Wessex Tales: "In the land of the great stone rings" (Story 5) Read online

~ WESSEX TALES ~

  Eight thousand years in the life of an English village

  ‘ In the Land of the Great Stone Rings ’

  * ‘In the Land of the Great Stone Rings’ (Story 05)

  is among 38 stories in my Wessex Tales collection.

  Robert Fripp

  Copyright 2013 Robert Fripp

  To find these e-stories on the web,

  try this Search Term => Wessex_Tales:Fripp

  Thank you for supporting me.

  Cover

  Photographer Lucille Pine (LuluP) writes,

  “A dramatic rainbow at Stonehenge.

  Saturday 30th December 2006,

  after the downpour, soaked to the bone.”

  Permission: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

  Cover design by The Design Unit,

  www.thedesignunit.com

  “In the Land of the Great Stone Rings”

  ISBN 978-0-9918575-0-0

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Author’s note

  Books by Robert Fripp

  Reach me Online

  A List of my Stories

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  ‘In the Land of the Great Stone Rings’

  4,600 years ago, give or take a lunar cycle or two

  Chapter 1

  “The Moon viewed from [the island of Britain] appears to be but a small distance from the Earth. … The account is also given that the god [the Moon?] visits the island every nineteen years, the period in which the return of the stars to the same place in the heavens is accomplished. … There is also on the island both a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo [the Sun] and a notable temple… and the supervisors are called Boreadae, and succession to these positions is always kept in the family.”

  Diodorus, History of the Ancient World, c. 50 B.C.

  “What did you do in the old days, Grandpa?”

  The boy’s question took Turig by surprise. Nobody bothered with old folks nowadays. “Ah,” he replied, “the olden days. Well…”

  They were alone in the hut. The boy’s parents were off trading barley and flax for a cow, staying with Turig’s other daughter and her family at a farmstead high on the chalklands, half a day east, in the principal lands of the Lords of the great Stone Rings. Livestock grew stronger bones there; the high chalk country made for better breeding than the soil surrounding this windy, north-facing promontory of hill.

  The boy would have gone along too but for the broken leg he suffered falling from a tree. His leg had been set and splinted by the “wisest woman in the world,” as his mother put it. It would soon heal.

  The worst of his grandfather’s memories had healed long since, glazing like the shiny skin that grows across old wounds. Well, most of them had healed: one continued to haunt. They say memories are a tonic to old minds, but they have to be shared to be useful, or they rot like chaff on a threshing-floor waiting for wind, rain or death to steal them away.

  At the moment his grandson spoke, Turig was whetting a bronze arrowhead. Taking his time, he measured its sharpness with his thumb, dropped the arrow in a quiver made of laced wooden panels and replaced the whetstone in a pouch on the quiver’s leather strap. Bronze-smiths brought whetstones on pannier-laden ponies from far-off northern lands, but Turig’s was more precious than any tinker’s stock in trade. It was a chunk off a broken maul used long ago to dress a sarsen for the outer circle of the great Stone Rings. It doubled as a whetstone and a relic.

  Beneath a lion’s mane of long white hair, Turig himself was bronzed from years of wind and sun. Time had treated him well. Heeding his grandson’s request for a story he rubbed his stubble, stirred a branch into the embers of a dying fire and began to speak. “It used to be much stricter than ’tis now. You had to jump to every order of the Lords. Many a man I seen whipped half to death.” He exaggerated, but a good child’s yarn instills some fear.

  The boy pulled the fleecy cover over his chin and looked at his elder with new respect. The old man’s eyes shone bright with recollection.

  “O yes, men were tough them days. When the Lords were building of that big Stone Ring they didn’t care just who they took. They called up women even, for to butcher cattle at the winter camps. As for men, when the fuzz on yr face got hard you got called up; you had to go.”

  Concealed beneath his fleece the boy rubbed the soft down on his cheek. No worries yet. Turig smiled inwardly.

  “We was more in the Lords’ domain those days. They needed haulers, see. Now they got their Stone Rings built they don’t give a fig about the outlands any more. To my mind just as well!”

  The old man paused, seeming to gather his inspiration from the timbers in the roof. Sunk in the earth and walled with vertical poles banked outside with turfs, the round hut was impervious to weather save in the greatest gales. A shallow cone of thatch shed every sort of wind and rain. Creaking eaves came as the only clue that a night wind was gathering for a blow.

