The Ruby In Her Navel

XX

I saw nothing more of Spaventa during my stay at Potenza. Perhaps he left that same night. To this day I am not certain by whose contrivance he could come and go so easily; at that time I assumed there was someone in the castle under orders from Atenulf to assist him. With the money delivered, my heart was lighter; there was nothing before me now but to wait for the arrival of the King's party and the sight of Alicia.

In the afternoon of the next day, in the gardens that lay between the inner and outer walls of the castle, I saw among a group of French knights who had arrived that morning in advance of their king, a man I thought I knew from the days we had both been squires, when we had met on several occasions, bearing the shields and tending the horses for our respective lords at tournaments. I was not sure of it, the years had passed, we had changed; moreover, he was white-faced and haggard-looking as if he had been through some illness. But when I came closer and asked him if he were not William Clermont, he knew me and greeted me by name and seemed glad to see me. We drew apart from the others and walked together, descending through the terraces until we came to a small loggia with benches inside where we could sit in the shade.

We talked about ourselves, about the things that had happened to us. His story was very different from mine. He had been knighted at the age of nineteen by his godfather, the lord of Montescaglioso, and had recently returned from the Holy Land, where he had taken part in the crusade. I asked him why he was in company with the Franks when he was as Sicilian as I was, more so, since he had been born on the island, descended from a family who had come with the invading Norman army under Robert Guiscard, our King Roger's uncle.

He had been desperate to take part in the crusade, he said, and his smile twisted with the words as if there were a bitter joke in them. "I wanted it more than anything," he said. No crusading army had assembled in Sicily as King Roger had declined to take part. So he and his father and some others in the following of Godfrey of Enna had crossed over to France. They had gone to the Assembly at Vézelay in March of 1146 to hear Bernard of Clairvaux preach the crusade. Never in his life had he heard such preaching.

I noticed now that William's hands had begun to tremble slightly, though he sought to disguise this by pressing them against his thighs, and that his eyes had taken on a fixed look as he spoke, as if he were reciting a lesson learned by heart.

Such preaching, he said, there was so much power in him. Edessa had fallen, the holy places were falling to the infidel, the Franks had been slaughtered by the barbarous hordes of Imad ed-Din Zengi, their women sold into slavery. The crowd was vast, there were too many for the cathedral, they had put up a platform in a field outside the town and Bernard had spoken from that, promising remission of sins to all who took part.

"We began to cry out for crosses," William said. "Crosses, give us crosses. The cloth they had brought was all used up. Bernard tore off his outer clothes to be cut up for crosses. Men fought over the scraps of his robe." He raised an unsteady hand and produced from within his bosom a scrap of dark cloth, frayed and ragged. "I have kept it," he said, and he laughed a little, though his eyes lost nothing of their starkness.

I was becoming uneasy now at his manner, and particularly the change in his voice, which had been lively enough when he first greeted me but had fallen now into a droning monotone.

"I have kept it by me," he said.

"To remember the crusade?"

"To remember the time before, when we did not know, when we were shouting for crosses. Everybody was shouting. I could not tell the difference between the shouts in my ears and those in my throat.

Crosses, give us crosses."

He again pressed down upon his thighs, staring before him as if hearing these shouts again. He had not looked at me since beginning to speak of Bernard's preaching, but I felt now that I had been the unwitting cause of his distress, that the surprise of our meeting had jolted him, set him talking in this vein.

He had taken the cross that same evening, among the lesser nobility, after King Louis and his brother Robert, Count of Dreux, and Alfonso Jordan, Count of Toulouse, and Henry, heir to the county of Champaigne, and William, Count of Nevers. "Immediately after these, the royal vassals," he said, and I saw how, even in the midst of his disorder, he took care to list these illustrious names, and showed satisfaction that he had been in such company. Everard of Barre, the Grand Master of the Temple, had also joined them with a body of knights from his Order, and many great ladies had accompanied their husbands, Eleonora of Aquitaine, the Countesses of Flanders and Toulouse…

The recital of the names had steadied him a little, and lifted his voice, but this was short-lived. There was nightmare in his face when he began again, a nightmare two years old but as fresh to his mind as if it had been yesterday. The German army, under their Emperor Conrad, had gone before, leaving Nicaea in October. "We did not know what had become of them. We were told they had won a great victory over the Turks, but the corpses we came upon were German, not Turkish. When we reached Nicaea we discovered that they had been massacred at Dorylaeum by the Seljuk cavalry, and that Conrad had fled the field. We kept coming on the bodies as we went forward, more and more of them, men and horses all piled together, one great smell of rotting flesh. We did not breathe air, we breathed death."

