The Ruby In Her Navel Page 18

  All this was very present to my mind as I spoke to them, as I avoided meeting Nesrin's eyes. I repeated everything several times, speaking slowly and emphasising the words. They could go out and see the wonders of Palermo – and wonders they would be, I told them, after the wretched places they had seen up to now. They must keep together as far as they could and they must promise not to dance or make music – I kept coming back to this. To my mind they were primitive people, living the days as they came, not looking far ahead; I was afraid they would yield to the passing lure of coin.

  "Naturally," I said, "we will trust your word. But to make sure you do not forget, you will be accompanied by a man of trust from our Diwan. Do not try to elude him, because we would take that to mean that you have broken your promise, and in that case you would not be allowed to perform before the King, you would not receive the gold dinars, you would not be permitted to keep the new clothes."

  "This one with us is man or woman?"

  "Why, a man of course," I said, finally obliged to meet her eyes.

  "And he follow us everywhere?"

  "Yes. Well, of course, not when -"

  "He follow us into the bushes?"

  Everyone laughed at this. Seeing this laughter, and Nesrin's falsely serious face, I had a sudden strong impulse to laughter myself, which I overcame for the sake of dignity, but only in precarious fashion – so much so that I judged it better to retire without adding more words.

  But on the following day something happened that drove all other thoughts out of my mind. It was mid-morning when Yusuf sent for me, at a time when Stefanos and I were engaged together on the tax registers of the royal demesne in western Sicily. It was a secretary of Yusuf's who came with the summons, a palace eunuch named Ibrahim. I found Yusuf in his private cabinet at a littered desk, and he motioned me to be seated across from him.

  "We have had a request of an unusual kind," he said, and he looked at me with his head tilted a little to one side, as if he were considering me in some new light altogether. "It has come from the Diwan of the Lord Chancellor. They have asked that you be given leave to join a hunting party at Favara."

  "But how can that be?" I said, made stupid by amazement. "It must be a mistake." Favara! It was a place of resort for the King himself, or those in his favour, or for visitors he wished to please, not for servants of his administration. I had ridden past the gates of the palace of Favara, but I had never set foot inside.

  "I do not know how it can be," Yusuf said. "I thought it possible you might know. But there is no mistake, the invitation has been confirmed.

  It is for the middle days of July." He was looking at me intently and rather coldly, as I thought. The dark eyes, luminous and unblinking in that narrow face, had long been trained to note and question; they were difficult to meet with composure now, because in this brief interval of time it had come to me like a shaft of light who it was that might have brought this invitation about. "But the King is away from Palermo," I said, more to gain time than for any other reason, so as to master my quickened breathing and keep it from his notice.

  He waited before replying, his eyes still upon me. "That is what makes it even more unusual. It seems that this was arranged in advance, before the King left. The hunting party is headed by Bertrand of Bonneval."

  This was a nephew of the Count of Conversano. I knew his name and parentage but little more, beyond the fact that the family had ties with Robert of Selby, the King's Chancellor.

  "Do you have any acquaintance with this Bertrand?"

  "No, none at all."

  "We have no list as yet of those who will be making up the party, but we will have one soon. I have set Nicholas to find out."

  I nodded. Whenever there was anything of this sort to unearth, Nicholas Langen was assigned to the task. He was adept in it. He lingered in chanceries on feigned errands, he gossiped with grooms and porters and serving-women. He was open-faced and friendly in his ways. He never failed.

  Yusuf permitted himself a slight smile. "So far, we have two names only, Bertrand of Bonneval and Thurstan Beauchamp."

  "I have not exchanged one word with him in the whole of my life," I said, and I knew these words of mine came with too much emphasis, as I had already denied the acquaintance, but the knowledge that I was concealing something from him made me unsure of being believed even when I spoke the truth, and this unsureness was made worse by my feeling that he sensed it and perhaps misunderstood it. It was not that I thought he disbelieved me; he trusted me to the limits of his capacity for trust.

  But suspicion was never entirely disarmed in him. And there was something here he did not understand.

  "Can you think of any reason why you might have been included in this Norman hunting party?" he said.

  I took care to avoid any appearance of haste in my denial, shaking my head and meeting his eyes firmly. I had never spoken to him of the Lady Alicia, not of our meeting in Bari and the time we had spent together there, not of the passion there had once been between us. I could have spoken of her now, so much would have been spared us had I done so. But I did not. To protect her name from any loose association, my first duty as her knight? To protect her from Yusuf's investigations? She was not his to enquire into. She was not there for his knowledge. She was mine, she belonged to my life of before the Diwan, when the air was pure and the ground clear before me. She could help me to recover such a life. In protecting her, I protected myself also. Was that the true reason? How can such questions ever find answers? It was the first time that I had lied to him, and it was like a stone dislodged from a bankside, there was to be a heavy fall after it.

  "Well," he said, "if that is so, there can only be one reason, or at least the reasons must all be of one general character. They will want to find out some weakness, they will want to learn something from you that can be used to damage our Diwan and turn the King's favour from us."

