The Pillars of the Earth

by Ken Follett

  He could see, through the windows, that the palace was surrounded by knights. The sight of them scared him more. This was clearly a carefully planned attack, and the perpetrators were prepared to commit violence. He hastily closed the bedroom door and pulled the bar across. The others watched him, content to let someone decisive take charge. Archbishop Thomas continued to look scornful but he did not try to stop Philip.

  Philip stood by the door and listened. He heard a man come through the oriel and enter the audience chamber. He wondered how strong the bedroom door was. However, the man did not attack the door, but crossed the audience chamber and started down the stairs. Philip guessed he was going to open the hall door from the inside and let the rest of the knights in that way.

  That gave Thomas a few moments' reprieve.

  There was another door in the opposite corner of the bedroom, partly concealed by the bed. Philip pointed at it and said urgently: "Where does that lead?"

  "To the cloisters," someone said. "But it's locked shut."

  Philip crossed the room and tried the door. It was locked. "Have you got a key?" he said to Thomas, adding as an afterthought, "My lord archbishop."

  Thomas shook his head. "That passage has never been used in my memory," he said with infuriating calm.

  The door did not look very stout, but Philip was sixty-three years old and brute force had never been his metier. He stood back and gave the door a kick. It hurt his foot. The door rattled flimsily. Philip gritted his teeth and kicked it harder. It flew open.

  Philip looked at Thomas. Thomas still seemed reluctant to flee. Perhaps it had not dawned on him, as it had on Philip, that the number of knights and the well-organized nature of their operation indicated a deadly serious intention to do him harm. But Philip knew instinctively that it would be fruitless to try to scare Thomas into fleeing. Instead he said: "It's time for vespers. We ought not to let a few hotheads disrupt the routine of worship."

  Thomas smiled, seeing that his own argument had been used against him. "Very well," he said, and he got to his feet.

  Philip led the way, feeling relief that he had got Thomas moving and fear that the archbishop still might not move fast enough. The passage led down a long flight of steps. There was no light except what came through the archbishop's bedroom. At the end of the passage was another door. Philip gave it the same treatment as he had given the first door, but this one was stronger and it did not open. He began to hammer on it, shouting: "Help! Open the door! Hurry, hurry!" He heard the note of panic in his own voice, and made an effort to stay calm, but his heart was racing and he knew that William's knights must be close behind.

  The others caught up with him. He continued to bang the door and shout. He heard Thomas say: "Dignity, Philip, please," but he took no notice. He wanted to preserve the archbishop's dignity--his own was of no account.

  Before Thomas could protest again, there was the sound of a bar being drawn and a key turning in the lock, and the door was opened. Philip grunted with relief. Two startled cellarers stood there. One said: "I didn't know this door led anywhere."

  Philip pushed past them impatiently. He found himself in the cellarer's stores. He negotiated the barrels and sacks to reach another door, and passed through that into the open air.

  It was getting dark. He was in the south walk of the cloisters. At the far end of the walk he saw, to his immense relief, the door that led into the north transept of Canterbury Cathedral.

  They were almost safe.

  He had to get Thomas into the cathedral before William and his knights could catch up. The rest of the party emerged from the stores. Philip said: "Into the church, quickly!"

  Thomas said: "No, Philip; not quickly. We will enter my cathedral with dignity."

  Philip wanted to scream, but he said: "Of course, my lord." He could hear the ominous sound of heavy feet in the disused passage: the knights had broken into the bedroom and had found the bolthole. He knew the archbishop's best protection was his dignity, but there was no harm in getting out of the way of trouble.

  "Where is the archbishop's cross?" Thomas said. "I can't enter the church without my cross."

  Philip groaned in despair.

  Then one of the priests said: "I brought the cross. Here it is."

  Thomas said: "Carry it before me in the usual way, please."

  The priest held it up and walked with restrained haste toward the church door.

  Thomas followed him.

  The archbishop's entourage preceded him into the cathedral, as etiquette demanded. Philip went last and held the door for him. Just as Thomas entered, two knights burst out of the cellarer's stores and sprinted down the south walk.

  Philip closed the transept door. There was a bar located in a hole in the wall beside the doorpost. Philip grabbed the bar and pulled it across the door.

