Stonehenge

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Lahanna’s anger?” Saban asked, puzzled. Ratharryn’s vengeance, maybe, but surely not Lahanna’s anger?

  Vennar frowned. “Some of our women say that Aurenna is Lahanna herself.”

  “She is beautiful,” the second man said wistfully.

  “And Slaol would not take her life,” Vennar said. “Is that not true?”

  “She is not Lahanna,” Saban said firmly, fearful what Derrewyn might do if she heard such a tale.

  “The women say she is,” Vennar insisted, and Saban could tell from his tone that Vennar was not sure what to believe for he was torn between his old loyalty to Derrewyn and his awe of Aurenna. Saban doubted that Aurenna herself would have encouraged such a rumor, but he wondered if Camaban had. It seemed likely. The folk of Cathallo had lost a sorceress, and what better to replace a sorceress than a goddess? “Didn’t the Outfolk worship her as a goddess?” Vennar demanded.

  “She is a woman,” Saban insisted, “just a woman.”

  “So was Sannas,” Vennar said.

  “Your brother claims to be Slaol,” the flute player said, “so why shouldn’t Aurenna be Lahanna?” But Saban would not talk of it anymore. He slept instead, or rather he wrapped himself in his cloak and watched the brilliant stars that lay so thick beyond the shimmering smoke and he began to wonder if Aurenna was indeed turning into a goddess. Her beauty did not fade, her serenity was never broken and her confidence was unshakeable.

  It took eleven days to move the first stone to Ratharryn, and once it was there Vennar and his men took the oxen and the sledge back to Cathallo to load another stone, while Saban stayed at the Sky Temple. The first stone was one of the smallest, destined to form a thirtieth part of the sky ring lifted on its pillars. Camaban had marked the ring on the ground by scratching a pair of concentric circles, and he now insisted that the stone be placed on that band. “The stone has to be shaped,” Camaban told Saban, “so that its outer edge curves to match the bigger circle, and its inner edge curves to match the smaller.”

  Saban stared at the lump of stone. It was bulbous, protruding far over the two scratched lines, yet Camaban insisted that it be smoothed into a small segment of a wide circle. “All the thirty stones of the sky ring must be the same length,” Camaban went on enthusiastically, “but you’re not to blunt their ends.” He took a lump of chalk and drew on the stone’s slab-like surface. “One end is to have a tongue and in the other end you’ll carve a slot, so that the tongue of one stone fits into the slot of the next stone all around the ring.”

  A man might as easily carve the sun, Saban thought, or wipe the sea-bed dry with thistledown, or count the leaves of a forest. And there were not just the sky ring’s stones to shape, but the thirty stones that would lift it so high into the air, and the fifteen huge stones of the sun house, which would stand even higher. Camaban had worked out the dimensions of each stone and cut willow sticks to record the measurements. Saban kept the sticks in a hut he made close to the temple. That hut became his home now. He had slaves to bring him firewood and to fetch water and to cook food, and more slaves to shape the first six stones, which had all arrived by midwinter.

  The six gray boulders, like all the stones that came from Cathallo’s hills, were slabs. Their top and bottom surfaces were parallel and nearly flat, and all the stones were of much the same thickness, so to make a pillar or a lintel it was only necessary to chip away the slab until its corners were square and its sides matched the lengths of the willow wands in Saban’s hut. But the stone was cruelly hard, much harder than the boulders from Sarmennyn, and at first Saban’s slaves merely broke their stone hammers on it, so Saban found harder stones. The stone hammers were skull-sized balls that the slaves lifted and dropped, lifted and dropped, and each blow ground away a patch of dust and stone splinters, so that, patch by patch, splinter by splinter, dust-grain by dust-grain, the stones were sculpted.

