Stonehenge: A Novel of 2000 BC

Sannas bent the foot flat, then splinted it in deer bones that she bound tight with strips of wolfskin. ‘I have used bone to mend bone,’ she told Camaban, ‘and you will either die or you will walk.’

Camaban stared at her, but said nothing. The pain had been more than he had ever expected, it had been a pain fit to fill the whole wide moonlit world, but he had not whimpered once. There were tears in his eyes, but he had made no sound and he knew he would not die. He would live because Slaol wanted it. Because he had been chosen. Because he was the crooked child who had been sent to make the world straight. He was Camaban.

Chapter 5 (#ulink_35cdf3ce-d695-5392-8075-818af5915b12)

Winter passed. The salmon returned to the river and the rooks to the high elms that grew west of Ratharryn. The cuckoo called and dragonflies darted where winter ice had locked the river. Lambs bleated among the ancestors’ grave mounds, and herons feasted on ducklings in Mai’s river. The blackbird’s song rippled across the woods where, when spring was full, the deer lost their grey winter coats and shed their antlers. Hengall’s father had once claimed to have seen deer eating their old antlers, but in truth it was Syrax, the stag god who roamed the woods, who took them back to himself. The shed antlers were prized as tools, and so men sought to find them before Syrax.

The fields were ploughed. The wealthier folk tugged the fire-hardened plough stake behind an ox, while others used their families to drag the gouging point across the soil. They broke the ground from east to west, then north to south before the priests came to scatter the first handfuls of seed. The previous harvest had been bad, but Hengall had hoarded seed in his hut and now he released it for the fields. Some fields were abandoned to grass, for their soil was tired, but the previous spring the men had ringed trees on the forest’s edge, then burned the dead trees in the autumn, and the newly cleared land was ploughed and sown while the women made a sacrifice of a lamb. Kestrels floated above the Old Temple where orchids flowered and blue-winged butterflies flew.

In summer, just when the thrushes fell silent, the boys of Hengall’s tribe faced their ordeals of manhood. Not every boy passed the ordeals and some did not even survive them. Indeed it was better, the tribe said, for a boy to die than to fail because in failure they risked ridicule for the rest of their lives. For a whole moon after the ordeal a boy who failed would be forced to wear a woman’s clothes and toil at woman’s work and squat like a woman to pass water. And for the rest of his life he could not take a wife, nor own slaves, cattle or pigs. A few of those who failed might display some talent for augury and dreams, and those boys might become priests and would then receive the privileges of those who had passed the ordeals, but most of those who failed were scorned for ever. It was better to die.

‘You’re ready?’ Hengall asked Saban on the morning of the first day.

‘Yes, father,’ Saban said nervously. He was not sure that was true, for how could anyone prepare to be hunted by Jegar and his hounds? In truth Saban was terrified, but he dared not show his fear to his father.

Hengall, whose hair had turned grey in the previous winter, had summoned Saban to give the boy a meal. ‘Bear meat,’ Hengall said, ‘to give you strength.’

Saban had no appetite, but he ate dutifully and Hengall watched each mouthful. ‘I have been unlucky in my sons,’ he said after a while. Saban, his mouth full of the pungent flesh, said nothing, and Hengall groaned as he thought of Lengar and Camaban. ‘But in you I have a proper son,’ he said to Saban. ‘Prove it in these next days.’

Saban nodded.

‘If I died tomorrow,’ Hengall growled, touching his groin to avert the ill luck implied in the words, ‘I suppose Galeth would become chief, but he wouldn’t be a good leader. He’s a good man, but too trusting. He would believe everything Cathallo tells us, and they lie to us as often as they speak the truth. They claim to be our friend these days, but they would still like to swallow us up. They want our land. They want our river. They want our food, but they fear the price they’d pay. They know we would maul them grievously, so when you become chief you must have proved yourself a warrior whom they would fear to fight, but you must also be wise enough to know when not to fight.’