  He turned around, sagging with relief, and leaned back against the door.

  Thomas was crossing the narrow transept toward the steps that led up to the north aisle of the chancel, but when he heard the bar slam into place he stopped suddenly and turned around.

  "No, Philip," he said.

  Philip's heart sank. "My lord archbishop--"

  "This is a church, not a castle. Unbar the door."

  The door shook violently as the knights tried to open it. Philip said: "I'm afraid they want to kill you!"

  "Then they will probably succeed, whether you bar the door or not. Do you know how many other doors there are to this church? Open it."

  There was a series of loud bangs, as if the knights were attacking the door with axes. "You could hide," Philip said desperately. "There are dozens of places--the entrance to the crypt is just there--it's getting dark--"

  "Hide, Philip? In my own church? Would you?"

  Philip stared at Thomas for a long moment. At last he said: "No, I wouldn't."

  "Open the door."

  With a heavy heart, Philip slid back the bar.

  The knights burst in. There were five of them. Their faces were hidden behind helmets. They carried swords and axes. They looked like emissaries from hell.

  Philip knew he should not be afraid, but the sharp edges of their weapons made him shiver with fear.

  One of them shouted: "Where is Thomas Becket, a traitor to the king and to the kingdom?"

  The others shouted: "Where is the traitor? Where is the archbishop?"

  It was quite dark now, and the big church was only dimly lit by candles. All the monks were in black, and the knights' vision was somewhat limited by their faceplates. Philip had a sudden surge of hope: perhaps they would miss Thomas in the darkness. But Thomas immediately dashed that hope by walking down the steps toward the knights, saying: "Here I am--no traitor to the king, but a priest of God. What do you want?"

  As the archbishop stood confronting the five men with their drawn swords, Philip suddenly knew with certainty that Thomas was going to die here today.

  The people in the archbishop's entourage must have had the same feeling, for suddenly most of them fled. Some disappeared into the gloom of the chancel, a few scattered into the nave among the townspeople waiting for the service, and one opened a small door and ran up a spiral staircase. Philip was disgusted. "You should pray, not run!" he shouted after them.

  It occurred to Philip that he, too, might be killed if he did not run. But he could not tear himself away from the side of the archbishop.

  One of the knights said to Thomas: "Renounce your treachery!" Philip recognized the voice of Reginald Fitzurse, who had done the talking earlier.

  "I have nothing to renounce," Thomas replied. "I have committed no treachery." He was deadly calm, but his face was white, and Philip realized that Thomas, like everyone else, had realized that he was going to die.

  Reginald shouted at Thomas: "Run away, you're a dead man!"

  Thomas stood still.

  They want him to run, Philip thought; they can't bring themselves to kill him in cold blood.

  Perhaps Thomas had under
stood that too, for he stood unflinching in front of them, defying them to touch him. For a long moment they were all frozen in a murderous tableau, the knights unwilling to make the first move, the priest too proud to run.

  It was Thomas who fatally broke the spell. He said: "I am ready to die, but you are not to touch any of my men, priests or monks or laymen."

  Reginald moved first. He waved his sword at Thomas, pushing its point closer and closer to his face, as if daring himself to let the blade touch the priest. Thomas stood like stone, his eyes focused on the knight, not the sword. Suddenly, with a quick twist of the wrist, Reginald knocked Thomas's cap off.

  Philip was suddenly filled with hope again. They can't bring themselves to do it, he thought; they're afraid to touch him.

  But he was wrong. The knights' resolution seemed to be strengthened by the silly gesture of knocking off the archbishop's cap; as if, perhaps, they had half expected to be struck down by the hand of God, and the fact that they had got away with it gave them courage to do worse. Reginald said: "Carry him out of here."

  The other knights sheathed their swords and approached the archbishop.

  One of them grasped Thomas about the waist and tried to lift him.

  Philip despaired. They had touched him at last. They were, after all, willing to lay hands on a man of God. Philip had a stomach-lurching sense of the depths of their evil, like looking over the edge of a bottomless pit. They must know, in their hearts, that they would go to hell for this; yet still they did it.

