“Tell Krona that the head of the star was crowned with gold. The time of our salvation is near: his bride who will give him heirs is coming and he must prepare himself.”
“Where is she?” his priests asked him. “Where are we to find her?”
“The star entered the constellation of the swan,” he told them, “and the swan is the form that the sun god takes when he flies over the water. I believe we should search for her upon the water.”
Since his discovery of Katesh’s deception, Nooma the mason had spent little time at his house. Partly this was because the pressure on him to supervise the dressing of the sarsens was so great; and partly it was out of choice.
He said nothing to her; nor did he allow his behaviour to change towards Tark, with whom he continued to work.
There was, however, a subtle change in his manner. Where he had been either quiet or enthusiastic, he now became abrupt, giving his orders curtly to the masons, and sending the labourers to their tasks with little more than a nod. But since he bore such a large responsibility, and since his skill and knowlege were unquestioned, the gradual change seemed normal to those around him who had come, with the passing of the years, to regard the curious-looking little fellow first with respect and even with awe.
From time to time he now took to going down river to the harbour whenever he heard that a merchant ship was coming in – for they usually had slave girls in their cargo. When he saw a girl he liked, he would buy her and take her to the hut he occupied near the sarsen site. It was widely known that he did so, but if news of it reached Katesh, she never mentioned the subject to him.
It was shortly after the comet was seen that he made one of these journeys.
He arrived at mid-afternoon, and as soon as he entered the long, still stretch of protected water, he saw the newly arrived merchant ship, moored by the jetty in the lee of the hill.
It was a stout, wooden vessel, with a double bank of oars that had made its long journey from a port on the Atlantic shore of Europe, skirting the dangerous coasts before it crossed to the island.
The little jetty was already crowded with people. Word had spread rapidly; farmers from all over the territory had hurried down the rivers, and were now jostling for a chance to see the boat and inspect its cargo.
The sailors were an interesting sight: small, dark, swarthy folk with bronzed skins from the south, but it was their leader whom Nooma especially noticed. About his own age, he had a bald round head, and a black beard that grew in hundreds of gleaming, tightly rolled curls, cut close and square. He had soft brown eyes, a snub nose, an engaging smile in which he displayed a fine row of white teeth, and a gentle, coaxing voice that seemed almost to ooze out of his throat: the sailors called him honey tongue. On his fingers he wore a dozen gold rings, which he clinked together constantly.
While the crowd watched in fascination, he brought forth his wares. There were jewelled ornaments which flashed in the sun, huge coils of beads, amphorae of wine, wonderful coloured cloths. Then with a flourish and a loud click of his fingers he made the sailors hold up the strangest pelt that Nooma had ever seen. It was like a huge lynx, but many times larger with a magnificent head, huge teeth and claws so large that Nooma shuddered to see them. Strangest of all was the animal’s strange colouring; it was striped black and ochre.
“This creature could rip an ox apart,” Nooma murmured to his neighbour, and he wondered what kind of animal this could be and where it came from.
But stranger things than a tiger skin from distant eastern trade routes had filtered through the Mediterranean and up to the northern sea ports before that.
Then came the merchant’s special prize. He built up to it splendidly. Using his whole body to emphasise his points, and accompanied by wonderfully enticing sounds of appreciation that seemed to arise from his belly, he let them know in a spoken pantomine that they were about to see something they had never seen before: a special gift from the gods – a human wonder. It was a girl he explained – but not just a girl: she was the most beautiful creature in the world, a princess in her own country, sold tragically into slavery. A virgin too. Of fifteen. This was the usual patter of any competent trader selling a slave, but the olive-skinned merchant did it so well that the crowd grew tense with expectation. When he judged that the dramatic moment had arrived, he once again clicked his fingers, and the sailors led forward a figure covered from head to foot in a heavy cloth. With a flourish he whipped it off: and the crowd gasped.
On the deck of the little ship stood a girl, entirely naked, and unlike anything they had ever seen before. Her eyes, which stared straight over the heads of the crowd, were blue. And her hair, which caught the sun so that it flashed, was golden!
It was the first time that a blonde woman had ever been seen on the island.
So stunned was the crowd that for minutes there was silence, and the shrewd merchant watched with satisfaction.
Nooma stood quite still; but his mouth had fallen open. It seemed to him that this extraordinary vision of loveliness was as far above all other women as the henge was above all temples. He noticed her well-formed body, her pale and delicately coloured skin, her wonderful, hard young breasts. But above all, it was the faraway blue eyes and the magnificent, the abundant golden hair that fascinated him. It seemed to him that she belonged not to the race of men but to the gods themselves. He could hardly believe that this marvellous creature was an ordinary woman at all.
The hair was genuine, the merchant assured them. To prove his point, he plucked several hairs from her head, and one also from her body, and passed them round for inspection. The girl, Nooma noticed, winced, but gave no cry of pain, and her eyes never left the horizon on which they were fixed.
She had been captured the previous year from one of the many and nameless tribes which roamed the vast, uncharted expanses that stretched between the eastern Mediterranean and distant Asia. She had been transported west, and then sold to the captain of a vessel which traded up the great rivers of south west Europe. Finally she had been seen by this clever trader as he was about to leave for the northern island and he had at once appreciated her value to the dark-haired islanders and paid a good price for her.
