Huge lith toppled over on a man. Crushed him; burst him like a bladder. Just a quarter mile from consecrated ground. Fell over for no reason. Was he thinking of leaving?

I am. Weary. Ten years and no break, going on eleven, since I was fourteen. Tired to death. Throat is so dry, skin burning from the dust. Exhausted. Arms always aching. Hard, hard labor. No life. Just do what my father taught me. What his father taught him. Stone dust in my eyes and throat. Some go blind. Stone chip shoots up and pierces the eyeball like a dart.
     And voices in my ears. Always. Fourteen hours a day, every day of the week, every week. I could quit, but we’re so near to done. Of course, that’s what my father heard … and his father. But I can feel it. A few weeks more, a few months at most. Stones tell me. Over and over they tell me.
      I could go right now. Leave behind my tools. Father’s dead. Mother’s dead. No wife. No children. Wouldn’t know how. Older brothers, three, all dead. From overwork. My fate, too? Nothing holding me here. Nothing I can see. Right now, this minute, just as it’s getting dark, go out across this plain. I could. Somewhere, anywhere. Miss me? No one would. The priests don’t even care any more. We’re so close now. I could do it. I could go. And then rest. So tired now. Real rest. Could get free. One ran yesterday and no one chased him. No one living.
      Voices say yes, voices say no.

      By your lights it was 2617 BC. Even more particularly, the vernal equinox. We called it something different, but that does not matter now, because we almost do not matter.

      As if actually building a project this size weren’t already difficult enough, we also had to deal with neighbors who truly did not want us. Plus, the weather, and distant supplies; things like that. At least at the beginning.
     And then for five centuries we had to make the workmen toe their marks.
     Location is everything, absolutely everything, in these matters. We would spend years finding just the right spot. A year, two years – nothing compared to the eternity of the gods. Even with nearly nine hundred sites, we never took a chance. Ever. Or relied on guesswork. We knew exactly where we wanted to be because the gods told us where; we were guided by amazingly precise measures of the land and of the heavens. Our life depended on it, in this world and the next. The gods required it.
     We measured and re-measured and calibrated and triangulated and confirmed. It usually meant staying on-site sunrise to sunrise for weeks at a time, recording every aspect of the land, and then coming back months later and doing the same all over again. This might go on for two or three years, at a minimum, and for decades in some cases. There was nothing haphazard about how we picked a location. Not a thing was left to chance.
     And then it was my job to get the project built.  Move two hundred workers into place; line up suppliers and materials and transportation and feeding; and deal with the locals to make sure that their objections were handled. These are noisy projects; they go on for years, with big crews of laborers and imported craftsmen. No one really likes them in their back yard.
     It happened that we needed to acquire some land the residents didn’t want to give up. Even today, in your world, eminent domain is not always a pretty thing; imagine what it was like for us back then.
     Typically we could satisfy the residents through barter, or through an appeal to their sense of community.
     But sometimes we had to slaughter two or three families to make our point with the others.
     If you’re willing to kill people, you can get a lot done. It shows them you are serious. We needed to be right there; we wanted to be right there.
     And then the work could begin. It didn’t necessarily make us popular, but in the long run everyone agreed, one way or another, and we moved on. And after a generation or two or three, people forgot their outrage, and applauded the wisdom of our ways.
     At least the living ones did.
     I am here to tell you the dead never forget. They can hold a grudge for centuries. In fact, they hold nothing else; they do nothing else. They can think of nothing else. It fills their whole world and they fester and grow worse with it.
     You could probably ask, at this distance of time, “Was it worth the effort?” Yes it was. The gods expected it; the priests explained that eternity hinged upon getting it built.
     My father and grandfather and his father and grandfather and his father and grandfather and further back still had all been in construction – if there was a big stone to be moved, squared up, put in place, mortised to another, we were the ones to do it. If there were a hundred such stones or a thousand, if they had to be moved miles or hundreds of miles, we were the ones called on. Nowadays you’d say that we inherited the construction gene. Our special skills re-appear from time to time, from place to place, in ways that astound ordinary people and your experts, even thousands of years later.
     You want a colossal pyramid? We do pyramids – crew of 20,000, lifetime employment. You want huge cryptic stone faces, gazing seaward across the centuries? We can make vast visages, using up whole civilizations in the process. Towns carved into the sides of mountains or houses stacked like canted layer cakes beside fertile plains? We’ll build those dwellings for you over the course of 20 or 30 generations. And particularly, in my case, for perplexing rings of enormous monoliths, solid geometry converted to solid stone, you come to me.
     Giant blocks carried miles and miles in ways we have never revealed, worked with tools and techniques you have never recovered, and organized according to plans so intricate that even now you do not fully comprehend them. Intellectually speaking, the pyramids are childish by comparison.  In a word, if you want a monument to last for four or five thousand years or more, to gratify the gods and to awestrike the people, you would want us.
     Rule One is always build in stone, preferably massive stone, so carefully and exactly carved and fitted that mortar is not needed. Rule Two is prepare the site carefully: you do not want the inevitable changes wrought by time – the precession of the stars, the changing course of rivers, four hundred decades of storms and sun – to affect the integrity of your work. And Rule Three is prepare for the fickleness of humanity, then build: today’s healing altar turns into tomorrow’s altar for blood sacrifices without a blink of irony, and then becomes an astronomer’s table in a few centuries, a threshing floor a few centuries later and finally a throne for the coronation of kings a thousand years after it was conceived.

