Stonehenge (30 page)

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 northward 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 eastward 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.”

“To move a temple?” Saban asked, suddenly jealous of Erek.

“To end winter,” Aurenna said, “and bring an end to grief. That is why your brother came to Sarmennyn and why he saved you from Lengar. You and I, Saban, are Erek’s servants.”

That winter Saban and Mereth roamed the southern woods of Sarmennyn and found the tallest, straightest oaks and elms, taller even than the highest temple poles at Ratharryn, and they touched their foreheads to the trunks, begging forgiveness of the trees’ spirits, and then they cut the trees, trimmed them of branches and used a team of oxen to drag the trunks to Aurenna’s settlement. There they shaped the massive trees into double-prowed hulls. They fashioned the outside of the hulls first, then turned the trunks over and hollowed them with adzes made of flint, stone or bronze. A dozen men worked on the river bank, singing as they swung the blades and piled the ground with wood chips. Saban loved the work for he was used to shaping timber and he took pleasure in watching the clean white-golden wood take its shape. Aurenna and the other women worked close by, singing as they slit hides into the thongs
that would be used to bind the crossbeams to the hulls and the stones to the beams. Saban was happy in those days. He had been accepted as the headman of Aurenna’s settlement and everyone there shared a purpose and took pleasure in watching the work progress. They were good times, filled with laughter and honest work.

When the first three hulls were finished Lewydd carved an eye on each bow so that the god who protected boats would look out for storms and rocks, and then he laid the three boats side by side. Each craft was as long as three men, and the width of the three boats together was half the length of the hulls, which Saban now joined together with two huge beams of oak as thick about as a man’s waist. The beams were squared with flint and bronze and their lower halves fitted into slots chipped from the three hulls’ gunwales. Once the timbers were jointed to the hulls, they were lashed tight with the long strips of hide. It was a monstrous thing, that first boat, and the fishermen shook their heads and said it would never float, but it did. Twenty men heaved it off the bank onto the mud at low tide and the incoming tide lifted the triple hull easily. They called that boat
Molot,
which meant monster, and Lewydd was certain it would take the weight of the greatest stone and still survive the sea’s malevolence.

Camaban travelled to Ratharryn at winter’s end and returned to Sarmennyn just as the
Molot
was finished. He admired the great boat, glanced at the other hulls that were being shaped, then squatted outside Saban’s hut to give him news from home. Lengar, he said, was more powerful than ever, but Melak of Drewenna had died and there had been a struggle for the chieftainship between Melak’s son and a warrior named Stakis. Stakis had won. “Which is not what we wanted,” Camaban said. He took a bowl of gruel from Aurenna and nodded his thanks.

“What’s so bad about Stakis?” Saban asked.

“We have to float the stones through his territory, of course,” Camaban explained, “and he might not prove a friend to us. Still, he’s agreed to meet us.”

“Us?”

“All of us,” Camaban said vaguely, waving a hand that could have encompassed the whole world. “A meeting of the tribes. Us,
Ratharryn and Drewenna. One moon before midsummer. The problem is” – he paused to scoop up some of the gruel – “the problem” – he went on with his mouth full – “is that Stakis doesn’t like Lengar. I can’t blame him. Our brother has to keep his spearmen busy, so he’s been raiding Drewenna’s cattle.”

“He doesn’t fight Cathallo?”

“All the time, only they hide behind their marshes and their new chief is a good warrior. He’s one of Kital’s sons, Rallin.”

“Derrewyn’s cousin,” Saban said, remembering the name.

“Derrewyn’s pup, more like,” Camaban said vengefully. “She calls herself a sorceress now and lives in Sannas’s old hut where she wails to Lahanna, and Rallin won’t take a piss without her permission. It’s strange, isn’t it” – he paused to eat more gruel – “how Cathallo likes being ruled by a woman? First Sannas, now Derrewyn! A sorceress indeed! She grubs about with herbs and makes threats. That isn’t sorcery.”

“Did she have Lengar’s baby?” Saban asked. He had a sudden image of a dark face framed by black hair, of Derrewyn laughing, then of the same face crying and screaming. He shuddered.

“The baby died,” Camaban said carelessly, then sneered. “What kind of sorceress can’t keep her own child alive?” He put the empty bowl down. “Lengar wants you to bring Aurenna to the meeting of the tribes.”

“Why?”

“Because I told him she’s beautiful.” Camaban said, “which is good reason to leave her here.”

“Lengar wouldn’t touch her,” Saban said.

“He touches every woman he wants,” Camaban said, “and no one dares deny him for fear of his spearmen. Our brother, Saban, is a tyrant.”

Kereval, Scathel, Haragg, Camaban and a dozen other elders and priests traveled to the meeting of the tribes. Seven boats were needed to carry the delegation, and Saban went with Lewydd in a fishing boat that was driven by eight paddlers. The weather was blustery, and the seas promised to be big, but Lewydd was unworried. “Dilan will preserve us,” he promised Saban, who faced his first proper sea voyage with trepidation.

The fleet left in a summer dawn, paddling down the river until
they reached the sea where they waited in the shelter of a headland. “The tides,” Lewydd said, explaining the pause.

“What of them?”

“The tides don’t just rise and fall, but are like winds in the water. They flow up and down the coast, but unlike the winds they keep to a rhythm. We shall go east with the water-wind, and when it turns against us we rest until it helps us again.” Lewydd had sacrificed a piglet in Malkin’s temple, then splashed the animal’s blood on the boat’s prow, and now he dropped the carcass over the side. The crews of the other six boats did the same.

When the tide turned Saban did not detect it, but Lewydd was satisfied and his eight paddlers gave a shout and drove the boat out to sea. They went well away from the coast before turning east and now the wind was behind them and so Lewydd ordered a sail raised. The sail was made of two ox hides that were hung on a short spar suspended at the top of a stubby mast, and once the wind caught the leather it seemed to Saban that the boat flew, though still the waves came faster. The great seas would heap up behind and Saban feared the boat must be overwhelmed, but then the stern would lift and the paddlers would redouble their efforts and for a heart-stopping moment the wave would carry the boat forward in a great seething surge before the crest passed under the hull and the boat would lurch back and the sail would crack like a whip. The other crews raced them, driving their paddles hard so that the spray flicked up in the sun. They chanted as they worked, rivaling each other in music as well as in speed, though sometimes the chanting paused as men used seashells to scoop water from their boats.