Stonehenge (11 page)

“Why should I be careful of you?” Saban asked. Fear and exhilaration were competing in him. He knew this was stupidity, but Derrewyn’s presence had driven him to it and his own pride would not let him back down. “You’re a bully, Jegar,” he said, drawing back the pole, “and I’ll thrash you bloody.”

“You child!” Jegar said, and ran at Saban, but Saban had guessed
what Jegar would do and he let the pole’s tip fall so that it tangled Jegar’s legs, and then he twisted the pole, tripping Jegar, and as Jegar fell Saban jumped on him and beat his enemy’s head with his fists. He landed two hard blows before Jegar managed to twist round and lash back. Jegar could not use his spear for Saban was on top of him, so first he tried to punch the boy away, then he clawed at Saban’s eyes. Saban bit one of the probing fingers and tasted blood, then hands seized and dragged him off Jegar. Other hands pulled Jegar away.

It was Galeth who had hauled Saban away. “You fool!” Galeth said. “You want to die?”

“I was beating him!”

“He’s a man. You’re a boy! And you’re going to have a black eye.” Galeth pushed Saban away, then turned on Jegar. “Leave him alone,” he ordered. “Your chance comes next year.”

“He attacked me!” Jegar said. His hand was bleeding where Saban had bitten it. He sucked at the blood, then picked up his spear. There was rage in his eyes, for he knew he had been humiliated. “A boy who attacks a man has to be punished,” he insisted.

“No one attacked anyone,” Galeth said. He was huge, and his anger was frightening. “Nothing happened here. You hear me? Nothing happened!” He drove Jegar back. “Nothing happened!” He turned on Derrewyn, who had watched the fight with wide eyes. “Be about your work, girl,” he ordered, then pushed Saban back to the roof. “And you’ve got work to do, so do it.”

Hengall chuckled when he heard about the fight. “Was he really winning?” he asked Galeth.

“He wouldn’t have lasted,” Galeth said, “but yes, he was winning.”

“He’s a good boy,” Hengall said approvingly, “a good boy!”

“But Jegar will try to stop him passing the ordeals,” Galeth warned.

Hengall dismissed his younger brother’s fears. “If Saban is to be chief,” he said, “then he must be able to deal with men like Jegar.” He chuckled again, delighted that Saban had shown such courage. “You’ll keep an eye on the boy through the winter?” he asked. “He deserves better than to be speared in the back.”

“I shall watch him,” Galeth promised grimly.

It proved a cruelly hard winter, and the only good news of that cold season was that the warriors of Cathallo abandoned their raids
on Hengall’s land. The peace, which would be sealed by Saban’s marriage, was holding, though some folk reckoned Cathallo was just waiting for Hengall’s death before snapping up Ratharryn as they had conquered Maden. Others reckoned that it was the weather that kept Kital’s men at bay, for the snow lay thick for days and the river froze so that the women had to break the ice to fetch their daily water. There were days when the snow on the hills blew from the low crests like smoke, when the fires seemed to give no warmth and the ice-bound huts crouched in a gray-white land that offered no hope of warmth or life. The weak of the tribe, the old, the young, the sick and the cursed, died. There was hunger, but the warriors of the tribe hunted in the forests. None rivaled Jegar and his band who, day after day, brought back carcasses that were butchered outside the settlement where the guts steamed in the cold air as the tribe’s dogs circled in hope of spoil. The hunters gave the stags’ skulls to women who fed their cooking fires with wood till they burned fierce, then held the roots of the antlers in the flames so that they would snap clean from the bone. There would be work to be done on the Old Temple in the spring, and the tribe would need scores of antler picks to make holes for the new stones that were to be fetched from Cathallo.

That winter never seemed to end. Wolves were seen by the river, but Gilan assured the tribe that all would be well when the new temple was made. This winter is the last of our woes, the high priest said, the last ill fortune before the new temple changed Ratharryn’s fate. There would be life again, and love, and warmth and happiness, and all things, Gilan assured the tribe, would be good.

Camaban had gone to Cathallo to learn. He had been alone for years, scavenging a thin living beyond Ratharryn’s embankment, and in those years he had listened to the voices in his head and he had thought about what they told him. Now he wanted to test that knowledge against the world’s other wisdom, and no one was wiser than Sannas, sorceress of Cathallo, and so Camaban listened.

