LITMIR.BIZ

      

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 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 otter-skin 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

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