The sun was high enough to give its warmth as the three walked back to the settlement. Gilan talked of his hopes, Saban held his lover’s hand, the smoke of the midsummer fires faded and all was well in Ratharryn.
Galeth was the temple’s builder, and Saban became his helper. They placed the four smaller boulders first. Gilan had calculated the positions for the stones, and they had to be placed by calculation rather than by observation for the four stones formed two pairs and each pair pointed toward Lahanna. In her wanderings about the sky, she stayed within the same broad belt year after year, but once in a man’s lifetime she went far to the north and once in a lifetime far to the south. The poles in her existing temple inside the settlement marked the limits of those northern and southern wanderings and if a man drew a line between the points on the horizon where the moon rose and set at her extremes it would cross the line of the sun’s midsummer rising at a right angle. That made Gilan’s task simple. “It isn’t so everywhere,” he explained to Saban. “It’s only here in Ratharryn that the lines cross square. Not at Drewenna, not at Cathallo, nowhere else! Only here!” Gilan was in awe of that fact. “It means we are special to the gods,” he said softly. “It means, I think, that this is the very center of all the world!”
“Truly?” Saban asked, impressed.
“Truly,” Gilan said. “Cathallo, of course, say the same about their Sacred Mound, but I fear they’re mistaken. This is the world’s center,” he said, gesturing at the Old Temple, “the very place where man was first made.” He shuddered at that thought, moved by the joy of it.
The high priest then laid a nettle string along the line of midsummer’s rising, taking it from the chalk marker which showed where the sun rose, through the very center of the temple and on to the southeastern bank. Galeth had jointed two pieces of thin timber to make a square angle and, by laying the timber against the string, and then running another string along the crosswise timber, they could mark a line that crossed the sun’s line at a right angle. That new line pointed to the extremes of the moon’s wandering, but Gilan wanted two parallel lines, one to point to the northernmost limit and the other to the southernmost, so he drew his second line and told Galeth that the four small stones must be placed inside the bank at the outer ends of both scratched lines. One of each pair was to be a pillar and the other a slab, and by standing beside the pillar and looking across the opposite slab a priest could watch where Lahanna rose or set and judge how close she approached her most distant wanderings.
Galeth had thirty men working and at first they simply dug the holes for the stones. They scraped away the turf, then prised at the hard chalk with the picks and broke it into clumps that could be scooped out with shovels. They dug the holes deep, and Galeth made them slope one side of the hole to make a ramp so that the stones could be slid down into their sockets. It was, he told Saban, no different from raising one of the big temple poles. When all four holes were dug, more men were fetched up from the settlement and the first stone, the smallest pillar, was dragged on its sledge through the entrance of the sun. Saban had thought there might be some ceremony as the stone was brought to its new sacred home, but there was no ritual other than a silent prayer that Gilan offered with his hands reaching to the sky. The sledge runners left scars of crushed grass. Galeth lined the stone up with the hole and kept the men hauling until the tip of the sledge just overhung the ramp that Saban had lined with three smoothed timbers that had been greased with pig fat to serve as a slide.
It took twelve men using long oak levers to shift the stone off the sledge. Saban thought the levers must break, but instead the stone moved bit by bit, heave by heave, and each heave lifted and carried the boulder another finger’s breadth forward. The men sang as they worked, and the sweat poured off them, but at last the weight of the stone tipped it forwards off the sledge and down onto the ramp. Men scattered, fearing the stone would fall back on them, but instead, just as Galeth had planned, it slid ponderously down the greased timbers to lodge at the ramp’s bottom. Galeth wiped his face and let out a great breath of relief.
When he erected the great temple poles Galeth would haul them upright by pulling their tops into the sky by means of a great tripod over which the ropes were led, but he reckoned this stone pillar was small enough to be pushed upright without any such help. He chose the twelve strongest men and they took their places beside the uppermost part of the stone that now tilted up from the ramp’s edge. The men got their shoulders under the stone and heaved. “Push!” Galeth shouted. “Push!” and they did push, but the stone still stuck halfway. “Heave on it!” Galeth urged them and added his own huge strength to theirs, but still the stone would not move. Saban peered down the hole and saw that the stone was catching on the upright face of rubbly chalk. Galeth saw it too, swore, and seized a stone axe with which he hacked at the chalk face to make room for the stone.
