The Ruby In Her Navel

by Barry Unsworth

  "What is that?"

  I did not expect much response to this; he had already said more than was customary with him. But I had come upon him at a propitious moment, he was in garrulous vein. "Yes," he said, "I have long believed that the answer lies with the Siculi, and lately I have become more convinced of it than ever. No doubt you are familiar with the customs of this tribe?"

  "Of course."

  "I see that you are not," he said, after a sly pause. "A very ancient tribe, they once occupied parts of this island. Their presence in Sicily and the Italian peninsula is well attested. Thucydides speaks of them, as does also Polybius. We even have some words of their language, which in my opinion has an affinity with Latin."

  "How does this touch upon the issue of kingship?"

  "I am coming to that. You are too much in haste, like all the young.

  Haste is a very bad thing. The Siculi had gods, like all others – there has never been a people without gods. The most important were the Polici, protectors of farmers and sailors. These Polici had a father-god named Adranus. Now it is this Adranus who has been rousing my interest of late."

  He might have meant lately, or in the course of the last five years or so, it was impossible to tell with him. "Well," I said, "I hope your labours bear fruit."

  I was beginning to move away but he clutched at my sleeve to stop me.

  "Always this haste," he said. "I am coming round to the belief that Adranus was not a god at all, but a king. That is to say, he was a mortal, but because of his kingship he was revered as a god."

  He smiled and raised his chin, as if that rustling had grown louder.

  There were more gaps than teeth in his mouth. "It fits together perfectly. Adranus was king, the Polici were his ministers and the farmers and sailors formed the people. I am rereading the works of Polybius in search of a reference that will clinch the matter. But for this time is needed, the writings of Polybius run to many volumes."

  He released his febrile clutch on my sleeve and I congratulated him on these discoveries and was finally able to move on. It did not seem to me at all likely that Glycas would live long enough to get through all the works of Polybius, that most long-winded of authors. But no doubt someone else would be appointed to continue. As I made my way across the courtyard I was filled yet again with wonder at the might of the King, how it infused all our lives. His title was not in dispute within the realm, it was recognised by all. True, he had potent enemies: the King of the Germans and the Emperor of the Byzantines both regarded him as usurper, and Pope Eugenius had not yet formally recognised his rule. But it was hard to believe that any of these would be brought to a new state of mind by learning that the ancient tribe of the Siculi had kings. Yet the labours of Glycas continued, they would be continued by others when Glycas was no more. Perhaps King Roger himself was no longer aware of the scholar's existence. At some time in the past he had taken a mortal life between finger and thumb and set it down in a room among books and left it there, warm enough, ignored, like an insect in a sunny corner.

  How many there were in forgotten corners, kept alive by the warmth of his power! I too, I thought, as I saddled my horse in its stable near the gate, and led it past the uniformed guards and so out into the street. When the heron took flight and the blindfold was removed from the hawk's eyes, how much space would Thurstan the Purveyor occupy in the King's mind?

  That sun of April was hot when it was trapped between walls. It was the hour when people were closing their shutters for the afternoon rest.

  Those in the streets were making for home or for a place in the shade.

  The water-sellers were calling with their high-pitched cries, their pails and dippers swinging from the yoke and scattering drops that flashed as they fell and dried before the marks could show. I passed a group of the King's Saracen footguards returning to their barracks after some display – they were in dress uniform of green kaftan and white turban, with the short, curved swords at their belts. Two Norman serjeants in chain mail rode by, and I saw the hostile looks they exchanged with the Saracens, who were the King's favourite troops.

  I arrived at my house to find the shutters already closed against the sun. The gatekeeper, Pietro, was in his shed at the side, half asleep on his cot, and he was slow to open to me. It was his wife, Caterina, a woman from Amalfi, who took care of my two rooms and kept my water jug full and cooked for me, as she cooked for others in the house, wheezing slowly up the stairs with food she had prepared in the kitchen below – I call it a kitchen but it was no more than an angle in the wall with a fireplace. Today she came with wheat cakes made with a filling of chives and melted goat cheese. With this I drank a little of the good Sicilian wine from the royal vineyards in the Conca d'Oro, to which the first three degrees of palace officials are entitled by contract.

