Song at Dawn: 1150 in Provence (The Troubadours Quartet)

by Jean Gill

  Estela looked once behind her but the mill was exactly as she had first seen it, workers once more busy in the process of making paper. Nothing had changed.

  The ride back was sombre, the silence broken only when Estela asked, ‘What does it mean ‘feet out of stirrups’?’

  ‘He’s warning me of a feint, a jongleur’s tricks, not to believe what I see.’ Estela said nothing. ‘He will have a reason, you know.’

  ‘You trust him, don’t you.’

  ‘Yes.’ Estela remembered that this was a soldier, this beautiful young man pledged to her honour and riding at her side. A soldier who had seen battle, to whom the spurt of blood from a man’s throat was nothing. A soldier whose first allegiance was to his Commander.

  They rode on without a word and it seemed to Estela that Arnaut was glad to leave her, to have done his duty and to return to the action. She, on the contrary, had decided she would try the hot tubs in the time that remained before evening meal. What was it al-Hisba had said about them? Cleansing, relaxing, purifying - that sounded about right.

  An hour later, Estela was soaking in steaming water so hot it reddened her skin. After being taken to the Ladies’ baths in a room beside the kitchen, she had dismissed the servant, preferring to be alone, the other two tubs being unoccupied. Towels were left to hand, her clothes neatly arranged on a bench at the back of the room and three drops of lavender oil added to the water. She took the little stool out of the tub and placed it on the tiles. She preferred to lie back, letting her hair float around her in the water, her feet up against the other side of the great half-barrel that served as a tub. She washed the day from her system with soft olive oil soap, imported from the Moorish south - what paradise al-Andalus must be! - and, even from the soap, the scent of lavender impregnated her skin and her brain, lulling her into non-being. She shut her eyes, submerged her head, so that all she could hear was the sound of her blood pulsing, her heart beating.

  She had no sense of falling asleep nor of waking but the cooling water told her she must have done so and she shivered. Time to dry herself, to return to the world. She stood up, held onto the edge of the tub, thinking perhaps she should have kept a servant to hand after all and she placed a tentative foot on the floor beside the bath. She put her weight onto one foot to climb out of the tub and cried out with pain, trying clumsily to reverse the weight, adding more slicing pain to the foot outside the tub before she could draw it over the side and back into the bath where the blood tricked in swirls into the water. She inspected her foot and saw the cuts, some still with splinters of glass protruding from them. She picked out the splinters, dropping them over the edge of the bath away from her intended exit.

  Kneeling, Estela looked over the tub at the floor where she had put her foot. Broken glass. She looked all round the bath for a clear space but there was broken glass everywhere, all round the bath, in a ring two yards or so wide. There was no way she could jump over it, assuming that she could bear to stand on the glass beside the bath and then jump. The very thought made her wince. The bath stool? No. Whoever had strewn the glass had also moved the stool to mock her at the back of the room, beside where her clothes should have been. She took in this new piece of information. Clothes gone. Towels, towels... she scanned the room, knowing already what she would find. No towels. But there was no point worrying about that until she had actually got out of the bath in the first place.

  She yelled for help and heard the echoes disappear into the steamy acoustics, the thick walls and no doubt into the clatter and chatter of a grand kitchen before evening meal. Maybe after the meal, or maybe not till the morning, if then, someone might hear her. She shivered as much at the thought of a night in cold water as because she was already cold. There was no way to get rid of the water unless she could make a hole in the tub and use a chunk of the bath itself as a board to walk across the glass? Puncture the solid wood tub with what, exactly? Estela had a bar of soap and her own body. There was no way of scratching or kicking her way through the tub. Think again.

  She hated the only plan she could come up with but she had to get out of the tub and there was no other way. Once more she knelt in the bath, leaning over the side so that she could drop her waist-length hair over into a pool on the floor. Contorting herself to reach the hair with her first foot, she climbed out of the bath, bent double all the time, to place her feet on her hair.

