The Ruby In Her Navel

I

When Nesrin the dancer became famous in the courts of Europe, many were the stories told about the ruby that glowed in her navel as she danced.

Some said it had been stolen by a lover of hers – who had gone to the stake for it – from the crown of King Roger of Sicily, others that it had been a bribe from Conrad Hohenstaufen for her help in a plot to kill that same king. The plot had failed, they said, but she had kept the ruby and paid for it in a way that contented Conrad even more than the death of his enemy, vindictive as he was. As time passed the stories ranged further and grew wilder: the gem was a gift from the Caliph of Bagdad, it was sent her by secret courier from the Great Khan of the Mongols with promises of more wealth if she would only come and dance for him and share his bed. And of course there were those who said that Nesrin was a shameless woman and the ruby was the reward of her pledge with the Devil. The troubadour who accompanied her made songs about the ruby, some happy, some sad, and this confused people even more. Neither of these two ever told the truth of it, no matter who asked, whether prince or peasant. I am the only one who knows the whole story, I, Thurstan.

Any human life lies in the future as well as the past, of however short duration that future may prove to be; they are hinged together like a door that swings, and that swinging is the present moment. To begin a story one must choose a time when the door swings wide, and this came for me on a day late in the April of 1149 when Yusuf Ibn Mansur asked me to remain with him at the end of what we called the majlis, the gathering of officials that was held twice-monthly in the royal palace of Palermo.

He asked me quite openly, rather carelessly, as if it were an afterthought, something that might easily been overlooked. But it was rare indeed that Yusuf overlooked anything. What better way of disarming suspicion than to speak in the hearing of all? There was nothing strange about my remaining there, about our having things to say in private: he was the Lord of the Diwan of Control and I was his subordinate in the same chancery. But secrecy was ingrained in him; and he knew, as I knew – indeed it was one of the things he had striven to teach me in the years I had served under him – that secrecy is best served by an appearance of openness.

The majlis itself has stayed in my memory because it was enlived by a quarrel. I had only recently returned from Naples, where I had made an attempt to bribe the Count's jester, a dwarf named Leo, to return with me to Palermo as a gift to the King. He had refused, though much tempted, being afraid of the Count's wrath, of being followed and strangled. This mission I had undertaken in my capacity as Purveyor of Pleasures and Shows, my official title in the Diwan of Control, a resounding one, but in fact there were only myself and my clerk and bookkeeper Stefanos and the doorman. I did not speak of this failure at the majlis; it was my practice in any case to say as little as possible at these meetings. I was distrusted as a man who belonged nowhere. I worked for a Moslem lord, I was not a Norman of France, being born in Northern England of a Saxon mother and a landless Norman knight. My father brought us to Italy in the year of Our Lord 1128, when I was still a child. He hoped to find advancement under the Norman rule, and he did so. My mother died some years later, struggling to give me a brother. My father… But more of my father later.

It was the eunuch Martin, a palace Saracen, that brought on the quarrel. He had words to say about a disrespectful incursion into the women's quarter of the palace on the part of certain drunken Norman knights. Spokesman for the Normans that morning was William of Vannes, who hotly denied the charge, clenching his huge fists and glaring at wizened Martin in his green turban and saffron robe, as if he would like to pound him to pieces, which he would have been easily able to do.

It is the Norman character to stress what they know causes adverse judgement. William knew the contempt of Greek and Arab alike for Norman uncouthness and barbarity, and he spoke the more loudly and roughly for it, in the only language he knew, a dialect of northern France very difficult to follow. And Martin concealed whatever fear he may have felt and gave him look for look and repeated the charges in his querulous, high-pitched voice. Only the presence of Yusuf, the host on this occasion and of a rank higher than either, restrained them from insult more personal and direct.

There were always tensions and hostility among us, moving just below the surface like a slow flame in damp grass. But open quarrels were rare, which is why this one has remained in my mind. Slight in itself, it was a mark of the deeper divisions that were opening among us, the rivalry for the King's favour between the Saracens in the palace service and the Norman nobility, a rivalry that was to grow fiercer in the time that followed.

