through the entrance. It was dark inside, for scarce any sunlight came through the door or through the smoke-hole in the roof’s peak that was supported by a thick pole. That pole was a bark-stripped trunk which had been left studded with the stubs of its many branches from which hung nets that were filled with human skulls. A burst of giggling alarmed Saban and he looked around to see a dozen faces peering from the hut’s low edges. ‘Never mind them,’ Sannas ordered in a hoarse, low voice, ‘come here.’
The sorceress had seated herself on a pile of furs beside the pole and Saban dutifully knelt to her. A small fire smouldered close to the pole, sifting the dark hut with a pungent smoke that made Saban’s eyes water as he bowed his head in respect.
‘Look at me!’ Sannas snapped.
He looked at her. He knew she was old, so old that no one knew how old she was, older than she even knew herself, so old that she had been old when the next oldest person in Cathallo had been born. There were those who said she could never die, that the gods had given Sannas life without death, and to the awed Saban that seemed true, for he had never seen a face so wizened, so wrinkled and so savage. She had taken off her hood and her unbound hair was ashen and lank, hanging over a face that was like a skull, only a skull with warts. The eyes in the skull were black as jet, she had only one tooth left, a yellow fang in the centre of her upper jaw. Her hands protruded from the edge of her badger fur cape like hooked claws. Amber showed at her scrawny throat; to Saban it looked like a gem pinned to a dried-out corpse.
As she stared at him, Saban, his eyes becoming accustomed to the hut’s smoky gloom, glanced nervously about to see that a dozen girls were watching him from the hut’s margins. There were bat wings pinned to the hut post, between round-bottomed pots that hung with the skulls in their string nets. There was a pair of antlers high on the central pole, while clusters of feathers and bunches of herbs hung from the roof, all swathed in cobwebs. The jumbled bones of small birds lay in a wicker basket beside the fire. This was not, Saban thought, a hut where people lived, but rather a storage place for Cathallo’s ritual treasures, the sort of place where the tribe’s Kill-Child would be kept.
‘So tell me,’ Sannas said in a voice that was as harsh as bone, ‘tell me, Saban, son of Hengall, son of Lock, who was whelped of an Outfolk bitch taken in a raid, tell me why the gods frown on Ratharryn?’
Saban did not answer. He was too frightened.
‘I hate dumb boys,’ Sannas growled. ‘Speak, fool, or I shall turn your tongue into a worm and you will suck on its slime all the days of your miserable life.’
Saban forced himself to answer. ‘The gods …’ he began, then realized he was whispering, so spoke up, determined to defend his tribe, ‘the gods sent us gold, lady, so how could they frown on us?’
‘They sent you the gold of Slaol,’ Sannas said bitterly, ‘and what has happened since? Lahanna refused a sacrifice, and your elder brother has slunk off to the Outfolk. If the gods sent Ratharryn a pot of gold, all you’d do is piss in it.’ The girls giggled. Saban said nothing and Sannas glowered at him. ‘Are you a man?’ she demanded.
‘No, lady.’
‘Yet you wear a man’s tunic. Is it winter?’
‘No, lady.’
‘Then take it off.’ She demanded. ‘Take it off!’
Saban hastily undid his belt and pulled the tunic over his head, prompting another chorus of giggles from the hut’s edges. Sannas looked him up and down, then sneered. ‘That’s the best Ratharryn can send us? Look at him, girls! It looks like something that oozed from a snail’s shell.’
Saban blushed, glad that it was so dark in the hut. Sannas watched him sourly, then reached into a pouch and took out a leaf-wrapped package. She peeled the leaves away to reveal a honeycomb from which she broke a portion that she pushed into her mouth. ‘That fool Hirac,’ she said to Saban, ‘tried to sacrifice your brother Camaban?’
‘Yes, lady.’
‘But your brother lives. Why?’
Saban frowned. ‘He was marked by Lahanna, lady.’
‘So why did Hirac try to kill him?’
‘I don’t know, lady.’
‘You don’t know much, do you? Miserable little boy that you are. And now Lengar has fled, and you are to take his place.’ She glowered at him, then spat a scrap of wax onto the fire. ‘But Lengar never liked us, did he?’ she went on. ‘Lengar wanted to make war on us! Why did Lengar not like us?’
‘He disliked everyone,’ Saban said.
She rewarded that comment with a crooked smile. ‘He feared we’d take away his chiefdom, didn’t he? He feared we’d swallow little Ratharryn.’ She pointed a finger into the shadows of the hut’s edge. ‘Lengar was to marry her. Derrewyn, daughter of Morthor who is the high priest of Cathallo.’
Saban looked where Sannas pointed and his breath checked in his throat, for he was staring at a slender girl with long black hair and an anxious, pretty face. She looked no older than Saban himself and had large eyes and seemed tremulously nervous, as though she was as uncomfortable in this smoke-reeking hut as Saban was himself. Sannas watched Saban and laughed. ‘You like her, eh? But why should you marry her in your brother’s place?’
‘So we can have peace, lady,’ Saban said.
‘Peace!’ the skull-face spat at him. ‘Peace! Why should we buy your miserable peace with my great-granddaughter’s body?’
‘You are not buying peace, lady,’ Saban dared to say, ‘for my tribe is not for sale.’
‘Your tribe!’ Sannas leaned back, cackling, then suddenly jerked forward and darted out a crooked hand that gripped Saban’s groin. She squeezed, making him gasp. ‘Your tribe, boy,’ she spat at him, ‘is worth nothing. Nothing!’ She squeezed harder, watching his eyes for tears. ‘Do you want to be chief after your father?’
‘If the gods wish it, lady.’
‘They’ve wished for stranger things,’ Sannas said, at last letting him go. She rocked back and forth, spittle dribbling from her toothless mouth. She watched Saban, judging him, and decided he was probably a decent boy. He had courage, and she liked that, and he was undeniably good-looking, which meant he was favoured by the gods, but he was still a boy and it was an insult to her people to present a boy for marriage. Yet there would be advantages in a marriage between Cathallo and Ratharryn, so Sannas decided she would swallow the insult. ‘So you’ll marry Derrewyn to keep the peace?’ she asked him.
‘Yes, lady.’
‘Then you are a fool,’ Sannas said, ‘for peace and war are not in your gift, boy, and they certainly don’t lie between Derrewyn’s legs. They lie with the gods, and what the gods want will happen, and if they choose to let Cathallo rule in Ratharryn then you could take every girl in this settlement to your stinking bed and it would make no difference.’ She closed her eyes and rocked back and forth again, and a dribble of honey and saliva ran down her chin where white hairs grew from dark moles. It was time, she decided, to scare this boy of Ratharryn, to make him so scared of her that he would never dare think of crossing her wishes. ‘I am Lahanna,’ she said in a deep voice scarce above a whisper, ‘and if you thwart my desire I shall swallow your petty tribe, I shall swill it in my belly’s bile and piss
