The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett [421]
Philip looked stricken. He was not yet forty years old, Jack reckoned, but his face was becoming lined, and his fringe of hair was now more gray than black. Nevertheless, there was a dangerous light in his clear blue eyes as he said: “I’m not going to accept this. I don’t think it’s the will of God.”
Jack wondered what on earth he was talking about. How could he “not accept” it? The chickens might as well say they refused to accept the fox, for all the difference it would make to their fate. “So what are you going to do?” Jack said skeptically. “Pray that William will fall out of bed tonight and break his neck?”
Richard was excited by the idea of resistance. “Let’s fight,” he said. “Why not? There are hundreds of us. William will bring fifty men, a hundred at most—we could win by sheer weight of numbers.”
Aliena protested: “And how many of our people will be killed?”
Philip was shaking his head. “Monks don’t fight,” he said regretfully. “And I can’t ask townspeople to give their lives when I’m not prepared to risk my own.”
Jack said: “Don’t count on my masons fighting, either. It’s not part of their job.”
Philip looked at Richard, who was the nearest they had to a military expert. “Is there any way we can defend the town without a pitched battle?”
“Not without town walls,” Richard said. “We’ve got nothing to put in front of the enemy but bodies.”
“Town walls,” Jack said thoughtfully.
Richard said: “We could challenge William to settle the issue by single combat—a fight between champions. But I don’t suppose he would agree to it.”
“Town walls would do it?” Jack said.
Richard said impatiently: “They might save us another time, but not now. We can’t build town walls overnight.”
“Can’t we?”
“Of course not, don’t be—”
“Shut up, Richard,” Philip said forcefully. He looked expectantly at Jack. “What’s on your mind?”
“A wall is not that hard to build,” Jack said.
“Go on.”
Jack’s mind was spinning. The others were listening with bated breath. He said: “There are no arches, no vaults, no windows, no roof.... A wall can be built overnight, if you’ve got the men and materials.”
“What would we build it of?” Philip said.
“Look around you,” Jack said. “Here are ready-cut stone blocks intended for the foundations. There is a stack of timber bigger than a house. In the graveyard is a heap of rubble from the collapse. Down at the riverside there’s another huge stack of stone from the quarry. There’s no shortage of materials.”
“And the town is full of builders,” Philip said.
Jack nodded. “The monks can do the organizing. The builders can do the skilled work. And for laborers we’ll have the entire population of the town.” He was thinking rapidly. “The wall would have to run all along the nearside bank of the river. We’d dismantle the bridge. Then we’d have to take the wall up the hill alongside the poor quarter to join up with the east wall of the priory... out to the north ... and down the hill to the riverbank again. I don’t know whether there’s enough stone for that....”
Richard said: “It doesn’t have to be stone to be effective. A simple ditch, with an earth rampart made of the mud dug out of the ditch, will serve the purpose, especially in a place where the enemy is attacking uphill.”
“Surely stone is better,” Jack said.
“Better, but not essential. The purpose of a wall is to force a delay on the enemy while he’s in an exposed position, and enable the defender to bombard him from a sheltered position.”
“Bombard him?” Aliena said. “With what?”
“Stones, boiling oil, arrows—there’s a bow in most households in the town—”
Aliena shuddered and said: “So we still end up fighting, after all.”
“But not hand to hand, not quite.”
Jack felt torn. The safest course, in all probability, was for everyone to take refuge in the forest, in the hope that William would be satisfied with burning the houses. But even then there was a risk that he and his men would hunt the townspeople down. Would the danger be greater if they all stayed here, behind a town wall? If something went wrong, and