Apart from this, what chiefly lives in my mind from that day, those hours, the beginning of my story, is a sort of amazement at the slightness and triviality of our words at such a time. Rarely had things looked worse for the Kingdom of Sicily than they did in this spring of 1149. A combined Venetian and Byzantine fleet was blockading Corfu and threatening Sicilian control of the Epirus coast and the Southern Adriatic. Conrad of Hohenstaufen and Manuel Comnenus, rulers respectively of the Western and Eastern empires, the two most powerful men in the world, sworn enemies of our King, were now, after years of mutual distrust, dismayingly close in friendship and alliance, united in the purpose of invading Sicily and crushing our kingdom while still in its infancy: less than twenty years were gone by since our good Roger of Hauteville had been invested and anointed in the cathedral of Palermo, made King of Sicily, Calabria and Apulia, the first Norman – the first of any race – to wear the crown. It was most of my years of life, but it was not long for a kingdom.

I cannot now remember what was said after this altercation, as if these few moments of heat had melted away what followed. I suppose my attention wandered. I had always liked this room, which was an antechamber to the two beyond, where the main work of our Diwan was conducted. The ceiling was of wood, the work of Saracen carvers, very delicately fretted, with painted stars between the bosses. There was a thin band of Greek scrollwork in marble, running all round the walls, a frieze of tendrils and fronds. As sometimes before, I let my gaze follow the curves of the scroll and I was soon lost and mazed in them; each loop turned back on itself, doubled round to form the first curving line of a new loop, there was no break in it, no beginning and no end, wherever the eye fell the mind was snared.

It happens to me when I dwell thus on the detail of form, when I look closely at things that are wrought for beauty and the upholding of power, my mind loosens and in some way dissolves and I feel the touch of heaven in the gross material of wood or stone. It has been with me from my early days, this sense of a crossing point between man and God that can lie in the work of hands. And on that April morning, still, the touch of heaven was the touch of my King, whose power was celebrated in that wood and that stone. My trance of mind was wonder at God's power and the King's; the voices around me still sounded, now loud, now soft, but the voice I heard was that unwavering one of majesty.

This drift of attention I would not have confessed to Yusuf, for fear it would damage me in his eyes – I wanted always to have his approval, though whether this was for increased pleasure in my own worth or to save him from disappointment I do not know. Can such things be truly known? In any case, suspicious as he was, I do not think he would have suspected such lapses on my part; they were too far from his own practice of unremitting alertness. Anything could be useful, could be vital, even the smallest thing, the very smallest – who could know? The sign of treason can lie in the flicker of an eyelid, he had once said to me. Without this acumen in seeing the signs, what can avail the rack and the wheel? So he tried to mould me and so I tried to fit the shape. As I say, I wanted to please him. But I was lacking, I was not an apt pupil – I knew it even then.

When we were alone I stood silently before him awaiting his words. But he took my arm without speaking and walked with me to the smaller chamber that lay beyond, where his notary and scribes did their work, and through this to his own cabinet, closing the heavy door behind us and leading me to the narrow space within the embrasure of the window.

It was no more than the habit of caution, bred by his many years in the palace service. I did not take it to mean that the matter was serious, nor did his first words give me any indications of this.

"Well, Thurstan Beauchamp," he said, "is that a new sorcot I see this morning?"

"Yes" I said, "so it is."

He made game of me sometimes about my extravagance in dress, using, with an accent of irony, the French terms that had become fashionable of recent months in Palermo. I like to be clean and neat and make a good figure and I took much care with my appearance, shaving twice every week and spending a good part of my stipend on clothes and scent and oil for my hair, which is very light in colour and reaches to my shoulders. That morning I was wearing a coat of dark blue silk, padded at the shoulders and pinched in the sleeves.

"And the chainse, that too? And the chauces?

He smiled as he spoke and I returned the smile, knowing these questions were a way he had found of showing affection for me. No, I told him, the shirt was not new, but more of the embroidery showed because my new coat was cut low at the neck. I was rather relieved that he made no jokes on this occasion about my singing. He had discovered – but he discovered everything – that I had a good singing voice and a good stock of songs both sacred and profane. He threatened sometimes to set me singing through the corridors of the Diwan, to enliven his work people.

"Yes, I see," he said. "Cut low at the neck, very striking." He himself dressed always with utmost simplicity, in white robe and high white turban and girdle of green silk, with for only ornament an emerald pin at his collar. Secretly I thought he made the better appearance, because he was also slender and graceful in movement, whereas I have more weight to me and more thickness in the shoulder.

