The Ruby In Her Navel

XXVI

The sense of surprise persisted as I returned to Palermo but now it was directed at my own obtuseness. If I were right in the suspicions that had only now come to me, all this while I had been confusing parties that were quite different in their aims, the one seeking to use me against Yusuf and so come closer to the King, the other seeking to use me for the King's harm. I tried to find excuses. Alboino and Gerbert were both churchmen of high rank; it was natural therefore to assume they had the same interest to serve, the same desire to expel the Saracens, increase the power of the Latin Church. And I had thought Alicia loved me and was working secretly to make our meetings easier and so had somehow contrived that I should carry the purse to Potenza. But she had used her knowledge that I was going there only to ensnare me further, only to build up my hope and dash it down again.

My misery was if anything deepened by these attempts at self-excusing; within them lay the proof – if more proof were needed – that I was a failure, unfit for the world I lived in. Returning by the Admiral's Bridge I remembered my joyful expectations on the day I rode out to Favara for the first time and how, crossing the Oreto here, a song of love and promise had come to my lips. I was very far from singing now.

Once in the city all other feeling was swallowed up in the dread of being recognised. Muhammed had said that the names of those making depositions against Yusuf had not been published, but he might have lied to me for reasons of his own, or the names might have been made known only now, only this morning. It seemed to me that I could read accusation in every eye that met my own, as if there were a mark on my brow, a brand, plain for all to see. And all would think as Muhammed had thought, that I had betrayed Yusuf for my own advancement, on the promise of taking his place. I could not go to the Diwan: the idea of encountering Stefanos, meeting his gaze, was unbearable. I could not go to anyone with my suspicions. How could I go to the King's Constable with a story of shadows and reflections and stray words? I had been the pursebearer, it might be thought I was one of the conspirators, seeking to betray my companions so as to gain favour. No, all I could do was wait for Sunday.

I made my way directly to my house and shut myself in there with orders that on no account should any visitor be admitted. They would disobey me if it was someone of rank or wealth, but it was all I could do. All that day my door was opened only twice and that was to Caterina, when she brought me first soup and bread and later some pastries of a kind I recognised. Stefanos had been, she told me, thinking I might be ill, and he had brought them with him. It occurred to me only now that Stefanos himself might be in some danger, through his long employment in Yusuf's Diwan. My doing…

Something there might be among Yusuf's records, if I could come at them, something to give substance to my suspicions. I decided to make the attempt. I waited till after the supper hour, in the hope I would find no one still working there. If I saw signs of any presence I was resolved to retire immediately. I took a dagger with me, one with a short and broad blade, which I thought might be useful if I had to force a door.

The guards were at the gate by which I usually entered and they greeted me with no apparent difference of bearing, and opened to me readily enough, supposing I had forgotten something or intended to work late into the night, a thing I did sometimes after an absence. All was quiet as I crossed the courtyard and mounted the stairway. I lit the lamp on the wall at the beginning of the passage and went down to my door. This was locked but I had the key to it. All was in order in my room, the documents on the table as I had left them. I went some steps farther down the passage, tried Yusuf's door and found it also locked. The room that the scribes and notaries used, which gave access to Yusuf's, had a door that was flimsier, and it was this that I had resolved to force, if I could do it with the dagger. But the door was unlocked, it swung open to my touch. While still on the threshold, I saw the reason: those who had been here had seen no need to secure the door, they had left little to guard. The room had been ransacked, drawers and shelves emptied out, a litter of parchment lay everywhere.

I crossed the room, my feet kicking against account books that had fallen to the floor and been disregarded. Yusuf's door on this side was closed with a latch only, easily lifted. There was a similar scene of desolation here. Everything had been turned out and scattered in some close search, for incriminating evidence against him, as I supposed – or against themselves. This, if they had found it, they had borne away.

They had left behind them a scene of ruin, with documents spilled out of their covers and shed over table and floor. I walked over to the room beyond, his sanctum, where he kept his state when there were visitors, or private talks to be held. The heavy oak door swung widely open and there was a similar devastation within, the same litter of documents, the cabinets gaping empty.

It was here, as I stood at the threshold of his inner room, his private self, that I truly felt his loss for the first time and knew that the grief and the blame would be with me always. His death was here, in this room. Before they had torn and mutilated his body they had violated the principle of order by which he had lived. Here was the tall casement where we had stood and talked together and which I had envied for the light and air it gave him; standing here he had given me the mission to carry an empty purse to Lazar – the mission that had been the beginning of his death. I remembered the delicate bones of his face and his hook of a nose and his eyes, always intolerant of dissent, always ready to show kindness for me. The sound of his voice came to me, the exaggerated accents of his French. Is that a new sorcot that I see this morning?

