Stonehenge (25 page)

Camaban and Saban also accompanied her, following the golden girl to the sheltered valleys on Sarmennyn’s south coast where the people farmed and took their long wooden fishing boats out to sea, and then up into the high, bare land of the north where cattle, sheep and the making of stone axes gave a poor living to scattered homesteads. And wherever they went Camaban inspected the temples, looking for the one he wanted moved to Ratharryn. The people, recognising him as a sorcerer, bowed. “Can you make magic?” Saban asked him one day.

“I turned you into a slave, didn’t I?” Camaban retorted.

Saban looked at the scar on his hand. “That was cruel,” he said.

“Don’t be absurd,” Camaban said wearily. “How else was I to
keep you alive? Lengar wanted to kill you, which was entirely the sensible thing to do, but I hoped you might prove useful to me. So I fed him a nonsensical tale about the gods taking revenge on those who killed their half-brothers, then gave him the idea of enslaving you. He liked that. And I wanted you to meet Haragg.”

“I like him,” Saban said warmly.

“You like most people,” Camaban said scornfully. “Haragg is quite clever,” he went on, “but you can’t trust all his ideas. He’s absurdly influenced by his daughter’s death! He distrusts ritual, but there’s nothing wrong with ritual. It shows the gods that we recognize their power. If we took notice of Haragg’s ideas we wouldn’t burn Aurenna to death and what is the point of the girl’s existence if it isn’t to burn?”

Saban looked ahead to where Aurenna walked between her attendant priests. He hated Camaban at that moment, but he said nothing, and Camaban, who knew exactly what his brother was thinking, laughed.

That afternoon they came to another temple, this one a simple circle of five stones that was typical of the shrines in the northern part of Sarmennyn. A few, very few, had as many as a dozen stones, but none of the boulders was as large as those that stood within Cathallo’s walls. Sarmennyn’s stones were rarely taller than a man nor any thicker than a man’s waist, but nearly all of them were squared into trim pillars.

Camaban liked none of the shrines they saw. “We want a temple that will astonish,” he told Saban. “We have to find a temple that will tell Slaol we have made a great effort on his behalf. What’s the achievement in moving four or five little rocks to Ratharryn?”

Saban reckoned that moving just one stone would be an achievement, and he had begun to doubt that Camaban would ever find the temple he wanted. “Why don’t you just pick any temple?” he asked one night. “Slaol will know how much effort we made to move it.”

“If I wanted the job done quickly and carelessly,” Camaban said, “I would have let you find a temple rather than waste my own time searching. Don’t be absurd, Saban.” They were eating in a crowded hut where Aurenna’s attendants had been greeted with gifts of fish, meat, pelts and pots of liquor. One pot of the liquor
could steal a man’s brains and legs, though Camaban always seemed unaffected. He drank it like water, belched, drank more, and never slurred his words nor staggered; in the morning, when Saban’s head was throbbing and sour, Camaban would be full of energy.

That night they were in the hut of a clan chief, the lord of all his kin whose huts were huddled in the lee of a mountain. The chief was a toothless old man who, in honor of Aurenna’s coming, wore a circle of gold about his scrawny neck. His wives had stirred a foul mess of seaweed and shellfish over a smoky fire and when the meal was eaten one of his sons, who looked as old and toothless as his father, took down the polished shell of a sea turtle that hung from a rafter and used it to beat out a rhythm while he chanted an apparently endless song about his father’s exploit in crossing to the land across the western sea where he had slaughtered many enemies, taken many slaves and brought home much gold. “What it probably means,” Camaban said to Saban, “is that the old fool wandered up the beach for three days and came back with a couple of striped pebbles and a gull’s feather.”

Folk came from the other huts while the chant continued. More and more packed themselves in until Camaban and Saban were crammed against the hut’s low stone wall. The people must have heard the tale many times, for they often joined in the chant and the old man nodded happily whenever such a chorus sounded, but then, quite suddenly, the drumbeat and the chanting ended. The old man opened his eyes and looked indignant at the silence until he saw that Aurenna, who had eaten in the privacy of her own hut, had just entered. The clan chief smiled and indicated that the sun bride could sit beside him, but Aurenna shook her head, peered about the hut, then stepped delicately through the press of bodies to sit beside Saban. She nodded to the chanter, indicating he could begin again, and the man tapped his turtle shell, closed his eyes and picked up his story’s thread.

