The Ruby In Her Navel

by Barry Unsworth

  He was a red-faced, flaxen-haired fellow, a few years older than myself, with blue eyes made vague now by the wine he had drunk. "Not two, no," he said. "The more virtuous may resist so long, but most will settle to their venery sooner."

  "You are speaking of the generality," I said. "What you say may be true of some of them, or even many, I know not. But it is not true of all, to my certain knowledge.

  "What knowledge is that?" You have not been there. I say they are all the same, wife or maiden, ready to open their legs to any man that takes their fancy."

  My rage rose at this but I kept a rein on it. He was looking belligerently at me now, scenting a quarrel. Like all his kind, he had a keen nose for this, fuddled or not. "A man should bridle his tongue when he cannot be sure of his company," I said. "I say there are ladies who have lived long in the Holy Land and are as pure and virtuous as I trust your mother is."

  He brought a fist down on the table. "Do you speak ill of my mother?"

  Where this might have led I cannot now be sure. I felt I had right on my side and was ready enough to take the thing further in defence of my lady Alicia and in rebuttal of the aspersions this loose-tongued fool had cast on her. But before I could answer him, another intervened, an older man, sitting farther down the table. "Come sirs," he said, "let us not mar the occasion with reckless speech. Subjects of King Louis of France and a subject of King Roger of Sicily are met here tonight, two of his subjects, I should say" – this with a sideways glance at William.

  "If we quarrel here it will not augur well for a good understanding between our masters tomorrow." Murmurs of agreement came from round the table. He rose from his place and came to lay a hand on the shoulder of his companion. "No offence to you was intended," he said, and as he spoke he looked across at me and smiled a little and gave a nod, as much as to say, now it is for you to speak.

  "I intended no disrespect to your lady mother," I said.

  The man hesitated a little but he was not proof against the hand on his shoulder and the feeling he sensed from round the table. He said, "There are always exceptions, so much is true. I would not question the honour of any lady vouched for by you, wherever her dwelling place."

  It had not come easily, but with the words once out his face cleared as if only they had been needed to restore his good humour. This suddenness, both of dark and light, I had met before in his fellow-countrymen – by his accent I knew him for a Breton – and I was glad of it now and I reached out my hand to him and he took it and I repented that I had thought him a fool when it was only that he was drunk.

  The man who had intervened to restore harmony among us seemed of higher degree than the rest, and possessed some authority over them. I noticed that they paid attention to him when he spoke, though the inflexions of his French were different from theirs, he was of the South. Certainly he had gifts as a peace-maker, as he had proved already and was to prove again now.

  "William has told us you are a notable singer," he said. "He told us of the meeting between you after all these years and said how he recalled your singing, how it gladdened men's hearts. Is it not so, William?"

  "Yes, it is so." William said – his first words of the evening. "He was known for his singing."

  "Will you favour us with a song now?" the older knight said, and his words were at once echoed by others round the table, among them the one with whom I had quarrelled.

  I did not need much persuading. My heart was light with thoughts of next day and I was gladdened that the good fellowship had been restored among us. First I sang a Neapolitan song that was popular at that time, in which the singer compares his sweetheart to an April day, beautiful in her smiles, changeable in her moods. It was a pretty, lilting air, without great range in the notes – easy to sing. And while I sang, taking me quite unawares, thoughts of Nesrin and the moods I had known in her came pressing upon me, her face in rage and in mockery, in laughter and in promise and in ecstasy of love. My Alicia, my intended bride, had one face only to my mind, reposeful and beautiful. Our knowledge of each other would grow with time…

  Next I chose a song of my own composing with words that were at the same time sorrowful and sweet, and I sang it to an air that I knew from my student days.

  I will not raise loud lament

  To make her guilty for my hurt.

  I am steadfast in my love.

  If I suffer, should I need her consent?

  This was greeted with much applause and I thought I saw tears in one man's eyes. Encouraged by this, I went on to give them several more songs. When we finally rose from the table every man of them came to praise me and thank me. Particularly warm in his commendation was the older knight who had first asked me to sing. "You have a talent far out of the common," he said. "Believe me, I have some knowledge of such matters. It is interesting to hear troubadour songs in the Italian tongue, a thing not so often met with. Can you play on any instrument so as to accompany your voice if need be?"

  I told him I could play on the viele and the mandora, and he nodded and looked at me in a considering way but said nothing more, and soon after we went our separate ways to bed.

  The couriers came early next morning to announce the impending arrival of the King and his party. I mounted the stairway that led from within the gatehouse up to the parapets. From here I could see the road they would come by. And here I waited, above the curtain wall, among baskets of rocks, and stakes with fire-hardened points and other weaponry for defence against siege. And through all the years of my life since then, when I remember that waiting, there comes to my mind those instruments of hurt, the jagged rocks, the blackened stakes, the great cauldrons with the bar through them for tilting the blistering oil.

