Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [67]
“If there is no sign of your bride by Winter Day,” he finally said, “then we will send out other priests. You shall have a wife before midwinter.”
In the late autumn, to keep his own spirits up and to encourage the workers on the henge, the High Priest decided himself to visit the sarsen site to inspect Nooma’s progress with the stones.
It was a windswept afternoon when he arrived. Grey shafts of sunlight burst through the fissures in the heavy grey clouds and lit the bare landscape harshly. The cold north-east wind that drove the clouds over the moorland threw the dust from the stonework into the masons’ and the priests’ eyes.
Nooma, in his heavy leather apron, his grizzled hair powdered with dust, prostrated himself in front of the High Priest and at his command quickly conducted him round the site.
It was extraordinary what he had done. Already three huge sarsens lay ready to be moved, and several others were nearing completion. As the party threaded their way through the knots of men they came upon a huge rock that was about to be worked into shape. It lay along the surface, seven feet across and as long as ten men.
Nooma patted it.
“I can make one of the tallest uprights from this one,” he said with confidence, and pointed to where a group of men were busily engaged near the centre of the rock. “This is where we cut it,” he explained, and he showed the High Priest a deep V-shaped groove that he had made across the stone. Underneath, at the same place, the men had dug a trench in the ground which they had just filled with brushwood.
The act of cutting through the rock was a remarkable operation, and Dluc remained to watch it. First the men lit the brushwood and then they busily stoked it, pushing fresh wood into the trench with long poles. Soon the heat had become tremendous and the rock grew so hot that no-one could touch it. Nooma urged the men on. After a while, the rock began to glow, but still the mason was not satisfied. Then finally, when the air around the rock seemed to pulsate with the heat, and the men’s faces were burning, he gave the order: “Now the water;” and quickly the men ran forward with leather buckets of water which they emptied into the V; there was an explosion of steam.
“More! more!” he called and they slopped the water in, jumping back so as not to be scalded. The process went on for several frantic moments, and then there was a great crack and all the men cheered.
As the steam cleared, it could be seen that a fissure had opened right through the red hot rock at the point where the split had been made. There was no sarsen, however large, that the mason could not reduce in this way.
Then Nooma led the party of priests over the rest of the site. The sarsens were in all stages of preparation and Nooma supervised everything. In particular, he watched over the dressing of the stone, which his masons did by pounding them with hard, round stones, which removed a little of the surface at a time.
“You see,” he explained to them, “the men always strike downwards, from the top of the upright towards the bottom. That way, every stone will have a consistent surface.”
When the priest inspected a finished sarsen, he could see that it was covered with minute grooves all aligned in the same direction, giving it a single grain so that when the stones were all in position, the light would always strike a vertical edge, enhancing the graceful effect of the whole.
Truly, he could see, Nooma was a master of his craft.
It was just as the High Priest was admiring this work that a messenger came running over the downland towards them.
“High Priest,” he cried, “you must come at once to Sarum: Krona is sick.”
He was more than sick: he seemed to be dying. The High Priest learned that a fever had seized him the very day that he had left for the quarry, but the chief had ignored it. By the time the priests were called, it had grown rapidly worse and soon they had despaired of saving him.
When Dluc entered Krona’s house, he was lying on a bed