The dozen men had no trouble holding the stone’s weight and, once the obstruction was cleared, they pushed it upright. The stone now stood a little less than the height of a man, with almost as much again buried in the socket, and all that was needed was to fill the ramp and press earth and chalk into the hole about the boulder. Galeth had collected some great river stones and they were packed about the pillar’s base, then the chalk rubble was scooped in, and with it the antlers that had broken while the hole was being dug, and all was stamped down and stamped down again until at last the hole and the ramp were filled and the first of the temple’s stones was standing. The tired men cheered.
It took until harvest to raise the other three moon stones, but at last they were done and the four gray boulders stood in a rectangle. Galeth had rigged a short tripod of oak beams to raise the slabs, for they were heavier than the pillars, but what made raising the stones even easier was Saban’s notion of lining the upright face of the hole with greased timbers so that the stone’s corner, grinding down into the earth, did not lodge against the chalk. The fourth stone they raised, even though it was one of the heavier slabs, took only half as long to raise as the first pillar.
“The gods made you clever,” Galeth complimented him.
“You too.”
“No.” Galeth shook his head. “The gods made me strong.”
The moon stones were finished. Now, if a man could draw a line through the pairs, and extend that line on either side to the very ends of the earth where the fogs lingered across gray seas in perpetuity, he could see where the moon rose and fell at the limits of her wanderings and Lahanna, endlessly traveling among the stars, could look down and see that the people of Ratharryn had marked her journeying. She would know that they watched her, know that they loved her, and she would hear their prayers.
The four larger stones stayed outside the temple while Ratharryn’s folk cut the year’s wheat and barley. It was a fair harvest and the women sang as they stood about the threshing floor that had been flattened and hardened by a day-long harvest dance. Saban and Derrewyn led the dance, and the women swayed and smiled because Derrewyn was young and happy, and Saban, they knew, was a good young man, decent and strong, and their imminent marriage was taken as a good augury. Only Jegar, who could still not hold a bow in his right hand and could only use a spear with his clumsy left hand, resented them, but there was little he could do. And Jegar’s jealousy grew worse when a band of Outfolk tried to raid the harvest from Cheol, which was an outlying settlement of Ratharryn, and Hengall led a war band against them, defeated them, and brought back six. heads. One of those heads was taken by Saban, though in truth Galeth had held the shrieking Outfolk warrior still so that Saban could kill him, but still Saban was allowed to wear a blue kill mark on his chest.
After that skirmish, and after the harvest was stored, the men went back to finish the remaining work, and Saban, going with them to begin the new work, stopped to stare at the Old Temple with its four new stones. It looked different suddenly. It was a chill day, with autumn’s first bite in the air, but the sun shone between a gap in the cl
ouds to light the new white banks of the sacred path and the clean chalk circle of the temple’s ditch and bank. And in that circle, their shadows stark in the morning light, the four stones stood.
Galeth paused beside Saban. “It looks good,” he said, sounding surprised, and it did. It looked splendid. It looked clean, purposeful, even calm. The temple was not massive and grand like Cathallo’s shrine, but instead was lifted up on the hill’s green breast so that the four stones seemed to float in the sky. Cathallo’s temple, with its great squat boulders dwarfed by the massive embankment, was more like a thing of the earth while this shrine was airy and delicate.
“It’s a sky temple,” Saban said.
Galeth liked that. “A sky temple,” he said, “why not? It’s a good name.” He clapped Saban on a shoulder. “It’s the right name, the Sky Temple!” He hefted a timber and walked on, peering intently at the southern horizon. He was looking for smoke that might betray where a hunting band had its camp, but he saw nothing. There was a rumor that a large band of Outfolk was in the forest, though Hengall, taking another war band west and south, had found no sign of them. “Let’s hope they’ve moved on,” Galeth said, touching his groin. “They can find someone else’s land, not ours.”
