‘It isn’t shit, sir.’
It is actually. I dislike all that hacking and hewing. My father’s fault, in point of fact. When my mother, who was a nice woman – a reeve’s daughter, nicely brought up – came to him to tell him she was with child, he told her, if I were a boy I would never be a knight. He wanted to punish her because her news made him feel inconvenienced, embarrassed, guilty or maybe he just had a bad hangover. At any rate, she was pleased because she didn’t want me to be a knight. She wanted me to be a priest. Priests had much better lives, were safer and better fed. My mother never wanted glory for me, only a soft bed, a full belly, and a nice little girl to cuddle, all of which a priest could have in those days.
The upshot was I was sent to an abbey to pray and learn Latin. It struck me as unfair that my father should expect me to be proficient with shield and mace on my return.
‘You are a disgrace to the Perches.’
‘Yes, sir. What would you like me to do, sir?’
‘Get out of my sight.’
Bastard children, if they are men, are called ‘fils’ or ‘son’ of whoever the lucky father might be: Fils Robert, or Fils William, or Fils Gerald, but the English, who find it hard to say ‘fils’, call them Fitz. Almost every other person you meet in England is called FitzSomething, I am told. It’s because the English drink so much – always have done, something to do with the weather – and the English women are promiscuous, the lot of them, as we have just seen (something to do with the weather). I met a Dane once and the only thing he would say about England was ‘English women have dirty feet’. So there you have it. Anyway, if we were in England, I would be called FitzRotrou because that is my father’s name.
‘I came to tell you how I was doing in the world, sir.’
But he had turned away to talk to his falconer. This was more like it. Perhaps I could get some shut-eye somewhere now.
My mother died of a fever when I was away at the monastery. She had caught a chill and had not looked after herself – as I would have made her do – but she was never one for being ill. Indeed she wasn’t ill for long, and she died before they could fetch me to say goodbye to her. My father had thought it wasn’t worth disturbing my education. She was a good mother and I was stricken with grief, but when you are fourteen years old and already half a man, nothing lasts for long, not even sorrow. I knew now that whatever life held for me, it was up to me to make it happen. I could depend on no one else. That is the bastard creed. Use or be used – and do both with a smile.
Mother had left me very little, only some old Norman silver. (Her father, the reeve, had a son to whom he had left his house and what little money he had.) But what she had done for me was to make me tall and well-featured, with eyes the colour of a speedwell flower (so they were described by the maid of my stepmother the Comtesse, and why argue?), and an expression that defaulted to a smile even when I didn’t feel like it. This smile disconcerted my enemies and enraptured my lovers. It was more valuable than money in many ways, though it was about to lead me into one hell of a lot of trouble.
The trouble showed itself as I slouched away from that encounter with my father, hugging the walls in case he should suddenly reappear. Hugging them so tight in fact that I almost bumped into someone coming from the opposite direction, someone who looked like a slightly more imperious version of my own father’s lovely Comtesse.
I was immediately assailed by her fragrance: rose, deep and passionate, a light touch of spice with something more troubling, the heart-quickening smell of wallflowers, with that appley-almondy smell of her skin …
I judged her to be some twenty-four years of age. She clutched at her bosom to draw breath. It struck me that she too had been anxious not to be seen.
‘My apologies!’ I gasped, thinking what a wonderful clutch that bosom made.
I had learned courtesy from my mother whose politeness had indeed, along with her beauty, so charmed the Comte my father that he had taken her into his bed, although alas she had not been able to teach him any. I had been furthered in the art of civilised conduct by an old Spanish Jew at my monastery, Saul Alfonsi. He had converted to Christianity and the monks called him Brother Paul because the apostle Paul was a Jew made good. His brother, a physician at court, had written Disciplina Clericalis drawing on the Mahomedan tradition of adab or courtesy.
‘One might almost have thought you did not want to be seen, coming round a corner like that,’ the beautiful girl remarked.
