Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [72]
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