Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [100]
It came, the rim of the sun god, the first flash of his burning rays that struck like an arrow along the avenue to the heart of the henge. At that same instant, the chanting stopped, and the terrible silence that followed was broken only by the faint sound within the henge, of the first victim being dropped on to the altar stone.
Dluc stared into the face of the sun. Slowly he raised Krona’s first-born child, in both his hands, high over his head, showing her to the god and cried:
Greatest of all gods, Sun,
Great Moon,
Your servants obey.
At the new Stonehenge, the sun god came to his kingdom; his huge, golden orb, pulsating with light, rose over the horizon into the turquoise sky. And opposite, for long, silent minutes, the silver orb of the moon hung facing him, in perfect opposition across the perfect circle of the henge, before dipping below the horizon. Sun god and moon goddess had shown their faces to the people.
As the victims were placed on the altar stone in rapid succession, Nooma strained to see them. The seventh was Katesh. He saw her pale body being held by two priests, saw it hit the stone and arch in horror as the bloody knife of the priest rose, flashed in the sun, and fell.
Dluc the High Priest never discovered how to predict an eclipse of the sun.
SORVIODUNUM
Some two thousand years after the building of the sarsen circle at Stonehenge, in the year A.D. 42, the most powerful man in the world had never heard of Sarum or its temple of stone.
The dominions of the Emperor Claudius, ruler of the mighty Roman Empire, extended from Persia in the east to Spain in the west; from Africa in the south to France and parts of Germany in the north. The Mediterranean Sea was his private lake and few men in the whole course of human history have ever wielded greater earthly power.
Despite his great empire, and his many talents as a scholar and a ruler, Claudius was considered something of a joke. He was lame, he stuttered, and though he came from a family which over centuries had provided many great generals, he himself had no victories to his name.
This was the situation, in the year 42, that he proposed to change.
It surprised nobody that he chose Britain. After all, everyone in Rome knew that it was time that the distant island in the north was brought into the civilised world.
Julius Caesar had led an expedition there a century before; and only three years ago, the previous emperor, Claudius’s nephew Caligula, had prepared a great invasion of the island, which had never taken place.
He would undertake the conquest himself, he announced, thereby completing what his illustrious ancestor Julius Caesar began.
Julius Caesar’s detailed account of his doings on the island in 55 and 54 B.C. were well known – although there were still a few diehard wits in Rome who insisted that the island did not in fact exist and that Caesar had invented the place. It pleased Claudius to link his own name in this way with that of the greatest commander Rome had ever known.
“But apart from Caesar’s writings, almost nothing is known about the island,” his commanders complained.
Nonsense, the scholar emperor had told them, a great deal was known.
This was an overstatement; but it was true that for centuries accounts of the island had been written, usually by Greek merchants, who had journeyed to the land of mists across the sea; and only a few years before, his own kinsman – the old Emperor Tiberius – had commissioned the great geographer Strabo to prepare a treatise on its trade. Britain, it seemed, was rich.