  Afterwards I slept a little and woke to feelings of unease, something like foreboding, remembering, as I still lay reclined on my couch, the marks of division so evident at the majlis that morning, the antagonisms that stirred among us. I wondered why Maurice Béroul had watched me so, what had been in his mind when he had seemed to hesitate. And I wondered who our King listened to, Norman or Lombard, Arab or Greek or Jew. Then I remembered I was to go all the way to Bari on a mission I did not believe in, simply for Yusuf to maintain the prerogatives of his Diwan.

  Mainly to expel these gloomy thoughts, but also because I would be away from Palermo for some time, I decided to go that evening to the Royal Chapel to see the progress of the mosaics. I felt the need for movement, I would go on foot, there had been no rain to muddy the streets. Also, I wanted to visit a goldsmith's shop near the Buscemi Gate, because I had it in mind, after seeing the mosaics, to spend some time with the women of the Tiraz, the silk workshop in the precincts of the palace, and in particular with a woman called Sara, who was my favourite among them.

  These women were from Thebes, of Jewish race, experts in the cultivation of the silkworm and the manufacture of robes and vestments for court occasions, who had been carried off from their homes and brought as a gift to the city of Palermo by the Admiral of the Fleet, the Emir of Emirs, George of Antioch, on a raid he had made into Greece two years before. Usually I gave Sara coin – it was what she preferred. But I handled money so much in my work that I liked sometimes to make her a present, some small trinket. Along with my clothes and the rent for my lodgings and the care of my horse, my visits to the Tiraz were a main part of my monthly expenditure.

  The light was fading as I set out and the lamps at street corners were being lit. There was the smell of spilt water round the troughs of the pump near my house, a strangely strong odour, though made from nothing but slaked dust and hot stones; as always, it evoked some longing in me, though I did not know for what, or whether it was more than merely a feeling of loneliness.

  This was the time of day when the street sweepers came into their own; sweepers they called themselves, but they were scavengers in fact. They were out now in force, sacks roped across their bodies. Of late months they had been coming to the attention of our Diwan. They were unruly; they were too successful. It was a closed company now, impossible to enter without a permit from one of the clan chiefs who controlled the various districts of the city, and had armed men at their bidding and skimmed off a portion of the sweepers' takings, as they did with beggars and whores. This was made more complicated by the fact that the dominant clans were of different races, Arabs in the Kalsa, Greeks on the south side, Sicilians in the area of the harbour. Disputes over territory arose from time to time and killings occurred. This was acceptable, so long as a proper balance was maintained. Lately, however, the balance had begun to tilt. There had been pitched battles between bands of sweepers, the number of deaths had increased very noticeably. ›From being a simple matter of bribes and intimidation, it had been dignified with the title of fiscal malpractice, and so it had come to the attention of the Diwan of Control. So far no remedy had been found. It was obvious that the sweeping, or scav
enging, or whatever one called it, mainly took the form of theft; the people were poor, there were not pickings enough in the streets of Palermo to maintain more than a handful of lawful scavengers.

  I fell to pondering the matter again as I walked along. The problem was threefold: how to stop the thefts, enlarge the King's coffers and have the streets swept clean. The sweepers could be made to wear a uniform of some kind, with a colour that would mark them out, yellow perhaps. Then people would be able to watch them more narrowly, especially when they were gathered in groups. Bolder, more likely to come to the notice of the King and gain his approval, would be to change their constitution altogether, form them into a single company with a new name, The Noble Company of Street Cleaners, wearing the royal emblem and regularly paying a fixed sum, or perhaps a portion of their earnings, into the Royal Treasury. In that case it would no longer be a bribe but a tax, and so quite lawful. But the difficulty here, apart from the hostility it would arouse among the chiefs, was that they had no earnings, properly speaking, only the proceeds of their thefts. Could people be persuaded to pay to have their streets cleaned? It seemed unlikely.

