The Ruby In Her Navel

by Barry Unsworth

  He listened to me and I saw a flicker of interest come into his eyes at my mention of the quarry birds I was to buy. He had had a passion for hawking in his other life; as a small boy I had sometimes gone with him, riding my pony at his side, watched him unhood the hawk and fly it loose in the hunting field, seen his pleasure when, through his own training and handling of it, a peregrine would stoop down on a grey heron, a bird accounted too big for it in the wild state, bind to it and bring it down, or else kill it with a stroke of the talons. This, and seeing him dressed for the lists, mounted on his black charger, plumed and burnished and splendid in his armour, with our colours on his shield and the pennant of his lance, were among my earliest memories of him, hardly quite believed in now, like scenes in a story I had been told and had begun to doubt, now that the storyteller had gone away and there was no one to ask.

  "What type of bird will you be looking for?" he asked. "Those marshes of Calabria close by the sea, I remember them for the cranes you found there, huge birds, you could hear the ruffle of their wings when they were still far." His voice had quickened, saying this, and he raised his head as if to follow those great birds in their flight.

  "One would need an eagle to take birds of that size," I said. "One of the King's golden eagles."

  "The King keeps eagles for the pride of it, and it is right he should do so, for it is a kingly bird. But an eagle is not biddable enough for good hawking, it does not give heed, no skill can train it beyond a certain point. No, you need a short-winged hawk for the cranes, one that can climb quickly. A goshawk is good."

  "I am hoping to get the smaller birds, the white egrets. The Royal Falconer has asked for those, as he does every year. They fly faster and change direction more swiftly and suddenly, so they make better sport."

  He nodded, but that life of interest had already left his face, subdued by the long habit of discipline. He cast his eyes down and listened soberly as I talked, and I looked at his face and sought there, again fruitlessly, something to account for the decision that had brought him here, the greatest single gesture of his life. Fourteen years ago he had walked barefoot up the stony track, beat at the gate of the monastery, and asked them to take him in, denying in that moment everything he had been brought up to think of as his duty and his destiny as a Norman knight.

  No clue in the face, how could there be? All the struggle was over now.

  He had held his fief as a vassal of the Duke of Apulia, to whom he had vowed his service. In fulfilment of this vow he had left home to take part in the Duke's wars against Robert of Capua, whose forces, aided by a contingent of German knights under Henry the Proud of Bavaria, were besieging Salerno. In a skirmish outside the walls he had been taken by the Capuans and kept six months in prison while they haggled over the ransom. During this time my mother, who had been pregnant when he left for the wars, died in childbirth, and he who would have been my brother died with her.

  The ransom left us poorer, but it was not this that so changed the course of my life, nor was it the loss of my mother, much as I grieved for her. The land was tenanted, with thrift the loss could have been made good. It was my father who ruined us, making the estates over to the monastery, together with his own person, and the rents that went with them. By a chance I could not help regarding as malign, the earlier devotion of the Cistercians to poverty, their refusal to accept manorial endowments, had for some time been relaxed. And so, at a stroke, I was disinherited.

  Part of the pain of this was not to know why. I was sixteen years old, I loved my father, I would have put all my mind to understanding him. But he had never spoken of it to me, never tried to explain. He had never talked to me of the solace he had found here or the grace he had discovered; he had never, that I could remember, uttered God's name. And in the years that followed the resentment that came to dress the wound had prevented me from asking. Had he witnessed some scene of cruelty or carnage that had charged his soul with horror for war? But he was no stranger to bloodshed. Perhaps in that prolonged captivity his heart had changed, he had discovered a love of solitude or a need for it, made greater by sorrow at the death of my mother, or even remorse, as if it might have been prevented had he been there by her side – theirs had been a love-match, so I remember my mother telling me.

  Whatever the cause, it had cost me dear. Once again, as I looked at the face that was slightly turned from me, and spoke to him – I was talking now of recent events in Palermo – I was struck by the strange congruity of our lives. Those barefoot steps that had taken him from knight to monk had taken me by degrees from aspirant knight to the Office of Control and its workings, open and hidden. We had both, in our different ways, gone into hiding. On that December day when my father begged for admittance at the monastery gate I had been within eighteen months of my dubbing as knight; I had been trained to arms from the age of ten and I was gifted in it; all my heart was in achieving knighthood, it was all in the world that I wanted.

  This disappointment, and the reproach I felt in my heart, lay always between us; it was between us now as we sat together there. When I might still have been freed from it he had kept himself away, behind these walls. It was too late to speak of it now. On this visit, as always before, I spoke of things that might interest him, among them what I had learned from Demetrius, that the Byzantine mosaicists were leaving with their work still unfinished, to be replaced by others of the Roman liturgy, Italians from the mainland and some Franks from beyond the Alps.

  With this topic I succeeded in rousing some interest in him, but his feeling about the matter was the reverse of mine; he approved of it entirely. "They should all be expelled," he said. "Or kept below ground in dungeons. It is wrong that they should be allowed to walk the streets of our cities."

