms, yawned again, tugged at the tangles in his beard and finally said that so long as he was awake he might go and talk to the goddess Mai about the prospect of catching some fish from her river. 'We saw some large pike there yesterday, did we not?' he called to Galeth.

'Very large pike.'

'I like eating pike,' Hengall said.

The strangers hastily added more bronze ingots and the people of Ratharryn murmured astonishment at the value of the gifts. And still the offerings came; some finely carved bone needles, a dozen bone combs, a tangle of fish-hooks, three bronze knives of great delicacy, and finally a stone axe with a beautifully polished head that had a blueish tinge and glittered with tiny shining flecks. Hengall lusted after that axe, but he forced himself to sound unimpressed as he wondered why the Outfolk had bothered to carry such miserable offerings so far from their own country.

The leader of the strangers added one final treasure: a bar of gold. The bar was the size of a spearhead and heavy enough to need two hands to carry it, and the watching crowd gasped. By itself that shining lump contained more gold than was in all the lozenges. The Outfolk were well known to be grudging with their gold, yet now they were offering a great piece of it, and that was a mistake for it contradicted their assertion that the missing treasures were mere trifles. Hengall, still pretending to be indifferent, pressed the strangers until, reluctantly, they confessed that the missing treasures were not trivial at all, but sacred objects that arrayed the sun's bride each year. The treasures, the grim-faced Haragg admitted, had been gifts from their sea god to Erek himself and the people of Sarmennyn feared that their loss would bring ill fortune. The strangers were pleading now. They wanted their treasures back, and they would pay for them dearly because they were terrified of Erek's displeasure.

'Erek is their name for Slaol,' Valan told Hengall.

Hengall, pleased to have forced the admission from the strangers, stood. 'We shall think on this matter,' he announced.

Food was fetched from the settlement. There was cold pork, flat bread, smoked fish, and bowls of chickweed and sorrel. The strangers ate warily, fearful of being poisoned, but afraid to give offence by rejecting the food. Only their priest did not eat, but just lay staring into the sky. Gilan and Ratharryn's priests huddled together, whispering fiercely, while Lengar and his friends formed another small group at the circle's far side. Folk came to inspect the offered gifts, though none crossed the charm-ringed circle to touch them for the gifts had still not been cleansed of Outfolk sorcery by Ratharryn's priests. Hengall talked with the elders and sometimes asked questions of the priests, though it was mainly with Gilan that he talked. The priest had now made two visits to Cathallo and he spoke urgently with Hengall who listened, nodded and finally seemed convinced by whatever Gilan urged on him.

The sun was sliding down to its western home when Hengall resumed his place, but custom demanded that any man in the tribe could have his opinion heard before Hen-gall pronounced a decision. A few men did stand and most advised accepting the Outfolk's payment. 'The gold is not ours,' Galeth said, 'but was stolen from a god. How can it bring us good luck? Let the strangers have their treasures.' Voices murmured in support, then Lengar beat the ground with his spear staff and the murmurs died as Hengall's son stood to address the crowd.

'Galeth is right!' Lengar said, causing surprise among those who thought that the two men could never agree. 'The Outfolk should have their treasures back. But we should demand a higher price than these scourings from their huts.' He gestured at the goods piled in front of the strangers. 'If the Outfolk want their treasures returned, then let them come from their far country with all their spears and all their bows and offer themselves to our service for a year.'

Haragg, the Outfolk interpreter, whispered to his companions, who looked worried, but Hengall shook his head. 'And how are we to feed this horde of armed Outfolk?' he asked his son.

'They will feed from the crops and cattle that they capture with their weapons.'

'And what crops and cattle are they?' Hengall asked.

'Those that grow and graze to the north of us,' Lengar answered defiantly, and many in the tribe voiced their agreement. The tribe of Sarmennyn was famous for its warriors. They were lean, hungry men from a bare land and they took with their spears what their country could not provide. Such feared warriors would surely make brief work of Cathallo and more of Hengall's folk raised their voices in Lengar's support.

Hengall raised his vast club for silence. 'The army of Sarmennyn,' he said, 'has never reached this far into the heartland. Yet now you would invite them? And if they do come with their spears and their bows and their axes, how do we rid ourselves of them? What is to stop them turning on us?'

'We shall outnumber them!' Lengar declared confidently.

Hengall looked scornful. 'You know how many spears they muster?' he demanded, pointing to the strangers.

'I know that with their help we can destroy our enemies,' Lengar retorted.

Hengall stood, a sign that Lengar's time of talking was over. Lengar stayed on his feet for a few heartbeats, then reluctantly squatted. Hengall spoke in a loud voice that reached the outermost part of the crowd. 'Cathallo is not our enemy! Cathallo is powerful, yes, but so are we! The two of us are like dogs. We can fight and maim each other, but the wounds we would inflict would be so deep that neither of us might live. But if we hunt together we shall feed well.' The tribe stared at him in silent surprise. They had expected a decision about the gold lozenges and instead the chief was talking of the problem of Cathallo.

'Together!' Hengall shouted. 'Together, Cathallo and Ratharryn will be as strong as any land in this earth. So we shall bind ourselves in a marriage of tribes.' That news caused a loud gasp from the crowd. 'On midsummer's eve we shall go to Cathallo and dance with their people.' The crowd thought about that, then a slow-growing murmur of agreement spread among them. Only a moment before they had been eagerly supporting Lengar's idea of conquering Cathallo, now they were seduced by Hengall's vision of peace. 'Gilan has talked with their chief and he has agreed that we shall not be one tribe,' Hengall declared, 'but two tribes united like a man and a woman in marriage.'

'And which tribe is the man?' Lengar dared to shout.

Hengall ignored him. There will be no war,' he said flatly, then he looked down at the strangers. 'And there will be no exchange,' he went on. 'Your god was given the treasures, but you lost them, and they were brought to us. They came to our Old Temple, which tells me they are meant to stay here. If we give back the gold, we insult the gods who sent the treasures to our keeping. Their coming is a sign that the temple must be restored, and so it shall be! It will be rebuilt!' Gilan, who had been urging that course, looked pleased.

The one-eyed man protested, threatening to bring war to Ratharryn.

'War?' Hengall brandished his great club. 'War!' he shouted. 'I will give you war if you come to Ratharryn. I will piss on your souls, enslave your children, make playthings of your women and grind your bones to powder. That is war as we know it!' He spat towards the strangers. 'Take your belongings and go,' he ordered.

The stranger's priest howled at the sky and their leader tried a last appeal, but Hengall would not listen. He had rejected the exchange and the Outfolk had no choice but to pick up their gifts and return to their horses.

But that evening, when the sun was tangled among the western trees like a fish caught in a woven-willow trap, Lengar and a dozen of his closest supporters left Ratharryn. They carried bows and spears and had their hounds leashed on long leather ropes, and they claimed they were going back to their hunting grounds. But it was noted that Lengar also took an Outfolk slave, a woman, and that shocked the tribe for women were not taken on hunting expeditions. And that night a half-dozen more young women slipped out of Ratharryn, so next morning the horrified tribe realized that Lengar had not gone hunting at all, but had fled, and that the women had followed their warrior lovers. Hengall's anger overflowed like the river flooding with storm water. He raged at the malign fate that had sent him such an elder son, then he sent warriors on Lengar's trail, though none expected to catch up with the fugitives who had too long a start. Then Hengall heard that Jegar, who was reckoned Lengar's closest friend, was still in Ratharryn and the chief summoned Jegar to his hut door and there ordered him to abase himself.

Jegar lay flat on the ground while Hengall raised his war club over the young man's head. 'Where has my son gone?' he demanded coldly.

'To Sarmennyn,' Jegar answered, 'to the Outfolk.'

'You knew they planned this,' Hengall asked, his rage mounting again, 'and did not tell me?'

'Your son put a curse on my life if I betrayed him,' Jegar said.

Hengall kept the club poised. 'And why did you not go with him? Are you not his soul's friend?'

'I did not go,' Jegar answered humbly, 'because you are my chief and this is my home and I would not live in a far country beside the sea.'

Hengall hesitated. He plainly wanted to slam the club down and spatter the earth with blood, but he was a fair man and he controlled his anger and so lowered the weapon. Jegar had answered his questions well and though Hengall had no liking for the young man, he still raised him to his feet, embraced him, and gave him a small bronze knife as a reward for his loyalty.

But Lengar had gone to the Outfolk. So Hengall burned his son's hut and pounded his pots to dust. He killed Lengar's mother, who had been his own first wife, and he ordered Gilan to use the Kill-Child on a boy who was popularly supposed to be Lengar's son. The child's mother screamed, begging for mercy, but the aurochs' bone swung and the boy died. 'He never lived,' Hengall decreed of Lengar. 'He is no more.'

Next day was the eve of midsummer and the tribe would walk to Cathallo. To make peace. And to face Sannas.

—«»—«»—«»—

At the dawn of the day on which the tribe was to walk north, Saban's father brought him a deerskin tunic, a necklace of boar's teeth and a wooden-handled, flint-bladed knife to wear in the belt. 'You are my son,' Hengall told him, 'my only son. So you must look like a chief's son. Tie your hair back. Stand straight!' He nodded curtly to Saban's mother, his third wife, whom he had long since ceased to summon to his hut, then went to examine the white sacrificial heifer that would be goaded to Cathallo. Even Camaban went to Cathallo. Hengall had not wanted him to go, but Gilan insisted Sannas wanted to see Camaban for herself. So Galeth had fetched the crippled boy from his lair in the Old Temple, and now Camaban limped a few paces behind Saban, Galeth and Galeth's pregnant woman, Lidda. They walked north along the hills above the river valley and it took a whole morning to reach the edge of that high land which meant they were now halfway to Cathallo. For most of the people who stood on the crest and gazed at the woods and marshes ahead, that was the greatest distance they had ever walked from home.

Their path now dropped steeply into thick woods dotted with small fields. This was Maden's land, a place of rich soil, tall trees and wide bogs.

The men of Hengall's tribe moved close to their women as they entered the trees and small boys were given bundles of straw bound tight to sticks, and the straw was set alight from smouldering coals carried in perforated clay pots. The boys then raced up and down the path, waving their smoky clubs and shrieking to drive away the malevolent spirits who might otherwise come and impregnate the women. The priests chanted, the women clutched talismans, and the men beat their spear staves against the tree trunks. Even more chants were needed to propitiate the spirits as the tribe crossed a tangle of small streams close to Maden.

Hengall walked at the head of his tribe, but he waited on the bank of one of the bigger streams for Saban to catch up. 'We must talk,' he told his son, then glanced at Camaban who limped just a few steps behind. The boy had found another rotting sheep's pelt to replace his old tunic, and carried a crude leather bag in which his few belongings, his bones and snakeskin and charms, were stored. He stank, and his hair was once again tangled and dirty. He looked up at his father, gave a shudder, then spat onto the path.

Hengall turned disgustedly away and paced ahead with Saban. After a while he asked Saban if he had noticed how plump Maden's wheat looked? It seemed the storm had spared those fields, Hengall said enviously, then commented that there had been some fine fat pigs in the woods by the river. Pigs and wheat, he said, were all folk needed for life, and for that he thanked the gods. 'Maybe only pigs,' he mused, 'maybe that's all we need to eat. Pigs and fish. The wheat's just a nuisance. It won't seed itself, that's the trouble.' Hengall was carrying a leather bag that clinked as he walked and Saban guessed it contained some of the tribe's treasures. The people far ahead had started singing and the song grew louder as folk caught up the tune. It passed to the walkers behind, but neither Hengall nor Saban joined in. 'In a few years,' Hengall said abruptly, 'you'll be old enough to become chief.'

'If the priests and the people agree,' Saban said cautiously.

