The Pillars of the Earth

  "Oh, Tom, if it was just me, I'd stay," she said sadly. "But look at my son."

  Tom looked at Jack. His face was purple with bruising, his ear was swollen to twice its normal size, his nostrils were full of dried blood and he had a broken front tooth.

  Ellen said: "I was afraid he would grow up like an animal if we stayed in the forest. But if this is the price of teaching him to live with other people, it's too much to pay. So I'm going back to the forest."

  "Don't say that," Tom said desperately. "Let's talk about it. Don't make a rash decision--"

  "It's not rash, it's not rash, Tom," she said sorrowfully. "I'm so sad that I can't even be angry anymore. I really wanted to be your wife. But not at any cost."

  If Alfred had not chased Jack, none of this would have happened, Tom thought. But it was only a boyish scrap, wasn't it? Or was Ellen right when she said Tom had a blind spot about Alfred? Tom began to feel he had been wrong. Perhaps he should have taken a firmer line with Alfred. Boys fighting was one thing, but Jack and Martha were smaller than Alfred. Perhaps he was a bully.

  But it was too late to change that now. "Stay in the village," Tom said desperately. "Wait a while and see what happens."

  "I don't suppose the monks will let me, now."

  He realized she was right. The village was owned by the priory and all the householders paid rent to the monks--usually in the form of days of work--and the monks could refuse to house anyone they did not like. They could hardly be blamed if they rejected Ellen. She had made her decision and she had literally pissed on her chances of retracting it.

  "I'll go with you, then," he said. "The monastery owes me seventy-two pennies already. We'll go on the road again. We survived before...."

  "What about your children?" she said gently.

  Tom remembered how Martha had cried from hunger. He knew he could not make her go through that again. And there was his baby son, Jonathan, living here with the monks. I don't want to leave him again, Tom thought; I did it once, and hated myself for it.

  But he could not bear the thought of losing Ellen.

  "Don't tear yourself apart," she said. "I won't tramp the roads with you again. That's no solution--we'd be worse off than we are now, in every way. I'm going back to the forest, and you're not coming with me."

  He stared at her. He wanted to believe that she did not mean it, but the look on her face told him she did. He could not think of anything more to say to stop her. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. He felt helpless. She was breathing hard, her bosom rising and falling with emotion. He wanted to touch her, but he felt she did not want him to. I may never embrace her again, he thought. It was hard to believe. For weeks he had lain with her every night, and touched her as familiarly as he would touch himself; and now suddenly it was forbidden, and she was like a stranger.

  "Don't look so sad," she said. Her eyes were full of tears.

  "I can't help it," he said. "I am sad."

  "I'm sorry I've made you so unhappy."

  "Don't be sorry for that. Be sorry that you made me so happy. That's what hurts, woman. That you made me so happy."

  A sob escaped from her lips. She turned away and left without another word.

  Jack and Martha went out after her. Alfred hesitated, looking awkward, then followed them.

  Tom stood staring at the chair she had left. No, he thought, it can't be true, she isn't leaving me.

  He sat down in the chair. It was still warm from her body, the body he loved so much. He stiffened his face to stop the tears.

  He knew she would not change her mind now. She never vacillated: she was a person who made a decision and then carried it through.

  She might regret it eventually, though.

  He seized on that shred of hope. He knew she loved him. That had not changed. Only last night she had made love frantically, like someone slaking a terrible thirst; and after he was satisfied she had rolled on top of him and carried on, kissing him hungrily, gasping into his beard as she came time and time again, until she was too exhausted with pleasure to go on. And it was not just the fucking that she liked. They enjoyed being together all the time. They talked constantly, much more than he and Agnes had talked even in the early days. She's going to miss me as much as I'll miss her, he thought. After a while, when her anger has died down, and she has settled into a new routine, she'll hanker for someone to talk to, a hard body to touch, a bearded face to kiss. Then she'll think of me. But she was proud. She might be too proud to come back even if she wanted to.

