Stonehenge (35 page)

It took three days to load the ten boats. Five of the craft carried large stones while the other five had a pair of smaller stones apiece, and once the stones were lashed to their beams the boats were all floated downstream. There were two places where the river ran shallow and men had to haul the boats across those places as though they were sledges, but in two days all the boats were safe at Aurenna’s settlement where they were tethered to trees. At low tide the great hulls rested in the mud while at high they floated free to tug restlessly at their moorings.

They were waiting for the weather. It was already late in the summer, but Lewydd prayed at Malkin’s shrine each morning then climbed the hills behind the settlement to peer westward. He was waiting for the wind to die and the sea to settle, but the wind seemed relentless in those late summer days and the gray waves roared endlessly from the west to shatter white on the rocky coast.

The harvest was cut and then the rains started, blasting from the ocean in teeming downpours so that Saban had to empty the moored boats of rainwater every day. The skies stayed dark and he began to despair of ever moving the stones, but Lewydd never abandoned hope and his optimism was justified for one morning Saban woke to a strange calm. The day was warm, the winds had settled and the fishermen reckoned the fine weather would last. It often happened like this, they said, that, late in the year, just before the autumn brought howling gales, Malkin would send long days of blissful calm and so the ten boats were loaded with skins of fresh water and sacks of dried fish and baskets of the flat bread that was made on hot stones, and then Scathel splashed each boat with the blood of a freshly killed bullock and, at midday, with a dozen paddlers manning each craft, the first of the temple’s stones went to sea.

There were plenty of men in the tribe who said the crews would never be seen again. In the heft of the sea, they claimed, the boats would swamp and the weight of the stones would drag them down to where the gray monsters of the deep waited. Saban and Aurenna walked to the coast and watched the ten boats, escorted by two slim fishing craft, turn around the headland and paddle out to sea. The pessimists were wrong. The ten boats rode the small waves easily and then the leather sails were hoisted above the stones, the paddles dug deep, and the small fleet rode the gentle wind and long tide eastward.

Now all Saban could do was wait for Lewydd’s return. He waited as the days shortened and as the wind rose and the air turned chill. Some days Saban and Aurenna would walk to the southern headland from where they would stare from the cliff’s top to search for Lewydd’s boats, but though they could see fishing boats with men standing and throwing their small nets, and though they saw plenty of traders’ boats loaded with goods, they saw none of the triple-hulled boats that had carried the stones. Day by day the wind drove the sea harder, smashing water white on rock and lashing the wave crests to foam, and still Lewydd did not return. There were days when the fishermen would not go out because the water and the wind were too angry and on those days Saban feared for Lewydd.

The first frost came and after that the first snow. Aurenna was pregnant again and some mornings she woke weeping, though she always denied that her tears were for Lewydd. “He lives,” she insisted, “he lives.”

“Then why are you crying?”

“Because it is winter,” she said, “and Erek dies in the winter and I am so close to him that I feel his pain.” She flinched when Saban touched her cheek. There were times when he felt she was distancing herself from him, moving closer to Erek. She would sit on her stone beside the river, her hands outstretched on either side, and claim to be listening to her god, and Saban, who heard no voices in his head, was jealous.

“Spring will come,” he said.

“As always,” Aurenna said and turned away.

Saban and Mereth made more boats. They found the last big oaks in the nearer forests and from those trunks they could make just five more craft. If Lewydd returned and brought his boats with him they would have fifteen boats, and fifteen boats could carry all the stones eastward in four voyages. But if Lewydd did not return then the temple could not be moved and, as day followed day, and as winter’s grip locked the land hard, there was neither news nor sight of Lewydd.

Lewydd’s long absence began to unsettle the folk of Sarmennyn. Rumors spread. One story claimed that the ten boats had foundered and their crews had been drowned, dragged down by the stones because Erek did not want them moved. Other folk claimed that Lewydd and his men had been slaughtered by the folk of Drewenna who, instead of providing the sledges as their new chief had promised after the massacre at Sul, had decided to take the stones for themselves. The rumors fed on themselves and, for the first time since Aurenna had walked from the fire, there were murmurs that Camaban and Kereval were wrong. Haragg tried to keep the tribe’s faith, but more and more folk muttered that the temple should never have been given away. Over a hundred of the tribe’s young men were gone with the boats and the tribe feared they would never see those men again. They had left widows and orphans, they had left Sarmennyn dangerously weak in spearmen, and because so many of the missing were fishermen, it meant there would be
hunger in Sarmennyn that winter, and it was all the fault of those who had said the temple should be moved. Scathel, Haragg and Kereval tried to stanch the anger, advising the people to wait for news, but still the rumors flourished and turned to a sudden rage one winter evening when a crowd of resentful folk left Kereval’s settlement and crossed the river with burning torches to walk south to Aurenna’s settlement.

