The Sunstone Circle

A biting autumn wind scours the chalk ridge of the Salisbury Plain, carrying the sharp scent of bruised turf and the grease of rendered ox fat. At the bottom of the long slope, the first great sarsen stone lies bound in braided hide cables upon oak timber sledges—thirty tons of speckled grey silcrete that took three moons to drag from the distant Marlborough Downs. A hundred men and women lean against the haul-ropes, chests heaving, their breath rising like pale smoke toward the grey vault of the sky. Beside you, Cadan pulls his heavy wool cloak tight against the damp, his missing left earlobe white with cold. He watches the trembling legs of the young haulers with sour eyes. "They are already spent," he mutters, shifting his weight off his lamed leg. "Two more miles of chalk to the henge ditch. If we kill our young folk dragging bedrock through the mire, who will sow the winter emmer in the northern valleys? The gods will feast on empty air while our children starve." Before you can invoke the ancestral skies, a hollow thud shakes the grass. A young coastal laborer, scarcely sixteen summers, pitches forward into the chalk silt beside the timber rollers, his grip slipping from the…