Now they were gone. What was left? The searing pain she had borne, as washer way, in silence. And strangely, though she knew that his love for her was bound up in their sons, the loss of them had awakened in her a renewed passion – not to restore their family, for that she knew she could never do now, but to heal with her love the stricken, wounded man she saw before her.
She had tried. She had failed.
“I shall not give him more children,” she told Dluc; and it was she who had then urged the chief:
“You must take new wives, young women who will give you children. Let the priest choose them for you.”
And so, early that winter, the process of finding Krona’s new wives had begun.
Soon after the autumn equinox, Dluc had made a great sacrifice: fifty-six oxen, fifty-six rams, and fifty-six sheep. When it was done, he had brought to the chief two young girls of good family.
He had lain with each, many times.
Spring had come, then summer; the harvest had been poor, spoilt by heavy rains; neither girl conceived; and the people of Sarum were discouraged.
“The curse is not lifted,” they said, “not even by the great sacrifice.”
In his heart, the High Priest knew that they were right. He knew it even when he made the sacrifices. The great slaughter had been useless: whatever it was the gods wanted, they were not appeased.
Krona was depressed.
“You are not old yet,” Dluc reminded him, although it grieved him to look upon this sad, grey-haired man who had been a magnificent chief in the full pride of his manhood only months before. “We will find others.”
It was some time after the summer solstice that he brought this latest girl to Krona. With her ripe, inviting and rather plump young body, even Krona, who had seemed to take little pleasure in the other girls, smiled when he saw her. The priest had chosen her because in the recent bad harvest her father’s crops, for some reason, had been excellent, and since the gods had clearly marked her father out for their special favour, he was hopeful that at last he had found a bride who would be pleasing to them.
Now he was looking at her, cowering on the floor, while the chief stared at him with eyes that were wild, and Ina sadly shook her head.
“Very well,” he said at last. “It shall be as you wish.” He did not believe that sacrificing the girl would do any good, but it was better to try every remedy. He did so at dawn the following day, with a heavy heart; and that same evening, Krona reported to him that he was well again.
“Send me more girls,” he urged.
But this time Dluc did not. For it was clear from the signs from the gods – and his own instincts also told him – that the causes of their present troubles were deep-rooted. They would not be overcome by making a sacrifice and sending the chief another girl.
“I do not think our sacrifices are enough,” he told the chief. “We must do more.”
“What?”
Dluc shook his head.
“I don’t know. But we must find out. We shall read the auguries.”
This process, by which the priests asked the gods direct questions and received their answers was a lengthy one which Dluc did not like to use: not because he had any doubts that the gods would reply, but because of the extraordinary difficulty of interpreting their answers, against which his precise, mathematical mind secretly rebelled. In this instance however, he could see no other course. For several days the priests roamed the woods, netting birds which they kept in cages, where they were fed with grain into which was mixed all kinds of other material – herbs and grasses, gold dust, tiny pellets of stone and coloured earth – all of which would leave a tiny residue for inspection in their gut.
Early one morning, when over a hundred birds had been collected, fed, and brought in their cages to the henge, Dluc aided by a circle of priests began the delicate task of reading the signs.
Carefully, using a small bronze knife, he slit the bird’s breast open and then, with sharp sticks, pulled out its intestines for inspection, cutting here and there to see what signs could be found which would indicate the wishes of the gods.
The questions were simple, and before opening each bird, Dluc called them out:
“Tell us, great sun god, is Krona to have an heir?”
To this, by noting the sex and state of the innards of each of ten birds, an affirmative answer was soon reached, and Dluc gave a sigh of relief.
But to the following questions, the answers were less simple. What must be done to appease the gods? No less than three kinds of intestine were discovered, suggesting three different conditions, each of which caused gasps of astonishment as they were understood; and several times as the priests peered at them Dluc had to call:
“More birds.”
Thirty-three were inspected before Dluc said:
“Then we are all agreed?” and his priests, glancing at one another in apprehension, nodded.
But it was the last question: “How are we to know Krona’s chosen bride?” that produced the strangest and most enigmatic answer of all, for in each bird, and twenty were opened, small specks of gold dust were found in the very top of the intestine: a very rare phenomenon which was repeated again and again. At last, when the priests had agreed on the message that the entrails conveyed, they were hardly less puzzled than when they had begun.
Dluc gave Krona the news that night.
“You will have an heir,” the priest assured him. “But first, the gods demand a new henge, made of stone.” This was the meaning of the pellets of stone found in many of the birds. “It is to be greater than any temple built before.”
Krona nodded.
“If it is the will of the gods, let the work be done.”
“The gods demand that you give your firstborn child to be sacrificed. After that, you will have a son who will succeed you. It will be your pledge that you submit to the power of sun, and he demands it.”
It was a terrible message. Krona weakly protested:
“I am growing old. Will there be time?”
“The gods will grant you time,” Dluc assured him. “Your son will be a great chief.”
The chief sighed. “And who is to be my bride?”
Dluc frowned. This was the part of the message that had puzzled the priests most.
“Her head will be crowned with gold,” he replied.
Krona stared at him. “What does that mean?”
“I am not sure,” the High Priest confessed. “Perhaps that she is the daughter of a great chief.”