'The priests just need bribes,' Hengall said, 'and the people do as they're told.' A pigeon clattered through the leaves and Hengall looked up to see in what direction the bird flew, hoping that it would be a good omen. It was, for the bird made towards the sun.

'Sannas will want to see you,' Hengall said ominously. 'Kneel to her and bow your head. I know she's a woman, but treat her like a chief.' He frowned. 'She's a hard woman, hard and cruel, but she has powers. The gods love her, or else they fear her.' He shook his shaggy head in amazement. 'She was already old when I was a boy!'

Saban felt fear at the prospect of meeting Sannas. 'Why will she want to see me?'

'Because you're to marry a Cathallo girl,' Hengall said flatly, 'and Sannas will choose her. There's no decision made in Cathallo without Sannas. They call Kital chief, but he sucks on the old woman's tits. They all do.'

Saban said nothing. He knew he could not marry anyone until he had passed the ordeals of manhood, but he liked the idea.

'So you're to take a bride from Cathallo,' Hengall said, 'as a sign that our tribes are at peace. You understand that?'

'Yes, father.'

'But Cathallo doesn't know you're my only son now,' Hengall said, 'and they won't be happy that you're still a boy. That's why you must impress Sannas.'

'Yes, father,' Saban said again. He understood now that Kital and Sannas were expecting Lengar to come to Cathallo and claim a bride, but Lengar was gone and so he must take his place.

'And you will be chief,' Hengall said heavily, 'and that means you have to be a leader of our people. But being chief doesn't mean you can do what you want. Folk don't realize that. They want heroes, but heroes get their people killed. The best chiefs know that. They know they can't turn night into day. I can only do what's possible, nothing more. I can break down beaver's dams to stop the fish-traps drying out, but I can't order the river to do it for me.'

'I understand,' Saban said.

'And we can't have war,' Hengall said forcibly. 'I'm not worried that we'd lose, but that we'd be weakened whether we won or lost. You understand that?'

'Yes,' Saban.

'Not that I mean to die yet!' Hengall went on. 'I must be close to thirty-five summers. Think of that, thirty-five! But I've plenty of good years left! My father lived more than fifty years.'

'So will you, I hope,' Saban said clumsily.

'But you must prepare yourself,' Hengall said. 'Pass your ordeals, go hunting, take some Outfolk heads. Show the tribe the gods favour you.' He nodded abruptly and, without another word, turned and signalled for his friend Valan to join him.

Saban waited for Galeth to catch up. 'What did he want?' Galeth asked.

'To tell me I'm to marry a girl from Cathallo,' Saban said.

Galeth smiled. 'And so you should.' Galeth knew the decision meant that Saban was favoured to become the next chief, but Galeth bore no grudge for that. The big man was happiest when he was working with wood, and had no great desire to succeed his elder brother. He cuffed Saban lightly across the head. 'I just hope the girl's pretty.'

'Of course she will be,' Saban said, though he was suddenly afraid that she might not be.

The tribe crossed the last of the marshes, then climbed into hills that were thick with trees, though the woods gradually thinned to reveal the splendours of Cathallo. They passed an ancient shrine, its timber posts rotting and its circle as overgrown with hazels as Ratharryn's Old Temple, then saw grave mounds on the hill slopes ahead. Those hills were as low as the slopes about Ratharryn, but were steeper, and among them was the famous sacred mound. There was nothing like it in Ratharryn, and though some of the tribe's travellers had brought back stories of other sacred mounds, all agreed that none was the size of Cathallo's. It was vast, a hill fit to stand among other hills, but this hill had been made by man; it reached from a valley to touch the sky and it was all gleaming white for it had been made by heaping chalk on top of more chalk. It was taller, far taller than Ratharryn's embankment; as tall, indeed, as the surrounding hills.

'Why did they make it?' Lidda asked Galeth.

'It's Lahanna's image,' Galeth said, his voice touched with awe and explained that the moon goddess, staring down from the stars, could see herself remade upon the earth and would know that Cathallo revered her. Lidda, hearing the explanation, touched her forehead in obeisance to the goddess for she, like most women, revered Lahanna above all the gods and spirits, but Camaban, who was still limping close behind, suddenly laughed. 'What's funny?' Galeth asked.

'They have giant moles in C-C-Cathallo,' Camaban said.

Lidda touched her groin. She was uncomfortable being so close to the cripple, fearing for the child in her belly, and she wished Camaban would fall behind, but he had stubbornly stayed close all day and still dogged her steps as they splashed through a small river and climbed a hill to the east of the mound. The hill was crowned by a temple that came as a relief to many of Hengall's people for it was much smaller than any of the temples at Ratharryn, though it did have stone markers in place of timber poles. The low stones were rough-hewn, mere stumps of rock, and some folk reckoned they were ugly compared to a properly trimmed pole. A group of Cathallo's priests waited at the temple, and it was to them that the first of Ratharryn's gifts was given: the white heifer that had been goaded bloody on the long journey and was now driven through the gap in the temple ditch. Cathallo's priests examined the beast warily. It was not, perhaps, the whitest heifer in Ratharryn, but she was still a good animal with a nearly unblemished hide and there were murmurs of resentment among Hengall's people as the priests appeared to doubt the beast's quality. At last, after prodding and smelling the animal, they grudgingly deemed her acceptable and dragged her to the centre of their small temple where a young priest, naked but for a pair of antlers tied onto his head, waited with a pole-axe. The heifer, seeming to understand what was about to happen, strained to escape the men holding her, so the priests cut the tendons of her legs and the immobilized beast bellowed mournfully as the great axe swung.

Hengall's folk sang Lahanna's lament as they filed through the heifer's wet blood and followed the priests along a path of paired stones. The temple might have failed to impress them, but the avenue of stones did not, for these stones were larger than the temple markers and they led far across the open country. The boulder-edged avenue dipped from the temple to the valley, but swerved before it reached the great chalk mound to stride north towards the crest of a wide down. There were so many stones flanking the sacred track that they could not be counted, and all were as tall or even taller than a man. Some were pillars, symbolizing Slaol, and each pillar was paired with a vast lozenge-shaped slab that honoured Lahanna. Cathallo's wonders really were true, and Hengall's people fell silent as they followed the priests north. They danced as they climbed, clumsily for they were tired, but dutifully shuffling from one side of the avenue to the other, zigzagging their way up to the crest where some folk from Cathallo had assembled to see the visitors. One group of warriors, their bodies greased and hair plaited, leaned on their spears to watch the women pass, though the sight of Camaban prompted the young men to cover their eyes and spit in case his clubbed foot brought them evil.

Saban, who had never visited Cathallo before, had assumed that the massive paired stones lined a path that led from Cathallo's settlement to the small stone temple where the heifer had been sacrificed, but as he crossed the crest of the down he suddenly realized that the small temple, far from being the end of the sacred path, was merely its beginning, and that the true wonders of Cathallo still lay ahead.

The settlement, unwalled, lay to the west, and that was not where the path went. Rather it led towards a great chalk embankment that reared up from the low ground. Word passed down the column of travellers that the white embankment surrounded Cathallo's shrine and Hengall's folk fell silent as they marvelled at the vast wall which looked to be as high and as extensive as the embankment which surrounded Ratharryn. The wall's long summit was crowned with animal and human skulls, while from within the great enclosure came the heavy beat of wooden drums.

The path did not lead direct to the vast temple, but instead, just outside the shrine's entrance, made a double turn so that the wonders within the high chalk circle would not be revealed until the very last moment of the approach. Saban shuffled his dance steps about the double bend and there, suddenly visible beyond the shoulders of the great encircling bank, was Cathallo's shrine. Saban's first impression was of stones. Stones and more stones, for the great space within the soaring chalk wall seemed filled with heavy, high, grey boulders, and some had been newly wetted so that glints of light shone from their rough surfaces. The giant stones lay ringed by a ditch that had been dug inside the chalk wall, and the ditch was as deep as the rampart was high, and the area enclosed by the ditch and wall was almost as large as Ratharryn itself and Ratharryn was a tribe's settlement with winter room for cattle, while this was just one temple.

Some of Ratharryn's women hesitated before entering the temple for women were not allowed inside their tribe's own shrines except when they married, but Cathallo's women urged them onwards. In Cathallo, it seemed, both men and women could enter the circle and so all Hengall's folk danced across the ditch and into the shrine of stones.

There was one wide ring of boulders skimming the ditch's edge, and each of those boulders was the size of the stacks made from the summer's hay in Ratharryn. There were dozens of those massive stones, too many to count, and within their wide circle stood two more rings of stone, each the size of Slaol's temple at Ratharryn, and still more stones stood between those inner rings. One of those stones was a ringstone, a boulder with a great hole in it, and that pierced rock had been lifted up on another, while nearby was a death house made from three massive stone slabs. Saban stared in stupefied awe. He did not understand how any man could raise such stones and he knew he must have come to a place where the gods worked marvels. Only Camaban, wincing every time he stepped on his clubbed foot, seemed unimpressed.

The people of Cathallo were massed on the embankment's inner slope and they let out a great cry of welcome as the visitors danced into the sacred ring. The shout echoed all around the vast enclosure and then they began to sing.

Kital, chief of Cathallo, waited to greet Hengall's folk. Kital wished to impress, and he did, for he was dressed in an ankle-length deerskin cloak that had been whitened with chalk and urine, then thickly sewn with rings of bronze that reflected the sun so that it seemed to glint when he moved forward to greet Hengall. The chief of Cathallo was tall, with a long thin clean-shaven face, and fair hair that was circled with a fillet of bronze into which he had pushed a dozen long swan feathers. Kital was of an age with Hengall, but there was an animation in his face that stole the years and he walked with a lithe, eager step. He spread his arms wide in a gesture of welcome and in so doing lifted the edges of his cloak to reveal a long bronze sword hanging from a leather belt. 'Hengall of Ratharryn,' he announced, 'welcome to Cathallo!'

Hengall looked shabby beside Kital. He was taller and broader than Cathallo's chieftain, but his bearded face was blunt compared to Kital's sharp features and his clothes were dirty and ragged, for Hengall had never been a man to worry about cloaks or jerkins. He kept his spear sharp, combed the lice from his beard, and reckoned that was the extent of a man's duty towards his appearance. The two chiefs embraced and the watching tribes murmured their appreciation for any public embrace between great men betokened peace. The chiefs held each other close for a heartbeat, then Kital pulled away and, leading Hengall by the hand, took him to where Sannas waited beside one of the great stones that formed the death house.

The sorceress wore a swathing cloak made from badger skins, and a woollen shawl hooded her long white hair. Saban stared at her, and for a heart-stopping moment she looked directly back and he flinched because the eyes that peered from her hood's shadows were malevolent, clever and terrifying. She was old, Saban knew, older, it was said, than any man or woman had ever been before.

Kital and Hengall knelt to talk with Sannas. The drummers, who were beating great hollow trunks, kept up their rhythm and a group of girls, all naked to the waist and with dog-roses, meadowsweets and poppies woven into their hair, danced to the sound, shuffling their feet back and forth, stepping sideways, advancing and retreating, offering a welcome to the strangers who had come to their great shrine. Most of the visitors gaped at the girls, but Galeth gazed at the stones and felt an immense sadness. No wonder Cathallo was so strong! No other tribe could match a shrine like this, so no other tribe could hope to win the favour of the gods like these people. Ratharryn, Galeth thought unhappily, was nothing to this, its temples were risible and its ambitions petty.

Saban was watching the sorceress, and it was evident that Sannas was unhappy with the news Hengall brought, for she turned away from him with a dismissive gesture. Hengall looked at Kital, who shrugged, but then Sannas turned back and snarled something before walking to a hut that stood close to the nearest stone circle. Hengall stood and came back to Saban. 'You're to go to Sannas's hut,' he said. 'Remember what I told you.'

