Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

The recital of the names had steadied him a little, and lifted his voice, but this was short-lived. There was nightmare in his face when he began again, a nightmare two years old but as fresh to his mind as if it had been yesterday. The German army, under their Emperor Conrad, had gone before, leaving Nicaea in October. "We did not know what had become of them. We were told they had won a great victory over the Turks, but the corpses we came upon were German, not Turkish. When we reached Nicaea we discovered that they had been massacred at Dorylaeum by the Seljuk cavalry, and that Conrad had fled the field. We kept coming on the bodies as we went forward, more and more of them, men and horses all piled together, one great smell of rotting flesh. We did not breathe air, we breathed death."

For the first time since he had started speaking William turned his face towards me, and I saw the dew of sweat on his brow. "So many bodies," he said. "We knew the Germans were ourselves. We were looking at our dead selves, we were smelling our own decay."

Then the arrival in Jerusalem and the Grand Assembly at Acre. He launched again on the recital of names and titles: King Baldwin of Jerusalem, the Patriarch Fuller, the Archbishops of Caesarea and Nazareth, Conrad's half-brothers Henry Jasomirgott of Austria and Otto of Freisingen, Frederick of Swabia, Welf of Bavaria…

He knew the names like a lesson learned, and it gave him some comfort, as before, this litany oft-repeated. But his hands still pressed down on his thighs as he went on. And what did they decide, he asked me, these princes and prelates? He attempted a laugh. Never was there better illustration of that verse in Isiah, Take council together and it shall come to naught.

The folly of the decision to attack Damascus was well known, as was the greed for land that had led to it. What no man could know unless he had lived through them were the sufferings of the retreat towards Galilee.

"A year ago, almost to the day," William said. "August, hot like this, much hotter. You think of the desert as light-coloured, sand-coloured, like the sand of our Sicilian beaches. But that desert was hell-scorched, dark grey. The heat from it burned your face like a flame if you looked down and the wind blistered you when you looked up. We had no order in the retreat, we were massed together, an easy target. These Turcoman riders are not cavalry as we Normans understand it, they are mounted archers, they move fast. They hung on our flanks, mile after mile, pouring arrows into the mass of us. The way was littered with corpses, men and horses." He raised one hand and took my arm above the elbow. "You understand?" he said. "It was prefigured. The same bodies, our bodies, the same stink. I smell it through my sleep, it wakes me."

I could feel the tremor of his hand on my arm and I was swept by a rush of pity for him, though at the same time I felt dismayed that a man should so exhibit his weakness who had been schooled to conceal it.

"These things will pass," I said.

"You could not tell, it was like bolts from heaven. You would be riding alongside a man and see the arrow strike. You would hear the whistle of it and the thud as it struck. My father was killed, he took an arrow through the nape of the neck. He had taken off his helmet because of the heat. I was beside him, I heard the arrow strike." He paused and opened his lips and drove out his breath between clenched teeth, making a sound like the rising flight of a strong bird. "The arrow went through his throat, I saw the head of it come out below the chin. He rode on with his throat pierced, then blood came round the head of the arrow and he pitched off his horse. I left him there to rot, there was no time, he was left in the open, in the sun, like all the others. In the night I smell it, the stench of rotting men and horses and my father, and I cry out for the time before the greed and the rivalry and all the death, to the time when we were calling for crosses."

He stopped and his hand moved away from my arm and silence fell between us. I would have liked to say words of comfort to him but did not find them. It seemed to me better, far better, to be alive, even in the grip of a nightmare that would not fade, than to be feast for crows in that hellish desert, but I could not say this. I wondered whether, in William's place, I would not have felt in my heart, amidst all the horror of it, some gladness that another man had been struck and not myself, even if it was my father. But naturally I could not speak of this either. It seemed strange to me, and passing all understanding but God's, that William, who I did not suppose lacked for courage and had entered eagerly on the war, should now be so white-faced and trembling when others who had ridden at his side showed no mark of it in speech or bearing. Strange too, though in a different order of strangeness, and very disturbing to me, that while I longed to resume my dream of knighthood, he should cry out in the night for refuge from the nightmare experience of it. I would have spoken of this, perhaps protested or even rebuked him, that he should cast such a shadow over my hopes and call into question the disappointment I had lived with through the years since he and I had been scudieri together. But when I would have spoken I saw that colour had returned to William's face and his shoulders had straightened and his eyes lost their staring look, and I understood that this telling of it to one who had not been there acted as a cure for him, quelled the demon, though not driving it out. So the wound he had dealt me I kept to myself, and we parted amicably enough, promising to spend more time together at supper. This was served in the hall of the castle, where I, in company with the party of Frankish knights, made a number great enough to occupy a table. But on this occasion William sat silent and morose, a little apart from the rest of us. His companions, all of whom had been on the crusade with him, ate and drank and laughed together, and paid no heed to William, which made me think they were accustomed to this behaviour of his.

The evening passed in wine and talk. I was in good spirits, looking forward to the morrow, when King Roger and his party would arrive, Alicia among them. For this reason, I was sparing with the wine, wanting to have a clear head and clear eyes when she and I met. This was fortunate as it turned out because a quarrel rose among us which, had I drunk more, might have had bloody consequences.

It happened in this way. The talk passed to the life lived by the Franks of Outremer, which all of these men had seen at Antioch and Jerusalem.

Since they had seen these wondrous cities and I had not, it was very natural they should seek to impress me with descriptions of them, and they vied with one another in this. They were rough men for the most part; many of them were landless knights who fought for pay and keep, and they were used to hardship and the discomforts of life in their native Normandy, wearing coarse wool next to the skin and washing seldom. Now they were divided between wonder and censure as they spoke of the luxury of life in the Frankish East, the houses with their carpets and tapestries, dining tables inlaid with ivory, mosaic floors.

Dinner was served on plates of gold and there were even dishes of porcelain brought from Persia and Cathar. The rich had water conducted by pipes directly into the houses and it could be heated while still in the pipes. The ladies of the house had baths and elegant chambers, their beds were hung with damask, the linen well-laundered and soft. Whether my companions had themselves set foot in these chambers – which was the impression they sought to give – or whether they were merely repeating what others had told them, it was not possible to know. But it was this mention of ladies that changed the course of their talk. They began to speak of the eastern style of dress of these ladies, their veils and turbans, their jewels and silks, their absence of petticoats, the languor of their movements, their mincing gait. From this it was a short step to the looseness of their morals, and one man in particular grew loud and forthright in this regard. They took lovers as a matter of course, he said, they took them to bed in their own houses, no one thought anything of it, the husband least of all because it left him free for his own amours. "I tell you," he said, "a lady of good Norman blood, two years out there, and she becomes little better than a whore."