For the first time since he had started speaking William turned his face towards me, and I saw the dew of sweat on his brow. "So many bodies," he said. "We knew the Germans were ourselves. We were looking at our dead selves, we were smelling our own decay."

Then the arrival in Jerusalem and the Grand Assembly at Acre. He launched again on the recital of names and titles: King Baldwin of Jerusalem, the Patriarch Fuller, the Archbishops of Caesarea and Nazareth, Conrad's half-brothers Henry Jasomirgott of Austria and Otto of Freisingen, Frederick of Swabia, Welf of Bavaria…

He knew the names like a lesson learned, and it gave him some comfort, as before, this litany oft-repeated. But his hands still pressed down on his thighs as he went on. And what did they decide, he asked me, these princes and prelates? He attempted a laugh. Never was there better illustration of that verse in Isiah, Take council together and it shall come to naught.

The folly of the decision to attack Damascus was well known, as was the greed for land that had led to it. What no man could know unless he had lived through them were the sufferings of the retreat towards Galilee.

"A year ago, almost to the day," William said. "August, hot like this, much hotter. You think of the desert as light-coloured, sand-coloured, like the sand of our Sicilian beaches. But that desert was hell-scorched, dark grey. The heat from it burned your face like a flame if you looked down and the wind blistered you when you looked up. We had no order in the retreat, we were massed together, an easy target. These Turcoman riders are not cavalry as we Normans understand it, they are mounted archers, they move fast. They hung on our flanks, mile after mile, pouring arrows into the mass of us. The way was littered with corpses, men and horses." He raised one hand and took my arm above the elbow. "You understand?" he said. "It was prefigured. The same bodies, our bodies, the same stink. I smell it through my sleep, it wakes me."

I could feel the tremor of his hand on my arm and I was swept by a rush of pity for him, though at the same time I felt dismayed that a man should so exhibit his weakness who had been schooled to conceal it.

"These things will pass," I said.

"You could not tell, it was like bolts from heaven. You would be riding alongside a man and see the arrow strike. You would hear the whistle of it and the thud as it struck. My father was killed, he took an arrow through the nape of the neck. He had taken off his helmet because of the heat. I was beside him, I heard the arrow strike." He paused and opened his lips and drove out his breath between clenched teeth, making a sound like the rising flight of a strong bird. "The arrow went through his throat, I saw the head of it come out below the chin. He rode on with his throat pierced, then blood came round the head of the arrow and he pitched off his horse. I left him there to rot, there was no time, he was left in the open, in the sun, like all the others. In the night I smell it, the stench of rotting men and horses and my father, and I cry out for the time before the greed and the rivalry and all the death, to the time when we were calling for crosses."

He stopped and his hand moved away from my arm and silence fell between us. I would have liked to say words of comfort to him but did not find them. It seemed to me better, far better, to be alive, even in the grip of a nightmare that would not fade, than to be feast for crows in that hellish desert, but I could not say this. I wondered whether, in William's place, I would not have felt in my heart, amidst all the horror of it, some gladness that another man had been struck and not myself, even if it was my father. But naturally I could not speak of this either. It seemed strange to me, and passing all understanding but God's, that William, who I did not suppose lacked for courage and had entered eagerly on the war, should now be so white-faced and trembling when others who had ridden at his side showed no mark of it in speech or bearing. Strange too, though in a different order of strangeness, and very disturbing to me, that while I longed to resume my dream of knighthood, he should cry out in the night for refuge from the nightmare experience of it. I would have spoken of this, perhaps protested or even rebuked him, that he should cast such a shadow over my hopes and call into question the disappointment I had lived with through the years since he and I had been scudieri together. But when I would have spoken I saw that colour had returned to William's face and his shoulders had straightened and his eyes lost their staring look, and I understood that this telling of it to one who had not been there acted as a cure for him, quelled the demon, though not driving it out. So the wound he had dealt me I kept to myself, and we parted amicably enough, promising to spend more time together at supper. This was served in the hall of the castle, where I, in company with the party of Frankish knights, made a number great enough to occupy a table. But on this occasion William sat silent and morose, a little apart from the rest of us. His companions, all of whom had been on the crusade with him, ate and drank and laughed together, and paid no heed to William, which made me think they were accustomed to this behaviour of his.