  He sprang out of his chair. He had to tell her what was on his mind. He left the house. She was at the priory gate, saying goodbye to Martha. Tom ran past the stable and caught up with her.

  She gave him a sad smile. "Goodbye, Tom."

  He took her hands. "Will you come back, one day? Just to see us? If I know you're not going away forever, that I will see you again sometime, if only for a little while--if I know that I can bear it."

  She hesitated.

  "Please?"

  "All right," she said.

  "Swear it."

  "I don't believe in oaths."

  "But I do."

  "All right. I swear it."

  "Thank you." He pulled her gently to him. She did not resist him. He hugged her, and his control broke. Tears poured down his face. At last she drew away. Reluctantly he let her go. She turned toward the gate.

  At that moment there was a noise from the stable, the sound of a spirited horse being disobedient, stamping and snorting. Automatically, they all looked round. The horse was Waleran Bigod's black stallion, and the bishop was about to mount. His eyes met Ellen's, and he froze.

  At that moment she started to sing.

  Tom did not know the song, although he had heard her sing often. The melody was terribly sad. The words were French, but he could understand them well enough.

  A lark, caught in a hunter's net

  Sang sweeter then than ever,

  As if the falling melody

  Might wing and net dissever.

  Tom looked from her to the bishop. Waleran was terrified: his mouth was open, his eyes wide, his face as white as death. Tom was astonished: why did a simple song have the power to scare such a man?

  At dusk the hunter took his prey,

  The lark his freedom never.

  All birds and men are sure to die

  But songs may live forever.

  Ellen called out: "Goodbye, Waleran Bigod. I'm leaving Kingsbridge, but I'm not leaving you. I'll be with you in your dreams."

  And mine, Tom thought.

  For a moment no one moved.

  Ellen turned away, holding Jack's hand; and they all watched in silence as she marched out through the priory gates and disappeared into the gathering dusk.

  PART TWO

  1136-1137

  Chapter 5

  AFTER ELLEN HAD GONE, Sundays were very quiet at the guesthouse. Alfred played football with the village boys in the meadow on the other side of the river. Martha, who missed Jack, played pretend games, gathering vegetables and making pottage and dressing a doll. Tom worked on his cathedral design.

  He had hinted to Philip, once or twice, that he should think about what kind of church he wanted to build, but Philip had not noticed, or had chosen to ignore the implication. He had a lot on his mind. But Tom thought about little else, especially on Sundays.

  He liked to sit just inside the door of the guesthouse and look across the green at the cathedral ruins. He made sketches on a piece of slate sometimes, but most of the work was in his head. He knew that it was hard for most people to visualize solid objects and complex spaces, but he had always found it easy.

  He had won Philip's trust and gratitude for the way he had dealt with the ruins; but Philip still saw him as a jobbing mason. He had to convince Philip that he was capable of designing and building a cathedral.

  One Sunday about two months after Ellen left, he felt ready to begin drawing.

  He made a mat of
woven reeds and pliable twigs, about three feet by two. He made neat wooden sides to the mat so that it had raised edges, like a tray. Then he burned some chalk for lime, mixed up a small quantity of strong plaster, and filled the tray with the mixture. As the mortar began to harden, he drew lines in it with a needle. He used his iron foot rule for straight lines, his set square for right angles and his compasses for curves.

  He would do three drawings: a section, to explain how the church was constructed; an elevation, to illustrate its beautiful proportions; and a floor plan to show the accommodation. He began with the section.

  He imagined that the cathedral was like a long loaf of bread, then he cut off the crust at the west end, to see inside, and he began to draw.

  It was very simple. He drew a tall flat-topped archway. That was the nave, seen from the end. It would have a flat wooden ceiling, like the old church. Tom would have greatly preferred to build a curved stone vault, but he knew Philip could not afford it.

