the leaves to where the white clouds rode the bright sky, and, by craning his neck, he could just see a patch of mossy ground at the tree’s foot. For a long while nothing happened. The wind rustled the leaves, a squirrel chattered its teeth and two bees drifted close. Somewhere a woodpecker rattled at bark, stopped, began again. A rustle of dead leaves made Saban peer down, fearing discovery, but all he saw was a fox carrying a dabchick in its jaws.
Then the living noises of the woods, all the small sounds of claw and beak and paw, just stopped, and there was only the sigh of the wind among the leaves and the creak of the trees. Everything that breathed was crouching motionless because something new and strange had come. There was danger; the forest held its breath, and Saban listened until at last he heard the noise that had silenced the world. A hound bayed.
It was a warm day, but Saban’s naked skin was suddenly chill. He could feel the hairs prickling at his neck. Another dog howled, then Saban heard men’s voices far away. The men were high above him on the slope. Hunters.
He could imagine them. There would be a half-dozen young men, Jegar their leader, all tall and strong and sun-browned, with their long hair twisted into hunter’s braids and hung with feathers. They would be peering up the oak tree, leaning on their spears and calling insults to where they thought Saban was hiding. Perhaps they loosed a few arrows into the leaves, hoping to drive him down so they could walk him back to Ratharryn and parade his shame in front of his father’s hut, but in a small while they would become bored and one of them – let it be Jegar, Saban prayed – would clamber up the oak’s trunk to find him.
Saban lay, his eyes closed, listening. Then he heard a shout. Not just a shout, but a yelp of protest and pain and anger, and he knew his small trap had bitten blood. He smiled.
Jegar fell from the tree, cursing because his right hand was cut deep across the palm. He shrieked and forced his bleeding hand between his thighs as he bent over to alleviate the agony. One of his friends placed moss on the wound, and bound the hand with leaves, and afterwards, furious, they rampaged along the ridge, but neither they nor their howling dogs came close to Saban. They followed his spirit down to the stream, but there the hounds lost him and after a while they abandoned the hunt. The sound of dogs faded and the myriad small sounds of the woods were heard again.
Saban grinned. He relived the moment when he had heard the scream and he thanked Slaol. He laughed. He had won.
He had won, yet still he did not move. He was hungry now, yet he dared not forage in case Jegar was still stalking the slope, so he stayed on his small platform and watched the birds fly home to their nests and the sky turn red with Slaol’s anger because the world was being given over to Lahanna’s care. The chill seeped up from the stream. A deer and her fawn stepped slow and delicate beneath the ash as they went to the water and their appearance suggested there were no hunters concealed on the ridge above, yet still Saban did not move. His hunger and thirst could wait. In the gaps between the high leaves he could see the sky turning smoky and misty, then the first star of Lahanna’s flock appeared. The tribe called that star Merra and it reminded Saban that all his ancestors were gazing down, but it also brought fears of those folk who had died in shame and who were now rousing from their day sleep to let their famished spirits wander the dark trees. Strange claws were being unsheathed and rabid teeth bared as the night terrors of the forest were unleashed.
Saban hardly slept, but instead lay and listened to the noises of the night. Once he heard the crackling of twigs, the sound of a great body moving through the brush, then silence again in which he imagined a monstrous head, fangs bared, questing up into the elm. A scream sounded higher on the ridge, and Saban curled into a ball and whimpered. An owl screeched. The boy’s only comforts were the stars of his ancestors, the cold light of Lahanna silvering the leaves and his thoughts of Derrewyn. He thought of her a lot. He tried to conjure up a picture of her face. Once, thinking about her, he looked up and saw a streak of light slither across the stars and he knew that a god was descending to the earth which he took to be a sign that he and Derrewyn were destined for each other.
For five days and nights he hid, foraging only in the half-light of dawn and dusk. He found a clearing at the bottom of the ridge where the stream had made a wide bend in its course and there he found chervil and garlic. He plucked sorrel and comfrey leaves, and found some broom buds, though they were bitter for their season was almost done. Best of all were the morels that he found higher on the ridge where a great elm had fallen. He carried them back to his platform in the ash and picked the woodlice from their crannies before eating them. One day he even tickled a small trout up from the weeds of the stream and gnawed greedily at its raw flesh. At night he chewed the gum that oozes from birch bark, spitting it out when all the flavour was gone.
Jegar had given up the hunt, though Saban did not know that, and one twilight, seeking for more morels by the rotting elm, he heard a footfall in the leaves and froze. He was concealed by the fallen tree, but the hiding place was precarious and his heart began to thump.
A moment later a file of Outfolk spearmen went past. They were all men, all with bronze-tipped spears and all had grey tattooed streaks on their faces. They had no dogs with them, and they seemed more intent on leaving the ridge than searching for prey. Saban heard them splash through the stream, heard the flutter as the waterbirds fled their presence, then there was silence again.
The last night was Saban’s worst. It rained, and the wind was high so that the noises of the trees were louder than ever as they tossed their heads in the wet sky. Branches creaked and, far off, Rannos the god of thunder tumbled the blackness. And it was dark, utterly dark, without a scrap of Lahanna’s light piercing or thinning the clouds. The darkness was worse than a cold hut, for this was a limitless night filled with horrors and in its black heart Saban heard something huge and cumbersome crash through the woods and he huddled on his platform thinking of the dead souls and their yearning for human flesh until, wet, cold and hungry, he saw a grey dawn dilute the damp darkness above the ridge. The rain eased as the sky brightened, and then the ox horns sounded to say that the first ordeal was done.
Twenty-two boys had left Ratharryn, but only seventeen returned. One had vanished and was never seen again, two had been found by hunters and had been driven back to Ratharryn, while two more had been so terrified of the darkness of the trees that they had willingly gone back to their humiliation. But the seventeen who gathered at Slaol’s temple were permitted to tie their hair in a loose knot at the nape of their necks and then they followed the priests down the track that led to Ratharryn’s entrance and their path was lined with women who held out platters of flat bread and cold pork and dried fish. ‘Eat,’ they urged the boys, ‘you must be hungry, eat!’ But hungry as they were, none touched the food for that too was an ordeal, though an easy one to survive.
The men of the tribe waited beside a raging fire inside the great wall and they thumped their spear butts on the ground to welcome the seventeen. The boys still had two tests to face, and some could yet fail, but they were no longer jeered. Saban saw Jegar, and saw the leaves bound with twine on his hand, and he could not resist dancing a few steps of victory. Jegar spat towards him, but it was mere petulance. He had missed his chance and Saban had survived the woods.
The boys had to wrestle against men for their next test. It did not matter if they won or lost, indeed no one expected a half-starved boy to beat a full-grown man, but it was important that they fought well and showed bravery. Saban found himself pitted against Dioga, a freed Outfolk slave noted for his bear-like strength. The crowd laughed at the mismatch between boy and man, but Saban was faster than any of them expected. He slipped Dioga’s rush, kicked him, slipped past him again, slapped him, jeered at him and landed one blow that stung Dioga’s face and then the bigger man at last caught the boy, threw him down and began to throttle him with his big hands. Saban clawed at Dioga’s tattooed face, attempting to hook his fingers into the man’s eye-sockets, but Dioga just grunted and bore down with his thumbs on Saban’s windpipe until Gilan hit him with a staff and made him let go. ‘Well done, boy,’ the high priest said. Saban choked as he tried to answer, then sat with the other boys and heaved breath into his starving lungs.
The seventeen boys endured the fire last. They stood with their backs to the flames as a priest heated the sharpened tip of an ash branch until it was red hot, then placed