Bernard Cornwell - Stonehenge

Camaban learned to set bones, to fill wounds with moss and spider web, and to make the potions that give men dreams. He carried those potions to Cathallo's priests who treated him with awe because he had been chosen by Sannas. He learned to make the glutinous poison that warriors smeared on their arrow-heads when they hunted Outfolk in the wide forests north of Cathallo. The poison was made from a mixture of urine, faeces and the juice of a flowering herb that Sannas prized as a killer. He made Sannas's food, grinding it to a paste because, only having the one tooth, she could not chew. He learned her spells, learned her chants, learned the names of a thousand gods, and when he was not learning from Sannas he listened to the traders when they returned with strange tales from their long journeys. He listened to everything, forgot nothing and kept his opinions locked inside his head. Those opinions had not changed. The voices that had spoken in his head still echoed there, still woke him at night, still filled him with wonder. He had learned how to heal and how to frighten and how to twist the world to the gods' wishes, but he had not changed. The world's wisdom had left his own untouched.

In the winter's heart, when Slaol was at his weakest and Lahanna was shining brightly on Cathallo's shrine to touch the boulders with a sheen of glistening cold light, Sannas brought two warriors to the temple. 'It is time,' she told Camaban.

The warriors laid Camaban on his back beside one of the temple's taller stones. One man held Camaban's shoulders, while the other held the crippled foot towards the full moon. 'I will either kill you,' Sannas said, 'or cure you.' She held a maul of stone and a blade that had been made from the scapula of a dead man and she laid the bone blade on the grotesquely curled ball of Camaban's foot. 'It will hurt,' she said, then laughed as if Camaban's pain would give her pleasure.

The warrior holding the foot flinched as the maul hammered on the bone. Sannas hammered again, showing a remarkable strength for such an old woman. Blood, black in the moonlight, was pouring from the foot, soaking the warrior's hands and running down Camaban's leg. Sannas beat the maul on the blade again, then wrenched the scapula free and gritted her teeth as she forced the curl of Camaban's clenched foot outwards. 'You have toes!' she marvelled, and the two warriors shuddered and turned away as they heard the cracking of cartilage, the splintering of bone and the grating of the broken being straightened. 'Lahanna!' Sannas cried, and hammered the blade into Camaban's foot again, forcing its sharpened edge into another tight part of the bulbous flesh and fused bone.

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.

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 for ever 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.