“You are free,” Haragg said solemnly, “and you may go if you wish, but your brother wished me to keep you safe until we can join him in Sarmennyn. He knew no other way of keeping you alive, except to doom you to my slavery, but he charged me to protect you because he has need of you.”
“Camaban needs me?” Saban asked, utterly bemused by all that Haragg was so tonelessly revealing. Saban still thought of his brother as a crippled stutterer, a thing of pity, yet it had been the despised Camaban who had arranged his survival and Camaban who had recruited the daunting Haragg to his own purposes. “Why does Camaban need me?” he asked.
“Because your brother is doing a marvelous thing,” Haragg said, and for once his voice held emotion, “a thing that only a great man could do. Your brother is making the world anew.” Haragg lifted the leather curtain at the hut door and peered out to see that a new snow was falling thick and slow to smother the world. “For years,” Haragg said, still staring at the snow, “I struggled with this world and its gods. I was trying to explain it all.” He dropped the curtain and gave Saban a look that was almost defiant. “It did not give me pleasure, that struggle. But then I met your brother. He cannot know, I thought, he is too young! But he did know. He did. He has found the pattern.”
“The pattern?” Saban asked, puzzled.
“He has found the pattern,” Haragg repeated gravely, “and all will be new, all will be well, and all will be changed.”
Chapter 8
In a winter night when the earth lay hard as ice and the trees were rimed with a frost that glowed under a pale misted moon, a man limped from the trees north of Cathallo and crossed the fallow fields. It was the longest night, the darkness of the sun’s death, and no one saw him come. The huts of the settlement seeped a small smoke as the night fires settled to embers, but the dogs of Cathallo slept and the wintering oxen, sheep, goats and pigs were safe in the huts where they could not be disturbed by the stranger.
Wolves had seen the man and in the previous dusk a dozen of the gray beasts had followed him, their tongues lolling as they looped around behind him, but the man had turned and howled at them and the wolves had first whimpered, then fled into the black, white-frosted trees. The man walked on. Now, in the starlit moments before the dawn, he came to the northern entrance of the great shrine.
The great stones within the high earth bank glimmered with frost. For a heartbeat, pausing in the entrance, it seemed to him that the great ring of boulders was shimmering like a circle of dancers shifting their weight from foot to foot. The dancing stones. He smiled at that idea, then hurried across the grass to Sannas’s hut.
He gently pulled aside the leather curtain that hung over the entrance and let in a gust of cold air that gave the dying fire a sudden glow. He ducked into the hut, let the curtain fall and went very still.
He could see almost nothing. The fire was mere embers in ash and no moonlight came through the small smoke-hole in the roof, and so he just squatted and listened until he detected the sound of three people breathing. Three sleepers.
He crept across the hut on his knees, going slowly so that he made no noise, and when he found the first of the sleepers, a young slave, he put one hand over her mouth and sliced a knife down with his free hand. Her breath bubbled harsh in her cut gullet, she twitched for a while, but at last went still. The second girl died the same way, and then the man discarded caution and went to the fire to blow on the smouldering embers and feed them with tinder of dried puffball and small twigs so that the flames flickered bright to illuminate the hanging skulls and bat wings and herb bunches and bones. The fresh blood glistened on the furs and on the killer’s hands.
The last sleeper shifted on the hut’s far side. “Is it morning?” her ancient voice asked.
“Not quite, my dear,” the man said. He was putting some larger pieces of wood on the fire now. “It’s almost dawn, though,” he added comfortingly, “but it will be a cold one, a very cold one.”
“Camaban?” Sannas sat up in the pile of furs that was her bed. Her skull-like face, framed by a tangle of white hair, showed surprise and even pleasure. “I knew you’d come back,” she said. She did not see the new blood, and the stench of smoke masked its smell. “Where have you been?” she demanded querulously.
“I have walked the hills and worshipped in temples older than time,” Camaban said softly, feeding more wood onto the revived fire, “and I have talked with priests, old women and sorcerers until I have sucked the knowledge of this world dry.”
