The Ruby In Her Navel

III

I cannot say that I found much comfort in these thoughts after the news I had heard and the manner of my parting with Demetrius. I felt heavy-hearted and needful of solace, and as I made the sign of the cross in the shadows before leaving, I thought again about the women of the Tiraz and more particularly about Sara and the gift I had for her in my purse, which would make her welcome the warmer – or so I hoped, feeling the need for her arms about me and the yield of her body.

As I reached the foot of the steps and began to make my way across the courtyard, a man came towards me from the shadows close to the wall. He came on my left side and he was silent and his step was light. The courtyard was deserted and I thought for a moment that he meant to attack me. I swung round to face him and my hand went to the dagger at my belt, that being quicker than a sword to draw and use in the short space there was between us.

"No," he said, "I am a friend, I am Béroul. I was crossing the square and saw you in the light from the doorway as you began to descend the steps."

"Light from the doorway?" I glanced back up the stairway. "You have good eyes."

I saw him smile, as if he knew my thoughts. "I have been wanting to speak with you for some time," he said. "I took the opportunity thus presented."

We were still standing in the shadow of the wall. He was wearing a hooded cloak and I could make out little of his face, except that the smile gave the set of his jaws a famished look.

"I am on my way to a visit of some importance," I said. "Can this not wait until another time?"

"It is something that concerns you closely. You would do well to hear me."

There was a colouring of threat in this, or so it seemed to me. I did not fear Béroul, but if he was prepared to use such a tone, he must deem the matter serious. "Very well," I said, infusing my voice with weariness. "I am listening."

"No, not here," he said. "What are you thinking of? A poor light will not make us less likely to be noticed, ill-wishers can more easily draw near."

"As you drew near to me."

"I am your friend and you will know it soon. If we talk here we will seem like conspirators. If we talk in a tavern I know of, not far away, we are Thurstan Beauchamp and Maurice Béroul, two servants of the Douana Regia, having a cup of wine together and not caring who sees us."

He had used the Latin title of the Royal Diwan with a certain deliberate emphasis, and this, when afterwards I looked back on our talk, seemed the first pointer to his intent. He began to move across the courtyard as he finished speaking and I fell into step beside him without more words.

The tavern was a poor enough place, no more than a cellar, ill-lit and almost deserted – there was a man asleep or befuddled sitting at a table with his head hanging low, and three others playing dice in a corner and disputing among themselves at every throw. The man who served us wore an evil-smelling leather apron and the wine was sour. I was surprised that Béroul should chose such a place. There were taverns in Palermo frequented by the people of the Palace but this was not one of them. We were conspicuous here, I with my plumed hat and loose-sleeved pellice, he with his dark mantle and the fringe and dome of his tonsure – he had thrown the hood back now to reveal this.

He drank a little from his cup, set it down carefully. After a moment he smiled his lean-jawed smile and said, "We have always taken a great interest in you, Thurstan."

"Indeed?" I said. "Is this the plural of majesty we are using?"

"We in the Vice-Chancery, the Magistri Camerarii Palatii. We have been watching over you when little you knew of it."

This I could well believe. "We do our watching too," I said, "we in the diwan al-taqiq al-mamur." I had used the Arab title deliberately and it seemed to me that his face hardened, but there was no change in his tone when he spoke again.

"We have seen your diligence and your devotion to the King's service. It is our opinion that your talents are being wasted."

He seemed to wait for a reply but I made none. After a moment he said, "In spite of your high abilities you will not go far in a douana conducted by Saracens, with a Saracen at its head."

"There are Christians in my diwan, besides myself."

Now, for the second time that evening, I saw a face made ugly by contempt. "Christians? You put yourself on a level with them, you who are of Christian birth? You call them Christians, these filthy palace Saracens that claim to be converted to our faith and secretly continue to practise their own?"

"I have seen no evidence of this," I said, but he did not hear me or showed no sign of doing so.

"Once a Saracen, always a Saracen, it is in their blood," he said. His eyes had a staring look now, that famished smile had gone, and with it all pretence of benevolent interest in me. He leaned forward across the table, bringing his face close to mine. "It is in their corrupted blood," he said, "and they will corrupt our blood with it if we allow them. The terrible warning is there for us in the words of Ezekiel: 'And when I passed by thee and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee: In thy blood live!' The Christian life as lived in Sicily can be summed up as a struggle against contamination, a struggle to keep our blood clean. It is a long struggle, one that has no ending. The threat is always there, no conquest can ever be more than provisional. Tell me, Thurstan, what does Christendom mean to you?"

