Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [267]
“Anger, gluttony, envy, sloth, avarice, lust, and pride,” he recited glumly.
Portehors nodded.
“And of which are you guilty today?”
How much did the canon know? Osmund considered carefully.
The work on which he had been engaged all summer, this splendid and unusual feature of the new city was, everyone knew, Canon Stephen Portehors’s particular pride and joy. The water courses of New Salisbury, though still unfinished, were already much admired. Tapping off the Avon just above the city, they formed a network of stone channels that ran down the centre of the most significant streets; they varied from two to six or seven feet wide and were crossed by tiny foot-bridges every few yards.
“They bring the river into the very town itself,” Portehors would announce proudly. “What could be more pleasant – or more healthy?”
Indeed, they were more important to him than the streets themselves: and when a few months before he had noticed that the ground along one of the main north-south streets being laid out was not quite level, he had altered the course of the street itself, and hence the whole of one side of the new town, in order to keep his precious watercourse on even ground.
“Precision,” he insisted. “The water will only run if the levels are exact.”
Exact. When the labourers had heard that word they shrugged gloomily; for it was well known in Sarum that the priest and his brother in the town had their family’s mania for exactness, and as soon as a word like precision was spoken, it was useless to argue. They had had to lay out the whole street and dig a new channel again.
And how the boy hated it!
Osmund the Mason. His name was a mockery to him. Though like his father and grandfather, both occasional stoneworkers at Avonsford, he too bore the nickname of ‘Masoun’ or Mason, it meant nothing. He was only a humble serf, a labourer who was occasionally allowed to trim the stones for these cursed water channels, if he was lucky.
For the masons were the craftsmen who worked on the great cathedral. And that was another world. True, it was a world he sometimes dreamed of. When his day’s work was done, he would often walk into the magical quiet of the close and watch the craftsmen about their business in the huge building. He would see the solemn master masons, who ran the masons’ guild, the elect, who came from all over the country and even from across the Channel. But they, and the ordinary masons, had all been engaged long ago. Even their apprentices were usually from their own families. Why should they take notice of a young serf from Avonsford whose father had once worked in stone?
Yet the spirit of the carver was in his blood. One day, he vowed, he would find a way – he would work in the cathedral itself, amongst those masons in their heavy aprons who strutted so proudly to their work each day.
It was over a century since Godric Body had swung on the gallows on the castle hill; a few months afterwards his son had been born; and since the baby’s mother died in childbirth, it had seemed only natural to his uncle Nicholas to take the baby in and bring the boy up as his own. As a result, the children and grandchildren of Godric Body had usually been nicknamed Mason, like the rest of their adopted family, and when, eighty years after Godric’s death, one of his descendants had married his short, stocky cousin, the squat body, short thumbs and large head of the Mason clan had been passed to their son. Though typical of the busy Mason clan in his looks, however, the boy Osmund had a secret wildness of imagination, a feeling for natural forms, that derived directly from the unlucky young shepherd carver who had been hanged. It was a genius that the stolid-looking young serf, though he loved to carve, still only vaguely sensed.
At the moment, all that was offered him was drudgery, and he had to admit, he did not always work as hard as he should.
So as he gazed at the thin, greying priest he answered sadly:
“The sin