‘Yes, father,’ Saban said. He had hardly heard a word for he was thinking about Jegar and his long-haired dogs with their tongues lolling between sharp teeth.

‘Cathallo must fear you,’ Hengall said, ‘as they fear me.’

‘Yes, father,’ Saban said. His chin was dripping with bear’s blood. He felt sick.

‘The ancestors are watching you,’ Hengall went on, ‘so make them proud of us. And once you’re a man we shall marry you to Derrewyn. We’ll make it the first ceremony of the new temple, eh? That should bring you Slaol’s favour.’

‘I like Derrewyn,’ Saban said, blushing.

‘Doesn’t matter whether you like her or hate her, you just have to give her sons, a lot of sons. Wear the girl out! Breed her, then breed other women, but make yourself sons! Blood is all.’

With these injunctions fresh in his ears, and with his gullet sour from the rank taste of the bear, Saban went to Slaol’s temple just beyond the settlement’s entrance. He was naked, as were the twenty-one other boys who gathered beneath the high temple poles. All the boys would now have to go into the wild woods for five nights and there survive even though they were being hunted, and the hunters, who were the men of the tribe, surrounded the temple and jeered at the candidates. The hunters all carried bows or spears and they called the boys woman-hearted, said they would fail, and warned them that the ghouls and spirits and beasts of the woods would rend them. The men invited the boys to abandon the quest before they began, saying that there was small point in their attempting to become men for they were so obviously puny and feeble.

Gilan, the high priest, ignored the jeers and taunts as he prayed to the god. The small chalk balls that were the symbols of the boys’ lives were laid in the temple’s centre, above the grave of a child who had been sacrificed to the god at the temple’s consecration. The balls would stay there until the end, when those who became men would be allowed to break them and those who failed would have to return the chalk symbols to their shamed families.

Gilan spat on the boys as a blessing. Each was allowed one weapon. Most clutched spears or bows, but Saban had chosen to take a flint knife that he had made himself from a rare piece of local flint big enough to make a blade as long as his hand. He had flaked the dark stone into a white and wicked edge. He did not expect to hunt with the knife, for even if he succeeded in killing a beast he would not dare light a fire to cook its flesh in case the smoke should bring the hunters. ‘You might as well take no weapon,’ Galeth had advised him, but Saban wanted the small knife for the touch of it gave him comfort.

Jegar taunted Saban from the temple’s edge. The hunter had hung a bunch of eagle feathers from his spearhead and more eagle feathers were tucked into his long hair. ‘I’m loosing my hounds on you, Saban!’ Jegar called. The dogs, huge and hairy, salivated behind their master. ‘Give up now!’ Jegar shouted. ‘What chance does a pissing child like you have? You won’t survive a day.’

‘We’ll drag you back in disgrace,’ one of Jegar’s friends called to Saban, ‘and you can wear my sister’s tunic and fetch my mother’s water.’

Hengall listened to the threats, but did nothing to alleviate them. This was the way of the tribe and if Saban survived the enmity of Jegar and his friends then Saban’s reputation would grow. Nor could Hengall try to protect Saban in the woods for then the tribe would declare that the boy had not passed the ordeal fairly. Saban must survive by his own wits, and if he failed then the gods would be saying he was not fit to be chief.

The boys were given a half-day’s start. Then, for five summer nights, they had to survive in the forest where their enemies would not just be the hunters, but also the bears, the great wild aurochs, the wolves and the Outfolk bands who knew that the boys were loose among the trees and so came searching for slaves. The Outfolk would shave the boys’ heads, chop off a finger and drag them away to a life of whipped servitude.

Gilan at last finished his invocations and clapped his hands, scattering the frightened boys out of the temple. ‘Run far!’ Jegar shouted. ‘I’m coming for you, Saban!’ His leashed dogs howled and Saban feared those animals for the gods had given hounds the ability to follow men deep through the trees. Dogs could sense a man’s spirit so that even in the dark a dog could find a man. They can track any creature with a spirit and the great shaggy hounds would be Saban’s worst enemies in the coming days.

