The Ruby In Her Navel

by Barry Unsworth

  Yusuf will be stripped of his powers, his career in the palace service will be over, but that will not be such a tragedy in his case. He is no mere palace Saracen, he has lands in his own right, he comes from an ancient family."

  It was my only attempt at bargaining, if such I may call this shameful offer. I returned to my table, to the silence and the knowledge of defeat. Still I delayed. Why now, after twenty years of his rule, should the King cause such a law to be made? Was there greater danger now from the encroachments of Islam in Sicily? How could that be when it was the religion of the conquered and subjected? What Christian could desire, in Sicily now, to abjure a religion that was growing daily in influence and power?

  I will not deny the truth, or try to give myself the cloak of good reason. At the time I did so, but I will not do so now. I wanted to believe Bertrand's words, and for the few minutes that were necessary I succeeded in this – at least in holding off the doubt. But I knew in my heart that Yusuf stood to lose his life. And with this knowledge of my own heart there came a sense of what knowledge there might be in the King's, and I trembled at what I might have been serving.

  It shames me now to remember how I wronged Yusuf in my thoughts so as to make it more easy to wrong him by my actions. He had betrayed me, he had sent me on missions without full information, he had kept things from me, withheld his trust. Worse still, he had played games with me, appeared to believe while not believing; he had had me watched and followed, even to the stable where Nesrin and I had lain together. He had violated my loyalty. He had abandoned me, like my father…

  The grief and rage were difficult to hold to, saner thoughts threatened.

  It was fear of these that guided my hand as I signed.

  XXIV

  On production of Bertrand's words and seal the outer gates of Favara were opened to me without demur. Once again I was met by a groom who accompanied me over the causeway, leading my horse; once again I approached the gate to the palace, saw the gilded bars and the arches and the water of the lake slip and stretch and lurch sideways then settle again as on the previous occasion.

  This time there was no chamberlain to meet me in the hall, only one of the palace domestics to take my bag and lead me to my room, which was not the same as the one I had had before but smaller and darker, with one barred window high up towards the ceiling.

  I did not much mind this, though noting it; I had reached a state in which such small comparisons and considerations count for little; all my being was concentrated in waiting for Alicia. She will be with you soon, Bertrand had said, as he gave me the pass with his seal. He had it ready to hand, there had been no doubt in his mind of the outcome. I had felt insulted at this, foolishly enough, though I had not been such a fool as to show it.

  Soon could mean today or tomorrow. In that case she was not with her father in Apulia, but somewhere closer at hand. Already, within minutes of my arrival, I was listening for her step. Deep within me, not fully acknowledged, was the feeling that I had purchased her life and rescued our love at heavy cost, and that I needed saving in my turn. Only by appearing now in all her graciousness and beauty could she lift the burden of the lies I had told for her sake. She would be, in the splendour of her person, my redemption and my reward. Everything but that would fall away; all the previous structure of my life would fall away, like a rotting platform of wood, leaving me with a future in which there would be no lies, no deceit. When I was knighted and had gained my fief and had Alicia as my consort, I would ride abroad doing good, defending the dispossessed, redressing injustice, protecting the weak against the strong. We would go far away from the mire and miasma of Palermo. We would go to Jerusalem the Golden, the land that was promised, end of heartache, balm for sin. I would look into her eyes and there I would see, not gratitude, but the knowledge of what it had cost me to betray Yusuf, how abhorrent to my nature such treachery had been…

  These and similar thoughts occupied my mind as I spent the hours of waiting, walking in the gardens that surrounded the palace or by the shores of the placid lake, where minnows chased in the warm borders and dragonflies made bright paths above the surface. From time to time – but never by design – I strayed into the zones governed by the turning mirrors, and then the world was strangely distorted, and until I found firm ground again it was not possible to know the true number and shape of things.

  There were no other guests, the palace and gardens were deserted. I would come upon Arab gardeners, who straightened up from their work when they saw me and then bowed low. The guards who kept the gate would sometimes come in their spells from duty to take their ease among the trees by the water, where it was cooler, but other than an exchange of greetings we spoke no words together. The palace and all the wooded lands and the terraces and pavilions seemed held in the grip of a summer already waning but relentless. It was the time of year when decay seems to lie below the skin of things, not sealed away completely. Faint, sweetish odours came from the green scum at the edges of the lake, the split and oozing figs where wasps feasted. There was a feeling of weariness, the fatigue of too much repose, as if the world were longing for release from this thralldom of August. The peaches were falling and the crashes they made were startling in the still air, like presage of change that still did not arrive.

  I revisited the places where she and I had spent time together, the landing stage, the little copse of ilexes where we had exchanged rings, the place where the tables had been set up for us, where Alboino had spoken to me of the touch of wrong and how day by day it destroys the soul, and where I had seen Alicia come out from the dark into the firelight, with her red gown and the gold net in her hair, and there had been my boat moored not far away and my plans laid to have her to myself for a while. The world around me was waiting for change, for release from the trance of summer, and I waited with it for my own release. She would come, she would bring new weather, a new quality of light.

