Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [85]
Each night, when he had made his observations, he waited for the dawn and then, as the sun god rose over the horizon in all his glory he would cry out:
“Greatest of all gods, Sun, Dluc has not deserted you! This is still your temple.”
There was one mystery however, above all others, that Dluc wished to solve; and when Nooma had seen the priests go out, night after night, it was on this, the High Priest’s life’s work, that they were so busily engaged.
Each month, as he surveyed the results of the labours he had ordered, he would pace about and burst out “Why – why do all our efforts fail? Why do the gods hide from us their greatest secrets?”
“Priests have tried to solve the problem for many generations,” the other priests replied.
But to Dluc, this was no comfort.
What the High Priest was so anxious to discover was the pattern that underlay the most significant, and the most dramatic of all the alignments in the heavens: the eclipse of the sun. After all, the astronomers had succeeded in establishing all the sun’s movements and some, at least, of the moon’s. Why was it so difficult to discover this particular feature of their relative motions?
For despite all his meticulous recordings, Dluc knew neither that the earth was round nor could he know the basic organisation of the solar system, without which knowledge such a prediction was, mathematically, almost an impossibility. But since he did not know this, and since he was a perfectionist, the High Priest continued, night after night, to send his priests out on their thankless task.
“It shall be my life’s work,” he muttered. Indeed, the discovery of the secret of this celestial phenomenon, when the moon goddess dared to cover the face of the sun god himself, was dearer to his heart than even the building of the new Stonehenge.
Her size had only made Nooma suppose that the child would be large. He was taken by surprise when Katesh gave birth to a daughter a month early.
She seemed delighted; never before had the little mason seen his wife look so happy. When he came to her, she held the child up for him proudly to inspect.
“It’s a girl,” she said with a tired laugh. “You shall have another mason next time.”
And Nooma eagerly took the baby in his arms.
But then he frowned.
The child was not premature. He could see that at once. And as he looked more carefully, he noticed other things: it had a long, narrow head, unlike his; even at its birth, he could see that its fingers and toes were unusually long, too. Like those of Tark.
He stared at Katesh in silence; but she did not seem to sense anything amiss: her whole mind was full of her happiness with the child. She even smiled at him.
Carefully he handed the baby back to her; then, after a few words with the women who were helping her, he went outside.
It was warm. Slowly and thoughtfully, he made his way up the path to the high ground and there, looking over the sweeping ridges, he considered what he should do.
There was no doubt in his mind – the child was not his. It had been conceived while he was away at the quarry, and he had no doubt either that the father was Tark. Bitterly the mason thought of Katesh’s sudden passion for him when he had returned: now he understood the reason for it – she had guessed already that she was pregnant; in silent disgust he paced along the ridge and as he thought about how he had been made a fool of by both his wife and his friend, the little fellow clasped and unclasped his stubby hands in rage.
It was some hours before he came down, having reached no conclusion.
That evening he ate alone; then, as the stars came out, he sat in front of the hut by himself and went over the alternatives again.
By the custom of Sarum, he knew, he could accuse his wife to the priests, and if she was found guilty, then she would be put to death and Tark would have to pay him compensation. That was the punishment for such a crime, and for a time Nooma considered it.
But he had loved Katesh once; he could not give her up to such a fate.
He would not even punish her: