Stonehenge - Bernard Cornwell

'I c-c-cannot jump,' Camaban answered, wrenching his face in an effort not to stutter. He stretched out his left leg so that the firelight flickered on the twisted lump of his foot. 'And if I tried,' he went on, looking at the foot, 'they would l-l-laugh at me.'

Sannas was holding a human thigh bone. It had belonged to her second husband, a man who had thought to tame her. She reached out with the bone and lightly tapped the grotesque foot. 'I can mend that,' she said, then waited for Camaban's reaction, and was disappointed when he said nothing. 'But only if I want to,' she added savagely, 'and I may not want to.' She drew her cloak about her. 'I once had a crippled daughter,' she said. 'Such a strange little thing, she was. A hunchback dwarf. She was all twisted.' She sighed, remembering. 'My husband expected me to mend her.'

'And did you?'

'I sacrificed her to Lahanna. She's buried in the ditch there.' She pointed the bone towards the shrine's southern entrance.

'Why would Lahanna want a c-c-cripple?' Camaban asked.

'To laugh at, of course,' Sannas snapped.

Camaban smiled at that answer. He had gone to Sannas's hut in the daylight and the girls had gasped at the horror of his left foot, shuddered at the stink of his filthy pelt, then mocked his stammer and his wildly tangled hair, but Sannas had not joined their mockery. She had examined the moon mark on his belly, then had abruptly ordered all the girls out of her hut. And after they were gone she had stared at Camaban for a long while. 'Why did they not kill you?' she asked at last.

'B-B-Because the g-g-gods look after me.'

She had struck his head with the thigh bone. 'If you stutter to me, child,' she threatened, 'I shall turn you into a toad.'

Camaban had looked into the black eyes of her skull-face, and then, very calmly, he had leaned forward and taken the sorceress's leaf-wrapped honeycomb.

'Give it back!' Sannas had demanded.

'If I am to be a t-t-toad,' Camaban had said, 'I shall be a honeyed toad.' And Sannas had laughed at that, opening her mouth wide to show her single rotting tooth. She had ordered him to throw his filthy sheepskin tunic out of the hut, then found him an otterskin jerkin, and afterwards she had insisted he comb the tangles and dirt from his hair. 'You're a good-looking boy,' she said grudgingly, and it was true, for his face was lean and handsome, his nose long and straight and his dark green eyes were full of power. She had questioned him. How did he live? How did he find food? Where did he learn about the gods? And Camaban had answered her calmly, showing no fear of her, and Sannas had decided that she liked this child. He was wild, stubborn, unafraid and, above all, clever. Sannas lived in a world of fools, and here, though only a youth, was a mind, and so the old woman and the crippled boy had talked as the sun sank and the fires were lit and the bull-dancers drove the wild-haired girls down to the shadowed turf between the boulders.

Now they sat watching the dancers whirl past the fires. Somewhere in the dark a girl whimpered. 'Tell me about Saban,' Sannas commanded.

Camaban shrugged. 'Honest, hard-working,' he said, making neither attribute sound like a virtue, 'not unlike his father.'

'Will he become chief?'

'Given time, maybe,' Camaban said carelessly.

'And will he keep the peace?'

'How would I know?' Camaban answered.

'Then what do you think?'

'What does it matter what I think?' Camaban asked. 'Everyone knows I am a fool.'

'And are you, fool?'

'It is what I w-w-want them to think,' Camaban said. 'That way they leave me alone.'

Sannas nodded her approval at that. The two sat in silence for a while, watching the sheen of the flames colour the slab-sided stones. Sparks whirled in the sky, rushing between the hard white stars. A cry sounded from the shadows where two young men, one from Ratharryn and the other from Cathallo, had started fighting. Their friends dragged them apart, but even as that fight ended, others began. The folk of Cathallo had been generous with their honey-liquor that had been specially brewed for the midsummer feast. 'When my grandmother was a girl,' Sannas said, 'there was no liquor. The Outfolk showed us how to make it and they still make the best.' She brooded on that for a while, then shrugged. 'But they cannot make my potions. I can give you a drink to make you fly, and food to give you bright dreams.' Her eyes glittered under the hood of her shawl.

'I want to learn from you,' Camaban said.

'I teach girls, not boys,' the old woman said harshly.

'But I have no soul,' Camaban said. 'It was broken by the K-K-Kill-Child. I am neither boy nor man, I am nothing.'

'If you are nothing, what can you learn?'

'All you c-c-can teach me.' Camaban turned to look at the sorceress. 'I will p-p-pay you,' he said.

Sannas laughed, the breath wheezing in her throat as she rocked back and forth. 'And what,' she asked when she had recovered, 'can a crippled outcast from little Ratharryn pay me?'