Scathel took a boat down the river to warn Saban that men were coming to burn the settlement and destroy the new boats. Kereval had tried to stop them, the high priest said, but Kereval was ailing and his authority was weakening.

Haragg spat angrily. “Who leads them?” he asked his brother. Scathel named some of the men who were coming and Haragg shook with anger. “They are worms,” he said derisively, and seized a spear.

“Let me talk to them,” Saban said.

“Talking won’t stop them,” Haragg retorted as he stalked down the path, spear in hand. Cagan went with him. Saban ordered Mereth to take the women of the settlement into the trees then he ran after Haragg, catching the huge man just as he confronted the firelit crowd on the narrow forest path. Haragg lifted his spear. “You are fighting against Erek,” he shouted, but before he could say another word an arrow whipped from the crowd to strike his chest and Haragg staggered back to fall against an oak. Cagan bellowed in distress, plucked up his father’s spear and charged at the crowd. He was met by more arrows and a shower of stones, but the arrows might as well have been loosed at an aurochs. The giant deaf-mute flailed the spear clumsily, driving men back, and Saban ran to help him, but then Cagan was tripped; he fell, and the crowd surged over the huge man and their spears were rising and falling as he writhed beneath the blades. Saban seized Haragg’s arm, hauled the trader to his feet and dragged him away so he would not see his son’s death. “Cagan!” Haragg called.

“Run!” Saban shouted. An arrow hissed past his ear and another thumped into a tree.

The crowd was following, their blood roused by Cagan’s death. A spear was thrown and it skidded along the path, nearly striking Saban’s ankle, then he saw Aurenna standing in the path’s center.
“Go back!” Saban shouted at her, but she waved him aside. Her golden hair hung free and her deerskin tunic swelled over her pregnant belly. “Go!” Saban said. “They’ve killed Cagan. Go!” He tried to pull her away, but Aurenna shook off his hand, refusing to be moved. She waited calmly, as placid as she had been when she had waited to endure the sun-bride’s fire, and then, when the rampaging crowd came into sight, she walked slowly forward to meet them.

She did not raise her hands, she did not speak, but just stood there and the attackers checked. They had killed a man, but now they were faced by a bride of Erek, a woman who was either a goddess or a sorceress, a woman of power, and none had the courage to attack her, though one man did step out of the crowd to confront her. His name was Kargan and he was a nephew of Kereval and a famous warrior in Sarmennyn. He wore ravens’ wings in his hair and had ravens’ feathers tied to the shaft of his spear which was longer and heavier than any other in Sarmennyn. He had a long jaw and brooding eyes and thick gray scars that boasted of the souls he had slaughtered in battle, but he reverently bowed his head to Aurenna. “We have no quarrel with you, lady,” he said.

“Then with whom, Kargan?” Aurenna asked gently.

“With the folk who stole our young men,” Kargan said. “With the fools who would move a temple across a world!”

“Who stole your young men, Kargan?” Aurenna asked.

“You know who, lady.”

Aurenna smiled. “Our young men will return tomorrow,” she said. “They will come in their boats and their song will be heard in the river. There will be joy tomorrow, so why cause more sadness tonight?” She paused, waiting, but no one spoke. “Go back,” she instructed the crowd, “for our men will come home tomorrow. Erek has promised it.” Then, with a last calm smile, she turned and walked away.

Kargan hesitated, but Aurenna’s certainty had taken the anger from the crowd and they obeyed her. Saban watched them go, then followed Aurenna. “And when the boats do not come tomorrow,” he asked her, “how will we stop them killing us?”

