The Ruby In Her Navel

by Barry Unsworth

"But this will be no service to the King. He holds Yusuf dear, Yusuf was his first choice for the post of Royal Chamberlain, everybody knew this."

  Muhammed made no reply, merely looked steadily at me, and this silence of his was more terrible than any words could have been. We sacrifice what we hold dear when there is a purpose we hold dearer. Had I myself not done so?

  "You have played a vile part," he said, breaking the silence at last.

  "To have betrayed him with a truth would have been base enough. But to betray him with a lie, knowing it for a lie… you knew he respected the religion of others. Your presence there, in the Diwan of Control, was a proof of it. There were Arabs and Greeks and Normans in his diwan, as there are in the King's domain. That is why they hated him. He saw that this mixing was the only way to keep the balance of the state. You are the champion of balance, my Thurstan, are you not? It is a word often on your lips. Well, as you have helped to destroy it in the Diwan, so you have helped to destroy it in the land as a whole. And for what? What stupid vanity made you so ready to believe in this Norman whore's love?

  You hoped she would bring you advancement, is it not so? You hoped to take his place at the Diwan."

  In the first moments the remnants of my pride held me back from answering this. Then I realised that he had no knowledge of the earlier love there had been between Alicia and me. Bertrand knew of it, and Alboino, but that was because she had told them – it must have provided the first idea of the way to ensnare me. But she would not have told anyone else, why should she? And if Muhammed did not know this, if he believed I had been led only by ambition, it was almost certain that he would not know of the conspiracy in which Guy of Morcone had been involved, would not know that I had signed to save her life.

  He would never know it. Only this instant resolve enabled me to raise my head now and meet his eyes. "I will return to Palermo tonight, I will recant, I will retract my signature. Without that the case against Yusuf will collaps."

  He was silent for a long moment. The dusk was gathering now, his face was indistinct, he and his men were no more than shapes of whiteness.

  But I saw him shake his head, as if in wonder. "Of course," he said, "you do not know, you have been kept apart here. He was executed yesterday at noon, though I did not know your part in it until today.

  The killing they gave him was a public one. On the orders of the King's Justiciars, among whom there are no Moslems, Yusuf Ibn Mansur was tied at the feet and dragged by a wild horse to a lime pit outside the city walls and what was left of him was burned there."

  At this a giddiness came to me and I clenched my fists and made my body tense to help me keep my footing. His further words were made indistinct by this struggle of mine, and seemed to come from a greater distance.

  "They would not have allowed you to recant, they would have killed you if you had attempted it. They kept you out of the way for the time necessary – it is why you were sent here."

  "Three days," I said, and my own voice too sounded distant.

  "As you say, three days. Time enough when the result is preordained. The speed of the judgement is the one thing that lightens your guilt, though only a very little. His death was decided well before you put your name to the document. Tell me, Thurstan, devoted servant of your royal master, by whose will was this trial conducted in such haste, why was no appeal heard, why was the execution of a Moslem of high birth and high position made into such a very public spectacle?"

  "I do not know," I said.

  "Yes, you know. I leave you now. Keep from crossing my path. You would be well advised to leave Palermo. There is no danger now. The names of the witnesses have not been published. Later, when you have grown accustomed to your baseness, when you have started to forgive yourself, then will be the moment for a visitor with a silk cord to give you the death we give to traitors."

  He stayed a moment or two longer looking at me, then turned, and with his followers once more at his heels moved away from me, back towards the trees that bordered the lake. For some moments, as they retreated, I made out the glimmering of their white robes. Then they were gone, lost in the darkness.

  XXV

  Hardly had they disappeared from sight when the nausea I had been fighting back rose into my throat and I leaned forward where I was and vomited.

  Desolation followed on this. I could no longer bear to be in the open, now that the dark had come. I felt the need for the four walls of the room they had given me, where I could be alone, enclosed, in the light.

