Edward Rutherfurd was born in Salisbury and educated in Wiltshire and Cambridge. He did live in New York, but returned to his roots to research and write his vast, best-selling saga, Sarum, based on the history of Salisbury. Russka, his second novel, tells the sweeping history of Russia from the Cossack horsemen of the steppes to the epic events of the Bolshevik revolution. His third novel, London, is the remarkable story of the greatest city on earth, bringing all the richness of London’s past unforgettably to life. In his fourth novel, The Forest, Rutherfurd weaves the history and legends of the New Forest into compelling form. Sarum, Russka, London, The Forest, Dublin and Ireland Awakening are all available in Arrow.
Sarum is the towering story of five families through 100 centuries of turmoil, tyranny, passion and prosperity. In a novel of extraordinary richness the whole sweep of British civilization unfolds through the story of one place, Salisbury, from beyond recorded time to the present day. The landscape – as old as time itself – shapes the destinies of the five families. The Wilsons and the Shockleys, locked in a cycle of revenge and rivalry for more than 400 years. The Masons, who pour their inspired love of stone into the creation of Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral. The Porters, descended from a young Roman soldier in exile. And the aristocratic Norman Godefrois, who will fall to the very bottom of the social ladder before their fortunes revive.
I am deeply indebted to the following, all experts in their respective fields, who with great kindness and patience read different parts of this book and corrected errors. Any errors that remain, however, are mine alone.
Dr J. H. Bettey, University of Bristol; Mr Desmond Bonney, Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England; Miss Alison Borthwick, formerly of the Archaeological Section, Wiltshire County Council Library and Museum Service; Dr John Chandler, Local Studies Officer, Wiltshire County Council Library and Museum Service; Miss Suzanne Eward, Librarian and Keeper of the Muniments of Salisbury Cathedral; Mr David A. Hinton, University of Southampton; Dr T. B. James, King Alfred’s College of Higher Education, Winchester; Mr K. H. Rogers, County Archivist and Diocesan Records Officer, Wiltshire County Council; Mr Roy Spring, Clerk of the Works, Salisbury Cathedral.
Thanks are also due to the following, all of whom gave valuable help and advice in different ways:
The Right Reverend John Austin Baker, Bishop of Salisbury; The Very Reverend Doctor Sydney Evans, Dean Emeritus of Salisbury; Mr David Algar; Miss S. A. Cross, formerly of The Museum of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society; Mrs Elizabeth Godfrey; Sir Westrow Hulse, Bt.; Mrs Alison Campbell Jensen; Dr P. H. Robinson, Curator, The Museum of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society; Mr Peter R. Saunders, Curator, Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum; Mr and Mrs H. S. Taylor-Young; Mrs Jane Walford.
I am grateful to the Director of the Wiltshire County Council Library and Museum Service for kindly allowing his library to become my second home over a period of more than three years, and to the staff of Salisbury Library for much valuable assistance.
No thanks can be enough to Mrs Margaret Hunter and the staff of Saxon Office Services, Shaftesbury for their unfailing help and good humour in the typing and constant altering of the manuscript.
I have also been most fortunate in finding an agent, Gill Coleridge of Anthony Sheil Associates and two editors, Rosie Cheetham of Century Hutchinson and Betty Prashker of Crown Publishers who early on had faith in this project and gave me such unfailing help and encouragement.
I am deeply grateful to my wife Susan, my mother and the Hon. Diana Makgill for their respective patience, unstinting help and hospitality.
Special thanks are also due to Miss Alison Borthwick for her expert maps and illustrations.
Finally, and most important of all, I owe the greatest possible debt of gratitude to Dr John Chandler whose book, Endless Street opened the doors of Salisbury’s history to me and has been my constant companion. For over three years, with unfailing patience and courtesy he has guided me towards my objective, and without his kind help and expert advice this book could not have been written.
Russka
London
The Forest
Dublin: Foundation
Ireland Awakening
New York
First, before the beginning of Sarum, came a time when the world was a colder and darker place.
Over a huge area of the northern hemisphere – perhaps a sixth of the whole globe – stretched a mighty covering of ice. It lay over all of northern Asia; it covered Canada, Scandinavia and about two thirds of the future land of Britain. Had it been possible to cross this gigantic continent of ice, the journey would have been some five thousand miles from whichever direction it was approached. The volume of the ice was stupendous; even at its outer edge it was thirty feet high.
In a desolate, dark belt to the south of the ice lay a vast subarctic wasteland of empty tundra, several hundred miles across.
This was the colder, darker world, some twenty thousand years before the birth of Christ.
Since the huge casing of ice contained a considerable portion of the earth’s water, the seas were lower than those in later times – some did not exist at all – and so the lands to the south stood higher, their sheer cliffs frowning upon empty chasms that have long since vanished under the waters.
