Mita had just managed to find a seller offering Assyrian cloth when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned, thinking that his father or Kuzari had come to snap at him for taking so long, and saw a big, good-looking, unfamiliar man.
“Excuse me,” said the man in accented Luwian. His voice was deep but quiet, and he’d lifted his hand and stepped back a bit; he wasn’t wearing a sword, just a tentative smile.
Fern earns his Name the winter before the Pow-wow. It is late for it, but he is late for everything; he is at least glad he’ll be able to Dance the Sun Dance this year. Even his younger brother, Fox Hide, has Danced– Fern is the last in his age group to do so.
Whatever Chasing Badger might say it’s not Fern’s fault that the old shaman of their tribe, Snake Bite, purposefully held him away from leading a Hunt, the one thing every boy must do before he can Dance and be declared a man. In the end, it is his lack of a father or uncle that facilitates Fern’s Hunt, his successful Hunt, and earns him his first feather and his new name.
It was the morning after Freddy Furlong’s farewell party, and I was suffering the effects of an assortment of wines, brandies, whiskies, ports and fruit liqueurs, mingled with semi-digested oysters, plovers’ eggs and a dish that Freddy had claimed was made from octopus, although nobody at the club had believed him. My brain had turned into porridge; my skull was threatening to split into more pieces than the Austro-Hungarian Empire; and somebody had decided that what my stomach really needed was a spot of incendiary bombing. In short, I was not a well man.
I will not fail.
The words burned like a thousand suns in Zolin’s mind as he knelt on the cold stone floor of the priest house.
It had been a long five days. Zolin was exhausted. Blood trickled down his neck from the piercings in his earlobes. He glanced around at the ash-smeared faces of his fellow priests. A few men met his eyes. Some whispered prayers underneath their breath. Most ignored him. Zolin recited his mantra in the privacy of his own skull.