The evening passed in wine and talk. I was in good spirits, looking forward to the morrow, when King Roger and his party would arrive, Alicia among them. For this reason, I was sparing with the wine, wanting to have a clear head and clear eyes when she and I met. This was fortunate as it turned out because a quarrel rose among us which, had I drunk more, might have had bloody consequences.

It happened in this way. The talk passed to the life lived by the Franks of Outremer, which all of these men had seen at Antioch and Jerusalem.

Since they had seen these wondrous cities and I had not, it was very natural they should seek to impress me with descriptions of them, and they vied with one another in this. They were rough men for the most part; many of them were landless knights who fought for pay and keep, and they were used to hardship and the discomforts of life in their native Normandy, wearing coarse wool next to the skin and washing seldom. Now they were divided between wonder and censure as they spoke of the luxury of life in the Frankish East, the houses with their carpets and tapestries, dining tables inlaid with ivory, mosaic floors.

Dinner was served on plates of gold and there were even dishes of porcelain brought from Persia and Cathar. The rich had water conducted by pipes directly into the houses and it could be heated while still in the pipes. The ladies of the house had baths and elegant chambers, their beds were hung with damask, the linen well-laundered and soft. Whether my companions had themselves set foot in these chambers – which was the impression they sought to give – or whether they were merely repeating what others had told them, it was not possible to know. But it was this mention of ladies that changed the course of their talk. They began to speak of the eastern style of dress of these ladies, their veils and turbans, their jewels and silks, their absence of petticoats, the languor of their movements, their mincing gait. From this it was a short step to the looseness of their morals, and one man in particular grew loud and forthright in this regard. They took lovers as a matter of course, he said, they took them to bed in their own houses, no one thought anything of it, the husband least of all because it left him free for his own amours. "I tell you," he said, "a lady of good Norman blood, two years out there, and she becomes little better than a whore."

He was a red-faced, flaxen-haired fellow, a few years older than myself, with blue eyes made vague now by the wine he had drunk. "Not two, no," he said. "The more virtuous may resist so long, but most will settle to their venery sooner."

"You are speaking of the generality," I said. "What you say may be true of some of them, or even many, I know not. But it is not true of all, to my certain knowledge.

"What knowledge is that?" You have not been there. I say they are all the same, wife or maiden, ready to open their legs to any man that takes their fancy."

My rage rose at this but I kept a rein on it. He was looking belligerently at me now, scenting a quarrel. Like all his kind, he had a keen nose for this, fuddled or not. "A man should bridle his tongue when he cannot be sure of his company," I said. "I say there are ladies who have lived long in the Holy Land and are as pure and virtuous as I trust your mother is."

He brought a fist down on the table. "Do you speak ill of my mother?"

Where this might have led I cannot now be sure. I felt I had right on my side and was ready enough to take the thing further in defence of my lady Alicia and in rebuttal of the aspersions this loose-tongued fool had cast on her. But before I could answer him, another intervened, an older man, sitting farther down the table. "Come sirs," he said, "let us not mar the occasion with reckless speech. Subjects of King Louis of France and a subject of King Roger of Sicily are met here tonight, two of his subjects, I should say" – this with a sideways glance at William.

"If we quarrel here it will not augur well for a good understanding between our masters tomorrow." Murmurs of agreement came from round the table. He rose from his place and came to lay a hand on the shoulder of his companion. "No offence to you was intended," he said, and as he spoke he looked across at me and smiled a little and gave a nod, as much as to say, now it is for you to speak.

"I intended no disrespect to your lady mother," I said.

The man hesitated a little but he was not proof against the hand on his shoulder and the feeling he sensed from round the table. He said, "There are always exceptions, so much is true. I would not question the honour of any lady vouched for by you, wherever her dwelling place."

It had not come easily, but with the words once out his face cleared as if only they had been needed to restore his good humour. This suddenness, both of dark and light, I had met before in his fellow-countrymen – by his accent I knew him for a Breton – and I was glad of it now and I reached out my hand to him and he took it and I repented that I had thought him a fool when it was only that he was drunk.

The man who had intervened to restore harmony among us seemed of higher degree than the rest, and possessed some authority over them. I noticed that they paid attention to him when he spoke, though the inflexions of his French were different from theirs, he was of the South. Certainly he had gifts as a peace-maker, as he had proved already and was to prove again now.