To Nooma she was a revelation. Suddenly the little fellow experienced emotions, passions, that he had never known before. It seemed to his dazzled eyes that the girl was above even the passage of time itself; he felt the years drop away and the blood race in his veins. He forgot his age, his unfaithful wife, his humble life. Above everything else in the world, he wanted to own this wonder. He must have the girl.
As the merchant began the bidding, the little mason forgot his reserve and began to shout, jumping up and waving his arms.
“Five pelts! Five pelts!” he cried.
The crowd laughed. The bid was ridiculous for such a rarity as this. The price for her would be far beyond anything Nooma the mason could afford and only the richest farmers could think of her. But Nooma was completely oblivious to everything except the girl.
“Twenty pelts,” he shouted wildly. Such a sum was a fortune to him.
Still there were more laughs.
Then, abruptly, the auction stopped. It did so at a sign from one of the priests who now stepped forward. Calmly he went up to the merchant, the crowd parting to let him pass, and in a few words let the merchant know that the girl was to be reserved for the temple. The trader bowed his head respectfully and the girl was immediately covered again. The merchant was well-pleased. He knew that the priests would pay a good price.
A sigh went up from the crowd as the girl was quickly removed from their sight. No doubt she was to be reserved for a sacrifice, probably at the dedication of the new henge. As Nooma saw it, he opened his mouth to cry out in protest at such a terrible fate, but he realised that this was futile and remained silent. The power of the priests could not be questioned. Moments later he discovered that there were tears on his cheeks.
When the priests brought the girl to the High Priest and explained where they had found her, he stared at her in wonder. As they uncovered her, the sunlight caught her golden hair so that it flashed. Dluc slowly nodded:
“This,” he murmured, “surely this must be the one. For truly, her head is crowned with gold.” And he ascertained that the long, soft golden hair was indeed genuine.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
The girl spoke no language that they knew; but by sign language she let them know that she came from far to the east, from a place where there were snow-capped mountains. She was the daughter of a chief killed in battle, she claimed. This was the story most slaves told, hoping to get special consideration, but Dluc considered that in her case it might be true. In any case, he was sure that he knew what he must do.
A few hours later he climbed the hill to Krona’s house and announced without hesitation:
“This is the girl foretold by the auguries. The curse over Sarum has been lifted. She will give you heirs.”
Krona stared at the girl. He put his long hands through her hair wonderingly, pulled out several strands and inspected them.
“Is this really the one?” he asked.
“I am sure,” Dluc replied.
“Perhaps,” he murmured. “Perhaps it is so.” And staring at her in almost childlike surprise, for the first time in many months, he smiled.
“What is her name?” he asked.
Dluc thought.
“Menona,” he said, which meant She Who is Promised.
The next day, Dluc married Krona and the girl.
But before he did so he said firmly to the chief:
“You must sacrifice a ram to the sun and acknowledge that he is the greatest of all the gods.”
And Krona bowed his head and said:
“Let it be done at once.”
When he heard those words, the High Priest knew that the reign of terror had ended.
During the night that followed, Dluc stood alone in the henge; many times he looked up into the heavens and murmured:
“Never again, Sun, never will I doubt you!”
At dawn he sacrificed the ram.
In an astonishingly short time, the years seemed to fall away from the chief. He came out of his house on the hill; he inspected his many fields; and once again he began to receive merchants. The network of spies was forgotten and just as they used to, the farmers now approached him without fear to receive justice and to get his advice.
The girl was a marvel. Dluc had explained to her in sign language that she had been sent by the gods to this great chief and that she was to provide him with children, and once she understood she nodded calmly. She seemed pleased with her lot, and indeed, Krona’s house was an improvement on the merchant ship or the prospect of life as a slave. Dluc soon came to believe for he watched her carefully, that she was indeed the daughter of a chief herself; for her hands were soft, not like those of an ordinary woman, and once in Krona’s house, she carried herself with the dignity of a chief’s daughter.
What was certain was that the gods had sent her. Although she did not speak the islanders’ language, she seemed always to understand Krona’s wishes and it was a joy to see the old chiefs face light up whenever he saw her.
As for being his companion in bed – when the High Priest enquired if all was well, the old chief grinned at him like a boy.
Dluc believed it was now safe to recall Omnic from his mountain hiding place, and that autumn, at the festival of the equinox, the ceremonies to the sun god were resumed with all their former splendour, and Krona led the people of Sarum as, once again, they worshipped in peace at the sacred henge.
But for Nooma the mason, the summer brought no lightening of spirits but a new fear, that rose like a cloud over the horizon and soon seemed to cover the whole sky.
The work on the henge was falling behind.
It was the fault of the masons shaping the stones. For the last two years Nooma had been fighting a battle to keep their work moving swiftly. First one or two would fall sick and have to be replaced. Then the replacements would need to be trained, or mistakes would be made. With his time now divided between the quarry and the henge, it was difficult for the mason to supervise everything, and at times he knew that his men had become discouraged.
But the result of this was that over a period of five years, not enough sarsens reached the henge.
All that summer he had chivvied the masons, for before the equinox, all the sarsens should be completed and ready for transportation; but as that day approached, he could see that the final shaping of the stones would not be finished.
The great dedication of the henge was due to take place the following summer. If the ground was soft in the spring, and it often was, then it would be too late to try to take any more sarsens to the henge. There was only one thing to do.
“We shall have to transport all the sarsens to the henge now,” the mason said. “We can finish shaping them there.”