“But the boats will come,” Aurenna said. “Erek told me in a dream.” She was quite confident, even astonished that Saban might doubt her dream. “The dream mists have cleared,” she told him happily,
“and I see Erek’s future.” She smiled at him, then led Haragg to her hut where she soothed the trader’s grief. He was breathing hard for the arrow had struck deep and pink blood was dribbling from his mouth, but Aurenna assured him he would live and gave him a potion to drink and then pulled the arrow’s shaft free.

Next morning, after Cagan’s body had been burned on a pyre, almost all the tribe walked south to the headland where the river met the sea, and there they waited above the gray waters. The white birds wheeled and their cries were like the wailing of drowned spirits. Saban was on the cliff top with Scathel and Mereth, and Kargan had come with the folk who had followed him the previous night, but Aurenna did not go. “The boats will come,” she had told Saban that morning, “and I do not need to see them.” She stayed with Haragg.

The morning passed and all that came was a squall. The rain hissed on the sea and the cold wind whipped it into the faces of the watching crowd. Scathel was praying, Saban was hunched in the lee of a rock and Kargan was pacing up and down the cliff top thumping the pale grass with his heavy spear. The sun was hidden by cloud.

Kargan finally faced Saban. “You and your brother have brought a madness to Sarmennyn,” he said flatly.

“I brought you nothing,” Saban retorted. “Your madness came when you lost the gold.”

“The gold was stolen!” Kargan shouted.

“Not by us.”

“And a temple cannot be moved!”

“The temple must be moved,” Saban said wearily, “or you and I will never have happiness again.”

“Happiness?” Kargan spat. “You think the gods want our happiness?”

“If you want to know what the gods want,” Saban said, “then ask Scathel. He’s a priest,” and he gestured toward the gaunt man who had been praying at the cliff’s edge, but Scathel was no longer holding his arms to the sky. Instead he was staring eastward, staring into the gray, shifting veils of rain and suddenly he shouted. He shouted again, pointed his staff and all the watching people turned to see where the high priest looked.

And they saw boats.

They saw a fleet of boats: a fleet racing home against rain and wind as it was carried on the last of the tide’s surging ebb. Lewydd had split the great hulls apart so that each triple boat was now three, and the beams that had supported the stones were stored inside the hulls driven by cold men eager to be home. The crowd, which the night before had murdered Cagan and had been ready to slaughter everyone in Aurenna’s settlement, now cheered. Lewydd, standing in the leading boat, waved his paddle. Saban was counting the boats and saw they were all there, every one. They came from the sullen waves into the lee of the headland in the river’s mouth where the exhausted paddlers waited for the tide to turn.

The evening tide brought the fleet upriver and, just as Aurenna had promised, the crews sang as they guided their big boats into her settlement. They sang the song of Dilan, the sea god, and they drove their paddles in time to the song’s rhythm and the crowd, which had followed them upstream, sang with them.

Lewydd jumped ashore and was greeted with embraces, but he fought through the crowd to put his arms about Saban. “We did it,” he exulted, “we did it!”

Saban had made a great fire in the open space beside the half-finished boats. The women had pounded roots and grain, and Saban had ordered venison roasted on the fire. The boats’ crews were given dry pelts and Kargan returned from Kereval’s settlement with pots of liquor and still more people so that it seemed to Saban that all of Sarmennyn was crowded around his home to hear Lewydd’s tale. He told it well and the listeners groaned or gasped or cheered as he described how the boats had carried the stones to the River Sul at summer’s end. There had been no difficulty in the voyage, he said. The boats rode the seas well, the stones stayed secure and the river was safely reached, but then their troubles began.

The supporters of Stakis, who had been defeated by Lengar, still roamed Drewenna and some of those men demanded tribute that Lewydd did not have. So he stayed at the Sul’s mouth where he made himself a palisade and waited for men to come from Kellan, the new chief of Drewenna, and drive the vagabonds away.

Kellan’s spearmen escorted the boats up the Sul, but when they reached the shallow headwaters where the boats could no longer
float there were no sledges waiting. Kellan had promised to make the sledges, but he had broken the promise and so Lewydd walked to Ratharryn and there argued and pleaded with Lengar, who, finally, agreed to persuade Kellan. By then, however, the autumn winds were cold and the rain was falling and it took long days of tiresome work to fell the trees and trim the trunks and make the great sledges onto which the stones, and then the boats, were laid.