Life is hard in the unending wilds of 8000 BC middle Europe, but for Kalesh, child of none, friend of none, kinsman of none, it is hardest still. The unwanted foundling can only dream, despairingly, of acceptance, of happiness?and of the enigmatic blackhaired girl, Mara, who, secretly and yet known to all, in the dark of night creeps about the sleeping village, and with her determined mouth performs unspeakable acts. Once yet only once when Mara sees Kalesh peering from his leanto at her midnight prowlings, before he can draw back, she scampers in and steals his seed. The young man is smitten, yet very confused. He calls her many bad names, and he scorns her and degrades her and pulls her hair and yet after she swallows in comingled triumph and shame, before she turns to leave, he whispers helplessly, ?I love you!? Certainly after the things she has done, no man would want Mara for a wife. Yet while she is the one who is low and polluted, Kalesh alone senses that somehow the smirking wench seems to look down upon the others from some great height, disdainfully. He cannot understand it, and such notions, of course, will not change his miserable life, or hers. One day, however, Kalesh on a lonely hill deep in the forest discovers the petrified body of an ancient giant. With the magical power of the gifts he finds there, he at last will take away his Mara, along with a wideeyed, diminutive, yet very intimately skilled blonde junior wife named Pon. Swaggering now with two shapely girls of his very own his to touch and fondle, to tease and torment, to heap with any outrage that might amuse him the longrepressed Kalesh will journey from mammothhaunted forests, over the pirateravaged Sea of the South, across burning desert and through fetid jungle, and even over the Western Sea to the fabled isle of the mighty Atlans, to chase his wild passions, and his destiny.
