The Lute Player (29 page)

That is what it is to be old. Some power remains but it must be husbanded, not squandered.

After a moment I said quite gently, ‘The wonder is not that I should have forgotten, Richard, but that you should have remembered.’

And so at the end we parted tenderly. Our paths lay in opposite directions and neither of us was bound on a peaceful errand. God alone knew how many things might so conspire that we might never see each another again. And he was my best beloved son; flawed by a fault I had never suspected, less perfect than I had believed all these years but no less dear.

I hung on his neck and kissed him and cried a little. He rallied me cheerfully. ‘Settle this business quickly, Mother, and take no risks for yourself. Remember—we are pledged to ride into Jerusalem together.’

Exhaustion had made me weak and fanciful. I stood there and I knew with a certainty past all question that we should never take that ride together. I thought then that the failure to keep the tryst would be on my side—I should be dead or too infirm. I never doubted that he would take Jerusalem; even as he spoke I could imagine that triumphant procession, the ultimate aim and object of his life. But I could not imagine myself by his side: no, the woman who rode there would be Berengaria. And that was as it should be. However, I answered him stoutly:

‘You make way for me in Jerusalem, Richard, and I will keep London open for you. We will ride together not once but twice!’

He kissed me again with great warmth and said: ‘We’ll meet outside Jerusalem!’

And then there was nothing left to do but to wish one another Godspeed.

Part Four: Richard’s Troubadour

Blondel gives his own account of the Third Crusade.

I am writing this history of the Third Crusade at the bidding of Anna, Duchess of Apieta, who has always been my true friend and patron.

I know quite well why she set me to it. It distresses her that I should so often seek oblivion in the wine pot and now that the house is finished she has cunningly—but I see through her—found me another occupation.

But why should I complain? Should I not rather gloat? I sit here in the sun with the shade of a vine to shelter me at need; I have quills and ink and fine Chinese paper for my work. By my side is a butt of that strange red Palestinian wine known as the Blood of Judas and I have time to write, time to remember. No scribe could ask more.

I am going to tell the truth as I see it about this crusade. Too many stories, each with that grain of truth that makes the falsehood palatable and dangerous, are already rife.
When Richard Marched through Holy Land
,
Jerusalem, I Die for Thee
and
Crossing the Holy Headland
are sung in every hall and tavern. And for the great mass of Christian men they tell the whole story.

The very word ‘crusade’ has something of magic and even men who have no skill in music and who lack voice for singing, provided they also lack an arm, a leg, an eye or have some scar to show, can stand up anywhere and recite one of these three songs and know that however they gabble and garble men will forgive them and reward them with alms. Why, once in Poitou I heard
When Richard Marched through Holy Land
being declaimed at three street corners simultaneously, so that a man might make a round of the market and never lose track of the tale. Very few of these minnesingers know or care whether their tale is true or false. I at least, as Anna says, was there.

My story begins on a night in Messina when Richard of England was bidden to sup with his betrothed, his mother and his sister and at the last minute failed them, sending some excuse about dredging beef barrels out of the inwashing tide. There were thousands of men in Messina at that moment who, at his bidding, would have drowned themselves, walked out and let themselves drown in that tide at a word from him—such was his power. Why must he stay and thus disappoint her?

When the news came I was in the kitchen of the palace in which we were housed, steadily and carefully drinking, sip by sip, waiting for the moment which I knew would eventually arrive—the moment when, with all my senses numbed by wine, I could face the ordeal of seeing the meeting between the woman I loved and the man she loved. Ludicrous and fantastic as it may seem—and, irrelevant as it may be to this story—I loved, and had loved for a long time, my mistress, Berengaria of Navarre, who looked on me as a dog. The spirit, as it says in Holy Writ, bloweth where it listeth. There is no more to say and do not fear that I shall trouble you here with a story of unrequited love.

This story, indeed, starts with anger. I knew better than any man alive that Henry of England, father to Richard, was a lecher unmatched since Herod Antipas who debauched Salome, his stepdaughter. And now I thought: Like father, like son; and what is all this we hear about the niece of Tancred? So that evening, my lady not being in a mood for music, I took my lute and, falling back to my old wayfaring gait, ten steps walking, ten steps running, made my way to the crusaders’ camp. And as I travelled I remembered the stories I had heard in England about Queen Eleanor’s way with little harlots. Tomorrow, if my suspicions proved well founded, she and I would be allies, most strangely yoked. She wanted an heir for England; I wanted my lady’s happiness.

