Stonehenge

by Bernard Cornwell

“Lallic!” Aurenna summoned her, then glared at Saban. “You have taken one child from the goddess. You will not take another.”

  The slaves stayed in their huts that day as the women of the tribe danced about the temple’s ditch and bank, singing Slaol’s lament. The men danced inside the temple, threading their heavy steps between the unfinished boulders and the emptied sledges. Camaban, some of his cuts reopened and bleeding, knelt beside the body and shrieked at the sky while Aurenna and Lallic, the only women who had been allowed to cross the temple causeway, cried loudly on either side of the corpse.

  What shocked Saban was that two priests then led an ox into the temple. Haragg had hated the sacrifice of anything living, yet Camaban insisted the dead man’s soul needed blood. The beast was hamstrung, then its tail was lifted so that its head dropped and Camaban swung the bronze axe, but his blow merely glanced off one of the horns and gouged into the animal’s neck. It bellowed, Camaban struck again, missed again, and when a priest tried to take the axe from him he swung it round in a dangerous arc, just missing the man, then hacked at the animal in a maniacal frenzy. Blood spattered on the mother stone, on the corpse, on Aurenna and Lallic and Camaban, but at last the hobbled beast crumpled and Camaban drove the axe deep into its spine to end its torment. He threw the axe down and dropped to his knees. “He will live!” he cried, “he will live again!”

  “He will live,” Aurenna echoed, then she put her arms around Camaban and lifted him up. “Haragg will live,” she said softly, stroking Camaban, who was weeping on her shoulder.

  The body of the heifer was dragged away and Saban angrily scuffed chalk dust over the blood splashes. “There was never supposed to be sacrifice here,” he said to Kilda.

  “Who said so?” she asked.

  “Haragg.”

  “And Haragg is dead,” she answered grimly.

  Haragg was dead and his body stayed in the sun house where it slowly decayed so that the stench of the dead priest was ever in the nostrils of the men digging the holes and shaping the stones. Ravens feasted on the corpse and maggots writhed in his rotting flesh. It took a whole year for the corpse to be reduced to bone, and even then Camaban refused to let it be buried. “It must stay there,” he decreed, and so the bones remained. Some were taken by animals, but Saban tried to keep the skeleton whole. Camaban recovered his wits during that year and declared that he would replace Haragg, which meant he was now chief and high priest. He insisted that Haragg’s bones needed the blood of sacrifices, therefore he brought sheep, goats, oxen, pigs and even birds to the temple and slaughtered them above the dry bones that became stained black with the constant blood. The slaves avoided the bones, though one day Saban was shocked to see Hanna crouching over the drenched skeleton. “Will he really live again?” she asked Saban.

  “So Camaban says,” Saban answered.

  Hanna shuddered, imagining the priest’s skeleton putting on flesh and skin, then climbing awkwardly to its feet and staggering like a stiff-legged drunk between the high stones. “And when you die,” she asked Saban, “will you lie in the temple?”

  “When I die,” Saban told her, “you must bury me where there are no stones. No stones at all.”

  Hanna frowned at him, then suddenly laughed. She was growing fast and in a year or two would be accounted a woman. She knew who her real mother was, and knew too that her life depended on never admitting it, so she called Kilda her mother and Saban her father. She sometimes asked Saban if her real mother still lived, and Saban could only say that he hoped so, yet in truth he feared the opposite. Hanna reminded him more and more of the young Derrewyn: she had the same dark good looks, the same vigor, and the young men of Ratharryn were acutely aware of her. Saban reckoned in another year he might have to place a clay phallus and a skull on his hut’s roof. Leir was among Hanna’s admirers, and she in turn was fascinated by Saban’s son, who had grown tall, wore his dark hair plaited down his back and now had the first kill marks on his chest. It was rumored that Camaban wanted Leir to be the next chief, and most thought that a good thing for Leir was already achieving a reputation for boldness. He fought in Gundur’s band and was kept busy either defending Ratharryn’s wide borders or in the raids that went beyond those hazy frontiers to bring back oxen and slaves. Saban was proud of his son, though he saw little enough of him for Camaban, in the years following Haragg’s death, demanded that the work on the temple be hurried.