  When the first spectre of doubt appeared I do not know. It did not come as a shaft or sudden visitation, but like a companion that had been walking by my side, unnoticed, for a time I could not determine. Through the hours of that first afternoon and those of the next day and the next, as the sun crossed the sky and there was only the sound of the cicadas and the sudden violence of the reflections when I strayed into the zone of the mirrors, all the time he had been there, this companion.

  Perhaps it was the tranced, arrested nature of the place, the feeling of a void in which I was suspended, that bred the first suspicions. I thought again of Alboino and Bertrand and their different faces, which were the same face. How could they promise she would come, how could they convey the document to her captors, if they had no knowledge of her whereabouts? The document once secured, and no doubt countersigned by them both as witnesses, they would have all that was needed for Yusuf's immediate arrest. Perhaps they were not intermediaries at all, but the principal actors. In that case, why should they honour their promise to release Alicia? Why should they continue to conceal her father's guilt?

  Would they not seek to gain the King's favour by informing him of it?

  The questions circled in my mind, they accompanied the wavering flight of gnats over the calm water, they leapt with the fish that snapped at flies on the surface, they were repeated and multiplied in the reflections that occasionally assailed me in my wanderings through the grounds. On the evening of the fourth day they were finally answered.

  I was about to retire to my chamber, having lost hope she would come that day. The sun was close to setting, too soft to cast shadows. It was that time on a summer evening when with the approach of darkness a certain kind of paleness comes into the light, a blanched quality, when everything for a brief while stands out with peculiar distinctness. I was standing at the lowest terrace of the gardens, there was a bush of white roses close by me and in this spent light the white of the flowers was very full, incandescent, as if lit from within. I remember this luminous whiteness and I remember thinking how strange it
was that it should presage the darkness soon to gather. The water of the lake lay beyond this and there was a gleaming tide of light on the surface.

  As I stood gazing here I saw the figures of men clothed in white robes and white turbans come suddenly into view from the fringe of trees at the border of the lake. As they approached I remained transfixed, quite without fear, though they were strangers: it was as if they could not be fully believed in, emanations, creatures of the blanched and deceiving light. Then I recognised the lordly, swaying gait and portly figure of the man leading, and the darkly bearded face, and a sudden presentiment of ill came to my heart.

  "Well, my Thurstan, salaam, greetings."

  "Muhammed, is it you? But how did you come here? How could you persuade them to open the gates to you?"

  "We do not stand at the gates of the Christian, begging for admittance.

  Many of those who work in the gardens here are my brothers in Islam. I know them, I know their names, I know the names of their wives and children. Their homes are outside. Do you think they use the main gates when they come and go?"

  He had come to a stop some three or four paces away. His face showed no particular expression but the tone was one he had never used with me before, cold and disdainful. His followers had gathered round him in close formation, one on either flank, one on the rear. All three wore scimitars at their belts.

  "The good news first," Muhammed said. "I am here to tell you that the lady will not come. You can wait for her till you take root and grow leaves, but she will not come."

  "Why do you speak in this way to me?" But I knew, even as I asked. "How have you come by this?" I said. "Why should I believe you?"

  "I have come to tell you that you have been fooled and duped from the beginning, you have been led along like a little pig with a ring through its nose. It is a great pleasure to tell you this, my Thurstan. A greater pleasure even than killing you would be."

  Some passion had entered his voice with this, and he paused briefly, as if to recover the impassive manner of earlier. "This Yusuf Ibn Mansur, who was arrested on your word, I have known him since we were children.

  Our fathers were friends and fellow-tribesmen, he and I went to the same mosque-school, he gave the name and the blessing to my eldest son. Let me tell you how this strumpet fooled you and led you by the nose and the words of your love were to her ears but the squealing of the little pig."

  "You are very brave and free with your insults when you are four to one," I said. "Send your men further off and we will see who squeals."

  "What a fool you are. A traitor and a fool. You think this is a time for trial by combat, the rules read out beforehand, like good knights in the tilting field? You have published base lies about a man a hundred times your better and you prate of insults and issue challenges and put on airs of chivalry. How can you be insulted now? Mario it was who set us on, though he was far from wishing it. You remember Mario?"

  "Yes, he deserted me at Cosenza, when I was buying herons for the royal falconry."

  "No, he did not desert you. Yusuf was troubled by this disappearance of Mario, as he was troubled by anything that lacked explanation. He spoke of it to me. We lived in different worlds but we sometimes worked together. I had ways open to me that were closed to him."

  "I did not know of this."

  "Why should you know of it? It did not concern you. For a long time we found no trace of Mario. In the end we were helped by merest chance. The other who accompanied you, Sigismond, saw him in a street in Palermo. He was well-dressed and he had grown a beard, but Sigismond recognised him and followed him to a house."

  " Why was I not told of it?"

  "By this time Yusuf no longer trusted you completely. You had kept too much from him. He had been obliged to set a watch on you. Sigismond was commanded to say nothing of it, on pain of the severest punishment. Once we knew where Mario lived, the rest was easy. We brought him from there and asked him some questions to which he was not able to withhold answers, not for long at least. Mario was in the pay of Bertrand of Bonneval, the nephew of the Count of Conversano, a powerful knight and very rich, already known to Yusuf as the leader of a faction of the Norman nobility set on destroying the Saracen influence at the palace and replacing it with a Council of Peers on the feudal model of the Franks."