Always the same form of words because he was fashioned so, never fully at ease when he was too close.

That I would not hear this voice again, no more seek to find some answer to his words about my clothes and my singing, only now came fully home to me. So far I had felt nothing but horror – at the violence done to him, at my part in it. Horror like a morass, a quagmire, leaving no ground to stand, no ground for grief. Now I felt the sobs rise in my throat and I choked and wept for Yusuf, whom I had blamed unjustly for my unhappiness when the reason was in myself. I had blamed my father also for this unhappiness of mine and I wondered now, through my tears, what ruin of his world there had been that had taken him that day to the monastery gate.

It was here that I had known Yusuf and it was here that I mourned him, in the midst of this desolate litter that was all he would leave for memorial. I stood there until my storm of weeping was over and I was a little soothed and could see again. I was turning to leave when the memory came to me, like a message from him, of a day when I had come earlier than expected to his summons and found him in his finery, having just returned from a cavalcade with his fellow-Saracens. I remembered the sumptuous silks he was wearing, the blue and scarlet and gold. He had spoken of this display of power and wealth as causing greater hatred for the Saracens and yet as being caused by this very hatred, in a circle that could only be broken by God's teaching. But by then he was back behind his desk. He had been close to the wall when I entered, bending down as if to gather something he had let fall below the wooden panelling. But there had been nothing on the floor and nothing in his hand as he moved away…

As if in obedience to some whispered command from him, I crossed to the place where he had been and crouched down to look. But there was nothing to see there, only the smooth face of the walnut they had used for the inlay. Still crouching there, I felt along the lower edge of the panelling, along the narrow line where the wood was inset. After some moments my fingers found an irregularity, a smooth boss of wood, smaller than a thumbnail. Pressing on this I heard the faintest of sounds and the panel swung open along the line of the join. Inside the opening thus made were loose sheets of parchment held between covers of stiffened cloth and secured with thin cord. They were numbered on the backs though without other distinction among them.

I took out the first and opened it and found details of sums paid and received with entries in Arabic against them. These would be irregular or unlawful payments of some kind, monies that had to be kept in a separate record, not passing through the official accounts of the Diwan.

The next one I opened was concerned with the providing of Moslem serfs in grant to Christian religious foundations in the region of Palermo.

Such grants of labour, usually renewable after a certain term of years, were greatly sought after by monasteries, especially the richer ones with more land than the monks were able or willing to work themselves, and they had to be paid for in one way or another. There were no records of payments here, which I supposed was the reason why the documents were kept secret.

I might have stopped here, concluding that there was nothing of great interest, but I took up one more and opened it at random. These were not accounts but reports from various sources in Greek and Arabic and some few in Italian. A name sprang out: Wilfred of Aachen; after it another, marked off in parenthesis: Rinaldo Gallicanus. So Wilfred the archivist had more than one name. I remembered his pale face and reddish hair and pedantic use of Latin. It had seemed to me that he kept a watch for eavesdroppers while Atenulf was explaining my mission to Potenza… I closed the door of the panel, heard that faint scraping sound as it fitted into place. I took the documents, still in their cloth cover, and bore them back with me along the passage to my room.

Wilfred's was the name that had caught my eye and I began with him. It seemed he was not German, as all had believed, and as he himself had given out: he was the son of one Stephen Gallicanus, who had been a knight in the following of Rainulf of Alife and one of his closest supporters in the rebellion against King Roger twelve years before.

Alboino had said that Guy of Morcone, Alicia's father, had also taken part in this rebellion, but there was no mention of his name here. It was this Stephen Gallicanus who had been singled out by the King and ordered to remove with his own hands his lord's putrefying body from the tomb where it was laid and to tie the rope round the neck of the corpse so that it could be dragged through the streets.

The feeling of horror returned to me, together with the nausea that always accompanied it. This desecration had been at the command of the King. And what of that done to Yusuf? It could not be more than a few weeks since he had compiled the information contained here. His own death had been designed already, by Bertrand and his fellow-Normans, by Alboino and those in the Curia who had sent him, by Alicia and probably her brothers. This dragging of Rainulf in his grave shroud was a fearsome prefiguring of the end that was so shortly to be his.

