Lovesong, p.10
Lovesong, page 10
Jocelyn drew his sword, and the overcrowded billet erupted with knights making room, getting clear. ‘Are you calling my boy a liar? Are you saying it happened somehow different? Were you there?’
Amaury held up two innocent palms, taking the opportunity to waggle the ten-ness of his fingers. ‘Can’t a man pay a compliment to a masterly storyteller? A dextrous painter of pictures? Is our science not that of painting with words? The jongleur has real talent; that’s all I’m saying.’
Oriole found himself praying to evaporate, to dissolve, to shatter like the preposterous confection of his story. They must not fight. Over the truth of his story? Over the courage and fate of the Lady Ida? On no account must they fight! For God sided with the Truth, no matter how banal. God allowed no margin for embroidery, embellishment, for the well-constructed lie, for the well-meaning liar. If they fought, the victory would go to Herm, who knew a lie when he heard it because he was such a liar himself.
‘Do you dispute the manner of my lady’s capture?’ demanded Foicelles with hysterical pomposity. ‘Are you calling my boy a liar?’
Oriole wanted to crouch down, to wrap his arms over his head, to swat away the swarms of words. ‘Don’t, sir! Not on my account!’
It made Foicelles turn on him. ‘Well? Are you ready to see it mocked? What happened? There? At Bathys?’
Oriole shut his eyes and saw it all again, as he saw it each time he shut his eyes. The Bathys massacre. ‘No, sir. Never ….’
‘Draw, then, knight – if you have a name …’
‘Amaury of Herm, sir. Is it your eyesight or your memory that helps you forget it?’
‘Draw or I’ll kill you where you stand. Find comedy in a lady’s death? Forgive me, but since when was grief good fodder for a joke?’
For the first time, the twitching, complacent grin left Herm’s face. His mouth disappeared behind its bevor of beard, and he seemed in perfect earnest when he said. ‘Ah now, grief. That’s different. Rarely grounds for laughter, I agree. Nor for poetical narratives.’ He too drew his sword.
‘Please, sir!’ Oriole broke in, stepping between them, turning his back on Herm. ‘All this way, sir! Did you come all this way, sir, on a Holy Crusade, sir, just to end fighting another Frenchman?’
And Herm was there again, agreeing with him. ‘The Songbird’s right. This is no time for private quarrels. Let’s see some sights before we cross swords, Foicelles. No hurry, eh? I’m going nowhere different. We’re all together on the same journey. Some of us may even reach home again. Isn’t that right, Oriole?’
There were tears in Amaury’s eyes.
The assembled company of knights began to harangue Foicelles, telling him, yes; he must wait; the war superseded personal disputes. He stormed out of the room.
But Oriole did not immediately go after him. He stood transfixed to the spot. He did not intend disloyalty. And yet he did not go.
‘Your master likes a good fairy tale, I see.’
‘Needed, sir. Needed,’ he found himself saying.
‘And you gave it to him. Well done indeed. Quite masterly.’
Why did Oriole not go? Why did he not spit on Amaury’s boots and go? And why were there tears in Amaury’s eyes?
‘Prefer it myself, sometimes. A good stirring story alongside the truth. Now ‘take today. Jaufré Rudel died today, I hear. Rudel? The troubadour? No great story to it. Just an arrow in the gut and septicaemia. You’re right. Where’s the glory in that? Needs something more. Is that why wars always sound so different in the retelling than they looked at the time? Rudel dead. Nothing more to come out of him but maggots. Yes, I should think up something better next time I tell that one, shouldn’t I? Maybe I should leave the job with you? Rudel dead and silent…’
Oriole felt as if his boots had cleaved to the floor, his tongue to the roof of his mouth. ‘He was a great poet,’ was all he managed to say. He meant to find some insult, something on behalf of his master. ‘A better poet than you,’ he ought to have said. And yet when he opened his mouth again, only the truth came out, sounding like a second-rate lie. ‘Almost as good as you, sir. I’m very sorry he’s dead.’
CHAPTER NINE
Jerusalem
Sir Jocelyn went on believing in the lie. He did not reflect on Amaury’s jibes and wonder if perhaps his go-between had exaggerated a little, improved on the Truth out of kindness. No, Oriole escaped all doubt, all cross-examination, all chance to withdraw the lie. For Jocelyn cleaved to it, preserved it word for word.
