Stonehenge (51 page)

A moon later Camaban said that Aurenna had dreamed that the faces of the stones had been polished to a shine, and by then Saban was so numb to the immensity of the task that he just nodded. He did not try to tell Camaban how huge was the effort needed to turn each finished stone so its four sides could be ground into a shining surface, instead he just told six of the younger slaves to start polishing one of the finished pillars. They rubbed stone hammers back and forth, back and forth, and sometimes poured scraps of flint, sand and stone dust onto the surface and ground the abrasive mix into the stubborn rock. All summer they pushed the hammers backward and forward, tearing their hands to raw shreds as they scraped the flinty dust, and at the summer’s end there was a patch
of stone the size of a lamb’s pelt that was smooth and, when wet, shiny. “More!” Camaban demanded, “more! Make it shine!”

“You must give me more workers,” Saban said.

“Why not whip the ones you have?” Camaban asked.

“They must not be whipped,” Haragg said. The high priest limped now, his back was bent and his muscles slack, but there was still a great power in his deep voice. “They must not be whipped,” he repeated harshly.

“Why not?” Camaban wanted to know.

“It is a temple to end the world’s woes,” Haragg said. “You want it to be born in blood and pain?”

“I want it made!” Camaban screamed. For a few heartbeats it seemed as though he would bring his precious mace crashing down onto one of the boulders and Saban flinched in expectation of the smooth head breaking into a thousand shards, but Camaban controlled his anger. “Slaol wants it built,” he said instead, “he tells me it can be done, yet nothing happens here! Nothing! You might as well piss on the stones for all the progress you’re making.”

“Give Saban more workers,” Haragg suggested, and so Camaban led raiding parties deep into the northern lands and brought back captives who spoke unknown languages, slaves who tattooed their faces red, slaves who worshipped gods Saban had never heard of, but still more slaves were needed for the work was cruelly hard and painfully slow, and Saban had yet to move any of the long boulders that would form the pillars of the sun’s house at the temple’s center. He had cut and shaped the big sledge runners, and those timbers had seasoned in Cathallo, but he had not dared try to move the gigantic stones.

He went to Galeth for advice. His uncle was old and feeble now, his scanty hair was white and his beard a mere wisp. Lidda, his woman, was dead and Galeth was blind, but in his blindness he could still envisage stones and levers and sledges. “Moving a large stone is no different from moving a small one,” he told Saban. “It’s just that everything is larger: the sledge, the levers and the ox team.” Galeth shivered. It was a warm night, but he had a large fire in his hut and had pulled a bearskin about his shoulders.

“Are you sick?” Saban asked.

“A summer fever,” Galeth said dismissively.

Saban frowned. “I can build the sledge,” he said, “and make levers, but I do not see how to shift the stones onto their sledges. They’re too big.”

“Then you must build the sledge under the stone,” Galeth suggested. He paused, his body racked with the shakes. “It’s nothing,” he said, “nothing, just a summer fever.” He waited until the shivering fit had passed, then described how he would first dig a trench down each of the stone’s long sides. Once the trenches had reached the bedrock chalk, he said, the huge runners could be laid down each flank. Then the stone must be levered up, using the sledge runners as fulcrums. “Do it one end at a time,” Galeth advised, “and put beams under the stone. That way you won’t have to shift the stone onto the sledge, but instead build the sledge under the stone.”

Saban thought about it. It would work, he decided, it would work very well. A ramp would have to be made in front of the sledge, and that ramp would need to be long and shallow so that oxen could haul the boulder up from the bedrock to the turf. How many oxen? Galeth did not know, but guessed Saban would need more beasts than had ever been harnessed to a sledge before. More ropes, more beams to spread the load of the ropes, and more men to guide the oxen. “But you can do it,” the old man said. He shivered again, then moaned.

“You’re sick, uncle.”

“Only fever, boy.” Galeth drew the bear’s pelt tighter about his old shoulders. “But I shall be glad to go to the Death Place,” he said, “and join my dear Lidda. You will carry me, Saban?”

“Of course I will,” Saban said, “but it will be years yet!”

“And Camaban tells me I shall live on earth again,” Galeth said, ignoring Saban’s optimism, “but I do not see how that can be.”

“He says what?”

“That I shall come back. That my soul will use the gates of his new temple to return to earth.” The old man sat silent for a while. The flames of his fire made the lines on his face deep shadowed like knife cuts. “I must have raised twenty temples in my life,” he said, breaking the silence, “and I saw nothing get better with any one of them. But this one will be different.”

