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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 aspossible 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 this 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