The northern world was a quieter place too. Over the ice, and the tundra, there reigned a silence that seemed to have no end. True, there were terrible winds, huge blizzards that howled across the land of ice; true, in the arctic tundra there were sparse forms of life – a meagre vegetation, small groups of hardy animals – which eked out a bleak existence in the freezing wastes; but to all intents the land was empty: thousands upon thousands of miles of desert; and in the vast glacial cap itself, all forms of life and the seas which might have spawned them were locked up in the great stasis of the ice.
Such was the last Ice Age. Before, there had been many like it; after it, there will be many more. And in the gaps between these ages, men have come and gone upon the northern lands.
Centuries passed; thousands of years passed, and nothing changed, nor seemed likely to. Then, at some time around 10,000 B.C., a change began to occur: at the outer edge of the frozen wastes, the temperature began to rise. It was not enough to be noticed in a decade, hardly in a century, and it did not yet have any effect upon the ice; but it rose nonetheless. Centuries passed. It rose a little more. And then the ice cap began to melt. Still the process was gradual: a stream here, a small river there; blocks of ice a few yards across in one place, half a mile in another, breaking away from the edge of the ice cap, a process hardly noticeable against the thousands of miles of the vast continent of ice that remained. But slowly this melting gathered pace. New land, tundra, emerged from under the ice; new rivers were born; ice floes moved southwards into the seas, which began to rise. A new ferment was in progress upon the surface of the earth. Century after century, the face of the continents changed as new lands began to define themselves and new life began, cautiously, to spread across the earth.
The last Ice Age was in retreat.
For several thousand years this process continued.
About seven thousand five hundred years before the birth of Christ, in the still bleak and uninviting season that was summer in those northern lands, a single hunter undertook a journey that was impossible. His name, as nearly as it can be written, was Hwll.
When she heard the plan, his woman Akun first looked at him in disbelief and then protested.
“No one will go with us,” she argued. “How shall we find food without help?”
“I can hunt alone,” he replied. “We shall eat.”
She shook her head vigorously in disbelief.
“This place that you speak of; it does not exist.”
“It does.” Hwll knew that it did. His father had told him, and his father’s father before that. Though he did not know it, the information was already several centuries old.
“We shall die,” Akun said simply.
They were standing on the ridge above their camp: a pitiful little cluster of wigwams made of reindeer skins and supported on long poles, which the five families that comprised their hunting group had set up when the winter snows departed. Across the ridge, as far as the eye could see, stretched the empty expanse of coarse grey-brown grass, dotted with the occasional bush, dwarf birch or clump of rocks, to which ragged lichen and stringy moss had attached themselves. Grey clouds scudded over the brown land, driven by a chill north east wind.
This was the tundra. For when the ice of the last glacial age began to retreat, it laid bare a desolate region that extended uninterrupted across the entire northern Eurasian land mass. From Scotland to China, in these vast, empty spaces similar in climate to Siberia today, small bands of hunters known to archaeologists as Upper Paleolithic, followed by Mesolithic man, had followed the sparse game that roamed the barren wastes. Stocky bison, reindeer, wild horse and the stately elk would appear on the horizon, then disappear again, and the hunters would follow, often for many days, in order to make their kill and survive another season. It was a cold, precarious life that continued for hundreds of generations.
It was in the extreme north west corner of this gigantic tundra region that Hwll and his woman found themselves.
He was typical of these wanderers, who were of no single racial type. He was five foot seven, just above average height, with high cheekbones, coal black eyes, a deeply rutted and weatherbeaten face with skin that seemed to have been worn like the landscape into innumerable valleys, creeks and gullies; he had half his teeth, which were yellow, and a full black beard now flecked with grey. He was twenty-eight: ripe middle age in that region and at that time. The crude jerkin and leggings that he wore were made of reindeer skin and fox fur, held together with toggles made of bone; for the art of stitching clothes together had not yet reached his people. On his feet were soft moccasin boots. He wore no ornaments. Thus naturally camouflaged in the tundra, he resembled a shaggy brown plant of some indeterminate kind, from the top of which hung the thickly tangled mass of his hair. When he stood stock still, his spear raised ready to throw, he could be mistaken at twenty yards for a stunted tree. The broad-set eyes under his deeply scored forehead and bushy brows were cautious and intelligent.
He was a good provider, known amongst the other hunters as a skilful tracker, and for many years the little group had lived and hunted undisturbed in a region approximately fifty miles east to west and forty north to south. They followed game, they fished, and it was the moon goddess who watched over all hunters that they trusted to protect their precarious way of life. In summer they lived in tents; in winter they built semi-subterranean houses, cutting them into the side of a hill and facing them with brushwood: crude shelters, but well designed to conserve precious body heat. He had taken Akun as his woman ten years before and in that time he had fathered five children, two of whom had survived: a boy of five and a girl of eight.
And now he was preparing to embark on an immense trek to an unknown place! Akun shook her head in despair.
