THE RUBY IN HER NAVEL by Barry Unsworth

Author:Barry Unsworth
Format: epub

XX

I saw nothing more of Spaventa during my stay at Potenza. Perhaps he left that same night. To this day I am not certain by whose contrivance he could come and go so easily; at that time I assumed there was someone in the castle under orders from Atenulf to assist him. With the money delivered, my heart was lighter; there was nothing before me now but to wait for the arrival of the King's party and the sight of Alicia.

In the afternoon of the next day, in the gardens that lay between the inner and outer walls of the castle, I saw among a group of French knights who had arrived that morning in advance of their king, a man I thought I knew from the days we had both been squires, when we had met on several occasions, bearing the shields and tending the horses for our respective lords at tournaments. I was not sure of it, the years had passed, we had changed; moreover, he was white-faced and haggard-looking as if he had been through some illness. But when I came closer and asked him if he were not William Clermont, he knew me and greeted me by name and seemed glad to see me. We drew apart from the others and walked together, descending through the terraces until we came to a small loggia with benches inside where we could sit in the shade.

We talked about ourselves, about the things that had happened to us. His story was very different from mine. He had been knighted at the age of nineteen by his godfather, the lord of Montescaglioso, and had recently returned from the Holy Land, where he had taken part in the crusade. I asked him why he was in company with the Franks when he was as Sicilian as I was, more so, since he had been born on the island, descended from a family who had come with the invading Norman army under Robert Guiscard, our King Roger's uncle.

He had been desperate to take part in the crusade, he said, and his smile twisted with the words as if there were a bitter joke in them. “I wanted it more than anything,” he said. No crusading army had assembled in Sicily as King Roger had declined to take part. So he and his father and some others in the following of Godfrey of Enna had crossed over to France. They had gone to the Assembly at Vézelay in March of 1146 to hear Bernard of Clairvaux preach the crusade. Never in his life had he heard such preaching.

I noticed now that William's hands had begun to tremble slightly, though he sought to disguise this by pressing them against his thighs, and that his eyes had taken on a fixed look as he spoke, as if he were reciting a lesson learned by heart.

Such preaching, he said, there was so much power in him. Edessa had fallen, the holy places were falling to the

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