He was fascinated also by the activities of the priests. Some things they did he understood. Each day at dawn, for instance, a careful note was made of the sun’s position as it rose; precise sightings were taken over the fifty-six wooden markers that stood in their circle just inside the perimeter wall. Each day he would watch as the priests noted the small difference in the sun’s position from the day before, adding each to their tally; and before long he found that he, too, could reckon the days and months with precision.
But some of their other activities baffled him. As dusk fell, little parties of priests would move about on the high ground around the henge carrying sticks and long strings of flax. With these they would take sightings of the stars, noting the motions of the moon and the planets, quietly pacing about until the first signs of dawn appeared, making ever more complex patterns with their sticks and lines until often the whole ground was covered with these strange constructions, and Nooma would return to Katesh, shaking his head in wonder and saying:
“The ways of the priests are very strange.”
As the summer continued and Katesh grew big, Nooma was excited.
“It will be another boy,” he said, “Another mason. I am sure of it.”
Katesh laughed whenever she heard this. “I think it’s a girl,” she told him.
“Perhaps,” he admitted, but immediately brightened: “Then she will look like you,” he decided happily.
One day when he held her belly and felt the child kicking inside he remarked:
“I think it is bigger than Noo-ma-ti was. When is it due?”
Katesh shrugged.
“When it arrives. Two months I think.”
“I still think it is bigger than the boy,” he said.
But soon afterwards, when he was at the henge, he realised that his wife had made a small error. Glancing at the fifty-six calendar posts, he realised that the sun’s position had only changed by six months since his return. The child could not be due for three months. He grinned to himself at his wife’s carelessness with the dates.
“She will have to wait a little longer than she thinks,” he chuckled; but just then one of the workers came to him with a problem and the matter went out of his mind.
It was only at night, during those terrible years, that the spirit of the High Priest found peace.
At night he would go up to the sacred high ground, walking alone past the pale chalk houses of the dead, and enter the great circle of the henge. There, and only there, in the silence under the huge blackness of the night sky he could recover his spirit. And despite all Krona’s madness and Sarum’s grief, it was during those years some of his best, his most precise observation of the heavenly bodies was accomplished.
The stars were his companions. Each night he looked up and saw the constellations shining down upon the henge: the ram, the deer, the auroch, and the constellation he loved the most of all, the stately swan that filled the northern sky – these were his faithful friends. So too was the milky way that stretched across the panoply of stars like a gleaming chalk path leading down to the horizon. Whatever madness was passing there below, the stars still shone with a pure and constant light, and when he saw them his faith in the immutable gods would return.
He found comfort in the secret mathematics of the heavens. It was he who had restored the fifty-six wooden markers to their honoured place within the circle of the sanctum’s walls: for had not the ancient priests, in the course of their endless tabulations, discovered the mystic properties of that sacred number? Was it not true that between three solar years and three lunar years of thirteen lunar months, there was an interval of fifty-six days? And was it not also true that between five solar years and five lunar years, if this time the lunar year was reckoned as twelve lunations, there would be an identical interval of fifty-six days? It was! In these secret ways, he knew, the gods revealed their harmonies to the priests who honoured them and studied their movements with reverence.
It was during this period that he charted the motions of the five moving stars. For countless generations the astronomers had recorded the appearance and disappearance of these wanderers across the heavens and had decided that they must be the sons and daughters of the sun and moon. But they had never been able to discover the exact pattern of their movements and the magic numbers which, they knew, must govern these motions. Night after night his gaunt, angular figure could be seen as he silently placed markers on the ground, joining them with lengths of twine in his efforts to discover these secrets; and often there were so many of these markers spread over the henge that in the morning the junior priests would whisper:
“See, Dluc the spider has been weaving his web again.”
He thought that he had established the pattern for two of them, which he added to the sacred sayings of the priests. But the other three continued to baffle him.
Each night, when he had made his observations, he waited for the dawn and then, as the sun god rose over the horizon in all his glory he would cry out:
“Greatest of all gods, Sun, Dluc has not deserted you! This is still your temple.”
There was one mystery however, above all others, that Dluc wished to solve; and when Nooma had seen the priests go out, night after night, it was on this, the High Priest’s life’s work, that they were so busily engaged.
Each month, as he surveyed the results of the labours he had ordered, he would pace about and burst out “Why – why do all our efforts fail? Why do the gods hide from us their greatest secrets?”
“Priests have tried to solve the problem for many generations,” the other priests replied.
But to Dluc, this was no comfort.
What the High Priest was so anxious to discover was the pattern that underlay the most significant, and the most dramatic of all the alignments in the heavens: the eclipse of the sun. After all, the astronomers had succeeded in establishing all the sun’s movements and some, at least, of the moon’s. Why was it so difficult to discover this particular feature of their relative motions?
For despite all his meticulous recordings, Dluc knew neither that the earth was round nor could he know the basic organisation of the solar system, without which knowledge such a prediction was, mathematically, almost an impossibility. But since he did not know this, and since he was a perfectionist, the High Priest continued, night after night, to send his priests out on their thankless task.
“It shall be my life’s work,” he muttered. Indeed, the discovery of the secret of this celestial phenomenon, when the moon goddess dared to cover the face of the sun god himself, was dearer to his heart than even the building of the new Stonehenge.