  Perhaps this too could be imposed as a tax. Meanwhile the scavengers might be required to carry broom and shovel; thus encumbered they would find it less easy to steal, but on the other hand a shovel in the wrong hands could be a formidable weapon…

  These fruitless thoughts occupied my mind until I came to the little square close to the Buscemi Gate where the goldsmith had his furnace. I watched him work for a little while, hammering out softened gold to thin leaf on his anvil. When he saw me he gave the work to his son, who was as brawny as he and always there to assist him, and came towards me, the sweat gleaming on his arms and face. He had a glass counter with the things for sale in boxes below the glass, so that they could be seen but not touched until he took them out. After some hesitation I chose a garnet stone with a painted foil on the underside to make it glow. I thought Sara could wear it on a chain round her neck, or have it set in a ring if she so chose. He asked three silver ducats for it.

  Making a purchase often lightens my spirits and it did so now. As I made my way through the darkening streets towards the chapel, my anticipation quickened. I had been following the progress of the mosaics for some years and was on close terms of friendship with the man whose charge it was to see them completed, the Byzantine master mosaicist Demetrius Karamides, who had come to oversee the work by personal invitation of our King Roger.

  I entered by the west doorway and the wonder of the place struck me anew, a familiar wonder but one that had never lost its power over me.

  The nave was in shadow as I moved forward, but there was lamplight at the far end, in the area of the sanctuary, where they were working. A gleaming light was cast upward on the saints and apostles in the arches of the crossing, holy ranks of those who intercede for us. Light fell on the raised right hand of Christ Pantocrator and on the open book with its message of salvation: I am the light of the world. I could not see the words but I knew them. Christ's face was in shadow but a tremulous radiance lay on the hem of the Virgin's robe and on the gold of her halo and on the outstretched hand of the Angel of the Annunciation. The shadows shifted as I drew nearer and I saw God's fingers and the bright wings of the Dove.

  As I walked forward through the shadow I felt that the light beyond was casting for me as an angler might draw his net for a fish to bring it up from the deep. There is no accident in our lives, everything has been foreseen. I had entered at a certain time, in a certain light. There was the open book, the shining disc, the wings; there were the hands above all, hands blessing, hands sending. For a moment I felt the dazzle of a different light, but then it receded and was lost to me. I saw Demetrius move into the light. He came towards me and we clasped hands in the way the Byzantine Greeks are used to doing it, gripping high up above the wrist. He had been more than eight years on the island, first at Cefalu and then at Palermo, yet he had made no smallest effort to adopt the manners or style of dress of his hosts, keeping still the ceremonious ways of Constantinople and the high-necked, loosely belted dalmatic. I had wondered if this were due to pride or a feeling of patriotism, dangerous if so, now that his emperor was preparing for war with Sicily.

  Perhaps just an unyieldingness of nature. Or was my own too yielding, too loose? This also I had wondered about. Greek among Greeks, Frank among Franks, what was Thurstan?

  I knew as I answered his greeting that something was amiss, not from his face, which was always sombre, but from his tone, from the way he at once drew me aside and led me into the south side of the crossing, out of hearing of the two working in the sanctuary. There was a man slung high against the opposite wall, suspended by ropes on a platform of wood, with lamps attached to the ropes either side. He was working on the decoration on the inside of the arch immediately above the Flight into Egypt. He was very fair; in the light his hair looked golden.

  "What is it?" I asked, immediately responsive to this silent guiding of me. As a plant knows the source of light and turns its face there, so I knew the manners of secrecy.

  But he said nothing for the moment, merely regarded me. He had eyes as black as jet, high-lidded and very lustrous, compelling in their gaze.

  When displeased he had a way of lowering the lids over them that gave his face an expression of suffering not patiently borne.

  "Is the work not proceeding well?"

  "We will not be permitted to finish the work. We will soon be leaving here."

  "Leaving? But there is so much still to do. There is the west wall, and the arcades and the apostolic sequence in…"

  "Yes, as you say, there is much to do still, but it will not be my people to do it, new people will be coming. We will finish the mosaics in the sanctuary and the crossing because they do not want so evident a mixture of styles, but we will be leaving before the end of the year."