The reasons for Hwll’s extraordinary plan were simple. For three years now, the hunting had been poor, and that last winter the little group had nearly ceased to exist. In vain he had searched in the snow, day after day, for the tell-tale tracks that might lead him to food. Day after day he had come back disappointed, having found only the trail of a single arctic fox, or the minute scuffling patterns of the lemmings which then inhabited the region. The little band had subsisted on a store of nuts and roots that they had gathered in the preceding months, and even that store had been nearly exhausted. He had watched the women and children grow wasted, and almost despaired. Nor had the weather given them any respite, for it had been bitterly cold, with continuous icy winds from the north. Then at last, he saw a party of reindeer, and the hunters, calling on their last reserves of strength, had managed to separate one from the group and kill it. This single lucky find had saved them from starvation: the flesh of the animal gave them meat and its precious blood gave them the salt which they would otherwise have lacked. Despite this kill, the end of the winter saw one of the women and three of the children dead.
Spring came and, in place of the snow, revealed a cold, marshy wasteland where small flowers and ragged grasses grew. Usually this change of season meant that they would encounter the bison, who cropped over the new shoots on the high ground during the early months of summer. But this year the hunters had found no bison. They met only wild horse, whose meat was tough and which was hard to catch.
“If the bison do not come, then the hunting here is over,” Hwll said to himself, and throughout the early summer as the pale sun coaxed the vegetation into flower, and the ground became firmer underfoot, they had travelled in a wide circle, twenty miles in radius, in search of game; but still there was almost nothing. The group was half starving and he was sure they would not survive another winter.
It was then that Hwll made his decision.
“I am travelling south,” he told the others, “to the warm lands. If we leave now, we can reach them before the snows.” He said this to encourage them, because in fact he did not know how long the journey would take. “I am going to cross the great forest of the east,” he said, “and go south to where the lands are rich and men live in caves. Who will come with me?”
It was a brave statement and it was based on the ancient store of oral tradition which was all he knew. The geography that had been handed down to Hwll through scores of generations by word of mouth was fairly simple. Far to the north, it was said – he did not know how far – the land grew colder and even more inhospitable until finally one reached a great wall of ice, as high as five men, that cut across the landscape from east to west. The ice wall had no beginning and no end. Beyond it lay the ice plateau, a shimmering white land that extended northwards for ever: for the land of ice had no end. Far to the west lay a sea, and that, too, had no end. To the south lay tundra, and thick forests, until one reached a sea too wide to cross. On three sides, therefore, the way was cut off. But to the south east there was a more inviting prospect. First one walked south many days until a great ridge of high ground arose, and down this it was possible to travel easily for several more days. Then from this ridge, turning east, one could cross other, lesser ridges, until a gently shelving plain led to a huge forest through which there were tracks that could safely be followed. By crossing the eastern forest it was possible to by-pass the southern sea; at the end of the forest began a great steppe, and when he reached that, he must turn south again and travel for many days until he reached those fabled warm lands where the people lived in caves.
“There it is much warmer,” he had been told, “and the hunting is good.”
Vague as it was, all this information was correct. For Hwll was standing in what would one day be called the north of England. Far to the north, the ice wall of the last glacial age, some thirty feet deep, had been retreating steadily and was still melting; only centuries before it had covered the place where their camp was now. To the west lay the Atlantic Ocean. With the exception of the island of Ireland, about which he did not know, the water continued until it reached the coast of North America, and would not be crossed for nearly nine thousand years. To the south lay the midlands and the broad lowlands of southern England, and further still the large estuary of the river Rhine had, with other rivers, been slowly carving out the small sea now called the English Channel for several thousand years. To the south east however, lay the great land bridge that joined the peninsula of Britain to the continent of Eurasia. Here, a vast plain stretched unbroken, forest interspersed with steppe, from eastern Britain for two and a half thousand miles to the snow-capped Ural Mountains of central Russia.
Across this land mass the hunters of the northern hemisphere had wandered for tens of thousands of years: moving south when successive Ice Ages came, and north once more each time the ice receded. Because of these migrations, Hwll’s ancestors could have been traced to many lands: to the Russian steppe, to the Baltic, to Iberia and the Mediterranean. It was the distant memory of these travels that had been handed down to him and which formed the basis of his world view now. Two centuries before, his ancestors had roamed through the huge eastern forest onto the British peninsula and had followed the game north to the area in which he now found himself. In his ambitious journey to the warm lands of the Mediterranean basin, fifteen hundred miles to the south, he would therefore be retracing their steps. Had he realised how far it was he might never have started; but he did not. All he knew was that the warmer lands existed and that it was time to go in search of them.
The plan was daring. It would also have been sound – had it not been for one fatal flaw of which he could not possibly have been aware, and which would bring it crashing down in ruins.
But when, later that day Hwll asked: “Who will come with me?” there was silence from the rest of the band. They had hunted there for generations and they had always somehow survived. Who knew if the warm lands really existed, or what kind of hostile people might live there if they did? Try as he might, Hwll could not persuade anyone to join him; and it was only several days later, after many furious arguments, that Akun came, sullenly and under protest.
