Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [73]
They were awesome: and when the people saw them at the festival, there was a gasp of wonder.
“The new temple will be the greatest ever built,” they said; and they were right.
The harvest was the best in living memory; Krona now smiled as the High Priest had not seen him do for years; Raka grew big with child.
“The sun god smiles on us at last,” Krona said to the priest, who nodded in agreement.
And summer passed and early autumn came, before the blow fell.
It was a warm, clear night in early autumn; the moon was in the thirteenth year of her cycle, with six years left before the great henge must be completed. Dluc and Krona were quietly conversing together in his house on the hill, and the High Priest was looking forward to his usual visit to the henge later that night, when suddenly a scream from another room brought both men hastily from their conference.
Raka had gone into early labour; and as soon as Dluc looked at her, he knew that something was badly wrong.
The rest of that night remained in his memory as a succession of blurred images: of Krona, distracted, cursing him; of his own, desperate prayers to the gods, and his awful conviction that they were useless; of Ina, as always, silent and strong, holding the poor girl in her arms; of the chief, ashen, leaving the room like a sleep-walker. But above all, it was the blood that he remembered. It seemed to be everywhere, as though a sacrifice had been messily performed. It covered the bed, the floor, even the walls. She had been dead, and so had the child before it left her body; it lay on the floor, a small, bloody, grey bundle of flesh, the death of all their hopes.
Then, while Ina, shaking her head, gathered up the dead child, her women began to keen and moan over Raka’s body, scattering herbs as they did so. And he, too, had wept.
He remembered the blood; and he remembered Krona’s face, when he went to him afterwards.
The chief was sitting alone in an out-house in which only two candles were lit; but by their light the priest could see his face clearly. It was more terrible than any human face he had seen: for it was not angry, nor in despair: it was blank.
When Dluc came towards him he stared as though he could see through him and, even before he spoke, the priest knew that he was mad.
Another, though quite insignificant series of events had been taking place in the valley below, during that summer.
It was by chance that Katesh had been standing by the riverbank below the hut one brilliant day in early summer when Tark the riverman had also chanced to bring Nooma the mason down the river from the henge to his home.
The water was moving slowly, and the long green waterweeds caused tiny eddies and ripples which caught the sun so that, as she watched with her baby, the surface of the water seemed to dance with light.
Katesh was contented that day. As she closed her eyes and let the warm sun play on her face, and then looked down at the chubby baby gurgling happily beside her, she felt a peacefulness she had not known for many months.
She had followed her mother’s advice. She had put all other thoughts out of her mind and tried to make her strange little husband happy; and in a way she had been rewarded.
For she loved her baby; as for her husband, if the other women sometimes smiled at his appearance, they were always quick to say:
“But you are lucky Katesh: your husband is the greatest mason of them all.”
She saw the canoe when it was still some distance away. Nooma had his back to her; Tark was paddling.
As she saw the squat little form of her husband, his broad strong back leaning forward as he earnestly made some point to the riverman, and the tall, spare form of Tark, as he quietly listened and guided the canoe down the steam, she could not help noticing how curious the little mason looked beside the riverman. For an instant – no longer she thought than one of the flashes of sunlight upon the surface of the river – it seemed to her that the small