Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [84]
“The ways of the priests are very strange.”
As the summer continued and Katesh grew big, Nooma was excited.
“It will be another boy,” he said, “Another mason. I am sure of it.”
Katesh laughed whenever she heard this. “I think it’s a girl,” she told him.
“Perhaps,” he admitted, but immediately brightened: “Then she will look like you,” he decided happily.
One day when he held her belly and felt the child kicking inside he remarked:
“I think it is bigger than Noo-ma-ti was. When is it due?”
Katesh shrugged.
“When it arrives. Two months I think.”
“I still think it is bigger than the boy,” he said.
But soon afterwards, when he was at the henge, he realised that his wife had made a small error. Glancing at the fifty-six calendar posts, he realised that the sun’s position had only changed by six months since his return. The child could not be due for three months. He grinned to himself at his wife’s carelessness with the dates.
“She will have to wait a little longer than she thinks,” he chuckled; but just then one of the workers came to him with a problem and the matter went out of his mind.
It was only at night, during those terrible years, that the spirit of the High Priest found peace.
At night he would go up to the sacred high ground, walking alone past the pale chalk houses of the dead, and enter the great circle of the henge. There, and only there, in the silence under the huge blackness of the night sky he could recover his spirit. And despite all Krona’s madness and Sarum’s grief, it was during those years some of his best, his most precise observation of the heavenly bodies was accomplished.
The stars were his companions. Each night he looked up and saw the constellations shining down upon the henge: the ram, the deer, the auroch, and the constellation he loved the most of all, the stately swan that filled the northern sky – these were his faithful friends. So too was the milky way that stretched across the panoply of stars like a gleaming chalk path leading down to the horizon. Whatever madness was passing there below, the stars still shone with a pure and constant light, and when he saw them his faith in the immutable gods would return.
He found comfort in the secret mathematics of the heavens. It was he who had restored the fifty-six wooden markers to their honoured place within the circle of the sanctum’s walls: for had not the ancient priests, in the course of their endless tabulations, discovered the mystic properties of that sacred number? Was it not true that between three solar years and three lunar years of thirteen lunar months, there was an interval of fifty-six days? And was it not also true that between five solar years and five lunar years, if this time the lunar year was reckoned as twelve lunations, there would be an identical interval of fifty-six days? It was! In these secret ways, he knew, the gods revealed their harmonies to the priests who honoured them and studied their movements with reverence.
It was during this period that he charted the motions of the five moving stars. For countless generations the astronomers had recorded the appearance and disappearance of these wanderers across the heavens and had decided that they must be the sons and daughters of the sun and moon. But they had never been able to discover the exact pattern of their movements and the magic numbers which, they knew, must govern these motions. Night after night his gaunt, angular figure could be seen as he silently placed markers on the ground, joining them with lengths of twine in his efforts to discover these secrets; and often there were so many of these markers spread over the henge that in the morning the junior priests would whisper:
“See, Dluc the spider has been weaving his web again.”
He thought that he had established the pattern for two of them, which he added to the sacred sayings of the priests. But the other three