own abdomen. The ointment would cause the short strip of flesh to drop off of the infant hunter’s body by the next Waxing Moon, leaving only a small mark on the infant hunter’s abdomen. Ugurk placed the new-born infant hunter in Azak’s arms, and Azak guided the infant hunter’s questing mouth to one of Azak’s nipples, and the infant hunter began to suck greedily of the milky, life-giving fluid contained there.

Ugurk turned back to the cut in Azak’s abdomen, to remove the rest of the piece of flesh that had connected Azak to the infant hunter while he was being formed, so that Azak’s body could be closed up with the proper healing herbs packed inside and outside. As he moved the Knife back into Azak’s body, however, he saw through The Power a sight which, for the first time that night, gave him pause.

Only once before in his long life of fifty summers – by far the longest life ever known among Our People; The Shaman Ugurk’s long life was already the subject of Our People’s poets and storytellers – had Ugurk seen the sight he now beheld, transfixed. Ugurk had expected to see the clean lines of Azak’s bowel, red with the seeping blood, showing the deflated pouch at the end of it, before the loops of Little Bowel connected to it. As the healing herbs took effect, the bowel would seal the opening to the pouch, and the pouch itself would wither and drop off, and be cleaned out as the herbs were cleaned and changed over the coming days and weeks, before the next Waxing Moon.

The Shaman Ugurk was therefore dumbfounded to see what appeared to him to be another figure inside Azak’s abdomen – another small copy of Azak, another infant hunter.

Ugurk stared for a moment to be sure that his old eyes did not deceive him, in the wavering light provided by the flickering torches around The Cave – and then The Power took his hands back into Azak’s abdomen and, just as before, Ugurk’s hands circled below and behind the small figure, and pulled it gently out of Azak’s abdomen, and it was connected by its own piece of flesh to Azak.

The triumphal roaring of Our People slowly dwindled down as Our People stood, stunned into profound silence at this new sight, never before seen by any of them. Ugurk was himself the only one left alive of Our People who had seen two infant hunters come from one Ceremony, and that when he was himself a child of only seven summers. Our People knew not what to think or to feel, and in some a dreadful fear was growing that was beginning as a murmur but might soon burst forth. Ugurk, guided by The Power, again used the Knife to cut the band of flesh that bound this infant hunter also to Azak, and raised the second infant hunter high, as he had the first, and slowly turned around to display him to all of Our People, as the Ceremony demanded. Just as Ugurk completed the circle, Azak gave another yell of triumph, and both of the infant hunters joined their voices to Azak’s, and Our People, thus emboldened, gave another, greater roar of joyful triumph.

Ugurk turned towards the firepit a few feet from Al-Tar, where his disciple Asram tended the low fire in which the healing herbs smouldered. Thankfully, Asram was not so bewildered by this unexpected turn of events that he neglected