There was a warm sun in the sky on the morning that they left the other four families, who stood watching them sadly until they were out of sight, certain that, whatever privations they themselves faced, Hwll and his family must surely die. For five days they walked south; the going was easy because the ground was firm and dry; in all directions, the brown tundra stretched to the horizon. They had taken with them a small quantity of dried meat, some berries, and a tent which Hwll and Akun carried between them. They travelled at a slow pace to conserve the strength of the two children, but nonetheless, they covered a solid ten miles a day, and Hwll was satisfied. Bleak as it was, the landscape was criss-crossed with little streams, and usually he was able to catch a fish to feed his family. On the third day he even killed a hare, using his slender bow and arrow with its long flint head; and always he kept an eye on the sky where the movement of the occasional eagle or kite might indicate food on the ground below. They spoke little; even the children were silent, sensing that they would need all their resources to survive the journey.
The boy was a sturdy little fellow with large, thoughtful eyes. He did not walk very fast, but he had a look of concentrated determination on his face. Hwll hoped it would be enough to carry him through. The girl, Vata, was a stringy, wiry creature, like a young deer, he thought. She looked the more delicate, but he suspected she was the tougher of the two.
On the fifth day they reached their first objective: the ridge.
It rose magnificently above the tundra – a huge natural causeway several hundred feet high, running for two hundred miles down the east side of Britain before it curved westwards across country for two hundred miles more, and finally turned south again to end its journey in the sea. A little before it reached the sea, this limestone, Jurassic ridge would skirt in the centre of southern Britain, a huge plateau of chalk, from which other long ridges spread out across the land like the tentacles of some giant octopus. Throughout prehistoric times, and even afterwards, these ridges were the great arterial roads along which men travelled – the natural and gigantic highways made for men by the land itself.
The views from the ridge were magnificent and even Akun smiled with wonder as she joined Hwll to look at them. They could see for fifty miles. As they began to make their way along it, they found that there were patches of wood and scrub so that they did not need to descend from the ridge to seek shelter at night. But as the days passed and the little family wandered on alone, it was sometimes difficult not to lose heart. Hwll, however, was set in his purpose. Grim-faced, silent, and determined, he led them down the ridge, and all the time in his mind’s eye, he tried to picture the southern lands where the weather was warm and the hunting was good. At such times he would look back at his two children and at Akun, to remind himself that it was for them that he had undertaken this astonishing migration.
Akun: there was a prize! A glow of warmth suffused his body when he looked at her. She had been twelve when they met, one of another group of wanderers who had entered the area where his people hunted. Such meetings were rare and were treated as a cause for celebration – and above all for the exchange of mates: for these simple hunters knew from the experience of centuries that they must keep their own bloodstock strong by seeking other hunters with whom to breed. He was a skilful young tracker without a woman; she was a good-looking girl just past puberty. There was no need even to discuss the matter; the two parties hunted together and, for a small payment of flint arrowheads, she was given to him by her father.
She was twenty-two now, entering middle life, but better looking than most of the tough, weatherbeaten women of her age. Her colouring was lighter than his. She had a rich brown mane of hair, though it was now greased with animal fat and matted from recent rains; her eyes were an unusual hazel colour and her mouth, pursed though it often was against the cold winds, was wide and sensual. She had most of her teeth, and her face had not yet developed the deep wrinkles that one day would make it resemble the cracked clay bed of an empty stream in a time of drought.
It was her body, though, that made the determined face of the hunter break into a tender smile. Smoother than the squat, hirsute bodies of the other women he knew, her skin had a rich, lustrous quality that set the blood racing in his veins. He would still catch his breath with wonder when he thought of the magnificent, swelling curves of her breasts and the rounded, powerful body in the full flower of its womanhood.
There was, in the tundra summer, a glorious, all too short period of less than a month when it was warm; and at this magical time, he and Akun would go down to one of the many streams that ran through the landscape and bathe together in the cold, sparkling waters. Afterwards she would stretch out her magnificent body in the warm sun and then, in an access of joy at the sight of her, and at the continuing strength of his own manhood, Hwll would throw himself upon her. She would laugh, a low, rich laugh that seemed to come from the earth itself, and languidly raise that wide, tantalising, sensuous mouth to his.
She was indeed a wonder! She knew with an infallible instinct where to find the best berries and nuts; she was deft in making nets for fishing. Perhaps, he hoped, they might still have another son: but not in the tundra, he vowed: they would reach the warm lands first.
It was twenty days after they had first set out, that Hwll and his family descended from the ridge and began to walk towards the east. The land now was flat and there was more vegetation. Woods were growing beside the streams; long reeds and grasses waved in the breeze. Hwll noticed these changes with pleasure; but the light wind came from the east and it was still cold.
