![]() ![]() ![]() His tunic was of wolfskin and his long black hair was braided and tied with a strip of fox's fur. He carried a longbow made of yew, tipped with horn, strung with sinew and polished with pork fat. Lengar had been a man for five years and had the blue scars of the tribe on his chest and the marks of a hunter and a warrior on his arms. "You'll never become a man,"Lengar jeered. Lengar had resented the duty and so, instead of teaching his brother, he dragged Saban through thickets of thorn so that the boy's sun-darkened skin was bleeding. ![]() But his time of trial was only a year away, and their father had instructed Lengar to take Saban into the forest and teach him where the stags could be found, where the wild boars lurked and where the wolves had their dens. He was six years younger than his half-brother, Lengar, and, because he had not yet passed the trials of manhood, he bore no tribal scars or killing marks. Saban, like all children, went naked in summer. ![]() It was a summer's day, the same day that Saban was almost murdered by his half-brother. Instead they called it the Year the Stranger Came.įor a stranger came to Ratharryn on the day of the storm. It was a great storm, a storm that would be remembered, though folk did not name the year by that storm. It might be smoke lying close to the ground, a rift in the clouds or the Right of a bird.īut on that day the gods sent a storm. It may be a leaf falling in summer, the cry of a dying beast or the ripple of wind on calm water. ![]()
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