Stonehenge

by Bernard Cornwell

  Hengall stood as his son approached. He had let Lengar have his time of glory, and now he stood and shrugged the bear cloak from his shoulders and threw it, fur down, into the mud at his feet. He wiped the mist’s moisture from his face with the ends of his big beard, then waited bare-chested so that all the folk in Ratharryn could see how thick the blue marks of dead enemies and slaughtered beasts clustered on his skin. He stood silent, the wind stirring his ragged black hair.

  Lengar stopped opposite his father. He was as tall as Hengall, but not so heavily muscled. In a fight he would probably prove the quicker man while Hengall would be the stronger, yet Hengall showed no fear of such a fight. Instead he yawned, then nodded at his eldest son. “You have brought me the stranger’s gold. That is good.” He gestured at the bear cloak that lay on the ground between them. “Put everything there, son,” he growled.

  Lengar stiffened. Most of the watching tribe thought he would fight, for his eyes bespoke a love of violence that verged on madness, but his father’s gaze was steady and Lengar chose to argue instead of striking with his spear. “If a man finds an antler in the woods,” he demanded, “must he give it to his father?” He spoke loudly enough for all the crowd to hear. The people of Ratharryn had clustered between the nearer huts, leaving a space for the confrontation, and some of them now called out their agreement with Lengar. “Or if I find the honey of the wild bees,” Lengar asked, emboldened by their support, “must I endure the stings, then yield the honey to my father?”

  “Yes,” Hengall said, then yawned again. “In the cloak, boy.”

  “A warrior comes to our land,” Lengar cried, “a stranger of the Outfolk, and he brings gold. I kill the stranger and take his gold. Is it not mine?” A few in the crowd shouted that the gold was indeed his, but not quite so many as had shouted before. Hengall’s bulk and air of unconcern was unsettling.

  The chief fished in a pouch that hung from his belt and took out the small lozenge that Saban had brought from the Old Temple. He dropped the scrap of gold onto the cloak. “Now put the rest there,” he said to Lengar.

  “The gold is mine!” Lengar insisted, and this time only Ralla, his mother, and Jegar, one of his closest friends, shouted their support. Jegar was a small and wiry man, the same age as Lengar, but already one of the tribe’s greatest warriors. He killed in battle with an abandon that was equal to Lengar’s own and he was avid for a fight now, but none of Lengar’s other hunting companions had the belly to confront Hengall. They were relying on Lengar to win the confrontation and it seemed he would do that by violence for he suddenly raised his spear, but instead of stabbing with the blade he held it high in the air to draw attention to his words. “I found the gold! I killed for the gold! The gold came to me! And is it now to be hidden in my father’s hut? Is it to gather dust there?” Those words provoked sympathetic murmurs for many in Ratharryn resented the way Hengall hoarded treasures. In Drewenna or Cathallo the chief displayed his wealth, he rewarded his warriors with bronze, he hung his women with shining metal and he made great temples, but Hengall stored Ratharryn’s wealth in his hut.

  “What would you do with the gold?” Galeth intervened. He was standing now, and he had untied his tail of hair which hung black and ragged about his face so that he looked like a warrior on the edge of battle. His spear blade was leveled. “Tell us, nephew,” he challenged Lengar, “what will you do with the gold?”

  Jegar hefted his spear to meet Galeth’s challenge, but Lengar pushed his friend’s blade down. “With this gold,” he shouted, patting the lozenges on his chest, “we should raise warriors, spearmen, archers, and end Cathallo forever!” Now the voices that had first supported him shouted again, for there were many in Ratharryn who feared Cathallo’s growth. Only the previous summer the warriors of Cathallo had taken the settlement of Maden that lay between Ratharryn and Cathallo, and hardly a week passed without Cathallo’s warriors scouring Hengall’s land for cattle or pigs, and many in the tribe resented that Hengall appeared to be doing nothing to stop the taunting raids. “There was a time when Cathallo paid us tribute!” Lengar shouted, encouraged by the crowd’s support. “When their women came to dance at our temples! Now we cower whenever a warrior of Cathallo comes near! We grovel to that foul bitch, Sannas! And the gold and the bronze and the amber that could free us, where is it? And where will this gold go if I give it up? There!” With that last word he turned and pointed the spear at his father. “And what will Hengall do with the gold?” Lengar asked. “He will bury it! Gold for the moles! Metal for the worms! Treasure for the grubs! We scratch for flint and all the while we have gold!”

