bag to his wounded belly. He had been ambushed in the forest three days before. He had not seen his attackers, just felt the sudden hot pain of the thrown spear, then kicked his horse and let it carry him out of danger.
‘I’ll fetch father,’ Saban whispered.
‘You won’t,’ Lengar hissed, and the wounded man must have heard them for he opened his eyes and grimaced as he leaned forward to pick up his bow. But the stranger was slowed by pain, and Lengar was much faster. He dropped his longbow, scrambled from his hiding place and ran across the death house, scooping up the stranger’s bow with one hand and his quiver with the other. In his hurry he spilled the arrows so that there was only one left in the leather quiver.
A murmur of thunder sounded from the west. Saban shivered, fearing that the sound would swell to fill the air with the god’s rage, but the thunder faded, leaving the sky deathly still.
‘Sannas,’ the stranger said, then added some words in a tongue that neither Lengar nor Saban spoke.
‘Sannas?’ Lengar asked.
‘Sannas,’ the man repeated eagerly. Sannas was the great sorceress of Cathallo, famous throughout the land, and Saban presumed the stranger wanted to be healed by her.
Lengar smiled. ‘Sannas is not of our people,’ he said. ‘Sannas lives north of here.’
The stranger did not understand what Lengar said. ‘Erek,’ he said, and Saban, still watching from the undergrowth, wondered if that was the stranger’s name, or perhaps the name of his god. ‘Erek,’ the wounded man said more firmly, but the word meant nothing to Lengar who had taken the one arrow from the stranger’s quiver and fitted it onto the short bow. The bow was made of strips of wood and antler, glued together and bound with sinew, and Lengar’s people had never used such a weapon. They favoured the longer bow carved from the yew tree, but Lengar was curious about the odd weapon. He stretched the string, testing its strength.
‘Erek!’ the stranger cried loudly.
‘You’re Outfolk,’ Lengar said. ‘You have no business here.’ He stretched the bow again, surprised by the tension in the short weapon.
‘Bring me a healer. Bring me Sannas,’ the stranger said in his own tongue.
‘If Sannas were here,’ Lengar said, recognizing only that name, ‘I would kill her first.’ He spat. ‘That is what I think of Sannas. She is a shrivelled old bitch-cow, a husk of evil, toad-dung made flesh.’ He spat again.
The stranger leaned forward and laboriously scooped up the arrows that had spilled from his quiver and formed them into a small sheaf that he held like a knife as though to defend himself. ‘Bring me a healer,’ he pleaded in his own language. Thunder growled to the west, and the hazel leaves shuddered as a breath of cold wind gusted ahead of the approaching storm. The stranger looked again into Lengar’s eyes and saw no pity there. There was only the delight that Lengar took from death. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, please, no.’
Lengar loosed the arrow. He was only five paces from the stranger and the small arrow struck its target with a sickening force, lurching the man onto his side. The arrow sank deep, leaving only a hand’s-breadth of its black-and-white feathered shaft showing at the left side of the stranger’s chest. Saban thought the Outlander must be dead because he did not move for a long time, but then the carefully made sheaf of arrows spilled from his hand as, slowly, very slowly, he pushed himself back upright. ‘Please,’ he said quietly.
‘Lengar!’ Saban scrambled from the hazels. ‘Let me fetch father!’
‘Quiet!’ Lengar had taken one of his own black-feathered arrows from its quiver and placed it on the short bowstring. He walked towards Saban, aiming the bow at him and grinning when he saw the terror on his half-brother’s face.
The stranger also stared at Saban, seeing a tall good-looking boy with tangled black hair and bright anxious eyes. ‘Sannas,’ the stranger begged Saban, ‘take me to Sannas.’
‘Sannas doesn’t live here,’ Saban said, understanding only the sorceress’s name.
‘We live here,’ Lengar announced, now pointing his arrow at the stranger, ‘and you’re an Outlander and you steal our cattle, enslave our women and cheat our traders.’ He let the second arrow loose and, like the first, it thumped into the stranger’s chest, though this time into the ribs on his right side. Again the man was jerked aside, but once again he forced himself upright as though his spirit refused to leave his wounded body.
‘I can give you power,’ he said, as a trickle of bubbly pink blood spilled from his mouth and into his short beard. ‘Power,’ he whispered.
But Lengar did not understand the man’s tongue. He had shot two arrows and still the man refused to die, so Lengar picked up his own longbow, laid an arrow on its string, and faced the stranger. He drew the huge bow back.
The stranger shook his head, but he knew his fate now and he stared Lengar in the eyes to show he was not afraid to die. He cursed his killer, though he doubted the gods would listen to him for he was a thief and a fugitive.
Lengar loosed the string and the black-feathered arrow struck deep into the stranger’s heart. He must have died in an instant, yet he still thrust his body up as though to fend off the flint arrow-head and then he fell back, shuddered for a few heartbeats, and was still.
Lengar spat on his right hand and rubbed the spittle against the inside of his left wrist where the stranger’s bowstring had lashed and stung the skin; Saban, watching his half-brother, understood then why the stranger wore the strip of stone against his forearm. Lengar danced a few steps, celebrating his kill, but he was nervous. Indeed, he was not certain that the man really was dead for he approached the body very cautiously and prodded it with one horn-tipped end of his bow before leaping back in case the corpse came to life and sprang at him, but the stranger did not move.
Lengar edged forward again, snatched the bag from the stranger’s dead hand and scuttled away from the body. For a moment or two he stared into the corpse’s ashen face, then, confident the man’s spirit was truly gone, he tore the lace that secured the bag’s neck. He peered inside, was motionless for a heartbeat, then screamed for joy. He had been given power.
Saban, terrified by his brother’s scream, shrank back, then edged forward again as Lengar emptied the bag’s contents onto the grass beside the whitened ox-skull. To Saban it looked as though a stream of sunlight tumbled from the leather bag.
There were dozens of small lozenge-shaped gold ornaments, each about the size of a man’s thumbnail, and four great lozenge plaques that were as big as a man’s hand. The lozenges, both big and small, had tiny holes drilled through their narrower points so they could be strung on a sinew or sewn to a garment, and all were made of very thin gold sheets incised with straight lines, though their pattern meant nothing to Lengar who snatched back one of the small lozenges that Saban had dared pick up from the grass. Lengar gathered the lozenges, great and small, into a pile. ‘You know what this is?’ he asked his younger brother, gesturing at the heap.
‘Gold,’ Saban said.
‘Power,’ Lengar said. He glanced at the dead man. ‘Do you know what you can do with gold?’
‘Wear it?’ Saban suggested.
‘Fool! You buy men with it.’ Lengar rocked back on his heels. The cloud shadows were dark now, and the hazels were tossing in the freshening wind. ‘You buy spearmen,’ he said, ‘you buy archers and warriors! You buy power!’
Saban grabbed one of the small lozenges, then dodged out of the way when Lengar tried to take it back. The boy retreated across the small cleared space and, when it appeared that Lengar would not chase him, he squatted and peered at the scrap of gold. It seemed an odd thing with which to buy power. Saban could imagine men working for food or for pots, for flints or for slaves, or for bronze that could be hammered into knives, axes, swords and spearheads, but for this bright metal? It could not cut, it just was, yet even on that clouded day Saban could see how the metal shone. It shone