The Ruby In Her Navel

by Barry Unsworth

  "Did they go to the bathhouse?" This was a question that came with a leap, it was out almost before I knew it. "I think she mentioned that they might do that," I said after a moment.

  "I do not know, they did not speak of it." He frowned a little as if perplexed. "I can find out."

  "No, it is not important. Just tell them what we have decided about the skirts."

  He left on this errand and I was glad to be alone for a while. But I made no further attempts at writing songs that day, why I do not know.

  XV

  The list came, her name was there, and strange it was to see it so indifferently mixed among the others when it sounded with golden trumpets and the voices of angels when my eyes came to rest on it. Day followed day, till that one came, the much-awaited. I rode out of the city while it was still early, before the sun grew too hot. The sky was clear, the larks were singing, my heart was high with anticipation. The waters of the Oreto sparkled as I crossed it by the Admiral's Bridge, as they call it, a bridge of many arches that was made on the orders of the Emir George Antiochenus, the same who afterwards raided Thebes and carried off the silk workers, among them my Sara. Before long, I thought, I will free myself from these silken strings; one last present, in gold, a keepsake; then all my heart and homage for Alicia…

  This thought raised my spirits further, and as I left the river behind me I lifted my head and broke into song: Lady, my heart, the best friend that I have, I leave in your keeping, till we can love with all our bodies I ceased, however, not feeling the words to be fitting, as I passed by the Church of San Giovanni dei Leprosi, which lies not far beyond the river. This church was built by our King's uncle, Robert Guiscard, on the very spot where the Norman army first encamped before Palermo, which was then still in the hands of the Saracens.

  The outer gates to the palace were reached by a roadway with forest on either side. I announced my name to the guards and they knew it without needing to look at any list, something of extreme rarity in my life up to then. I was conducted by one of them, who walked alongside, holding my horse, this also being far from common in my experience. I wondered whether I might in future take my father's title and call myself Thurstan of Mescoli.

  We came to the lakeside and the arcaded front of the palace rose before me, set amidst groves of orange trees. There was a causeway, built up with stone, that led across the water to the gilded gates of the palace itself – the only way to reach them by land. Passing over this, I saw a ripple and a flash of gold as some great carp turned near the surface.

  There was a strange, sudden impression of extended distances and doubled perspectives, as if the lake itself, the sunlit waters and the dark-leaved trees and the interleaving arches of the palace were shifting and receding as I drew nearer.

  It was a confusion of the senses very fleeting, ceasing as I came before the gates. Glancing aside before entering, I saw a group of men and women walking together at the borders of the lake, dressed in light-coloured clothes. I wondered if one of the ladies might be Alicia, but it was too far for me to see clearly. In the open courtyard beyond the gate, my guide was replaced by a groom in the same colours of dark red and pale blue, who took my horse's bridle and held her head while I dismounted, keeping close in case I needed help – servants trained to this perfection do not distinguish people by their seeming young or old or fat or thin. He led the horse away, having first handed my saddle-bags to yet another liveried attendant, who went before me across the courtyard and delivered me to a chamberlain waiting in the hall, dressed with sober richness in black velvet. Never before that I could remember had I been greeted on arriving anywhere by so many persons, one after another, before even setting eyes on my host. To live in the open and be known, to bear your own wealth and be careless in the display of it, to have knightly title and a lady of birth at your side, to be surrounded by care and attention. Not just for a day, but every day of your life!

  The chamberlain conducted me to my room, which was on the floor above and had a high-vaulted ceiling carved intricately in wood in the Saracen style, and a broad window shuttered against the sun. All this was splendid enough, but it was the bed that caught my eye: it was big enough for four Thurstans, canopied in green silk. In the wall opposite the bed there was a niche tiled in dark blue with a design of red flowers at the base. It seemed to me that this must be one of the finest sleeping-chambers in the palace – certainly I had never slept in one so fine. Outside the door, some few paces along a passageway, there was a privy, which the chamberlain pointed out to me. It was for my use only, he said, I nodded and strove to make it appear a commonplace in my life that I should have a privy to my private use – it was one of the privileges I hoped to inherit if I succeeded to Yusuf's place at the Diwan.