  Hengall shook his head sadly. The crowd that had cheered Lengar’s last words fell silent and waited for the fight to start. Lengar’s men must have thought the moment was close for they summoned their courage and closed up behind their leader with leveled weapons. Jegar was dancing to and fro, his teeth bared and spear blade pointing at Hengall’s belly. Galeth edged closer to Hengall, ready to defend his brother, but Hengall waved Galeth away, then turned, stooped and fetched his war mace from where it had been hidden under the low thatch of his hut’s eave. The mace was a shaft of oak as thick as a warrior’s wrist topped with a misshapen lump of gray stone that could crush a grown man’s skull as if it were a wren’s egg. Hengall hefted the mace, then nodded at the cloak of bear fur. “All the treasure, boy,” he said, deliberately insulting his son, “all of it, in the cloak.”

  Lengar stared at him. The spear had a longer reach than the mace, but if his first lunge missed then he knew the stone head would break his skull. So Lengar hesitated, and Jegar pushed past him. Hengall pointed the mace at Jegar. “I killed your father, boy,” he snarled, “when he challenged me for the chiefdom, and I crushed his bones and fed his flesh to the pigs, but I kept his jawbone. Hirac!”

  The high priest, his skin mottled with dirt and chalk, bobbed at the edge of the crowd.

  “You know where the jawbone is hidden?” Hengall demanded.

  “I do,” Hirac said.

  “Then if this worm does not step back,” Hengall said, staring at Jegar, “make a curse on his blood. Curdle his loins. Fill his belly with black worms.”

  Jegar paused for a heartbeat. Although he did not fear Hengall’s mace, he did fear Hirac’s curse, so he stepped back. Hengall looked back at his son. “In the cloak, son,” he said softly, “and hurry! I want my breakfast!”

  Lengar’s defiance crumpled. For a second it seemed he would leap at his father, preferring death to dishonor, but then he just sagged and, with a despairing gesture, dropped the spear, unlooped the gold from his neck and cut the stitches holding the great lozenges to his jerkin. He placed all the lozenges in the bear cloak, then unclasped the belt and tossed it with its great gold buckle onto the lozenges. “I found the gold,” he protested lamely when he had finished.

  “You and Saban found it,” Hengall agreed, “but you found it in the Old Temple, not in the woods, and that means the gold was sent to all of us! And why?” The chief had raised his voice so that all the folk could hear him. “The gods have not revealed their purpose, so we must wait to know the answer. But it is Slaol’s gold, and he sent it to us, and he must have had a reason.” He hooked the bear cloak with his foot, dragging it and the treasures toward his hut’s doorway from where a pair of woman’s hands reached out to haul the glittering pile inwards. A faint groan went through the crowd, for they knew it would be a long time before they ever saw that gold again. Hengall ignored the groan. “There are those here,” he shouted, “who would have me lead our warriors against the folk of Cathallo, and there are folk in Cathallo who would like their young men to attack us! Yet not all in Cathallo wish war on us. They know that many of their young men will die, and that even if they win the war they will be weakened by the fight. So there will be no war,” he finished abruptly. That had been a very long speech for Hengall, and a rare one in that he had revealed his thinking. Tell someone your thoughts, he had once said, and you give away y
our soul, but he was hardly giving away secrets when he declared his abhorrence of war. Hengall the Warrior hated war. The business of life, he liked to say, is to plant grain, not blades. He did not mind leading war bands against Outlanders, for they were strangers and thieves, but he detested fighting against the neighboring tribes, for they were cousins and they shared Ratharryn’s language and Ratharryn’s gods. He looked at Lengar. “Where’s the dead Outlander?” he asked.

  “In the Old Temple,” Lengar muttered. His tone was surly.

  “Take a priest,” Hengall instructed Galeth, “and get rid of the body.” He ducked back into his hut, leaving Lengar defeated and humiliated.