I hear them. Commanding me from the heart of the stones. “Do this, do that.” To me alone? Can the others hear also? Can’t ask. Don’t need to be marked as crazy. “Do you hear them, too, the voices in the rocks?” Shrieking and cajoling, day and night. No sleep. Contrary voices. “Give it up” – “Get it done.” “Let it go” – “Make it perfect.” Fighting in my head. Fighting like cats in my head. Living in the stone. Did my brothers hear them? My father and uncles? Does the master mason?
     Sign of too much work, I think. Head throbs. But we’re so close to done. Done after all these years. Twenty-five generations of my fathers. Can I outrun the voices? Get far away, lose them? Who can say? I’m strong from all this work, strong, not fast. And weary now. Probably can’t run, even if I want to. Man died yesterday, squashed open like a gourd, because he couldn’t move out of the way of a falling lith. Strongest man I’d ever seen, but like me, slow to react, slow to move. I believe the rock mesmerized him and then it tumbled. Tired every day of my life. Going to drop from exhaustion soon. No honor to be buried here. No name, no memory. The thing, the Ring, will go on without me. I can escape right now. Maybe! But the voices may go faster than my slow legs.

      We had a challenge. Someone had already made a pretty big henge and the priests said we needed to keep that intact as the outer apron of our new rings of gigantic stone. I suppose we could have enclosed the dirt construction within a stone circle, but that would not have met the gods’ needs, so we went for the challenge and designed the most complicated plan ever envisioned. It needed to serve many functions … star map, bloodletting altar, medical center, eclipse calendar, ceremonial site, campground, fairground, sports arena, cemetery, all at the command of the gods … and for ourselves of proving how good we were at what we did.
     People already lived there. They followed the antiquated ways of some old limp gods in that old shrine. They were unwilling to move on, though we offered to build them new homes just a quarter mile away. Went ahead and built them, in fact, along with our own. Nothing doing. So one night I took 60 men and massacred them, without letting any drops of blood fall on the ground, which would contaminate the whole locale. Try doing that, especially against men defending their homes with axes and flint spears. But, as assigned, we did it. I can’t say how any more how we did it than I may reveal how we put those 50-ton sarsen stones in place. Professional secret.
     I’ve gotten to spend some time now with the folks we slaughtered and they have never forgiven us, even four thousand years later they’re still bitter and vicious. They’ll banshee-up if I come near.
     It’s not necessarily something you feel good about, though it’s quite an accomplishment to kill 138 people without spilling a drop of blood on the ground. But I can take satisfaction that we carried out the gods’ instructions. The ones we killed thought that their gods had given them orders, too, but it’s pretty clear that our instructions were the right ones, since we were able to kill them off, rather than the other way around. Interpreting sacred omens is risky – I’m glad we always had deep priests and the strongest gods. Our priests offered us a ritual cleansing right away, so we were able to get to work the next day.

