Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

"The latest was only some months ago. Our good Roger is called a dragon belching fire, the common enemy of all Christians, an illegal occupier of the land of Sicily."

"And what is that to you or me? How do we enter into it? Thurstan, think what an absurd and terrible thing it is to blame a whole people for everything that is done or said in their name. By that reasoning, I, Demetrius Karamides, am to blame for the miserable failure of this latest crusade, because the Emperor of the Byzantines did not provision the Franks generously enough in their passage through his lands, and the country people of Konya charged too much for their chickens or hid away their grain, whereas the true blame lies in the arrogance and stupidity of the crusaders themselves."

Outrage came to my rescue at these scornful words of his, diverting me from the suspicion that I was having the worst of the argument. "I am not surprised you find the streets of Palermo dangerous," I said. "If these are the sentiments you give voice to when you go abroad, you are lucky not to have been hanged from the nearest tree. The crusade was blessed by the Pope, it was preached by that great man of God, Bernard of Clairvaux. Those who took the cross were ardent to defend the holy places."

"Ardour comes in various forms." His dark and heavy-lidded eyes were regarding me with a patience that seemed almost sorrowful, almost like martyrdom, and this annoyed me further. "You know well," he said, "that many were possessed by ardour of a different kind, and that was to get their hands on as much land as possible. But however that may be, blessing and preaching and ardour do not save us from stupidity and arrogance in the conduct of wars, nor do they save us from defeat."

I could find no very convincing argument to counter this: that there had been a defeat, and a catastrophic one, was undeniable. "It is true that nothing much was achieved," I said.

"Nothing at all was achieved and many thousands died in the course of not achieving it. For a disaster on that scale, someone to blame must urgently be found, and they found it in the Empire of the East, a vast extent of territory counting many peoples and languages."

It was obstinacy now that kept me arguing with him. "You cannot deny that you formed an alliance with the Turk against your fellow Christians."

"I did not ally myself with any Turks, I do not know any Turks. I was here in the Royal Chapel, working on the Pentecost vault.

Fellow-Christians, did you say? It is not two years since your King Roger took Corfu. What was the first thing he did after taking it? He raided Thebes, a city inhabited by his fellow-Christians, and carried off hundreds of silk-workers to help the silk industry of Palermo."

Hearing this, I thought of Sara and her welcoming plumpness, and I felt some shame that this was all that the ravishment seemed immediately to mean to me.

"After that it was Corinth," Demetrius said. "A prosperous city, densely populated with fellow-Christians. Corinth was sacked and all her treasures taken back to Corfu. It was obvious to Manuel Comnenus – it was obvious to everyone – that Roger intended to use Corfu as a base for the further raids. It was fear of this that drove him into the arms of the Sultan. Now tell me, if Manuel betrayed his fellow-Christians, what did Roger do? Which is the enemy of Christendom? Or putting it in an other way, who has most right to Corfu?"

He smiled again and reached forward with his left hand and took by the forearm of my right. "The same question, the same answer," he said. "We are friends, we can speak frankly. You have a soul, Thursdan. I have seen the way you look at the mosaics. I am older than you by a dozen years, but we are the same, though you may not know it yet. We do not live by the words of kings or emperors. I am Demetrius Karamides, I made the mosaics in the Royal Chapel of Palermo, those of the apse and the Sanctuary and the crossing and the chapels. There are no mosaics more beautiful anywhere. I did not make them in homage to your king. They will still be here when Roger and Manuel are dust, and all the generations of their descendents. Why should it matter to me who owns Corfu?"

I looked at him in silent wonder for some moments. He was not joking, he was not speaking with the defiance of one soon to leave. He really did not care, and this was something I could scarcely understand, not to put first, before all other things, the loyalty to those set in authority over us, not wish to see them triumphant and so to triumph with them. I remembered now his contempt for those who would take his place, but it had been for their skills, and because he was being supplanted, not because it was Franks who were ousting him. He would not change his style of dress or the cut of his beard so as to pass unnoticed in the streets, not out of patriotic feeling as I had supposed, and always admired in him, but simply because these were things that belonged to him, they were himself – he brought everything back to himself. He did not care who owned Corfu, he did not care whose banners flew there! He had no devotion, no spirit of service. I felt pity for him at that moment, as if he lacked some limb and was condemned to hobble through the world instead of walking. But this pity lasted scarcely longer than the time it takes to draw a breath. The demon of envy that lies always in ambush struck me and pierced me and I thought suddenly of that Filippo who in the twelfth year had set his face against the waiting ship, and then I thought of Nesrin and how she turned in the dance. I strove to put these thoughts away, because I knew them for corruption.

"You are wrong," I said. "We are not the same, you and I. I serve the King my master and hope for his greater glory. Corfu belongs to the Kingdom of Sicily by lawful title."

He shrugged slightly but said nothing, and I saw that this too, our sameness or our difference, did not matter to him one way or the other.

He reached and took up a handful of the tesserae that lay on a trestle beside him. They were small cubes of silvered glass and when he let them fall again into the tray, pouring them from tilted palm, they caught the light in falling and made a cascade that seemed unbroken. "Silver is used for the light that comes from Christ," he said. "It gives white reflections of great intensity. It is used for the arms of the cross, and for the halo. Angels also may have silver haloes, but no other figure may have them. Silver pieces can be used for the shine of weapons, they can be used to heighten the effect of other colours, especially the blues and greys." He took up another handful and let it fall again. "Yes, silver has various uses. Without the silver our work would show much less. But in my palm, or in the tray, the pieces are all the same. No one can see the form that will be by studying the pieces, no, not if he spent all his life in the study."

It was hot here, in the long, narrow rectangle of the workshop. The shutters were open but the walls were of brick and held the heat of the day. There was a slight vapour in the air: the resin that was to form the first layer of the bed had been heated to make it more adhesive and easier to spread. Dust from the powdered stone they were to use to strengthen the mortar hung in the air between the beaten earth floor and the raftered ceiling. Looking up, I saw a flutter of wings: some small bird that had entered through a window and did not find the way out.

"You will come to it, sooner or later," he said. "There may be some, even many, who fulfil their own needs by serving another's, but you are not of that company. Take the lesson from the mosaic. There is one true assembly of these pieces into the shape that is needed. Whether they are gold or silver or marble or glass or mother-of-pearl, they will be set in such a way as to have a meaning in the form and to catch the light.