  "Well," I said, "I do not see them as dangerous, but of course, speaking strictly, they are enemies to our realm, now that their emperor is preparing to invade us."

  "Not dangerous? Not dangerous when they paint their faces and pad their bodies and go abroad in the clothing of women?"

  "There are some who behave in this manner, so much is true. The population of Palermo is very great and many are the needs there that seek satisfaction."

  "Needs," he said, and he looked at me as if I were a stranger.

  "Franks and Saracens and Lombards could be found who do the same."

  "No, it is a vice of the Byzantine Greeks. That is common knowledge.

  They darken their eyelids and hang rings from their ears."

  Common knowledge where? Inside these walls? I felt the usual stirring of dislike for these communities of monks, a feeling I knew to be childish and unjust, as many worthy men, and scholars of note among them, have lived cloistered lives. But it was bred by my father's desertion, the ruining of my dreams of glory. He thought of the Byzantine Greeks as decadent and womanish and as poor soldiers, and this was not anything to do with his life in the monastery – what did he see of them? It came from his life of before, it was the common prejudice of the class to which he had belonged, to which he still belonged in some part of him.

  The Greek was womanish, the Lombard was treacherous, the Saracen was a worthy foe… The years of toil in the fields, of prayers and vigils, of mortifying the flesh, had made no smallest difference to these views of his.

  As I say, anger with him made me childish. I wanted to say that I preferred the company of Greeks to that of Normans, which in fact was true; I wanted to ask him if darkening the eyelids was not better, since it might be thought by some to improve the appearance, than shaving the pate clean and leaving a fringe all round, which could not be thought by any to do so.

  But of course I did not. My feelings for him were divided but I could not have hurt or offended him. I had love for him, and something else that was not love but in some way bound up with it, something stronger than merely blaming: I felt he had betrayed me, that he betrayed me over again at every parting. Always, as the parting approached, I tried to bring him closer and to punish him by usi
ng those powers of speculation that Yusuf had fostered in me, figuring to myself the life to which he was returning. And always my imaginings leapt over the daylight hours and lingered on the night, and this, I think, because I so much hate the dark. I saw him lying in the common dormitory, still clothed in his habit; he would have been sleeping there since nightfall. Then, in the darkness, long before first light, the bells would ring for matins and he would rise still full of sleep, and fumble to put on his night shoes.

  He would throw the covers over his bed, he would put on his cowl to go to the privy – to go bare-headed was forbidden, I knew this from my reading, but the wherefore of it was not said, and such a question I could never have asked him, but supposed these functions of the body, performed always in company with others, were too intimate for the face to be shown, each was protected by not knowing who squatted beside him.

  All this while the bell would still be sounding, they would shuffle down the stairs into the cavern of the church, dark here too save for some scattered light of candles, and assemble in the choir to sing the night offices.

  There was always some horror for me in this thought, that my father, once so splendid to view in face and form, should submit himself to this night-time hooding and groping, that he should have become a person of the night to me, when he had been like the sun. He had been a knight of modest estate and modest following, but he had been my model of all a knight should be. I was my own model now, and far from perfect I found it. Perhaps some of the sadness of this knowledge showed in my face as we said goodbye, because this time he clasped my arm for a moment and his eyes looked into mine and we saw each other and there was something that perhaps he would have said to me, but the moment passed and he drew back.

  At first, as I rode away, though the sun was high now and the countryside flooded with light, thoughts of my father's night life continued to obscure my mind, like mist that was slow to disperse. I saw him still in the dimness of the church, groping to his place in the choir, with scarce light enough to give him guidance. Sometimes perhaps, being old and drowsy, he would fall asleep during the singing. Would there be someone appointed to watch for this? If my father slept, would someone lay hands on him, shake him awake?

  From this I fell to thinking yet again of all I had lost by the change in him, and neither the beauty of the day nor the exercise of riding could take my mind from this. Perhaps it is true that the frustrating of hope makes the desire seem in memory stronger, as Saint Augustine maintains in his 'Confessions' – I think it is to be found there. I do not know, after these years that have passed, whether it was the idea of knighthood that drew me, to battle for the good under God and the King, or whether it was simply the wish to join an order that belonged to my rank in life, to do what was required of me, as my father had done, and his father before him. I know only that I wanted it with all my being.

  I was seven years old when my father sent me from our home in Apulia to the court of Richard of Bernalda, where I spent seven years as a page.

  The loneliness and the longing for home were tempered – even then – by pride in the calling. There were ten other boys of my age there and eight girls, all the children of nobles. We boys shared the pride and did our best to conceal the sorrow, and with the girls it was something of the same – there was one girl there that I loved and we talked together when we could contrive to meet.

  This is what you were born for, my father said, on this our first parting – my father, who not many years later was to give my birthright away. You are the only son, the destiny of knighthood began with your birth, it is for this you must be sent away, to learn manners, wait on the ladies, serve at meals, help to take care of the armour and the horses. He did not expect tears from me, so there were none, but my mother wept.

