Stonehenge - Bernard Cornwell

'You want her to rule Cathallo?'

'I want her to draw Lahanna back! Aurenna is the sun's bride. If we are to have joy in the world, Saban, we must have Slaol and Lahanna united again. Aurenna alone can do it. Slaol has told me so and you, my brother, must let her go.' He held out a hand so that Saban could pull him to his feet. 'Please,' Camaban said.

'If Aurenna wishes to go,' Saban said, reckoning his wife would have no wish to be isolated so far from the new temple, but to his surprise Aurenna did not reject the idea. Instead she talked a long time with Camaban and Haragg, and afterwards she went to Slaol's old temple where she submitted herself to the widow's rite by having her long golden hair hacked short with a bronze knife. Haragg burned the hair, the ashes were placed in a pot and the pot was broken against one of the timber poles.

Saban watched horrified as Aurenna walked from the temple with her once beautiful hair ravaged into crude clumps smeared with blood where the knife had grazed her scalp, yet on her face was a look of joy. She knelt to Saban. 'You will let me go?' she asked.

'If you really want to,' he said reluctantly.

'I want to!' she said fervently. 'I want to!'

'But why?' Saban asked. 'And why the widow's rite?'

'My old life is gone,' Aurenna said, climbing to her feet. 'I was given to Slaol, and even though he rejected me I was ever his worshipper. But from today, Saban, I am a priestess of Lahanna.'

'Why?' he asked again, his voice filled with pain.

She smiled calmly. 'In Sarmennyn we used to offer the god a human bride each year, but in a year's time the god demanded another bride. One girl after another, Saban, burning, burning! But the girls didn't satisfy Slaol. How could they? He wants a bride for ever, a bride to match his glory in the sky and that can only be Lahanna.'

'The Outfolk have never worshipped Lahanna,' Saban protested.

'And we were wrong,' Aurenna said. 'Lahanna and Slaol! They are made for each other as a man is made for a woman. Why did Slaol spare me from the fire at the Sea Temple? He must have had a purpose and now I see what it is. He rejected a human bride because he wants Lahanna and my task will be to draw her to his embrace. I shall do it by prayer, by dancing, by kindness.' She smiled at Saban, then cupped his face in her hands. 'We are to do a great thing, you and I. We are to make the marriage of the gods. You will make the shrine and I shall bring the bride to Slaol's bed. You cannot forbid me that task, can you?'

'They will kill you in Cathallo,' Saban growled.

Aurenna shook her head. 'I shall comfort them, and in time they will worship at our new temple and share in its joy.' She smiled. 'It is why I was born.'

She left next day, taking Leir and Lallic with her, and Gundur returned to Ratharryn, but left a score of his warriors behind. Aurenna had those men hunt the forests for boar and deer to feed the settlement.

Saban stayed in Ratharryn. Camaban wanted him there, for Camaban was intent on his temple's design and needed his brother's advice. What was the largest stone that could be raised as a pillar? Could one stone be piled on another? How were the stones to be moved? Could the stone be shaped? The questions did not end, even if Saban had no answers. Winter ended and the spring touched the trees with green and still Camaban brooded.

Then one day there were no more questions for the doorway of Camaban's hut stayed curtained and no one, not even Saban or Haragg, was allowed inside. A mist hung across Ratharryn, hiding the skulls on the embankment's crest. There was no wind that day and the world was silent and white. The tribe, sensing that the gods were close about the settlement, kept their voices low.

At sunset Camaban screamed, 'I have found it!'

And the wind blew the mists away.

Haragg and Saban were summoned to Camaban's hut where a patch of the earthen floor had been swept clean and smooth. Saban expected to see the finished model, but instead the wooden blocks had been pushed into a jumbled heap beside which Camaban squatted with eyes so bright and skin so sheened with sweat that Saban wondered if his brother had a fever, but the fever was no sickness, it was excitement. 'We shall build a temple,' Camaban greeted Saban and Haragg, 'like none that is now or ever will be again. We shall make the gods dance with joy.' Camaban was naked, his skin reddened by the glare of the fire which warmed and lit the hut. He waited until Saban and Haragg had settled, then he placed a single wooden pillar very close to the centre of the cleared space. 'That is the mother stone,' Camaban said, 'reminding us that we are of the earth and that the earth is at the heart of all that exists.' The bones hanging from his hair and beard clicked together as he rocked back on his heels. 'And around the mother stone,' he went on, 'we shall build a death house, only this death house will also be Slaol's house. It will remind us that death is the passage to life, and we shall make Slaol's house with stones as tall as any wooden temple pole.' He took the longest two blocks and placed them just behind the mother stone. 'We shall touch the sky,' he said reverently, then took a smaller piece of wood and put it across the two pillars' tops so that the three stones formed a tall and very narrow archway. 'Slaol's arch,' he said reverently, 'a slit through which the dead can go to him.'

