Bernard Cornwell - Stonehenge

Late that day a band of men did attack. They rose from the heather to loose arrows, but they were few and cautious, and they showed themselves too soon. The hired spearmen tried to frighten the outcasts away by shouting and waving their spears, but the enemy was stubborn and still blocked the path. 'You must attack them,' Haragg shouted at the warriors, but they were unwilling to die for a few traders. Cagan wanted to charge the ragged men, howling like a beast, but Haragg held him back and let Saban advance instead. Saban loosed an arrow and saw it fall short so he ran a few more paces and let another fly. It fluttered just wide of his target and he guessed that was because the arrow had been slightly out of true rather than because of the wind, and he released a third and watched it thump home into a man's belly. The enemy's arrows were being aimed at Saban now, but they had poor bows, and Saban ran another few steps and hauled the sinew back and let it go to drive another man back. He screamed at them, mocking their courage and their marksmanship, then slashed a third flint arrow-head into a wild-haired man in a dirty fleece tunic. He danced as they ran away. 'Your mothers were swine!' Saban called. 'Your sisters lie with goats!' None of the enemy would have understood the insults, even if they had been close enough to hear them.

Haragg actually grinned at Saban. He even clapped his shoulder and laughed. 'You should have been a warrior, not a slave,' he said, and Cagan, following his father's example, bobbed his head and grinned at Saban.

'I always wanted to be a warrior,' Saban confessed.

'All boys do. What good is a boy who wants to be anything else?' Haragg asked. 'But all men are warriors, except the priests.' He said the last three words with an intense bitterness, but refused to explain why.

Next day the traders spread out their goods at a settlement north of the moors. Tribes from other settlements had come, and hundreds of folk wandered in the pasture where the haggling went on from dawn until dusk. Haragg exchanged most of his goods that day, taking in return more herbs and the promise of a pile of white pelts to be delivered to him at winter's end. 'Till then,' he told Saban, 'we shall stay here.'

It seemed a bleak place to Saban for it was nothing but a deep valley between soaring hills. Pine trees clothed the lower slopes and a cold stream tumbled over grey rocks between the dark trees. There was a stone temple lower down the valley and a huddle of huts higher; Haragg and Saban took a dilapidated hut for themselves and Saban repaired its rafters, then cut turfs and laid them as a roof. 'Because I like it here,' Haragg said when Saban asked why he did not return to Sarmennyn for the winter. 'And it will be a long winter,' Haragg warned him, 'long and cold, but when it is over I shall take you back to your brother.'

'To Lengar?' Saban asked bitterly. 'You'd do better to kill me here.'

'Not to Lengar,' Haragg said, 'Camaban. It was not Lengar who wanted you to be my slave, but Camaban.'

'Camaban!' Saban exclaimed in astonishment.

'Camaban,' Haragg confirmed calmly. 'Lengar wanted to kill you when he returned to Ratharryn, but Camaban was determined you should live. It seems that you protested once when your father was going to kill him?'

'I did?' Saban asked, then remembered the failed sacrifice and his involuntary cry of horror. 'So I did,' he said.

'So Camaban persuaded Lengar that it would bring him bad luck if he killed you. He suggested slavery instead, and to a man of Lengar's mind slavery is worse than death. But you had to become my slave, not any man's slave, so Camaban claimed to have been told as much in a dream. Your brother and I planned all this. We sat for whole nights discussing how it could be done.' Haragg looked at Saban's hand where the scar of the missing finger was now a wrinkle of dried skin. 'And it had to be done properly,' he explained, 'or Lengar would never have agreed and you would be dead.' He opened his pouch and took from it the precious knife that had been Hengall's gift to Saban and with which Saban's finger had been cut off. He held the knife to Saban. 'Take it,' he said, then gave him back the amber amulet.

Saban hung his mother's amber about his neck and pushed the blade into his belt. 'I am free?' he asked, bemused.

'You are free,' Haragg said solemnly, 'and you may go if you wish, but your brother wished me to keep you safe until we can join him in Sarmennyn. He knew no other way of keeping you alive, except to doom you to my slavery, but he charged me to protect you because he has need of you.'

'Camaban needs me?' Saban asked, utterly bemused by all that Haragg was so tonelessly revealing. Saban still thought of his brother as a crippled stutterer, a thing of pity, yet it had been the despised Camaban who had arranged his survival and Camaban who had recruited the daunting Haragg to his own purposes. 'Why does Camaban need me?' he asked.

'Because your brother is doing a marvellous thing,' Haragg said, and for once his voice held emotion, 'a thing that only a great man could do. Your brother is making the world anew.' Haragg lifted the leather curtain at the hut door and peered out to see that a new snow was falling thick and slow to smother the world. 'For years,' Haragg said, still staring at the snow, 'I struggled with this world and its gods. I was trying to explain it all.' He dropped the curtain and gave Saban a look that was almost defiant. 'It did not give me pleasure, that struggle. But then I met your brother. He cannot know, I thought, he is too young! But he did know. He did. He has found the pattern.'

'The pattern?' Saban asked, puzzled.

'He has found the pattern,' Haragg repeated gravely, 'and all will be new, all will be well, and all will be changed.'

