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 toward 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 Hengall.
“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 rumors 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.
Chapter 2
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 gray. A thatched roof, sodden with rainwater, had collapsed in the night, and folk marveled 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 afterward 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 th
is 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 gray 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 toward his father.