29: Feasting
I
t
had been the greatest feast the dark folk had ever known. Never before in Craig Dun had such quantities of food been eaten at one time—beef and mutton and pig, venison brought up the hill by the Hunters, barley bread and millet porridge, great flat cheeses of sheep’s milk and goat milk, and all washed down with barley beer and sweet honey mead drunk from bulls horns and clay beakers, decorated with cord-patterns wound round and round about the swelling sides.
Family after family of the folk had gone up to the slate tables to eat their fill and had then joined the others about the round fire hearth, or had retired to lie in the sheltered cubicles round the greenstone walls with the women of their choosing, gold or black.
Now the air was thick with woodsmoke and the fum
