Stonehenge - Bernard Cornwell

'No!' Scathel shouted. He was gazing at the gold as though it were Erek himself. Tears were running down his gaunt face and a look of pure wonder was in his eyes. He dropped to his knees. 'Please, no!' he begged Camaban.

'You will move a temple to Ratharryn?' Camaban asked.

'I will move a temple to Ratharryn,' Scathel said humbly, still kneeling.

Camaban pointed northwards. 'In your madness, Scathel,' he said, 'in the mountains, you built a double ring of stone. That is the temple I want.'

'Then you shall have it,' Scathel said.

'It is agreed?' Camaban asked Kereval.

'It is agreed,' Kereval said.

Camaban still held the large lozenge high. 'Erek rejected the bride because you rejected his ambition! Erek wants his temple at Ratharryn!' Folk had crept out of shelter and were listening to Camaban who stood tall and terrible on the dark cliff's edge where the wind lifted his long black hair and rattled the bones tied to its ends. 'Nothing is done for nothing,' he shouted. 'Losing your gold was a tragedy, but a tragedy with meaning, and what does it mean? It means Erek would increase his power! He would spread his light to the world's centre! He will reclaim his proper bride, the earth itself! He will bring us life and happiness, but only if you do what he wishes. And if you move his temple to Ratharryn then you will all be like gods.' He slumped, exhausted. 'You will all be like gods…' he said again.

'Thank you for saving her,' Saban said, an arm about Aurenna.

'Don't be absurd,' Camaban said wearily. Then he walked forward and knelt in front of Scathel. He laid the gold, all twelve pieces of it, on the grass between them, and the two men embraced as though they were long-lost brothers. Both wept and both swore to do the sun god's bidding.

So Aurenna lived, Camaban had won and Ratharryn would have its temple.

Scathel did not know what to do with Aurenna: she had walked the path to the fire and lived, and no bride had ever done that. Scathel's first instinct was to kill her, while Kereval wanted to take her as his own bride, but Camaban, whose authority now stood almost unchallenged in Sarmennyn, decided she must go free. 'Erek permitted her to live,' he told the tribe, 'and that means he must have a use for her. If we kill her or if we force her to a marriage, then we defy Erek.'

And so Aurenna walked north to where her own folk lived and she stayed there through the winter, but in the spring she came south again and brought two of her brothers with her.

The three came down the river on a boat made from willow branches that had been bent into a bowl and covered with hides. Aurenna was dressed in deerskins and had her golden hair tied at the nape of her neck. She landed at Kereval's settlement in the evening, and the sinking sun glowed on her face as she walked through the huts where the folk shrank from her. Some believed she was still a goddess, others thought her rejection by Erek had turned her into a malign spirit; all feared her power.

She stooped at the entrance of Haragg's hut. Saban was alone inside, chipping flints into arrow-heads. He liked the task, for it was satisfying to see the sharp slivers emerge from the knobs of rough stone, but then the light by which he was working was blotted out and he looked up, irritated, and did not recognise Aurenna for she was merely a shape against the light outside. 'Haragg is not here,' he said.

'I came to see you,' Aurenna answered, and that was when Saban recognised her and his heart was suddenly too full for him to speak. He had dreamed of seeing her again but had feared he never would; now she had come. She bent to enter the hut and sat opposite him while her two brothers squatted beyond the door. 'I have prayed to Erek,' she said gravely, 'and he has told me to help you move the temple. It is my fate.'

'Your fate? To move stone?' Saban almost smiled.

'To be with you,' Aurenna said and gazed at him anxiously as though he might refuse her help.

Saban did not know what to say. 'To be with me?' he asked nervously, wondering exactly what she meant.

'If you will have me,' she said, and blushed, though it was too dim in the hut for Saban to see it. 'I prayed to Erek all last winter,' Aurenna went on in a small voice, 'and I asked him why he had not taken me. Why had he shamed my family? And I spoke with our priest and he gave me a cup of liquid to drink and I dreamed the wild dream and Erek told me that I am to be the mother of the guardian of his new temple at Ratharryn.'

'You are to be a mother?' Saban asked, hardly daring to believe what she so calmly proposed.

'If you will have me,' she said humbly.

'I have dreamed of little else,' Saban confessed.

Aurenna smiled. 'Good,' she said, 'then I will be with you and my brothers can move your stones.' She explained that the brothers, Caddan and Makin, were accustomed to bringing great lumps of rock from the splintered mountain tops to the lower land where the families broke the boulders and made the axe-heads. 'And I hear,' she went on earnestly, 'that you are finding the task of moving the stones difficult?'

