The Ruby In Her Navel

by Barry Unsworth

  "Yes, how did you know? She is difficult, that one, certainly." He paused a moment, shaking his head in mild perplexity. "A beautiful girl," he said, "in her face and in her movements also. But very excitable. She shook her skirts about as if there were rats underfoot.

  She said she was not a horse, to sleep in the stable, she had two legs, not four. Shapely legs they are, what I saw of them."

  I could see he had been taken by this Nesrin, even in the midst of this flagrant misbehaviour of hers. "She is perverse," I said. "She is one who sleeps by the roadside, but walls and a roof are not good enough."

  I had spoken more eagerly perhaps than met the case, and I felt Stefanos' eyes on me. He said, "I explained to her, as well as I could – her Greek is limited – that they are not stables now but chambers, and I pointed out to her the swept floors and the clean straw that had been put down for them, with the cotton quilts to lay over. Then she said she would not share the space, she wanted to sleep alone. We had thought one room for the men, another for the women, but this turned out to be a mistake because the others are in couples, a man and a woman together."

  "All this no doubt they discussed among themselves in their own tongue, loudly and at length."

  "So they did. Now they are occupying three stables, rooms I mean, and for the present they are content."

  "Well," I said, "if she is by herself she will have only herself to quarrel with. Let us bring the tailor and make a start with dressing them. I foresee difficulties at every stage with these people, but time is on our side, though gained through misfortune – the King will not want to see dancing so soon after the death of his son."

  I had scarcely finished saying this when one of the eunuch slaves employed as messengers came to tell me that Lord Yusuf had returned and required my presence as soon as possible. I went immediately, bearing with me a written statement containing details of all the monies disbursed in the King's name in the course of my mission. These he would have to approve and sign. Among them was no mention of my stay with the Hospitallers of Saint John.

  I recounted the purchase of the birds and the hiring of the dancers.

  Naturally, I said nothing about the difficulties and irritations that had been attendant on these transactions. Yusuf listened, with his eyes on my face, but made no comment of any kind; birds and dancers were after all my responsibility and I would have to answer for any shortcomings in either.

  "And Mario?" he said suddenly, cutting me short. "What became of Mario?"

  "So you were informed of it? I was coming to the mention of him."

  "If I had been in your place, and rendering this account, I would have begun with that. It is unusual. The other things are not unusual, neither the herons nor the dancers."

  "Not unusual?" I said warmly. "They are amazing. They can move their bellies in a way never seen before."

  "Thurstan, Thurstan," he said in a lowered voice, as if in pity for me.

  He said nothing more for the moment. The mid-morning light came through the tall window where we were standing together, as generally in these colloquies of ours, and fell on his white turban and robe with a brightness that perplexed my eyes a little, and just for a moment I was reminded of my visit to Muhammed, his form as he rose to greet me and the way he had seemed to become a shadow of himself, a white shadow. But Yusuf's face was clear and familiar, and there was a look of kindness for me in it.

  "You should always pay attention to the unusual," he said. "A guard may get drunk and cause trouble, he may wound or kill someone in an affray, or be wounded or killed himself, he may rob someone or rape someone.

  These are usual things, unfortunately, the people we employ are of poor quality and not enough provision is made for their wages. But this Mario, he vanishes into thin air, in Calabria, far from home – he is Sicilian, of Palermo, that much we know, though it is all we know, for the moment at least."

  I made no mention of that fleeting impression of Mario's face among the crowd of pilgrims at Bari, convinced as I was that I had been mistaken.

  "He may have met the woman of his dreams," I said. "Who knows?" This was frivolous, deliberately so, but I was suddenly weary of the lecturing he gave me, a weariness I dared not show openly but which I had felt more often of late.

  As I had expected, he did not waste words on a reply. "And Lazar?" he said. "How did he take it?"

  "He was far from pleased to go away empty-handed, and he made his displeasure plain. Perhaps he will do more for us, perhaps he will change sides."