He had been right about the children. Vata was very thin; her face was pinched and her head hunched forward; but she had kept on doggedly. The boy was starting to worry him. For three days he had been walking with his thumb in his mouth – a bad sign. Twice, the day before, he had stopped, refusing to go on. Both Hwll and Akun knew what they must do: if they gave in once, the boy would break the necessary rhythm of their journey. He must not be allowed to think that they would wait. And so they left him standing there, watching his parents moving slowly away from him until they receded into the distance. It was Vata who finally turned back and dragged him along, and when he caught up at last there were huge tears in his eyes. For the rest of that day he refused even to look at his parents. He did not fall behind again, though.
That night they camped in the shelter of the woods, and Hwll caught two fish in a stream. Akun sat opposite him, a small fire burning between them; the two children huddled close to her.
“How far is it to the forest?” she now asked. During the twenty days that they had travelled, she had said nothing about the journey which she had so opposed. She had spent her energy keeping the children alive and he was grateful for the silence between them, even though he knew that it was also a form of protest. Perhaps her question now meant that she was ready to show her anger, he thought, but her face was expressionless. He was too tired to concern himself anyway.
“Six days journey, I think,” he said, and fell asleep.
Five days passed. They came to another ridge and crossed it. There were many streams to get over; some of the land was marshy and the going was more difficult. But he was fascinated by the gradual change in the landscape. Bleak as the plain was, it contained far more vegetation than there had been in the tundra to the north; and though it was still very empty, game was not so sparse. The children barely noticed the change, for now even the boy was too dazed to protest: his thumb was no longer in his mouth; he and Vata moved like automatons, staring straight ahead of themselves as though in a dream while Akun strode beside them at her stately walk. But they kept a steady pace and he did not let them cover more than ten to twelve miles a day, conserving the last reserves of their strength.
“Soon you will see the great forest,” he promised them. And each day, to encourage them, he repeated what his father had told him. “It has many kinds of different trees, and plenty of game, and strange birds and animals that you have never seen before. It is a wonderful place.” They would listen to him, then stare blankly, straight ahead, and he prayed to the goddess of the moon, who watched over all hunters, that this information was correct.
On the sixth day disaster struck, and when it did so, it came in a form unlike anything the hunter had ever dreamed of.
He woke at dawn, to a clear, chilly day. Akun and the children, wrapped in furs and huddled together beside a clump of bushes, were still sleeping. He stood up, sniffing the air and staring towards the east where a watery sun was rising. At once his instincts told him that something was wrong.
But what? At first he thought it was something in the air, which had a curious, clinging quality. Then he thought the trouble was something else and his brow contracted to a frown. Finally he heard it.
It was the faintest of sounds: so faint that it would never have been picked up by any man other than a skilled tracker like himself, who could discern a single buffalo three miles away by putting his ear to the ground. What he heard now, and what in his sleep had troubled him all night, was a barely perceptible murmur, a rumbling in the earth, somewhere to the east. He put his ear to the ground and remained still for a while. There was no mistaking it: some of the time it was little more than a hiss; but it was accompanied by other grating and cracking sounds, as though large objects were striking against each other. He frowned again. Whatever it was, this sound was not made by any animal: not even a herd of bison or wild horse could generate such a trembling of the earth. Hwll shook his head in puzzlement.
He stood up. “The air,” he muttered. There was, undeniably, something strange about the air as well. Then he realised what it was. The faint breeze smelt of salt.
But why should the air smell of salt, when he was close to the great forest? And what was the curious noise ahead?
He woke Akun.
“Something is wrong,” he told her. “I must go and see. Wait for me here.”
All morning he travelled east at a trot. By late morning he had covered fifteen miles, and the sounds ahead were growing loud. More than once he heard a resounding crack, and the murmur had turned into an ominous rumble. But it was when he came to a patch of rising ground and had reached the top that he froze in horror.
Ahead of him, where the forest should have been, was water.
It was not a stream, not a river, but water without end: a sea! And the sea was on the move, as ice floes stretching out as far as he could see, drifted past, going south. He could hardly believe his eyes.
Along the shoreline, small ice floes buffeted the vegetation, and tiny waves beat on the ground. This was the hissing sound he had heard. Further out, the tops of great trees were still visible here and there, sticking out of the water; and occasionally a small iceberg would crack and splinter the wood as it rubbed against them. So that had been the strange cracking sound that had puzzled him!
Before his very eyes, lay the entrance to the great forest he had been seeking; and here was a new sea, moving inexorably southward, gouging out a mighty channel and sweeping earth, rock and tree before it.
Hwll had seen the rivers swollen with ice floes in the spring, and he surmised correctly that some new and gigantic thaw must have taken place in the north to produce this flow of waters. Whatever the cause, the implication was terrible. The forest he wanted to cross was now under the sea. For all he knew, so were the distant eastern plains and the warm lands to the south. Who could tell? But one thing was certain: there would be no crossing for him and his family. The ambitious plan for the great trek was destroyed; all the efforts they had made on their long journey had been wasted. The land to the east, if it still existed, was now cut off.
