The Lute Player (32 page)

From our point of vantage out in the harbour we could see that at the very moment when the sea-facing gate gave way the one to the rear of the town opened, as though the one blow had struck it also; between twenty and thirty men on horseback, oxcarts, a long string of donkeys and then a great crowd of people on foot began to move out from the rear of the town, seeking the hills and safety. But the King of England, on the seaward side, could not have known that the retreat had begun.

Then he performed his second act of recklessness. Leaping upon the ram, which had been left this time to stand where it had been thrust, he ran along it and threw himself through the narrow breach in the gate. Any one resolute man or any one desperate woman standing on the other side with even so slight a weapon as a stout stick could have despatched him then, for he had been helping to handle the ram and had discarded all his armour. Bareheaded and clad only in the soft leather jerkin which knights wear under their mail to save their skins from chafing, he flung himself into Limassol.

Berengaria, her face the grey-white of ashes and so wet with sweat that it looked like the face of a drowned woman, said:

‘Oh, fool, crazy fool. Now they’ll kill him!’

‘But they never do,’ Joanna cried. ‘This is his way. They’re too surprised.’

That evening we all went ashore and through the broken gateway and up to the strange pink palace from which Isaac had fled. It was a beautiful place, quite unlike any building in the West. One entered through a single gateway set in a long blank wall and found oneself in a courtyard full of fountains and dark trees and flowering shrubs and great marble vases brimming with flowers. Eighteen wide stairs on its farther side led to a deep verandah reared upon marble pillars and within there were rooms of great size and magnificence, almost empty save for low cushioned divans or cushions laid on the floor, and tables of marble or silver, none more than eighteen inches high. The space and the emptiness and the strangeness were a little intimidating and as I moved about in the Cypriot palace I could not help thinking how lost, how very homesick Berengaria would have been had Sancho succeeded in making her marry Isaac. This evening, with Richard safe and within arm’s reach, she was so happy that the strangeness was merely another excitement.

For lack of ordinary furniture we were all bound to sit on cushions or squat on our haunches, according to our degree, and take our food from the little dwarf tables and that fact alone gave rise to great hilarity. Amidst all the jollity, trying not to dwell too closely or with too jaundiced an eye upon the pair who sat together on one divan, he eating and drinking heartily as a conqueror should, she with an unwonted banner of scarlet flying in her white face, I thought now and again of the outer world and found little comfort in my thoughts. There was the old woman, thin and brown as a stick, who had been carrying water when the stone from the mangonel struck her; the bucket had rolled from her grasp and lay there, side by side with the stone which had split her old skull and spilt her brains.

Not that the mangonel had done all the damage. In the very road where the palace stood I saw a little Cypriot boy, seven, eight years old, stretch his arms from post to post of his house door and defy one of the Northmen to enter. He was spitted like a fowl. And there was a thin yellow dog, writhing in a ball of agony as he bit at the broken arrow in his flank.

What pity can I spare now for the old woman, the child, the dog? I who have seen 2,844 men killed in cold blood in one day. I who have lifted my own arm and slain men in hot blood.

III

Of the wedding of my lady Berengaria to Richard Plantagenet I cannot write as an eyewitness for I was lying drunk in the kitchen yard when it took place. I had had my hair cut and I had donned my best clothes. I had the music ready to play. I meant to do her credit. At the last minute I went into the kitchen, which was full of pages and serving-men and guards drinking, snatching morsels from the spits and the ovens, helping one another dress and all very merry. And I remembered her as I had just seen her, all white and gold. The white gown encrusted with gold lilies, the golden cloak bordered and lined with white and a deep collar of filigree gold, spun by the same family of craftsmen who had made the golden, spider-web altar in the cathedral at Pamplona, encircling her throat, covering the scar. So very beautiful, so radiantly happy. And I knew, because of my dreams, just how that black hair, cool yet warm, warm yet cool and with a fragrance all its own, would tumble loose over the breast of a lover; how the curved pink mouth would break open and the kiss would begin, soft, then hard on the teeth and finally soft and sweet on the tongue. I knew all but one of the intimacies of the flesh, knee, belly, breast and thigh, but always at the point of consummation the dream would leave me and I would awake and rise in a sensuous languor to seek the well for in cold water, blessed or unblessed, there is great virtue. And often I have gone into my lady’s presence, subdued, cleansed, a little damp but not forgetful, and thought: Could you but know, how angry, how infinitely shocked, offended and insulted you would be!