  “Daddy says it’s blasphemy to say bad things about the Lords, Grandpa.”

  The old man raised his voice, “Your father’s right, son. Keep your mind wide open and your mouth tight shut. Don’t you go heeding what a foolish old man says.” How many lives had the Stone Rings cost? How many years of widowhood and human dislocation? Turig didn’t like to think. Damn the priests but do it silently! Thatch and walls had ears.

  He launched into his odyssey. “I weren’t much more’n you when I went out. There was three of us local lads took up and marched away; I never did hear tell what happened to the other two. They took us up along the Ridgeway sharpish and when we got to the top and went on a bit we seen a very different world. Foreign-like.”

  The last pale light had quit the door, leaving the old man and boy in near dark. The child’s world seemed suddenly both small and great, with all the possibilities of world-encompassing imagination crammed into their hut.

  “Did you see the spirit-people up there, Grandpa?”

  “Not so’s we could tell.”

  Valley folk feared the uplands. The downs were thick with barrows: long ones built in ancient times; round or disc-shaped tumuli constructed by the Lords’ own Wessex folk. Some of these were so old that grass and trees had grown on top; others were white scars of chalk, as fresh as grief. Fortunate were the few who lay in them. Barrow-graves did honor to the golden caste of men—the Lords themselves and high-born kin—who lay beneath the earth with treasures, waiting till time’s cycle turned and brought them back again. Meanwhile high-caste ghosts were said to walk abroad beneath All-Father Moon.

  Turig continued to describe his youthful anabasis: “We was marched the best part of a day, and all the way they’d cleared the forest out and built great huts. Long huts, but…” The old man was lost for words. How to describe the sophistication of farmsteads with long-halls for masters and servants and cattle byres? “They had cattle mire's you can count on all your fingers and your toes. To keep ’me in they dug big ditches round the land they held separate from their neighbors. They had trenches there with banks and tree stumps running miles, to keep the cattle in.

  “Well, that first night we slept in the lee of a barrow—spirit-home or not, it cut the wind—and next day we went on through country where the cattle stood like corn. By’r Moon, their serfs were clad in better linen shifts than we have in the outlands!

  “They’d picked up more of us poor buggers by then. Half through the second day we got to where the gods come down and mark the seasons out. Well, you should ’a seen it;
there was men and mud and trees knocked down for miles, and they marched us to a round ditch banked both sides, mire's an arrow shot across, and inside the inner bank, standing up in rings, we seen the biggest stones that ever was in the whole world.”

  Grandfather spoke truth. The biggest rocks in their home country were flint nodules from the chalk, weighing at best no more than a man. But at the Rings, “the stones we hauled were big as four bulls end to end, so heavy that to drag ’em to the holy place took”—the old man scratched his mind to find a metaphor—“more strong men than all the barley grains that you can cup in your two hands. Horses, too!”

  The boy could have no notion of such a mystery, let alone understand why an army of men should drag stones around. Perhaps Grandpa had been chewing shaman’s toadstools.

  “Well, ’twas a strange place then, and I don’t doubt ’tis a strange place now, but, no matter what your family totem was, ’twas more’n a little blessed.” The old man remembered the day they’d brought him to the place where the gods convene to calculate the seasons’ boundaries. He’d been but a boy then, full of terrors and homesick, but with his own eyes he had witnessed the Lords chart sky-gods’ paths.

  Once, standing in the sanctuary, he had watched the annual ritual as they predicted the shortest day. Every year, a quarter of a moon before it came to pass, the Lords sent runners to each little vill in their world to tell folk when to offer sacrifice in order to restore the waning powers of Lady Sun.

  Such was the power of the Lords that their ritual never failed. Every year the Wessex people pulled the goddess from her death-plunge through collective prayer and sacrifice. Then they waited, watched and prayed: on the third day past the solstice, when they were sure that She was safe, they ate the roasted carcass of their sacrifice.

  The jumble of tradition, superstition and ritual that a young boy observed from year to year began to fall together and make sense now that Grandpa was behind it all.

  “Around the sanctuary they had this ditch between two banks just like you’d see in a Lord’s grave-barrow. But this’n was old, dug up by the first people, as must have been. Anyway, years before my time they’d made a ramp across the ditch and hauled in stones, like I said, to stand them up on end as neat as if they were wood posts to set up in our wall. Only they set the stones apart a bit, so it looked like a loose-weave basket or a great big hut all made of doors. Hah, you’re going to sleep!” The old man poked the boy accusingly.

