Chapter 2
Then there was the girl. Was she still alive? Old Turig remembered her as if she were yesterday, remembered how he had fallen for her, smitten by an impossible love.
“What are you thinking about, Grandpa?” His elder’s voice had soothed the boy to sleep. Deprived of it, he woke.
“O, things. It’s all so long ago.” And as dear to Turig as if he had lived his whole life through again in this past hour.
The girl in question had been his overseer’s daughter; he of course was but an indentured serf strung along on gruel, chunks of bread as hard as sarsen stone and a freezing barracks with not much better than the winter winds for walls.
He had been in barracks a month—long enough to appreciate the privilege of escaping its confines—when his overseer plucked him from the crowd and took him off to serve as a houseboy at hall. Hall was where, in normal times, the overseer was foreman of his master’s ranch hands. But with the Stone Rings nearly finished and religious zealotry dominating society’s every burp and breath, the master had been forced to cede the overseer’s winter service to the Lords.
Home, then, during much of Turig’s first winter on a sarsen-gang was a ranch similar to several he had seen on his two-day forced march to the Rings. Three long wooden halls were built on a more or less east-west axis, the better to draw smoke from holes at each end of the eaves. The ranch to which the overseer belonged was not far off the land-route taken by the sarsen gangs. In fact the great stones were being dragged through its pasture. What the master and his people thought of this was never voiced.
The Wessex Folk farmed the best land in the world. Well-traveled traders told them so. Furthermore, many routes crossed on their high plains. The finest products of Irish goldsmiths, Welsh metalworkers, Cornish tin and Mendip lead mines travelled south and east; in return, skillfully wrought metal objects came the other way from unknown lands beyond the sea.
From a distant northern country came wonderful evening sun-colored jewels of perpetual ice with insects trapped inside. All these marvels crossed the high plains to converge in the land of the great Stone Rings where the Wessex Folk bred cattle, and ponies to serve the trade routes of the world. Astronomical considerations apart, no wonder the gods had instructed the Lords to build them a gathering place on these high plains.
So it was that back in the old days a young lad from the outlands came into the ranch-master’s hall astounded by what he saw. Two generations later the wonders of that time escaped his grasp of words. Turig told his grandson, “There was this time I was took off to hall to wait on table and suchlike. They didn’t let me off the stone-gang, mind. But at least I was warm at night and well fed, which was better than some of them fellows were. Many a man was took in the chest and died of coughing frost.
“My overseer’s wife, she was a real shrew. A hard-faced peasant, that old cow, and no mistake. You’ll meet ’em, boy; she married above her caste and never let the world forget.” Referring to the crescent-shaped metal chokers which women wore, he told the boy, “I seen her wear a copper lunula around her throat all winter through. I think she slept in it. She had the best the sumptuary law allowed.”
This couple, the overseer and his wife, had a daughter of an age and mind ripe for exploration and innocent of complication; and she was lovely, to boot. Her zest for life included the young houseboy whom her father had dragged in from the cold and mostly ignored, leaving the lad free to embark on his own youthful fancies of discovery.
The first time Turig clapped eyes on his overseer’s daughter was at table. All members of the household ate together, their caste ranked by their precedence at the board. As the least of the low, he sat at the foot of the table some thirty feet from the master at its head. From this vantage point he was required to rise and fill cups, which meant that, at the dog-end of a day hauling sarsens over frost-hard ground, he often spent more time on his feet than at bread.
For her part, the overseer’s daughter developed a considerable thirst. Taboos prevented her making eye contact. A peasant might look a person of caste in the eyes, but never the other way around, lest nobility drain out along their rays of sight. High caste people typically ‘looked down’ by staring at the bridge of a peasant’s nose. This gave young Turig the advantage. He could study the girl’s profile at leisure with little risk of being spotted in return. Mind you, she sat beside her mother, so the youth seldom dared glance past the cup he frequently filled for her; and she, facing her father across the board, dared not catch the young man’s eye. But, even in these constrained surroundings, an impossible fascination grew between them.