All this I sat thinking as the hourglass dripped its sand towards the moment when they should be made man and wife in the sight of God. And I drank, seeking the numbness which a sufficiency of wine usually brought me. It eluded me and I drank more. Then suddenly I found myself blinking and retching under a bench in the kitchen; the wall torches were flaring, for night had come, the meats were hissing on the turning spits and the wedding was over, the feast in full swing. From the hall came the loud, jubilant sound of a harp skilfully and masterfully played.

I caught a serving-man who was bringing empty dishes back into the kitchen. ‘Who is making the music?’ I asked.

‘Old Ikymo’s daughter,’ he replied with brief discourtesy.

I listened for a moment. Then I turned away. At this her wedding, my lady had no need even of my music.

IV

Most of the songs and some of the serious accounts of the crusade make mention of Isaac of Cyprus’s daughter and in more than one there is a hint that she was responsible for the failure of the marriage between Richard and Berengaria. That story, which people eagerly believed and ardently spread, was an attempt to explain the inexplicable and there is as little truth in it as in the earlier story which accused him of dalliance with Tancred’s niece and the later one which accused him of being in love with Saladin’s sister.

That the marriage was a failure from the beginning was all too plain but no other woman can be blamed for that. Unless she be some nameless, unrecorded woman who took from him, in time past, all the woman-love that was in his nature. I can vouch for the fact that he never spent a moment alone in the company of the Cypriot princess whom we called Lydia. She had eight given Christian names, all of them lovely, but to the rank and file she was always known by the name which the English soldiers bestowed on her. The English always have a great affection for their enemies, especially after they have beaten them, and indicate their fondness by the giving of nicknames. Isaac was always Old Ikymo, and Lydia was always Ikymo’s daughter or Princess Ikymo.

She was a small, swarthy, voluptuously curved young woman with a vivacious manner and a talent for entertainment; she sang; she played the lute, harp and dulcimer; she danced. To my taste her face was spoiled by a growth of dark hair on the upper lip but I have heard men of some discernment in such matters count that as a charm rather than a fault. She came and gave herself up to Richard some forty-eight hours before her father was brought in and Richard received her chivalrously, raising her from the ground and saying to a knight nearby, ‘Conduct this lady to the princess’; and with Berengaria, Joanna, Anna Apieta and Carmelita Avosola she spent the campaign. She had no importance and I mention her at such length only to refute the scandalous story and because her presence in the household had two effects, one small one on my personal history, one larger and more far-reaching. She superseded me as musician to the ladies. And she was niece to Leopold of Austria who, after his quarrel with Richard, accused him of robbing, ill-treating and debauching her and made this part of his excuse for his subsequent behaviour towards his former ally.

It is quite amusing to reflect that Richard, to whom women were profoundly unimportant—the only woman to whom he cared even to talk was Anna Apieta—should have had his relationship with two of his allies, Philip of France and Leopold of Austria, marred by innuendoes concerning women.

This recurring rumour that he was a lecherous man is understandable. His father’s reputation was evil, his own marriage a disaster. Why that should be only God, Who made them both and brought them together, could explain. She was so beautiful, one would have thought that lust, if not love, would have held him to her for a little, for long enough for him to get to know her and appreciate her worth. Every man who looked at her loved her and most women, too, and women are not usually devoted to one who outshines them in every way. It was surely the most cursed fate that the one man she loved, the man whom she had chosen and fought for, should be impervious to her looks and her qualities.

It may be because she loved him and had neither the skill nor the wish to hide it. There was a perverse streak in him; he could only appreciate what he had to struggle for; the fiercer the struggle, the more value he set on the object. To run to him and say, ‘Here I am, take me,’ was to make oneself negligible to him.

Dear Anna, when you read this, will you be astonished that I noticed how he sought your approval? Will you remember how often on those few occasions when he favoured the ladies with his company he would turn to you and say, ‘What does Anna think?’ or ‘Anna, this will interest you.’ Berengaria, and not she alone—any other of the ladies would have her ears for so much evidence of his notice—but they were for you.

