Sarum (23 page)
Authors: Edward Rutherfurd
He had chosen this time of the year because it was then that the first frosts had made the ground hard, so that the huge weight of the sarsens would not cause them to get bogged down.
“We can get the sarsens halfway to the henge before the snows come,” Nooma said. “Perhaps they will go over the snow too.”
On his orders, each sarsen was strapped to a framework of timber, and hundreds of trees had been felled and their trunks stacked at points along the route, to be used as rollers over which the frames could be guided. The route was carefully chosen, keeping as much as possible to the higher ground where the going was easy. He began this work with five hundred men and a hundred teams of oxen.
The men worked efficiently, but Nooma had soon found that the oxen were a problem.
“The obstinacy of these beasts,” one of the priests said to him, “is greater even than the obstinacy of men.” And it was certainly true.
A single pair, or even a team of oxen could be driven easily enough. But to pull one of the huge stones, many pairs of oxen, twenty or thirty were needed, and though their strength was enormous, their movements were spasmodic.
“They are impossible to handle,” the mason cried in despair, and he called for more teams of men to replace them.
In the end, the oxen were used only on the uphill slopes, where their extra power was useful in helping the disciplined teams of men who pulled steadily on the leather ropes and sang as they worked.
When the snows came, Nooma tried to build a great sled under one of the sarsens, but the weight of the stone was so great that it sank into the snow and was impossible to budge; and the moving of sarsens had to stop until the early spring.
It was in the spring, soon after the equinox, that the news for which Sarum had waited so long finally came. Raka was pregnant.
She was a strange creature. As the months passed, she still spoke little, complained about nothing, asked for nothing, had no friends and no enemies; she was always at Krona’s side; and of the other women in the house, including old Ina, she took no notice at all. She did not insult them; but it was as if they did not exist. There might have been complaints at such conduct: old Ina, though she said nothing, walked about the house in dejection; but now that the girl was with child, no one could speak a word against her. The fate of Sarum rested in her belly.
Was the girl happy, Dluc once or twice asked himself? Who knew? And truth to tell, who cared? She had beer, brought there for a purpose; there could be no doubt about her destiny; and she was fulfilling her task.
Above all, Krona was happy. Each day, it seemed to the chief that he drew strength from Raka, and each day, as he saw her belly swell, he would exclaim: “The gods sent you to us.”
As the spring ended, there was every sign that there would be a brilliant summer that year: a seemingly endless succession of hot, still days followed each other and on the broad slopes above the five rivers, the heavy corn seemed to promise a bumper harvest. Sarum, at last, was at peace with the gods and Krona was full of hope. A month before the summer solstice Nooma began to erect the first of the huge grey trilithon arches of the new Stonehenge.
And during these months, the mason too was contented. After all, his wife had given him a son. The work on the henge was proceeding quickly. Like all the people of Sarum, he was conscious of a lightening of his spirit now that Raka was with child and the gods smiled upon its valleys and ridges once again.
It was true that from before the time that their son was born he had seen that Katesh was sometimes irritable and short-tempered, but he put this down to trivial causes, and their life together continued placidly enough. Indeed, the girl proved herself a good wife: she cooked well and the leather jerkins he wore were now beautifully trimmed with fur. Her care for him was everything it should be: and if sometimes her response to his enthusiastic and energetic lovemaking was lukewarm, the little fellow was still so excited by her splendid young body that he hardly thought anything of it. When he came home to find her sitting cross-legged by the fire in front of the hut with their little son and saw her smile of welcome, he would lift her up and carry her indoors just as he had when they first married.
Often he was away; for it would sometimes be necessary to camp at the sarsen site for a month at a time; and during these periods Katesh was left alone to fill the time caring for their little plot of ground on the hillside, and sitting with the other women who lived in that part of the valley. But many of the men were away for long periods while the great work on the henge continued, and Katesh never complained.
Truly, she was a good wife.
Sometimes, if he had been absent for a while, Nooma would consult his friend Tark the riverman, and ask him:
“What can I give Katesh that will please her on my return?”
Tark would tell him to wait and then, after one of his visits to the harbour, he would return with some fine ornament or a string of gleaming beads that he had traded with the merchants who came from across the sea.
“These are the things women like,” he told the mason. When Nooma gave these presents to Katesh, she flushed with pleasure, and the little mason grinned to see that he had made his wife happy.
It was during the late spring, when he was returning to the valley one evening, that Nooma made a small discovery which delighted him. Beside the path that led down from the ridge, he had often noticed a small thorn tree whose roots for some reason had pushed up through the ground so that one had to be careful not to trip over them. That day he carelessly caught his foot in one of these, and almost fell. And it was in turning to look at the root, that he noticed it had pushed up a small piece of stone which must have been lying under the surface. He stopped to look at it. To his surprise, he saw that the little lump of grey stone, which was no bigger than his fist, had already been carved – crudely but unmistakably – into the form of a little woman, squat and full-bodied. Something about the curious little figure pleased him as he cradled it in his stubby hands. He saw and felt how the carver had succeeded in reproducing lovingly the big, firm curves of the squat little woman, how he had captured the very essence of her boundless fertility.
“The man who made this loved his woman,” he murmured. And he pushed it into the leather pouch he wore on his belt and took it home with him.
