LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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