“This one will be different,” Saban agreed.

“I hope so,” the old man said, “but I cannot help thinking that
the folk of Cathallo said the same thing when they made their big shrine.” Galeth chuckled and Saban reflected that his uncle was not nearly as slow-thinking as folk thought. “Or do you think,” Galeth asked, “that they moved the stones because they had nothing better to do?” He thought about that, then reached out and touched a deerskin bag in which he kept Lidda’s flensed bones. He wanted his own bones added to hers before they were buried. He shivered again, then waved a hand to avert Saban’s expression of concern. “This longest stone,” he said after a while, “is it slender?”

Saban found a piece of kindling in a pile at the hut’s edge and put it into Galeth’s hand. “Just like that,” he said.

Galeth felt the long, thin sliver of wood. “You know what you should do?”

“Tell me.”

“Put it in the hole sideways,” the old man said, and showed what he meant by bending the long thin piece of wood. “A long flat rock could snap in two when you try to hoist it,” he explained. He turned the scrap of wood sideways and no amount of pressure could bend or snap it, but when he bent it again flatwise it snapped easily. “Put it in the hole sideways,” he said again, tossing the scraps aside.

“I will,” Saban promised.

“And carry my corpse to the Death Place. Promise me that.”

“I will carry you, uncle,” Saban promised a second time.

“I shall sleep now,” Galeth said, and Saban backed from the hut and went to Camaban to tell him Galeth was sick. Camaban promised to take him an infusion of herbs, but when Saban went back to his uncle’s hut he could not wake the old man. Galeth lay on his back, his mouth open and the hairs of his moustache not moving with any breath. Saban gently tapped Galeth’s cheek and the old man’s blind eyes opened, but there was no life there. He had died as gently as a feather falls.

The women of the tribe washed Galeth’s body, then Mereth, his son, and Saban laid the corpse on a hurdle woven from willow. Next morning the women sang the body to the settlement’s entrance before Mereth and Saban carried it on to the Death Place. Haragg walked in front of the corpse while a young priest came behind and played a lament on a bone flute. The body was covered with an ox hide on which Saban had strewn some ivy. Camaban
did not come, and the only other mourners were Galeth’s two younger sons who were Mereth’s half-brothers.

The Death Place lay to the south of Ratharryn, not so very far from the Sky Temple, though it was separated from it by a wide valley and hidden by a wood of beech and hazel trees. The Death Place was itself a temple, dedicated to the ancestors, though it was never used for worship, or for bull dances, or for weddings. It was for the dead and so it was left derelict and overgrown. It stank, especially in the high summer, and as soon as the rank smell soured the funeral party’s nostrils the young priest hurried ahead to dispel the spirits which were known to cluster about the temple. He reached the sun gate and shrieked at the unseen souls. Ravens called harshly back, then reluctantly spread their black wings and flew to the nearby trees, though the bolder of the birds settled on the remains of a ring of short timber poles which stood inside the temple’s low bank. A fox snarled at the approaching men from among the nettles in the ditch, then ran to the trees. “Safe now,” the young priest called.

Mereth and Saban carried Galeth through the entrance that faced the rising midsummer sun, then threaded the small spirit stakes, which were scattered throughout the temple. Haragg found an empty space and there the two men laid the hurdle down. Mereth pulled the heavy ox hide from the naked corpse, then he and Saban tipped Galeth onto the rank grass, which grew so thick among the dead. The old man was on his side, mouth agape, and Saban pulled on a stiff shoulder so that his uncle lay staring toward the clouded sky. A slave of Camaban’s who had died only two days before lay close by; already her pregnant belly had been torn apart by beasts and her face ravaged by ravens’ beaks. A dozen other bodies lay in the Death Place, two of them almost reduced to skeletons. One had weeds growing through its ribcage and the young priest bent over the bones to judge whether the time had come to remove them. The spirits of the dead lingered in this grim place until the last of their flesh was gone, and only then did they rise into the sky to join the ancestors.

Galeth’s younger sons had brought a sharpened stake and a stone maul which they gave to Mereth. He squatted beside his father’s corpse and banged the spirit stake into the turf until it struck the
bedrock chalk, and then he gave it three more sharp taps to tell Garlanna that another soul had passed from her domain. Saban closed his eyes and cuffed away a tear.

