Chapter 6

Mak was not in a good mood. For one thing, his feet hurt. He'd lost his sandals, swimming the river, and he was tired, thirsty, and ravenously hungry. Stumbling along ahead of him, prodded on by their captors' spears, Jewel and Lyssa looked like they were in even worse shape than he was. The sun was sinking behind the trees when at last they came to a mediumsized clearing in the forest. Looming before them in the gathering dusk he saw a rude barricade of logs interwoven with brush. Their silent captors herded them in through a gap in the fence.

Inside the crude stockade was a haphazard collection of shelters, most of them of badlycured hides stretched over frameworks of wooden poles. To Mak, the village looked like it hadn't been there very long, since the ground between the buildings wasn't trodden deeply into rutted paths. Then he looked again, and wondered whether he was right. The amount of filth and garbage piled around and between the shelters was almost unbelievable, the stench awesome. He'd seen no fields, could see no domesticated animals. Did this tribe lived solely by hunting and gathering food in the forests? He wondered how they managed to stay alive during the winter.

Their captors straggled to a halt in front of a large, gaudily painted hide tent. A quavering shout from the dirtiest and fiercestlooking warrior among their captors brought heads popping out of doorways, and in moments they were surrounded by a foulsmelling mass of jabbering humanity. Slowly the sounds sorted themselves out into understandable speech. Mak realized that they spoke his language, though with a heavy accent and mixing in many unfamiliar words.

The jabbering was silenced by an even louder shout from a gaudily daubed man. He was huge, not only tall but repulsively fat, waddling ponderously amid the sudden silence from the largest skin hut. The leader of the group that had captured them moved quickly to his side, speaking softly but urgently in his ear.

"Who are you? What do you do here? Where is your village?" He thrust the tall warrior aside and scowled ferociously at Mak, singling him out as the only male captive. "You tell or I kill you slow! King Bann the Mighty speaks!"

"I am Mak the Hunter, of village Wallen. We come from that way." He pointed off to the south, keeping a tight rein on his temper as he thought about the spears pointed at their backs. This was no time to make any kind of trouble!

"Why are you here? I not know of village Wallen!"

"I take these two Most Great Ones back to their people. Great rewards wait at the end of our journey," Mak lied, improvising hastily.

"Who are these 'Most Great Ones'? These women not short and hairy like you. Why are you with them?"

"Do not your oldest stories tell of a time when mighty men, doers of great deeds lived in the land, oh King Bann? They built tall buildings and fought great battles, but they left and their children slowly forgot their ways. Now they return, and these are two of their number. They became lost from the others, and I must lead them back to their people." Spurred on by desperation, Mak's inventive tongue was in full swing now.

"Your story is very strange, Mak the Small and Hairy. You be my guests this night, and we speak more of this." He waved expansively toward his hut, his smile unconvincing as it exposed uneven rows of decaying teeth. "Enter. I have food and drink brought."

Mak turned to the two women, bowing deeply, and spoke in the traders' tongue. "Don't let them know you speak their language. Let me do the talking for now."

They were followed into the dark and smelly structure by most of the tribe. On a low platform just inside the doorway was a massive bronze statue of a man fighting a huge wolf and an even larger serpent. Battered and covered though it was by an agesold coating of grease, smoke and dirt, its fine details and vigor of expression proclaimed its origin in a far higher culture than that of its present owners.

"It is well that you show fear at the sight of God of our ancestors," King Bann's oily voice rumbled. "He is a mighty warrior."

"Ask him the name of his God," Jewel whispered.

"Your God is indeed great, King Bann. Is it permitted that I ask His name?"

"He is the great and mighty TorrHa! Killer of great fish, hunter of giant boar. When He fights, wives lose husbands, children lose fathers. Wind and clouds are His home, and His club smashes big trees. Us, Sons of TorrHa, come from far away in the North to make all of this land our home. No man tells us go away." He turned his head and shouted, "Wives! Bring food! We eat now."