Saban stared at the high arch. 'How tall are the stones?' he asked.

'They are the same height as the tallest of the two poles at the temple,' Camaban answered and Saban flinched as he remembered the height of the slender wands that his brother had planted in the cleared temple. Camaban was demanding that the arch should stand more than four times the height of a man, taller than any stone Saban had ever seen, so tall that he could not imagine how such stones were to be raised, let alone how the capstone was to be lifted onto their summits, but he said nothing. He just watched as Camaban placed eight more pillars to flank the first two, not in a straight line, but curved sharply forward in the shape of an ox's horns to make a bay that wrapped about the mother stone. He put blocks on each pair of pillars so that the sun's house was now made of five archways. The central arch was tallest, but the flanking four would all soar high above the ground. 'These arches' — Camaban tapped the four lower arches — 'point towards the moon stones. They will let the dead escape from Lahanna's grip. Wherever she goes, north or south, east or west, the dead will find a gateway into Slaol's house.'

'And from Slaol's house,' Haragg said, 'the dead will escape through the tallest arch?'

'And thus we shall take the dead from Lahanna and give them to Slaol,' Camaban agreed, 'and it is Slaol who gives life.'

'Gateways of the moon,' Haragg said approvingly, 'and an archway of the sun.'

'It isn't finished,' Camaban said, and he took thirty blocks of wood and placed them in a wide circle of pillars all around the sun's house. All but one of the stones were the same size, all were neatly squared and all were shorter than any of the central arches, but the last of the pillars, though as tall as the others, was only half as wide. 'These pillars show the days of the moon,' Camaban explained, and Haragg nodded for he understood that the thirty stones represented the twenty nine and a half days in which the moon travelled from nothingness to fullness, 'So Lahanna will see that we recognise her.'

'But Slaol -' Haragg began, meaning to protest that Camaban had surrounded Slaol's house with a ring dedicated to the moon.

Camaban hushed him and picked up thirty more wooden blocks that he laid one by one on top of the ring of pillars until he had completed a circle of lintels. 'We shall make a ring of stone,' he explained, 'to reflect Slaol. Lahanna will carry the ring and will understand that her duty is to be subservient to Slaol.'

'A sky ring,' Saban said quietly. He did not know how it could be done, but he felt a surge of excitement as he stared at the wooden blocks. It would be magnificent, he thought, and then he told himself that these were mere playthings, and the temple was to be made of boulders that Camaban assumed could be moved and shaped as easily as timber.

Camaban took a last block which he placed a long way from the others, putting it where, on the hillside, the sacred avenue had been dug. That,' he said, tapping the final block, 'is our sun stone, and at midsummer its shadow will reach into the sun's house, and at midwinter the sun's light will go through the tall arch and strike the stone. So when Slaol dies his last light will touch the stone that marked his greatest power.'

'And Slaol will remember,' Haragg said.

'He will remember,' Camaban agreed, 'and he will want his power again and so he will fight against winter and thus come closer to us. Closer and closer until his ring' — he touched the sky ring of stones — 'matches Lahanna's twelve seasons. And then Slaol and Lahanna will be wed and we shall have bliss. We shall have bliss.' He fell silent, gazing at his model temple of wood, but in his mind's eye he was seeing it made of stone and standing on the hill's green slope where it would be ringed by the bank and ditch of whitest chalk. A circle of chalk and a ring of stone and a house of arches to call the far gods back to their home.

Saban stared at the wooden blocks. Their shadows made a complex pattern that flickered black and red. Camaban was right, Saban thought. There was nothing like it in all the land, nothing like it under the sky or between the grey seas. Saban had never dreamed of a temple so splendid, so clean, and so difficult to build.

'It can be done?' Camaban asked with a trace of nervousness in his voice.

'If the god wants it done,' Saban answered.

'Slaol wants it done,' Camaban replied confidently. 'Slaol demands that it be done! He wants it done in three years.'

Three years! Saban grimaced at the thought. 'It will take longer than that,' he said mildly, expecting an angry retort.

Camaban dismissed the pessimism with a shake of his head. 'Whatever you need,' he said, 'demand. Men, timber, sledges, oxen, whatever you want.'

'It will need many men,' Saban warned.

'We shall use slaves,' Camaban decreed, 'and when it is done you will be reunited with Aurenna.'

