Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

The return journey has left no mark on my mind. I was hoping to find some message waiting for me, but there was nothing. It was late at night when I came to Palermo and I was exhausted – from the haste of the journey, from the tumult of my feelings. This must still have shown on my face next morning, as Stefanos remarked with concern on my drawn looks, and he was the only man, of all those I knew, who would be concerned for me in this way. Yusuf might see, but he would not speak.

My father did not see my face, nor I think any other, except perhaps the suffering one of Christ Crucified.

I had intended to make my report to Yusuf immediately, and in particular relate the circumstances of my meeting with Spaventa and the words we had used; these I had memorised carefully so as to give him an accurate account. But he was not in the Diwan, so Stefanos told me, nor in his town house, where I might have sought admittance; he was at his mansion in the Conca d'Oro, host to a party of Arab dignitaries from Spain.

I busied myself during the day with the documents that had accumulated during my absence. When we were making ready to leave Stefanos asked me if I would like to accompany him home and sup with him and his wife Maria, something I always enjoyed because of the warmth of their welcome and the attention they gave me. Maria was an excellent cook, far surpassing Caterina, the Amalfitanian woman who kept house for me. This time, I knew, the invitation was not planned: Stefanos had asked on impulse, out of kindness, seeing the dejection I was in. I accepted gladly and we went together to his house in the Cala, where Maria greeted me with evident pleasure.

In the company of these good people, whom I had known and trusted for a good many years now, my heart was eased and my case began to seem more hopeful. She had been prevented from coming, and from sending word.

Something had occurred, some unexpected obstacle. But she would find a way to circumvent it. I had her love, she had shown it when still hardly more than a child and now again as a grown woman. And she was resourceful, I knew it of old – how often, in my thoughts of her, I found comfort in this resourcefulness, proved over and again in the stratagems of childhood.

"But you have lost weight, you are thinner, even your face," Maria said.

She was stout of figure and broad-cheeked, with a high colour and luxuriant eye-lashes and very lustrous black hair, often in some disorder. She believed in feeding as a means of solving all problems, whether of heart or mind or spirit. She had used this method with her three sons, she was fond of saying, and they had all grown up to be full-bodied men and were making their way in the world. It was extraordinary to listen to her and look across at Stefanos and see how lean he was.

She had not had time this evening to prepare a wealth of courses but what she served was plentiful and delicious. We had chicken on the spit in the Greek style, flavoured with cumin and garlic, a great platter of minced cabbage and lentils and beans in the pod, wheat cakes flavoured with honey and the sweet pastries she had learned to make from Arab neighbours – in this region, on the south side of the Cala, Arab and Greek lived happily enough together. With the meal we had the red wine that comes from the slopes of Mount Etna, and it was good and fresh, only recently fermented.

Under the combined assault of food and drink and warmth of friendship, I came very close to unburdening myself to them, confessing my feelings for the Lady Alicia and the difficulties we were encountering in the course of our love. I did not do so, whether from caution, care for her name, the habit of reticence, I do not know. I have wished often enough since that I had spoken of her then. Stefanos' position in the Diwan was not exalted, he was in the third category of the administration, but he had been there many years and heard many things, and he was observant and shrewd and retentive of memory; he might have known something remembered something, perhaps only a scrap but it could have changed everything.

Instead I asked about the things that had happened during my absence. In this way I learned that Demetrius and his Byzantines had ended their work at the Royal Chapel, and were gone from Palermo. I was sorry to hear this, though it was no more than I had expected, and I could tell that Stefanos, who was of the Greek faith, was sorry too. The new people who had come were Lombards and northern Italians, he said. Some spoke only German. The King would come to the chapel for the Feast of the Transfiguration on the Sunday after next. It might be the last time he attended in single state to hear the liturgy: he was soon to marry Sibylla of Burgundy.

As he spoke of the Transfiguration – a feast day formerly more celebrated among the Christians of the East but gaining much in importance also in the Latin Church of late years, though Rome had not yet established a date for it – something tugged at my mind, something heard or witnessed, something quite recent. But it eluded me and Stefanos's next piece of news distracted me from it: old Glycas had died, his monumental task of proving the existence of Sicilian kings in remote antiquity still uncompleted. "He died as he lived," Stefanos said. "Pen in hand, at his writing table, between one phrase and the next."

"So the work will be abandoned. If such a scholar as he, after so many years…"

"Abandoned?" He surveyed me across the table, the usual gleam of irony in his brown eyes. "There is another already appointed to continue the work. It is just this continuing that matters most to our King Roger. So long as the search continues, the thing sought for can be said to exist.

If it did not exist, it would not be sought for."

I had my doubts of this on the plane of logic, except in the negative formulation that it could not be said not to exist. But I knew better than to take him up on it; he was subtle and quick-witted in argument like many Greeks, and very tenacious for so mild a man; an issue of this sort could occupy the rest of the evening, and I was likely to have the worst of it. "Well," I said, "however that may be, to abandon the quest is to admit defeat and so our good King is right to continue in it."

"There is something else you may not have heard, good news this time, a reprieve. That evening of the day you left Potenza word was brought to the King that the Serbs have risen in revolt against the Byzantine yoke.

They are supported by Hungarian mounted archers, who have crossed the border in what is said to be large numbers. Whatever the numbers, Manuel Comnenus will be forced to take action to quell the uprising, and by the time he restores order – if indeed he succeeds in doing so – winter will be upon us, the seas will be rough, all thoughts of invading Sicily will have to be abandoned, for this year at least."

"That is good news indeed." I thought of Lazar's face as I had last seen it, in the tavern at Bari, full of rage at being refused the expected payment. I remembered my self-contempt as I sat on there, after he had left. Whether this rebellion was his doing could not be known for certain. But he would claim the credit, there was little doubt of that.

And with the credit, the reward. Another journey for Thurstan the Pursebearer, more clinking of coin. But of course, if my hopes were realised I would be Thurstan the Pursebearer no longer… "Our work has borne fruit at last," I said.

There was a pause while I resisted Maria's urging to eat more of the pastries, her third or fourth attempt at this; I wanted to please her but had no space left in me even for a crumb.

Stefanos passed the wine. "There is not much else to hearten us in recent events," he said. "This failure of the crusade has brought much harm in its wake. Conrad Hohenstaufen, who calls himself the Emperor of the Romans and claims title to Italy, cut an execrable figure, having lost his entire army and only saved his own skin by fleeing the field.