His smile faded now and he looked at me more closely. "There is a mission for you," he said.

I should pause here to say something more about this Diwan al-tahqiq al-ma' mur, which some called the Diwan of Control, and others the Diwan of Secrets. It is the central financial office of the palace administration, responsible for tax registers and for confirming grants of land and villeins out of the Royal Demesne. Much power lies in this chancery, since the royal grants and renewals of privilege can only be issued by its officers and not by the ordinary officers and scribes of the Royal Diwan. It is also concerned with the more secret operations of money, the management of blackmail and bribes, which both come under the heading of inducements, and the gathering of certain sorts of information, regularly reported by Yusuf in private audience with the King. Like all those who served in the palace chanceries, we took care to keep certain activities from public knowledge – and more particularly from the knowledge of other chanceries. Much of my work lay on this darker side. It was the King's policy to use bribes wherever possible; I was one of his pursebearers, and this consorted well with my official duties as purveyor, since my travels could always be explained as being in quest of new pleasures and shows.

"As you know," Yusuf said now, "we continue to have close relations with the Kingdom of Hungary." It was usual with him to begin with what was commonly known. Coloman, King of the Hungarians, was married to our King's cousin, Busilla, and all knew there was close friendship between the two thrones. "We are still receiving assurances that the Hungarians are ready to support an uprising in Serbia, if this could be brought about."

Yusuf's face was thin, and always seemed thinner by virtue of the tall, dome-shaped turban. His eyes were dark, set deep in his head and very penetrating. They rested on me steadily, on a level with my own – he was tall for an Arab, as tall as I, though slighter, as I have said, and narrower-boned. "Actively support," he said after a moment, still looking closely at me.

My heart had been sinking ever lower since the mention of Serbia: I was already suspecting the nature of this mission. "My lord," I said, "how many times have we heard of this readiness of theirs?"

"True, but this time there is more ground for belief in it. We have it from sources close to the throne and it is confirmed on the Serbian side. Hungarian cavalry units are massing on the border. The train is set. We are waiting only for a spark."

I nodded but made no immediate reply. This spark, so much awaited, was a Serbian uprising against Byzantine rule. This, aided by the Hungarians, who were eager to extend their eastern borders, would distract Manuel Comnenus, oblige him to send troops in Serbia to put down the rebellion, and so turn his attention from his plans to invade Sicily.

Privately I no longer believed either in Serbian uprising or Hungarian intervention; both had been promised so often before. Now I would have to travel somewhere to meet Lazar Pilic, the only Serbian rebel leader who spoke Greek. I did not trust Lazar and I knew that wherever this meeting took place it would mean an uncomfortable and probably dangerous journey. To be sure, the danger to Lazar was greater. Byzantine rule in the Balkans was not secure. They felt the ground shifting, they feared for their footing and so they became more watchful and more cruel.

Blinding – the usual punishment for traitors and spies – was the least Lazar could expect if he came under suspicion.

The real difficulty lay in the fact that our Diwan did not have full scope for action in the Balkans, being restricted to the payment of bribes. Elements in the Vice-Chancellor's Office had formed a separate chancery which they called the Diwan of Command, a title confusing in its similarity to our own. They had gained the ear of the King and been granted the mission of diplomatic persuasion in Hungary. We had to rely on their reports, which came to us in garbled form with much that was significant omitted. Sometimes they did not come to us at all. So there were now two branches of the administration separately involved in fomenting rebellion in Serbia, each jealous of the other and neither sharing their information.

"We have already disbursed a good deal of the King's coin on these Serbs," I said. "So far without result. We do not know how they spend the gold, we have no means of knowing."

"This time there will be no gold. So far they have taken with both hands and made promises that were not kept. Now we in our turn will make promises, but we will keep our hands hidden."

He smiled a little, saying this; he had the Arab love for word-play and reversed figures. I for my part felt some beginning of relief. He had spoken of a mission, but where was the mission in this?

"If we are to refuse them, there is no need for a meeting," I said.

"On the contrary, there is every need. If you are there in person to refuse, it will strike them the more. You are there, before their eyes.

You are only the reach of a hand away. They reach out their hands, and lo, you give them nothing. The situation is serious for us; perhaps by these means we will make it more serious for them."

