Читать книгу Stonehenge: A Novel of 2000 BC - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 13

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 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 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 in front of the mounds, white against the darkening hillside, the temple’s ring seemed to shine in the dying light. The shadows of the bank stretched long and Galeth noticed, for the very first time, how the ring of chalk had been placed on a slope so that it was very slightly tilted towards the place where the sun rose in midsummer.

‘It looks beautiful,’ Lidda, Galeth’s woman, said.

‘It does look beautiful,’ Galeth agreed. It was Galeth, practical, strong and efficient, who would have to raise the stones, and he tried to imagine how the eight great boulders would look in that clean setting of grass and chalk. ‘Slaol will be pleased,’ he decided.

There was thunder that night, but no rain. Just thunder, far off, and in the darkness two of the tribe’s children died. Both had been sick, though no one had thought they would die. But in the morning the sun rose to make the newly cleared chalk-ring shine, and the gods, folk reckoned, were once again smiling on Ratharryn.

Derrewyn was not yet a woman, but it was a custom in both Ratharryn and Cathallo that betrothed girls would live with their prospective husband’s family, so Derrewyn came to Ratharryn to live in the hut of Hengall’s oldest surviving wife.

Her arrival disturbed the tribe. She might be a year from womanhood, but her beauty had blossomed early and the young warriors of Ratharryn stared at her with undisguised yearning, for Derrewyn of Cathallo was a girl to stir men’s dreams. Her black hair hung below her waist and her long legs were tanned dark by the sun. About her ankles and her neck she wore delicate chains of pure white sea-shells, all the shells alike and of a size. Her eyes were dark, her face was slender and high-boned, and her spirit as quick as a kingfisher’s flight. The young warriors of Hengall’s tribe noted her, watched her, and reckoned she was too good for Saban who was still only a child. Hengall, seeing their desire, ordered Gilan to work a protective charm on the girl, so the high priest placed a human skull on the roof of Derrewyn’s hut and beside it he put a phallus of unfired clay and every man who saw the charm understood its threat. Touch Derrewyn without permission, the skull and phallus said, and you will die, and from that time the men looked, but did nothing more.

Saban also looked and yearned, and some in the tribe noted how Derrewyn gazed back at Saban, for he was promising to be a handsome man. He was still growing, but already he was as tall as his father and he had all Lengar’s quickness of eye and hand. He was accurate with a yew bow, was one of the fastest runners in the tribe and yet was modest, calm-tempered and well liked in Ratharryn. He promised to be a good man, but if he failed his ordeals he would never be reckoned an adult, so, in the months after his first meeting with Derrewyn, he was kept busy learning the secrets of the woods and the ways of the beasts. He watched the stags fighting and rutting, found where the otters had their dens and learned how to steal honey from irate bees. He was not allowed to sleep in the woods for he was still a child, but he killed his first wolf in early winter, felling it with a well-aimed arrow and ending the wounded beast’s life with a blow of a stone axe. Galeth’s woman, Lidda, pierced the wolf’s claws and threaded them on a sinew, then gave the necklace to Saban.

Saban might have been the son of the chief, but he was expected to work like everyone else. ‘A man who does nothing,’ Hengall liked to say, ‘eats nothing.’ Galeth was the tribe’s best woodworker, and for seven years Saban had been learning his uncle’s trade. He had learned all the names of the tree gods and how to placate them before an axe was laid to a trunk, and he had learned how to shape oak and ash into beams, posts and rafters. Galeth taught him how to make an adze blade from flint, and how to tie it to the haft with wet oxhide strips that shrank tight so that the head did not loosen during work. Saban was allowed to use flint tools, but neither he nor Galeth’s son, who had been born to Galeth’s first wife, were ever permitted to touch the two precious bronze axes that had been carried long distances across the land and had cost Galeth dearly in pigs and cattle.

Saban learned to carve beechwood into bowls and willow into paddles. He learned how to whittle a branch of stone-hard yew wood into a deer-killing bow. He learned to joint wood, and how to auger it with spikes of flint, bone or holly. He learned how to take an elm trunk and shape it into a hollow boat that could float all the way down the river to the sea and bring back bags of salt, shells and dried fish. He learned how to peg green oak so that it shrank into place, and he learned well, for in the winter before Saban’s ordeals Galeth trusted him to raise a new roof on the hut where Derrewyn slept.

Saban stripped the rotting thatch, but first handed the skull down to Derrewyn who, knowing that it protected her, kissed its forehead and then looked up at Saban. ‘And the rest,’ she said, smiling.

‘The rest?’

