Bernard Cornwell - Stonehenge

'And if he doesn't?' Derrewyn asked.

'Then I have built a great temple,' Saban said firmly, 'and when the madness is over we shall come here and we shall dance and we shall pray and the gods will use the stones as they think best.'

'And that is all you've done?' Derrewyn asked sourly. 'Built a temple?'

Saban remembered what Galeth had said so shortly before his death. 'What did the folk of Cathallo believe they were doing when they dragged those great boulders from the hills?' he asked Derrewyn. 'What miracle were those stones going to work?'

Derrewyn stared at him for a heartbeat, but had no answer. She turned to Kilda. 'Tomorrow,' she said, 'you will tell the slaves that they are to be killed on midwinter's eve. Tell them that in my name. And tell them that tomorrow night there will be a path of light to take them to safety. And you, Saban' — she turned and pointed at him with a bony finger — 'tomorrow night you will sleep in Ratharryn and you will send Leir and my daughter back to the island. If Hanna stays in Ratharryn she will likely die, for she is still a slave of this temple even if she does rut with your son.'

Saban frowned. 'Will I see my son again?'

'We shall come back,' Derrewyn confirmed. 'We shall come back, and let me promise you something, and I promise it on my life. Your brother is right, Saban. On the day this temple is dedicated the dead will walk. You will see it. In three days' time, when night falls on Ratharryn, the dead will walk.'

She pulled the hood over her head and, without a backward glance, walked away.

Kilda would not go with Saban to the settlement. 'I am a slave,' she told him. 'If I stay in Ratharryn I shall be killed.'

'I wouldn't permit it,' Saban said.

'The temple has made your brother mad,' Kilda responded, 'and what you will not permit will give him delight. I shall stay here and walk Derrewyn's path of light.'

Saban accepted her choice, though without any pleasure. 'I am getting old,' he told her, 'and my bones ache. I could not bear to lose a third woman.'

'You will not lose me,' Kilda promised. 'When the madness is over we shall be together again.'

'When the madness is over,' Saban promised, 'I shall marry you.'

With that promise he walked to Ratharryn. He was in a nervous mood, but so, he discovered, was the settlement, which was filled with an uneasy anticipation. Everyone was waiting for the temple's dedication, though no one other than Camaban seemed certain what change would come in two days' time, and even Camaban was vague. 'Slaol will return to his proper place,' was all he would say, 'and our hardships will vanish with the winter.'

Saban ate that night in Mereth's hut where a dozen other folk had gathered. They brought food, they sang and they told old tales. It was the kind of evening Saban had enjoyed throughout his youth, yet this night the singing was half-hearted for all in the hut were thinking of the temple. 'You can tell us what will happen,' a man demanded of Saban.

'I don't know.'

'At least your slaves will be happy,' another man said.

'Happy?' Saban asked.

'They are to have a feast.'

'A feast of liquor,' Mereth interjected. 'Every woman in Ratharryn has been told to brew three jars and tomorrow we are to carry it to the temple as a reward to your slaves. There's no honey left in Ratharryn!'

Saban wished he could believe that Camaban really intended to offer the temple's builders a feast, but he suspected the liquor was only intended to stupefy the slaves before the spearmen assaulted their encampment. He closed his eyes, thinking of Leir and Hanna who even now should be following the River Mai northwards. He had embraced them both, then watched them walk away with nothing except Leir's weapons. Saban had waited till they vanished in the winter trees and he had thought how simple life had been when his father had worshipped Mai, Arryn, Slaol and Lahanna, and when the gods had not made extravagant demands. Then the gold had come and with it Camaban's ambitions to change the world.

'Are you sick?' Mereth asked, worried because Saban looked so pale and drawn.

'I'm tired,' Saban said, 'just tired,' and he leaned back on the hut wall as the folk sang the song of Camaban's victory over Rallin. He listened to the singing, then smiled when Mereth's Outlander wife began a song from Sarmennyn. It was the tale of a fisherman who had caught a monster and fought it through the wind-stinging foam all the way to shore, and it reminded Saban of the years he had lived beside Sarmennyn's river, Mereth's wife sang in her own tongue and Ratharryn's folk listened from politeness rather than interest, but Saban was remembering the happy days in Sarmennyn when Aurenna had not aspired to be a goddess, but had taken such delight in the making of the boats and the moving of the stones. He was thinking of Leir learning to swim when there was a sudden shout from the darkness outside and Saban twisted to the hut entrance to see spearmen running south towards a glow on the horizon. He stared and for a mad instant he thought the vast glow of fire meant that the stones themselves were on fire, then he shouted to Mereth that something strange was happening at the temple and scrambled into the night.

Derrewyn, it could be no one else, had fired the great piles of kindling and sledge timbers that had been waiting for the dedication. She had done more, for when Saban reached the sacred avenue he saw that the slave huts were also burning, indeed his own hut was in flames and the crackling fires lit the stones, making them beautiful in the darkness.

Then a warrior shouted that the slaves were gone.

Or most were. A few, too scared to run away, or not believing the rumour that Kilda had assiduously spread all day, were huddled by the sun stone, but the rest had fled southwards along Derrewyn's path of light. Saban climbed the crest south of the temple to see the path, which had been made by ramming torches into the turf, then lighting them so that their flames marked a path to safety. The torches burned low now as they snaked across the hills to disappear among the trees beyond the Death Place. The path of light was empty, for the slaves had long gone. By now, Saban thought, they would be deep in the forest and, even as he watched, the guttering torches began to flicker out.

Camaban raged amidst the astonishment. He shouted for water to extinguish the fires, but the river was too far away and the fires were too fierce. 'Gundur!' he shouted, 'Gundur!' and when the warrior came to him Camaban ordered that every spearman and every hunting dog in Ratharryn be sent on the fugitives' trail. 'And in the meantime take them to the temple and kill them.' He pointed his sword towards the handful of surviving slaves.

'Kill them?' Gundur asked.

'Kill them!' Camaban screamed, and set an example by hacking down a man who was trying to explain what had happened in the night. The man, a slave who had stayed at the temple expecting gratitude, looked astonished for a moment, then fell to his knees as Camaban chopped blindly down with his sword. Camaban was splashed with the man's blood by the time he had finished, and then, his appetite unslaked, he looked around for another slave to kill and saw Saban instead. 'Where were you?' Camaban demanded.

'In the settlement,' Saban said, staring at his blazing hut. What few possessions he had were in that hut. His weapons, clothes and pots. 'There is no need to kill any slaves,' he protested.

'I decide the need!' Camaban screamed. He drew back the bloody sword. 'What happened here?' he demanded. 'What happened?'

Saban ignored the threatening sword. 'You tell me,' he said coldly.

'I tell you?' Camaban kept the sword raised. 'What would I know of this?'

'Nothing happens here, brother, unless you decide it. This is your temple, your dream, your doing.' Saban fought his rising anger. He looked at the flickering red flame-light where it touched the stones to fill the temple's interior with a quivering tangle of locking shadows. 'This is all your doing, brother,' he said bitterly, 'and I have done nothing here except what you have told me to do.'