  The slaves learned as they worked. It was quicker, they discovered, to grind shallow trenches down the face of the stone, then to knock away the ridges left between. Some of the stones came with a dull brown line traceable in their gray faces and Saban found that the discoloration betrayed a weakness in the boulders that could sometimes be exploited if it ran where excess stone was to be removed. A dozen hammers dropped together on one side of the brown line could sometimes shear a great lump away, but if that failed Saban would set a fire down the length of the stain, feed the fire till it raged, then feed it again with a trickle of pig’s fat which carried the searing heat down to the stone’s surface. He would let the fat sizzle and flare until the rock was almost red hot and then his workers would dash cold water onto the fire and as often as not the stone would crack down the line of the stain. Sometimes the boulders were already cracked and the slaves could drive wedges into the split and hammer the rock apart or, on the coldest nights, fill the cracks with water and let it freeze so that the water spirits, trapped in the ice, would break the rock apart to escape. Yet most of the stones had to be shaped by sheer hard work, by repetitive grinding, by continuous blows, and the crash of the hammers and the grating of the grindstones never stopped. Even in his dreams Saban heard the scrape and crack and screech of stone on stone, and his skin turned as gray as the boulders and his hair and beard were filled with the gritty dust.

  Eight stones came the second year, and eleven the third, and Saban had to find more workers to grind and hammer and split and burn the stone, and more workers required still more slaves to bring food and water to the temple, and Camaban now had war parties permanently roaming up and down the land in search of captives. He led some of those war bands himself. He wore a sword now and had a bronze-plated tunic and a close-fitting cap made of bronze panels that had been cunningly riveted into the shape of a bowl. Men reckoned him as great a warrior as Lengar and a better sorcerer than Sannas, because those whom his spears could not defeat, his reputation could scare into submission.

  Yet no sorcery could shape the stones and Camaban, between his raiding forays, grew ever more impatient with the slow progress. He would watch the slaves singing as they worked and the sound angered him. “Work them harder!”

  “They are working as hard as they can,” Saban said.

  “Then why do they have breath to sing?”

  “The song gives the work rhythm,” Saban explained.

  “A whip would give them a faster rhythm,” Camaban grumbled.

  “There will be no whips,” Saban said. “If you want them to work faster then send them more food. Send pelts for clothes. They are not our enemies, brother, but the folk who will build our dream.”

  Camaban might be dissatisfied with the temple’s progress, but that did not stop him from creating yet more work for the builders. He wanted the pillars jointed to their capstones so that the sky ring would never fall. Saban had thought it would be enough to rest the stones on top of their pillars, but Camaban insisted they must be fixed and so each pillar had to have two knobs sculpted into its top. In time the lintels would need holes ground into their undersides to slot over the knobs, but Saban would not do that work until the pillars were raised and he could measure exactly where the holes had to be bored.

  And still Camaban refined his temple. He visited Cathallo and talked for hours with Aurenna, so many hours that folk whispered about their being together, but Haragg dismissed the rumors, saying that the two only spoke of the temple. Saban feared those conversations for they invariably hatched some new and impossible demand. In the fourth year of the work Camaban demanded to know if Saban had ever noticed how some of the temple poles in Ratharryn seemed to look the same width all the way up from the ground to the sky.

  Saban had been helping lay a trail of firewood down a boulder’s flank. He straightened, frowning. “They look straight and regular because that’s the way they grow.”

  “No,” Camaban said. “Aurenna watched a hut being built in Cathallo and she said the center-post was tapered, but once it was raised it looked straight. I talked to Galeth ab
out it, and he tells me it’s an illusion.”

  “An illusion? You mean it’s magic?” Saban asked.

  “Slaol spare me from idiots!” Camaban seized a piece of chalk and swept aside the line of firewood that Saban had so carefully placed. “Tree trunks are wider at one end than the other,” he said, scratching an exaggeratedly tapered outline on the stone’s rough surface. “But sometimes Galeth would find a trunk that was just about the same width all the way up, and those, he says, all look wider at the top. It’s the ones with narrower tops that look straight, while the straight ones look deformed. So I want you to taper the stones. Make them slightly narrower at the top.” Camaban threw away the chalk and brushed his hands together. “You don’t have to taper them much. Say a hand’s width on every side? That way they’ll all look regular.”

