Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

"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.

I said nothing to Yusuf about this encounter, and this was the first and perhaps the gravest of the mistakes I made with him. Some of the shame I had felt at the time stayed with me. I was afraid he would think, as I had not been able to help thinking even in the midst of my anger, that I had been singled out as a likely traitor because so I was regarded. And if so I was regarded, perhaps so I was. And truth compels me to admit that a thought had come to me, suppressed at once but piercing nonetheless, when Béroul had spoken of those who have power to change a man's life, there had been a moment when I had thought of my disappointed hopes and my failure to become a knight.

I did not think Yusuf could detect such flickerings of my mind, but I feared he would place less trust in me, that I would lose his regard – and his favour, on which depended my advancement. Frankness then would have saved much sorrow later. But secrecy and suspicion were in the air we breathed, both of us, I was his pupil after all. And I thought it unlikely that the meeting with Béroul would come to his knowledge.

I spent the days before leaving in a way not different from usual. The mornings were passed at my desk in the small room I shared with my clerk Stefanos, and we did the work there that we were accustomed to do. There were accounts to look through that were not entered on the account books of the Royal Demesne, though they could be sent for at any time for the King's scrutiny; monies paid out for information, as rewards and inducements of various kinds, monies used to foment revolt in the Balkans and, more recently, in Germany, where we were hoping to unsettle Conrad Hohenstaufen, one of the King's bitterest enemies, by financing a league of German princes headed by Count Welf of Bavaria, who claimed a better title than Conrad's to the imperial throne. Our King Roger would use force of arms if necessary, but he was the first of his warlike line to prefer the undermining of his enemies by diplomatic means, and to me this was one of the marks of his greatness.

I visited Sara and gave her the garnet and benefited from her gratitude.

I made some further enquiries about the birds I was to purchase in Calabria, though without learning a great deal more than Yusuf had told me. Every year they migrated to the marshes that lie between the sea and the town of Cosenza. They came in the spring, grew long crests for their courtship, and in this heedless time of mating were snared easily by the people of the marshes. All I knew beyond this was the price I was to pay – or at least not to exceed.

On the day following my visit to the King's Chapel a man asked to see me and he was brought in, one of the palace attendants accompanying him. My room was no more than an adjunct of Yusuf's much more spacious quarters, but it was on the other side of the passage and had its own entrance. I insisted that anyone who came asking for me should be required to lay down his arms before entering and always accompanied into the room. This was for the dignity of my office, it was not owing to fear; I was aware that I might have enemies whose names and faces I did not know, but I was strong and quick and I had been trained to arms before coming into the palace service. The man was a trader in a small way, an Italian from the colony at Messina who carried salt and our hard Sicilian grain to Salerno and Naples and cities further north, travelling in all weathers by boat and mule-train, a stocky, grizzled man, no longer young, used to hardship and danger in the pursuit of small profits. He had seen, he said, just west of Benevento, a troupe of dancers and musicians of a kind never seen before, the women half-naked or more than half – he said this with a narrowing of the eye and a droop of the mouth.

If that was the great new thing about them, I told him, he was wasting my time. Did he think the King had not seen women in every stage of dress or undress, right down to nothing but a ring on the finger or a ribbon in the hair? Where was the need for a journey to Benevento when there were a dozen places here in Palermo where women danced and took off their clothes while dancing and did all manner of things besides, Saracens, Jews, Greeks, Italians, singly or in groups, according to taste and the preferences of race and religion?

Undeterred, he continued with his praises. Beautiful women. They could touch the earth at heels and head only, the body arched up like a bow, as if inviting the love of a god. They could make their bellies ripple without strain or effort…

"The dancing girls of Tunis can do as much," I said.

"No," he said, "the bellies one moment smooth, the next moment rolling, while the rest of the body remains still, the face composed, a very amazing thing." The dancers were the women, the men made the music. They were from the east, from Anatolia and spoke a language no one could understand.

He himself spoke the language of cupidity. He was eager to interest me in these dancers, knowing me for the King's purveyor, knowing that if they were brought to the court on his information, he would be well paid. He even found occasion to describe the instruments played by the men, of a very unusual kind, he said, drums the shape of hourglasses with a skin across at both ends, a kind of dulcimer with a neck longer than a swan's, played with a bow that was the span of a man's arms…

He was eloquent, thoughts of coin had silvered his tongue, exalted his fancy too – I did not believe his words about the bow, the span of a man's arms is a very variable measure. However, I was interested in what he had said about the body remaining still and only the belly moving.

The dancers of the Mahgreb could sway the hips to simulate the thrusts of love, but I had not seen any with this ability to concentrate all on the muscles of the stomach. On the other hand, if this man could exaggerate about one thing, he could exaggerate about another. I had in the past been deceived sometimes by accounts of dancers, jugglers, acrobats, and paid out good money for performers that proved to be mediocre at best and not fit for the King's attention. On occasion, he who spoke so well of them was discovered to be in their pay, or even to be one of their number. Certainly I did not suspect anything like this in the man before me, but there is a saying among Sicilians that while to give your trust is good, to withhold it is even better.

"Well," I said, "they may be all you say and it is true that we have not had Anatolian dancers in Palermo before, but they are in the neighbourhood of Benevento and I am not going there."

"They are travelling people," he said, sensing my interest. "They move here and there. Just at this time they will be following the pilgrims."