'This.' Camaban uncurled his right hand to reveal a single gold lozenge. 'Part of the Outfolk gold,' he said, 'the b-b-bride of Slaol's treasure.' Sannas reached for the lozenge, but Camaban closed his fist.

'Give it to me, child!' the old woman hissed.

'If you say you'll teach me,' Camaban said, 'I shall give it to you.'

Sannas closed her eyes. 'If you do not give it to me, you crippled lump of horror,' she intoned in a voice that had terrified three generations of her tribe, 'I shall give your body to the worms and send your soul to the endless forest. I shall curdle your blood and beat your bones to a paste. I shall have the birds peck out your eyes, the vipers suck at your bowels and the dogs eat your guts. You will plead for my mercy and I shall just laugh at you and use your skull as my pissing pot.' She stopped suddenly, for Camaban had climbed to his feet and was limping away. 'Where are you going?' she hissed.

'I have heard,' Camaban said, 'that there is a sorcerer at Drewenna. He c-c-can teach me.'

She glared at him her eyes bright in her corpse's face, but he stayed quite calm, and Sannas shuddered with anger. 'Take one more step, cripple,' she said, 'and I will have your twisted bones put beside that dwarf in the ditch.'

Camaban held up the gold lozenge. 'This p-p-pays you to t-t-teach me,' he said, and then he produced a second lozenge. 'And this p-p-piece of gold,' he went on, 'will p-p-pay you to mend my foot.'

'Come here!' Sannas ordered. Camaban did not move, but just held the scraps of gold that glittered in the firelight. Sannas stared at them, knowing what mischief she could make with such powerful talismans. She hoped to gain more of this gold in the morning, but every scrap was precious to her and so she governed her anger. 'I will teach you,' she said calmly.

'Thank you,' Camaban said calmly, then knelt in front of her and reverently placed the two lozenges in her outstretched hand.

Sannas spat on the gold, then shuffled back into the deep darkness of the hut where her fire was little more than a heap of charred embers. 'You can sleep inside the door,' she said from the darkness, 'or outside. I do not care.'

Camaban did not answer, but just stared at the great temple stones. The shadows of the lovers were motionless now, but the dying firelight flickered and it seemed to him that the ring of stones was shimmering in the smoky night. It was as though the stones were alive and the people were dead, and that made him think of the Old Temple, so far away, that was his home, and he leaned forward and put his forehead on the ground and swore to whatever gods were listening that he would make the Old Temple live. He would make it dance, he would make it sing, he would make it live.

—«»—«»—«»—

Hengall was pleased with the results of his negotiations with Kital. Peace was assured, and that peace would be sealed by the marriage of Saban and Derrewyn. 'Not that she's the girl I'd have chosen for you,' Hengall grumbled to his son as they walked south towards Ratharryn. 'She's much too thin.'

'Too thin?' Saban asked. He had thought Derrewyn beautiful.

'Women are no different from cattle,' Hengall said. 'The best have wide rumps. It's no use marrying a thin thing, they just die in childbirth. But Sannas decided you're to marry Derrewyn and the marriage will seal our peace, so that's the end of it.'

Hengall had not only agreed to the marriage, he had also bought eight great boulders with which Gilan could remake the Old Temple. The price for the stones had been one of the large gold lozenges and nine of the small, which Hengall reckoned cheap. It was right, he thought, to exchange a small part of Sarmennyn's gold for the stones for he was sure now that the arrival of the treasures had been a message from Slaol to remake the Old Temple and Gilan had convinced him that Ratharryn must possess a temple made of stone.

There was no stone at Ratharryn. There were pebbles in the river, and a few larger rocks that could be shaped into hammers or axes, but the settlement had no big stones to rival the pillars and slabs that ringed Cathallo's temple. Ratharryn was a place of chalk, grass and trees, while Cathallo's land was rich in the great boulders which lay so thickly scattered on their hills that from a distance they looked like a flock of giant grey sheep. Sannas contended that the stones had been flung there by Slaol in a vain attempt to stop the people of Cathallo from raising the sacred mound to Lahanna, though others said that the rocks had been cast onto the hills by Gewat, the god of the clouds, who had wanted to see his own likeness on the earth's green face, but however the stones had reached Cathallo, they were the closest boulders to Ratharryn.

Saban liked the idea of building something new and impressive at Ratharryn. A few of Hengall's folk muttered that timber temples had always served Ratharryn well enough, but the traders, those men who carried hides and flint and pots to exchange for axes and shellfish and salt, pointed out that Drewenna possessed a large stone temple and that nearly all the shrines in the distant west were also made of boulders, and the prospect of a stone temple of their own served to revive the spirits of most of Hengall's people. A new temple, made of stone, might restore the tribe's luck, and that belief was enough to persuade the priests that Gilan should be the new high priest. They reported as much to Hengall, and the chief, who had bribed four of the priests with bronze bars, Outfolk slave girls and lumps of amber to make just such a choice, gravely accepted the verdict as having come from the gods.