With a short gesture of despair he sat down, stared at the scene before him, and tried to put his thoughts in order. There was much to think about. When had this calamity begun, he wondered, and were the waters still rising? For if they continued to rise, they might engulf the land in which he was standing as well, even perhaps the ridge that he had left six days before. It was a thought which terrified him. For then, he considered, perhaps there will be nothing left. Perhaps this was the end of the world.
But Hwll was a practical man. He stayed where he was all afternoon, and as the sun went down he noted carefully the exact level the waters had reached. Having done so, he hunched his furs over his shoulders and waited for the dawn.
All night the hunter considered the huge forces that could unleash such a flood; for he saw that they must be powerful gods indeed. He thought with sadness of the great forest full of game that lay before him under the dark waters. For reasons that he could not have explained it moved him profoundly.
In the morning, he could detect no raising of the water level. But still he did not move. Patiently he settled down for another day and another night, minutely observing the great flood. By the end of that day he had discovered that there was a small tide, and had noted its high and low points. Then, all through the remaining night he sat awake by the shore, sniffing the salt sea air and listening in that vast emptiness to the hiss, crack and moan of the slow decline of an ice age.
On the second morning, he was satisfied. If the waters were still rising, they were doing so slowly, and unless there was a further deluge of water after this, he had time at least to lead his family to high ground where they might be safe. He rose stiffly and turned to go back to Akun. Already new plans were forming in the hunter’s tenacious mind.
What Hwll had witnessed was the creation of the island of Britain. The great forest which he had tried to cross lay off what is now known as Dogger Bank, in the North Sea. During a short period of time – very probably in the space of a few generations – the vast melting floes of the northern ice cap had passed a critical point and had broken through the land barrier across the northern sea, flooding the low-lying plain that joined Britain to Eurasia. Around this time also – the chronology is still uncertain – the land bridge across the Straits of Dover, which had been the south eastern extremity of another of the great chalk ridges of Britain, had also been breached. The land that Hwll’s ancestors had crossed was all gone, and for the whole of his short life, he had no longer been living on a peninsula of Eurasia, but on a new island. Because of that arctic flood Britain was born, and for the rest of her history, her people would be separate, protected from the outside world by a savage sea.
When he reached Akun, he explained to her in a few words what had happened.
“So, shall we go back?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No.” He had come too far to go back now, and besides, it seemed to him possible that further south there might yet be higher ground that the sea had not been able to swallow up. Perhaps there was still a way over.
“We will go south along the coast,” he said. “There may be another way across.”
Akun stared at him angrily. He knew that she was near revolt. Vata’s eyes were sunken; but the little boy disturbed him more: he was past fatigue; there was a strange apartness about him.
“He is leaving us,” Akun said simply.
He knew it was true. The little fellow’s spirit had almost gone; if they did not recover it soon, he would die. Hwll had seen such things before.
Akun held both children close. They clung to her silently, hardly knowing what was happening to them, taking comfort from their mother’s warmth and the rancid but familiar smell of the pelts she wore. He was sorry for them, but there could be no turning back.
“We go on,” he said. He would not give up now.
The journey seemed endless, and at no point did they see anything to the east except the churning waters. But ten days later, one change was evident which gave him cause for new hope. They had left the tundra.
They encountered marshes, and large woods. Trees appeared that they had never seen before: elm, alder, ash and oak, birch and even pine. They investigated each one in turn. The pine in particular they smelt with interest, and felt the sticky gum that oozed from its soft bark. There were huge luxuriant rushes by the water, and lush green grass in enormous tufts. Signs of game appeared; one morning when he was trapping a fish in a stream, the children came to his side and silently led him a hundred paces upstream. There, ahead of him, were two long brown animals with silky fur playing on the riverbank in the sunlight. They had not seen beavers before and for the first time in months, the travellers smiled with pleasure. That same night, however, they heard another new sound – the eerie, chilling cry of wolves in the woods – and they huddled close together in fear.
For the curious paradox, which Hwll had no means of understanding, was that the very flood which cut him off from the lands to the south was part of a process which was providing him with exactly the warmth that he sought, there, where he already was. As the ice cap melted in the distant north, and the seas rose, the temperature of Britain had risen too, and would continue to do so for another four thousand years. The tundra region from which Hwll had come was itself a belt that was moving north as the ice retreated; and as the generations passed, three hundred miles to the south it was already becoming appreciably warmer. Hwll was entering these warm lands now, without needing to cross the eastern forest at all. They were the warm southern lands of the new island of Britain.
Despite this fact, Hwll was not yet ready to abandon his quest for the fabled lands to the south; there, he still believed, lay safety.
The following day, he made a mistake. After they had walked all morning he found his way south barred by a large stretch of water, on the other side of which he could see land. Obsessed as he was with the lands to the south, he said:
“It’s the southern sea.”
But Akun shook her head.
