The Pillars of the Earth (121 page)

The sun came up into a clear blue sky. It was going to be a hot day. The priory kitchen supplied barrels of beer, but Philip ordered it to be watered, and Jack approved, for people who were working hard would drink a lot in this weather, and he did not want them falling asleep.

Despite the awful danger there was an incongruous air of jollity. It was like a holiday, when the whole town did something together, like making bread on Lammas Day or floating candles downstream on Midsummer Eve, People seemed to forget the peril which was the reason for their activity. However, Philip did see a few people discreetly leaving town. Either they were going to take their chances in the forest, or more likely they had relations in outlying villages who would take them in. Nevertheless, nearly everyone stayed.

At noon Philip rang the bell again, and work stopped for dinner. Philip made a tour of the wall with Jack while the workers were eating. Despite all the activity they did not seem to have achieved much. The stone walls had only reached ground level, the earth ramparts were still low mounds, and there were vast gaps in the wooden fence.

At the end of their tour Philip said: “Are we going to finish in time?”

Jack had been purposely cheerful and optimistic all morning, but now he forced himself to make a realistic assessment. “At this rate, no,” he said despondently.

“What can we do to speed things up?”

“The only way to build faster is to build worse, normally.”

“Then let’s build worse—but how?”

Jack considered. “At the moment we’ve got masons building walls, carpenters building fences, laborers making earthworks, and townspeople fetching and carrying. But most carpenters can build a straightforward wall, and most laborers can put up a wooden fence. So let’s get the carpenters to help the masons with the stonework, have the laborers build the fences, and let the townspeople dig the ditch and throw up the ramparts. And as soon as the operation is running smoothly, the younger monks can forget about organization and help with the laboring.”

“All right.”

They gave the new orders as people were finishing dinner. Not only would this be the worst-built wall in England, Jack thought; it would probably be the shortest-lived. If all of it was still standing in a week’s time, it would be a miracle.

During the afternoon, people began to get tired, especially those who had been up in the night. The holiday atmosphere evaporated and the workers became grimly determined. The stone walls rose, the ditch got deeper, and the gaps in the fence began to close. They stopped work for supper, as the sun dipped toward the western skyline, then began again.

At nightfall the wall was not complete.

Philip set a watch, ordered everyone except the guards to get a few hours of sleep, and said he would ring the bell at midnight. The exhausted townspeople went to their beds.

Jack went to Aliena’s house. She and Richard were still awake.

Jack said to Aliena: “I want you to take Tommy and go and hide in the woods.”

The thought had been in the back of his mind all day. At first he had rejected the idea; but as time went on he kept returning to the dreadful memory of the day William burned the fleece fair; and in the end he decided to send her away.

“I’d rather stay,” she said firmly.

Jack said: “Aliena, I don’t know if this is going to work, and I don’t want you to be here if William Hamleigh gets past this wall.”

“But I can’t leave while you’re organizing everyone else to stay and fight,” she said reasonably.

He was long past worrying about what was reasonable. “If you go now they won’t know.”

“They’ll realize eventually.”

“By then it will be over.”

“But think about the disgrace.”

“To hell with the disgrace!” he shouted. He was mad with frustration at not being able to find the words to persuade her. “I want you to be safe!”

His angry voice woke Tommy, who started to cry. Aliena picked him up and rocked him. She said: “I’m not even sure I’d be safer in the forest.”

“William won’t be searching the forest. It’s the town he’s interested in.”

“He might be interested in me.”

“You could hide in your glade. Nobody ever goes there.”

“William might find it by accident.”

“Listen to me. You’ll be safer there than here. I know it.”

“All the same I want to stay here.”

“I don’t want you here,” he said harshly.

“Well, I’m staying anyway,” she replied with a smile, ignoring his deliberate rudeness.

Jack suppressed a curse. There was no arguing with her once she had made up her mind: she was as stubborn as a mule. He pleaded with her instead. “Aliena, I’m scared of what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

“I’m scared, too,” she said. “And I think we should be scared together.”