  "They will not succeed through me."

  He was looking at me more kindly now. "Not by your intention, I know that well. But you will need to be vigilant, because you are not made of one piece. If we think of a man as a wall with joints that make cracks for a bar to be inserted and so bring it down, my wall has no cracks in it. I am an Arab of Sicily, born of parents who were Arabs of Sicily. I can trace my family in a continuous line to the Fatimid Caliphs who ruled here two hundred years ago. We have always held public office. One of my ancestors was vizir to the Emir Jafar, he who built the palace of Favara, which was a resort of pleasure long before the time of the Normans. When I entered the King's service I was following in the path of my forbears and I have followed in that path ever since. Such facts tell us nothing about a man's true nature or his innermost desires, but they make a singleness that is difficult to attack. Your wall has joints in it and these have made cracks where the bar could be put in. You are of mixed birth, you come from another land, you have gone from squire to guardsman-in-training to pursebearer and purveyor in the diwan al-tahqiq. These are momentous changes. An enemy could seek to use them against you, by dividing you against yourself."

  "None of these changes was by my choice, you know that well." I raised my head and straightened my back to say this. His words had wounded me, seeming to suggest I was inconstant of purpose and uncertain in my loyalties. Nor had I liked being compared to a cracked wall, though I could tell Yusuf was pleased with the figure: the lines of his mouth were normally straight and thin, but a slight curve of relish visited them when he had made a comparison he felt to be felicitous. "You know why I had to give up my hopes of knighthood," I said. "And as for the Household Guard, it was you yourself that took me from it." For your own sake you took me, not for mine, I could not help saying within me, and I felt the return of resentment, thinking how he had employed me for his own advancement.

  "That is true," he said. "I was taken with you, I was struck by your abilities. In the midst of learning to kill or maim your fellow-man, which for the Norman is the only essential training, you had le
arned to read and speak Greek, and even some Latin. You were destined for better things than the Guards, Thurstan. I have never regretted bringing you here. What I said was not meant as a reproach to you, but as a warning, so that you will be on your guard when you go there."

  At these words my resentment was forgotten and my heart expanded with joy: after his questioning of me and his close looks I had began to fear that he would forbid me to go, which it was in his power to do. "Lord,"

  I said, "I promise that I will be careful."

  "These are difficult times. The King has enemies on all hands, both at home and abroad. Your co-religionists will try to make you believe that the threat to his life and throne comes from his Moslem subjects, this so as to have no one close to the King but themselves. But their words are not true. There are those of the King's own faith who hate him – who hate him in secret, you understand? – because he took no part in this crusade, because he resists the Pope's claims to overlordship. They would like a king of Sicily more friendly to these claims. Now, of five princes, there is only William left. Before the year is out the King will marry again, but until his new Queen gives him male children, all who love him should be concerned for his safety and that of the realm.

  We must be on our guard. While you are at Favara, keep your eyes and ears open."

  "I will do so."

  "In particular, you will report to me on what is said directly to you, or deliberately in your hearing, anything you think is designed to sway you. I want the words said and the names of those who say them."

  I earnestly undertook to do this, and only then did Yusuf's sternness abate altogether. He smiled and said it would after all be useful that I should go, it was unaccustomed company and there was much that we might learn. He even joked a little, his usual joke, about my clothes, about the sorcot and the chainse and the chauces I would need to wear to make a good figure among these Norman nobles, giving the French words an exaggerated inflexion. He had himself been to the palace of Favara several times, he told me, together with other high officials of the Royal Diwan, to sit in council with the King. "I was never invited to a hunting party, however," he said, still smiling. "Once, I remember, there was some hawking. You will like Favara, they have enlarged the gardens since I first went there and extended the lake, the water encircles the palace now. There are strange devices in the grounds but I will not spoil the surprise by speaking of them now. I am sure you will enjoy your time there."

  I felt sure of this too, if what I suspected proved to be true. And what other explanation could there be? Only when I got back to my desk and made pretence of continuing work on the land registers was I fully able to savour my good fortune. There would be a list of course, the tireless Nicholas would furnish one; until I had scanned that I could not be certain. This I tried to keep in mind, so as to guard against disappointment. But my hopes ran ahead of me. I remembered the words we had said, the looks she had given me, the touch of her hand. I knew her name would be there.

  There was also the joke against Yusuf, to add to the pleasure. He had been quite mistaken in seeing such dark motives behind the invitation.