  The sense of destiny was there already, even in unhappiness; it grew greater as the unhappiness grew less, as I learned to ride and fight. By the age of fourteen I had abandoned miniature weapons and was already practised at managing lance and sword on horseback; true, it was not a charger yet, but a stallion and restive enough. Riding home through the smiling countryside, bright spring flowers at my feet, larks singing overhead, on the eve of a mission for which I felt no eagerness, I remembered my ardour of those days; with a sort of arid pride I remembered that I had been the strongest of my companions, always first at the practice lists.

  I was bare-headed and the sun was hot; I stopped to pull on my velvet cap that came fashionably low over the brow. Then I allowed the mare to go her own placid pace, remembering the dusty courtyard where we practised, the heavy, snorting breaths of the horses, the gallop, the levelled lance, the straw-filled effigy twitching and swaying there as they jerked it on the ropes, the triumph when I pierced it and dashed it to the ground, the sacking agape as the belly of straw was spilled out.

  A year later and I was shield-bearer to Hubert of Venosa, went hunting with him and attended him at the lists and learned to manage his war-horses and to fight on foot with sword and dagger so I could protect him in battle if he were unhorsed. Then, in a skirmish outside the walls of Salerno my father advanced too far, was surrounded, tumbled from his horse and taken captive. And with that recklessness of his my dream of knighthood was over, the splendour of the armour, the shine of the silver on the shield, the bright silk across the saddle, the enemy before your face.

  On the day when my father beat at the monastery gates I had the best part of two years to wait before my time came for the vigil and the blessing of the weapons and the flat of the sword against my neck.

  Hubert might have kept me for the time, he was always generous. But the armour I would wear when I knelt to be dubbed, who would pay for that?

  Who would buy for me the war-horse, an animal bred for weight and very costly? How would I come by the weapons, and the trappings for the horse, more costly still?

  What would have become of me I do not know. I might have returned to England, to my mother's people, and sought my fortune there. Then came delegates from the Seneschal's Office on a visit. Shows of various kinds were put on for them. We squires did our tilting at effigies and our mounting at the gallop and our sword exercises. I distinguished myself and was noticed and my situation was explained to the visitors. A question or two, a quick reply, and I returned with them to Palermo, to the Palace, where I entered on a different kind of preparation. I was to be one of the King's Household Guard, a body whose duty it was to guard his person when he appears in public, and whose numbers were kept small – there were never more than fifty at any one time, including officers, all of good family. There was no bar to enrollment on grounds of race or creed, and this by the King's own wish, who put his trust more in diversity than sameness. Shared by all were loyalty, skill with weapons and the obligation to speak Greek, the common language of the island.

  I was set to study Greek, my knowledge of which was imperfect at that time since I had grown up in courts where the language was French. These lessons were a great boon to me, as it proved, they led me to a love of studying, and this is with me still. My teacher, finding me an apt pupil, perhaps unusually so, introduced me to Latin, though in the main it was later, during my years in the Diwan, that I made strides in this language. I was also taught wrestling, and the ways of fighting when space is limited and the opponent close, which was mainly the use of the dagger and of a sword shorter and lighter than the one I had been used to. There were holds and blows which we learned, designed to disable a man or even to kill him, and we spent some time each day in lifting weights and doing exercises that make the body strong.

  In all these matters I think I can say I did my best to excel. My disappointment at failing to become a knight was still keen, but I looked forward to the day when I would don the uniform of the household guards, a splendid uniform with a plumed cap and a tunic worked in silver thread on a scarlet background and a polished leather belt and embroidered leggings that had a line of silver at the sides. My role would still be one of service, I would b
e protecting the King's sacred person and helping to uphold his state, I would be near him, I would live in the light of his presence.

  However, none of this came about. Another question, another answer, in Arabic this time, changed my life again. Now, as I made my way back through the Conca d'Oro, as it narrows towards the city and the harbour beyond, where I would take ship next day, I felt my life narrowing too and the knowledge of loss constricted my heart.

  VI

  It was still dark when I embarked next morning. The two who were to accompany me to Cosenza were waiting at the dock. One of them, Sigismond, I recognised; the other, who gave his name as Mario, was new.

  Both were brawny and impassive, as usual with those who are engaged in these duties. I would have been happier without an escort, but the rules of the Diwan obliged me to have one: I was carrying money to pay for the birds and to meet my expenses for the second part of my journey; there were some who knew this and others who would guess it. In accordance with my usual custom, I kept some coin in the purse at my belt – an empty purse convinces no one. But the bulk of the money I wore strapped across my abdomen below the shirt.

  The captain too was waiting at the dock. The ship was a small merchant vessel like a thousand others, with a crew of three, all Greeks from Cefalu, trading along the western shore of Calabria as far as Maratea.

  This time, as they knew, they would be going only as far as Paola, and taking no cargo there but the birds. It was on the King's orders, they knew that too and were happy at it, they were counting the coin already, but they would not touch any till they were back in Palermo, and this too formed part of the knowledge that lay between us. What did not was the fact that I would not be returning with the ship; neither captain nor crew would know this till the last moment.