‘The clay,’ she said. The unfired clay phallus had crumbled in the weather, but Saban collected what he could from among the rotting thatch and gave it to her. She grimaced at the dirty scraps of clay, but found one fragment that was cleaner than the rest and reached up to give it back to Saban. ‘Swallow it,’ she ordered him.

‘Swallow it?’

‘Do it!’ she insisted, then laughed at his expression as he forced the lump down his throat.

‘Why did I do that?’ Saban asked her, but she just laughed and then the laugh faded as Jegar came round the hut’s corner.

Jegar was now the tribe’s best hunter. He went into the forest for days, leading a band of young men who brought back carcasses and tusks. There were some in the tribe who believed Jegar should succeed Hengall, for it was plain the gods favoured him, though if Jegar shared that opinion he showed no sign of it. Instead he was respectful to Hengall and took care to offer the chief the best cuts of meat from his kill and Hengall, in turn, dealt cautiously with the man who had once been Lengar’s closest companion.

Jegar now stared at Derrewyn. Like the other men of the tribe he had been deterred by the skull on her roof, but he could not hide his longing for her, nor his jealousy of Saban. In the new year, when Saban undertook the ordeals of manhood, he would be hunted in the deep forest and all the tribe knew that Jegar and his hounds would be on Saban’s trail. And if Saban failed, then Saban could not marry.

Jegar smiled at Derrewyn who clutched the skull to her breasts and spat. Jegar laughed, then licked his spear blade and pointed it at Saban. ‘Next year, little one,’ he said, ‘we shall meet in the trees. You, me, my hunting companions and my hounds.’

‘You need friends and hounds to beat me?’ Saban asked. Derrewyn was watching him and her gaze made him reckless. ‘Tell me about next year, Jegar,’ he said. He knew it was dangerously foolish to taunt Jegar, but he feared Derrewyn would despise him if he meekly allowed Jegar to bully him. ‘What will you do if you catch me in the forest?’ he demanded, jumping down to the ground.

‘Thrash you, little one,’ Jegar said.

‘You don’t have the strength,’ Saban said, and he picked up a long ash pole that was used to measure the lengths of the replacement rafters. He was taller than Jegar, and he also knew that Jegar would not dare kill him here in the settlement where so many were watching, but he was still risking a painful beating. ‘You couldn’t thrash a kitten,’ he added scornfully.

‘Go back to work, boy,’ Jegar said, but Saban just slashed the pole at him, making the smaller man step back. Saban slashed again, and the clumsy weapon whipped past Jegar’s face. This time the hunter snarled and levelled his spear. ‘Careful,’ he said.

‘Why should I be careful of you?’ Saban asked. Fear and exhilaration were competing in him. He knew this was stupidity, but Derrewyn’s presence had driven him to it and his own pride would not let him back down. ‘You’re a bully, Jegar,’ he said, drawing back the pole, ‘and I’ll thrash you bloody.’

‘You child!’ Jegar said, and ran at Saban, but Saban had guessed what Jegar would do and he let the pole’s tip fall so that it tangled Jegar’s legs, and then he twisted the pole, tripping Jegar, and as Jegar fell Saban jumped on him and beat his enemy’s head with his fists. He landed two hard blows before Jegar managed to twist round and lash back. Jegar could not use his spear for Saban was on top of him, so first he tried to punch the boy away, then he clawed at Saban’s eyes. Saban bit one of the probing fingers and tasted blood, then hands seized and dragged him off Jegar. Other hands pulled Jegar away.

It was Galeth who had hauled Saban away. ‘You fool!’ Galeth said. ‘You want to die?’

‘I was beating him!’

‘He’s a man. You’re a boy! And you’re going to have a black eye.’ Galeth pushed Saban away, then turned on Jegar. ‘Leave him alone,’ he ordered. ‘Your chance comes next year.’

‘He attacked me!’ Jegar said. His hand was bleeding where Saban had bitten it. He sucked at the blood, then picked up his spear. There was rage in his eyes, for he knew he had been humiliated. ‘A boy who attacks a man has to be punished,’ he insisted.

‘No one attacked anyone,’ Galeth said. He was huge, and his anger was frightening. ‘Nothing happened here. You hear me? Nothing happened!’ He drove Jegar back. ‘Nothing happened!’ He turned on Derrewyn who had watched the fight with wide eyes. ‘Be about your work, girl,’ he ordered, then pushed Saban back to the roof. ‘And you’ve got work to do, so do it.’

Hengall chuckled when he heard about the fight. ‘Was he really winning?’ he asked Galeth.

‘He wouldn’t have lasted,’ Galeth said, ‘but yes, he was winning.’

‘He’s a good boy,’ Hengall said approvingly, ‘a good boy!’

