Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [342]
It was a strange little figure, of a naked woman with big breasts and strong, muscular hips; it fitted neatly into the palm of his hand and the feel of it gave him a strange sense of pleasure.
It was eight hundred years since the little figure of Akun, the hunter’s woman, had last been seen; yet her presence there was not so strange. She had travelled up river with Tarquinus the heathen, and then been discreetly returned by him one day and secreted in a hidden niche in a wall in Sorviodunum where she belonged. Sorviodunum had been deserted; its buildings had tumbled down, and over the centuries its stones had been dispersed until no visible trace of them remained. Some of them had been carried up the hill, and later Norman builders had unwittingly moved the little figure, in a heap of other assorted rubble to be used as in-fill, and dropped her into a cavity in the walls of a house on the castle hill. In her eight-thousand-five-hundred-year journey, she had therefore never travelled far from the little northern valley, and now, delighted with her shape, the old mason carried her back to Avonsford.
For several days he wondered what to do with the little figure; and then a thought occurred to him that made him smile.
The tower of the great cathedral had not collapsed: he had been wrong. Though the cathedral continued to settle, it seemed that, after all, it would hold up. And though he continued to criticise the building, he secretly rejoiced that the noble structure and its many carvings were safe after all. It was thinking about the tower that gave him the idea.
It was a few evenings later that Osmund walked slowly into the cathedral close just as dusk was falling. The masons in the tower had already left for the day and the place was almost deserted so that no one saw him as he quietly entered the cathedral and moved to the staircase which led to the upper storey. It was a long climb: first to the top of the main arches then to the clerestory above them, until finally he reached the level of the vaulting. Below him in the cavernous spaces of the nave, half lit by a dim glow from the great windows, he could nor hear anyone moving about. As he had hoped, the door to one of the four staircases to the tower was open. He climbed the narrow spiral: twenty feet, forty feet, up to the first landing with its parapet and sweeping views over the city. The first stars were beginning to glimmer but set in the wall above, despite the dim light, he noticed one of the dog’s heads he had carved.
“They don’t want me in the tower, but they’re glad enough to use my carvings,” he muttered.
He climbed again, breathing heavily, and this time he came out at the top of the tower. The work on the spire had not yet begun and there was nothing above him but the open sky. He was two hundred and twenty feet above the ground.
Everywhere the stars were appearing; they seemed brighter and more plentiful than the little lights of the city below. The great stone tower thrust so high above the other buildings, belonged more to the world of the stars than the world of man.
Osmund moved around the parapet, inspecting it. There were dozens of small niches in the masonry, some containing figures, some empty, and finally he found one on the outer edge of the parapet into which a tiny head would neatly fit. From his pouch he drew a little chisel and hammer and, disregarding the height, he leaned out over the edge of the parapet and hollowed a deeper recess in the niche; when this was done, he dropped the little figure of Akun into the hollow so that just her head appeared, looking out of the lip, while her squat body was concealed. Glancing about, he saw some mortar and a bucket of water, left by