Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [91]
Later that morning, a party of three priests sent by Dluc approached across the snow.
With scarcely a word to the mason, they inspected the sarsens and stared at the white ridges.
“How will you move them?” they finally asked.
Nooma looked miserably at the ground.
“I do not know.”
“Find a way,” they told him, and departed across the snow.
The mason hunched his shoulders and thought. He knew now very well what fate awaited him if he failed.
Meanwhile, the men were becoming restive. They were cold; many were ill; one man who had wandered away from the tents in the blizzard had died. They wanted to go home. Nooma did not know what to do. He stamped about in the snow and made one attempt to move a sarsen on a huge sled. He knew it would fail. It did. Tark moved amongst the men, trying to keep their spirits up; but even he did not have much success.
By the afternoon, Nooma wanted to let the men return to their homes; but the priests accompanying them forbade it.
“The High Priest requires you to finish the task,” they said. “Stay here until you do.”
When three men tried to escape, the priests caught them and flogged them unmercifully, and left them bleeding in the snow. There were no more attempts to leave.
For two more cold and bitter days, Nooma and his thousand men waited, inadequately camped, on the cold, bare ridge; and at the end of that time, Nooma could only see the prospect of a miracle from the gods themselves, or the failure of all his plans and his own execution.
When Dluc had recovered from his first fury at the incompetence of the mason in falling behind with the work, and when he got over his shock at the sudden snowstorm, he knew what he must do.
At the henge, in the thick snow, a space was hurriedly cleared on the altar stone, and Dluc himself sacrificed six rams to the sun god, while the priests knelt in the snow.
“Great sun,” he cried, “your servant Dluc has placed his trust in you. We await your will.”
And conquering his doubts he told the priests:
“The temple will be built. It is the will of the gods. The sun god will help us.”
The sun god heard them.
For on the third day, a warm wind blew up from the south west, bringing with it a heavy rain that fell steadily all day, and began a general thaw. Then, that same night, while the drenched ridges were awash, the wind changed yet again, the sky cleared, and there was a heavy frost. The temperature plummeted, and the following morning when Nooma looked out from the camp, he saw an extraordinary scene.
It was unlike anything he had witnessed before. For mile after mile, as far as the eye could see, over the rolling ridges and under a clear blue sky, there lay a sparkling land of solid ice; as the sun struck the ground, it dazzled him. He stamped on the ground. It was hard as iron. He took a stone out of his pouch and hurled it. The stone bounced and slithered away for a hundred yards.
Nooma smiled.
“I think,” he muttered, “that now we can move the sarsens.”
He was right. For now he could construct the huge sleds, as he had tried so unsuccessfully to do before; and this time they worked. When the teams of men hauled on the long leather ropes, the mighty stones on their sleds now hissed easily over the unyielding ice on the bare ridges.
There were still problems. On the long downward slopes between the ridges, it was necessary for two or three small teams of men to go in front, to steer the sleds; the bulk of the men on these occasions being placed behind the stones, steadying them and preventing them from rushing forward down the slope. But their foothold on the slippery ice was precarious and the danger