In the beginning, Sannas said, Slaol and Lahanna had been lovers. They had circled the world in an endless dance, the one ever close
to the other, but then Slaol had glimpsed Garlanna, the goddess of the earth who was Lahanna’s daughter, and he had fallen in love with Garlanna and rejected Lahanna.

So Lahanna had lost her brightness, and thus night came to the world.

But Garlanna, Sannas insisted, stayed loyal to her mother by refusing to join Slaol’s dance and so the sun god sulked and winter came to the earth. And Slaol still sulked, and would not listen to the folk on earth, for they reminded him of Garlanna. Which is why, Sannas insisted, Lahanna should be worshipped above all other gods because she alone had the power to protect the world from Slaol’s petulance.

Camaban listened, just as he listened to Morthor, Derrewyn’s father, who was high priest at Cathallo, and Morthor told a similar tale, though in his telling it was Lahanna who sulked and who hid her face in shame because she had tried and failed to dim her lover’s brightness. She still tried to diminish Slaol, and those were fearful times when Lahanna slid herself in front of Slaol to bring night in the daytime. Morthor claimed that Lahanna was the petulant goddess, and though he was Sannas’s grandson and though the two disagreed, they did not fight. “The gods must be balanced,” Morthor claimed. “Lahanna might try to punish us because we live on Garlanna’s earth, but she is still powerful and must be placated.”

“Men won’t condemn Slaol,” Sannas told Camaban, “for they see nothing wrong with him loving a mother and her daughter.” She spat. “Men are like pigs rolling in their own dung.”

“If you visit a strange tribe,” Morthor said, “to whom do you go? Its chief! So we must worship Slaol above all the gods.”

“Men can worship whatever they want,” Sannas said, “but it is a woman’s prayer that is heard, and women pray to Lahanna.”

On one thing, though, both Sannas and Morthor agreed: that the grief of this world had come when Slaol and Lahanna parted, and that ever since the tribes of men had striven to balance their worship of the two jealous gods. It was the same belief that Hirac had held, a belief that gripped the heartland tribes and forced them to be cautious of all the gods.

Camaban heard all this, and he asked questions, but kept his own opinions silent. He had come to learn, not to argue, and Sannas
had much to teach him. She was the most famous healer in the land and folk came to her from a dozen tribes. She used herbs, fungi, fire, bone, blood, pelts and charms. Barren women would walk for days to beg her help and each morning would find a desperate collection of the sick, the crippled, the lame and the sad waiting at the shrine’s northern entrance. Camaban collected Sannas’s herbs, picked mushrooms and cut fungi from decaying trees. He dried the medicines in nets over the fire, he sliced them, infused them and learned the names that Sannas gave them. He listened as the folk described their ills and he watched what Sannas gave them, then marked their progress to health or to death. Many came complaining of pain, just pain, and as often as not they would rub their bellies and Sannas would give them slices of fungi to chew, or else made them drink a thick mixture of herbs, fungus and fresh blood. Almost as many complained of pain in their joints, a fierce pain that doubled them over and made it hard for a man to till a field or for a woman to grind a quern stone, and if the pain was truly crippling Sannas would lay the sufferer between two fires, then take a newly chipped flint knife and drag it across the painful joint. Back and forth she would cut, slicing deep so that the blood welled up, then Camaban would rub dried herbs into the wounds and place more of the dried herbs over the fresh cuts until the blood no longer seeped and Sannas would set fire to the herbs and the flames would hiss and smoke and the hut would fill with the smell of burning flesh.

One man went mad in that hard wintertime, beating his wife until she died, then hurling his youngest child onto his hut fire and Sannas decreed that the man had been possessed of an evil spirit. He was brought to her, then pinioned between two warriors as Sannas cut open his scalp, peeled back the flesh, and chipped a hole in his skull with a small stone maul and a thin flint blade. She levered out a whole circle of bone, then spat onto his brain and demanded that the evil thing come out. The man lived, though in such misery it would have been better had he died.