“Find her quickly,” Krona growled.
There was one other condition laid down by the gods in the auguries, and it was this one that had caused the priests to look at each other with such apprehension: it was the date by which the new henge must be completed:
The henge must be finished by the day when the sun looks into the moon’s full face along the avenue.
To the astronomer priests who knew the mysteries of Stonehenge, this cryptic statement could only have one meaning.
For their henge was a wonderful and complex instrument. Not only did the sun’s shadow on the markers tell the days of the year; many other wonders took place there.
“At the summer solstice,” the older priests explained to the novices, “in certain years, not only does the sun god rise along the avenue, but the moon goddess sets opposite him. And at mid-winter solstice, the positions are reversed; and while sun departs in the south west, moon rises along the avenue.” Sun and moon, male and female, summer and winter: all of these perfect oppositions were contained in the great circle.
There were many other subtle coincidences and angles between the solar and lunar paths. “And these do not occur so perfectly at other henges in the far north,” the priests declared, “by which we know that our henge is especially favoured by the gods.”
In fact this was correct, although their science was not able to discover the true reason. For the relationships between the sun and moon will alter at different latitudes on the globe.
But there were greater secrets than this. Some time after the henge was first built, its astronomers made another discovery: that the moon in its orbit round the earth does not follow a single path, but that it oscillates from side to side in a subtle cycle of its own, which is repeated every nineteen years.
“There at the entrance,” the novices were told, “the priests of old set up the markers to record the shifts of the moon goddess back and forth along the horizon. For at each winter solstice, she returns to a slightly different spot when she rises – you would never notice it from one year to the next unless you marked the spot, but it is so. And she swings from side to side, back and forth along the horizon, once every nineteen years. That is what we call the sacred moonswing.
“The observation took one hundred years,” the priest would continue, thus reminding the novitiates that this degree of precision and dedication would be expected from them too.
Nor was this all. For though the solar year does not divide neatly into twenty-nine-day lunar months, it was Dluc himself who had discovered, by patient calculation, that a coincidence between solar and lunar years could be arranged on a long count of nineteen years – a discovery always ascribed to Meton the Greek, some two millennia later.
“It is one of the greatest secrets in the sacred sayings of the priests,” the novices were told – “that the moon goddess only shows the same face, on the same day, once in nineteen years.”
And this was the significance of the augury. For Dluc and his priests, from their meticulous recordings, knew that soon a rare and notable event was due to take place in the heavens. At the end of the present nineteen-year moonswing, already nearly half completed, not only would the sun at midsummer solstice rise opposite the moon and exactly down the centre of the avenue, but on that precise day it would be full. It was a huge astronomical coincidence, an opposition more perfect than any seen for generations: and it was due to take place at the end of that very moonswing – in ten years’ time.
“How can such a huge work be accomplished in so short a time?” a young priest cried.
“By the will of the gods,” Dluc replied coldly.
For several days, Dluc pondered the new temple design. Into it he put all his knowledge of the mysteries of the gods, the intricate pattern of their motions in the heavens, the magic numbers the priests derived from the motions of the sun and moon and the succession of the days – all of this and more went into his design, until finally he was satisfied and murmured to himself: “Truly this will be a hymn to the gods, a marvel in stone.”
It was. The henge that Dluc designed was far taller than any temple on the island. The bluestones stood six to eight feet high, and were sacred. But the High Priest decided to replace them with the mighty sarsen stones that came from the downland nearly twenty miles away, and which would stand three times as high. At the centre, he would place five huge free-standing arches, each consisting of two uprights with a lintel across the top of them, and arranged in a half circle around the altar, with the open end towards the entrance and the avenue. These were the five trilithons which would stare down upon the sacrifices. Then, in place of the half-completed bluestone circle, a massive ring of thirty huge sarsens would be built, supporting lintels which would be joined together to form a perfect, unbroken circle. It was a sophisticated, daring design, and he pondered it for many days, making careful drawings of the various parts with chalk on pieces of bark.
When he had completed this work, he summoned the priests and declared: “The design is ready. Now we need a builder to supervise the work. Who shall it be?”
After some discussion it was agreed:
“Nooma shall build the new Stonehenge.”
Nooma the stonemason was a curious little figure; and a few mornings later the priests gazed in mild contempt as the mason in his leather apron waddled towards the henge, his over-large grizzled head nodding sagely at his own thoughts as he went along.
His ancestors, who were potters, had been tall; but fate had decreed that Nooma, while being blessed with a head that was huge and statuesque, should be given to go with it a body that was short, stocky and bandy-legged. The result was that his solemn round head with its ageless face sat on his shoulders like an enormous and rather absurd egg. His hands were small, with short fingers and thumbs that were little more than stumps. Shy and reserved and still unmarried, he usually spoke little, unless something in his work excited him, when he would start to tremble, break into voluble, unexpected eloquence and wave his little arms about wildly. But most of the time, his quiet eyes were serious and trusting, and this often made people take advantage of him.
If his appearance was absurd, it was misleading. For generations his family had been fine craftsmen – potters and carpenters usually – and he had all their skill. The stubby fingers, that looked ill-suited to delicate work, could produce miracles. Although only twenty-five, he had worked all over the island since he was a boy and was said to be the best stone worker living.