Stonehenge - Bernard Cornwell

Galeth and Saban walked nervously forward, both half expecting arrows to come from Lengar's companions who waited at the temple's far side, but no bowstring sounded. Lengar drew his sword as they approached. 'There are men here who might expect one of you to challenge me,' Lengar said. 'Even you, little brother.' He bared his teeth at Saban, pretending to smile.

Saban said nothing. He saw that Lengar had tattooed a pair of horns on his face, one outside of each eye, and the horns made him look even more sinister. Lengar held the sword out so that its tip touched Saban's breast. 'It is good to see you, brother,' he said.

'Is it?' Saban asked as coldly as he could.

'You think I have not missed Ratharryn?' Lengar asked. 'Sarmennyn is a bare place. Raw and cold.'

'You came home to be warm?' Saban asked sarcastically.

'No, little one, I came home to make Ratharryn great again. There was a time when Cathallo paid us tribute, when they were proud that their women married a man from Ratharryn, when they came to dance in our temples and begged our priests to keep them from harm, but now they sell us rocks.' He slapped the closest stone. 'Rocks!' He spat the word again. 'Why did you not buy oak leaves from them? Or water? Or air? Or dung?'

Galeth glanced at his brother's body. 'What do you want of us?' he asked Lengar dully.

'You must kneel to me, uncle,' Lengar said, 'in front of all the tribe, to show that you accept me as chief. Otherwise I shall send you to our ancestors. Greet them for me, if I do.'

Galeth frowned. 'And if I kneel, what then?'

'Then you shall be my honoured adviser, my kinsman and my friend,' Lengar said effusively. 'You shall be what you have always been, the builder of our tribe and the counsellor of its chief. I did not come back to let the Outfolk rule here. I came to make Ratharryn great again.' He gestured at the red warriors. 'When their work is done, uncle, they will go home. But till then they are our servants.'

Galeth looked again at his brother's body. 'There will be no more killing in the tribe?' he asked.

'I will kill no one who accepts my authority,' Lengar promised, glancing at Saban.

Galeth nodded. He paused for a heartbeat then sank to his knees. There was a sigh from the watching tribe as he leaned forward and touched his hands to Lengar's feet.

'Thank you, uncle,' Lengar said. He touched Galeth's back with the sword, then turned to Saban. 'Now you, brother.'

Saban did not move.

'Kneel,' Galeth muttered.

Lengar's yellow-tinged eyes, oddly bright in the gathering dark, stared into Saban's face. 'I do not mind, little brother,' Lengar said softly, 'whether you live or die. There are those who say I should kill you, but does a wolf fear a cat?' He reached out with the sword and stroked the cold blade down Saban's cheek. 'But if you do not kneel to me, I shall take your head and use your skull as a drinking pot.'

Saban did not want to submit, but he knew Lengar's madness, and he knew he would be killed like a frothing dog if he did not yield. He bit back his pride and made himself kneel, and another sigh sounded from the tribe as he too leaned forward to touch Lengar's feet. Lengar, in turn, touched the nape of Saban's neck with the bronze blade. 'Do you love me, little brother?' Lengar asked.

'No,' Saban said.

Lengar laughed and took the sword away. 'Stand,' he said, then stepped back to look at the silent, watching crowd. 'Go home!' he called to them. 'Go home! You too,' he added to Saban and Galeth.

Most of the crowd obeyed, but Derrewyn and her mother ran to the temple's ditch where Morthor lay wounded. Saban joined them to see that an arrow had struck high on the priest's shoulder and its force had driven the head clean through his body. Saban pulled the flint free, but left the shaft in place. 'The arrow will come out cleanly,' he reassured Derrewyn. The chalk slurry on Morthor's chest was stained pink and he was breathing in short panicked gasps. 'The wound will mend,' Saban told the frightened priest, then twisted back because Derrewyn had suddenly screamed.

Lengar had taken hold of Derrewyn's arm and was hauling her round so that he could see her face in the light of the great fires. Saban stood, but immediately found himself staring at the point of Lengar's sword. 'You want something of me, little brother?' Lengar asked.

Saban looked at Derrewyn. She was in tears, flinching from Lengar's tight grip on her arm. 'We are to marry,' Saban said, 'she and I.'

'And who decided that?' Lengar asked.

'Father,' Saban said, 'and her great-grandmother, Sannas.'

Lengar grimaced. 'Father is dead, Saban, and I rule here now. And what that moonstruck hag of Cathallo wants does not matter in Ratharryn. What matters, little brother, is what I want.' He snapped an order in the harsh Outfolk language and a half-dozen of the red warriors ran to his side. One took the sword from Lengar, while two others faced Saban with their spears.

