The Ruby In Her Navel Read online

  He spoke in German to his companions, mentioning my name and, as I supposed, also the place I held, and they inclined their heads. "These are two from the community of Groze on the Moselle, where I spent many years as a monk," he said. "I brought them to see the wonderful work that is being done here, so they can tell their brothers of it when they return, which is soon now. They had hoped to celebrate our Lord's Ascension in the royal presence before leaving, and I had obtained permission for them, but it was not to be."

  "Why is that?"

  "You have not heard?" He looked at me with raised eyebrows. "There has been a change. His Majesty will not be attending the liturgy. He leaves early tomorrow for Troina, where there is a dispute over the investiture of the Bishop that urgently needs his presence. You were not told of this?"

  "No."

  "We knew of it some hours ago. Perhaps the douana in which you serve omitted to inform you. You should come to work for us, in the Office of the Capellanus, we would know how to value you."

  It was said lightly enough, and the words were accompanied by a smile, but there was something disquieting in it that remained with me after they had passed and moved away down the nave towards the west door. He had taken good care to let me see his surprise…

  Still thinking of this, I took some steps forward. I was standing now at the centre of the Sanctuary, looking towards the northern chapel, at the arched alcove of the King's loge, set high in the inner wall, where he sat when he came to hear the liturgy, screened from the view of those below by the marble wall of the balustrade. None would see him arrive here and none would see him leave; he came from within the palace by means of the covered gallery that led from his apartments. Once again I tried to bring the King's life to my mind, and this time, perhaps because I was alone there and close below his viewing place and surrounded by the emblems of his glory and majesty, I succeeded better.

  He would approach by the covered passage, which was narrow, too narrow to admit anyone to walk at his side – those favoured would walk behind him. Once seated there, he would see the images of his kingship on every hand. I raised my head to look up at the vault as he would see it, the scene of the Ascension, the Apotheosis of Christ, to which his own destiny as earthly ruler was linked. Glancing to his left, towards the eastern wall of the chapel, he would see the standing figure of the Virgin and Child, Guardians and Protectors. Looking straight before him across the nave towards the southern chapel… But here my attention was distracted, I was again aware of moving shadows on the south side of the crossing, a rapid flitting that passed over the marbles of the floor like a bird's wings or faint ripples on the surface of water.

  So strong was this sense of movement that I turned to look back down the nave, as if in expectation of figures approaching, but there was no one.

  And in that brief time of looking away all had again become still. The shadows lay over the marble, unmoving; all was calm and golden. Then I was lost amidst the paths of light and stood there for a time I did not measure. It was the sound of hammering that roused me from this: there was a man standing on a plank laid across two trestles and driving a nail into a joint of the wall on a part of the nave arcade where no mosaic had been laid yet, so as to make a firm base for the mortar. I called up to the two who were working on the platform above me, asking them where I could find Demetrius, but the hammering was loud, they did not hear. I thought that if he were anywhere there at all, he would be in the workshop alongside the chapel, and it was here that I found him, supervising the preparation of the mortar that was to be applied to the section of the wall where the man was driving in the nails.

  He greeted me in friendly fashion, with no sign of ill-feeling. I asked him if he knew that the King's plans had changed and he said, yes, he had been told, not more than an hour before. "It was because I learned of this," he said, "that I set the fellow on to drive in the nails.

  Otherwise there is too much dust, and it takes too long for the air to clear, and the dust clings to the pieces and takes from their lustre. I did not wish my lord the King to have a bad impression of our work when he came to hear the liturgy."

  I seemed to detect something almost of sarcasm in his tone, though I might have been mistaken in this. "The man driving in the nails," I said, "is he one of the newcomers?"

  "He is one of those that have come now, but he is only employed to make the frame."

  "You will lay the mortar this evening then?"