“I think it’s a river,” she replied. And so it proved to be. For they had come upon the estuary of the river Thames.
They followed the river inland for two days and crossed it easily by making a small raft. Then once again, Hwll headed his little party south east.
“If there is a way across,” he said, “I think it will be here.”
If the land joining Dover to France had not already been washed away, he would have been correct, and six days later he reached the high, chalky cliffs of the south eastern tip of the island.
This time they did see what they had been looking for: jutting over the horizon was the clear outline of the tall, grey shoreline of the European mainland. It was there: but it was unattainable. Hwll and Akun stared across the English Channel and said nothing. At their feet, the chalk cliffs descended in a sheer drop for two hundred feet, and at their base the angry waters of the channel buffeted the coast.
“This time I am sure . . .” he began.
Akun nodded. The distant shores were the path to the warm lands of the south; and the churning waters below were the reason why they would never reach them. The cliffs where they were standing had once clearly been part of a great ridge that crossed the sea, but the waters had washed it away as they pressed south and west into the funnel of the Dover Straits.
“We could cross with a raft,” he started hopefully, although he knew that they would not. In that angry sea they would unquestionably be destroyed on any raft that they knew how to build; for they were looking at one of the most treacherous patches of water in Europe.
The quest had failed. He had been defeated. Now it was time for Akun to speak.
“We cannot go south any more,” she said bluntly. “And we cannot hunt alone. We must find other hunters now.”
It was true. And yet . . . He pursed his lips. Even at this moment of defeat his active mind was busily sketching new plans. They had come down the east coast and he knew for certain that water barred his way in that direction. But was it possible that there might, after all, be a land bridge across further west? Although he had no reason to think so, the persistent fellow refused, even now, to give up all his hopes. And if they found no land bridge in the west perhaps at least they would find another hunting group. Lastly, he was determined to find high ground. If another flood came, who knew how much land it might engulf? He did not want to be caught on the lowlands if the sea came in; he wanted to be able to flee to the mountains.
“We’ll try going west then,” he announced.
For twenty more days they travelled steadily westwards along the chalk and gravel cliffs, always with the sound of the sea on their left. On the second day the distant coastline opposite dipped low on the horizon and disappeared entirely by nightfall. They never saw it again. Looking inland he could sometimes see hills and ridges running parallel with the shore.
The fundamental facts of the geography of prehistoric Britain that Hwll was discovering were fairly simple, and governed much of Britain’s history since. To the north lay ice and mountains; to the south, the sea; and across the rich lands in between, the huge network of ridges divided the country into high ground and lowlands. Southern Britain, into which Hwll was now travelling, consisted of three main entities: water, alluvial land and chalk – rolling ridges of it lightly covered with trees; and in the alluvial land below stretched huge warm forests and marshes.
Several times now Akun asked him to stop for a few days and camp. But he was resolute.
“Not yet,” he reminded her. “We must find other hunters before the summer is over.” And he pressed on.
At last, however, there were signs which gave them encouragement: signs that other hunters had passed that way not long before. Twice they came upon clearings made in the trees and marks where fires had been lit. Once they discovered a broken bow.
“Soon we will find them,” he promised.
At the end of three weeks they came upon a sight which confirmed all Hwll’s fears, and determined the course of the last stage of the journey. This was the estuary of a huge river that rolled impressively towards them from the west, so wide and deep that it was clear they must now turn inland to follow along its bank. At this point, it ran almost parallel with the coast and as they walked along it, they could still see a line of the cliffs a few miles away to the south.
It was later that day that Hwll saw what he had feared: five or six miles away to the south, the line of cliffs was broken. The sea had breached it, formed a gully, and then poured in, flooding a large part of the low-lying area between the coastline and the river. He looked at it with dread.
“You see,” he explained to Akun, “the sea has come through the cliffs. It is breaking in everywhere. The sea has not only cut us off, but I think perhaps it will wear down all the cliffs and swallow up the whole land. That is why we must find high ground.”
He was right. In the coming centuries, the sea would break through again and again, flooding the coastal areas and wearing down the chalk cliffs. The whole chalk coastline of southern Britain would disappear under the waves, and miles of land be flooded. The great river Solent, on whose banks they stood, was to disappear completely into the sea, and all that remains of this original chalk coastline of Britain is the single, diamond-shaped chunk standing off the southern coasts that is called the Isle of Wight.
“But first we must camp,” she reminded him. “The children cannot go on.”
“Soon,” he replied, but he could see that she was right. Vata no longer even opened her eyes as she walked. The little boy had fallen three times that morning.
Now Hwll picked him up and put him on his shoulders.
“Soon,” he promised once again.
Still with their faces west towards the setting sun, the little family turned inland, and Hwll began to look for a suitable place.
The next day he discovered the lake.