Lengar put both hands on the neck of Derrewyn's deerskin tunic. He looked into her eyes, smiled when he saw the fear there, then tore the tunic with sudden force. Derrewyn cried out; Saban instinctively leapt forward, but one of the Outfolk spears tangled his ankles, and the other clouted him across the skull then came to rest on his belly as he fell to the ground.

Lengar ripped off the remnants of the tunic, leaving Derrewyn naked. She tried to hide her body, but Lengar pulled her out of the crouch and spread her arms. 'A thing of Cathallo,' he said, looking her up and down, 'but a pretty thing. What does one do with such pretty things?' He asked the question of Saban, but expected no answer. 'Tonight,' he went on, 'we must show Cathallo what the power of Ratharryn means,' and with that he took Derrewyn's wrist and dragged her towards the settlement.

'No!' Saban shouted, still pinned to the ground by the Outfolk spear.

'Quiet, little brother,' Lengar called. Derrewyn tried to pull away from him and he struck her hard across the face, scattering meadowsweets from her hair, and, when he was sure she would be obedient, he tugged her onwards. She pulled away from him again, but he gave her a second blow, much harder than the first; she whimpered and this time followed him in a daze. Her mother, still kneeling beside her husband, shouted a strident protest, but a red-painted warrior kicked her in the mouth and silenced her.

And Saban, bereft at the Sky Temple, could do nothing except weep. Two Outfolk warriors guarded him. Neel and Morthor, the wounded priests, were carried away to leave the bodies of Hengall and Gilan in the moonlight where Saban sobbed like a child. Then the Outlanders prodded him to his feet and drove him like a beast towards the settlement.

The Sky Temple had been consecrated but disaster had come to Ratharryn. Saban's world had turned dark. The gods were screaming again.

—«»—«»—«»—

Most of the Outfolk warriors stationed themselves on the embankment's crest from where, with their short bows and sharp arrows, they could threaten the folk inside Ratharryn's settlement, but a handful of Outfolk spearmen stood guard outside Hengall's hut where Lengar took Derrewyn. Most of the tribe had gathered beside Arryn and Mai's temple; they heard a blow, heard Derrewyn scream, then heard no more.

'Should we fight them?' Galeth's son, Mereth, asked.

There are too many of them,' Galeth said softly, 'too many.' He looked broken, sitting in the temple's centre with his head low. 'Besides,' he went on, 'if we fight them, how many of us will die? How many will be left? Enough to resist Cathallo?' He sighed. 'I knelt to Lengar, and so he is my chief…' He paused. 'For now.' The last two words were said so low that not even Mereth could hear them. The women outside the temple cried for Hengall, because he had been a good chief, while the men inside watched the enemy on the high earth bank. Lahanna stared down, unmoved by the tragedy. After a while the frightened folk slept, though their sleep was broken by people crying aloud in their nightmares.

Lengar appeared just before the dawn. The tribe woke slowly, becoming aware that their new chief was stepping over sleeping bodies to reach the centre of Arryn and Mai's temple. He still wore the bronze-plated jerkin and had the long sword at his waist, but he carried no spear or bow.

I did not mean that Gilan should die,' he said without any greeting. Folk were sitting up and shuffling off the cloaks in which they had slept, while the women outside the temple's rings leant forward to catch Lengar's quiet words. 'My companions showed more zeal than I wanted,' he continued ruefully. 'One arrow would have been enough, but they were frightened and thought more were necessary.'

All the people were awake now. Men, women and children — the whole tribe — gathered in a protective cluster in and around the small temple and all listened to Lengar.

'My father,' Lengar went on, raising his voice just a little, 'was a good man. He kept us alive in hard winters and he cut down many trees to give us land. Hunger was rare and his justice was fair. For all that he should be honoured, so we will make him a mound.' People responded for the first time, muttering their agreement, and Lengar let the murmuring continue for a while before raising a hand. 'But my father was wrong about Cathallo!' He spoke louder now, his voice touched with hardness. 'He feared it, so he let Kital and Sannas rule you. It was to be a marriage of two tribes, but in marriage it is the man who should be master and in time Cathallo would have mastered you! Your harvest would have been carried to their storehouses, your daughters would have danced the bull dance in their temple and your spears would have fought their battles. But this is our land!' Lengar cried, and some folk shouted that he was right.

'Our land,' Mereth shouted angrily, 'and filled with Outfolk!'