  "Yes, we will have short hours of sleep tonight, we must have the bed ready for the setting of the pieces by early morning. It is the scene of the building of the Tower of Babel on the arcade of the nave. We will take it by stages, as always; tomorrow will be the beginning. Since the King will not be present, we have leave for our work to continue through the day."

  "It will take many days, will it not? I am happy to think you will stay in Palermo for the time that is needed."

  "Well, there are figures in it, and that needs more changes of colour in a lesser space. There are the workmen at their tasks of building, there are people watching, grouped together." He smiled and widened his eyes as he did so, a habit I had always found engaging in him, seeming to hint at an exciting prospect suddenly perceived. "It will be the last thing before we go. To be frank with you, now I have had time to reflect, I will not be sorry to leave Sicily. We are not welcome here.

  The moment I step outside these walls, I cease to be Karamides an artist in mosaic, I become Karamides a Byzantine sailor taking part in the siege of Corfu, an island formerly belonging by divine right to the Byzantine empire, now by divine right belonging to the Kingdom of Sicily."

  "It should surprise no one that there is hostility to the Byzantine," I said, "in view of the Imperial Edicts you send out from Constantinople denigrating our King." These words came stiffly from me, in spite of my wish for ease between us; I had not liked the way he spoke of divine right as if it belonged to both and therefore to neither, when anyone who looked at a map could see that the possession of Corfu was necessary to Sicily for control of the Adriatic.

  His smile had gone now, and he shook his head as he looked at me. "What Edicts are these that I send out from Constantinople while fully occupied with the mosaics in Palermo?"

  "The latest was only some months ago. Our good Roger is called a dragon belching fire, the common enemy of all Christians, an illegal occupier of the land of Sicily."

  "And what is that to you or me? How do we enter into it? Thurstan, think what an absurd and terrible thing it is to blame a whole people for everything that is done or said in their name. By that reasoning, I, Demetrius Karamides, am to blame for the miserable failure of this latest crusade, because the Emperor of the Byzantines did not provision the Franks generously enough in their passage through his lands, and the country people of Konya charged too much for their chickens or hid away their grain, whereas the true blame lies in the arrogance and stupidity of the crusaders themselves."

  Outrage came to my rescue at these scornful words of his, diverting me from the suspicion that I was having the worst of the argument. "I am not surprised you find the streets of Palermo dangerous," I said. "If these are the sentiments you give voice to when you go abroad, you are lucky not to have been hanged from the nearest tree. The crusade was blessed by the Pope, it was preached by that great man of God, Bernard of Clairvaux. Those who took the cross were ardent to defend the holy places."

  "Ardour comes in various forms." His dark and heavy-lidded eyes were regarding me with a patience that seemed almost sorrowful, almost like martyrdom, and this annoyed me further. "You know well," he said, "that many were possessed by ardour of a different kind, and that was to get their hands on as much land as possible. But however that may be, blessing and preaching and ardour do not save us from stupidity and arrogance in the conduct of wars, nor do they save us from defeat."

  I could find no very convincing argument to counter this: that there had been a defeat, and a catastrophic one, was undeniable. "It is tru
e that nothing much was achieved," I said.

  "Nothing at all was achieved and many thousands died in the course of not achieving it. For a disaster on that scale, someone to blame must urgently be found, and they found it in the Empire of the East, a vast extent of territory counting many peoples and languages."

  It was obstinacy now that kept me arguing with him. "You cannot deny that you formed an alliance with the Turk against your fellow Christians."

  "I did not ally myself with any Turks, I do not know any Turks. I was here in the Royal Chapel, working on the Pentecost vault.

  Fellow-Christians, did you say? It is not two years since your King Roger took Corfu. What was the first thing he did after taking it? He raided Thebes, a city inhabited by his fellow-Christians, and carried off hundreds of silk-workers to help the silk industry of Palermo."

  Hearing this, I thought of Sara and her welcoming plumpness, and I felt some shame that this was all that the ravishment seemed immediately to mean to me.

