Chapter 3
All these years old Turig hadn’t told a soul about the girl or the moment of revelation the mistress’s amber pendant had given him.
Lying beside him his grandson saw only an old man lost in thought, staring into the changing patterns of black and orange in the embers and picking his teeth from time to time with a straw. Grandpa had been silent for too long. The boy monitored his breathing, as children do when they listen to sleeping parents to assure themselves that life beats on and all is well. The moon had risen during this silence, intruding its pale light through the rectangle of door.
“Grandpa?”
“Hm?”
“You were telling me about the stones.”
“O, ah. The second year were colder.” The old man spoke as if he had never stopped. “By then we’d got ’en mostly near the sanctuary and we had to put ’en up. ’Course, I’d wangled myself on a different gang by then.” This left the boy puzzled; he hadn’t heard the story of the overseer’s girl. “Now, I don’t know who thought this up, some priest, I s’pose, but they had this ring of stones standing twice as high as a man and, like I said, we had to put them sarsens flat on top. Well, Lord Moon, you should ’a seen us sweat and strain.
“We had this wood. We’d been using wood for rollers, levers, tracks to slide them stones down hills—they’d been at it for years and there weren’t a tree standing for miles, only chalky mud. But wood! If I had a breath for every log I seen I’d live a thousand cycles of the sun!
“Well, they started us making cradles for these stones—No, that’s not right. That was later. First thing, the masons ’ud measure ’em up with strings to see which ones fit best across the top of the standing stones. Then they’d cut a sort of knob on the uprights and a hollow bit for the one they wanted up on top. All brute work, mind. That stuff was hard enough that it blunted bronze. Here, feel that!” Turig reached his whetstone from its pouch and gave it to the boy. “Hard, eh? Well, we drug ’en; we stood ’en up; we stuck these others up on top. Moon’s, that Rings’ Land were cold!
“Anyway, when the masons finished, they had us young fellows do the muscle-work. We’d haul a stone in place beside the pair it was going up on, dig under one end just enough to reach levers under and then we’d lift the bugger up until we got a baulk of timber under ’en.” Turig took an arrow, shoved the point under the end of a fire log, used his wrist as a fulcrum and worked the arrow as a lever with the other hand. One end of the log rose, balanced on the arrow for a heartbeat or so, then fell off and dropped in the ash.
“See, we’d raise ’en up one end at a time, stuff a log under, and then go do the other end. It got so’s the cradle-crew—that’s what we called the timber handlers—had each log notched and marked so’s they could build the same frame every time.”
Turig dropped the arrow back in its quiver and threw the wood in the embers. “ ’Course, they learned years back it weren’t enough to raise the stone; you had to raise the place we put the levers in.”
His mind’s eye saw the ‘cradle’ rising by the thickness of a timber baulk each time. Atop it lay a sarsen like a corpse upon a bier. The ends of the cradle, higher than the rest by the thickness of one log, were an arm’s length away from the stone. Here lay the fulcrums, great worn logs of oak, gouged and split by the pressure of hundreds of men hanging from levers of ash-wood and imported fir. “Moon’s, that work were dangerous for them in front! You got ’en up a man’s height and a half and then she started rocking to and fro. It didn’t mind how big them timbers were. You started pulling at ’en and she’d shift and groan like ghosts, and all a mortal soul could do was hang up there and pray. There was that many men you couldn’t move. If she came down, there was nowhere you could run.”
Several hundred men had to work the levers. They’d wedge six or seven poles under the stone—there wasn’t room for more—and then they hoisted her.
As the cradle rose, there came a time when men couldn’t reach the levers and they had to fling ropes over and haul down on the ends. From a distance it looked like centuries of men hanging from a common gibbet, legs thrashing, arms straining to support their weight.
Meanwhile the cradle-crew would slip a small log in the gap the lever-men had won, then a thicker log, and then another. So it went. And though the timbers of the cradle were notched and built up with great care, there was always a chance that something would slip.
Heave! Heave! Heave! Heave! The lever-men built up a rhythm and the rhythm gave them added purchase, until Boom! a drum beat had crews jumping, hanging on their levers while the stone rose up a fingerbreadth, now two, the crack between the stone and cradle parting slowly, reluctantly, as if the gap were a maiden’s virtue. Men were shouting, falling from their ropes while timber creaked and split, and all the while the cradle-crew risked life and limb to stuff another log into the crack.
But the very rhythm that gave lever-men their lift must also set the cradle rocking, none too gently. As old Turig told the boy, for the closest lever-men and cradle-crew, “If she came down, there was nowhere you could run.”
All these years later Turig still got nightmares when the wind came up and stirred the restless, creaking rafters in their hut: he would wake, sweating fear, even in the cold of winter.
“You’re going to sleep, Grandpa.”
“No, son. Just thinking. I’ll bet you a handful of river mussels you go to sleep before I do.”
“Hah! For that I’ll keep awake forever. Just you see!”
Turig smiled at the dark patch that defined his grandson’s head. Above them the wind ranted and the rafters squeaked and heaved in sympathy. The old man looked up, but his mind’s eye did the real seeing.
Wood straining, whining, splitting beneath the weight of hanging men and a counterpoised stone.
The cradle collapse happened suddenly. Two levers snapped at once, throwing the sarsen’s weight on the remaining three. Try as they might, the inexorable weight of the stone bore the lever crews into the air: men dropped on their fellows; a few were catapulted over the stone. The real damage happened when one lever was thrust up to the vertical and got wedged between the sarsen and the fulcrum log, dislodging the latter and throwing it down on the nearest members of the lever crews. Then the cradle came unstuck. It started with a creak that rose to a demon shriek, clearly audible above the screams of men pinned in the logs. Then the whole thing buckled and gave way, dropping the sarsen on a score of men below.
Turig could see it now. The lucky ones escaped or died instantly. Three men lay screaming, crushed beneath the bulk of stone.
Triage time. The overseer cut their throats, as he was required to do, with prayers and blessings from the duty-priest. Others had their trapped and mangled limbs severed quickly with axes.
As for Turig, he stood apart, his whole body retching with dry heaves until an older man slapped the hysterics out of him. “You can’t do nothing for ’em, boy. Get back to work is best.”
Thus the stones rose, one by one, one on two, until the outer circle of the gods was done. At last there came the blessed day, at the end of Turig’s second winter at the Rings, when the final sarsen stone was hauled sideways off its timber cradle and dropped smoothly into place.
For a dozen heartbeats after that the noise of the crews went on as if nothing were different, nothing changed. Then, one by one, men fell silent till a great hush came over the sanctuary. Lords and priests fell on their knees and wept; lesser men looked dumbly round and smiled, not knowing what to do.
A kestrel had time to swoop on a mouse during this hiatus. At last two men of the cradle-crew who had ridden the final sarsen into place stood up, looked down on the assembled throng and started cheering. In an instant every man joined in, rending the still winter air with an animal bellow that resonated around the great Stone Rings and soared up to the realm of gods.
Lords embraced masons; priests kissed working men; peasants wept upon each other freely. No wonder. Some seventy
generations had cut, and moved and labored on those stones, and these were the survivors, the inheritors of benefit.
“And I was there!” old Turig almost shouted at his grandson. “When your time comes to pay your homage to the Rings, boy, just remember, your old Grump’ was there!” He held his hands up, rough and scarred and skilled. “I built that Stone henge with these hands.
“You tell ’en when you go, old Turig put them stones in place, and he was there the day we finished ’em!” Reliving all the energy, the fear, the love, the joy of that proud moment long ago he looked down at his grandson for response.
The boy was fast asleep.