Cathedral of the Sea

In the end, following thousands of calculations and even more sketches, he traced the outline of where the keystone should go on the top platform of the scaffolding. That was the exact spot, not an inch to one side or the other. When they had hauled the keystone right to the top, the men below almost despaired when Berenguer refused to allow them to rest it on the platform as they had done lower down, but went on shouting orders:

“A little more, Santa Maria. No. Santa Clara, pull, now hold it there. Santa Eulàlia! Santa Clara! Santa Maria ... ! Lower! Higher! Now!” he suddenly shouted. “Everyone hold it there. A little lower! Little by little. Gently does it!”

All at once, there was no more weight on the cables. The men peered silently up at the sky, where Berenguer de Montagut was kneeling to inspect the positioning of the keystone. He walked round its two-yard diameter, stood up, and waved in triumph to everybody down below.

Arnau and Joanet could feel the shouts of joy that rose from the throats of men who had been toiling for hours: they reverberated against the church wall behind them. Many of them sank thankfully to the ground. A few others hugged one another and danced. The hundreds of spectators who had been watching shouted and applauded. Arnau could feel a knot in his throat, and all the hairs on his body stood on end.

“I wish I were older,” he whispered to his father that night as the two of them lay on the straw pallet surrounded by the coughs and snores of the slaves and apprentices.

Bernat tried to fathom what was behind his son’s wish. Arnau had returned home in high spirits, and had told him a thousand times how the keystone of the Santa Maria apse had been raised. Even Jaume had listened closely to him.

“Why, son?”

“Because everybody does something. There are lots of boys who help their fathers at Santa Maria, but Joanet and I ...”

Bernat put his arm round his son’s shoulders and drew him toward him. It was true that except when his father had some special errand for him, Arnau spent the whole day at the church. What could he usefully do there?

“You like the bastaixos, don’t you?”

Bernat had felt his son’s enthusiasm whenever he spoke about these men who carried the blocks of stone to the new church. The boys followed them as far as the gates of the city, waited there for them, then walked back with them, all along the beach from Framenors to Santa Maria.

“Yes,” Arnau said. His father rummaged for something under the pallet.

“Here, take this,” Bernat said, giving him the old waterskin he had taken with them when they first fled his lands. Arnau felt for it in the darkness. “Offer them fresh water. You’ll see how they thank you for it.”

As always, at dawn the next day Joanet was waiting for him at the gates of Grau’s workshop. Arnau showed him the skin, then hung it round his neck, and they both ran off down to the beach. They made for the angel fountain, the only one that was on the bastaixos

route. The next fountain was down in Santa Maria itself.

When the boys spotted the line of bastaixos coming slowly toward them, bent under the weight of their stones, they clambered onto one of the boats on the beach. As the first bastaix came level with them, Arnau showed him the waterskin. The man smiled and came to a halt next to the boat so that Arnau could pour the water directly into his mouth. The others waited until the first man had finished; then the next one stepped up. Lightened of their load, on their way back to the royal quarry they paused at the boat to thank the boys for the fresh water.

From that day on, Arnau and Joanet became the water carriers for all the bastaixos. They waited for them close to the angel fountain, or, whenever the laborers had to unload a ship and could not work for Santa Maria, followed them, around the city to pour them water without their having to drop the heavy loads they were carrying.

The two boys still found time to go down to Santa Maria to watch the building work, talk to Father Albert, or sit and watch how Angel wolfed down his food. Anyone observing them could see how their eyes shone in a different way whenever they looked at the church. They were doing their bit to help build it! That was what the bastaixos and even Father Albert had told them.

The keystone hung high in the sky, and the boys saw how the ribs from each of the ten columns were gradually rising to meet it. The masons built trusses and then placed one block after another on them, curving upward. Behind the columns, surrounding the first eight of them, the walls of the ambulatory had already been built, with the interior buttresses in place. “Between these two,” Father Albert told them as he pointed out two of the stone columns, “we will put the Jesus chapel, the one belonging to the bastaixos, where the Virgin will stand.”