Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

"You talk like a lawyer."

"I was a student of Roman law at the School of Law of Bologna."

"Were you so? Well, I will tell you something now about Spaventa, and why he does not like to be contradicted in matters of theology. Listen now and mark me well. I have taken to you and for this reason I confide in you. Before I found my true path in life, I was intended for the priesthood. My sainted mother wanted this for me, may she rest in peace.

But it was seen otherwise by our Father in Heaven. One evening at suppertime I fell into dispute with a fellow-student at the seminary in Viterbo where we were preparing to take holy orders. The subject of our talk was Saint Anselm's proof for the existence of God, that which they call the ontological proof. I was pointing out to my friend, who was sitting opposite to me, that it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot be conceived not to exist and that this is greater than one which can be conceived not to exist and hence, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived can be conceived not to exist, it is not that than which nothing greater can be conceived. And he, instead of recognising the truth of this and complimenting me on the coherence of my argument, contradicted me and derided my logic. He laughed in my face. The blood rose to my head, there was a carving-knife on the table, in one motion I had seized it and in one stroke severed his jugular."

He paused on this. A glisten had come to his eyes. "That was the end of my hopes of ordination, it was almost the end of me all together – I was forced to flee. But the talent was there already, sleeping within me till it woke that day. In that fraction of time, of all the blows he could have struck, Spaventa chose the fatal one. And it turned out for the best. As a priest, I would not have made a great figure in the world. Is there by chance some wine remaining? If so, we could drink a cup together and toast this great enterprise of ours."

"Yes, there is some." I went to the jug and poured wine for him into my water cup. The cup I had used already I filled again for myself. He took the cup and waited and watched me and I understood he was waiting for me to drink first in sign of good faith. When I had done so, he raised his cup.

"Render unto Caesar."

It seemed a strange toast to me, but I thought his mind was still running on the Gospels. "And to God what is His," I said.

The movement he made on hearing this was of the slightest: he leaned back against the wall and raised his head to look more fully at me as I stood there before him. But with that small movement the whole posture of his body had changed, become tense and gathered. His eyes were bright and without expression, or none that I could read. There had been something, in the first moment, before that involuntary gathering of the body, some leap of surprise masked immediately. My reply to the toast had been the wrong one, not the one expected.

"But of course," he said softly. He set his cup, still with most of the wine left in it, carefully down beside him, restored the knife to his belt, took up the bag of money in his left hand, bearing the weight of it quite effortlessly, and rose to his feet. While I still had not moved, he took three quick steps to the door, unbarred it and was gone.

I saw nothing more of Spaventa during my stay at Potenza. Perhaps he left that same night. To this day I am not certain by whose contrivance he could come and go so easily; at that time I assumed there was someone in the castle under orders from Atenulf to assist him. With the money delivered, my heart was lighter; there was nothing before me now but to wait for the arrival of the King's party and the sight of Alicia.

In the afternoon of the next day, in the gardens that lay between the inner and outer walls of the castle, I saw among a group of French knights who had arrived that morning in advance of their king, a man I thought I knew from the days we had both been squires, when we had met on several occasions, bearing the shields and tending the horses for our respective lords at tournaments. I was not sure of it, the years had passed, we had changed; moreover, he was white-faced and haggard-looking as if he had been through some illness. But when I came closer and asked him if he were not William Clermont, he knew me and greeted me by name and seemed glad to see me. We drew apart from the others and walked together, descending through the terraces until we came to a small loggia with benches inside where we could sit in the shade.

We talked about ourselves, about the things that had happened to us. His story was very different from mine. He had been knighted at the age of nineteen by his godfather, the lord of Montescaglioso, and had recently returned from the Holy Land, where he had taken part in the crusade. I asked him why he was in company with the Franks when he was as Sicilian as I was, more so, since he had been born on the island, descended from a family who had come with the invading Norman army under Robert Guiscard, our King Roger's uncle.

He had been desperate to take part in the crusade, he said, and his smile twisted with the words as if there were a bitter joke in them. "I wanted it more than anything," he said. No crusading army had assembled in Sicily as King Roger had declined to take part. So he and his father and some others in the following of Godfrey of Enna had crossed over to France. They had gone to the Assembly at Vézelay in March of 1146 to hear Bernard of Clairvaux preach the crusade. Never in his life had he heard such preaching.

I noticed now that William's hands had begun to tremble slightly, though he sought to disguise this by pressing them against his thighs, and that his eyes had taken on a fixed look as he spoke, as if he were reciting a lesson learned by heart.

Such preaching, he said, there was so much power in him. Edessa had fallen, the holy places were falling to the infidel, the Franks had been slaughtered by the barbarous hordes of Imad ed-Din Zengi, their women sold into slavery. The crowd was vast, there were too many for the cathedral, they had put up a platform in a field outside the town and Bernard had spoken from that, promising remission of sins to all who took part.

"We began to cry out for crosses," William said. "Crosses, give us crosses. The cloth they had brought was all used up. Bernard tore off his outer clothes to be cut up for crosses. Men fought over the scraps of his robe." He raised an unsteady hand and produced from within his bosom a scrap of dark cloth, frayed and ragged. "I have kept it," he said, and he laughed a little, though his eyes lost nothing of their starkness.

I was becoming uneasy now at his manner, and particularly the change in his voice, which had been lively enough when he first greeted me but had fallen now into a droning monotone.

"I have kept it by me," he said.

"To remember the crusade?"

"To remember the time before, when we did not know, when we were shouting for crosses. Everybody was shouting. I could not tell the difference between the shouts in my ears and those in my throat.

Crosses, give us crosses."

He again pressed down upon his thighs, staring before him as if hearing these shouts again. He had not looked at me since beginning to speak of Bernard's preaching, but I felt now that I had been the unwitting cause of his distress, that the surprise of our meeting had jolted him, set him talking in this vein.

He had taken the cross that same evening, among the lesser nobility, after King Louis and his brother Robert, Count of Dreux, and Alfonso Jordan, Count of Toulouse, and Henry, heir to the county of Champaigne, and William, Count of Nevers. "Immediately after these, the royal vassals," he said, and I saw how, even in the midst of his disorder, he took care to list these illustrious names, and showed satisfaction that he had been in such company. Everard of Barre, the Grand Master of the Temple, had also joined them with a body of knights from his Order, and many great ladies had accompanied their husbands, Eleonora of Aquitaine, the Countesses of Flanders and Toulouse…