If that could have been the sum of it, Oriole would not have regretted lying. He might even have congratulated himself on leaving everyone so much happier than the truth would have made them. But it clung to him, that lie.
It was soon after reaching Ephesus that the whole Turkish army mobilised against them. Sir Jocelyn rejoiced in the news. For he said it would give him an opportunity to trample Turkish heads like grapes at harvest time.
When military discipline began to break down in the French army, Sir Jocelyn was the first to help his King re-establish order. Following Louis’ example, he cut the hands off looters, the feet off laggards, the heads off deserters, while exhorting the rest to fresh endeavour, swearing that every Christian martyr would be avenged with the death of a thousand Saracens.
When enemy harassment escalated to a full-pitched battle, it was Jocelyn de Foicelles who regarded the billows of Turkish robes, undaunted. There was a sneer of contempt on his face, and his faith surpassed Moses’, for he rode directly towards the horizon without waiting for a miracle to clear his path. He scattered all obstacles through the sheer momentum of his charge, by brute force. The weight of hatred inside him impelled him into the thick of battle like a boulder from a trebuchet catapulted clean through fortress walls. The only time his jongleurs and pages caught sight of him was when he came raging out of the press, demanding another lance, another buckler. His horse’s mane was hogged short by Turkish short-swords; his own pink ribbons stuck to his armour with sweat or blood, for all the world like strips of skin flayed from the enemy. The nasal of his helmet was bent so out of shape that it rendered his face grotesque, buckled.
Whereas most of the knights fought with a professional indifference to their own safety, not holding anything back for tomorrow, still they could not be said to hate the enemy. There was probably more ill-will between Frank and German, between crusader and Byzantine than between the cavalrymen of opposing sides. But Foicelles was different. He had a score to settle. He was God’s flail pounding on the chaff. He used his horse like a battering ram to fell whole stables of Arab ponies, whole tribes of men. He carried his life in his teeth; he cursed and insulted each man he killed, so great was his righteous indignation. Because of the lie Oriole had told him.
It was Jocelyn who forced a firebreak through the forest of Turks and began the reversal which should have seen the Turk crushed against the walls of Pisideon Antioch. And when – by some bizarre diplomatic coup – the enemy disappeared inside the citadel, it was Foicelles who sat astride his winded mare, head thrown back and both fists shaking as he brayed up at Heaven, ‘Fire and brimstone! Send fire and brimstone!’ Thus great was his hatred of the Infidel. Because of the lie Oriole had told him.
Well? Would the Truth have led to anything different? Oriole asked himself at first. The enemy had killed the mistress of Jocelyn’s heart. Would that not have given rise to just as much wrath and vengeance?
No. For then the Lady Ida would have been in Paradise, walking like Xenocrates on the walls of Heaven. She would have been overhead, watching with pride and trepidation her champion’s shows-of-arms. Safe. Where no one could lay a finger on her. Then he could have continued to carry her stolen boot over him in battle, its magic fit to kick the Unbeliever out of all Outremer. As it was, Jocelyn no longer carried her token. Because Oriole had miscalculated in the lie he had told.
Sleeping in the same tent at night, Oriole could not help but know this. When the other exhausted knights were snoring their way through peaceful, dreamless nights, Foicelles was awake and pacing. Foicelles wanted music from his jongleur – something that might soothe him to sleep but never did. Foicelles wanted Oriole to recite every sirventes he had ever memorised – something that might occupy a knightly mind, while he paced up and down, up and down his tent, biting his fingernails and dragging that crest of blond hair up and back, up and back.
For Foicelles had an imagination every whit as sexual as Amaury of Herm. The woman whose chastity had been so crucial to his worship of her lay bound there each night in the harem of his mind. Had she been dead, no rival could have sullied her, disturbed one strand of her golden curls. Now, thanks to Oriole, Jocelyn nightly imagined her debauched, deflowered, forced against her will to submit to the well-chronicled perversions of an oiled body black as sin.
And he, like a harem eunuch looking on, had been rendered impotent any longer to love her.
So Foicelles did not sleep. And he threw himself against the enemy like a wave at a cliff, without the magic of any domna over him for protection.