Rinaldo Gallicanus was not much older than myself. He would have been barely twenty at the time of Rainulf's rebellion. Yusuf had inserted a question: Did he witness the public outrage done to his father? It was not known, but there was likelihood of it in the light of the young man's subsequent course of life. He had left his home in Apulia and travelled to Germany, where after some passage of time he had entered the monastery of Groze on the Mosel, taking the name of Wilfred. Among this community was Gerbert, who subsequently served at the Papal Court and was soon to be appointed Rector of the Enclave of Benevento. These two had travelled to Sicily at an interval of some months, Gerbert to work for an extension of the Pope's prerogatives in the appointment of bishops, Wilfred to take employment as keeper of the palace archives.

The report on Wilfred ended here but there was a note in another hand stating that the post of archivist had been obtained on the recommendation of Atenulf the Lombard, Lord of the Office of the King's Fame, who considered the compiling and preserving of archives to fall within the province of this Office. Yusuf had appended a comment here: As also no doubt the altering or destroying of them.

Further notes followed, also written by Yusuf, based on the material in the report, speculating in particular on the fact that all three of these men had come from Germany. There was the sketch of an equilateral triangle, with the three names at the angles and words of connection written very small and lines drawn outwards from the sides of the triangle, these lines also with writing on them.

As I say, this writing was small, and I postponed the reading of it for a little while, turning to the sheets that followed. All the time I was looking for Alicia's name, feeling sure that Yusuf, once knowing that the meeting in Bari had been deliberately contrived, would have set people on to watch her and find out what they could about her past. But she was not here among these names, Yusuf had not made the same mistake as I – there was nothing to connect her with Atenulf or Gerbert or my mission to Potenza.

I found her in the entry concerning Bertrand of Bonnval and more lines were given to him than to her. The long course of his efforts, public and private, to increase the Norman power at court and foment hostility towards the Saracens in the palace service, all was given here with details that went back over several years. Alicia had less than a page to herself. Those returned from the Holy Land who had known her there had been questioned and had testified to the dissolute manner of her life, her lovers, the lavishness of her spending which was impoverishing her husband and the cause of much quarrelling when he tried to curtail it. There were some who said that the manner of his death had been other than the one given out, that a stoppage of the heart can have various causes. But such rumours were too vague, Yusuf had noted, amounting to little more than gossip. Some lines were devoted to her father. Far from having taken part in any revolt, he had been Roger's firm and constant follower, no slightest suspicion of disloyalty was attached to his name; he had on various occasions given hospitality to his Norman peers at his castle in Apulia, among them Bertrand and his lady. There was no reference to the state of his health in the present or the past.

My last defence was stripped away by this reading, my last attempt to attenuate her treachery. There had been no threat to her life or to any member of her family, there had been no forcing of her. My bitterness returned, the sense of having been treated cruelly, like some tender-skinned creature that has strayed into a blistering light it is helpless to avoid and so can only wriggle and suffer.

To escape from these thoughts I turned back among the sheets until I found again the sketch of the triangle. Yusuf had drawn lines which went out at right angles from the exact centre of each side. I saw that these lines were designed to show connections between the three names written at the angles. Gerbert's name was at the apex, Atenulf's at the angle on the left. Along the line that came out on this side two things were written, one above and one below. I drew the lamp nearer and strained my eyes to read. The writing above the line related to Gerbert and gave a date of three months previously when he had visited the city of Augsburg, where at that time Conrad Hohenstaufen was holding court.

Below the line was a briefer note: Tostheim-Augsburg 6 leagues. Tostheim was Atenulf's birthplace, his father's lands were there – this much I knew. No date was given, but it was natural that a son should sometimes return to the home of his parents. A simple matter, in the course of one such visit, to travel those leagues. Departure and return would be scarcely noticed. Natural also that a prelate of high degree like Gerbert, with his knowledge of the language and his experience of the country, should be chosen to bear missives from Rome to the King of the Germans…

I sat back, staring straight before me. These two events might have coincided – that must be what Yusuf had meant by drawing only the single line. That would mean that on a certain day in the early summer of this present year Atenulf and Gerbert had been at Augsburg together in the royal presence. Render unto Caesar. Who was Caesar now, I had asked myself. There was an answer here. He who hated King Roger with a mortal hatred as usurper of his lands and powers. He who had himself crowned King of Italy at Monza at a time when he still possessed no more than a German Dukedom. He was Caesar and heir to all the Caesars, in his own eyes at least, grandson and nephew of Emperors, bent on the Roman Imperial title and the lands of Italy conquered and held in subjection by Charlemagne. Conrad of Hohenstaufen. Was it for him I had carried the purse?