Bernard Cornwell - Stonehenge

Saban flinched. He looked at his hut where Kilda was tending a fire and he saw Hanna come through the low doorway with dry firewood. The girl saw Leir, but she must have sensed that he wanted to be alone with his father for she stayed at the hut with Kilda. 'And what do you think of Camaban's idea?' Saban asked Leir.

'If I liked it, father, would I have come to you?' Leir paused and glanced towards Hanna. 'Camaban wants to kill all the slaves, father, all of them.'

'And what would you have me do about it?'

'Talk to Camaban?'

Saban shook his head. 'You think he listens to me? I might as well talk to a charging boar.' He stroked the sun stone. In time, he supposed, all the temple's stones would lose their pristine greyness and go dark with lichen. 'We could talk to your mother,' he suggested.

'She won't talk to me,' Leir confessed. 'She talks to the gods, not to men.' He sounded bitter. 'And Gundur says there's another reason to kill the slaves. He says that if they are allowed to go to their homes then they will take the secrets of the temple's construction with them and then others will build like it and Slaol will not come to us, but go to them.'

Saban stared at the grey dust that smothered the ground. 'If I tell the slaves to run away,' he said softly, 'then the spearmen will just gather more.'

'You can do nothing?' Leir sounded indignant.

'You can do something,' Saban said. He turned and beckoned to Hanna and as she ran eagerly towards Leir she looked so like her mother that the breath caught in Saban's throat. A dozen spearmen had asked Saban if they could marry Hanna and Saban's rejection of their requests had caused resentment. Hanna, they said, was only a slave, and a slave should be flattered to be courted by a warrior, but there was only one warrior whom Hanna liked and that was Leir. She smiled shyly at him, then looked obediently to Saban and bowed her head as a girl would to her father. 'I want you to take Leir to that island in the river,' Saban told her, 'the island I showed you a year ago.'

Hanna nodded, though she looked puzzled for she had never before been given the freedom to go with a young man into the forest. Saban felt in his pouch and brought out the small patch of worn leather that was folded about the golden lozenge. 'You are to take this,' Saban said to Leir, unwrapping the lozenge, 'and you are to place it in the fork of a willow tree. Hanna will show you which tree.' He put the gold into his son's hand.

Leir frowned at the bright scrap. 'What will this do?'

'It will change things,' Saban said, and hoped it was true for he did not even know if Derrewyn was still alive, yet the gold had always changed things. Its coming to Ratharryn had changed everything, and now he would let the sun-filled metal work its magic again. 'Hanna will tell you what the gold will do,' Saban told his son, 'for it is time that Hanna told you everything.' He kissed the girl on the forehead, for Saban knew that with those last words he had released Derrewyn's daughter from his care. He was giving her and Leir to the truth and he hoped his son would not be aghast when Hanna told him she was the daughter of Ratharryn's bitterest enemy. 'Hanna will tell you everything,' he said. 'Now go.'

He watched them walk towards the river and remembered how he had walked that same path with Derrewyn so many years before. He had thought then that his happiness would never end, and later he had believed his happiness would never return. He saw Hanna reach out and take Leir's hand and Saban's eyes filled with tears. He turned to look at the temple and saw how intricately the light and the shadows mixed on the soaring stones, and he knew his brother had dreamed a wondrous thing, but he understood now how that soaring dream was curdling into madness.

He walked back to the stones. There were only two to raise before the temple would be finished and it would be then, and only then, Saban reckoned, that he would discover why the gods had wanted it made.

—«»—«»—«»—

The very last stone was placed just three days before midwinter. It was the capstone which rested on the smallest pillar of the outer circle. Saban had worried about that pillar for Camaban had insisted it should be only half as wide as the others because it represented the half-day of the moon's journey and it also left a wider gap in the outer stones through which folk could file into the temple's centre, but there was scarce room on its narrow summit to make the knobs for the two capstones which Saban feared would rest precariously.

He had the wrong fears. It was not the space that was inadequate, but the stone itself, for when the platform of timbers was built, and after the final capstone had been levered up layer by layer to its full height, and after it had been edged across until its tongue was above the slit in the neighbouring lintel, and when it was released to drop into place, the pillar cracked.

The capstones always fell into place with a jarring crash, and Saban always feared the moment, worrying that either the lintel itself or the pillars beneath would shatter under the impact. The hard stone contained faults that Saban had sometimes used to shape the boulders and he knew that some of those flaws must be hidden deep in the rock, though none had ever betrayed itself till now. The five lintels of the sun's house and twenty-nine capstones of the sky ring had all been safely raised, each had been levered across to its position so that the holes on its base lined up with the knobs on the pillars, and all had been released to fall with a crash, yet every stone had stayed whole until this final capstone was dropped. It did not fall with a crash, but with a flat cracking sound that echoed ominously from the circle's far side.

Saban went very still, waiting for disaster, but the silence stretched. The capstone was in its proper place and the pillar stood, but when he climbed down the stacked layers of timber he saw that the narrow pillar had a deep crack running diagonally across its face. The crack started at the stone's top and ran halfway down one flank. A slave jumped down beside Saban and put a finger into the crack. 'If that gives way…' he said, but did not finish the statement.

