Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [266]
Several times he looked hopefully away from his work. It was back-breaking labour and he hated it. How he longed to change his life.
Canon Stephen Portehors stared at him coldly.
Of all the people in Sarum, no one was more insignificant, more utterly unimportant, than young Osmund the Mason. Osmund knew it too, for Canon Stephen had told him so himself.
“In the eye of God, you are as small, Osmund, as a grain of dust,” the priest had explained. “But remember,” he added ominously, “he sees everything that you do – for not even a grain of dust can hide from the Father. Your sins will all be known.”
Now the canon was beckoning. And Osmund knew why: he had sinned.
It seemed to Osmund that, wherever he looked, there was dust.
There was dust like a shimmering haze around the huge grey pile of the rising cathedral looming a few hundred yards to the south. There was dust on the broad open space of the cathedral close – the two-hundred-acre precinct around the cathedral, which stretched from the eastern boundary ditch to the river. There was dust on the piles of grey Chilmark stone around the construction site, dust on the carts, planks, scaffolding, on the coils of rope and the heaps of rubble to fill the walls; dust all over the spacious plots where the fine stone houses of the priests were being built with gardens backing on to the curve of the sweeping of the Avon river; dust on the river itself; dust on the long dark riverweeds that waved slowly in the stream. The swans who drifted at their secret, measured pace past the green banks were half grey with it. There was dust on the flat marshy meadows that stretched past Fisherton and Bemerton villages to Wilton beyond. All over the half-completed chequerboard of the new town beside the cathedral precincts there was dust from the lathe and plaster houses.
There was dust, he could even see it, like a pale grey mantle over the dark, half-deserted castle on its hill. And on the slopes above, on the bare high ground, whenever the wind came from the south, the sheep gave off a puff of grey chalk if you handled them. The pale blue butterflies, too, seemed to carry a subtle coating of it as they shimmered up in their summer clouds from the hard warm ground. Even that great curious circle of fallen stones to which he had once walked, eight miles away, had seemed to have collected the dust from the new city. It looked like a strange, outlying satellite of the building site itself, as if it might be arising once again, instead of falling silently into decay.
He was covered with dust himself. The dour canon, too, had collected a rim of dust on his shoulders.
It choked Osmund, and irritated him.
Yet he knew he should be grateful.
“Our city is built on a rock,” the canon had told him. “Our foundations are sure.”
Indeed, this was literally true, for although much of the surrounding terrain was marshy, the ground the wise bishop had chosen in Myrifield was firm.
“See,” Canon Stephen had pointed out to young Osmund the day before, “though this site is low, if you dig down a little you come to a thick layer of gravel.” And as Osmund had looked into the trench beside which they were standing, he could see that this was so. “The gravel is strong – it will support even the greatest cathedral we could build,” the priest assured him. “Be grateful that you were born at such a time, when you can see such great works undertaken, to the glory of God.”
But now the priest was angry. His hair was grey and thin but his eyebrows were bushy and still mainly black, curling up at the outer corners like a tawny owl. The eyes themselves were dark brown and piercing. As he spoke, it seemed to Osmund that his voice was as hard and cutting as flint.
“Name the seven deadly sins, Osmund.”
The sins committed deliberately and with knowledge, the sins that ensured