Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [80]
“Give her to the moon goddess,” he raved. “She accepts my sacrifices though the sun does not!” When the priest still tried to argue, he swore: “Then I will kill her myself.” And again he threatened: “If you will not perform my sacrifice. I will stop the work on the henge.”
Sometimes, after this, he would be calmer, put out his hand and take Dluc by the arm. “Sarum must have an heir,” he would remind him urgently. “Time is passing.” And Dluc would shake his head, for he had no solution to offer.
In the end, the High Priest always did as Krona asked. It seemed to him that the girls would be better sacrificed than murdered by Krona: for those sacrificed to the gods were received by them at once after death, and walked with the spirits on the sacred grounds.
Every three months a new girl was sacrificed on the altar, while the henge slowly grew, and Krona’s servants would go out to find another victim for his bed. The farmers began to hide their daughters to save them from this fate, but such attempts were useless. Krona’s servants were cunning, their spies were everywhere; nothing and no one could escape them. And often they would come to the chosen house at night, dragging the girl from her couch, slashing and hacking at her parents with their terrible stone axes if they dared to protest.
As for Krona, it seemed to Dluc that he became more than ever like a bird of prey. Physically he did not deteriorate. Indeed, apart from the fact that his hair was grey, he looked as fit as he had been in years. But he was, in a way, no longer a man, so hardened had he become by this appalling way of life. He cast off each girl as casually as if she had been one of his cattle to be slaughtered.
When the red harvest moon appeared, no one at Sarum rejoiced any more, as they used to do.
“See,” people whispered, “Krona has filled the moon with blood.”
None of Krona’s girls conceived. The priests sacrificed nineteen of them.
Krona knew, for nothing was hidden from him, that the priests still performed secret rites to the sun god. Many times he summoned the High Priest to him and raged:
“You make the moon goddess angry!” And each time that another girl failed to conceive he shouted: “This is all your fault.” Several times he became so angry that Dluc feared for his life, but even in his rage Krona hesitated to strike down the High Priest. And it occurred to Dluc that perhaps even in his madness, the chief was still secretly afraid of the sun god.
The work on the new Stonehenge went on. But with what a change! The men no longer sang hymns as they dragged the sarsens over the chalk ridges: they were silent and sullen; even Nooma’s masons had to be watched carefully.
“Sarum is cursed,” they said. “What’s the use of building a new temple?”
And sometimes the priests had to whip the labourers to make them approach the sacred grounds at all.
Somehow faithful Nooma, his solemn face serene, his little hands always busy, led the masons and kept them all at work. But despite the beauty of the new building, which was already become apparent, it was often a long and bitter task, and sometimes when he was alone in the henge at night, the High Priest would cry out into the sky:
“Give me a sign, Sun and Moon – give me some sign, at least, that we are doing your will.”
Nearly five years of Krona’s madness had passed when Dluc sacrificed the nineteenth of his luckless victims. She was little more than a child – a dark haired, dark eyed, creature with a pretty little red mouth. Her terror when she was dragged from her parent’s hut to the house on the hill was heart rending. Dluc had seen her with Krona twice in the three months she was allotted to give him an heir and watched her pathetic attempts to please him, which the chief accepted with a coldness that was terrible. He knew that it was said that a woman who is frightened is more likely to conceive; but in the case of Krona’s women, it seemed to make no difference. When Dluc slit her throat, her wild, child’s eyes gazed up at him as though to ask: “Why?”
And