Stonehenge Read Free Page A

five other men had been returning to the settlement when they heard the boy’s shouts. They turned back up the hill, and Saban ran through the rain to clutch at his uncle’s deerskin jerkin. “What is it, boy?” Galeth asked.
    Saban clung to his uncle. “He tried to kill me!” he gasped. “He tried to kill me!”
    “Who?” Galeth asked. He was the youngest brother of Saban’s father, tall, thick-bearded and famous for his feats of strength. Galeth, it was said, had once raised a whole temple pole, and not one of the small ones either, but a big trimmed trunk that jutted high above the other poles. Like his companions, Galeth was carrying a heavy bronze-bladed axe for he had been felling trees when the storm came. “Who tried to kill you?” Galeth asked.
    “He did!” Saban shrieked, pointing up the hill to where Lengar had appeared with the longbow in his hands and a new arrow slotted on its string.
    Lengar stopped. He said nothing, but just looked at the group of men who now sheltered his half-brother. He took the arrow off the string.
    Galeth gazed at his older nephew. “You tried to kill your own brother?”
    Lengar laughed. “It was an Outlander, not me.” He walked slowly downhill. His long black hair was wet with rain and lay sleek and close to his head, giving him a frightening appearance.
    “An Outlander?” Galeth asked, spitting to avert ill fortune. There were many in Ratharryn who said Galeth should be the next chief instead of Lengar, but the rivalry between uncle and nephew paled against the threat of an Outfolk raid. “There are Outfolk up on the pasture?” Galeth asked.
    “Only the one,” Lengar said carelessly. He pushed the Outfolk arrow into his quiver. “Only the one,” he said again, “and he’s dead now.”
    “So you’re safe, boy,” Galeth told Saban, “you’re safe.”
    “He tried to kill me,” Saban insisted, “because of the gold!” He held up the lozenge as proof.
    “Gold, eh?” Galeth asked, taking the tiny scrap from Saban’s hand. “Is that what you’ve got? Gold? We’d better take it to your father.”
    Lengar gave Saban a look of utter hatred, but it was too late now. Saban had seen the treasure and Saban had lived and so their father would learn of the gold. Lengar spat, then turned and strode back up the hill. He vanished in the rain, risking the storm’s anger so that he could rescue the rest of the gold.
    That was the day the stranger came to the Old Temple in the storm, and the day Lengar tried to kill Saban, and the day everything in Ratharryn’s world changed.
    The storm god raged across the earth that night. Rain flattened the crops and made the hill paths into streamlets. It flooded the marshes north of Ratharryn and the River Mai overflowed her banks to scour fallen trees from the steep valley that twisted through the high ground until it reached the great loop where Ratharryn was built. Ratharryn’s ditch was flooded, and the wind tore at the thatch of the huts and moaned among the timber posts of its temples’ rings.
    No one knew when the first people had come to the land beside the river, nor how they had discovered that Arryn was the god of the valley. Yet Arryn must have revealed himself to those people for they named their new home for him and they edged the hills around his valley with temples. They were simple temples, nothing but clearings in the forest where a ring of tree trunks would be left standing, and for years, no one knew for how many, the folk would follow the wooded paths to those timber rings where they begged the gods to keep them safe. In time Arryn’s people cleared away most of the woods, cutting down oak and elm and ash and hazel, and planting barley or wheat in the small fields. They trapped fish in the river that was sacred to Arryn’s wife, Mai, they herded cattle on the grasslands and pigs in the patches of woodland that stood between the fields, and the young men of the tribe hunted boarand deer and aurochs