Page 148 of The Pillars of the Earth
“And how many of you are coming, in all?” Philip asked.
The man looked surprised at the question. “Just us four,” he replied.
During the next hour people trickled through the priory gate until, by midmorning, there were seventy or eighty volunteers at work, including the villagers. Then the flow stopped altogether.
It was not enough.
Philip stood at the east end, watching Tom build a wall. He had already constructed the bases of two buttresses up to the level of the third course of stones, and now he was building the wall between. It would probably never be finished, Philip thought despondently.
The first thing Tom did, when the laborers brought him a stone, was to take out an iron instrument shaped like the letter L and use it to check that the edges of the stone were square. Then he would shovel a layer of mortar on to the wall, furrow the mortar with the point of his trowel, put the new stone on, and scrape off the surplus mortar. In placing the stone he was guided by a taut string which was stretched between the two buttresses.
Philip noticed that the stone was almost as smooth on the top and bottom, where the mortar was, as on the side that would show. This surprised him, and he asked Tom the reason. “A stone must never touch the ones above or below,” Tom replied. “That’s what the mortar’s for.”
“Why must they not touch?”
“It causes cracks.” Tom stood upright to explain. “If you tread on a slate roof, your foot will go through it; but if you put a plank across the roof, you can walk on it without damaging the slates. The plank spreads the weight, and that’s what mortar does.”
Philip had never thought of that. Building was an intriguing business, especially with someone like Tom, who was able to explain what he was doing.
The roughest face of the stone was the back. Surely, Philip thought, that face would be visible from inside the church? Then he recalled that Tom was in fact building a double-skinned wall with a cavity between, so that the back of each stone would be hidden.
When Tom had laid the stone on the bed of mortar, he picked up his level. This was an iron triangle with a leather thong attached to its apex and some markings on its base. The thong had a lead weight attached to it so that it always hung straight down. He put the base of the instrument on the stone and watched how the leather thong fell. If it hung to one side or the other of the center line, he would tap the stone with his hammer until it was exactly level. Then he would move the instrument until it straddled the join between the two adjacent stones, to check that the tops of the stones were exactly in line. Finally he turned the instrument sideways on the stone to make sure it was not leaning one way or the other. Before picking up a new stone he would snap the taut string to satisfy himself that the faces of the stones were in a straight line. Philip had not realized it was so important that stone walls should be precisely straight and true.
He lifted his gaze to the rest of the building site. It was so big that eighty men and women and a few children were lost in it. They were working away cheerfully in the sunshine, but they were so few that it seemed to him there was an air of futility about their efforts. He had originally hoped for a hundred people, but now he saw that even that would not have been enough.
Another little group came through the gateway, and Philip forced himself to go to greet them with a smile. There was no need for them to know that their efforts would be wasted. They would gain forgiveness for their sins, anyway.
It was a large group, he saw as he approached them. He counted twelve, and then two more came in. Perhaps after all he would have a hundred people by midday, when the bishop was expected. “God bless you all,” he said to them. He was about to tell them where to start digging when he was interrupted by a loud shout. “Philip!”
He frowned disapprovingly. The voice belonged to Brother Milius. Even Milius was supposed to call Philip “Father” in public. Philip looked in the direction from which the voice came. Milius was balancing on the priory wall in a somewhat undignified stance. In a calm but carrying voice, Philip said: “Brother Milius, get off the wall.”
To his astonishment Milius stayed there and shouted: “Come and look at this!”
The new arrivals were getting a poor impression of monastic obedience, Philip thought, but he could not help wondering what it was that had got Milius so excited that he had forgotten all his manners. “Come here and tell me about it, Milius,” he said in a voice he normally reserved for noisy novices.
“You must look!” Milius yelled.
He’d better have a very good reason for this, Philip thought crossly; but since he did not want to give his closest colleague a telling-off in front of all these strangers, he was obliged to smile and do as Milius asked. Feeling irritated to the point of anger, he walked across the muddy ground in front of the stable and jumped up onto the low wall. “What is themeaningof this behavior?” he hissed.