So Gilan became the new high priest and his first demand was that the tribe should clear the Old Temple of its weeds and hazels so that the shrine would be ready for the arrival of Cathallo's stones in the new year.

The men did the work, while the women stayed outside the bank and danced in a ring. They sang as they danced and their song was the wedding chant of Slaol. Only women ever sang that beautiful song, and only on occasions of the deepest solemnity. It went in snatches, with long pauses between the music, and during the pauses the dancers would stand quite motionless, before, seemingly without anyone telling them when, the steps and the singing would begin again. Their voices overlaid each other in a twisting harmony and, though they never practised the song together, it always sounded hauntingly lovely and the steps always stopped and started in perfect unison. Mothers taught the parts of the song to their daughters, and some learned one part and others learned another, and then they came together and everything fitted. Many of the women cried as they danced, for the song was a lament. On the day before the marriage of Slaol and Lahanna the sun god had fought with his bride and deserted her, but the women lived in hope that Slaol would relent and come back to his bride.

Gilan supervised the work, sometimes stopping to listen to the women's song and at other times helping the men grub out the weeds and shrubs. A few of the hazels were good-sized trees and their roots needed loosening with antler picks before they could be dragged clear of the soil. The trees could not simply be cut down, for hazel will grow again from its stump, so the bigger trees were hauled out and their root holes filled with a chalky rubble dug from the ditch. The ox-skull that Camaban had placed in the temple's centre was buried in the ditch, his lair was pulled down, the weeds were grubbed out, the grass cut with flint knives and the waste burned. The smoke from the fire disturbed the dancers so that they moved farther away from the temple as the men cleared the grass and weeds from the ditch and inner bank so that the shrine was again ringed with its bright chalk-white circle.

The old rotting posts that had stood so thick in the entrance of the sun and about the death house were tossed onto the fire. Some of the posts had been huge and their remains were buried deep: those were snapped off at ground level and their stubborn stumps left to decay. And once all the weeds, trees and posts had been cleared, the men danced across the wide circle to the haunting rhythm of the women's song. The temple was bare again, clean. It was a low grassy bank, a ditch and a high bank ringing a circle that held nothing.

The tribe returned to Ratharryn in the evening light. Galeth was one of the last to leave and he paused at the brow of the hill above the settlement to turn and look at the temple. The clump of hazels which had broken the southern skyline was gone so that only the grave mounds of the ancestors could be seen on that horizon, but in front of the mounds, white against the darkening hillside, the temple's ring seemed to shine in the dying light. The shadows of the bank stretched long and Galeth noticed, for the very first time, how the ring of chalk had been placed on a slope so that it was very slightly tilted towards the place where the sun rose in midsummer.

'It looks beautiful,' Lidda, Galeth's woman, said.

'It does look beautiful,' Galeth agreed. It was Galeth, practical, strong and efficient, who would have to raise the stones, and he tried to imagine how the eight great boulders would look in that clean setting of grass and chalk. 'Slaol will be pleased,' he decided.

There was thunder that night, but no rain. Just thunder, far off, and in the darkness two of the tribe's children died. Both had been sick, though no one had thought they would die. But in the morning the sun rose to make the newly cleared chalk-ring shine, and the gods, folk reckoned, were once again smiling on Ratharryn.

—«»—«»—«»—

Derrewyn was not yet a woman, but it was a custom in both Ratharryn and Cathallo that betrothed girls would live with their prospective husband's family, so Derrewyn came to Ratharryn to live in the hut of Hengall's oldest surviving wife.

Her arrival disturbed the tribe. She might be a year from womanhood, but her beauty had blossomed early and the young warriors of Ratharryn stared at her with undisguised yearning, for Derrewyn of Cathallo was a girl to stir men's dreams. Her black hair hung below her waist and her long legs were tanned dark by the sun. About her ankles and her neck she wore delicate chains of pure white sea-shells, all the shells alike and of a size, Her eyes were dark, her face was slender and high-boned, and her spirit as quick as a kingfisher's flight. The young warriors of Hengall's tribe noted her, watched her, and reckoned she was too good for Saban who was still only a child. Hengall, seeing their desire, ordered Gilan to work a protective charm on the girl, so the high priest placed a human skull on the roof of Derrewyn's hut and beside it he put a phallus of unfired clay and every man who saw the charm understood its threat. Touch Derrewyn without permission, the skull and phallus said, and you will die, and from that time the men looked, but did nothing more.