Stonehenge Read Online Free PDF

and, with a despairing gesture, dropped the spear, unlooped the gold from his neck and cut the stitches holding the great lozenges to his jerkin. He placed all the lozenges in the bear cloak, then unclasped the belt and tossed it with its great gold buckle onto the lozenges. “I found the gold,” he protested lamely when he had finished.
    “You and Saban found it,” Hengall agreed, “but you found it in the Old Temple, not in the woods, and that means the gold was sent to all of us! And why?” The chief had raised his voice so that all the folk could hear him. “The gods have not revealed their purpose, so we must wait to know the answer. But it is Slaol’s gold, and he sent it to us, and he must have had a reason.” He hooked the bear cloak with his foot, dragging it and the treasures toward his hut’s doorway from where a pair of woman’s hands reached out to haul the glittering pile inwards. A faint groan went through the crowd, for they knew it would be a long time before they ever saw that gold again. Hengall ignored the groan. “There are those here,” he shouted, “who would have me lead our warriors against the folk of Cathallo, and there are folk in Cathallo who would like their young men to attack us! Yet not all in Cathallo wish war on us. They know that many of their young men will die, and that even if they win the war they will be weakened by the fight. So there will be no war,” he finished abruptly. That had been a very long speech for Hengall, and a rare one in that he had revealed his thinking. Tell someone your thoughts, he had once said, and you give away your soul, but he was hardly giving away secrets when he declared his abhorrence of war. Hengall the Warrior hated war. The business of life, he liked to say, is to plant grain, not blades. He did not mind leading war bands against Outlanders, for they were strangers and thieves, but he detested fighting against the neighboring tribes, for they were cousins and they shared Ratharryn’s language and Ratharryn’s gods. He looked at Lengar. “Where’s the dead Outlander?” he asked.
    “In the Old Temple,” Lengar muttered. His tone was surly.
    “Take a priest,” Hengall instructed Galeth, “and get rid of the body.” He ducked back into his hut, leaving Lengar defeated and humiliated.
    The last of the mists vanished as the sun broke through the thin cloud. The moss-covered thatch steamed gently. The excitement in Ratharryn was over for the moment, though there were still the aftereffects of the storm to marvel at. The river flowed above its banks, the great ditch which lay inside the encircling embankment was flooded and the fields of wheat and barley were beaten flat.
    And Hengall was still the chief.
    The vast earthen embankment defined Ratharryn. Folk still marveled that their ancestors had made such a wall for it stood five times the height of a man and ringed the huts where close to a hundred families lived. The bank had been scraped from soil and chalk with antlers and ox blades, and was topped by the skulls of oxen, wolves and enemy spearmen to keep away the spirits of the dark forest. Every settlement, even the mean houses up on the higher land, had skulls to frighten the spirits, but Ratharryn mounted its skulls on the great earth bank that also served to deter and awe the tribe’s enemies.
    The families all lived in the southern part of the enclosure, while in the north were the huts of the potters and carpenters, the forge of the tribe’s one smith and the pits of the leather workers. There was still space inside the bank where herds of cattle and pigs could be sheltered if an enemy threatened, and at those times the people would throng to the two temples built inside the earthen ring. Both shrines were rings of timber poles. The largest had five rings and was a temple to Lahanna, the goddess of the moon, while the smaller, with just three rings, was for Arryn, the god of the valley, and for Mai, his wife, who was