Saban ran south across the pastureland and his path took him close to the Old Temple which stood waiting for Cathallo’s stones. He thought, as he ran past the ditch, that he heard Camaban’s voice calling his name and he stopped in puzzlement and looked into the cleared shrine, but there was nothing there except two white cows cropping the grass. His fears told him to keep running towards the trees, but a stronger instinct made him cross the shallow outer bank, clamber through the chalk ditch and climb the larger bank inside.

The sun was warm on his bare skin. He stood motionless, wondering why he had stopped, and then another impulse drove him to his knees on the grass inside the shrine where he used the flint knife to cut off a hank of his long black hair. He laid the hair on the grass, then bowed his forehead to the ground. ‘Slaol,’ he said, ‘Slaol.’ It was here that Lengar had tried to kill him, and Saban had escaped that enmity, so now he prayed that the sun god would help him evade another hatred. Saban had been praying for days now, praying to as many gods as he could remember, but now, in the warm ring of chalk on the wind-touched hill, Slaol sent him an answer. It came as if from nowhere, and Saban suddenly knew he would survive the ordeal and that he would even win. He understood that in his anxiety he had been praying for the wrong thing. He had begged the gods to hide him from Jegar, but Jegar was the tribe’s best hunter and Slaol had given Saban the thought that he should let Jegar find him. That was the god’s gift. Let Jegar find his prey, then let him fail. Saban raised his head to the brightness in the sky and shouted his thanks.

He ran into the woods where he felt his fears rise again. This was the wild place, the dark place where wolves, bears and aurochs stalked. There were Outfolk hunting bands looking for slaves and, even worse, there were outcasts. When a man was banished from Ratharryn the tribe did not say that he was gone from the settlement, but that he had gone to the woods, and Saban knew that many such outcasts roamed the trees, men said to be as savage as any beast. It was rumoured they lived off human flesh and they knew when the tribes’ boys were hiding among the trees and so they searched for them. All those dangers frightened Saban, but there were still more horrible things among the leaves: those dead souls who did not pass into Lahanna’s care haunted the woods. Sometimes hunters vanished without a trace and the priests reckoned they had been snatched by the jealous dead who so hate the living.

The forest was all dark danger, which is why the woods were forever being felled and why women were not allowed into it. They could forage for herbs among the copses close to the settlement, or they could travel through the woods if they were accompanied by men, but they could not go alone into the trees that lay beyond the outermost fields for fear of being assaulted by ghouls and spirits, or of being captured by the outcasts. Some women, very few, actually ran to join those fugitives and once there, hidden in the deep trees, they formed small savage clans who preyed on crops, children, herds and flocks.

Yet Saban saw no dangers as he headed westwards through the woods. The sun made the green leaves shine and the warm wind whispered in the branches. He followed the same path on which he and Lengar had tracked the stranger who had brought the treasure to Ratharryn, and though he knew there was a risk in walking such a path so openly when the woods were filled with enemies, he took the chance for he wanted Jegar’s dogs to have no trouble in following his spirit through the tangling trees.

In the afternoon, when he had reached the high crest from where he could stare far across the western forests, Saban heard the faint sound of ox horns blowing. That ominous booming told him that Ratharryn’s hunters had been released. They would be carrying glowing embers in pots so that if they chose to stay in the woods at night they could build vast fires that would deter the spirits and the beasts. Saban could use no such defence. He had only Slaol’s help and one short-bladed knife of brittle flint.

He spent a long time searching for a tree that would suit Slaol’s purpose. He knew Jegar’s dogs would be lunging along the path, but he had a long start and time enough, and after a while he settled on an oak tree that grew low and broad, though halfway up its trunk there was a space from which no branches sprang. A man could easily climb the first length of the tree, then he would need to leap to catch hold of a convenient branch that was the thickness of a man’s arm. That branch made the perfect handhold, and if Jegar thought Saban was hidden in the upper leaves of the tree he would leap for it. Saban leapt for it now, and held on tight as his feet scrabbled for purchase on the trunk. Then he hauled himself up and straddled the tree’s narrow limb.