So, hot in pursuit of the hare of my suspicion, I thrust my way into the camp and by showing my lute and saying that I had come to play to the King of England I gained access to his very tent. He was not within it and a glance informed me that it was no place in which any intrigue of a secret nature could be carried on. It was a large tent and the lower end was just like the lower end of any castle hall. If Richard of England intrigued with Tancred’s niece he did not do it here.

Supper was over; a few latecomers were still at the trestle tables; a few satiated men lingered over their drinking, watching two young knights put their hounds through their paces for a wager. One fellow, very drunk, stood unsteadily on his feet and gave voice to a ribald song which was received with enthusiasm and sly exhortations to further bawdiness.

My lute, as always, assured my welcome. A sober-visaged squire removed the bone upon which he had been gnawing from his mouth and beat on the table with it. ‘Now we shall have some proper music, and time too,’ he shouted. The man who was already singing took objection to this and spoke his mind freely. The grave man stood up and dealt him, without rancour, a stunning blow and then, taking him around the middle like a sack, attempted to throw him out of the tent. Those who had been applauding the song joined in the fray. The two hounds, leaping and baying, added to the confusion and the noise.

‘Strike up, for the love of God,’ someone said in my ear, ‘or there’ll be fighting in a minute; and fighting amongst ourselves is one thing the King will not tolerate.’

So I struck up as lustily as I could, choosing a song which I knew—having once been in England—was immensely popular there. Within a moment every Englishman in the tent was roaring out the stanzas of
’Twas on a Fair May Morning
with their peculiar mixture of sentiment and bawdiness and the Frenchmen present joined in by humming or beating out the measure on the tables. Even the hounds were clouted into silence.

By repetition and by inserting trills I made the song last as long as possible, for I knew I had no other which would be so well favoured here. But at last I was bound to end it.

There was some applause and through it a loud voice said:

‘I am glad to see a company in such good heart.’

We all scrambled to our feet and faced towards the tent entry.

I had seen Richard Plantagenet, Duke of Aquitaine and King of England, before in circumstances which have no place in this story. I had seen him first in a dimly lighted anteroom in William’s Tower in London and there my jealous eyes had sought his face and his body for the beauty or the grace which had so commended him to my lady that she had fallen in love with him at first sight. I found none then and tonight I found none.

He was a tall man, certainly; his shoulders were broad and his his hips narrow; but his legs were slightly bowed from long hours in the saddle and his arm muscles so overdeveloped that they looked clumsy. Christ once gave sight to a man blind from birth and he, looking on his fellows for the first time, said, “I see men like trees walking,” and that exactly describes Richard Plantagenet. Minstrels sing of his red-gold hair and beard. Red-gold is a colour which shows to advantage from a distance; close at hand, it was the raw crude colour of a scraped carrot. And it accorded ill with his complexion which was so red that it wore habitually the look of a skin flayed by harsh winds or newly sun-scorched. Amidst all this florid colour his eyes, which were blue, looked startlingly pale, prominent, which gave him an unsettled look. He had, too, very thick eyebrows of the same colour as his hair; they grew outwards in tufts and upwards in points and were unusually mobile. His nose was short, hooked, with great flaring nostrils full of red hair and his mouth was wide, paler than his face and slightly crooked. His mouth wronged him; it gave him a sardonic look, as though he mocked. And mockery was never one of his pursuits; his approach was always very simple and straightforward. The tree walking!

It is to be hoped that Anna never gives this manuscript to my lady, Berengaria, to wile away an hour of tedium. But if she does… There you are, my dear. That is how Richard Plantagenet appeared to the impartial observer. (O God, forgive that word “impartial”! I lie. I hated him.)

But it was quite plain that the story about dredging up beef casks had not been a fabrication. When he walked into his tent and I saw him in full light for the first time he was soaked from head to foot. The thin linen jerkin and hose which he wore clung to him like a skin; the red-gold hair was plastered to his skull; the red-gold beard came to a point like a rat’s tail and rippled water onto his breast. And I never in all my days saw a man look so radiantly, so beatifically happy and contented.

He said, genially chiding, ‘I thought I gave orders that this tent was to be cleared thirty minutes after the supper bugle! Feed you I must, put up with your hullabaloo I will not. Get you gone. You all have duties or beds. Get to them.’

He looked at the company and I had an odd feeling that he knew exactly what the duties and where the bed of each individual would be. His eye rested on me. Duty undefined, bedding place unknown.

He strode through the tent until he was level with me.

Then he put his hand, cold and rough from its contact with salt water, under my chin—just as a man greets a petted child, raising the shy face.

‘You play very well, boy. Welcome to our tent. Come along. Presently, when I am more at my ease, you shall play for me.’

