Bernard Cornwell - Stonehenge

Saban offered his brother food, but Camaban just stared into the fire. A single tear once ran down a black scar, but that could have been the wind-whirled smoke irritating an eye.

It was not till mid-morning that he stirred. He frowned first, pushed hair from his face, then blinked as if he had just been woken from a dream. 'They have a great temple in the land across the sea,' he said abruptly.

Aurenna stared at Camaban in a trance, but Saban frowned, fearing that his brother would demand that this new temple be fetched by boat.

'A great temple,' Camaban said with awe in his voice, 'a temple of the dead.'

'A temple to Lahanna?' Saban asked, for Lahanna had ever been reckoned the guardian of the dead.

Camaban shook his head. A louse crawled from his hair down into his beard, which was braided like his hair and decorated with more small knuckle bones. He smelt of brine. 'It is a temple to Slaol,' he whispered, 'to the dead who are united with Slaol!' He smiled suddenly, and to Saban's children the smile looked so wolfish that they shrank from their strange uncle. Camaban made the shape of a low mound with his hands. 'The temple is a hill, Saban,' he said enthusiastically, 'circled by stone and hollowed out, with a stone house of the dead in its heart. And on the day of Slaol's death the sun pours down a rock-lined shaft into the very centre of the house. I sat there. I sat among the spiders and the bones and Slaol talked to me.' He frowned, still gazing into the fire. 'Of course it's not built to Lahanna!' he said irritably. 'She has stolen our dead, and we must reclaim them.'

'Lahanna has stolen the dead?' Saban asked, puzzled by the concept.

'Of course!' Camaban shouted, turning his eerily striped face to Saban. 'Why did I never see it before? What happens when we die? We go the sky, of course, to live with the gods, but we go to Lahanna! She has stolen our dead. We are like children without parents.' He shuddered. 'I met a man once who believed the dead go to nothing, that they are lost in the chasm between the stars, and I laughed at him. But maybe he is right! When I sat in that house of the dead with the bones all about me I heard the corpses of Ratharryn calling to me. They want to be rescued, Saban, they want to be reunited with Slaol! We have to save them! We have to bring them back to the light!'

'You have to eat,' Aurenna said.

'I must go,' Camaban said. He looked again at Saban. 'Have they started building the temple at Ratharryn?'

'So Lewydd says,' Saban confirmed.

'We have to change it,' Camaban said. 'It needs a death house. You and I will rebuild it. No mound, of course. The people across the sea are wrong about that. But it must be a place to pull the dead back from Lahanna.'

'You can rebuild it,' Saban said, 'but I shall stay here.'

'You will go!' Camaban shouted, and Aurenna scurried to comfort Lallic who had begun to weep. Camaban pointed a bony finger at Saban. 'How many stones must still be delivered?'

'Eleven,' Saban said. 'Just those you see on the river.'

'And you shall go with them,' Camaban said, 'because it is your duty to Slaol. Carry the stones to Ratharryn, and I shall meet you there.' He frowned. 'Is Haragg here?'

Saban jerked his head to show that the big man was in his hut. 'His son died,' he told Camaban.

'Best thing for him,' Camaban said harshly.

'And Haragg himself was wounded,' Saban went on, 'but he recovered, though he still mourns Cagan.'

'Then he must be given work,' Camaban said, then stood and ducked out into the wind and rain. 'It is your duty to go to Ratharryn, Saban! I spared Aurenna's life for you! I spared your life! I didn't do it so you could rot on this river bank, I did it for Slaol and you will repay him by building his temple.' He went to Haragg's hut and pounded a fist on the mossy thatch. 'Haragg!' he shouted. 'I need you.'

Haragg came from the door with a startled expression. He was completely bald now and unnaturally thin, so that he looked old before his time. The arrow's strike had left him sick for a long time and there had been days when Saban was sure the breath would die in the big man's throat, but Haragg had survived. Yet it seemed to Saban that he was wounded in his spirit far more grievously than in his body. Haragg now stared at Camaban and, for a heartbeat, did not recognise the man with a striped face, then he smiled. 'You've come back!' he said.

'Of course I've come back!' Camaban snapped. 'I always said I would, didn't I? Don't just gaze at me, Haragg, come! You and I have much to discuss and far to travel.'

Haragg hesitated an instant, then abruptly nodded and, without even looking back at his hut, let alone fetching anything he might need, followed Camaban towards the trees.

'Where are you going?' Saban called after them.

'To Ratharryn, of course!' Camaban said.

'You're walking?' Saban asked.

'I never wish to see another boat,' Camaban said fervently, 'so long as I live,' and with that he walked on. To make his new temple even greater. To tie Slaol to the living and the dead to Slaol. To make a dream.

—«»—«»—«»—

'Camaban is right,' Aurenna said that evening.

'He is?'

'Erek saved us,' she said, 'so we must travel where he wishes. It is our duty.'

Saban rocked back and forth on his heels. It was night, the children were sleeping and the fire was burning low to fill the hut with smoke. The wind had dropped and the rain had ended, though the eaves of the thatch still dripped. 'Camaban said nothing of you going to Ratharryn,' Saban said.

'Erek wants me there,' Aurenna retorted.

Saban groaned inwardly for he knew he must now argue with the god. 'My brother Lengar would want nothing more than for me to take you to Ratharryn. He will see you, lust after you and then take you. I shall fight for you, of course, but his warriors will cut me down and you will be forced onto his pelts and raped.'

'Erek will not permit it,' Aurenna said placidly.

'Besides,' Saban said petulantly, 'I don't want to go to Ratharryn. I'm happy here!'

