The Pillars of the Earth (96 page)

“There’s trouble,” he shouted urgently. “We must all take refuge in the cloisters.”

She looked at him. “What’s happening—is there a fire?”

“It’s Earl William and his men-at-arms,” he said.

Aliena suddenly felt as cold as the grave. William. Again.

Jack said: “They’ve set fire to the town. Tom and Alfred are going to the cloisters. Come with me, please.”

Ellen unceremoniously dropped the bowl of greens she was carrying onto the table in front of a startled Flemish buyer. “Right,” she said. She grabbed Martha by the arm. “Let’s go.”

Aliena shot a panicky look at her storehouse. She had hundreds of pounds’ worth of raw wool in there that she had to protect from fire—but how? She caught Jack’s eye. He was looking at her expectantly. The buyers left the table hurriedly. Aliena said to Jack: “Go. I have to look after my stall.”

Ellen said: “Jack—come on!”

“In a moment,” he said, and turned back to Aliena.

Aliena saw Ellen hesitate. She was clearly torn between saving Martha and waiting for Jack. Again she said: “Jack! Jack!”

He turned to her. “Mother! Take Martha!”

“All right!” she said. “But
please
hurry!” She and Martha left.

Jack said: “The town is on fire. The cloisters will be the safest place—they’re made of stone. Come with me, quickly.”

Aliena could hear screams from the direction of the priory gate. The smoke was suddenly everywhere. She looked all around, trying to make out what was happening. Her insides were knotted with fear. Everything she had worked for for over six years was stacked up in the storehouse.

Jack said: “Aliena! Come to the cloisters—we’ll be safe there!”

“I can’t!” she shouted. “My wool!”

“To hell with your wool!”

“It’s all I’ve got!”

“It’s no good to you if you’re dead!”

“It’s easy for you to say that—but I’ve spent all these years getting to this position—”

“Aliena!
Please
!”

Suddenly the people right outside the stall were screaming in mortal terror. The riders had entered the priory close and were charging through the crowds, regardless of whom they trampled, setting fire to the stalls. Terror-stricken people were crushing one another in their desperate attempts to get out of the way of the flying hooves and the firebrands. The crowd pressed against the flimsy wooden hurdle that formed the front of Aliena’s stall, and it immediately collapsed. People spilled onto the open space in front of the storehouse and upset the table with its plates of food and cups of wine. Jack and Aliena were forced back. Two riders charged into the stall, one swinging a club at random, the other brandishing a flaming torch. Jack pushed himself in front of Aliena, shielding her. The club came down at Aliena’s head, but Jack threw a protective arm over her, and the club smashed down on his wrist. She felt the blow but he took the impact. When she looked up she saw the face of the second rider.

It was William Hamleigh.

Aliena screamed.

He looked at her for a moment, with the torch blazing in his hand and the light of triumph glittering in his eyes. Then he kicked his horse and forced it into her storehouse.

“No!” Aliena screamed.

She struggled to escape from the crush, shoving and punching those around her, including Jack. At last she got free and dashed into the storehouse. William was leaning out from the saddle, putting his torch to the piled sacks of wool. “No!” she screamed again. She threw herself at him and tried to pull him off the horse. He brushed her aside and she fell to the ground. He held his torch to the woolsacks again. The wool caught fire with a mighty roar. The horse reared and screamed in terror at the flames. Suddenly Jack was there, pulling Aliena out of the way. William wheeled the horse and went out of the storehouse fast. Aliena got to her feet. She picked up an empty sack and tried to beat the flames out. Jack said: “Aliena, you’ll be killed!” The heat became agonizing. She grabbed at a woolsack that was not yet on fire, and tried to pull it free. Suddenly she heard a roaring in her ears and felt intense heat on her face, and she realized in terror that her hair was on fire. An instant later Jack threw himself at her, wrapping his arms around her head and pulling her tightly against his body. They both fell to the ground. He held her hard for a moment, then loosed his hold. She smelled singed hair but it was no longer burning. She could see that Jack’s face was burned and his eyebrows had gone. He grabbed her by one ankle and dragged her out through the door. He kept on pulling her, despite her struggles, until they were well clear.

