Stonehenge - Bernard Cornwell

'Now!' Aurenna shouted from the temple. 'Now!'

But Camaban could not move. He stared at Sannas who came to the sun stone. There she smiled at him and there was only one tooth in her mouth. 'Do you have my soul safe?' she asked him in a voice that was as dry as bones that had been resting for generations in the dark hearts of their grave mounds. 'Is my soul safe, Camaban?' she asked.

'Don't k-k-kill me, p-p-p-please don't k-kill me,' Camaban begged. The old woman smiled at him, then put her arms about his neck and kissed him on the mouth. The crowd stared in amazement; many recognised the old woman and they touched their groins and shook with fear. It was then that Lewydd shouldered aside the terrified guards holding Saban to the ground and Saban climbed to his feet, seized one of the guards' spears and ran towards the sun stone where the ray of Slaol's dying light was shrinking. 'Now!' Aurenna shouted again, and the crowd was moaning and wailing in fear of the dead sorceress in her black and white cloak, and the spearmen did not dare interfere for they had seen Camaban's horror and it had infected them.

Sannas took her mouth from Camaban's lips. 'Lahanna!' she prayed in her grating voice, 'give me his last breath,' and she kissed him again and Saban thrust the spear with all his strength into his brother's back. He did not hesitate, for it was his own oath that had endangered his daughter's life and he alone could save her, and he struck high on Camaban's back so that the heavy blade smashed through the ribs and into his heart. Saban screamed as he struck and the force of his killing blow drove Camaban forward so that he fell, dying, but with the woman's mouth still on his.

Sannas clung to Camaban as they fell, then waited till she saw her enemy was truly dead before she pushed back her hood and Saban saw it was Derrewyn, as he had known it must be, and they stared at each other, blood on the grass between them and the light almost gone from the sun stone. 'I took his soul,' Derrewyn whispered to Saban. Her hair was whitened with ash and her gums were still bloody where she had pulled out her teeth. 'I took his soul,' she exulted. Just then Aurenna ran from the temple, screaming, and as she passed Saban she drew a copper dagger from beneath her raven-black cloak. There was still a patch of light on Lallic's face. The light shone on the sun bride and on the stone behind her, the stone which marked Slaol's midsummer rising and served as a reminder to the sun god of his strength. Slaol could see the stone, could know his power, and by seeing what gift was brought to the stone he would know what his loving people wanted. And surely he would give it to them? In that belief Aurenna drove the green blade through her daughter's throat so that the blood spurted out to spatter scarlet on Camaban's white-feathered robe.

'No!' Saban shouted, too late.

'Now!' Aurenna turned to the sun. 'Now!'

Saban stared in horror. He had thought Aurenna was running to rescue Lallic, not kill her, but the girl had collapsed at the stone's foot and her slim white body was webbed with blood. She choked for a heartbeat and her eyes stared at Saban, but then she was dead and Aurenna threw down the knife and shrieked once more at Slaol. 'Now! Now!'

Lallic did not move.

'Now!' Aurenna howled. There were tears in her eyes. 'You promised! You promised!' She staggered towards the temple, her hair wild, her eyes wide and her hands red with her daughter's blood. 'Erek!' she screeched, 'Erek! Now! Now!'

Saban turned to follow her, but Derrewyn put out a hand. 'Let her find the truth,' she said, still speaking in Sannas's voice.

'Now!' Aurenna wailed. 'You promised us! Please!' She was crying now, racked by great sobs. 'Please!' She was back among the stones and the ray of light had vanished so that the temple was all shadow, but rimmed with the sun's dying brightness, and Aurenna, weeping and moaning, turned to see that her daughter did not live and so she ran through the stones, twisting past the pillars to the entrance at the southern side of the sky ring where she fell to her knees in the wide gap next to the slender pillar, clasped her hands together and howled again at the sun, which now sat red and vast and uncaring on the horizon. 'You promised! You promised!'

Saban did not see it. He heard it. He heard the crack and the grating noise and the crash that made the earth shudder, and he knew that the last pillar of Lahanna's ring had broken and the capstone had fallen. And Aurenna's scream was cut off.

Slaol slipped beneath the earth.

There was silence.

—«»—«»—«»—

Saban did not want to be chief of Ratharryn, yet the tribe chose him and would not let him refuse them. He pleaded that Leir was a younger man and that Gundur was an experienced warrior, but the men of Ratharryn were tired of being led by spearmen or by visionaries and they wanted Saban. They wanted him to be like his father, so Saban ruled as Hengall had ruled in Ratharryn. He dispensed justice, he hoarded grain and he let the priests tell him by what signs the gods were making their wishes known.