Saban, conscious that he was being watched by two tribes, crossed to the hut that stood between the two smaller stone circles and was the only building inside the temple. It was a round hut, a little bigger than most living huts, with a tall pointed roof but a wall so low that Saban had to drop onto all fours to crawl through the entrance. It was dark inside, for scarce any sunlight came through the door or through the smoke-hole in the roof's peak that was supported by a thick pole. That pole was a bark-stripped trunk which had been left studded with the stubs of its many branches from which hung nets that were filled with human skulls. A burst of giggling alarmed Saban and he looked around to see a dozen faces peering from the hut's low edges. 'Never mind them,' Sannas ordered in a hoarse, low voice, 'come here.'

The sorceress had seated herself on a pile of furs beside the pole and Saban dutifully knelt to her. A small fire smouldered close to the pole, sifting the dark hut with a pungent smoke that made Saban's eyes water as he bowed his head in respect.

'Look at me!' Sannas snapped.

He looked at her. He knew she was old, so old that no one knew how old she was, older than she even knew herself, so old that she had been old when the next oldest person in Cathallo had been born. There were those who said she could never die, that the gods had given Sannas life without death, and to the awed Saban that seemed true, for he had never seen a face so wizened, so wrinkled and so savage. She had taken off her hood and her unbound hair was ashen and lank, hanging over a face that was like a skull, only a skull with warts. The eyes in the skull were black as jet, she had only one tooth left, a yellow fang in the centre of her upper jaw. Her hands protruded from the edge of her badger fur cape like hooked claws. Amber showed at her scrawny throat; to Saban it looked like a gem pinned to a dried-out corpse.

As she stared at him, Saban, his eyes becoming accustomed to the hut's smoky gloom, glanced nervously about to see that a dozen girls were watching him from the hut's margins. There were bat wings pinned to the hut post, between round-bottomed pots that hung with the skulls in their string nets. There was a pair of antlers high on the central pole, while clusters of feathers and bunches of herbs hung from the roof, all swathed in cobwebs. The jumbled bones of small birds lay in a wicker basket beside the fire. This was not, Saban thought, a hut where people lived, but rather a storage place for Cathallo's ritual treasures, the sort of place where the tribe's Kill-Child would be kept.

'So tell me,' Sannas said in a voice that was as harsh as bone, 'tell me, Saban, son of Hengall, son of Lock, who was whelped of an Outfolk bitch taken in a raid, tell me why the gods frown on Ratharryn?'

Saban did not answer. He was too frightened.

'I hate dumb boys,' Sannas growled. 'Speak, fool, or I shall turn your tongue into a worm and you will suck on its slime all the days of your miserable life.'

Saban forced himself to answer. 'The gods…' he began, then realized he was whispering, so spoke up, determined to defend his tribe, 'the gods sent us gold, lady, so how could they frown on us?'

'They sent you the gold of Slaol,' Sannas said bitterly, 'and what has happened since? Lahanna refused a sacrifice, and your elder brother has slunk off to the Outfolk. If the gods sent Ratharryn a pot of gold, all you'd do is piss in it.' The girls giggled. Saban said nothing and Sannas glowered at him. 'Are you a man?' she demanded.

'No, lady.'

'Yet you wear a man's tunic. Is it winter?'

'No, lady.'

'Then take it off.' She demanded. 'Take it off!'

Saban hastily undid his belt and pulled the tunic over his head, prompting another chorus of giggles from the hut's edges. Sannas looked him up and down, then sneered. 'That's the best Ratharryn can send us? Look at him, girls! It looks like something that oozed from a snail's shell.'

Saban blushed, glad that it was so dark in the hut. Sannas watched him sourly, then reached into a pouch and took out a leaf-wrapped package. She peeled the leaves away to reveal a honeycomb from which she broke a portion that she pushed into her mouth. 'That fool Hirac,' she said to Saban, 'tried to sacrifice your brother Camaban?'

'Yes, lady.'

'But your brother lives. Why?'

Saban frowned. 'He was marked by Lahanna, lady.'

'So why did Hirac try to kill him?'

'I don't know, lady.'

'You don't know much, do you? Miserable little boy that you are. And now Lengar has fled, and you are to take his place.' She glowered at him, then spat a scrap of wax onto the fire. 'But Lengar never liked us, did he?' she went on. 'Lengar wanted to make war on us! Why did Lengar not like us?'

'He disliked everyone,' Saban said.

She rewarded that comment with a crooked smile. 'He feared we'd take away his chiefdom, didn't he? He feared we'd swallow little Ratharryn.' She pointed a finger into the shadows of the hut's edge. 'Lengar was to marry her. Derrewyn, daughter of Morthor who is the high priest of Cathallo.'

Saban looked where Sannas pointed and his breath checked in his throat, for he was staring at a slender girl with long black hair and an anxious, pretty face. She looked no older than Saban himself and had large eyes and seemed tremulously nervous, as though she was as uncomfortable in this smoke-reeking hut as Saban was himself. Sannas watched Saban and laughed. 'You like her, eh? But why should you marry her in your brother's place?'

'So we can have peace, lady,' Saban said.

'Peace!' the skull face spat at him. 'Peace! Why should we buy your miserable peace with my great-granddaughter's body?'

'You are not buying peace, lady,' Saban dared to say, 'for my tribe is not for sale.'

'Your tribe!' Sannas leaned back, cackling, then suddenly jerked forward and darted out a crooked hand that gripped Saban's groin. She squeezed, making him gasp. 'Your tribe, boy,' she spat at him, 'is worth nothing. Nothing!' She squeezed harder, watching his eyes for tears. 'Do you want to be chief after your father?'

'If the gods wish it, lady.'

'They've wished for stranger things,' Sannas said, at last letting him go. She rocked back and forth, spittle dribbling from her toothless mouth. She watched Saban, judging him, and decided he was probably a decent boy. He had courage, and she liked that, and he was undeniably good-looking, which meant he was favoured by the gods, but he was still a boy and it was an insult to her people to present a boy for marriage. Yet there would be advantages in a marriage between Cathallo and Ratharryn, so Sannas decided she would swallow the insult. 'So you'll marry Derrewyn to keep the peace?' she asked him.

'Yes, lady.'

'Then you are a fool,' Sannas said, 'for peace and war are not in your gift, boy, and they certainly don't lie between Derrewyn's legs. They lie with the gods, and what the gods want will happen, and if they choose to let Cathallo rule in Ratharryn then you could take every girl in this settlement to your stinking bed and it would make no difference.' She closed her eyes and rocked back and forth again, and a dribble of honey and saliva ran down her chin where white hairs grew from dark moles. It was time, she decided, to scare this boy of Ratharryn, to make him so scared of her that he would never dare think of crossing her wishes. 'I am Lahanna,' she said in a deep voice scarce above a whisper, 'and if you thwart my desire I shall swallow your petty tribe, I shall swill it in my belly's bile and piss it into a ditch filled with scum.' She laughed then, and the laughter turned to a fit of coughing that made her gasp for breath. She groaned as the coughing bout passed, then opened her black eyes. 'Go,' she said dismissively. 'Send your brother Camaban to me, but you go. Go, while I decide your future.'

Saban crawled back into the sunlight where he hurriedly pulled on his tunic. The dancers shuffled back and forth, the drummers beat on, and Saban shuddered. Behind him, from inside the hut, he heard laughter and he was ashamed. His tribe was so little, his people so weak, and Cathallo was so strong. The gods, it seemed to Saban, had turned against Ratharryn. Why else had Lengar fled? Why had Lahanna refused the sacrifice? Why was he forced to crawl to a hag in Cathallo? Saban believed her threats, he believed his tribe was in danger of being swallowed and he did not know how he could save it. His father had warned him against heroes, but Saban thought Ratharryn needed a hero. Hengall had been a hero in his youth, but he was cautious now, Galeth had no ambition and Saban was not yet a man — he did not even know if he would pass the ordeals. Yet he would be a hero if he could, for without a hero he foresaw nothing but grief for his people. They would just be swallowed.

That night the people of Cathallo lit the midsummer fires that sparked and billowed smoke across the landscape. The fires burned to drive malignant spirits from the fields, and more fires burned inside Cathallo's great temple where twelve men dressed in cattle hides romped among the stones. The skins formed grotesque costumes, for the beasts' heads and hooves were still attached. The monstrous horned shapes capered between the flames while the men beneath the skins bellowed their challenges to the evil spirits that could bring disease to the tribe and to its herds. The beast-men guarded Cathallo's prosperity, and there was much competition between the young warriors to be given the honour of dancing in the bulls' hides for, when the night's dark was full and the furious flames were rushing towards the stars, a dozen girls were pushed naked into the fire circle where they were pursued by the roaring men. The crowd, which had been dancing about the ring of flames, stopped to watch as the girls dodged and twisted in feigned panic away from their horned pursuers who were half blinded and made clumsy by their cumbersome skins. Yet one by one the girls were caught, thrust to the ground and there covered by the horned monsters as the onlookers cheered.

Both tribes leapt the fires when the bull dance was over. The warriors competed to see who could jump through the highest, widest fires, and more than one fell into the flames and had to be dragged screaming from the blaze. The old folk and the children skipped across the smallest fires, and then the tribe's new-born livestock were goaded through the glowing beds of embers. Some folk showed their bravery by walking barefoot across the embers, but only after the priests had pronounced a charm to stop their feet from burning. Sannas, watching from her hut doorway, jeered at the ritual. 'It has nothing to do with any charm,' she said sourly. 'So long as their feet are dry it doesn't hurt, but have damp feet and you'd see them dancing like lambkins.' She hunched by her thatch and Camaban squatted beside her. 'You can jump the flames, child,' Sannas said.

'I c-c-cannot jump,' Camaban answered, wrenching his face in an effort not to stutter. He stretched out his left leg so that the firelight flickered on the twisted lump of his foot. 'And if I tried,' he went on, looking at the foot, 'they would l-l-laugh at me.'

Sannas was holding a human thigh bone. It had belonged to her second husband, a man who had thought to tame her. She reached out with the bone and lightly tapped the grotesque foot. 'I can mend that,' she said, then waited for Camaban's reaction, and was disappointed when he said nothing. 'But only if I want to,' she added savagely, 'and I may not want to.' She drew her cloak about her. 'I once had a crippled daughter,' she said. 'Such a strange little thing, she was. A hunchback dwarf. She was all twisted.' She sighed, remembering. 'My husband expected me to mend her.'

'And did you?'

'I sacrificed her to Lahanna. She's buried in the ditch there.' She pointed the bone towards the shrine's southern entrance.

'Why would Lahanna want a c-c-cripple?' Camaban asked.

'To laugh at, of course,' Sannas snapped.

Camaban smiled at that answer. He had gone to Sannas's hut in the daylight and the girls had gasped at the horror of his left foot, shuddered at the stink of his filthy pelt, then mocked his stammer and his wildly tangled hair, but Sannas had not joined their mockery. She had examined the moon mark on his belly, then had abruptly ordered all the girls out of her hut. And after they were gone she had stared at Camaban for a long while. 'Why did they not kill you?' she asked at last.

'B-B-Because the g-g-gods look after me.'

She had struck his head with the thigh bone. 'If you stutter to me, child,' she threatened, 'I shall turn you into a toad.'

Camaban had looked into the black eyes of her skull-face, and then, very calmly, he had leaned forward and taken the sorceress's leaf-wrapped honeycomb.

'Give it back!' Sannas had demanded.

