Free Stonehenge by Bernard Cornwell Page B

fell silent as they marveled at the vast wall which looked to be as high and as extensive as the embankment which surrounded Ratharryn. The wall’s long summit was crowned with animal and human skulls, while from within the great enclosure came the heavy beat of wooden drums.
    The path did not lead direct to the vast temple, but instead, just outside the shrine’s entrance, made a double turn so that the wonders within the high chalk circle would not be revealed until the very last moment of the approach. Saban shuffled his dance steps about the double bend and there, suddenly visible beyond the shoulders of the great encircling bank, was Cathallo’s shrine. Saban’s first impression was of stones. Stones and more stones, for the great space within the soaring chalk wall seemed filled with heavy, high, gray boulders, and some had been newly wetted so that glints of light shone from their rough surfaces. The giant stones lay ringed by a ditch that had been dug inside the chalk wall, and the ditch was as deep as the rampart was high, and the area enclosed by the ditch and wall was almost as large as Ratharryn itself and Ratharryn was a tribe’s settlement with winter room for cattle, while this was just one temple.
    Some of Ratharryn’s women hesitated before entering the temple for women were not allowed inside their tribe’s own shrines except when they married, but Cathallo’s women urged them onward. In Cathallo, it seemed, both men and women could enter the circle and so all Hengall’s folk danced across the ditch and into the shrine of stones.
    There was one wide ring of boulders skimming the ditch’s edge, and each of those boulders was the size of the stacks made from the summer’s hay in Ratharryn. There were dozens of those massive stones, too many to count, and within their wide circle stood two more rings of stone, each the size of Slaol’s temple at Ratharryn, and still more stones stood between those inner rings. One of those stones was a ringstone, a boulder with a great hole in it, and that pierced rock had been lifted up on another, while nearby was a death house made from three massive stone slabs. Saban stared in stupefied awe. He did not understand how any man could raise such stones and he knew he must have come to a place where the gods worked marvels. Only Camaban, wincing every time he stepped on his clubbed foot, seemed unimpressed.
    The people of Cathallo were massed on the embankment’s inner slope and they let out a great cry of welcome as the visitors danced into the sacred ring. The shout echoed all around the vast enclosure and then they began to sing.
    Kital, chief of Cathallo, waited to greet Hengall’s folk. Kital wished to impress, and he did, for he was dressed in an ankle-length deerskin cloak that had been whitened with chalk and urine, then thickly sewn with rings of bronze that reflected the sun so that it seemed to glint when he moved forward to greet Hengall. The chief of Cathallo was tall, with a long thin clean-shaven face, and fair hair that was circled with a fillet of bronze into which he had pushed a dozen long swan feathers. Kital was of an age with Hengall, but there was an animation in his face that stole the years and he walked with a lithe, eager step. He spread his arms wide in a gesture of welcome and in so doing lifted the edges of his cloak to reveal a long bronze sword hanging from a leather belt. “Hengall of Ratharryn,” he announced, “welcome to Cathallo!”
    Hengall looked shabby beside Kital. He was taller and broader than Cathallo’s chieftain, but his bearded face was blunt comparedto Kital’s sharp features and his clothes were dirty and ragged, for Hengall had never been a man to worry about cloaks or jerkins. He kept his spear sharp, combed the lice from his beard, and reckoned that was the extent of a man’s duty toward his appearance. The two chiefs embraced and the watching tribes murmured their appreciation for any public embrace between