Saban was acutely conscious of Aurenna’s proximity. He had spoken to her a few times while they walked Sarmennyn’s rough paths, but she had never sought his company and her arrival at his side made him clumsy, shy and tongue-tied. It hurt him even to look at Aurenna for the thought of what must happen to her in a brief time. Her fate and Derrewyn’s had become tangled in his
mind so that it seemed to him that Derrewyn’s soul had entered Aurenna’s body and now must be snatched from him again. He closed his eyes and bent his head, trying to will away the thoughts of Derrewyn’s rape and Aurenna’s impending death.

Then Aurenna leaned close to him so that he would hear her voice above the chanter’s song. “Have you found your temple?” she asked.

“No,” he said, shaking with nervousness.

“Why not?” Aurenna asked. “You must have seen a new temple every day?”

“They’re too small,” Saban answered, blushing. He did not look at her for fear that he would stammer.

“And how will you move your temple?” Aurenna asked. “Will you have the god make it fly to Ratharryn?”

Saban shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You should talk to Lewydd,” she said, indicating one of her guardian spearmen who was squatting beside the hut’s central post. “He says he knows how it can be done.”

“If Scathel ever lets us take a temple,” Saban said gloomily.

“I shall defeat Scathel,” Aurenna said confidently.

Saban dared to look into her eyes then. They were dark, though the flicker of firelight was reflected in them, and he suddenly wanted to weep because she was going to die. “You’ll defeat Scathel?” he asked.

“I hate him,” she said softly. “He spat at me when I was first taken to my temple. That’s why I wouldn’t let him put you in the pit. So when I go to the fire I shall tell my husband that he is to let you take a temple to Ratharryn.” She looked away from Saban as another man took the turtle shell drum and started another song, this one in praise of the sun bride herself. Aurenna listened intently as a compliment to the singer as he began by describing the sun god’s loneliness and his yearning for a human bride, but when he moved on to describe the sun bride’s beauty Aurenna seemed to lose interest for she leaned close to Saban again. “Is it true that in Ratharryn you do not send the god a bride?”

“No.”

“Nor in Cathallo?”

“No.”

Aurenna sighed, then gazed at the fire. Saban stared at her, while her guards watched him. “Tomorrow” – Aurenna swayed close to Saban again – “I must start back toward Kereval’s settlement, but you should climb the hill behind this place.”

“Why?”

“Because there is a temple there,” she said. “The folk here told me of it. It is Scathel’s new temple, the one he built when he was recovering from his madness. He says he will dedicate it when the treasures are returned.”

Saban smiled, thinking how angry Scathel would be if he knew that his own new temple might go to Ratharryn. “We shall look at it,” Saban promised her, though he would rather have stayed with Aurenna – to what purpose, he could not tell. She would be dead soon, dead and gone to her glory in the blazing sky.

Next morning, as a thick fog rolled in from the sea, Aurenna began her southward journey, but Camaban and Saban went north, climbing the hill through the fog’s thick whiteness. “It will be a waste of time,” Camaban grumbled, “just another tawdry ring of stones,” but he still led Saban up the steep grass and across screecovered slopes until at last they emerged from the cloud into glorious sunlight. They were now above the fog that lay all about them like a white and silent sea in which the mountain’s peak was an island of splintered rock, as tangled and jagged as if a god had hammered the summit in a rage. Saban saw now why all the pillars of Sarmennyn’s temples were alike for the rock, shattering from the peak, fell in naturally square shafts and all a man needed to make a temple was to carry the split rock down the mountainside.

There was no temple in sight, but Camaban guessed it lay somewhere in the thick fog beneath and so he sat on a stone ledge to wait. Saban paced up and down, then asked Camaban, “Why would we want Scathel’s temple if Scathel is an enemy?”

“He’s no enemy of mine.”

Saban sneered at that. “Then what is he?”

“He’s a man like you, brother,” Camaban said, “a man who hates things to change. But he is a good servant of Slaol and in time he will be our friend.” He turned and looked eastward where the peaks of other mountains stood like a line of islands above the whiteness. “Scathel wants Slaol’s glory, and that is good. But what do you
want, brother? And don’t say Aurenna,” he added, “for she’ll be dead soon.”

Saban blushed. “Who says I do want her?”

