Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

It was here that I had known Yusuf and it was here that I mourned him, in the midst of this desolate litter that was all he would leave for memorial. I stood there until my storm of weeping was over and I was a little soothed and could see again. I was turning to leave when the memory came to me, like a message from him, of a day when I had come earlier than expected to his summons and found him in his finery, having just returned from a cavalcade with his fellow-Saracens. I remembered the sumptuous silks he was wearing, the blue and scarlet and gold. He had spoken of this display of power and wealth as causing greater hatred for the Saracens and yet as being caused by this very hatred, in a circle that could only be broken by God's teaching. But by then he was back behind his desk. He had been close to the wall when I entered, bending down as if to gather something he had let fall below the wooden panelling. But there had been nothing on the floor and nothing in his hand as he moved away…

As if in obedience to some whispered command from him, I crossed to the place where he had been and crouched down to look. But there was nothing to see there, only the smooth face of the walnut they had used for the inlay. Still crouching there, I felt along the lower edge of the panelling, along the narrow line where the wood was inset. After some moments my fingers found an irregularity, a smooth boss of wood, smaller than a thumbnail. Pressing on this I heard the faintest of sounds and the panel swung open along the line of the join. Inside the opening thus made were loose sheets of parchment held between covers of stiffened cloth and secured with thin cord. They were numbered on the backs though without other distinction among them.

I took out the first and opened it and found details of sums paid and received with entries in Arabic against them. These would be irregular or unlawful payments of some kind, monies that had to be kept in a separate record, not passing through the official accounts of the Diwan.

The next one I opened was concerned with the providing of Moslem serfs in grant to Christian religious foundations in the region of Palermo.

Such grants of labour, usually renewable after a certain term of years, were greatly sought after by monasteries, especially the richer ones with more land than the monks were able or willing to work themselves, and they had to be paid for in one way or another. There were no records of payments here, which I supposed was the reason why the documents were kept secret.

I might have stopped here, concluding that there was nothing of great interest, but I took up one more and opened it at random. These were not accounts but reports from various sources in Greek and Arabic and some few in Italian. A name sprang out: Wilfred of Aachen; after it another, marked off in parenthesis: Rinaldo Gallicanus. So Wilfred the archivist had more than one name. I remembered his pale face and reddish hair and pedantic use of Latin. It had seemed to me that he kept a watch for eavesdroppers while Atenulf was explaining my mission to Potenza… I closed the door of the panel, heard that faint scraping sound as it fitted into place. I took the documents, still in their cloth cover, and bore them back with me along the passage to my room.

Wilfred's was the name that had caught my eye and I began with him. It seemed he was not German, as all had believed, and as he himself had given out: he was the son of one Stephen Gallicanus, who had been a knight in the following of Rainulf of Alife and one of his closest supporters in the rebellion against King Roger twelve years before.

Alboino had said that Guy of Morcone, Alicia's father, had also taken part in this rebellion, but there was no mention of his name here. It was this Stephen Gallicanus who had been singled out by the King and ordered to remove with his own hands his lord's putrefying body from the tomb where it was laid and to tie the rope round the neck of the corpse so that it could be dragged through the streets.

The feeling of horror returned to me, together with the nausea that always accompanied it. This desecration had been at the command of the King. And what of that done to Yusuf? It could not be more than a few weeks since he had compiled the information contained here. His own death had been designed already, by Bertrand and his fellow-Normans, by Alboino and those in the Curia who had sent him, by Alicia and probably her brothers. This dragging of Rainulf in his grave shroud was a fearsome prefiguring of the end that was so shortly to be his.

Rinaldo Gallicanus was not much older than myself. He would have been barely twenty at the time of Rainulf's rebellion. Yusuf had inserted a question: Did he witness the public outrage done to his father? It was not known, but there was likelihood of it in the light of the young man's subsequent course of life. He had left his home in Apulia and travelled to Germany, where after some passage of time he had entered the monastery of Groze on the Mosel, taking the name of Wilfred. Among this community was Gerbert, who subsequently served at the Papal Court and was soon to be appointed Rector of the Enclave of Benevento. These two had travelled to Sicily at an interval of some months, Gerbert to work for an extension of the Pope's prerogatives in the appointment of bishops, Wilfred to take employment as keeper of the palace archives.

The report on Wilfred ended here but there was a note in another hand stating that the post of archivist had been obtained on the recommendation of Atenulf the Lombard, Lord of the Office of the King's Fame, who considered the compiling and preserving of archives to fall within the province of this Office. Yusuf had appended a comment here: As also no doubt the altering or destroying of them.

Further notes followed, also written by Yusuf, based on the material in the report, speculating in particular on the fact that all three of these men had come from Germany. There was the sketch of an equilateral triangle, with the three names at the angles and words of connection written very small and lines drawn outwards from the sides of the triangle, these lines also with writing on them.

As I say, this writing was small, and I postponed the reading of it for a little while, turning to the sheets that followed. All the time I was looking for Alicia's name, feeling sure that Yusuf, once knowing that the meeting in Bari had been deliberately contrived, would have set people on to watch her and find out what they could about her past. But she was not here among these names, Yusuf had not made the same mistake as I – there was nothing to connect her with Atenulf or Gerbert or my mission to Potenza.

I found her in the entry concerning Bertrand of Bonnval and more lines were given to him than to her. The long course of his efforts, public and private, to increase the Norman power at court and foment hostility towards the Saracens in the palace service, all was given here with details that went back over several years. Alicia had less than a page to herself. Those returned from the Holy Land who had known her there had been questioned and had testified to the dissolute manner of her life, her lovers, the lavishness of her spending which was impoverishing her husband and the cause of much quarrelling when he tried to curtail it. There were some who said that the manner of his death had been other than the one given out, that a stoppage of the heart can have various causes. But such rumours were too vague, Yusuf had noted, amounting to little more than gossip. Some lines were devoted to her father. Far from having taken part in any revolt, he had been Roger's firm and constant follower, no slightest suspicion of disloyalty was attached to his name; he had on various occasions given hospitality to his Norman peers at his castle in Apulia, among them Bertrand and his lady. There was no reference to the state of his health in the present or the past.