Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [310]
“They cross north east to south west, south east to north west, over the nave that runs from west to east,” Osmund summarised. “They divide each section into four quarters.”
“Why do you do it?” the boy asked.
“Simple,” the mason replied proudly. “First, once we have got the basic cross arches up – these we call the ribs – we have the bones of our building. Its flesh, the vaulting between, we call the cells.” Now he took his son up into the space above the vaults. “We fill the cells with these,” he explained, and the boy saw a collection of differently shaped stones, all wedge-shaped, but some much broader than others. “They’re voutains,” Osmund told him. “Being wedges, we drop them in from above, like a peg into a hole – so once the ribs are up we can fill in the rest of the vaults from up here.”
“And the different sizes?”
“Simple again. As you go higher, the vaults open out wider, so we use bigger stones.” And he showed him an adjustable wooden mould that was used by the stone cutters.
“Now come down again,” he ordered, and led the boy back to the floor of the church. “The most important thing,” he pointed up at the soaring arches, “is that instead of all the weight of the roof falling evenly on the walls, now it’s the ribs that hold it all up, and they rest on the pillars. So the walls don’t have to be so thick any more and we can build these fine big windows.”
When Edward remembered the heavy old Norman cathedral he had seen, still standing but nearly unused, on the castle hill and compared it with this airy new building, he understood what Osmund meant.
But it was another feature, less important perhaps, and less easy to see, which was for the mason the church’s best feature. This was the series of carved heads in which he himself had specialised ever since the day he made the figure of Bartholomew twenty years before. They were everywhere, brightly and naturally coloured; peeping from the screen, from the aisles and the clerestory arches; but the finest of all were the highest up, at the end of the shafts where the broad vaulting ribs spread out to form the ceiling, so high that one had to peer carefully to see them at all.
“Yet they are the best,” the mason told him enthusiastically. “There are fifty-seven of them up there in the vaults,” he explained. “We’ve been adding them ever since the building first started.”
“And how many did you make,” the boy said.
“Eight,” Osmund said proudly. “No one has made more.”
Set just in the cleft of the V that begins the vaulting the heads were arranged in perfect symmetry: king opposite king, bishop matched with bishop, staring at each other or down into the softly echoing spaces below. They were of many kinds, by many hands: a few in Purbeck marble, most in the softer Chilmark stone.
It had taken him many years of study to perfect his technique. He had even travelled to Winchester where, the century before, King Stephen’s brother the bishop had collected pagan statues from Rome. But the stylised classical heads, and the wooden staring faces produced by many of his fellow masons had never caught his imagination. He searched always, as he had from the first, for a more natural, lively form, as though he was carving in wood; and in several of his heads he had achieved this wonderfully.
“See up there,” he pointed to Edward: and far above the boy suddenly saw the face of Canon Portehors, his deeply lined, frowning and disembodied face staring bleakly at them from its great height.
Afterwards he took the boy to where he had been working in the masons’ lodge. Masons like Osmund were known as bench-masons, so called because unlike the lesser stone cutters and labourers, they did their work at a bench. Here the mason showed him another head he had been working on, this time of a former bishop, and on the underneath, where it could never be seen unless the head was one day dislodged from its place, he showed Edward the small mark he had chiselled in the surface. It consisted of a capital M,