Bernard Cornwell - Stonehenge - A Novel of 2000 BC

‘We don’t even know that it is the gold of Sarmennyn,’ Hengall said, though without much conviction.

‘It is,’ Hirac said, gesturing at the single small lozenge, brought by Saban, that glittered on the earth floor between them. Sarmennyn was an Outfolk country many miles to the west, and for the last two moons there had been rumours how the people of Sarmennyn had lost a great treasure. ‘Saban saw the treasure,’ Hirac said, ‘and it is the Outfolk gold, and the Outfolk worship Slaol, though they give him another name …’ He paused, trying to remember the name, but it would not come. Slaol was the god of the sun, a mighty god, but his power was rivalled by Lahanna, the goddess of the moon, and the two, who had once been lovers, were now estranged. That was the rivalry that dominated Ratharryn and made every decision agonizing, for a gesture to the one god was resented by the other, and Hirac’s task was to keep all the rival gods, not just the sun and the moon, but the wind and the soil and the stream and the trees and the beasts and the grass and the bracken and the rain, all of the innumerable gods and spirits and unseen powers, content. Hirac picked up the single small lozenge. ‘Slaol sent us the gold,’ he said, ‘and gold is Slaol’s metal, but the lozenge is Lahanna’s symbol.’

Hengall hissed, ‘Are you saying the gold is Lahanna’s?’

Hirac said nothing for a while. The chief waited. It was the high priest’s job to determine the meaning of strange events, though Hengall would do his best to influence those meanings to the tribe’s advantage. ‘Slaol could have kept the gold in Sarmennyn,’ Hirac said eventually, ‘but he did not. So it is those folk who will suffer its loss. Its coming here is not a bad omen.’

‘Good,’ Hengall grunted.

‘But the shape of the gold,’ Hirac went on carefully, ‘tells us it once belonged to Lahanna, and I think she tried to retrieve it. Did not Saban say the stranger was asking for Sannas?’

‘He did.’

‘And Sannas reveres Lahanna above all the gods,’ the priest said, ‘so Slaol must have sent it to us to keep it from reaching her. But Lahanna will be jealous, and she will want something from us.’

‘A sacrifice?’ Hengall asked suspiciously.

The priest nodded, and Hengall scowled, wondering how many cattle the priest would want to slaughter in Lahanna’s temple, but Hirac did not propose any such depredation on the tribe’s wealth. The gold was important, its coming was extraordinary and the response must be proportionately generous. ‘The goddess will want a spirit,’ the high priest said.

Hengall brightened when he realized his cattle were safe. ‘You can take that fool Camaban,’ the chief said, talking of his disowned second son. ‘Make him useful, crush his skull.’

Hirac rocked back on his haunches, his eyes half closed. ‘He is marked by Lahanna,’ he said quietly. Camaban had come from his mother with a crescent birthmark on his belly and the crescent, like the lozenge, was a shape sacred to the moon. ‘Lahanna might be angry if we kill him.’

‘Maybe she would like his company?’ Hengall suggested slyly. ‘Maybe that is why she marked him? So he would be sent to her?’

‘True,’ Hirac allowed, and the notion emboldened him to a decision. ‘We shall keep the gold,’ he said, ‘and placate Lahanna with the spirit of Camaban.’

‘Good,’ Hengall said. He turned to the leather screen and shouted a name. A slave girl crept nervously into the firelight. ‘If I’m to fight Lengar in the morning,’ the chief said to the high priest, ‘then I’d better make another son now.’ He gestured the girl to the pile of furs that was his bed.

The high priest gathered the baby’s bones, then hurried to his own hut through the growing rain that washed the chalk from his skin.

The wind blew on. Lightning slithered to earth, turning the world soot-black and chalk-white. The gods were screaming and men could only cower.

Saban feared going to sleep, not because the storm god was hammering the earth, but because he thought Lengar might come in the night to punish him for taking the lozenge. But his elder brother left him undisturbed and in the dawn Saban crept from his mother’s hut into a damp and chill wind. The remnants of the storm gusted patches of mist within the vast earthen bank which surrounded the settlement while the sun hid its face behind cloud, appearing only as an occasional dull disc in the vaporous grey. A thatched roof, sodden with rainwater, had collapsed in the night, and folk marvelled that the family had not been crushed. A succession of women and slaves went through the embankment’s southern causeway to fetch water from the swollen river, while children carried the night’s pots of urine to the tanners’ pits which had been flooded, but they all hurried back, eager not to miss the confrontation between Lengar and his father. Even folk who lived beyond the great wall, in the huts up on the higher land, had heard the news and suddenly found reason to come to Ratharryn that morning. Lengar had found the Outfolk gold, Hengall wanted it, and one of the two had to prevail.

Hengall appeared first. He emerged from his hut wearing a great cape of bear fur and strolled with apparent unconcern about the settlement. He greeted Saban by ruffling his hair, then talked with the priests about the problems of replacing one of the great posts of the Temple of Lahanna, and afterwards he sat on a stool outside his hut and listened to anxious accounts of the damage done by the night’s rain to the wheatfields. ‘We can always buy grain,’ Hengall announced in a loud voice so that as many people as possible could hear him. ‘There are those who say that the wealth hidden in my hut should be used to hire weapons, but it might serve us better if we buy grain. And we have pigs to eat, and rain doesn’t kill the fish in the river. We won’t starve.’ He opened his cloak and slapped his big bare belly. ‘It won’t shrink this year!’ Folk laughed.

Galeth arrived with a half-dozen men and squatted near his brother’s hut. All of them carried spears and Hengall understood that they had come to support him, but he made no mention of the expected confrontation. Instead he asked Galeth whether he had found an oak large enough to replace the decayed temple pole in Lahanna’s shrine.

‘We found it,’ Galeth said, ‘but we didn’t cut it.’

‘You didn’t cut it?’

‘The day was late, the axes blunt.’

Hengall grinned. ‘Yet I hear your woman’s pregnant?’

Galeth looked coyly pleased. His first wife had died a year before, leaving him with a son a year younger than Saban, and he had just taken a new woman. ‘She is,’ he admitted.

‘Then at least one of your blades is sharp,’ Hengall said, provoking more laughter.

The laughter died abruptly, for Lengar chose that moment to appear from his own hut, and in that grey morning he shone like the sun itself. Ralla, his mother and Hengall’s oldest wife, must have sat through the stormy darkness threading the small lozenges on sinews so that her son could wear them all as necklaces, and she had sewn the four large gold pieces directly onto his deerskin jerkin over which he wore the stranger’s gold-buckled belt. A dozen young warriors, all of them Lengar’s close hunting companions, followed him while behind that spear-carrying band was a muddy group of excited children who waved sticks in imitation of the hunting spear in Lengar’s hand.

Lengar ignored his father at first. Instead he paraded through the huts, past the two temples built within the great embankment, then up to the potters’ huts and tanners’ pits at the north of the enclosure. His followers clashed their spears together, and more and more folk gathered behind him so that eventually he led his excited procession in an intricate path that twisted between the rain-soaked thatch of the low round huts. Only after he had threaded the settlement twice did he turn towards his father.