Bernard Cornwell - Stonehenge

Saban splashed back to the island where he lay on his belly in the grass. He watched Derrewyn dive and swim, and still watched her as she came to the river's edge and slowly walked from the water with her long black hair sleek and dripping. To Saban she appeared like the river goddess Mai herself, coming from the water in awesome beauty, and then she knelt beside him, making the skin of his back shiver where her hair touched the burn scars on his shoulder blades. He lay very still, conscious of her, but scarce daring to move in case he frightened her away. This, he told himself, was why he had asked her to come into the forest, though now that the moment was on him he was consumed by nervousness. Derrewyn must have known what he was thinking for she touched his shoulder, making him turn over, then she lowered herself into his arms. 'You ate the clay, Saban,' she whispered, her wet hair cold on his shoulders, 'so the skull's curse cannot touch you.'

'You know that?'

'I promise that,' she whispered, and he shivered because it seemed to him as if Mai really had come in her splendour from the water. He held her close, very close, and like a fool he thought his joy could last for ever.

—«»—«»—«»—

That afternoon, as Derrewyn and Saban waited for the sun to sink and the twilight to bring the shadows through which they could creep secretly home, they heard singing from the hill above the river's western bank. They dressed, waded across the branch of the river, and climbed towards the sound that became louder with their every step. The two went slowly and cautiously, but they need not have worried about being seen for the singers were too intent on their task to notice two lovers among the leaves.

The singers were women from Cathallo and they were lined up either side of seventy sweating men who were hauling on long ropes of twisted leather which were attached to a great oak sledge on which the first of Ratharryn's eight stones sat. It was one of the smaller stones, yet its weight was such that the men were heaving and grunting to keep the cumbersome sledge moving along the rough woodland path. Other men went ahead to smooth the way, cutting out roots and kicking down tussocks of grass, but after a while the men on the ropes were simply too exhausted to continue. They had hauled all day, they had even pulled the great sledge up the hill south of Maden, and now they were spent so they left the sledge in the middle of the wood and walked south towards Ratharryn where they expected to be fed. Derrewyn gripped Saban's arm. 'I'll go with them,' she whispered.

'Why?'

'Then I can say I came to meet them. That way no one will wonder where I've been.' She reached up, kissed his cheek, then ran after the retreating people.

Saban waited until they had gone, then went and stroked the stone on its oak sledge. It was warm to the touch and, where the sun pierced the leaves to shine on the boulder, tiny flecks of light glinted in the rock. Touching the stone coincided with a great surge of happiness. He was a man, and he had a woman as beautiful as any in the land. He had held Derrewyn on the river's bank and it seemed to Saban that life was as rich and hopeful as it could ever be. The gods loved him.

Hengall hardly felt that the gods loved him for that evening a great crowd of Cathallo folk arrived at Ratharryn and they all needed to be fed and given places to sleep and he had not realized, when he paid the gold pieces for the eight stones, that they would cost him so much in food. He also had to provide more folk to help haul the stones, and those were found among the poorer families in the settlement and they had to be paid in meat and grain. Hengall saw his herds diminish and he began to doubt the wisdom of his bargain, but he did not try to repudiate it. He sent men to haul the stones and, day by day as the summer neared its height, the great boulders crept towards Ratharryn.

The four larger stones proved difficult. There was a path across the stream-cut marshlands near Maden, but it was too narrow for the bigger stones and so Kital's men hauled those boulders far to the west before turning south towards Ratharryn. But there was a hill in their path, not so steep as the hill up which the four smaller stones had already been hauled, but still a formidable obstacle that proved too much for the men dragging the first of the big boulders. More ropes were fetched and more men were harnessed to the sledge, but still the stone would not shift up the slope. They tried pulling the sledge with oxen, but when the beasts took the strain they bunched together and impeded each other and it was not until Galeth devised the idea of harnessing the oxen to a great bar of oak, and then attaching ropes from the oak bar to the sledge, that they managed to shift the great stone and so drag it to the hilltop where, with its runners now crushing the level grass, it was hauled onwards. The other three heavy stones were fetched in the same way. The priests hung flowers from the oxen's horns, the beasts were surrounded by singers and there was joy in Ratharryn for the summer was kind, the stones had come safely and it seemed that the ill omens of the past had all faded.

Midsummer arrived. The fires were lit and Ratharryn's men wore the bullskins and chased the women about Slaol's temple. Saban did not run with the bull-men, though he could have, but instead he sat with Derrewyn and, as the fires died, they jumped the flames hand in hand. Gilan dispensed the liquor brewed for the night's celebrations; some folk screamed as they saw visions, while others became belligerent or ill, but eventually they slept, except Saban, who stayed awake, for Jegar had been drunkenly searching for him with a spear in his left hand and revenge on his liquor-fuddled mind. Saban stayed close to the temple that night, sitting guard over the sleeping Derrewyn, though he dozed towards morning when he was woken by footfalls and quickly lifted his spear. A man was coming up the path from the settlement and Saban crouched, ready to lunge, then saw the reflection of dying firelight glint from the man's bald head and realized it was Gilan, not Jegar.

'Who's that?' the high priest asked.

'Saban.'

'You can help me,' Gilan said cheerfully. 'I need a helper. I was going to ask Neel, but he's sleeping like a dog.'

Saban woke Derrewyn and the two of them walked with Gilan to the Old Temple. It was the year's shortest night and Gilan kept glancing at the north-eastern horizon for fear that the sun would rise before he reached the Old Temple. 'I need to mark the rising sun,' he explained as they passed through the grave mounds. He bowed to the ancestors, then hurried on to where the eight stones waited on their sledges just outside the Old Temple's ditch. The north-eastern sky was perceptibly lightening, but the sun had yet to blaze across the far wooded hills. 'We need some markers,' Gilan said, and Saban went down into the ditch and found a half-dozen large lumps of chalk, then he stood in the entrance causeway while Gilan went to the stake that marked the temple's centre. Derrewyn, forbidden to enter the temple because she was a woman, waited between the ditches and banks of the newly cut sacred path.

Saban turned to face the north-east. The horizon was shadowy and the hills in front of it were grey and sifted with the smoke from the dying midsummer fires that rose from Ratharryn's valley. The cattle on the nearer slopes were white ghostly shapes.

'Soon,' Gilan said, 'soon,' and he prayed that the scatter of clouds on the horizon would not hide the sun's rising.

The clouds turned pink and the pink deepened and spread, becoming red, and Saban, watching where the blazing sky touched the jet black earth, saw a gap of sky above the trees and suddenly there was a fierce brightness in those distant woods as the sun's upper edge slashed through the leaves.