Bernard Cornwell - Stonehenge

'To your left!' Gilan called. 'Your left. One pace. No, back! There! There!'

Saban placed a chalk marker at his feet, then stood to watch the sun chase away the stars. At first Slaol appeared like a flattened ball that leaked an ooze of fire along the wooded ridge, and then the red turned to white, too fierce for the eyes, and the first light of the new year shone straight along the new sacred path that led to the Old Temple's entrance. Saban shaded his eyes and watched the night shadows shrink in the valleys. 'To your right!' Gilan called. 'To your right!' He made Saban place another marker at the spot where the sun was at last wholly visible above the horizon, and then he waited until the sun just showed above Saban's head and made him place a third marker. The sound of the tribe singing its welcome to the sun came gently across the grass.

Gilan examined the markers Saban had laid and grunted happily when he saw that some of the old posts which had decayed in their sockets had evidently marked the same alignments. 'We did a good job,' he said approvingly.

'What do we do next?' Saban asked.

Gilan gestured either side of the temple's entrance. 'We'll plant two of the larger stones here as a gate,' he said, then pointed to where Derrewyn stood in the sacred path, 'and put the other two there to frame the sun's midsummer rising.'

'And the four smaller stones?' Saban asked.

'They'll mark Lahanna's wanderings,' the priest answered, and pointed across the river valley. 'We'll show where she appears farthest to the south,' he said, then turned and gestured in the opposite direction, 'and where she vanishes in the north.' Gilan's face seemed to glow with happiness in the early light. 'It will be a simple temple,' he said softly, 'but beautiful. Very beautiful. One line for Slaol and two for Lahanna, marking a place where they can meet beneath the sky.'

'But they're estranged,' Saban said.

Gilan laughed. He was a kindly man, portly and bald, who had never shared Hirac's fear of offending the gods. 'We have to balance Slaol and Lahanna,' he explained. 'They already have a temple apiece in Ratharryn, so how will Lahanna feel if we give Slaol a second shrine all of his own?' He left that question unanswered. 'And we were wrong, I think, to keep Slaol and Lahanna apart. At Cathallo they use one shrine for all the gods, so why shouldn't we worship Slaol and Lahanna in one place?'

'But it's still a temple to Slaol?' Saban asked anxiously, remembering how the sun god had helped him at the beginning of his ordeal.

'It's still a temple to Slaol,' Gilan agreed, 'but now it will acknowledge Lahanna too, just like the shrine at Cathallo.' He smiled. 'And at its dedication we shall marry you to Derrewyn as a foretaste of Slaol and Lahanna's reunion.'

The sun was high enough to give its warmth as the three walked back to the settlement. Gilan talked of his hopes, Saban held his lover's hand, the smoke of the midsummer fires faded and all was well in Ratharryn.

—«»—«»—«»—

Galeth was the temple's builder, and Saban became his helper. They placed the four smaller boulders first. Gilan had calculated the positions for the stones, and they had to be placed by calculation rather than by observation for the four stones formed two pairs and each pair pointed towards Lahanna. In her wanderings about the sky, she stayed within the same broad belt year after year, but once in a man's lifetime she went far to the north and once in a lifetime far to the south. The poles in her existing temple inside the settlement marked the limits of those northern and southern wanderings and if a man drew a line between the points on the horizon where the moon rose and set at her extremes it would cross the line of the sun's midsummer rising at a right angle. That made Gilan's task simple. 'It isn't so everywhere,' he explained to Saban. 'It's only here in Ratharryn that the lines cross square. Not at Drewenna, not at Cathallo, nowhere else! Only here!' Gilan was in awe of that fact. 'It means we are special to the gods,' he said softly. 'It means, I think, that this is the very centre of all the world!'

'Truly?' Saban asked, impressed.

'Truly,' Gilan said. 'Cathallo, of course, say the same about their Sacred Mound, but I fear they're mistaken. This is the world's centre,' he said, gesturing at the Old Temple, 'the very place where man was first made.' He shuddered at that thought, moved by the joy of it.

The high priest then laid a nettle string along the line of midsummer's rising, taking it from the chalk marker which showed where the sun rose, through the very centre of the temple and on to the south-eastern bank. Galeth had jointed two pieces of thin timber to make a square angle and, by laying the timber against the string, and then running another string along the crosswise timber, they could mark a line that crossed the sun's line at a right angle. That new line pointed to the extremes of the moon's wandering, but Gilan wanted two parallel lines, one to point to the northernmost limit and the other to the southernmost, so he drew his second line and told Galeth that the four small stones must be placed inside the bank at the outer ends of both scratched lines. One of each pair was to be a pillar and the other a slab, and by standing beside the pillar and looking across the opposite slab a priest could watch where Lahanna rose or set and judge how close she approached her most distant wanderings.

Galeth had thirty men working and at first they simply dug the holes for the stones. They scraped away the turf, then prised at the hard chalk with the picks and broke it into clumps that could be scooped out with shovels. They dug the holes deep, and Galeth made them slope one side of the hole to make a ramp so that the stones could be slid down into their sockets. It was, he told Saban, no different from raising one of the big temple poles. When all four holes were dug, more men were fetched up from the settlement and the first stone, the smallest pillar, was dragged on its sledge through the entrance of the sun. Saban had thought there might be some ceremony as the stone was brought to its new sacred home, but there was no ritual other than a silent prayer that Gilan offered with his hands reaching to the sky. The sledge runners left scars of crushed grass. Galeth lined the stone up with the hole and kept the men hauling until the tip of the sledge just overhung the ramp that Saban had lined with three smoothed timbers that had been greased with pig fat to serve as a slide.

It took twelve men using long oak levers to shift the stone off the sledge. Saban thought the levers must break, but instead the stone moved bit by bit, heave by heave, and each heave lifted and carried the boulder another finger's breadth forward. The men sang as they worked, and the sweat poured off them, but at last the weight of the stone tipped it forwards off the sledge and down onto the ramp. Men scattered, fearing the stone would fall back on them, but instead, just as Galeth had planned, it slid ponderously down the greased timbers to lodge at the ramp's bottom. Galeth wiped his face and let out a great breath of relief.

When he erected the great temple poles Galeth would haul them upright by pulling their tops into the sky by means of a great tripod over which the ropes were led, but he reckoned this stone pillar was small enough to be pushed upright without any such help. He chose the twelve strongest men and they took their places beside the uppermost part of the stone that now tilted up from the ramp's edge. The men got their shoulders under the stone and heaved. 'Push!' Galeth shouted. 'Push!' and they did push, but the stone still stuck halfway. 'Heave on it!' Galeth urged them and added his own huge strength to theirs, but still the stone would not move. Saban peered down the hole and saw that the stone was catching on the upright face of rubbly chalk. Galeth saw it too, swore, and seized a stone axe with which he hacked at the chalk face to make room for the stone.