The Ruby In Her Navel

by Barry Unsworth

  "Does not Yusuf Ibn Mansur quote passages from the Koran? Does he not use the name of his god in your hearing? Do you think a human soul is lost at one stroke? Day by day, the touch of wrong, so you become habituated, you grow callous. That is what destroys the soul."

  "But he does not quote from his book more than we are accustomed to quote from ours, or name his god more than we."

  "Young man, what are you saying? I see that already there has been a deadening of the soul. Do you put them on a level, his blasphemies and our Holy Writ? So one doctrine is as good as another, so long as there is faith? Any noxious plant can grow so long as those who tend it are devout? Do you not know that devotion can pervert the soul if the object of it is mistaken?" He turned his face from me and remained for a while in silence, shaking his head slowly. "The weeds spread and choke our garden," he said, in a voice hardly louder than a murmur, as if speaking only to himself. "We cannot live with Islam, we must root it out, it is a pernicious weed in our garden."

  He turned to look at me and said in a stronger voice, "Our garden is Christendom, Thurstan, this great movement of our Latin Church that has grown in power for a century now, to bring salvation and peace and order under the spiritual authority of the Pope, who unites us in bonds of faith. That movement, that authority, knows only one truth, not several living side by side. In our garden of Christendom all compromise is corruption."

  For some moments I could find no way of answering him. I felt myself in the grip of dilemma. Our King chose Saracens for his companions, preferring them to Normans for their learning; he trusted his Saracen troops to defend him and they had proved loyal; much of the Royal Diwan was in the hands of Saracen officials. It seemed to me that if the King kept this balance it was because he recognised more than one truth, and knew that the security of the realm depended on this recognition, it kept him afloat on his silver barge, and I, as his faithful servant, was bound in duty to uphold this view. But I could see that any talk of balance or silver barges or strife below the surface would not be welcome to Alboino, and I was afraid of offending him, afraid that he would speak ill of me to Alicia, and so incline her away from me when I was not there to speak in my own defence.

  "My Lord Abbot, I will ponder the matter," was all that in the end I could find to say.

  "Ponder it well. And ponder also this: If the Saracen is our enemy in Syria and Palestine, how can he be our friend in Palermo? Is it not the same beast?"

  I promised to add this to the things to be considered. Then, in order to change discourse, and remembering that Alicia had said he came from Rome, I asked him whether his coming had been recent and whether he would stay long. And with these questions of mine he relaxed the severity of his manner, and seemed glad to tell me something of himself.

  He belonged to the Cistercian Order, and had spent some years at the Papal Curia, where he had been sent at the behest of the head of the order, Bernard of Clairvaux, to work for the moving of a new Crusade, against Byzantium now, whose treachery was blamed for the loss of Edessa and the failed siege of Damascus. But the King of the Germans, Conrad, had shown a lamentable lack of Christian fervour and declined the venture, and in view of this Pope Eugenius had abandoned the idea and sent Alboino to Sicily, recommending him to King Roger, who had appointed him head of the Monastery of the Trinitr in Palermo.

  All this was interesting enough, but it left one question unanswered.

  Why Sicily? King Roger might be asked to furnish ships and provisions for a new crusade, but no one would want him for an active partner, it would be too dangerous: he still laid claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, through his mother Adelaide. Something else had induced Eugenius to send the abbot here and I was casting about in my mind for some way of discovering this when I suddenly saw Alicia, in the company of her brother, standing near the fire that was farthest from us; it seemed to me that they had come through the trees from where the minstrel was singing. At once, all thoughts left my head save only one, and that was my strategy with the boat.

  The darkness of the trees was behind her, but she was full in the firelight and clearly visible to me, from the gold net in her hair to the slender feet below the hem of her red gown. This suddenness of her appearance by the fire and the not seeing her approach took my breath for a moment, making her seem like an apparition, summoned by my desire, the dwelling of my mind on her.

  They came towards us and we rose to greet them. I spoke the polite words and returned the smiles, and we stood there, the four of us, talking together – though to say truth I spoke very little and have no memory of the words. I had reached a stage of awareness of Alicia's presence that made me scarcely dare to look at her when others were by, for fear the force of my feeling would create some material sign, a bolt of light, or a burst of flame that would envelope us.

  I could not long remain where I was, in any case; my presence among them was the chief impediment to my hopes; while I was in Adhemar's company I certainly would not succeed in seeing Alicia alone. So after some further talk I made as if I was retiring, bade them good night and walked a little way off towards the place where I had left my boat.

  I did not go far, only into the darkness of the trees. From here I could watch without being seen, as they were still in the light of the fires.

  Servants with lighted lanterns were waiting at the little jetty where the boats were moored, which made me fear that people might be returning to the palace before long, and Alicia with them, constrained by her brother and uncle. I waited there and watched and hoped – it was all I could do. For some time they stood talking together. Then – miracle of miracles! – the two men withdrew together, though they did not speak any farewells, or take definite leave, as far as I could tell; it was as if they were intending shortly to return. I thought perhaps they had gone to relieve themselves. Alicia remained alone and took some steps towards the moored boats and some steps back towards the fires.