  A moon later Camaban said that Aurenna had dreamed that the faces of the stones had been polished to a shine, and by then Saban was so numb to the immensity of the task that he just nodded. He did not try to tell Camaban how huge was the effort needed to turn each finished stone so its four sides could be ground into a shining surface, instead he just told six of the younger slaves to start polishing one of the finished pillars. They rubbed stone hammers back and forth, back and forth, and sometimes poured scraps of flint, sand and stone dust onto the surface and ground the abrasive mix into the stubborn rock. All summer they pushed the hammers backward and forward, tearing their hands to raw shreds as they scraped the flinty dust, and at the summer’s end there was a patch of stone the size of a lamb’s pelt that was smooth and, when wet, shiny. “More!” Camaban demanded, “more! Make it shine!”

  “You must give me more workers,” Saban said.

  “Why not whip the ones you have?” Camaban asked.

  “They must not be whipped,” Haragg said. The high priest limped now, his back was bent and his muscles slack, but there was still a great power in his deep voice. “They must not be whipped,” he repeated harshly.

  “Why not?” Camaban wanted to know.

  “It is a temple to end the world’s woes,” Haragg said. “You want it to be born in blood and pain?”

  “I want it made!” Camaban screamed. For a few heartbeats it seemed as though he would bring his precious mace crashing down onto one of the boulders and Saban flinched in expectation of the smooth head breaking into a thousand shards, but Camaban controlled his anger. “Slaol wants it built,” he said instead, “he tells me it can be done, yet nothing happens here! Nothing! You might as well piss on the stones for all the progress you’re making.”

  “Give Saban more workers,” Haragg suggested, and so Camaban led raiding parties deep into the northern lands and brought back captives who spoke unknown languages, slaves who tattooed their faces red, slaves who worshipped gods Saban had never heard of, but still more slaves were needed for the work was cruelly hard and painfully slow, and Saban had yet to move any of the long boulders that would form the pillars of the sun’s house at the temple’s center. He had cut and shaped the big sledge runners, and those timbers had seasoned in Cathallo, but he had not dared try to move the gigantic stones.

  He went to Galeth for advice. His uncle was old and feeble now, his scanty hair was white and his beard a mere wisp. Lidda, his woman, was dead and Galeth was blind, but in his blindness he could still envisage stones and levers and sledges. “Moving a large stone is no different from moving a small one,” he told Saban. “It’s just that everything is larger: the sledge, the levers and the ox team.” Galeth shivered. It was a warm night, but he had a large fire in his hut and had pulled a bearskin about his shoulders.

  “Are you sick?” Saban asked.

  “A summer fever,” Galeth said dismissively.

  Saban frowned. “I can build the sledge,” he said, “and make levers, but I do not see how to shift the stones onto their sledges. They’re too big.”

  “Then you must build the sledge under the stone,” Galeth suggested. He paused, his body racked with the shakes. “It’s nothing,” he said, “nothing, just a summer fever.” He waited until the shivering fit had passed, then described how he would first dig a trench down each of the stone’s long sides. Once the trenches had reached the bedrock chalk, he said, the huge runners could be laid down each flank. Then the stone must be levered up, using the sledge runners as fulcrums. “Do it one end at a time,” Galeth advised, “and put beams under the stone. That way you won’t have to shift the stone onto the sledge, but instead build the sledge under the stone.”

  Saban thought about it. It would work, he decided, it would work very well. A ramp would have to be made in front of the sledge, and that ramp would need to be long and shallow so that oxen could haul the boulder up from the bedrock to the turf. How many oxen? Galeth did not know, but guessed Saban would need more beasts than had ever been harnessed to a sledge before. More ropes, more beams to spread the load of the ropes, and more men to guide the oxen. “But you can do it,” the old man said. He shivered again, then moaned.

  “You’re sick, uncle.”

  “Only fever, boy.” Galeth drew the bear’s pelt tighter about his old shoulders. “But I shall be glad to go to the Death Place,” he said, “and join my dear Lidda. You will carry me, Saban?”

  “Of course I will,” Saban said, “but it will be years yet!”

  “And Camaban tells me I shall live on earth again,” Galeth said, ignoring Saban’s optimism, “but I do not see how that can be.”

  “He says what?”