His tone had deepened slightly during these last words, a sign of feeling which he was perhaps not aware of. There was a gesture too that betrayed him. He wore as a talisman a scroll inscribed with the 99 names of God in an embroidered leather case carried on a silk cord that passed over his left shoulder and across his body. In times of anxiety he would touch this case, brushing it slightly with his fingers. Unlike many of the Saracens in the Royal Diwan, who had converted to Christianity, Yusuf had kept the faith of his fathers.

That the matter was serious there could be no doubt. We were facing the most formidable military alliance anyone could conceive. Apart from the danger to our realm, we both had much to lose personally. Yusuf held great power in his hands, but the rise of the Vice-Chancellor's Office was calling some of his prerogative into question. And now the King was to create a new post, that of Royal Chamberlain, with powers of supervision and control that extended over both Offices in all matters of finance, renewal of privilege and grants of land. He who gained this post would be second in power and influence only to the King's First Minister, the Emir of Emirs, who at that time was George of Antioch.

Yusuf wanted this post and on all hands he was spoken of as likely to obtain it. If he did, there was a good possibility that he would put my name forward to succeed him in his present position as Lord of the Diwan of Control. Then I would become rich like him, and have concubines, and white horses with gilded trappings, and Saracen attendants in uniform to make way for me in the streets, and a mansion of my own with gardens. I would inherit the marble frieze and the fretted ceiling and the breath that came through the moulded casement of the window. I would send others on missions to meet people like Lazar. Yusuf had never made promises to me, but I was close to him, though different in most respects. He was not a man to demonstrate great warmth of feeling, but I knew he had some tenderness for me.

In a few words now he told me what he had in mind for me. We were then near the end of April and the great pilgrimage to Bari in Apulia was already under way. From all over Europe, from Scandinavia and the Baltic, from Russia and the lands of the Slavs, bands of pilgrims were making slow convergence on the town of Bari for the Feastday of Saint Nicholas, to visit the church where his holy relics were kept and wet their lips with the miraculous oil which was exuded from his uncorrupted body and had power to heal the sick and the lame. I would join this throng, I would travel to Bari in the guise of a pilgrim and there I would meet Lazar and deny him the gold.

First, to lend natural colour to my setting out, I would go in my own person, and openly, to Calabria, and there I would purchase the small white herons that are trapped at this time of the year in the marshes that lie between the town of Cosenza and the sea. I would have them shipped back to Palermo to restock the Royal Falconry – the King liked to use these swift-flighted birds for his goshawks. This accomplished, I would cross the peninsula on horseback. At a distance from Bari I judged suitable I would leave the horse and proceed on foot with hood and staff and satchel and mingle with the crowds of the pilgrims.

"For the herons you must not exceed eight folles per bird," he said.

"And that includes the price of the cage."

I could not help smiling at this. No detail was too small for him; he must have been to the falconers to get this figure. "Supplying birds for the King's sport has never been among my duties as purveyor," I said.

"Why does the usual person not go?"

"I have enquired into it. The usual person was Filippo Maiella and he decamped with the money last year and has not been seen since. A highly respected man in the Diwan of the Protonotary, he went to Calabria year after year to buy these birds. Twelve years at least. Then last year, only Allah the All-Merciful knows why, who knows all things, he disappeared with the purchase money."

There was wonder in Yusuf's voice at a wildness so foreign to him, so much at odds with his own ordered life. "He walked away, he left everything," he said, and while the amazement still lingered in his voice I was assailed without warning by a demon, struck with sudden envy for this thievish Filippo. I knew it must be a demon who stabbed me thus: such a feeling could not dwell within me, who was always so careful, who counted every follaris of the King's money. "He must have taken leave of his senses," I said, thinking of him there, with the money in his purse, setting his face towards the mountains and the sea.

"It was thought at first that his guards had murdered him and hidden the dinars," Yusuf said. "They were watched, but such people do not wait long if they have money to spend, and it was soon clear that these had not."

"Where will the meeting with Lazar take place?"

"In the Basilica, beside the steps that lead down to the crypt."

"That will be his idea. The area round the steps will be crowded, the people will be jostling to get down to the crypt, to the tomb of the saint."

"No doubt that is his reason, In such a throng you will be the more likely to escape notice."

