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goddess of the river. The highest poles of those temples stretched three times the height of Galeth, who was the tribe’s tallest man, but they were dwarfed by the third temple which lay just to the south of the encircling embankment. That third temple had six rings of timber, and two of the rings had wooden lintels spanning their posts’ tops, and that temple belonged to Slaol, the sun god. The Sun Temple had been deliberately built outside the settlement for Slaol and Lahanna were rivals and theirtemples had to be separated so that a sacrifice at one could not be seen from the other.
    Slaol, Lahanna, Arryn and Mai were the chief deities of Ratharryn, but the people knew there were a thousand other gods in the valley, and as many again in the hills, and countless more beyond the hills, and a myriad in the winds. No tribe could build temples for each of the gods, nor even know who they all were, and besides that multitude of unknown gods there were the spirits of the dead, spirits of animals, spirits of streams, spirits of trees, spirits of fire, spirits of the air, spirits of everything that crept and breathed and killed or grew. And if a man was silent, standing on a hill in the evening quiet, he could sometimes hear the murmuring of the spirits, and that murmur could make a man mad unless he constantly prayed at the shrines.
    Then there was a fourth shrine, the Old Temple, that lay on the southern hill where it was overgrown with hazel and choked with weeds. That temple had been dedicated to Slaol, but years before, no one could remember when, the tribe had built Slaol the new temple close to the settlement and the old shrine had been abandoned. It had just decayed, yet it must still possess power, for it was there that the gold of the Outfolk had come. Now, on the morning after the great storm, Galeth took three men to the ancient temple to find and bury the Outlander’s body. The four men were accompanied by Neel, the youngest of Ratharryn’s priests, who went to protect them from the dead stranger’s spirit.
    The group stopped at the brow of the hill and made a bow to the grave mounds that stood between the Old Temple and the settlement. Neel howled like a dog to attract the attention of the ancestors’ spirits, then told those spirits what errand brought the men to the high ground. Galeth, while Neel chanted his news to the dead, stared at the sacred way that ran straight as an arrow’s flight off to the west. The ancestors had built that path but, like the Old Temple, it was now overgrown and abandoned, and not even the priests could say why its long straight ditches and banks had been scratched from the earth. Hirac thought it had been made to placate Rannos, the god of thunder, but he did not really know nor did he care. Now, as Galeth leaned on his spear and waited for Neel to detect an omen, it seemed to him that the world was wrong. It wasdecaying, just as the ancient sacred path and the Old Temple were decaying. Just as Ratharryn was decaying under the siege of sad harvests and persistent sickness. There was a tiredness in the air, as though the gods had become weary of their endless circling of the green world, and that tiredness frightened Galeth.
    “We can go,” Neel declared, though none of the men accompanying him had seen what sign the young priest had detected in the landscape. Perhaps it was the brush of a mist tendril against a tree bough, or the banking flight of a hawk, or the twitch of a hare in the long grass, but Neel was confident that the ancestral spirits had given their approval. So the small party walked on into a small valley and up the further slope to the Old Temple.
    Neel led the way through the rotted posts on the causeway and into the hazels. The young priest, his deerskin tunic soaked from the wet leaves, stopped with surprise when he reached the old death house. He frowned and hissed, then touched his groin to avert evil. It was not the stranger’s body that caused that