Stonehenge

Saban splashed back to the island where he lay on his belly in the grass. He watched Derrewyn dive and swim, and still watched her as she came to the river's edge and slowly walked from the water with her long black hair sleek and dripping. To Saban she appeared like the river goddess Mai herself, coming from the water in awesome beauty, and then she knelt beside him, making the skin of his back shiver where her hair touched the burn scars on his shoulder blades. He lay very still, conscious of her, but scarce daring to move in case he frightened her away. This, he told himself, was why he had asked her to come into the forest, though now that the moment was on him he was consumed by nervousness. Derrewyn must have known what he was thinking for she touched his shoulder, making him turn over, then she lowered herself into his arms. 'You ate the clay, Saban,' she whispered, her wet hair cold on his shoulders, 'so the skull's curse cannot touch you.'

'You know that?'

'I promise that,' she whispered, and he shivered because it seemed to him as if Mai really had come in her splendour from the water. He held her close, very close, and like a fool he thought his joy could last for ever.

—«»—«»—«»—

That afternoon, as Derrewyn and Saban waited for the sun to sink and the twilight to bring the shadows through which they could creep secretly home, they heard singing from the hill above the river's western bank. They dressed, waded across the branch of the river, and climbed towards the sound that became louder with their every step. The two went slowly and cautiously, but they need not have worried about being seen for the singers were too intent on their task to notice two lovers among the leaves.

The singers were women from Cathallo and they were lined up either side of seventy sweating men who were hauling on long ropes of twisted leather which were attached to a great oak sledge on which the first of Ratharryn's eight stones sat. It was one of the smaller stones, yet its weight was such that the men were heaving and grunting to keep the cumbersome sledge moving along the rough woodland path. Other men went ahead to smooth the way, cutting out roots and kicking down tussocks of grass, but after a while the men on the ropes were simply too exhausted to continue. They had hauled all day, they had even pulled the great sledge up the hill south of Maden, and now they were spent so they left the sledge in the middle of the wood and walked south towards Ratharryn where they expected to be fed. Derrewyn gripped Saban's arm. 'I'll go with them,' she whispered.

'Why?'

'Then I can say I came to meet them. That way no one will wonder where I've been.' She reached up, kissed his cheek, then ran after the retreating people.

Saban waited until they had gone, then went and stroked the stone on its oak sledge. It was warm to the touch and, where the sun pierced the leaves to shine on the boulder, tiny flecks of light glinted in the rock. Touching the stone coincided with a great surge of happiness. He was a man, and he had a woman as beautiful as any in the land. He had held Derrewyn on the river's bank and it seemed to Saban that life was as rich and hopeful as it could ever be. The gods loved him.

Hengall hardly felt that the gods loved him for that evening a great crowd of Cathallo folk arrived at Ratharryn and they all needed to be fed and given places to sleep and he had not realized, when he paid the gold pieces for the eight stones, that they would cost him so much in food. He also had to provide more folk to help haul the stones, and those were found among the poorer families in the settlement and they had to be paid in meat and grain. Hengall saw his herds diminish and he began to doubt the wisdom of his bargain, but he did not try to repudiate it. He sent men to haul the stones and, day by day as the summer neared its height, the great boulders crept towards Ratharryn.

The four larger stones proved difficult. There was a path across the stream-cut marshlands near Maden, but it was too narrow for the bigger stones and so Kital's men hauled those boulders far to the west before turning south towards Ratharryn. But there was a hill in their path, not so steep as the hill up which the four smaller stones had already been hauled, but still a formidable obstacle that proved too much for the men dragging the first of the big boulders. More ropes were fetched and more men were harnessed to the sledge, but still the stone would not shift up the slope. They tried pulling the sledge with oxen, but when the beasts took the strain they bunched together and impeded each other and it was not until Galeth devised the idea of harnessing the oxen to a great bar of oak, and then attaching ropes from the oak bar to the sledge, that they managed to shift the great stone and so drag it to the hilltop where, with its runners now crushing the level grass, it was hauled onwards. The other three heavy stones were fetched in the same way. The priests hung flowers from the oxen's horns, the beasts were surrounded by singers and there was joy in Ratharryn for the summer was kind, the stones had come safely and it seemed that the ill omens of the past had all faded.