  Having waited to assure himself that all was satisfactory to me, the chamberlain bowed and took his leave. I opened the shutters and immediately a low sound of running water came into the room: below my window there lay a courtyard with a marble fountain, and tiny streams carried the water from the basin of the fountain into lower basins, until all the water flowed into a small pond, and there were white lilies floating on the surface of this.

  A serving girl came with towels and a ewer of scented water for me to wash and refresh myself after the journey. She was followed shortly afterwards by an armed retainer – he too in the same livery – who bore throwing lance and long dagger and hunting horn, but of these I had no need, having brought my own. At this season it would be the hart that was hunted, not the boar, so it was useless to carry a sword. I had hunted hart as a squire in the service of Hubert of Venosa, and since then sometimes in the woods of the Conca D'Oro with companions from the palace administration. My horse was not notably spirited but she was steady. I was confident of bearing myself with credit, and I had brought with me hunting clothes specially made for the occasion, which I thought suited me admirably well, a high-waisted doublet with slashed sleeves, and leggings that did justice to the shape of my legs, the whole in matching colours of wine-red and pale yellow. It had cost me half a month's wages.

  The chamberlain returned to ask me if I would be pleased to descend. In the main hall my host and his lady awaited me, and they responded very affably to my bows. Bertrand of Bonneval was a very tall man – taller than I – broad-faced and fair-bearded, with blue eyes so clear and direct as to seem childlike. The Lady Isabelle seemed low of stature beside this stout lord of hers, though I think she was of middling height; she was delicate of feature and not much given to smiling and very brightly painted.

  "I knew your father," Sir Bertrand said. "A very valiant knight, we were companions-in-arms at the siege of Salerno in the summer of '34. Now making his peace with God, as I hear reported. Admirable, very admirable. Even if it were only for the father's sake, we would be glad to welcome the son."

  I made some confused reply to this, expressing appreciation on my father's behalf and on my own. The exact words I have forgotten. In fact the confusion was caused by what I felt to be some ambiguity in his remarks. Did he mean that I had been invited for my father's sake?

  Surely not – I did not believe he had known my father so well. He must have meant that there were reasons in addition, reasons he was too circumspect to mention, in spite of those guileless eyes, or one reason at any rate: Alicia had found some way of recommending me to him. It had not occurred to me before, not fully, so delighted had I been, how difficult it might have been for her to press my name, to show her interest in a way that was consistent with her honour. Perhaps she had enlisted some third party to act as go-between…

  We were joined now by others, introductions were made, we moved all together, not into the main courtyard through which I had come on entering the palace, but across the hall, then across a second, smaller one, and so out into the rose gardens behind, where there was a marble pavilion in the style of a Greek temple, but with an arcade of slender Saracenic columns. Within this, shaded from the sun, there were people already sitting at a lon
g table laid for a meal and decked with vases of roses white and red.

  As we drew nearer I saw that Alicia was among those seated and I felt the blood leave my face. I could give no sign of recognition unless she did; I did not know whether she had spoken of our meeting or wished to keep it secret. But she looked up as I came to the table, our eyes met and she smiled. Never had fire warmed me as that smile of hers so openly upon me – a smile for all to see. She spoke in turn to the men on either side of her, one of whom looked of an age with me, the other older, tonsured and wearing the dark gown of a cleric. I knew she must be speaking of me, as both looked towards me and nodded a greeting. On the spur of this I went to where they were sitting and made my bow to them and they stood to return this bow and I heard Alicia say my name and those of the two with her. The younger man was her brother Adhemar, who had accompanied her from the Holy Land, the other her uncle, Abbot Alboino. He was recently from Rome, she had said. Adhemar had his sister's fairness and her level brows. He smiled readily and his manners were easy and pleasing. The abbot, by contrast, smiled hardly at all but he addressed me in friendly fashion and said that his niece had spoken well of me. He was round-faced and well-fleshed, but his eyes seemed to gainsay this air of well-being: sadder eyes than his I could not remember seeing in any man's face.

