Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

"Well," he said, "you are a fine upstanding fellow now, and so you must have been at sixteen. But the dangers that beset the soul are greater now."

He was still regarding me with the same attention. I saw his mouth draw together as at some sharp taste. Perhaps it was this impression of bitterness in him that made me think by contrast of Hugo the Spy and his taste for honey cakes. "Children know wickedness too," I said. "But I suppose the temptations are fewer and more simple."

"That was not my meaning. I was speaking of you, your situation."

For a moment I thought he might be referring to the attraction that Alicia had shown for me. He could not but know that she had exerted herself to have me invited here. He had eyes in his head, he had watched, he must have seen the glances we exchanged. And in any case he must have wanted to take a look at me. It might have been for this that he had come to Favara – he had not been at the Assembly, so did not intend to take part in the hunt. There was power in him, both when he spoke and when he was silent; it came from him like an emanation. Alicia too must feel this power… "Lord Abbot," I said, "I have no ill intentions in regard to your niece, I beg you will believe this." A lump had formed in my throat, and I paused before speaking again to swallow it down. "If it rested with me, she would be kept safe for ever."

"I have no doubts of that," he said. "Though it is true that Alicia causes me concern, as she does also to her brother. She is self-willed, but she lacks guile or even great caution in bringing her ends about.

This could be used to her harm."

It seemed to me he judged her wrongly; guile and caution she had possessed in large measure already at fourteen, who should know that better than I? "Used to her harm? You mean by others?"

Darkness had fallen as we talked. Behind us men came with armfuls of dry tinder and heaped the fires so that they blazed up, and in this stronger light I saw the Abbot's face half turned away, the high brow and firm mouth and strong chin. Despite the sad look of the eyes, it was the face of one who knew his way through the thickets and marshes of this world.

He had left my last question unanswered. After a short silence, during which the voice of the jongleur still sounded, though now from farther away, he said, "No, I meant your situation at the Douana, the fact that you are at the orders of a Moslem, you rub shoulders with Moslems, day by day you are subject to the influence of their religion."

For some moments it seemed to me that he might almost be joking, so very gentle and equable was the voice he used. But the face he turned to me now had no joking in it. "No one of good Christian family can find that acceptable," he said.

"But I am not subject to the influence of their religion. I do not discuss religion in my work at the… Diwan."

"Does not Yusuf Ibn Mansur quote passages from the Koran? Does he not use the name of his god in your hearing? Do you think a human soul is lost at one stroke? Day by day, the touch of wrong, so you become habituated, you grow callous. That is what destroys the soul."

"But he does not quote from his book more than we are accustomed to quote from ours, or name his god more than we."

"Young man, what are you saying? I see that already there has been a deadening of the soul. Do you put them on a level, his blasphemies and our Holy Writ? So one doctrine is as good as another, so long as there is faith? Any noxious plant can grow so long as those who tend it are devout? Do you not know that devotion can pervert the soul if the object of it is mistaken?" He turned his face from me and remained for a while in silence, shaking his head slowly. "The weeds spread and choke our garden," he said, in a voice hardly louder than a murmur, as if speaking only to himself. "We cannot live with Islam, we must root it out, it is a pernicious weed in our garden."

He turned to look at me and said in a stronger voice, "Our garden is Christendom, Thurstan, this great movement of our Latin Church that has grown in power for a century now, to bring salvation and peace and order under the spiritual authority of the Pope, who unites us in bonds of faith. That movement, that authority, knows only one truth, not several living side by side. In our garden of Christendom all compromise is corruption."

For some moments I could find no way of answering him. I felt myself in the grip of dilemma. Our King chose Saracens for his companions, preferring them to Normans for their learning; he trusted his Saracen troops to defend him and they had proved loyal; much of the Royal Diwan was in the hands of Saracen officials. It seemed to me that if the King kept this balance it was because he recognised more than one truth, and knew that the security of the realm depended on this recognition, it kept him afloat on his silver barge, and I, as his faithful servant, was bound in duty to uphold this view. But I could see that any talk of balance or silver barges or strife below the surface would not be welcome to Alboino, and I was afraid of offending him, afraid that he would speak ill of me to Alicia, and so incline her away from me when I was not there to speak in my own defence.

"My Lord Abbot, I will ponder the matter," was all that in the end I could find to say.

"Ponder it well. And ponder also this: If the Saracen is our enemy in Syria and Palestine, how can he be our friend in Palermo? Is it not the same beast?"

I promised to add this to the things to be considered. Then, in order to change discourse, and remembering that Alicia had said he came from Rome, I asked him whether his coming had been recent and whether he would stay long. And with these questions of mine he relaxed the severity of his manner, and seemed glad to tell me something of himself.

He belonged to the Cistercian Order, and had spent some years at the Papal Curia, where he had been sent at the behest of the head of the order, Bernard of Clairvaux, to work for the moving of a new Crusade, against Byzantium now, whose treachery was blamed for the loss of Edessa and the failed siege of Damascus. But the King of the Germans, Conrad, had shown a lamentable lack of Christian fervour and declined the venture, and in view of this Pope Eugenius had abandoned the idea and sent Alboino to Sicily, recommending him to King Roger, who had appointed him head of the Monastery of the Trinitr in Palermo.

All this was interesting enough, but it left one question unanswered.

Why Sicily? King Roger might be asked to furnish ships and provisions for a new crusade, but no one would want him for an active partner, it would be too dangerous: he still laid claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, through his mother Adelaide. Something else had induced Eugenius to send the abbot here and I was casting about in my mind for some way of discovering this when I suddenly saw Alicia, in the company of her brother, standing near the fire that was farthest from us; it seemed to me that they had come through the trees from where the minstrel was singing. At once, all thoughts left my head save only one, and that was my strategy with the boat.

The darkness of the trees was behind her, but she was full in the firelight and clearly visible to me, from the gold net in her hair to the slender feet below the hem of her red gown. This suddenness of her appearance by the fire and the not seeing her approach took my breath for a moment, making her seem like an apparition, summoned by my desire, the dwelling of my mind on her.

They came towards us and we rose to greet them. I spoke the polite words and returned the smiles, and we stood there, the four of us, talking together – though to say truth I spoke very little and have no memory of the words. I had reached a stage of awareness of Alicia's presence that made me scarcely dare to look at her when others were by, for fear the force of my feeling would create some material sign, a bolt of light, or a burst of flame that would envelope us.