Camaban learned to set bones, to fill wounds with moss and spider web, and to make the potions that give men dreams. He carried those potions to Cathallo’s priests who treated him with awe because he had been chosen by Sannas. He learned to make
the glutinous poison that warriors smeared on their arrowheads when they hunted Outfolk in the wide forests north of Cathallo. The poison was made from a mixture of urine, feces and the juice of a flowering herb that Sannas prized as a killer. He made Sannas’s food, grinding it to a paste because, only having the one tooth, she could not chew. He learned her spells, learned her chants, learned the names of a thousand gods, and when he was not learning from Sannas he listened to the traders when they returned with strange tales from their long journeys. He listened to everything, forgot nothing and kept his opinions locked inside his head. Those opinions had not changed. The voices that had spoken in his head still echoed there, still woke him at night, still filled him with wonder. He had learned how to heal and how to frighten and how to twist the world to the gods’ wishes, but he had not changed. The world’s wisdom had left his own untouched.

In the winter’s heart, when Slaol was at his weakest and Lahanna was shining brightly on Cathallo’s shrine to touch the boulders with a sheen of glistening cold light, Sannas brought two warriors to the temple. “It is time,” she told Camaban.

The warriors laid Camaban on his back beside one of the temple’s taller stones. One man held Camaban’s shoulders, while the other held the crippled foot toward the full moon. “I will either kill you,” Sannas said, “or cure you.” She held a maul of stone and a blade that had been made from the scapula of a dead man and she laid the bone blade on the grotesquely curled ball of Camaban’s foot. “It will hurt,” she said, then laughed as if Camaban’s pain would give her pleasure.

The warrior holding the foot flinched as the maul hammered on the bone. Sannas hammered again, showing a remarkable strength for such an old woman. Blood, black in the moonlight, was pouring from the foot, soaking the warrior’s hands and running down Camaban’s leg. Sannas beat the maul on the blade again, then wrenched the scapula free and gritted her teeth as she forced the curl of Camaban’s clenched foot outward. “You have toes!” she marveled, and the two warriors shuddered and turned away as they heard the cracking of cartilage, the splintering of bone and the grating of the broken being straightened. “Lahanna!” Sannas cried, and hammered the blade into Camaban’s foot again, forcing its
sharpened edge into another tight part of the bulbous flesh and fused bone.

Sannas bent the foot flat, then splinted it in deer bones that she bound tight with strips of wolfskin. “I have used bone to mend bone,” she told Camaban, “and you will either die or you will walk.”

Camaban stared at her, but said nothing. The pain had been more than he had ever expected, it had been a pain fit to fill the whole wide moonlit world, but he had not whimpered once. There were tears in his eyes, but he had made no sound and he knew he would not die. He would live because Slaol wanted it. Because he had been chosen. Because he was the crooked child who had been sent to make the world straight. He was Camaban.

Winter passed. The salmon returned to the river and the rooks to the high elms that grew west of Ratharryn. The cuckoo called and dragonflies darted where winter ice had locked the river. Lambs bleated among the ancestors’ grave mounds, and herons feasted on ducklings in Mai’s river. The blackbird’s song rippled across the woods where, when spring was full, the deer lost their gray winter coats and shed their antlers. Hengall’s father had once claimed to have seen deer eating their old antlers, but in truth it was Syrax, the stag god who roamed the woods, who took them back to himself. The shed antlers were prized as tools, and so men sought to find them before Syrax.

The fields were ploughed. The wealthier folk tugged the fire-hardened plough stake behind an ox, while others used their families to drag the gouging point across the soil. They broke the ground from east to west, then north to south before the priests came to scatter the first handfuls of seed. The previous harvest had been bad, but Hengall had hoarded seed in his hut and now he released it for the fields. Some fields were abandoned to grass, for their soil was tired, but the previous spring the men had ringed trees on the forest’s edge, then burned the dead trees in the autumn, and the newly cleared land was ploughed and sown while the women made a sacrifice of a lamb. Kestrels floated above the Old Temple where orchids flowered and blue-winged butterflies flew.

In summer, just when the thrushes fell silent, the boys of Hengall’s tribe faced their ordeals of manhood. Not every boy passed the ordeals and some did not even survive them. Indeed it was
better, the tribe said, for a boy to die than to fail because in failure they risked ridicule for the rest of their lives. For a whole moon after the ordeal a boy who failed would be forced to wear a woman’s clothes and toil at woman’s work and squat like a woman to pass water. And for the rest of his life he could not take a wife, nor own slaves, cattle or pigs. A few of those who failed might display some talent for augury and dreams, and those boys might become priests and would then receive the privileges of those who had passed the ordeals, but most of those who failed were scorned forever. It was better to die.