Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

He was a red-faced, flaxen-haired fellow, a few years older than myself, with blue eyes made vague now by the wine he had drunk. "Not two, no," he said. "The more virtuous may resist so long, but most will settle to their venery sooner."

"You are speaking of the generality," I said. "What you say may be true of some of them, or even many, I know not. But it is not true of all, to my certain knowledge.

"What knowledge is that?" You have not been there. I say they are all the same, wife or maiden, ready to open their legs to any man that takes their fancy."

My rage rose at this but I kept a rein on it. He was looking belligerently at me now, scenting a quarrel. Like all his kind, he had a keen nose for this, fuddled or not. "A man should bridle his tongue when he cannot be sure of his company," I said. "I say there are ladies who have lived long in the Holy Land and are as pure and virtuous as I trust your mother is."

He brought a fist down on the table. "Do you speak ill of my mother?"

Where this might have led I cannot now be sure. I felt I had right on my side and was ready enough to take the thing further in defence of my lady Alicia and in rebuttal of the aspersions this loose-tongued fool had cast on her. But before I could answer him, another intervened, an older man, sitting farther down the table. "Come sirs," he said, "let us not mar the occasion with reckless speech. Subjects of King Louis of France and a subject of King Roger of Sicily are met here tonight, two of his subjects, I should say" – this with a sideways glance at William.

"If we quarrel here it will not augur well for a good understanding between our masters tomorrow." Murmurs of agreement came from round the table. He rose from his place and came to lay a hand on the shoulder of his companion. "No offence to you was intended," he said, and as he spoke he looked across at me and smiled a little and gave a nod, as much as to say, now it is for you to speak.

"I intended no disrespect to your lady mother," I said.

The man hesitated a little but he was not proof against the hand on his shoulder and the feeling he sensed from round the table. He said, "There are always exceptions, so much is true. I would not question the honour of any lady vouched for by you, wherever her dwelling place."

It had not come easily, but with the words once out his face cleared as if only they had been needed to restore his good humour. This suddenness, both of dark and light, I had met before in his fellow-countrymen – by his accent I knew him for a Breton – and I was glad of it now and I reached out my hand to him and he took it and I repented that I had thought him a fool when it was only that he was drunk.

The man who had intervened to restore harmony among us seemed of higher degree than the rest, and possessed some authority over them. I noticed that they paid attention to him when he spoke, though the inflexions of his French were different from theirs, he was of the South. Certainly he had gifts as a peace-maker, as he had proved already and was to prove again now.

"William has told us you are a notable singer," he said. "He told us of the meeting between you after all these years and said how he recalled your singing, how it gladdened men's hearts. Is it not so, William?"

"Yes, it is so." William said – his first words of the evening. "He was known for his singing."

"Will you favour us with a song now?" the older knight said, and his words were at once echoed by others round the table, among them the one with whom I had quarrelled.

I did not need much persuading. My heart was light with thoughts of next day and I was gladdened that the good fellowship had been restored among us. First I sang a Neapolitan song that was popular at that time, in which the singer compares his sweetheart to an April day, beautiful in her smiles, changeable in her moods. It was a pretty, lilting air, without great range in the notes – easy to sing. And while I sang, taking me quite unawares, thoughts of Nesrin and the moods I had known in her came pressing upon me, her face in rage and in mockery, in laughter and in promise and in ecstasy of love. My Alicia, my intended bride, had one face only to my mind, reposeful and beautiful. Our knowledge of each other would grow with time…

Next I chose a song of my own composing with words that were at the same time sorrowful and sweet, and I sang it to an air that I knew from my student days.

I will not raise loud lament

To make her guilty for my hurt.

I am steadfast in my love.

If I suffer, should I need her consent?

This was greeted with much applause and I thought I saw tears in one man's eyes. Encouraged by this, I went on to give them several more songs. When we finally rose from the table every man of them came to praise me and thank me. Particularly warm in his commendation was the older knight who had first asked me to sing. "You have a talent far out of the common," he said. "Believe me, I have some knowledge of such matters. It is interesting to hear troubadour songs in the Italian tongue, a thing not so often met with. Can you play on any instrument so as to accompany your voice if need be?"

I told him I could play on the viele and the mandora, and he nodded and looked at me in a considering way but said nothing more, and soon after we went our separate ways to bed.

The couriers came early next morning to announce the impending arrival of the King and his party. I mounted the stairway that led from within the gatehouse up to the parapets. From here I could see the road they would come by. And here I waited, above the curtain wall, among baskets of rocks, and stakes with fire-hardened points and other weaponry for defence against siege. And through all the years of my life since then, when I remember that waiting, there comes to my mind those instruments of hurt, the jagged rocks, the blackened stakes, the great cauldrons with the bar through them for tilting the blistering oil.

With the news of the royal party's approach, the gates were opened, the portcullis was raised – the creak and grind of the chains as they drew it up was to my excited senses the music of Alicia's arrival. As I stood there – joined now by others who had mounted the walls – I felt a need for the sight of her that was almost painful. To see her was to believe again in my own life. She would come and she would redeem my life and join the past together, broken as it was, like a fractured limb that she would bind up and make whole, bone and blood and tissue. Only later was it to come to me how grossly, in my concern to mend my own life, I had failed to take into account that hers too might be damaged, broken. That day, as I stood waiting there, such thoughts were far from my mind. In the time of our first love I had thought of my life and hers as pure, unmixed. There was one aim, one course of action, everything was in keeping: a knight's son, a knight's daughter, the same class, the same thoughts for the future…

There was a light breeze, the pennants on the battlements fluttered.

Glancing up, I saw a pair of hawks, high in the sky, in lazy flight.

Something must have alarmed or enraged the fowl in the kitchen garden because there was a sudden outcry from there. When this died down I heard the hooves of the horses on the road and saw the dust from the mailed men that were riding ahead of the King. I saw them pass through the stockade gate and heard the clatter they made on the lowered bridge.

The King came next behind, mounted on a white horse with a silver harness, as on the day of his coronation twenty years ago, when my father had lifted me up to see him. But I had not seen his face then, and I did not now, he rode beneath a canopy of scarlet silk – Atenulf's invention, as it was said. I saw nothing of him but the grip of his legs on the horse's flanks as he covered the space from the stockade wall and disappeared in his turn below the overhang of the gatehouse. My eyes went eagerly to those following. I saw them enter in twos and threes, saw them reach the bridge, heard them pass into the gatehouse. They rode in order of rank, the Cardinal Bishop of Santa Rafina, Gilbert of Bolvaso, Master Constable Designate, with his lady, behind these the King's notary, Giovanni dei Segni, and the Provost Leontios and John Malaterra from the Vice-Chancellor's Office, and others whom I did not know. But the face I was searching for I did not find, and my breath came short and I felt the skin of my face draw together with the quick flight of the blood. She was nowhere among them. She had not come.