Part One

The hero and narrator is a dark-haired boy called Drost, born the son of the Middle Priestess Malda in the west of Scotland in around 500BC and conceived during a spring fertility ritual, with no record of who his father was. He is raised in the Hearth-house, the priestesses’ home and temple, but because the two boys were born in the same hour, at six he is picked to be the future Dark Twin of Ailill, the king’s white-blond son and heir, whom he barely knows and who proves to be an arrogant, spiteful boy.

The Dark Twin is the king’s adviser, understudy and remote viewer, and Ailill and Drost are expected to grow up to rule their tribe, the Men of the Boar, together. The imminent death of the current king (also called Ailill) has apparently been foreseen as the two boys are rushed through months of intensive training and rote learning of the law by Lurgan, a priest of the New Way, with cruelty and blows and semi-starvation; but things improve slightly after Ailill’s father dies and he becomes king in waiting (although his father’s own Dark Twin, Malduin, does the ruling until Ailill is older). At this point the two boys begin to be taught poetry and actual understanding of the tribe’s laws by Felim, the king’s bard. Drost comes under the guidance of the seer Mangan, who teaches him to direct his dreams and use them to gather knowledge, but doing so makes him a potential security risk to his mother’s religion and exposes him to Talorc, the high priest of the New Way: a sinister figure of whom Mangan is terrified, and who is taking the men’s religion down an extreme and authoritarian path.

Talorc is consumed by lust for power and hatred of women, and Drost sees him in a vision as in some psychological or spiritual sense feeding off Mangan. When a Greek pilgrim named Demetrios (although Drost can’t pronounce it and calls him Demetroos) visits, the boys are taken to the village to meet him. Demetrios is equally interested in the women’s sacred places as the men’s, and Drost’s priestess mother Malda shows concern for Mangan’s health, so Talorc shows off by trying to whip up a mob to “burn the witch”. His frothing insanity becomes so obvious that Regil and Dran, senior figures amongst the secular men, restrain him and Malda curses him, causing him to have a stroke and lose the ability to speak. Demetrios moves in with Malda, and Mangan seizes the opportunity to introduce Drost to astral projection and the concept of reincarnation.

Part Two

As a result of Talorc’s disability, Drost and Ailill’s education with the priests is derailed and they are sent to the House of the Girls (which, perversely, is where boys are trained for their adult roles) to be taught by Regil and Dran, even though they are still two years younger than the youngest boys there. The House of the Girls proves to be a much better life than training under Lurgan. The boys learn hunting and weapons skills, cattle herding and male crafts such as making fishing nets, and dancing and music for both pleasure and ritual. They are still worked hard but there is an atmosphere of cameraderie and they are properly fed and not abused, and Drost makes friends with Gerig, who is much older and tutors him, and with Arth who is only two years older than he is. Drost and Ailill are now in two rival groups of young boys, one tutored by Gerig and the other by another grown boy called Culla, and they barely see each other. But religious conflict has followed them there for Dran follows the Old Way, while Ailill, though he began by hating the priests who abused him, has become an adherent of the New Way and a toady for Lurgan.

Even at The House of the Girls, Drost’s dreams are invaded by visions in which Talorc, acting through Mangan, tells him to trust in Talorc and in the New Way, until Mangan throws off Talorc’s control for a moment and tells him to trust only in the Mother. Felim, when he consults him, agrees and tells him to follow the Old Way. The Old One, the priestess of the Crone, comes and tells all the boys’ fortunes: for Drost she has a complex vision of fates followed and derailed, an early marriage and widowhood and powerful sons to rule the tribe after him, but for Ailill she sees only a clean, early death. For Gerig, she sees that he will one day remove a rotten timber and take the strain in its place. Not long afterwards, Gerig and Culla and the other older boys pass their tests to become men and leave the fort, and Drost’s tutoring passes to a boy called Lan.

Drost still has some clairvoyance, even though he isn’t working on it, but Demetrios comes to him in a vision and tells him to keep his mind closed. Not long after, when the boys are twelve, Drost and Ailill are taken to see Malduin, who gives them his dying blessing, and Drost sees his soul depart with the Maiden Herself. The next morning he overhears Lurgan having a crisis of faith and wanting to return to the worship of the Mother, and the Old One tells Lurgan that the gods of the New Way are also the Mother’s children.

Talorc is still alive but physically very weak, and has been living only through Mangan. He summons Drost and uses him as a mouthpiece through which to demand gold from the queen, Ailill’s mother, over whom he has some kind of blackmail hold (we later learn that it’s the fact that her mother was a slave).

