Stonehenge Read Free

gold sheets incised with straight lines, though their pattern meant nothing to Lengar, who snatched back one of the small lozenges that Saban had dared pick up from the grass. Lengar gathered the lozenges, great and small, into a pile. “You know what this is?” he asked his younger brother, gesturing at the heap.
    “Gold,” Saban said.
    “Power,” Lengar said. He glanced at the dead man. “Do you know what you can do with gold?”
    “Wear it?” Saban suggested.
    “Fool! You buy men with it.” Lengar rocked back on his heels. The cloud shadows were dark now, and the hazels were tossing in the freshening wind. “You buy spearmen,” he said, “you buy archers and warriors! You buy power!”
    Saban grabbed one of the small lozenges, then dodged out of the way when Lengar tried to take it back. The boy retreated across the small cleared space and, when it appeared that Lengar would not chase him, he squatted and peered at the scrap of gold. It seemed an odd thing with which to buy power. Saban could imagine men working for food or for pots, for flints or for slaves, or for bronzethat could be hammered into knives, axes, swords and spearheads, but for this bright metal? It could not cut, it just was, yet even on that clouded day Saban could see how the metal shone. It shone as though a piece of the sun was trapped within the metal and he suddenly shivered, not because he was naked, but because he had never touched gold before; he had never held a scrap of the almighty sun in his hand. “We must take it to Father,” he said reverently.
    “So the old fool can add it to his hoard?” Lengar asked scornfully. He went back to the body and folded the cloak back over the stumps of the arrows to reveal that the dead man’s trews were held up by a belt buckled with a great lump of heavy gold while more of the small lozenges hung on a sinew about his neck.
    Lengar glanced at his younger brother, licked his lips, then picked up one of the arrows that had fallen from the stranger’s hand. He was still carrying his longbow and now he placed the black-and-white fledged arrow onto the string. He was gazing into the hazel undergrowth, deliberately avoiding his half-brother’s gaze, but Saban suddenly understood what was in Lengar’s mind. If Saban lived to tell their father of this Outfolk treasure then Lengar would lose it, or would at least have to fight for it, but if Saban were discovered dead, with an Outfolk’s black-and-white feathered arrow in his ribs, then no one would ever suspect that Lengar had done the killing, nor that Lengar had taken a great treasure for his own use. Thunder swelled in the west and the cold wind flattened the tops of the hazel trees. Lengar was drawing back the bow, though still he did not look at Saban. “Look at this!” Saban suddenly cried, holding up the small lozenge. “Look!”
    Lengar relaxed the bowstring’s pressure as he peered, and at that instant the boy took off like a hare sprung from grass. He burst through the hazels and sprinted across the wide causeway of the Old Temple’s entrance of the sun. There were more rotted posts there, just like the ones around the death house. He had to swerve to negotiate their stumps and, just as he twisted through them, Lengar’s arrow whirred past his ear.
    Thunder tore the sky to shreds as the first rain fell. The drops were huge. A stab of lightning flashed down to the opposite hillside. Saban ran, twisting and turning, not daring to look back and see if Lengar pursued him. The rain fell harder and harder, filling the airwith its malevolent roar, but making a screen to hide the boy as he ran north and east toward the settlement. He screamed as he ran, hoping that some herdsman might still be on the pastureland, but he saw no one until he had passed the grave mounds at the brow of the hill and was running down the muddy path between the small fields of wheat that were being battered by the drenching rain.
    Galeth, Saban’s uncle, and