Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [323]
Now at last he saw exactly what to do. Deftly, suddenly gifted with a knowledge he had not possessed before, he drew the outlines of Eve’s body, and by the end of that day, rising from the rib cage of the first man, came in perfect detail, the form of the girl Cristina. Her body was perfect – for did not every line of it haunt his imagination? Her long hair was swept back, just as it had been when she came out of the river, and in her face – though he himself could not say how he had done it – was to be found the look of innocence and knowledge, purity and lasciviousness, the necessary but impossible combination that had defeated him for so many months.
It took him six weeks to complete the carvings of the Garden of Eden. The scene where Adam takes the apple from the tree of knowledge was the perfect representation of the master mason’s proud self-importance before his humiliation; the expulsion from Eden showed Adam with head bowed, just as his own had been when he made his way shamefacedly to his work after his own fall.
If Sarum was still laughing at him, Osmund was hardly aware of it. He worked from dawn until dusk, half abstracted, in a contented passion, realising as each day passed that God, having first humiliated him, was now creating a little masterpiece through his hands.
And in this manner, he completed the spandrel carvings of the chapter house.
1289
Even before the year of Our Lord 1289, the new tower had begun to dominate the city. It seemed to be rising out of a table set in the sky.
This impression was quite correct. At the crossing of the nave and transepts, where the marble pillars soared into the roof like four legs of a table, the masons had now in effect begun a second building – a massive square grey tower rising nearly a hundred feet over the roof. It rose in two huge tiers, its walls elegantly broken by tall lancet arches. From all five rivers it could be seen, a stately presence in the sky and when the tower was completed, yet another tall structure – a slender spire – was to be set upon it, so that Osmund the mason had remarked to his son:
“They’ll build the cathedral into the clouds.”
It was a noble conception, and no one approaching the new city now could help looking up in admiration at the stones above.
But on a warm September morning in 1289, it was not the tower that a little party entering the city over Fisherton Bridge stopped and stared at. Their eyes instead were fixed downwards, at a crumpled figure lying by the roadside.
It was the stout old burgess Peter Shockley who got slowly from his cart, went forward and made the identification.
“Is he alive?” Jocelin de Godefroi looked down sadly from his horse.
Shockley nodded. “Just.”
A light wind by the river stirred the dust that had gathered in the fallen man’s clothes.
The bridge was a busy, pleasant spot. Below its narrow arches, the river with its long green weeds flowed smoothly and strongly. Just above, on the city side, the bishop’s mills ground corn for the new city’s bread; a little below, the stream was briefly split by a narrow bar of land before it curved round the edge of the close, and here the poorer pilgrims on their journey east and local vagabonds, both wanting to escape the modest tolls on the bridge, would often try to ford it. The current was a little stronger than it looked and it was a favourite pastime for the city children to gather on the bridge, where they were tolerated, to watch the pilgrims downstream lose half their possessions in the water. Ducks and moorhens favoured the ford. The swans liked to nest a little below it. To the west of the bridge, a few dozen cottages straggled beside the road towards Wilton.
The figure huddled by the roadside was dressed in black. His feet were dirty and bare; his hood, which Peter Shockley had just lifted, had been pulled