He will die because I lied to him, thought Oriole every waking night between that Christmas and New Year. And no matter how much he inwardly argued his good intentions, Oriole found himself weighed down with guilt.
He did not want to stay and see Sir Jocelyn cut down in battle – a man so appallingly alone, a lover without a mistress to love. Yet never once did it occur to him to recant – to retract his lie. Somewhere, at some moment during the Cheravas mudslide or the massacre at the Bathys River, seeds of wickedness had lodged in Oriole’s heart. Perhaps it had happened as he crouched in that river, fumbled by the tree roots and unseen plant-tendrils. He harboured vague hopes of purging himself in Jerusalem, at the altar of the Virgin, but only the feeblest of hopes – like a man who means to gouge out a splinter when he has a free moment, but knows that all the while the skin is healing over it.
Besides, he wanted to live. Come war, come pestilence, come famine, come-what-may; Oriole wanted to return to his wife and child and bear, and to take home more than he had brought; to show a profit on the war. To do that, he must stay in the service of his knight.
With every one of Foicelles’ suicidal onslaughts on the enemy, he was acquiring new pensions, accolades, tokens of King Louis’ esteem and appreciation. Why should Oriole not share in them, who had almost died on his behalf? Retract his story of how Ida had been taken? Foicelles would have cast him off quicker than he had discarded Ida’s boot. Try to describe the true circumstances? Foicelles would never choose to believe them. So while Oriole’s guilty conscience shouted in one ear that he had robbed his master of all happiness and peace-of-mind, his newly acquired wickedness shouted in the other, ‘He risked your life. He owes you a living. You have responsibilities…’
Besides, it was a good lie, an excellent lie. Even Amaury of Herm had admired it – had seen it for what it was – a great journeyman’s masterpiece of a lie. As an artist, Oriole cherished it.
The road to Attalia on the Caramanian coast was littered with dead pilgrims. It dragged itself over high, wintry mountains cantankerous with storms. Crusaders who had sweated inside their mail and taken it off at night to find the iron ring-pattern scorched into their flesh, now found red rust stains on their bodies instead, and they cursed the cold. The Lady of the Golden Boot (as Louis’ Queen Eleanor was dubbed by an admirer) had abandoned mounted grandeur, along with the other women crusaders, and opted for the marginal comfort of a draughty litter. In place of vowing to visit this shrine and that altar, the ladies vowed simply that they would never go crusading again.
But though it cost such pains to get there, Attalia was hardly the answer to a pilgrim’s prayers when they arrived. It was a little port surrounded by unproductive countryside and already short of pro visions because of Turkish raiders. Of course the local merchants charged what they could get for what little they had to sell. Of course there were not ships enough moored in this tiny, out-of-the-way place to carry all the surviving crusaders on towards the Holy Places. So when King Louis decided that the Crusade should continue on its way by sea, he of course meant only the officers. He said the infantry must continue along the pilgrim trail on foot, and that God would protect them from misfortune.
Drawn up in a crescent (not by any command, for there was no one left to command them, but according to the geography of the place) the terrified, abandoned infantry of the Second Crusade and the few hundred pilgrims travelling in their shelter, watched their officers and perfidious King sail out to sea and away over the horizon.
Oriole leaned on the ship’s rail and watched till they were out of sight. ‘Is that how a father treats his enfants?’ he said, off-guard, assuming that Foicelles would share his dismay at the King’s behaviour. ‘I think you could teach him a thing or two of Chivalry, master, for all he’s a king.’
Foicelles looked askance at him for only a moment and said nothing. But ten minutes later he burst out into one of his rages (no longer so very rare) and, while Oriole stared at him open-mouthed, demanded to know how a jackanape minstrel dared to criticise the judgement of a king. ‘By God, I should pitch you over the side to swim home. How dare you! How dare you! How dare you!’
The Queen dared. She questioned the King’s judgement. She practically called into question his parentage and his sanity. In the end she said his entire corpus regni wasn’t worth so much as a rotten pear. People clearly heard her say it.
It was not the evacuation of Attalia over which they quarrelled, but after the ships docked in Antioch. Her rebellious spirit, warmed through by the Syrian springtime, allowed her opinions on the war to blossom and increase. Her uncle, Prince Raymond of Antioch, escorted the royal company up from Saint Symeon harbour to his city and feted them with kids’ meat and pomegranates. They drank sweet water from the aqueduct, and wore new, outlandish clothes as they listened to Raymond’s renowned tactical logic. Eleanor had a high opinion of Raymond’s tactical logic.