  So grave he had been, so ponderous with his suspicious looks and his talk of plots and machinations. He saw conspiracy everywhere. It would never occur to him that it might simply be a lady's contrivance. True, considering my office, it had been in a certain way unwise of Alicia to bring me into this lion's den of the Norman aristocracy. But then, she did not know the nature of this office, I had not spoken of it much, and she was recently from Outremer – how could she know the rivalries and divisions that governed our lives here in Palermo? And then, I thought, there was a lady's caprice in it: she had wanted to see me, she had wanted to find circumstances in which we could be together without hurt to her good name…

  Thus the edifice rose glittering before me, founded on no more than wishes and desires. I began from that moment to count the days to my going to Favara. In my chamber at home and in what intervals I could find at my desk, inspired by thoughts of Alicia, I returned to an earlier practice of mine, of late years abandoned, I began again to write verses for singing. My model for these were the Provencal songs that were now popular at Court, but I used the Italian vernacular, not knowing well the language of southern France. I did not try to devise new melodies, for which I had no gift, but sought to fit my lines to melodies that I knew, sometimes the Latin carmina I remembered from my student days, sometimes a folksong, sometimes a dance tune that I had heard in the streets. I tried to emulate the great Bernard of Ventadour, whose song about the rising lark was heard everywhere now, and compose three-line stanzas without repeated phrases.

  I was occupied with this on a morning three days after my talk with Yusuf when I was alone in the room, Stefanos having gone to see to the fitting of the dresses for the dancers. I had begun with the subject of my meeting with Alicia and the joy of love remembered and the hope for love renewed, but my imagination was too carnal, the lines that came to mind were not always true of my experience, though I hoped they might be. The memory of her kisses, the fragrant warmth of her mouth, these were true enough, but the dazzling whiteness of her breasts went too far and had to be excluded. I tested the shape of the words by singing them, which was the only way I knew, keeping my voice low so as not to draw attention to the fact that a man was here singing who should be studying the document before him on his desk, which concerned a plea, written in Latin, from the monastery of San Giorgio di Fragalr for a royal grant to extract salt from the mines of Castrogiovanni. In my heart a secret joy I tell no one, this joy devours me, no, consumes me, no, not strong enough, burns me, mi brucia, yes, that was better, d'amor lo cor mi brucia, I tell my heart to hope, to look upward… But if the joy was secret, was it necessary to add the fact that I told no one? And could the heart look upward?

  I was still puzzling – and still singing – when Stefanos entered, accompanied by the dressmaker. The Anatolian women would not wear their skirts without an underskirt and since I had said there should be nothing it had been thought best to refer the matter to me.

  At a stroke all higher thoughts were driven from my mind. "What is their reason?"

  "They will not agree to wear the skirts without an undergarment that reaches to the knees," the dressmaker said. "I cannot argue with them, I cannot understand them even when they do not shout."

  "It is for reasons of modesty," Stefanos said. "They say the stuff of the dress is very fine, it is damask, without an underskirt the lower part of their bodies would be too plainly visible." He paused for a moment, looking at me in his usual mild and slightly peering fashion.

  "Even as high as the fork, she said".

  "Who? No, no need to tell me."

  "She is headstrong. She is like my older son, Matteus, who will have about your years, who would be a sailor whatever one said to him, and a sailor he is." Stefanos always spoke of this self-willed son, as if in deprecation, but in truth he was proud of the young man, who was now master of one of the King's ships. That he should have made this comparison at all was a sign that he approved of this girl in spite of everything. "Her name means 'wild rose'," he said now. "She told me that without my asking, perhaps as a way of making it known to you."

  "Why should she want to do that?"

  "She might think it of interest. It is a beautiful name in the sound."

  "Well, the thorns are there, but I do not see the petals." I felt suddenly weary, and in some way discouraged. My words had been a lie.

  The petals displayed I could see well enough, those hidden and enfolded I could all too easily imagine. I did not feel able to confront these people again, to find the eyes turned from me, sombre and indifferent-seeming, except only hers, and she looking only to find weakness, and finding it, as if she saw something within me that was beyond my own power to discover, but it was an illusion, it was only her presumption, she knew nothing but dusty roads in summer and muddy roads in winter, and the dance of the abdomen.

 
"I cannot talk to them now," I said. "They would wear down a stone. With the lights in the walls behind and no lights in front it would have been a spectacle indeed, it would have given delight and we would have acquired merit."

  "She says their bodies are made like the bodies of other women. Millions and millions of women, she says. It is their dancing that makes them different, not what lies between the legs. She is outspoken, that one."

  "In any case, it is useless to insist. Tell them we agree to a petticoat. It can be as long as they like, but it must be made of some thin material. Otherwise, all the King will see of their lower parts will be a swaddled-up bundle. He will not be gratified much by that, will he?"

  "I will tell them." Stefanos blinked mild brown eyes. "I will go back with the dressmaker and explain it to them. I have found that they misapprehend things and get easily excited, but if one speaks calmly to them they quickly grow quiet again."

  "This is the behaviour of children. Nesrin, she grows quiet too?"

  Stefanos smiled indulgently, but whether the indulgence was for Nesrin or for me, I could not be sure. "She especially. That is, when she does not feel called upon to do battle. She does not need to fight me, I do not matter."

  "And me? Are you saying this little savage is hostile only to me?"

  "I did not say she was hostile."

  "Stefanos, spare me these subtleties, I am not in the mood for them.

  Have there been any complaints from the one that escorts them?"

  "No, he says they have behaved well. They go to the markets, they buy little things, trinkets, scarves, belts set with beads. The men have bought knives – they say the knives are good here, so far they have not found much else to praise."