  Thomas lost his balance, flailed his arms, and began to struggle. The other knights joined in trying to lift him up and carry him. The only people left from Thomas's entourage were Philip and a priest called Edward Grim. They both rushed forward to help Thomas. Edward grabbed Thomas's mantle and clung on tight. One of the knights turned and lashed out at Philip with a mailed fist. The blow struck the side of Philip's head, and he went down, dazed.

  When he recovered, the knights had released Thomas, who was standing with his head bowed and his hands together in an attitude of prayer. One of the knights raised his sword.

  Philip, still on the floor, gave a long, helpless yell of protest: "Noooo!"

  Edward Grim held out his arm to ward off the blow.

  Thomas said: "I commend myself to Go--"

  The sword fell.

  It struck both Thomas and Edward. Philip heard himself scream. The sword cut into the archbishop's skull and sliced the priest's arm. As blood spurted from Edward's arm, Thomas fell to his knees.

  Philip stared aghast at the appalling wound to Thomas's head.

  The archbishop fell slowly forward onto his hands, supported himself only for an instant, then crashed onto his face on the stone floor.

  Another knight lifted his sword and struck. Philip gave an involuntary howl of grief. The second blow landed in the same place as the first, and sliced off the top of Thomas's skull. It was such a forceful swing that the sword struck the pavement and snapped in two. The knight dropped the stump.

  A third knight committed an act which would burn in Philip's memory for the rest of his life: he stuck the point of his sword into the opened head of the archbishop and spilled the brains out onto the floor.

  Philip's legs felt weak and he sank to his knees, overcome with horror.

  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 a martyr.

  The clergy began to come to their senses. The archbishop's chamberlain, Osbert, with tears streaming down his face, took out a knife and cut a strip from his own shirt, then bent down by the body and clumsily, gruesomely tied Thomas's skull back on to his head, in a pathetic attempt to restore a modicum of dignity to the horribly violated person of the archbishop. As he did so, a low collective groan went up from the crowd all around.

  Some monks brought a stretcher. They lifted Thomas onto it gently. Many hands reached out to help them. Philip saw that the archbishop's handsome face was peaceful, the only sign of violence being a thin line of blood running from the right temple, across the nose, to the left cheek.

  As they lifted the stretcher, Philip picked up the broken stump of the sword that had killed Thomas. He kept thinking of the woman who had collected the archbishop's blood in a bottle, as if he were a saint. There was a massive significance to th
at small act of hers, but Philip was not yet sure exactly what it was.

  The people followed the stretcher, drawn by an invisible force. Philip went with the crowd, feeling the weird compulsion that gripped them all. The monks carried the body through the chancel and lowered it gently to the ground in front of the high altar. The crowd, many of them praying aloud, watched as a priest brought a clean cloth and bandaged the head neatly, then covered most of the bandage with a new cap.

  A monk cut through the black archbishop's mantle, which was soiled with blood, and removed it. The man seemed unsure what to do with the bloody garment, and turned as if to throw it to one side. A citizen stepped forward quickly and took it from him as if it were a precious object.

  The thought that had been hovering uncertainly in the back of Philip's mind now came to the foreground in an inspirational flash. The citizens were treating Thomas like a martyr, eagerly collecting his blood and his clothes as if they had the supernatural powers of saints' relics. Philip had been regarding the murder as a political defeat for the Church, but the people here did not see it that way: they saw a martyrdom. And the death of a martyr, while it might look like a defeat, never failed to provide inspiration and strength to the Church in the end.

  Philip thought again of the hundreds of people who had flocked to Kingsbridge to build the cathedral, and of the men, women and children who had worked together half the night to put up the town wall. If such people could be mobilized now, he thought with a mounting sense of excitement, they might raise a cry of outrage so loud it would be heard all over the world.

  Looking at the men and women gathered around the body, their faces suffused with grief and horror, Philip realized that they only wanted a leader.

  Was it possible?

  There was something familiar about this situation, he realized. A mutilated corpse, a crowd of onlookers, and some soldiers in the distance: where had he seen this before? What should happen next, he felt, was that a small group of followers of the dead man would range themselves against all the power and authority of a mighty empire.

  Of course. That was how Christianity started.