For a moment his pale eyes gazed at my face and I wondered whether he remembered that dim anteroom, the borrowed lute. But he strode on, saying, ‘Yes, Raymond, go on now, I am listening,’ and one of the men with him broke into gabbling speech.

I could have turned and gone then. I had satisfied my curiosity. I was free to go and puzzle out some means of telling my lady that it was true about the dredging of casks. But something held me. It was just like another moment I remembered, a fatal, decisive moment when I had been free to go, free to stay. I could have turned on the market place at Pamplona and joined Stefan in the tavern and never set eyes on Berengaria; never in this world have looked on the Princess of Navarre. A staggering thought. And I was equally free, as men reckon freedom, to turn now and go from Richard Plantagenet’s tent. He might have remembered and asked: Where is that lute player? Where did he go? But no one could have answered him because nobody knew whence I came or whither I went.

But I believe that we choose as we are meant to choose. Here I set it down in black and white and in my best writing. We do what we are ordered to do. By God or the devil. (Dear Anna, you understand; you wouldn’t publish that heresy while I was alive, would you?)

I followed to a rough sort of platform which had been reared at the end of the tent and furnished with a rug, a table and chair and a screen.

Standing near the edge of the platform in a waiting attitude was a small man wearing the black robe and the white tabs of the physician and as I drew near I recognized with a little shock of surprise Escel, the doctor from Valladolid whom Sancho, King of Navarre, had summoned in haste to Pamplona when Berengaria had lain a-dying. Escel had arrived to find his patient well on the way to recovery but he had borne no grudge because he was on the road to France to take the Cross. ‘The crusade will need those who can mend wounds as well as inflict them,’ he had said.

Richard stopped by Escel’s side.

‘I’m sorry to interrupt you again, Raymond,’ he said, ‘but this is urgent. Well, Escel, what news?’

‘Four more died today, sire.’

‘God damn it! Why? Escel, why? Young lusty men, well fed, well tended. And all in that quarter. That’s how many—fourteen, fifteen—this last week?’

‘Fifteen, sire.’

‘And you bled them?’

‘Yes, sire.’

‘And gave them the new draughts?’

‘Yes, sire.’

‘Then by God’s blood the place must be cursed or it’s bad air, as I said. They must be moved. Ralph.’ He looked round inquiringly, and an elderly, responsible-looking man pushed his way forward. ‘Ralph, I want every tent between what they called Pets’ Corner and the water moved. There’s something wrong with that site. Move the whole lot up here into the meadow at the back of this tent.’

‘My lord, in that meadow His Majesty of France has picketed his horses,’ Ralph said diffidently.

‘I know. But with all due deference, my archers are of slightly more importance. Nevertheless, Simon—’

‘Here, my liege.’

‘Simon, put on your most formal manner and go and wait upon His Majesty of France. Give him my greetings and tell him that I propose, with his kind permission, to set some tents in his horses’ pasture. Tell him the exchange will benefit his nags because down by the water the grass grows very green. No, wait a bit. Better begin with the horses. Say that I’ve noticed that the high pasture behind my tent is grazed to the ground; ask him whether he’d
like
to make the exchange. No. By the sacred wounds of Christ, he won’t like that either; he’ll take it as criticism. We’ve had words already about the French way with horses. Oh, devil take the lot of them. Ralph, get those tents moved; Simon, round up the French horses and drive them down. I’ll go to His Majesty of France in the morning and explain. That way my archers will have the benefit of the better air while we argue the matter out.’

The solution seemed to me to be sensible, though some of the remarks preceding it reflected rather ominously upon the state of relationship between the two leaders. Richard reverted with scarcely a pause to whatever it was that Raymond was telling him. Finally he said, ‘Tell him I said so and I don’t propose to discuss the matter any further. His conscience, forsooth. Tell him I have a conscience, too, and that it has teeth!’ Raymond and two others who had not spoken bade their King good night and went away.

Richard leapt lightly onto the platform and went behind the screen. I climbed up, too, and took my place at the end of the table, laying down my lute until such time as it was required. From this position I could see his bed, a canvas pallet stuffed with straw, protruding in places, set upon a wooden frame. I could see also two iron tripods, one holding a basin and ewer, the other his mail. My cell at Gorbalze had not been barer.

He talked on and all the time an apparent half-wit called Dickon was clumsily wielding a towel and fumbling about for dry clothes. Not without surprise and some inner amusement I found myself thinking how much more nimbly I could have ministered to him; and when one of the remaining men started to make some complaint in a high raucous voice I thought: Oh, couldn’t you wait until the man is dry and re-clothed?