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CHAPTER 1
NEW MOON, SUNDAY 13 JUNE STONEHENGE
Mist rolls like vaporous tumbleweed in the dead of the Wiltshire night. Out in the flat, sprawling fields hooded Lookers tilt their heads skyward to witness the first sliver of silver. The moon is new, showing only a faint flash of virginal white beneath a voluminous wrap of black-velvet haute couture.
On the horizon, a pale face turns in its cowl. A fiery torch is raised in an old hand. Hushed but urgent words pass from Looker to Looker. The sacrifice is ready. He has been brought from his fast. Seven days without food. No light, nor sound, nor touch, nor smell. His body has been cleansed of the impurities he has ingested. His senses sharpened. His mind focused on his fate.
The Lookers are robed in handwoven sackcloth, belted with string plaited from plants, their feet shod in rough animal skins. It is the way of the ancients, the creators of the Craft.
The Cleansers remove the man's grimy clothes. He will leave this world with no more than he entered it. They pull a ring from his finger. A watch from his wrist. And from around his neck, a crude gold chain dangling a symbol of some false god.
They carry him, fighting, to the river and immerse him. Cold water fills his mouth and gurgles and froths in his corrupted lungs. He struggles like a startled fish, seeking a safe current to escape the hands of his captors.
It is not to be.
Once purified, he is dragged spluttering to the shore. The Bearers fall upon him and bind him with strips of bark to a litter made from pine, the noble tree that stepped with them from the age of ice. They hoist him high on to their shoulders. Carry him like proud and loving men bearing the coffin of a beloved brother. He is precious to them.
Their walk is long – more than two miles. South from the ancient encampment of Durrington. On to the great avenue, down to where the bluestones and the forty-ton sarsens are sited.
The Bearers make no complaints. They know the pain their forefathers suffered moving the mighty stones hundreds of miles. The astroarchitects trekked through hills and valleys, crossed stormy seas. With antlers of red deer and shoulder blades of cattle, they dug the pits where the circle now stands. Behind the Bearers come the Followers. All male. All dressed identically in hooded, coarse brown robes. They have come from across Britain, Europe and all corners of the globe. For tonight is the new Henge Master's first sacrifice. An overdue offering to the gods. One that will rejuvenate the spiritual strength of the stones.
The Bearers pause at the Heel Stone, the massive chunk of leaning sandstone that is home to the Sky God. It dwarfs all around it, except the gigantic sarsens standing eighty yards away.
In the center of the megalithic portal a bonfire flickers in the darkness, its smoking fingers grasping at the moon, illuminating the Henge Master as he raises his hands. He pauses then sweeps them in a slow arc, pressing back the wall of energy surging between him and the horseshoe of towering trilithons.
'Great gods, I feel your eternal presence. Earth Mother most eternal, Sky Father most supreme, we gather in your adoration and dutifully kneel in your presence.'
The secret congregation of hooded figures sinks silently to the soil. 'We, your obedient children, the Followers of the Sacreds, are gathered here on the bones of our ancestors to honor you and to show you our devotion and loyalty.'
The Master claps his hands and leaves them joined above his head, fingers pointing in prayer to the heavens. The Bearers rise from their knees. Once more they lift upon their shoulders the naked young man tethered to the rough litter.
'We thank you, all you great gods who look over us and who bless us. In respect to you and the ways of the ancients, we dedicate this sacrifice.'
The Bearers begin their final journey, out through the giant stone archways toward the sacrificial point that lies on the line of the solstice.
The Slaughter Stone.
They lay the young man upon the long gray slab. The Henge Master looks down and lowers his joined hands to touch the forehead of the sacrifice. He is not afraid to look into the terrorized blue eyes beneath him. He has prepared himself to banish all feelings of compassion. Just as a king would exile a traitor.
He slowly circles his joined hands around the man's face as he continues the words of the ritual. 'In the names of our fathers, our mothers, our protectors and our mentors, we absolve you from your earthly sins and through your mortal sacrifice we purify your spirit and speed you on your journey to eternal life in paradise.'
Only now does the Henge Master separate his palms. He spreads them wide. His body is in balance with the lunar phase. His silhouette against the great stones is that of a cruciform.
Into each outstretched hand the Bearers place the sacred tools. The Henge Master grips them, his fingers folding around smooth, wooden shafts carved centuries ago.
The first flint axe strikes the head of the sacrifice.
Then the second.
Now the first again.
Blows rain down until bone and skin collapse like an eggshell. With the death of the sacrifice comes a roar from the crowd. A triumphant cheer as the Master moves back, his arms spread wide for them to see the sacrificial blood spattered on his robes and flesh.
'Just as you shed blood and broke bones to assemble this godly portal to protect us, so too do we shed our blood and break our bones for you.'
One by one the Followers come forward. They dip their fingers in the blood of the sacrifice, mark their foreheads. Then they walk back into the main circle and kiss the trilithons.
