The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett [538]
The knight said: “He won’t get up again—let’s be off!”
They all turned and ran.
Philip watched them go down the nave, laying about them with their swords to scatter the townspeople.
When the killers had gone there was a moment of frozen silence. The corpse of the archbishop lay facedown on the floor, and the severed skull, with its hair, lay beside the head like the lid of a pot. Philip buried his face in his hands. This was the end of all hope. The savages have won, he kept thinking; the savages have won. He had a giddy, weightless sensation, as if he were sinking slowly in a deep lake, drowning in despair. There was nothing to hold on to anymore; everything that had seemed fixed was suddenly unstable.
He had spent his life fighting the arbitrary power of wicked men, and now, in the ultimate contest, he had been defeated. He remembered when William Hamleigh had come to set fire to Kingsbridge the second time, and the townspeople had built a wall in a day. What a victory that had been! The peaceful strength of hundreds of ordinary people had defeated the naked cruelty of Earl William. He recalled the time Waleran Bigod had tried to have the cathedral built at Shiring so that he could control it for his own ends. Philip had mobilized the people of the whole county. Hundreds of them, more than a thousand, had flocked to Kingsbridge on that marvelous Whitsunday thirty-three years ago, and the sheer force of their zeal had defeated Waleran. But there was no hope now. All the ordinary folk in Canterbury, even the entire population of Christendom, would not be enough to bring Thomas back to life.
Kneeling on the flagstones in the north transept of Canterbury Cathedral, he saw again the men who had burst into his home and slaughtered his mother and father before his eyes, fifty-six years ago. The emotion that came to him now, from that six-year-old child, was not fear, not even grief. It was rage. Powerless to stop those huge, red-faced, bloodthirsty men, he had conceived a blazing ambition to shackle all such swordsmen, to blunt their swords and hobble their war-horses and force them to submit to another authority, one higher than the monarchy of violence. And moments later, as his parents lay dead on the floor, Abbot Peter had come in to show him the way. Unarmed and defenseless, the abbot had instantly stopped the bloodshed, with nothing but the authority of his Church and the force of his goodness. That scene had inspired Philip all his life.
Until this moment he had believed that he and people like him were winning. They had achieved some notable victories in the past half century. But now, at the end of his life, his enemies had proved that nothing had changed. His triumphs had been temporary, his progress illusory. He had won some battles, but the cause was ultimately hopeless. Men just like the ones who killed his mother and father had now murdered an archbishop in a cathedral, as if to prove, beyond all possibility of doubt, that there was no authority that could prevail against the tyranny of a man with a sword.
He had never thought they would dare to kill Archbishop Thomas, especially in a church. But he had never thought anyone could kill his father, and the same bloodthirsty men with swords and helmets had shown him the grisly truth in both cases. And now, at the age of sixty-two, as he looked at the grisly corpse of Thomas Becket, he was possessed by the childish, unreasoning, all-encompassing fury of a six-year-old boy whose father is dead.
He stood up. The atmosphere in the church was thick with emotion as the people gathered around the corpse of the archbishop. Priests, monks and townspeople came slowly nearer, stunned and full of dread. Philip sensed that behind their shocked expressions there was a rage like his own. One or two of them were muttering prayers, or just moaning half audibly. A woman bent down swiftly and touched the dead body, as if for luck. Several other people followed suit. Then Philip saw the first woman furtively collecting some of the blood in a tiny flask, as if Thomas were