  More slaves were sought, and to feed them and the tribe more war bands ranged in search of pigs, oxen and grain. The temple had become a great mouth to be fed, and still the stones came from Cathallo to be shaped by hammers, sweat and fire, and still Camaban fretted. “Why does it all take so long?” he constantly demanded.

  “Because the stone is hard,” Saban constantly replied.

  “Whip the slaves!” Camaban demanded.

  “And it will take twice as long,” Saban threatened, and then Camaban would get angry and swear that Saban was his enemy.

  When half the pillars of the sky ring were in place Camaban demanded a new refinement. “The sky ring will be level, won’t it?” he asked Saban.

  “Level?”

  “Flat!” Camaban said angrily, making a smoothing gesture with his hand. “Flat like the surface of a lake.”

  Saban frowned. “The temple slopes,” he said, pointing to the gentle fall in the ground, “so if the sky ring’s pillars are all the same height then the ring of stone will follow the slope.”

  “The ring must be flat!” Camaban insisted. “It must be flat!” He paused to watch Hanna walk away from the hut and a sly smile crossed his face. “She looks like Derrewyn.”

  “She is young and dark haired,” Saban said carelessly, “that is all.”

  “But your daughter’s life says she is not Derrewyn’s daughter,” Camaban said, still smiling, “does it not?”

  “You heard my oath,” Saban said, and then to distract Camaban he promised to make the sky ring flat, although he knew that would take still more time. He laid light timbers across the tops of the pillars and on each timber in turn he laid a clay trough; when he filled the trough with water he could see whether or not the adjacent pillars were level. Some pillars stood too tall and slaves had to climb pegged ladders and hammer the pillar tops down. After that, because Saban dared not erect a stone that proved too short, he deliberately made the new pillars slightly too long so that each of them had to be hammered and scraped down until it stood level with its neighbors.

  One stone almost broke as they erected it. It slid from its rollers, rammed into the facing timbers and a great crack showed in the stone, running diagonally up its face. Saban ordered it raised anyway and by some miracle it did not break as it swung into place, though the crack was still visible. “It will serve,” Camaban said, “it will serve.”

  In another two years all the stones had come from Cathallo and half the sky ring’s pillars had been placed, but before those pillars could be completed Saban knew he had to drag the sun house capstones into the temple’s center and he did that in the summer. The stones were hauled by scores of slaves who manoeuvred the sledges so that each capstone stood squarely by the twin pillars it would surmount.

  Saban had spent days and nights wondering how to lift those capstones. Thirty-five had to be raised into the sky, thirty of them for the sky ring and five on the arches of the sun house, and it had been deep in one winter’s night that the answer had come to him.

  The answer was timber. A vast amount of timber that had to be cut from the forests and dragged to the temple where, with a team of sixteen slaves, Saban would try to make his idea work.

  He began with the tallest arch. The sledge with the arch’s capstone lay parallel to the twin pillars and about two paces away from it and Saban ordered the slaves to lay an oblong of timbers all about the sledge so that when they were done it seemed as though the long stone rested on a platform of wood. The slaves now used oak levers to raise one end of the capstone and Saban shoved a long timber under
neath it, crosswise to the timbers in the bottom layer. He did the same at the stone’s other end, and now the capstone rested on two timbers a forearm’s height above the oblong platform.

  More timbers were brought and laid all about the two supporting beams until, once again, the stone appeared to be resting on a platform, and then the stone was levered up again and propped on two blocks of wood. A new platform was laid about the blocks, using timbers that lay parallel with the beams of the first layer. The platform was now three layers high and was wide enough and long enough for men to work their levers under the stone with each subsequent raising.