In a winter night when the earth lay hard as ice and the trees were rimed with a frost that glowed under a pale misted moon, a man limped from the trees north of Cathallo and crossed the fallow fields. It was the longest night, the darkness of the sun's death, and no one saw him come. The huts of the settlement seeped a small smoke as the night fires settled to embers, but the dogs of Cathallo slept and the wintering oxen, sheep, goats and pigs were safe in the huts where they could not be disturbed by the stranger.

Wolves had seen the man and in the previous dusk a dozen of the grey beasts had followed him, their tongues lolling as they looped around behind him, but the man had turned and howled at them and the wolves had first whimpered, then fled into the black, white-frosted trees. The man walked on. Now, in the starlit moments before the dawn, he came to the northern entrance of the great shrine.

The great stones within the high earth bank glimmered with frost. For a heartbeat, pausing in the entrance, it seemed to him that the great ring of boulders was shimmering like a circle of dancers shifting their weight from foot to foot. The dancing stones. He smiled at that idea, then hurried across the grass to Sannas's hut.

He gently pulled aside the leather curtain that hung over the entrance and let in a gust of cold air that gave the dying fire a sudden glow. He ducked into the hut, let the curtain fall and went very still.

He could see almost nothing. The fire was mere embers in ash and no moonlight came through the small smoke-hole in the roof, and so he just squatted and listened until he detected the sound of three people breathing. Three sleepers.

He crept across the hut on his knees, going slowly so that he made no noise, and when he found the first of the sleepers, a young slave, he put one hand over her mouth and sliced a knife down with his free hand. Her breath bubbled harsh in her cut gullet, she twitched for a while, but at last went still. The second girl died the same way, and then the man discarded caution and went to the fire to blow on the smouldering embers and feed them with tinder of dried puffball and small twigs so that the flames flickered bright to illuminate the hanging skulls and bat wings and herb bunches and bones. The fresh blood glistened on the furs and on the killer's hands.

The last sleeper shifted on the hut's far side. 'Is it morning?' her ancient voice asked.

'Not quite, my dear,' the man said. He was putting some larger pieces of wood on the fire now. 'It's almost dawn, though,' he added comfortingly, 'but it will be a cold one, a very cold one.'

'Camaban?' Sannas sat up in the pile of furs that was her bed. Her skull-like face, framed by a tangle of white hair, showed surprise and even pleasure. 'I knew you'd come back,' she said. She did not see the new blood, and the stench of smoke masked its smell. 'Where have you been?' she demanded querulously.

'I have walked the hills and worshipped in temples older than time,' Camaban said softly, feeding more wood onto the revived fire, 'and I have talked with priests, old women and sorcerers until I have sucked the knowledge of this world dry.'

'Dry!' Sannas laughed. 'You've hardly licked the tit, you young fool, let alone sucked on it.' In truth Sannas knew Camaban had been her best pupil, a man to rival her own skills, but she would never tell him as much. She leaned to one side, revealing a leathery flap of breast as she reached for her honeycomb. She put a piece in her mouth and sucked noisily. 'Your brother is making war on us,' she said sourly.

'Lengar loves to make war,' Camaban said.

'And loves to make babies,' Sannas said. 'Derrewyn is pregnant.'

'I heard as much.'

'May her milk poison the bastard,' Sannas said, 'and its father too.' She pulled the furs round her shoulders. 'Lengar takes our men prisoner, Camaban, and sacrifices them to his gods.'

Camaban rocked back on his heels. 'Lengar thinks the gods are like hounds that can be whipped into obedience,' he said, 'but he will learn soon enough that their whips are bigger than his. But for the moment he does Slaol's work so I imagine he will prosper.'

'Slaol!' Sannas hissed.

'The great god,' Camaban said reverently, 'the god above all gods. The only god who has the power to change our sad world.'

Sannas stared at him as a dribble of honey trickled from her lips. 'The only god?' she asked in disbelief.

'I told you that I wished to learn,' Camaban said, 'so I have learned, and I have discovered that Slaol is the god above all the gods. Our mistake has been to worship the others, but they are much too busy worshipping Slaol to take any notice of us.' He smiled at Sannas's appalled expression. 'I am a follower of Slaol, Sannas,' he said, 'and I always have been, ever since I was a child. Even when I listened to you talk of Lahanna, I was a worshipper of Slaol.'

She shuddered at his impiety. 'Then why come back here, fool?' she demanded. 'You think I love Slaol?'

'I came to see you, my dear, of course,' Camaban said calmly. He put a last piece of wood on the fire, then moved to her side where he sat and cradled her shoulders. 'I paid you to teach me, remember? Now I want my final lesson.'

The old woman saw the blood on his hands then and tried to claw his face. 'I will give you nothing,' she said.

Camaban turned his body to face her. 'You will teach me the last lesson, Sannas,' he said gently. 'I paid for it with Slaol's gold.'

'No!' she hissed.

'Yes,' Camaban said gently, then he leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. She struggled, but Camaban used his weight to push her down. He still kissed her, his mouth fixed on hers, and for a few heartbeats she tried to escape his kiss by twisting her head, but her strength was no match for his.

She glared up at his eyes, then he moved the furs from her breasts and put one arm around her body and began to squeeze. The old woman struggled again and a small whimper escaped her, but Camaban pushed his mouth hard down on hers, squeezed with his arm and pinched her nostrils with his left hand. All the time he kept his green eyes on her black eyes.