  I made no reply to this but into my mind there came a recollection of Yusuf's face and manner when he had told me of the invitation to Favara.

  Hardly surprising he was suspicious of me, knowing what he knew. I wondered if he had also known by this time of my meetings with Alicia.

  Alboino was associated with Bertrand, and Alboino was her uncle. Could she have been part of this Norman faction? Perhaps she was vowed to secrecy and for that reason had not confided in me. Was it this Muhammed meant when he said she had duped me? Was it only this?

  "Mario did not desert you at Cosenza. On the contrary, he stayed with you like a shadow. He followed you to Bari. And there he and a man named Caspar Loritello, who was posing as a groom, tracked you through the streets."

  He smiled for the first time, saying this. "Caspar had been seen visiting your house with some message. It was a man of Yusuf's who saw this. A watch had been set on your house by then. So when we had Mario in our hands we tested him with this name and it all came tumbling out."

  He smiled again. "As things will," he said. "Mario had no more to tell us but we made diligent enquiries and in time we discovered that Loritello was the name of Guy of Morcone's chamberlain, by whom the boy was brought up. He is a bastard son of Alboino, Alicia's cousin and one of her lovers in Jerusalem, one of several… She is a lady who gives careful study to her pleasure and her safety, and finds ways of serving the one and guarding the other."

  As we had been speaking the first thickening of darkness had come into the air. The light on the lake was paler now, but Muhammed's turban and robe still held that luminous whiteness, making his face seem darker by contrast. Those with him remained silent and motionless.

  "I do not believe it," I said. "You are lying. I will maintain her honour upon any that questions it."

  "Sword in hand, eh? Before it was the pig squealing, now it is the donkey braying. Forget about the lady's honour, it was never in your keeping. Use your brain. But it is good you do not believe me at first, I like it better that you should resist, you will feel the hurt all the more. You have betrayed a man who was like a father to you and you will get nothing for it, nothing. Those two fine fellows tracked your movements in Bari until they could bring you to a meeting with the lady, who waited very patiently for the right moment."

  I had never doubted her. Her faith was beyond question, she had proved it for ever in childhood. Why was it then that doubt sprang so instantly now? I have thought since that Muhammed's words served only to confirm a loss already suffered, that it was Favara itself that took away my belief, the lonely waiting, the cheating mirrors, the act of treachery that had gone before, the shame of it, destroying the sense of my worth, making of me a miscreant to whom no good could ever come. She was to have redeemed me… I thought back again to the moment of the meeting, the ruined house with its broken pavement, the fragments of mosaic, the peace that had descended on me in that place, broken by the clatter of hooves and the company approaching. Alicia straight-backed in the saddle, looking neither to right or left – it was indeed as if she had been given a cue, prompted in the moment, in that particular moment.

  Like a player coming on to the stage – players do not look at those watching. If I had not spoken, would they have passed by in silence? Or would she at the last moment have glanced at me, reined in her horse, assumed that same look of pleased recognition? But I had spoken, I had played my part. How was it that I, Thurstan, the Purveyor of Spectacles, had failed to see that this was a spectacle too?

  My resistance was draining away, seeping from me, I could not hold to it, the vessel of my being was not stout enough. Would Muhammed have come here to lie to me, would he have tak
en such pleasure in lying? His pleasure was to inflict the truth. Nevertheless, I strove to keep him there, to prolong the talk between us, hoping still, when hope had all but gone, to find some falsity in him, provoke some unguarded words that might discredit what he had told me. With enmity for me in his heart, he was for these moments my only hope. My dread now was that he would leave me alone, with no company but the knowledge of Alicia's perfidy.

  "And Yusuf knew of this?", I said. "He knew that the meeting had been contrived?"

  "We told him what we had learnt from Mario."

  "He knew it and he said nothing. All through those weeks, all through the times we talked together."

  "He did not know enough. He was waiting to know more. Some conspiracy there was, so much was evident. But what use they intended to make of you, that he could not be sure of. He did not think you would sell him to his enemies, he trusted to your loyalty in spite of everything. He was always a man to watch and wait. This time he waited too long."

  He paused and glanced aside as if to assure himself that his silent followers were still in place. "I will not stay longer," he said. " I will not dignify you with more words from my mouth. You have been her dupe and so you will always be, as long as you live."

  There was no other way of keeping him there but by inviting more hurt, offering more entertainment. "But why should she do it?"

  "She belongs in the Norman party, which is also supported by her uncle Alboino and by some in the Roman Curia, as a means of extending the powers of the Pope in Sicily. Also her brothers are active in this. They will not return to Outremer, they know that the days of Frankish power there are numbered. Your Kingdom of Jerusalem will return to the possession of those to whom it truly belongs, my fellow Moslems. The future for families like that of the lady Alicia lies here, in Sicily, in the grants and favours they can exact for services rendered to their king."