All the ones before me. Anonymous and gone. Don’t even know where my father is, which hole. Grandfathers, uncles, great grandfathers, cousins. Worn out. Ground down by rock dust. Consumed here on five-hundred-year-old orders from gods we no longer even know, conquered and forgotten. Founders whose dust is dust, thin, less than air.
     Death is the nature of this Thing. Not wrong, death is in our lives. But death and life at the same time? Another one died yesterday. Held his head and started screaming and jumped from the top to the table stone. Not a long fall, but fatal against unyielding rock. My own head boils with conflict. I’m just holding on till it’s done. I know how he felt. Stop the noises in my brain. Run. Run.

      But that wasn’t the half of it … the extremely precise plan was actually changed in the middle of construction, years and years into the work, and we had to start all over again, only this time we didn’t have to eradicate any objectors. By then, my great-great-great-great-grandson ran the crew, which was now made up of the great-great-great-great-grandsons of my original workers. Whole generations were devoted to the work, supported in some seasons by hunting and in other seasons by a levy we placed on the locals. Believe me, I know the Egyptian and Inca pyramids, I know the cathedrals in France and Spain, and the viaducts and aqueducts and roadways of the Romans, and I can say that we were better than any of them. We had no slaves. We did not use conquered craftsmen, didn’t defile anyone’s wife or daughter. Everyone on this job was taken care of, laborer and master, who came and stayed because the project was sacred. The gods called them to it. Our world revolved around getting it right.
     They all knew that their immortality was in the stones themselves and what we made of them. We and the stones are the same. Working with forgotten tools to produce a wonder of the world. Amazing things are accomplished when skilled people combined for a common blessing, powered by the gods. They, after all, spoke to us.
     But I’m getting ahead of myself.
     Clearing and purifying the land was the first. Moving the immense stones here was the second. Carving them was the third … or really the second, since so much of the carving and shaping took place at the quarry and only the finish work was done on site at Salisbury. Keeping up with the change orders was the fourth, and perhaps the biggest.
     Have you ever worked for a fickle architect? How about an architect taking his orders from a committee of priests? Whose vision changes from decade to decade? One set of plans yields to another. First it’s eighty 5-ton blocks in two circles with a moongate, all dragged from 140 miles away; then it’s, “Make sure to cap those blocks with big lintels so that we can hang stuff between them;” then it’s, “No, we’d rather have a bigger circle, two arches, an altar, a heel stone, mortised lintels all around and, by the way, we’d like to switch to that lovely giant bluestone we saw at Bath last year, and the priests say you can only use consecrated stone tools.” And on and on for so long I cannot count.

Holes here, ancient ones and new ones, are filled up with the bones of men who stayed and worked and died. Young men, old men. No one remembers who. No markers. No memories. Gave lives for the Thing. Can’t even be sure where my brothers are. Always bone-tired. Always urged on. Finish. Must finish. Must finish. I must rest. Get away.
     Contrary voices, vindictive voices saying “Give it up,” and other voices, just as loud, saying “Finish it right”. Far away and sleep for a month. Not let them drive me into one of the holes.