In a corner of his hut he had a pile of such objects – flint arrowheads, spearheads, and stones with curious formations that he had found and which he delighted to study, noting the grain and the secret inner forces of the rock that had caused each strange shape. Onto this pile he placed the little figure that Hwll the hunter had made of his woman Akun, thousands of years before, and there for many years it remained.
It was during the long warm days of summer that Nooma began to erect the first arches of the new Stonehenge.
The raising of the sarsens was a delicate matter. The huge uprights were brought to the edge of the pit that had been dug for them so that a few feet overlapped the edge. Then ropes were attached, and two hundred men would lever and haul the stones, inch by inch, into an upright position – one group pulling the ropes over a high wooden frame while another pushed in props behind the slowly rising stone. Gradually it would slip into the pit – the greatest trilithon was set eight feet deep – and gangs of men would pack in the chalk filling around it.
When it came to raising the lintels – each weighing several tons and needing to be lifted twenty feet into the air – the labourers had at first been uncertain which was the best way to proceed.
Nooma supplied the answer at once.
“It’s easy,” he explained. “Just build a wooden scaffold under the lintel and raise it.” He showed then what he meant, using a pebble and some twigs. “We raise the stone with levers at one end and slip a wooden pole under. The same the other end. Then lay two more poles over them, crossways so that you have a square. Then you lever the stone up again over the crosspoles, exactly as before. And you do this again and again, securing the scaffolding underneath with ropes as you go.” His quick fingers arranged the twigs so that the workers saw the stone rise before their eyes. “When the scaffolding is as high as the uprights, we lever the lintel across into place.”
It worked very well. Under Nooma’s direction, the scaffolding was built and the lintels slowly rose. By the festival of the solstice, two of the tallest trilithon arches at the centre of the henge were in place.
They were awesome: and when the people saw them at the festival, there was a gasp of wonder.
“The new temple will be the greatest ever built,” they said; and they were right.
The harvest was the best in living memory; Krona now smiled as the High Priest had not seen him do for years; Raka grew big with child.
“The sun god smiles on us at last,” Krona said to the priest, who nodded in agreement.
And summer passed and early autumn came, before the blow fell.
It was a warm, clear night in early autumn; the moon was in the thirteenth year of her cycle, with six years left before the great henge must be completed. Dluc and Krona were quietly conversing together in his house on the hill, and the High Priest was looking forward to his usual visit to the henge later that night, when suddenly a scream from another room brought both men hastily from their conference.
Raka had gone into early labour; and as soon as Dluc looked at her, he knew that something was badly wrong.
The rest of that night remained in his memory as a succession of blurred images: of Krona, distracted, cursing him; of his own, desperate prayers to the gods, and his awful conviction that they were useless; of Ina, as always, silent and strong, holding the poor girl in her arms; of the chief, ashen, leaving the room like a sleep-walker. But above all, it was the blood that he remembered. It seemed to be everywhere, as though a sacrifice had been messily performed. It covered the bed, the floor, even the walls. She had been dead, and so had the child before it left her body; it lay on the floor, a small, bloody, grey bundle of flesh, the death of all their hopes.
Then, while Ina, shaking her head, gathered up the dead child, her women began to keen and moan over Raka’s body, scattering herbs as they did so. And he, too, had wept.
He remembered the blood; and he remembered Krona’s face, when he went to him afterwards.
The chief was sitting alone in an out-house in which only two candles were lit; but by their light the priest could see his face clearly. It was more terrible than any human face he had seen: for it was not angry, nor in despair: it was blank.
When Dluc came towards him he stared as though he could see through him and, even before he spoke, the priest knew that he was mad.
Another, though quite insignificant series of events had been taking place in the valley below, during that summer.
It was by chance that Katesh had been standing by the riverbank below the hut one brilliant day in early summer when Tark the riverman had also chanced to bring Nooma the mason down the river from the henge to his home.
The water was moving slowly, and the long green waterweeds caused tiny eddies and ripples which caught the sun so that, as she watched with her baby, the surface of the water seemed to dance with light.
Katesh was contented that day. As she closed her eyes and let the warm sun play on her face, and then looked down at the chubby baby gurgling happily beside her, she felt a peacefulness she had not known for many months.
She had followed her mother’s advice. She had put all other thoughts out of her mind and tried to make her strange little husband happy; and in a way she had been rewarded.
For she loved her baby; as for her husband, if the other women sometimes smiled at his appearance, they were always quick to say:
“But you are lucky Katesh: your husband is the greatest mason of them all.”
She saw the canoe when it was still some distance away. Nooma had his back to her; Tark was paddling.
As she saw the squat little form of her husband, his broad strong back leaning forward as he earnestly made some point to the riverman, and the tall, spare form of Tark, as he quietly listened and guided the canoe down the steam, she could not help noticing how curious the little mason looked beside the riverman. For an instant – no longer she thought than one of the flashes of sunlight upon the surface of the river – it seemed to her that the small form of Nooma was that of a stranger, while that of Tark . . . she could not say what; but she watched the canoe with fascination as his long arms gently lifted and dipped the paddle in the stream.
When they came ashore, the little mason leapt on to the bank with a cry of joy, took his wife in his arms, and then lifted up his baby son and showed him to Tark, saying “Here’s a fine young mason,” before he led them all up the path to his hut.
It was the first time that she had been near the riverman for some months. She had seen him pass in one of his boats from time to time though, and had seen him giving orders at the trading post. Her husband had often spoken highly of him too, and she had learned from the women that he had another reputation, which did not surprise her. She had been curious about him.
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