If it gave way, Saban knew, then the capstone would collapse. 'Don't even touch it,' he told the slave, and when Camaban came that evening Saban told him the grim news.

Camaban peered at the crack, then looked up at the lintel. 'The stone stands, doesn't it?' he declared.

'It stands, but for how long?' Saban asked. 'It should be replaced.'

'Replaced?' Camaban sounded astonished.

'We should bring another stone from Cathallo.'

'And how long will that take?' Camaban demanded.

'To move the stone? To shape it? To take this one away?' Saban thought for a few heartbeats. 'And we'll have to take both lintels off the narrow pillar,' he said, 'which is why I left the platform in place.' He shrugged. 'It might be done by next summer.'

'Next summer?' Camaban shouted. 'We are going to dedicate this temple in three days' time! Three days! It cannot wait! It is done, it is done, it is done! Of course it won't fall.' He beat the flat of his hand against the cracked pillar and Saban instinctively stepped back, but the stone did not shatter. Then Camaban tapped it with his small mace and afterwards, because he saw Saban was flinching, he picked up one of the heavy round stone mauls that had been used to shape the boulders and he beat it with all his strength against the cracked pillar. He smashed the stone again and again, grunting and sweating, filling the temple with the echoes of each hammering blow, and still the stone remained whole. 'You see?' Camaban asked, letting the maul fall, and then, his temper rising as it always did when his temple encountered an obstacle, he placed himself between the cracked stone and its neighbouring pillar and began to throw his full weight at the flawed stone, bouncing back and forth between the pillars. 'You see?' he screamed, and the slaves glanced nervously at Saban.

The pillar did not break. Camaban threw himself a last time at the stone, then tried to shake it with his hands. 'You see?' Camaban asked again, pulling his cloak straight. 'It is done. It is finished.' He backed away from the sky ring and stared up at its lintels. 'It is finished.' He cried those last words in triumph, then unexpectedly turned and embraced Saban. 'You have done well, Saban, you have done well. You have made the temple. It is finished! It is finished!' He screamed the last word and capered a few clumsy dance steps, then fell on his knees and prostrated himself on the ground.

And it really was finished. There was the just the last platform to dismantle and the debris of the long years to clear up. The stones of Sarmennyn were to be left in the low ground to the temple's east, while the timber of the sledges had already been piled into two great heaps that would be burned at the temple's dedication. That ceremony was three days away and Camaban, when he had finished his prayers, said that it was time the slave huts were pulled down and their timbers and straw added to the fire heaps. 'Huts burn well,' he said wolfishly.

'If I pull down the slaves' huts,' Saban asked, 'where will they sleep?'

'They can go free, of course,' Camaban said dismissively.

'Now?' Saban asked.

'Not yet,' Camaban said with a frown. 'I want to thank them. Should I give them a feast?'

'They deserve it,' Saban said.

'Then I shall arrange it,' Camaban said carelessly. 'They will have a feast on midwinter's eve. A great feast! And you can pull down the slave huts on the morning of the ceremony.' He walked away, though he continually turned to stare back at the stones.

Leir and Hanna both now lived in Saban's hut. The couple had come back from the island where Leir had left the lozenge, though there had been no reply from Derrewyn and Saban feared she was dead. Leir, far from being shocked at Hanna's parentage, seemed excited by it and demanded to hear the old stories of Cathallo and Ratharryn, of Lengar and Hengall, and of Derrewyn and Sannas.

'Derrewyn is not dead,' Kilda said stubbornly on the night of the temple's completion. The stones were deserted and Saban and Kilda walked hand in hand through the dark pillars that were touched with moonlight so that the tiny flecks embedded in the grey rock glinted like reflections of the uncountable stars. Somehow the stones seemed taller at night, taller and closer, so that when Saban and Kilda edged between two of the sun house's pillars it was as though they were enclosed by stone. Haragg's bones were shadowed, but the sour smell of blood lingered in the cold air.

'It seems smaller when you're inside,' Kilda said.

'Like a tomb,' Saban said.

'Maybe it's a temple of death?' Kilda suggested.

'Which is what Camaban wants,' a harsh voice said from the shadows that shrouded Haragg's stinking bones. 'He thinks it will give life, but it is a temple of death.'

Kilda had gasped when the voice interrupted them and Saban had put an arm around her shoulders as they turned to see a hooded figure stand up from beside the bones and walk towards them. For an instant Saban thought it was Haragg coming back to life, then Kilda suddenly released herself from his grip, ran to the dark figure and dropped at its feet. 'Derrewyn!' she cried. 'Derrewyn!'

The figure pushed back the hood and Saban saw it was indeed Derrewyn. An older Derrewyn, white haired and with a face so thin and skull-like that she resembled Sannas. 'You left the lozenge, Saban?' she asked.

'My son and your daughter left it,' Saban said.

Derrewyn smiled. Kilda was embracing her legs and Derrewyn gently disentangled herself and walked towards Saban. She still had a small limp, a legacy of the arrow that had pierced her thigh. 'Your son and my daughter,' she said, 'are they lovers now?'