The Stone Arrow
When the men of Burh, settlers from continental Europe, fall upon the sleeping nomad tribe in the depths of the forest amid the Downs of southern England, Tagart is the only survivor, escaping by sheer chance after his wife and young son have been massacred. Twenty-five and heir to the chiefdom of the roving hunters, he sees his only inheritance now to be an overwhelming urge for merciless revenge - of his family, his tribe and indeed of a way of life which in the England of 5,000 years ago is steadily being eroded by these tillers of the soil. (1978 Winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize.)
Approx. 71,214 words.
got ready for harvest. Normally on such a morning Sturmer would long ago have been up and in the fields with the rest of the village. But today there was no work to be done. The crops were dying. For six weeks there had been no rain at all.
That alone would have been enough, but Sturmer had other worries too.
During his tenure, the village had enjoyed an increase in prosperity and population. Apart from its thirty-three stone and timber houses, Burh now had a threshing shed, a granary, two silos and a general barn, a bakery, a bear-proof palisade, and, to Sturmer's intense pride, a long meeting house where met the village council.
The most important crop was emmer, a kind of wheat that Sturmer had substituted for the old einkorn used by his predecessor. From corn and barley and honey the villagers made ale; broomcorn millet and oats were grown partly as winter fodder for the animals -- goats, cattle, and sheep. Crops like lentils and broad beans, kale and rape, were grown in plots beside