"It is the term we use for those regions where our Roman faith is predominant."

"That is all it signifies to you? This great spread of our faith no more than a matter of geography? I will tell you what Christendom is.

Christendom is the universal Christian Church, the universal Christian society. Christendom is a mighty host that is destined to bring the world under its sway."

Rarely had I seen such exaltation on a human face. The constraint he was under to keep his voice low intensified the vehemence of his speech. It was quieter now inside the room. The dice game was over, one of the three had left; the head of the solitary sleeper had declined on to the table.

"This Christendom of ours is young," Béroul said, more calmly. "Bear with me, travel back with me in time a little. A hundred years ago almost to the day, you might have seen a company of men making their way from Worms to Rome. If you had been fortunate enough to be of that company, you would have known one of them for Bruno of Egisheim, newly elected Pope Leo IX, another for Hugh, Abbot of Cluny, and the third for Hildebrand, who would later become Pope Gregory VII. Think of it, Thurstan. When, before or since, have three such men travelled in a single company? Three future saints, three men of genius, each dedicated to extending the power and influence of Holy Church. They saw more clearly than ever before that the danger lay in diverse practices, in their different ways they worked to transcend the local, to make our Church one single body. These were the founders of Christendom. Theirs was the spirit that inspired the first crusade and took the Holy Land for Christ."

He said nothing of the second crusade, which had ended in disastrous failure only the year before, and I understood the reason for this and it brought me, if only for that moment, closer to Béroul than I was ever to come again: we were briefly united in the sorrow all Christians felt for our loss of Edessa, for our humiliation before the walls of Damascus, for the disorderly and ignominious retreat of the greatest army that the Franks had ever put into the field.

"We see further than they did," Béroul said after a moment of repose.

"Not because we have sharper eyes but because of the foundation they laid for us. They were giants, we are dwarfs. We see further because we are sitting on their shoulders. This is a figure of my own invention that I sometimes use when I want to explain these matters."

"It bears a resemblance to some words of Bernard of Chartres, written at a time before I was born."

"Well done, Thurstan! I made a little test for you. They have not exaggerated who praise your accomplishments. But I was intending to say that while the danger still lies in local practices, we see now today, here in Sicily, that the great threat to our Church is the existence among us of a militant faith hostile to our own. These Moslems are allowed to live and breed among us, their blood is corrupted, they will corrupt the blood of Holy Church, our blood." The calmer mood that had come to him when he spoke of those great men of the past was broken now, that fixed and staring look had returned to his face. "We will be condemned to live in our polluted blood and the words Ezekiel will come to pass."

"Is it to tell me this that you brought me here?" I said.

His eyes fell away from mine. He reached out a hand and moved his cup a little to one side, no more than a fraction, as if to find an ideal place for it. "You can help us in this sacred task. Your douana is a source of corruption. Will you say you have not noticed how year by year the language of the Saracens has supplanted all others in the documents produced by your douana? It was formerly Greek. Then Latin, the language of our religion, began to be used. But this was suppressed through their cunning. Now all is in their Saracen language. Will you say you have not noticed this?"

"It is not true that all is in Arabic. Greek also is used – my clerk is a Greek. Arabic is more usual now and the reason for that is not difficult to see. We use Saracen scribes because they have better instruction and write a better hand. We are occupied with land holdings and the grants and fees belonging to them. Clarity is essential. Those set to write in Latin could not make themselves clear in that or in any other language."

"Do you not see that this rise of their language is part of a conspiracy that goes far beyond the shores of this island? The Saracens ruled here once – not long ago. They are working to undermine the King's realm and to regain the power they had. They are assisted from abroad. Have you followed the rise of the Almohads in North Africa? One after another our colonies are falling to them, they are taking our ports and our trade, they are recovering the land for Islam. They send their spies across the water to stir up rebellion and acts of violence among their fellow-Moslems here."