'If I am to be a t-t-toad,' Camaban had said, 'I shall be a honeyed toad.' And Sannas had laughed at that, opening her mouth wide to show her single rotting tooth. She had ordered him to throw his filthy sheepskin tunic out of the hut, then found him an otterskin jerkin, and afterwards she had insisted he comb the tangles and dirt from his hair. 'You're a good-looking boy,' she said grudgingly, and it was true, for his face was lean and handsome, his nose long and straight and his dark green eyes were full of power. She had questioned him. How did he live? How did he find food? Where did he learn about the gods? And Camaban had answered her calmly, showing no fear of her, and Sannas had decided that she liked this child. He was wild, stubborn, unafraid and, above all, clever. Sannas lived in a world of fools, and here, though only a youth, was a mind, and so the old woman and the crippled boy had talked as the sun sank and the fires were lit and the bull-dancers drove the wild-haired girls down to the shadowed turf between the boulders.

Now they sat watching the dancers whirl past the fires. Somewhere in the dark a girl whimpered. 'Tell me about Saban,' Sannas commanded.

Camaban shrugged. 'Honest, hard-working,' he said, making neither attribute sound like a virtue, 'not unlike his father.'

'Will he become chief?'

'Given time, maybe,' Camaban said carelessly.

'And will he keep the peace?'

'How would I know?' Camaban answered.

'Then what do you think?'

'What does it matter what I think?' Camaban asked. 'Everyone knows I am a fool.'

'And are you, fool?'

'It is what I w-w-want them to think,' Camaban said. 'That way they leave me alone.'

Sannas nodded her approval at that. The two sat in silence for a while, watching the sheen of the flames colour the slab-sided stones. Sparks whirled in the sky, rushing between the hard white stars. A cry sounded from the shadows where two young men, one from Ratharryn and the other from Cathallo, had started fighting. Their friends dragged them apart, but even as that fight ended, others began. The folk of Cathallo had been generous with their honey-liquor that had been specially brewed for the midsummer feast. 'When my grandmother was a girl,' Sannas said, 'there was no liquor. The Outfolk showed us how to make it and they still make the best.' She brooded on that for a while, then shrugged. 'But they cannot make my potions. I can give you a drink to make you fly, and food to give you bright dreams.' Her eyes glittered under the hood of her shawl.

'I want to learn from you,' Camaban said.

'I teach girls, not boys,' the old woman said harshly.

'But I have no soul,' Camaban said. 'It was broken by the K-K-Kill-Child. I am neither boy nor man, I am nothing.'

'If you are nothing, what can you learn?'

'All you c-c-can teach me.' Camaban turned to look at the sorceress. 'I will p-p-pay you,' he said.

Sannas laughed, the breath wheezing in her throat as she rocked back and forth. 'And what,' she asked when she had recovered, 'can a crippled outcast from little Ratharryn pay me?'

'This.' Camaban uncurled his right hand to reveal a single gold lozenge. 'Part of the Outfolk gold,' he said, 'the b-b-bride of Slaol's treasure.' Sannas reached for the lozenge, but Camaban closed his fist.

'Give it to me, child!' the old woman hissed.

'If you say you'll teach me,' Camaban said, 'I shall give it to you.'

Sannas closed her eyes. 'If you do not give it to me, you crippled lump of horror,' she intoned in a voice that had terrified three generations of her tribe, 'I shall give your body to the worms and send your soul to the endless forest. I shall curdle your blood and beat your bones to a paste. I shall have the birds peck out your eyes, the vipers suck at your bowels and the dogs eat your guts. You will plead for my mercy and I shall just laugh at you and use your skull as my pissing pot.' She stopped suddenly, for Camaban had climbed to his feet and was limping away. 'Where are you going?' she hissed.

'I have heard,' Camaban said, 'that there is a sorcerer at Drewenna. He c-c-can teach me.'

She glared at him her eyes bright in her corpse's face, but he stayed quite calm, and Sannas shuddered with anger. 'Take one more step, cripple,' she said, 'and I will have your twisted bones put beside that dwarf in the ditch.'

Camaban held up the gold lozenge. 'This p-p-pays you to t-t-teach me,' he said, and then he produced a second lozenge. 'And this p-p-piece of gold,' he went on, 'will p-p-pay you to mend my foot.'

'Come here!' Sannas ordered. Camaban did not move, but just held the scraps of gold that glittered in the firelight. Sannas stared at them, knowing what mischief she could make with such powerful talismans. She hoped to gain more of this gold in the morning, but every scrap was precious to her and so she governed her anger. 'I will teach you,' she said calmly.

'Thank you,' Camaban said calmly, then knelt in front of her and reverently placed the two lozenges in her outstretched hand.

Sannas spat on the gold, then shuffled back into the deep darkness of the hut where her fire was little more than a heap of charred embers. 'You can sleep inside the door,' she said from the darkness, 'or outside. I do not care.'

Camaban did not answer, but just stared at the great temple stones. The shadows of the lovers were motionless now, but the dying firelight flickered and it seemed to him that the ring of stones was shimmering in the smoky night. It was as though the stones were alive and the people were dead, and that made him think of the Old Temple, so far away, that was his home, and he leaned forward and put his forehead on the ground and swore to whatever gods were listening that he would make the Old Temple live. He would make it dance, he would make it sing, he would make it live.

—«»—«»—«»—

Hengall was pleased with the results of his negotiations with Kital. Peace was assured, and that peace would be sealed by the marriage of Saban and Derrewyn. 'Not that she's the girl I'd have chosen for you,' Hengall grumbled to his son as they walked south towards Ratharryn. 'She's much too thin.'

'Too thin?' Saban asked. He had thought Derrewyn beautiful.

'Women are no different from cattle,' Hengall said. 'The best have wide rumps. It's no use marrying a thin thing, they just die in childbirth. But Sannas decided you're to marry Derrewyn and the marriage will seal our peace, so that's the end of it.'

Hengall had not only agreed to the marriage, he had also bought eight great boulders with which Gilan could remake the Old Temple. The price for the stones had been one of the large gold lozenges and nine of the small, which Hengall reckoned cheap. It was right, he thought, to exchange a small part of Sarmennyn's gold for the stones for he was sure now that the arrival of the treasures had been a message from Slaol to remake the Old Temple and Gilan had convinced him that Ratharryn must possess a temple made of stone.

There was no stone at Ratharryn. There were pebbles in the river, and a few larger rocks that could be shaped into hammers or axes, but the settlement had no big stones to rival the pillars and slabs that ringed Cathallo's temple. Ratharryn was a place of chalk, grass and trees, while Cathallo's land was rich in the great boulders which lay so thickly scattered on their hills that from a distance they looked like a flock of giant grey sheep. Sannas contended that the stones had been flung there by Slaol in a vain attempt to stop the people of Cathallo from raising the sacred mound to Lahanna, though others said that the rocks had been cast onto the hills by Gewat, the god of the clouds, who had wanted to see his own likeness on the earth's green face, but however the stones had reached Cathallo, they were the closest boulders to Ratharryn.

Saban liked the idea of building something new and impressive at Ratharryn. A few of Hengall's folk muttered that timber temples had always served Ratharryn well enough, but the traders, those men who carried hides and flint and pots to exchange for axes and shellfish and salt, pointed out that Drewenna possessed a large stone temple and that nearly all the shrines in the distant west were also made of boulders, and the prospect of a stone temple of their own served to revive the spirits of most of Hengall's people. A new temple, made of stone, might restore the tribe's luck, and that belief was enough to persuade the priests that Gilan should be the new high priest. They reported as much to Hengall, and the chief, who had bribed four of the priests with bronze bars, Outfolk slave girls and lumps of amber to make just such a choice, gravely accepted the verdict as having come from the gods.

So Gilan became the new high priest and his first demand was that the tribe should clear the Old Temple of its weeds and hazels so that the shrine would be ready for the arrival of Cathallo's stones in the new year.

The men did the work, while the women stayed outside the bank and danced in a ring. They sang as they danced and their song was the wedding chant of Slaol. Only women ever sang that beautiful song, and only on occasions of the deepest solemnity. It went in snatches, with long pauses between the music, and during the pauses the dancers would stand quite motionless, before, seemingly without anyone telling them when, the steps and the singing would begin again. Their voices overlaid each other in a twisting harmony and, though they never practised the song together, it always sounded hauntingly lovely and the steps always stopped and started in perfect unison. Mothers taught the parts of the song to their daughters, and some learned one part and others learned another, and then they came together and everything fitted. Many of the women cried as they danced, for the song was a lament. On the day before the marriage of Slaol and Lahanna the sun god had fought with his bride and deserted her, but the women lived in hope that Slaol would relent and come back to his bride.

Gilan supervised the work, sometimes stopping to listen to the women's song and at other times helping the men grub out the weeds and shrubs. A few of the hazels were good-sized trees and their roots needed loosening with antler picks before they could be dragged clear of the soil. The trees could not simply be cut down, for hazel will grow again from its stump, so the bigger trees were hauled out and their root holes filled with a chalky rubble dug from the ditch. The ox-skull that Camaban had placed in the temple's centre was buried in the ditch, his lair was pulled down, the weeds were grubbed out, the grass cut with flint knives and the waste burned. The smoke from the fire disturbed the dancers so that they moved farther away from the temple as the men cleared the grass and weeds from the ditch and inner bank so that the shrine was again ringed with its bright chalk-white circle.

The old rotting posts that had stood so thick in the entrance of the sun and about the death house were tossed onto the fire. Some of the posts had been huge and their remains were buried deep: those were snapped off at ground level and their stubborn stumps left to decay. And once all the weeds, trees and posts had been cleared, the men danced across the wide circle to the haunting rhythm of the women's song. The temple was bare again, clean. It was a low grassy bank, a ditch and a high bank ringing a circle that held nothing.

The tribe returned to Ratharryn in the evening light. Galeth was one of the last to leave and he paused at the brow of the hill above the settlement to turn and look at the temple. The clump of hazels which had broken the southern skyline was gone so that only the grave mounds of the ancestors could be seen on that horizon, but in front of the mounds, white against the darkening hillside, the temple's ring seemed to shine in the dying light. The shadows of the bank stretched long and Galeth noticed, for the very first time, how the ring of chalk had been placed on a slope so that it was very slightly tilted towards the place where the sun rose in midsummer.

'It looks beautiful,' Lidda, Galeth's woman, said.

'It does look beautiful,' Galeth agreed. It was Galeth, practical, strong and efficient, who would have to raise the stones, and he tried to imagine how the eight great boulders would look in that clean setting of grass and chalk. 'Slaol will be pleased,' he decided.

There was thunder that night, but no rain. Just thunder, far off, and in the darkness two of the tribe's children died. Both had been sick, though no one had thought they would die. But in the morning the sun rose to make the newly cleared chalk-ring shine, and the gods, folk reckoned, were once again smiling on Ratharryn.

—«»—«»—«»—

Derrewyn was not yet a woman, but it was a custom in both Ratharryn and Cathallo that betrothed girls would live with their prospective husband's family, so Derrewyn came to Ratharryn to live in the hut of Hengall's oldest surviving wife.

Her arrival disturbed the tribe. She might be a year from womanhood, but her beauty had blossomed early and the young warriors of Ratharryn stared at her with undisguised yearning, for Derrewyn of Cathallo was a girl to stir men's dreams. Her black hair hung below her waist and her long legs were tanned dark by the sun. About her ankles and her neck she wore delicate chains of pure white sea-shells, all the shells alike and of a size, Her eyes were dark, her face was slender and high-boned, and her spirit as quick as a kingfisher's flight. The young warriors of Hengall's tribe noted her, watched her, and reckoned she was too good for Saban who was still only a child. Hengall, seeing their desire, ordered Gilan to work a protective charm on the girl, so the high priest placed a human skull on the roof of Derrewyn's hut and beside it he put a phallus of unfired clay and every man who saw the charm understood its threat. Touch Derrewyn without permission, the skull and phallus said, and you will die, and from that time the men looked, but did nothing more.