‘It is true,’ I said, feeling that honesty might be the most amusing course. ‘I was trying to escape my father.’
Now that I had a little time to compose my mind and observe the girl’s distinguishing features rather than her general impression, I saw that she was a tall young woman with a splendid head of red-gold hair, a fine full figure, green eyes and a flawlessly pale skin. That was how it struck me at the time, and I have not revised the impression since.
‘Your father? Who is he?’ she asked.
‘He is Comte Rotrou of Perche.’
She laughed.
‘There’s more to him than meets the eye,’ she said. ‘And your name?’
‘I am his bastard Bertold. May I ask who I had the honour of nearly knocking over?’
‘I am the Duke’s bastard daughter Juliana, Comtesse de Breteuil.’
I knew that the Duke was also the King of England, and another of the Duke’s daughters was here to visit her sister at the castle, but I had not listened properly to any details. There were many pretty women at dinner last night, but I must have been blind or drunk – or both – not to notice this lady. The King’s daughter! A phrase from the Psalms swam into my mind: ‘Kings’ daughters shall be among thy honourable women.’ Oh yes, indeed, she could be among my honourable women any time. I was a lusty scoundrel in those days.
‘We bastards must stick together,’ I said, rather cheekily.
It seemed to me in my impudence that this encounter might offer opportunities for Bertold’s advancement. I could see that the idea amused her.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘perhaps we should …’
There was the tiniest pause between ‘perhaps’ and ‘we should’, as I believe she intended. She was too much a lady to say anything more obvious, but I noticed it. All you want when you are young is a fuck and a furtherance. Better and better, Bertold.
She prepared to move on. I thought I could not let her go without some furthering; we must pick apples when we see them ripe and there was a smell of apples about her – and an airy spice, and the faint smell of a spark just after the flint has been struck.
‘When shall I see you again…?’ I started to blurt in a desperate manner that my old Jewish mentor at the monastery would have deplored.
‘Not so fast, my young Fitz. All in good time.’
She was almost gone, poised on that soft little bit of foot behind the toes.
‘Who were you hiding from?’ I asked.
‘My husband, of course.’
And then she walked on. I stood, deep in thought because I had met a wonderful girl who might just, conceivably, be the way ahead for a young man without prospects. The next moment, a bucket of water was poured over me. I looked round, somewhat irritated, not wanting to appear ridiculous in case the Comtesse should come back, and ready to put the blame roundly on my father because it was just the sort of thing he would do. But it was not the Comte, it was that prick of a son of his, Robert, the son and heir legitimate. Fifteen years old and already a complete arsehole.
‘Thought you were getting a bit hot,’ he smirked. ‘Thought you needed to cool down.’
‘I’m going to kill you,’ I said.
But he kept his distance and snivelled.
‘Bastard,’ he said. ‘You bastard. You touch me and I’ll tell my father. Anyway, you shouldn’t go talking like that to your betters. I can talk to a comtesse because I am going to be a comte. But you’re always going to be a bastard.’
I wasn’t going to take this,
Comte or no Comte. I made a grab for Robert and he ran off like the cowardly little twerp he was, and I couldn’t be bothered to chase him. Instead I fixed my mind on Juliana. She was hardly older than me and I could sense that she liked me. She was a spirited girl that was for sure. She wasn’t going to hide from me the way she hid from her husband. But why was she hiding from him?
I watched the man in hall that evening and the reasons were all too clear. He was another boring old fart. He picked his nose, which is absolutely counter to the advice in Divina Clericalis which Brother Paul had shown me, and when this Comte belched he did not look up at the ceiling which everyone knows is the thing to do. He was simply beyond the bounds of custom and duty.
IV
I hope you will bear with me if I take you again for a little ride into my past, because it has some bearing on the extraordinary tale that I am going to unfold for you, and also because I have an affection for what has been. I am not the only one. Does it not say in Ecclesiastes 3.15: ‘For that which is past is now, and that which is to be hath already been, and God requireth that which is past’? It seems to me the past is the only thing that assures you that you really do exist. The present is all too self-consuming. It eats time and never gets any fatter.