Midsummer arrived. The fires were lit and Ratharryn's men wore the bullskins and chased the women about Slaol's temple. Saban did not run with the bull-men, though he could have, but instead he sat with Derrewyn and, as the fires died, they jumped the flames hand in hand. Gilan dispensed the liquor brewed for the night's celebrations; some folk screamed as they saw visions, while others became belligerent or ill, but eventually they slept, except Saban, who stayed awake, for Jegar had been drunkenly searching for him with a spear in his left hand and revenge on his liquor-fuddled mind. Saban stayed close to the temple that night, sitting guard over the sleeping Derrewyn, though he dozed towards morning when he was woken by footfalls and quickly lifted his spear. A man was coming up the path from the settlement and Saban crouched, ready to lunge, then saw the reflection of dying firelight glint from the man's bald head and realized it was Gilan, not Jegar.

'Who's that?' the high priest asked.

'Saban.'

'You can help me,' Gilan said cheerfully. 'I need a helper. I was going to ask Neel, but he's sleeping like a dog.'

Saban woke Derrewyn and the two of them walked with Gilan to the Old Temple. It was the year's shortest night and Gilan kept glancing at the north-eastern horizon for fear that the sun would rise before he reached the Old Temple. 'I need to mark the rising sun,' he explained as they passed through the grave mounds. He bowed to the ancestors, then hurried on to where the eight stones waited on their sledges just outside the Old Temple's ditch. The north-eastern sky was perceptibly lightening, but the sun had yet to blaze across the far wooded hills. 'We need some markers,' Gilan said, and Saban went down into the ditch and found a half-dozen large lumps of chalk, then he stood in the entrance causeway while Gilan went to the stake that marked the temple's centre. Derrewyn, forbidden to enter the temple because she was a woman, waited between the ditches and banks of the newly cut sacred path.

Saban turned to face the north-east. The horizon was shadowy and the hills in front of it were grey and sifted with the smoke from the dying midsummer fires that rose from Ratharryn's valley. The cattle on the nearer slopes were white ghostly shapes.

'Soon,' Gilan said, 'soon,' and he prayed that the scatter of clouds on the horizon would not hide the sun's rising.

The clouds turned pink and the pink deepened and spread, becoming red, and Saban, watching where the blazing sky touched the jet black earth, saw a gap of sky above the trees and suddenly there was a fierce brightness in those distant woods as the sun's upper edge slashed through the leaves.

'To your left!' Gilan called. 'Your left. One pace. No, back! There! There!'

Saban placed a chalk marker at his feet, then stood to watch the sun chase away the stars. At first Slaol appeared like a flattened ball that leaked an ooze of fire along the wooded ridge, and then the red turned to white, too fierce for the eyes, and the first light of the new year shone straight along the new sacred path that led to the Old Temple's entrance. Saban shaded his eyes and watched the night shadows shrink in the valleys. 'To your right!' Gilan called. 'To your right!' He made Saban place another marker at the spot where the sun was at last wholly visible above the horizon, and then he waited until the sun just showed above Saban's head and made him place a third marker. The sound of the tribe singing its welcome to the sun came gently across the grass.

Gilan examined the markers Saban had laid and grunted happily when he saw that some of the old posts which had decayed in their sockets had evidently marked the same alignments. 'We did a good job,' he said approvingly.

'What do we do next?' Saban asked.

Gilan gestured either side of the temple's entrance. 'We'll plant two of the larger stones here as a gate,' he said, then pointed to where Derrewyn stood in the sacred path, 'and put the other two there to frame the sun's midsummer rising.'

'And the four smaller stones?' Saban asked.

'They'll mark Lahanna's wanderings,' the priest answered, and pointed across the river valley. 'We'll show where she appears farthest to the south,' he said, then turned and gestured in the opposite direction, 'and where she vanishes in the north.' Gilan's face seemed to glow with happiness in the early light. 'It will be a simple temple,' he said softly, 'but beautiful. Very beautiful. One line for Slaol and two for Lahanna, marking a place where they can meet beneath the sky.'

