Sarum (12 page)
Authors: Edward Rutherfurd
KRONA
: You have killed one of our animals. The penalty is death. Do you understand?
: You have killed one of our animals. The penalty is death. Do you understand?
Taku said nothing.
KRONA
: You should die. But instead, you shall take a message to your people to warn them. We have come in peace, but they must not touch our animals.
: You should die. But instead, you shall take a message to your people to warn them. We have come in peace, but they must not touch our animals.
He turned to the settlers, and cried:
“His toes are too long!”
Then he signalled to the medicine man, who at once stepped forward, and with a sharp flint knife cut off the last joint of Taku’s big toes. The hunter yelped with pain.
KRONA
: You will not run into the valley again.
: You will not run into the valley again.
The settlers thought this a great joke, and Taku hobbled away. No hunter ever touched the animals in the valley again.
The second incident occurred during the winter. It was particularly cold and long, and even the river had frozen solid. At this time, with the first harvest not yet arrived and the livestock still no more than a few precious animals needed for breeding, the farmers nearly starved. Then it was Magri, the stout hunter and his son who came down into the valley from the high ground one day, carrying between them a deer they had killed. They dropped it in front of Krona’s house and moved away without a word.
From that time onwards, the settlers and the hunters lived in peace.
There were many things that puzzled the hunters, and many that interested them.
They were fascinated by the long painted boats which the settlers let them inspect. Taku in particular, who despite his punishment, struck up a curious friendship with several of the farmers, was delighted with them.
“They are strong, but so light,” he marvelled as he hobbled round them. There was no question that the boats made of skins were larger, more manoeuvrable, in every way superior to his own dugout.
The women were amazed by the woven clothes, and both men and women impressed by the solid timber houses. But for a long time, the entire complex business of sowing crops and raising livestock confused them; and they were deeply puzzled by the way that the farmers took the livestock into their own houses to protect them during the winter months. It was normal and sensible for the farmer and his family to sleep next to animals on which their life depended, but to the hunters this seemed strange indeed.
By the end of the second year however, with the first crops harvested and the stock beginning to increase in number, they had to admit that the settlers had kept their word. They lived in the valley, and they had not needed to encroach upon the hunting grounds outside.
“They eat well,” the women said.
“But they live like old women,” old Magri retorted. He pitted his wits against the animals he hunted; he roamed free over the great ridges under the open sky, where the wind moaned. The static, confined life of the farmer harvesting his crops and keeping his animals in pens had no appeal for him.
“It is not a life for a man,” he stated, and the other hunters agreed with him.
Two more years passed, and now the hunters could hardly recognise the valley any more.
On the hill overlooking the river Krona’s farm now consisted of a stout wooden building thirty feet long and fifteen deep with a sloping thatch roof and a large doorway to let in light and air. Around it were grouped several small outhouses. Beside the hill, on the slopes, where the soil was light and well-drained, small plots of various shapes had been laid out, their borders marked with stones. He had sown them with wheat, barley and flax, after cross ploughing them with a light ard – a small hoe with a flint head – which he could handle, if necessary, without even the aid of an animal. This process of ploughing fields first one way, and then at right angles, was the most efficient way of breaking up the soil with so light an implement. Near the huts were two pits, six feet deep and four across, lined with plaited straw; in these, and in their pots, they would store the grain. Beside the river, pigs and cattle wandered, and on the high ground above the fields, a few sheep cropped the coarse grass that grew in patches cleared among the scattered trees. All the way up the little northern valley, the pattern was the same, as the trees were destroyed and the land taken up instead by crops and livestock.
The hunters gazed at it all with increasing wonder.
It was a tiny beginning – the clearing of the slopes of a small, obscure valley in the midst of an immense forest that covered most of the island: an almost invisible scratch on the surface of the landscape.
And yet for the landscape of much of Britain, such early clearings were to have profound significance.
For when Krona and his men started to cut down trees on the edge of the high ground, they began a process whose result would be a permanent change in the composition of the soil. Previous ages had created the rich topsoil which covered the chalk downlands of Britain, and the trees which covered the ridges held this topsoil, often only inches thick, in place. When men cut down the trees, this fragile covering was exposed at once to wind and rain, and in many places it would be washed downhill, leaving behind only a harsh chalky soil full of flints. Sometimes trees would grow again in such places before the topsoil was gone; often man or his animals destroyed them once more. If the topsoil were displaced, the chalky soil remaining was good enough for growing corn, or grazing sheep on the turf covering that would form when it was not ploughed; indeed, the process brought much new life to the land – cowslips, buttercups, huge quantities of butterflies, all of which found the fields their natural habitat – but the woods did not grow there again.
Once begun, this destructive process had a momentum of its own. The chalky soil was often exhausted by the corn and the land had to be left fallow. Then the farmers would turn sheep on to it to crop the stubble and manure the ground, while more woodland was cut down for sowing. As generations passed, the sheep increased rapidly in number, and the human population increased too, so that the process of land clearance was accelerated still further. The farmers proceeded with a ruthless destructive efficiency: experiments have shown that with their flint axes, three men could clear six hundred square yards of birchwood in three hours. And as the centuries passed and more settlers came, all over southern England, these neolithic farmers cleared the light forest cover from the chalkland soils which they could so easily till.
The bare, sweeping chalk downs of southern England, familiar today, are not a natural feature of the landscape: they were created by prehistoric man.
