The Ruby In Her Navel Page 27

He gave a short laugh. "I see you are a joker," he said. "We will serve him well on Mount Tabor."

  At this I passed from uncertainty to bewilderment. It seemed that he was responding to what he thought was my joke with a joke of his own. But there was no laughter in his face. Yusuf's counsels, and my years at the Diwan, now came to my aid. Seem to know, nod the head, wait to learn more. This I did, but he added nothing, though looking still at me. The silence lengthened and I deemed it wiser now to find some new topic of talk between us. "It is a lot of money," I said – and indeed this was true, it was far more than I had ever known paid for a killing. "Tell me, what would there be to stop you walking away with the money and going no further in this thing you are charged with?"

  He gave the same narrow smile as before. "Walk away? That would be very dangerous, my friend. Those I had betrayed would seek for me. They would set people on who are clever at such seeking, well-versed in it. I would outwit them, naturally. I am Spaventa. But after these many years as the hunter, I would not take well to being hunted. Besides, there is the second half of the money. We must honour our agreements, what kind of world would it be otherwise? " He smiled again. "Why do you ask me questions, master purse-bearer?"

  There was that about him that drove one to speak in haste. I answered with the first words that came to me. "It is enjoined on us. The Gospel tells us we must love our neighbour. Obviously implied in this is that we must seek first to understand him, since love cannot be exercised in ignorance and still keep the name."

  "You are wrong, my young friend. It is only in ignorance of our fellow-man that we can love him. The words of our Lord contain no previous conditions, no injunction that we should seek to know a person before loving him, I mean in the sense of knowing or understanding him in the workings of his soul. And there is a good reason for that. The more knowledge we have of him, the less possible it becomes to love him.

  For Spaventa it is only necessary to know which way the duck will fly."

  I saw some refuge in this argument from the oppression of his presence, and I went on with it. "I cannot agree. In his Sermon on the Mount, in the Gospel according to St Matthew, Christ tells us that we must love not only our friends but our enemies too. Clearly, in order even to make this distinction, in order to know who our enemies are and what makes them enemies, we have to see our fellows in their difference, not in their sameness. In sameness there are neither friends nor enemies."

  For the first time since he had entered the room his face lost its half-smiling expression. His mouth tightened and his eyes narrowed in obvious displeasure. "Young man," he said, "be warned, I do not like contradiction. Friends, enemies, it is all one, it is like the ocean, all one salt. Do you search for sweet water among the billows? You are young, take the advice of Spaventa. Do not trouble yourself with such useless distinctions. They weaken your eyes and spoil your aim. Know the flight of the duck and where to wait for its passing."

  I could well understand why he did not want to trouble himself with differences. All men were strangers to him. A stranger might or might not be easier to love, but he would be easier to kill. However, the spirit of dispute worked within me, I would not give ground. "It belongs to our dignity to make distinctions," I said. "As it also does to argue against a man if we cannot accord with him, and more particularly so if he warns us against it."

  "You talk like a lawyer."

  "I was a student of Roman law at the School of Law of Bologna."

  "Were you so? Well, I will tell you something now about Spaventa, and why he does not like to be contradicted in matters of theology. Listen now and mark me well. I have taken to you and for this reason I confide in you. Before I found my true path in life, I was intended for the priesthood. My sainted mother wanted this for me, may she rest in peace.

  But it was seen otherwise by our Father in Heaven. One evening at suppertime I fell into dispute with a fellow-student at the seminary in Viterbo where we were preparing to take holy orders. The subject of our talk was Saint Anselm's proof for the existence of God, that which they call the ontological proof. I was pointing out to my friend, who was sitting opposite to me, that it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot be conceived not to exist and that this is greater than one which can be conceived not to exist and hence, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived can be conceived not to exist, it is not that than which nothing greater can be conceived. And he, instead of recognising the truth of this and complimenting me on the coherence of my argument, contradicted me and derided my logic. He laughed in my face. The blood rose to my head, there was a carving-knife on the table, in one motion I had seized it and in one stroke severed his jugular."

  He paused on this. A glisten had come to his eyes. "That was the end of my hopes of ordination, it was almost the end of me all together – I was forced to flee. But the talent was there already, sleeping within me till it woke that day. In that fraction of time, of all the blows he could have struck, Spaventa chose the fatal one. And it turned out for the best. As a priest, I would not have made a great figure in the world. Is there by chance some wine remaining? If so, we could drink a cup together and toast this great enterprise of ours."

  "Yes, there is some." I went to the jug and poured wine for him into my water cup. The cup I had used already I filled again for myself. He took the cup and waited and watched me and I understood he was waiting for me to drink first in sign of good faith. When I had done so, he raised his cup.

  "Render unto Caesar."

  It seemed a strange toast to me, but I thought his mind was still running on the Gospels. "And to God what is His," I said.

  The movement he made on hearing this was of the slightest: he leaned back against the wall and raised his head to look more fully at me as I stood there before him. But with that small movement the whole posture of his body had changed, become tense and gathered. His eyes were bright and without expression, or none that I could read. There had been something, in the first moment, before that involuntary gathering of the body, some leap of surprise masked immediately. My reply to the toast had been the wrong one, not the one expected.

  "But of course," he said softly. He set his cup, still with most of the wine left in it, carefully down beside him, restored the knife to his belt, took up the bag of money in his left hand, bearing the weight of it quite effortlessly, and rose to his feet. While I still had not moved, he took three quick steps to the door, unbarred it and was gone.

  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."