It was not Saban who was finding the task difficult, but Haragg, for Kereval had placed the trader in charge of moving the temple and the big man seemed perplexed by the problems. He had spent all the previous summer and autumn travelling back and forth between Scathel's temple and the chief's settlement and he had still not decided how the stones were to be shifted or, indeed, whether they could be moved at all. He worried at the problem, listened to suggestions, then fell into indecision. Lewydd and Saban were sure they knew how it could be done, but Haragg was nervous of taking their advice. 'It can be done,' Saban now told Aurenna, 'but only when Haragg decides to trust Lewydd and me.'

'I shall tell him to trust you,' Aurenna said. 'I shall tell him of my dream, and he will obey the god.'

Aurenna's return unsettled the priests for they feared her power might rival theirs, so Saban made her a hut on the other river bank, closer to the sea, and there he and Aurenna lived and folk came from all across Sarmennyn, and even from the lands touching Sarmennyn's borders, for her touch. Fishermen brought their boats for her blessing and barren women came to be granted the gift of children. Aurenna disclaimed any power, yet still they came and some even built their own huts close to hers until the place became known as Aurenna's settlement. Lewydd, the spearman who was a fisherman's son, also came to live there, bringing a wife, and Aurenna's brothers made their homes next to his and took themselves wives. Haragg and Cagan came also and Haragg bowed to Aurenna and seemed relieved when she instructed him that Erek had decreed that Saban and Lewydd were to move the temple stones. She told Haragg, 'My brothers will move the stones down the mountains, Saban will make boats to carry the stones and Lewydd will take the boats to Ratharryn.'

Haragg accepted Aurenna's word and thereafter joined Camaban who was travelling all through Sarmennyn and preaching his vision, for the task of moving the stones would need the help of the tribe and so the folk must be convinced. At the beginning of time, Camaban said, the gods had danced together and the folk of Earth had lived in their happy shadow, but men and women had begun to love the moon goddess and the earth goddess more than Erek himself and so Erek had broken the dance. Yet if Erek could be brought back then the old happiness would be restored. There would be no more winter, no more sickness and no more orphans crying in the dark. Haragg preached the same theme and the promises were received with astonishment and hope. In just one year the tribe's sullen opposition to moving a temple was turned into enthusiastic support.

It was one thing to persuade Kereval's people to move the stones, but it was another to make sure Lengar accepted the temple and so Scathel, who was now Camaban's sworn ally, went to Ratharryn in the spring. 'Tell Lengar that the temple we are sending him is a war temple,' Camaban instructed the high priest.

'But it isn't!' Scathel protested.

'But if he believes it is a war temple,' Camaban explained patiently, 'then he will be eager to receive it. Tell him that if he exchanges the gold for the stones then it will grant his spearmen invincibility. Tell him it will make him the greatest warrior of all the world. Tell him that songs of his prowess will ring through the years for ever.'

So Scathel went and told Lengar the lies and Lengar was so awed by the tall, gaunt priest and by his promises of invincibility that he actually yielded a half-dozen more of the small lozenges, though he said nothing of the ones Derrewyn had stolen.

When Scathel returned from Ratharryn he brought Galeth's son, Mereth, to be Saban's helper. Mereth was a year younger than Saban, and he had inherited his father's strength and knowledge. He could shape wood, lift stone, raise a temple pole or chip flint, and do all those things with dexterity, speed and skill. Like his father he had huge hands and a generous heart, though when he came to Sarmennyn that heart was burdened with news for Saban's mother had died.

Saban wept for her, listening as Mereth described how they had carried her corpse to the Death Place. 'We broke pots for her in Lahanna's temple,' Mereth said. 'Lengar wants to pull that temple down.'

'He wants to destroy Lahanna's temple?' Saban was amazed.

'Cathallo worships Lahanna, so Ratharryn isn't allowed to any more,' Mereth explained, then added that Derrewyn had rallied the people of Cathallo.

And that too was news to Saban. Derrewyn had escaped to Cathallo and taken a child in her belly. Saban pressed Mereth for whatever detail he could reveal, though Mereth knew little more than he had already told. Saban felt a fierce pleasure at the news and that, in turn, made him feel guilty about Aurenna. 'Derrewyn must have had the baby by now?' he suggested.

'I heard nothing,' Mereth said.

Mereth and Saban made sledges and boats, while Caddan and Makin, Aurenna's brothers, went to the mountain to move the stones of Scathel's temple from their high valley. They used sledges, each one twice the length of a man's height and half as broad, made of two stout oak runners spanned by baulks of timber. Saban made a dozen sledges that first year, and Lewydd carried them up the river from Aurenna's settlement on a boat made of two hulls joined by timber beams. The river twisted through the woods past Kereval's settlement and into the bleaker country where the trees were sparse and windbent, then wound northwards until it became too shallow for Lewydd's boat, but by then it was under the shadow of the mountain where the temple stood.