I could recite nearly the whole of the Bible once, in Latin. When I was sent away to the monastery I wanted to go because I had an interest in medicine at the time, still have to some extent, and I had a mind to learn. I had heard that an abbey beyond L’Aigle on the road to Montreuil, about thirty miles from my home, was a place where the new teaching brought by the Jews from Spain had filtered through. It was the best place in Normandy for mathematics as well as doctoring and had a strong connection with the medical school in Montpellier. These were the weapons – mathematics and medicine, rather than the sword and the lance – that were going to make my fortune, and of course there was Latin to be learned, the language of scholars and men on the make. I was precocious in those days. Now my future is all behind me.
I was persistent enough to bring the Abbey of Saint-Sulpice to my mother’s attention. She brought it to my father’s, so in the end they sent me there, though my mother wept when I left, as did I. It was a hard place in many ways. The endless round of services – from Lauds starting before first light, to Matins at midnight, said as we kneeled in front of our beds in the dormitory – seemed designed to put a boy off a life of holiness rather than encourage it. Not that I was interested in a life of holiness at the time; the blood ran warm in those cold days.
The food for novices was anything the Brothers didn’t want to eat themselves, often gristle and slops. Later, I made friends with Brother Gilbert, the cook, who also came from my county of Perche and didn’t need bribing with a feel up my tunic. I don’t pretend to be perfect. I would have let him have a grope for a loaf and a slice of bacon. It isn’t so bad if you don’t make a habit of it. That is a monk joke. We used to have a number of those. The trouble with masturbation is that it can get out of hand. And so on, and so on.
The bone-chipping cold in my stone cell, the beatings when I transgressed or was idle, the advances of some of the too-friendly brothers (especially Brother Thomas), were all tribulations, but on the positive side, I was taught to read. And what made my stay at Saint-Sulpice even more useful than literacy and Latin, music and medicine, was the new mathematics.
The old Jew, who taught me good manners, had brought knowledge up from the south, and was also a mathematician. It was he who showed me the new numerals of the Arabs which he had learnt in Castile and which made the Roman numbers seem cumbersome and slow – and what’s more he taught me how to use them. Brother Paul made me put one set of the old Roman numbers on top of a lesser one, told me to take away the lesser from the larger, and then when I had juggled all those Vs and Xs and Cs and Ds and Ms, he showed how much simpler it was to do it with the new Arabic numbers. After that we did addition, and I discovered how to put the Arab numbers together to make a larger sum in half the time. And so on with multiplication and division. Multiplication I had previously found a graveyard littered with those Roman letters which passed for numbers. And division had been even worse.
Best of all, since I was acquiring a strong persuasion that the way to be happy was to be rich, Brother Paul showed me how these new numerals made tallying much easier. I could see a future in that.
‘Do not call it tallying, that is for peasants and those who still use the abacus,’ said the old Jew. ‘You keep these figures on a slate or, if you are rich, on vellum. You write everything down. One side of beef … three silver pennies. You must have a record of transactions if you are to control your trade and your life. And when you are rich don’t forget old Saul who taught you that.’
‘I shall not forget you, Brother,’ I told him, and I meant it.
My head was astir with the possibilities of these new numbers which were so strange and yet so simple compared with the old Roman way. He talked about using these new numbers in a science the Greeks know as geometry and in an even stranger invention of the Arabs, a science hardly known in this country, called al-gebra which in time he would show me.
That said, he looked me solemnly in the eye.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘I am going to show you a wonder.’
‘What is it?’ I asked him. ‘Is it a trick with powder and fire? Or a way to turn iron into gold?
He took a piece of charcoal and drew a circle on the table.
‘There,’ he said. ‘This is what you need to make the heavens themselves seem small.’
