The Pillars Of The Earth Page 0,193

off," the man snarled, and kicked his horse into a trot.

She walked back to the tree stump. "Beggars usually ask for food or old clothes," she said dejectedly. "I never heard of anyone giving them money."

"Well, how do people get money?" Richard said. The question had obviously never occurred to him before.

Aliena said: "The king gets money from taxes. Lords have rents. Priests have tithes. Shopkeepers have something to sell. Craftsmen get wages. Peasants don't need money because they have fields."

"Apprentices get wages."

"So do laborers. We could work."

"Who for?"

"Winchester is full of little manufactories where they make leather and cloth," Aliena said. She began to feel optimistic again. "A city is a good place to find work." She sprang to her feet. "Come on, let's get started!"

Richard still hesitated. "I can't work like a common man," he said. "I'm the son of an earl."

"Not anymore," Aliena said harshly. "You heard what the jailer said. You'd better realize that you're no better than anyone else, now."

He looked sulky and said nothing.

"Well, I'm going," she said. "Stay here if you like." She walked away from him, toward the West Gate. She knew his sulks: they never lasted.

Sure enough, he caught her up before she reached the city. "Don't be cross, Allie," he said. "I'll work. I'm pretty strong, actually-I'll make a very good laborer."

She smiled at him. "I'm sure you will." It was not true, but there was no point in discouraging him.

They walked down the High Street. Aliena recalled that Winchester was laid out and divided up in a very logical way. The southern half, on their right as they walked, was divided into three parts: first there was the castle, then a district of wealthy homes, then the cathedral close and the bishop's palace in the southeast corner. The northern half, on their left, was also divided into three: the Jews' neighborhood, the middle part where the shops were, and the manufactories in the northeast corner.

Aliena led the way down the High Street to the eastern end of the city, then they turned left, into a street that had a brook running along it. On one side were normal houses, mostly wooden, a few partly of stone. On the other side was a jumble of improvised buildings, many of them no more than a roof supported by poles, most of them looking as if they might fall down at any minute. In some cases a little bridge, or a few planks, led across the brook to the building, but some of the buildings actually straddled the brook. In every building or yard, men and women were doing something that required large quantities of water: washing wool, tanning leather, fulling and dyeing cloth, brewing ale, and other operations that Aliena did not recognize. A variety of unfamiliar smells pricked her nostrils, acrid and yeasty, sulfurous and smoky, woody and rotten. The people all looked terribly busy. Of course, peasants also had a great deal to do, and they worked very hard, but they went about their tasks at a measured pace, and they always had time to stop and examine some curiosity or talk to passersby. The people in the manufactories never looked up. Their work seemed to take all their concentration and energy. They moved quickly, whether they were carrying sacks or pouring great buckets of water or pounding leather or cloth. As they went about their mysterious tasks in the gloom of their ramshackle huts, they made Aliena think of the demons stirring their cauldrons in pictures of hell.

She stopped outside a place where they were doing something she understood: fulling cloth. A muscular-looking woman was drawing water from the brook and pouring it into a huge stone trough lined with lead, stopping every now and again to add a measure of fuller's earth from a sack. Lying in the bottom of the trough, completely submerged, was a length of cloth. Two men with large wooden clubs-called fuller's bats, Aliena recollected-were pounding the cloth in the trough. The process caused the cloth to shrink and thicken, making it more waterproof; and the fuller's earth leached out the oils from the wool. At the back of the premises were stacked bales of untreated cloth, new and loosely woven, and sacks of fuller's earth.

Aliena crossed the brook and approached the people working at the trough. They glanced at her and continued working. The ground was wet all around them, and they worked with their feet bare, she noticed. When she realized