'But they're estranged,' Saban said.

Gilan laughed. He was a kindly man, portly and bald, who had never shared Hirac's fear of offending the gods. 'We have to balance Slaol and Lahanna,' he explained. 'They already have a temple apiece in Ratharryn, so how will Lahanna feel if we give Slaol a second shrine all of his own?' He left that question unanswered. 'And we were wrong, I think, to keep Slaol and Lahanna apart. At Cathallo they use one shrine for all the gods, so why shouldn't we worship Slaol and Lahanna in one place?'

'But it's still a temple to Slaol?' Saban asked anxiously, remembering how the sun god had helped him at the beginning of his ordeal.

'It's still a temple to Slaol,' Gilan agreed, 'but now it will acknowledge Lahanna too, just like the shrine at Cathallo.' He smiled. 'And at its dedication we shall marry you to Derrewyn as a foretaste of Slaol and Lahanna's reunion.'

The sun was high enough to give its warmth as the three walked back to the settlement. Gilan talked of his hopes, Saban held his lover's hand, the smoke of the midsummer fires faded and all was well in Ratharryn.

—«»—«»—«»—

Galeth was the temple's builder, and Saban became his helper. They placed the four smaller boulders first. Gilan had calculated the positions for the stones, and they had to be placed by calculation rather than by observation for the four stones formed two pairs and each pair pointed towards Lahanna. In her wanderings about the sky, she stayed within the same broad belt year after year, but once in a man's lifetime she went far to the north and once in a lifetime far to the south. The poles in her existing temple inside the settlement marked the limits of those northern and southern wanderings and if a man drew a line between the points on the horizon where the moon rose and set at her extremes it would cross the line of the sun's midsummer rising at a right angle. That made Gilan's task simple. 'It isn't so everywhere,' he explained to Saban. 'It's only here in Ratharryn that the lines cross square. Not at Drewenna, not at Cathallo, nowhere else! Only here!' Gilan was in awe of that fact. 'It means we are special to the gods,' he said softly. 'It means, I think, that this is the very centre of all the world!'

'Truly?' Saban asked, impressed.

'Truly,' Gilan said. 'Cathallo, of course, say the same about their Sacred Mound, but I fear they're mistaken. This is the world's centre,' he said, gesturing at the Old Temple, 'the very place where man was first made.' He shuddered at that thought, moved by the joy of it.

The high priest then laid a nettle string along the line of midsummer's rising, taking it from the chalk marker which showed where the sun rose, through the very centre of the temple and on to the south-eastern bank. Galeth had jointed two pieces of thin timber to make a square angle and, by laying the timber against the string, and then running another string along the crosswise timber, they could mark a line that crossed the sun's line at a right angle. That new line pointed to the extremes of the moon's wandering, but Gilan wanted two parallel lines, one to point to the northernmost limit and the other to the southernmost, so he drew his second line and told Galeth that the four small stones must be placed inside the bank at the outer ends of both scratched lines. One of each pair was to be a pillar and the other a slab, and by standing beside the pillar and looking across the opposite slab a priest could watch where Lahanna rose or set and judge how close she approached her most distant wanderings.

Galeth had thirty men working and at first they simply dug the holes for the stones. They scraped away the turf, then prised at the hard chalk with the picks and broke it into clumps that could be scooped out with shovels. They dug the holes deep, and Galeth made them slope one side of the hole to make a ramp so that the stones could be slid down into their sockets. It was, he told Saban, no different from raising one of the big temple poles. When all four holes were dug, more men were fetched up from the settlement and the first stone, the smallest pillar, was dragged on its sledge through the entrance of the sun. Saban had thought there might be some ceremony as the stone was brought to its new sacred home, but there was no ritual other than a silent prayer that Gilan offered with his hands reaching to the sky. The sledge runners left scars of crushed grass. Galeth lined the stone up with the hole and kept the men hauling until the tip of the sledge just overhung the ramp that Saban had lined with three smoothed timbers that had been greased with pig fat to serve as a slide.