  Layer by layer the stone was raised until the boulder had been carried to the very top of the twin pillars and was poised there on a monstrous pile of stacked timbers. Twenty-five layers of wood now supported the capstone, but it still could not be slid across to the pillars for Saban had to measure the twin knobs on the pillars’ tops and make chalk marks on the capstone where the corresponding sockets should be bored. It had taken eleven days to raise the stone and another twenty were needed to hammer and grind the holes, and then the stone had to be turned over with levers, and two more layers of wood added beneath it before the slaves could lever it, finger’s breadth by finger’s breadth, across from the platform and onto two beams that carried the stone until its sockets were poised directly above the twin knobs on the pillar tops.

  Three men levered up one end of the capstone and Saban kicked away the beam that had been supporting the stone, and the slaves pulled the lever away so that the stone crashed down onto the pillar. The platform shook, but neither the capstone nor the pillar broke. The second beam was freed, the stone crashed down again and the first, and tallest, of the five great arches was complete.

  The platform was dismantled and taken to the second pair of pillars and, as the slaves began to place the first layer of timbers about the second capstone, Saban stepped back and gazed up at the first.

  And he felt humbled. He knew, better than anyone, how much labor, how many days of grinding and hammering, and how much sweat and grief had gone into those three stones. He knew that one of the pillars was too short and stood on a grotesquely clubbed foot in a hole that was too shallow, but even so the archway was magnificent. It took his breath away. It soared. And its capstone, a boulder so heavy that sixteen oxen had been needed to drag it from Cathallo, was now lifted into the sky out of man’s reach. It would stay there forever and Saban trembled as he wondered whether any man would ever again lift so great a burden so high into the sky. He turned and looked at the sun which was setting behind pale clouds on the western horizon. Slaol must surely be watching, he thought. Slaol would surely reward this work with Lallic’s life and that hope brought tears to Saban’s eyes and he dropped to his knees and touched his forehead to the ground.

  “It took how many days?” Camaban wanted to know.

  “A few days more than a whole moon,” Saban said, “but the others will be swifter, for the pillars are lower.”

  “There are thirty-four more capstones to raise!” Camaban shouted. “That’s three years!” He howled his disappointment, then turned to stare at the slaves who were hammering and grinding the remaining sky-ring pillars smooth. “Not every stone has to be properly shaped,” Camaban said. “If they’re nearly square, then let them go up. Forget the outer faces, they can be left rough.”

  Saban stared at his brother. “You want me to do what?” he asked. For years Camaban had been demanding perfection, now he was willing to let half-shaped stones be raised?

  “Do it!” Camaban shouted, then turned on the listening slaves. “None of you will go home till the work is done, none of you! So work! Work! Work!”

  It was possible now to see how the finished temple would look, for the last pillars were being erected and, from the west and north, the circle of pillars already looked complete. The sun house was built, towering above the growing ring of stone, and Saban would often walk a hundred or more paces away and stare at what he had made and feel astonishment. It had taken years, this temple, but it was beautiful. Most of all he loved the pattern of shadows that it cast, regular and straight-sided, unlike any shadows he had ever seen, and he understood how he was watching the broken pattern of the world being mended on this hillside and at those moments he would marvel at his brother’s dream. At other times he would stand in the temple’s center and feel shrunken by the pillars and oppressed by their shadows. Even on the sunniest days there was a darkness inside the stones that seemed to loom over him so that he could not rid himself of the fear that one of the capstones would fall. He knew they could not. The capstones were socketed, and the pillars’ tops were dished to hold the lintels firm, yet even so, and especially standing beside Haragg’s bones in the narrow space between the tallest arch and the mother stone, he felt crushed by the temple’s dark heaviness. Yet if he walked away from it, crossed the ditch and turned to look again, the darkness went.

  And this temple was not slight, as the stones of Sarmennyn had been slight. It filled its proper place, no longer dwarfed by the sky and the long slope of grass. Visitors, some coming from strange lands across the seas, would often drop to their knees when they first saw the stones, while the slaves now kept their voices low as they worked. “It’s coming alive,” Kilda said to Saban one day.