“Dry!” Sannas laughed. “You’ve hardly licked the tit, you young fool, let alone sucked on it.” In truth Sannas knew Camaban had been her best pupil, a man to rival her own skills, but she would never tell him as much. She leaned to one side, revealing a leathery flap of breast as she reached for her honeycomb. She put a piece in her mouth and sucked noisily. “Your brother is making war on us,” she said sourly.
“Lengar loves to make war,” Camaban said.
“And loves to make babies,” Sannas said. “Derrewyn is pregnant.”
“I heard as much.”
“May her milk poison the bastard,” Sannas said, “and its father too.” She pulled the furs round her shoulders. “Lengar takes our men prisoner, Camaban, and sacrifices them to his gods.”
Camaban rocked back on his heels. “Lengar thinks the gods are like hounds that can be whipped into obedience,” he said, “but he will learn soon enough that their whips are bigger than his. But for the moment he does Slaol’s work so I imagine he will prosper.”
“Slaol!” Sannas hissed.
“The great god,” Camaban said reverently, “the god above all gods. The only god who has the power to change our sad world.”
Sannas stared at him as a dribble of honey trickled from her lips. “The only god?” she asked in disbelief.
“I told you that I wished to learn,” Camaban said, “so I have learned, and I have discovered that Slaol is the god above all the gods. Our mistake has been to worship the others, but they are much too busy worshipping Slaol to take any notice of us.” He smiled at Sannas’s appalled expression. “I am a follower of Slaol, Sannas,” he said, “and I always have been, ever since I was a child. Even when I listened to you talk of Lahanna, I was a worshipper of Slaol.”
She shuddered at his impiety. “Then why come back here, fool?” she demanded. “You think I love Slaol?”
“I came to see you, my dear, of course,” Camaban said calmly. He put a last piece of wood on the fire, then moved to her side where he sat and cradled her shoulders. “I paid you to teach me, remember? Now I want my final lesson.”
The old woman saw the blood on his hands then and tried to claw his face. “I will give you nothing,” she said.
Camaban turned his body to face her. “You will teach me the last lesson, Sannas,” he said gently. “I paid for it with Slaol’s gold.”
“No!” she hissed.
“Yes,” Camaban said gently, then he leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. She struggled, but Camaban used his weight to push her down. He still kissed her, his mouth fixed on hers, and for a few heartbeats she tried to escape his kiss by twisting her head, but her strength was no match for his.
She glared up at his eyes, then he moved the furs from her breasts and put one arm around her body and began to squeeze. The old woman struggled again and a small whimper escaped her, but Camaban pushed his mouth hard down on hers, squeezed with his arm and pinched her nostrils with his left hand. All the time he kept his green eyes on her black eyes.
It took a long while. A surprisingly long while. The old woman kicked and twitched under the furs, but after a while the spasmodic movements ended, and still Camaban kissed her. The fire was almost dead again by the time Sannas’s small, birdlike movements had ended, but her eyes were still open and Camaban stared into them until at last, though cautiously, as if expecting a trick, he slowly pulled his face from hers. He waited, his mouth just a finger’s breadth from her mouth, but she did no
t move. And still he waited, scarce daring to breathe, but finally he smiled. “What a honey-sweet kiss that was,” he said to the corpse, then touched his finger to her forehead. “I took your last breath, lady. I have stolen your soul.”
He sat for a moment, savoring the triumph. With her last breath he had stolen her power and engulfed her spirit, but then he remembered the closeness of dawn and he hurriedly crossed the hut. He cleared away the stones that ringed the small hearth and then, using a piece of firewood, shifted the burning wood, embers and hot ashes aside. He found a broken antler and used it to dig into the hot soil beneath the hearth, scrabbling the earth away where he knew Sannas hid her most precious possessions.
He uncovered a leather pouch. He prised it gently from the earth’s grip, then pulled aside the leather curtain at the hut entrance where the first seeping gray of the morning provided a sullen light. He untied the pouch and spilt its contents on to his palm. There were eleven of Sarmennyn’s small lozenges and one large one. It was the gold Hengall had exchanged for Cathallo’s stones and the two lozenges Camaban himself had paid to Sannas. He gazed at the treasure for an instant, then returned it to the pouch, tied the pouch to his belt and went out into the cold.