The area of her stall had emptied. Jack released his hold on her. She tried to get up, but he grabbed her and held her down. She continued to struggle, staring madly at the fire that was consuming all her years of work and worry, all her wealth and security, until she had no energy left to fight him. Then she just lay there and screamed.

Philip was in the undercroft beneath the priory kitchen, counting money with Cuthbert Whitehead, when he heard the noise. He and Cuthbert looked at one another, frowning, then got up to see what was going on.

They stepped through the door into a riot.

Philip was horrified. People were running in every direction, pushing and shoving, falling over and treading on one another. Men and women were shouting and children were crying. The air was full of smoke. Everyone seemed to be trying to get out of the priory close. Apart from the main gate, the only exit was through the gap between the kitchen buildings and the mill. There was no wall there, but there was a deep ditch that carried water from the millpond to the brewery. Philip wanted to warn people to be careful of the ditch, but nobody was listening to anyone.

The cause of the rush was obviously a fire, and a very big one. The air was thick with the smoke of it. Philip was full of fear. With this many people all crowded together, the slaughter could be appalling. What could be done?

First he had to find out exactly what was going on. He ran up the steps to the kitchen door, to get a better view. What he saw filled him with dread.

The entire town of Kingsbridge was alight.

A cry of horror and despair escaped his throat.

How could this be happening?

Then he saw the horsemen, charging through the crowd with their burning firebrands, and he realized that it was not an accident. His first thought was that there was a battle going on between the two sides in the civil war, and somehow it had engulfed Kingsbridge. But the men-at-arms were attacking the citizens, not one another. This was no battle: it was a massacre.

He saw a large blond man on a massive war-horse crashing through the crowds of people. It was William Hamleigh.

Hatred rose in Philip’s gorge. To think that the slaughter and destruction going on all around had been caused deliberately, for reasons of greed and pride, drove him half mad. He shouted at the top of his voice: “I see you, William Hamleigh!”

William heard his name called over the screams of the crowd. He reined in his horse and met Philip’s eye.

Philip yelled: “You’ll go to hell for this!”

William’s face was suffused with bloodlust. Even the threat of what he feared most had no effect on him today. He was like a madman. He waved his firebrand in the air like a banner. “This is hell, monk!” he shouted back; and he wheeled his horse and rode on.

Suddenly everyone had disappeared, the riders and the crowds. Jack released his hold on Aliena and stood up. His right hand felt numb. He remembered that he had taken the blow aimed at Aliena’s head. He was glad his hand hurt. He hoped it would hurt for a long time, to remind him.

The storehouse was an inferno, and smaller fires burned all around. The ground was littered with bodies, some moving, some bleeding, some limp and still. Apart from the crackle of the flames it was quiet. The mob had got out, one way or another, leaving their dead and wounded behind. Jack felt dazed. He had never seen a battlefield but he imagined it must look like this.

Aliena started to cry. Jack put a comforting hand on her shoulder. She pushed it off. He had saved her life, but she did not care for that: she cared only for her damned wool, which was now irretrievably lost in smoke. He looked at her for a moment, feeling sad. Most of her hair had burned away, and she no longer looked beautiful, but he loved her all the same. It hurt him to see her so distraught, and not to be able to comfort her.

He felt sure she would not try to go into the storehouse now. He was worried about the rest of his family, so he left Aliena and went looking for them.

His face hurt. He put a hand to his cheek, and his own touch stung him. He must have got burned too. He looked at the bodies on the ground. He wanted to do something for the wounded, but he did not know where to begin. He searched for familiar faces among the strangers, hoping not to see any. Mother and Martha had gone to the cloisters—they had been well ahead of the mob, he thought. Had Tom found Alfred? He turned toward the cloisters. Then he saw Tom.

His stepfather’s tall body was stretched out full length on the muddy ground. It was perfectly still. His face was recognizable, even peaceful-looking, up to the eyebrows; but his forehead was open and his skull was completely smashed. Jack was appalled. He could not take it in. Tom could not be dead. But this thing could not be alive. He looked away, then looked back. It was Tom, and he was dead.