That winter is very hard and many people starve. There is talk of a similar famine many years ago which Malduin averted through some terrible sacrifice, but no-one will tell Drost what it was (it’s hinted that it was self-castration). Drost learns that the priests of the New Way have seized next year’s seed corn from the priestesses, and they give out meal to their followers but to no-one else. He sees in a vision that Lurgan and a slave named Terik are circumventing the priesthood in some way to do with the grain, but he can’t make out what.

Then the priests of the New Way summon Drost and Ailill to perform some ceremony to end the famine. The boys are separated for days, and Drost is simultaneously pampered and drugged by a new, strange priest called Naas; but Malda, Felim and Demetrios come to Drost in a vision and tell him to fast, so he does so and begins to cast off the drug. He is locked into a tomb and given visions which lead to him discovering a small golden-handled sickle (the implication is that the New Way is that of the Druids) but he sees a vision of Mangan, dying, telling him with his last breath to turn the knife aside, as the White Doe comes to carry him away to the orchard of the dead. The priests bring Drost from the tomb, and through a procession where he has visions of a similar walk from a previous life in what seems to be Egypt. They come to an altar where he sees a white calf, bound, and Talorc speaks for the first time in years and tells him to strike. He does so, but as he brings the sickle down he remembers Mangan’s words, his head clears and he sees that the “calf” is really Aililll. He aborts the blow, but loses control of the blade and stabs himself.

Part Three

Drost languishes in his mother’s house, barely alive and lost in visions for days – visions in which among other things he half recalls a lost lover from another life in what looks like Egypt, and Naas tries to entrap him and lure his soul away, masked by a false appearance in which he pretends to be Drost’s adopted little sister Cardail. When Drost recovers he learns that Mangan had fled to Malda’s house before he died and warned her what was happening, and she had come with some of the men and saved him. He learns that Talorc had had Lurgan dry the seed corn they had taken from Malda’s house, to kill it, and then had Naas bring fresh corn from the north (paid for with the gold he extracted from the queen) which was to be given only to those who followed the New Way, so that it would seem the gods favoured them because only their corn would grow. But Lurgan and Terik had given out only meal ground from the dried corn, and had saved the new seed corn and taken it to Malda.

Drost develops sepsis and in his delirium he travels in astral and sees Naas and Talorc conspiring. Talorc has regained speech and is presenting himself to Naas as caring for the welfare of the people but his inner voice cares only for personal power. They speak about a death of two kings from years ago, which had given the New Way power. Drost sees that Naas is acting for a group to the north called the Eagles and that he had initially expected Drost or Ailill to make the same sacrifice as Melduin, and hadn’t expected either boy to die, until the portents said they should. Talorc insists that Ailill should be killed: he seems to think he himself will rule by controlling Drost’s mind. He also imagines that Mangan died still his pawn and that Lurgan is still obedient.

As Drost recovers, listening to the talk in the house, he learns that the Old One is his mother’s mother and that Felim is the Old One’s son, conceived during a fertility rite as Drost himself was, and is therefore his mother’s half-brother. Ailill is ill from being drugged by the priests, and his mother Ginetha, the queen, comes to the house to retrieve jewellery she had previously left there as an offering, and accuses Malda of having bewitched him. She is a silly, spiteful person, like her son, and carries a grudge because she and Malda had once been rivals in love, probably over Malduin. Drost tells his mother of his dreams and she counsels him to search for his past lover in this life, and not to put it off too long, as she did.

He learns that decades ago, before Ailill’s father became king, there had been a pair of kings of whom the Dark Twin Ennis died in battle, and the other, Daran, died a few weeks later of disease, along with Ellis’s young sons. Daran had been a useless king and had no legal heirs, just a son and daughter born to a slave-woman: Ginetha was his daughter. Ailill the Elder used these deaths to whip up resentment, accusing the priestesses of the Old Way of having bewitched the previous kings and caused their deaths, and brought in Talorc to be his priest.

Ailill and Drost have both been very ill and remain with their respective mothers for months, during which Drost learns to compose songs. But the harvest Lurgan saved is good and the men desert the New Way, and Lurgan leaves, possibly to commit suicide. Eventually the deserted temple of the New Way is struck by lightning and burned down.

The boys, who must now be about fourteen, recover enough to return to the House of the Girls, but Ailill has absorbed his mother’s paranoia and believes that Drost and Malda mean him harm, so he tries to kill Drost. Arth, meanwhile, has fallen in love with Cardail. Eventually Drost, Ailill, Arth and the other older boys are taken on a bear hunt to earn their manhood, and lure the bear, the Smiler as they call him, into standing up to be speared by dancing to him – all succeed, but Drost is very distressed at having killed something so beautiful.

