Stonehenge: A Novel of 2000 BC. Bernard Cornwell

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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