Saban also looked and yearned, and some in the tribe noted how Derrewyn gazed back at Saban, for he was promising to be a handsome man. He was still growing, but already he was as tall as his father and he had all Lengar's quickness of eye and hand. He was accurate with a yew bow, was one of the fastest runners in the tribe and yet was modest, calm-tempered and well liked in Ratharryn. He promised to be a good man, but if he failed his ordeals he would never be reckoned an adult, so, in the months after his first meeting with Derrewyn, he was kept busy learning the secrets of the woods and the ways of the beasts. He watched the stags fighting and rutting, found where the otters had their dens and learned how to steal honey from irate bees. He was not allowed to sleep in the woods for he was still a child, but he killed his first wolf in early winter, felling it with a well-aimed arrow and ending the wounded beast's life with a blow of a stone axe. Galeth's woman, Lidda, pierced the wolf's claws and threaded them on a sinew, then gave the necklace to Saban.

Saban might have been the son of the chief, but he was expected to work like everyone else. 'A man who does nothing,' Hengall liked to say, 'eats nothing.' Galeth was the tribe's best woodworker, and for seven years Saban had been learning his uncle's trade. He had learned all the names of the tree gods and how to placate them before an axe was laid to a trunk, and he had learned how to shape oak and ash into beams, posts and rafters. Galeth taught him how to make an adze blade from flint, and how to tie it to the haft with wet oxhide strips that shrank tight so that the head did not loosen during work. Saban was allowed to use flint tools, but neither he nor Galeth's son, who had been born to Galeth's first wife, were ever permitted to touch the two precious bronze axes that had been carried long distances across the land and had cost Galeth dearly in pigs and cattle.

Saban learned to carve beechwood into bowls and willow into paddles. He learned how to whittle a branch of stone-hard yew wood into a deer-killing bow. He learned to joint wood, and how to auger it with spikes of flint, bone or holly. He learned how to take an elm trunk and shape it into a hollow boat that could float all the way down the river to the sea and bring back bags of salt, shells and dried fish. He learned how to peg green oak so that it shrank into place, and he learned well, for in the winter before Saban's ordeals Galeth trusted him to raise a new roof on the hut where Derrewyn slept.

Saban stripped the rotting thatch, but first handed the skull down to Derrewyn who, knowing that it protected her, kissed its forehead and then looked up at Saban. 'And the rest,' she said, smiling.

'The rest?'

'The clay,' she said. The unfired clay phallus had crumbled in the weather, but Saban collected what he could from among the rotting thatch and gave it to her. She grimaced at the dirty scraps of clay, but found one fragment that was cleaner than the rest and reached up to give it back to Saban. 'Swallow it,' she ordered him.

'Swallow it?'

'Do it!' she insisted, then laughed at his expression as he forced the lump down his throat.

'Why did I do that?' Saban asked her, but she just laughed and then the laugh faded as Jegar came round the hut's corner.

Jegar was now the tribe's best hunter. He went into the forest for days, leading a band of young men who brought back carcasses and tusks. There were some in the tribe who believed Jegar should succeed Hengall, for it was plain the gods favoured him, though if Jegar shared that opinion he showed no sign of it. Instead he was respectful to Hengall and took care to offer the chief the best cuts of meat from his kill and Hengall, in turn, dealt cautiously with the man who had once been Lengar's closest companion.

Jegar now stared at Derrewyn. Like the other men of the tribe he had been deterred by the skull on her roof, but he could not hide his longing for her, nor his jealousy of Saban. In the new year, when Saban undertook the ordeals of manhood, he would be hunted in the deep forest and all the tribe knew that Jegar and his hounds would be on Saban's trail. And if Saban failed, then Saban could not marry.

Jegar smiled at Derrewyn who clutched the skull to her breasts and spat. Jegar laughed, then licked his spear blade and pointed it at Saban. 'Next year, little one,' he said, 'we shall meet in the trees. You, me, my hunting companions and my hounds.'

'You need friends and hounds to beat me?' Saban asked. Derrewyn was watching him and her gaze made him reckless. 'Tell me about next year, Jegar,' he said. He knew it was dangerously foolish to taunt Jegar, but he feared Derrewyn would despise him if he meekly allowed Jegar to bully him. 'What will you do if you catch me in the forest?' he demanded, jumping down to the ground.

'Thrash you, little one,' Jegar said.

'You don't have the strength,' Saban said, and he picked up a long ash pole that was used to measure the lengths of the replacement rafters. He was taller than Jegar, and he also knew that Jegar would not dare kill him here in the settlement where so many were watching, but he was still risking a painful beating. 'You couldn't thrash a kitten,' he added scornfully.

'Go back to work, boy,' Jegar said, but Saban just slashed the pole at him, making the smaller man step back. Saban slashed again, and the clumsy weapon whipped past Jegar's face. This time the hunter snarled and levelled his spear. 'Careful,' he said.

'Why should I be careful of you?' Saban asked. Fear and exhilaration were competing in him. He knew this was stupidity, but Derrewyn's presence had driven him to it and his own pride would not let him back down. 'You're a bully, Jegar,' he said, drawing back the pole, 'and I'll thrash you bloody.'

'You child!' Jegar said, and ran at Saban, but Saban had guessed what Jegar would do and he let the pole's tip fall so that it tangled Jegar's legs, and then he twisted the pole, tripping Jegar, and as Jegar fell Saban jumped on him and beat his enemy's head with his fists. He landed two hard blows before Jegar managed to twist round and lash back. Jegar could not use his spear for Saban was on top of him, so first he tried to punch the boy away, then he clawed at Saban's eyes. Saban bit one of the probing fingers and tasted blood, then hands seized and dragged him off Jegar. Other hands pulled Jegar away.

It was Galeth who had hauled Saban away. 'You fool!' Galeth said. 'You want to die?'

'I was beating him!'

'He's a man. You're a boy! And you're going to have a black eye.' Galeth pushed Saban away, then turned on Jegar. 'Leave him alone,' he ordered. 'Your chance comes next year.'

'He attacked me!' Jegar said. His hand was bleeding where Saban had bitten it. He sucked at the blood, then picked up his spear. There was rage in his eyes, for he knew he had been humiliated. 'A boy who attacks a man has to be punished,' he insisted.

'No one attacked anyone,' Galeth said. He was huge, and his anger was frightening. 'Nothing happened here. You hear me? Nothing happened!' He drove Jegar back. 'Nothing happened!' He turned on Derrewyn who had watched the fight with wide eyes. 'Be about your work, girl,' he ordered, then pushed Saban back to the roof. 'And you've got work to do, so do it.'

Hengall chuckled when he heard about the fight. 'Was he really winning?' he asked Galeth.

'He wouldn't have lasted,' Galeth said, 'but yes, he was winning.'

'He's a good boy,' Hengall said approvingly, 'a good boy!'

'But Jegar will try to stop him passing the ordeals,' Galeth warned.

Hengall dismissed his younger brother's fears. 'If Saban is to be chief,' he said, 'then he must be able to deal with men like Jegar.' He chuckled again, delighted that Saban had shown such courage. 'You'll keep an eye on the boy through the winter?' he asked. 'He deserves better than to be speared in the back.'

'I shall watch him,' Galeth promised grimly.

It proved a cruelly hard winter, and the only good news of that cold season was that the warriors of Cathallo abandoned their raids on Hengall's land. The peace, which would be sealed by Saban's marriage, was holding, though some folk reckoned Cathallo was just waiting for Hengall's death before snapping up Ratharryn as they had conquered Maden. Others reckoned that it was the weather that kept Kital's men at bay, for the snow lay thick for days and the river froze so that the women had to break the ice to fetch their daily water. There were days when the snow on the hills blew from the low crests like smoke, when the fires seemed to give no warmth and the ice-bound huts crouched in a grey-white land that offered no hope of warmth or life. The weak of the tribe, the old, the young, the sick and the cursed, died. There was hunger, but the warriors of the tribe hunted in the forests. None rivalled Jegar and his band who, day after day, brought back carcasses that were butchered outside the settlement where the guts steamed in the cold air as the tribe's dogs circled in hope of spoil. The hunters gave the stags' skulls to women who fed their cooking fires with wood till they burned fierce, then held the roots of the antlers in the flames so that they would snap clean from the bone. There would be work to be done on the Old Temple in the spring, and the tribe would need scores of antler picks to make holes for the new stones that were to be fetched from Cathallo.

That winter never seemed to end. Wolves were seen by the river, but Gilan assured the tribe that all would be well when the new temple was made. This winter is the last of our woes, the high priest said, the last ill fortune before the new temple changed Ratharryn's fate. There would be life again, and love, and warmth and happiness, and all things, Gilan assured the tribe, would be good.

—«»—«»—«»—

Camaban had gone to Cathallo to learn. He had been alone for years, scavenging a thin living beyond Ratharryn's embankment, and in those years he had listened to the voices in his head and he had thought about what they told him. Now he wanted to test that knowledge against the world's other wisdom, and no one was wiser than Sannas, sorceress of Cathallo, and so Camaban listened.

In the beginning, Sannas said, Slaol and Lahanna had been lovers. They had circled the world in an endless dance, the one ever close to the other, but then Slaol had glimpsed Garlanna, the goddess of the earth who was Lahanna's daughter, and he had fallen in love with Garlanna and rejected Lahanna.

So Lahanna had lost her brightness, and thus night came to the world.

But Garlanna, Sannas insisted, stayed loyal to her mother by refusing to join Slaol's dance and so the sun god sulked and winter came to the earth. And Slaol still sulked, and would not listen to the folk on earth, for they reminded him of Garlanna. Which is why, Sannas insisted, Lahanna should be worshipped above all other gods because she alone had the power to protect the world from Slaol's petulance.

Camaban listened, just as he listened to Morthor, Derrewyn's father, who was high priest at Cathallo, and Morthor told a similar tale, though in his telling it was Lahanna who sulked and who hid her face in shame because she had tried and failed to dim her lover's brightness. She still tried to diminish Slaol, and those were fearful times when Lahanna slid herself in front of Slaol to bring night in the daytime. Morthor claimed that Lahanna was the petulant goddess, and though he was Sannas's grandson and though the two disagreed, they did not fight. 'The gods must be balanced,' Morthor claimed. 'Lahanna might try to punish us because we live on Garlanna's earth, but she is still powerful and must be placated.'

'Men won't condemn Slaol,' Sannas told Camaban, 'for they see nothing wrong with him loving a mother and her daughter.' She spat. 'Men are like pigs rolling in their own dung.'

'If you visit a strange tribe,' Morthor said, 'to whom do you go? Its chief! So we must worship Slaol above all the gods.'

'Men can worship whatever they want,' Sannas said, 'but it is a woman's prayer that is heard, and women pray to Lahanna.'

On one thing, though, both Sannas and Morthor agreed: that the grief of this world had come when Slaol and Lahanna parted, and that ever since the tribes of men had striven to balance their worship of the two jealous gods. It was the same belief that Hirac had held, a belief that gripped the heartland tribes and forced them to be cautious of all the gods.

Camaban heard all this, and he asked questions, but kept his own opinions silent. He had come to learn, not to argue, and Sannas had much to teach him. She was the most famous healer in the land and folk came to her from a dozen tribes. She used herbs, fungi, fire, bone, blood, pelts and charms. Barren women would walk for days to beg her help and each morning would find a desperate collection of the sick, the crippled, the lame and the sad waiting at the shrine's northern entrance. Camaban collected Sannas's herbs, picked mushrooms and cut fungi from decaying trees. He dried the medicines in nets over the fire, he sliced them, infused them and learned the names that Sannas gave them. He listened as the folk described their ills and he watched what Sannas gave them, then marked their progress to health or to death. Many came complaining of pain, just pain, and as often as not they would rub their bellies and Sannas would give them slices of fungi to chew, or else made them drink a thick mixture of herbs, fungus and fresh blood. Almost as many complained of pain in their joints, a fierce pain that doubled them over and made it hard for a man to till a field or for a woman to grind a quern stone, and if the pain was truly crippling Sannas would lay the sufferer between two fires, then take a newly chipped flint knife and drag it across the painful joint. Back and forth she would cut, slicing deep so that the blood welled up, then Camaban would rub dried herbs into the wounds and place more of the dried herbs over the fresh cuts until the blood no longer seeped and Sannas would set fire to the herbs and the flames would hiss and smoke and the hut would fill with the smell of burning flesh.