  "After that it was Corinth," Demetrius said. "A prosperous city, densely populated with fellow-Christians. Corinth was sacked and all her treasures taken back to Corfu. It was obvious to Manuel Comnenus – it was obvious to everyone – that Roger intended to use Corfu as a base for the further raids. It was fear of this that drove him into the arms of the Sultan. Now tell me, if Manuel betrayed his fellow-Christians, what did Roger do? Which is the enemy of Christendom? Or putting it in an other way, who has most right to Corfu?"

  He smiled again and reached forward with his left hand and took by the forearm of my right. "The same question, the same answer," he said. "We are friends, we can speak frankly. You have a soul, Thursdan. I have seen the way you look at the mosaics. I am older than you by a dozen years, but we are the same, though you may not know it yet. We do not live by the words of kings or emperors. I am Demetrius Karamides, I made the mosaics in the Royal Chapel of Palermo, those of the apse and the Sanctuary and the crossing and the chapels. There are no mosaics more beautiful anywhere. I did not make them in homage to your king. They will still be here when Roger and Manuel are dust, and all the generations of their descendents. Why should it matter to me who owns Corfu?"

  I looked at him in silent wonder for some moments. He was not joking, he was not speaking with the defiance of one soon to leave. He really did not care, and this was something I could scarcely understand, not to put first, before all other things, the loyalty to those set in authority over us, not wish to see them triumphant and so to triumph with them. I remembered now his contempt for those who would take his place, but it had been for their skills, and because he was being supplanted, not because it was Franks who were ousting him. He would not change his style of dress or the cut of his beard so as to pass unnoticed in the streets, not out of patriotic feeling as I had supposed, and always admired in him, but simply because these were things that belonged to him, they were himself – he brought everything back to himself. He did not care who owned Corfu, he did not care whose banners flew there! He had no devotion, no spirit of service. I felt pity for him at that moment, as if he lacked some limb and was condemned to hobble through the world instead of walking. But this pity lasted scarcely longer than the time it takes to draw a breath. The demon of envy that lies always in ambush struck me and pierced me and I thought suddenly of that Filippo who in the twelfth year had set his face against the waiting ship, and then I thought of Nesrin and how she turned in the dance. I strove to put these thoughts away, because I knew them for corruption.

  "You are wrong," I said. "We are not the same, you and I. I serve the King my master and hope for his greater glory. Corfu belongs to the Kingdom of Sicily by lawful title."

  He shrugged slightly but said nothing, and I saw that this too, our sameness or our difference, did not matter to him one way or the other.

  He reached and took up a handful of the tesserae that lay on a trestle beside him. They were small cubes of silvered glass and when he let them fall again into the tray, pouring them from tilted palm, they caught the light in falling and made a cascade that seemed unbroken. "Silver is used for the light that comes from Christ," he said. "It gives white reflections of great intensity. It is used for the arms of the cross, and for the halo. Angels also may have silver haloes, but no other figure may have them. Silver pieces can be used for the shine of weapons, they can be used to heighten the effect of other colours, especially the blues and greys." He took up another handful and let it fall again. "Yes, silver has various uses. Without the silver our work would show much less. But in my palm, or in the tray, the pieces are all the same. No one can see the form that will be by studying the pieces, no, not if he spent all his life in the study."

  It was hot here, in the long, narrow rectangle of the workshop. The shutters were open but the walls were of brick and held the heat of the day. There was a slight vapour in the air: the resin that was to form the first layer of the bed had been heated to make it more adhesive and easier to spread. Dust from the powdered stone they were to use to strengthen the mortar hung in the air between the beaten earth floor and the raftered ceiling. Looking up, I saw a flutter of wings: some small bird that had entered through a window and did not find the way out.

  "You will come to it, sooner or later," he said. "There may be some, even many, who fulfil their own needs by serving another's, but you are not of that company. Take the lesson from the mosaic. There is one true assembly of these pieces into the shape that is needed. Whether they are gold or silver or marble or glass or mother-of-pearl, they will be set in such a way as to have a meaning in the form and to catch the light.