  The last of the mists vanished as the sun broke through the thin cloud. The moss-covered thatch steamed gently. The excitement in Ratharryn was over for the moment, though there were still the aftereffects of the storm to marvel at. The river flowed above its banks, the great ditch which lay inside the encircling embankment was flooded and the fields of wheat and barley were beaten flat.

  And Hengall was still the chief.

  The vast earthen embankment defined Ratharryn. Folk still marveled that their ancestors had made such a wall for it stood five times the height of a man and ringed the huts where close to a hundred families lived. The bank had been scraped from soil and chalk with antlers and ox blades, and was topped by the skulls of oxen, wolves and enemy spearmen to keep away the spirits of the dark forest. Every settlement, even the mean houses up on the higher land, had skulls to frighten the spirits, but Ratharryn mounted its skulls on the great earth bank that also served to deter and awe the tribe’s enemies.

  The families all lived in the southern part of the enclosure, while in the north were the huts of the potters and carpenters, the forge of the tribe’s one smith and the pits of the leather workers. There was still space inside the bank where herds of cattle and pigs could be sheltered if an enemy threatened, and at those times the people would throng to the two temples built inside the earthen ring. Both shrines were rings of timber poles. The largest had five rings and was a temple to Lahanna, the goddess of the moon, while the smaller, with just three rings, was for Arryn, the god of the valley, and for Mai, his wife, who was goddess of the river. The highest poles of those temples stretched three times the height of Galeth, who was the tribe’s tallest man, but they were dwarfed by the third temple which lay just to the south of the encircling embankment. That third temple had six rings of timber, and two of the rings had wooden lintels spanning their posts’ tops, and that temple belonged to Slaol, the sun god. The Sun Temple had been deliberately built outside the settlement for Slaol and Lahanna were rivals and their temples had to be separated so that a sacrifice at one could not be seen from the other.

  Slaol, Lahanna, Arryn and Mai were the chief deities of Ratharryn, but the people knew there were a thousand other gods in the valley, and as many again in the hills, and countless more beyond the hills, and a myriad in the winds. No tribe could build temples for each of the gods, nor even know who they all were, and besides that multitude of unknown gods there were the spirits of the dead, spirits of animals, spirits of streams, spirits of trees, spirits of fire, spirits of the air, spirits of everything that crept and breathed and killed or grew. And if a man was silent, standing on a hill in the evening quiet, he could sometimes hear the murmuring of the spirits, and that murmur could make a man mad unless he constantly prayed at the shrines.

  Then there was a fourth shrine, the Old Temple, that lay on the southern hill where it was overgrown with hazel and choked with weeds. That temple had been dedicated to Slaol, but years before, no one could remember when, the tribe had built Slaol the new temple close to the settlement and the old shrine had been abandoned. It had just decayed, yet it must still possess power, for it was there that the gold of the Outfolk had come. Now, on the morning after the great storm, Galeth took three men to the ancient temple to find and bury the Outlander’s body. The four men were accompanied by Neel, the youngest of Ratharryn’s priests, who went to protect them from the dead stranger’s spirit.

  The group stopped at the brow of the hill and made a bow to the grave mounds that stood between the Old Temple and the settlement. Neel howled like a dog to attract the attention of the ancestors’ spirits, then told those spirits what errand brought the men to the high ground. Galeth, while Neel chanted his news to the dead, stared at the sacred way that ran straight as an arrow’s flight off to the west. The ancestors had built that path but, like the Old Temple, it was now overgrown and abandoned, and not even the priests could say why its long straight ditches and banks had been scratched from the earth. Hirac thought it had been made to placate Rannos, the god of thunder, but he did not really know nor did he care. Now, as Galeth leaned on his spear and waited for Neel to detect an omen, it seemed to him that the world was wrong. It was decaying, just as the ancient sacred path and the Old Temple were decaying. Just as Ratharryn was decaying under the siege of sad harvests and persistent sickness. There was a tiredness in the air, as though the gods had become weary of their endless circling of the green world, and that tiredness frightened Galeth.