The sheen of fire-bright metal dictated the caste spectrum at table. The master was not one to display wealth—he and his lady were both near kin to Lords—but his women’s lunulae and matching pannier-style ear-rings were wrought in fine gold from the western isle. The master’s wife, whose natural beauty was an extra privilege of caste, owned a necklace of short gold tubes interlaced with sky-blue faience beads from a far-away land in the realm of the sun. (They said the color of faience conveyed on its wearer the power of airy gods. It was more precious than gold: in fact it was so precious that, after the Wessex Folk passed away, some sixty generations would come and go before it was imported to Britain again.) Across from the mistress, the couple’s son wore a surcoat-collar of gold over linen, the precious metal of his destiny strung on perhaps a dozen thongs heavy as two fistfuls of flint.
Below the family came distinguished commanders, knights, the family’s genealogist (and arbiter of caste disputes), along with lesser priests for whom the laws prescribed silver, the metal of the moon. Beneath them sat overseers, sergeants and masons—men of bronze—the highest rung of caste to which a born churl could attain. Then came the rest, graded from this point by the low-born themselves, for caste-law wasted little thought on churls. Still, the peasantry enforced a pecking order of precedence as rigid as the caste divisions above them, for everyone needed the comfort of having a place in the list.
On the whole, young Turig hadn’t begrudged his lowly duty at table; it gave him an excellent view of the overseer’s daughter. Speech between them was forbidden, of course, but they contrived to meet; or, to be precise, he made it his business to stalk the public spaces of the hall, and she made a point of being seen.
Then came the time the overseer’s daughter took young Turig by surprise. It was a quarter-day, when sarsen-gangs rested, and he was mucking out the master’s stable when the girl’s head popped over a hazel-twisted hurdle between stalls.
“Hello,” she said. “It’s me.”
Shocked, he studied the oval face defined by a freshly-combed head of dark hair, the ends almost meeting beneath her chin. She respected her station to the extent of not looking a churl in the eye.
When he didn’t reply—a peasant ‘spoke up’ only when a caste-lord asked a question—she slipped from the stall to stand before him, plain to see. Beyond the thrill of forbidden fascination, Turig was terrified for both of them: the girl was wearing her mother’s gold lunula and faience beads, a privilege reserved to members of the highest caste. Faience was the blue of sky, the home of the principal gods. Its color was divine; its stones bestowed upon their wearer something of the power of deities and warded off the ills of earth.
“What are you doing wearing that?” he hissed. At the very least they could expect a whipping.
“Don’t you like me?” She posed, swishing the straw as she swirled around for his approval.
His whispered “Where’d you get ’em?” only amplified his fear.
“I’m shining milady’s jewellery today. If I want to put it on, who’s going to know?”
“You got no place in stables with low folk like me. Go on, quick, before you get us both in trouble!”
In a voice commanding natural authority she asked, “What’s your name?”
He told her, instantly obedient to a question from one of caste.
“You fancy me,” she
said. “I seen you looking.” Ignoring her breeding, the overseer’s daughter stared the peasant in the eye.
He responded, horrified, “You’re not supposed to look.”
She studied his shoulder instead, then countered Turig’s resistance with a gesture, both hands holding the faience beads to her mouth and moving her head from side to side, passing the cold, rough-polished stones between her lips.
A churl’s defensiveness had stirred Turig to anger as well as fear. “For Moonssakes, go!” he ordered. “Bad enough for you. They’ll whip me if they catch you here with me.”
She looked in his eyes again, noting his fear before catching the jitters on her own account. Unclasping the mistress’s lunula, she removed it and the faience beads as well. “I thought you liked me,” she sniffed. “ ’Bye!” With a rustle of feet in the straw she was gone.
Turig was careful after that. Puppy-love may be blind; it is not suicidal. The thought of a whipping and a quick-march to barracks kept him out of public places on quarter-days. On work days he flopped on his straw after the meal and slept soundly through the long cold nights. Much of a winter passed this way, the boy filling the girl’s cup at table while they exchanged nothing more than the thrill of shared guilt.
Five or six quarter-days came and went before the overseer’s daughter appeared, like a wraith at dusk, again.
Turig was mucking the stable when a groom brought in a string of horses, freed them from their halters, put a rope across the door and left. Turig was bent over his shovel when the girl’s voice pricked him.
“You didn’t see me,” she said. “I came in with the horses.” Whatever else he felt, he was grateful she had left the gold and faience beads behind this time. But, “Look!” she ordered, holding out a long brown polished jewel, roughly the triangular shape of a flint spear tang. “Perpetual ice!”