But Louis did not.
Prince Raymond recommended a strike against the seat of power of Nur ed-Din – against Aleppo. It was not so very far away. Raymond even took a contingent of knights up to its walls, like an estate merchant accompanying prospective buyers to view an empty house. Nur ed-Din had been picking off Christian fortresses one by one; but the seizure of Aleppo would hamstring the man. Queen Eleanor smiled on her uncle’s plans; smiled with that serene blessing of a smile which said, ‘Very well. You have convinced me. That is how it shall be.’
But King Louis said, damn Aleppo: he would go to Jerusalem, because that was what he had vowed to do. And the more his wife told him he was stupid, ungrateful, ignorant of local politics, deaf to sound advice, the more devoted he became to that vow. The King would go to Jerusalem, not Aleppo.
Sir Jocelyn de Foicelles and his household could hear the sound of raised voices ricochetting through the halls of Prince Raymond’s palace. The whole Chivalry of France could hear it. Distance blurred the specific words, but there was no mistaking the venom.
That was the first time the word was whispered, the first time the unthinkable was voiced: divorce. Rumours rank as sewage blew abroad, fanned by sweaty mysogynists who liked to suggest Eleanor slept with her uncle. Some knights sprang gallantly to her defence. Some sided with the King. The facts of the case had little to do with who joined which faction.
Eleanor of Aquitaine was Queen of Hearts, a living patron saint of troubadours and artists. She drew poets to her like moths to a flame: by beauty, by largesse, by the brightness of the new, by sexual charm, by favourable comparison with her monkish husband. Louis was an ascetic with less and less interest in the cult of High Romance. He also appeared singlehandedly capable of losing the war. And so the seam began to strain within the French Court, the threads to pull, the fabric to give, the royal raiment to show itself for what it was: a union of two very different cloths. The farsighted began to question where they would choose to stand if a rift came.
Not Jocelyn. He saw no rift, perceived no friction. He was sunk too deep in writing sirventes , hunched over close-clenched knees, scratching with a quill like a surgeon dissecting a brain.
Not the King, either. Louis did not agonise over Eleanor’s lack of wifely obedience. He simply sent armed men to her room one night and forced her aboard ship – out of Antioch – away from the influence of her uncle and those who shouted down the small clear voice of God in the name of ‘tactical logic’.
Jerusalem was aswarm with thousands of crusaders. So Oriole found it extraordinary – significant – strange beyond coincidence that he should chance upon the very billet of Sir Amaury and his retinue within a week of his arrival. It did not occur to him that he had walked the streets of the city for hours on end, half-looking for that red head of hair, that lavish, swaggering livery. Did he happen to mention the name, too, to an ordnance officer? Was that how he first found, among the narrow roads and souks, the little white house with its striped awnings and vine-hung pergola? Surely not. He remembered only coincidence, astonishment, as he stood outside on the street. So this was where his tormentor Amaury of Herm resided. Oriole stood for a while and looked, then turned back for the pilgrim hospital where Sir Jocelyn had chosen to billet.
Foicelles had chosen it in the spirit of humility, and Oriole could plainly see how his master would prefer the shadowy austerity of the long, low building. Apart from the hot sun lifting the skin off his fair scalp like flaked fish-flesh, there were sights outside of such extraordinarily seductive beauty that men had been known to throw up Christianity and live like Moslems, never going home, trapped inside a sensual maze. Foicelles only ventured out of his cloister to visit the Holy Sights. En route to them, his eyes fastidiously avoided the fountains at the crossroads, the white doves tumbling like plump fruit through the branches of cedars and great bay trees. There were turbans moving like a thousand Gordion knots between the woolly hair of black African slaves who walked naked through the lanes. There were olive-faced Arabs on the street corners. The lady crusaders had put away their armour. Now they went veiled like Moslem women, and painted their eyelids, and minced about flicking their beamy Frankish buttocks like horses pestered by horseflies. They were powerless to fire any admiration in Sir Jocelyn. Even the prostitutes of Outremer could not turn his head, and they were fabulous.