  The last pillar of the sky ring, which was only half as wide as the others because it represented the half-day of the moon’s cycle, was erected on midwinter’s day. It went up easily and Camaban, who had come to see that final pillar raised, stayed at the temple as the sun sank. It was a fine day, cold but clear, and the southwestern sky was delicately banded with thin clouds that turned from white to pink. A flock of starlings, looking like flint arrowheads, wheeled over the temple. The birds were innumerable and black against the high sky’s emptiness, they all shifted together, changing direction as one, and the sight made Camaban smile. It had been a long time since Camaban had smiled with pleasure. “It’s all about pattern,” he said quietly.

  The sun sank lower, lengthening the temple’s shadows, and Saban began to feel the stones stirring. They looked black now, for he was standing with Camaban beside the sun stone in the sacred avenue and the shadows were imperceptibly reaching toward them. And as the sun went lower the temple seemed to grow in height until its stones were vast and black. Then the sun vanished behind the capstone of the tallest arch and the first shadows of night engulfed the brothers. Behind them, in Ratharryn, the great midwinter fires were being lit and Saban assumed Camaban would go back to preside over the day’s feast, but instead he waited, staring expectantly at the shadowed stones. “Soon,” Camaban said softly, “very soon.”

  A few heartbeats later the lower edge of the highest capstone was touched a livid red and then the sun blazed through the sliver between the tallest pillars and Camaban clapped his hands for pure joy. “It works!” he cried. “It works!”

  The land all about them was in darkness, for the shadows of the sky ring’s pillars locked together to cast a great pall across the sacred avenue, but in the center of that great stone-cast shadow there was a beam of light. It was the sun’s dying light, the last light of the year, and it lanced across the horizon, over the woods, above the grass and through the arch to dazzle Camaban as he stood beside the sun stone. “Here!” he shouted, thumping his breast as if he were drawing Slaol’s attention. “Here!” he shouted again, then stared, entranced, as the sun slid behind the stones and the shadows of the stones melded into one great blackness that spilt across the grassland. “Do you see what we have done?” Camaban asked excitedly. “The dying sun will see the stone that marked his greatest strength, and he will yearn for that strength and so rid himself of his winter weakness. It will work! It will work!” He turned and clasped Saban’s shoulders. “I want it ready for next midwinter.”

  “It will be ready,” Saban promised.

  Camaban stared into Saban’s eyes, then frowned. “Do you forgive me, brother?”

  “Forgive
you what?” Saban asked, knowing full well what Camaban was asking.

  Camaban grimaced. “Slaol and Lahanna must be one.” He let go of Saban’s shoulders. “I know it is hard for you, but the gods are hard on us. They are hard! There are nights when I pray that Slaol will let go of his goad, but he makes me bleed. He makes me bleed.”

  “And Aurenna gives you joy?” Saban asked.

  Camaban flinched, but nodded. “She gives me joy, and what you have made, brother’ – he nodded at the temple – “will give us all such joy. Finish it. Just finish it.” He walked away.

  The entrance pillars were taken to the causeway and put back in their holes, and then all that needed to be done was to raise the last capstones of the sky ring. Saban worried that the newest pillars would not have had time to settle in the ground, but Camaban would endure no delay now. “It must be done,” he insisted, “it must be ready.”

  But ready for what? Sometimes, when Saban gazed for a long time at the shadowed stones, it seemed to him that they did have their own life. If he was tired and the light was dim the stones appeared to shift like ponderous dancers, though if he raised his head and stared directly at the pillars they would all be still. Yet the gods were in the stones, of that he was sure. The temple was not dedicated, yet the gods had found it. They brooded over the high stones. Some nights he would pray to them; Kilda found him doing so one evening and she sat and waited for him to finish, then asked him what he had begged of the gods.

  “What I always pray,” Saban said, “that they will spare my daughter’s life.”

  “Your daughter is Hanna now,” Kilda said. “Mine too.”

  “You think Derrewyn is dead?”

  “I think she lives,” Kilda said, “but I think you and I will always be parents to Hanna.”

  Saban nodded, yet still he prayed for Lallic. She would be a priestess here, and he was the temple’s builder, so, in time, he decided, she would lose her fear of him and come to trust him, for she would surely see that this was a beautiful place, a home for the gods, and know that her father had made it.