  Then, little by little, she shuffled hair and feet forward, one at a time, in a monkey-crouch that strained her knees to shaking point. An occasional splinter would pierce through the hair into a foot but it was bearable and she kept going until she was sure that she was past the broken glass, when she straightened up with a groan of relief and complaints from her aching muscles, Her swinging hair caught her side and again she felt stabbing pains. Stupid! Her hair was a torture-machine, spiked with splinters of glass.

  She gathered her hair in one hand, near enough her head to be above the glass splinters and she held it in a pony-tail as far out from her body as she could. Now there was nothing for it but to go out the door, stark naked, holding her hair where it could give her no covering at all. She could only hope that the first person she met would take pity on her. She swallowed hard at the thought of walking through the door into the busy kitchen and her hand was on the latch, ready to face the music when she heard a voice she knew well, on the other side.

  ‘Estela, are you in there? It’s me, Dragonetz. Aliénor wants you to play tonight and you’re going to be late.’

  Help from Dragonetz or face a kitchen-full of curious eyes? Some choices are quickly made. Estela lifted the latch, opened the door enough to hiss round it, ‘Come in here!’ She stepped back quickly so no-one could see her through the doorway as Dragonetz entered the bathroom. ‘Shut the door!’ If she hadn’t been cold, anxious and humiliated, she would have enjoyed the momentary shock in his expression but he mastered himself quickly.

  ‘It seems you wanted a swim after all,’ he drawled. Then he saw the glass in the hank of hair swinging beside her. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Turn your back,’ she told him.

  ‘It’s a bit late for that! You have two breasts and the place of Venus, like all women. I’m not going to ravish you and you’re going to tell me what happened. Let me hold your hair while you put this on.’ While talking, he had removed his tunic and passed it to her.

  ‘My feet hurt.’

  He picked her up in his arms and carried her over to one of the tubs with no glass around it. ‘Can you kneel and lean into the tub?’ he asked her quietly and on her assent, he swept up her hair and unloosed it into the clean water in the un-used tub, swishing it back and forwards so that the splinters were dislodged. He took off the belt round his undershirt and used the buckle like a coarse comb, grooming the hair for more splinters. And finally he ran his hand over the hair, combing it with his fingers, checking that it was clear and clean. He squeezed the water from the tresses, asked Estela to sit on the edge of the bath and inspected her feet. Little trickles of blood and water still ran from the cuts.

  ‘Painful,’ was his judgement, ‘and the less you walk on those the better, but nothing serious. Let’s get you out of here. ‘Put your arms round my neck.’ She was beyond protesting and curled up against the fine linen undershirt, pulling the tunic to cover her knees as best she could, hiding behind her hair as she was carried out of the bathroom. Dragonetz gave a few curt orders to the first servants he passed, to clean the bathroom and fetch al-Hisba to Estela’s chamber, then he strode through the back ways of the Palace, picking out the route with the ease of a man who could find a spy-hole in a secret passageway.

  He laid her gently on her own bed and told her, ‘I’ll have my tunic back now, if you please. I don’t feel I am dressed for dinner and neither are you.’ He then turned politely to look out the window, while Estela ignored her feet to grab clothing out of the trunk, throw it on and return the tunic. Then she sat down on a stool and filled up with tears.

&n
bsp; Dragonetz toyed with her bangles, abandoned on the table top, then picked up her brush and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world and she were not sitting there crying, he drew it lightly through her hair.

  ‘The bottom first,’ she managed to say, ‘or you will force the tangles to the roots and never get them out.’

  ‘You see what you bring me to?’ he asked her.

  She felt the weakness of her smile but at least the tears were drying up, thank God. ‘Your training as a lady’s maid is sadly lacking, my Lord, but with some practice and effort on your part, I believe you could pass muster.’ She felt his breath on her hair.

  ‘Shall I make your excuses to Aliénor?’ he asked her softly. ‘It is too much for you, I think.’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I will not lose Aliénor’s goodwill and throw away my own future for some scheming sneaky evil-doing stab-in-the-back - oh,’ she stopped short, remembering an actual attempt to stab in the back. ‘Could it be they want me too?’ she wondered aloud.