  Yusuf regarded me with his usual expression, quizzical, slightly sardonic. "If his friendship does not help us, his enmity cannot do us much harm. He is not necessary."

  "Yet we have been paying him."

  "The money was set aside for that purpose. If we spent only when we were certain of return, our coffers would be always full. With or without Lazar, the Serbs will rise against their Byzantine masters, they make restless subjects."

  I knew Yusuf was fond of me in his way and that he spoke with no unkind intention, his aim being always to instruct me in the realities of the palace administration. But it was not he who had made the difficult and dangerous journey he now dismissed as pointless. Adept at concealment when he had ends to serve, he took no pains to conceal from me that I was a means of serving those ends, that money and bearer had the same weight in the balance. A sudden resentment rose in me and I spoke to him on the spur of it. "Restless subjects, yes," I said. "Not like the Saracens of Sicily."

  Nothing changed in Yusuf's posture but it was a different face that looked at me now, and before he spoke I felt the chill of his displeasure. "So you make our patience a reproach to us?"

  "No, I did not mean that." Already I was regretting my temerity. "The rule of our King Roger is merciful and just, unlike that of Manuel Comnenus, and so there is no cause for his subjects to be restless, whether Moslem or Christian or Jew."

  But this came too late. "You talk loosely, Thurstan," he said, "and that is because your mind is loose. My people have been loyal to the Norman King. This shows lack of spirit in your view? We should emulate the Serbs?"

  "Lord, I did not think you would make this application of my words."

  "A man should always think before speaking. How many times over how many years have I tried to instil this simple precept into you?"

  "I meant only that the Serbs -"

  "The Serbs are a fractious people. If they had no overlords they would fight among themselves. It is this quality in them that might make them useful to us in turning Manuel's thoughts from the invasion of Sicily.

  My people are different. Our ancestors took this island from the Greeks by conquest and it was by conquest that our fathers lost it to the Normans. My father was still young when the last Arab city surrendered, Noto, the city of his birth. I was born in that same city five years later, forty-six years ago, born subject to the Norman rule. What is the experience of the father is in some sense the experience of the child.

  It is in the minds of all of us that we have been dispossessed. How could it be otherwise? But in these sixty years since the taking of Noto, not once have my people risen against the Christian ruler. You are a Norman, half of you at least. Do you think the Normans have more right to rule here than we had, that there is something in the soil or the soul of this island that makes it more suitable for Christians to reside in and govern?"

  His eyes had taken on a light I saw in them rarely. "Answer me," he said.

  "No," I said, "no," and this was a lie, for in my heart I did think so.

  "My lord, do not speak loudly, there are always people ready to listen."

  I was alarmed because he had raised his voice, a thing I could not remember him ever doing before, in this place of corners and corridors where listening people could hide, where anyone – domestics, attendants, messengers, guards – could be a spy.

  "Not once," he repeated. "The King's Saracen foot soldiers are the most steadfast and loyal troops in the army. He knows it
well – it is not for nothing that he forbids them to convert to Christianity. He trusts them more than he trusts his fellow-Normans, he uses them in battle against his Christian vassals – it is they who rise against him, not us. This town you have just come from, who was it that defended the citadel of Bari against the combined forces of Pope and Emperor for four weeks, when all others had deserted the King's cause? Was it the Christians?"

  "No, lord. I was young when this happened, not yet twelve, but news of it came to us at Bernalda."

  "Four weeks, fewer than five hundred men, all Moslems. Every man of them was hanged when the citadel was taken."

  His hand had strayed to the cube of embroidered leather at his breast, where he kept the scroll with the names of God in it. "Not once," he said again, more quietly now. "And what is our reward? The land is given to the Christians."

  "Some new allocations of the land there must be, when new rulers come,"

  I said. "Our King respects the rights of all his subjects."

  "You repeat the words you hear others say. There is something in you that persists, and it is endearing but also foolish, a wish for comfort, a wish to believe. Here in Palermo our people are privileged. The King has grown up among Arabs, he speaks our language, he prefers our company to that of the Frankish nobles whom he finds boorish and ignorant, which, let it be said between us, they are. But who are these Arabs that surround the King?"