  “No I’m not, Grandpa. Moon’s truth!”

  “Anyway, there were other stones to get, which was why we was up there, to fetch ’em in, so… When we got the stones upright we had to put great slabs along the top, so wide the priests and Lords could walk around on them to chart the sky and mark how shadows fell down in the precinct. See?” the old man challenged his grandson’s sleepy face.

  The boy saw nothing but a fire’s faint glow that was their single source of light. It made Grandpa’s eyes twinkle. Standing stones in a house of doors. This, and every other thing that lay beyond their humble clearing was a mystery.

  “Well, we was supposed to fetch in the last few stones; they’d got it mostly built by then with an inner ring up and shaped like a hoof, open one end to greet the first light of the summer sun, just like a priest with arms outstretched, ’cause that’s the way they greeted her.” The boy put his arms behind his head and prepared for a long listen. “Then there was a ring of stones all way round that, and an outer ring joined up with stones laid flat on top, like I said.”

  The wind picked up, shifting the eaves. Unconsciously the old man hunched into his clothes, a tunic and trousers of finely sewn deerskins mended and patched through many a year. “It was cold them days. ’Course, we only drug them stones in winter when the ground was hard. We didn’t miss none of the planting and harvest that way. Come Spring rains, most of us went home.

  “Well, in my time at the Stone Rings they needed but another handful or two of stones, and most of them we brung down from a day’s march north across a valley and up the other side. They was just lying up there in the forest, big as barrows. A day’s march to get there, but, hah! the best part of three moons to drag a stone back to the Rings.

  “Lord Moon, what a business that was! We had lines of men and ropes so long the one end couldn’t see the tother. The Lords picked out a stone and masons dressed it first. They’d cut a line along and light up fires till she was hot, then pour on water sudden-like until she snapped.”

  The old man might be waking to his memories, but his grandson was dozing off. Stirrings of wind in the eaves and a slow-paced old voice were soporific: the boy closed his eyes. Grandpa’s experiences became a child’s shallow dreams.

  “The first half of the way from where we got them stones weren’t bad. ’Twere mostly all downhill. We’d harness a stone and heave ’er out and let ’er slide. The trick was taking all the strain together. Well, sometimes we could get ’er on a track of roller-logs, and—whoosh!—she’d slip a mile downhill. We’d haul one stone a quarter-moon or so, drag it some miles, then go back fetch another one. That way the track crew didn’t have to shift the logs each time we went back.”

  Heaving, straining, three, four lines of sweating men stretch out before a great, grey rock. Somewhere in the middle of the lines a drum beats to coordinate the tugging at both ends. Dum Dum Boom. Ready, Set, Heave! Ready, Set, Heave!

  It’s winter, frost burns into feet, but still men throw off garments, tie them round their necks or toss them down: their owners won’t be far away. A foot gained here, a man’s length there, or nothing. In the camaraderie of Mission some taboos are cast away with clothes: clan scars on men’s backs are suddenly exposed.

  Years later he might curse the Lords and priests, but two winters on a rope gang had imparted a quality the old man could not put in words: it was pride, an exhilaration in the oneness and the sense of mission that the toilers felt. The pain, the strain, thin soup and frostbite seemed so far removed when he and hundreds bent beneath the single task. They had built an oratory for gods.

  A tug, the stone shifts a little; an inch or two is won. Another tug; the stone shoots forward and men fall in hundreds, scraping knees. Six, seven hundred men bend their backs to serve the essences of all-perceiving gods. Heave! a foot is gained. Heave! the motion of the deities above dictates the cadences of harmony below. Heave! the effort is a joy of being, of belonging, of straining to bring gods home to earth, to focus their vast wanderings within a worthy frame. Heave! six hundred puny efforts work to satisfy the moods of nature and the cosmos wheeling through the charted skies. Heave! each mile closer to the chosen sanctuary makes gods more rational, more MANifest. Heave! just one or two years now, and nature and her deities will have a final earthly definition and a home.

  The old man knew nothing of fifteen generations of geometer-priests who had devoted their lives to studying the gods’ alignments before settling on this final place. Who could tell how many false starts those who came before had made? The land was littered with the sites of sanctuaries abandoned as the truth of deities’ alignments was refined through years of observation, till the gods’ concordance was resolved to this one place.