Derrewyn went to Cathallo and appointed a chief there, but Leir and Hanna stayed at Ratharryn where Kilda became Saban's wife. Slaol's temple, the one just outside the settlement's gate, was given to Lahanna.

The world was as it had been. The winter was as cold as ever. Snow fell. The old, the sick and the cursed died. Saban doled out grain, sent hunters to the woods and guarded the tribe's treasures. Some of the old folk said it was as though Hengall had never died, but had simply been reborn into Saban.

Yet on the hill there stood a broken circle of stone within a ring of chalk.

The bodies of Camaban, Aurenna and Lallic were laid in the Death House and there, in the shadow of the mother stone, the ravens fed on their flesh until, in the late spring, there were only white bones left on the grass. Haragg's bones had long been buried.

The temple was never deserted. Even in that first hard winter folk came to the stones. They brought their sick to be healed, their dreams to be fulfilled and gifts to keep Ratharryn wealthy. Saban was surprised, for he had thought that with Camaban's death and the capstone's fall the temple had failed. Slaol had not come to earth and winter still locked the river with ice, but the people who came to the temple believed the stones had worked a miracle. 'And so they did,' Derrewyn said to Saban in the first spring after Camaban's death.

'What miracle?' Saban asked.

Derrewyn grimaced. 'Your brother believed the stones would control the gods. He thought he was a god himself, and that Aurenna was a goddess, and what happened?'

'They died,' Saban said curtly.

'The stones killed them,' Derrewyn said. 'The gods did come to the temple that night and they killed the man who claimed he was a god and crushed the woman who thought she was a goddess.' She stared at the temple. 'It is a place of the gods, Saban. Truly.'

'They killed my daughter too,' Saban said bitterly.

'The gods demand sacrifice.' Derrewyn's voice was harsh. 'They always have. They always will.'

Aurenna and Lallic were laid in a shared grave and Saban raised a mound over them. He made another mound for Camaban, and it was that second grave that had brought Derrewyn to Ratharryn. She watched as Camaban's bones were laid in the mound's central pit. 'You won't take his jawbone?' she asked Saban.

'Let him talk to the gods as he always did.' Saban put the small mace beside his brother's body, then added the gold-hiked knife, the copper knife, the great buckle of gold and, last of all, a bronze axe. 'In the afterlife,' Saban explained, 'he can work. He always boasted he never held an axe, so let him hold one now. He can fell trees, as I did.'

'And he will go to Lahanna's care after all,' Derrewyn said with a toothless smile.

'It seems so,' Saban said.

'Then he can take her a gift from me.' Derrewyn climbed down into the pit and placed the three lozenges on Camaban's breast. She placed the large one in the centre and the two smaller on either side. A robin perched on the edge of the pit and Saban took the bird's presence as a sign that the gods approved of the gift.

Saban helped Derrewyn climb from the grave. He stared a last time at his brother's bones, then turned away. 'Fill it,' he ordered the waiting men, and so they scraped the earth and chalk onto Camaban's body, finishing the mound that would stand with the other ancestors' graves on the grassy crest above the temple.

Saban walked home.

It was evening, and the shadow of the stones stretched long towards Ratharryn. They stood grey and gaunt, broken and awesome, like nothing else on all the earth, but Saban did not look back. He knew he had built a great thing and that folk would worship there until time itself was ended, but he did not look back. He took Derrewyn's arm and they walked away until they were free of the temple's shadow.

There were fish traps to mend and ground to break and grain to sow and disputes to settle.

Behind Saban and Derrewyn the dying sun flashed in the temple's topmost arch. It blazed there for a while, edging the stones with dazzling light, and then it sank and in the twilight the temple turned as black as night. Day folded into darkness and the stones were left to the spirits.

Which hold them still.