However, the wedding feast lasted for three days and there were three nights when they went to bed together. She had so much; three days and nights in Cyprus in the spring. And she was Queen of England and of Cyprus, for Bernard of Bayonne crowned her after the wedding with a double crown and gave her both titles. And she knew, I think, what the world did not, that whatever took him from her was not another woman. No. He left her lonely, unsatisfied, bewildered, never jealous. God help the woman who inspired jealously in her! Or maybe I should say what a pity no woman did! Jerked out of her meekness, her subservience, her piteous submission, she might then have shown Richard the other side of her nature, the ruthlessness, the fury, the determination that lay under the lilies and the white roses which were all he ever saw. But that never happened and their story proceeded as I tell it.

On the morning of the fourth day with that same boisterous, almost childish air of escaping back to his own world, Richard went out to the stable yard where Isaac, through panic or muddle, had left several horses. There were two special chargers of some fame, a bright yellow named Flavel and Lyard, a grey. Richard intended to choose one of these for his own mount. Since I was interested in horses and the morning being fair and warm, I went out with the motley crowd to see him make his choice.

The grey accepted him as though he had been its master since it was foaled; the yellow resented being mounted by a stranger. In the first moment it threw him and went snorting and charging about the yard like a crazed thing. We ran towards Richard, who lay on the stones partially stunned, but he bellowed, ‘Catch the horse, you clowns, never mind me!’ And he got up and mounted again. This time Flavel tried other tactics; bucking and rearing, standing on his hind legs and striking as he had been trained to do in battle with his heavily shod forefeet; he rampaged round the yard, at intervals rushing towards a doorway, a wall or a gatepost and trying with devilish cunning to crush his rider’s leg. But Richard stayed in the saddle and fought with grim good humour and presently from the doorways or tops of walls where we had taken refuge we saw the change come. Flavel ceased fighting and began showing off. He charged, he stopped in half his own length, he pivoted on his hind legs, turning on a space no larger than a dish; he smote down an imaginary enemy with his forefeet and then, lowering his head, lifted him in his teeth and cast him away. And presently they were no more a horse and a rider but some other entity, half human, half equine, like the legendary centaurs, fused into one by the heat of their battle, melted together by their sweat.

‘This is mine,’ Richard said as he dismounted, ‘but I’ll take the grey too. I have a use for him.’

He stood catching his breath and brushing the sweat out of his eyes; the knuckles of one hand had been grazed to the bone by one of Flavel’s wall-rubbings and some of the blood, together with a good deal of dirt, was transferred to his dripping wet face. And there he stood, a grubby, happy, carefree boy, when Sir Stephen de Turnham and Sir Bertrand de Verdun entered the yard.

‘What brings you abroad so early, my lords?’

‘A letter from His Majesty of France, sire. This moment arrived by swift ship,’ said Sir Bertrand.

‘News travels fast in these parts,’ Richard said, shaking a sweat drop from his nose. ‘Pious protest against putting Isaac in chains! No way for one Christian monarch to treat another, dear me, no!’ He began to break the seal but the stickiness of blood and sweat on his fingers hindered him and he rasped out, ‘God’s name, can’t somebody spread this for me? And you dolts, get that horse rubbed down! Shall he take a chill while you gape?’

Sir Bertrand broke the seal neatly and spread the letter. Richard took it and gave it his reluctant attention. Then, like a hound that has scented his quarry, he stiffened, read on, absorbed. Finally he crushed the missive in his hand.

‘But I
told
him,’ he cried, ‘I told him to do nothing until I arrived except widen the beachhead. The one thing that mattered. The one thing he didn’t do! Dear my God, what are our enemies? It is our allies we should be saved from. Sir Bertrand, run. Have the muster sounded; send criers through the town. We start embarking in an hour. The French went and surrounded Acre and now the Saracens have surrounded them and are trying to cut them off from the sea! Sir Stephen, will you warn the ladies and take charge of them as before? Boy, boy, run and find Sir Guy de Lusignan; bring him to me at once. I shall be on the beach.’