Her size had only made Nooma suppose that the child would be large. He was taken by surprise when Katesh gave birth to a daughter a month early.
She seemed delighted; never before had the little mason seen his wife look so happy. When he came to her, she held the child up for him proudly to inspect.
“It’s a girl,” she said with a tired laugh. “You shall have another mason next time.”
And Nooma eagerly took the baby in his arms.
But then he frowned.
The child was not premature. He could see that at once. And as he looked more carefully, he noticed other things: it had a long, narrow head, unlike his; even at its birth, he could see that its fingers and toes were unusually long, too. Like those of Tark.
He stared at Katesh in silence; but she did not seem to sense anything amiss: her whole mind was full of her happiness with the child. She even smiled at him.
Carefully he handed the baby back to her; then, after a few words with the women who were helping her, he went outside.
It was warm. Slowly and thoughtfully, he made his way up the path to the high ground and there, looking over the sweeping ridges, he considered what he should do.
There was no doubt in his mind – the child was not his. It had been conceived while he was away at the quarry, and he had no doubt either that the father was Tark. Bitterly the mason thought of Katesh’s sudden passion for him when he had returned: now he understood the reason for it – she had guessed already that she was pregnant; in silent disgust he paced along the ridge and as he thought about how he had been made a fool of by both his wife and his friend, the little fellow clasped and unclasped his stubby hands in rage.
It was some hours before he came down, having reached no conclusion.
That evening he ate alone; then, as the stars came out, he sat in front of the hut by himself and went over the alternatives again.
By the custom of Sarum, he knew, he could accuse his wife to the priests, and if she was found guilty, then she would be put to death and Tark would have to pay him compensation. That was the punishment for such a crime, and for a time Nooma considered it.
But he had loved Katesh once; he could not give her up to such a fate.
He would not even punish her: everyone knew the fate of cuckolded husbands: instead of being admired as the great mason, he would be laughed at as the bandy-legged little fellow whose wife so easily deceived him. Why should he subject himself to that? He shook his head. No, he would ignore her; his pride was too hurt: his love for her had died.
But as he brooded about what had happened, it was the tall, mocking figure of Tark, his friend, who rose up, again and again before his eyes.
For several hours more, he sat in silence, making his plans, nodding to himself from time to time; and could the people of Sarum have seen the little mason then, they would have been surprised: for his eyes were hard as stone.
At last, when he was satisfied, Nooma slowly rose. Inside, the tapers were still burning as Katesh, rather pale, lay asleep with her baby. He glanced at his wife, but looked away in disgust. Then he glanced at the baby. It, too, was asleep; but now the mason’s kindly face softened as he reached out a stubby finger to touch its face.
“You shall not suffer,” he murmured. “You have done no wrong.”
Then he moved over to where Noo-ma-ti lay and smiled. The boy at least was his; that was one consolation.
A few minutes later however, as he lay on his own bed of straw, the mason’s face grew hard again, as he thought of Tark, and now he whispered:
“I will have revenge!”
It was a quiet summer night without a moon. The white circle of Stonehenge on its rolling ground stared up into the black and silver heavens like a single, huge all-seeing eye.
Alone in the henge, Dluc the High Priest concentrated on the stars, wiping from his mind the memory of the nineteenth of Krona’s girls that he had sacrificed that morning; trying to forget for a few hours that only a year remained before the henge was due to be completed.
He had chosen to be alone that night, and since there was no moon, no measurements could be made in the prediction of the eclipse. With a sigh, he relaxed his long body and let his eye wander over the glittering sky.
And then he saw it.
It was on the western side of the great constellation of the swan; a small but very bright star that he had never seen before, and as he looked carefully he saw that behind it in a broad V-shape stretched a gleaming cloud of light. This, he knew at once, was one of those strangest of all the heavenly bodies, the wanderers which the people called the stars with hair and which appeared only once or twice in a life time. The astronomers had kept records in the sacred sayings of every one for centuries, and since there was no pattern in their movements, they knew for certain that they were special signs to them from the gods. He gazed at the new star intently and as he did so, he realised its most remarkable feature – the trail of hair behind this messenger from the gods was not silver, as the sayings told them to expect, but golden.
“The head of this star is crowned with gold,” he said aloud. As he did so, he realised the huge significance the statement might have. Could it be that, at last, the time of their salvation had come? Surely that must be the meaning of such a portent in the sky; yet after so many disappointments he could hardly bring himself to believe it.
He watched it carefully all night: it was moving slowly and growing larger.
By the following night, all the people of Sarum had seen it. The priests gathered at the henge and together they watched the golden-haired star and made exact note of its movements. It grew brighter still and before dawn it had moved half way into the constellation of the swan. On that second day, even after dawn had broken, it could still be seen in the early morning sky.
It was then that the High Priest showed both his faith and his courage.
In front of all the priests he firmly declared:
“The gods have not deserted Sarum or their faithful priests. This is the sign for which we have waited.” And then he added: “Bring me a ram, so that I can sacrifice it at once to the greatest of all gods, sun. And let all Sarum know that the sun is honoured again at the temple today.”
Soon after first light, messengers came to the henge from Krona to ask the meaning of the portent in the sky. And with a new confidence the High Priest declared: