When he had finished, and he gazed at the silent grey temple around him, so nearly perfect, he spoke a single prayer aloud to the sun god.
“Great sun, let the work of your servant Nooma, who has laboured so hard, be completed perfectly.”
And with that he returned home contented.
It was the following morning that Nooma had to meet Tark at the henge to discuss the arrangements for the great feast that was soon to take place. Over a thousand people would be fed on a broad stretch of open ground on the riverbank in the valley about a mile from the henge and there were many matters to organise.
It was just as the two men were deep in conversation at one side of the henge that a call from the masons told Nooma that his men were about to lever a lintel across from the scaffolding into its final position. Still talking to Tark, and paying no very close attention to the workers, Nooma waddled across, with the riverman loping beside him, and took up his normal station on the ground directly underneath the lintel, to supervise the delicate task. Tark, beside him, noticed with admiration the expert way in which the huge stone was slowly moved out to the edge of the scaffolding and across the narrow gap on to the uprights. He was so busy watching that at first he did not hear what the mason was saying.
Then he did, and gazed down at him in amazement. The absurd little fellow’s normally solemn face was contorted into a mask of rage and hatred such as he would not have believed possible. Between his teeth he hissed:
“You lie with my wife, riverman! You gave her the child! Do you expect that I will forgive?”
He stared at Nooma in surprise. He did not think the mason had realised. But as he did so, it was now Tark who blanched: for as he looked into the transformed face of the mason, he understood the meaning of his words, and for the first time in many years, the riverman was afraid. Never had he seen anger so absolute, so condensed as now, to his astonishment, he saw in the eyes of his strange little friend.
And at that moment he knew that Nooma was going to kill him.
How it happened that one side of the scaffolding suddenly collapsed that morning, no one could ever explain.
Tark the riverman, who happened to be standing underneath and had just opened his mouth to say something, had hardly even time to look up as the four tons of the stone lintel that was being moved tipped off the edge of the scaffolding, struck the side of the uprights and crashed down upon him, striking his head and crushing the life out of him immediately.
No one had noticed anything amiss with the scaffolding. All eyes, until the moment when it collapsed, had been on the delicately balanced lintel. Two of the workers on it had fallen too. One broke his collarbone, the other a leg. But Nooma, who had been directly under the lintel, by a miracle of luck, managed to throw himself to one side and escaped with only bruises.
Two days later the lintel was successfully raised into place.
The priests made no comment on the accident. Nooma hoped that they had not guessed the truth.
When Nooma described the accident to Katesh, he saw her grow pale; her lips quivered; for a moment she seemed to stagger, reaching out for something to support her. And then she stood silently, looking at the ground.
“It is only by the will of the gods that I was not killed myself,” he said.
Katesh did not seem to hear. But Nooma could see that she was holding back her tears; and the little mason secretly rejoiced.
Then suddenly, Katesh looked up, and her large dark eyes looked straight into his. She did not try to hide her secret; she let her little husband see the pain in her eyes. With complete honesty, for the first time in their lives together, their eyes met; and Katesh saw, as she thought she had heard, triumph in his expression. It was at that moment she knew with absolute certainty what the mason had done.
And Nooma, in his triumph, saw in his wife’s eyes the naked soul of a woman who has lost her lover, and for a moment, in his way, he felt ashamed. But then the mason saw the expression in his wife’s eyes change from one of pain to hatred and contempt. It was only for an instant, before she lowered them; but in those moments the marriage of Nooma and his wife achieved, for the only time, complete honesty, and at the same time ended.
In the following days, Katesh moved about the hut quietly. She fed her husband and did all that a wife should: but as if he was a stranger. They neither spoke unnecessarily, nor approached each other.
Though Nooma had assumed that nothing could now go wrong at the henge, he was mistaken. Three days after the death of Tark, as he was inspecting the last of the lintels to be raised, he suddenly noticed that something was amiss. The socket on the underside was in the wrong place. He stared at it in astonishment. It was too far towards the centre by the span of a man’s head. This was a serious matter. Not only would a new hole have to be quickly made, but the lintel was no longer perfect, as every stone on the sacred henge should be. Had there been any time, it should have been replaced. But there were only days until the solstice. It was impossible to do anything.
How had this happened, he demanded angrily? Someone, it seemed, had made a careless scratch mark on the stone and one of the younger masons, seeing this, had assumed that it marked the spot where the hole should go. Before anyone knew what had happened, it had been hollowed out. It was a simple, and foolish mistake. But it was Nooma’s fault that it had occurred.
The hole would be just visible from beneath the completed arch. He could not, even if he wanted to, hide it from the priests. Miserably, he had to report the matter.
“I cannot make a new stone in time,” he ruefully explained.
The priest inspecting it gave him a cold stare that made him tremble.
“The mistake must be invisible,” he said. “And the stone must be put in place.”
The mason prepared a plug of clay and filled the hole; and across the plug he placed a disc of grey stone that he made from chippings; and when he had done this, his work was so good that no one but himself could even find the place where the mistake had been made. But the lintel was no longer perfect: the henge contained a tiny flaw; when he thought of this news reaching the High Priest, he shook. Neither the priests, nor the gods, would be able to forgive this.
“They will sacrifice me to the sun,” he muttered sadly. “After all, that is how it will end.”
However, the lintel was raised into place, and with five days to spare before the all-important solstice, the new Stonehenge was complete.
Half proud, half terrified, at the feast for the labourers held by the river the following night, Nooma drank himself to sleep.
But the next morning, one thought kept coming to his mind: “I have killed a man; I have made an error in the building of the sacred henge. Nothing is hidden from the priests: they will destroy me.”
It was nearly dawn. The moon was still high.
As Dluc the High Priest surveyed the new temple that the mason had built, he experienced a profound emotion.
“It is complete,” he murmured. For it seemed to him that not only the building itself, not only a cycle of the sun and moon were now completed, but also that the terrible journey along which the people of Sarum had passed had now reached its completion, which the perfect circle of stones symbolised. Sun and moon, day and night, winter and summer, the spring time and the harvest: all these things seemed to him to be contained in the henge: all Sarum’s life and all its destiny lay in the stones that recorded the endless procession of the days and the harmony of the heavens.
It was five days before the solstice, and, that day, as he always had in times gone by, Chief Krona was to hunt the boar.
As dawn approached, Dluc called his litter, and gave the runners their orders.
It was the custom that before the hunt, he would perform the ritual asking the moon goddess to bless the huntsmen, and so, soon after dawn, he arrived in the broad clearing which lay at the foot of the escarpment by the entrance to the eastern valley, where the hunters were meeting.
Ah, the beauty of it! When he saw them, he too felt young again. There were fifty hunters, in their thick leather jerkins, carrying bows, heavy quivers of arrows and the short, heavy spears with flint tips that were used for hunting the boar. They were standing in groups, joking together. Krona was in the centre of it all, just as he used to be: tall and impressive, with his flowing beard, all white now, and wearing the jaunty headdress with long green feathers stuck in it that he favoured for hunting. His harsh laugh rang round the clearing, as he jested easily with the huntsmen. Beside him rested the light litter made of pine, and carried by four surefooted runners, which would carry him over the ground while the other men walked or ran beside him. He wore a short green cloak and in his belt was a magnificent hunting knife made of flint. This was Krona the chief as he truly was: how his brother the priest rejoiced to see him like that once more!
The men were delighted to be hunting with the chief again. Old Muna the chief huntsman, his hair grizzled and his face now very red, with his stocky figure in its crimson and black tunic, was everywhere. On his head he wore the small set of antlers that were his badge of office, and in his hand he held a hunting horn decorated with bronze and gold. He was cheerfully directing the men who handled the hounds – eight couples of the sleek, swift hunting dogs, who could follow a scent all day, and whose excited pants sent steam into the cold morning air. With Muna was his grandson, a wide-eyed boy of ten. It was the boy’s first hunt.
“Krona has promised that he will blood this boy himself if we kill today,” the old man grinned. Hearing this, the chief turned.
Krona looked at the boy’s eager face and remembered how, at his age, his own father, following the ancient custom, had lifted a portion of the dead animal when he was in at his first kill and wiped the blood across his cheek. He had carefully kept that mark on his face for a month, for it had been the first mark of his manhood. “You’ll be blooded,” he laughed.
Then Krona called for silence, and the High Priest spoke the simple, ancient words of the hunting ritual:
“Moon goddess, who watches over all hunters, to whom the spirits of all dead animals belong, watch over us and give us good hunting today.”
Muna gave a short blast on his horn, Krona stepped into his litter, and the whole party moved off through the woods, up the eastern valley.
That was how afterwards, the High Priest liked to remember Krona – a gallant figure, a great chief, hunting the woods at Sarum.
They brought him back that night.
Although the Sarum huntsmen believed that their method of hunting the boar was the best, it had several disadvantages. If the boar deceived the hunters, he could easily kill one of them; and it the boar was driven according to plan, then the chief was always exposed to the animal’s charge. But Krona in particular favoured this Sarum method. The procedure was that when the hounds seemed to have cornered the boar, usually in a thicket, the hunters would fan out in a long line and make a slow encircling movement. Then, when the circle was closed, those behind the boar would advance through the wood, making as much noise as possible and driving the boar out of his hiding place towards the centre where the chief, surrounded by the best hunters would be waiting. Using this method, Krona saw many fine kills take place before him; but those driving the boar took a terrible risk if the boar should turn on them with his flashing tusks, and there was always the risk that one day the boar would break through Krona’s hunters and gore the chief himself.
He was still alive when they brought his body into the valley that evening.
The hunt had gone according to plan: the boar had been driven towards the place where Krona waited, had hurled itself across the clearing, where the hunters waited. But then the disaster had taken place. Whether because they were out of practice or whether because the boar was more cunning than most, the ferocious animal had broken straight through the line of hunters and burst upon Krona himself before getting away. There were terrible wounds in the chief’s stomach where the beast’s tusks had ripped him open, tearing the flesh to shreds. He had lost much blood and he was already a pale grey colour. When Dluc saw him, he thought he would die that night.
The High Priest did what he could for the friend of his youth: for that is how Krona now seemed to him – neither the great chief of Sarum, nor the monster who sacrificed the nineteen girls in those darkest days; but his friend, wounded and in pain. He bound up his wounds; he helped him drink a little of a broth he made with herbs, and with Menona he tended him through the night.
Krona lay dying. He knew it. His wounds were deep and already beginning to fester – they were far beyond any medicine, or even the High Priest’s prayers.
And now began the last, and the hardest of all the trials sent to Sarum by the gods.
For neither man had forgotten the promise that had been made when they first began work on the new Stonehenge. Krona’s first born child was to be given to the gods for a sacrifice; and in return, the auguries had claimed, he was to be given a second, who would be his heir.