He sat facing the oak’s trunk, said a brief prayer to the tree so that it would forgive the wound he was about to inflict, then used his knife’s tip to gouge a narrow slit along the branch’s topmost surface. Then, when the cut was wide and deep enough, he jammed the flint blade into the wood so that its wicked, white-flaked edge stood proud of the bark. He did his work well, for the blade sat firm in the tree’s grip when he was finished. He spat on the flint to give it luck, then dropped down from the branch. He looked up to make sure that his small trap was invisible, then collected and hid the small scraps of freshly chipped wood that had fallen by the oak’s bole.

He ran downhill to find the stream that flowed at the ridge’s foot and once there he waded through the shallow water because everyone knew that spirits could not cross water. While he was in the stream his own spirit would shrink into his body, thus leaving no trace for Jegar’s dogs. He waded a long way, occasionally muttering a prayer to placate the stream’s spirit, then climbed back up the hill to discover a place where he could rest.

He found a place where two branches sprang from an elm tree’s trunk, and he placed smaller branches across the two to make a platform where he could lie safely. He was hidden, but high enough to see between the leaves to where the white clouds rode the bright sky, and, by craning his neck, he could just see a patch of mossy ground at the tree’s foot. For a long while nothing happened. The wind rustled the leaves, a squirrel chattered its teeth and two bees drifted close. Somewhere a woodpecker rattled at bark, stopped, began again. A rustle of dead leaves made Saban peer down, fearing discovery, but all he saw was a fox carrying a dabchick in its jaws.

Then the living noises of the woods, all the small sounds of claw and beak and paw, just stopped, and there was only the sigh of the wind among the leaves and the creak of the trees. Everything that breathed was crouching motionless because something new and strange had come. There was danger; the forest held its breath, and Saban listened until at last he heard the noise that had silenced the world. A hound bayed.

It was a warm day, but Saban’s naked skin was suddenly chill. He could feel the hairs prickling at his neck. Another dog howled, then Saban heard men’s voices far away. The men were high above him on the slope. Hunters.

He could imagine them. There would be a half-dozen young men, Jegar their leader, all tall and strong and sun-browned, with their long hair twisted into hunter’s braids and hung with feathers. They would be peering up the oak tree, leaning on their spears and calling insults to where they thought Saban was hiding. Perhaps they loosed a few arrows into the leaves, hoping to drive him down so they could walk him back to Ratharryn and parade his shame in front of his father’s hut, but in a small while they would become bored and one of them – let it be Jegar, Saban prayed – would clamber up the oak’s trunk to find him.

Saban lay, his eyes closed, listening. Then he heard a shout. Not just a shout, but a yelp of protest and pain and anger, and he knew his small trap had bitten blood. He smiled.

Jegar fell from the tree, cursing because his right hand was cut deep across the palm. He shrieked and forced his bleeding hand between his thighs as he bent over to alleviate the agony. One of his friends placed moss on the wound, and bound the hand with leaves, and afterwards, furious, they rampaged along the ridge, but neither they nor their howling dogs came close to Saban. They followed his spirit down to the stream, but there the hounds lost him and after a while they abandoned the hunt. The sound of dogs faded and the myriad small sounds of the woods were heard again.

Saban grinned. He relived the moment when he had heard the scream and he thanked Slaol. He laughed. He had won.

He had won, yet still he did not move. He was hungry now, yet he dared not forage in case Jegar was still stalking the slope, so he stayed on his small platform and watched the birds fly home to their nests and the sky turn red with Slaol’s anger because the world was being given over to Lahanna’s care. The chill seeped up from the stream. A deer and her fawn stepped slow and delicate beneath the ash as they went to the water and their appearance suggested there were no hunters concealed on the ridge above, yet still Saban did not move. His hunger and thirst could wait. In the gaps between the high leaves he could see the sky turning smoky and misty, then the first star of Lahanna’s flock appeared. The tribe called that star Merra and it reminded Saban that all his ancestors were gazing down, but it also brought fears of those folk who had died in shame and who were now rousing from their day sleep to let their famished spirits wander the dark trees. Strange claws were being unsheathed and rabid teeth bared as the night terrors of the forest were unleashed.

