Read Online Circle of Stones by Catherine Fisher - Free Book Online Page B

small sluggish river crossed by a wooden bridge. As we clattered over I looked for the great house, but I could see none. It seemed a poor, mangy sort of place.
    We turned between two hovels of cottages. A snot-nosed boy ran out & stared at us as if he’d never seen such things as men before.
    â€œThis is it,” Forrest said. And dismounted.
    I confess I thought he was jesting. My expression must have told of my disgust, because he looked up & said softly, “You must climb down from your high horse, Zac, if you want to work with me. I am not a man for airs & graces.”
    I wanted to say something scornful & angry. But I bit my tongue & swung down, my boots splatting in the unspeakable filth.
    Forrest bent to the boy. “Remember me, sirrah?”
    The child nodded & grinned. He had few teeth. “Then we will have the same arrangement as before. Lead our horses to the inn & have them stabled & come to me for the pennies. We’ll be at the stones.”
    He hauled his bag of surveying instruments down.
    My heart plummeted. “Stones?”
    He cast me a sidelong look. “Did you expect some mansion, sir? Well, I’ll show you one.”
    He led me over a stile in the hedge, & when I was across it & picking its splinters from my hand, I found myself in a field lumpy with dried dung & fallen leaves. Sheep stood & stared at us. A few moved away & bleated uneasily. The sound set a crowd of jackdaws racketing in the trees.
    Forrest stopped. “There, Zac.” His voice was awestruck. “Is that not the masterpiece of some long-dead architect?”
    The field was littered with stones. They were enormous, leaning, fallen. The nearest to me was made of some red conglomerate, a massy lichened thing higher than my head, wider than I could put my arms around. I stared at its pitted surface, pocked & pustuled with holes. I said, “The ancients liked their materials rough.”
    Forrest laughed. “Indeed. The fashionable ladies of Aquae Sulis would never tolerate it. But these stones are no haphazard mess. They form circles.”
    He walked among them & I gazed around. The space was enormous, almost as great as the center of our Circus would be. The stones stood like slewed cubes of gray in the gently sloping field. They were meaningless, would take winches & rope & oxen to move. And yet he was right. It was a circle.
    â€œI have surveyed this place before—I think I was the first to do so properly,” Forrest said, dumping his bag in a patch of bare grass. “No one else has cared for it, but it was important once, Zac. Look at its proportions! It cannot have been built to live in. That makes no sense. There is this circle  .  .  . the Great Circle, let us call it. Then, over there, more stones. I found two smaller circles, which I have called the North-east & the South-west. Those are in better condition—one has a flat slab, like an altar. Great ceremonies must have taken place in them. Vast gatherings of wise men, maybe women too. Then there are stones outside them which may be roads for processions of druids to walk along.”
    He was on it again, his hobby-horse. I was hungry, & longing for some food. “Did druids have inns?” I asked carelessly.
    He turned to me & for a moment I knew I had goaded him to anger. Oddly, that pleased me. He snapped, “We have work to do, sir. Let’s get on with it.”
    If he had already surveyed it, why do it all over again? We spent the whole afternoon checking his measurements, unrolling long tapes & walking backward with the sighting poles, so that my boots stank with sheep dung. It was biting cold too, the wind rising & whipping the long skirts of my coat against my legs, flapping my collar. Forrest seemed unconscious of the weather; he worked like a man absorbed, pacing & drawing, & sometimes just standing with one hand on one of the stones as if he could feel something that moved deep inside it.
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