      Somebody had dug a field of holes around the original henge and the priests spent ten years just trying to decide if we could re-use them; finally the oracles said it was fitting to bury stonemasons there. The first group of planners wanted to be able to predict eclipses, but then a few generations later they decided that knowing the exact moment Spring and Summer began was much more important, so we had to shift fifteen hundred tons of stones 2° to the right, after they were half assembled. And the whole stone tool thing – my men could have been using bronze or even iron tools to do most of this work … could have, except that that would have tainted the project according to the priests, so on it dragged for an extra generation; that’s how much longer stone tooling takes. And we had to keep training new masons in obsolete techniques. There we were, year after year, chip-chip-chip in the old way, until the work was done.
     With the most spectacular geometric skill in the world and the most primitive tooling, we progressed slowly. Our engineers could measure 15,000 yards with an error no bigger than your earlobe, and elevations of a hundred feet within a tenth of a barleycorn; with a 1,200-yard piece of rope they created corners more accurate than on the pyramids and a circle more perfect than the Parthenon or even the disk of the moon. If you scratched the top of the heel stone where the sun first peeped over on the day Spring began, and then scratched it again the next year, and the next year, and the next, all the scratches for a century years wouldn’t vary by a sparrow’s pecker. And over a thousand years or four thousand years we knew exactly how far left or right those scratches would move. We worked joyfully, for we knew that this would outlive us and our families and maybe civilization itself, if we got it right. Euclid ten centuries later catalogued only half of the geometry we used every day, and he was considered a wonder; our construction techniques, now shrouded, confound even your best archeology.
     No project can remain forever in flux; eventually the priests have to yield to reality. Changes and changes must give way to a final plan, the esoteric layout, the intrinsic mysteries, the eerie look and feel. Stone after stone is shaped and placed and secured … so firmly that four millennia later, when a stone finally topples, even after a thousand years of neglect, it is an omen of the death of a king. In the end, after five centuries of construction, stop-start-stop-start-stop-start, we had what we wanted. Of course all of us, the Founders, were long since dead. This, above all else, led to our final hurdle. We needed to maintain through twenty-five generations of builders the original compulsion to perfection, the original fervent commitment to the project.

Two voices. I can distinguish them now. Serious, hollow and stern: “Finish, make it right, never shirk.” Inflamed and hateful: “Let it go, get away, give it up, save yourself.”

     And then, there was the added hostility of the people we had murdered. Their shades think of nothing else day and night but to hamstring the project. They knew we were fated to prevail. That was in the stars. That was why our strong gods triumphed and why we were able to destroy them. But nothing was written about how long all this would go on, and for centuries they hounded the project, just for spite. They obstructed. They impeded. Disruptive angry ghosts.
     Five hundred-thousand man-years of work. How do you keep the flame of pride bright long after everyone who lit it is not even a wisp of memory?
     The master’s apprentice’s apprentice’s apprentice loses sight of why we were here in the first place. He knows none of the Founders who had burned with the original zeal. The gods speak less and less to our descendants and finally not at all. The plans are scratched on stone but symbols lose their meanings, language changes in subtle ways, a technique is varied here or there, and in the minds of its carvers the 30th stone may be only a stone, not a living part of the mysteries. They flag for an instant, leaving an error of a tenth of an inch that no one will notice, anyway. And if that slides by, then more deviation creeps in and a little more.

“Let it go!” “Don’t relent!” With each swing of the mallet. Exhaustion and perfection, fighting in my head? No, they are real voices, from the stones’ hearts. And more. Crying, “Blood, blood, blood.” Crying, “Butchered wives and babies.” “Get out, get out, it’s cursed. Don’t put your hand to the cursed Thing.” But then, “Chisel it here, shape it there, smooth this, angle that, be blessed for all time as the Ring is blessed … or we shall never let you go.” Swing the mallet: a flake of stone shoots back and sears my cheek. Could have been my eye.

     Workers with even the best intentions could lapse over time. It will become just a job. The owners of a vineyard lack the faith of their ancestors who planted the vines a hundred years earlier. The man shaping the last stone, five centuries after the first, has none of the fervor that we had. He has not conversed with the gods; has not worked with the priests to sanctify the plain; has not lived through revolutions in design and the accumulation of functions. He has not helped kill off the first residents. I feared, all the shades feared that time would defeat the integrity of the Ring in the end.
     So we kept the project on course the only way we could, the only way we knew how.
     We haunted it.

I’m going mad.