  On top of the nave he drew a triangular roof. The width of the building was determined by the width of the roof, and that in turn was limited by the timber available. It was difficult to get hold of beams longer than about thirty-five feet--and they were fiercely expensive. (Good timber was so valuable that a fine tree was liable to be chopped down and sold by its owner long before it was that high.) The nave of Tom's cathedral would probably be thirty-two feet wide, or twice the length of Tom's iron pole.

  The nave he had drawn was high, impossibly high. But a cathedral had to be a dramatic building, awe-inspiring in its size, pulling the eye heavenward with its loftiness. One reason people came to them was that cathedrals were the largest buildings in the world: a man who never went to a cathedral could go through life without seeing a building much bigger than the hovel he lived in.

  Unfortunately, the building Tom had drawn would fall down. The weight of lead and timber in the roof would be too much for the walls, which would buckle outward and collapse. They had to be propped up.

  For that purpose Tom drew two roundtopped archways, half the height of the nave, one on either side. These were the aisles. They would have curved stone ceilings: since the aisles were lower and narrower, the expense of stone vaults was not so great. Each aisle would have a sloping lean-to roof.

  The side aisles, joined to the nave by their stone vaults, provided some support, but they did not reach quite high enough. Tom would build extra supports, at intervals, in the roof space of the side aisles, above the vaulted ceiling and below the lean-to roof. He drew one of them, a stone arch rising from the top of the aisle wall across to the nave wall. Where the support rested on the aisle wall, Tom braced it further with a massive buttress jutting out from the side of the church. He put a turret on top of the buttress, to add weight and make it look nicer.

  You could not have an awesomely tall church without the strengthening elements of aisles, supports and buttresses; but this might be difficult to explain to a monk, and Tom had drawn the sketch to help make it clear.

  He also drew the foundations, going far underground beneath the walls. Laymen were always surprised at how deep foundations were.

  It was a simple drawing, too simple to be of much use to builders; but it should be right for showing to Prior Philip. Tom wanted him to understand what was being proposed, visualize the building, and get excited about it. It was hard to imagine a big, solid church when what was in front of you was a few lines scratched in plaster. Philip would need all the help Tom could give him.

  The walls he had drawn looked solid, seen end on, but they would not be. Tom now began to draw the side view of the nave wall, as seen from inside the church. It was pierced at three levels. The bottom half was hardly a wall at all: it was just a row of columns, their tops joined by semicircular arches. It was called the arcade. Through the archways of the arcade could be seen the round-headed windows of the aisles. The windows would be neatly lined up with the archways, so that light from outside could fall, unobstructed, into the nave. The columns in between would be lined up with the buttresses on the outside walls.

  Above each arch of the arcade was a row of three small arches, forming the tribune gallery. No light would come through these, for behind them was the lean-to roof of the side aisle.

  Above the gallery was the clerestory, so called because it was pierced with windows which lit the upper half of the nave.

  In the days when the old Kingsbridge Cathedral had been built, masons had relied on thick walls for strength, and had nervously inserted mean little windows that let in hardly any light. Modern builders understood that a building would be strong enough if its walls were straight and true.

  Tom designed the three levels of the nave wall--arcade, gallery and clerestory--strictly in the proportions 3:1:2. The arcade was half the height of the wall, and the gallery was one third of the rest. Proportion was everything in a church: it gave a subliminal feeling of rightness to the whole building. Studying the finished drawing, Tom thought it looked perfectly graceful. But would Philip think so? Tom could see the tiers of arches marching down the length of the church, with their moldings and carvings picked out by an afternoon sun ... but would Philip see the same?

  He began his third drawing. This was a floor plan of the church. In his imagination he saw twelve arches in the arcade. The church was therefore divided into twelve sections, called bays. The nave would be six bays long, the chancel four. In between, taking up the space of the seventh and eighth bays, would be the crossing, with the transepts sticking out either side and the tower rising above.

  All cathedrals and nearly all churches were cross-shaped. The cross was the single most important symbol of Christianity, of course, but there was a practical reason too: the transepts provided useful space for extra chapels and offices such as the sacristry and the vestry.

