Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [343]
He grinned. The head was so small that it would probably never be noticed; but there it was, gazing northwards towards the high ground, a last contribution from the master mason, despite the wishes of the guild, to the cathedral that had been his life. He gave the tiny head a pat.
“If this tower stands up, you’ll stay here now,” he said.
And so it was that Akun found a new resting place in the tower of stone, high above the bowl of land where the five rivers met.
And now at last the great work was almost completed.
The final addition to the new cathedral was its most dramatic feature – the crowning glory that transformed it from a splendid church into a wonder: there was nothing else like it on the island, hardly, indeed, in all Europe.
For the tapering octagonal spire, that ineffable narrow grey cone that rested on top of the tower, soared a further, astounding hundred and eighty feet. It almost doubled the height of the cathedral to over four hundred feet. Year after year it had gently risen over the stately mass of the tower, aweing even the masons who were building it.
None had been more fascinated than old Osmund. Time had taken away some of the pain of the events of 1289, and although for some years he was not a popular figure with the other masons, they tolerated his presence when, once or twice a year Edward had taken him up the tower to show him the progress on the spire. In the early years of the building, Edward had always explained: “He’s getting old. This may be the last time he sees the spire before he dies.” But as the years passed, this excuse became a sort of joke with the little band still working in the spire’s upper reaches.
For Osmund, having passed through the grand climacteric of his life, seemed to have settled quietly into an indestructible old age. Thin and bent, his shuffle a little slower, he seemed always to be in motion, and even as he neared his eightieth year, he still walked the few miles from Avonsford to the new city at least once a week if he could not get a ride in a cart. “We’ll be building another cathedral before that old man dies,” the masons began to joke, as he gamely pulled himself up the tall staircases that led to the spire.
Year by year it slowly rose, and year by year Osmund climbed up to inspect it, gazing carefully at the bending pillars. The buttresses that had been added seemed to be taking the strain of the arcades; the soaring purbeck shafts, miraculously, seemed to be holding in place.
The construction of the spire fascinated him, for there were several new technical problems to surmount. The first was how to fit an octagonal spire on to a square tower – a problem which fell into two parts: how to support its eight corners’ vertical thrusts, and how to counteract the eight horizontal thrusts that accompanied them. To support them, arches had to be constructed across the four corners of the tower, subdividing the area into eight bases. But now the weight of the spire was pushing upon not only the tower’s corners but the middle of the walls as well, where the new arches met, forcing them outwards and threatening to split the tower apart.
Once again, the builders decided to bind the tower with bands of iron, this time just below the parapet. Thin iron bands were therefore placed around the inside and outside, fastened securely together through the masonry, and again the work was so well done that it would not be reinforced for four centuries. Next, turrets were built at the corners to act as extra buttresses against the outward thrust at the bottom of the spire’s sloping walls. But it was something else that truly astonished Osmund. For on his fourth visit, when the cone had grown some twenty-five feet, he noticed that the last five feet of its walls were much thinner than the first twenty; and when he clambered up the scaffolding to inspect it, he was amazed to discover that it was only a little thicker than the span of his own small hand.
“Are you