Jack knelt beside the body. He felt the urge to do something, or say something, and for the first time he understood why people liked to pray for the dead. “Mother is going to miss you terribly,” he said. He remembered the angry speech he had made to Tom on the day of his fight with Alfred. “Most of that wasn’t true,” he said, and the tears started to flow. “You didn’t fail me. You fed me and took care of me, and you made my mother happy, truly happy.” But there was something more important than all that, he thought. What Tom had given him was nothing so commonplace as food and shelter. Tom had given him something unique, something no other man had to give, something even his own father could not have given him; something that was a passion, a skill, an art, and a way of life. “You gave me the cathedral,” Jack whispered to the dead man. “Thank you.”

1142-1145

WILLIAM’S TRIUMPH WAS RUINED by Philip’s prophecy: instead of feeling satisfied and jubilant, he was terrified that he would go to hell for what he had done.

He had answered Philip bravely enough, jeering “This is hell, monk!” but that had been in the excitement of the attack. When it was over, and he had led his men away from the blazing town; when their horses and their heartbeats had slowed down; when he had time to look back over the raid, and think of how many people he had wounded and burned and killed; then he recalled Philip’s angry face, and his finger pointing straight down into the bowels of the earth, and the doom-laden words: “You’ll go to hell for this!”

By the time darkness fell he was completely depressed. His men-at-arms wanted to talk over the operation, reliving the high spots and relishing the slaughter, but they soon caught his mood and relapsed into gloomy silence. They spent that night at the manor house of one of William’s larger tenants. At supper the men grimly drank themselves senseless. The tenant, knowing how men normally felt after a battle, had brought in some whores from Shiring; but they did poor business. William lay awake all night, terrified that he might die in his sleep and go straight to hell.

The following morning, instead of returning to Earlscastle, he went to see Bishop Waleran. He was not at his palace when they arrived, but Dean Baldwin told William that he was expected that afternoon. William waited in the chapel, staring at the cross on the altar and shivering despite the summer heat.

When Waleran arrived at last, William felt like kissing his feet.

The bishop swept into the chapel in his black robes and said coldly: “What are you doing here?”

William got to his feet, trying to hide his abject terror behind a facade of self-possession. “I’ve just burned the town of Kingsbridge—”

“I know,” Waleran interrupted. “I’ve been hearing about nothing else all day. What possessed you? Are you mad?”

This reaction took William completely by surprise. He had not discussed the raid with Waleran in advance because he had been so sure Waleran would approve: Waleran hated everything to do with Kingsbridge, especially Prior Philip. William had expected him to be pleased, if not gleeful. William said: “I’ve just ruined your greatest enemy. Now I need to confess my sins.”

“I’m not surprised,” Waleran said. “They say more than a hundred people burned to death.” He shuddered. “A horrible way to die.”

“I’m ready to confess,” William said.

Waleran shook his head. “I don’t know that I can give you absolution.”

A cry of fear escaped William’s lips. “Why not?”

“You know that Bishop Henry of Winchester and I have taken the side of King Stephen again. I don’t think the king would approve of my giving absolution to a supporter of Queen Maud.”

“Damn you, Waleran, it was you who persuaded me to change sides!”

Waleran shrugged. “Change back.”

William realized that this was Waleran’s objective. He wanted William to switch his allegiance to Stephen. Waleran’s horror at the burning of Kingsbridge had been faked: he had simply been establishing a bargaining position. This realization brought enormous relief to William, for it meant that Waleran was not implacably opposed to giving him absolution. But did he want to switch again? For a moment he said nothing as he tried to think about it calmly.

“Stephen has been winning victories all summer,” Waleran went on. “Maud is begging her husband to come over from Normandy to help her, but he won’t. The tide is flowing our way.”

An awful prospect opened up before William: the Church refused to absolve him from his crimes; the sheriff accused him of murder; a victorious King Stephen backed the sheriff and the Church; and William himself was tried and hanged. ...