The Outfolk had lived in the land for generations now, indeed no one living could remember when they had first come from the land across the eastern sea, but all knew they spoke a different language and had different customs. Some of them, like the men of Sarmennyn who had lost their gold lozenges, had found great tracts of empty land to make their home, but others still wandered the forest in search of places to live and it was those homeless bands that caused trouble to Ratharryn, for the bigger Outfolk settlements were all far away.
“They won’t come near us,” Saban said, “not while their tribesmen’s heads are on our embankment.”
“I pray not,” Galeth said, touching his groin again, but he still stared southward. Hengall might not have found the hungry Outlanders, but a hunting party had discovered a campsite with its ashes still warm and a trader had glimpsed a large band of gray-tattooed men prowling in the deep trees. “We had a good harvest,” Galeth said, “and if the Outlanders had a bad one then they’ll be eyeing us.”
They walked on to the temple and there the difficulty of raising the last stones drove away any fears of an Outfolk raid. Two of the boulders were to be raised on either side of the entrance of the sun, and those two were twice as long, twice as thick and, it seemed, many times the weight of the moon stone pillars. It took four days to raise the first, and that did not count the days digging the hole, and another three days to put up the second. The last two stones, the sun stones, that were to serve as a doorway in the avenue for the rising midsummer sun, were bigger still. They saved the largest stone till last and the hole they dug was so deep that a man could stand at its foot and not see over the lip. They made the ramp and lined it with timber and another pig died so that its fat could grease the wood. Then, when all was ready, they set about planting the stone.
It took sixty men to move the big sun stone off its sledge. Galeth tied ropes about the boulder, harnessed them to forty men and had them haul it forward while the others used levers to ease the great stone along its oak bed. It took a whole day to shift the stone off the sledge and the best part of the next day to seat it properly in the ramp, for it had gone in crooked, so they had to straighten it with levers, but at last, after two days’ work, it rested on the ramp.
Galeth had built a new tripod of oak to raise the taller stones. The tripod stood four times the height of a man and, because he feared that the hide ropes going over the peak would stick, he set a smooth piece of elm in the joint and greased it with fat. He strapped the four ropes around the upper end of the stone, led them over the elm block and tied those ropes to a beam of oak to which he harnessed sixteen oxen. Then the men whipped and goaded the beasts and slowly the stone moved, but agonizingly slowly, and so more ropes were tied to the oak beam and men were harnessed alongside the beasts and again the whips slashed down and the goads jabbed and the men fought for footing on the grass and slowly, so very slowly, the tall stone edged upward. The higher it went the easier it became because the ropes were now pulling the stone’s top straight toward the tripod’s peak, while at the beginning of the raising the ropes made a narrow angle between themselves and the stone. The stone’s foot crunched and splintered the greased wood lining the hole, then suddenly Galeth was shouting at the men driving the oxen to hold their whips. “Gentle now!” he shouted. “Gentle!” The stone was almost upright. “Pull again!” Galeth shouted and the ropes creaked and the tripod quivered and Saban feared that the stone had lodged against an unseen obstruction at the base of the hole, but then it crashed forward against the timber-clad face and Galeth screamed at the men to stop hauling in case they pulled the stone clean over the hole’s brink. The ropes slackened, but the big sun stone did not fall. It stood there, huge and gray, more than two times the height of a man.
They rammed the stone’s base with stones, filled the hole, untied the ropes and thus the work was finished. The Old Temple was no more and Ratharryn had its sanctuary of stone. They had the Sky Temple.
The day chosen for the dedication of the Sky Temple proved to be propitious for it was warm and cloudless, a day that late autumn had stolen from high summer. All Hengall’s people came to the ceremony. They arrived from the outlying settlements and from the upland farmsteads, and the women assembled at Lahanna’s shrine while the men danced around the poles of the temple where they had stacked their spears and piled their bows for no man would carry a weapon this day. This day was given to the gods.