It took twelve men using long oak levers to shift the stone off the sledge. Saban thought the levers must break, but instead the stone moved bit by bit, heave by heave, and each heave lifted and carried the boulder another finger's breadth forward. The men sang as they worked, and the sweat poured off them, but at last the weight of the stone tipped it forwards off the sledge and down onto the ramp. Men scattered, fearing the stone would fall back on them, but instead, just as Galeth had planned, it slid ponderously down the greased timbers to lodge at the ramp's bottom. Galeth wiped his face and let out a great breath of relief.

When he erected the great temple poles Galeth would haul them upright by pulling their tops into the sky by means of a great tripod over which the ropes were led, but he reckoned this stone pillar was small enough to be pushed upright without any such help. He chose the twelve strongest men and they took their places beside the uppermost part of the stone that now tilted up from the ramp's edge. The men got their shoulders under the stone and heaved. 'Push!' Galeth shouted. 'Push!' and they did push, but the stone still stuck halfway. 'Heave on it!' Galeth urged them and added his own huge strength to theirs, but still the stone would not move. Saban peered down the hole and saw that the stone was catching on the upright face of rubbly chalk. Galeth saw it too, swore, and seized a stone axe with which he hacked at the chalk face to make room for the stone.

The dozen men had no trouble holding the stone's weight and, once the obstruction was cleared, they pushed it upright. The stone now stood a little less than the height of a man, with almost as much again buried in the socket, and all that was needed was to fill the ramp and press earth and chalk into the hole about the boulder. Galeth had collected some great river stones and they were packed about the pillar's base, then the chalk rubble was scooped in, and with it the antlers that had broken while the hole was being dug, and all was stamped down and stamped down again until at last the hole and the ramp were filled and the first of the temple's stones was standing. The tired men cheered.

It took until harvest to raise the other three moon stones, but at last they were done and the four grey boulders stood in a rectangle. Galeth had rigged a short tripod of oak beams to raise the slabs, for they were heavier than the pillars, but what made raising the stones even easier was Saban's notion of lining the upright face of the hole with greased timbers so that the stone's corner, grinding down into the earth, did not lodge against the chalk. The fourth stone they raised, even though it was one of the heavier slabs, took only half as long to raise as the first pillar.

'The gods made you clever,' Galeth complimented him.

'You too.'

'No.' Galeth shook his head. 'The gods made me strong.'

The moon stones were finished. Now, if a man could draw a line through the pairs, and extend that line on either side to the very ends of the earth where the fogs lingered across grey seas in perpetuity, he could see where the moon rose and fell at the limits of her wanderings and Lahanna, endlessly travelling among the stars, could look down and see that the people of Ratharryn had marked her journeying. She would know that they watched her, know that they loved her, and she would hear their prayers.

The four larger stones stayed outside the temple while Ratharryn's folk cut the year's wheat and barley. It was a fair harvest and the women sang as they stood about the threshing floor that had been flattened and hardened by a day-long harvest dance. Saban and Derrewyn led the dance, and the women swayed and smiled because Derrewyn was young and happy, and Saban, they knew, was a good young man, decent and strong, and their imminent marriage was taken as a good augury. Only Jegar, who could still not hold a bow in his right hand and could only use a spear with his clumsy left hand, resented them, but there was little he could do. And Jegar's jealousy grew worse when a band of Outfolk tried to raid the harvest from Cheol, which was an outlying settlement of Ratharryn, and Hengall led a war band against them, defeated them, and brought back six heads. One of those heads was taken by Saban, though in truth Galeth had held the shrieking Outfolk warrior still so that Saban could kill him, but still Saban was allowed to wear a blue kill mark on his chest.

After that skirmish, and after the harvest was stored, the men went back to finish the remaining work, and Saban, going with them to begin the new work, stopped to stare at the Old Temple with its four new stones. It looked different suddenly. It was a chill day, with autumn's first bite in the air, but the sun shone between a gap in the clouds to light the new white banks of the sacred path and the clean chalk circle of the temple's ditch and bank. And in that circle, their shadows stark in the morning light, the four stones stood.

Galeth paused beside Saban. 'It looks good,' he said, sounding surprised, and it did. It looked splendid. It looked clean, purposeful, even calm. The temple was not massive and grand like Cathallo's shrine, but instead was lifted up on the hill's green breast so that the four stones seemed to float in the sky. Cathallo's temple, with its great squat boulders dwarfed by the massive embankment, was more like a thing of the earth while this shrine was airy and delicate.