     How can we haunt? Let me count the ways. There are fantasies and nightmares. Blinding visions, voices in the head; the mirage, the shadow around the corner, and the mysteriously ringing bell. Omens – crows and storms, eclipses, blood-red skies, and baffling phenomena such as crop circles. Fairy work like mutilating herds; goblins who appear in frightening shapes with ghostly moans. The wind can be made to keen; oceans can surge beyond their boundaries; rivers change course, overflow or run dry.
     And for our purposes the huge insensate stones can speak.
     For centuries, the building of this mysterious circle of stone was run, literally, by ghosts. In Celtic myths, cities are built to music; this was built to the pleas of phantoms and is now inhabited by spirits. The men heard the stones talk to them and stayed on course. As workers hauled a hundred thousand-pound blocks from Wales, we haunted them to keep them steady, for there would be no other reason to do this work. We inspired the architects with visions and the priests with sacred dreams; we cajoled the laborers with threats and promises. All to a good purpose. We made people revere their work; we forced precision on them until they yearned to complete the task, not for the reasons that had inspired us in the beginning, but because they couldn’t get perfection out of their heads as long as we were in them. We were over their shoulders watching, like a second conscience for each worker.
     The spirits are the masters buried in the first 50 or 60 holes around the site; old guys, like myself, who were there at the beginning and understood what we were doing. To the later bosses it was just work, not the gods’ work, not salvation.
     And we fought the slaughtered innocents every step of the way, with their deceitful visions and nightmares.

Day and night now. Working around the clock. Walking around like a zombie. Voices growing louder, day and night. Asleep, awake, it doesn’t matter. More insistent. A sign we’re near the end? Priests say it every day. I wouldn’t believe them – they said so to my father, too. But the voices know it. And are getting more desperate. I know it. The other men hear them too, I think. Never whispered a word to anyone. All like zombies, exhausted, red-eyed, covered in stone dust, too tired to brush it away. We eat it and breathe it. More holes being dug. For more stones? For more men? Kill us all in the end? At the pyramids they did. Sign of loyalty. The gods want sacrifices. Here? Its purpose. Will we be the ones? Others hear the voices, I know. Look at them. Tired and terrified. But trudging on. I could leave. We all could leave. Voices tell us to go. The Thing. Stronger voices tell us to stay and stay. The Ring.

     In the last days of major construction the final lintel was being readied. Now, people have speculated how we got those lintels up there, since they weighed thousands of pounds. Also, how we got them to fit so well, and the mortises to line up so beautifully and exactly. Well, here’s the truth: species evolve, engineering evolves; sometimes there are dead-ends – works that survive a short while and then fail. Twenty-five or thirty generations of workers certainly give lots of opportunity for old-fashioned trial and error. We could have built dirt ramps. It’s the easiest thing on earth. But assuredly not the way we did it, either. For, long before we neared the very end of the building phase – before the consecration and what you would nowadays call the occupancy phase – before all that, we were already using a new thing. Generations and generations before you think they even existed, we invented the gantry crane to pick up the big blocks, roll to the site, and lower them carefully into place. And once the whole project was done, we burned the crane as part of the cleansing rituals demanded by the priests. It was too bad to see it go, but all for the good from a secrecy point of view. Someone else might have used it. For example, to take the Ring apart.
     Just because you have not found evidence of a wheel does not prove we did not have wheels. Block and tackle we’d always had along with mighty wood construction techniques. And we certainly had forests of oak.

Chopping. Days and days. All taken away from our other tasks to fell and haul. Twenty huge oaks. Backbreaking labor, like the stones. With their own voices, like the stones. The same voices. Shows I cannot outrun them. Urgent voices guide us forward. Dismal voices foretell disaster. Who cares? Failure means being crushed, ground into bone dust and blood. All at once or an inch at a time. No matter. Went back to the stones. Woodworkers from far away come to build something massive. At least a novelty. Oak smells still on me. Let it go. Let it go.

     We are not allowed to slaughter them again in this afterlife. It is the revenge of their impotent gods, an eternity of wailing. Ghosts cannot kill ghosts, but gods can. Our gods must think one death is enough. Not like the Egyptians, who balance the souls of the dead against a feather. If you are weighed down by even a slight sin there is no reprieve. A Beast devours your soul on the spot. Their punishment is not eternal agony, but extinction. But in our world we cannot annihilate the shrieking dead, and as the end neared for the great site, they became more furious. They inhabited the stones, the tools, the eating vessels, even the very rags the workers wore. Haunting, terrorizing. Terrifying visions of damnation and pain. Blood lust was on them and their energy was ceaseless. They poisoned the ears and the hearts of every stonecarver, every woodcarver, every worker. They offered rest. They offered freedom from this moral obligation. They promised eternal anguish for anyone who did our bidding.

