World Without End Page 0,76

Edward Butcher."

"He's already married, and has four other children with his wife."

"I'm saying they don't always force people to marry. You could just carry on as you are."

"No, I couldn't. Elfric would throw me out."

She looked thoughtful. "So, you've already talked to Elfric?"

"Talked?" Merthin touched his bruised cheek. "I thought he was going to kill me."

"And his wife - my sister?"

"She screamed at me."

"So she knows."

"Yes. She said I have to marry Griselda. She never wanted me to be with you, anyway. I don't know why."

Caris muttered: "She wanted you for herself."

That was news to Merthin. It seemed unlikely that the haughty Alice would be attracted to a lowly apprentice. "I never saw any sign of that."

Only because you never looked at her. "That's what made her so cross. She married Elfric in frustration. You broke my sister's heart - and now you're breaking mine."

Merthin looked away. He barely recognized this picture of himself as a heartbreaker. How had things gone so wrong? Caris went quiet. Merthin stared moodily along the river to the bridge.

The crowd had come to a standstill, he saw. A heavy cart loaded with woolsacks was stuck at the southern end, probably with a broken wheel. The can pulling Nell had stopped, unable to pass. The crowd were swarming around both carts, and some people had climbed on to the woolsacks for a better view. Earl Roland was also trying to leave. He was at the town end of the bridge, on horseback, with his entourage; but even they were having trouble getting the citizens to give way. Merthin spotted his brother Ralph on his horse, chestnut-coloured with a black mane and tail. Prior Anthony, who had evidently come to see the earl off, stood wringing his hands with anxiety while Roland's men forced their horses into the mob, trying in vain to clear a passage.

Merthin's intuition rang an alarm. Something was badly wrong, he felt sure, though at first he did not know what. He looked more closely at the bridge. He had noticed, on Monday, that the massive oak beams stretching from one piling to another across the length of the bridge were showing cracks on the upstream side; and that the beams had been strengthened with iron braces nailed across the cracks. Merthin had not been involved in this job, which was why he had not previously looked hard at the work. On Monday he had wondered why the beams were cracking. The weakness was not half way between the uprights, as he would have expected if the timbers had simply deteriorated over time. Rather, the cracks were near the central pier, where the strain should have been less.

He had not thought about it since Monday - there was too much else on his mind - but now an explanation occurred to him. It was almost as if that central pier was not supporting the beams, but dragging them down. That would mean that something had undermined the foundation beneath the pier - and, as soon as that thought occurred to him, he realized how it could have happened. It must be the faster flow of the river, scouring the river bed from under the pier.

He remembered walking barefoot on a sandy beach, as a child, and noticing that when he stood at the sea's edge, letting the water wash over his feet, the outgoing waves would suck the sand from under his toes. That kind of phenomenon had always fascinated him.

If he was right the central pier, with nothing underneath to support it, was now hanging from the bridge - hence the cracks. Elfric's iron braces had not helped; in fact, they might have worsened the problem, by making it impossible for the bridge to settle slowly into a new, stable position.

Merthin guessed that the other pier of the pair - on the farther, downstream side of the bridge - was still grounded. The current surely spent most of its force on the upstream pier, and attacked the second of the pair with reduced violence. Only one pier was affected; and it seemed that the rest of the structure was knitted together strongly enough for the entire bridge to stay upright - as long as it was not subjected to extraordinary strain.

But the cracks seemed wider today than on Monday. And it was not difficult to guess why. Hundreds of people were on the