'It's a sky temple,' Saban said.

Galeth liked that. 'A sky temple,' he said, 'why not? It's a good name.' He clapped Saban on a shoulder. 'It's the right name, the Sky Temple!' He hefted a timber and walked on, peering intently at the southern horizon. He was looking for smoke that might betray where a hunting band had its camp, but he saw nothing. There was a rumour that a large band of Outfolk was in the forest, though Hengall, taking another war band west and south, had found no sign of them. 'Let's hope they've moved on,' Galeth said, touching his groin. 'They can find someone else's land, not ours.'

The Outfolk had lived in the land for generations now, indeed no one living could remember when they had first come from the land across the eastern sea, but all knew they spoke a different language and had different customs. Some of them, like the men of Sarmennyn who had lost their gold lozenges, had found great tracts of empty land to make their home, but others still wandered the forest in search of places to live and it was those homeless bands that caused trouble to Ratharryn, for the bigger Outfolk settlements were all far away.

They won't come near us,' Saban said, 'not while their tribesmen's heads are on our embankment.'

'I pray not,' Galeth said, touching his groin again, but he still stared southwards. Hengall might not have found the hungry Outlanders, but a hunting party had discovered a campsite with its ashes still warm and a trader had glimpsed a large band of grey-tattooed men prowling in the deep trees. 'We had a good harvest,' Galeth said, 'and if the Outlanders had a bad one then they'll be eyeing us.'

They walked on to the temple and there the difficulty of raising the last stones drove away any fears of an Outfolk raid. Two of the boulders were to be raised on either side of the entrance of the sun, and those two were twice as long, twice as thick and, it seemed, many times the weight of the moon stone pillars. It took four days to raise the first, and that did not count the days digging the hole, and another three days to put up the second. The last two stones, the sun stones, that were to serve as a doorway in the avenue for the rising midsummer sun, were bigger still. They saved the largest stone till last and the hole they dug was so deep that a man could stand at its foot and not see over the lip. They made the ramp and lined it with timber and another pig died so that its fat could grease the wood. Then, when all was ready, they set about planting the stone.

It took sixty men to move the big sun stone off its sledge. Galeth tied ropes about the boulder, harnessed them to forty men and had them haul it forward while the others used levers to ease the great stone along its oak bed. It took a whole day to shift the stone off the sledge and the best part of the next day to seat it properly in the ramp, for it had gone in crooked, so they had to straighten it with levers, but at last, after two days' work, it rested on the ramp.

Galeth had built a new tripod of oak to raise the taller stones. The tripod stood four times the height of a man and, because he feared that the hide ropes going over the peak would stick, he set a smooth piece of elm in the joint and greased it with fat. He strapped the four ropes around the upper end of the stone, led them over the elm block and tied those ropes to a beam of oak to which he harnessed sixteen oxen. Then the men whipped and goaded the beasts and slowly the stone moved, but agonizingly slowly, and so more ropes were tied to the oak beam and men were harnessed alongside the beasts and again the whips slashed down and the goads jabbed and the men fought for footing on the grass and slowly, so very slowly, the tall stone edged upwards. The higher it went the easier it became because the ropes were now pulling the stone's top straight towards the tripod's peak, while at the beginning of the raising the ropes made a narrow angle between themselves and the stone. The stone's foot crunched and splintered the greased wood lining the hole, then suddenly Galeth was shouting at the men driving the oxen to hold their whips. 'Gentle now!' he shouted. 'Gentle!' The stone was almost upright. 'Pull again!' Galeth shouted and the ropes creaked and the tripod quivered and Saban feared that the stone had lodged against an unseen obstruction at the base of the hole, but then it crashed forward against the timber-clad face and Galeth screamed at the men to stop hauling in case they pulled the stone clean over the hole's brink. The ropes slackened, but the big sun stone did not fall. It stood there, huge and grey, more than two times the height of a man.