Returning from a hunt, Drost, now a young man among men, meets Talorc, who has been wandering, and is dying. Talorc is overcome because, for perhaps the first time ever, he’s had a true Sending from the gods, warning him that a gift that Malda is about to give to Drost has a geis on it, and must not touch rope.

Because he is dying he confides his past to Drost. Drost learns that Talorc is actually his father, and he loved Malda, then hated her because she loved only Malduin. He is also Daran’s son and Ginetha’s brother (and the younger Ailill’s uncle), which explains how he knew Ginetha’s mother was a freed slave. He hated Malduin not only out of jealousy over Malda but because he, Talorc, the previous king’s son, should have been Ailill Sr’s Dark Twin. He reveals that when Ennis died and Daran grew sick, Ailill the elder murdered the two infant sons of Ennis in order to take the throne, and Talorc blackmailed him and got power because he had evidence that Ailill Sr. had killed the two boys. Much of his scheming has been aimed at removing Ailill Jr. and putting Drost on the throne – Drost in power was an end and not, or not primarily, a means.

As Talorc dies Drost has a vision of the sacred White Doe coming to collect his soul, welcoming him back to the Mother. Afterwards Drost goes to his own mother, who gives him a splendid bronze sword. The Old One is there and she predicts that now Talorc and his religion are finished, the next stage, which will prove that the sickness is gone from the people, will be if the men are permitted to hunt the White Boar. We learn that Demetrios left his home after the girl he loved died, and now he is in love with Malda, but she still loves only Malduin.

Part Four

The young men go out hunting for pork. Only in full daylight do they realise that the boar they have just hunted and killed, and had assumed was grey, was really almost white. Arth took the biggest part in killing the boar, and is delighted that this gives him the right to lead the spring dancing and have sex with the Maiden – who will be played by Cardail this year.

When they return from the hunt Ailill and Drost begin to fulfill their role as kings, dealing with an embassy from the east. They are invited to travel to the eastern lowlands (it’s not clear whether this is modern East Lothian or Aberdeenshire) to marry with two daughters of a great queen. They travel to this eastern tribe, a matriarchy who have very different and far more authoritarian customs from theirs. There is a lot of tension over the fact that the easterners regard the younger child as more important than the elder and therefore treat Drost as more honoured than Ailill, even though he is only younger by a few minutes. Ailill has never fully recovered from being drugged and brainwashed by the priesthood, and is increasingly unstable. However, he and Drost are still linked by the fact that Drost writes wonderful songs but can’t sing them, while Ailill has a beautiful singing voice.

Felim and his music make a big hit, and the eastern queen takes him to her bed. There is some toing and froing which results in Ailill being paired with the younger girl, Yssa, and Drost with her sister Ilissa, but Yssa and Drost realise at the last minute that they are past lovers who have searched for each other. Both girls are seers and understand the problem, so their parents rearrange things, aided by the fact that Ailill is unable to perform publicly as the husband of the younger girl is supposed to do. Ailill’s behaviour is very erratic, and Drost and Yssa are paired after all. But they only get three days before Drost and Ailill have to return to their own people. Drost must go with Ailill to keep a lid on Ailill’s worsening mental health. This is in early spring.

Initially, Ailill seems better, and gives out sensible judgements with Drost’s support. Meanwhile, Gerig Jr. has taken an unspecified vow and has cut his hair and taken off his ornaments. But in the autumn the men ask whether they should still light a ceremonial fire on the hills, as they used to do for the New Way, and Ailill, seeming slightly manic again, leaves it up to Drost and takes his friends to go night-fishing in a sea pool.

Drost is inclined to think they should light the fires, for he has in the past seen visions of the New Way’s gods and considers them completely real, even though they aren’t his gods. He goes to the ruins of the New Way’s temple to meditate about this. At the temple, the wooden statues of the gods were consumed by fire but he finds that someone has left offerings at the bare plinths they once stood on. He scouts around and finds Luad, a rather offhand young priest he had met about nine years ago when he was seven, when he and Ailill were taken to meet Demetrios for the first time. Luad, however, has grown more serious with age and had come to take his religion seriously, and he has been serving the temple alone, but now he is lying in a broken hut, very ill with fever and starvation.