Blessed and blooded, they bow before silently disappearing into the dark Wiltshire fields.
CHAPTER 2
LATER THAT MORNING TOLLARD ROYAL, CRANBORNE CHASE, SALISBURY
Professor Nathaniel Chase sits at a desk in the oak-walled study of his seventeenth-century country mansion and through the leaded windows watches morning twilight yield to a summer sunrise. It's a daily battle that he never misses.
A colorful male pheasant struts the lawn, cued by the first light on the dew-soaked grass. Dull females follow in the bird's wake, then feign disinterest and peck at fat-filled coconut shells strung out by Chase's gardener.
The male proudly spreads his wings to form a cape of iridescent copper. His head, ears and neck are tropical green and his throat and cheeks an exotic glossed purple. A distinctive white band around his neck gives him a priestly stature while his face and wattle are a deep red. The bird is melanistic – some kind of mutation of the common pheasant. As the professor looks closer, he suspects that a few generations back there must also have been some crossing with a rare green pheasant or two.
Chase is a successful man. More than most ever dream of being. Academically brilliant, he has been hailed as one of Cambridge's finest brains. His books on art and archaeology have sold globally and built a following beyond those bound to buy them for study. But his vast fortune and luxuriously refined lifestyle don't come from his learned ways. He left Cambridge many years back and turned his talents to sourcing, identifying, buying and selling some of the rarest artifacts in the world. It was a practice that earned him a regular place in the rich list and a whispered reputation as something of a grave-robber.
The sixty-year-old takes off his brown-framed reading glasses and places them on the antique desk. The matter in hand is pressing but it can wait until the floor show outside is done.
The pheasant's humble harem break from their feeding to pay the cock the attention he craves. He stomps out a short, jerky dance and leads the buff-brown females toward a stretch of manicured privets. Chase picks up a pair of small binoculars that he keeps by the window. At first he sees nothing except gray-blue sky. He tilts the glasses down and the blurred birds fill the frame. He fiddles with the focus wheel until everything becomes as sharp and crisp as this chilly summer morning. The male is surrounded now and warbling short bursts of song to mark his pleasure. Off to the right lies a shallow nest at the foot of the hedge.
Chase is feeling sensitive, emotional. The display outside his window touches him almost to the point of tears. The male with its many admirers, at the peak of life, vibrant in color and potency preparing to raise a family. He remembers those days. That feeling. That warmness.
All gone.
Inside the grand house there are no pictures of his dead wife, Marie. Nor any of his estranged son, Gideon. The place is empty. The professor's days of plumage-spreading are done.
He puts the binoculars down beside the fine casement window and returns to the important paperwork. He picks up a vintage fountain pen, a limited-edition Pelikan Caelum, and savors its weight and balance. One of only five hundred and eighty ever made, a homage to Mercury's fifty-eight-million-kilometer orbit of the sun. Astronomy has played a vital role in the life of Nathaniel Chase. Too vital, he reflects.
He dips the nib into a solid brass antique inkwell, lets the Pelikan drink its fill and resumes his chore.
It takes Nathaniel an hour to finish writing on the fine cotton-blend paper that bears his own personalized watermark. He meticulously reviews every finished line and contemplates the impact the letter will have on its reader. He blots it, folds it precisely into three, places it into an envelope and seals it with old-fashioned wax and a personalized stamp. Ceremony is important. Especially today.
He places the letter in the middle of the grand desk and sits back, both saddened and relieved to have completed the text.
The sun is now rising above the orchard at the far side of the garden. On another day, he'd walk the grounds, perhaps take lunch in the summerhouse, watch the wildlife in the garden, and then enjoy a midafternoon snooze. Another day.
He opens the bottom drawer of the desk and pauses as his gaze falls on what lies in there. In one determined move, he takes out the First World War revolver, puts it to his temple and pulls the trigger.
Outside the blood-spattered window, pheasants squawk and scatter into the gray sky.
CHAPTER 3
THE FOLLOWING DAY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY
Gideon Chase quietly puts the phone down and stares blankly at the walls of his office where he's been reviewing the findings of a dig at a Megalithic temple in Malta.
The policewoman had been clear enough. 'Your father is dead. He shot himself.' Looking back, it's hard to see how she could have been any clearer. No wasted words. No hyperbole. Just a verbal slap to the guts that sucked his breath away. Sure, she'd thrown in a 'sorry' somewhere, murmured her condolences, but by then the twenty-eight-year-old's brilliant professor-in-waiting brain had shut down.
Father. Dead. Shot.
Three small words that painted the biggest imaginable picture. But all he could manage in reply was 'Oh.' He asked her to repeat what she'd said to make sure he'd understood. Not that he hadn't. It was just that he was so embarrassed that he couldn't say anything other than 'Oh.'