Voices tell me to kill the priests. “Gut them. Do it now!” If not, maybe they’ll sacrifice me when the job is done. “They will cut out your living heart and throw it on a fire and roast it for the gods.” Hollow, shifting eyes on my mates. They’ve heard them, too. “They’ve killed before to make this Thing.” My forefathers slaughtered them to clear the sacred land. Wouldn’t hesitate to do it again. “Exterminate the priests,” they insisted. Cover the ground with sacerdotal blood. End the work now. “Save yourself. Save yourself,” I hear, and the other voices, promising a reward in the hereafter, are weak. Hatred stronger than duty. “It would be so easy. They are not strong. They’ll die softly. Save yourself.”

     They were moving the last huge lintel into place with their massive oak gantry crane. It made the stone look puny and required all the workers, nearly 200, to push and maneuver it. The huge stone cradled high in the air, swaying gently; the tons of oak on creaky wheels … all resisting movement and most certainly sudden movement. The men sweated and strained coming the 400 yards from our staging area. All were exhausted from the long days and, doubtless, from the terror tactics of our slaughtered enemies. Who scared them over and over with ridiculous tales of human sacrifice. But our priests were not like that. Maybe 1,000 years later the Druids would, but not us.
     When our sacred site here was finally done, there were a dozen others across Britain where workers were needed. Couldn’t afford the premature loss of a single man.
     All of us had redoubled our efforts, through voices and omens: I was pretty sure we were failing. We’d organized 100 doves to circle the stones already in place. We placed a rainbow across the plain, though it hadn’t rained in two weeks. We cajoled them constantly, voices from the stones and from their tools. We told them the blessings awaiting them for their part in this colossus. Cool breezes for their harried bodies and images of eternal rest for their hearts. But fear is so much stronger than duty, and the band of slaughtered ones matched us terror for vision and nightmare for dream, spewing their lies and their futility.
     We all knew: If they abandoned the work, even this late, our centuries and lives were wasted, and our gods were deposed. Would the others try to do something even more desperate? Our voices filled the hearts and ears. “Carry on, finish the good work. Do not yield. Your reward awaits.”

Noise now - agony. All the voices mingle all the sounds become one. Go on, don’t go on. “Imagine the happy rest of your father and brothers, the eternal blessings.” Birds overhead, circling. White birds. What do they mean? Priests can’t say. “Your father and his father and all of them before have been obliterated from the earth and all memory, and their lives are an eternal nothing.” Rainbow in the distance. Can’t be good. Storms coming. Tugging at this rope. All of us. Men around me fainting and gasping. Don’t trample the fallen ones. What will become of us all? Straining to move the thing. An inch at a time. Creaks, moans like gods in their death throes. Can’t move this too fast or we can’t stop it. Crashing into the others. Maybe chaos. Gods infuriated. Priests infuriated. Harsh voices bubbling with blood. Soothing voices full of promises. “Finish and rest in god’s embrace.” Then, “Finish and die a ghastly death.” An inch at a time it moves, hanging from the great limbs like a baby from his mother’s breast, rocking and swaying with each motion. But the weight of 500 grown men. Massive and unforgiving. Great cords around its belly will lower it into perfect position for the final work.
     Sounds pounding in my brain; too loud to think or see. I close my eyes, drop my hold on the rope, put my hands to my ears. Let them think I’m crazy. I scream to drown out both voices. “Leave me alone, leave me alone.” Some of the others look at me. Pity? Wrath? Another man releases his grip, covers his ears, too. “Mercy,” he cries, “mercy, mercy, mercy.” The crane is inching along and we are carried in the tide. Another man drops his rope and another, hands to ears, eyes shut, wailing in anguish.
      The voices persist, not words, not thoughts, only inarticulate screeching as the dead do battle in our brains, seeking dominance. So loud and sharp. Lacerating the tissue of our brains. Stabbing pain. Unbearable. Nauseous from the pain. The men drop their ropes and fall to the ground in pain. Chaos in the ranks of men, “Be careful, push him aside, don’t crush him.” They are all struggling to finish the task. Any end, death or glory will be better than pain that make your ears bleed.
      There is no motion. Writhing on the ground, falling against each other like terrified pigs before slaughter, we roll on the ground and wail like animals. The crane is stopped and even the priests are at a loss, some of them with blood streaming from their eyes and noses as if butchered from the inside out.
      Free me! Whatever it takes, let me go.