Saban hardly slept, but instead lay and listened to the noises of the night. Once he heard the crackling of twigs, the sound of a great body moving through the brush, then silence again in which he imagined a monstrous head, fangs bared, questing up into the elm. A scream sounded higher on the ridge, and Saban curled into a ball and whimpered. An owl screeched. The boy’s only comforts were the stars of his ancestors, the cold light of Lahanna silvering the leaves and his thoughts of Derrewyn. He thought of her a lot. He tried to conjure up a picture of her face. Once, thinking about her, he looked up and saw a streak of light slither across the stars and he knew that a god was descending to the earth which he took to be a sign that he and Derrewyn were destined for each other.

For five days and nights he hid, foraging only in the half-light of dawn and dusk. He found a clearing at the bottom of the ridge where the stream had made a wide bend in its course and there he found chervil and garlic. He plucked sorrel and comfrey leaves, and found some broom buds, though they were bitter for their season was almost done. Best of all were the morels that he found higher on the ridge where a great elm had fallen. He carried them back to his platform in the ash and picked the woodlice from their crannies before eating them. One day he even tickled a small trout up from the weeds of the stream and gnawed greedily at its raw flesh. At night he chewed the gum that oozes from birch bark, spitting it out when all the flavour was gone.

Jegar had given up the hunt, though Saban did not know that, and one twilight, seeking for more morels by the rotting elm, he heard a footfall in the leaves and froze. He was concealed by the fallen tree, but the hiding place was precarious and his heart began to thump.

A moment later a file of Outfolk spearmen went past. They were all men, all with bronze-tipped spears and all had grey tattooed streaks on their faces. They had no dogs with them, and they seemed more intent on leaving the ridge than searching for prey. Saban heard them splash through the stream, heard the flutter as the waterbirds fled their presence, then there was silence again.

The last night was Saban’s worst. It rained, and the wind was high so that the noises of the trees were louder than ever as they tossed their heads in the wet sky. Branches creaked and, far off, Rannos the god of thunder tumbled the blackness. And it was dark, utterly dark, without a scrap of Lahanna’s light piercing or thinning the clouds. The darkness was worse than a cold hut, for this was a limitless night filled with horrors and in its black heart Saban heard something huge and cumbersome crash through the woods and he huddled on his platform thinking of the dead souls and their yearning for human flesh until, wet, cold and hungry, he saw a grey dawn dilute the damp darkness above the ridge. The rain eased as the sky brightened, and then the ox horns sounded to say that the first ordeal was done.

Twenty-two boys had left Ratharryn, but only seventeen returned. One had vanished and was never seen again, two had been found by hunters and had been driven back to Ratharryn, while two more had been so terrified of the darkness of the trees that they had willingly gone back to their humiliation. But the seventeen who gathered at Slaol’s temple were permitted to tie their hair in a loose knot at the nape of their necks and then they followed the priests down the track that led to Ratharryn’s entrance and their path was lined with women who held out platters of flat bread and cold pork and dried fish. ‘Eat,’ they urged the boys, ‘you must be hungry, eat!’ But hungry as they were, none touched the food for that too was an ordeal, though an easy one to survive.

The men of the tribe waited beside a raging fire inside the great wall and they thumped their spear butts on the ground to welcome the seventeen. The boys still had two tests to face, and some could yet fail, but they were no longer jeered. Saban saw Jegar, and saw the leaves bound with twine on his hand, and he could not resist dancing a few steps of victory. Jegar spat towards him, but it was mere petulance. He had missed his chance and Saban had survived the woods.