  It was my chance, the only one I might have. I went through the trees towards her. I came into the open and Alicia saw me and paused a moment then walked towards me. I took a lantern from one of the men waiting there, and holding this in one hand I held out the other to her. When I would have led her into the cover of the trees she held back, but I told her that the boat was there, not far away, and I begged her to give me her company, if only for a little time, to let me be with her when no one else was by, and at these words she resisted no longer but followed behind me as I held the lantern up to show the way.

  The place where I had left the boat had not been well chosen: there was no secure stepping place on to it from the shore. I had to bring it close and help her on to it while holding up the lantern so she could see where she was setting her feet. In order successfully to achieve this I was obliged to go over my knees in the water and she was concerned and said that now I would be wet and uncomfortable and it would be her fault. But her hand was on my shoulder and mine rested a moment against the small of her back as she got on the boat, and I felt heat not chill and this I told her and she laughed and said my name in a tone that lay between remonstrance and tenderness and my heart expanded to hear her say it thus. Nevertheless, I was thankful that it had not befallen at a time when I was wearing my new hunting clothes.

  The boat had two narrow benches. She took one and sat facing me while I seated myself on the other and took up the paddle, which had only one blade and so had to be used from side to side. The lantern we set between us. There was no breath of wind; the surface of the water was still and dark, no faintest tremor on it as it stretched away across the lake. The ripples and rings of earlier, when there had still been light, insects skating on the surface, fish rising, were gone now. The light from the lantern was cast upward over her bosom and face, and white moths came out of the shadows of the bank to flutter against the flame.

  I paddled out into the open water, taking the moths with us, aware of nothing for the moment but her face before me and the need not to shed a single drop of water on her
as I crossed the paddle from one side to the other. As we moved out towards the middle of the lake, I had the feeling that together she and I were entering a territory altogether new, a place from which we would not emerge unchanged. I brought in the paddle and the boat drifted round, following some current of the water imperceptible on the calm surface.

  I began now, as my exhilaration subsided, to see some disadvantages in this boat. I could only look at Alicia, I could not touch her. At the most, leaning forward, I could have laid my hand on her knee, but such a gesture could have had no sequel, would moreover seem grotesque, as if I were about to offer some ponderous advice, like a wise elder. Closer than that, without much care on my part and extreme docility on hers – and it was too soon for that – I could not get, without risking to send us both overboard, the boat being too light and shallow, too easily overturned. Always, always, there was some impediment. The time was short, there was a journey to make, Adhemar might be watching. And now this closeness and farness of her…

  As the boat moved in its slow arc I saw the turrets and domes of the palace outlined against the sky and the cluster of lanterns at the landing stage. The fires must have been replenished, the light from them lay red across the water, reaching almost to the opposite shore. A boat with a lantern at its prow was crossing the water and it passed through this reflection of the fire and the lantern was not reddened but silvered by it.

  "We must not stay long," she said, thus unwittingly adding to my discontent.

  "When will we have time for ourselves," I said, "without some one watching, someone waiting?"

  "Soon now, my love. We must be patient."

  This came in the deeper, surer tone of the woman she had become, but the soft endearment and the ceaseless need for patience before the tyranny of time had all the essence of our early love, and memories of this came flooding back to me now and it was as if nothing had changed: the night that surrounded us, this boat in which we drifted on the dark water, seemed no different from an obscure corner in the castle of Richard of Bernalda, one of the many where we had met and kissed and made our promises. I spoke words of love to her now as I had then, and now, as then, the fullness of my heart made the words stumbling. I vowed my service of patience to her. I was her knight, I said, she had made me so by her touch on my head. I would show my service in patience. Was not patience in devotion the quality of a true knight?

  "You will be my true knight before the world," she said. "You will be my husband, if you so desire. When next we meet it will be to exchange our vows and make our betrothal known. Now we must return, I must rejoin my uncle and brother. They will be wondering what has befallen me."

  So calmly uttered had these words been that I had obediently taken up the paddle before the promise in them came fully home to me. When it did so I could find no words but those of adoration, and these came in a rush. As I swung the little boat round and headed for the fires that were still blazing at the lakeside, my exultation knew no bounds, I blessed the sky and the water, the very night itself, for my good fortune, and as I did so, at that same moment, we crossed in our boat some invisible line and entered the territory of the mirrors: the leaping fires and the lanterns clustered at the landing stage and those on the boats returning to the palace and the shifting reflections of all these on the water and even the drops from my paddle that were caught in the starlight, all began to wheel and tilt and multiply and stretch away, rank upon rank, into a distance that seemed infinite, the heat haze above the fires shimmered over the water and a multitude of boats trembled in this heat and the ripples of it played like a soundless music on the turrets and towers of the palace and suddenly, between one thrust of the paddle and the next, I saw an exact copy of Alicia sitting behind me, somewhere on the water, her bosom and face illuminated.