  “That I shall come back. That my soul will use the gates of his new temple to return to earth.” The old man sat silent for a while. The flames of his fire made the lines on his face deep shadowed like knife cuts. “I must have raised twenty temples in my life,” he said, breaking the silence, “and I saw nothing get better with any one of them. But this one will be different.”

  “This one will be different,” Saban agreed.

  “I hope so,” the old man said, “but I cannot help thinking that the folk of Cathallo said the same thing when they made their big shrine.” Galeth chuckled and Saban reflected that his uncle was not nearly as slow-thinking as folk thought. “Or do you think,” Galeth asked, “that they moved the stones because they had nothing better to do?” He thought about that, then reached out and touched a deerskin bag in which he kept Lidda’s flensed bones. He wanted his own bones added to hers before they were buried. He shivered again, then waved a hand to avert Saban’s expression of concern. “This longest stone,” he said after a while, “is it slender?”

  Saban found a piece of kindling in a pile at the hut’s edge and put it into Galeth’s hand. “Just like that,” he said.

  Galeth felt the long, thin sliver of wood. “You know what you should do?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Put it in the hole sideways,” the old man said, and showed what he meant by bending the long thin piece of wood. “A long flat rock could snap in two when you try to hoist it,” he explained. He turned the scrap of wood sideways and no amount of pressure could bend or snap it, but when he bent it again flatwise it snapped easily. “Put it in the hole sideways,” he said again, tossing the scraps aside.

  “I will,” Saban promised.

  “And carry my corpse to the Death Place. Promise me that.”

  “I will carry you, uncle,” Saban promised a second time.

  “I shall sleep now,” Galeth said, and Saban backed from the hut and went to Camaban to tell him Galeth was sick. Camaban promised to take him an infusion of herbs, but when Saban went back to his uncle’s hut he could not wake the old man. Galeth lay on his back, his mouth open and the hairs of his moustache not moving with any breath. Saban gently tapped Galeth’s cheek and the old man’s blind eyes opened, but there was no life there. He had died as gently as a feather falls.

  The women of the tribe washed Galeth’s body, then Mereth, his son, and Saban laid the corpse on a hurdle woven from willow. Next morning the women sang the body to the settlement’s entrance before M
ereth and Saban carried it on to the Death Place. Haragg walked in front of the corpse while a young priest came behind and played a lament on a bone flute. The body was covered with an ox hide on which Saban had strewn some ivy. Camaban did not come, and the only other mourners were Galeth’s two younger sons who were Mereth’s half-brothers.

  The Death Place lay to the south of Ratharryn, not so very far from the Sky Temple, though it was separated from it by a wide valley and hidden by a wood of beech and hazel trees. The Death Place was itself a temple, dedicated to the ancestors, though it was never used for worship, or for bull dances, or for weddings. It was for the dead and so it was left derelict and overgrown. It stank, especially in the high summer, and as soon as the rank smell soured the funeral party’s nostrils the young priest hurried ahead to dispel the spirits which were known to cluster about the temple. He reached the sun gate and shrieked at the unseen souls. Ravens called harshly back, then reluctantly spread their black wings and flew to the nearby trees, though the bolder of the birds settled on the remains of a ring of short timber poles which stood inside the temple’s low bank. A fox snarled at the approaching men from among the nettles in the ditch, then ran to the trees. “Safe now,” the young priest called.

  Mereth and Saban carried Galeth through the entrance that faced the rising midsummer sun, then threaded the small spirit stakes, which were scattered throughout the temple. Haragg found an empty space and there the two men laid the hurdle down. Mereth pulled the heavy ox hide from the naked corpse, then he and Saban tipped Galeth onto the rank grass, which grew so thick among the dead. The old man was on his side, mouth agape, and Saban pulled on a stiff shoulder so that his uncle lay staring toward the clouded sky. A slave of Camaban’s who had died only two days before lay close by; already her pregnant belly had been torn apart by beasts and her face ravaged by ravens’ beaks. A dozen other bodies lay in the Death Place, two of them almost reduced to skeletons. One had weeds growing through its ribcage and the young priest bent over the bones to judge whether the time had come to remove them. The spirits of the dead lingered in this grim place until the last of their flesh was gone, and only then did they rise into the sky to join the ancestors.