He knew he should give in gracefully, but he was too worried. “Damn you, then,” he said angrily, and he stormed out.

He stood outside, breathing the night air. After a few moments he cooled down. He was still terribly worried, but it was foolish to be angry with her: they might both die in the morning.

He went back inside. She was standing where he had left her, looking sad. “I love you,” he said. They embraced, and stood like that for a long while.

When he went out again the moon was up. He calmed himself with the thought that Aliena might even be right: she could be safer here than in the woods. At least this way he would know if she was in trouble, and could do his best to protect her.

He knew he would not sleep, even if he went to bed. He had a foolish fear that everyone might sleep past midnight, and nobody would wake until dawn when William’s men rode in slashing and burning. He walked restlessly around the edge of the town. It was odd: Kingsbridge had never had a perimeter until today. The stone walls were waist-high, which was not enough. The fences were high but there were still enough gaps for a hundred men to ride through in a few moments. The earth ramparts were not too high for a good horse to surmount. There was a lot to do.

He stopped at the place where the bridge used to be. It had been taken to pieces, and the parts had been stored in the priory. He looked over the moonlit water. He saw a shadowy figure approach along the line of the wooden fence, and felt a shiver of superstitious apprehension, but it was only Prior Philip, as sleepless as Jack.

For the moment Jack’s grudge against Philip had been overshadowed by the threat from William, and Jack did not feel unfriendly toward Philip. He said: “If we survive this, we should rebuild the wall, bit by bit.”

“I agree,” Philip said fervently. “We should aim to have a stone wall right around the town within a year.”

“Just here, where the bridge crosses the river, I would put a gate and a barbican, so that we could keep people out without dismantling the bridge.”

“It’s not the kind of thing we monks are good at—organizing town defenses.”

Jack nodded. They were not supposed to be involved in any kind of violence. “But if you don’t organize it, who will?”

“How about Aliena’s brother, Richard?”

Jack was startled by that idea, but a moment’s reflection led him to realize that it was brilliant. “He’d do it well, it would keep him from idleness, and I wouldn’t have to support him any longer,” he said enthusiastically. He looked at Philip with reluctant admiration. “You never stop, do you?”

Philip shrugged. “I wish all our problems could be solved so simply.”

Jack’s mind returned to the wall. “I suppose Kingsbridge will now be a fortified town forevermore.”

“Not forever, but certainly until Jesus comes again.”

“You never know,” Jack said speculatively. “There may come a time when savages like William Hamleigh aren’t in power; when the laws protect the ordinary people instead of enslaving them; when the king makes peace instead of war. Think of that—a time when towns in England don’t need walls!”

Philip shook his head. “What an imagination,” he said. “It won’t happen before Judgment Day.”

“I suppose not.”

“It must be almost midnight. Time to start again.”

“Philip. Before you go.”

“What?”

Jack took a deep breath. “There’s still time to change our plan. We could evacuate the town now.”

“Are you afraid, Jack?” Philip said, not unkindly.

“Yes. But not for myself. For my family.”

Philip nodded. “Look at it this way. If you leave now, you will probably be safe—tomorrow. But William may come another day. If we let him have his way tomorrow, we will
always
live in fear. You, me, Aliena, and little Tommy, too: he’ll grow up in fear of William, or someone like William.”

He was right, Jack thought. If children such as Tommy were to grow up free, their parents had to stop running away from William.

Jack sighed. “All right.”

Philip went off to ring the bell. He was a ruler who kept the peace, dispensed justice, and did not oppress the poor people under him, Jack thought. But did you really have to be celibate to do that?

The bell began to toll. Lamps were lit in the shuttered houses, and the craftsmen stumbled out, rubbing their eyes and yawning. They started work slowly, and there were some bad-tempered exchanges with laborers; but Philip had the priory bakehouse going, and soon there was hot bread and fresh butter, and everyone cheered up.