  When he had drawn a simple floor plan Tom returned to the central drawing, which showed the interior of the church viewed from the west end. Now he drew the tower rising above and behind the nave.

  The tower should be either one and a half times the height of the nave, or double it. The lower alternative gave the building an attractively regular profile, with the aisles, the nave and the tower rising in equal steps, 1:2:3. The higher tower would be more dramatic, for then the nave would be double the size of the aisles, and the tower double the nave, the proportions being 1:2:4. Tom had chosen the dramatic: this was the only cathedral he would ever build, and he wanted it to reach for the sky. He hoped Philip would feel the same.

  If Philip accepted the design, Tom would have to draw it again, of course, more carefully and exactly to scale. And there would be many more drawings, hundreds of them: plinths, columns, capitals, corbels, doorcases, turrets, stairs, gargoyles, and countless other details--Tom would be drawing for years. But what he had in front of him was the essence of the building, and it was good: simple, inexpensive, graceful and perfectly proportioned.

  He could not wait to show it to someone.

  He had planned to find a suitable moment to take it to Prior Philip; but now that it was done he wanted Philip to see it right away.

  Would Philip think him presumptuous? The prior had not asked him to prepare a design. He might have another master builder in mind, someone he had heard of who had worked for another monastery and had done a good job. He might scorn Tom's aspirations.

  On the other hand, if Tom did not show him something, Philip might assume Tom was not capable of designing, and might hire someone else without even considering Tom. Tom was not prepared to risk that: he would rather be thought presumptuous.

  The afternoon was still light. It would be study time in the cloisters. Philip would be at the prior's house, reading his Bible. Tom decided to go and knock at his door.

  Carrying his board carefully, he left the house.

  As he walked past the ruins, the prospect of building a new cathedral suddenly seemed daunting: all that stone, all that timber, all those craftsmen, all those years. He would have to contr
ol it all, make sure there was a steady supply of materials, monitor the quality of timber and stone, hire and fire men, tirelessly check their work with his plumb line and level, make templates for the moldings, design and build lifting machines ... He wondered if he really was capable of it.

  Then he thought what a thrill it would be to create something from nothing; to see, one day in the future, a new church here where now there was nothing but rubble, and to say: I made this.

  There was another thought in his mind, hidden away in a dusty corner; something he was hardly willing to admit to himself. Agnes had died without a priest, and she was buried in unconsecrated ground. He would have liked to go back to her grave, and get a priest to say prayers over it, and perhaps put up a small headstone; but he was afraid that if he called attention to her burying place in any way, somehow the whole story of abandoning the baby would come out. Leaving a baby to die still counted as murder. As the weeks went by he had worried more and more about Agnes's soul, and whether it was in a good place or not. He was afraid to ask a priest about it because he did not want to give details. But he had consoled himself with the thought that if he built a cathedral, God would surely favor him; and he wondered whether he could ask that Agnes receive the benefit of that favor instead of himself. If he could dedicate his work on the cathedral to Agnes, he would feel that her soul was safe, and he could rest easy.

  He reached the prior's house. It was a small stone building on one level. The door stood open, although it was a cold day. He hesitated for a moment. Calm, competent, knowledgeable, expert, he said to himself. A master of every aspect of modern building. Just the man you'd cheerfully trust.

  He stepped inside. There was only one room. At one end was a big bed with luxurious hangings; at the other a small altar with a crucifix and a candlestick. Prior Philip stood by a window, reading from a vellum sheet with a worried frown. He looked up and smiled at Tom. "What's that you've got?"

  "Drawings, Father," Tom said, making his voice deep and reassuring. "For a new cathedral. May I show you?"

  Philip looked surprised but intrigued. "By all means." There was a large lectern in a corner. Tom brought it into the light by the window and put his plaster frame on its angled rest. Philip looked at the drawing. Tom watched Philip's face. He could tell that Philip had never seen an elevation drawing, a floor plan or a section through a building. The prior's face wore a puzzled frown.