Pillars of Light (26 page)

Savaric looked from one to another like a starving man at a banquet. “That one,” he said, indicating a girl whose long black hair hung loose to her waist, hiding only her breasts beneath the thin shift she wore. I looked away.

“John, pick your lady or I’ll do it for you.” He was already dragging his “lady” to her feet. I watched as she shot a look at him and read in it, even in that low light, contempt and revulsion. I could only stand there, mute and frozen, wishing that I were outside, away from the smells, the fug, the women.

“For heaven’s sake, man!”

Suddenly a warm body thrust up against me, a soft breast pressed into my arm, and I was propelled into a side room. The door closed fast behind me. The woman Savaric had thrust at me pulled away and we stared at each other like two animals unexpectedly finding themselves in the same bear-pit. She was very young and her eyes were huge and wary. She began to shrug out of her robe.

“No!”

She stopped, one arm out of the dress, and said something in the local language.

I shook my head. “No, I don’t … I don’t want …” I backed towards the door.

Her chatter became an insistent gabble—panicked, maybe even angry.

The dress was off now, crumpled on the floor. She lay back on the pallet that was the room’s only furniture, placed her feet flat with her knees bent, spread her legs and waited for me to join her.

I had never seen a woman naked before. I couldn’t help but look, but all I could think was that she looked incomplete, strangely unfinished. There was no stirring in me; quite the opposite. It occurred to me that I must be a very unnatural sort of man that the sight of a woman’s naked cunt made me want to run.

My bewilderment must have showed on my face for the girl began to cry, which was the last thing I had intended. Ashamed, I handed her her dress and she covered herself with it, and we spent the next half hour sitting at opposite sides of the room, not looking at one another, trying not to listen to the noises from the adjoining room.

Walking back to the billet, the three of us were quiet. We were passing through the quarter where the market traders were selling food when suddenly Ezra exclaimed, “What are those?” She pointed at a stall laden with little orbs as bright as the setting sun. I’d never seen anything like them, even in the London markets, and they must have been unfamiliar to the people there as well, for quite a crowd had gathered.

Ezra tugged at my sleeve. “Oh, buy me one, John, please. Please!”

“You can buy one for yourself.”

“I can’t. They speak foreign here.”

“I hate to break this to you, but they’ll be speaking foreign wherever we go.”

She made a face. “Go on.”

Savaric encouraged me. “Buy her one, John. After all, you’ve had your treat.”

I approached the stall, and though I’d picked up none of the local lingo I found my bastard French worked. The man selling the things told me they were “
naranja
,” some sort of fruit, apparently, brought out of the east. He sounded a little like my Moor but looked nothing like him. He asked a ludicrous amount for the fruit. I suggested a price that made him bellow with laughter; he lowered the number a little. On we went, spiralling inward to the point we knew we would both reach eventually. When we finally agreed on a price, he nodded and smiled and said a word I’d heard the Moor use.

“Where are you from?” I asked him, handing over the money.

“Here and there.”

“Where’s there?”

He laughed. “Marrakech.”

“Where’s Marrakech?”

“Across the water.” He gestured vaguely towards the sea.

“Are you a Baba?”

He wrinkled his brow at me and I repeated the question, trying to form the word the way the Moor said it.

“
Al-barbari
, Berber, originally. We call ourselves Amazigh.” It sounded like
Ama-zir
the way he said it, the “r” rolled the French way, like
Robairrr
. “The free people, it means. Now that’s a laugh, stuck in this shithole, trampled by the Franj.” He spat in the dust.

In the end he gave me two of the
naranja
for the price we’d agreed for one. I thanked him, bowing my head and pressing my hand to my heart the way the Moor would do, and this made him grin.

I took my prizes back to Ezra and Savaric. Ezra took hers in a kind of wonderment, stroked it as if it were a precious object, sniffed it, squeezed it, squealed at the perfume it left on her hand, then squirrelled it carefully away in her pack. “I’ll eat it later,” she promised, “when I’m alone.”

Wiping the skin clean on my tunic as I would an apple, I bit deeply into the fruit, then exclaimed in shock, “Oh, it is horrible, horrible!” and added a few choice words in Cornish for good measure. Bitterness shrivelled my tongue. I spat out the offending pulp and it lay there bright in the dust.

A gale of laughter—the stallholder and his friends, highly amused. “You don’t eat the skin, you barbarian! Like this.” The man from Marrakech picked up a fruit, dug his thumbs in, tore a hole through the thick skin and proceeded to peel it.

Mortified, I copied him, but just as I was about to bite into the naked flesh a pair of big Templar knights barged past and confronted the man. “What have we told you about selling here?” One grabbed the stallholder by the throat and, being a good head taller, lifted him off his feet.

“We don’t want your kind in this city,” the second knight added. He was a big man, with a meaty face, and for some reason familiar to me.

“In this
country
,” the first Templar corrected him. “Or anywhere else in Christendom. Stop trying to rip off decent Christians! Take your produce and stick it up your arse!”

“Or we’ll do it for you, then roast you over a fire like the pig you are!”

“He wasn’t doing anything wrong, I just—”

I tried to intervene but the first Templar shot me a look of pure disgust. “Don’t stand up for this infidel bastard or you’ll get the same treatment!” He turned his attention back to the stallholder. “Get down on your knees and pray to Jesus Christ the Saviour for your black soul!”

Behind the stall, other Amazigh were gathering, drawn by the rumpus. They looked militant, angry, like men who’d been subjected to this sort of harassment one time too many and were determined to make a stand. When the
naranja
-seller did not immediately do
as the Templars asked, they tipped his stall over, sending bright fruit tumbling. Then they casually stabbed the trader in the gut and kicked him as he writhed.

“No!” I couldn’t help myself. I should have remembered the beating I took in London, but in the heat of it I grabbed the first Templar by the arm, and when he turned I punched him in the face once, twice—short, hard punches that did the most damage. He went down groaning, clutching his broken nose. The second came at me, sword in hand. I was trying to draw my blade but the midnight-blue cloak—so unnecessary in the heat—got in the way, tangling around my blade.

All at once Ezra was in front of me, darting at the knight, dagger in hand. She stuck the blade into his forearm and twisted. There was a sound like wood splintering, then a shriek. He dropped the weapon with a clang and clutched his ruined arm.

All hell broke loose. Infidels were pouring into the street with meat cleavers and other makeshift weapons, to be met by a stream of Christian fighters, some of whom I recognized as shipmates, and before long we were in the middle of a pitched battle and blood flowed among the cobbles.

I caught hold of Ezra but she gave me a mad look and tried to tear herself free. I very much feared that if I let go of her she would lay into the Templar knight again.

“No, leave him, come on!”

Savaric was running off down the street, never one for a fight. Ezra struggled but I managed to drag her away, and together we merged into the tide of men converging on the little market.

“Geoffrey de Glanvill!” I said it like a curse.

Ezra gazed at me, said nothing.

“That man,” I went on, “the one whose arm you just skewered, he was one of the men who … ah … in Winchelsea—”

“You don’t forget the man who raped you,” she said calmly.
“I wish I’d severed more than his arm, and if I see him again, I bloody well will.”

We found Savaric back at the house looking pale and sheepish. He spread his hands apologetically. “I’d have just been in your way.”

What had started with the murder of the
naranja
-seller escalated to a riot as the sailors and soldiers bound for the Holy Land on a sacred task put their Christian zeal into practice and started slaughtering the remaining Saracens and Jews of Lisbon. For days the rampage continued. Whole quarters of the city were burned, shops and homes looted. The skies were thick with smoke, the streets sticky with blood.