Historical Note

It is surely obvious that every character and deity in the novel is fictitious. The Stonehenge that we see is the ruin of a monument that was erected at the end of the third millennium BC, the beginning of Britain's Bronze Age, and we have no records of kings, chiefs, cooks or carpenters from that era. Nevertheless, some of the detail in the novel is drawn from the archaeological records. There was an archer, with a stone bracer to protect his wrist from the lash of his bow, buried beside Stonehenge's north-eastern entrance, and he had been killed, evidently at close quarters, by three arrows. The three gold lozenges, the belt buckle, the knives, axe and ceremonial mace were discovered in one of the burial mounds closest to the monument and are today on display in the Devizes Museum. Ratharryn is what we now call Durrington Walls and its vast embankment was one of the great feats of neolithic man, though today it is little more than a shadow on the ground. There were probably two temples within the embankment and a third, which is now called Woodhenge, just outside, and all of those shrines were close to Stonehenge which is here called the Old Temple or the Sky Temple. Cathallo is Avebury, the long barrow where Camaban's warriors defiled the bones is at West Kennet, the small temple at the end of the sacred avenue is the Sanctuary and the Sacred Mound, of course, is Silbury Hill, and all those features can still be visited. Drewenna is Stanton Drew, Maden is Marden, Sarmennyn is southwest Wales. At Stonehenge itself the 'moonstones' are now called the Station Stones, while the 'sun stone' is the Heel Stone. The word 'henge' is deliberately not used in the novel, for it would have had no meaning. The Saxons originally applied the word only to Stonehenge, for only Stonehenge had 'hanging' (henge) stones (i.e. the lintels), but over the years we have broadened its meaning to include any and every circular monument that remains from the neolithic and early bronze ages.

What is Stonehenge? It is the question that occurs to most visitors and little at the site provides any answer other than the one propounded by R. J. C. Atkinson in his impressive book Stonehenge. 'There is one short, simple and perfectly correct answer: we do not know, and we shall probably never know.' Which is rather dispiriting, for without some idea of their use and purpose, the stones are diminished. We can appreciate the immense labour involved in the transport and erection of the monument, we can marvel that such a thing was built at all, but without a glimpse into the minds of the builders, it is somewhat meaningless.

It is, plainly, a place of worship, but worship of what? The usual answer is that the temple of Stonehenge is aligned on the rising of the midsummer sun, and that belief has led to much nonsensical misuse of the monument. The revived Order of Druids likes to worship there each midsummer, even though Stonehenge had nothing whatever to do with the Druids, who flourished long after the monument had decayed and who, in any case, probably preferred their rites to take place in dark, forested shrines. Undoubtedly there is an alignment on the midsummer sunrise, but it is not the only alignment at Stonehenge. John North, in his challenging book Stonehenge, Neolithic Man and the Cosmos, makes an overwhelming case for the alignment on the midwinter sunset, and it so happens that at Stonehenge the midsummer sun rises above the north-eastern horizon almost diametrically opposite the place on the south-western skyline where the midwinter sun sets (in 2000 BC the difference between the two alignments was less than half a degree), so any monument aligned on the one will, fortuitously, mark the other and, as both events are plainly important in the annual cycle of the seasons, we can suspect that both were marked by appropriate rites.

Professor North also suggests that celestial events were not observed from the inside of the monument looking out, but rather from the outside looking in. No doubt both means of viewing were possible; anyone wanting the best view of the midsummer sunrise would wish to be in the centre of the monument, but at midwinter sunset the observer would want to stand outside the shrine and look through its centre. That main axis, the line stretching from the avenue through the monument, seems to be the major astronomical feature which marks the summer rising and the winter setting of the sun. The four Station Stones, of which two remain, were aligned on major lunar events, but they form a rectangle and its two shorter sides are parallel with the monument's main solar axis.

Which raises the question of why such an elaborate monument was necessary. After all, if marking the observed extremes of the sun and moon were all that was required, then it could have been done with just four or five stones. But the same is true of more recent religions. God, we are assured, can be worshipped as efficaciously about a kitchen table as in a church, but that is not a compelling argument for the demolition of Salisbury Cathedral. And cathedrals do have something to tell us about Stonehenge. If, four thousand years from now, archaeologists were to discover the remains of a cathedral they might deduce all kinds of things from the ruins of the building, but their first, and most obvious, conclusion would be that it faces the rising sun from which they would assume, reasonably enough, that Christianity worshipped a sun god. In truth the east-west alignment of most Christian churches has nothing to do with the sun. Nevertheless a theory would be propounded that Christianity was a solar religion (while the incidence of crucifixes would surely persuade our future archaeologists that Christians conducted horrific human sacrifices), and what might never be suspected are the vast range of other activities — weddings, coronations, funerals, masses, worship services, concerts — that went on within the building. So it is with Stonehenge. We can see the solar and lunar alignments clearly enough (and must hope that, unlike our notional future archaeologists, we are not entirely wrong about them), but we cannot see the other activities that happened at the stones.