  I stumbled back to my room, lit the lamps, barred the door against the night and Muhammed's words and the gardens and the lake of this palace of Favara, which had delivered me a blow more grievous than any in my life before.

  But there was no rest or relief here from the questions that pursued me.

  Over and over again I summoned to mind her words and looks, every smallest detail of her behaviour since that meeting at Bari, until what was remembered and what was imagined mingled together in confusion. I still hoped to find something, even now, that would show this monstrous story of deception to be false, I still hoped to wake from it, from the white-robed nemesis that had come to me beside the lake. Accompanying this tormented quest, though bringing no sense of contradiction to my mind, was a sick amazement at my own incredulity. How could I have believed that one such as I would be invited to this palace of Favara, to hunt on ground that formed part of the royal preserve, only on the word of a woman lately arrived from long years in the Holy Land, a woman with no consort and no great power? Bertrand it was who had the royal favour, not Alicia. And the courtesy he had shown me, the special place he had given me, how could I have imagined it consorted with my deserts, an obscure servant of the palace, pursebearer and purveyor?

  All this was sickness and confusion. But what brought horror to my soul was the cruelty she had shown me, the long-sustained, unfaltering cruelty to one she had loved – for she had loved me in those early days, of that I continued to be sure. She had used this love to fool me and betray me; she had watched me floundering. But of course… I saw it now, any but a fool would have seen it sooner: she had not changed, they were hers still, those things in her I had so much admired, the promptness to seize an occasion, the resourcefulness, the readiness to take risks to gain her ends.

  My only respite from these bitter thoughts was to cling to a belief in the conspiracy in which her father had been involved. Muhammed had known nothing of it, but he knew little more than what he had extracted from the wretched Mario. It soothed me a little, it deadened the horror, to believe that the story Alboino had told me, of evidence in the hands of the Curia, of a dire threat to Alicia and her family, had been true, or if not true that they had made her believe it. This last was the version I preferred: she too had been duped, they had told her lies, it had been to protect her family and her own life that she had acted thus. I did not want to speak to her or look at her face or even hear the mention of her name, ever again. But it gave me some solace, through the sleepless hours of the night, to believe in this mitigation of her cruelty.

  So the night passed, the worst night of my life. My chamber, at first a refuge, became a prison, and with the first intimations of dawn I left it and passed into the grounds, where I wandered aimlessly as the light strengthened. I wanted to leave and yet was curiously reluctant, as if I might turn some corner and find again the promise that had been here, in the woods and the gardens and the lake. Leaving was to brand myself finally as dupe and traitor and to stamp this land of marvels as a sham, when I had entered it in such triumph, Thurstan of Mescoli, with the lackeys running before me and the chamberlain all smiles, awaiting me in the hall. It was a dream of recompense such as children have, when time seems something that can be gathered up again. But there was nothing here to recover: from the first moment every word of hers had been a lie, every look a cheat.

  I stood at the edge of the water as the sun showed its rim over the horizon and pale colours of silver and saffron made
spreading stains over the lake. There were clouds surrounding the sun, they shifted and thinned as it rose clear and the surface of the water seemed to quiver in response to these changes, but the reflections of the trees were motionless, not a leaf stirring. I remembered how we had paddled out from the darkness of the bank into the open water. Then too there had been no faintest stir of wind among the trees. The reflections of the turning mirrors had splintered the world and mended it and I had felt we were entering together a territory altogether new, from which we would not emerge unchanged. My prescient soul, I thought bitterly – there had been change indeed.

  The sun was still low when I made my way to the little pavilion where she and I had exchanged our first kiss. The shapes of birds and animals were as I remembered them. There was a gardener there, at work with long-bladed scissors, and he bowed to me and moved away, out of sight.

  I mounted the steps and stood within the enclosure where we had stood together, out of the midday sun. Suddenly I remembered the wave of gratitude that had swept through me, a devoted gratitude for her presence there, for her return to my life, for the gift she had brought of a golden future. I had began to speak this gratitude of mine but she had laid a finger on my lips to prevent me. For a moment she had seemed troubled, distressed, and I had not understood it. I understood it now.