  ‘More likely to be some jealous creature of Aliénor’s. Cut feet don’t kill.’

  There was a polite knock on the door and Dragonetz answered it to al-Hisba, who tutted over Estela’s feet, then applied a salve and some bandaging. When he had finished, Estela made sure her face was wiped clean. She must be glowing after all this soap and water! No time to apply make-up in the style the Ladies had taught her. She picked up her mandora and, slowly so as to spare Estela’s feet, the three of them went down together to the Great Hall, looking as if they had not a care in the world.

  Chapter 8.

  Forgetting, Estela idly stroked Nici with her foot under the table and winced. She was too much on edge to feel hungry and toyed with her food. She sipped a little wine, enjoying the warmth and trying not to think of the day’s crazy events. She only had to think of water and she saw blood, a Jew’s blood wiped from a dagger, and her own blood, and she felt chilled to the bone. At least she was sitting down for a while so her feet didn’t hurt as much. The walk to the Hall had never seemed so long and she knew the two men had talked to make it less obvious that they were slowing down for her, offering to carry her instrument and taking an arm each to support her, support that she reluctantly accepted. The talk had made no sense at all. Al-Hisba had passed on the thanks of Abraham ben Isaac to Dragonetz for saving the lives of so many Jews and said he would make arrangements for the body to be delivered to the man’s family, something he did not deserve. Dragonetz grimly replied that the respite was temporary and that the choice of a Jew had been deliberate. Apparently Abraham ben Isaac agreed. Estela might as well have been invisible except for the strong arms on which her own rested and once again she wondered at being trusted with such a conversation, even if she didn’t understand any of it. She would, she swore to herself, she would understand it all, but for now all that mattered was walking.

  At the entrance to the Great Hall, Estela took her mandora and walked away from the men, proud and alone, but sank gratefully to the nearest corner of a bench, quickly joined by Nici, who sniffed obsessively at her feet and tried licking her boots. The smell of blood, Estela realized, and the urge to lick the wounds of a pack member. She told him no but caressed his big head and he flopped, sighing and contented. Waiting on a bone, Estela told herself. If only people were as straightforward.

  There was an air of expectation round the Hall during the meal and Estela noticed some new figures at the High Table. Someone sober as a cleric in plain grey frowned at some men strangely attired in cream linen tabards, which had necklines like keyholes and were edged with broad bands of multi-coloured embroidery. The guttural sounds of their language when they spoke to each other added a liquid note to the chat around the hall, nothing that Estela could identify, not French, not Latin, not Arabic, not the Jewish languages, nothing she had heard around Narbonne.

  The Chief sat beside Ermengarda, hairy and immense, with a shaggy mane of red hair and a long beard to match. Round his neck hung a gold chain worth the price of a hunting lodge with a huge hammer-head hanging below it. If that too was solid gold, as Estela suspected, it was beyond price. Nor was that all. He wore a large golden clasp fastening the tunic, which crossed over to one side, and when the plain trumpet sleeves fell back, they revealed chunky torques around the massive arms. Never had Estela seen so much gold on one person.

  However, she could not say that he displayed the most wealth, without a professional evaluation of the jewels worn by both Ermengarda and Aliénor. If those were real diamonds in the gold net sparkling over Ermengarda’s hair, then surely that put her slightly ahead of Aliénor’s emerald-studded coronet, but then there was a broad embroidered belt, also studded with emeralds, and the bracelets, to be added to the reckoning. Estela was dizzy with the sparkle from the High Table glinting in the torchlight and she had forgotten her nerves in her speculation about the barbarians until a drum roll interrupted the conversation and Ermengarda stood up to address the Hall.