Memories of London on that terrible coronation day returned, leaving me sweating and trembling like a sick child. I found it hard to sleep. I was seized by nightmares. Every day members of the troupe returned with fresh tales of horror. A group of knights had been set upon and decapitated by Muslims in the alleys; by way of retribution the Templars had set fire to their mosque, their place of worship, at first prayer and slaughtered dozens as they came running out. Muslim women were hauled out into the streets and raped in the name of Christ. No one could keep order—certainly not the local authorities, who were unprepared for such an eruption of violence, or even the commanders of the fleet, whose charges had been cooped up for far too long aboard ship to show any restraint or discipline. In the end, battalions of soldiers were brought in by the Portuguese king to restore order. Many hundreds of our army were thrown into prison to sober up and repent of their wrongdoings, amongst them Quicksilver—taken in a drunken brawl—and Red Will.

“You were supposed to keep an eye on him,” I reminded the twins.

“He got away from us,” Hammer lied.

In the end we found they’d been thrown into the same cell with a load of Frenchmen. Savaric reported that when he came upon them they were sitting together playing knucklebones on the floor of the gaol, laughing like brothers. “Best place for them,” he said on his return. Which meant that not only would they be kept out of further trouble, but also that while they were in custody he wouldn’t have to pay their upkeep.

The mayhem continued, despite reinforcements to the Lisbon garrison. There was an uneasy atmosphere wherever you went. Before we came there had been a working truce among the different elements of the populace, the different cultures rubbing along without much friction, but ancient animosities had been rekindled, dormant grudges acted upon.

Savaric told us to keep our heads down and to stay out of trouble, which coincided neatly with our own inclination. For a long while we remained confined to the area immediately adjacent to the merchant’s house, our only exercise being to accompany our master between there and the church, with the occasional visit to the ship to help board supplies. At least this meant no repeat visit to the bordello.

I’d started taking my drawing things with me, as much to ward off boredom as to practise my sole skill. Down at the quays I drew an old man gutting fish. He came to see what I was doing and stared blankly at the sketch, unable to make any sense of the flat image. I drew children throwing a wooden ball under their mothers’ watchful care, and a woman weaving at a loom set up in a sunny courtyard. A group of black-clad women came past, chattering like jackdaws. When they saw what I was at they made the sign of the evil eye, as if they thought there was some sort of dangerous magic in my sketches. After more instances of this, I decided to stick to drawing buildings, which were unlikely to have an opinion of me or my work.

Towards the end of the third week in July, after attending the morning mass, I told Savaric I’d like to remain behind. I waved my leather draftsman’s satchel by way of explanation.

He nodded. “I am sure Reginald would like to see your impression of this church, since he cannot be here in person.”

The canon, with whom I had managed to exchange a few words, told me that the little church had once been a mosque. He said it quite matter-of-factly, without any shame or awkwardness, and added, “We all worship the same God,” which took me greatly aback. Until then I had been under the impression that Muslims revered some other deity, and this confused me mightily. Why were we crossing seas and continents to fight people who believed much the same as we did? I decided the old priest had meant something different, or that I had misunderstood.

I wandered about the church, drawing a detail here and there, taking in the elegant pointed arches, the striped pillars, the friezes of carved lettering. Some of the latter had been recently painted over, since they were Islamic writings, but what caught my eye was a small portrait of a holy figure on the eastern wall. Dark-skinned, dark-eyed, hollow-cheeked, with a golden halo that radiated out towards the top corners of the icon. Something within me flipped over at the sight of it, a strange yet familiar flutter. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t reproduce on paper the arresting face on the wall. The rest of the church receded as I tried to capture this one image, but failed again and again: the nose too long, the eyes too close together, the jaw too broad … One last try, from memory this time.

And then, quite suddenly, there it was. The expression in the eyes, endlessly patient and wise, maybe a little sorrowful, maybe—in another light—a little wry.

My breath caught, my vision hazing at the edges. “I told you we would meet again, John,” I heard.

In the shadows was the Moor. I jumped to my feet. Quills, ink, paper flew, and I cried out in despair. The little pot of ink shattered on the floor, spreading in a ruinous black pool across the drawing and the mosaic tiles beneath my feet, like spilled blood.

When I looked up again, the Moor had vanished.