  She had spoken of her brother Adhemar's spying in an attempt to explain her agitation and to distract my mind with alarm at his hostility. But Adhemar had not been the cause. She had felt a moment of pity for me, the poor dupe, stumbling out words of gratitude for having been deceived and tricked and ill-used. Poor, pitiable fool…

  This sense of her pity, the only tenderness she had shown, gave terrible pain to me. Worse than all her acting was this brief moment of truth, worse than all her pretended kindness was this true kindness of contempt. The hurt of it was so strong that I wanted to cry out. But I believe it was that moment that saw the obscure birth of my cure. The humiliation, my own abjectness, was beyond enduring; some escape from it had to be found. A dim prospect of this came – and only those who have not experienced such a blow to selfesteem will find paradox in it – not in heaping blame on Alicia but in reproaching myself. If I sought refuge in hatred I would never be free of her. That I knew her so little was proof of the neglect of her that had lain at the heart of what I called my love. She could not have so deceived me if I had not deceived myself; she could not have played me false if I had not aided her in it. I had fashioned her in the form of my desires, I had made her shining, lustrous from our childhood and the time of my hope, bright with the future when she would make that hope come true, a creature of light, not her own, bestowed on her. She had no light of her own…

  I was standing at the head of the steps and the early sunlight was in my eyes. At this moment I again heard the wailing cry, wulla-wulla-wulla, that had come to me as I mounted these same steps towards the waiting Alicia, and had brought Nesrin's face before me even at such a moment.

  Then I had thought it an illusion, some trick of the wind, or human voices distorted by distance. This time there could be no doubt: it was the lament of the white herons, the same wailing that had come from the piled cages on the deck of the ship at Paola.

  I went down the steps and turned in the direction of the sound. I had to follow the shore of the lake, from the farther side, passing the place where the fires had been lit for our supper on the first evening, going beyond this into a part I had not visited before, through trees thinly planted and then over an open space where the grass was tall and wasted with summer. Reflections from the turning mirrors confused my eyes and bedevilled my sense of direction. I was hunting for a sound that came no more, but I persisted, growing more intent as I proceeded. I have sometime thought since that this intentness of purpose came to me through God's mercy.

  At last, after much blundering, I came upon a wicker gate and a narrow path that led through trees to a row of bamboo cages, all empty save one and this had the white birds in it, six of them I counted, all that were left, and as I approached they shuffled their wings and set up their wailing, and it was as if I were back in Cosenza, before the meeting with Alicia, when I still had the trust of Yusuf, when Nesrin was filling my thoughts. There was nothing securing the door of the cage but a wooden bar. This I lifted off and held the door open. But the birds would not come for fear of me standing so close. So I left it open wide and began to make my way back towards the palace, feeling as I did so a lightening of the spirit – the first since Muhammed had come.

  It was my intention to leave and I was on the way to gather my belongings when I found myself in the courtyard below the room I had occupied on my first visit, which had delighted me so when I had opened the shutters and looked down. The sound of water was everywhere here, flowing from the mouth of the fountain into basins set one below the other and thence in covered channels to the pool in the centre, which was undisturbed for all the little streams that fed into it, and I fell to wondering how this could be so, and marvelling at the art of those who had made it. The respite I had felt since freeing the birds was still with me and it was pleasant there, with the gentle splashing sounds of the water and the coolness it made in the air. The pool seemed deep to my eyes and I bared my arm to test it but the water rose only to the elbow: the appearance of depth came from the blue tiles with which the pool was lined. The immersion of my hand and arm broke the surface, shivered into fragments the pale reflections of the clouds that still accompanied the sun that morning.