There was another feature of the settlement which intrigued the hunters.
For in the third year, when the settlers’ precious little herd of cattle was beginning to grow, Krona ordered all the men to come to the hill at the foot of the valley, and there, under his direction, a short distance from the medicine man’s sacred circle, they stripped away the remaining trees and shrubs from the hilltop and laid out a rectangle, forty paces long and twenty wide, heaping around it a modest wall of earth. For this was to be the corral, in which the cattle would be protected and watched over at night. When this work was done, and Krona looked at the sturdy earthwork, and the plots of corn on the nearby slopes, his fierce face broke into a smile. Now the valley was starting to look like a proper settlement.
So far, the relationship between the hunters and the settlers had developed as Krona had hoped it would. The two communities lived well apart, but when they met, there was little trouble, and soon the enclosure on Krona’s hill became a meeting place and the focus of sporadic but lively barter trade between them. To the enclosure the hunters would bring furs and flints, and occasionally a fine deer they had killed; and the settlers brought woven cloth and pottery. Before long both sides knew a few necessary words of the other’s language.
The incident with Taku was forgotten. Since he could not hunt easily on his maimed feet, he became the most expert of fishermen, and soon he was allowed to take the farmers along the five rivers in the boats he admired so much, showing them the best places to fish.
It was when the settlement was six years old that this precarious harmony was broken and an open warfare broke out that nearly destroyed the settlement. It was the medicine man’s fault.
Twice a year, at the start of winter and at the time of harvest, the medicine man would paint his face chalk white and go down the valley to Krona’s hill. Waddling and wheezing, he would climb to the top of the little promontory and there, watched by the settlers, he would perform the sacrifice to the sun god. In winter, he asked for a good harvest. And after the harvest, the community gave thanks. On each occasion he would sacrifice an animal, usually a lamb.
The hunters were afraid of the medicine man. They knew that he sacrificed to the sun god but not to the moon goddess —and like most hunters, they had more reverence for the moon. Besides this, there was something about the fat, smooth-headed man with the shifting eyes that made them distrustful of his power. They trusted Krona, but they avoided the medicine man whenever possible.
His power in the valley, however, was considerable. If a child were sick, he would be summoned to cure it. When a new plot had been cleared, he would walk slowly round the bounds with the farmer, muttering an incantation. Whenever an animal was killed, a choice cut would be sent to the medicine man in payment for his services; he lived well and was second in influence only to Krona. And if, unlike Krona, he was not brave, he was cunning and ruthless to make up for it.
In the sixth year, despite a fine spring and a warm early summer, there were heavy rains soon afterwards which continued non-stop for twenty days. The harvest was ruined.
Although the community had enough stores to last them through the winter, the failure of the harvest was a serious blow. Such a disaster could only mean that the sun god was offended with them for some reason and to placate him and ensure a good crop the following year, the medicine man made a special sacrifice of four lambs that winter, repeating this costly gesture again in the spring.
That summer was an anxious time, not only for the farmers, but for the medicine man as well: for his magic was being tested and all eyes were now upon him. The spring and early summer were fine, however, and with a renewed confidence he waddled round the farmhouses, inspecting the extra land that had been sown, and predicted a bumper harvest. But then, at midsummer, the rains came yet again, and for a second time the entire harvest was ruined. This year the settlers faced real hardship.
If this second failure of the harvest brought the threat of hunger to the farmers, it brought an even greater threat to the medicine man. For it was clear to all the settlers that the sun god must be angry and that the sacrifices of the medicine man had not worked.
“The sun god has turned his face away,” they acknowledged. “He does not speak to the medicine man; he has refused the sacrifices.”
The medicine man had failed and as each day passed, there were signs of the settlers’ anger and his declining influence with them that he could not ignore. There were sullen murmurs about him in the homesteads. Women with sick children did not go to him and the men avoided his company. One day, at the cattle enclosure, he even saw a settler woman whose child had stumbled into some poison ivy, accept gratefully a herbal cure from one of the hunters. He had waddled forward to stop this, but the woman had taken the herbs and quickly left without looking at him.
One day a small deputation arrived at the farm on the hill to see Krona.
“The medicine man has brought two years of rain,” they complained. “He is displeasing the gods and we should drive him out.”
After they had gone, Liam joined her voice with theirs.
“He has failed,” she reminded him, “and besides, he is not to be trusted.”
The ageing chief knew that his proud young wife resented the influence of the medicine man in the valley, and he understood the feelings of the settlers, but he was unwilling to do such a thing.
“We shall not be hasty,” he decreed. “Speak to me of this no more.”
But from that day, the medicine man noticed that whenever Krona saw him his weatherbeaten face took on a hard and angry stare that was frightening. Still more disturbing was the suggestion he overheard a young farmer make to some companions, none of whom disagreed with him:
“I think the sun god has no power in this place,” he said. “Perhaps it belongs to the moon goddess the hunters worship and we should sacrifice to her instead.”
When he heard this, he knew that he had not much time.
It was at this critical moment, when the very future of the settlement in the valley seemed in doubt, that an event took place that was to give the medicine man his opportunity.
Early one morning, near the end of summer, a single man walked slowly out of the woods to the east and entered the place where the five rivers met. He was very old – probably older than any other man living in the south of the island; he carried a staff to lean on and walked with a shuffle; and his sudden arrival caused a flurry of excitement amongst the hunters.
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