The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett [222]
As they drew nearer, Otto, a dark-skinned man with a rough manner, frowned at the sound, but he said nothing. The other men muttered to one another uneasily. Tom ignored them but he walked faster, impatient to find out what was going on.
The road curved through a patch of woodland and ended at the base of a hill. The hill itself was the quarry, and a huge bite had been taken out of its side by past quarrymen. Tom’s initial impression was that it would be easy to work: a hill was bound to be better than a pit, for it was always less trouble to lower stones from a height than to lift them out of a hole.
The quarry was being worked, no question of that. There was a lodge at the foot of the hill, a sturdy scaffold reaching twenty feet or more up the scarred hillside, and a stack of stones waiting to be collected. Tom could see at least ten quarrymen. Ominously, there were a couple of hard-faced men-at-arms lounging outside the lodge, throwing stones at a barrel.
“I don’t like the look of this,” said Otto.
Tom did not like it either, but he pretended to be unperturbed. He marched into the quarry as if he owned it, and walked swiftly toward the two men-at-arms. They scrambled to their feet with the startled, faintly guilty air of sentries who have been on guard for too many uneventful days. Tom quickly looked over their weapons: each had a sword and a dagger, and they wore heavy leather jerkins, but they had no armor. Tom himself had a mason’s hammer hanging from his belt. He was in no position to get into a fight. He walked straight at the two men without speaking, then at the last minute turned aside and walked around them, and continued on to the lodge. They looked at one another, unsure what to do: if Tom had been smaller, or had not had a hammer, they might have been quicker to stop him, but now it was too late.
Tom went into the lodge. It was a spacious wood building with a fireplace. Clean tools hung around the walls and there was a big stone in the corner for sharpening them. Two stonecutters stood at a massive wooden bench called a banker, trimming stones with axes. “Greetings, brothers,” Tom said, using the form of address of one craftsman to another. “Who’s the master here?”
“I’m the master quarryman,” said one of them. “I’m Harold of Shiring.”
“I’m the master builder at Kingsbridge Cathedral. My name is Tom.”
“Greetings, Tom Builder. What are you here for?”
Tom studied Harold for a moment before answering. He was a pale, dusty man with small dusty-green eyes, which he narrowed when he spoke, as if he were always blinking away stone dust. He leaned casually on the banker, but he was not as relaxed as he pretended. He was nervous, wary and apprehensive. He knows exactly why I’m here, Tom thought. “I’ve brought my master quarryman to work here, of course.”
The two men-at-arms had followed Tom in, and Otto and his team had come in behind them. Now one or two of Harold’s men also crowded in, curious to see what the fuss was about.
Harold said: “The quarry is owned by the earl. If you want to take stone you’ll have to see him.”
“No, I won’t,” Tom said. “When the king gave the quarry to Earl Percy, he also gave Kingsbridge Priory the right to take stone. We don’t need any further permission.”
“Well, we can’t all work it, can we?”
“Perhaps we can,” said Tom. “I wouldn’t want to deprive your men of employment. There’s a whole hill of rock—enough for two cathedrals and more. We should be able to find a way to manage the quarry so that we can all cut stone here.”
“I can’t