One man went mad in that hard wintertime, beating his wife until she died, then hurling his youngest child onto his hut fire and Sannas decreed that the man had been possessed of an evil spirit. He was brought to her, then pinioned between two warriors as Sannas cut open his scalp, peeled back the flesh, and chipped a hole in his skull with a small stone maul and a thin flint blade. She levered out a whole circle of bone, then spat onto his brain and demanded that the evil thing come out. The man lived, though in such misery it would have been better had he died.

Camaban learned to set bones, to fill wounds with moss and spider web, and to make the potions that give men dreams. He carried those potions to Cathallo's priests who treated him with awe because he had been chosen by Sannas. He learned to make the glutinous poison that warriors smeared on their arrow-heads when they hunted Outfolk in the wide forests north of Cathallo. The poison was made from a mixture of urine, faeces and the juice of a flowering herb that Sannas prized as a killer. He made Sannas's food, grinding it to a paste because, only having the one tooth, she could not chew. He learned her spells, learned her chants, learned the names of a thousand gods, and when he was not learning from Sannas he listened to the traders when they returned with strange tales from their long journeys. He listened to everything, forgot nothing and kept his opinions locked inside his head. Those opinions had not changed. The voices that had spoken in his head still echoed there, still woke him at night, still filled him with wonder. He had learned how to heal and how to frighten and how to twist the world to the gods' wishes, but he had not changed. The world's wisdom had left his own untouched.

In the winter's heart, when Slaol was at his weakest and Lahanna was shining brightly on Cathallo's shrine to touch the boulders with a sheen of glistening cold light, Sannas brought two warriors to the temple. 'It is time,' she told Camaban.

The warriors laid Camaban on his back beside one of the temple's taller stones. One man held Camaban's shoulders, while the other held the crippled foot towards the full moon. 'I will either kill you,' Sannas said, 'or cure you.' She held a maul of stone and a blade that had been made from the scapula of a dead man and she laid the bone blade on the grotesquely curled ball of Camaban's foot. 'It will hurt,' she said, then laughed as if Camaban's pain would give her pleasure.

The warrior holding the foot flinched as the maul hammered on the bone. Sannas hammered again, showing a remarkable strength for such an old woman. Blood, black in the moonlight, was pouring from the foot, soaking the warrior's hands and running down Camaban's leg. Sannas beat the maul on the blade again, then wrenched the scapula free and gritted her teeth as she forced the curl of Camaban's clenched foot outwards. 'You have toes!' she marvelled, and the two warriors shuddered and turned away as they heard the cracking of cartilage, the splintering of bone and the grating of the broken being straightened. 'Lahanna!' Sannas cried, and hammered the blade into Camaban's foot again, forcing its sharpened edge into another tight part of the bulbous flesh and fused bone.

Sannas bent the foot flat, then splinted it in deer bones that she bound tight with strips of wolfskin. 'I have used bone to mend bone,' she told Camaban, 'and you will either die or you will walk.'

Camaban stared at her, but said nothing. The pain had been more than he had ever expected, it had been a pain fit to fill the whole wide moonlit world, but he had not whimpered once. There were tears in his eyes, but he had made no sound and he knew he would not die. He would live because Slaol wanted it. Because he had been chosen. Because he was the crooked child who had been sent to make the world straight. He was Camaban.

Winter passed. The salmon returned to the river and the rooks to the high elms that grew west of Ratharryn. The cuckoo called and dragonflies darted where winter ice had locked the river. Lambs bleated among the ancestors' grave mounds, and herons feasted on ducklings in Mai's river. The blackbird's song rippled across the woods where, when spring was full, the deer lost their grey winter coats and shed their antlers. Hengall's father had once claimed to have seen deer eating their old antlers, but in truth it was Syrax, the stag god who roamed the woods, who took them back to himself. The shed antlers were prized as tools, and so men sought to find them before Syrax.

The fields were ploughed. The wealthier folk tugged the fire-hardened plough stake behind an ox, while others used their families to drag the gouging point across the soil. They broke the ground from east to west, then north to south before the priests came to scatter the first handfuls of seed. The previous harvest had been bad, but Hengall had hoarded seed in his hut and now he released it for the fields. Some fields were abandoned to grass, for their soil was tired, but the previous spring the men had ringed trees on the forest's edge, then burned the dead trees in the autumn, and the newly cleared land was ploughed and sown while the women made a sacrifice of a lamb. Kestrels floated above the Old Temple where orchids flowered and blue-winged butterflies flew.

In summer, just when the thrushes fell silent, the boys of Hengall's tribe faced their ordeals of manhood. Not every boy passed the ordeals and some did not even survive them. Indeed it was better, the tribe said, for a boy to die than to fail because in failure they risked ridicule for the rest of their lives. For a whole moon after the ordeal a boy who failed would be forced to wear a woman's clothes and toil at woman's work and squat like a woman to pass water. And for the rest of his life he could not take a wife, nor own slaves, cattle or pigs. A few of those who failed might display some talent for augury and dreams, and those boys might become priests and would then receive the privileges of those who had passed the ordeals, but most of those who failed were scorned for ever. It was better to die.

'You're ready?' Hengall asked Saban on the morning of the first day.

'Yes, father,' Saban said nervously. He was not sure that was true, for how could anyone prepare to be hunted by Jegar and his hounds? In truth Saban was terrified, but he dared not show his fear to his father.

Hengall, whose hair had turned grey in the previous winter, had summoned Saban to give the boy a meal. 'Bear meat,' Hengall said, 'to give you strength.'

Saban had no appetite, but he ate dutifully and Hengall watched each mouthful. 'I have been unlucky in my sons,' he said after a while. Saban, his mouth full of the pungent flesh, said nothing, and Hengall groaned as he thought of Lengar and Camaban. 'But in you I have a proper son,' he said to Saban. 'Prove it in these next days.'

Saban nodded.

'If I died tomorrow,' Hengall growled, touching his groin to avert the ill luck implied in the words, 'I suppose Galeth would become chief, but he wouldn't be a good leader. He's a good man, but too trusting. He would believe everything Cathallo tells us, and they lie to us as often as they speak the truth. They claim to be our friend these days, but they would still like to swallow us up. They want our land. They want our river. They want our food, but they fear the price they'd pay. They know we would maul them grievously, so when you become chief you must have proved yourself a warrior whom they would fear to fight, but you must also be wise enough to know when not to fight.'

'Yes, father,' Saban said. He had hardly heard a word for he was thinking about Jegar and his long-haired dogs with their tongues lolling between sharp teeth.

'Cathallo must fear you,' Hengall said, 'as they fear me.'

'Yes, father,' Saban said. His chin was dripping with bear's blood. He felt sick.

'The ancestors are watching you,' Hengall went on, 'so make them proud of us. And once you're a man we shall marry you to Derrewyn. We'll make it the first ceremony of the new temple, eh? That should bring you Slaol's favour.'

'I like Derrewyn,' Saban said, blushing.

'Doesn't matter whether you like her or hate her, you just have to give her sons, a lot of sons. Wear the girl out! Breed her, then breed other women, but make yourself sons! Blood is all.'

With these injunctions fresh in his ears, and with his gullet sour from the rank taste of the bear, Saban went to Slaol's temple just beyond the settlement's entrance. He was naked, as were the twenty-one other boys who gathered beneath the high temple poles. All the boys would now have to go into the wild woods for five nights and there survive even though they were being hunted, and the hunters, who were the men of the tribe, surrounded the temple and jeered at the candidates. The hunters all carried bows or spears and they called the boys woman-hearted, said they would fail, and warned them that the ghouls and spirits and beasts of the woods would rend them. The men invited the boys to abandon the quest before they began, saying that there was small point in their attempting to become men for they were so obviously puny and feeble.

Gilan, the high priest, ignored the jeers and taunts as he prayed to the god. The small chalk balls that were the symbols of the boys' lives were laid in the temple's centre, above the grave of a child who had been sacrificed to the god at the temple's consecration. The balls would stay there until the end, when those who became men would be allowed to break them and those who failed would have to return the chalk symbols to their shamed families.

Gilan spat on the boys as a blessing. Each was allowed one weapon. Most clutched spears or bows, but Saban had chosen to take a flint knife that he had made himself from a rare piece of local flint big enough to make a blade as long as his hand. He had flaked the dark stone into a white and wicked edge. He did not expect to hunt with the knife, for even if he succeeded in killing a beast he would not dare light a fire to cook its flesh in case the smoke should bring the hunters. 'You might as well take no weapon,' Galeth had advised him, but Saban wanted the small knife for the touch of it gave him comfort.

Jegar taunted Saban from the temple's edge. The hunter had hung a bunch of eagle feathers from his spearhead and more eagle feathers were tucked into his long hair. 'I'm loosing my hounds on you, Saban!' Jegar called. The dogs, huge and hairy, salivated behind their master. 'Give up now!' Jegar shouted. 'What chance does a pissing child like you have? You won't survive a day.'

'We'll drag you back in disgrace,' one of Jegar's friends called to Saban, 'and you can wear my sister's tunic and fetch my mother's water.'

Hengall listened to the threats, but did nothing to alleviate them. This was the way of the tribe and if Saban survived the enmity of Jegar and his friends then Saban's reputation would grow. Nor could Hengall try to protect Saban in the woods for then the tribe would declare that the boy had not passed the ordeal fairly. Saban must survive by his own wits, and if he failed then the gods would be saying he was not fit to be chief.

The boys were given a half-day's start. Then, for five summer nights, they had to survive in the forest where their enemies would not just be the hunters, but also the bears, the great wild aurochs, the wolves and the Outfolk bands who knew that the boys were loose among the trees and so came searching for slaves. The Outfolk would shave the boys' heads, chop off a finger and drag them away to a life of whipped servitude.

Gilan at last finished his invocations and clapped his hands, scattering the frightened boys out of the temple. 'Run far!' Jegar shouted. 'I'm coming for you, Saban!' His leashed dogs howled and Saban feared those animals for the gods had given hounds the ability to follow men deep through the trees. Dogs could sense a man's spirit so that even in the dark a dog could find a man. They can track any creature with a spirit and the great shaggy hounds would be Saban's worst enemies in the coming days.

Saban ran south across the pastureland and his path took him close to the Old Temple which stood waiting for Cathallo's stones. He thought, as he ran past the ditch, that he heard Camaban's voice calling his name and he stopped in puzzlement and looked into the cleared shrine, but there was nothing there except two white cows cropping the grass. His fears told him to keep running towards the trees, but a stronger instinct made him cross the shallow outer bank, clamber through the chalk ditch and climb the larger bank inside.

The sun was warm on his bare skin. He stood motionless, wondering why he had stopped, and then another impulse drove him to his knees on the grass inside the shrine where he used the flint knife to cut off a hank of his long black hair. He laid the hair on the grass, then bowed his forehead to the ground. 'Slaol,' he said, 'Slaol.' It was here that Lengar had tried to kill him, and Saban had escaped that enmity, so now he prayed that the sun god would help him evade another hatred. Saban had been praying for days now, praying to as many gods as he could remember, but now, in the warm ring of chalk on the wind-touched hill, Slaol sent him an answer. It came as if from nowhere, and Saban suddenly knew he would survive the ordeal and that he would even win. He understood that in his anxiety he had been praying for the wrong thing. He had begged the gods to hide him from Jegar, but Jegar was the tribe's best hunter and Slaol had given Saban the thought that he should let Jegar find him. That was the god's gift. Let Jegar find his prey, then let him fail. Saban raised his head to the brightness in the sky and shouted his thanks.