The narrow end of the stone was drilled to take a thong, which the overseer’s daughter held, twirling the bright jewel in a dingy stable as if she were a hypnotist. And so she was. The precious thing was fascinating. One of its long edges was opaque brown, but the stone cleared across its width, till the opposite edge was a clear pale yellow. And there, as plain as if the living creature sat on the seed-head of a summer reed, the perpetual ice entrapped the wing and partial thorax of a dragonfly.
Throwing inhibition aside, Turig made to take it, but the overseer’s daughter closed her hand on the stone. To examine the jewel the churl must touch her flesh.
“Give it here,” he told her.
“You’ll have to take it, won’t you?”
The gravity of their offence made him retract his hand.
“Look!” she teased, rubbing the perpetual ice on the shoulder of her tunic. She held it up. It crackled spitefully.
“You’ll break it,” he warned.
She smiled, holding the jewel to the ends of her hair, which rose, hissing and snapping, reaching for the stone.
Turig gasped.
She said, “I bet you never saw that before. There’s god-powers in perpetual ice that’s reaching to get free.”
Priests taught the Wessex Folk how soul—distinct from spirit—always had a form; from which it followed that things with form had soul. Spirit, on the other hand, sprang from pure energy, and energy came of Our Lady Sun. Here was a god whose soul was captured in a strange insect cocoon, a pupa of perpetual ice, its spirit struggling to get free.
Turig listened to its sharp snaps as the jewel tugged the girl’s hair. It made the sound of fairies running on a twig-strewn forest floor. A tiny spark as hair touched stone reminded him of sky gods in lightning over summer hills. There must be godness in the ice. Turig reached, prized the girl’s willing fingers apart while she smiled, looking blatantly into his eyes.
“Say you like me, Turig.”
“I like you.” He said it without hesitation, intent on the god in the ice which he took while she kept holding it on its thong. Rubbing it on his tunic he put it to his ear, hearing the little god speak in crackles as it reached to pluck at his stalks of young beard.
“God speaks,” he told the cosmos softly, believing it.
The overseer’s daughter teased him: “What’s she say?”
“She says…” The amber’s tiny cracklings were sounds of living things and dead souls too, of lightning, wind in trees and water gurgling over rocks. To Turig’s ear the amber was describing symmetry in snow flakes, ice-ferns frozen on the sides of brazen bowls.
The religion that built the great Stone Rings taught that souls are spirit made manifest, and that spirit is the mindful, all-directing energy that orders forms and shapes for things. Souls channel spirit; spirit defines form.
The spirit trapped in the amber’s soul clicked and snapped and tugged at flesh. In that instant the doctrine of the priests began to take form for Turig and the natural scheme of things fell into place. The voice in the amber emanated from one of the soul-channeled spirits for whom so many generations had labored to locate the holy ground and then to build the great Stone Rings.
It came to Turig in a flash: if a tiny jewel could be a spirit medium, what must be the impact of those great stones set out on the downs? Why, they were scaled up to hear the cosmos speak!
The Rings’ great stones were many times the size of the perpetual ice in Turig’s hand. They had to be to serve as an effective focal point through which the Lords and priests interpreted the spirit-purposes of gods in heaven and earth. The Stone Rings were as a sea-shell held against an ear, revealing, not the secrets of the sea, but the silent voices of the universe.
This must be the way of things: the great stones spoke to priests and pilgrims as the amber spoke to Turig. Gods, great stones, material things and men were held together for the Wessex Folk by spirit born of energy from Mother Sun, the energy that made the mind of humans reach and soar.
Turig was so wrapped in his moment of revelation that he never heard the man approach until it was too late. He had but time to register the shock on the girl’s young face before he was pulled backwards by the hair and slammed face first against the rough wood wall. The overseer’s too familiar voice snarled in his ear, “You came here with nothing; you go out with nothing. If she wasn’t mine I’d make the master sacrifice you to the moon. Back to the barracks, you little sod. Get out!” The overseer slammed Turig’s head into the wall once more for good measure, turned him to the door and kicked him over the rope barring the way.
Behind him the boy heard a slap followed by screams. Whatever else happened was lost in the dark interior and the scuffling of restive horses’ hooves.
There was worse. Turig still held the ice-god in his palm. When it was missed the master would have him and the overseer’s precious daughter tried as thieves and sacrificed. Steadying the rope across the stable door he hung the pendant on it. “Here,” he shouted at the muffled sobbing in the dark. “Take back your god!”
He never saw the overseer’s girl again.