"William has told us you are a notable singer," he said. "He told us of the meeting between you after all these years and said how he recalled your singing, how it gladdened men's hearts. Is it not so, William?"

"Yes, it is so." William said – his first words of the evening. "He was known for his singing."

"Will you favour us with a song now?" the older knight said, and his words were at once echoed by others round the table, among them the one with whom I had quarrelled.

I did not need much persuading. My heart was light with thoughts of next day and I was gladdened that the good fellowship had been restored among us. First I sang a Neapolitan song that was popular at that time, in which the singer compares his sweetheart to an April day, beautiful in her smiles, changeable in her moods. It was a pretty, lilting air, without great range in the notes – easy to sing. And while I sang, taking me quite unawares, thoughts of Nesrin and the moods I had known in her came pressing upon me, her face in rage and in mockery, in laughter and in promise and in ecstasy of love. My Alicia, my intended bride, had one face only to my mind, reposeful and beautiful. Our knowledge of each other would grow with time…

Next I chose a song of my own composing with words that were at the same time sorrowful and sweet, and I sang it to an air that I knew from my student days.

I will not raise loud lament

To make her guilty for my hurt.

I am steadfast in my love.

If I suffer, should I need her consent?

This was greeted with much applause and I thought I saw tears in one man's eyes. Encouraged by this, I went on to give them several more songs. When we finally rose from the table every man of them came to praise me and thank me. Particularly warm in his commendation was the older knight who had first asked me to sing. "You have a talent far out of the common," he said. "Believe me, I have some knowledge of such matters. It is interesting to hear troubadour songs in the Italian tongue, a thing not so often met with. Can you play on any instrument so as to accompany your voice if need be?"

I told him I could play on the viele and the mandora, and he nodded and looked at me in a considering way but said nothing more, and soon after we went our separate ways to bed.

The couriers came early next morning to announce the impending arrival of the King and his party. I mounted the stairway that led from within the gatehouse up to the parapets. From here I could see the road they would come by. And here I waited, above the curtain wall, among baskets of rocks, and stakes with fire-hardened points and other weaponry for defence against siege. And through all the years of my life since then, when I remember that waiting, there comes to my mind those instruments of hurt, the jagged rocks, the blackened stakes, the great cauldrons with the bar through them for tilting the blistering oil.

With the news of the royal party's approach, the gates were opened, the portcullis was raised – the creak and grind of the chains as they drew it up was to my excited senses the music of Alicia's arrival. As I stood there – joined now by others who had mounted the walls – I felt a need for the sight of her that was almost painful. To see her was to believe again in my own life. She would come and she would redeem my life and join the past together, broken as it was, like a fractured limb that she would bind up and make whole, bone and blood and tissue. Only later was it to come to me how grossly, in my concern to mend my own life, I had failed to take into account that hers too might be damaged, broken. That day, as I stood waiting there, such thoughts were far from my mind. In the time of our first love I had thought of my life and hers as pure, unmixed. There was one aim, one course of action, everything was in keeping: a knight's son, a knight's daughter, the same class, the same thoughts for the future…

There was a light breeze, the pennants on the battlements fluttered.

Glancing up, I saw a pair of hawks, high in the sky, in lazy flight.

Something must have alarmed or enraged the fowl in the kitchen garden because there was a sudden outcry from there. When this died down I heard the hooves of the horses on the road and saw the dust from the mailed men that were riding ahead of the King. I saw them pass through the stockade gate and heard the clatter they made on the lowered bridge.

The King came next behind, mounted on a white horse with a silver harness, as on the day of his coronation twenty years ago, when my father had lifted me up to see him. But I had not seen his face then, and I did not now, he rode beneath a canopy of scarlet silk – Atenulf's invention, as it was said. I saw nothing of him but the grip of his legs on the horse's flanks as he covered the space from the stockade wall and disappeared in his turn below the overhang of the gatehouse. My eyes went eagerly to those following. I saw them enter in twos and threes, saw them reach the bridge, heard them pass into the gatehouse. They rode in order of rank, the Cardinal Bishop of Santa Rafina, Gilbert of Bolvaso, Master Constable Designate, with his lady, behind these the King's notary, Giovanni dei Segni, and the Provost Leontios and John Malaterra from the Vice-Chancellor's Office, and others whom I did not know. But the face I was searching for I did not find, and my breath came short and I felt the skin of my face draw together with the quick flight of the blood. She was nowhere among them. She had not come.