He ran into the woods where he felt his fears rise again. This was the wild place, the dark place where wolves, bears and aurochs stalked. There were Outfolk hunting bands looking for slaves and, even worse, there were outcasts. When a man was banished from Ratharryn the tribe did not say that he was gone from the settlement, but that he had gone to the woods, and Saban knew that many such outcasts roamed the trees, men said to be as savage as any beast. It was rumoured they lived off human flesh and they knew when the tribes' boys were hiding among the trees and so they searched for them. All those dangers frightened Saban, but there were still more horrible things among the leaves: those dead souls who did not pass into Lahanna's care haunted the woods. Sometimes hunters vanished without a trace and the priests reckoned they had been snatched by the jealous dead who so hate the living.

The forest was all dark danger, which is why the woods were for ever being felled and why women were not allowed into it. They could forage for herbs among the copses close to the settlement, or they could travel through the woods if they were accompanied by men, but they could not go alone into the trees that lay beyond the outermost fields for fear of being assaulted by ghouls and spirits, or of being captured by the outcasts. Some women, very few, actually ran to join those fugitives and once there, hidden in the deep trees, they formed small savage clans who preyed on crops, children, herds and flocks.

Yet Saban saw no dangers as he headed westwards through the woods. The sun made the green leaves shine and the warm wind whispered in the branches. He followed the same path on which he and Lengar had tracked the stranger who had brought the treasure to Ratharryn, and though he knew there was a risk in walking such a path so openly when the woods were filled with enemies, he took the chance for he wanted Jegar's dogs to have no trouble in following his spirit through the tangling trees.

In the afternoon, when he had reached the high crest from where he could stare far across the western forests, Saban heard the faint sound of ox horns blowing. That ominous booming told him that Ratharryn's hunters had been released. They would be carrying glowing embers in pots so that if they chose to stay in the woods at night they could build vast fires that would deter the spirits and the beasts. Saban could use no such defence. He had only Slaol's help and one short-bladed knife of brittle flint.

He spent a long time searching for a tree that would suit Slaol's purpose. He knew Jegar's dogs would be lunging along the path, but he had a long start and time enough, and after a while he settled on an oak tree that grew low and broad, though halfway up its trunk there was a space from which no branches sprang. A man could easily climb the first length of the tree, then he would need to leap to catch hold of a convenient branch that was the thickness of a man's arm. That branch made the perfect handhold, and if Jegar thought Saban was hidden in the upper leaves of the tree he would leap for it. Saban leapt for it now, and held on tight as his feet scrabbled for purchase on the trunk. Then he hauled himself up and straddled the tree's narrow limb.

He sat facing the oak's trunk, said a brief prayer to the tree so that it would forgive the wound he was about to inflict, then used his knife's tip to gouge a narrow slit along the branch's topmost surface. Then, when the cut was wide and deep enough, he jammed the flint blade into the wood so that its wicked, white-flaked edge stood proud of the bark. He did his work well, for the blade sat firm in the tree's grip when he was finished. He spat on the flint to give it luck, then dropped down from the branch. He looked up to make sure that his small trap was invisible, then collected and hid the small scraps of freshly chipped wood that had fallen by the oak's bole.

He ran downhill to find the stream that flowed at the ridge's foot and once there he waded through the shallow water because everyone knew that spirits could not cross water. While he was in the stream his own spirit would shrink into his body, thus leaving no trace for Jegar's dogs. He waded a long way, occasionally muttering a prayer to placate the stream's spirit, then climbed back up the hill to discover a place where he could rest.

He found a place where two branches sprang from an elm tree's trunk, and he placed smaller branches across the two to make a platform where he could lie safely. He was hidden, but high enough to see between the leaves to where the white clouds rode the bright sky, and, by craning his neck, he could just see a patch of mossy ground at the tree's foot. For a long while nothing happened. The wind rustled the leaves, a squirrel chattered its teeth and two bees drifted close. Somewhere a woodpecker rattled at bark, stopped, began again. A rustle of dead leaves made Saban peer down, fearing discovery, but all he saw was a fox carrying a dabchick in its jaws.

Then the living noises of the woods, all the small sounds of claw and beak and paw, just stopped, and there was only the sigh of the wind among the leaves and the creak of the trees. Everything that breathed was crouching motionless because something new and strange had come. There was danger; the forest held its breath, and Saban listened until at last he heard the noise that had silenced the world. A hound bayed.

It was a warm day, but Saban's naked skin was suddenly chill. He could feel the hairs prickling at his neck. Another dog howled, then Saban heard men's voices far away. The men were high above him on the slope. Hunters.

He could imagine them. There would be a half-dozen young men, Jegar their leader, all tall and strong and sun-browned, with their long hair twisted into hunter's braids and hung with feathers. They would be peering up the oak tree, leaning on their spears and calling insults to where they thought Saban was hiding. Perhaps they loosed a few arrows into the leaves, hoping to drive him down so they could walk him back to Ratharryn and parade his shame in front of his father's hut, but in a small while they would become bored and one of them — let it be Jegar, Saban prayed — would clamber up the oak's trunk to find him.

Saban lay, his eyes closed, listening. Then he heard a shout. Not just a shout, but a yelp of protest and pain and anger, and he knew his small trap had bitten blood. He smiled.

Jegar fell from the tree, cursing because his right hand was cut deep across the palm. He shrieked and forced his bleeding hand between his thighs as he bent over to alleviate the agony. One of his friends placed moss on the wound, and bound the hand with leaves, and afterwards, furious, they rampaged along the ridge, but neither they nor their howling dogs came close to Saban. They followed his spirit down to the stream, but there the hounds lost him and after a while they abandoned the hunt. The sound of dogs faded and the myriad small sounds of the woods were heard again.

Saban grinned. He relived the moment when he had heard the scream and he thanked Slaol. He laughed. He had won.

He had won, yet still he did not move. He was hungry now, yet he dared not forage in case Jegar was still stalking the slope, so he stayed on his small platform and watched the birds fly home to their nests and the sky turn red with Slaol's anger because the world was being given over to Lahanna's care. The chill seeped up from the stream. A deer and her fawn stepped slow and delicate beneath the ash as they went to the water and their appearance suggested there were no hunters concealed on the ridge above, yet still Saban did not move. His hunger and thirst could wait. In the gaps between the high leaves he could see the sky turning smoky and misty, then the first star of Lahanna's flock appeared. The tribe called that star Merra and it reminded Saban that all his ancestors were gazing down, but it also brought fears of those folk who had died in shame and who were now rousing from their day sleep to let their famished spirits wander the dark trees. Strange claws were being unsheathed and rabid teeth bared as the night terrors of the forest were unleashed.

Saban hardly slept, but instead lay and listened to the noises of the night. Once he heard the crackling of twigs, the sound of a great body moving through the brush, then silence again in which he imagined a monstrous head, fangs bared, questing up into the elm. A scream sounded higher on the ridge, and Saban curled into a ball and whimpered. An owl screeched. The boy's only comforts were the stars of his ancestors, the cold light of Lahanna silvering the leaves and his thoughts of Derrewyn. He thought of her a lot. He tried to conjure up a picture of her face. Once, thinking about her, he looked up and saw a streak of light slither across the stars and he knew that a god was descending to the earth which he took to be a sign that he and Derrewyn were destined for each other.

For five days and nights he hid, foraging only in the half-light of dawn and dusk. He found a clearing at the bottom of the ridge where the stream had made a wide bend in its course and there he found chervil and garlic. He plucked sorrel and comfrey leaves, and found some broom buds, though they were bitter for their season was almost done. Best of all were the morels that he found higher on the ridge where a great elm had fallen. He carried them back to his platform in the ash and picked the wood-lice from their crannies before eating them. One day he even tickled a small trout up from the weeds of the stream and gnawed greedily at its raw flesh. At night he chewed the gum that oozes from birch bark, spitting it out when all the flavour was gone.

Jegar had given up the hunt, though Saban did not know that, and one twilight, seeking for more morels by the rotting elm, he heard a footfall in the leaves and froze. He was concealed by the fallen tree, but the hiding place was precarious and his heart began to thump.

A moment later a file of Outfolk spearmen went past. They were all men, all with bronze-tipped spears and all had grey tattooed streaks on their faces. They had no dogs with them, and they seemed more intent on leaving the ridge than searching for prey. Saban heard them splash through the stream, heard the flutter as the waterbirds fled their presence, then there was silence again.

The last night was Saban's worst. It rained, and the wind was high so that the noises of the trees were louder than ever as they tossed their heads in the wet sky. Branches creaked and, far off, Rannos the god of thunder tumbled the blackness. And it was dark, utterly dark, without a scrap of Lahanna's light piercing or thinning the clouds. The darkness was worse than a cold hut, for this was a limitless night filled with horrors and in its black heart Saban heard something huge and cumbersome crash through the woods and he huddled on his platform thinking of the dead souls and their yearning for human flesh until, wet, cold and hungry, he saw a grey dawn dilute the damp darkness above the ridge. The rain eased as the sky brightened, and then the ox horns sounded to say that the first ordeal was done.

Twenty-two boys had left Ratharryn, but only seventeen returned. One had vanished and was never seen again, two had been found by hunters and had been driven back to Ratharryn, while two more had been so terrified of the darkness of the trees that they had willingly gone back to their humiliation. But the seventeen who gathered at Slaol's temple were permitted to tie their hair in a loose knot at the nape of their necks and then they followed the priests down the track that led to Ratharryn's entrance and their path was lined with women who held out platters of flat bread and cold pork and dried fish. 'Eat,' they urged the boys, 'you must be hungry, eat!' But hungry as they were, none touched the food for that too was an ordeal, though an easy one to survive.

The men of the tribe waited beside a raging fire inside the great wall and they thumped their spear butts on the ground to welcome the seventeen. The boys still had two tests to face, and some could yet fail, but they were no longer jeered. Saban saw Jegar, and saw the leaves bound with twine on his hand, and he could not resist dancing a few steps of victory. Jegar spat towards him, but it was mere petulance. He had missed his chance and Saban had survived the woods.

The boys had to wrestle against men for their next test. It did not matter if they won or lost, indeed no one expected a half-starved boy to beat a full-grown man, but it was important that they fought well and showed bravery. Saban found himself pitted against Dioga, a freed Outfolk slave noted for his bear-like strength. The crowd laughed at the mismatch between boy and man, but Saban was faster than any of them expected. He slipped Dioga's rush, kicked him, slipped past him again, slapped him, jeered at him and landed one blow that stung Dioga's face and then the bigger man at last caught the boy, threw him down and began to throttle him with his big hands. Saban clawed at Dioga's tattooed face, attempting to hook his fingers into the man's eye sockets, but Dioga just grunted and bore down with his thumbs on Saban's windpipe until Gilan hit him with a staff and made him let go. 'Well done, boy,' the high priest said. Saban choked as he tried to answer, then sat with the other boys and heaved breath into his starving lungs.

The seventeen boys endured the fire last. They stood with their backs to the flames as a priest heated the sharpened tip of an ash branch until it was red hot, then placed the glowing tip on their shoulder blades and left it there until the skin bubbled. Gilan stared into their faces to make certain they did not cry. Saban sang the rage song of Rannos as the fire scorched his back, and the heat was such that he thought he would have to cry aloud, but the pain passed and Gilan grinned his approval. 'Well done,' the high priest said again, 'well done,' and Saban's heart was so full of joy he could have flown like a bird.