‘A circle?’ I exclaimed. ‘Is it a magic circle into which you can lure spirits?’
‘It is a magic circle, certainly, though I cannot speak for the spirits. But you yourself can perform miracles with it.’
‘What is it?’ I asked again, wishing to be great very soon.
‘It is nothing,’ he told me, gravely. ‘It is naught. It is zero. It is the greatest invention of the Arabs. But it is truly not even theirs – they borrowed it from the Indians.’
‘Nothing? I can’t see what use nothing can be. You are joking. Or perhaps you have been hoodwinked. I have heard naught like it.’
‘Naught with an a is a word but nought with an o is a figure – a circle with nothing inside it,’ he told me. ‘It is not just nothing – though it is the symbol for nothing which neither the Romans nor the Greeks had thought of. It is also the symbol of magnitude, of increasing any given figure by the power of ten if it is written behind it. Thus 6, the new Arabic number for the Roman VI, becomes 60 if we put a zero after it.’
I began to see what he was driving at.
‘And 3 becomes 30…’ I said, writing the figures down as he had shown me.
‘And what if I put a nought after the nought?’ he asked.
I was puzzled by that. I had never seen figures of this kind.
‘If these were Roman numerals,’ he said, ‘it would be like multiplying by X every time you put 0 behind a number.’
‘Why,’ I exclaimed, ‘30 multiplied by ten becomes 300. And 300 times ten is 3000. And...’
My head was spinning with the size of these figures.
‘He drew a few random figures to show me, announcing their quantities as he went.
‘Copy these new numbers out,’ he continued ‘1 to 9, and play with them, sprinkle the noughts around and see what figures you make! And the only one you cannot make is infinity. That is God’s number.’
We had been able to calculate before but never with such simple means! I felt the power of the new knowledge surging through me; I was sure it had been looking for me as its vessel, not this scrawny old Jew, decent man and scholar that he was. Where would I be without him? But if I wasn’t careful, he would go and blurt it out to the world.
‘Don’t tell anyone about this,’ I urged him. ‘We should keep it to ourselves. Magic stops being magic if everyone knows it.’
‘You cannot hold back the spread of knowledge,’ the old man told me, gravely. ‘
You might as well try to stop the Eure with a shrimping net. With these Arab numbers and the Hindu one for zero, any number can be written and the universe is within man’s grasp. Keep it to yourself? It would be like keeping the secret of perfect proportion. No, no. This method is for mankind, not just for you.
‘And do not be condescending or proud about nothing, for nothing is an absence of something and pregnant with possibility. Something itself can be dull, boring, flat and lumpen, but nothing is the creative state from which all things arose. Try to get back to it sometimes.’
Eccentric as I thought he was, I promised that I would do so if I could, and he went on to tell me more about the Arabs, how they had built castles all over Spain, in stone, when the French were still building with wood and earth. It was said that they had learned the art from the Byzantines.
‘I hope you are not going to ask me to build a castle with you,’ I asked him.
He chuckled. ‘I would do it,’ he said, ‘if we had the time and the implements. I have an idea about rounding off the edges of castle towers to make them less vulnerable, but we will have to sit on that for a while. The Normans love their square towers … Oh, and there is another thing I have to show you. Something the Arabs do with wine. They heat it and distil it in a retort over fire until a pure essence comes out of it which they call alcohol. See! Smell this.’
He reached across and put a small glass bottle into my hand. I took the stopper out and sniffed. A sweet and volatile aroma came out unlike anything I had smelt before.
‘Taste it,’ he said.
I put a little on my finger which I raised to my mouth. It stung my tongue and lips, and tasted fiery.
‘Ouch. Mmm. What do they use it for?’ I asked.
‘For fragrant attars and essences of flowers; for anything that needs to be perfectly clean; for medicine; for preserving small animals or anything that is to be kept; and of course it can make you, very quickly, perfectly inebriated.’
The White Ship Page 2