They rammed the stone's base with stones, filled the hole, untied the ropes and thus the work was finished. The Old Temple was no more and Ratharryn had its sanctuary of stone. They had the Sky Temple.

—«»—«»—«»—

The day chosen for the dedication of the Sky Temple proved to be propitious for it was warm and cloudless, a day that late autumn had stolen from high summer. All Hengall's people came to the ceremony. They arrived from the outlying settlements and from the upland farmsteads, and the women assembled at Lahanna's shrine while the men danced around the poles of the temple where they had stacked their spears and piled their bows for no man would carry a weapon this day. This day was given to the gods.

In the late afternoon Gilan led the tribe up from the settlement. They stopped at the grave mounds where the skull pole was paraded and the ancestors were told what was happening, and then they danced to where the new sacred path scarred the grassland. The tribe's priests were naked, their bodies chalked white with patterns swirled by spread fingers, while their heads were crowned with antlers and their hair and beards hung with animal bones and teeth. The folk who followed the priests had all dressed in their best pelts. Saban and Derrewyn were to be married after the sun set. Derrewyn wore a dress of sewn deerskins that were very pale in colour so that her skin looked even darker, while her long hair had been threaded with creamy meadowsweets. Her parents had come to see the ceremony and her father, Morthor, high priest at Cathallo, danced with Ratharryn's priests; those priests led with them a small child, a fair-haired girl just three years old, who had been born deaf. The child, like Derrewyn, wore meadowsweets in her hair.

The sun blazed into the faces of the folk as they crossed the rim of the down from where the sacred path stretched clean and white to the eight new stones of the Sky Temple. Gilan carried the tribe's skull pole, which had been decorated with ivy, while Neel, the youngest priest, had an axe with a beautifully carved greenstone head that Galeth had sharpened that same afternoon.

The people stamped their dance between the newly made chalk banks of the sacred path, scattering the grazing sheep as they advanced. Four of the men carried goatskin drums and they set the rhythm of the dance and, as the priests neared the four taller stones, the drumming became more frantic and the tribe swooped from side to side. The women led the singing, praising Slaol, while the men echoed the last line of each verse.

The tribe swerved aside at the temple to dance about its edge. The priests went inside and, once they had driven out the sheep and cattle that were grazing on the temple's grass, they formed a circle where they stamped the intricate steps of their own dance. The priests danced inside and the people sang and danced outside. The men circled closest to the ditch, with the women outside them, and all danced sunwise as Slaol sank towards the horizon. The singing and dancing seemed to induce a trance that gripped the folk as the sun sank. Some women called out in ecstasy as on and on they danced, not noticing the tiredness in their legs but swept up by the music, and they only stopped when the men who had carried pots of fire from the settlement put the embers in the great heaps of wood that were piled on either side of the temple. The flames caught fast, the small twigs crackled and the smoke whirled the sparks upward. Galeth had broken up the great sledges and put their huge timbers in the piles. He rued such a waste of good wood, but the sledges had served a sacred purpose and so must be returned to the gods. The fires became fierce as the tribe gathered about the twin stone pillars of the sun's gate which stood in the centre of the sacred path. The drummers were silent now, but the dance was still inside the people and some could not be still, but swayed from side to side and some of the women moaned as they stared towards the great swollen ball of the sun where it flattened on the far horizon. 'Slaol,' they called. 'Slaol!'

'Slaol!' Gilan shouted at the sun, raising his arms, and Hengall now took the deaf child's hand and led her to the very centre of the temple where Galeth had dug a hole. It was not a deep hole, nor was it long, but it was enough and the child with flowers in her hair was taken to the hole's edge and there her tunic was lifted over her hair so she was naked and Gilan knelt and gave her a pot. 'Drink,' he said gently and, because she was deaf, motioned what she should do. The girl took the pot in both hands and laughed at the high priest's kindly face.

The pot contained a potion to bring dreams: a potion made from mushrooms and herbs, a potion to carry the deaf child to the gods, and all the folk watched, utterly silent, as she drank. She made a face as if the liquid were bitter, but then she laughed again and dropped the pot. Gilan stood and stepped back from her, watching to see what omens the potion brought.