  ‘In honour of our visitors, Aliénor, Duchesse d’Aquitaine and Toulouse, the Queen of France,’ Ermengarda waved a gracious hand towards Aliénor, who had smiled like a cat with cream at being given her disputed title of ‘Toulouse’. ‘And of Jarl Rognvaldr Kali Kolsson.’ The massive barbarian beat the table with one fist to show his appreciation of the somewhat superfluous gesture in his direction. The hammer round his neck took on a whole new meaning and there was little chance of mistaking who might be the Jarl. ‘Prince of Orkney, on his way to the Holy Land and calling by chance at our fair port, where he is learning what welcome we in Narbonne give to those from over seas.’ Her last words were drowned by the drumming of booted feet on the ground, surprisingly loud for only six men, who added some table-banging for good measure. An enthusiastic group, that was certain.

  ‘In honour of our visitors,’ Ermengarda continued when she could be heard again, ‘I declare a Torneig of Song.’ More stamping and banging. ‘To the winner I offer this prize.’ Ermengarda clapped her hands above her head and a servant ran to her, knelt and held out something that rested on a tasseled cushion. Once more the Viscomtesse raised her arms but this time to display a sword belt and scabbard. ‘In the most supple leather from al-Andalus, tooled in designs of the south and with my pledge that the finest leather-worker in Narbonne will add the blazon of whoever wins.’ General murmurs of approval and of course some stamping. Just what she’d always wanted, Estela told herself, a man’s leather sword-belt. Not that there was any expectation at all that a man would win, like, say, Dragonetz for example! She knew perfectly well that she was not in his class yet but one day she would be, she vowed.

  Aliénor was on her feet now beside Ermengarda. ‘And from me, the winner shall have this.’ She too clapped her hands and there was a gasp as a servant brought her a suit of chainmail, which she could hardly lift to show the assembly, to yet more noise of approval. The two women were about to sit when Jarl Rognvaldr heaved to his feet. ‘And I,’ he said in a heavy accent that still carried the gulping sound of his native tongue, ‘offer this!’ In one swift movement he pulled the large golden clasp from his own tunic and thumped it down on the table in front of Ermengarda as if it were a piece of meat. His followers hammered and stamped enough to test the Palace foundations. The Viscomtesse picked up the circular pin like the treasure it was and held it high. ‘It is a Viking luck rune,’ the Jarl explained, ‘and has been with me since I was a boy.’

  Ermengarda turned to him but spoke for everyone in the Hall to hear. ‘You do us too much honour, my Lord. Such a prize carries a piece of your heart with it. Choose again, please.’

  And everyone in the Hall heard his reply, deep and strong. ‘I leave all of my heart a willing prisoner in this hall, my Lady Ermengarda, whether I give away a trinket or not. Narbonne keeps me stronger captive than a man chained inside Cubby Roo’s Castle, where the walls are as thick as a boat is wide.’ There was a heartbeat pause and then he roared, ‘Let the Torneig begin!’ Amid the stomping and b
anging, Ermengarda gave the official signal, leaned to catch something Dragonetz was telling her and nodded. Estela’s stomach dived again and instinctively she looked to Dragonetz for reassurance. Was it her imagination or he did he look her way as he raised his glass in a barely perceptible toast? She felt for her mandora and touched its angled peg-box, ran her fingers down the neck.

  A hush ran round the Hall as the first troubadour took his place, exactly where Estela had thought she would go, when she rehearsed the moment mentally. Her stomach looped once more, like a swallow over the river. A page announced ‘Marcabru’ as the man dressed like a cleric took a stool and now Estela knew who he was, as did everyone else in the Hall. Better known even than Dragonetz, and older than him, people said he had been left on a rich man’s doorstep, nicknamed ‘Pan Perdut’, ‘Left-over Bread’, and then called Marcabru, some said named after the woman who’d left him on the doorstep but no-one really knew. Since then he’d performed for the Lords of Gascony and the Lords of Aragon and it was quite a coup for Ermengarda to produce him out of her sleeve like a jongleur. Estela ignored a reminder from her insides that he would be a hard act to follow and concentrated on Marcabru.

  The man had presence. From the first notes of his lute and his voice, he spun a mood and a story. He took his audience to the Crusade in his opening verse, made them fight alongside him for ‘Peace in the Name of God.’