Edward Marston - The Wolves of Savernake

“What ails you, Ralph?” asked Gervase.

“I wanted to feel the blood race in my veins.”

“You frightened us.”

“We needed some exercise,” said Ralph, slapping the neck of his stallion with an affectionate palm. “And we wanted to see it first.”

“See what?”

“Wait for the others, Gervase.”

“But what did you see?”

“Wait, wait …”

Canon Hubert coaxed a final spurt out of the donkey with his chubby legs and joined the two men. Like Gervase, he was some yards short of the summit and his view ahead was blocked by the ample frame of Ralph Delchard. Righteous indignation turned the prelate’s fat cheeks to the colour of plums. He waved an admonitory finger and put severe reproach into his voice.

“Have you run mad?” he demanded.

“Only with joy,” said Ralph.

“You are here to guide and protect me, not to desert me in open country where thieves might lurk.”

“No man would dare to lift a hand against you, Canon Hubert,” said Ralph with amusement. “Seated upon that fine beast, you look like Christ Himself riding into Jerusalem.”

“That is blasphemy!”

“It is a compliment.”

“Beware of a wicked tongue.”

“I speak but as I find. Besides,” added Ralph, “you had no need to fear. With one man gone, you still had six left to throw a ring of steel around you.” He indicated the other riders, who had now reached them. “Seven of you in all, Canon Hubert. That is a good, round, comforting biblical number.”

The prelate blustered, the donkey brayed, Ralph chuckled. Gervase Bret found smooth words once more to calm the upset. It was not the first time that Ralph Delchard had teased the short, plump, pompous canon, and it fell to the youngest member of the group to reconcile them. A sense of duty was finally restored to the expedition. An uneasy companionship was resumed.

They were eight in number. Ralph Delchard was leader of the commission, a proud, sometimes arrogant, and always strong-willed character with the rough handsomeness of a man of action. The adipose Canon Hubert of Winchester, a solemn soul with an acute mind, gave the company its spiritual weight, and his emaciated assistant, Brother Simon, a white wraith in a black cowl, lent his own spectral religiosity.

Gervase Bret was the real force in the party, a shrewd and brilliant lawyer of little more than five and twenty who had risen to a high position as a Chancery clerk and who had been selected for this assignment by the king himself. Slight of build and of medium height, Gervase had a studious air that belied his capacity to defend himself against physical attack. His short dark hair framed a face that had a boyish appeal behind its keen intelligence. Four men-at-arms accompanied the commissioners, picked by Ralph from his own retinue to provide good humour on the journey as well as to enforce its purpose.

Two pack-horses were towed in the rear. Ralph Delchard wore mantle, tunic, and cap of a cut and quality which marked his status, but his soldiers were in matching helm and hauberk. All of them were skilled with a sword and two of them proficient with the bows that were slung across their backs. Safety had been ensured on the journey.

Any robbers would be deterred by the sight of so much expertise.

Canon Hubert had recovered his composure.

“Have you taken leave of your senses?” he enquired.

Ralph shook his head. “My senses bid me ride off.”

“But why?”

“He wanted to see something,” explained Gervase.

“See what? See where?”

Ralph Delchard tugged on his reins to pull his horse out of their line of vision. He flung out an arm to gesture at the landscape ahead and drank in its marvel anew.

“Come forward,” he beckoned. “And behold!”

They nudged their animals the last few yards up the incline so that they were able to survey the prospect below. Then they gaped. Gervase Bret was frankly astonished. Canon Hubert was just as frankly horrified. Brother Simon blanched with apprehension and began to mumble a prayer. The soldiers had seen it before, but they were still impressed and bemused afresh. Even the donkey was cowed into silence.

What they saw was so stirring and remarkable that it shook them to the core. They were in the presence of sheer magic. Salisbury Plain stretched away before them in its crushing enormity, but it was no flat and featureless expanse of land. It rose and fell like the waves of the sea, surging and retreating, billowing and dying, forever chang-ing shape and colour as the clouds scudded across the sky to obscure the sun before allowing it to filter through again and paint its vivid hues upon the earth once more. As a gust of wind set the grass and the scrub in motion, it seemed as if the waves were dancing with crazed delight.

But there in the middle, unmoved and majestic, awesome in its scope and unnerving in its certainty, was an island of defiance. Con-centric circles of gigantic stones were enclosed within a much wider circle of chalk rubble which was banked up to a height of six feet or more and fronted by a deep ditch. The earthwork was broken by a broad gap on the north-east side and there were smaller gashes elsewhere. A hundred feet inside this rampart was the first circle of stones, some thirty in total, massive uprights which were topped by an almost continuous line of lintels. A few had been displaced and had crashed to the ground, gouging out a new home for their troublesome bulk. The huge blocks were carved from natural sandstone and all dressed to shape.

Within this imposing circle was a smaller, tighter bluestone circle, incomplete and largely in ruin. Uprights lay at curious angles. Dis-carded lintels burrowed into the ground. Some of the rock looked as if it had just been hewn from its source and not yet cut to shape. There was also a horseshoe of even bigger sandstone blocks, inside which a bluestone horseshoe had been erected with uprights that increased in height towards the centre. It was a sight so unexpected in such a setting, a sign of life in a seeming void, a mysterious order in a place of chaos. Time had attacked it viciously, but its primitive power remained. What hit the onlookers most was this sense of hideous permanence.

Canon Hubert could bear to view it no longer.

“Let us ride on,” he insisted.

“But I had to show you Stonehenge,” said Ralph.

“It is the work of the Devil.”

“So is our king,” reminded the other mischievously. “His father, the duke, was of that name: Robert the Devil. If we serve William, we serve the Devil through him.”

“Take us away from here,” said Hubert querulously. “It is a place of damnation.”

“No,” said Gervase, still excited, still absorbed, still running an eye to count the stones and trace their patterns. “Truly, it is a place of worship.”

“Worship!”

“Yes, Canon Hubert. Worship of what and by whom I may not tell.

But there is purpose down there on the plain. There is homage.

There is sacrifice.”

“To Satan himself!”

The prelate now took refuge in prayer and the donkey shifted restlessly beneath his holy burden. Brother Simon was torn between fear and fascination, joining his master in appealing to heaven while sneaking an occasional glance back at this miracle in stone. The soldiers were intrigued but warily so, as if sensing a hostility in the weird formations below them. When Ralph and Gervase elected to take a closer look at the phenomenon, none of the men was keen to go with them. Ignoring the loud protests of Canon Hubert and the feeble bleating of Brother Simon, the two friends set off at a canter across almost a mile of undulating plain.

Stonehenge was even more daunting at close quarters, but the couple rode right into the heart of it. They noted the pits in the ground at regular intervals and the small white circles on its surface where the chalk had been exposed. But it was the stones themselves which intrigued them. Ralph Delchard and Gervase Bret felt like insects walking through a range of mountains. Solid rock dwarfed them to insignificance. When they had set out from Winchester, they had seen masons swarming over the half-built cathedral and hoisting up their stone with strong ropes. At Salisbury, too, they had witnessed much activity on the castle walls as they were extended and strengthened with Norman thoroughness. Nothing seen then could compare with this. The largest blocks used in cathedral or castle were only a fraction of the size and weight of the colossal uprights.