At dawn Jack made another tour with Philip, both of them anxiously scanning the dark horizon for signs of horsemen. The riverside fence was almost complete, with all the carpenters working together to fill in the last few yards. On the other two sides, the earth ramparts were now as high as a man, and the depth of the ditch on the outside gave it an extra three or four feet: a man might scramble up, with difficulty, but he would have to get off his horse. The wall was also man-height, but the last three or four courses of stone were completely weak, because the mortar had not set. However, the enemy would not learn that until they tried to scale the wall, and at that point it might even serve to distract them.

Apart from those gaps in the wooden fence, the work was done, and Philip issued fresh orders. The older citizens and the children were to go to the monastery and take refuge in the dormitory. Jack was pleased: Aliena would have to stay with Tommy, and the two of them would be well behind the front line. The craftsmen were to continue building, but some of their laborers now became military squadrons, under Richard’s leadership. Each group was responsible for defending the section of wall it had built. Those of the townsmen and women who had bows would be ready at the walls to shoot arrows down on the enemy. Those who had no weapons would throw stones, and they were to make stockpiles ready. Boiling water was another useful weapon, and cauldrons were heated ready to be poured down on attackers at strategic points. Several of the townsmen had swords, but they were the least useful of weapons: if it came to hand-to-hand combat, the enemy would have got in, and the building of the wall would have been in vain.

Jack had been awake for forty-eight hours straight. He had a headache and his eyes felt gritty. He sat on the thatched roof of a house near the river and looked out across the fields, while the carpenters rushed to finish the fence. Suddenly he realized that William’s men might shoot burning arrows over the wall in an attempt to set fire to the town without having to breach the wall. Wearily he got off the roof and trotted up the hill to the priory close. There he found that Richard had had the same thought, and had already got some of the monks to organize barrels of water and buckets at strategic locations around the outer edges of the town.

He was just leaving the priory when he heard what sounded like warning shouts.

His heart racing, he scrambled up onto the roof of the stable and looked out over the fields to the west. On the road that led to the bridge, a mile or so away, a cloud of dust betrayed the approach of a large group of horsemen.

Until this moment there had been an element of unreality about the whole thing; but now the men who wanted to burn Kingsbridge were right there, riding along the road, and suddenly the danger was hideously real.

Jack felt a sudden urge to find Aliena, but there was no time. He jumped off the roof and ran down the hill to the riverbank. A crowd of men was gathered around the last gap. As he watched, they drove stakes into the ground, filling the space, and hastily nailed the last two bracing members to the back, finishing the job. Most of the townspeople were here, apart from those who had taken refuge in the refectory. A few moments after Jack arrived, Richard came running down, shouting: “There’s nobody on the other side of town! There could be another group sneaking up behind us! Go back to your posts, quickly!” As they started to move off, he muttered to Jack: “There’s no discipline—no discipline at all!”

Jack stared out across the fields as the dust cloud got closer and the figures of the individual horsemen became visible. They were like fiends from hell, he thought, insanely intent on death and destruction. They existed because earls and kings felt the need of them. Philip may be a damned fool on matters of love and marriage, Jack thought, but at least he’s found a way to rule a community without the help of savages like these.

It was an odd moment for such reflections. Was this the kind of thing men thought about when they were about to die?

The horsemen came closer. There were more than the fifty Richard had forecast. Jack reckoned the number was nearer to a hundred. They headed for the place where the bridge had been; then they began to slow down. Jack’s spirits rose as they came to a ragged halt and reined in their horses in the meadow on the other side of the river. As they stared across the water at the brand-new town wall, somebody near Jack started to laugh. Someone else joined in, and then the laughter spread like wildfire, so that soon there were fifty, a hundred, two hundred men and women roaring with laughter at the embarrassed men-at-arms stuck on the wrong side of the river with no one to fight.

Several of the horsemen dismounted and went into a huddle. Peering through the faint morning haze, Jack thought he could see the yellow hair and red face of William Hamleigh at the center of the group, but he could not be sure.