Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

They had singing voices, despite the fervour of their pleas, every phrase reaching a high note then sonorously descending, with the last word amazingly drawn out, as if indeed they had decided to end in song.

As I strove to understand them – no easy matter, they sang all at the same time – I caught sight of the Anatolians standing at the stern of the ship, looking down at the spectacle and laughing among themselves.

Fortunately the theme before us was one of extreme simplicity, they asking more for the herons, I offering less. They knew quite well that the price for bird and cage was established beforehand, but there was still a hope in them, which I supposed perennial, quenched one year only to be renewed the next, that they could get more if only the right arguments could be found. They spoke of adverse weather, changed patterns of flight, fewer numbers. One man, more inventive than the others, tried to make me believe that the herons had grown in cunning.

These last had quietened now but looked far from cunning, their yellow eyes staring and fearful, as if knowing their fate, knowing the cruel talons that awaited them, though I thought that when the moment came, when they were struck down by the hawk like a bolt from the sky, their eyes would have a different look, their wings would be outspread, till that moment of death they would be in possession of freedom. Unluckier, as it seemed to me, were those already sickening, those who had spent too much time in the cage. But I knew no way to detect this and refuse payment, so saving my master from wasteful expenditure: drawing near to the town, the men would have cleaned the cages, washed the putrid excrement from the elegant dark legs…

There were forty-eight birds. Payment, when we finally agreed on it and struck hands together, came to sixteen silver ducats, money that would keep these people and their families in oatmeal and salt and oil through the winter to come.

The bargaining, though no more than a pretence, had been a lengthy process, and I was much relieved when all was settled and we had the birds on board and the catchers had set off on their journey homeward.

Soon the ship would be casting off and I would be free to proceed with my mission. I was about to go aboard again to give final instruction to the master, who at that moment was nowhere to be seen – I thought perhaps he had taken refuge somewhere below from all that tumult. He had done this run before, more than once, with my predecessor, Filippo Maiella, a person who had become more real to me in the course of this transaction with the herons, so much so that I found it hard not to see things through his eyes. Eleven years of the wailing birds in their cages – the twelfth had been too much for him. There was the money in his purse, the beckoning distance…

I needed to find the master and talk to him. He had carried herons to Palermo before, but he had not carried dancers and musicians, or so I supposed. He was the best person to trust with the matter as he had touched no coin yet – the reverse of the case with Filippo. He would have to accompany them to the Diwan of Control and deliver them to the care of my clerk Stefanos, who would arrange for their lodgings. Then, and only then, he would receive his payment and give the crew their part of it.

Thinking these thoughts and seeing the master nowhere on land, I was mounting from the quayside to the deck when I heard a sudden outcry, a female voice raised to a pitch like that of the screech owls that live in the hills round Lake Poma. The sound startled the herons, who set up that desolate wailing again, wulla-wulla-wulla, and tried to flap their wings inside the cages. When I reached the top of the ladder, I saw, across the ranks of lamenting herons, the furious face of the younger dancer, who was standing in the stern a little apart from the others. I say standing but she had crouched a little, drawing her shoulders together, as if about to spring. Facing her at some two or three paces distance, foolishly leering in spite of the girl's rage, was one of my guards, the hulking Sigismond. It came to my mind immediately that he had offered her some insult, perhaps laid hands on her, even tried to pull her away; he was a brutish fellow and must have been roused by her dancing of the night before – in my sudden anger at his behaviour I forgot that I too had been roused by it.

She had moved away from the others, perhaps to see better what was going on below, but now I saw the two men come forward, saw how they widened the distance between them as they drew nearer to Sigismond, saw that one had a hand inside his shirt. I moved quickly towards them, overturning cages in my haste. Strangely, the herons bore this in silence, they had all fallen silent now, as had the girl at my approach. Her hair was loose about her face and she had a long pin in one hand, copper, I thought – it shone with a dull light.

Drawing nearer to Sigismond I saw at once, even before I smelled the wine on his breath, that he had been drinking, saw it from the way he had planted his feet and the foolish bravado of his smiling. "What is this?" I said.

He was grinning still, as if seeking to indicate by this that it was some sort of a joke. Perhaps, in his primitive way, he had lost sight of the borders between public and private, thought that a woman who danced before men could be any man's.

I did not intend to make much of the matter. No harm was done, the fellow had been routed, he would know better than to try again. But when I gestured him with the back of my hand, indicating that he should back away and give ground, his grin faded and he did not lower his eyes but stared back at me with what seemed deliberate insolence. Nor did he give room, as ordered.

I felt my anger rise. To reach this state he must have started with the flagon on his own, before any money had been handed over, probably while the marsh people were thronging round me, in other words while he should still have been fulfilling his duties as my guard. "You misbegotten wretch," I said. "How dare you brave me in this way? Step back."

It seemed to me that his hand moved a little, up towards his belt and the knife there. Or perhaps this was only the pretext I gave myself. I knew I would have to be quick. He was thickset and strong, and no doubt an accustomed brawler. Whether he would return a blow from one set in authority over him I could not know; it would earn him a flogging if he returned to Palermo, and cost him his place, but he might think he had lost that already. It could not be left to chance, in any case – the blow would have to be heavy. I could only do what I had been taught in my days of training for the King's Guard. I took a step forward and flicked at his eyes with the fingers of my left hand. He pulled back his head, which is always the first movement when the eyes are threatened.

In so doing he lifted his chin a little and exposed his neck. My right-hand blow came hard upon this, while his hands were still lowered, a hooking blow with as much weight as I could put into it, driving my fist into the neck tendons on his left side. It was strange, but my anger left me as I struck him. I had never struck any man in this way before, only a bag of sand in the exercise yard. He did not fall but he leaned over, fighting for breath. Now indeed I could have struck him a blow, with his head hanging low in that fashion, but I did not, and two men of the crew came forward and took his arms to lead him away. Even then for some moments he set his feet against going, and this roused some respect in me after the grievous blow I had given him.

The girl had been silent all this time. When I looked back towards her I saw that her face was composed, that eye-snapping fury quite departed.

She was regarding me intently, not with the self-absorbed look of her dancing, but openly, in a way that was neither friendly nor hostile, but as if dwelling on my face, as if considering. It seemed to me too that her look had something more gentle in it than I remembered from the night before. I understood then, and it took me by surprise, so enraged had I been by Sigismond's defiance, that she believed I had struck the man in anger at his insolence towards her, whereas in truth it had been his insolence towards me that had driven me to it. But looking at her face now more attentively than I had done before in our short acquaintance, and in this clearer light, at the thick, black hair still in disorder, the dark eyes, not large but full of life, slanting upwards a little towards the temples, the bones of her cheeks that lay so close below the skin, the mouth that had bitterness in it but something tender too, noting all this, I could discover in myself no smallest inclination to set her right in the mistake I thought she had made. I smiled at her and inclined my head a little and laid a hand on my breast. "Thurstan,"