Free Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd Page A

hunter with the long toes had no chance. He faced death calmly, his hard, mean little face staring straight at the huge form rushing towards him. At the last moment, knowing that it was useless, he made a dart to one side, but the auroch’s great horns caught him and with a single burst of blood, Hwll saw his small body broken apart. Tossing the body high into the air, the auroch thundered forward towards the trees and a moment later he could hear the great beast stumbling about in the wood, snapping the spears off against the tree trunks. The hunters made no attempt to follow.
    Tep was dead: a sad little mess of flesh and blood, scarcely recognisable. Without a word, they carried him back to the camp and that evening they buried him on the high ground, under a small cairn of stones.
    The death of Tep left the little community with a new problem, and one that had to be solved quickly. Ulla was still of child-bearing age, and her family, except for her son, who was still a youth, had no protector. But there was no available man in the area. They could not be sent down river again alone.
    No words were spoken between Hwll and Akun on the subject but both of them knew what must happen.
    Two days after the death of Tep, Akun herself strode down the hill to the camp by the river and brought the family there up to her own camp on the hill. There, forty paces along the slope, they set to work to build a new shelter: it consisted of two parts, one for Ulla and one for her children.
    Ulla said nothing. It was hard to know whether she was frightened by the loss of her protector or glad that Tep, who had always bullied her, was gone. In any case, her new status was uncomplicated: she and her children were now under Hwll’s protection. Akun inspected the girl carefully while they built her new home. She was a stringy, unsatisfactory creature used to being treated as a workhorse by Tep. But she had survived, if nothing else, and Akun had no doubt that she would have more children.
    She explained the matter to Ulla simply and succinctly:
    “Hwll will be your man now; we shall both be his women. But I am the senior woman and you will obey me.”
    Ulla said nothing, but made a token nod of submission. For many years she had learned how to submit.
    It was Hwll who was most affected by the change. Akun had been his woman for many years and when he thought of a woman, it was she alone who came into his mind. Now all was to be changed and it gave him a profound sense of unease.
    While the two women prepared Ulla’s new home, the hunter went off alone. He was gone several days and when he returned, he said nothing about his absence, but moved quietly about the camp with a new look of satisfaction on his face.
    During his time away, he had wandered along the valley to the west. Some miles away he had often noticed an unusual slope above the river. There, instead of the usual chalk, the ground exposed a long rib of soft grey rock with a wonderful texture and colour, quite unlike anything else in that area. He had passed it many times and noticed the curious grey light it seemed to return when the sun struck it. The only stone that he had any use for was flint, and so he had passed by the grey stone without giving it much thought. But now, in this crisis in his life, a strange new idea had formed in his mind.
    At the rockface he had searched the ground for some time, picking up lumps of stone and discarding them, until finally, with a grunt of satisfaction, he found what he was looking for. It was a lump about the size of his fist, oval in shape and smooth to the touch. The stone was not hard, and settling down on his haunches beside an oak tree, he began to work it with a flint.
    That night he stayed by the grey rockface, and the next day he strode up to the high ground he loved. All the time he worked the stone, hardly pausing. Several times he washed it in a stream, and by the end of the second day he had begun to polish it. On the third day,