  An exclamation of wonder rose to my lips at this celebration of my happiness – for so I took it to be. But it was never uttered, because Alicia had made no sound at all and her face had not changed, nor her posture on the seat, and so I knew that she could not have seen this spectacle, only I had seen it, it was I who had my face towards the turning mirrors.

  It may seem strange to one who reads this, as it sometimes seems strange to me when I recall it, that I made no mention to Alicia of the tricks my eyes played me. I could have done so, though briefly, as we drew nearer to the fires. Perhaps I was unwilling that such a difference should be declared at a moment when all else united us in joyful thoughts of the future. And then, there was so little time: this riotous breeding of images was short-lived, we were soon again in the world I knew. I would tell her another time, I thought, I would tell when we were next together. Once we had made our vows public we would have more time together and more freedom in our talk.

  I did not bring the boat as far as the jetty, but grounded it higher up on the shore and this time it was an easy step from the boat to the land and so I got no second wetting as I helped her out. I would have walked with her and lighted the way but she did not wish it. "There is light enough," she said. "It is not far." She turned to face me, still in the shadow of the trees. She raised her hands and brought them together in a gesture that seemed at first like prayer. "I leave you my ring," she said, "as an earnest of my love, until the time we can be together."

  I slipped the ring from the little finger of my left hand and I swore my love and service to her and we exchanged the rings.

  "I told you true when I said you are splendid," she said in low tones.

  "You will always be so. You will always be my splendid Thurstan."

  She came into my arms and kissed me and her body pressed against mine and somewhere in my stomach I felt a movement like a fish leaping. Then she was gone through the trees to where the boats and the lanterns waited.

  XVII

  All through the hunt, from sunrise when we rode out, her image stayed in my mind. The time passed as in a dream, when the thoughts and feelings belong only partly to what is before our eyes, and there is an attendant life that runs along beside us. While we waited for the finding and unharbouring of the hart, while I held myself in readiness for the chase and listened for the baying of the scent, while we followed the ruses and doublings of the quarry as he ran back on his own tracks to strengthen the scent then bounded sideways to confuse the hounds or entered and left the streamlets that run through the woods so as to break his traces, while I galloped with the others and followed the sound of the horn and shouted with all the power of my lungs and ducked the low branches, amidst all this hullabaloo and headlong career, I still drifted on the dark lake, still heard the words of love and promise she had given me, still felt the ring where it lay threaded against my breastbone. And when this splendid animal was worn down at last and lost its faith in flight and turned to confront the dogs, when Bertrand, as Lord of the Hunt, brought his mount forward and lifted his bulk in the saddle and plunged his lance through the shoulder and pierced the heart, my pity for it and my admiration for the stand it had made were deepened by memories of Alicia's words and glances, her face bright-eyed in the light of the lantern, and the beauty of the hart's slaying was the beauty of her hands as she raised them in the dimness of the trees to take off her ring.

  It was late when we regained the palace; there had been much to do – as generally in a hunt that is well conducted – in the flaying and butchering of the hart and the rewarding of the dogs. And here again Bertrand showed me his favour, as he had the day before at the Assembly.

  When the hart had been laid on its back and the scrotum and testicles removed and the skin of the throat slit up the length of the neck, and we had sounded the death on our horns and the dogs had bayed the death and been granted a brief time to tear at the throat, so as to remind them that the hart was their true and noble quarry, when the skin had been well and neatly peeled away by the huntsman and his varlets, Bertrand, whose prerogative it was to make the first cuts of the jointing, turned courteously to me and graciously asked me, before all that company – and her br
other Adhemar among them – to assist him in it.

  Bertrand of Bonneval, whose mother's brother was the Count of Conversano. And he allowed me to use his severing knives from his own scabbard, with handles made of ebony inlaid with gold. With our sleeves rolled up to keep them from the blood, we worked side by side, he very elegantly cutting out the tongue and I slicing the smaller muscles of the shoulder. And glad I was for my time as squire to Hugo of Venosa, when I had learned the unmaking of the hart under his exacting gaze.

  So it was with a great sense of well-being and satisfaction that I returned, bearing in my pannier some delicate morsels I was hoping to offer Alicia when we feasted on the venison that night, in particular those tender muscles the Normans call fol l'i laisse, meaning he is mad who would leave them. But I had scarce had time to wash away the stains of blood from forearms and hands, when there was a tapping at my chamber door and it was Caspar, come to tell me that his mistress had left in the morning, being worried for her father, who was ill and needed care.

  The surprise of this made my disappointment all the keener. I remembered now that she had spoken once before of her father's ill-health. But she had said nothing to me of her intention to leave so early, on the very day of the hunt. Perhaps it was only this morning she had decided to go.

  Otherwise, surely, she would have told me…

  Caspar must have read my feelings in my face – it was always Yusuf's reproof that I allowed too much to show there. "He is asking for her," he said. "The messenger came early, soon after you set out. She left me here to inform you of it and to give you her regrets for this sudden departure."

  "What is the nature of the illness?"

  He paused a moment before replying, then shrugged slightly, a gesture that would have been insolent in a servant but in him, with the special place he appeared to enjoy in Alicia's regard, it seemed natural enough.