Bernard Cornwell - Stonehenge

They rammed the stone's base with stones, filled the hole, untied the ropes and thus the work was finished. The Old Temple was no more and Ratharryn had its sanctuary of stone. They had the Sky Temple.

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The day chosen for the dedication of the Sky Temple proved to be propitious for it was warm and cloudless, a day that late autumn had stolen from high summer. All Hengall's people came to the ceremony. They arrived from the outlying settlements and from the upland farmsteads, and the women assembled at Lahanna's shrine while the men danced around the poles of the temple where they had stacked their spears and piled their bows for no man would carry a weapon this day. This day was given to the gods.

In the late afternoon Gilan led the tribe up from the settlement. They stopped at the grave mounds where the skull pole was paraded and the ancestors were told what was happening, and then they danced to where the new sacred path scarred the grassland. The tribe's priests were naked, their bodies chalked white with patterns swirled by spread fingers, while their heads were crowned with antlers and their hair and beards hung with animal bones and teeth. The folk who followed the priests had all dressed in their best pelts. Saban and Derrewyn were to be married after the sun set. Derrewyn wore a dress of sewn deerskins that were very pale in colour so that her skin looked even darker, while her long hair had been threaded with creamy meadowsweets. Her parents had come to see the ceremony and her father, Morthor, high priest at Cathallo, danced with Ratharryn's priests; those priests led with them a small child, a fair-haired girl just three years old, who had been born deaf. The child, like Derrewyn, wore meadowsweets in her hair.

The sun blazed into the faces of the folk as they crossed the rim of the down from where the sacred path stretched clean and white to the eight new stones of the Sky Temple. Gilan carried the tribe's skull pole, which had been decorated with ivy, while Neel, the youngest priest, had an axe with a beautifully carved greenstone head that Galeth had sharpened that same afternoon.

The people stamped their dance between the newly made chalk banks of the sacred path, scattering the grazing sheep as they advanced. Four of the men carried goatskin drums and they set the rhythm of the dance and, as the priests neared the four taller stones, the drumming became more frantic and the tribe swooped from side to side. The women led the singing, praising Slaol, while the men echoed the last line of each verse.

The tribe swerved aside at the temple to dance about its edge. The priests went inside and, once they had driven out the sheep and cattle that were grazing on the temple's grass, they formed a circle where they stamped the intricate steps of their own dance. The priests danced inside and the people sang and danced outside. The men circled closest to the ditch, with the women outside them, and all danced sunwise as Slaol sank towards the horizon. The singing and dancing seemed to induce a trance that gripped the folk as the sun sank. Some women called out in ecstasy as on and on they danced, not noticing the tiredness in their legs but swept up by the music, and they only stopped when the men who had carried pots of fire from the settlement put the embers in the great heaps of wood that were piled on either side of the temple. The flames caught fast, the small twigs crackled and the smoke whirled the sparks upward. Galeth had broken up the great sledges and put their huge timbers in the piles. He rued such a waste of good wood, but the sledges had served a sacred purpose and so must be returned to the gods. The fires became fierce as the tribe gathered about the twin stone pillars of the sun's gate which stood in the centre of the sacred path. The drummers were silent now, but the dance was still inside the people and some could not be still, but swayed from side to side and some of the women moaned as they stared towards the great swollen ball of the sun where it flattened on the far horizon. 'Slaol,' they called. 'Slaol!'

'Slaol!' Gilan shouted at the sun, raising his arms, and Hengall now took the deaf child's hand and led her to the very centre of the temple where Galeth had dug a hole. It was not a deep hole, nor was it long, but it was enough and the child with flowers in her hair was taken to the hole's edge and there her tunic was lifted over her hair so she was naked and Gilan knelt and gave her a pot. 'Drink,' he said gently and, because she was deaf, motioned what she should do. The girl took the pot in both hands and laughed at the high priest's kindly face.

The pot contained a potion to bring dreams: a potion made from mushrooms and herbs, a potion to carry the deaf child to the gods, and all the folk watched, utterly silent, as she drank. She made a face as if the liquid were bitter, but then she laughed again and dropped the pot. Gilan stood and stepped back from her, watching to see what omens the potion brought.

The girl began to gasp as if her breath were being stolen, then she screamed for her mother in a half-formed voice, and then she tried to run back towards the watching crowd, but Neel caught her and forced her back to the hole where she screamed again. Her watching mother wailed for the child. The omens were bad. She should have been smiling, laughing, dancing, but she was struggling and frantic, and her screams were scratching at the tribe's souls. To stop her noise Gilan shook her hard, so hard that she went still with terror and in that moment Gilan thrust her out at arm's length and took the greenstone axe from Neel.

Gilan raised the blade to the dying sun, paused, then struck down hard so that bloody flowers fell to the grass as the child, her skull nearly split in two, died without a sound.

She had gone to the sky. She had gone to Slaol. There would be no death place for the child and no gifts on her behalf for she was herself a gift. That was why she was not killed with the Kill-Child, for she was not really dead, but instead, even as her tribe watched in awed silence, her soul was rising to the sky to tell Slaol about this place that had been made for him. The golden-haired child was Ratharryn's messenger and she would watch the Sky Temple until time itself was ended.

Gilan laid the little body in the grave. He broke the pot that had held the potion and dropped it beside her, placed the chalk ball of her life on her bloodied breast, and then the priests kicked the heap of earth onto her body. The child's mother still shrieked with grief and the other women clustered about to comfort her, telling her that her daughter was not dead at all, but happy in the skyworld where she was a playmate of the gods.

The sun sank beneath the horizon just as Lahanna, huge and pale, rose above the western trees. The fires were roaring now, the great timbers at their heart burning bright so that the smoke made a red-tinged pall above the temple. In a moment or two the temple's first ceremony would begin as Derrewyn and Saban danced their marriage steps in the shrine's centre, but first Hengall stood by the sun child's grave and raised his hand.

It was Hengall's task to tell the tribe what they had done. To tell the tale of the Sky Temple so that his folk would remember it and tell their children and their children's children, and so he stood with his arm raised, summoning the words, and the murmuring crowd fell silent. It was twilight, and the blinding glare of the sun had vanished to leave behind a red-rimmed sky smudged by smoke and in that livid haze Saban saw a flicker. At first he thought it was the dead child's spirit and he was glad, for it showed that the sacrifice had worked.

The flicker was red, reflecting the dying sunlight, and then Saban saw it was not the child's soul, but an arrow streaking up from the black crest of the southern upland where more of the ancestors' bones lay in their mounds. The arrow's flight seemed to take a long time, though of course it took no time at all. Indeed Saban had scarcely time to open his mouth, let alone call out, yet he ever remembered it as being a long, long time. He saw the arrow reach up to the sky and then begin to fall. Its head glittered, the black flint flashing back the firelight, and then it slammed into Hengall's back.