  With the news of the royal party's approach, the gates were opened, the portcullis was raised – the creak and grind of the chains as they drew it up was to my excited senses the music of Alicia's arrival. As I stood there – joined now by others who had mounted the walls – I felt a need for the sight of her that was almost painful. To see her was to believe again in my own life. She would come and she would redeem my life and join the past together, broken as it was, like a fractured limb that she would bind up and make whole, bone and blood and tissue. Only later was it to come to me how grossly, in my concern to mend my own life, I had failed to take into account that hers too might be damaged, broken. That day, as I stood waiting there, such thoughts were far from my mind. In the time of our first love I had thought of my life and hers as pure, unmixed. There was one aim, one course of action, everything was in keeping: a knight's son, a knight's daughter, the same class, the same thoughts for the future…

  There was a light breeze, the pennants on the battlements fluttered.

  Glancing up, I saw a pair of hawks, high in the sky, in lazy flight.

  Something must have alarmed or enraged the fowl in the kitchen garden because there was a sudden outcry from there. When this died down I heard the hooves of the horses on the road and saw the dust from the mailed men that were riding ahead of the King. I saw them pass through the stockade gate and heard the clatter they made on the lowered bridge.

  The King came next behind, mounted on a white horse with a silver harness, as on the day of his coronation twenty years ago, when my father had lifted me up to see him. But I had not seen his face then, and I did not now, he rode beneath a canopy of scarlet silk – Atenulf's invention, as it was said. I saw nothing of him but the grip of his legs on the horse's flanks as he covered the space from the stockade wall and disappeared in his turn below the overhang of the gatehouse. My eyes went eagerly to those following. I saw them enter in twos and threes, saw them reach the bridge, heard them pass into the gatehouse. They rode in order of rank, the Cardinal Bishop of Santa Rafina, Gilbert of Bolvaso, Master Constable Designate, with his lady, behind these the King's notary, Giovanni dei Segni, and the Provost Leontios and John Malaterra from the Vice-Chancellor's Office, and others whom I did not know. But the face I was searching for I did not fi
nd, and my breath came short and I felt the skin of my face draw together with the quick flight of the blood. She was nowhere among them. She had not come.

  XXI

  The disappointment was too keen to be borne in its fullness. I snatched at hopes: she had been delayed, she would arrive later. But the hours passed and she did not come. In the afternoon the French King arrived, his wife at his side, escorted by Saracen troops from the garrison at Brindisi. I saw the Queen's face as she passed below me, and she was beautiful and held her head very proudly, but the sight of this much celebrated Eleanora of Aquitaine meant little to me at that moment, my heart was heavy, my last hopes of Alicia's coming were ebbing away. No one in King Roger's following had sought me out with a message from her, there was no one I could ask. Something had happened to prevent her, something sudden and unforeseen – if she had known of it in time she would have sent word. I thought of her brother Adhemar and what she had said about his hostility to our marriage. Perhaps there were others, acting in concert with him…

  My misery increased as the day wore on, and to darken my mood even further was the fact that I was not among those invited to the royal banquet in the Great Hall that evening, but had to be content to sup in a much smaller room, ill-lighted and further from the kitchens with for company the serjeants-at-arms I had taken ship with from Palermo, a number of lesser palace officials who had come in the King's party and some Pisan merchants who had nothing whatever to do with this meeting of monarchs but were seeking trade concessions from the lord of Potenza. I tried to keep myself apart as much as I could, eating little, not sharing in the talk. I knew with bitterness that if Alicia had come and our intention to marry been declared I would not have been treated thus; at that very moment I would have been sitting in the light, among the nobility, with my betrothed by my side.

  Of the talk among us at table I can remember almost nothing. As I say, I took small part in it. One of the Pisans, too coarse-grained to notice my dejection, spoke to me about the great benefits to commerce brought about by the crusades, benefits to which the recent defeat, he said, made no smallest difference, rather the contrary, creating a market in Europe for luxury goods from the east, bringing closer the trade links with Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. "And those that are settled there," he said, "the Frankish states in the Holy Land, they are in need of weapons and supplies. Constant need, you understand me? And what is the best way to transport them, these weapons and supplies? I will tell you, my friend. The best and safest way is by sea. We of Pisa are well placed."

  As I was about to rise from the table, the knight who had saved the peace among us the previous day entered the room and came to me. Seeing that I had finished eating and was ready to leave, he asked if he might have some words of talk with me. I had no desire for this, I wanted only to retire to my chamber and nurse my unhappiness there: I was too cast down even to feel much curiosity as to his purposes. But it would have been churlish to refuse, especially after all his courtesy towards me.

  We walked for a little while together on the cobbled stretch of ground between the inner wall and the postern gatehouse. He had come from the royal presence, he said, from the Hall where they were banqueting; he had obtained leave from King Louis to come and speak to me. "I praised your singing to him," he said. "To the King, not to Queen Eleonora, she knows nothing of it, and there is a design in this which you will understand in a moment."