  There are times after turbulence of emotion when a sort of emptiness comes to the spirit, and it was so now with me. I had been through a great deal since the morning Caspar had come with the summons. I had not slept, but felt no tiredness now, only this vacancy. As I still knelt at the pool, shadows like swift ripples swept across the face of it and when I glanced up I saw the six herons flying together very low, just over my head, saw them wheel and turn westward toward Palermo and the sea. And at once, unbidden, as I followed their flight, there came memories of other shadows, the sunlit afternoon in the Royal Chapel, shafts of light that entered from outside, contending with the light of the lamps, both together making a glory of light on the Magdalen's head and on the raised hand of Christ Pantocrator. Moving shadows everywhere within the space of the chapel, the two workmen high up on the wall with their lamps and their mirrors, they both glanced down towards me at the same moment, but this could not have been because of any sound I had made, I was standing motionless. Nor was there other sound, not at that moment, or I would have heard it. Some swift reflection passing across the mirrors they had on either side? But no movement from the ground could have caused such a reflection, the men were too high above. As high up as the Tree of Knowledge it must have been, or it would not have registered in the mirrors. Perhaps they had seen shadows moving over the wall before them, shadows of some unusual kind, to make them look away from their work… Then I had come upon Gerbert and his German companions, and there had been shadows like those the birds had made on the pool before me, swift shadows moving over the south side of the crossing, passing over the marbles of the floor like birds' wings or ripples on the surface of water.

  I tried to concentrate my mind on the recollection of those few moments.

  The sunlight had entered from somewhere high up on the south side. I had been standing in the centre of the Sanctuary looking up at the mosaics, those the King would see from his loge opposite, the images to which his destiny was linked: the scene of the Ascension, with Christ borne aloft, prefiguring his own apotheosis as earthly ruler; the standing figure of Virgin and Child, guarding and protecting. Then there had been these flitting shadows. Gerbert and his companions could not have made them, the shaft of light had passed over their heads, it had come from higher up, from a window or aperture on that side. Someone had been moving up there, though very briefly. Someone had passed across the light. Next day had been the Day of Christ's Ascension, a very important day for King Roger and the Norman
kingdom he had founded. It was known that he planned to attend the liturgy. His plans had changed, almost at the last moment, the following day he had left for Salerno. Gerbert it was who told me of this change of plan. Gerbert, whom I had seen the day before in the cloister of San Giovanni degli Eremiti in close talk with Atenulf the Lombard. Atenulf, the student of dates and times and symbols, server of the royal power, faithful builder of the King's fame.

  All this while I had been crouching at the side of the pool. These thoughts passed over my mind as quickly almost as the shadows over the water that had given rise to them, moments only – my arm was still wet from its immersion in the water. The reflections of the clouds on the surface had formed again, the shallow pool looked deeper than dreams could fathom. I rose to my feet, glanced up to the sky – the clouds looked less real than their reflections. The impulse was renewed in me to leave this place of cheating images, and I turned my back on the pool and began to make my way towards my room.

  This wish of hasty retreat was still with me on arriving there and I began immediately to put my few things together in preparation for leaving. As I did so I remembered the hopes with which I had come and I could not prevent thoughts of Alicia returning to my mind, how she had duped me and made a mock of me and the terrible treachery there had been in her heart as she raised her hands in that gesture that had seemed like prayer and slipped the ring from her finger and uttered the words of promise to me. From the beginning it had been there, through all her smiles and glances, this deep well of her cruelty in which she dipped secretly, Satan at her side to hold the ladle, as he had been there with the saw at the side of the traitor Atenulf had spoken of, he who had cut through the chains of the drawbridge in the darkness of night and was soon now to die at Spaventa's hands.

  These thoughts brought back the feeling of nausea, which was never far away during these days, and I paused in my movements about the room and stood still, taking deep breaths. And in this moment of enforced stillness it came to me that I had been in a certain way mistaken: the well of ill was deep indeed, deep beyond knowing, but the power of ill was limited, and this was true also of Alboino and Bernard. In my misery I had seen conspiracy everywhere, but it seemed certain to me now that neither the one nor the other had played any part in sending me to Potenza – the time they disposed of had been too short.