The Pillars Of The Earth Page 0,284

the nerve to approach her. Most of all he was afraid of putting her off. He had spoken to her on the very first day he returned to Kingsbridge, the Whitsunday that all the volunteers had come to work on the cathedral, and he had said the wrong thing then, with the result that he had hardly talked to her for four years. He did not want to make a similar blunder now.

A few moments later he peeped around the trunk of a beech tree and saw her.

She had picked an extraordinarily pretty place. There was a little waterfall trickling into a deep pool surrounded by mossy stones. The sun shone on the banks of the pool, but a yard or two back there was shade beneath the beech trees. Aliena sat in the dappled sunlight reading a book.

Jack was astonished. A woman? Reading a book? In the open air? The only people who read books were monks, and not many of them read anything except the services. It was an unusual book, too-much smaller than the tomes in the priory library, as if it had been made specially for a woman, or for someone who wanted to carry it around. He was so surprised that he forgot to be shy. He pushed his way through the bushes and came out into her clearing, saying: "What are you reading?"

She jumped, and looked up at him with terror in her eyes. He realized he had frightened her. He felt very clumsy, and was afraid he had once again started off on the wrong foot. Her right hand flew to her left sleeve. He recalled that she had once carried a knife in her sleeve-perhaps she did still. A moment later she recognized him, and her fear went as quickly as it had come. She looked relieved, and then-to his chagrin-faintly irritated. He felt unwelcome, and he would have liked to turn right around and disappear back into the forest. But that would have made it difficult to speak to her another time, so he stayed, and faced her rather unfriendly look, and said: "Sorry I frightened you."

"You didn't frighten me," she said quickly.

He knew that was not true, but he was not going to argue with her. He repeated his initial question. "What are you reading?"

She glanced down at the bound volume on her knee, and her expression changed again: now she looked wistful. "My father got this book on his last trip to Normandy. He brought it home for me. A few days later he was put in jail."

Jack edged closer and looked at the open page. "It's in French!" he said.

"How do you know?" she said in astonishment. "Can you read?"

"Yes-but I thought all books were in Latin."

"Nearly all. But this is different. It's a poem called 'The Romance of Alexander.' "

Jack was thinking: I'm really doing it-I'm talking to her! This is wonderful! But what am I going to say next? How can I keep this going? He said: "Um... well, what's it about?"

"It's the story of a king called Alexander the Great, and how he conquered wonderful lands in the east where precious stones grow on grapevines and plants can talk."

Jack was sufficiently intrigued to forget his anxiety. "How do the plants talk? Do they have mouths?"

"It doesn't say."

"Do you think the story is true?"

She looked at him with interest, and he stared into her beautiful dark eyes. "I don't know," she said. "I always wonder whether stories are true. Most people don't care-they just like the stories."

"Except for the priests. They always think the sacred stories are true."

"Well of course they are true."

Jack was as skeptical of the sacred stories as he was of all the others; but his mother, who had taught him skepticism, had also taught him to be discreet, so he did not argue. He was trying not to look at Aliena's bosom, which was just at the edge of his vision: he knew that if he dropped his eyes she would know what he was looking at. He tried to think of something else to say. "I know a lot of stories," he said. "I know 'The Song of Roland,' and 'The Pilgrimage of William of Orange'-"

"What do you mean, you know them?"

"I can recite them."

"Like a jongleur?"

"What's a jongleur?"

"A man who goes around telling stories."

That was a new concept to Jack. "I never heard of such a man."

"There are lots in France. I used to go overseas with my father when