Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  The following summer, when Krona had already taken the fourth of his victims, Nooma went to the sarsen site and stayed there for two months.

  When Tark came up the path, she thought of hiding; but instead she gathered her courage, stepped forward and greeted him politely. He was respectful.

  “I bring a message from Nooma. He will be at the site for another month. There is much work.”

  She nodded. With Krona’s rages and the anxiousness of the priests, Nooma was especially careful to see that no criticisms could be made of his work on the henge.

  “I thank you, Tark,” she replied correctly. And as custom required, she offered him food and drink.

  Sensing her thoughts, Tark sat at a distance from her, and spoke generally of the henge, of events at the harbour, and of the rumours about Krona and his wives.

  Cleverly he interested her so that gradually she forgot her reserve. She had been left alone for a long time and she began to ply him with questions: What did the merchants say about Sarum? Were the priests satisfied with the work on the henge?

  For a long time they spoke, and his answers to her questions fascinated her; the shadows were already lengthening when he rose to go.

  Two days later he came again. This time she was less reserved.

  Two days after that, just after dusk had fallen, she heard the faint sound of his paddle in the river below, and knew that he would come to her.

  Even then, after they had kissed passionately and moved inside, she paused. The reproachful figure of the mason rose up before her eyes. If she did this thing, how she would hurt him; and what terrible punishment would the gods visit upon her?

  She trembled, turning her face away from Tark, not daring to look at him. But now, having got so far, she realised that she wanted the riverman with a pain that she could hardly endure, and so at last, letting her clothes fall from her, she turned her naked body towards him with a little cry.

  “Ease my pain.”

  The passion of Katesh took place that summer and, when Nooma returned to supervise the hauling of the sarsens, the autumn that followed it.

  She came to know every feature of the riverman’s body, became obsessed by it.

  Sometimes her fear of the gods, and of her husband if he found out, caused her to tremble. But then the memory of her lover’s touch, the shape of the back of his neck as he laughed, his soft eyes and gentle voice, obliterated everything else. She longed to have his child, to flee with him over the sea; but all this she knew was impossible: she would only steal a dangerous and forbidden passion during the dark days and nights of Krona’s rage at Sarum.

  And the danger was very great.

  “Krona’s spies are everywhere,” she would say. “If we are seen and reported to the priests . . .”

  “I am careful,” Tark assured her. “We shall not be seen.”

  For under the laws of Sarum, if a husband could prove to the priests that his wife had lain with another man, she was sacrificed to the gods, while the other man was liable to pay the cuckolded husband a heavy fine.

  When she thought of this, Katesh shook her head in terror and moaned to herself:

  “Why did the gods not give me another husband?”

  Tark was so different from the little mason. Sometimes he would lean back, the silky black hairs on his chest catching the light from the taper, stretch all his limbs like a cat, and she would mount him with a little gasp of joy while he slowly smiled; then she would tell him to be still while she rhythmically moved and stretched herself, arching back, upon his taut body. But above all, she loved simply to hold him in her arms, glancing from time to time into his soft, sleepy eyes, and cradling the powerful head that relaxed, when he slept, so that it often seemed to her like that of a child.

  Unlike Nooma, Tark was a skilful lover, who took his time. He was so gentle, she thought, feeling her, teasing her, encouraging her to come again and again.

  When the mason came home, she did her best to appear pleased to see him. She submitted to his lovemaking and tried to make him happy, as before.

  She was sometimes almost overcome with guilt at what she had done with Tark, and again and again promised herself that it would stop. But each time that Nooma departed, and she saw the riverman, her resolve broke down once more.

  It was in early winter that she made the terrible discovery that she might be pregnant.

  Nooma had been away for a month. Now the gods would punish her!

  “He will discover!” she cried. And she wept bitterly for the pain she would cause the worthy mason who had given her, in his clumsy, well-meaning way, nothing but kindness.

  “He will give me to the priests,” she wailed. She deserved such a fate, she knew, but it was terrible to think of it.

  Then Tark told her what she must do.

  The next day, Nooma was surprised when his friend came striding across the ridges to where the gangs of men were hauling the sarsens; and still more surprised when Tark took him to one side.

  “Let me supervise the labourers,” he said. “The work at the henge is being badly done. Go there at once and supervise it or the priests will begin to complain.”

  Grateful for the advice, Nooma set off at once and when he got to the henge, although he could see no signs of bad work that would have caused immediate complaint, he noticed a number of small mistakes the masons were making and corrected them at once.

  “That Tark is more of a perfectionist than I,” he chuckled to himself.

  He was glad that he had come back. For when he reached his home, an extraordinary change had come over Katesh.

  He was completely unprepared for the reception that awaited him. When he first arrived, she prepared food for him as usual while he sat by the fire in the doorway of the hut and played with his son. But while he ate, he noticed her looking at him in a way that was new; and that night when they lay together, she made love to him with a passion unlike anything that she had ever shown before.

  The next night the same thing-occurred again. And the next. It seemed that suddenly his wife had fallen violently in love with him; and the little mason, though he was astonished, rubbed his little hands together with joy. Now, when he told her about the wonder of the henge, or his work with the stones, or the problems he had overcome with his masons and labourers, instead of nodding absently, as she had usually done before, her face was full of admiration and she would ask him to tell her more.

  “My husband is the greatest mason in the whole island,” she would smile. “All Sarum says so.”

  And the mason was gratified that his young wife appreciated him.

  All that winter, Nooma experienced an excitement and happiness that was even greater than that of the first year of their marriage. Katesh did everything she could to please him; and at nights her moans and cries of passion aroused him to new heights. Then, in the spring, he saw to his joy that at last his hopes had been realised and that Katesh was pregnant again; when he felt her belly with his strong little hands and kissed her, Katesh smiled at him happily, whispering:

  “I think we shall have many more.”

  Early in the summer, Nooma gave a sheep to the priests for his new child.

  While all Sarum suffered under Krona’s madness and while the girls continued to be sacrificed, Nooma went quietly about his business with a happiness that it seemed nothing could shake.

  His greatest delight at that time was to take his son with him to the henge. The boy was such an exact replica of his father that even the priests would smile with amusement as the two bandy-legged figures, one a diminutive version of the other, waddled around the henge to survey the work. Noo-ma-ti had quick little hands and loved to model figures with the clay his father brought him.

  “He will be a master craftsman,” Nooma told the priests proudly. “Better than me.”

  He would show the tiny boy the great sarsens he had made, running his hands over them lovingly and explaining the properties of the grey stone.

  “You wi
ll learn to work stone,” he told the boy, “and to love the henge.”

  For as the years had passed, the henge itself had begun to exercise a fascination upon the mason. Normally he would never have been allowed inside the earth circle, but his building work took him into the most sacred precincts so often that he grew used to the place and the ways of the priests. He came to love the broad encircling bank, the silent sanctum within, and the great avenue that pointed like an arrow at the dawn on the horizon. At the end of the day’s work, when dusk fell and the masons and labourers laid down their tools and departed, Nooma would often linger there, quietly tolerated by the silent priests as they went about their nightly tasks. The henge, he realised, had a strange, echoing quality about it when one stood inside and the light receded from the empty sky above. Was it the wide circle of the chalk bank? Was it the sarsens as the temple neared completion? He could not say; but he knew that it affected him.

  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 eagerl
y 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.