Bernard Cornwell - Stonehenge

'How do you know?' Saban asked. He had been counting the stones, and had already numbered more than seventy.

'How else?' Camaban asked curtly. 'It's obvious.' He whirled around in his excitement. 'The Sea Temple for midsummer and the Temple of Shadows for the winter! Scathel is marvellous! But this one will be ours. It will be ours!' He began walking around the circle, cracking his staff against the stones until he reached the lintelled gate where he stooped to gaze through the tunnel of five stone arches. 'A doorway for Slaol,' he said in wonder, then straightened and wiped the nearest stone. The fog's moisture had left the rocks with a strange blue-green sheen that began to fade to black as the spring sun and the sea wind dried them. Camaban, to Saban's horror, tried to push one of the lintels as if hoping to topple it, but it would not move. 'How do they fix it?' he asked.

'How would I know?'

'I don't suppose you would,' Camaban said carelessly, then frowned. 'Did I tell you Sannas is dead?'

'No.' Saban was oddly shocked, not because he had any fondness for the old woman, but because as long as he had lived she had been a part of his world, and not just any part, but a forbidding presence. 'How?' he asked.

'How would I know?' Camaban retorted. 'She just is. A trader brought the news, and she was an enemy of Slaol so it's good news.' He turned to gaze again at the temple. Now, freed of the fog's moisture, it was a black double ring in a black valley crouched in the mountain's black-rocked grip. It was wide and splendid, a mad priest's tribute to his god, and Camaban had tears in his eyes. 'It is our temple,' he said reverently, 'and it will banish winter.'

Somehow they had to persuade Scathel to let them take it, then carry it halfway across the world to Ratharryn.

The thick fog that had shrouded the Temple of Shadows gave way to days of warm sun and calm winds. Old folk marvelled at that early summer, saying they could not remember its like, while Kereval claimed that the weather's kindness was a sign of the sun god's approval of his new bride. Some of the fishermen, who kept a small salt-reeking hut beside the river where they made offerings to a weather god called Malkin, made dire prophecies of storms, but day after day their pessimism was confounded. Kereval's favourite sorceress, a blind woman who uttered her wisdom while in the throes of violent fits, also predicted storms, but the skies stayed stubbornly clear and the winds light.

Kereval's feared warriors made their summer raids into the neighbouring territories to bring back slaves and livestock; traders came from the land across the western sea bringing gold; and the growing crops greened the land. All was well in Sarmennyn, or should have been, except that when Camaban and Saban returned to Kereval's settlement they found the folk sullen.

It was Scathel's return that had soured Sarmennyn. The high priest raged and preached against Kereval's agreement with Ratharryn, claiming that Lengar would never return the treasures unless he was forced and so, while Camaban and Saban were travelling with Aurenna, the high priest had dug a monstrous hole in front of Kereval's hut and placed above it a lattice of stout branches so that the pit could serve as a prison-cage for Saban. There Scathel could torture Saban, confident that every mutilation would be magically visited on Lengar, but Scathel's hopes were frustrated by Kereval who refused to give his permission. Kereval stubbornly insisted that Lengar would return the treasures and the chief liked to point to the bright sky and ask what better omen the tribe could wish. 'The god loves his bride already,' Kereval claimed, 'and when she goes to him, he will reward us. There is no need for the brother magic to be used.'

Yet Scathel constantly preached the need for Saban's eyes to be gouged out and for his hands to be lopped off. He toured the huts inside the settlement and visited the homesteads that lay within a half-day's journey and he harangued Sarmennyn's people, and the folk listened to him. 'Ratharryn will never take a temple from us!' Scathel ranted, 'Never! The temples are ours, built by our ancestors, made from our stone! If Ratharryn wants a temple, let them pile their own dung and bow to it!'

'If your brother were to send us some of the gold, it would help,' Kereval told Camaban wistfully, but Camaban shook his head and said that that had never been part of the agreement. The gold would come, he said, when the temple was moved, though he took care not to say that it was Scathel's own shrine he wanted for the tribe's passions were already running too high. Kereval did his best to calm the growing anger. 'Folk will calm down when they see the sun bride go in her glory,' the worried chief assured Saban.

Day after day Saban would visit the sun-bride's temple and watch the shadow of the tall outlying stone. He feared that shadow, for it crept ever closer to the centre stone, and when the shadow touched the stone Aurenna must go to the flames. Aurenna herself avoided the temple, as if by ignoring the shadow she might lengthen her life; instead, in those days as she waited for her wedding, she was drawn to Haragg. 'When you go to your husband,' he would tell her, 'you must persuade him to stop the waste. He must reject the brides!' But Haragg could no more persuade the tribe to abandon their yearly sacrifice than Kereval could persuade them that Lengar would keep faith, so Aurenna would have to die. As the days grew longer she spent more time with Haragg and Saban, and Haragg left them together for he understood that Aurenna was attracted to the tall, dark-haired young man who had come out of the heartland with a missing finger and a single blue tattoo on his chest. Other young men boasted of their killing scars, but instead of boasting Saban told Aurenna stories. At first he told her the same stories his own mother had told him, like the tale of Dickel, the brother of Garlanna, who had tried to steal the earth's first harvest and how Garlanna had turned him into a squirrel as punishment. Aurenna liked the stories and was ever hungry for more.

The two were never alone for the sun bride was always guarded. She could go nowhere except into the privacy of her own hut without being dogged by the four spearmen and so Saban became used to her guardians and even befriended one of them. Lewydd was a fisherman's son and he had inherited his father's squat build. His chest was broad and his arms hugely strong. 'From the time I could walk,' he told Saban, 'my father made me pull nets. Pull nets and paddle! That makes a man strong.' It was Lewydd who had devised a way of transporting a temple's stones to Ratharryn. 'You must take them by boat,' he said. Lewydd was three years older than Saban and had already gone on two slave-raids deep into the eastern territories. 'Almost all of the journey to Ratharryn can be done on water,' he claimed.

'Ratharryn is far from the sea,' Saban pointed out.

'Not by sea, by river!' Lewydd said. 'You would ride the sea to the river that will carry us to the far edge of Drewenna, and there we would need to carry the boats and the stones to the rivers of Ratharryn. But it can be done.'

The boats at Sarmennyn, like the river craft at Ratharryn, were made from the trunks of old, big trees. There were few woods in Sarmennyn, so the priests would mark certain trees that must be preserved until they grew large enough for the boat-builders and when the trunk was tall enough the tree would be cut down and hollowed out. Lewydd took Saban to sea one day, but Saban hid his head in his hands when the great waves hissed towards him and Lewydd, laughing, turned the boat around and let it run back into the river's calm.

Aurenna liked to cross the river in one of the hollowed-out boats. She and her spearmen would walk in the woods on the eastern bank and inevitably she would seek out a great grey-green boulder that was flecked with sparkling chips and small pink marks, and Aurenna would sit on the rock and watch the river run by. When Saban accompanied her she would ask him to tell her more stories and once he told her how Arryn, god of their valley, had chased Mai, the river goddess, and how she had tried to hinder him by turning great stretches of the land into marsh, and how Arryn had felled trees to make paths across the bog and so cornered her at the spring where she rose from the earth. Mai had threatened to turn him to stone, but Arryn had whispered to Lakka, the god of the air, and Lakka had sent a fog so that Mai could not see Arryn, who sprang on her and made her his wife. Still, Saban told her, a mist would rise from Mai's river on cold mornings to remind Arryn that he had only found happiness through trickery.