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 smoldered 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 center 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 favored 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.
Chapter 4
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 honor of dancing in the bulls’ hides for, when the night’s dark was full and the furious flames were rushing toward 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 newborn 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 toward 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. Some-where 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 color 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 his
sed.
“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.”
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