Drost fetches Demetrios and some slaves and they move Luad to a better hut, which proves to have been Mangan’s, with patterns on the wall to guide the astral traveller home. But Drost cannot get out of body to visit Yssa, and in frustration he goes to where the statues stood and prays to the New Way’s gods, and is granted a vision of past lives, many with Yssa, culminating in one where he is a boy running across a grassy plain alongside a chestnut horse, in what logic suggests is the central Asian steppes. On the hillside above the temple he sees the standing stones that were a temple to the former inhabitants of the land, which sparks off a conversation with Demetrios about the universal nature of deity and all gods being aspects of a greater whole. At this point Arth comes calling for Drost, to tell him Ailill is dead.

Part Five

Drost learns that Ailill and his friends had gone fishing in the sea pool by night, and then heard a boar on the cliffs above. Ailill, in his high mood, climbed up the bank alone to listen for the boar, and either fell from the bank or was pushed off by the boar.

Gerig has been freed from his unspecified vow. One stormy winter night he and Drost are called to see the Old One, who is dying. She has an obscure conversation with Gerig which hints that he might have killed Ailill himself because Ailill was the rotten timber that must be replaced. There is some mention of a blood feud paid out, which may relate to the fact that Ailill Sr. had deserted Gerig’s father to die in battle. Arth and Cardail have had a baby, who the Old One says will be the Dark Twin to Drost’s own son, and Gerig will raise the boys. She predicts that Drost himself will leave and go to Yssa.

After she is dead, Felim reveals that she was the lover of Ennis, and possibly the mother of his sons who were murdered by Ailill Sr.

Early the next year, when Drost must be about seventeen, a woman from the east comes to him with a red-haired baby who is his son by Yssa. She tells him that the queen, Yssa’s mother, has had a new daughter – Felim’s child – and Yssa is in danger of being killed to clear the way for her sister to be queen, since with them it is the youngest who rules. Her older sister Ilissa – who is a priestess and therefore not in the succession – helped her to escape into the hills.

Before Drost goes to find Yssa, Regil says the boys, the future King and Dark Twin, should be shown to the people. Gerig Sr., Gerig Jr.’s grandfather, asks the slave Terik to tell them how it should be done. He reveals that the slaves are descended from the earlier inhabitants of the land and still remember some of their rituals, so the babies are shown to the people in the old stone circle, with music and ritual, and Demetrios feels that this is the well of music which he had come there seeking. The slaves, the old people of the land, are happy for Drost’s son to be king because they know Drost’s grandmother was one of them.

Drost finds Yssa in the hills and they flee together, hunted by her people. She reveals that as a princess she had many geasa, taboo acts which would bring disaster, including eating fish and seeing the moon on water. Her people fear a god or demon called Black Arkai the Fisherman, a shape-changer – perhaps the ur-origin of the kelpie. Heading east to fool the pursuers, they come to water, and Yssa sees a woman washing clothes at a ford, but thinks nothing of it (it’s a traditional omen of death).

They follow the river till it becomes salt, but they can hear the hounds following. They find a boat and cast off, but in his haste Drost uses his sword to cut the rope which ties it, breaking the geis that his sword must not touch rope. As they head out into the water they see that the hounds they heard weren’t Yssa’s father’s hounds pursuing them at all but just random hounds chasing a stag, but the sea is geas to Yssa. She falls into a trance state where she feels she must give up and return to her father and his hounds, and she stands up, overturning the boat.

Part Six

Drost appears to have been washed right across the sea, perhaps clinging to the upturned boat, as he comes out on a beach where there are hunter-gatherers who are of an Inuit type, or perhaps Sami. He has certainly been washed a long way, and almost certainly across to continental Europe, because neither the Sea People nor their inland neighbours speak any language he recognises. He has lost both his memory and his psychic ability. He lives with the Sea People for a considerable time, maybe a year or more, until the day comes when he saves one of them from a bear by dancing to it to get it to rear up, and then spearing it. Far from being pleased, they decide he is some kind of monster, and drive him out.

He flees them until he comes to a farming community where he sees a ceremony honouring the goddess, and the priestess and king of this community, who are partners, take him in and help him to recover his memory. He travels across country for many years, sometimes stopping in one place for a long time, serving as priest, healer and singer, before he reaches the far west and can go no further without crossing the sea, which he will not do again because it was geas to Yssa. The fact that he is able to travel west without crossing the sea suggests his landfall was made in either Denmark or the far north of Norway. Of the two, Denmark is more likely as the currents from the east of Scotland run broadly south and east towards Denmark and the far south of Norway.

The place where he ends up is an area with tin mines, but can’t be Cornwall because he’s not in Britain, so we must assume it’s Brittany. There he grows old and prepares for death, nursed by a child whose name is also Yssa, which he takes as an omen, and telling his story so that his Yssa, in some future incarnation, may hear it.