He was a man. He could take a bride, own a slave, keep his own livestock, give himself a new name and speak in the tribal meetings. Neel, the young priest, presented Saban with the chalk ball that was his childhood's spirit shelter and Saban danced up and down on it, breaking and powdering the chalk as he whooped with delight. His father, unable to conceal his pleasure, gave him a wolfskin tunic, a fine spear and a bronze knife with a wooden handle. His mother gave him an amulet of amber, which had been a gift to her from Lengar, and Saban tried to make her keep it for she was sick, but she would not take it back. Galeth gave him a yew longbow, then sat him down and tattooed the marks of manhood on his chest. He used a bone comb that he dipped in woad, then hammered into Saban's skin; the pain meant nothing to Saban for now he was a man. 'You can take a new name now,' Galeth said.

'Hand-Splitter,' Saban said jokingly.

Galeth laughed. 'I thought that was your work. Well done. But you've made a lifelong enemy.'

'An enemy,' Saban said, 'who will find it hard to hold a bow or wield a spear.'

'But a dangerous man,' Galeth warned him.

'A crippled man now,' Saban said, for he had heard that the flint knife had bitten right through the sinews of Jegar's hand.

'A worse enemy for that,' Galeth said. 'So will you change your name?'

'I shall keep it,' Saban said. His birth name meant Favoured One and he reckoned it was apt. He watched the blood and woad trickle down his skin. He was a man! Then, with the sixteen others who had passed the ordeals, Saban sat down to a feast of meat, bread and honey, and while they ate, the women of the tribe sang the battle song of Arryn. By the meal's end the sun was going down and the girls who had been sequestered all day in the Temple of Lahanna were taken to the Temple of Slaol. The tribe lined the path from the settlement to the temple and they danced and clapped as the seventeen men followed the girls who would now become women.

Derrewyn was not among the girls. She was too valuable as a bride to be given to that night's revelry, but next morning, as Saban walked back into the settlement to find a place where he could build his own hut, Derrewyn greeted him. She gave him one of her precious necklaces of white sea-shells. Saban blushed at the gift and Derrewyn laughed at his confusion.

And that same day Gilan began to plan how the eight stones would be placed.

—«»—«»—«»—

The new men were not expected to work on the day after their ordeals, so Saban wandered up onto the hill to watch Gilan begin his work in the Old Temple. Butterflies were everywhere, a host of blue and white scraps being blown across the flower-studded grass where a score of people were digging the chalk with antler picks to make ditches and banks that would flank a new sacred path leading to the temple's gate of the sun.

Saban walked to the western side of the temple and sat on the grass. His new spear was beside him and he wondered when he would first use it in battle. He was a man now, but the tribe would expect him to kill an enemy before he was reckoned a proper adult. He drew out the bronze knife his father had given him and admired it in the sunlight. The blade was short, scarce as long as Saban's hand, but the metal had been incised with a thousand tiny indentations that made a complex pattern. A man's knife, Saban thought, and he tilted the blade from side to side so that the sun flashed from the metal.

Derrewyn's voice spoke behind him, 'My uncle has a sword just like that. He says it was made in the land across the western sea.'

Saban twisted round and stared up at her. 'Your uncle?' He asked.

'Kital, chief of Cathallo.' She paused. 'Of course.' She crouched beside him and placed a delicate finger to the blue-red scabs of his new tattoos. 'Did that hurt?' she asked.

'No,' Saban boasted.

'It must have done.'

'A little,' he conceded.

'Better those scars than being killed by Jegar,' Derrewyn said.

'He wouldn't have killed me,' Saban said. 'He just wanted to drag me back to Ratharryn and make me carry the chalk to my father.'

'I think he would have killed you,' Derrewyn said, then gave him a sidelong glance. 'Did you cut his hand?'

'In a way,' Saban admitted, smiling.

She laughed. 'Geil says he might never use the hand again properly.' Geil was Hengall's oldest wife and the woman with whom Derrewyn lived, and she had famous skills as a healer. 'She told Jegar he should go to Sannas because she's much more powerful.' Derrewyn plucked some daisies. 'Did you know Sannas has straightened your brother's foot?'

'She did?' Saban asked in surprise.

'She cut his foot right open,' Derrewyn said. 'There was blood everywhere! She did it on the night of the full moon and he didn't make a sound and afterwards they strapped his foot to some deer bones and he had a fever.' She began making the daisies into a chain. 'He got better,' she added.-

'How do you know?' Saban asked.

'A trader brought the news while you were in the woods,' she said. She paused to slit a daisy's stem with a sharp fingernail. 'And he said Sannas is angry with your brother.'

'Why?'

'Because Camaban just walked away,' Derrewyn said with a frown. 'Even before the foot was healed he just walked away, and no one knows where he's gone. Sannas thought he might have come here.'

'I haven't seen him,' Saban said, and felt somehow disgruntled that he had not heard this news of his brother before, or perhaps he was disappointed that Camaban had not come to Ratharryn, though he could think of no reason why he should want to visit his father's tribe. But Saban liked his awkward, stuttering half-brother and felt distressed that Camaban had gone away without any leave-taking. 'I wish he had come here,' Saban said.

Derrewyn shuddered. 'I only met him once,' she said, 'and I thought he was frightening.'

'He's just clumsy,' Saban said and half smiled. 'I used to take him food and he liked to try and frighten me. He'd gibber and jump about, pretending to be mad.'

'Pretending?'

'He likes to pretend.'

She shrugged, then shook her head as if Camaban's fate were of no importance. South of the temple a group of men were tearing the wool from the backs of sheep, making the beasts bleat pitifully. Derrewyn laughed at the naked-looking animals, and Saban watched her, marvelling at the delicacy of her face and the smoothness of her sun-browned legs. She was no older than he was, yet it seemed to Saban that Derrewyn had a confidence he lacked. Derrewyn herself pretended not to notice that she was being admired, but just turned to look at the Old Temple where Gilan was being helped by Galeth and his son, Mereth, who was just a year younger than Saban. Just a year, though because Saban was now a man the gap between him and Mereth seemed much wider.

Gilan and his two helpers were trying to find the centre of the shrine, and to do it they had stretched a string of woven bark fibre across the grassy circle within the inner bank. Once they were sure that they had discovered the widest space across the circle they doubled the string and tied a piece of grass about its looped end. That way they knew they had a line that was as long as the circle was wide, and that the grass knot marked the exact centre of the line, and now they were stretching the line again and again across the circle's width in an attempt to find the temple's centre. Galeth held one end of the string, Mereth the other, and Gilan stood in the middle for ever wanting to know if his two helpers were standing right beside the bank, or on it, or just beyond it, and whenever he was satisfied that they were in their right places he would mark where the scrap of grass was tied about the string by planting a stick in the ground. There were now a dozen sticks, all within a few hands' lengths of each other, though no two were marking exactly the same place and Gilan kept taking new measurements in the hope of finding two points that agreed.

'Why do they need to find the middle of the temple?' Saban asked.

'Because on midsummer's morning,' Derrewyn said, 'they'll find exactly where Slaol rises and then they'll draw a line from there to the temple's centre.' She was a priest's daughter and knew such things. Gilan had now decided on one of the many sticks, so he plucked the others out of the soil before clumsily banging a stake into the ground to mark the shrine's centre. It seemed that was the extent of this day's work, for Gilan now rolled the string into a ball and, after muttering a prayer, walked back towards Ratharryn.

'You want to go hunting?' Galeth called to Saban.

'No,' Saban called back.

'Getting lazy now you're a man?' Galeth asked good-naturedly, then waved and followed the high priest.

'You don't want to hunt?' Derrewyn asked Saban.

'I'm a man now,' Saban said. 'I can have my own hut, keep cattle and slaves, and I can take a woman into the forest.'

'A woman?' Derrewyn asked.

'You,' he said. He stood, picked up his spear, then held out his hand.

Derrewyn looked at him for a heartbeat. 'What happened last night in Slaol's temple?'

'There were seventeen men,' Saban said, 'and fourteen girls. I slept.'

'Why?'

'I was waiting for you,' he said and his heart was full and tremulous for it seemed that what he did now was far more dangerous than sleeping in the dark trees among the Outfolk and outcast enemies. He touched the necklace of sea-shells she had given him. I was waiting for you,' he said again.

She stood. For an instant Saban thought she would turn away, but then she smiled and took his hand. 'I've never been into the forest,' she said.

'Then it is time you went,' Saban said, and led her eastwards. He was a man.

Saban and Derrewyn went eastwards across Mai's river, then north past the settlement until they reached a place where the valley was steep and narrow and thick trees arched high above the running water. Sunlight splashed through the leaves. The call of the corncrakes in the wheatfields had long faded and all they could hear now was the river's rippling and the whisper of the wind and the scrabble of squirrels' claws and the staccato flap of a pigeon bursting through the high leaves. Orchids grew purple among the water mint at the river's edge while the haze of the fading bluebells clouded the shadows beneath the trees. Kingfishers whipped bright above the river where red-dabbed moorhen chicks paddled between the rushes.

Saban took Derrewyn to an island in the river, a place where willow and ash grew thick above a bank of long grass and thick moss. They waded to the island, then lay on the moss and Derrewyn watched air bubbles breaking the leaf-shadowed water where otters twisted after fish. A doe came to the farther bank, but sprang away before she drank because Derrewyn sighed too loudly in admiration. Then Derrewyn wanted to catch fish, so she took Saban's new spear and stood in the shallows and every now and then she would plunge the blade down at a trout or a grayling, but always missed. 'Aim below them,' Saban told her.

'Below them?'

'See how the spear bends in the water?'

'It just looks that way,' she said, then lunged, missed again and laughed. The spear was heavy and it tired her, so she tossed it onto the bank, then just stood letting the river run about her brown knees. 'Do you want to be chief here?' she asked Saban after a while.

He nodded. 'I think so, yes.'

She turned to look at him. 'Why?'

Saban did not have an answer. He had become accustomed to the idea, that was all. His father was chief, and though that did not mean that one of Hengall's sons should necessarily be the next chief, the tribe would look to those sons first and Saban was now the only one who might succeed. 'I think I want to be like my father,' he said carefully. 'He's a good chief.'

'What makes a good chief?'

'You keep people alive in winter,' Saban said, 'you cut back the forests, you judge disputes fairly and protect the tribe from enemies.'

'From Cathallo?' Derrewyn asked.

'Only if Cathallo threatens us.'

'They won't. I shall make sure of that.'

'You will?'

'Kital likes me, and one of his sons will be the next chief and they're all my cousins, and they all like me.' She looked at him shyly, as though he would find that surprising. 'I shall insist that we all be friends,' she said fiercely. 'It's stupid being enemies. If men want to fight they should go and find the Outfolk.' She suddenly splashed him with water. 'Can you swim?'

'Yes.'

'Teach me.'

'Just throw yourself in,' Saban said.

'And I'll drown,' she said. 'Two men in Cathallo drowned once and we didn't find them for days and they were all swollen.' She pretended to half lose her balance, 'And I'll be like them, all swollen and nibbled by fish and it'll be your fault because you wouldn't teach me to swim.'

Saban laughed, but stood and stripped off his new wolfskin tunic. Until a few days before he had always gone naked in summer, but now he felt embarrassed without the tunic. He ran fast into the water that was wonderfully cold after the heat under the trees and swam away from Derrewyn, going into a deep pool where the river swirled in dark ripples. Splashing to keep his head above water, once he had reached the pool's centre, he turned to call Derrewyn into the river, only to find that she was already there, very close behind him. She laughed at his shocked expression. 'I learned to swim a long time ago,' she said, then took a deep breath, ducked her head and kicked her bare legs into the air so that she could dive down beneath Saban. She too was naked.