Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [59]
“More birds.”
Thirty-three were inspected before Dluc said:
“Then we are all agreed?” and his priests, glancing at one another in apprehension, nodded.
But it was the last question: “How are we to know Krona’s chosen bride?” that produced the strangest and most enigmatic answer of all, for in each bird, and twenty were opened, small specks of gold dust were found in the very top of the intestine: a very rare phenomenon which was repeated again and again. At last, when the priests had agreed on the message that the entrails conveyed, they were hardly less puzzled than when they had begun.
Dluc gave Krona the news that night.
“You will have an heir,” the priest assured him. “But first, the gods demand a new henge, made of stone.” This was the meaning of the pellets of stone found in many of the birds. “It is to be greater than any temple built before.”
Krona nodded.
“If it is the will of the gods, let the work be done.”
“The gods demand that you give your firstborn child to be sacrificed. After that, you will have a son who will succeed you. It will be your pledge that you submit to the power of sun, and he demands it.”
It was a terrible message. Krona weakly protested:
“I am growing old. Will there be time?”
“The gods will grant you time,” Dluc assured him. “Your son will be a great chief.”
The chief sighed. “And who is to be my bride?”
Dluc frowned. This was the part of the message that had puzzled the priests most.
“Her head will be crowned with gold,” he replied.
Krona stared at him. “What does that mean?”
“I am not sure,” the High Priest confessed. “Perhaps that she is the daughter of a great chief.”
“Find her quickly,” Krona growled.
There was one other condition laid down by the gods in the auguries, and it was this one that had caused the priests to look at each other with such apprehension: it was the date by which the new henge must be completed:
The henge must be finished by the day when the sun looks into the moon’s full face along the avenue.
To the astronomer priests who knew the mysteries of Stonehenge, this cryptic statement could only have one meaning.
For their henge was a wonderful and complex instrument. Not only did the sun’s shadow on the markers tell the days of the year; many other wonders took place there.
“At the summer solstice,” the older priests explained to the novices, “in certain years, not only does the sun god rise along the avenue, but the moon goddess sets opposite him. And at mid-winter solstice, the positions are reversed; and while sun departs in the south west, moon rises along the avenue.” Sun and moon, male and female, summer and winter: all of these perfect oppositions were contained in the great circle.
There were many other subtle coincidences and angles between the solar and lunar paths. “And these do not occur so perfectly at other henges in the far north,” the priests declared, “by which we know that our henge is especially favoured by the gods.”
In fact this was correct, although their science was not able to discover the true reason. For the relationships between the sun and moon will alter at different latitudes on the globe.
But there were greater secrets than this. Some time after the henge was first built, its astronomers made another discovery: that the moon in its orbit round the earth does not follow a single path, but that it oscillates from side to side in a subtle cycle of its own, which is repeated every nineteen years.
“There at the entrance,” the novices were told, “the priests of old set up the markers to record the shifts of the moon goddess back and forth along the horizon. For at each winter solstice, she returns to a slightly different spot when she rises – you would never notice it from one year to the next unless you marked the spot, but it is so. And she swings from side to side, back and forth