Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [83]
The next night the same thing-occurred again. And the next. It seemed that suddenly his wife had fallen violently in love with him; and the little mason, though he was astonished, rubbed his little hands together with joy. Now, when he told her about the wonder of the henge, or his work with the stones, or the problems he had overcome with his masons and labourers, instead of nodding absently, as she had usually done before, her face was full of admiration and she would ask him to tell her more.
“My husband is the greatest mason in the whole island,” she would smile. “All Sarum says so.”
And the mason was gratified that his young wife appreciated him.
All that winter, Nooma experienced an excitement and happiness that was even greater than that of the first year of their marriage. Katesh did everything she could to please him; and at nights her moans and cries of passion aroused him to new heights. Then, in the spring, he saw to his joy that at last his hopes had been realised and that Katesh was pregnant again; when he felt her belly with his strong little hands and kissed her, Katesh smiled at him happily, whispering:
“I think we shall have many more.”
Early in the summer, Nooma gave a sheep to the priests for his new child.
While all Sarum suffered under Krona’s madness and while the girls continued to be sacrificed, Nooma went quietly about his business with a happiness that it seemed nothing could shake.
His greatest delight at that time was to take his son with him to the henge. The boy was such an exact replica of his father that even the priests would smile with amusement as the two bandy-legged figures, one a diminutive version of the other, waddled around the henge to survey the work. Noo-ma-ti had quick little hands and loved to model figures with the clay his father brought him.
“He will be a master craftsman,” Nooma told the priests proudly. “Better than me.”
He would show the tiny boy the great sarsens he had made, running his hands over them lovingly and explaining the properties of the grey stone.
“You will learn to work stone,” he told the boy, “and to love the henge.”
For as the years had passed, the henge itself had begun to exercise a fascination upon the mason. Normally he would never have been allowed inside the earth circle, but his building work took him into the most sacred precincts so often that he grew used to the place and the ways of the priests. He came to love the broad encircling bank, the silent sanctum within, and the great avenue that pointed like an arrow at the dawn on the horizon. At the end of the day’s work, when dusk fell and the masons and labourers laid down their tools and departed, Nooma would often linger there, quietly tolerated by the silent priests as they went about their nightly tasks. The henge, he realised, had a strange, echoing quality about it when one stood inside and the light receded from the empty sky above. Was it the wide circle of the chalk bank? Was it the sarsens as the temple neared completion? He could not say; but he knew that it affected him.
He was fascinated also by the activities of the priests. Some things they did he understood. Each day at dawn, for instance, a careful note was made of the sun’s position as it rose; precise sightings were taken over the fifty-six wooden markers that stood in their circle just inside the perimeter wall. Each day he would watch as the priests noted the small difference in the sun’s position from the day before, adding each to their tally; and before long he found that he, too, could reckon the days and months with precision.
But some of their other activities baffled him. As dusk fell, little parties of priests would move about on the high ground around the henge carrying sticks and long strings of flax. With these they would take sightings of the stars, noting the motions of the moon and the planets, quietly pacing about until the first signs of dawn appeared, making ever more complex patterns