  The night was dark, there was only the lantern set in the postern gate to see by, and this gave hardly light enough for us to make out each other's faces. From somewhere close by, up towards the battlements, there came the hooting of an owl, a sound that seemed, in my present wretchedness, to pour mockery on me and my singing both. "I did not think King Louis had a taste for songs," I said.

  "Nor does he, unless they are sacred in character and preferably sung in church. To say truth, he does not have a taste for anything that lifts the heart or raises the spirits. No, it is she that is the lover of music."

  The darkness seemed to press upon me. The desire of solitude grew stronger. I said, "Sir, I am not in the best of spirits tonight, and my understanding is slow. I cannot find meaning in what you say."

  "Bear with me a while longer and I will make all clear to you. I am speaking now in confidence, which I know you will respect. I am Robert of Talmont and I am the Queen's man, not the King's – I have spent most of my life at the court of Aquitaine. I was present when they married in the Cathedral of Bordeaux, and I was in her following when she accompanied Louis to Paris to reign as queen. You will know that things are not well between them – there has even been talk of a divorce. There are those who would wish this, for the sake of a some private advantage.

  But any who have the peace and safety of France at heart will want this marriage to endure. I have thought that in a small way – but small things can lead to great ones – you might help in this."

  This seemed such an extraordinary idea that it distracted me for a moment from my gloom. "Help in it? How in the world could I help in it?"

  "Queen Eleanora loves music. She grew up in her father's court and heard when still a child the songs of Cercamon and Marcabru and other troubadours of like gifts. Her husband does not care for such things but he wants to please her, he wants to save the marriage. I have suggested to him that he should make a gift of you to the Queen, and he has very graciously consented."

  "Make a gift of me? In heaven's name -"

  "You would have great success in Paris. The Queen would like you and so would the court. You have a voice of rare quality and range and you know how to put feeling into the words, which is not such a common thing.

  Also you have a fine presence, you are tall and handsome and have the look of the north about you, which makes you different from the singers of Poitou and Aquitaine that people are used to."

  I almost felt inclined to laugh, it was such an absurdity, coming at such a time. My head and trunk and arms and legs, all the ties of my life in Palermo, all the hopes I still had, in spite of everything, in Alicia, bundled together into a packing box, tied up with ribbons and sent off to Paris! "I am grateful for your good opinion of my singing,"

  I said, "and I hope for a better understanding between their majesties, but what you are asking of me is quite impossible. To be frank with you in my turn, my life is about to change but not in such a way as that. I am soon to be married and my bride and I will be leaving for the Kingdom of Jerusalem, where we will live on our estates."

  He was silent for a while and I saw him nod his head. "That will be the lady you so stoutly defended yesterday. A pity – with your gifts you could make your fortune in France. Well, I see the time is not right, which is often the case with causes that are otherwise good. But the offer is there still. If for any reason you should change your mind in these next weeks and decide to come to Paris, remember my name, Robert of Talmont, ask for me and I will make sure you are well introduced."

  I thanked him for his kindness and promised not to forget his name, and he wished me good fortune, and so we parted. The encounter, and the unexpected proposal, had helped to turn my mind from the disappointment I had suffered that morning, and once back in my room I began to think what it might be best to do. She would not come now, so much was certain. There might be some word from her waiting for me at Palermo. I had delivered the money to Spaventa and I had his token. No one here would care whether I stayed or went. I decided to leave with first light, whether or not I found company, even though some parts of the way were dangerous for the solitary traveller. In the event, I was fortunate: the Saracen troops from Brindisi, their escort duties concluded, had a period of leave which they were spending in Salerno, and it was in their company that I left the castle.

  The return journey has left no mark on my mind. I was hoping to find some message waiting for me, but there was nothing. It was late at night when I came to Palermo and I was exhausted – from the haste of the journey, from the tumult of my feelings. This mus
t still have shown on my face next morning, as Stefanos remarked with concern on my drawn looks, and he was the only man, of all those I knew, who would be concerned for me in this way. Yusuf might see, but he would not speak.

  My father did not see my face, nor I think any other, except perhaps the suffering one of Christ Crucified.

  I had intended to make my report to Yusuf immediately, and in particular relate the circumstances of my meeting with Spaventa and the words we had used; these I had memorised carefully so as to give him an accurate account. But he was not in the Diwan, so Stefanos told me, nor in his town house, where I might have sought admittance; he was at his mansion in the Conca d'Oro, host to a party of Arab dignitaries from Spain.

  I busied myself during the day with the documents that had accumulated during my absence. When we were making ready to leave Stefanos asked me if I would like to accompany him home and sup with him and his wife Maria, something I always enjoyed because of the warmth of their welcome and the attention they gave me. Maria was an excellent cook, far surpassing Caterina, the Amalfitanian woman who kept house for me. This time, I knew, the invitation was not planned: Stefanos had asked on impulse, out of kindness, seeing the dejection I was in. I accepted gladly and we went together to his house in the Cala, where Maria greeted me with evident pleasure.