He went north, and a child saw him leave the shrine in the misty grayness but did not raise any alarm. He limped across the frost-whitened fields to the dark woods in which he vanished before the sun rose to blaze across Cathallo’s shrine.
Where Sannas the sorceress lay dead.
* * *
Haragg hired three slave women for the winter. They came from a tribe that lived yet farther north and spoke a language that even Haragg did not understand, but they knew their duties. The youngest slept with Haragg, and Saban and Cagan shared the other two. “A man should sleep with a woman,” Haragg told Saban. “It is a natural thing, the proper thing.”
Haragg seemed to take small pleasure from his own woman. Instead his joy came from the spare, cold life of that long winter. Each morning he would go to the temple to pray and afterward he would bring water or ice to the fire while Cagan fed hay or leaves to the three horses that shared the hut. The chief of the settlement regarded Haragg as an honored guest and provided food for all of them, though Saban supplemented those gifts by hunting. He preferred hunting by himself, stalking the scarce prey through an ice-bound land, though he did once join the men of the settlement when a bear was found sleeping in a cave. They woke the beast with fire and killed it with flint and bronze and afterward Saban carried a bleeding haunch of meat back to the hut. There was never quite enough food, at least for the giant Cagan, but none of them starved. They ate berries and nuts that were stored in jars, eked out their bags of grain and herbs, and occasionally gorged on venison, hare or fish.
And day after day the snow glittered on the hills and the air seemed filled with a sparkling frost and the sun came for a short time and the nights were endless. They burned peat, which Saban had never seen before, but sometimes, to make the light in the hut brighter, they would add logs of resinous pine that burned smoky and pungent. The long evenings were usually silent, but sometimes Haragg talked. “I was a priest,” the big man said one night, startling Saban. “I was a priest of Sarmennyn, and I had a wife and a son and a daughter.”
Saban said nothing. The peat glowed red. The three horses stamped their feet and Cagan, who loved the horses, felt the vibration and turned and gurgled soothingly to them. The three women watched the men, sheltering under a shared pelt. They had tangled masses of black hair that half hid the scars on their foreheads, which showed they were slaves. Saban was learning their language, but now he and Haragg spoke in the Outfolk tongue.
“My daughter was called Miyac,” Haragg said, staring into the fire’s steady glow. It was almost as though he were talking to himself, for he spoke softly and did not look at Saban. “Miyac” – his voice caressed the name – “and she was a creature of great loveliness. Great loveliness. I thought she would grow to marry a chief or a war leader, and I was glad, for her husband’s wealth would keep my wife and me in our old age and would preserve Cagan when we were dead.”
Saban said nothing. There was a slithering noise from the roof as a mass of snow slid down the roof turfs. “But, in Sarmennyn,” Haragg went on, “we choose a sun bride each year. She is chosen in the spring and for three moons” – he rocked his hand back and forth to show that the three moons were an approximation – “she is a goddess herself. And then, at midsummer, at the sun’s glory, we kill her.”
“Kill her?” Saban asked, shocked.
“We send her to Erek.” Erek was the Outfolk’s name for Slaol. “And one year,” Haragg went on, “we chose Miyac.”
Saban flinched. “You chose her?”
“The priests chose her,” Haragg said, “and I was a priest. My wife screamed at me, she hit me, but I thought it was an honor to our family. What greater husband could Miyac have than Erek? And so my daughter went to her death and my wife died within a moon, and I fell into a black sadness, and when I came from that sadness I no longer wanted to be a priest and my ideas were unwelcome and so I began to wander the land. I traded.” The sadness showed on his face and Cagan whimpered so that Haragg leaned over and patted his son’s hand to show that everything was well.
Saban shifted closer to the fire, dragged the pelt around his shoulders and wondered if the world would ever be warm again.
“My twin brother was the high priest in Sarmennyn,” Haragg said, “and when I told him I no longer believed in sacrifice he allowed me to become a trader instead of a priest. His name is Scathel. You will meet him, if he still lives.”
Something about the way Haragg said his brother’s name suggested that Saban did not want to meet Scathel. “Is your brother still the high priest?” he asked.