So Saban began the work. He did it gladly for he had been inspired by Camaban's vision and he longed for the day when the gods would be restored to their proper pattern and so bring an end to the world's afflictions. He had Mereth take a team of men to cut oaks in the forests around Maden for it was in that settlement that the oaks would be trimmed, cut and made into sledges. Each sledge would have two broad runners joined by three massive beams on which a stone could rest, and a fourth beam at the front to which oxen would be harnessed. Men might pull some of the smaller stones, but the great stones, the ten tall ones which would make the sun house and the thirty that would hold the sky ring aloft, would need teams of oxen, so oxen had to be counted. And the ox teams would need harness ropes, which meant more oxen had to be killed, their hides tanned and then cut and twisted into strong lines. There were not enough oxen in Ratharryn and Cathallo so Gundur and Vakkal led their warriors on long raids to find more. Saban made other ropes by soaking stripped lime bark in water-filled pits and, when the strands separated, weaving them into long lines that were curled down in a storehouse.

Camaban laid out the temple's plan in the turf where the stones of Sarmennyn had stood. He scribed a circle in the earth with a plough stick attached by a line to a peg at the shrine's centre and the scratched ring showed where the stones of the sky ring would be planted. He marked the places for its thirty pillars, then banged pegs into the ground where his tall sun house would be built. The shrine's centre was now bare of grass for so many feet trampled the space each day while the chalky rubble that had been used to fill the old holes where the stones from Sarmennyn had stood got kicked all across the circle.

Camaban had given Saban six willow wands, each cut to a precise length, and careful instructions how many stones were needed of each length. The longest pole was four times the height of a man, and that merely represented the length of the stone that needed to be above the turf. Saban knew that a stone needed a third of its length sunk in the ground if it were to resist the storms and winds. Camaban was demanding two such massive stones and when Saban visited Cathallo he could only find one boulder that was big enough. The next longest was too short, though if it was buried shallowly it might just stand. It was simple enough to select the shorter stones, for plenty were scattered across the green hills, but time and again Saban wandered back to the monstrous rock that would form one pillar of the sun's high arch.

It was indeed monstrous. It was a piece of stone so huge that it looked like a rib of the earth itself. It was not thick, for its lichened top barely reached to his knee, though much of the rock's bulk was buried in the soil. Yet at its widest it stretched more than four paces and it was over thirteen paces long. Thirteen! If it could be raised, Saban thought, then it would indeed touch the sky, but how to raise it? And how to lift it from the earth and move it to Ratharryn? He stroked the stone, feeling the sun's warmth in its lichened surface. He could imagine how the smaller stones might be prised from their turf beds and eased onto the beams of an oak sledge, but he doubted there were enough men in all the land to lift this great boulder from the ground.

But however he lifted the stone he knew he would need a sledge that was three times bigger than any he had made before, and he decided the sledge must be made in Cathallo from oak timbers that he would place in a long and narrow hut so that the timber could season. Dry wood was just as strong as green timber, but weighed much less, and Saban reckoned he must make the sledge as light as possible if the big boulder were to be shifted off the hill. He would let the timbers dry for a year or more and in that time he would worry at the problem of how to lift the stone.

He found Aurenna in Cathallo's shrine. She was wearing a strange robe made of deerskin cut with a myriad tiny slits into which she had threaded jays' feathers so that the garment seemed to shiver blue and white whenever a breeze blew. 'The people expect a priestess to be different,' she said, explaining the robe, and Saban thought how beautiful she looked. Her pale skin was still unflawed, her gaze was firm and gentle, while her ravaged hair was growing back so that it now enclosed her face like a soft golden cap. She looked happy, radiantly so, and laughed off Saban's worries that the defeated folk of Cathallo would burn his drying timbers. 'They'll work hard to make our temple a success,' she promised.

'They will?' Saban asked, surprised.

'When the temple is finished,' Aurenna explained, 'they will be free again. I have promised them that.'

'You promised them freedom?' Saban asked. 'And what does Camaban say?'

'Camaban will obey Slaol,' Aurenna said. She walked Saban through the settlement and though she proclaimed a blithe belief in the goodness of Cathallo's people, to Saban they looked sullen and resentful. Their chief was dead, their sorceress had vanished and they lived under the spears of Ratharryn's warriors, and Saban feared they would try to burn the long timbers. He also feared for Aurenna's life, and for the life of his two children, but Aurenna laughed at his worries. She explained how she refused the protection of Ratharryn's warriors and how she walked unguarded in the humiliated settlement. 'They like me,' she said simply, and told Saban how she had fought to keep the shrine unviolated. Haragg had wanted to pull down the temple's boulders and move them to Ratharryn, but Aurenna had persuaded Camaban to leave the stones alone. 'Our job is to entice Lahanna, not to offend her,' she said, and so the temple had remained and the folk of Cathallo took some comfort from that.