  These civilities over, I returned to the place allotted to me, guided in this by the lord's steward. Water was brought in silver ewers and poured over the guests' hands, a second servant following behind with towels.

  Grace was said by our host, and the first courses were brought in.

  I remember the meal as excellent but at the time I scarcely paid attention to what I was eating, nor to the words exchanged with those sitting next to me, so enraptured was I by the knowledge that Alicia had spoken of me to these members of her family and that they, far from thinking me unworthy, had seemed pleased by the acquaintance. She would also had spoken of me to her parents, I thought, on her return to Troina. They too had not been displeased by the connection; otherwise, how could the brother have shown such friendliness towards me? From time to time, more frequently perhaps than was decorous, I glanced down the table at her, eager for anything of her that my sight could register, her hands, the set of her head, the movement of her throat when she drank. Sometimes our eyes met, and then her look lingered on me.

  When we rose from the table my first thought was to join her immediately, but she was borne away by those in attendance on her, I did not see the way they went, and spent a time that seemed wearisome to me looking in courtyards that led to vestibules and antechambers that then opened to other courtyards, with no one in sight but servants who bowed to me silently. At last I came out by the lakeside and stood there, gazing down at the water, wondering where to look now for her, and whether there was someone I might ask.

  There were reflections of clouds in the water, faint shreds and curls of cloud that I had not known were there in the sky until I saw them thus reflected, and also of foliage, the sharp-leaved foliage of the orange trees and the golden fruit. And now again there came that sense of shifting and displacement that I had felt earlier while crossing the causeway. There was no wind to stir the water, the surface was calm, yet the clouds and the leaves and the bright globes of the oranges stretched and shifted, and it was strangely difficult to see where the borders of the lake ended. I looked up at trees and sky with some vague idea of finding an explanation there, but these too for some moments seemed to stretch away from me and their confines melted into distance. I had a feeling of threatened balance, as if the ground under my feet was not firm. Through the trees, in that part of the island farthest from the palace, I saw a flash of brilliant light that remained for some short while then ceased. I walked toward this, passing beyond the trees into terraced gardens and pergolas of jasmine and honeysuckle, very sweetly scented. The flash of light came again and the pergolas multiplied strangely.

  Then, coming once more into the open, I saw the cause of it: raised on brass pillars to a level above my own height, was a disk of polished tin greater in diameter than the span of a man's arms, and it was turning, very slowly, through a wide angle, and catching the sun as it turned. No slightest sound came from this great weight of metal. I saw it stop at the limit of the turn, and pause, and then begin the slow swing round to its former position. As I came closer, I saw that there were two dwarf Saracens of brass, identical in every respect, bearded and dressed in turbans and robes, suspended on chains below the turning mirror at a distance one from the other, and that each held a long-handled ladle with a deep bowl. By means which I could not determine – perhaps by conduits passing under the ground – the lake water was brought here into a pool, and then in some way invisible to me forced upward, compelling each of these brass water-men in turn to dip his ladle and fill his bowl. When one bowl was full the weight was enough to swing the mirror, but even as it did so the water in the bowl poured itself away, the other bowl dipped down and the mirror began its return.

  How long I stood watching this I do not know. I could not look long at the gleaming surface of the metal because of the blinding flashes that came from it and because it made the mind dizzy, turning earth and sky and water into a medley of wheeling forms and fleeting colours, that had no bounds, no confines. But the Saracen water-men fascinated me, their movements, continuous, relentless, not smooth as human movements are, but marked by infinitesimal intervals, as if they might cease, rebel against the water that governed them, but they did not, they were condemned to labour for ever. I could not see by what cunning means the water of this calm pool could master them so. Somewhere hidden, I thought, a pump, a pressure that mounted by pipes, but in that case…

  "There is another," a voice said behind me. "Another mirror, exactly the same, on the other side of the island."