  I took this for a rhetorical question and so attempted no answer. He was regarding me with less animosity now and I breathed more easily for it; he was formidable in his anger, there was such threat of harm in it.

  "They are artists and philosophers and men of science, people of the court. I am not questioning the King's justice. He is just, unjust things are done in his name, is it so difficult for you to bring these things together in your mind? Go to Butera or Randazzo. Go to Noto, where I was born. See the colonies of Lombard emigrants there. Their numbers are swelling from month to month. They build their houses, they take over the land. They are encouraged in this by some who stand close in counsel to the King. The Arabs become serfs on the land they owned."

  I did not reply at once to this, knowing that the Arabs kept slaves long before the Normans came, but it was as if Yusuf read this thought in my mind, for he said now, "There was oppression of Christians in the days of Arab rule, I do not deny it, but a Christian could still have title to land, legal title that was respected. Without the right to hold land, a people is reduced to nothing."

  He fell silent and looked away from me, and I saw the rise and fall of his breathing. I looked down over the courtyard that lay below the window and saw a man in the royal livery of scarlet and gold with a hunting mastiff on a chain. It was a boar hound and half as high as he was. It was straining at the leash and the man's arm was wrenched with the force of it as he tried to lead it where it should go. Then two palace Saracens in bright green robes and turbans came out from the portico. They spoke with their faces close together and they were laughing and the silk of their robes gleamed in the sunshine. With their fluttering gestures they were like birds of paradise. It was the same courtyard where I had encountered Glycas, not long ago if one counted the days, but it seemed like another life – between that time and now lay my meeting with Alicia.

  "It will not be so," I said. "The King has always dealt justly with his Moslem subjects."

  "Do not deceive yourself. We are hated here. The failure of this crusade, the humiliation of the Franks in Syria, has made the hatred worse. Before many years there will be no land owned by Moslems in Sicily. I should have not spoken so to you, but your words provoked me, coming at a time when the wrongs suffered by the Moslems were uppermost in my mind. While you were away a cousin of mine by marriage, the son-in-law of my mother's brother, was killed at Vicari, on the land he used to own, by the son of the Lombard who now owns it. The connection with me was not close enough to prevent the expropriation, but it was close enough for them not to throw him off the land altogether – he remained as a bailiff. Seeing a Moslem serf being badly beaten by a son of the new owner, he protested and the young man stabbed him to death. I am applying to the courts but without much hope of success. The father is related to the Lombard clan of Sclavus and so very close to the Lombards in the office of the Vice-Chancellor. They will bring it in as self-defence. He never went armed, but of course they will find the weapon."

  He looked directly at me and I thought I saw a suspicion of moistness in his eyes. "Five years ago," he said, "such a crime would have been punished, whoever the culprit. If the courts give us no satisfaction, what can we do? We must find other ways." There was no threat in his voice, only sadness, but it seemed to me that this young Lombard was destined not to survive his victim long. Yusuf was right in any case: five years ago the Lombard faction would not have dared to touch a man related to the Lord of the Diwan of Control, however distant the relation.

  "How long can it last?" he said. "If they take the right to ownership of land, all other rights will go with it. Our King is beset with bad counsellors. He rules a land where many races live close together. And with his crown he inherited the knowledge that the peace of his realm depends on the acquiescence of non-Christians to Christian rule. If he fails to keep that rule within bounds that the Moslems can accept, there will be civil war in Sicily. We too will become restless subjects like the Serbs." He was looking at me very closely now. "The Moslems cannot win such a war, it would be the end of us. But it would be an end long in coming – we would be a thorn in the flesh of the Norman kings for many years to come. You can help to prevent this, Thurstan. If the King makes me Lord Chamberlain, I will strive to advise him well, to nurture respect for the claims and the rights of all. You will help me, we will work together. We will take more Christians into the Diwan, Latin and Greek, until no one can say it is one thing or another. Our scribes will copy in Latin and Greek as well as Arabic. You have a good head on your shoulders, when you care to use it, and you have a good heart. You will prosper if you keep by me. It is a mark of trust that I speak my mind to you in this way."