      Defeat.
     Five centuries and thousands of lives wasted and incomplete. I was wrong in thinking we were destined to prevail. We’d lost through the frailty of men. Look at them, wriggling on the ground like worms, vomiting and bleeding and falling away from their duty, torn away by malicious ghosts, but, oh, so weak. Felled by ghosts. Us and them. And yet the arms we need to complete the mystery.
     We stopped, our voices silent, our haunting at an end. We could hear the triumph of those few who opposed us. And then they, too, fell silent, as they realized the havoc and agony they had created. Two hundred wounded men, ears bleeding, in terror, some had had strokes, surely not to survive, and all voices ended.
     In the ghostly silence all we heard were moans, death rattles, calls for help, Almost mute on the plain. Not a hundred yards from its destination the final immense stone swung in mid-air on its immense cradle. Slowly, slowly, the men struggled to their feet and slowly hobbled away, rarely looking back, helping their weaker comrades, dragging them away. Turning this day of celebration into a day of disaster and defeat.
     Silence from us in the afterlife. Our hauntings now wasted and meaningless. Our gods in ignominy. The band of slaughtered triumphant. It cannot be. It cannot be. We won’t let it. And yet, there is no hope. A ghostly moan begins from deep in the souls of the defeated dead.

Get up. Drag myself away. Others in worse shape. Wherever my father and brothers are buried, I bid them goodbye. Sad, there’s nothing more. Then leave. Nothing to get, nothing to carry away. Tools cursed. Clothes tatters.  Just start walking and walking, one of the lucky ones who can walk. Will the voices follow me? Punish me? Others all around me going away, too. Wounded, limping, ear-bleeding. Don’t look back, might get caught up. Vindictive spirits.
     Half a mile, past the hulking stones awaiting shaping, past the work sheds and machines for moving the heavy loads. A mile, past piles of oak logs. Two miles and more. To the river. Touch the water to wash off the blood and dirt and smell of the work. A simple purification … dip my head in the water to expunge the ghosts and their heartless demands. Walk in and sink down. Calm and quiet under the water for a few seconds and I come up refreshed. Now I can peer into the distance and see the Ring. Fear washed from me. The cleansing my father and brothers never had, freedom from the voices.
      But not wonder, not awe.
     From this distance I can still see the Ring.
      And I can see the big motionless crane. The what? I think I see it waver and then begin to move slowly across the field. Eyes bad? No! Alone. No one grasps the heavy ropes. No one jacks the wheels. Nor shouts at a horde of struggling men. No foremen. No chanting priests. The scene is vacant of all living souls. Yet the gantry starts, and moves. In the distance, silent, but it must be creaking and moaning under its great load. Shrill like the shrill voices of the dead. But from here, in silence it rolls, alone, guided by no living man. Along and along. And unmanned it brings the last great stone to position, silently lowers it. There is always straining and creaking, though afar I cannot hear it. It is sacredly quiet here. My mates at the river stare, transfixed, and say nothing. We know the weight of that stone and the ache of drawing those ropes.
     Carefully the stone lowers and settles in place. It is perfect. The massive crane now silently slips back across the plain, untouched by any visible hand. Like a black skeleton it stops and rests a half mile from the Ring, its work complete. Then, without kindling or ritual, it bursts into flame, obscuring the Ring from our vision. It burns massively, through the twilight and then into the night: oak trunks and oak beams feeding a tremendous fire.
      And in the morning light … who knows? By morning I have walked 10 miles, lighted only by a sliver of white moon, with the others, the ones who could walk, silent, straggling. Away, away, like animals in migration. We are relieved for there is quiet in our brains. The sounds I hear here are field birds: I can no longer see my old life; just a curl of smoke and a tiny blur on the horizon.