  I turned to find a man regarding me whom after a moment I recognised: it was the groom who had ridden before Alicia in that street in Bari, where we had met. He was not in livery now, but in a long surcoat of undyed linen. I had not thought at the time that he had the air or the glance of a servant, and I did not think so now, from the way he was regarding me.

  "You walk softly," I said.

  "A careless step can cost a man dear." This was an Arab saying, though he spoke in Italian, and he smiled as he uttered it. He was a handsome man, with a good forehead and a high-bridged nose and eyes of a colour between green and hazel. "Yes," he said, "one catches the reflections of the other, between them they invert the order of earth and heaven. Our good King's Saracen engineers fashioned them in the fifth year of his reign, at the time when the improvements were made here. The Saracens have no match when it comes to the harnessing of water. There is a gardener here whose sole task it is to keep the surfaces polished and remove drowned insects from the pools."

  "You have come to tell me this?"

  "I have come at the Lady Alicia's bidding to lead you to where she awaits you."

  "You are the lady's groom?" I asked, as I went with him.

  "Her groom, her bearer, her messenger, her man-at-arms when she has need of one. I came in her following from Jerusalem. My father was in the service of her father, Guy of Morcone."

  "So you have known the family long?"

  "A good many years, yes."

  "And your name?"

  "I am called Caspar."

  A thought struck me now that made me pause briefly in my walk. "If your father was in that service, you must have known the Lady Alicia as a child?"

  He had stopped with me, but did not look at me fully, glancing away as if tolerating these questions rather than welcoming them. "I would not say known," he said. "I was a stable-boy in the castle when she was born."

  I had a mind, as we resumed our walking, to question him further; anything concerning Alicia was of absorbing interest to me, and this Caspar must have seen her grow up. Not only that: if he had come with her from Jerusalem, it seemed likely that he had gone with her there when she left to be married to Tibald.
But he stopped and pointed and said, "She is there, you will come upon her if you follow the paved way through the gardens. There is a gate and beyond it a walled yard with a fountain and a small pavilion."

  With this he inclined his head and withdrew, leaving me with the impression that he quitted me thus abruptly, and while still at some distance from where Alicia waited, so as to curtail this talk of ours and forestall further questioning. But the anticipation of seeing Alicia drove all else from my mind, and I walked on eagerly until I came to the gate he had spoken of, which was low and tinted with silver and surmounted by arabesques.

  Passing through this, for a fleeting moment I thought that the enclosure was peopled, then saw that there were shrubs of some dense-growing sort which had been very skilfully cut into the shapes of animals and birds, and these cast shadows on the walls, which had been whitened with lime, so that the figures were repeated there. Among these shapes, and the shadows they cast, there was at first no sign of Alicia, but then I made out her form above me, inside the pavilion, saw the pale colour of her gown first, then her face. She heard my step and turned and saw me but remained in the shade of the pavilion. This had a balustrade with short marble pillars set very close together in it like bars. Now this is strange to relate, but as I began to climb the marble steps towards her, I thought I heard somewhere in the distance that wailing sound of the herons, wulla-wulla-wulla, and a memory came to me, brief as the flicker of an eye, of mounting to the deck of the ship and looking across the white birds in their cages at Nesrin.

  Then Alicia came forward and held out both hands to me and I took them in my own and would have kissed her, because this was a different kind of being together now, we were no longer wayfarers amazed at a chance encounter, wanting to talk and remember, we were meeting in private, by assignation, by a summons of the lady. I would have kissed her on the mouth, but she held back, though it was gently that she did so, and she still remained close.