Haragg shrugged. “He lost his wits when the treasures were stolen and fled into the mountains, so now I do not know if he is alive or dead,”
“Who stole the treasures?” Saban asked.
“His name is never spoken,” Haragg answered, “but he was a son of our chief and he wanted to be chief himself, except he had three older brothers and all were greater men than he and so he stole the tribe’s treasures to bring ill luck on Sarmennyn. He had heard of Sannas, and he believed she could use the treasures to make a magic that would kill his father and brothers and give him the chieftainship. We know that, for he said as much to his woman, and she told us before we killed her, and then Scathel averted the ill luck by killing the chief and all his family. So the gold never did reach Sannas, but Scathel still went mad.” He paused. “And perhaps the ill luck was not averted, I don’t know. What I do know is that my people will do anything, give anything, to have the treasures returned.”
“They must give a temple,” Saban said, remembering what Lengar had told him on the morning of his enslavement.
“They must listen to Camaban,” Haragg said softly, and once again Saban was filled with wonderment that his awkward, crippled brother had suddenly gained such an awesome reputation.
A few days later, when a thaw had melted some of the snow on the passes through the hills and Haragg’s precious white pelts had been delivered, and as the days lengthened again as Slaol recovered his strength, Haragg took Saban and Cagan westward. Ostensibly they went to buy some axes made from black stone that were much prized in the south country, but Saban suspected there was another purpose in the journey. It took half a day until, quite unexpectedly, they reached a high hill that ended abruptly at a sea cliff. This was the first time Saban had ever seen the sea and he whimpered at the sight. He had never imagined anything so dark, gray, cold and venomous. It heaved constantly, as though muscles worked beneath its white-flecked surface, and where it met the land it broke into a myriad wind-whipped fragments, then sucked and drained and surged to shatter again. Shrieking white birds filled the air. He could have gazed at it forever, but Haragg stirred him northward along the shore. Monsters’ bones littered the small beaches in the cliff bends
and, when they came to the settlement that sold the axes, Saban found himself sleeping in a hut whose rafters were made of those vast curved bones that arched above him to support a low roof of wood and turf.
Next morning Haragg took Cagan and Saban to a narrow fragment of high land that jutted into the vast ocean and, at the land’s end, atop a cliff that seemed to shake with the endless thunder of the sea, there was a temple. It was a simple enough shrine, a mere ring of eight tall stones, but one stone stood proud of the circle. “Erek again,” Haragg said, “for wherever you travel, you will find Erek is worshipped. Always Erek.” The outlying stone, Saban guessed, stood toward the place where the sun rose in midsummer and its shadow would pierce the circle as the sun gave life to the earth. Small sprigs of dead heather lay at the foot of the stones, evidence of prayers made, and not even the skirling sea wind could wholly snatch away the blood stink of a beast that had been sacrificed at the temple not long before. “We have a shrine like this in Sarmennyn,” Haragg said softly, “and we call it the Sea Temple, though it has nothing to do with Dilan.” Dilan, Saban now knew, was Sarmennyn’s sea god. “Our Sea Temple doesn’t face the rising sun,” Haragg went on, “but looks to where it sets in midsummer, and if I had my way I would pull it down. I would take its stones and cast them into the sea. I would obliterate it.” He spoke with an uncommon bitterness.
“The sun bride?” Saban guessed diffidently.
Haragg nodded. “She dies at the Sea Temple.” He closed his eyes for a few heartbeats. “She goes to the temple arrayed in Erek’s gold and there she is stripped naked, just as a bride should go to her husband, and sent to her death.” Haragg hugged his knees, and Saban could see tears on his face, or perhaps that was just the effect of the wind that flecked the sea ragged and whirled the shrieking birds about the sky. Saban understood now why Haragg had come to this high place, because from here he could gaze into the vastness above the sea where his daughter’s spirit flew with the soaring white birds. “The gold was a gift from Dilan,” Haragg went on. “The treasures were washed ashore in a swamped boat, close to where the Sea Temple stands, and so our ancestors decided the gold was a gift from one god to the other, and perhaps they were right.”
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