He spoke as if no one else knew of these Almohads, the Berbers of Morocco who were taking all by storm, whereas most of Palermo knew of them, and all those in the palace service. I myself knew more about it than he did, as I had carried the King's money over the water to stiffen the resistance of the Emir of Bougie, who was favourable to our trade interests there, but all to no avail, every day our Arab friends were losing ground, these Almohads were already west of the Zurid Kingdom.

"They make use of the alamat to make secret signals among them," he said now.

"That cannot be true."

The alamat were a form of signature in the Kufic script used by Arab scribes in documents that circulated through the chanceries. "They are extremely difficult to read," I said. "Almost impossible."

"That is the cunning of it. They make the writing intricate not for the sake of ornament but so as to deceive. We have used trained scribes to decipher them. They are quotations from the Koran. Let me give you an example. 'On the Day of Judgement to whom will the Kingdom belong? To God, the One, the Victorious.'" He paused, staring across at me in a manner of one who has made a point impossible to refute. "It could hardly be clearer," he said. "That is an incitement to rebellion. Have you seen them pray? Hundreds of men moving together like a single beast."

I watched him in silence as he again paused to make a small adjustment to the position of his cup. His fingers were very white and the nails well cared-for.

"The Beast that waits to devour us," he said. "Who is it that gives your Saracen scribes their employment and oversees their work? Is it not the lord of your douana?"

"You know it is."

"Yusuf Ibn Mansur. He is close to the throne and seeks to come even closer. But he will not leave his place to you, Thurstan, he will leave it to a creature of his own. We know already the successor he has in mind."

If he was hoping I would question him on this, he was disappointed. In any case, I did not believe it. By spying we can find the nest of the lark, the lair of the fox, the place where a man hides his treasure. But the spy was not born that could see into the purposes of a man like Yusuf. Nevertheless, though confident of this, I felt stricken by Béroul's words as if they took some shelter from me. "I do not seek his place," I said, and this I felt to be true in the sense of actively seeking.

"We know certain other things about him. We know that he and certain others, Saracens subordinate to him, are engaged in perverting our faith by offering bribes to any that will convert to Islam."

This was so insensate a thing that for some moments I could not find words to answer him. By a law newly introduced by the Council of Justiciars – a council appointed by the King – such attempts at conversion, whether by bribes or coercion, were defined as a crime tantamount to treason. "But you are mad," I said at last.

"No, believe me, we have been watching him for a long time now. He has not made any such attempt on you?"

"No, of course not, never."

Béroul remained silent for some time, glancing away from me across the room. Then, still without looking at me, he said, "Think carefully, my fine young man. It is a capital offence. You would not want to be associated with him in guilt. It may be that you remember something, some form of words."

"What do you mean?"

"Something perhaps scarcely noticed at the time, but coming together afterwards in memory to form a particular significance."

Slowly he turned his face towards me and I saw the smile return and the attempted look of benevolence, which would always be defeated by the needy set of his jaws. "From you it would have great force," he said.

"Who came with evidence of this kind would earn the gratitude of some of the highest in the Kingdom, those able to grant any wish, able to change a man's life with a word, with the stroke of a pen."

My understanding of his meaning had been delayed by disbelief. It came now, leaving no room for surprise but only for rage. This was the urgent matter he had wanted to discuss, this was where that talk of Christendom had been tending. I got to my feet and looked down at him, feeling the rush of blood to my face.

"You dare to ask me to give false evidence against my benefactor? You think my honour so slight a thing?"

"No, no," he said. "I ask you only to search your memory."

He had not moved, which was fortunate for us both: if he had stood to face me, I think I would have struck him, even in holy orders as he was.

"They who set you on did well to choose a priest," I said. "Your cloth has been your protection tonight."

With this I left him sitting there. I threw a coin to the landlord as I went, not wanting to be beholden to Béroul, even to that small degree.

Anger contended with shame in me, though the nature of this shame I could not determine. That I had listened so far? That I had been deemed a fit subject? More questions to plague myself with. Below anger and shame there stirred something of the fear I had felt in the chapel at the news of Demetrius' supplanting. There was a sickness in Béroul that was all his own; his was the blood that was corrupted. But Béroul was no more than a messenger, a lackey. Those behind him would be less concerned with the triumph of Christendom than with the gathering of power into their hands on this our island of Sicily.

Such was the disorder of my spirits that all desire for the women of the Tiraz left me. I went home by the shortest way, heavy-hearted after the rage, with Sara's ringstone still in my purse.