Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

My only respite from these bitter thoughts was to cling to a belief in the conspiracy in which her father had been involved. Muhammed had known nothing of it, but he knew little more than what he had extracted from the wretched Mario. It soothed me a little, it deadened the horror, to believe that the story Alboino had told me, of evidence in the hands of the Curia, of a dire threat to Alicia and her family, had been true, or if not true that they had made her believe it. This last was the version I preferred: she too had been duped, they had told her lies, it had been to protect her family and her own life that she had acted thus. I did not want to speak to her or look at her face or even hear the mention of her name, ever again. But it gave me some solace, through the sleepless hours of the night, to believe in this mitigation of her cruelty.

So the night passed, the worst night of my life. My chamber, at first a refuge, became a prison, and with the first intimations of dawn I left it and passed into the grounds, where I wandered aimlessly as the light strengthened. I wanted to leave and yet was curiously reluctant, as if I might turn some corner and find again the promise that had been here, in the woods and the gardens and the lake. Leaving was to brand myself finally as dupe and traitor and to stamp this land of marvels as a sham, when I had entered it in such triumph, Thurstan of Mescoli, with the lackeys running before me and the chamberlain all smiles, awaiting me in the hall. It was a dream of recompense such as children have, when time seems something that can be gathered up again. But there was nothing here to recover: from the first moment every word of hers had been a lie, every look a cheat.

I stood at the edge of the water as the sun showed its rim over the horizon and pale colours of silver and saffron made spreading stains over the lake. There were clouds surrounding the sun, they shifted and thinned as it rose clear and the surface of the water seemed to quiver in response to these changes, but the reflections of the trees were motionless, not a leaf stirring. I remembered how we had paddled out from the darkness of the bank into the open water. Then too there had been no faintest stir of wind among the trees. The reflections of the turning mirrors had splintered the world and mended it and I had felt we were entering together a territory altogether new, from which we would not emerge unchanged. My prescient soul, I thought bitterly – there had been change indeed.

The sun was still low when I made my way to the little pavilion where she and I had exchanged our first kiss. The shapes of birds and animals were as I remembered them. There was a gardener there, at work with long-bladed scissors, and he bowed to me and moved away, out of sight.

I mounted the steps and stood within the enclosure where we had stood together, out of the midday sun. Suddenly I remembered the wave of gratitude that had swept through me, a devoted gratitude for her presence there, for her return to my life, for the gift she had brought of a golden future. I had began to speak this gratitude of mine but she had laid a finger on my lips to prevent me. For a moment she had seemed troubled, distressed, and I had not understood it. I understood it now.

She had spoken of her brother Adhemar's spying in an attempt to explain her agitation and to distract my mind with alarm at his hostility. But Adhemar had not been the cause. She had felt a moment of pity for me, the poor dupe, stumbling out words of gratitude for having been deceived and tricked and ill-used. Poor, pitiable fool…

This sense of her pity, the only tenderness she had shown, gave terrible pain to me. Worse than all her acting was this brief moment of truth, worse than all her pretended kindness was this true kindness of contempt. The hurt of it was so strong that I wanted to cry out. But I believe it was that moment that saw the obscure birth of my cure. The humiliation, my own abjectness, was beyond enduring; some escape from it had to be found. A dim prospect of this came – and only those who have not experienced such a blow to selfesteem will find paradox in it – not in heaping blame on Alicia but in reproaching myself. If I sought refuge in hatred I would never be free of her. That I knew her so little was proof of the neglect of her that had lain at the heart of what I called my love. She could not have so deceived me if I had not deceived myself; she could not have played me false if I had not aided her in it. I had fashioned her in the form of my desires, I had made her shining, lustrous from our childhood and the time of my hope, bright with the future when she would make that hope come true, a creature of light, not her own, bestowed on her. She had no light of her own…

I was standing at the head of the steps and the early sunlight was in my eyes. At this moment I again heard the wailing cry, wulla-wulla-wulla, that had come to me as I mounted these same steps towards the waiting Alicia, and had brought Nesrin's face before me even at such a moment.

Then I had thought it an illusion, some trick of the wind, or human voices distorted by distance. This time there could be no doubt: it was the lament of the white herons, the same wailing that had come from the piled cages on the deck of the ship at Paola.

I went down the steps and turned in the direction of the sound. I had to follow the shore of the lake, from the farther side, passing the place where the fires had been lit for our supper on the first evening, going beyond this into a part I had not visited before, through trees thinly planted and then over an open space where the grass was tall and wasted with summer. Reflections from the turning mirrors confused my eyes and bedevilled my sense of direction. I was hunting for a sound that came no more, but I persisted, growing more intent as I proceeded. I have sometime thought since that this intentness of purpose came to me through God's mercy.

At last, after much blundering, I came upon a wicker gate and a narrow path that led through trees to a row of bamboo cages, all empty save one and this had the white birds in it, six of them I counted, all that were left, and as I approached they shuffled their wings and set up their wailing, and it was as if I were back in Cosenza, before the meeting with Alicia, when I still had the trust of Yusuf, when Nesrin was filling my thoughts. There was nothing securing the door of the cage but a wooden bar. This I lifted off and held the door open. But the birds would not come for fear of me standing so close. So I left it open wide and began to make my way back towards the palace, feeling as I did so a lightening of the spirit – the first since Muhammed had come.

It was my intention to leave and I was on the way to gather my belongings when I found myself in the courtyard below the room I had occupied on my first visit, which had delighted me so when I had opened the shutters and looked down. The sound of water was everywhere here, flowing from the mouth of the fountain into basins set one below the other and thence in covered channels to the pool in the centre, which was undisturbed for all the little streams that fed into it, and I fell to wondering how this could be so, and marvelling at the art of those who had made it. The respite I had felt since freeing the birds was still with me and it was pleasant there, with the gentle splashing sounds of the water and the coolness it made in the air. The pool seemed deep to my eyes and I bared my arm to test it but the water rose only to the elbow: the appearance of depth came from the blue tiles with which the pool was lined. The immersion of my hand and arm broke the surface, shivered into fragments the pale reflections of the clouds that still accompanied the sun that morning.

There are times after turbulence of emotion when a sort of emptiness comes to the spirit, and it was so now with me. I had been through a great deal since the morning Caspar had come with the summons. I had not slept, but felt no tiredness now, only this vacancy. As I still knelt at the pool, shadows like swift ripples swept across the face of it and when I glanced up I saw the six herons flying together very low, just over my head, saw them wheel and turn westward toward Palermo and the sea. And at once, unbidden, as I followed their flight, there came memories of other shadows, the sunlit afternoon in the Royal Chapel, shafts of light that entered from outside, contending with the light of the lamps, both together making a glory of light on the Magdalen's head and on the raised hand of Christ Pantocrator. Moving shadows everywhere within the space of the chapel, the two workmen high up on the wall with their lamps and their mirrors, they both glanced down towards me at the same moment, but this could not have been because of any sound I had made, I was standing motionless. Nor was there other sound, not at that moment, or I would have heard it. Some swift reflection passing across the mirrors they had on either side? But no movement from the ground could have caused such a reflection, the men were too high above. As high up as the Tree of Knowledge it must have been, or it would not have registered in the mirrors. Perhaps they had seen shadows moving over the wall before them, shadows of some unusual kind, to make them look away from their work… Then I had come upon Gerbert and his German companions, and there had been shadows like those the birds had made on the pool before me, swift shadows moving over the south side of the crossing, passing over the marbles of the floor like birds' wings or ripples on the surface of water.