“What’s this?” Haragg asked and Saban turned to see that the high priest was frowning at the turf beside a half-rotted body. Saban stepped over the corpse to see that a lozenge shape had been scratched into the yellow grass. “It’s Lahanna’s symbol,” Haragg said, frowning.

“Does it matter?” Saban asked.

“It is not her temple,” Haragg said, then scratched at the symbol with his foot, obliterating the lozenge shape from the turf. “Maybe it’s just child’s play,” he said. “Do children come here?”

“They’re not supposed to,” Saban said, “but they do. I did.”

“Child’s play.” Haragg dismissed the lozenge. “Have we finished?”

“We’re finished,” Saban said.

Mereth looked a last time at his father, then walked from the temple and tossed the ivy that had covered the corpse down the deep hole that led to Garlanna’s mansion. He and his half-brothers walked on through the hazels and the beech trees, then Mereth realized that Saban was still lingering by the corpse. “Aren’t you coming?” he shouted back.

“I want to say a prayer here,” Saban said, “alone.”

So Mereth and the others went and Saban waited amidst the foul stench. He knew who had carved the lozenge shape in the Death Place’s rank soil, so he stood beside his uncle’s pale corpse until he heard a rustle in the trees. “Derrewyn,” he then said, turning toward the noise and surprising himself by the eagerness in his voice.

And Derrewyn surprised him by smiling as she stepped from the trees, then surprised him further for, when he had crossed the low bank and ditch, she put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him. “You look older,” she said.

“I am older,” Saban said.

“White hairs.” She touched his temples. She was painfully thin and her hair was tangled and dirty. She had been living as an outlaw, harried from woodland to woodland, and her pelts were filthy with mud and dead leaves. Her skin was stretched tight over her cheekbones, reminding Saban of Sannas’s skull face. “Do I look older?” she asked him.

“As beautiful as ever,” Saban said.

She smiled. “You lie,” she said gently.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Saban told her. “Camaban’s spearmen search for you.” The rumors of Derrewyn’s survival had never subsided and Camaban had sent scores of warriors and dogs to scour the forests.

“I see them,” Derrewyn said scornfully. “Clumsy spearmen blundering through the trees, following their hounds, but no hound can see my spirit. Do you know that Camaban sent me a messenger?”

“He did?” Saban was surprised.

“He released a slave into the forests, carrying in his head Camaban’s words. ‘Come to Ratharryn,’ he said, ‘and kneel to me and I shall let you live and worship Lahanna.’” Derrewyn laughed at the memory. “I sent the slave back to Camaban. Or, rather, I left his head on Ratharryn’s embankment with its tongue cut out. The rest of him I gave to the dogs. Do you still have the lozenge?”

“Of course.” Saban touched the pouch where he kept the sliver of Sarmennyn’s gold.

“Guard it well,” Derrewyn said, then she walked to the Death Place’s ditch and stared at the bodies. “I hear,” she said over her shoulder, “that your wife has become a goddess?”

“She has never claimed that,” Saban insisted.

“But she will not lie with you.”

“Did you come all this way to tell me that?” Saban asked, nettled.

Derrewyn laughed. “You do not know where I have come from. Just as you do not know that your wife lies with Camaban.”

“That isn’t true!” Saban snapped angrily.

“Isn’t it?” Derrewyn asked, turning. “Yet men say Camaban is Slaol and the women claim Aurenna is Lahanna. Are you not supposed to be bringing them together with your stones? A sacred marriage? Perhaps they rehearse the wedding, Saban?”

Saban touched his groin to avert evil. “You tell stories,” he said bitterly, “you have always told stories.”

Derrewyn shrugged. “If you say so, Saban.” She saw how much she had upset him and so she walked to him and lightly touched his hand. “I will not argue with you,” she said humbly, “not on a day that I come begging a favor from you.”

“What you said isn’t true!”

“I do tell stories,” Derrewyn said humbly, “I am sorry.”

Saban took a deep breath. “A favor?” he asked guardedly.

Derrewyn made an abrupt gesture toward the trees and Saban had the impression of six or seven people back there in the shadowed beeches, but only two emerged from the trees. One was a tall and fair-haired woman in a ragged deerskin tunic half covered with a sheepskin cloak, while the other was a child, perhaps Lallic’s age or a year younger. She was a dark-haired girl with wide eyes and a frightened face. She stared at Saban, but clung tight to the woman’s hand and tried to hide beneath the skirt of the sheepskin cloak.