Bernard Cornwell - Stonehenge - A Novel of 2000 BC

‘Lengar!’ Saban scrambled from the hazels. ‘Let me fetch father!’

‘Quiet!’ Lengar had taken one of his own black-feathered arrows from its quiver and placed it on the short bowstring. He walked towards Saban, aiming the bow at him and grinning when he saw the terror on his half-brother’s face.

The stranger also stared at Saban, seeing a tall good-looking boy with tangled black hair and bright anxious eyes. ‘Sannas,’ the stranger begged Saban, ‘take me to Sannas.’

‘Sannas doesn’t live here,’ Saban said, understanding only the sorceress’s name.

‘We live here,’ Lengar announced, now pointing his arrow at the stranger, ‘and you’re an Outlander and you steal our cattle, enslave our women and cheat our traders.’ He let the second arrow loose and, like the first, it thumped into the stranger’s chest, though this time into the ribs on his right side. Again the man was jerked aside, but once again he forced himself upright as though his spirit refused to leave his wounded body.

‘I can give you power,’ he said, as a trickle of bubbly pink blood spilled from his mouth and into his short beard. ‘Power,’ he whispered.

But Lengar did not understand the man’s tongue. He had shot two arrows and still the man refused to die, so Lengar picked up his own longbow, laid an arrow on its string, and faced the stranger. He drew the huge bow back.

The stranger shook his head, but he knew his fate now and he stared Lengar in the eyes to show he was not afraid to die. He cursed his killer, though he doubted the gods would listen to him for he was a thief and a fugitive.

Lengar loosed the string and the black-feathered arrow struck deep into the stranger’s heart. He must have died in an instant, yet he still thrust his body up as though to fend off the flint arrow-head and then he fell back, shuddered for a few heartbeats, and was still.

Lengar spat on his right hand and rubbed the spittle against the inside of his left wrist where the stranger’s bowstring had lashed and stung the skin; Saban, watching his half-brother, understood then why the stranger wore the strip of stone against his forearm. Lengar danced a few steps, celebrating his kill, but he was nervous. Indeed, he was not certain that the man really was dead for he approached the body very cautiously and prodded it with one horn-tipped end of his bow before leaping back in case the corpse came to life and sprang at him, but the stranger did not move.

Lengar edged forward again, snatched the bag from the stranger’s dead hand and scuttled away from the body. For a moment or two he stared into the corpse’s ashen face, then, confident the man’s spirit was truly gone, he tore the lace that secured the bag’s neck. He peered inside, was motionless for a heartbeat, then screamed for joy. He had been given power.

Saban, terrified by his brother’s scream, shrank back, then edged forward again as Lengar emptied the bag’s contents onto the grass beside the whitened ox-skull. To Saban it looked as though a stream of sunlight tumbled from the leather bag.

There were dozens of small lozenge-shaped gold ornaments, each about the size of a man’s thumbnail, and four great lozenge plaques that were as big as a man’s hand. The lozenges, both big and small, had tiny holes drilled through their narrower points so they could be strung on a sinew or sewn to a garment, and all were made of very thin gold sheets incised with straight lines, though their pattern meant nothing to Lengar who snatched back one of the small lozenges that Saban had dared pick up from the grass. Lengar gathered the lozenges, great and small, into a pile. ‘You know what this is?’ he asked his younger brother, gesturing at the heap.

‘Gold,’ Saban said.

‘Power,’ Lengar said. He glanced at the dead man. ‘Do you know what you can do with gold?’

‘Wear it?’ Saban suggested.

‘Fool! You buy men with it.’ Lengar rocked back on his heels. The cloud shadows were dark now, and the hazels were tossing in the freshening wind. ‘You buy spearmen,’ he said, ‘you buy archers and warriors! You buy power!’

Saban grabbed one of the small lozenges, then dodged out of the way when Lengar tried to take it back. The boy retreated across the small cleared space and, when it appeared that Lengar would not chase him, he squatted and peered at the scrap of gold. It seemed an odd thing with which to buy power. Saban could imagine men working for food or for pots, for flints or for slaves, or for bronze that could be hammered into knives, axes, swords and spearheads, but for this bright metal? It could not cut, it just was, yet even on that clouded day Saban could see how the metal shone. It shone as though a piece of the sun was trapped within the metal and he suddenly shivered, not because he was naked, but because he had never touched gold before; he had never held a scrap of the almighty sun in his hand. ‘We must take it to father,’ he said reverently.

‘So the old fool can add it to his hoard?’ Lengar asked scornfully. He went back to the body and folded the cloak back over the stumps of the arrows to reveal that the dead man’s trews were held up by a belt buckled with a great lump of heavy gold while more of the small lozenges hung on a sinew about his neck.

Lengar glanced at his younger brother, licked his lips, then picked up one of the arrows that had fallen from the stranger’s hand. He was still carrying his longbow and now he placed the black-and-white fledged arrow onto the string. He was gazing into the hazel undergrowth, deliberately avoiding his half-brother’s gaze, but Saban suddenly understood what was in Lengar’s mind. If Saban lived to tell their father of this Outfolk treasure then Lengar would lose it, or would at least have to fight for it, but if Saban were discovered dead, with an Outfolk’s black-and-white feathered arrow in his ribs, then no one would ever suspect that Lengar had done the killing, nor that Lengar had taken a great treasure for his own use. Thunder swelled in the west and the cold wind flattened the tops of the hazel trees. Lengar was drawing back the bow, though still he did not look at Saban. ‘Look at this!’ Saban suddenly cried, holding up the small lozenge. ‘Look!’

Lengar relaxed the bowstring’s pressure as he peered, and at that instant the boy took off like a hare sprung from grass. He burst through the hazels and sprinted across the wide causeway of the Old Temple’s entrance of the sun. There were more rotted posts there, just like the ones around the death house. He had to swerve to negotiate their stumps and, just as he twisted through them, Lengar’s arrow whirred past his ear.

Thunder tore the sky to shreds as the first rain fell. The drops were huge. A stab of lightning flashed down to the opposite hillside. Saban ran, twisting and turning, not daring to look back and see if Lengar pursued him. The rain fell harder and harder, filling the air with its malevolent roar, but making a screen to hide the boy as he ran north and east towards the settlement. He screamed as he ran, hoping that some herdsman might still be on the pastureland, but he saw no one until he had passed the grave mounds at the brow of the hill and was running down the muddy path between the small fields of wheat that were being battered by the drenching rain.

Galeth, Saban’s uncle, and five other men had been returning to the settlement when they heard the boy’s shouts. They turned back up the hill, and Saban ran through the rain to clutch at his uncle’s deerskin jerkin. ‘What is it, boy?’ Galeth asked.

Saban clung to his uncle. ‘He tried to kill me!’ he gasped. ‘He tried to kill me!’

‘Who?’ Galeth asked. He was the youngest brother of Saban’s father, tall, thick-bearded and famous for his feats of strength. Galeth, it was said, had once raised a whole temple pole, and not one of the small ones either, but a big trimmed trunk that jutted high above the other poles. Like his companions, Galeth was carrying a heavy bronze-bladed axe for he had been felling trees when the storm came. ‘Who tried to kill you?’ Galeth asked.