  Indeed, he had never spoken to me in such a way before, and this in spite of the fact – but I was not to learn this till later – that he knew of my talk with Béroul in the tavern, knew I had kept it from him.

  I wonder now if he had some presentiment of evil that came masked as good: the Devil is well able to play such tricks. As he spoke he reached forward to take my hand, and I was moved by this, which I think he saw.

  If we had stopped there, I would have carried the warmth of it away with me. But even as our hands were still clasped together he said, "That is why I chose you, that is why I brought you here."

  As I returned to my office, these words echoed in my mind. That was why he had picked me out, to be a representative Christian in the spectacle he was putting on – his douana, a model of races and creeds living in harmony. He was the lord of the douana, it was he who was the Purveyor, not I. It had not been my knowledge of Arabic or the good reports of my teachers; it had been my looks, my Norman ancestry, my Roman religion – attributes of the rulers…

  No doubt I did him an injustice; he had appealed for my help in good faith; he had made me the hearer of dangerous words – a signal mark of trust in such a man. But I could not rid myself of the feeling that I was no more than an instrument to him, that I lived and breathed and was Thurstan Beauchamp to serve his advancement. And I forgot, in the injury to my pride, that his advancement meant also my own. The truth was – and this I knew even then – that the need for dignity was more present to me now that I had felt Alicia's hand on my head and heard her murmured words above me.

  Stefanos was not there when I returned and I supposed he was still engaged with the tailor. I sat at my table and began to busy myself with the papers there. These were royal renewals of privilege, originally written in Greek with a version in Arabic attached to them. It was my task to ensure that the translation reflected the meaning accurately.

/>   This was not so difficult as it might seem, since I had read a good number of such orders for renewal in my time at the Diwan of Control, and the form of words was always the same. Nevertheless it required some concentration, as the scribes occasionally made errors. And concentration, this morning, was lacking. I stared down at the first one, following the arenga, with which they always began: Since it is beholden on us zealously to guard the rights of the holy churches and keep them in peaceful state, we therefore order that the rights and privileges of the Abbey of San Filippo in the district of Corleone be renewed and tended for scrutiny so they may be confirmed by the power of our sublime Majesty…

  My eyes lost sharpness, the words swam together; out of them, like a reflection of cloud on water, gathering and thinning and gathering again, came Alicia's face as I had seen it on the morning of our parting, the clear look of her eyes, their readiness to meet mine, as they seemed to do now from the page, the long fair hair falling loose about her face. Hair made even fairer, she had said, by the sun of Outremer, though she had allowed no touch of that sun on her skin, where the pure lily mingled with the flushed rose, no, that was wrong, a single flower, a pure white rose with a flush at the tips of the petals.

  Perhaps I could set this into verse, find an air to sing it by…

  I was interrupted in this train of thought by the return of Stefanos, who told me that the tailor was waiting in an anteroom across the passage. We went together to see him, since he had more space there for the showing of his fabrics.

  He had a boy with him to carry the pieces he had brought us to see – he would not have dreamed of carrying anything himself. Tailors in the palace employ were highly skilled in their trade and much favoured. The King had a corpulent and imposing figure, and he spent freely on his dress and on those who fashioned it, and in this he was followed by the people of the court. All this had given the tailors an exaggerated idea of their own importance. They dressed in the height of fashion themselves, as if they were perambulating advertisements for their own handiwork, and put on all manner of airs and graces. This one was dressed in green velvet with an embroidered shirt that came high and was stiff in the collar, so that it forced his chin up, giving him a look more condescending than ever. Seeing him thus, I surmised that this high neck would be soon the general fashion and I resolved to have two such shirts made for me. The tailor was inclined to be sulky, having learned from Stefanos who his clients were; it was clear that he felt it beneath him to make clothes for a band of ragged nomads.