'But your work here is done,' Aurenna pointed out. 'There are no more boats to be made and no more stones to be fetched down the mountain. Erek's work moves to Ratharryn and he saved our lives, so that is where we shall go.' She smiled. 'We shall go to Ratharryn and we shall wind the world back to its beginning.'

It was an argument Saban could not win for Erek was against him, and so Aurenna readied herself and the children for the voyage. Yet the sea winds would not abate and still the great waves broke white and ragged on the headland and day after day passed until the summer brought bramble blossom and bryony, bindweed and speedwell, and still Lewydd would not risk the journey. 'The gods,' Lewydd said one night, 'they are holding us back.'

'It's the missing stones,' Aurenna said. 'The two that we lost in the river and the one that broke on the mountain. If we don't replace those stones the temple will never be complete.'

Saban said nothing, though he did glance at Lewydd to see how he would respond to the thought of fetching more stones from the mountains.

Aurenna closed her eyes and swayed back and forth. 'It is a temple to Erek,' she said softly, 'but it is being built to draw him back to Modron' — Modron was the Outfolk name for Garlanna — 'so we should send one stone for her. One great stone to replace the three that were lost.'

'We could fetch one more stone from the mountain,' Lewydd said grudgingly.

'Not from the mountain,' Aurenna said, 'but from here.' In the morning she showed Lewydd the greenish boulder beside the river where she and Saban liked to sit, the great stone with shining flecks and pink sparkles embedded in its heart. The mother stone, Aurenna called it, for it lay in mother earth's dark grip while the rest of the boulders had been plucked from the hanging valley in Erek's sky.

It was vast, that mother stone, twice the weight of the heaviest of the temple's pillars, and it lay deeply embedded in the grassy bank. Saban stared at the stone for two days, trying to work out how to shift it, then he and Mereth went into the woods and found six tall trees that they chopped down. They trimmed the trunks into smooth poles, then cut them into eighteen shorter lengths.

Next day they lifted the mother stone from the earth with levers of oak. Saban dug deep on either side of the stone, scraping holes like badgers' setts far under the rock, and the levers were thrust down into the earth and then, with six men on either side, the front end of the rock was heaved up. It came reluctantly, and men had to scrabble the earth away from beneath the boulder to free it from the soil's grip, but at last it lifted and Mereth could thrust one of the short rollers under the stone.

For three days they levered and lifted until the stone was resting on the eighteen rollers, and now Lewydd could bring one of the empty triple-hulled boats in to the bank. He tethered the craft with its bows facing the stone, then waited for the tide to drop so that the boat was stranded on the mud. Once the boat was in place, Saban's men levered the rock forward while others stood in the riverbank's mud and tugged on ropes to drag the mother stone along the rollers. The boulder was almost three times the height of a man, but slender, and it rolled willingly enough. Men dragged the rollers as they emerged behind the rock and placed them in front of it, and so, hand's breadth by hand's breadth, the great slab was dragged and pushed until one end of it jutted out from the bank to overhang the stranded boat.

'Careful now!' Saban called. One of the rollers had been placed on the boat and two men held it in place as a dozen others manned levers at the back of the stone. 'Heave again!' Saban called, and the great slab edged forward and then began to tip down. 'Let it tip! Let it tip!' Saban shouted, and watched as the stone's forward edge swung down to rest on the boat. The three hulls creaked alarmingly under the stone's weight. More rollers were placed on the boat and the men levered again and, as the rain speckled the river and the women watched and the tide rose, the vast tongue of stone was pushed onto the boat. The mother stone was so long that it almost filled the boat's whole length.

'Now to see if it floats,' Lewydd said, and he, Saban and Aurenna waited on the river bank as night fell and the tide went on rising. They lit a fire and by its light they saw the dark incoming water swirl about the boat's three hulls. Higher and higher the water came until Saban was sure that it must rise above the boat's gunwales and so flood the hulls, but then the mud under the boat yielded a sucking sound and the three hulls were shifting in the current. 'I never thought we'd move that stone,' Lewydd said wonderingly.

'We've still got to shift it to Ratharryn,' Saban said.

'Erek will help,' Aurenna claimed confidently.

'The boat floats low,' Lewydd said, worried, and explained that at sea the waves inevitably slopped over the hull's gunwales to flood the boats. The outer hulls, where the paddlers knelt, could be bailed easily enough, but the mother stone was so long there was scarce room for a man to crouch in the central hull.

'Put a small boy there,' Saban suggested, and in the morning they discovered there was just room for a boy to crouch in front of the stone, and another behind it, and Lewydd reckoned that if the two boys kept scooping out the seawater then the heavily laden boat might survive the voyage. 'So long,' he added, 'as the weather is kind.'

But the weather stayed hard. The boats waited, the warriors were ready to travel, but the winds heaped up the seas and brought yet more stinging rain. Another moon passed, the summer was slipping away and Saban began to fear he could never leave. Or hope he could never leave, for he did not really want to go back to Ratharryn. Home was Sarmennyn, beside this river, where he had thought he would live out his life, watch his children grow and become a member of Kereval's tribe. He would put Sarmennyn's scars on his face and rub ash into them so that they showed grey. Only now Camaban and Aurenna insisted he go back to the heartland and Saban did not want to go, so he welcomed the bad weather that kept him beside Sarmennyn's river where he and Mereth whiled away the wasting time by shaping and hollowing a trunk that had been rejected as too short to be turned into one of the hulls for carrying the stones, but which would make a fine fishing craft. They planned to give the boat to Lewydd as a reward for moving the temple.