‘But Jegar will try to stop him passing the ordeals,’ Galeth warned.

Hengall dismissed his younger brother’s fears. ‘If Saban is to be chief,’ he said, ‘then he must be able to deal with men like Jegar.’ He chuckled again, delighted that Saban had shown such courage. ‘You’ll keep an eye on the boy through the winter?’ he asked. ‘He deserves better than to be speared in the back.’

‘I shall watch him,’ Galeth promised grimly.

It proved a cruelly hard winter, and the only good news of that cold season was that the warriors of Cathallo abandoned their raids on Hengall’s land. The peace, which would be sealed by Saban’s marriage, was holding, though some folk reckoned Cathallo was just waiting for Hengall’s death before snapping up Ratharryn as they had conquered Maden. Others reckoned that it was the weather that kept Kital’s men at bay, for the snow lay thick for days and the river froze so that the women had to break the ice to fetch their daily water. There were days when the snow on the hills blew from the low crests like smoke, when the fires seemed to give no warmth and the ice-bound huts crouched in a grey-white land that offered no hope of warmth or life. The weak of the tribe, the old, the young, the sick and the cursed, died. There was hunger, but the warriors of the tribe hunted in the forests. None rivalled Jegar and his band who, day after day, brought back carcasses that were butchered outside the settlement where the guts steamed in the cold air as the tribe’s dogs circled in hope of spoil. The hunters gave the stags’ skulls to women who fed their cooking fires with wood till they burned fierce, then held the roots of the antlers in the flames so that they would snap clean from the bone. There would be work to be done on the Old Temple in the spring, and the tribe would need scores of antler picks to make holes for the new stones that were to be fetched from Cathallo.

That winter never seemed to end. Wolves were seen by the river, but Gilan assured the tribe that all would be well when the new temple was made. This winter is the last of our woes, the high priest said, the last ill fortune before the new temple changes Ratharryn’s fate. There would be life again, and love, and warmth and happiness, and all things, Gilan assured the tribe, would be good.

Camaban had gone to Cathallo to learn. He had been alone for years, scavenging a thin living beyond Ratharryn’s embankment, and in those years he had listened to the voices in his head and he had thought about what they told him. Now he wanted to test that knowledge against the world’s other wisdom, and no one was wiser than Sannas, sorceress of Cathallo, and so Camaban listened.

In the beginning, Sannas said, Slaol and Lahanna had been lovers. They had circled the world in an endless dance, the one ever close to the other, but then Slaol had glimpsed Garlanna, the goddess of the earth who was Lahanna’s daughter, and he had fallen in love with Garlanna and rejected Lahanna.

So Lahanna had lost her brightness, and thus night came to the world.

But Garlanna, Sannas insisted, stayed loyal to her mother by refusing to join Slaol’s dance and so the sun god sulked and winter came to the earth. And Slaol still sulked, and would not listen to the folk on earth, for they reminded him of Garlanna. Which is why, Sannas insisted, Lahanna should be worshipped above all other gods because she alone had the power to protect the world from Slaol’s petulance.

Camaban listened, just as he listened to Morthor, Derrewyn’s father, who was high priest at Cathallo, and Morthor told a similar tale, though in his telling it was Lahanna who sulked and who hid her face in shame because she had tried and failed to dim her lover’s brightness. She still tried to diminish Slaol, and those were fearful times when Lahanna slid herself in front of Slaol to bring night in the daytime. Morthor claimed that Lahanna was the petulant goddess, and though he was Sannas’s grandson and though the two disagreed, they did not fight. ‘The gods must be balanced,’ Morthor claimed. ‘Lahanna might try to punish us because we live on Garlanna’s earth, but she is still powerful and must be placated.’

‘Men won’t condemn Slaol,’ Sannas told Camaban, ‘for they see nothing wrong with him loving a mother and her daughter.’ She spat. ‘Men are like pigs rolling in their own dung.’

‘If you visit a strange tribe,’ Morthor said, ‘to whom do you go? Its chief! So we must worship Slaol above all the gods.’

‘Men can worship whatever they want,’ Sannas said, ‘but it is a woman’s prayer that is heard, and women pray to Lahanna.’

On one thing, though, both Sannas and Morthor agreed: that the grief of this world had come when Slaol and Lahanna parted, and that ever since the tribes of men had striven to balance their worship of the two jealous gods. It was the same belief that Hirac had held, a belief that gripped the heartland tribes and forced them to be cautious of all the gods.