Lengar paused, smiling. 'My cousin is right,' he said after a while. 'I have brought Outfolk here. But there are not many. They have fewer spears than you do! What is to stop you killing them now? Or killing me?' He waited for an answer, but none of the men moved. 'Do you remember,' Lengar asked, 'when the Outfolk came and begged for the return of their treasures? They offered us a high price. And what did we do? We turned them down and used some of the gold to buy stone from Cathallo. Stone! We used Slaol's gold to buy rocks!' He laughed, and many of his listeners looked ashamed for what the tribe had done.

'We shall buy nothing more from Cathallo,' Lengar said. 'They claim to want peace, but war is hidden in their hearts. They cannot bear to think that Ratharryn will be great again, and so they will try to crush us. In our ancestors' time this tribe was stronger than Cathallo! They paid us tribute and begged our approval. But now they despise us. They want us helpless, and we shall have to fight them. How do we defeat them?' He pointed at the embankment where the Outfolk warriors squatted. 'We will defeat Cathallo by buying the help of the Outfolk, for they will pay almost any price to have their gold returned. But to receive their gold they must do our bidding. We are masters here, not them! And we shall use the Outfolk warriors to become the mightiest tribe in all the land.' He watched his listeners, judging the effect of his words. 'And that is why I came back,' he finished softly, 'and why my father had to join his ancestors, so that Ratharryn will be known through all the land, feared through all the land, and honoured through land and sky.'

The tribe began to thump their hands on the earth, and then the men were standing and cheering. Lengar had persuaded them.

Lengar had won.

—«»—«»—«»—

Saban spent the night in his hut, guarded there by two of Lengar's red-painted spearmen. He wept for Derrewyn, and the knowledge of what she endured in the dark gave him such pain that he was tempted to take the knife that had been a gift from his father and slit his own throat, but the lure of revenge stayed his hand. He had knelt to Lengar in the Sky Temple's gate, but he knew the gesture had been hollow. He would kill his brother. He swore as much in the awful dark, then cursed himself for not showing more fight at the temple. But what could he have done? He had possessed no weapon, so how could he have fought warriors armed with swords, spears and bows? Fate had crushed him, and he was close to despair. Only as dawn neared did he fall into a dream-racked, shallow sleep.

Gundur, one of the men who had fled Ratharryn with Lengar, woke him. 'Your brother wants you,' Gundur said.

'What for?' Saban asked resentfully.

'Just get up,' Gundur said scornfully. Saban put the bronze knife into his belt and picked up one of his hunting spears before following Gundur from the hut. He would kill his brother now, he had decided. He would spear Lengar without warning, and if he died under the blades of Lengar's companions then at least he would have avenged his father. The ancestors would approve of that and welcome him to the afterlife. He gripped the spear shaft tight and stiffened his resolve to strike as soon as he entered the chief's big hut.

But an Outfolk warrior waiting just inside the hut seized Saban's spear before he had even stooped beneath the lintel. Saban tried to keep hold of the ash shaft, but the man was too strong and the brief struggle left Saban sprawling ignominiously on the floor. Galeth, he saw, waited for him, and three more Outfolk warriors sat behind Lengar who had watched the scuffle with amusement. 'Did you think to avenge our father?' Lengar asked Saban.

Saban rubbed his wrist that was sore from the Outlander's grip. 'The ancestors will avenge him,' he said.

'How will the ancestors even know who he is?' Lengar asked. 'I chopped off his jawbone this morning.' He grinned, and pointed to Hengall's bloody and bearded chin that had been spiked to one of the hut poles. If a dead man's jawbone was taken then he could not tell tales to the ancestors. 'I took Gilan's too,' Lengar said, 'so the pair of them can mumble away in the afterlife. Sit beside Galeth, and stop scowling.'

Lengar was draped in his father's bearskin cloak and was surrounded by treasures, all of them unearthed from the floor or dug out of the piles of hides where Hengall had concealed his fortune. 'We are rich, little brother!' Lengar said happily. 'Rich! You look tired. Did you not sleep well?' Gundur, who had sat beside Lengar, grinned, while the three Outfolk warriors, who did not understand what was being said, just stared fixedly at Saban.

Saban glanced towards the leather curtain that hid the women's portion of the hut, but he saw no sign of Derrewyn. He squatted in front of the tribe's heaped treasures. There were bars of bronze, beautifully polished knives of stone and flint, bags of amber, pieces of jet, great axes, loops of copper, carved bone, sea-shells and, most curious of all, a wooden box filled with strangely carved pebbles. The stones were small and smoothly rounded, none of them bigger than the ball of a man's thumb, but all had been deeply cut with patterns of whorls or lines. 'Do you know what they are?' Lengar asked Galeth.

'No,' Galeth said curtly.

'Magic, I suspect,' Lengar said, tossing one of the stones from hand to hand. 'Camaban would know. He seems to know everything these days. It's a pity he's not here.'