Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd Page B

frozen solid. At this time, with the first harvest not yet arrived and the livestock still no more than a few precious animals needed for breeding, the farmers nearly starved. Then it was Magri, the stout hunter and his son who came down into the valley from the high ground one day, carrying between them a deer they had killed. They dropped it in front of Krona’s house and moved away without a word.
    From that time onwards, the settlers and the hunters lived in peace.
    There were many things that puzzled the hunters, and many that interested them.
    They were fascinated by the long painted boats which the settlers let them inspect. Taku in particular, who despite his punishment, struck up a curious friendship with several of the farmers, was delighted with them.
    “They are strong, but so light,” he marvelled as he hobbled round them. There was no question that the boats made of skins were larger, more manoeuvrable, in every way superior to his own dugout.
    The women were amazed by the woven clothes, and both men and women impressed by the solid timber houses. But for a long time, the entire complex business of sowing crops and raising livestock confused them; and they were deeply puzzled by the way that the farmers took the livestock into their own houses to protect them during the winter months. It was normal and sensible for the farmer and his family to sleep next to animals on which their life depended, but to the hunters this seemed strange indeed.
    By the end of the second year however, with the first crops harvested and the stock beginning to increase in number, they had to admit that the settlers had kept their word. They lived in the valley, and they had not needed to encroach upon the hunting grounds outside.
    “They eat well,” the women said.
    “But they live like old women,” old Magri retorted. He pitted his wits against the animals he hunted; he roamed free over the great ridges under the open sky, where the wind moaned. The static, confined life of the farmer harvesting his crops and keeping his animals in pens had no appeal for him.
    “It is not a life for a man,” he stated, and the other hunters agreed with him.
    Two more years passed, and now the hunters could hardly recognise the valley any more.
    On the hill overlooking the river Krona’s farm now consisted of a stout wooden building thirty feet long and fifteen deep with a sloping thatch roof and a large doorway to let in light and air. Around it were grouped several small outhouses. Beside the hill, on the slopes, where the soil was light and well-drained, small plots of various shapes had been laid out, their borders marked with stones. He had sown them with wheat, barley and flax, after cross ploughing them with a light ard – a small hoe with a flint head – which he could handle, if necessary, without even the aid of an animal. This process of ploughing fields first one way, and then at right angles, was the most efficient way of breaking up the soil with so light an implement. Near the huts were two pits, six feet deep and four across, lined with plaited straw; in these, and in their pots, they would store the grain. Beside the river, pigs and cattle wandered, and on the high ground above the fields, a few sheep cropped the coarse grass that grew in patches cleared among the scattered trees. All the way up the little northern valley, the pattern was the same, as the trees were destroyed and the land taken up instead by crops and livestock.
    The hunters gazed at it all with increasing wonder.
    It was a tiny beginning – the clearing of the slopes of a small, obscure valley in the midst of an immense forest that covered most of the island: an almost invisible scratch on the surface of the landscape.
    And yet for the landscape of much of Britain, such early clearings were to have profound significance.
    For when Krona and his men started to cut down trees on the edge of the high ground, they began a process whose result would be a