The girl began to gasp as if her breath were being stolen, then she screamed for her mother in a half-formed voice, and then she tried to run back towards the watching crowd, but Neel caught her and forced her back to the hole where she screamed again. Her watching mother wailed for the child. The omens were bad. She should have been smiling, laughing, dancing, but she was struggling and frantic, and her screams were scratching at the tribe's souls. To stop her noise Gilan shook her hard, so hard that she went still with terror and in that moment Gilan thrust her out at arm's length and took the greenstone axe from Neel.

Gilan raised the blade to the dying sun, paused, then struck down hard so that bloody flowers fell to the grass as the child, her skull nearly split in two, died without a sound.

She had gone to the sky. She had gone to Slaol. There would be no death place for the child and no gifts on her behalf for she was herself a gift. That was why she was not killed with the Kill-Child, for she was not really dead, but instead, even as her tribe watched in awed silence, her soul was rising to the sky to tell Slaol about this place that had been made for him. The golden-haired child was Ratharryn's messenger and she would watch the Sky Temple until time itself was ended.

Gilan laid the little body in the grave. He broke the pot that had held the potion and dropped it beside her, placed the chalk ball of her life on her bloodied breast, and then the priests kicked the heap of earth onto her body. The child's mother still shrieked with grief and the other women clustered about to comfort her, telling her that her daughter was not dead at all, but happy in the skyworld where she was a playmate of the gods.

The sun sank beneath the horizon just as Lahanna, huge and pale, rose above the western trees. The fires were roaring now, the great timbers at their heart burning bright so that the smoke made a red-tinged pall above the temple. In a moment or two the temple's first ceremony would begin as Derrewyn and Saban danced their marriage steps in the shrine's centre, but first Hengall stood by the sun child's grave and raised his hand.

It was Hengall's task to tell the tribe what they had done. To tell the tale of the Sky Temple so that his folk would remember it and tell their children and their children's children, and so he stood with his arm raised, summoning the words, and the murmuring crowd fell silent. It was twilight, and the blinding glare of the sun had vanished to leave behind a red-rimmed sky smudged by smoke and in that livid haze Saban saw a flicker. At first he thought it was the dead child's spirit and he was glad, for it showed that the sacrifice had worked.

The flicker was red, reflecting the dying sunlight, and then Saban saw it was not the child's soul, but an arrow streaking up from the black crest of the southern upland where more of the ancestors' bones lay in their mounds. The arrow's flight seemed to take a long time, though of course it took no time at all. Indeed Saban had scarcely time to open his mouth, let alone call out, yet he ever remembered it as being a long, long time. He saw the arrow reach up to the sky and then begin to fall. Its head glittered, the black flint flashing back the firelight, and then it slammed into Hengall's back.

Hengall stumbled forward. Most in the crowd still did not know what was happening, but they recognized an ill omen and they moaned. Then Hengall fell and they saw the arrow in his back, its black feathers dark, and still they did not understand, and it was not until the priests rushed to the chief's side that the wailing began.

Saban ran forward, then checked, for more arrows were flickering in the sky. They thumped into the turf, struck the priests, and one glanced off a moon stone with a click. Then Saban saw the naked creatures who came from the southern skyline that was all aflame with red.

The creatures themselves were red. They screamed as they capered forward and the sight of them made Ratharryn's people howl, but when they turned to flee towards the settlement there were more of the creatures behind and some of the attackers were mounted on small shaggy horses that galloped across the low chalk banks of the sacred path.

They were Outfolk warriors and they had smeared their bodies with red ochre, the same substance that was sometimes used to colour the skins of the important dead, and now these living dead-men screamed as they closed on the tribe that had no weapons. There were dozens of the enemy and Hengall's orphaned folk could do nothing but crouch in terror. Morthor, Derrewyn's father, was wounded, Gilan lay dead, while Neel, the young priest, crawled on the temple's turf with an arrow in his thigh.

The leader of the red warriors appeared last of all and he alone was clothed and he alone had not used ochre to make his face look dreadful. He strode towards the temple and in his right hand was the long yew bow which he had used to kill Saban's father.

And to kill his own father too, for the man who came to the Sky Temple with a smile on his face was Lengar.

Who had come home.