Camaban heard all this, and he asked questions, but kept his own opinions silent. He had come to learn, not to argue, and Sannas had much to teach him. She was the most famous healer in the land and folk came to her from a dozen tribes. She used herbs, fungi, fire, bone, blood, pelts and charms. Barren women would walk for days to beg her help, and each morning would find a desperate collection of the sick, the crippled, the lame and the sad waiting at the shrine’s northern entrance. Camaban collected Sannas’s herbs, picked mushrooms and cut fungi from decaying trees. He dried the medicines in nets over the fire, he sliced them, infused them and learned the names that Sannas gave them. He listened as the folk described their ills and he watched what Sannas gave them, then marked their progress to health or to death. Many came complaining of pain, just pain, and as often as not they would rub their bellies and Sannas would give them slices of fungi to chew, or else made them drink a thick mixture of herbs, fungus and fresh blood. Almost as many complained of pain in their joints, a fierce pain that doubled them over and made it hard for a man to till a field or for a woman to grind a quern stone, and if the pain was truly crippling Sannas would lay the sufferer between two fires, then take a newly chipped flint knife and drag it across the painful joint. Back and forth she would cut, slicing deep so that the blood welled up, then Camaban would rub dried herbs into the wounds and place more of the dried herbs over the fresh cuts until the blood no longer seeped and Sannas would set fire to the herbs and the flames would hiss and smoke and the hut would fill with the smell of burning flesh.

One man went mad in that hard wintertime, beating his wife until she died, then hurling his youngest child onto his hut fire and Sannas decreed that the man had been possessed of an evil spirit. He was brought to her, then pinioned between two warriors as Sannas cut open his scalp, peeled back the flesh, and chipped a hole in his skull with a small stone maul and a thin flint blade. She levered out a whole circle of bone, then spat onto his brain and demanded that the evil thing come out. The man lived, though in such misery it would have been better had he died.

Camaban learned to set bones, to fill wounds with moss and spider web, and to make the potions that give men dreams. He carried those potions to Cathallo’s priests who treated him with awe because he had been chosen by Sannas. He learned to make the glutinous poison that warriors smeared on their arrow-heads when they hunted Outfolk in the wide forests north of Cathallo. The poison was made from a mixture of urine, faeces and the juice of a flowering herb that Sannas prized as a killer. He made Sannas’s food, grinding it to a paste because, only having the one tooth, she could not chew. He learned her spells, learned her chants, learned the names of a thousand gods, and when he was not learning from Sannas he listened to the traders when they returned with strange tales from their long journeys. He listened to everything, forgot nothing and kept his opinions locked inside his head. Those opinions had not changed. The voices that had spoken in his head still echoed there, still woke him at night, still filled him with wonder. He had learned how to heal and how to frighten and how to twist the world to the gods’ wishes, but he had not changed. The world’s wisdom had left his own untouched.

In the winter’s heart, when Slaol was at his weakest and Lahanna was shining brightly on Cathallo’s shrine to touch the boulders with a sheen of glistening cold light, Sannas brought two warriors to the temple. ‘It is time,’ she told Camaban.

The warriors laid Camaban on his back beside one of the temple’s taller stones. One man held Camaban’s shoulders, while the other held the crippled foot towards the full moon. ‘I will either kill you,’ Sannas said, ‘or cure you.’ She held a maul of stone and a blade that had been made from the scapula of a dead man and she laid the bone blade on the grotesquely curled ball of Camaban’s foot. ‘It will hurt,’ she said, then laughed as if Camaban’s pain would give her pleasure.

The warrior holding the foot flinched as the maul hammered on the bone. Sannas hammered again, showing a remarkable strength for such an old woman. Blood, black in the moonlight, was pouring from the foot, soaking the warrior’s hands and running down Camaban’s leg. Sannas beat the maul on the blade again, then wrenched the scapula free and gritted her teeth as she forced the curl of Camaban’s clenched foot outwards. ‘You have toes!’ she marvelled, and the two warriors shuddered and turned away as they heard the cracking of cartilage, the splintering of bone and the grating of the broken being straightened. ‘Lahanna!’ Sannas cried, and hammered the blade into Camaban’s foot again, forcing its sharpened edge into another tight part of the bulbous flesh and fused bone.

Sannas bent the foot flat, then splinted it in deer bones that she bound tight with strips of wolfskin. ‘I have used bone to mend bone,’ she told Camaban, ‘and you will either die or you will walk.’

Camaban stared at her, but said nothing. The pain had been more than he had ever expected, it had been a pain fit to fill the whole wide moonlit world, but he had not whimpered once. There were tears in his eyes, but he had made no sound and he knew he would not die. He would live because Slaol wanted it. Because he had been chosen. Because he was the crooked child who had been sent to make the world straight. He was Camaban.