I looked at him in silence for some moments. His face wore its usual look of patient shrewdness. He was sending me. He did not want me to come to harm; he may not have had much faith in the results, may even have felt, with me, that standing still in a moving throng of people is not the best way to escape notice. But such missions formed part of the powers and prerogatives of his Diwan; they had to be exercised or they would be lost or expropriated, and that would leave him the weaker.

"Lord," I said, "I am ready to do anything you ask of me, no matter what, but it is a long way to go, just to show empty hands."

"We work by signs and gestures. Do you not know this yet? The money has the same importance whether it is absent or present. There is a verse in the Koran which speaks of this: "But that mankind would become one people we would have given those who denied merciful God silver roofs for their houses and stairways to mount to them."

I nodded as if I fully understood this, which was far from being the case. In fact, I was often at a loss to understand quotations from the Holy Book of the Moslems. I thought this one might mean that God did not set store by gold or silver, but I did not see the relevance of this, as we were talking about Lazar, who set great store by both.

"The pains we take are part of the message," Yusuf said. "He will have to take great care in making this clear to his own people, who will be angry with him, not with us, and who may be inclined to regard him as a spent force and seek to replace him. You see, Thurstan Beauchamp?"

He used my name always, my full name, when he knew I was opposed and he wished to create an understanding between us, as if I were a child, unwilling to see reason. And this annoyed me and touched me in equal measure, which I think he knew. When he had finished speaking he stood silent for a while. Tall and frail-seeming, with his slight, scholarly stoop of the shoulders, he more resembled one of the Arab artists and men of letters with whom our King loved to surround himself than what he was, mission-master, controller of the royal revenues, with a power that made him envied and feared, ruthless and devoted in serving this kingdom – a kingdom that his forbears had ruled for two centuries, ruled now by a Norman king, whose father and uncle had landed in Sicily as penniless adventurers and taken the island by conquest.

He started slightly now, as if he had forgotten something, or allowed himself too much pause, too much silence. Then he inclined his head, said a brief word of farewell to me and turned away. Thus dismissed, I left at once, this time not passing through the antechamber but stepping directly out into the passage, which followed the line of the wall facing towards the city. At the far end of this there were steps that led down in a spiral to the courtyard on this side. There was a narrow landing at the first curve of the staircase and in the recess of the wall an open casement with, at this hour of the day, sunlight slanting through it onto the steps and making a spill of light there. As I approached this I heard the wavering cries of the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer from the balconies of minarets throughout the city. I understood now why Yusuf had been so abrupt in his farewell: it was the noon call, he had heard the first notes.

I stopped and stood still there before the opening, as I had sometimes done before; it was scarcely two spans across at the broadest point, but I could see a section of sky through it. Yusuf would have needed time to summon his servant to bring water for the ritual ablution of his face and hands… I had been encouraged by him to use a faculty of picturing, of turning imagination like a directed light, a ray, on to the movements, thoughts, habits of others, to keep their continuing existence in my mind, see them in their times of vacancy or solitude, when they were unguarded. Where would such a person go, what might he do next? Even in the intimate details of his bodily life I would follow him. It was Yusuf, as I say, who had fostered this in me; now I turned the ray on him. He would shake his narrow feet loose from the slippers, he would clap his hands for his servant, a Berber boy slave he had named Matthew, who had a mat on the floor in the adjoining room. Matthew would know what to do without needing to be told. He would bring the ewer of water and the towel; he would pour the water very slowly into the basin that was always there; as the water flowed from the neck of the ewer, Yusuf would catch it in his hands and bring it to his face and wet his ears and nostrils and eyes and mouth, so that the organs of sense could be cleansed before he turned towards Mecca and intoned the intention to pray.

All this takes long to write, not long to see in the mind. The call was still continuing, rising from all directions, far and near, testifying to the greatness of God, calling upon the faithful to come to salvation, a clamorous melodious hubbub that fell on the city five times a day, confused by varying distance and the overlapping of sound, since those chanting did not all begin at the same moment, one voice fell away as another was raised, like veils of sound laid one across the borders of another, veils that were then torn again by the movements of the muezzins themselves, since each had to address all quarters of the world and so pronounce his summons four times, each time facing in a different way. It was a ragged music, deeply familiar to all who had their lives in the city, and moving in its confusion, to me at least, though a Christian – like the loud plaints that lambs make, lost on the hillsides, one answering another near and far, which I remember from the dales of my childhood in England, a chorus that always seemed to me like sorrow and joy at the same time.