In the late afternoon Gilan led the tribe up from the settlement. They stopped at the grave mounds where the skull pole was paraded and the ancestors were told what was happening, and then they danced to where the new sacred path scarred the grassland. The tribe’s priests were naked, their bodies chalked white with patterns swirled by spread fingers, while their heads were crowned with antlers and their hair and beards hung with animal bones and teeth. The folk who followed the priests had all dressed in their best pelts. Saban and Derrewyn were to be married after the sun set. Derrewyn wore a dress of sewn deerskins that were very pale in color so that her skin looked even darker, while her long hair had been threaded with creamy meadowsweets. Her parents had come to see the ceremony and her father, Morthor, high priest at Cathallo, danced with Ratharryn’s priests; those priests led with them a small child, a fair-haired girl just three years old, who had been born deaf. The child, like Derrewyn, wore meadowsweets in her hair.
The sun blazed into the faces of the folk as they crossed the rim of the down from where the sacred path stretched clean and white to the eight new stones of the Sky Temple. Gilan carried the tribe’s skull pole, which had been decorated with ivy, while Neel, the youngest priest, had an axe with a beautifully carved greenstone head that Galeth had sharpened that same afternoon.
The people stamped their dance between the newly made chalk banks of the sacred path, scattering the grazing sheep as they advanced. Four of the men carried goatskin drums and they set the rhythm of the dance and, as the priests neared the four taller stones, the drumming became more frantic and the tribe swooped from side to side. The women led the singing, praising Slaol, while the men echoed the last line of each verse.
The tribe swerved aside at the temple to dance about its edge. The priests went inside and, once they had driven out the sheep and cattle that were grazing on the temple’s grass, they formed a circle where they stamped the intricate steps of their own dance. The priests danced inside and the people sang and danced outside. The men circled closest to the ditch, with the women outside them, and all danced sunwise as Slaol sank toward the horizon. The singing and dancing seemed to induce a trance that gripped the folk as the sun sank. Some women called out in ecstasy as on and on they danced, not noticing the tiredness in their legs but swept up by the music, and they only stopped when the me
n who had carried pots of fire from the settlement put the embers in the great heaps of wood that were piled on either side of the temple. The flames caught fast, the small twigs crackled and the smoke whirled the sparks upward. Galeth had broken up the great sledges and put their huge timbers in the piles. He rued such a waste of good wood, but the sledges had served a sacred purpose and so must be returned to the gods. The fires became fierce as the tribe gathered about the twin stone pillars of the sun’s gate which stood in the center of the sacred path. The drummers were silent now, but the dance was still inside the people and some could not be still, but swayed from side to side and some of the women moaned as they stared toward the great swollen ball of the sun where it flattened on the far horizon. “Slaol,” they called. “Slaol!”
“Slaol!” Gilan shouted at the sun, raising his arms, and Hengall now took the deaf child’s hand and led her to the very center of the temple where Galeth had dug a hole. It was not a deep hole, nor was it long, but it was enough and the child with flowers in her hair was taken to the hole’s edge and there her tunic was lifted over her hair so she was naked and Gilan knelt and gave her a pot. “Drink,” he said gently and, because she was deaf, motioned what she should do. The girl took the pot in both hands and laughed at the high priest’s kindly face.
The pot contained a potion to bring dreams: a potion made from mushrooms and herbs, a potion to carry the deaf child to the gods, and all the folk watched, utterly silent, as she drank. She made a face as if the liquid were bitter, but then she laughed again and dropped the pot. Gilan stood and stepped back from her, watching to see what omens the potion brought.
The girl began to gasp as if her breath were being stolen, then she screamed for her mother in a half-formed voice, and then she tried to run back toward the watching crowd, but Neel caught her and forced her back to the hole where she screamed again. Her watching mother wailed for the child. The omens were bad. She should have been smiling, laughing, dancing, but she was struggling and frantic, and her screams were scratching at the tribe’s souls. To stop her noise Gilan shook her hard, so hard that she went still with terror and in that moment Gilan thrust her out at arm’s length and took the greenstone axe from Neel.
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