Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

The captain too was waiting at the dock. The ship was a small merchant vessel like a thousand others, with a crew of three, all Greeks from Cefalu, trading along the western shore of Calabria as far as Maratea.

This time, as they knew, they would be going only as far as Paola, and taking no cargo there but the birds. It was on the King's orders, they knew that too and were happy at it, they were counting the coin already, but they would not touch any till they were back in Palermo, and this too formed part of the knowledge that lay between us. What did not was the fact that I would not be returning with the ship; neither captain nor crew would know this till the last moment.

The wind was favourable, the sea untroubled; we made good time, arriving at the harbour of Paola as dusk was falling. There was only one inn, very ill-kept. I was given the best room in it, or so the innkeeper told me, but a foul and damp room it proved to be, the bed aswarm with creatures eager for my blood – I could see the lively stirrings of them as I stood there, talking of the price. He asked three times what the room was worth – naturally, since I was a stranger and he knew the errand I was on. We haggled, I brought the price down; this was the King's money, I would not be wasteful with it, I would not overspend by a single follaris – it was a point of honour with me, a mark of my devotion. The result of this haggling was that the innkeeper grew surly.

However, the lentil soup they served us with in the room below was welcome enough, as were the sardines, freshly caught and fried with black olives.

After supper, since it was still early, I walked for a while among the steep streets of the town, my two guards following close behind. Higher up it was pleasant, a light breeze was coming off the sea and the moon was near the full, giving light enough to see by. It was a question of passing some few hours. The people of the marshes would know of my arrival, word had been sent; next day the bird-catchers would come down to the harbour, having walked through the night with their caged herons.

We would agree the price, I would make the payment and see the birds carried on board. I would send my escort back with the ship; their presence was oppressive to me, and once I had paid over the money there would be no more need of them. With the departure of the ship I would be free to continue my journey to Bari.

I descended again to the harbour and walked there for a while. I was restless, my nerves were tense, there seemed some edge of promise in the night. I was unwilling to return to my cramped and windowless room at the inn, the scrape of rats behind the walls, the verminous tribe in the bedclothes. This last was a particularly disagreeable thought to me. In Palermo I nagged at Caterina and paid her a monthly sum additional to the rent to keep my sleeping room aired and swept, to strip the bed and hang the sheets in the sun and scrub the bed frame with vinegar and water. Thinking of this made me wish I were home again. It came suddenly to my mind to sleep that night on the deck of the ship, where at least there was air and space enough. I told my guards of this decision and if they were displeased at the idea they knew better than to show it.

I returned to the inn to tell them that after all I would not be staying there. But they had made the room ready, after a fashion, and I had agreed on the price with the landlord; it seemed to me now that this would have to be paid; I was the King's pursebearer, I saw it as my equal duty to save him from cheats and to preserve his name for justice and fair dealing. But when I arrived I found only the wife, a slatternly woman with tangled black hair and a look of discontent. He had gone to Passo di Lupo, she said, to see the new dancers.

"What is new about them?" I asked her.

"Why," she said, "they are the ones that are travelling here and there in the country." And she looked at me as if there must be something sadly lacking in a person who did not know even this much.

"Woman," I said, as patiently as possible, "that they are travelling about is nothing to the point. It is what dancers very often do. I was enquiring into what is new about them."

"They come from far, it is dancing not seen before."

"Will they not come here?"

"No, it is why he is gone. People say they will go next to Melfi, but nobody can know, they go here and there wherever the fancy takes them.

They sleep by the roadside."

She spoke sourly – perhaps in her heart she envied this freedom. "The women are whores," she said. "They have demons in the belly – and in what lies below. That is why he has gone there, the pig, along with all the others – the town is empty of men tonight, only the priest is left.

They are whores and pagans, no one can understand their speech."

"Demons in the belly?" I said, but she made no answer. Suddenly it came to me that these might be the dancers that the Greek trader had spoken of and at once I formed the intention of going to see if this was indeed so. It was a diversion that made strong appeal to me in my restless mood; it would take up some of the slack time of waiting.

Are there horses here," I asked her.

"No, he has taken the horse. There are mules that can be hired in the town."

I sent Mario to conduct this business, while I waited with the other in the inn yard. He returned after not much time, leading three mules in a train. The money I had given him, he said, had proved exactly enough for the hire. He affected to admire me for my judgement in giving him just the right amount, but I did not believe his words, feeling sure that he had kept back some of the coin. However, it would have been difficult to prove and I did not want the delay. There was something displeasing to me about this Mario, he was too eager to ingratiate himself. He was a thick-shouldered, tow-headed fellow with small eyes that did not rest long on anything, and there was a pale knife scar across his cheekbone on the left side. The other man, Sigismond, was taller, raw-boned and taciturn, with slow blue eyes.

The boy who served there came forward, offering to go with us and show us the way. The moon was high as we set off. Our guide went in front with a lantern, but the moonlight was enough to see by, glinting on the stones of the track. The memory of that moonlit journey often comes to me now, and I still find it strange that but for the coincidence of the dancers being close by when I had already heard mention of them, and the fact that I had felt some sort of promise in the night, I would have done the safer thing and waited in the town to finish the task I was saddled with, and so my life would have taken a different course and I would not be the same person as the one who is writing this. Certain things about myself I would not have discovered, and what is not discovered can never truly belong to us; it is only that knowledge of itself the soul knows how to summon that can truly be said to dwell within the soul. It is Boethius who says this in his 'Consolation of Philosophy' – I believe it is to be found there.

Passo di Lupo was a cluster of low buildings hanging on a hillside, with the castle of the lord above it and the openness of the sea below. There was the light of a fire in an open space below the castle walls. We saw the movements of the flames and heard the swirl of the music before we caught any glimpse of the dancers – a dark mass of bodies blocked our view.

We tied the mules a little way below and left the boy in charge of them.

Above us were a beat of drums and a play of shadows, movements that resembled those of a flail when corn is threshed, half obscured by the forms of the people watching. We pressed forward, the three of us forming a wedge to drive a way through to the front.

My sight was confused at first. The red of the flames contended with the white of the moon to make a light that belonged to neither. Something dipped in pitch had been put in the fire and it made the flames leap and caused a smoke that was black and acrid. There were three dancers, all women, moving in a slow circle, one younger than the other two and a little taller. They were barefoot and they wore bands of copper round their ankles and they were dressed in the same manner, in long skirts worn low on the hips and black girdles with tassels that swung as they moved, and bodices that left the arms bare and came well short of the waist, so that their midriffs would have been exposed had they not worn light-coloured sashes wound about them.