Now, as I still stood there in the thin shaft of sunlight, in response as it seemed to the human voices, but not in rivalry, there rose the brazen voices of bells from monasteries and churches all over the city announcing the noon hour and the office of sext. And now again there was a confusion of sound, the clear silver bells that hang inside the cloisters, the deeper ones above convent gates, the clanging, deep-throated ones mounted in the towers of churches. For some moments more the throats of men and bells made that medley of loss and celebration, and as I glanced upwards at the section of sky that was visible through the window I saw the swift-winged birds that live in the sky above the city and never alight on the ground, saw them flock together in the bright air, rising above the sound, not as in fear but as in joy.

With this I was swept by a familiar love for this city of Palermo, where I had spent most of my years, for the diversity these sounds expressed, the different faiths that lived together here, the different races that jostled in the markets and laboured on the buildings that were rising everywhere, praying apart and having their cases tried in their own tongues, but all held together in unity by our great King. I thought of him now, the times on state occasions I had seen him, always at a distance. He rode with a canopy of pale-coloured silk stretched above his head, and the light that fell through it seemed to obscure his face, a radiance that obscured. I had no picture in my mind of the King's face.

From here I could not see the Pisan Tower, where the Royal apartments were, but I knew he spent his morning hours there, in the audience chamber on the second storey. He would be there now, hearing ambassadors or studying documents that touched the lives of us all, or perhaps scanning details of the revenues from his estates – in that case, his eye might fall, just for the merest moment, on an entry I myself had made, some item of expenditure. He would see the marks I had traced! A sense of wonder descended on me with this thought, wonder at his nearness and farness. I tried to picture him, as I had just pictured Yusuf, but I could not, he was beyond my imagining, divinely appointed as he was, by God's grace invested with the sceptre and the orb. I was eight years old that Christmas Day when he was crowned in the cathedral of Palermo. I saw him then for the first time, standing with my father in the ranks of the nobility. My father lifted me up and I saw him pass in sunlight and he was in a mantle of gold and the bridle of his horse was gold and its hooves made no sound because of the carpets they had laid over the pavement.

I had lived ever since in the protective shadow of his power. I felt ashamed now that I had been so grudging and reluctant in the way I had received the news of my mission to Bari, when it was in his service that I was sent. My life up till that time had contained disappointments. In fact it had sometimes seemed to me that it was my fate never to arrive at a promised end. I had wanted with all my soul to fight in the King's cause as a knight and it had not been granted to me for reasons I will give more fully later. I had sought a command in his Household Guard and this too had come to nothing because Yusuf had taken me from it. He had noticed me and greeted me in Arabic and I had answered him in the same language, which I knew, though at that time imperfectly, from the Arab nurse my parents had given me. With these few words I gave him in answer my life was changed. I was to learn that he had wanted more Christians in the Diwan, to broaden the base of his power. One like myself, of the Latin faith and of Norman descent, had been particularly suitable for this purpose of his. He had other reasons also, which I only learned later.

He had sent me to study Roman Law at Bologna, so as to argue cases affecting the King's temporal power against ecclesiastical claims where property or revenue were involved. I studied but I felt no vocation for the law and I was not among the most brilliant there. I had more success in the taverns, where I added to my stock of songs, both those in Latin that the students sang and the new ones in French that were coming from Poitou and Aquitaine. Somehow, returning to Palermo and the palace service, I had become purveyor of pleasures and pursebearer. Service in the sun, in the open, with no handling of coin, this is what I would have wanted. But I could still be of use to him in the shadows. And was I not going openly to Cosenza to buy for him the white marsh birds that he so loved to serve to his falcons?

Set aglow by these thoughts, I turned from the window to continue my way down. As I did so by chance or by some instinct, I glanced behind me at the way I had come. There was a man at the head of the stairway, standing quite still, watching me. After a moment I knew him for Maurice Béroul, an ordained priest, employed now in the legal department of the Vice-Chancery as an advisor in matters touching canon law. He had been present at the majlis but had not spoken. He did not speak now, though he seemed for a moment to hesitate as if he might come towards me. Then he turned, took some steps back along the passage and disappeared from view.