  And that will be their only setting, because the one who puts his thumb on the pieces and sets them into the bed will tilt them just a little, this way or that; no one can ever repeat the thumb print, no one can ever catch again the same effects of light, not even the one who set them. Who can remember all the marks of his thumb?"

  It was on this note we parted, amicably enough, though without my being able to utter the words of reconciliation I think he was hoping for. He was like Yusuf, he wanted always to be teaching, and to hear the thanks of the student. Muhammed also. Perhaps there was something about me, something of which I was not aware, that brought this out in them. I promised to come to the chapel again soon to see the progress that was made on the tower of Babel. Some of the things he had said that afternoon seemed unnatural and perverse to me, and even contradictory: he too served an exacting master, more exacting than the King. But his words about form and light and the look of his face as he poured the silver pieces from his palm, these lodged in my mind. They are there still.

  XIV

  The King's departure meant that the Anatolians I had brought from Calabria had to be kept longer than expected – we were to have asked permission for them to perform as soon as the clothes were ready. In fact, the King stayed away from Palermo for almost a month, journeying on from Troina to Messina and after some days taking ship for Salerno, where a long-running dispute as to the status of the Papal Enclave there and the prerogatives of the Pope in ecclesiastical appointments had now broken out more violently. Relations between King Roger and the Roman Curia were far from cordial at this time. Our King was insisting on his right to appoint bishops and so questioning the pope's ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Sicily. Until this issue was settled, there was no hope that pope Eugenius would give his formal recognition of Roger's kingship.

  During this time of the King's absence, I saw little of the troupe, either the men or the women; in fact I saw them only twice. They had been given leave to go out into the town, but strictly forbidden to dance or play in public: it was essential that the court should be the first to see them, essential that the element of newness should be kept.

  This I made clear to them. Unthinkable, I said, that our King Roger should come second to some idle, gaping folk at a street corner. They had money enough, they could come and go as they pleased, with only this one condition; if they disobeyed in this they would
be sent packing and this great opportunity lost to them for ever.

  In making this speech I took good care to keep my eyes turned away from Nesrin, feeling sure she would seek to undermine my words in some way.

  Still on my mind was the discomfiture of the previous occasion, the dance of the measurements, the way the men had laughed together, something steady and noticing in the regard of the two women. All this confirmed me in the belief that there had been talk of me among them, talk of a certain kind. And this in its turn made me feel sure that my weakness had been noticed, that my face had given me away.

  If true it was a serious laps on my part, or so at least I regarded it, not just a weakness of the flesh. It had been my training, and it was required in much of the work I did, to remain impassive in my dealings with people, not to give any indication of feeling. This principle of concealment Yusuf had patiently schooled me in – he was himself a perfect example of it. In his kindness he had persisted, though I was not a good pupil, I was too quick-tempered, it was always too easy to read my feelings by the look of my eyes and mouth. It was a fault in me, and I was conscious of it, and I felt that my composure had not been proof against that triple assault, the mockery, the seducing movements, the scrutiny of the others. And besides, whatever my face may have shown, certain it was that I had stayed there, I had watched her…

  The truth was that the girl still ran in my mind, as she had done from the beginning, not just the movements of her body in the dance, but the look of her face, the cheekbones that lay so close below the skin, the narrow eyes with their upward slant, the suffering of the mouth, a suffering dissolved in mischief when she smiled. And this despite all my hope in Alicia, the wonder of our meeting, my resolve to prove worthy of her and of the regard in which she had once held me. But owing to some defect of nature in me, the higher thought did not cast out the lower.

  It may be as Guilbert of Nogent somewhere asserts, that the reviewing of our faults, an activity we feel to be virtuous, can sometimes be a snare laid for us by the Evil One, who tempts us to think we are resolving to make amends when what we are really doing, under cover of piety, is dwelling upon the pleasure of the sin.