Bernard Cornwell - Stonehenge

The dozen men had no trouble holding the stone's weight and, once the obstruction was cleared, they pushed it upright. The stone now stood a little less than the height of a man, with almost as much again buried in the socket, and all that was needed was to fill the ramp and press earth and chalk into the hole about the boulder. Galeth had collected some great river stones and they were packed about the pillar's base, then the chalk rubble was scooped in, and with it the antlers that had broken while the hole was being dug, and all was stamped down and stamped down again until at last the hole and the ramp were filled and the first of the temple's stones was standing. The tired men cheered.

It took until harvest to raise the other three moon stones, but at last they were done and the four grey boulders stood in a rectangle. Galeth had rigged a short tripod of oak beams to raise the slabs, for they were heavier than the pillars, but what made raising the stones even easier was Saban's notion of lining the upright face of the hole with greased timbers so that the stone's corner, grinding down into the earth, did not lodge against the chalk. The fourth stone they raised, even though it was one of the heavier slabs, took only half as long to raise as the first pillar.

'The gods made you clever,' Galeth complimented him.

'You too.'

'No.' Galeth shook his head. 'The gods made me strong.'

The moon stones were finished. Now, if a man could draw a line through the pairs, and extend that line on either side to the very ends of the earth where the fogs lingered across grey seas in perpetuity, he could see where the moon rose and fell at the limits of her wanderings and Lahanna, endlessly travelling among the stars, could look down and see that the people of Ratharryn had marked her journeying. She would know that they watched her, know that they loved her, and she would hear their prayers.

The four larger stones stayed outside the temple while Ratharryn's folk cut the year's wheat and barley. It was a fair harvest and the women sang as they stood about the threshing floor that had been flattened and hardened by a day-long harvest dance. Saban and Derrewyn led the dance, and the women swayed and smiled because Derrewyn was young and happy, and Saban, they knew, was a good young man, decent and strong, and their imminent marriage was taken as a good augury. Only Jegar, who could still not hold a bow in his right hand and could only use a spear with his clumsy left hand, resented them, but there was little he could do. And Jegar's jealousy grew worse when a band of Outfolk tried to raid the harvest from Cheol, which was an outlying settlement of Ratharryn, and Hengall led a war band against them, defeated them, and brought back six heads. One of those heads was taken by Saban, though in truth Galeth had held the shrieking Outfolk warrior still so that Saban could kill him, but still Saban was allowed to wear a blue kill mark on his chest.

After that skirmish, and after the harvest was stored, the men went back to finish the remaining work, and Saban, going with them to begin the new work, stopped to stare at the Old Temple with its four new stones. It looked different suddenly. It was a chill day, with autumn's first bite in the air, but the sun shone between a gap in the clouds to light the new white banks of the sacred path and the clean chalk circle of the temple's ditch and bank. And in that circle, their shadows stark in the morning light, the four stones stood.

Galeth paused beside Saban. 'It looks good,' he said, sounding surprised, and it did. It looked splendid. It looked clean, purposeful, even calm. The temple was not massive and grand like Cathallo's shrine, but instead was lifted up on the hill's green breast so that the four stones seemed to float in the sky. Cathallo's temple, with its great squat boulders dwarfed by the massive embankment, was more like a thing of the earth while this shrine was airy and delicate.

'It's a sky temple,' Saban said.

Galeth liked that. 'A sky temple,' he said, 'why not? It's a good name.' He clapped Saban on a shoulder. 'It's the right name, the Sky Temple!' He hefted a timber and walked on, peering intently at the southern horizon. He was looking for smoke that might betray where a hunting band had its camp, but he saw nothing. There was a rumour that a large band of Outfolk was in the forest, though Hengall, taking another war band west and south, had found no sign of them. 'Let's hope they've moved on,' Galeth said, touching his groin. 'They can find someone else's land, not ours.'

The Outfolk had lived in the land for generations now, indeed no one living could remember when they had first come from the land across the eastern sea, but all knew they spoke a different language and had different customs. Some of them, like the men of Sarmennyn who had lost their gold lozenges, had found great tracts of empty land to make their home, but others still wandered the forest in search of places to live and it was those homeless bands that caused trouble to Ratharryn, for the bigger Outfolk settlements were all far away.

They won't come near us,' Saban said, 'not while their tribesmen's heads are on our embankment.'

'I pray not,' Galeth said, touching his groin again, but he still stared southwards. Hengall might not have found the hungry Outlanders, but a hunting party had discovered a campsite with its ashes still warm and a trader had glimpsed a large band of grey-tattooed men prowling in the deep trees. 'We had a good harvest,' Galeth said, 'and if the Outlanders had a bad one then they'll be eyeing us.'

They walked on to the temple and there the difficulty of raising the last stones drove away any fears of an Outfolk raid. Two of the boulders were to be raised on either side of the entrance of the sun, and those two were twice as long, twice as thick and, it seemed, many times the weight of the moon stone pillars. It took four days to raise the first, and that did not count the days digging the hole, and another three days to put up the second. The last two stones, the sun stones, that were to serve as a doorway in the avenue for the rising midsummer sun, were bigger still. They saved the largest stone till last and the hole they dug was so deep that a man could stand at its foot and not see over the lip. They made the ramp and lined it with timber and another pig died so that its fat could grease the wood. Then, when all was ready, they set about planting the stone.

It took sixty men to move the big sun stone off its sledge. Galeth tied ropes about the boulder, harnessed them to forty men and had them haul it forward while the others used levers to ease the great stone along its oak bed. It took a whole day to shift the stone off the sledge and the best part of the next day to seat it properly in the ramp, for it had gone in crooked, so they had to straighten it with levers, but at last, after two days' work, it rested on the ramp.

Galeth had built a new tripod of oak to raise the taller stones. The tripod stood four times the height of a man and, because he feared that the hide ropes going over the peak would stick, he set a smooth piece of elm in the joint and greased it with fat. He strapped the four ropes around the upper end of the stone, led them over the elm block and tied those ropes to a beam of oak to which he harnessed sixteen oxen. Then the men whipped and goaded the beasts and slowly the stone moved, but agonizingly slowly, and so more ropes were tied to the oak beam and men were harnessed alongside the beasts and again the whips slashed down and the goads jabbed and the men fought for footing on the grass and slowly, so very slowly, the tall stone edged upwards. The higher it went the easier it became because the ropes were now pulling the stone's top straight towards the tripod's peak, while at the beginning of the raising the ropes made a narrow angle between themselves and the stone. The stone's foot crunched and splintered the greased wood lining the hole, then suddenly Galeth was shouting at the men driving the oxen to hold their whips. 'Gentle now!' he shouted. 'Gentle!' The stone was almost upright. 'Pull again!' Galeth shouted and the ropes creaked and the tripod quivered and Saban feared that the stone had lodged against an unseen obstruction at the base of the hole, but then it crashed forward against the timber-clad face and Galeth screamed at the men to stop hauling in case they pulled the stone clean over the hole's brink. The ropes slackened, but the big sun stone did not fall. It stood there, huge and grey, more than two times the height of a man.