It has been years since father and son last spoke. One of their bitterest rows. Gideon had stormed out and vowed never to talk to the old goat again and it hadn't been difficult to keep to his word.
Suicide.
What a shock. The great man had wittered on all his life about being bold, daring and positive. What could be more cowardly than blowing your brains out? Gideon flinches. God, it must have been ugly.
He moves around his small office in a daze. The police want him to travel over to Wiltshire to answer a few questions. Help fill in some blanks. But he's not sure he can find his way out of the door, let alone to Devizes.
Childhood memories tumble on him like a row of falling dominoes. A big Christmas tree. A melting snowman on the front patch of lawn. A preschool Gideon coming downstairs in pajamas to open presents. His father playing with him while his mother cooked enough food to feed a village. He remembers them kissing under the mistletoe while he hugged their legs until they had to pick him up and include him. Then comes the thump. As a six-year-old, enduring the pain of his mother's death. The silence of the graveyard. The emptiness of their home. The change in his father. The loneliness of boarding school.
He has much to think about on the journey south to Wiltshire, the county where his mother had been born, the place she'd always lovingly called 'Thomas Hardy Land'.
CHAPTER 4
WILTSHIRE
Few know of its existence. A secret vault of cold stone, scaled to epic proportions by prehistoric architects. A place unvisited by the uninitiated.
The Sanctuary of the Followers is an unseen wonder. It is the size of a cathedral and yet a mere bump in the turf on the fields above, almost invisible to the human eye. Belowground, it's the jewel of an ancient civilization, the product of a people whose brilliance still baffles the greatest brains of modern times.
Fashioned three thousand years before Christ, the place is an anachronism, a vast temple as out-of-time, breathtaking and impossible as the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Buried in its subterranean tombs are the architects of both Stonehenge and the Sanctuary. Their bones rest in the midst of more than two million blocks of stone, quarried from the same sources. Just as the Giza monument was a near-perfect pyramid, the Sanctuary is a near-perfect semi-sphere, a dome arcing over a circular floor, a cold moon sliced in half.
Now footsteps resound through the Descending Passage as though rain is falling into the cavernous chambers. In the candlelight of the Lesser Hall, the Inner Circle gathers. There are five of them, representatives of the giant trilithons sited inside the circle of Stonehenge. All are cloaked and hooded: a sign of respect for generations past, those who gave their lives to create this sacred place.
Upon initiation, Followers become known by the name of a constellation that shares the initial letter of their own first name. This shroud of secrecy is another age-old tradition, an echo of an epoch when the whole world was guided by stars.
Draco is tall and broad and exudes power. He is the most senior, the Keeper of the Inner Circle. His name comes from the Latin for 'dragon' and the constellation that almost three thousand years ago cradled the northern world's all-important pole star.
'What is being said?' He gives a flash of perfect teeth beneath his hood. 'What are they doing?' The 'they' in question are the police, the Wiltshire constabulary, the oldest county police force in the country.
Grus, a thickset man in his early fifties, pounces. 'He shot himself.'
Musca paces thoughtfully, candles casting spectral shadows on the stone walls behind. Although the youngest of them all, his large physical presence dominates the chamber. 'I never expected him to do this. He was as devoted as any of us.'
'He was a coward,' snaps Draco. 'He knew what we expected of him.'
Grus ignores the outburst. 'It presents us with certain problems.'
Draco steps closer to him. 'I read the signs as well as you. We have time enough to ride this storm before the holy nexus.'
'There was a letter,' adds Grus. 'Aquila knows someone working on the investigation and a suicide note was left for his son.'
'Son?' Draco casts his mind back and a vague memory surfaces. Nathaniel with a child, a skinny youth with a mop of black hair. 'I forgot he had a son. Became a teacher at Oxford?'
'Cambridge. Now he'll be coming home.' Grus lays out the implication. 'Back to his father's home. And who knows what he might find in there.'
Draco creases his brow and looks fixedly to Musca. 'Do what must be done. We all thought well of our brother. In life he was our greatest of allies. We must ensure that in death he does not turn out to be our worst of enemies.'
CHAPTER 5
STONEHENGE
An evening mist swirls around the base of the stones, a meteorological sleight of hand creating an archipelago in a sea of clouds. To motorists zipping past on the nearby trunk roads it's a scenic bonus but to the Followers it is much more.
This is twilight. L'heure bleue. A precious, twice-a-day time between dawn and sunrise, sunset and dusk. When light and dark are in balance and the spirits of the hidden worlds find a fragile harmony.
The Henge Master understands. He knows that nautical twilight comes first, as the sun sinks between six and twelve degrees below the horizon and gives sailors the first reliable readings of the stars. Astronomical twilight follows, as the sun slides from twelve to eigh teen degrees below the horizon.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Stonehenge Legacy"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Sam Christer.
Excerpted by permission of The Overlook Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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