Bernard Cornwell - Stonehenge

'Show me what?'

'Wait,' she said curtly.

Aurenna greeted them gently enough. She gave Kilda a cursory glance, made a fuss of Hanna and ordered a hut prepared for Saban. 'Your woman will share it?' she asked.

'She is my slave, not my woman.'

'And the child?'

'Hers,' Saban said shortly. 'The woman cooks for me while I work here. I shall need a score of men in a few days, more later.'

'You can have all there are after the harvest,' Aurenna said.

'Twenty will do for now,' Saban said.

Saban had decided he would move the very largest stone first. If that great earthbound rock could be shifted then the others must prove easier, and so he summoned the twenty men and ordered them to dig the earth away all around the boulder. The men worked willingly enough, although they refused to believe that such a rock could be lifted. Galeth, however, had told Saban how to do it and Saban now made the task easier by hammering and scraping and burning the vast boulder to reduce its width and so lessen its weight. It took a whole moon, and when the work was done the great boulder had begun to resemble the tall pillar it was destined to become.

Leir liked to come to watch the stone being hammered and Saban welcomed his son, for he had seen too little of the boy in the last years. While the men roughly shaped the stone the children of Cathallo scrambled over its surface, fighting to occupy its long stony plateau. They used ox goads as spears, and sometimes their mock battles became fierce and Saban noted approvingly that Leir did not complain when he was pierced in the arm so deeply that the blood ran to drip from his fingers. Leir just laughed the injury away, snatched up his toy spear and charged after the boy who had wounded him.

Once the stone's weight had been lessened they dug two trenches down its long sides. That took six days, and it took another two to bring the seasoned sledge runners up from the settlement. The huge runners were laid in the trenches, and then, using two dozen men and levers so long that their outer ends had to be hauled downwards with hide ropes, Saban raised one end of the great rock so that a beam could be shoved beneath it. Raising the one end took a whole day, and another was spent lifting the back of the stone and putting three more beams beneath. Saban fastened the beams to the runners, then dug a long smooth ramp up from the bedrock chalk.

He had to wait now, for it was harvest and all the folk of Cathallo were busy in the fields or on the winnowing floors, but those harvest days gave Saban a chance to spend time with Leir. He taught the boy how to draw a bow, geld a calf and stroke fish out of the river. He saw little of his daughter. Lallic was a nervous child, scared of spiders, moths and dogs, and whenever Saban appeared she would hide behind her mother. 'She is frail,' Aurenna claimed.

'Sick?' Saban asked.

'No, just precious. Fragile.' Aurenna patted Lallic fondly. The girl did indeed look fragile to Saban, but she was also beautiful. Her skin was white and clean, her golden eyelashes were long and delicate, and her hair was as bright as her mother's. 'She has been chosen,' Aurenna added.

'Chosen as what?' Saban asked.

'She and Leir are to be the guardians of the new temple,' Aurenna said proudly. 'He will be a priest and she a priestess. They are already dedicated to Slaol and Lahanna.'

Saban thought of his son's enthusiasm in the war games that the children had fought around the stone. 'I think Leir would rather be a warrior.'

'You give him ideas,' Aurenna said disapprovingly, 'but Lahanna has chosen him.'

'Lahanna? Not Slaol?'

'Lahanna rules here,' Aurenna said, 'the true Lahanna, not the false goddess they once worshipped.'

When the harvest was gathered the folk of Cathallo danced in their temple, weaving between the boulders to lay gifts of wheat, barley and fruit at the foot of the ring-stone. There was a feast in the settlement that night, and Saban was intrigued to see that both of his children, and all the orphans who lived with Aurenna, were at the feast, but that Aurenna herself stayed in the temple. Lallic missed her mother and when Saban made a fuss of her she looked as if she wanted to cry.

There was a fire burning in the temple, its glow outlining the skull-topped crest of the embankment, but when Saban walked towards that embankment a priest stopped him. 'There is a curse on it this night.'

'This night?'

'Just this night.' The priest shrugged and gently pulled Saban back towards the feast. 'The gods do not want you there,' he said.

Kilda saw Saban return and, leaving Hanna with another woman, came and took his arm. 'I said I would show you,' she said.

'Show me what?'

'What Derrewyn and I have seen.' She drew him into the shadows then led him north away from the settlement. 'I told you,' she said, 'that no one would betray us.'

'But you have been recognised?'

'Of course.'

'And Hanna? Do folk know who she is?'

'They probably do,' Kilda said carelessly, 'but she has grown since she was here, and I tell people that she is my daughter. They pretend to believe me.' She leapt a ditch then turned eastwards. 'No one will betray Hanna.'

'You are not from Cathallo?' Saban asked. He still knew little about Kilda, but her voice betrayed that she had learned Cathallo's language late. He did know that she was little more than twenty-two summers old, but otherwise she was a stranger to him.

'I was sold into slavery as a child,' she answered. 'My people live beside the eastern sea. Life is hard there and daughters are more valuable if they are sold. We worshipped the sea god, Crommadh, and Crommadh would choose which girls were to be sold.'

'How?'

'They would take us far out on the mud flats and make us race the incoming tide. The fastest were kept to be married and the slowest were sold.' She shrugged. 'The very slowest were drowned.'

'You were slow?'

'I deliberately went slowly,' she said flatly, 'for my father would use me in the night. I wanted to escape him.'

She went south now, approaching the temple. No priest or guard had seen them loop far out into the fields and there was only a sliver of a moon to light the stubble. 'Be quiet now,' Kilda said, 'for if they see us they will kill us.'

'If who sees us?'

'Quiet,' she cautioned him, then the two of them climbed the steep chalk slope of the embankment under the baleful gaze of the wolf skulls. Kilda reached the summit first and lay flat. Saban dropped beside her.

At first he could see nothing in the wide temple. The big fire burned close to Aurenna's hut and its violent flames threw the flickering shadows of the boulders across the black ditch onto the inner slope of chalk. The fire's smoke plume, its underside touched red by the fires in the settlement, sifted towards the stars. 'Your brother came to Cathallo this afternoon,' Kilda whispered into Saban's ear, then pointed to the temple's far side where Saban saw a black shadow detach itself from a boulder.

He knew it was Camaban, for even at that distance and although the man was swathed in a bull-dancer's cloak, he could see that the figure was limping slightly. The great hide hung from his shoulders, the bull's head flopped over his face, while the hoofs and tail of the dead beast flopped or dragged on the ground. The bull-man limped in a clumsy dance, stepping from one side to another, stopping, going on again, peering about him. Then he bellowed and Saban recognized the voice.

'In your tribe,' Kilda whispered, 'the bull is Slaol, yes?'

'Yes.'

'So we are watching Slaol,' Kilda said scornfully.

Then Saban saw Aurenna. Or rather he saw a shimmering white figure come from the shadow of the hut and run lithely across the temple. White scraps floated behind her. 'Swan feathers,' Kilda said, and Saban realized his wife was wearing a cloak like her jay-feather cape, only this one was threaded with swan feathers. It seemed to glow, making her ethereal. She danced away from Camaban who roared in feigned rage and then rushed towards her, but she evaded him easily and ran around the temple's margin.