  “We can go,” Neel declared, though none of the men accompanying him had seen what sign the young priest had detected in the landscape. Perhaps it was the brush of a mist tendril against a tree bough, or the banking flight of a hawk, or the twitch of a hare in the long grass, but Neel was confident that the ancestral spirits had given their approval. So the small party walked on into a small valley and up the further slope to the Old Temple.

  Neel led the way through the rotted posts on the causeway and into the hazels. The young priest, his deerskin tunic soaked from the wet leaves, stopped with surprise when he reached the old death house. He frowned and hissed, then touched his groin to avert evil. It was not the stranger’s body that caused that precaution, but rather because the space in the shrine’s center had been deliberately cleared of weeds and hazel. It looked as though someone worshipped here in secret, though the presence of the ox skull suggested that whoever came to this forgotten place prayed to Slaol for the ox was Slaol’s beast, just as the badger and the bat and the owl belonged to Lahanna.

  Galeth also touched his groin, but he was warding off the spirit of the dead stranger who lay on his back with the three arrows still protruding from his chest. Neel dropped onto all fours and barked like a dog to drive the dead man’s spirit far from the cold flesh. He barked and howled for a long time, then suddenly stood, brushed his hands and said the corpse was now safe. “Strip him,” Galeth told his men, “and dig a grave for him in the ditch.” The stranger would be given no ceremony in his death, since he was not of Ratharryn. He was a mere Outlander. No one would dance for him and no one would sing for him, for his ancestors were not Ratharryn’s ancestors.

  Galeth, despite his huge strength, found it hard to free the arrows for the stranger’s cold flesh had tightened on the wooden shafts, but the shafts did at last come loose, though their flint heads stayed inside the corpse as they were supposed to do. All the tribes tied their arrowheads loosely so that an animal or an enemy could not pull out the barbed flint which, instead, would stay in the wound to fester. Galeth tossed the three shafts away, then stripped the body naked, leaving only the flat piece of stone that was tied to the dead man’s wrist. Neel feared that the stone, which was beautifully polished, was a magical amulet that could infect Ratharryn with a dark spirit from the Outfolk’s nightmares, and though Galeth insisted that it had merely protected the man’s wrist from his bowstring’s lash, the young priest would not be persuaded. He touched his groin to avert evil, then spat on the stone. “Bury it!”

  Galeth’s men used antler picks and ox shoulder blade shovels to deepen the ditch beside the temple’s entrance to the sun, then Galeth dragged the naked body through the hazels and dumped it in the shallow hole. The stranger’s remaining arrows were broken and tossed in beside him, and then the spoil was kicked over the body and trampled flat. Neel urinated on the grave, m
umbled a curse on the dead man’s spirit, then turned back into the temple.

  “Aren’t we finished?” Galeth asked.

  The young priest raised a hand to demand silence. He was creeping through the hazels, knees bent, stopping every other pace to listen, just as though he were stalking some large beast. Galeth let him go, presuming that Neel was making certain the stranger’s spirit was not clinging to the temple, but then there was a rush of feet, a yelp and a piteous howl from deep within the hazels and Galeth ran into the shrine’s center to find Neel holding a struggling creature by the ear. The priest’s captive was a dirty youth with wild black hair that hung matted over a filthy face, so filthy that he seemed as much beast as human. The youth, who was skeletally thin, was beating at Neel’s legs and squealing like a pig while Neel flailed wildly in an attempt to silence him.

  “Let him go,” Galeth ordered.

  “Hirac wants him,” Neel said, at last succeeding in landing a stinging blow on the youth’s face. “And I want to know why he’s been hiding here! I smelt him. Filthy beast,” he spat at the boy, then clouted him again. “I knew someone had been interfering here,” Neel went on triumphantly, gesturing with his free hand at the carefully cleared space where the ox skull sat, “and it’s this dirty little wretch!” The last word turned into an agonized scream as the priest suddenly let go of the boy’s ear and doubled over in pain, and Galeth saw that the boy had reached under Neel’s bone-fringed tunic to squeeze his groin, and then, like a fox cub unexpectedly released from a hound’s jaws, dropped to all fours and scrambled into the hazels.

  “Fetch him!” Neel shouted. His hands were clutched to his groin and he was rocking back and forward to contain the agony.