“Your face says so. You stare at her like a thirsty calf gazing at an udder.”

“She’s beautiful,” Saban said.

“So was Derrewyn, but what does beauty matter? In a dark hut at night, how can you tell? Never mind, tell me what you want.”

“A wife,” Saban said, “children. Good crops. Plentiful deer.”

Camaban laughed. “You sound just like our father.”

“And what’s wrong with that?” Saban asked defiantly.

“Nothing is wrong with that,” Camaban said wearily, “but what a little ambition it is! You want a wife? Then find one! Children? They come whether you want them or not, and half will break your heart and the other half will die. Crops and deer? They’re there now.”

“So what do you want?” Saban asked, stung by his brother’s scorn.

“I told you,” Camaban said calmly. “I want everything to change, and then nothing will change, for we shall reach the point of balance. The sun won’t wander and there will be no more winter and no more sickness and no more tears. But to do that we must make Slaol a proper temple, and that is what I want. A temple that does Slaol honor.” With those words he suddenly fell silent and stared, wide-eyed, into the fog beneath, and Saban turned to see what had attracted his brother’s attention.

At first he could only see fog, but then, slowly, as the land appears when the night drains, a shape emerged in the whiteness.

And what a shape. It was a temple, but unlike any Saban had ever seen. Instead of one circle of stones it had two, one set inside the other, and at first Saban could only see the dark tips of those stones in the vapor. He tried to count the pillars, but there were too many, and at the double circle’s farther side, looking toward the place on the skyline where the winter sun would set, there was an entrance made from five pairs of stone pillars that had other stones laid crosswise on their tops to make a row of five doorways for the dying sun. Saban stared, and for a magical time the whole temple seemed to float in the vapor and then the fog drained from
the high valley to leave the stones rooted in the dark earth.

Camaban was standing now, his mouth open. “Scathel was not mad,” he said quietly, then he gave a cry and leaped off the rocks and hurried down the hill, scattering dark-fleeced sheep as he went. Saban followed more slowly, then edged between the twin rings of stone to find Camaban crouched at the temple’s northeastern side where he was peering into the tunnel made by the linteled stones. “Slaol’s gates,” Camaban said in wonder.

The temple was built in a high hanging valley that overlooked the low country to the south and, at midwinter, when the sun was on that far horizon, it would shine across the sea and land to pierce the gates of stone. “All else would be dark,” Camaban said softly, “all would be shadowed by the stones, but in the shadow’s center would be a shaft of light! It’s a temple of shadows!” He hurried to the stone opposite the entrance and there, facing the sun’s gateway, he spread his arms and flattened himself against the rock as though the light of the dying sun was pinning him to the boulder. “Scathel is magnificent!” he cried. “Magnificent!”

The pillars, naturally square, were not large. Those in the sun’s gate were a little taller than Camaban, but the rest were shorter than a man and some were no higher than a toddling child. All the rocks had been prised or lifted from the shattered mountain top and slid down the steep slope to this flat patch of high hanging land where they had been shallowly rooted in the thin soil. Saban pushed against one stone and it rocked dangerously. The stone against which Camaban stood was actually two pillars, both too thin, but they had been joined together by carving a groove in one long side and sculpting a tongue in the other so that the two stones fitted like a man fits to a woman. “Two halves of the circle,” Camaban said reverently, noticing the jointed stones. “The sun side” – he gestured to the south, indicating the stones over which the sun would travel in its daily path – “and the night side, and they’re joined here, and the joint must be sealed with blood at the sun’s dying.”

“How do you know?” Saban asked. He had been counting the stones, and had already numbered more than seventy.

“How else?” Camaban asked curtly. “It’s obvious.” He whirled around in his excitement. “The Sea Temple for midsummer and
the Temple of Shadows for the winter! Scathel is marvelous! But this one will be ours. It will be ours!” He began walking around the circle, cracking his staff against the stones until he reached the linteled gate where he stooped to gaze through the tunnel of five stone arches. “A doorway for Slaol,” he said in wonder, then straightened and wiped the nearest stone. The fog’s moisture had left the rocks with a strange blue-green sheen that began to fade to black as the spring sun and the sea wind dried them. Camaban, to Saban’s horror, tried to push one of the lintels as if hoping to topple it, but it would not move. “How do they fix it?” he asked.