and Hengall groaned as he thought of Lengar and Camaban. ‘But in you I have a proper son,’ he said to Saban. ‘Prove it in these next days.’
Saban nodded.
‘If I died tomorrow,’ Hengall growled, touching his groin to avert the ill luck implied in the words, ‘I suppose Galeth would become chief, but he wouldn’t be a good leader. He’s a good man, but too trusting. He would believe everything Cathallo tells us, and they lie to us as often as they speak the truth. They claim to be our friend these days, but they would still like to swallow us up. They want our land. They want our river. They want our food, but they fear the price they’d pay. They know we would maul them grievously, so when you become chief you must have proved yourself a warrior whom they would fear to fight, but you must also be wise enough to know when not to fight.’
‘Yes, father,’ Saban said. He had hardly heard a word for he was thinking about Jegar and his long-haired dogs with their tongues lolling between sharp teeth.
‘Cathallo must fear you,’ Hengall said, ‘as they fear me.’
‘Yes, father,’ Saban said. His chin was dripping with bear’s blood. He felt sick.
‘The ancestors are watching you,’ Hengall went on, ‘so make them proud of us. And once you’re a man we shall marry you to Derrewyn. We’ll make it the first ceremony of the new temple, eh? That should bring you Slaol’s favour.’
‘I like Derrewyn,’ Saban said, blushing.
‘Doesn’t matter whether you like her or hate her, you just have to give her sons, a lot of sons. Wear the girl out! Breed her, then breed other women, but make yourself sons! Blood is all.’
With these injunctions fresh in his ears, and with his gullet sour from the rank taste of the bear, Saban went to Slaol’s temple just beyond the settlement’s entrance. He was naked, as were the twenty-one other boys who gathered beneath the high temple poles. All the boys would now have to go into the wild woods for five nights and there survive even though they were being hunted, and the hunters, who were the men of the tribe, surrounded the temple and jeered at the candidates. The hunters all carried bows or spears and they called the boys woman-hearted, said they would fail, and warned them that the ghouls and spirits and beasts of the woods would rend them. The men invited the boys to abandon the quest before they began, saying that there was small point in their attempting to become men for they were so obviously puny and feeble.
Gilan, the high priest, ignored the jeers and taunts as he prayed to the god. The small chalk balls that were the symbols of the boys’ lives were laid in the temple’s centre, above the grave of a child who had been sacrificed to the god at the temple’s consecration. The balls would stay there until the end, when those who became men would be allowed to break them and those who failed would have to return the chalk symbols to their shamed families.
Gilan spat on the boys as a blessing. Each was allowed one weapon. Most clutched spears or bows, but Saban had chosen to take a flint knife that he had made himself from a rare piece of local flint big enough to make a blade as long as his hand. He had flaked the dark stone into a white and wicked edge. He did not expect to hunt with the knife, for even if he succeeded in killing a beast he would not dare light a fire to cook its flesh in case the smoke should bring the hunters. ‘You might as well take no weapon,’ Galeth had advised him, but Saban wanted the small knife for the touch of it gave him comfort.
Jegar taunted Saban from the temple’s edge. The hunter had hung a bunch of eagle feathers from his spearhead and more eagle feathers were tucked into his long hair. ‘I’m loosing my hounds on you, Saban!’ Jegar called. The dogs, huge and hairy, salivated behind their master. ‘Give up now!’ Jegar shouted. ‘What chance does a pissing child like you have? You won’t survive a day.’
‘We’ll drag you back in disgrace,’ one of Jegar’s friends called to Saban, ‘and you can wear my sister’s tunic and fetch my mother’s water.’
Hengall listened to the threats, but did nothing to alleviate them. This was the way of the tribe and if Saban survived the enmity of Jegar and his friends then Saban’s reputation would grow. Nor could Hengall try to protect Saban in the woods for then the tribe would declare that the boy had not passed the ordeal fairly. Saban must survive by his own wits, and if he failed then the gods would be saying he was not fit to be chief.
The boys were given a half-day’s start. Then, for five summer nights, they had to survive in the forest where their enemies would not just be the hunters, but also the bears, the great wild aurochs, the wolves and the Outfolk bands who knew that the boys were loose among the trees and so came searching for slaves. The Outfolk would shave the boys’ heads, chop off a finger and drag them away to a life of whipped servitude.
Gilan at last finished his invocations and clapped his hands, scattering the frightened boys out of the temple. ‘Run far!’ Jegar shouted. ‘I’m coming for you, Saban!’ His leashed dogs howled and Saban feared those animals for the gods had given hounds the ability to follow men deep through the trees. Dogs could sense a man’s spirit so that even in the dark a dog could find a man. They can track any creature with a spirit and the great shaggy hounds would be Saban’s worst enemies in the coming days.
Saban ran south across the pastureland and his path took him close to the Old Temple which stood waiting for Cathallo’s stones. He thought, as he ran past the ditch, that he heard Camaban’s voice calling his name and he stopped in puzzlement and looked into the cleared shrine, but there was nothing there except two white cows cropping the grass. His fears told him to keep running towards the trees, but a stronger instinct made him cross the shallow outer bank, clamber through the chalk ditch and climb the larger bank inside.
The sun was warm on his bare skin. He stood motionless, wondering why he had stopped, and then another impulse drove him to his knees on the grass inside the shrine where he used the flint knife to cut off a hank of his long black hair. He laid the hair on the grass, then bowed his forehead to the ground. ‘Slaol,’ he said, ‘Slaol.’ It was here that Lengar had tried to kill him, and Saban had escaped that enmity, so now he prayed that the sun god would help him evade another hatred. Saban had been praying for days now, praying to as many gods as he could remember, but now, in the warm ring of chalk on the wind-touched hill, Slaol sent him an answer. It came as if from nowhere, and Saban suddenly knew he would survive the ordeal and that he would even win. He understood that in his anxiety he had been praying for the wrong thing. He had begged the gods to hide him from Jegar, but Jegar was the tribe’s best hunter and Slaol had given Saban the thought that he should let Jegar find him. That was the god’s gift. Let Jegar find his prey, then let him fail. Saban raised his head to the brightness in the sky and shouted his thanks.
He ran into the woods where he felt his fears rise again. This was the wild place, the dark place where wolves, bears and aurochs stalked. There were Outfolk hunting bands looking for slaves and, even worse, there were outcasts. When a man was banished from Ratharryn the tribe did not say that he was gone from the settlement, but that he had gone to the woods, and Saban knew that many such outcasts roamed the trees, men said to be as savage as any beast. It was rumoured they lived off human flesh and they knew when the tribes’ boys were hiding among the trees and so they searched for them. All those dangers frightened Saban, but there were still more horrible things among the leaves: those dead souls who did not pass into Lahanna’s care haunted the woods. Sometimes hunters vanished without a trace and the priests reckoned they had been snatched by the jealous dead who so hate the living.
The forest was all dark danger, which is why the woods were forever being felled and why women were not allowed into it. They could forage for herbs among the copses close to the settlement, or they could travel through the woods if they were accompanied by men, but they could not go alone into