It was a small, low hill about five miles inland that first attracted his attention. It looked like a place from which he could spy out the land and where they could camp at least for the night. When he reached the place, however, he was surprised and delighted to find that hidden below it and in his path lay a shallow lake about half a mile across. At its eastern end, a small outlet carried its waters away towards the sea. Tracking round the lake he found that it was fed from the north and the west by two small rivers. On its northern side was a flat, empty marsh.
The water, sheltered by the hill, was very still; there was a sweet smell of fern, mud and water reed. Over the surface of the lake, a heron rose and seagulls cried. Protected from the wind it was warm. It did not take him long to make a small raft and cross the little stretch of water.
From the top of the hill he looked inland; all the way to the horizon now, he could see low wooded ridges succeeding each other. He turned to Akun and pointed.
“That is the way that we must go.”
There were two months of summer left. This was clearly the place to rest and recoup their strength.
“We shall stay here for ten days,” he said. “Then we go inland.” And with a sigh of relief, Akun and the two children made their way down the hill to the shallow water’s edge.
The lake turned out to be a magical place, and Hwll was delighted to find that it abounded in game. The hill embraced the water like a protective arm, and animals that he had never seen before paraded themselves there: swans, a pair of herons, even a flock of pelicans waded by the water’s edge. On the open ground beyond the marsh, the soil was peaty and covered with heather, and a troupe of wild horses galloped across it one morning before vanishing towards the low wooded ridges to the north. In the rivers he found trout and salmon; one day he even crossed the Solent on a raft and reached the rock pools by the sea, returning with crabs and mussels which they cooked over the fire that night.
The children were beginning to recover their strength. Hwll smiled one morning to see Vata being chased by her little brother along the shallow waters by the lake’s edge.
“We could stay here for the winter,” Akun said. “There is plenty of food.” It was true; they could build their winter quarters in the shelter of the hill. But he shook his head.
“We must go on,” he said. “We must find high ground.”
Nothing would shake his fear of the terrible force of the sea.
“You will kill us,” said Akun angrily. But she prepared to move on.
The end of Hwll’s remarkable journey was in fact closer than he thought. But it was not to be accomplished alone.
Before leaving the lake, Hwll had decided to reconnoitre the land immediately to the north, and so one morning he began to work his way up the river, towards the first of the low ridges he had seen from the hill. The banks were lightly wooded and the river, which was only thirty feet across, glided by at a gentle pace. River fowl ducked in and out of the rushes; long green river weeds waved their tendrils in the stream and he could see the large brown fish that paused silently just beneath the surface. He had followed the river five miles, when to his great surprise he almost walked over a camp.
It was in a small clearing by the bank. It consisted of two low huts made of mud, brushwood and reeds. The sloping roofs of the huts were covered with turf and they seemed to grow out of the ground like a pair of untidy fungi. Tethered by the riverbank was a dugout.
Startled, he halted. There was no fire, but he thought he could smell smoke, as if one had been put out recently. The camp seemed to be empty. Cautiously, he moved forward towards one of the huts. And then suddenly he became aware of a small man, with narrow-set eyes and a crooked back watching him intently from the cover of the reeds, fifteen yards away. In his hands he held a bow, fitted with an arrow which was pointed straight at Hwll’s heart. Neither man moved.
Tep, who was the owner of the camp, had watched Hwll’s approach for some time. As a precaution, he had hidden his family in the woods, before taking up his position; and although he could have killed Hwll, he had decided to watch him instead. One never knew, the stranger might be useful in some way.
As Hwll would discover, he was a cautious and cunning hunter; but apart from these two attributes, his character had no redeeming qualities whatever.
He had a face like a rat, with narrow eyes, a long nose, a pointed chin, pointed teeth, unusual, carrot-coloured hair, a shuffling walk and one very distinctive inherited peculiarity: his toes were so long that he could even grip small objects with them. He was mean-minded, vicious without provocation, and untrustworthy. Some time before, he and his family had lived with a group of hunters fifteen miles to the north east of the lake; but after a furious quarrel about the distribution of meat after a hunt – where he had demonstrably tried to cheat the other hunters – they had cast him out. He was a pariah in the region and few of the scattered folk there cared to deal with him. But Hwll knew none of this.
Hwll made a sign to indicate that he had come in peace. Tep did not lower his arrow, but nodded to him to speak.
In the next few minutes the two men discovered that although they spoke different dialects, they could make themselves understood well enough with the aid of sign language and Hwll, anxious to secure aid if he could, told this curious figure about his journey.
“Are you alone?” Tep asked suspiciously.
“I have a woman and two children,” Hwll told him.
Slowly Tep lowered his aim.
“Walk in front,” he instructed. “I will come and see.”
By the end of the day, Tep had inspected the new arrivals and decided that it would be wise to make friends with the stranger from the north. He had a son who would one day need a woman; perhaps Hwll’s girl would do.
When he understood that Hwll was looking for high ground, his calculating eyes lit up.
“I know such a place,” he assured Hwll. “There are many valleys, full of game, but above them there is high ground,” he indicated a great height, “many days journey across.”