  "New people?" I was bewildered. "Who are they that do not want mixed styles?"

  Demetrius indicated with a movement of his head the man on the platform high on the north wall of the crossing. "He is one of the new ones. They are Latins from the north, Franks. We set this one to do the fleurs délices decoration on the arch because it is all we can trust him to do."

  I glanced upwards. There was an aureole of light around the man's head; he was like a heedless angel, suspended there with his back to us. To the right of him, level with his shining head, were the emerald fronds of the Egyptian palm and the infant Christ sitting upright on Joseph's shoulder. When I looked back at Demetrius my sight was dimmed for some moments, as if I had been looking into the sun. "It cannot be," I said.

  "It cannot be to replace you that they are sent. To work with you, to learn, yes. You are known for a master, you made the mosaics at Cefalu for our King Roger, and all of us know how much they pleased him."

  The King's gratitude had been lavish: five hundred gold dinars as a gift on the completion of the mosaics, this sum in addition to the wages and the maintenance written in the contract. I knew this for a fact, as the accounts had been drawn up in our Diwan. "There must be some mistake," I said.

  Demetrius made the strange, angular gesture of the Byzantine Greek, angry and resigned at the same time, shrugging his right shoulder and slightly raising his right arm, palm upwards, as if throwing some object awkwardly up into the air. "There is no mistake. Unless it be the mistake of employing lesser craftsmen in our stead. We have the wrong liturgy, the Latin Christians will take our place."

  "By whose order?"

  "By order of the King."

  I was dumbfounded at this; in fact for some moments I could not believe the words had been said. A long course of persuasion and many promises had been needed to bring Demetrius Karamides to Sicily. In Cefalu first, and now here in the Royal Chapel, in the apse and sanctuary and crossing, he and those he had brought with him from Constantinople had made mosaics that were the wonder of the world. Whose the skill of tongue that had persuaded the King to or
der this dismissing of them? It could only be as Demetrius said, those of the Roman Church, wanting mosaic workers of their own liturgy in this place where the Latin mass would be celebrated. But what filled my mind, once the shock of surprise was over, excluding all else, was the fact that this decision had been taken and these orders carried out without the smallest trickle of information reaching the Diwan of Control – not even rumour had come to us. This it was that gave me the beginnings of fear as I looked beyond Demetrius into the shadows of the nave. Such secrecy was the mark of power. By what paths had they reached it?

  "It cannot be," I said, but I was speaking now of this discord, this enmity of faiths, here where Saracens had carved the wood of the ceiling, Latins made the marble inlays, Greeks set the stones of the mosaics, all working together to make a church where our Norman King could hear the mass.

  Perhaps hearing the trouble of my spirit in my voice, Demetrius moved towards me and again took my arm. "Come this way a little," he said.

  "You cannot see well in the lamp light. Not well enough to make a full judgement. But the medallions in the soffits of the arcade here, these were done by our people, working alongside Lombards from the mainland.

  Working together, you understand? The work is fine, just as it is in the apse and the sanctuary and the side chapels. They worked well but it was always under our guidance. They have learned but it is not yet enough.

  Now these newcomers, who know even less, will have charge of all the work in the nave. You will see how the mosaics will be coarsened, they will hold less light."

  His eyes opened wide as he spoke. "Light," he said, "the art of mosaic is the art of light. It is in the setting of the pieces, not in the colour. We see where one colour ends and another begins, but light is splendour, and splendour has no bounds. Who does not know how to catch the light will never make truly fine mosaic. Their work will never be as ours here. You will see where our work ended and theirs began."

  He had spoken with much feeling and his eyes, as he opened them full upon me, gleamed in the lamplight as if they too had caught the light he was extolling. But it seemed to me that he was exaggerating because of his hurt at being supplanted – a feeling natural enough. I could not believe the King had allowed himself to be persuaded to entrust the mosaics of his own chapel to people of inferior skill, knowing them for such. Demetrius spoke as if there were no other makers of mosaic in the world.