Aurenna's brothers needed scores of men to move the stones, but the folk of Sarmennyn had been inspired by Camaban and Haragg and there was no shortage of helpers. The women sang as the men dragged the sledges up the mountain. The first of the temple's stones were rocked loose from their sockets, then lowered onto the sledges. Aurenna's brothers began with the smaller stones for they could be lifted by a mere dozen men and two such stones could be placed on one sledge. A dozen men dragged the first sledge to the high valley's lip and there the sledge tipped over the edge and it needed thirty men, not to pull it, but to stop it from running loose down the steep slope. It took a whole day to guide the first two stones down the slope, and another full day to drag the sledge from the mountain's foot to the river's bank, and it would take another two years to bring the whole temple down the hill, and in all that time only one sledge ran out of control to thunder down the slope, tip and shatter so that its pillar broke into a thousand pieces. The largest stones, which needed thirty or forty men to lift, were stored beside the river on their sledges while the smaller pillars, which could be manhandled by a dozen men, were left on the grass.

It was Lewydd who would carry the stones to Ratharryn, for the temple would float for most of its journey and he was a seaman. Lewydd devised the boats. In the first year, after the first few stones had been brought down the mountain, he loaded two of the smaller stones onto the same boat that had carried the sledges upstream. He manned the two hulls with a dozen paddlers, then set off downriver. The boat moved fast, carried by the current, and Lewydd was confident enough to take the stones to where the river widened into the sea. He wanted to discover how the boat rode the larger waves, but no sooner had the first green sea broken on the bows than the weight of the stones pushed the two hulls outward and the boat split into two and the pillars sank. Haragg cried aloud, claiming the work was being done all wrong, but Camaban assured the men watching from the cliffs that Dilan, the sea god, had exacted his price and that no more stones would be lost. A heifer was sacrificed on the beach and its blood allowed to run into the water and a moment later three porpoises were seen offshore and Scathel declared that Dilan had accepted the sacrifice.

'Three hulls, not two,' Lewydd told Saban. Lewydd and his crew had swum safely ashore and the young seaman had decided it was not Dilan who had taken the stones, but the inadequacy of the boat. 'I want three hulls for each boat,' he explained, 'side by side. And I want ten boats, more if you can find the trees.'

'Thirty hulls!' Saban exclaimed, wondering if there were enough trees in Sarmennyn's scanty forests to provide so many. He had thought of using some of the tribe's existing boats, but Camaban insisted that the boats must be new and dedicated solely to Erek's glory and that once they had carried the stones eastwards they must be burned.

That summer the new sun bride burned, going to her death in a blaze of glory. The folk of Sarmennyn had never seen Erek so red, so swollen and so majestic as he was that midsummer night, and the bride died without a cry. Aurenna did not go to the Sea Temple for the ceremony, but stayed in her hut. She was pregnant.

The child was born early the next year. It was a boy and Aurenna called him Leir, which means 'One Who Was Saved', and she named him that because she had been saved from the fire. 'I never really thought I would die,' Aurenna confessed to Saban one winter evening after Leir's birth. They were sitting on their stone, the pink-flecked greenish boulder that lay on the river bank close to their hut, and sharing a bear's pelt to keep warm.

'I thought you would die,' Saban admitted.

She smiled. 'I used to pray to Erek every day, and somehow I knew he would let me live.'

'Why?'

She shook her head, almost as if Saban's question were irrelevant. 'I just did,' she said, 'though I hardly dared believe the hope. Of course I wanted to be his bride,' she added hastily, frowning, 'but I also wanted to serve him. When I was a goddess I had dreams, and in the dreams Erek told me the time of change was coming. That the time of his loneliness was ending.'

Saban was always uncomfortable when she talked of having been a goddess. He was not certain he really believed her, but he admitted to himself that he had not grown up in Sarmennyn and so he was not accustomed to the notion of a girl being changed into a goddess, or, indeed, changing back again. 'I prayed you would live,' he said.

'I still get the dreams,' Aurenna said, ignoring his words. 'I think they tell me the future, only it's like looking into a mist. It's how you told me you first saw Scathel's temple, as a shape in the mist, and that's how my dreams are, but I think they'll become clearer.' She paused. 'I hope they'll become clearer,' she went on, 'but at least I still hear Erek in my head and I sometimes think I am really married to him, that perhaps I am the bride he left on earth to do his work.'