“Just look!” Milius said, pointing.
Following his gesture, Philip looked out, over the roofs of the village, past the river, to the road that followed the rise and fall of the land to the west. At first he could not believe his eyes. Between the fields of green crops, the undulating road was a solid mass of people, hundreds of them, all walking toward Kingsbridge. “What is it?” he said uncomprehendingly. “An army?” And then he realized that, of course, they were his volunteers. His heart leaped for joy. “Look at them!” he shouted. “There must be five hundred—athousand—more!”
“That’s right!” Milius said happily. “They came, after all!”
“We’re saved.” Philip was too thrilled to remember why he was supposed to be angry with Milius. The mass of people filled the road all the way to the bridge, and the line wound through the village all the way to the priory gate. The people he had greeted were the head of a phalanx. They were pouring through the gate now, and milling about at the western end of the building site, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. “Hallelujah!” he yelled recklessly.
It was not enough to rejoice—he had to use these people. He jumped down off the wall. “Come on!” he shouted to Milius. “Call all the monks off laboring—we’re going to need them as marshals. Tell the kitchener to bake all the bread he can and roll out some more barrels of beer. We’ll need more buckets and shovels. We must get all these people working before Bishop Henry arrives!”
For the next hour Philip was frantically busy. At first, just to get people out of the way, he assigned a hundred or more to the task of bringing materials up from the riverbank. As soon as Milius had assembled a supervisory group of monks, he began sending the volunteers down into the foundations. They soon ran out of shovels, barrels and buckets. Philip ordered all the cooking pots brought from the kitchen, and set some of the volunteers to making rough timber boxes and basketwork platters for carrying earth. There were not enough ladders or lifting devices, so they made a long slope at one end of the largest foundation hole so that people could walk into and out of it. He realized he had not given sufficient thought to the question of where he was going to put the vast quantity of earth that was coming out of the foundations. Now it was too late to mull it over: he made a snap decision, and ordered the earth dumped on a patch of rocky ground near the river. Perhaps it might become cultivable. While he was giving that order, Bernard Kitchener came to him in a panic, saying he had only catered for two hundred people at most, and there seemed to be at least a thousand here. “Build a fire in the kitchen courtyard and make soup in an iron bath,” Philip said. “Water the beer. Use all the stores. Get some of the villagers to prepare food on their own hearths. Improvise!” He turned away from the kitchener and resumed organizing laborers.
He was still giving orders when someone tapped him on the shoulder and said in French: “Prior Philip, may I have your attention for a moment?” It was Dean Baldwin, Waleran Bigod’s associate.
Philip turned around and saw the entire visiting party, all on horseback and gorgeously dressed, gazing in astonishment at the scene around them. There was Bishop Henry, a short, thickset man with a pugnacious look about him, his monkish haircut contrasting strangely with his embroidered scarlet coat. Beside him was Bishop Waleran, dressed in black as always, his dismay not quite concealed by his habitual look of frozen disdain. There was fat Percy Hamleigh, his strapping son, William, and his hideous wife, Regan: Percy and William were looking bemused, but Regan understood exactly what Philip had done and she was furious.
Philip returned his attention to Bishop Henry, and found to his surprise that the bishop was favoring him with a look of intense interest. Philip returned his gaze frankly. Bishop Henry’s expression showed surprise, curiosity and a kind of amused respect. After a moment Philip approached the bishop, held his horse’s head, and kissed the beringed hand that Henry proffered.
Henry dismounted with a smooth, agile movement, and the rest of his party followed suit. Philip called a couple of monks to stable the horses. Henry was the same age as Philip, approximately, but his florid complexion and well-covered frame made him look older. “Well, Father Philip,” he said. “I came to verify reports that you were not capable of getting a new cathedral built here at Kingsbridge.” He paused, looked around at the hundreds of workers, then returned his gaze to Philip. “It seems I was misinformed.”
